Read Alpine Zen : An Emma Lord Mystery (9780804177481) for Free Online Page A

two weeks. What next? Ocelot? Platypus?”
    I headed into my office. Vida was, as she would put it, on the peck this morning. Deadline day wasn’t off to a good start. Alison followed me, barely able to suppress a giggle fit.
    “Mrs. Runkel’s hat,” she whispered, catching her breath. “Did she lose a bet or is it really made of sponges?”
    “I haven’t seen that one in years,” I replied, making sure Vida was out of hearing range. “One of her granddaughters in Bellingham made it for her in a crafts class. If you look while she’s sitting down you’ll see it has no crown. In warm weather, it’s probably cool. The sponges are thin.”
    Alison grew serious. “She seems…different from when I worked here last December. Is that because of what happened to Roger?”
    I nodded. “She’s taken his disgrace hard. She never mentions him.” I noticed Vida was heading in our direction, but veered off past Mitch’s desk to the back shop. She hadn’t even glanced at Alison and me. That spoke volumes. Vida’s sharp gray eyes usually darted every which way, including, it seemed, behind her.
    My phone rang, so Alison left to assume her front-office duties. I heard Milo’s voice in my ear.
    “Roy Everson was waiting for me when I got here this morning,” he said in a beleaguered tone. “If we don’t have any crises, I’ll send Dwight Gould and Jack Mullins to the dump site before it gets hot. If nothing else, it’ll disprove your wacky theory about Myrtle being buried there next to the Everson property. It might even get Roy off my back until some moron digs up a turkey drumstick.”
    “Maybe I’ll send Mitch to get a picture,” I said.
    “Of what? Mullins’s ass while he’s digging through a bunch of garbage? Forget it.”
    “It’ll show how diligent and sensitive the sheriff’s employees are,” I said in a bright voice. “When will they go out there?”
    “I don’t know. Why does it matter?”
    “Because,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time since I’d met Milo Dodge, “today is our deadline.”
    “It is? Hunh. You’d think I’d remember that by now.” He actually sounded sincere.
    “Guess what? For once,
I’m
hanging up on
you
.” I banged the phone down.
    The good news was that by eleven o’clock, most of the copy was in to the back shop. The bad news was that if it hadn’t been for the Summer Solstice festivities, the front page would’ve been deadly dull. Not that the past few issues had contained earthshaking news, but the previous edition featured a five-inch, four-column photo of an overturned eighteen-wheeler that had jackknifed on a hairpin curve two miles east of Alpine. Miraculously, the driver had escaped with only minor cuts and bruises. Mitch had written the upbeat copy that went next to a photo of the sheepish Wenatchee man who’d been heading home.
    I was coming back into the empty newsroom ten minutes later when I heard an all-too-familiar voice call my name. “Hi, Ed,” I greeted my former ad manager, who’d done almost nothing in the early years of my tenure and nearly put the
Advocate
out of business.
    “Hot enough for you?” Ed asked, never one for an original turn of phrase. Apparently the relatively pleasant morning was too hot for him. He was stuffed into plaid Bermuda shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with the words
Remember de Bronska
. The allusion was to the so-called villa Ed had built with a large inheritance from an aunt in Iowa. He’d managed to fritter it all away in a few short years before finally selling the property to the rehab facility now known as RestHaven. The T-shirt had been made for the booth Ed had set up in Old Mill Park to sell souvenirs from his villa during the Summer Solstice celebration.
    “It’s not supposed to get really hot until the end of theweek,” I said, perching on the edge of Leo’s desk. I had no intention of getting stuck in my office without an escape route.
    “Right, right,” Ed murmured,