The Alpine Recluse Read Online Free PDF Page A

up to it. But I knew Vida was bursting with curiosity. Maybe she could use her coaxing soft-soap manner. It might be better to have a woman handle the story, given that Tiffany was pregnant.
    “Yes,” I said, “but she may not be ready to talk to outsiders. She’s lucky if she doesn’t miscarry.”
    Vida quickly counted on her fingers. “Four months along. She should be all right. I’ll talk to Cookie Eriks. Or perhaps Dot Parker. She
is
her grandmother, after all, and I still have to interview the Parkers about their Alaska trip.”
    I’d forgotten the Parker-Eriks-Rafferty connection. Even after so many years in Alpine, I still had trouble unraveling all the family ties. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do the main story, and have Scott handle whatever sidebars we need. You’ll write the obituary, of course.”
    “Of course,” Vida agreed.
    Scott appeared from the back shop, where he’d been conferring with Kip MacDuff, our production manager. “I should have hung around longer last night,” he asserted with a scowl. “I left right after you did, so I missed it when they found Tim’s body.”
    “Don’t feel guilty,” I said. In fact, I hadn’t driven by what was left of the Rafferty house that morning. It would have taken me only a block out of my usual way down Fourth Street, but I’d doggedly kept to my routine. Seeing the smoking rubble would have been a bad way to start the day. “I wasn’t there, either. Besides, we wouldn’t run pictures of . . . Tim’s remains.”
    Scott nodded. “I know. But I could have gotten a shot of the firefighters standing over the place where they found the poor guy. A silhouette, maybe, with their outlines against the sky.”
    I smiled appreciatively at Scott. He was an adequate writer, but it was his photographic skills that made him so valuable. His artistic talent was inherent, of course, and his technical expertise was growing. The better he got, the more readily he’d be able to market his skills to a wider world.
    I didn’t want to think about that. Besides, I had work to do. I took a mug of coffee and a sweet roll into my office to start the day. But before I sat down at my desk, I called out to Scott.
    “What about the county commissioners? Was there any big news last night?”
    Scott set his own mug of coffee down next to his computer screen and came to the doorway. “They’re still arguing over whether the county or the city has jurisdiction out by the fish hatchery. The new bridge over Burl Creek that everybody wants may be inside the city after all, if the Peabodys can ever figure out where their property line ends. Right now, they think it’s in the middle of their chicken coop.”
    “Anything else?”
    “The usual—potholes in the ski lodge road, potential flooding on the Skykomish River, that illegal dump site off Highway 187.” His expression turned puckish. “And Ed.”
    I sighed. “I was afraid of that. Did he present his bond issue proposal?”
    “Oh, yeah.” Scott shook his head. “That’s why the meeting ran on so long. Ed had charts and diagrams and even clips from that Japanese TV series,
Mr. Pig.
Leonard Hollenberg—he’s getting really senile—thought Ed was promoting some kind of 4-H thing. Leonard couldn’t figure it out, because hardly anybody around here raises pigs, but he thought it’d be a good idea.”
    “What? A bond issue? More pig farms? Japanese cartoons?”
    “More pigs, I guess,” Scott replied with a grin. “Leonard said he really enjoyed a nice ham on Sundays. Hams don’t taste like they used to. He insisted that his complaint be put into the record.”
    “Was it?”
    Scott shook his head. “George Engebretsen voted nay to Leonard Hollenberg’s yea, and Alfred Cobb was asleep. As usual.”
    “So what happened to Ed’s proposal?”
    “They tabled it.”
    “Ooooh—good grief!” Vida, who—naturally—had been eavesdropping, yanked off her glasses and began rubbing her eyes in that furious and