A grave denied (17 page)

“Gary and Fran? Sure.”

“They move to town.”

“I didn’t know that.”

She endured a less than tolerant glance her way. “You not here. How could you know?”

“Why are Gary and Fran selling their place?”

“Gary, he like everybody, not making a living with the fish. He go back to school, he say, learn computers, get a job in Anchorage.”

Kate thought of the tall, raw-boned man with hair bleached blond by the sun and a perpetual sunburn, dressed eternally in ragged, oil-stained, scaly overalls, and tried to imagine him in a button-down shirt with a tie, sitting in front of a computer terminal in one of those little cubicles on the fourth floor of one of those office buildings in Anchorage where the closest you got to the outdoors was the view of Knik Arm through the window. She shuddered and looked back at her list. “Gary was on Bonnie’s list, Auntie. He passed a message to Len Dreyer last May that he needed some work done on his homestead.”

Auntie Vi nodded sagely. “Spruce the place up, get a better price for it.”

“Who did Gary sell it to?”

“Not sold yet.”

“How much is he asking for it?”

“Too much.”

“Don’t any of the girls want it?”

The Drussells had three daughters, all in high school, although the oldest one might be out by now. Maybe the two eldest, Kate couldn’t remember. Auntie Vi shook her head. “Girls go to school in Anchorage, too.”

Auntie Vi cut the bread into fourths and began shaping it into loaves. “Gary, he want to fix up his house before he put it on the market. To get a better price, you know.”

“I know, Dandy already told me he and Dreyer worked on it together.”

Auntie Vi glared at her. “If you already know everything, why ask?”

“Well, Auntie, I — ” Sentences to Auntie Vi that began “Well, Auntie, I — ” had an historic tendency to run on forever and end up with Kate apologizing for her own stupidity and for wasting her aunt’s valuable time. Kate folded her lips down over her teeth and shut up.

Auntie Vi greased four loaf pans and patted the loaves into them. “You know this brother of Bobby’s?”

“No. I haven’t met him. Not yet.”

Auntie Vi said something in Aleut that sounded highly uncomplimentary, but then Aleut spoken properly was full of a lot of rich, back-of-the-throat gutturals that just naturally lent themselves to insult. Kate caught a word here and there, enough to inspire a devout hope to see Jeffrey Clark coming so that she could head in the other direction. When she ran down, Auntie Vi switched back to English. “Len Dreyer put a new roof on Bobby’s house in October.”

This time Kate kept her mouth shut.

Auntie Vi gave her a sharp look. “You not writing this down?”

Kate snatched up her pencil. “Of course. Bobby’s roof, you said? October? Very important, very important information indeed.” A glance from Auntie Vi told her that she might be overdoing it. She picked another topic at random. “Johnny’s made a friend.”

“Boy or girl?”

That was Auntie Vi, cutting right to the chase. “Girl. But not like that.”

Auntie Vi cast her eyes up to heaven, pleading for help in the face of this idiocy on the part of her niece. “It always like that between a boy and a girl.”

“They’re just kids.”

Auntie Vi looked at her with a raised brow. “And you just a kid when Ethan come home from college.”

Kate made a face. “I talked to him.”

“Good.” Auntie Vi slid the loaves into the oven and set the timer. “Which girl is Johnny’s friend?”

“Vanessa Cox.”

“Ah.” Auntie Vi, wiping down the breadboard, nodded sadly. “Poor girl.”

“Why poor?”

“She lose her parents in a car wreck Outside. That make anyone a poor girl.”

Kate couldn’t argue with that. “At least she had somewhere to go.”

Auntie Vi made a face. “The Hagbergs.”

“What’s wrong with the Hagbergs?”

“Nothing,” Auntie Vi said, “nothing. But she is young. They old. And that Virgil, he don’t care nothing about nothing except Telma. And Telma, she care nothing about nothing, I don’t think.” She fixed a stern look on Kate. “You watch out for that girl, Katya. She start feeling lonely, she start being around your boy more, and you know what happen then.”

“She’s Johnny’s friend,” Kate said. “I’m not going to forbid her on the premises.”

“Didn’t say you should,” Auntie Vi said promptly. “Who said I said you should do that? Maybe a good thing, that, with her and your boy. Both not from Park.” She ruminated in silence for a moment. “I hear something about Virgil Hagberg,” she said, her brows knit. “I think he selling the homestead.”

“You’re kidding. I was just out there yesterday, Auntie. He didn’t say a word about it.”

“Virgil thinking since they don’t have kids they leave the homestead to that land conservancy Ruthe run.”

“Really,” Kate said. “I bet Ruthe loves that plan.”

“They talking to her about it. Virgil, he anxious that the land stay as it is, and that they don’t trade it down the line for something better.”

“Ruthe wouldn’t do that.”

Auntie Vi gave her a look. “Ruthe Bauman do anything and everything she can to carve out the biggest chunk of leave-it-alone in the state, Katya.”

“Yes, Auntie,” Kate said. “What else?”

What else was, Budd Davies getting collared by Dan O’Brian for taking too many beavers the winter before last. Kate winced. “Ouch. What’d Dan do to him?”

“Not too bad. Take the pelts, confiscate Budd’s traps, and fine him five thousand dollars.”

“No jail time?”

Auntie Vi shook her head. “No jail. Dan says that Budd get no lawyer, pay up without whining, Budd and him are good.”

Kate had to laugh. Justice, Park style. “Is Budd pissed?”

Auntie Vi gave this judicious consideration, and shook her head. “No.” A glimmer of a smile. “I see Harvey on my last trip into Ahtna. He say Budd has order for more traps.”

What else was, the security guard who was patrolling the TransAlaska Pipeline on his snow machine getting caught in a whiteout February before last, flipping his machine, breaking his leg, and crawling two miles to the road for help, where he got run over by a vanload of college students taking the scenic route from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to a basketball game with perennial rival University of Alaska Anchorage. The guard had only recently recovered the ability to speak and to sit up. Opinion was divided in the Park as to whether his wife thought that was a good thing, since in the interim she had taken up with a freight handler for Frontier Airlines in Atka.

What else was all this and more, and Kate tried to correlate the inundation of information with what she had learned from Bonnie Jeppsen and what she had picked up from her previous interviews. Budd and the security guard didn’t show up on Bonnie’s list so she tentatively eliminated them, which reduced the list of people she was going to have to talk to, but not by much. She sighed.

“If it was easy, everybody do it,” Auntie Vi said. She pulled the second bowl of dough off the back of the stove where it had been set to rise. “You want some more fry bread?”

There was never a time when Kate didn’t.

₉

It was a little after three when she emerged from Auntie Vi’s bed-and-breakfast, stuffed full of fry bread and information. For the moment, Johnny was tucked safely away at Bobby’s. She stood next to the truck, her hand on the door handle. Mutt watched her face with wise eyes. So many people to talk to, and she had to stay out of Jim Chopin’s way while she did. She looked at the cross-referenced list of names and thought about the geography involved. She could start at the Roadhouse and work north. Or on the Step and work south. Or in Niniltna and work west.

Really, the first thing she ought to do was go back to Dreyer’s cabin and investigate the scene more thoroughly. She went back to her own instead.

It looked, if anything, even more forlorn than it had the day before. Her cabin, the place she had been born into this world, where she had spent most of what little time she’d had with her parents, the place to which she had retreated as a child when Emaa had tried to force her into living in Niniltna, the womb to which she had fled from the stifling, swarming confines of college, the place waiting for her on long weekends and vacations between time on the job in Anchorage, the one place in the world able to heal the wounds inflicted by five and a half years of casework featuring raped and beaten women and abused children, her home, her center, her sanctuary, her refuge.

It was all that and more, and now it was a pile of smoking rubble, too.

“It’s only a cabin,” she said out loud. Mutt, standing with her shoulder pressed to Kate’s knee, looked up, gray plume of a tail waving ever so slightly. “Cabins can be rebuilt. All I need is some logs and some Sheetrock and some insulation. I could put in a flush toilet. I could even wire the place for electricity, finally hook it up to the generator like I’ve been threatening.”

She could do all those things, but deep down she knew that this cabin could never be rebuilt. Her father was dead, the hands that had raised the cabin’s walls long since crumbled to dust. Her mother, a good, kind, loving woman until the booze got hold of her, was no more. Emaa was gone, nevermore to darken the doorstep and blight Kate’s life with the reminder of her bounden duty to her tribe. And Jack, with whom she’d spent so many nights making thunder roll out of the bed in the loft. Seventy years of laughter and tears and memories had been reduced to ashes by a malicious, anonymous hand, and there was no way ever to get them back.

Which was why when she heard the footstep behind her, she turned and without any greeting pretty much hurled herself into Jim’s arms.

The angry words that had been ready to tumble out of his mouth since Bobby had run him to earth that morning and clued him into Kate’s continued involvement in the investigation of Len Dreyer’s murder were stilled when he looked down and saw that she was weeping.

She didn’t just weep. She cried. She sobbed. She pounded his chest like it was a punching bag. She cursed and she cried some more and then she cursed some more. It took a long time, and somewhere along the way his anger faded. He held her gently until the flood began to ebb, wishing he could think of something of comfort to say, knowing there was nothing. He settled for rubbing her back, and felt like a lame-ass good-for-nothing as he did so.

Finally she looked up. Her eyes were swollen and her nose was red and running. She was not a pretty sight. “Sorry,” she said in a husk of a voice. He winced inwardly when she wiped her nose on the sleeve of the blue shirt that looked familiar, just not on Kate. It didn’t fit very well, or it fit very well, depending on your point of view, and then he damned himself for an insensitive bastard and put resolutely from his mind any thought of unfitting shirts. It helped to look over her shoulder at the ruin, so he did. “I just missed you at Auntie Vi’s,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, on a shuddering sigh.

Any minute now she would start to be embarrassed at losing her self-control in front of him. And then she would be angry with herself, but of course she’d take it out on him because, hey, he was there. He braced himself.

She ran a hand through her hair, matted from being mashed up against his uniform shirt, which was itself looking rather the worse for wear. “Were you looking for me?”

He tried to get past the fact that she was still leaning against him, firm and resilient and vital, every inch of her alive, if a little more subdued than he was used to. Had he been looking for her? It was hard to remember. He waited for her to pull free and say something nasty, something designed to push him away, anything, and the sooner the better.

She laid her cheek against his chest and closed her eyes.

It was a trap. It had to be a trap. She was resting her full weight against him. He could feel her breasts, her thighs, oh my god, she was putting her arms around his waist. He worried about her knees and what she might decide to do with one of them.

She rubbed her check against his chest and gave a long, deep sigh.

Mutt, who had for some strange reason of her own not monopolized Jim’s attention from the first moment of his appearance, gave the two of them a long, impenetrable look and vanished from the clearing.

The hell with it. Jim picked up Kate in one smooth, easy motion and walked over to sit down beneath a spruce tree with spreading branches overhead and fifty years’ worth of needles piled beneath. He settled her in his lap and her head naturally found a place on his shoulder. He thought carefully about what to do with his hands, until one curved just as naturally around her waist and she relaxed into it with another long, deep sigh. The other he rested on her hip, the curve of which fit into his palm like it had been designed specifically for that purpose.

Time passed. The sun shone. A soft breeze teased the fat buds on the branches of the trees. Birds sang and cawed and called. A porcupine rattled out of the woods, looked them over, and rattled back in again. Jim thought he heard a moose stripping bark from a willow tree. There was a distant crashing of brush like a bear might be passing through, and he gave some thought to pulling his weapon, but it might have woken Kate and the danger wasn’t clear and present enough to justify anything that drastic.