Authors: Mary Daheim
I was passing the turnoff to Index. Traffic was still heavy but moving at the speed limit. Shafts of sunlight filtered through the tall stands of Douglas fir and hemlock. Involuntarily, my lips curved in a smile. I was climbing steadily, going up the pass, almost home.
There were no eligible men in Alpine. Not for me with my college education and my city rearing. Except for Milo, small-town native that he was. If I wanted to meet a man who could fill in all the blanks on my imaginary future-husband application, I’d have to find him in Seattle. That would take a concentrated effort.
I passed Deception Falls. Did I want a husband? I’d
never had one. I didn’t know what marriage was like. A shared life, juggling schedules, allergies to my favorite foods, dirty socks, all sorts of compromises. I was accustomed to living alone. And liking it. Usually.
Why was I beating myself up? I had a fine son, a rewarding job, a nice little home. If someone came along and we fell in love, that would be wonderful. But what was the point in putting pressure on my life? Who really cared but me?
I turned off the highway and crossed the Skykomish River. Vida had urged me to reflect, to think, to make decisions. Why? She had been widowed in her forties, left with three girls. Had Vida tried to find a second husband? She had not, as far as I knew. Instead, she had gone to work for
The Advocate
and seemed to love what she was doing. What gave her the right to meddle in my life?
Friendship, concern, affection—these were the reasons for Vida’s attempt to give me guidance. I could argue that I didn’t need it, but I couldn’t fault her for trying. In her brusque, unsentimental manner Vida was like a second mother. My parents had been killed in a car crash while I was in college. I missed them dreadfully. It was an unexpected comfort to meet Vida twenty years later.
Alpine’s version of rush hour was different from Seattle’s. Both lanes of Front Street were busy with cars, trucks, and RVs. In the three blocks between Alpine Way and
The Advocate
office I spotted four out-of-state license plates, from Oregon, California, British Columbia, and Texas.
There were a few wispy clouds hanging above Mount Baldy, but otherwise the town looked summer fresh in the late afternoon sun. Most of the shops along Front Street were still open, and quite a few people roamed the sidewalks. The Chamber of Commerce’s flower
planters were flourishing. A banner proclaiming Fixer-Upper Week was stretched across the street by the Venison Inn on one corner and the Whistling Marmot Movie Theatre on the other. After four days in Port Angeles, Alpine seemed to have shrunk. There was no wide vista of open sea, no sculpted harbor, no major highway cutting through the heart of town. The Cascade foothills closed in around Alpine, as if holding the inhabitants in a cradle. But I felt no sense of claustrophobia: The rocky ground and thick forest in which Alpine had been built, log by log and shingle by shingle, provided sanctuary. I was home, and happy for it.
It was close to five-thirty when I walked into the news office. Only Vida was still at work. She was sitting at her desk going over what appeared to be a large diagram. At first I thought she was laying out the paper. Vida refused to use a computer program or a word processor.
“Well, you made it.” Vida spoke without looking up. “Whatever have you been up to these past four days?”
“It’s a long story,” I said, sinking down into the chair by her desk. “What’s that?”
At last Vida looked at me. Her paisley blouse was more rumpled than usual and her gray curls needed taming. “My family tree. It’s difficult, but it’s all there, going back to my grandfather and my husband’s grandfather. Pre-Alpine. Well? If this isn’t a job, I’ll put in with you!”
Vida’s version was even more crude—and extensive—than the Rowley-Melcher family tree we’d put together in Port Angeles. I couldn’t make head or tails of it. “Are we going to run this?” I asked.
“Yes. But not in this form.” Vida removed her tortoiseshell glasses and rubbed her eyes, though not with her usual vigor. “Carla knows someone who has a family tree computer program. They can adapt my version
and print it out. It’ll fill a half-page. We can use the copy.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t entirely convinced. “Why do you need the grandfathers if they weren’t in Alpine? Couldn’t you save space by starting with the next generation?”
Vida bristled. “I didn’t say they were never in Alpine. They weren’t born here, that’s all. My Grandpa Blatt worked for the Great Northern Railroad. He used to stop on his way through Alpine for pie and coffee with some of the local ladies. Grandpa Eldon Runkel knew Carl Clemans in Snohomish. He got jobs for his sons, Rufus, my father-in-law, and Rupert in the woods.” Vida tapped the page with her pencil. “That was back in 1919. Rufus and Rupert were mere teenagers. Neither finished high school.”
I was able to make out the Runkel brothers’ names on the family tree. Rufus had married Ingeborg Stensrud; they were the parents of Vida’s late husband, Ernest, and thus her in-laws. I didn’t recall Rupert.
I pointed to the younger brother’s name. “What happened to Rupert?” I inquired.
“He was killed in the woods. Twenty-three years old.” Vida clucked her tongue. “Not an uncommon tragedy, but it ruined Rufus’s logging career. He couldn’t bear to go back after Rupert died. That’s why Rufus was so intent on starting up the ski lodge when the original mill was closed a few years later.”
I nodded. Logging was still a dangerous business. Like other timber towns, Alpine had its share of amputees and people with missing digits. Casually, I checked to see if young Rupert had left a family.
He’d had a wife. Her maiden name was Julia Malone.
It was a coincidence, a similarity of names that had nothing to do with Port Angeles. I refused to believe
that Vida could be connected, however tenuously, to the Rowley-Melchers. Julia Malone Runkel’s year of birth was noted by Vida as 1904, but even that could be coincidental.
Yet I knew the ties between the logging towns of western Washington were strong and intertwined. Part of it was the nature of logging, the nomadic existence that so many woodsmen lived, going where their work or their whim led them.
“Tell me about Julia Malone Runkel,” I said, feeling faintly light-headed.
Vida put her glasses back on and frowned. “Aunt Julia?” She traced her finger across the page to the Blatt branch. “After Rupert died, she married my uncle Elmer. They moved to Sultan while I was in high school. When Elmer passed away in the Sixties, she married an Olofson, from Seattle. She buried him, too, and died about twelve years ago. She was Marje Blatt’s grandmother. Why do you ask?”
I heaved a deep sigh. “Vida, are you hungry?”
“Well …” Vida glanced into her wastebasket, where I suspected the remnants of her latest diet lunch reposed. “I’ve been working like a dog all day. I could use a little sustenance.”
The Venison Eat Inn and Take Out was crowded. We managed to snag the last booth, stepping nimbly in front of a couple who had
tourist
marked all over their deeply tanned faces.
I spent the salad course relating the events of my stay in Port Angeles as well as the background. I tried to keep to the basic facts, stressing only Julia Malone’s relationship to the mystery. Vida listened attentively, occasionally cocking her head to one side like an owl. By the time I finished, I was hardly surprised to see her nod.
“Oh, that’s Aunt Julia, all right. She was from Port
Angeles originally, though I honestly don’t know much about her family. Except that it wasn’t a happy situation for her or she wouldn’t have run away.”
“Why Alpine?” I asked. “She was only fifteen. It seems like an odd choice.”
“Oh, no.” Vida allowed her empty salad plate to be removed. “She had a stepmother here. Well, not really a stepmother, a stepgrandmother, but she was too young to be called that.” Abruptly, Vida’s mouth turned down. “Her husband was a cook at Camp Two. They left town after the mill closed.” Vida was showing some signs of distress.
My hot turkey sandwich and Vida’s pot roast arrived. I was somewhat confused as well as alarmed. “What’s wrong, Vida?”
Regaining her composure, Vida assaulted her dinner. “I’m not telling this at all well. Let me back up. It might help you with your little mystery. This cook was an out-of-work fisherman from Alaska. It was a year or so after the Great War and he’d met someone in Ketchikan who knew Carl Clemans and was heading for a job in Alpine after the fishing season was over. It was suggested that he come along, since the cook at Camp Two had recently quit, and this fellow was French, which doesn’t mean he was a
chef
. But you know how people think in such clichés. And as it turned out, the Frenchman
did
have a knack for cooking. Armand Nievalle brought his wife, Simone, to Alpine in the fall of 1919. Julia joined them soon after they set up housekeeping.”
“Armand! Simone!” The names shot out of my mouth. “That was the second Mrs. Rowley and her lover!”
Vida gave a little shrug. “Was it now? I don’t think I knew who Simone had been married to before. You
must remember that this was before my time. I was only aware that she had been close to Aunt Julia.”
“But how? Julia was very small when she and her family left Port Angeles.”
“Aunt Julia knew Simone and Armand in Seattle. Simone was left by herself for months at a time while Armand fished in Alaska.” Vida paused to administer great sprinklings of salt and pepper on her mashed potatoes and green beans. “Aunt Julia used to take the streetcar and sneak across town to visit Simone in West Seattle. Simone was very pretty, very gay. Julia was very fond of her, much more so than of her own mother. That’s why it was quite natural for Aunt Julia to run away to Alpine.”
I had always said that not only did Vida know everybody, she was related to most people, too. Given her numerous nieces and nephews and the rest of her extended Runkel-Blatt family, it wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Now I discovered that she had a connection with the Rowley-Melcher family. I was surprised, but I should have guessed. When it came to knowing everything about everybody, Vida was an oracle. Or, in this case, a conjurer.
For a few moments I was silent, eating my hot turkey and sage stuffing and gravy-soaked white bread. It wasn’t a summer meal, but the long drive had given me an appetite.
“I gather they’d had quite a bit of money somewhere along the line—no doubt from Simone’s first husband, if you’re saying Mr. Rowley was rich—but they’d frittered it away,” Vida explained, employing both knife and fork in her attack on the pot roast. “Simone had expensive tastes, even in Alpine, and I heard Armand liked to gamble. Then there was a child,” Vida said, her voice dropping a notch, her eyes not on me but on the aisle that separated us from the other diners. “He’d been
born while Armand was in Alaska that summer. They named him Charles. He was very strange, never fitting in, going his own way.”
“A different drummer?” I suggested.
“An entire marching band.” Vida spoke without humor. “Charles was always a problem.”
“Did Julia help care for him?” I inquired, wondering why Vida seemed so uneasy.
“Certainly. Aunt Julia never shirked a task.” Vida acknowledged Durwood and Dot Parker’s exit from a rear booth. “When Carl Clemans closed the mill in Twenty-nine, the Nievalles moved away, as so many of the earlier people did. They left Charles in Alpine with Julia and Elmer.”
I was surprised. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten. “Why? Where did they go?”
“They were headed for San Francisco. Simone wasn’t well. She’d never been robust. I think they intended to send for Charles once they got settled. But they never did. Simone kept in touch, but she died a few years later, when I was about eight. Armand dropped out of the picture.” Vida nodded at the Lutheran minister and his wife, who were being escorted to the booth vacated by the Parkers.
My portrait of Simone Dupre Rowley Nievalle was changing. Yes, she had been vain, self-indulgent, extravagant, and amorous. But she had also possessed a good heart or she would not have taken in Julia Malone. Yet something about this revised portrait jarred me, as if the colors clashed.
“I don’t get it, Vida. Simone abandoned her own son, while on the other hand she took in a troubled runaway teenage girl. That’s not consistent.”
“I told you,” Vida replied doggedly, “Simone was sick by the time she and Armand left Alpine. I’m not excusing her, mind you. But there was a big difference
between Aunt Julia and little Charles. Julia wasn’t troubled in the sense that you’re implying. She didn’t get along with her mother. There may be two sides to every story, but in this case I’d take the daughter’s side. Or so my mother did. When Julia married Uncle Elmer, she became my mother’s sister-in-law. They were rather close.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind certain small scraps of information were dancing about, demanding my attention. “Details,” Paul Melcher had said.
Details were important
. Momentarily, I shut myself off from the bustle of the restaurant. My greetings to Harvey and Darlene Adcock were somewhat distracted.
“Harvey’s taken it well,” Vida whispered as the Adcocks headed for the cashier.
I gave Vida a startled look. “What?”
“The ad for the hardware store.” Vida’s expression reproached me. “You’ve forgotten Ed’s debacle?”
I had. I’d forgotten Ed, too, at least temporarily. “I’m sorry, Vida. I’m trying to remember something. I think it’s important.” Taking a last bite of turkey, I slid out of the booth. “I’m going to make a phone call. It shouldn’t take long.”
Vida arched her eyebrows but said nothing. I hurried to the pay phone in the hallway between the restaurant and the bar. Digging in my purse, I found the number for Claudia Malone Cameron in Victoria. I had only two questions for her, but if she had the right answers, the Melcher mystery was solved.
“Boysenberry pie,” Vida said upon my return five minutes later. “It’s fresh this time of year. It wouldn’t be right to pass it up, do you think?”
“Go ahead,” I replied, wearing a big grin. “I’ll settle for coffee.”