Authors: Mary Daheim
I nodded. “Yes, I can see that. It’s rather like you enlightening me about your father and his marriages. Marriage, I mean.” I felt like kicking myself; I wasn’t about to give up the chase.
Mrs. Cameron didn’t seem at all perturbed by my single-mindedness. “People get confused, especially about the past. Their memories become hazy. And young people in particular have no sense of what’s gone on before they were born. It’s all one great cluster of events with no specific order. They have no feel for history. It’s a pity.”
My agreement was given halfheartedly. I was distracted. The interview hadn’t gone as I’d planned. There was nothing else to ask Mrs. Cameron. Not without disturbing her. The steeple clock on the mantel showed that I’d been inside her house for less than an hour. I was anxious to get away. But I knew that she enjoyed my company. For once I succumbed to my better nature and asked about her own family. A flood of information surged from Mrs. Cameron’s lips. Her husband Sandy’s career with the provincial parks. Their two children’s marriages, one satisfactory, the other not. The grandchildren, scattered from Vancouver to Toronto. The great-grandchildren, who she had seen only in photographs. I sat back and made appropriate comments.
“It’s a pity to lose track of people,” she said, now sounding a bit weary. “I should have gone over to Port Angeles. But they wouldn’t have known me really. The Melchers, I mean.”
“Well,” I answered slowly, “they would have known who you were.” I tried to envision Lena giving a warm
welcome to the daughter of an ex-governess. Or Rose, throwing Sanford out of the music parlor so that she could entertain company. I knew nothing of Uncle Arthur’s wife, but if she had followed in the footsteps of the other Melcher women, there would have been no rolling out of the red carpet.
“It’s so hard,” Mrs. Cameron was saying, and I realized I’d missed something. “Arizona is so hot and Chicago is so cold. Even though Walter and Daniel were closer, we seldom got together. I do regret that. For so many reasons.”
Desperately, I tried to piece the conversation back together. Walter and Daniel were Claudia’s brothers, now deceased. Another brother—Joseph?—was retired in Arizona. A sister lived in Chicago. Was it Julia or Mary Ann? It must be Mary Ann. Julia was dead. But unless I’d missed it, Mrs. Cameron hadn’t mentioned Julia. Maybe she wasn’t dead after all. I tried to remember what Tessie Roo had told me about the Malone offspring.
“Julia lived too far?” I’d tried to make the comment into a statement, but it came out a question.
Mrs. Cameron’s lips pursed. “Julia.” She lifted the lid from the teapot. “It’s empty. Shall I …?”
If I drank any more tea, I could float back to Port Angeles. Mrs. Cameron didn’t press me. Instead, she twisted her swollen fingers together and frowned.
“I was so fond of Julia when we were girls. We had such fun together. How I’ve missed her all these years!” A faint tremor vibrated in Mrs. Cameron’s voice.
“She … died?” As soon as I asked, I finally recalled Tessie Roo’s information: Walter and Julia Malone had passed away in recent years in the Seattle-Tacoma area.
Mrs. Cameron regarded me with a sad yet wry expression. “They all do eventually. But I’m talking about years ago, when we were young. Julia ran away.”
“Oh!” I leaned forward in the chair, eager for my hostess’s confidences.
“Julia and my mother never got along. Never.” Mrs. Cameron shook her head. “Isn’t it strange how children can have the same parents and yet react so differently to them? It was cat and dog with Mother and Julia. When I was twelve and Julia was fifteen, she ran away. Like that!” The old lady made a feeble attempt to snap her fingers.
Julia. Julia, Julia, Julia … I found her on the family tree now imprinted in my brain. She was the eldest of Jimmy Malone’s children. Carrie’s eldest, too, according to the Clallam County genealogy records. If she’d been fifteen when she ran away, the year was 1919. The influenza epidemic came to mind.
“Where did she go?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Mrs. Cameron’s face sagged. “We never heard from her again. Not until she died. Someone I knew in Seattle read about her funeral in the newspaper and sent me a note at Christmas. Her married name was Olofson. She had two children, but they were scattered about, like all the rest.”
“Goodness.” It was all I could think of to say. Where would a fifteen-year-old girl go in the post-World War I era? Had she merely lost herself in the growing metropolis of Seattle? Had she found some of her Irish relatives in another city? Had she run off with a boy? I posed this last question to Mrs. Cameron.
My hostess was slow to answer. “There was no special boy that we knew of. But Julia would go off on the streetcar every so often and be gone for several hours. She was much too young to be on her own, riding around town. Julia was a pretty thing, so we had to assume it was a boy. At that time in our lives the age difference was such that she no longer confided her secrets to me. To her, I was still a baby. If she ran off with
someone, it wasn’t so much because of him as it was because of our mother. They couldn’t get along, plain and simple. Poppa doted on his girls, especially when he was in his cups. He called us his little princesses. Julia’s defection was hard on Poppa and me, but Walter suffered the most from her absence. He was always a shy little boy, but after Julia went away, he seemed to withdraw even more. He was very dependent on her, you see, since she was the oldest.”
“Neither of you ever tried to find her?” I asked gently. “That is, after you grew up?”
Claudia Cameron’s gaze looked beyond me, to the farthest corner of the room, or perhaps into a dark place in her soul. “No. I married and moved to Victoria. I had my children and … well, you get so caught up in your own life.” She plucked at the shawl that was thrown over her legs.
“And Walter?”
“No.” The word was emphatic. Claudia’s thin lips tightened. “Not Walter. He had his own … difficulties.”
A veil seemed to have descended between us. There didn’t seem to be much left to say. Mrs. Cameron was obviously tired out from my visit, though she made a polite plea for me to stay on. It was after noon when I finally called a cab to take me out of Oak Bay and back to downtown Victoria.
The next passenger ferry left at one. I was tempted to delay my departure until the later sailing at four, but I knew that Jackie would be wringing her hands over my absence. Besides, my car might be ready. Grabbing an order of fish and chips wrapped in genuine English newspaper, I headed for the ferry slip.
As we left the Inner Harbor, the sun was trying to come out at least three hours ahead of schedule. I strolled the deck, noting that this time the ferry seemed much more crowded. Armed with a cup of coffee, I
sauntered over to the stern to watch Victoria grow smaller as we headed out into the strait.
A man in a rumpled cotton sports coat was leaning over the rail. He seemed to be leaning a trifle too far, and I wondered if he was ill. Or, I thought fleetingly, suicidal. I smiled at my own fancy and came up within a few yards of him. Out of the comer of my eye I sensed that there was something familiar about him. A sidelong glance registered the sharp profile with the broken nose.
It was the drunk from the library, and judging from his desolate air, it looked to me as if suicide wasn’t a fantasy after all.
I
SPILLED MY
coffee on purpose, then let out a little yip. Slowly, reluctantly, the man turned. He didn’t seem very interested in my dilemma. But before he could look away, I burst into laughter.
“I’m such a dunce! Don’t walk over here. You might slip and fall. Have you got a napkin?”
“No.” The word fell out of his mouth like a stone. Again he tried to ignore me.
“Could you get me some from the vending area?” I assumed my most helpless air. “Please? I feel like a dope!”
With a sigh of resignation Leo Fulton Walsh moved off. The name had come to me as I visualized his California driver’s license. I drank what was left of my coffee and waited. The other passengers, who had stared at my little drama, now resumed chatting and watching the water. I caught sight of Mount Baker over on the mainland. The big, snow-covered peak always reminded me of an ice cream cone. It crowned the North Cascades, a link in the range that led to Alpine. The idea made me smile, and I wondered if I was homesick. In the past three and a half years I’d never consciously thought of Alpine as home. It was my base of operations, the place where I had my job. But
home
was my native Seattle or my adopted Portland. Had I assumed the guise of the small-towner? No, never that; I was a born and bred
denizen of the Big City. But maybe Alpine had sneaked into my heart, if not my soul. I smiled at the idea.
“You look pretty happy for a gal who damned near scalded herself,” said Leo Walsh, handing me a dozen paper napkins.
Startled, I accepted the napkins, then bent down to wipe up the spilled coffee. Most of it had already drained overboard. I spent more time than I needed to swab the deck. What could I say to a man I thought was about to commit suicide? How should I initiate a conversation with somebody who was dead drunk when I last saw him? Should I stick to meaningless clichés or actually try to discover what was eating Leo Fulton Walsh?
“Did you spend the day in Victoria?” I asked, settling for triteness.
Leo arched his eyebrows at me. As I’d suspected, his normal complexion was faintly florid. He did not, however, seem marked by signs of excessive drink. Indeed, his brown eyes were clear and in sharp focus.
“I went over for the morning,” he answered after a faint pause. “There’s not much to see unless you’re nuts about English bone china and fuzzy Eskimo sweaters.”
“Oh, no,” I said quickly. “There’s a wonderful museum and the Parliament buildings are fascinating, especially when they’re in session, and they’ve got an undersea garden and a wax museum and …”
His smile was crooked. It went with the nose. “You did all that in four hours?”
I blinked at Leo. “You saw me on the early ferry?”
He gave an indifferent nod. “Right. You were attacking one of the vending machines. I liked the way you kicked it and the coins flew out.”
“Oh!” I uttered an embarrassed laugh. “Well, I hate those contraptions. They never seem to work for me. They’re hexed.”
The light in Leo Walsh’s eyes went out. He looked away, beyond me to the open sea. “You were at the library.” His voice had resumed its dull, deadly tone.
I hesitated before answering. There was no point in dancing around the issue. “You feel better now?”
“Better than what?” He had returned to the rail, leaning on it as if his body had no other means of support.
Having spent the better part of two hours trying to tactfully elicit information from an old lady, I didn’t feel like playing word games with a middle-aged man. “Better than unconscious,” I retorted. “I’ll say one thing, you might have been a smart-ass when you spoke to me yesterday, but you sure were better-natured.”
Leo refused to look at me. “I don’t remember what I said,” he muttered.
His manner was so dejected that I immediately regretted my own smart-assed remarks. “Come on,” I said with a sigh, “let’s go inside. We’re out in the middle of the strait and the wind’s up. I could use a full cup of coffee.”
To my surprise, Leo followed me to the food-service area. I didn’t make the mistake of trying to get coffee from a machine but slipped into the cafeteria line. Leo also got coffee. We paid separately, which suited me fine.
After we sat down at a small table, I waited for him to speak first. It took a couple of minutes. “What are you?” he finally asked. “A Saint Bernard for tourists?”
I gave him a wry little smile. “If I were, I’d think twice about offering you brandy. Are you staying in Port Angeles?”
“It doesn’t look like it.” His expression was now noncommittal.
I wasn’t sure what to make of his reply. “You’re making the Olympic Loop trip?”
Leo felt inside his jacket, scanned our surroundings,
and noticed the No Smoking signs. His hand came out empty and he sighed with annoyance. “This part of the country is too damned healthy. Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights?”
As an ex-smoker I often count time in terms of not smoking rather than forgetting all about my unwholesome habit. Thus, I sympathized. But only briefly. I was about to add that it was a good way to kill yourself, but so was jumping off
The Victoria Express
. I decided to change the subject.
“What did you think of Victoria?” I asked in my most casual manner.
“I told you. It’s a tourist trap.” Leo drummed his fingers on the table. “At least the sun came out.”
“Big deal.” I was having a hell of a time being polite to Leo Walsh. “You Californians would rather have a riot than rain. And how about those brush fires and earthquakes and that smog, Mr. Walsh?”
“You’ve got earthquakes up here, too,” he grumbled, then stared at me. It was the first eye contact since we’d been out on deck. “How do you know my name? Or where I’m from?”
“I lifted your wallet. In the library.” I gave a little shrug. “I’m not a local, either. I didn’t know who you were. It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it.” Now I was the one who lowered my gaze.
For the first time Leo Walsh laughed. It was actually a surly sound, but not entirely unpleasant. “Okay, so who are you?”
I told him my name, adding that I was a visitor from the other side of Puget Sound. Leo didn’t need to hear my life story. “My car broke down. What about you?”
“Hunh. My car broke down, too.” Leo looked bemused. “In fact, it just plain died. It’s got over a hundred and thirty thousand miles on it. I’ve got a lot more on me.”
“Don’t we all,” I remarked lightly. “So how are you going to get back home?”
Leo gave me a sour look. “What home?” He gripped the table with both hands. “Hey, are you trying to pick me up or save me from my evil self?”
I let my eyes roam about the galley. “Oh, I just go around finding people with sad stories to tell and let them slobber all over me.” Abruptly, I leaned forward and zeroed in on Leo. “What’s yours?”