"The feathers you wore in Seattle were a bit winterlike," I said.

Vida harrumphed. "More than just that, apparently."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Did you notice that disreputable man with the beard who approached me at the bus stop on Aurora?"

I said I did. "Did he ask for money?"

"No." Vida lowered her voice. "He offered it. Fifty dollars, but I had to wear the hat. Can you imagine?" She had actually gone pale.

I put a hand over my mouth to stifle a burst of laughter. "No!" I exclaimed, eyes wide. "He must have been... drunk." Or crazy or blind or the kinkiest man in western Washington. "What did you say?"

"I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself," Vida replied. "I can't think when I've been so insulted."

Regarding Vida with a keen eye, I wondered. Deep down, I suspected she'd been thrilled. But she made no further comment and began going through her in-basket. "Goodness, such a bunch of nonsense. There must be a dozen different recipe mailings in here, not to mention all the other unnewsworthy releases from businesses and organizations that have nothing to do with Alpine."

"I get them, too," I said, and waited some more.

"There were three weddings over the weekend," she continued. "Diane Skylstad's bridal gown was orange. Why? I wonder. Oh," she continued, reading from the standard wedding release we provided, "her groom went to Oregon State. He wore a black tuxedo. Beaver colors, it says here." She paused while I fought my impatience. "Beverly Iverson accompanied herself on the piccolo while she came down the aisle singing *You Are the Wind Beneath My Bings.' "

"That should be wings," I interrupted. "It's a typo. Vida..."

"The Petersen-Huff nuptials took place in a hot-air balloon at Snohomish," Vida broke in, scribbling the correction. "Talk about wind-the Petersens have enough hot air to fly an airplane. Not to mention the Huffs. The name says it all."

"Very cute," I remarked, my curiosity at the bursting point. "Vida, where have you been?"

She glanced up from the handwritten piece of paper she was perusing. "Nowhere in particular," she said, but avoided my gaze. "You wouldn't think people would get married on Easter weekend, would you?"

"Vida..."

"What?" Finally, she stared at me through her big gla.s.ses.

"Don't you want to know all the details about last night?"

"Last night?" The faintest and most uncharacteristic of blushes emerged on her cheeks. "Did I miss something?" I could swear I heard her groan.

"Yes," I said. "Where were you?"

"Oooh..." She whipped off her gla.s.ses and began to rub her eyes in that fierce fashion that always drives me nuts. "I was with Buck. We spent a very leisurely evening."

"That sounds... nice," I said, keeping a straight face. While Vida would use every means short of thumbscrews to elicit the most personal information from others, she is a clam when it comes to revealing details of her own private life. Unlike many nosy people I've known, there is no mutual exchange of intimate affairs. In Alpine, it's understood that my House and Home editor takes no prisoners on the battlefield of gossip.

"All right," she said, putting her gla.s.ses back on and blinking several times, "tell me what I somehow missed last night."

Scott Chamoud and Kip MacDuff arrived together, so I waited until they'd settled in with coffee and the doughnuts that I'd picked up at the Upper Crust Bakery. Ginny came in with more phone messages, and Leo showed up just after I began my account.

"Wow!" Scott exclaimed after I'd finished. "I leave town, and everything blows up."

"It's all yours now," I said, "though you'll need background from Vida on the Harquist-O'Neill feud."

"You keeping the sheriff for yourself?" Leo asked with a bland expression on his craggy face.

"No," I said with a hard stare for my ad manager. "I have to go back to Seattle tomorrow. There's no point in me staying with any of the stories just before deadline."

"You can't go back to Seattle," Leo said. "We've got lunch with Spencer Fleetwood tomorrow."

I'd forgotten. "Can we put it off until Friday?" I asked, feeling stupid.

"I'll check with Fleetwood," Leo replied, but he didn't look pleased.

Throughout this exchange, Vida had remained silent. At last she spoke, her bust thrust out, her mangoes bobbing: "It was bound to come to this. The Harquists and the O'Neills have been building toward a showdown for years."

Leo turned in his swivel chair. "Aren't family feuds kind of dated, even in Alpine? This isn't Albania, d.u.c.h.ess."

Vida glared at Leo. "Really, what do you know about it? You're still a newcomer. At least the Harquists and the O'Neills take some pride in family honor. I find it rather heartwarming."

"Sicily," Leo said. "It's more like Sicilian families, having a ritual bloodbath."

"Not at all," Vida a.s.serted. "Everyone involved is fair-complected. The O'Neills are mostly redheaded, and the Harquists are very blond. Of course Cap is bald now, but..."

I left Vida and Leo to their argument and retired to my cubbyhole. The workday commenced. I called the hospital to check on Milo and was put through to his room.

"I'm stuck here until tomorrow," he complained. "I argued with Doc about it, but I lost. Now I have to run this whole Harquist-O'Neill mess from here. It's d.a.m.ned aggravating."

Milo was never one to delegate. I sympathized, then asked how he was going to manage when he went home. Surely he'd have to stay off his foot for a few days.

"That's another thing," he said, still grumpy. "Doc wants me to keep off of it until next week. h.e.l.l, it's not that big a deal. I shot myself in the foot once when I was a kid."

"But you're going to need some help," I pointed out. "I talked to Jeannie last night at the hospital, and it sounded as if she's going out of town for a few days." I couldn't resist putting the needle into Milo.

"Right," the sheriff responded. "You have to give seven days' notice at the place where we had our reservations. The deadline pa.s.sed last Sat.u.r.day. Janet Driggers tried to wheedle an exception, but no luck. They're sticklers in Sun Valley."

So Milo was making excuses for his youthful sweetheart. "Goodness," I said, "you wouldn't want to be out two or three hundred dollars just because you got shot in the line of duty."

"What does that crack mean?" Milo snapped.

I was silently chortling. "Get well, cowboy. I'll bring you a tuna ca.s.serole when you get home." Milo hated tuna ca.s.serole. I hung up, still chortling.

Vida and I ate at the Venison Inn, where she listened in relative silence to my adventures the previous day in Seattle.

"I'm actually relieved that I didn't have to go to those seedy bars," she admitted. "However, I can't help but wonder if things might have gone more smoothly with Darryl Lindholm had I been there."

I bristled a bit. "How? You couldn't have avoided mentioning Kendra."

"Perhaps you should have inquired about Carol first," Vida said, taking a bite from her Reuben sandwich.

"Why?" I shot back. "I was trying to add a positive note to what was otherwise an extremely negative conversation. Mr. Rapp said that Darryl, Carol, and Kendra looked happy together, like a family. I thought that mentioning Kendra would make him feel better."

"Apparently not," Vida murmured, looking faintly smug. "Oh, well. I'll call on him tomorrow."

"You're going with me?" I said. "What about the paper?"

"I told you, I already have my section well in hand," Vida said calmly. "All I need now are some *Scene Around Town' items," she added, referring to her gossip column. "I could use some of the information from the encounter last night at Cap Harquist's-if you could make it amusing."

"It didn't seem amusing at the time," I retorted. "Besides, I don't think that would be in very good taste."

"Oh-it could be," Vida said airily. "You know- *Half-clad but doughty Cap Harquist protesting removal from family homestead built in thirty-three.' *Forty years later Sheriff Dodge gets shot in other foot. Was he waiting for the other bullet to drop?' *Meara O'Neill uses old copies of Advocate to start fire.' That sort of thing."

"Those are not funny," I a.s.serted. "And you know better."

Vida shrugged. "Then give me something I really can use."

"I haven't been here much the past few days," I said, then brightened. "How about *Darryl Lindholm, formerly of Alpine, now working for Microsoft in Redmond'?"

"You know I'm not one to use *formerly of Alpine' items," Vida said, frowning. "I like to keep things local."

"I know," I agreed, "but what if somebody who's known him since he left comes up with something interesting. Something recent, maybe."

Vida sprinkled extra salt and pepper on her potato salad. "Hmm. That's possible. But it's rather unfortunate that his name would appear in the same issue with his ex-girlfriend's murder, don't you think?"

She was right. "It probably wouldn't do any good anyway," I allowed. "Darryl cut his ties with Alpine a long time ago."

"But did he do it willingly? I wonder," Vida mused.

I looked up from my hot pastrami and rye. "As in?"

"It seems to me that his parents moved from here not long after he graduated from high school," Vida explained. "He was two, maybe three years older than Carol, and already enrolled at Pacific Lutheran in Tacoma. Carol went off to have the baby in Seattle-where she lived with Olive and Burt Nerstad. It wasn't long before the Lindholms sold their house on First Hill and moved to Mount Vernon."

"You're suggesting that Darryl was coerced out of marrying Carol?"

Vida nodded. "Perhaps. This is all coming back to me. Darryl was quite bright. I believe he'd won a scholarship to PLU. The Lindholms were fairly well-off, however. Mr. Lindholm had been a superintendent at the old Tye Lumber Company before it closed. Darryl's mother came from Sultan, where her parents owned a great deal of property north of the town. The Lindholms had enough money to buy that bulb company in the Skagit Valley. They certainly didn't want to see their son marry too soon or beneath him."

"His first marriage failed," I remarked.

"Probably because it wasn't to Carol," Vida said. "Perhaps he really loved her. Perhaps he didn't mind what she'd become."

"Perhaps," I noted dryly, "he blamed himself for that."

"Perhaps," Vida said with an ironic smile. "He certainly must have blamed himself for the accident that killed his second wife and their two boys."

"I'm afraid so," I said. "All right, we'll leave at noon tomorrow for Seattle. I had the motel reserve a room for Tuesday night."

Amber seemed relieved that I was going away again. Obviously, she enjoyed the freedom to pig up the place. In her favor, she'd actually fixed dinner: overdone rib steaks, a can of string beans, and baked potatoes. I'd been trying to teach her how to cook. It was an uphill battle.

I'd tried to see Milo on my way home from work, but he was conducting a staff meeting in his room, so I left. Scott had learned earlier in the day that Cap Harquist had been hospitalized for smoke inhalation, but was already released. Rudy Harquist was back in jail, charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm. Apparently, even Milo wasn't sure that the shooting hadn't been an accident. Meara O'Neill was also out of the hospital. The Harquists wanted to charge her with arson, but our new prosecutor, Rosemary Bourgette, was probably going to nail both Rudy and Ozzie for kidnapping. The two O'Neills, who had carry permits, had been brought in on unlawful brandishing of a firearm. I'd written the first part of Scott's story myself. It was a big one, and I didn't mind giving him credit, but I'd have to go over his part with a fine-tooth comb. The whole mess was fraught with libel possibilities. a.s.suming, of course, that any of the feuding instigators could read.

About an hour after I'd cleared away the dinner things, I urged Amber to clean up the living room with its usual obstacle course of toys, tabloids, and wearing apparel, both large and small. The phone rang while she was still staring at the litter.

"What's this about Cousin Ronnie?" Ben demanded, the crackle in his voice more apparent than ever. "I haven't thought about him in thirty years."

I'd briefly mentioned in my message that I'd been trying to help get Ronnie out of jail. Since Danny was yelling his head off because he didn't want to surrender a big plastic toy that looked like an octopus wearing bells, I scampered into my bedroom.

"You're a good kid," Ben said after I'd given him the details. "Now I feel guilty for not being there to help him, too." He paused and lowered his voice. Some of the crackling lost its snap. "You aren't on some kind of family-connection search, are you?"

"Of course not," I replied, still able to hear the leather-lunged Danny. "Ronnie contacted me. Why would you ask such a question?"

This time the pause was longer. "I haven't mentioned this before, Sluggly," he said, using his childhood nickname for me, "but I've felt a little guilty ever since Adam went into the seminary."

Amber was calling my name. She sounded desperate. "Hang on, Ben," I interrupted, removing the cordless phone from my ear and rushing into the living room.

Amber was trying to loosen Danny's grip from a box of fireplace matches that had somehow fallen off the mantel. He'd pried the lid open and was trying to stick one of the matches into his mouth. His anxious mother was hampered from rescuing him because-or so I gathered from her incoherent yips-she'd sat down in my new recliner and the footrest part had gone up instead of down. She was stuck in the chair.

I s.n.a.t.c.hed the matches away from Danny, put them out of harm's way, and gave the footrest a terrific yank. It came down. I shot Amber a look that said, "If you'd been picking up all this junk, you wouldn't have gotten stuck in the d.a.m.ned chair, you lazy little twerp."

"As you were saying?" I said to Ben with a sigh. "About guilt?"

"Right," my brother responded. "Let's face it, I was very pleased when Adam told me he wanted to become a priest. He said I'd been his inspiration. Naturally, I was flattered, not so much on a personal level, but that the idea of my own vocation and the way I was handling it had influenced him. It's hard to explain."

"You don't want to brag," I said dryly. "Never mind, go on."

"Well-" He stopped to clear his throat. In the living room, Danny was crying again. "You know Adam's track record better than I do when it comes to choosing careers. Over time, he's wanted to be everything from an anthropologist to a circus clown."

"He was only twelve when he got that idea," I put in.

"But you know what I mean," Ben continued. "He was off in every direction. I figured that maybe the vocation thing was just another wild hair."

"I guess not," I said. "He's been in the seminary long enough now to know if being a priest is what he really wants."

"I agree." Ben had grown very serious, almost formal. I could picture him counseling someone with a crisis in faith or a broken marriage. "And that's what makes me feel guilty. I've robbed you of your earthly immortality. Robbed myself, too, in a way."

A terrible crash resounded from the living room. I didn't want to interrupt Ben again, not when he was in such a solemn mood, so I ducked out of the bedroom to see what new horror had occurred.

Danny had pulled the lace cloth off the dining-room table, and with it, a potted azalea I'd bought at Alpine Gardens the previous week. He was screaming his head off. Amber was nowhere in sight.

I started running to the child, tripped over the plastic octopus, and fell flat on my face. The toy's little bells played a cheery tune. It should have been a dirge.

"So," Ben went on, "when you told me about Ronnie, I began to feel guilty all over again. I sense that you want grandchildren after all, and somehow, it's my fault you don't have them to jiggle on your knee."

It was my knee that hurt most. Amber appeared from the kitchen with a broom and a dustpan. I struggled to sit up. Danny began eating dirt from the potted azalea.

"Shut up," I said to Ben. "Don't ever mention the word grandchildren to me again."

Ronnie had a smaller bandage on his ear when I visited him Tuesday afternoon in jail. The first thing he asked about was Budweiser.

I lied. "He's fine," I said, relating how I'd gone to Pete and Jenny Chan's house. "The little boys are darling. Their own dog had been run over, so they're taking good care of Buddy."

It was the wrong thing to say. "They'll get attached," Ronnie said, bowing his head. "They'll want to keep him."