“Not that I ever heard,” Goldman said. “Kimi wasn’t like élan. Like I said, she was a quiet kid, polite. She kept more to her studies.” Goldman leaned forward, looking at Tracy over the top of his glasses. “Are you saying otherwise?”
“I don’t know yet,” Tracy said. “But something about what happened back then didn’t sit right with a young deputy sheriff—”
“Buzz Almond.”
Tracy nodded. “You really do have a computer up there, don’t you?”
“Use it or lose it, friend; that’s what my doctor says. I intend to use it.” Goldman sat back again. “Buzz was a good man and a great sheriff. If Buzz thought something was up, it likely was.”
“So tell me, what was a great kid like Kimi doing with someone like Tommy Moore?”
“Tommy got all the girls back then. He was our James Dean—smoldering good looks. He could charm a rattlesnake into not biting him.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Not well. Never spoke to him. I covered his fights when he fought Golden Gloves. He could have been a good boxer; he had a heck of a left hook.”
“What happened to him?”
“He drank too much, and the town more or less ran him out after the story broke about Kimi. They blamed him for her death. I heard he moved back home to the reservation. Hasn’t been seen or heard from since, far as I know.”
Tracy switched gears to the two receipts in Buzz Almond’s file. “How about Hastey Devoe? I understand he owned a windshield repair company and an auto repair shop.”
“That’s right, just off 141 on Lincoln Road, I believe.”
“What kind of guy was he?”
“What do you mean?”
Tracy struggled to rephrase her question. “I don’t know. Was he honest? Did he go to church? You know what I mean?”
“I never had any direct business with him, but I never heard anything to indicate he wasn’t a stand-up guy.”
“Any connection to Tommy Moore you’re aware of?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Sounds like it was an interesting time around here, Sam.”
“It was like Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’”
“You wouldn’t know of any place else that carries copies of old newspapers I could go through, would you? Evelyn thought I might try the library in Goldendale.”
Goldman smiled again. “Friend, I know the best library around, and it’s a lot closer than Goldendale.”
Tracy followed Goldman through a spotless kitchen that held the faint odor of lemon-scented bleach.
“Where’re you going now, Sam?” Adele asked.
“Back to the future,” he said, leading Tracy into a tiny mudroom off the kitchen and turning the deadbolt on a curtained back door.
“You’re not taking her out to that awful shed are you?” Adele looked at Tracy like Sam was taking her to a horror film. “He’s got more stuff in there than the thrift store in town. You’ll get dust all over your nice clothes.”
Tracy smiled. “I’m not wearing anything that can’t get dirty,” she said, though she’d thrown on her blue cashmere sweater that morning.
Goldman led Tracy down wooden steps into a sun-drenched patch of grass enclosed by a six-foot redwood fence. The yard looked to have been buttoned down for the winter, benches stacked upon a picnic table and stored beneath a lean-to extending off the roof of the freestanding shed. The shed doors were secured with a sturdy padlock. Goldman removed it, swung the door open, and used a five-gallon bucket to keep it propped. Inside, he flipped a switch, and two bare bulbs hanging from overhead rafters shone golden light upon Sam Goldman’s treasures—bicycles, garden tools, baseball bats, a bucket of tennis balls, tennis rackets, file cabinets, and dozens of ties adorned with Disney and Peanuts characters and other trinkets. Adele hadn’t exaggerated; a thrift-store owner would have been duly impressed.
Goldman slid aside and rearranged his treasures as he made his way to the back of the shed. With each movement, more dust motes danced in the shafts of light, spinning and swirling. At the back of the garage stood a wall of Bekins boxes, six or seven high and extending the width of the building. Each box had been neatly labeled with the month and the year in black marker and stacked in chronological order, starting with “7/1969” and ending with “12/2000.” Goldman moved a few boxes until he reached the box labeled “6/1975–1/1977.”
“This would be it.” He removed the lid, revealing neatly folded newspapers.
“You kept every newspaper?” Tracy asked.
“From the day we opened our door until the day we closed. I was like the milkman. I delivered regularly.”
Goldman thumbed through the papers. “August, September, October . . .” When he got to November, he pulled out four of the papers and set the lid back on the box, using it as a table. “These are the issues leading up to and following the game,” he said. “This is where you’ll find the articles on Kimi Kanasket, and they’ll give you a feel for what it was like around here.”
“Front-page news,” Tracy said, reading the headline of the first paper.
Stoneridge Wins Region!
State Championship Saturday
“Like I said, they’d have lynched me if I hadn’t covered it.”
The half-column article on Kimi Kanasket’s death was pushed to the bottom of the front page.
Local Girl’s Body Pulled
from White Salmon River
The article did not mention the word “suicide.”
“I take it there weren’t any follow-up articles?” Tracy asked.
“Nothing to follow up. She was cremated in a private service on the reservation. The detective told me the coroner concluded she’d jumped in because Tommy Moore broke up with her. I had a copy of his report at one time, though I don’t believe I kept it. Didn’t see any reason to make that public, though everyone knew soon enough.”
“You spoke to the detective?”
“Jerry Ostertag.”
“Is he still around?”
“I wouldn’t know, chief. Last I heard he’d retired and moved someplace in the Midwest to fish. Montana, maybe.”
Jenny had said that Ostertag had died, but even if Ostertag was still around, Tracy doubted he would recall many of the details of Kimi Kanasket’s death. Kimi Kanasket was a black mark on an otherwise joyous occasion, like the drunk uncle who causes a scene at a family wedding. You didn’t acknowledge or talk about the incident. You quietly escorted him from the building so others could focus on the celebration, and when the family got together to remember that day, the blemish was never discussed, until, as the years passed, the incident was forgotten completely.
CHAPTER 16
Tracy and Sam Goldman made copies of the relevant pages of the newspaper at the copy machine in the drugstore in town, a task that took longer than it otherwise should have. Goldman stopped to talk to just about everyone, calling each person “chief,” “friend,” or “hero.”