Buffalo Bill's Defunct (9781564747112) (9 page)

Marybeth listened with a polite smile and poked at her taco salad.

Just when Meg was beginning to believe she might escape without having to talk about the Body in the Garage, Marybeth said, “Have they solved your murder yet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Tell us about it!” Annie burst out. “Jake won’t say a word. Just that a city cop found a dead man buried in the floor of your garage.”

Meg speared her last tiny scallop. “Well, I’d left the doors open to air the place out and Rob Neill saw a dog in there, digging away.” She gave them what she’d told Darcy, omitting the petro-glyph, but hyping the comedy when it came to the house search. They drank it up. Marybeth looked almost animated.

“And that’s all I know,” Meg admitted.

“Convenient having a deputy next door,” Marybeth offered. Meg thought the remark was not satirical.

Annie said, “I like Rob. I was a year ahead of him in school. He was small for his age, weedy, must have grown six inches after he left. Everybody knew he was real smart. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when he left all that in California and came home.”

Meg’s ears pricked. “All that?”

“Oh, you know, computers. He was in on some big stuff in the early days of the Internet, before Microsoft took over everything. I guess his marriage went down the drain, so he sold out early and moved north. That’s one version of things, anyway. He took real good care of Mrs. Guthrie when she got sick.”

“Congestive heart failure,” Marybeth offered.

“I wondered,” Meg murmured. “I admired her.”

“We all did. After she retired as head librarian, she stayed on the library board. It was a darned good thing, too, what with those witch hunters wanting to burn all the books except the Bible and typing manuals.” Marybeth’s pale cheeks flushed.

“Witch hunters?” Meg ventured.

Annie gave a snort of laughter. “They wanted Snow White off the shelves. Can you believe it? Now they’re after Harry Potter.”

“But Hazel Guthrie showed us how to deal with them.” Marybeth shoved her salad away.

“It’s a splendid policy,” Meg said. “So Rob Neill took care of her. Literally?”

Marybeth said, “He’s not a nurse and anyway she wasn’t confined to her bed. She just needed trained help. He hired good care-givers and kept a close eye on them.”

Annie’s face darkened. “You have to do that.” Personal experience there. “He lived at his cabin up at Tyee Lake, but he spent time with his grandma almost every day, Jake said. Even in the middle of a big case. She lived ten years after she was diagnosed, and she was still on the library board when she died.”

“She was pretty sick, though, the last year,” Marybeth murmured. “Missed meetings or had to leave early. Nobody even considered asking her to resign. Rob did move into town, into her house, that last year.”

“And Mrs. Guthrie died two years ago?”

Annie nodded. “Rob’s been there three years now, but he still has the cabin up at Tyee. Took his daughter there in August. Nice kid, a real California girl.”

“What on earth do you mean?” Meg asked, wondering if her Lucy was a California girl. She kept her voice humorous, but it was not a stereotype she liked.

Annie blushed but stuck to her guns. “It’s just that she looks like she’s been, I dunno, waxed and polished?”

Meg had to laugh. Marybeth regarded the two of them with incomprehension. Marybeth had a degree in Library Science from the University of Washington, whereas Annie had only a high school diploma and a couple of extension classes, but Annie was obviously brighter where it counted.

A blond server, who looked uncomfortable in a vaguely Mexican costume, intruded to ask whether they wanted dessert or coffee. There was, she said, deep-fried ice cream. Meg said no thanks. Annie looked tempted.

Marybeth glanced at her watch. “Just bring us the bill, please.”

“My treat,” Meg said. “No, I insist.” She smiled at the waitress. “One check.”

“Thanks,” Annie said. “Oops, I gotta go. See you.” And she whisked from the small restaurant almost at a run.

“She’s punctual,” Marybeth murmured, as if that were Annie’s solitary virtue.

“Hmmm. Ah, tell me, Marybeth, what do you know about the Tichnors, the people who owned my house?”

“Not a whole lot. I didn’t grow up in Klalo, you know. I moved here from Portland.”

“Must have been quite a shock.”

Marybeth gave a short, sharp nod. “It was. My ex-husband got transferred. He’s a chemist. Then Georgia-Pacific closed the paper mill, and he had to commute to Camas. When we split up, I stayed on. My daughter likes the school, and we have a house.”

A nicer house, probably, than a divorced woman could afford in Portland on a librarian’s salary. She didn’t say that but it was obvious.

Marybeth sighed. “You asked about your house. It belonged to a man named Strohmeyer who had grown children. He left it to his daughter when he died last year.”

“Charlotte Tichnor.”

“That’s the name. Her son’s an oncologist in Vancouver, always contributes to Friends of the Library. So does his mother.”

The server brought the check and took Meg’s Visa card.

“I think there’s a daughter, and another son in Portland, something to do with insurance or real estate. I bought a sideboard at the estate sale.” She took a last sip of herbal tea and set her cup down. “If you want to know more about local families you could go to the historical society. Mrs. Wirkkala knows everybody. I think she’s there on Fridays.”

“Thanks.” Meg signed the requisite form as Marybeth rose and shrugged into her raincoat.

“Can’t think of anything else,” she said. “We’ll see you next week at the library.”

“A week from Monday,” Meg corrected, smiling. “Don’t rush me. I have a lot of unpacking yet to do. Thanks, Marybeth.” She rescued her own damp raingear from the coat rack but almost forgot her umbrella.

Marybeth gave her a small, chilly smile as they headed out into the storm.

M
RS. Wirkkala—call me Helmi—was a fountain of information. A seventyish dumpling with fierce blue eyes, she was delighted to meet the new librarian, and Meg suspected, to hear of Meg’s ordeal firsthand.

They sat drinking coffee in Helmi’s office in the old Carnegie Library, a sturdy red-brick building like thousands the philanthropist had scattered across the country. In the late ‘Fifties, Helmi told Meg, when the book collection and the population had outgrown it, the current library had been erected and the old one turned over to the Latouche County Historical Society. Helmi, a retired high school history teacher, was the unpaid director.

Meg couldn’t imagine a better use for the old building. It reeked of history—dark wood, dim lighting, leather-bound tomes. She was glad she wouldn’t have to work there.

She obliged Helmi with her well-rehearsed narrative. It was beginning to feel like the ritual retelling of an ancient myth. When the telling was over and Helmi had made appropriate exclamations, Meg explained why she’d sought out someone with a historical perspective.

“I need to know about the people who owned my house, the Strohmeyers.”

Helmi gave an impish grin. “A fine old family. Charlotte Tich-nor’s grandfather was a bootlegger.”

“My goodness.”

Helmi poured coffee. “I went to high school with Charlotte. She was a real queen bee. You know the type—head cheerleader, homecoming queen, president of the honor society. She was a good student but an awful snob.”

“Stuck up?”

“She smiled graciously on the peasants. If you wanted to Be Somebody, though, you had to wear the right clothes, date the jerks on the basketball team, and hang out at the right drugstore after school. Charlotte made sure of that. Finnish girls in homemade skirts didn’t cut the mustard.” The twinkle reappeared. “I used to remind myself that our Char was the moonshiner’s grandbaby.”

“Prohibition.” Meg slapped her forehead. “The compartment in the garage. I should have thought of that as a possibility at least. The garage is more recent than the house.” The house had been built in 1904. “Did Old Strohmeyer get away with it?”

“My dear, he was a local hero. What do you know about Temperance?”

“Uh, Carry Nation?”

Helmi looked at her with pity. “I did my thesis on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. It was the first great women’s movement.”

“Wait a minute, what about suffrage?”

“That appealed to women with an education. Temperance was
popular.”

“With women.”

“Exactly. The Volstead Amendment—Prohibition—was the great triumph of the WCTU.”

“Some triumph.”

Helmi took a judicious sip of coffee. “Prohibition was a direct consequence of women getting the vote in 1920.”

“Why does that make me cringe?”

“Because it was a very bad thing for this country. Organized crime is the spawn of Prohibition, on the one hand. On the other, you have our obsession with other people’s vices—drinking and smoking and having sex in the backseat of a car, blasphemy, doing drugs and dancing and reading books about witches, listening to rock music with the volume turned up. Our first impulse is prohibition.”

Meg had to laugh. “Do you write pop history?”

“Sometimes I squeeze out an article for our quarterly. Mostly I just watch.”

“So it’s all women’s fault?”

“I wouldn’t say that. A lot of the blame lies with Baptist and Methodist preachers, and all of them were men.”

“And all of
them
opposed woman suffrage.” Meg knew a lot about the suffrage movement.

“There were exceptions.”

“The Quakers,” Meg conceded. “Other than the Quakers, every single Christian church organization in this country opposed giving women the vote.”

“They certainly did to begin with. At any rate, preachers played an important role in the Temperance Movement. I studied the WCTU of Clark County. It was never big here in Latouche County. Too many Catholics.”

“Catholics?”

Helmi pushed a plate of gingersnaps at Meg. “Think about it. Myself, I was raised by parents who departed from the Evangelical Lutheran tradition, which may be even more puritanical than the Methodists but was ethnic Scandinavian. The Catholics around here are ethnic German like the Strohmeyers, and nowadays Hispanic. Elsewhere they were Italian or Irish, for the most part. In Clark County, right next door, they were French Canadian. All ethnic.”

“Ethnics were excluded from the WCTU?”

“Socially excluded. Catholics were excluded. By and large, black people were excluded. Indians weren’t even considered. It was an all-white Protestant movement, like the Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan.”

Meg stared. “You’re not saying the membership overlapped, I hope.”

“Not at all. Separate spheres. The women put on their best hats and went out to ice cream socials.”

“And the men took a fortifying sip of White Lightning, and rode out to lynch rabbis, priests, and black men?”

Helmi smiled. “Some of the men. It’s not accidental that the Klan was big in that period, especially in Oregon. Washington is less WAS Pish. Always has been.”

“I’m getting dizzy.”

Helmi laughed. “It’s complicated. I’m just trying to explain why a nice law-abiding German Catholic man like Otto Stroh-meyer took to bootlegging alcohol. Gin, in his case.”

“His culture was under attack by women and WASPs. I see that.”

“You do but our Charlotte didn’t. Charlotte thirsted after respectability.”

“She wanted to be a Methodist lady?”

Helmi dipped a gingersnap into her coffee. “A WASP.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Meg said through a mouthful of cookie. The homemade gingersnaps were delicious.

“World War Two did something for Charlotte’s character, too. Her father, Emil, had trouble finding work in the ‘Thirties. He’d trained as a carpenter, but the Depression hit this town hard. When the Kaiser Shipyard started up in Vancouver, he moved the whole family there. Charlotte went to grade school and junior high in Vancouver, and it gave her larger social ideas.”

“I guess the war changed a lot of people.”

Helmi nodded. “And helped secularize society. The preachers lost influence. For a while.”

“But the Strohmeyers were Catholics.”

“Not when they came back to Klalo. By that time they were Episcopalians, very respectable, very WASP.”

Meg turned over what she knew of the population shifts during World War II. Long Beach had had a shipyard, and there were the big aircraft factories. “The Strohmeyers wouldn’t have been respectable in Vancouver. It’s an old town. They would have been considered migrant workers.”

Helmi beamed at her as if she were a bright first grader. “In Vancouver, Charlotte baby-sat for an Old Family. She internalized their notions.”

“What then?”

Helmi shrugged. “The war ended. Otto died. When people started building houses again, Emil brought his wife and kids home. He built a lot of the ranch-style houses in town, so he was pretty well fixed. He sent Peter, his oldest boy, to college. The second son, Jimmy, went into the army out of high school and never amounted to much.” Her round face clouded. “I had a crush on Jimmy.”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, nothing dramatic. He died in Las Vegas ten years ago. Three marriages, no kids. He had a drinking problem, which is a nice irony. Charlotte was the baby and got whatever she wanted. What she wanted was out.”