The Alpine Betrayal Read Free Page A

out to meet her!”
    I gazed at Vida. “I guess you’d better get a picture.”
    But Carla was on her feet, jumping up and down. “Let me! This is incredibly cool! When I was going to journalism school at the University of Washington, I never thought I’d get to meet a movie star in Alpine!”
    And, I thought cruelly, her professors probably never thought she’d get a job in newspapers. But here was Carla, now in her second year as a reporter on
The Advocate
. Why, I asked myself for the fiftieth time, did all the good ones go into the electronic media? Or were there any good ones these days? Was I getting old and crotchety at forty-plus?
    Vida was only too glad to let Carla take the assignment. “I’ve been looking at Dani Marsh since she was waddling around in diapers and plastic pants. Just make sure you load the camera this time, Carla. You remember what happened two weeks ago at Cass Pidduck’s hundredth birthday party.”
    Carla, who usually bounces her way through life, looked crestfallen. “I left the film in the car.”
    Vida nodded. “At least you had it with you.”
    Carla’s long dark hair swung in dismay. “So I went out to get it, but when I came back, Mr. Pidduck had died.”
    “Yes, I know,” said Vida, “but his children liked that shot of him slumped forward in his birthday cake. They said it was just like old Grumps. Or whatever they called him,” Vida added a bit testily. “Frankly, the Pidducks never did have much sense. Cass may have been long in the tooth, but he was short in the upper story.”
    Accustomed to Vida’s less than charitable but often more than accurate appraisals of Alpine residents, I withdrew to my inner office. The usual phone messages had accumulated, including one from my son, Adam, in Ketchikan. After two years and no foreseeable major at the University ofHawaii, my only child had decided to go north to Alaska. He was spending the summer working in a fish packing plant, and had a vague notion about enrolling for fall quarter at the state university in Fairbanks. I looked at Ginny Burmeister’s phone memo with my customary sense of dread whenever my son called in prime time.
    He was staying in a dormitory owned by the fish co-op, which meant that I was put on hold for a long time while somebody tried to determine if he was on or off the premises. For ten minutes, I counted the cost and perused the mail. Adam should be at work in the middle of the day. Maybe he’d had an accident. Or had gotten sick. I lost interest in the numerous bills, press releases, irate letters to the editor, advertising circulars, and exchange papers that jammed my in-basket—especially on Mondays. At last Adam’s clear young voice reached my ear:
    “Hey, Mom,” he began, “guess what? Fairbanks is seven hundred miles away! I thought I could take the bus to campus.”
    Adam’s sense of geography, or lack thereof, was astounding. Indeed, I had tried to explain the vastness of Alaska to him before he flew out of Sea-Tac Airport. I might as well have saved my breath.
    “Is that why you’re calling at two o’clock on a Monday afternoon when you ought to be at work?” I demanded. “Bear in mind, Fairbanks is so far away it’s in another time zone, twice removed.”
    “I worked Sunday,” Adam said, sounding defensive. “Didn’t I tell you I’m on a different shift this month?”
    He hadn’t. Adam was well over six feet tall, weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds, was approaching his twenty-first birthday—and still qualified as my addled baby. One of these days, I’d turn around and find him gainfully employed, happily married, and the father of a couple of kids. And maybe one of these days I’d fly to Mars on a plastic raft.
    “So you just discovered you couldn’t commute to Fairbanks?” I said, wondering whether to be amused or dismayed.At least he’d never suggested taking a degree in transportation.
    “Well, yeah, but that’s okay. I’ll just move there next