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Chapter One
IN MY DREAM, Vida Runkel had her clothes on backward. In real life, Vida only wore her hat the wrong way to. Obviously, the poor woman had regressed in my subconscious. Maybe people who spend a lifetime working on small-town newspapers tend to deteriorate in every possible way. Maybe, I thought hazily, as the phone rang, that will happen to me. …
“Emma Lord here,” I mumbled, trying to make sure I wasn’t talking into the earpiece. “Who died?” A call at two A.M. had to be bad news. Unless it was my son.
It was. “Nobody’s dead, Mom,” replied Adam, his usually strong young voice sounding a bit reedy over the five-thousand-mile cable between the shining sands of Honolulu and the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. “What are you talking about? You working on a story for the paper?”
I sat up, fumbling for the light switch on the lamp next to my bed. “Why else would you be phoning in the middle of the night unless there was a disaster? Are you in jail?”
Adam laughed, and I relaxed a little. “Hey, everything’s fresh. It’s not the middle of the night. It’s only eleven o’clock. How come you’re asleep so early?”
Single mothers, married mothers, even stepmothers are basically a patient lot. They have to be or they would devour their offspring early on, like guppies. I repressed a sigh. “Gee, Adam, you’ve only been going to the University of Hawaii for two years. When are they planning to teach you about time differences? The earth is round, remember? You’re three hours behind us, you nitwit. Are you broke again?”
“No.” The incredulity in Adam’s response struck me as incredible. This was the kid who could lose money as fast as he could spend it. He could lose just about anything, if it came to that, having once misplaced his baby-sitter when he was eight. She thought it was the other way around, but it wasn’t. So if Adam wasn’t broke, he must have robbed a bank. Ergo, he was probably in jail after all. I finally managed to locate the light switch. “It’s Chris Ramirez,” Adam was saying, as I blinked against the brightness of my cozy little bedroom. “He’s coming home. Can you put him up at our house?”
“Chris?” I sank back against the pillows. A cool breeze blew in through the two-inch span of open window. I could smell the evergreens and the damp earth. As always, they gave me strength, like an elixir. “Why on earth is he coming back to Alpine after all these years?”
“He’s quitting school.” Adam made it sound simple. He also made me sound as if I were simple, too. “He wanted to quit even before his mom died. He registered, but he didn’t go to any of the classes. He can get his money back, but it’s a big hassle.”
My son’s attitude toward extra effort rankled, as usual, but I decided not to run up the phone bill by saying so. Undoubtedly, Adam had charged the call to my credit card. “Okay, when will he be in?”
“Let me see …” Obviously, Adam was consulting an airline schedule. I marveled that he’d bothered to pick one up. “It’s a six-hour flight. He’ll be there in about … uh … five hours. But you don’t have to pick him up at the airport. He’ll hitch a ride up to Alpine.”
I bolted upright, clutching at the phone. “What? You mean he’s on his way? Hell, Adam, it’s over a two-hour drive to the airport! I’ve got a paper to put out! It’s Wednesday!”
It was Adam’s turn to exhibit patience, a virtue he seemed to reserve only for parts on his ’82 Rabbit and his considerably older, if more reliable, mother. “Yeah, I know. That’s why I called now, to give you some advance notice. But you don’t have to go clear into Sea-Tac. I told him it’d be a cinch to find somebody driving over the Pass.”
Visions of various serial murderers danced through my mind. In my opinion, hitchhiking should be outlawed not only on the freeway, but everywhere. “Never mind,” I said grimly. “I’ll go get him.”
“That’s up to you,” my son said, and I could see him shrug. “Hey, I gotta run. I got some dudes with a half-rack waiting for me, okay? I’ll write this weekend and tell you about Deloria.”
“Deloria?” But Adam had hung up.
I put the phone back and ran a hand through my short brown hair that somehow had not yet turned gray, despite a conspiracy by the rest of the world. Instead, my teeth kept trying to fall out. Thank God for “Dr. Starr and giggle gas, I thought as I reset the alarm for four-thirty. The Seattle-Tacoma Airport was over ninety miles from Alpine, but at least I shouldn’t run into much traffic.
Unfortunately, I was now wide awake. Even if Chris’s plane was on time, I wouldn’t get back to Alpine until ten. As for Chris himself, I had seen him twice, on trips to Honolulu to get Adam settled in at the university. He was dark, spare, handsome, and more moody than most young men his age. A bit of the poet about him, or would have been, if he, like the rest of his generation, didn’t seem to be semiliterate. But then I was prejudiced. You get that way when you spend a lifetime in journalism and watch the circulation figures drop. I keep waiting for The New York Times to make the endangered species list.
Or at least The Alpine Advocate. Granted, except for the fact that both are printed in English and appear on newsprint, there isn’t much of a comparison. But then Alpine isn’t New York. Originally, the town where I live and work was called Nippon because of the Orientals who helped build the railroad. Later, a sawmill was opened by a relative of Mark Twain’s, one Carl Clemans, whose father had changed the spelling of the family name back to its Welsh origins. Carl, in turn, had rechristened the scattering of buildings along the railroad tracks as Alpine. The town thrived, if that’s the word, from the pre-World War I era until the Depression when it should have folded and disappeared, like other railroad semaphore spots along the old Great Northern route, such as Tonga and Korea. But a farsighted entrepreneur named Rufus Runkel joined forces with a Norwegian immigrant called Olav the Obese, who decided that putting boards on people’s feet and letting them fall down steep hills could be fun—and profitable. They built a lodge in the early 1930s and saved the town from extinction. The mill had closed in 1929. Logging had continued in the vicinity but was jeopardized in the last two years by the controversy over the spotted owl.
Sixty years ago, when both owls and trees had still seemed plentiful, the former mill workers who didn’t want to log found other jobs, first in building the ski resort, and then in staffing it. Meanwhile, the silver mines that had originally lured Mark Twain’s relative continued to draw visitors who were more curious than greedy. A good thing, since nobody I know has found any silver worth having assayed since 1942.
I turned the alarm off, got up, and got dressed. The Advocate office is less than a mile from my house, and I often walk. But, since I’d need the car for the trip to Sea-Tac, I drove. Many of the four-thousand souls who live in Alpine are now commuters to Everett and Seattle. The spectacular beauty of the Cascades, the sharp, fresh mountain air, and the comparatively cheap real estate prices have kept Alpine—well, thriving. During ski season, the town is full of visitors, but in late September, we can still call our souls—and our grocery store—our own. The first snows weren’t due for another two weeks, at least.
The Advocate office is small but up-to-date. We have three word processors, though Vida Runkel insists on banging out her House & Home section on an old Royal upright. Every Wednesday at nine in the morning, we ship the finished layout off to a printer in Monroe, some forty miles away. It comes back around three, ready for our carriers to deliver and the post office to mail. Then we sit back and wait for the irate phone calls to the publisher and incensed letters to the editor, both of whom happen to be me. I love it. Usually.
