The Alpine Recluse Part 17

"I wasn't. I hardly knew her." Dwight started to move away. "I came today for the Parkers and for Beth."

"How are they?"

"How do you think?" Dwight opened the door to his pickup. "Beth should take some time off, if you ask me, but n.o.body ever does. I could tell 'em a thing or two." He climbed into the cab and shut the door.

I had asked Dwight. But he hadn't told me anything.

I WAS MORTIFIED. The week seemed to have flown by. I'd completely forgotten to call Rolf back. I couldn't believe it.

"It's this murder story," I explained in my most abject voice when he called me just before noon. "I've been so focused on it that my mind has fallen apart."

"No kidding."

I couldn't tell if Rolf was being humorous-or acting like Dwight Gould.

"I can leave here before five," I said.

"Don't."

"What?"

"I gave the tickets away. I figured you didn't give a d.a.m.n."

This was our first quarrel. I braced myself. It had been a long time since I'd been involved in a romantic squabble.

"It isn't as if I haven't been thinking about you," I said in a pleading voice. "I have." That much was true. During brief respites from focusing on murder, I'd envisioned Rolf in an abstract sort of way. Not, unfortunately, as the man I was supposed to be meeting in a few hours for a lovers' tryst.

Apparently, the story didn't always come first for Rolf. "You should never date a journalist," I said flatly.

"I am a journalist," Rolf replied in the same tone. "Maybe I should have stuck to dating myself. I'm always there for me."

"How mad are you?"

"Mad? I'm not sure that's the right word. Disappointed, hurt, p.i.s.sed off. That covers it, I think. I could throw in disillusioned, but that's probably too strong. Besides, I've never been one for illusions in the first place. I got the impression that you were real."

"You're not bad at this guilt thing," I said, my temper flaring up. "I had enough of Irish Catholic guilt with Tom Cavanaugh. Do I have to put up with Jewish guilt, too?"

"It would appear not," Rolf said coolly. "Who's feeling guilty? Not me."

"Okay," I said, "concert or no concert, I'm coming down to see you."

"I won't be here," Rolf replied. "I'm flying to Spokane this afternoon to cover a story."

"Oh. So you were going to cancel on me, is that it?"

"No. I volunteered this morning to fill in for a sick colleague. You know I usually work the desk, not the field."

That was the difference between us: Unlike me, Rolf didn't have to chase the news on a regular basis. It came to him. We seemed to have reached an impa.s.se. "I don't know what to say. I feel miserable."

"Good. I have to go now. The airport shuttle is picking me up in ten minutes. Goodbye, Emma."

Rolf hung up before I could say another word.

"Well?" Vida demanded, standing on the threshold of my cubbyhole. "You look like the pigs ate your little brother. Or, in your case, your big brother. What's wrong?"

I told her. "I can't believe I forgot," I finally said. "Am I so caught up in my work that I don't have time for a real life?"

Vida shrugged. "He's a man, and you've hurt his vanity. He'll get over it." She sat down in one of my visitor's chairs. "I noticed that you dropped in for the funeral, but you didn't stay. What happened?"

I'm convinced that Vida has eyes in the back of her head-or her hat. She takes in every detail, no matter how trivial. Maybe she absorbs it, like osmosis. "Can we wait to talk about it?" I asked. "I don't feel very clearheaded right now."

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Vida looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. "You're acting like a teenager! It's a good thing I don't go mooning around whenever Buck and I have a disagreement."

Given that Buck was a retired air force colonel and almost as strong-minded as Vida, I imagined that their "disagreements" were frequent. Yet they had been companions for years.

She was right about my adolescent reaction. "Okay," I said, and revealed what Toni had told me.

"Well now." Vida pursed her lips. "Toni isn't reliable, and a very poor judge of human nature. I wouldn't put much stock in what she said about Tiffany killing Tim. Still . . . the spouse is always the prime suspect."

"Surely Milo's checked her alibi."

"One a.s.sumes so." Vida reflected for a moment. "There were serious marital problems. Dot and Durwood hinted as much to me at the reception this morning."

I nodded. "Tiffany and Tim could live together, but a legal union spoiled the fun?"

"So it seems. Not to mention the responsibility involved. Of course," Vida continued, removing the black hat and fluffing up her gray curls, "the Parkers aren't the kind to talk about family matters." She frowned, apparently at the virtue of discretion. "But I could tell they weren't happy about their granddaughter's marriage. I got the impression-well, I've had it all along-that Tim was a very controlling sort of person. So protective, you know, which can indicate a much darker side, such as cutting Tiffany off from her friends and even family."

"It sounds to me as if Tiffany should've considered having a baby on her own," I remarked. "Speaking from experience, I don't encourage it, but if she was that desperate, it might have been better."

"Oh," Vida said, waving a hand, "she's the sort who'd have to have a man in her life somewhere. Very dependent, very needy. Unless . . ." She frowned. "Unless she felt that the baby was all she needed to be complete."

"That happens," I said.

"It's Beth that worries me," Vida said. "She's not herself. Billy mentioned that the other day. Oh, she's keeping up a valiant front, but she's very troubled. I could scarcely get her to make eye contact while we were chatting over some lovely pilchard sandwiches."

"How was her mother?"

Vida shook her head. "Mrs. Rafferty just sat there in her wheelchair. She had no idea what was going on."

"She's confined to a wheelchair in addition to having Alzheimer's?"

"Not completely," Vida replied. "She can walk a bit. Though that's part of the problem. She wanders off. So many Alzheimer's patients do, you know."

"Yes." At least twice a year we ran a story about some poor soul who had left a nursing home or even a private residence and disappeared, only to be found later, dead from hypothermia. A small town on the edge of the forest was a dangerous place. "She wasn't aware of what was going on, I take it?"

"Not as far as I could tell," Vida answered sadly. "I greeted her when we got to the church hall, but she didn't seem to recognize me. All she said was, 'That hat. It's big. Like you.' "

Frankly, that sounded fairly cogent to me. But it didn't mean that Mrs. Rafferty could identify the large person wearing the large hat.

I suggested that Vida use her clout with Bill Blatt to find out if Tiffany did indeed have an alibi. She agreed. "Perhaps I could treat him to lunch if he can get away," Vida said. "Though I'm rather full. The pickled herring at the reception was delicious."

Vida could take on Tiffany. I decided to burden myself with Beth. I liked her, and always felt we could be friends-if I made the effort. I'd try to call her later, after she'd had time to recover from the funeral. Since that was homicide-related, I thought grimly, I might actually remember to make the call.

Milo wandered in shortly after one o'clock. "Back from lunch, I see," he remarked, easing into a visitor's chair.

"I never went," I said. "I wasn't hungry."

"That doesn't sound like you." He removed his Smokey Bear hat and set it on one knee. "How come?"

I didn't feel like telling Milo about Rolf. "I just wasn't. What's new?"

"We've been checking deeper into Tim's moneymaking schemes," Milo replied. "Nothing new, really. No trace of the baseball stuff. He must have kept it at the house. We did find out that he'd put some of it on eBay and sold a few items over the past few years. Nothing big. An Alex Rodriguez rookie card got the top price-forty-five bucks, unsigned."

"And the online trading?"

Milo shrugged. "Nickel and dime. Tim didn't invest other people's money, as far as we can tell. He made some, he lost some. He liked to brag about the good ones, though. Oren Rhodes told me that every time Tim made money, he'd try to get him-Oren-to follow his lead. But Oren wouldn't bite. Oren said his wife, Sunny, provides the extras with her Avon lady job."

"Oren probably does okay with tips at the Venison Inn," I remarked. "That's your news?"

"Hey," Milo said, scowling, "what did you expect? We got no evidence, we got no witnesses, we got no motive. And n.o.body's seen Old Nick since you thought you did."

I felt defensive. "I'm ninety-five percent certain it was him. Who else would run off like that?"

"Whoever it was didn't come out of Mugs Ahoy," Milo replied. "We checked."

The sun, which was now directly overhead, felt as if it were beating down on the newspaper's tin roof like a blowtorch. "Is Beth coming to work this afternoon?" I inquired.

"Yep. She's a trooper. I wanted her to take it easy, wait until Monday, but she told Dwight Gould she'd work a short one-to-six s.h.i.+ft. She should be on duty now. Beth had to haul her mother back to the nursing home, but that wouldn't take long since it's right across from the Lutheran church."

After Milo loped away, I called Beth on her nonemergency number and asked if she'd like to have dinner with me.

"That's really nice of you," she replied, sounding a bit cautious. "But I'm doing okay. And frankly, I don't have much appet.i.te."

"Neither do I," I confessed, "but I felt bad because I was only able to stay for part of Tim's service. I didn't get to talk to you afterwards. Why don't we meet at the ski lodge? It's air-conditioned."

"That part sounds good," Beth declared. "All I have is a fan." She paused. "Six-fifteen?"

"Perfect." I decided I could kill an hour by keeping the promise I'd made to Donna Wickstrom to visit her art gallery.

For the rest of the afternoon, I felt restless, hot, and upset. Angry, too. I shouldn't have been, but I'm not always rational. The fault was mine. I didn't take much comfort in the fact that if it was ninety on this side of the mountains, it would probably be over a hundred in Spokane. Maybe Rolf would melt, though the most I could really wish for was a thaw in our suddenly chilly relations.h.i.+p.

At exactly five o'clock, I left my stuffy cubbyhole and walked out into the bright suns.h.i.+ne. The Alpine Building is directly across Front Street, but I was sweating when I arrived at the gallery. Donna had just put up the OPEN sign and unlocked the door for me.

"You came," she said, apparently surprised.

"I wanted to." It wasn't exactly a lie, but of course I should have been on my way to Seattle to meet Rolf. "Everything looks very elegant." That much was true. Donna had an artistic eye. The s.p.a.ce was small, no bigger than my living room, but she had managed to make the most of it without a sense of clutter. There were the expected mountain and forest paintings, some abstract works, a couple of gorgeous vases, sculptures done in various media, and jewelry. What caught my eye was a river scene, with dark green water tumbling over boulders gilded by the sun.

"That's very nice," I said, pointing to the painting.

"It's called Sky Autumn," Donna said. "It's my favorite, too."

I read the label attached to a corner of the painting. The artist's name was Craig Laurentis and the price was five hundred dollars. "Is he local?" I asked.

Donna shook her head. "Not really. That is, he doesn't live in Alpine. I have two more of his paintings in storage and one that's already been sold. The couple who bought it are from Monroe. They'll pick it up tomorrow."

I'm a sucker for rivers. Others may prefer seascapes, or just watching the surf at the ocean. But for me, the tide goes in-and the tide goes out. It just keeps doing that, and I get bored. Rivers are unpredictable, from sudden surging floods to lazy ripples over rocky beds. Rivers turn color, from brown to blue to gray to black to green. They change course; they cut new channels; they go wherever they will. Maybe it's that sense of reckless freedom that appeals to my inherently cautious nature.

"This Laurentis has really captured the feeling of a river," I said. "It looks like you could touch the water and get wet."

"Do you want to see the two I have in storage?" Donna asked.

"Rivers?"

"One river, one waterfall," she replied. "Craig paints only scenes from this side of the Cascades. I'll be right back."

While she was gone, I studied some of the other works. Two or three were done by locals, including Nina Mullins, Deputy Jack's wife. I had no idea Nina painted, but she didn't do it very well. It was no wonder that the asking price was only fifty dollars. Her rendition of a red barn in a snow-covered field was amateurish, even to my untrained eye.

The two vases, however, were a different matter. Both were tall and graceful, with cherry blossoms around the rim. One was pink, the other white. The price made me reel: Each one cost nine hundred dollars. I didn't know the artist, whose name was Anton Kublik.

"Who's this?" I asked when Donna reappeared.

"A Colorado gla.s.smaker," Donna replied. "He's a Nordic skier, and stopped by last winter on his way to Stevens Pa.s.s. He showed me some pictures of his work and asked if he could send a couple of items. I was thrilled. I've already sold one to a couple from Everett. It's surprising how many western artists want to exhibit their wares in small-town galleries. At least, the ones that get some tourist trade."

Carefully, Donna removed the protective packaging from the Laurentis paintings. The waterfall was a spring freshet that could have tumbled down the slopes of Highway 2. The earth was a rich, damp brown, after a heavy rain.

"Lovely," I said.

The second picture was even more vigorous. A river poured white water through a narrow canyon, sweeping an uprooted cedar on its crest. It was Nature on the rampage, an unstoppable force that the artist had captured so realistically that I could almost feel the spray as river struck rock.

"I'd wear hip boots if I owned that one," I said. "But it's quite stunning."

"These just came in this week," Donna explained. "I'll leave them out now and set them up. Craig wasn't sure he wanted me to have them, but I talked him into it. All of the works I have are of the Sky-or along it, in the case of the waterfall. I'll say this for him-he's loyal."

"But not from here?"

"No. In fact, I've never met him. We handle everything by e-mail. I think he lives in Monroe or around there someplace. The paintings are always sent from there."

"Interesting. So you don't have him hovering over you telling you how to display his works?"

Donna shrugged. "Half of the works I show are by out-of-towners. The other half are locals, or at least summer people. Frankly, we don't have many truly good artists in Alpine, although there are a couple of promising students at the college."

My gaze returned to Sky Autumn. "I really like that. I've had Monet's water lilies in my living room forever. I like it, but this is so evocative of the area." I grimaced. "Can I think about it?"

Donna laughed. "Most people do. I never encourage people to buy art on impulse. My husband's always loved paintings, but he's bought at least three over the years that are now in the garage. It was love at first sight, and complete loathing after he hung them up at home. That's how I got interested in opening the gallery. I didn't want him making any more mistakes."

"Five hundred dollars," I murmured. "That's a serious investment for a poor newspaper person."

"I know." Donna looked sympathetic. "Steve's high school math teacher's salary doesn't go very far, either. That's why I still run the day care. As for the gallery, I figure if I can pay the rent, I'm doing okay."