The Alpine Betrayal by Mary Daheim Read Free Book Online Page A

the clear mountain air. Milo was climbing into his Cherokee Chief. He was a nice man, and I ought to wish him well. Certainly he wasn’t the sort I’d want to spend the rest of my life with. He was too rough around the edges, too small-town in his outlook, too anti-intellectual and too unsophisticated.
    But even more than what he was, there was what he wasn’t: Milo Dodge wasn’t Tom Cavanaugh, and that was that.
    Front Street was lined with bunting and banners, looking more festive than the Fourth of July, more colorful than Christmas. Just as Milo had feared, tourists were beginning to arrive in Alpine. Traffic on Front Street was unusually heavy, which meant there were cars in both lanes. I made a mental note to have Carla do a story on the visitors, with perhaps two or three interviews included.
    Having walked to work, as I often did in the summer, I greeted Ginny Burmeister, who informed me that Carlawasn’t coming in. The yellowjacket sting was less swollen, but the reaction had upset her stomach. She hoped to be back to work tomorrow.
    Vida hadn’t yet arrived, and Ed was at a Kiwanis breakfast meeting. I went into my editorial office and made a haphazard attempt to clear my desk. Among the leftovers from this week’s edition were several glossy photos of the movie crew—Dani Marsh, Matt Tabor, even Reid Hampton. I started to pitch them into the wastebasket, but it occurred to me that there might be some fans around town who’d appreciate having the pictures as souvenirs. I left them to one side, then sorted through the notes Ginny had left on my desk. As always on a Thursday, there were repercussions from the previous day’s paper. Several people had responded—unfavorably—to my article on the danger of flooding caused by clear-cutting timber. Never mind that I’d tried to balance the piece. In a town that leaned on lumber for much of its economic stability, it was hard to present any other point of view.
    Most of the criticism, however, had to do with the historical pieces we had run in the special Loggerama section. The turn-of-the-century silver mines had been worked by Chinese, not Japanese. The Japanese and possibly some Koreans had worked on the Great Northern Railroad because the Chinese had been excluded by a federal act in 1882. That, asserted Grace Grundle, was why Alpine had originally been named Nippon. The largest steelhead ever caught in the Skykomish River was thirty-two pounds, three ounces, not thirty-three pounds, two ounces. And the year was 1925, not 1924, insisted Vida’s eldest brother, Ralph Blatt. The correct spelling of the name of the Norwegian emigrant who had helped Rufus Runkel found the ski lodge was Olav Lanritsen, with just one n, not two, said Henry Bardeen, the current resort manager.
    No matter how certain a reader may be, it doesn’t pay to accept criticism on faith alone. I would check and recheck each correction. I never ran a retraction, never suppressed astory, never allowed anyone to censor the news—but I always owned up to mistakes.
    I was verifying the spelling of Olav the Obese’s surname when I heard the newsroom door open. Vida, I thought, without looking up. But it was Patti Marsh, tramping purposefully toward my inner sanctum.
    “You bitch!” she flared, leaning on my desk and showing her teeth like a she-wolf. “You defamed me! I’ll sue your butt off!”
    Being threatened by furious readers wasn’t a novelty to me. Usually, however, they resorted to the telephone, being timid about facing me in person. But Patti Marsh was bold as brass tacks, glaring at me from about three feet away.
    “What’s the problem?” I asked, turning slightly in my swivel chair and staring right back.
    She jabbed at a copy of
The Advocate
that lay on my desk. “That’s the problem, right there on page four! You said my husband left me! That’s a lie, I threw the bastard out! Nobody leaves Patti Erskine Marsh!”
    Calmly, I pulled the paper out from under her hand