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

and opened it to the offending page. I read Vida’s copy aloud:
    “‘When Dani was less than a year old, her father left Alpine. Patti Marsh raised her only daughter alone, working at the Loggers’ Café. After Dani’s graduation from Alpine High School in 1985, she married …’” I stopped and shrugged. “Excuse me, Ms. Marsh, it doesn’t say he left
you;
it says he left
Alpine
. That’s not exactly the same.”
    “The hell it isn’t!” Patti Marsh waved a sunburned arm in repudiation. Up close, in the daylight, I could see a faint resemblance to Dani. The brown eyes were similar; so was the aquiline nose. But the bad perm and the tinted blond hair didn’t do much to enhance her features. I judged her to be about my age, but there was a lot more mileage in her face than mine. She was short, like her daughter, but carried an extra twenty pounds. The polka dot halter top and the skintight white pants showed that most of the added weight was well-distributed. It was too bad that her head seemed to be empty.
    “Look,” I said, standing up but staying behind the desk which I always thought of as the moat that kept my public at bay, “you’re trying to interpret the sentence. Why? It just says that Dani’s father left town. Some other reader might figure that you chased him off with a two-by-four. Did you?”
    Patti was still wild-eyed, but she was beginning to lose steam. I gauged that she was the sort of person who can bulldoze her way through life as long as there’s nothing very substantial in her path. In my guise as editor and publisher of
The Advocate
, I always felt fairly substantial. It was in my other roles that I sometimes felt like a will-o’-the-wisp.
    “This town’s full of gossipy old bitches—the men, too.” Her brown eyes raked over my small cluttered office. Patti Marsh had a skittish, nervous gaze, as if her emotions were in charge of her vision. “How many calls have you had?”
    My own stare turned blank. “About what?”
    She pointed again at the paper. “About me. And … Dani.” It seemed she could hardly get her daughter’s name out.
    “None. It’s a pretty tame story, Ms. Marsh.”
    The expression of scorn she bestowed on me might have withered a person who wasn’t used to letters that started “Dear Knucklehead.” Or worse. “Hey, kiddo, you don’t know the half of it,” asserted Patti, with a toss of her bleached hair. “This whole ball of wax is anything but tame.” She started to heel around on her black thongs, then her mouth twisted into a nasty little smile. “If you ask me, we’ll all be lucky if somebody doesn’t end up killed.” Her eyes dropped to the stack of glossy photos at the side of my desk. “Who’s that?” she demanded, looking startled.
    I glanced down. Reid Hampton’s picture was on top of the pile. “The director. Why?”
    Patti Marsh gave herself a vigorous shake. “Hunh. So he’s the one who’s been pushing Dani. I wonder why.” There was a sneer in her voice, then she strutted out of the office, almost colliding with Vida, who was just coming in.I didn’t hear the exchange between them; I was too busy trying to figure out what on earth Patti Marsh was talking about. Whatever it was, I assumed it had nothing to do with Loggerama.
    Vida surged through the newsroom, heading straight for my office. Her sailor hat was tipped over one ear. At least she didn’t have it on backward, as often happen with Vida’s headgear. Behind the tortoiseshell glasses, her eyes were afire. “If I didn’t think all you Catholics were a bunch of smug hidebound hypocrites, I’d convert so I could be eligible for sainthood. Any normal person would have put Patti Marsh’s nose in her navel.”
    Accustomed to Vida’s fulminations against any religion but her own Presbyterian sect, I merely grinned. “Got you riled, huh? What’s really eating that woman?”
    “Woman!” sniffed Vida, plopping down into one of the two chairs on the other side of