A grave denied (13 page)

“You know anything about arson?”

Jim shook his head. “Fuck all.”

“They’ve got specialists for that back in the world, don’t they?” Bobby said.

“Yeah, sure, but I doubt that I can get the state to fork out the airfare for one when said arson doesn’t involve either extensive property damage or multiple deaths.”

They turned as one to look at the wreckage, and the smoke had cleared enough now to see the handle of the old-fashioned water pump that had once presided over the sink sticking up out of the rubble like a forlorn sentinel. The loft was pretty much intact, having fallen almost as one piece as the walls below had burned. Jim suspected that the falling loft had had something to do with smothering some or all of the fire, and wondered when it had come down. Probably right about the time Kate decided to rescue her “things.”

The rage started hammering at the locked door. Never had self-control seemed more elusive. One of the first things taught in trooper school was how to establish authority at a crime scene. If he’d had to take that test this morning he would have failed miserably. For the first time in his career, he wished he had someone else he could hand off a case to.

Thinking out loud, he said, “Log cabin, sixty-odd years old. Probably would go up like tinder once it was torched. Small, too, so it wouldn’t take long.” He looked around the clearing. The outbuildings were intact, although the roofs of shop and outhouse had some scorch marks. The wooden stand beneath the half dozen fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel oil stacked in a neat pyramid had burned and collapsed, and the drums had broken free of their strapping and rolled into a haphazard scatter into the brush.

Billy cast a wary eye over his shoulder. “This have something to do with Dreyer’s death?”

Jim hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the red pickup. “She thinks so,” he said.

Bobby grinned again. “Feeling guilty?” he said, entirely without sympathy. Dinah nudged him, and Jim saw it, which was the only thing that saved Bobby from instant annihilation.

He walked over to the cabin. The heat from the still-smoldering embers was warm on his face. He walked around the perimeter, looking for the line of copper tubing leading from the fuel oil into the cabin. It was still there, and as near as he could figure by eyeballing it, it hadn’t been tampered with.

He heard a footstep and turned to see Kate. “Did you lock your door last night?” He saw the answer on her face. “Of course you didn’t. Who does, in the Park? So it was probably just a matter of someone opening it and pitching a lit firestarter inside. Probably knew you sleep in the loft. Probably knew hot air rises. Probably figured you’d be dead of smoke inhalation before you woke up enough to get to the ladder. Do you get it, Shugak? Somebody tried to kill you last night.”

“I got it, Chopin,” she said tightly. “I’ve had longer to think about it than you have.”

For the first time he was able to look beyond his own fear and rage and see hers, and the sight only exacerbated his own. “You’re fired,” he said tightly.

She looked confused. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re
fired!”
he bellowed. “Canned, sacked, riffed, laid off! I don’t want you anywhere near this case from now on! You will talk to no more people about Len Dreyer, do you hear me! Not one! You will collect
no more evidence!
If the murderer kneels at your feet and offers you a signed confession sealed by a notary public, I want you to walk away! Walk
away,
do you
hear
me?”

“I think they can hear you in Canada,” Bobby said.

“Shut the fuck up!” Jim said furiously, rounding on him.

“Okay,” Bobby said, hands patting the air. Billy, Annie, and Dinah backed up a step in unison.

“And stay the fuck out of police business!”

“Anything you say, buddy,” Bobby said. Billy, Annie, and Dinah backed up another step, and Bobby lowered his hands just long enough to roll the tires on his chair back, just so he wouldn’t be hanging it out in front all alone. None of them could remember seeing Jim angry. Jim Chopin didn’t get angry; in fact, they had thought that he couldn’t, that maybe he didn’t know how or that it had been trained out of him in trooper school and on the job. Their mistake.

Their reaction went a long way toward restoring Jim’s composure. “Okay,” he said more calmly. He turned back to Kate. She had something big and square clamped beneath an elbow. “What’s that?”

“My photograph album,” she said. “The one I put together from the pictures in Emaa’s kitchen.”

Another wave of fury almost swamped him. He battled it back, and managed to ask in a reasonable tone of voice, “That what you went back for?”

“Yes. And the otter.” She pulled out the little ivory carving with two fingers, wincing. She nodded at the pickup. “And the guitar. Johnny wants to learn to play.”

As she spoke they heard the sound of a four-wheeler, and Mutt came arrowing into the clearing. She saw Kate and in the same smooth motion knocked her flat on her back. Front paws on Kate’s shoulders, crooning a constant anxious whine, she licked Kate’s face, hands, every part of her she could get to, and then nosed her over on her face like she was flipping a pancake and examined her backside with the same attention to detail.

“I’m all right, Mutt,” Kate said, exasperated, and got to her feet just in time to see Vanessa and Johnny drive into the clearing on their four-wheelers. Johnny vaulted off his before it stopped moving and headed for Kate. “What happened? Are you all right? Mutt was worried this morning, she woke me up and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep. She made us come home early.” He looked at the cabin and his face went white. “What happened to the cabin?”

“It’s okay,” Kate said.

“No, it’s not, your cabin’s burned down!” He rounded on her, his face dark with suspicion. “Did she do this?”

“What? Who? Oh.” Kate pulled herself together. “No. No, I don’t think so, Johnny, I don’t think it had anything to do with her. We don’t know if it was deliberate, anyway, it could have been an accident.”

“Yeah, right,” Johnny said, “like I’ve ever, ever seen you leave the fire door open on the stove, or not turn the lamps off when you were going to be gone. Give me a break.”

“Her who?” Jim said.

Kate scowled at him. “It’s not important.”

“It is, too,” Johnny said hotly, and looked at Jim. “My mother could have done this.”

“Jane?” Jim said.

Johnny nodded vigorously. “It’s just the kind of thing she would do if she was smart enough to think of it. Kate has to prove she can provide shelter for me, doesn’t she? So I can live with her?”

Jim looked at Kate. “Yes. She does.”

“Well?” Johnny pointed at the rubble. “Now we don’t have a place to live. What’s some judge going to say about that?”

The boy could have a point, Jim thought, and tried to ignore how much he’d like to believe it was Jane who had tried to burn Kate alive and not Len Dreyer’s killer. “I don’t think so, Johnny,” he said gentiy. “She knows you’re living here, too, and I don’t care how bad things are between you, I don’t think she’d try to burn down a house you were sleeping in.”

That rocked Johnny back. Vanessa dismounted, paused at Johnny’s four-wheeler to kill the engine, and came to stand shoulder to shoulder with him, staring at the remains of Kate’s cabin with wide eyes.

Her eyes got wider when yet another four-wheeler shouldered its way into the clearing, ridden by Virgil Hagberg. Virgil had a hard, anxious look on his face. He spotted Jim first, towering over the other heads, and started forward. “Oh god. Oh god, Officer Chopin, what…” His voice trailed away when he looked beyond Jim to the smoldering ruin that was once Kate’s cabin. “What… oh my god.” He looked as if he might throw up right there. “What happened?”

“Somebody burned down Kate’s cabin,” Jim said.

“Oh my god,” Virgil said. “Oh my god. Bobby, Dinah, I’m so sorry, I know you were good friends. Oh my god. This is awful. This is just… awful, I—”

“What are you doing here, Virgil?” Jim said.

A fine tremor ran through the older man’s body. “I am looking for Vanessa. She must have gone out after we went to bed, Telma went to get her up for school and she wasn’t there. We are worried sick, and then I remembered Kate telling us that that boy who is staying with her was friends with Vanessa, and I thought…”

“It’s okay,” Kate said, stepping from behind Jim’s bulk. “Vanessa’s right here.” She propelled the girl forward.

Virgil went gray, his knees gave out, and Billy had to catch his arm so he wouldn’t go all the way down. “Oh my god,” he said weakly. “Oh my god.”

Kate nudged Vanessa. The girl walked forward to stand next to Virgil. “I’m all right, Uncle Virgil,” she told him. “I wasn’t even here when it burned down. Johnny and I were camping out at—”

She stopped when Johnny nudged her.

Virgil laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Oh thank god,” he said, “oh thank god. I don’t know what I would have told Telma. Oh thank god.” He used her shoulder to regain his feet, moving like the old man he looked to be.

And not for the first time that morning, since she had seen the glow against the sky, since she had rolled into the clearing to see flames through the cabin windows, since she had with almost inconceivable stupidity walked into that fire to grab the photograph album off the shelf and the one-pound Darigold butter can off the kitchen table and the ivory otter from the windowsill and the guitar off the wall, since she had given up the cabin for lost, since she had backed the pickup and the snow machine and the four-wheeler out of danger, and watched fearfully for a spark to set one of the outbuildings on fire, since she had watched the flames consume the old dry logs and her lifelong home collapse in on itself, since she had driven the longest twenty-seven miles of her life to Bobby and Dinah’s house, since the even longer drive back, Kate thought of how terrible it could have been had Johnny been inside the cabin, asleep on the couch, when it had been torched.

She looked at Johnny, pale and stricken and looking much younger than he had when he was laying down the law to her up at the mine, and she knew exactly what Virgil was feeling, and a fine trembling seemed to move from his knees to hers.

A warm, steady grip took her by the elbow, and she heard Jim say in a far gender voice than she had yet heard that morning, “Sit down a minute, Kate.”

She didn’t remember anything clearly for a while after that.

She woke up on a couch in Bobby and Dinah’s living room much later that day, to be greeted by a blinding smile and another tug on her hair. “Kate,” Katya said with immense satisfaction. “Kate waked up! Kate play now!”

“Ouch?” Kate said.

“Shhhh, Katya,” Johnny said, coming around the corner at a dead run and scooping Katya up in his arms. “Come on, let’s go outside and play.”

“If’s okay,” Kate said, sitting up. “I’m awake.” She stretched and yawned. “What time is it?”

“About three.”

“In the afternoon? Man, I must have been tired.” She rubbed at the sore patch on her scalp where Katya had been pulling her hair. She smiled at the toddler beaming at her from Johnny’s arms. “You little monster. Come here and let me pull your hair.”

“You’re better,” Johnny said, relieved.

“Better?”

“You were practically comatose when Jim carried you in here this morning.”

“Jim carried me in?”

“Yeah. You went out in his front seat on the way here.”

“Oh.”

Dinah peered over the divider. “Ah, Kate Van Winkle awakes. Want a shower?”

Kate became aware of the sooty and smelly condition of her clothes. “I’d love a shower,” she said with feeling.

“Good. I’ve got a change of clothes in the bathroom for you.”

Kate had taken too many snowmelt baths in galvanized wash-tubs to take a hot shower for granted, and she stood with her face in the stream of water until she felt parboiled. Dinah’s shirt, a pale blue button-down affair, was too tight across the chest and her jeans were too loose in the hips, but they were clean and she was grateful. She came out of the bathroom refreshed. “I’ll need to get some new clothes,” she said, rolling up the sleeves of the shirt. “For me and Johnny.”

“Want to order them over the Internet?” Dinah nodded at the computer.

“Don’t you need a credit card to do that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a credit card.”

Dinah smiled. “I do.” She shepherded Kate to the computer and Googled up the Eddie Bauer and Jockey websites. From there they went to Niketown, where they searched for Lady Cortez, except that the style was now called Cortez Basic and cost $35 more than the last time Kate had bought them. It took her a few profane moments to cope with the news, but they had them in size seven so she ordered her usual six pair and had them sent priority mail. “That takes care of me,” Kate said. “What about Johnny?”

Johnny had more fashion consciousness than Kate and he knew a lot more about surfing the ‘Net, so it took them until dinnertime to fill out his wardrobe. Dinah assured them both that they weren’t anywhere near her credit limit. Kate suspected she was lying, but by then Bobby had returned with Jim in tow, and they all sat down to eat chicken-fried caribou steaks and baked potatoes and a cherry pie baked by Bobby the day before.