The Alpine Escape (3 page)

Jackie poured wine for Paul, another mineral water for herself, and then we adjourned to the den. Paul seemed mesmerized by the sad story of my Jaguar. He speculated on its problems.

“Those Jags—they’re a wonderful piece of automobile,” he said with a serious expression on his face, “but they didn’t used to call the head of their engineering department Dr. Demento for nothing.”

“Really?” I winced. But I had been warned. In fact, it was Mavis who had told me that if I couldn’t afford the price of a new Jag—and I couldn’t, not even with my unexpected inheritance, which had also allowed me to buy
The Advocate
—then I probably couldn’t afford the repairs. It appeared that I’d been lucky. So far.

My eyes glazed over as Paul presented a litany of possible causes. The starter. The stick shift. The electrical system. I wondered what kind of pizza Jackie would order. Pastrami sounded good to me.

“… with parts. Now over in Victoria they’d probably be able to get …” Paul seemed unusually talkative for an engineer, rambling on while carefully piling the magazines and stacking the videocassettes. He finally shut up. Jackie was weeping. “Sweets, what’s wrong now?” He reached over from his place next to me on the small sofa and patted her knee.

Jackie wiped her eyes and sighed. “All this talk of fancy cars. How many people live in an old beat-up Volkswagen van? It made me think of the homeless. Why do they have to sleep under bridges? Do you think anybody is sleeping under a bridge in Port Angeles? We have so many of them, with all these gullies.”

Gently, Paul soothed her. There weren’t that many homeless people in town. It was July, and while the summer weather had been cool and uncertain, nobody would take cold even if they had to sleep under a bridge. Shelters were provided. The churches were
helping out. The United Way was doing its best. Jackie shouldn’t worry. The baby would get upset. Paul’s arguments were logical, orderly.

Wanly, Jackie smiled at her husband. “You’re right, Lamb-love. Let’s talk about something cheerful. Like the body.”

Paul rubbed her knee. “That’s my Sweets.” He gave me another big grin. “Emma would like to hear about that. It’s pretty interesting.”

“I’ll bet it is,” I said, bracing myself. “When did you find this … ah … body?”

Paul’s grin faded only a mite. “Yesterday.” He stood up. “We’re keeping it in the basement. Want to see it? Afterward, we can order pizza.”

T
HE
R
OWLEY
-M
ELCHER HOUSE
was huge. The builder was Cornelius Rowley, some distant connection of Paul’s and a local timber baron who had hailed from Saginaw, Michigan. Cornelius had built on a grand scale. The paneled entry hall was half the size of my little log home. An inglenook curved out on each side of the fireplace. Fir wainscoting, rose wall sconces, and a wrought-iron chandelier reminded me more of a hotel lobby than a honeymoon cottage. The handsome, if uncarpeted, staircase led up to the second floor. The music parlor and the living room were sparsely furnished, and the bare maple floors looked as if they had sustained some water damage.

“The flooring guy is coming next week,” Jackie said, her voice echoing off the living-room walls. “Then the rug man. We’re going green. Dark.” She gave her husband an arch glance. “Paul wanted white. Does that make any sense with kids?”

“It’d brighten up the place,” he replied with a frown. “All those big trees outside make it kind of gloomy.”

Jackie shrugged as she led us into the formal dining room. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you believed those ghost stories.”

Paul rolled his eyes. “I’m being practical, that’s all. And might I point out that you’re the one who brought up the subject of ghosts when we found the body.”

Jackie seemed unfazed by the remark. So far, I still hadn’t seen the remains. Clearly, there was no urgency in the Melchers’ manner. My host and hostess had decided to show me through the house before venturing into the basement. We’d already trekked around the second floor, where I’d put my meager belongings into a bedroom that faced the mountains. A small fireplace was closed off, and its dark blue tiles needed cleaning. Jackie had furnished the room with a bleached maple suite she’d had in her Portland apartment. The master bedroom, which looked out over the strait, was beautifully done in Amish style, complete with a quilt on the king-size bed and a large oval braided rug. The other four bedrooms, including two on the third floor, were all but empty.

“The dining-room set is the original,” Jackie noted. “We had it refinished.”

I didn’t blame her. The long oak table and eight matching chairs were perfect for the room with its plate rail and boxed beam ceiling. The buffet was built into the wall, its leaded-glass doors etched with a delicate spiderweb pattern. Through a Tiffany window the late-afternoon sun caught the gleam of the newly polished table.

“What’s this about a ghost?” I asked as we headed for the basement stairs.

Jackie was fumbling for a light switch, or so I thought. Actually, the basement lights were turned on with a cord that was next to the top step. As we descended, the air smelled musty, with the trace of fruit that often permeates the wooden counters of old cellars and kitchens.

“You tell her,” Jackie said to Paul as we reached the bottom of the stairs. “It’s your ghost.”

“I never paid much attention,” Paul responded with a grim little smile. We were standing in what I assumed
had been a ballroom or, more recently, a rec room. Paneled in birch, the room’s focal point was a handsome stone fireplace. We moved on, passing a laundry room, a big furnace that looked like an octopus, a storage area, and a workshop. A glance at the latter showed that it was Paul’s domain: Shelves neatly lined with jars and cans, shiny tools hanging from carefully placed nails, renovation manuals filed between sturdy bookends all attested to my host’s love of order.

“My dad told me about the ghost,” Paul said, resting his hand on the doorknob that, I presumed, led to the unfinished part of the basement. “He didn’t believe it, of course, but he’d tell it to me as a bedtime story. It was about a woman in a big cloak who showed up outside the house—this house—whenever there was a storm. She’d wail and shriek and carry on.” He lifted one shoulder. “Typical stuff you’d expect with a place like this.”

I nodded. “Most of the older houses in Port Angeles probably have a ghost or two.”

“I don’t know,” Paul answered, opening the door. “There aren’t that many big old houses here. Port Angeles was kind of a latecomer in terms of settlement.”

The dank smell was almost overpowering. Paul pulled yet another cord to light up the unfinished section of the basement. There were no stairs leading from the door, though a stepladder rested against the wall. I peered at bare timbers and mounds of dirt. Then I saw the skeleton.

Grabbing Jackie’s arm, I let out a small shriek. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you and the baby. I guess I hadn’t expected to see … 
that
.” My free hand fluttered in the direction of the skeleton. I wasn’t about to admit that I’d expected a dead mouse or a stray cat.

Paul regarded me with a tight smile.
“Body
sounds
more dramatic than
bones
.” His gaze locked with Jackie’s innocent stare. “My bride is a real thrill-seeker.”

“I am not!” Jackie asserted as I let go of her arm. “If I were, I’d have gone with the white carpets!” She burst into tears.

Absently, Paul patted her shoulder, then frowned at the skeleton. “I still think we should compromise on a lighter shade of green. What do you think, Emma?”

“I like green—all shades, except for the institutional kind.” The truth was I felt a little green around the gills myself.

“No, no,” Paul said quickly, still patting Jackie, whose sobs were subsiding. “I mean, about this guy. A workman, maybe? Heart attack, got trapped, something like that?”

I summoned up my journalistic aplomb. The skeleton was in remarkably good condition. “He looks small. Did you measure him?”

Paul shook his head. “No. But I called the sheriff and the police. They’re too busy to bother with a bunch of old bones. Besides, the sheriff’s department is facing some big cuts. Both the police and the sheriff’s people told us to get ahold of the prosecutor’s office and go through channels. Maybe we should contact Jackie’s doctor, too.”

But Jackie, who had recovered from her latest attack of weeping, gave a vigorous shake of her head. “Dr. Carlisle has his hands full with live patients. Anyway, he’s an ob-gyn. I think we should get an anthropologist or somebody who teaches anatomy at Peninsula College.”

The idea seemed sound to me. “How’d you find this in the first place?” I asked.

Paul indicated that we should move away from the door with its precarious ledge. “The electricians were here yesterday. We’ve rewired everything except for the
basement, four hundred amps, with a new breaker box. I did most of that myself, but I wanted a final runthrough by experts. The workmen were rooting around in here and found the skeleton. They practically quit on the spot.”

We were heading back to the main floor. It was after five and time for Jackie to order the pizza. I wondered if I’d hear anything from Dusty’s about my Jaguar.

“What’s so scary about a skeleton?” Jackie demanded, apparently dialing the phone number from memory. “It must have been there for years and years. I mean, it’s kind of creepy in a way, but Paul’s right—the guy probably had a heart attack. Or maybe he was a crook and hid out in the basement. How can we know why he died? There might have been a hermit in the—
Oh!
Hi! We want a large double cheese, Canadian bacon, mushrooms, and green pepper with three small salads.… That’s right, you know my voice! Thanks much.” Jackie replaced the receiver and beamed. “I’ve called so often lately that they don’t even have to ask for our address.”

“Great,” Paul said with forced enthusiasm. “But how come you didn’t get Italian sausage this time?”

Jackie clutched her stomach and made retching noises. “Don’t even think about it! Sausage! Yuck!” Reeling around the kitchen, she finally landed next to her husband. “Hey—don’t you know somebody at the college? Rand or Randolph or something like that?”

Paul put an arm around Jackie. “Mike Randall. But he’s a biologist. I could call him and see who he’d recommend, though.” Paul’s expression was thoughtful as he studied the telephone. It rang even as I followed his gaze.

The news was not good. For me. Dusty—or his mechanics—couldn’t get to my Jag until morning. Offhand, they’d guess it was an electrical problem. It often
was, with the XJ6 model. How many times had the car done this before? It hadn’t, I replied. The man at the other end of the line laughed incredulously and told me I was certainly a lucky person.

I didn’t feel so lucky when I hung up. “You’re stuck with me, at least for the night,” I said in a humble voice. “Let me buy the pizza.”

Jackie wouldn’t hear of it. Indeed, she seemed excited about having a houseguest. She urged Paul to telephone Mike Randall.

“It’s perfect,” she enthused, “just like I told Emma on the phone. We’ve got somebody with an inquiring mind. Let’s start our investigation. It’ll be like a game, only with a real body!”

Paul winced and I blanched. Over the years my job had brought me into contact with too many dead bodies. It wasn’t a parlor game. It was real life and often tough to accept. But Jackie’s high spirits couldn’t be dampened. Five minutes later Paul was on the line with Mike Randall of Peninsula College. Mike volunteered; he’d taught anatomy at the high school level before coming from Tacoma to the two-year community college in Port Angeles.

“Mike was my high school biology teacher,” Paul explained while we waited for the pizza at the breakfast counter in the kitchen. Paul busied himself with clearing off the space, neatly placing the paper products in one recycling container, the plastic items in another. “Mike and his wife were divorced a couple of years ago, so he wanted a change of scene. I didn’t realize he was in P.A. until I ran into him having breakfast at Landing’s Restaurant last winter.”

Jackie perched on her stool and tickled Paul under the chin. “Lamb-love! You were still a carefree bachelor then! Both of you! Now you’ve got me—and baby makes three! But poor Mike … he’s all alone. Think of
it, parted from his family, forced to start over in an unfamiliar place, leaning on strangers for emotional support. It’s so sad. Have I met him?”

“No,” Paul replied firmly. “And it’s not sad, Sweets. His brother works here for the Fish and Game Department. Mike and Janice didn’t have any kids, and she drinks like a fish. He’s well out of it. Mike spent over ten years in living hell. As he says, he’s no quitter, but he’s also a survivor.”

“Oh.” Jackie seemed taken aback, then she stared at me, her gray eyes sparkling. “Well, now! How would you like to meet an eligible bachelor, Emma? He’ll be here any minute!”

Paul sighed. “He’ll be here at seven. I couldn’t ask him for dinner. We don’t have enough pizza to go around, and”—he added with a dark look for Jackie—“this house really needs to be cleaned before we invite more company.”

Jackie tossed her hair. “Oh, pooh! Why bother when we’re in the middle of renovating it? You get too worked up over being tidy. Why can’t you be like other husbands and leave a trail of socks and shorts and stuff all over the place? Then I could nag you.” Jackie’s eyes snapped at her mate.

Paul’s small sigh of resignation was almost inaudible. But he didn’t argue. The domestic diversion had, however, let me off the hook. The last thing I needed just now was another man to confuse my already chaotic life. I hoped that Mike Randall was a wart-covered gnome, with hair growing out of his nose.

He wasn’t. Mike Randall was six foot one, middle forties, with broad shoulders, a full head of wavy brown hair, and deep blue eyes. If he wasn’t handsome, he came dangerously close. Involuntarily, I fluffed up my bangs as he strolled through the back door.

Introductions were made, pleasantries exchanged, and
then Paul and Mike went down to the basement. Jackie and I stayed behind in the kitchen.