The Alpine Nemesis (37 page)

The funeral Mass was held Thursday in the new marble and glass cathedral, which I found impressive but lacking in warmth. When the white pall was placed over Tom's casket, Adam leaned down and kissed it. I rarely cry, but the tears flowed freely until we were out of the church. They began afresh when a trio of Irish bagpipers played at the graveside.

I was too distraught to feel awkward in the presence of Tom's children. They seemed polite, if curious. I couldn't blame them. To Kelsey and Graham Cavanaugh, I was the Other Woman.

The hard part was acknowledging that Tom would be buried next to Sandra in the cemetery of her ancestors. But, as Ben counseled me, Tom had never belonged to Alpine, only to me. That was one reason we didn't attend the funeral reception. I didn't want to see Tom's home in Pacific Heights. I'd never been a part of his life in the Bay Area. I needed no reminders of Tom with Sandra, of Tom

with his other children. I had my own memories of him, if ever I dared to bring them back into the open.

Ben flew from San Francisco to Flagstaff and on to Tuba City. Adam returned with me to Alpine, where he planned to stay for a few days. We'd come home Thursday night, and I resisted my son's urgings to take Friday off. There was the Hartquist murder trial under way, the arraignment of Nolan Curry, and the Everett police had turned Dan Peebles over to SkyCo. Tara had already been charged by the Everett police as a co-conspirator with her sons. Her fate and Don's were out of Milo's hands. He was bitter, of course, since she had tried to manipulate him into marriage as part of some lamebrained scheme to avoid prosecution.

That Friday morning, the sheriff filled me in on the gaps in the Curry case. Nolan had come with Brian to Tonga Ridge. I'd figured that much out from talking to Gina Ancich—Nolan had lied about Brian going to early Mass at St. James Cathedral in Seattle. Meara O'Neill had heard from Brian shortly after nine o'clock that morning. He was already in Alpine. With Nolan Curry.

As Leo had related, when the two young men got up on the Ridge, Brian announced that he wanted out. Nolan had stabbed him to death and hidden his body. He bragged about it, considering himself a martyr to the cause, comparing himself to the Irish patriot Bobby Sands, who went on a hunger strike and died in prison many years ago. Milo figured that Nolan's martyr complex was why he'd shot Tom so boldly and so publicly. Nolan was making a statement. For Ireland. As if most Irish men and women on either side of the ocean cared.

But I cared. I cared so much that I couldn't have borne going home from work that night if Adam hadn't been waiting for me.

But he was. When I pulled up in the driveway, I saw him standing in the front yard, looking at some of

the new plantings I'd put in to fill the spaces Tom had cleared.

The Lexus drives so smoothly that my son didn't hear my arrival. For a moment, I watched him, his back to me, and looking so like his father at that same age. My heart filled up with longing. No wonder I had felt such apprehension. I'd mistaken it as worry for Milo. How odd that we often can't read our own feelings.

Odd, too, that we don't ever really know another person. In the past couple of weeks, I'd misjudged a number of people: Gina Ancich, Dan Peebles, Nolan Curry, and maybe—just maybe—Spencer Fleetwood. They'd hidden their true selves from me. But we all do that, and Tom had good reason to keep his secret.

There were so many questions that would never get asked. The future I'd glimpsed so briefly had withered, like spring buds in a killing frost.

Adam was still studying the garden, still reminding me of Tom. For almost thirty years, ever since I met Tom, he had rarely been at my side. But Adam had been with me always, from the womb.

Getting out of the car, I called his name. He turned to look at me with Tom's blue eyes. The last time I'd seen Tom's face, he'd looked at me with those same eyes. I didn't know it then, but they were the eyes of the dead.

Adam was still alive.

Maybe I was, too.

A
LPINE
, W
ASHINGTON WAS
a real town, a company town, and as such, it was doomed from the start.

In the early twentieth century, Carl Clemans and two partners went into the timber business, first in eastern Washington, and later in the Cascades, a mile off the Stevens Pass Highway. The site they chose was a whistle stop called Nippon on the Great Northern Railroad. Carl Clemans rechristened the town-to-be as Alpine. He built a mill and began logging operations.

A benevolent man, Clemans was both boss and father figure to the men and the families who moved to Alpine. From 1915 until 1921, my grandfather and my great-uncle were among the workers he employed. My mother and her five siblings were raised in the town, which could be reached only by railroad or by climbing a mile up the mountainside.

The family returned to Seattle after my mother graduated from high school. But that was not her last look at Alpine. In 1926, she married my father, who took a job at Carl Clemans's sawmill. My parents remained there for almost two years, but saw the handwriting on the clear-cut slopes. By 1929, Clemans's parcel of land had been logged out. There was no other reason for the town's existence, so it was shut down and burned. Such was the fate of many company towns that had outlived their reason for being.

But memories lingered on and were possibly gilded. From my earliest days, I listened to my parents and grandparents and other relatives speak of Alpine with great fondness and good humor. Geographically isolated, snowbound six months of the year, these hardy souls formed a bond that endured through the rest of the century.

That sense of community and continuity for a tiny town that had been erased from the map inspired me to make Alpine come alive again in my series of mystery novels. I suppose it was inevitable. I never saw Alpine, but it has been with me since the beginning. It lives again, at least in my imagination.

—M
ARY
D
AHEIM