The Deader the Better (14 page)

I got out and followed her inside. She walked around the counter
and let herself into the cramped back room. Boxes full of brochures,
a small battered desk with an old Macintosh computer, a video
recorder and a big black electronic device I didn’t recognize.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A combination videotape editor and converter.” She pointed to
the bag of tapes. “I spend all of every Wednesday editing and
changing the format. If I screw up, it sometimes takes me till the
wee hours. I take all of those and put them on one tape. And then I
convert a half-inch video into a threequarter-inch video tape loop.”
She could tell I was lost.

“We have our own TV station,” she said. “It used to be an
electronic monitoring station for the Strategic Air Command. They
gave it to us when they didn’t want it anymore. It was cheaper than
tearing it down. We use it to run ads for local merchants, the
community bulletin board, sports schedules, the church calendars.
That kind of thing. Here in town it plays on Channel Fourteen all the
time. Friday afternoons we broadcast to most of the peninsula for an
hour.” Her eyes were bright. “It’s been a heck of a boost for
business. Something like fifteen percent, we figure.”

She picked up the phone, dialed her access code and listened to
her messages. She made a few notes in a battered day planner and then
got to her feet. “Ready?”

When I said I was, she grabbed a red videotape box from the center
desk drawer.

“After you,” she said.

She locked up behind us and got behind the wheel. I was already
belted and hanging on. “Nobody likes my driving,”

she said.

As we were racing back toward town, I asked, “How come you’re…I
mean…”

A smile twisted the corners of her mouth. “You’re working up
your version of what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like
this?”

“Something like that,” I admitted. “I mean, I’m sure this
particularly bucolic hamlet has its charms…”

She knitted her brow and narrowed her eyes. “Careful what you
say, now. I was born and raised here.”

“And you can still speak in complete sentences.”

She had a rich, muscular laugh.

“That’s because I went away for a while.”

When I didn’t say anything, she went on. “Chicago…fifteen
years.”

“What brought you back?”

“Oh, a bunch of things. A divorce. A job I was good at but
didn’t really like.” She shrugged. “Just a general sense of
disconnectedness.”

“So are you cured? Are you connected now?”

She mulled it over. “I’m cured of some of it, I suppose.”

She threw me a sharp look. “You ask a lot of questions, you know
that?”

“I’m a detective,” I said. “We’re allowed to do that.”

“It was just so sad,” she said after a moment. “The town,”

she said without me asking. “Lots of people were talking about
leaving, they were talking about closing the school and busing the
kids to Sequim. I don’t know. The whole way of life just seemed to
me like something worth saving.”

“What did you do in Chicago?”

“Real estate development.”

“Ah…so it was a natural.”

She gave another laugh and launched into the prepared part of the
program.

“Nothing about Stevens Falls is natural. It’s like I keep
telling anybody who’ll listen. This is a town and a way of life on
the brink. We either bootstrap ourselves into the new century or we
go the way of all those hundreds and hundreds of other Northwest
towns that just dried up and blew away when they ran out of whatever
it was they were selling. Coal, tin, lead, lumber, it doesn’t
matter. One ending is another beginning. One man’s loss is another
man’s opportunity.”

She was right; it could be done. Up in the Cascades, the mountain
town of Leavenworth had transformed itself into an alpine village,
Octoberfest, lederhosen, dirndls and all. Farther over the mountains,
Winchester had turned itself into the wild wild West, with saloons
and staged gunfights in the streets. Vast tracts of eastern
Washington, once considered unusable, were now covered by trendy
vineyards. She caught me looking at her. “I was doing my spiel,
wasn’t I?”

“You’ve got my vote,” I said.

“I’m afraid I am something of a fanatic on the subject.”

“It usually takes a fanatic to get anything worthwhile started.”

“Who said that?”

“I was hoping it was me.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve heard some variation of that
before.”

We rolled back past the Steelhead, out the west end of town,
toward J.D.’s place and the damaged bridge. “You know that bridge
that’s coming up in a few miles?” I began.

“The Fox Creek Bridge.”

“The one to J.D.’s place.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

She kept her eyes on the road. “Actually…nothing. We’ve just
had it closed all this time so we could drive J.D. crazy.”

She put her right hand across her chest, Pledge of Allegiance
position.

“I swear, Leo. That’s what J.D. thought was going on. That man
honest to God thought the whole thing was a conspiracy to drive him
out of business.”

“So then, it is damaged.”

She looked at me as if for the first time. “Of course it’s
damaged. Why else would it be closed? He’s not the only one who
uses that bridge. It’s a heck of an inconvenience for a lot of
people, not just Mr. J.D. Springer.”

She went on. “Last winter we had nearly double our average
rainfall. You remember how bad it got out here?”

I said I did. I recalled pictures of people rowing boats through
downtown.

“We had rocks the size of houses rolling down the Hoh. It’s a
seventy-year-old wood frame bridge. It took quite a beating.”

“How long is it going to take to fix?”

She barked out a dry laugh. “Ha,” she said. “With or without
money?”

“I thought the state—” I began.

“The state comes up with half of it. The feds come up with half
of that. The rest is our responsibility.”

“And you don’t have it.”

“Touchdown,” she said. “Things like the road we can do. But
we don’t have the engineering expertise to do anything about the
bridge.”

“What about the road?”

She took her eyes off the road for a moment. “You’re doing
that detective thing again, aren’t you?” she chided. I resisted a
strange desire to confess all. “It’s in the blood,”

I said.

“The road was easy. We had Tonkin Construction go out of
business. He had all his construction equipment up for sale. He was
getting offers of five cents on the dollar because the equipment was
so old. The stuff just sat there in the rain, month after month. When
the river washed out this part of the road…” She made a rueful
face. “As usual, we couldn’t come up with our share.”

“Yeah?”

“I had an idea. What if we did it ourselves? Lord knows we’ve
got enough people who know how to operate heavy equipment and have
the time. I sat down and did the math. The way I calculated it, if we
paid old man Tonkin twenty cents on the dollar and paid operators ten
bucks an hour, adding in the cost of materials, it was still seventy
percent cheaper than having an outside contractor do the job. So…I
went to Mr. Tonkin and put it to him.”

I was thinking the old guy never had a chance. “And he went for
it,” I said.

“Oh heck. He was thrilled. He helped us put the stuff back into
shape and then taught everybody how to run the machines.”

She anticipated my next question. “It was slow going. There was
a pretty steep learning curve. Especially with some of the people we
had doing the learning.” She grinned over at me. “You remember
Whitey from back at the tavern?

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, just to give you some idea of what we were working with,
Whitey drives the dump truck on the road crew.”

She could tell I was suitably impressed. “We made a lot of
mistakes, but we learned from them. We did it as soon as we could pay
for it. That’s something else J.D. had a problem understanding.”

“What’s that?”

“That he was the only one living out this far, and that, you
know…that we were going to get around to this end of the road when
we got around to it. He seemed to think that we should aim all our
resources at his problem, and when we didn’t, when we took care of
the most first, he seemed to think it was personal or something.”
She took a deep breath and went on. “In the end, we got it done for
about half the cost, and now we collect the state and federal money,
do the work ourselves and pocket the difference. This fall, we put a
new roof on the school with the leftover money.”

About a mile before the Fox Creek bridge, we skidded to a stop in
front of a galvanized cattle gate. Ramona got out, unfastened the
lock and chain and then tied the gate open. When she got back in, she
said, “Wait till you see this thing. The Air Force guy they sent
out when we took it over said it was designed to survive anything
short of a direct nuclear hit.”

We went bouncing up a well-worn dirt track, winding our way up the
side of a steep clear cut mountain. Ten minutes of gunning it up the
straights and then sliding around the switchbacks. The scenery never
changed. All the way to the top, the unbroken ranks of huge gray
stumps sat among the scrub brush like tombstones.

We arrived at the top on two wheels, a combination of too much
speed and a steep final grade that gave way a little too quickly to
the man-made plateau at the summit. To my left, in a large fenced-in
yard, a dump truck, a road grader, an asphalt spreader and a
steamroller. In front of me, something that looked like it should be
defending the Siegfried Line. A squat concrete bunker with a massive
antenna on top. At least two hundred feet of welded steel and dull
red paint.

I chuckled. “You could broadcast to Rangoon on that thing.”

“We could send pictures into space, if the FCC would let us,”
she said. “All we had to buy was the rig you saw in the office and
a commercial VCR. Everything else was already here.”

She turned off the truck and checked her watch. “Gotta hurry,”
she said, grabbing the red tape box, popping the door and hustling
toward the bunker. I pried my fingers from the overhead handle and
followed along at a leisurely pace. She looked back over her
shoulder. “You always walk this slow, Mr. Leo Waterman, or do you
just like being behind me?”

“A little of both,” I admitted.

She laughed and walked faster. Over to the thick steel door. She
unlocked it and pulled it open, blocking my view of the interior.
“Come on,” she said. “The tape loop recycles at two-thirty. If
it’s going to be nice and neat and I’m not going to stop
something midstream, that’s when I need to change the tape.”

The interior was tiny, one table, one chair, still smelled of
fresh concrete. Two overhead lights cast a dim glow over the low
room. The feeling was one of being squeezed. Of dampness. Of an
oppressive weight coming at you in all directions. I felt trapped and
had to overcome the urge to back out the door. On the wall to the
right of the door, someone had drilled into the concrete and hung a
piece of plywood with a series of hooks. On the hooks hung keys
labeled TRUCK, SPREADER, ROLLER, GRADER. A bead of sweat rolled down
my spine and I shuddered at the dampness.

“It’s a weird feeling, isn’t it?” she said. “I used to
feel the same way, like the whole thing was going to come down around
me.” She checked her watch. “Here we go,” she said. She pulled
this week’s tape from the red box. We waited in the damp silence
until the three-quarter-inch video player on the table beeped twice
and then made a loud clicking noise. She pushed the eject button. The
tape slid out. In went the new. Buttons were adjusted and knobs
turned. “It’s completely automatic,” she said. She pointed to a
red toggle switch on the VCR. “I come up first thing on Friday,
flip that switch up, and we’re on the air all over the peninsula.”

“I’ll be outside,” I said. I stood in the clearing taking
deep breaths, feeling disassociated from myself. I heard the whoosh
of the door being closed and the crunching sound of her feet on the
gravel. “You okay?” she asked.

“Like you said,” I replied. “It’s a weird feeling in
there.”

She took off for the car. I ambled along behind, taking in the
scenery.

“Just when I was wondering if there was
anything
that
made you uneasy.”

“What do you mean?”

She pulled open the truck door and stood there. One arm over the
open door, one arm on the roof, her hair moving slightly in the
breeze. “Well, you slew the town bully. You faced down a whole pack
of his friends.”

“I had you on my side.”

She waved me off. “You weren’t one bit afraid of that motley
crew. Don’t tell me you were.” I tried to protest, but she gave
me the raspberry. “And then you very nearly get into it with Nathan
Hand about whether or not you’re going to get in the police car.”
She shook her beautiful head. “Just when I was beginning to think
you were Superman.” She snapped her fingers. “Another illusion
shattered.” She got in the truck and started the engine.

“Better now than later,” I said. I hopped in beside her and
fastened myself down as she did a doughnut in the gravel and then
went ripping back down the narrow road.

REBECCA WAS SEATED AT THE SAME TABLE WHERE WE’D had coffee a
couple of hours before. “How’d you do?” I asked as I sat down.

“Where do you want me to start?”

“The eviction,” I said, “seems like the most pressing.”

She agreed. “I talked with the city attorney—a man named Mark
Tressman. A dedicated letch of the first order.”

“Really?”

“Mark, as he insisted I call him, assured me that he and his
wife had”—she made quotation marks with her fingers—“an
‘arrangement’ about such things. I asked if he’d mind if I
called her and chatted and all of a sudden he got all professional on
me.”