Alpine Hero by Mary Daheim Read Free Book Online Page A

rhyme
taco
and
Waco
before.”
    Even as she led us out of the kitchen, Jane nodded solemnly. “It was after that terrible tragedy with the Branch Davidians. The poem was my attempt to make sense of it all.”
    “Yes,” Vida responded, still grim. At the door, shemade one last effort with Laurie. “You’re certain that you don’t know who called about Ms. Whitman?”
    Laurie looked blank, which wasn’t unusual. “I don’t think so.”
    “I’ve written a new poem, about the baseball strike,” Jane put in, now sounding faintly frantic. “I’ve tied the owners into the cosmos.”
    “A good place for them,” Vida retorted, without looking at Jane. “Tell me one more thing, Laurie—did this man who called on the telephone ask for Honoria or Kay Whitman?”
    The question seemed to send Laurie’s brain into a paroxysm of labor. “Oh … I … Sheriff Dodge asked me … but I don’t think he said … the man who called on the phone …”
    “It begins, ‘O thou sky so infinite, weep not for the parasite; the universe counts not the winner, nor cares a fig for George Steinbrenner.’ What do you think, Ms. Runkel?”
    Reluctantly, Vida turned to Jane. “I think that’s … apt.” She looked again at Laurie, still trying to coax the words out of her. “Did he actually give the first name?” Vida coached.
    Laurie’s shoulders slumped. “No,” she admitted in defeat. The failure caused her to avoid Vida’s gaze. “He just asked for Ms. Whitman.”
    “Ms.? Not Miss or Mrs.?” Vida never gave up.
    It was too much for Laurie. She simply didn’t know, or couldn’t remember, or think for another second. Her mother shielded her daughter with one arm, and though Jane’s smile was bright, her eyes were hard.
    “So good to see you. Drop by another time when we’re not in such a muddle. Good night.” Jane Marshall waved us off. Or brushed us off, depending upon the interpretation.
    “Rats,” Vida muttered, tramping through the snow to her Buick. “That girl is impossible!”
    “We didn’t find out much more than Stella already told us,” I said, getting into the passenger side of the car.
    Vida gathered her tweed coat closer and squeezed behind the wheel. “Yes, we did,” she said with fervor. Before turning on the ignition, she gazed at me through her glasses. “We found out that Jane Marshall isn’t merely protective of her daughter. Laurie’s mother is also scared to death
for
her. Or perhaps
of
her. Which do you think it is?”
    Vida’s remark had distracted me just enough that at first I didn’t realize we weren’t headed back to
The Advocate
so that I could collect my aging Jaguar. “Obviously, Jane’s frightened for Laurie,” I agreed. “But how could that poor girl scare anybody? She’s not only dim, but exceedingly meek.”
    “I didn’t mean it that way,” Vida replied as a few flakes of new snow dusted the windshield. “I got the impression that Jane was afraid of what Laurie might reveal. Why else was she so determined not to let her daughter see us?”
    “We can see Laurie anytime we want at Stella’s,” I pointed out. “Frankly, I got the impression that Laurie isn’t just dim, but a little evasive.”
    “She’s not clever enough to be evasive,” Vida retorted, then, after a pause, murmured, “Perhaps.”
    “Perhaps what?” I inquired.
    But Vida merely shook her head. We had continued driving along Cascade, passing St. Mildred’s Catholic Church on the right and now, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church on the left. Vida began to slow down by Sky Robics. The building next door had been through several guises in the past eighty-odd years. Originally a bunkhouse, it was Holy Trinity’s first site of worship,later a pool hall and allegedly a brothel, that—for no apparent reason, though Vida hints otherwise—became the Elks Club. Thirty years ago it assumed its current incarnation as an apartment complex with some eight units crammed into its two