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Stump Hill. I suppressed a smile, wondering if Vida’s desire to do the story on Bridget wasn’t motivated as much by curiosity as by sympathy. It didn’t matter; Vida would turn out a first-rate profile. In the process of talking to her subject, she’d also dig up material that she wouldn’t be able to use in the paper. Vida had a knack for unearthing the darkest secrets, which she usually kept to herself.
    Hearing my phone ring, I went into my office and grabbed the receiver. Milo Dodge had Doc Dewey’s report.
    “This is pretty sketchy,” he warned me. “Subject was female, aged fifteen to twenty-five, about five foot six, ahundred and twenty pounds, probably Caucasian, reasonably well-nourished, dismembered after death. Oh, and the tennis shoe is a Reebok, size seven and a half.”
    “It doesn’t sound so sketchy to me,” I said, making notes. “What’s this
dismembered after death
bit?”
    I heard Milo’s sigh. “You don’t like gory details, right?”
    “Right. Oh, dear.” I steeled myself for the worst. “You mean …?”
    “Sawed up. Just like you said.”
    Somehow, it sounded worse coming from Milo than it had from me. But maybe that was because I had been guessing. Milo’s verdict—or rather Doc Dewey’s—was official. “Foul play?” I asked in a faint voice.
    “We can’t rule it out,” said Milo. “That’s obvious. Right now, we’re checking the missing persons file, but as I told you …”
    “What about the tennis shoe?” I didn’t care to hear Milo’s missing persons lecture a second time.
    “It’s pretty ordinary,” he replied. “It’d take forever to track it down. In fact, we probably never could.”
    I fiddled with my ballpoint pen. It would be almost a full week before we’d publish again. Maybe Milo would learn something else by that time. If he didn’t, I might as well relegate the item to next week’s back page. In this case, no news wasn’t good news, but it was no more than a follow-up.
    After I hung up from talking to Milo, it occurred to me that Evan Singer, Jack of All Trades, Master of Some, might be worth a feature. I went into the newsroom and offered Carla the assignment. She balked.
    “Evan is weird,” she declared. “I was in Video-to-Go a few times while he worked there. He was always trying to push X-rated films off on me. All I wanted to do was chill out with Mel Gibson or Dennis Quaid.”
    Since Carla rarely balks at anything and enthusiasm is her major asset, I capitulated. “I’ll do it myself. I need to keepin practice.” It was true—I hadn’t done a feature in six months. My last interviewee had been a U. S. Senate candidate who’d made a swing through Alpine. The quotes were platitudes, the pictures were dull, the background was bland. The would-be senator had lost in the primary. It served him right for making such lousy copy. Yet it had occurred to me that maybe I was losing my touch as an interviewer. I would try to do better by Evan Singer.
    But I had another task slated for that afternoon. It was December 9, the traditional day I bring home my Christmas tree. When Adam and I had lived in Portland, we’d always bought one from a lot, made a two-inch cut off the trunk, and stuck it in a bucket of water outside for a week. Sometimes the trees stayed fresh and fragrant through New Year’s; other times, their branches drooped and needles dropped by Christmas Day. Since coming to Alpine, I had cut my own trees, not on designated forest service lands, but wherever I happened to find the perfect Douglas fir during the course of the year. Last June, I had discovered my tree, eight feet tall, bushy, virtually symmetrical, just below Alpine Falls. As always, I’d checked with Milo to make sure I wasn’t trespassing or poaching or whatever I might be doing if caught in the act of hacking down a tree with somebody else’s name on it.
    “That’s state land, so don’t tell me about it,” Milo had said as he did every year.