The Alpine Nemesis Read Free Page A

details?”
    “I'll have somebody from city hall drop off that information this afternoon,” Fuzzy said, getting to his feet and brushing at the temples of his dyed auburn hair. “Work should start in a few days. You'll want some pictures in progress, I imagine.”
    “Definitely,” I replied, keeping a straight face.
    “Wonderful.” Fuzzy rapped on my desk, an apparent sign of jubilation. “I kind of thought that since this was my idea it would be nice to name the rest rooms after me. What do you think of running a contest to see who can come up with the best name? The winner could have the privilege of inaugurating the toilets.”
    After more than ten years in Alpine, I know there is no such thing as a really terrible idea. “Why not?” I said. “Make up the rules, send them along with the other information.”
    “I've got a really good photo of the toilets in a catalog,” Fuzzy said. “Can you scan them into the newspaper?”
    “Why not?” I repeated. Why not have a contest for the biggest hind end in Skykomish County? The candidates were too numerous to mention. I felt as if I were drowning in a sea of… something or other.
    A proposed toilet was not a lead story, not even for the
Advocate.
I cudgeled my brain for other ideas. Maybe I could use the phone call to Al Driggers from Brian Conley's parents:
CLOSURE SOUGHT BY MISSING SNOWBOARDER's FAMILY
    I sighed, even as I jotted down the possible headline. To refresh my memory, I pulled out the binder that contained the issues for the first quarter of the year. There was the first snowboarder story, telling our readers— after they'd already been informed by KSKY—that a twenty-five-year-old Seattle man named Brian Conley had been missing for four days on the north slope of Tonga Ridge. A week later, the follow-up story reported that Brian still hadn't been found. We had received a black-and-white photo of him from his girlfriend, and I'd run it on the front page just below the fold. I stared at the one-column cut. Brian looked younger than twenty-five, but perhaps the picture had been taken a couple of years earlier. He had a pleasant if undistinguished face. The description that had been given to the authorities listed Brian as five-ten, a hundred and sixty-five pounds, with blue eyes, dark brown hair worn short, and a small scar on the back of his right hand. I stared some more at the photo. He looked like the kind of person I'd inferred from the way his girlfriend had talked about him: ordinary, average, nice. Not the sort of person whose life should be cut off by a tragic accident. I shook my head and closed the bound volume.
    If I planned to write another story I'd have to call the Conleys back in Penn Yan. Without much enthusiasm, I dialed Al's number at the funeral home. His gusty, lusty wife, Janet, answered.
    “I'm filling in this morning,” she announced. “Cammy Olson is in bed with a bad case of postcoital sex.”
    “The result or the cause thereof?” I inquired, laughing at Janet's typically ribald remark.
    “Actually,” Janet replied, “she's got chicken pox. At twenty-two, isn't she a little old for that?”
    “Not really,” I said. “The problem is, the older youare, the harder the case. I expect she's miserable.” Maybe this was my lead story:
SPOTTED WOMAN STALKS ALPINE
    Maybe not.
    “The younger generation,” Janet said scornfully. “She'll be out for at least a week. Between her and Al's new assistant, Dan Peebles, I should quit at Sky Travel and work at the mortuary full time. The only problem is, I get free trips at the travel agency. At the funeral home, people go, but they don't come back. Until this morning, they haven't even been going. It's all these hardy Scandinavians—they live forever.”
    Janet had found the Conleys' number, and two minutes later I was speaking to Mrs. Conley. She seemed a bit confused about who I was and why I was calling, but finally she figured it out.
    “It's a terrible thing, not