The Alpine Pursuit Read Free Page A

Vatican, I followed his instructions on where to go and what to see. I started at Piazza di Porta San Giovanni, where I visited the basilica dedicated to St. John the Evangelist and St. John the Baptist. The church, which frankly isn’t all that imposing on the outside, is also Rome’s cathedral. I stumbled over an uneven place in the floor and fell to one knee. If any onlookers saw me, they probably thought I was genuflecting and praying. Instead, I was wobbling and cussing.
    If this was a pilgrimage, it had gotten off on the wrong foot.
    ∗ ∗ ∗
    As Rita rang off abruptly, I knew it was because she wouldn’t want to keep the mayor waiting. But the call wasn’t from Fuzzy Baugh. Instead, it was from Sunny Rhodes, the mother of one of our carriers. Her son, Davin, had fallen off his bike and possibly broken his ankle. If he was laid up, could the family collect disability from the
Advocate
? I told her I’d have to check into it with our attorney, Marisa Foxx. I felt like telling Mom that her son should have been using snowshoes, not a bicycle.
    Deputy Sam Heppner phoned in the name of the highway accident victim, a resident of Wenatchee, on the other side of the Cascades. Crass as it sounds, his lack of association with Alpine didn’t mean we’d missed a major story. Next week, the fatality would take up no more than two inches on the inside pages.
    As it turned out, the mayor never called that afternoon. Apparently, he wasn’t upset over the omission of his formal portrait. Maybe he didn’t want to annoy me. Maybe he was taking Ed Bronsky’s electoral challenge seriously.
    Despite the gloomy gray clouds, it was still light at five o’clock when I left the office. Spring was exactly a month away, but it was hard to believe with the snow piled high at the sidewalk’s edge. Not that it was unusual for Alpine to get snow even as late as April. We’d been spoiled the past few years by warmer weather that might have been easier to live with but hurt the winter sports industry. The lack of a sizable snowpack also kept the rivers low and caused a shortage of hydroelectric power.
    Tire chains weren’t practical in town, since Front Street and Alpine Way were kept clear. But the moment I turned onto Fir Street and headed to my little log house, I had to rely on studded tires. After returning from my two-week vacation in Italy, I’d sold the Lexus that Tom Cavanaugh had virtually given me and replaced it with an almost-new Honda Accord. I couldn’t ever replace Tom and I had only sad memories of the Lexus. He’d been dead for going on two years. Yet I still awoke some mornings thinking he was alive.
    “Time,” people kept telling me. “Time heals. You’ll get over the worst parts.”
    I was feeling more stable. But I’d never heal completely. Tom was the father of my child, the only love of my life, the man I had been about to marry after waiting for almost thirty years. I was reminded of a song, something about the sea being wide and “. . . I cannot get over it.”
    I would never get over Tom Cavanaugh.

TWO
    There was no new snow on the ground Thursday morning. I’d almost hoped for a blizzard that would shut down the town and make it impossible for the show to go on.
    “Well!” Vida exclaimed as she entered the newsroom almost fifteen minutes late. “Guess what?”
    Leo, Scott, and I all looked up from the Grocery Basket layout we’d been studying.
    “You skied to work,” Leo said. “That’s why you’re late. We were about to send Dodge out to look for you.”
    Vida dismissed the remark with a wave of her hand and an amiable laugh. “Nothing of the sort. Amy called just as I was leaving. You’ll never guess what she had to say.”
    Scott stared at Vida. “Your daughter won the lottery?”
    “No, no, no.” Vida made another gesture of dismissal, as if a few million dollars wouldn’t cause such excitement. “Roger is in
The Outcast
!”
    I wanted to say that Roger
was
the outcast. Vida’s