Authors: Mary Daheim
“Oh. Oh, no.” I groaned. Crazy Eights Neffel was Alpine’s resident lunatic, a seventy-five-year-old cuckoo who may or may not have been senile but who had always been insane. Roughly every six months Crazy Eights would wander into the editorial offices and demand that Vida or Carla or the hatrack—whichever he found most responsive—write a story about his latest adventures. Some of them were true; all of them were bizarre. The board games with the bear could fall into both categories.
“How long?” I asked, holding my breath and clutching the Melchers’ cordless phone.
“Four inches,” Vida replied. “I used one inch to describe the cave.”
I nodded absently, my mind preoccupied with how we could make up for the loss of the two ads to Barton’s Bootery and Harvey’s Hardware. “Has the paper
actually gone off to be printed yet?” It was shortly after eight
A.M.
, and under ordinary circumstances Kip MacDuff would have left Alpine between seven and seven-thirty.
“No. I forgot to tell you that part. Kip broke his arm playing soccer.”
Hearing Jackie rustle about in the kitchen, I suppressed several four-letter words. “So who’s driving the paper down to Monroe?” I asked, hearing my voice rasp.
“I am,” snapped Vida. “Who else is there?”
“Ed?”
“Oooooooh! Emma! I tried to tell you, Ed suffered a relapse! He has again become completely feckless. It happened overnight, from when he left early for his stupid appointment Monday afternoon and when he strolled into work yesterday around nine-thirty. I think he’s on drugs.”
I reeled at the idea. Ed didn’t have enough imagination or daring to become involved in anything that couldn’t be covered with gravy. I said as much to Vida.
“Yes, yes,” she answered impatiently. “But all the same, Ed’s acting very peculiar, even for Ed.”
I could hear bacon sizzling in the microwave. “Morose as well as lazy, I suppose.”
“No, actually.” Vida’s tone conveyed bafflement. “Ed seemed very chipper yesterday. He hummed.”
It was my turn to be mystified. Until Ed had undergone his previous metamorphosis, he had suffered from severe gloominess as well as inertia. “One day does not a lifetime make,” I noted, attempting to lift my spirits and maybe Vida’s, too. “I take it he hasn’t come in yet this morning?”
“That’s right.” Vida sounded annoyed.
My mind was wrestling with the problem of the missing ads. I hated to ask Vida to do more work than she’d
already been saddled with, but I had no choice. I suggested that she use Ed’s tired clip-art file and try to salvage the lost ads.
“We could go twenty-two pages,” I continued. “There must be news filler or handouts to cover each of the half-pages.” I hated to publish a paper with a single sheet; it cost extra because the printer had to stuff the odd page.
“I was planning to leave in five minutes,” Vida said sharply. “Ginny is holding down the fort.”
The reference to Ginny Burmeister, our young but efficient office manager, calmed me a bit. As of July first I’d given her a promotion and a raise. Ginny had proven her mettle during the past three years by not only excelling at her own job but by helping Ed with the advertising side of the shop. Maybe she could bail us out of the current mess.
“I hope Ginny doesn’t catch whatever Carla’s got,” I said with fervor. Ginny and Carla were chums. I had visions of them passing the flu bug back and forth between them like a tennis ball. “It’s too bad Ginny didn’t handle those ads in the first place. I hate like hell to leave them out.”
“We’ll make it up to Barton’s and Harvey Adcock next week,” Vida said, still sounding testy. “There’s no time to waste now. Ginny and I’ve already spent over an hour looking for the blasted dummies. The press is already off schedule. That’ll cost you something, too.”
I hardly needed the reminder. Surrendering, I gave up and told Vida to drive safely. She harumphed in my ear, asking if I thought she would otherwise drive carelessly. A hundred miles away, the receiver banged.
I wandered back into the kitchen, still holding the cordless phone. There had been no chance to tell Vida about my car troubles. Or, as a side issue, the body in the Melchers’ basement. I felt a real sense of letdown.
Not only was my staff falling apart on me, so was
The Advocate
itself. And Vida, whom I sometimes thought of as my second mother, hadn’t offered her broad shoulder for sympathy.
“Not that I blame her.” Jackie jumped, and I realized I had spoken aloud.
“Blame her? Who, me?” She was draining three slices of bacon on paper towels.
I shook my head and gave Jackie an apologetic smile, then tried to explain the predicament with the paper. Jackie put two slices of bread in the toaster.
“Most newspapers have too many ads anyway,” she asserted, sounding as if she and Ed would get along famously. “I always used to argue with Mom about that before she retired from
The Oregonian
. Who wants to look at all that stuff? Especially the electronics ads. They’re so
ugly
. Paul’s the only one I know who ever reads them.”
If Mavis hadn’t been able to convince her daughter that advertising revenue paid the bills, then I wasn’t about to try. I accepted a cup of coffee and arranged myself at the breakfast counter on one of the kitchen stools. Paul had left for work before I got up. Jackie’s breakfast had consisted of soda crackers and coffee. She insisted on fixing toast and bacon for me.
“I can’t do eggs, though,” she said, putting my plate in front of me. “The yolks—they’re like big yellow eyes staring up at me. And soft-boiled—all I can think of is what’s going on inside the shell. Isn’t it gruesome?”
Never having considered the inner workings of an egg, I was at a loss for words. Bacon and toast would do nicely. There were many mornings when I didn’t eat anything for breakfast unless somebody on the staff stopped off at the Upper Crust Bakery.
Jackie joined me on one of the other stools. “I’ve
been planning our day,” she announced. “We’ll start with the museum.”
“Good,” I said, assuming she meant we were going sightseeing. “We’ll have to wait until Dusty’s calls, though. I’d like to go out on Ediz Hook, too.” The Hook was a topographical companion to Dungeness Spit. It curved out into the strait like a big scimitar, forming the city’s natural harbor.
Jackie, however, was shaking her head and blowing on her coffee. “We don’t need to do that. The museum, the newspaper, maybe the city and county libraries—that’s where the information will be.”
I blinked at Jackie. “Oh! You mean … research on the family?”
“Right.” Jackie sipped her coffee and made a face. “Uhg, needs more sugar.” She scooped two heaping teaspoons out of a red ceramic bowl.
My first reaction was to discourage Jackie in her attempt to delve deeper into the mystery of the basement. But I was curious, too. If I helped her with the task, I wouldn’t feel like such a freeloader. My car might not be ready until late afternoon.
A moment later I discovered I was being optimistic. Dusty’s informed me that I needed a new fuel pump. The estimate was somewhere between two and three hundred dollars for parts and labor. The fuel pump would have to be ordered from Victoria, but the ferry that would bring it across the strait probably wouldn’t arrive until three o’clock. I’d be lucky to have the Jag back by noon on Thursday.
I groaned, but Jackie clapped. “You see! It was meant to be! I should call Mom and tell her you’re here. Except that she and Dad are in Santa Fe.”
We left the house shortly after nine. I wondered if Vida had arrived in Monroe yet. I wondered if Carla
was recovering. I wondered if Ed was still doing nothing except humming.
On the short drive to the museum Jackie asked me what I thought of Mike Randall. I told her that he seemed nice. The comment was, I hoped, ambivalent.
“Good,” Jackie responded, angling her Honda into a parking place on Lincoln Street. “Sexy, too, huh?”
Jackie ran one wheel up onto the curb, which was lucky for me because she became distracted. She also had to feed the parking meter and needed to borrow a dime. I didn’t want to tell her that despite Mike’s good looks and obvious intelligence, I hadn’t found him sexy. He struck me as utterly humorless, a sin far worse than blowing broccoli out one’s nose. But maybe I hadn’t given him a fair chance.
The museum was housed in the old redbrick courthouse. The lobby was finished in classic marble, with a sweeping staircase at each side of the rotunda. Since Jackie seemed as confused as I was, I guessed she hadn’t been inside before.
“We’ll get somebody to help us,” she whispered, then marched up to the main desk. A plump woman with graying red hair offered us a pleasant smile.
A few minutes later we were trudging through the standing exhibits, which depicted the history of Port Angeles. I knew that the area had been staked out some four hundred years ago by Juan de Fuca, a Greek pilot sailing under the Spanish flag and a Spanish name. Two centuries later Spain had been joined by England and the United States in making claims along the strait named for de Fuca. By the mid-nineteenth century the Americans had persevered. But the English and Spanish place-names endured. Captain George Vancouver had gone on a spree: Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Whidbey Island, Bainbridge Island, Vashon Island, Puget Sound—they were but a few of the places Vancouver
had named for crew and friends. Port Angeles, however, had originally been called Puerto de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. The natives couldn’t pronounce it and neither could the early settlers who started arriving at the outbreak of the Civil War. It was easier to call the fledgling town Port Angeles.
And for a brief period during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had designated the frontier settlement as the second national city. Had the Confederacy captured Washington, D.C., President Lincoln planned to move the capital to this tiny, rugged outpost. The concept caused me to smile. But it wasn’t much help in solving the Melchers’ mystery.
We quickly moved through the conflict between Native Americans and white pioneers. We scarcely paused at the mock-up of the failed Puget Sound Co-operative Colony, which had stood on the site of ITT Rayonier. We merely smiled at the account of how vigilantes stole the county records from Dungeness and moved them to Port Angeles to change the seat of Clallam County. We skipped over the squatters who had jump-claimed government reserve lands in the 1890s. It was only when we reached the turn of the century that we began to slow down and study the past.
On the edge of the Olympic Peninsula, Port Angeles was isolated, more so than Alpine. The Great Northern Railroad had helped give birth to the mining town on Stevens Pass. It had linked Seattle and Minneapolis in 1893, though in the beginning the name had been Nippon and the inhabitants had been either railroad men or Japanese miners. The real settlement hadn’t begun until 1910 when Carl Clemans came up from Snohomish, built a sawmill, and renamed the town Alpine.
But Port Angeles had no such early bond with larger cities. Except for rough overland travel or going by ship, the struggling county seat had been cut off from
the rest of the world. During the last decade of the nineteenth century the town had not only failed to thrive but had actually shriveled. The future had looked bleak.
The West had been built by men of vision, also known as gamblers. Port Angeles had had its share, from Judge George Venable Smith and his Utopian colony to banker Thomas T. Aldwell, who brought hydroelectric power to the Olympic Peninsula. They, along with a number of other expansionists, had also hopped on those homesteads. So had Cornelius Rowley, Michigan timber cruiser, whose claim had included a tract of virgin timber on Lincoln Hill.
“Here he is!” Jackie cried, though she tried to lower her voice while pointing to a mounted photograph of a bearded, burly man in a three-piece suit and a derby hat. According to the lengthy cutline, Rowley had come to Port Angeles in 1892 and worked for the Filion brothers, who had also hailed from Michigan. Eventually, Rowley had bought up some five thousand acres of his own in the Little River Valley outside of town. In 1896 he had brought his family west to homestead.
Sure enough, there was the Rowley house in a photograph that had been blown up and mounted on posterboard. The graininess of the enlargement made it impossible to identify the four people who stood under the Moorish arches of the front porch.
“Two men and two women,” I noted, squinting at the exhibit. “Cornelius and Mrs. Rowley and the two grown kids?”
Jackie ran a hand through her taffy-colored hair. “Carrie and Eddie? Maybe. Isn’t one of the women holding something?”
Trying for a closer look, I practically fell into the display. At least no one else was going through the museum this early in the day. “A baby, I think.” My eyes traveled down to the fifth and last of the arches that
fronted the big house. “There’s someone else, almost hidden behind the comer pillar. A man or a woman? I can’t tell.”
Jackie frowned. “I can’t, either.” She gazed at the wide expanse of front lawn that ran all the way down to the unpaved street. “Hey, look! They hadn’t put the rockery in yet. I could have sworn it was a million years old!”
It didn’t take long to finish our tour. Jackie suggested we try the genealogy room, but I figured it was more for general-interest ancestor seekers than for those looking for historical specifics. If Paul’s memory had served him well, we had a firm grip on the family tree. Thus, we polished off the rest of the museum, quickly passing by the arrival of the railroad, the opening of the Elwha River Dam, the introduction of electricity, and the patriotic fervor of World War I. We lingered, however, at the tribute to Lena Stillman Melcher Rowley, who looked as if she could have eaten steel girders for lunch. Lena’s accomplishments were many, including a hatchet job on a couple of local taverns, one of which still stood on East First Street. Her husband, Edmund Rowley, was mentioned in a footnote. In 1898 he had served under Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War and been wounded in the charge up San Juan Hill.
“Eddie,” murmured Jackie as we moved through Port Angeles’s bootlegging days in the Roaring Twenties and on up through the doleful Great Depression. “That’s Paul’s stepgreat-grandfather, isn’t it?”