The Alpine Nemesis Read Free Page B

knowing,” Mrs. Conley declared. “My husband and I should have come out when we learned that Brian was missing. But we kept waiting and hoping…” Her voice trailed away. I felt like a ghoul, knowing that I had upset her, aware that I had made dozens of such calls to bereaved relatives and friends. I hated this part of the job, but it was necessary.
    I spoke up in an attempt to rescue her from the awkward moment. “A friend reported him missing, as I recall.”
    “Yes.” There was an audible sniff at the other end of the line. “Gina, his girlfriend. We met her once, they came to visit last summer. She's very sweet. But by the time she notified the authorities, Brian had been gone overnight. Still, we thought maybe he'd just been hurt or gotten lost or …” Again Mrs. Conley's voice faded.
    “Brian was alone, as I recall,” I said, racing to the rescue one more time.
    “Yes.” Another sniff. “I guess so. Though we'd spoken with him a few days earlier, and I thought he mentioned something about going with a friend. But Gina wasn't sure, so maybe he changed his mind. Oh, Ms. Lord, you can't imagine what it's like to lose a son!”
    I could, but I didn't want to. “I have a son about the same age as Brian,” I said. “He's my only child. Do you have other children?”
    “Yes,” Mrs. Conley said, her voice somewhat stronger. “Two girls and two boys besides Brian. They're a comfort, but they can't make up for losing him. He was the baby of the family, and very special. Brian was such a passionate young man, always caught up in this cause and that. Do you think we're foolish to want to conduct some sort of service on that mountain where he was lost?”
    “No,” I answered slowly. “If it would help you deal with your loss, it isn't foolishness.”
    “That's so,” Mrs. Conley said vaguely. “You have a priest in Alpine?”
    “Yes, Father Dennis Kelly,” I said. “He's very spiritual, very intelligent.” And his sermons are about as inspiring as legal notices. “Did you plan to come out soon?”
    Mrs. Conley said that she and her husband hadn't made up their minds, they'd just come up with the idea of a mountainside service a couple of days ago. Their pastor in Penn Yan had celebrated a memorial Mass just two weeks earlier. Maybe they shouldn't spend the money on travel. Maybe they really were being foolish. Maybe Brian wasn't dead after all.
    I pounced on that remark. “What do you mean?” Besides the hope of the hopeless, I thought.
    Mrs. Conley didn't respond right away. When she did, her voice had taken on a wary note. “You never know. About disappearances, I mean.” She began speaking moreMary Daheim
    rapidly. “Amnesia, for instance. Someone here in Penn Yan had amnesia and went missing for over two years. His son-in-law ran into him at a service station in Albany where he was pumping gas. Imagine—the poor man was an attorney with a very profitable practice.”
    I made encouraging noises, then politely extricated myself from the conversation. There was no news here, and even if the Conleys did come to Alpine, the story wouldn't rate more than four inches. The missing snow-boarder was a dead end.
    How could I have been so wrong?

W HEN I ARRIVED at my little log house, I was still lacking a decent front-page story. I'd spent two hours on the phone, checking with the city, county, state, and federal agencies to see if any of them had generated a smidgen of local news other than toilets. They hadn't. Fiscal reports, that was the thing, they said, coming July first. Wow.
    The mail was all catalogs and circulars and a couple of bills. There were no messages on the answering machine. I wished I were back in St. Paul with Adam. I'd visited him in February and we'd spent some wonderful hours together, walking the snow-covered grounds of the seminary where he was studying to be a priest. Leaving winter behind on the return trip, I took a detour to Arizona to see my brother, Ben. I enjoyed the