The Alpine Menace by Mary Daheim Read Free Book Online

adoption and what I remembered about it. Then she shows up with Kendra, and two weeks later Carol gets herself killed. Didn't I say she liked trouble?”
    “So you did,” Vida remarked, now at the door.
    “You always liked other people's trouble, as Burt used to tell me,” Olive said, one hand on her hip, the other on the doorknob. “It's no wonder he didn't like you.”
    “Actually,” Vida said in a deceptively mild tone, “he did. Burt asked me to go steady when I was a junior in high school.” With a rustle of her duster, she departed.
    “Is that true?” I asked when we reached the elevator. “About Burt?”
    Vida gave a single nod. “Certainly. I turned him down. Sour grapes, on his part, saying he didn't like me. If, in fact, he really said that.”
    At the desk, Vida asked the pert blond for a Seattle directory. “There's a Sam Addison, on Ashworth,” she murmured. “Is that close to Green Lake?”
    “Very,” I replied. “It's about a block or two off Green Lake Way. I grew up nearby.”
    “You did?” Vida seemed intrigued. “You must show me your family home.”
    “And swing by the Addison place?” I asked slyly.
    “Well… perhaps.”
    We were less than five minutes away from the far side of Green Lake. I drove the old familiar route with a sudden surge of memories flooding my brain. Woodland Park, the tennis courts, the picnic tables, the playing field, and the modest but well-kept neighborhood that faced Green Lake Way. We drove up Fifty-fifth to Meridian, which had been a sleepy little two-block business district in my youth. The grocery stores were gone, replaced by trendy restaurants and an organic produce market. The building that had housed a design school and the Texaco service station had been razed for what looked like the start of condominiums. Only a revamped Briggs Pharmacy, the Jehovah's Witness Hall, and Leny's Tavern remained.
    “It's too bad it's dark,” Vida remarked as I slowed down by the huge maple that stood in front of my old home. The tree was in bud, its gnarled trunk taking up most of the parking strip, its old roots raising parts of the sidewalk. “This was your house?” Vida asked, leaning forward to look past me. “It's rather nice.”
    The Craftsman bungalow dating from the World War I era had received a coat of paint and a new roof since I'd last seen it ten years ago. Ben and I had made a sentimental journey before I moved to Alpine and he was transferred to the mission church in Tuba City, Arizona. After our parents had been killed in a car wreck eighteen years earlier, we'd sold the house to a newly marriedcouple who were expecting. I had no idea who lived there now, but the lights were on and a small station wagon was pulled into the garage out back.
    “Did Ronnie ever visit here?” Vida asked.
    It was the furthest thing from my mind. “Ronnie?” I thought back, peeling the years away. “Yes, once or twice when he and his sisters were very young. They tore the place up. My parents were furious, but Aunt Marlene and Uncle Gary didn't do a thing to stop them.”
    “Memories,” Vida murmured. “Family. How sweet.”
    I ignored the remark. My recollections were very different from Vida's fixation. Ben and me, plundering our presents under the tree on Christmas morning, our mother's Thanksgiving turkey roasting in the gas oven, our father loading us into the secondhand sedan on Sunday mornings to attend Mass at St. Benedict's. The irony that one of the altar boys was Tom Cavanaugh, who lived in a neighborhood two miles away in Fremont, but belonged to the same parish. He and I hadn't realized that until many years later when we were in bed.
    “We didn't do a lot of things with the rest of the relatives,” I said. “Dad had only the one sister, Marlene, and Mom had a brother who lived in Olympia and another in California. There wasn't much of an extended family to mingle with.”
    “A pity,” Vida said, still gawking at the house and what she could