The Alpine Obituary Read Online Free PDF Page B

earlier.
    “I took to my bed,” she announced, “but I can’t sleep, even propped up on pillows. I cough more when I’m recumbent.”
    I offered sympathy, then posed the question that Vida had asked: “Which is your family name, Marsha? Foster or Klein?”
    “Both,” Marsha replied. “It was my mother who hyphenated her name—which was Klein—and my father’s name of Foster. Why? Have you changed your mind about helping me?”
    I hesitated. “I don’t feel right about turning you down.” “That’s up to you.” Marsha coughed three times in a row, taking some of the sting out of her remark.
    “What puzzled me,” I went on, “is that I thought one of those names might have belonged to your husband.”
    “I never took his name,” Marsha said. “I’d already started practicing law when we were married. Anyway, he died a year later, right after our son was born. Phil had a brain tumor.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. Marsha and I had something else in common besides Tom’s murder trial.
    “You don’t need to apologize,” Marsha responded. “You didn’t cause the tumor.” She coughed steadily for almost a minute. “I’m hanging up now,” she gasped.
    I heard the click at the other end of the line. After a few minor domestic chores, I took a long bath, went to bed, and tried to read myself to sleep. But sleep didn’t come easily these days, even when I was dead tired. Shortly after eleven-thirty, I put my book aside and reached for my handbag, which I kept next to the bed.
    I didn’t re-read the letter to Marsha, but instead, stared at the old snapshot. What was important about it? Why had it been taken in the first place? Was it because of the trestle— or the rope?
    I must have hypnotized myself with that long stare. Five minutes later I went to sleep with the light still on and the photo having slipped onto the floor.
    Buddy Bayard’s Picture Perfect Photo Studio has always been our version of a photography lab. The next morning I told Vida I was going to show him the snapshot to see if he could identify it. Buddy and his wife Roseanna have an extensive collection of old Alpine pictures.
    “An excellent idea,” Vida declared. “So you’ve changed your mind. That’s wonderful.”
    “Marsha’s a widow.” I almost added, “too.” Somehow I thought of myself as a widow. “She has a son, you know.”
    “Yes, he’s college age,” Vida remarked. “I’m glad you’re doing this. It’s good for you.”
    “It is?” I was dubious.
    “Of course,” Vida said. “That’s why I didn’t call Marsha last night to tell her I was stepping in for you. I was sure you’d come ’round.”
    Which, I assumed, was also why Vida hadn’t shown me to her door. She was giving me time to think things through. Darn her hide. She was rarely wrong about people.
    “I was thinking of checking the
Blabber
files,” she said, ignoring my bemused expression.
    The Alpine Blabber
was the precursor of the
Advocate
. It was more newsletter than newspaper, published on an irregular basis from the end of World War I to the closure of the original mill in 1929. A gap in local news coverage had existed for almost three years before Marius Vandeventer’s father founded the
Advocate
.
    “Good idea,” I told Vida. “By the way, last night I looked at the index cards on the Iversons. There were two spellings. I take it there must have been two different families in the early days.”
    Vida was sitting at her desk and wearing one of the more bizarre hats from her collection, a black high-crowned affair with a small gilt-edged picture of a Victorian lady stuck in the satin band. It was reminiscent of the Mad Hatter’s headgear from
Alice in Wonderland
.
    “No,” she said slowly, “that’s not the case. The original spelling of Iverson was -
sen
, but they changed it to -
son
years ago. Now let me think why.” She rested her cheek on her hand and appeared to concentrate. “It wasn’t a family