A grave denied (31 page)

“Uh-huh,” Kate said. She doctored her own coffee and waited. He didn’t say anything and she sipped coffee and waited some more.

Silence, as Kate had noted before, was the most underrated tool in the investigator’s toolbox. It had a way of creating a vacuum into which words were irresistibly sucked, and so long as the investigator kept her mouth shut, the words would perforce come from the witness. And unless Kate was very much mistaken, George Perry had just become a witness in the Leon Duffy murder investigation. So she sipped her coffee and let her eyes drift to the window and her mind drift to the scene outside. As an additional precaution she also kept her mouth full of Oreos. No sacrifice was too great for the investigation.

This year, May in the Park was looking a lot like Camelot in the song. It was only raining after sundown and then only in brief showers, just enough to help the ground thaw and the plants to raise eager heads to the sun, which so far had been remarkably reliable about showing its face every morning. Canada geese were arriving by the squadron and settling in for the summer on the Kanuyaq River delta, along with flights of every duck ever identified by the Audubon Society and a few Kate suspected were not. She hoped so, at any rate. There was far too little mystery left in the world as it was, and deep in her bones she knew that nature was not done with them yet.

She wondered if the sandhill cranes had arrived. Unknown to anyone, she kept an acre of ground mowed where her property line met the creek, not for a garden but for the sandhill cranes to land and feed. She might even have been not known to spread a few sackfuls of grain around the acre from time to time. She liked sandhill cranes, with their red foreheads and their long ungraceful legs. The Yupik called them the “Sunday turkey” and they were in fact Alaska’s largest game bird, but Kate never hunted them, at least not the ones who landed on her property. One of the few memories she had of her mother was of sitting in her mother’s lap at the edge of the mowed circle, hidden in a tangle of alder, listening to the cranes sing their rolling, rattling song and watching the awkward passion of their mating dance. Her father had grumbled, but Kate noticed that even after her mother died he kept the patch mowed.

The last thing she did before the first snowfall every year was mow the crane patch. Come to think of it, it was probably time to service the mower. It was always a little sluggish from having sat around all winter. There might even be some dried corn leftover from last year, if the mice hadn’t eaten it all.

George, who had begun to fidget, cleared his throat. “So.”

Kate turned and smiled at him, giving him the frill treatment. “So,” she said.

He shifted in his seat, uneasy beneath all that wattage. “So you asked me Sunday if Gary Drussell flew into the Park last fall.”

Everything inside Kate went still. “No, I just asked you when the last time was you had seen him in the Park.”

“Yeah. Well. I told you I hadn’t seen him since last breakup.”

“Yes.”

“I lied.”

Kate was silent.

George was examining the contents of his mug as if he could divine in which valley in Sumatra the beans had been picked. “Don’t even start with me,” he said.

Kate was silent.

“I mean it, I don’t want to hear it.”

Kate was silent.

“The last thing I need is a lecture on my civic duty.”

Kate was silent.

George shoved his mug away. “He’s a friend, okay? We’ve hunted together every fall going back, what, fifteen, sixteen years now. I know his wife, and I watched his daughters grow up. I mean from the time they were tiny babies, Kate.” He sat back and looked out the window. “I’m not much of a kid person. Never wanted marriage or anything that came with it. So I wasn’t thrilled when Gary asked if it’d be okay if we brought Alicia along on a caribou hunt.”

“Which one is that?”

“The oldest daughter. The smart one. Well, they’re all smart, but Alicia, well, she’s special. Regardless of the way things happened, I don’t think Gary’s sorry to have moved into town. Cheaper for her to live at home while she goes to college, and he really wanted college for Alicia.”

Kate waited.

“Anyway. Alicia was all of ten years old when Gary decides he’s going to make a hunter out of her. I tried to talk him out of taking her, but he was determined. So we did, and I’m here to tell you, that little girl hiked me right into the ground. I mean, she kept up, Kate, and she carried her own pack the whole time. She damn near outshot us, she like to use up her dad’s tags and then she started in on mine.” He shook his head at the memory. “That was one tough little girl. Shirley, now, she was the same, smart, even tougher than Alicia, bagged her a moose on her first hunt. Of course, it was a cow, but what can you do. We butchered her out without Dan nailing us, for a change. Those were good kids, Kate. Good company on the trail, too, knew when to talk and when to shut up, and when they talked they had something to say. I liked them both.”

“What about the youngest daughter?”

“Tracy?” George’s face darkened. “I don’t know what happened with Tracy. I don’t know her as well as I do Alicia and Shirley. She never came on the hunt with us. I think maybe…”

“What? Come on, George, I need to know it all.”

“There isn’t any all,” he said. “Goddamn it. Gary Drussell is no murderer. Even if he was…”

“What about Tracy?” Kate said, inexorably.

His face creased with what looked like pain. “Tracy… she’s the baby, you know? I think the last kid in any family is spoiled, mostly I think because the parents are tired of laying down the law to the other kids by then and they slack off. Also because it’s their last kid and they want to. Anyway, she was pretty and she knew it, especially when she hit her teens. Fran used to worry about her flirting; Gary mostly shrugged it off.” He leaned forward again, anxious to explain all of it so that there would be no misunderstanding, so Kate would think only good thoughts of his friend and his friend’s family. “She wasn’t obnoxious about it, Kate. Tracy, I mean. She wasn’t as bright as the other two and she knew it.”

“So she tried to make up for it with her looks?”

“Yes,” George said. “I mean, no. Oh, hell. I guess so. It doesn’t mean she deserved what happened.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Kate said. “What did happen?”

“Shit,” George said wretchedly. “I promised Gary I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Mutt let out a soft whine. “Tell me,” Kate said gently. “It won’t go any further than it has to.”

What had happened, as near as anyone could figure from what Tracy said, which wasn’t much, was that overnight Tracy Drussell had changed from a pretty, ordinary teenaged girl into Linda Blair. “It was like a nightmare, Gary said,” George said, voice so low Kate had to lean forward to catch the words. “She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, shut herself up in her room. Then Fran noticed she, uh, she, well, you know.”

“She missed her period,” Kate said.

He nodded.

There had been no signs of a baby at the Drussells’ Anchorage home. “Oh, crap,” she said. And how inadequate was that?

He nodded again. “They were in Anchorage by then. She was only eleven weeks along, so it was fairly easy, although Fran said Gary like to kill some guy with a sign outside the clinic. Tracy told them then, of course. Said it was her fault, she’d been flirting with Dreyer, and he took her up on her offer.”

Kate thought of little Vicky Gordaoff in Cordova.

“Only it wasn’t an offer,” George said. His hands had become fists during the telling. He looked down and noticed, and straightened them out again.

“Why did it take Gary so long to come looking for Dreyer?” Kate said.

George looked blank.

“You said she was eleven weeks along when she told them. Dreyer worked for them in May. I’m guessing that’s when he raped Tracy.”

George winced away from the word but he nodded.

“School let out the first week of June, Gary and family moved to Anchorage the day after high school graduation. They must have found out about the middle to end of July.” She looked at him for confirmation. He nodded again. “So how is it that Gary didn’t come looking for Dreyer until over two months later?”

“Because she didn’t tell them who the man was,” he said, snapping the words off. “Otherwise he and his shotgun would have been on the next plane.”

“He was traveling with a shotgun, was he?” Kate said.

George looked at her. She wasn’t used to being looked at with that expression by people she considered her friends. I have to ask, she told him silently, you know I do.

“Yes,” George said, his voice icily precise, “he was traveling with his shotgun.”

“I see. And what day in October would that have been?”

His hand was shaking slightly when he thrust it into the pocket of his begrimed overalls. It was still shaking when he brought out the yellow slip of paper. He shoved it across the table and wriggled out of the booth.

She looked down. It was a copy of a ticket for Chugach Air Taxi Service, roundtrip Anchorage-Niniltna-Anchorage, in the name of Gary Drussell, and it was dated October 24th.

The day after the first snowfall of last winter, according to Bobby’s NOAA records. The date after which they had determined Leon Duffy aka Len Dreyer had never been seen again in the Park.

She became aware that George had not left. She looked up to see him standing in the open doorway.

He was staring at the burned pile of lumber that had been her cabin, and her father’s cabin before that, and what could have been her grave. As if he could feel her eyes on him, he said without turning around, “I’m sorry, Kate.”

“So am I, George.” She hesitated, and then spoke. “Did Gary come back to the Park again?”

He nodded, still without turning around.

“Last week?”

He nodded again. “He said it was to clear up some paperwork with the guy who bought the homestead. He was in and out in a day.”

“Which day?”

“The day your cabin burned. But he was gone,” George said desperately, “he was gone by then.”

“Did you fly him out?”

He hesitated, and then shook his head. “No,” he said in a whisper. “He flew Spernak that time.”

He looked at her, his expression miserable. He started to speak, and then shook his head again.

The door swung shut gently behind him.

After a while she got up and washed out the mugs.

So there it was. She thought of Tracy Drussell sprawled on that couch in Anchorage, convinced that she had invited the assault inflicted upon her, when all she had been doing was testing her wings. It wasn’t her fault that the sky had opened up and swallowed her whole. Kate hoped like hell that Fran had called Colleen.

And she hoped like hell no one else needed Colleen’s services before this was over.

She needed to find Jim and fill him in, but whenever she thought about getting up, she sat back down again. If it were left up to her she’d have given Drussell a medal. At least she would have before he tried to burn her cabin down with her and Johnny in it.

She was sitting on the other side of the booth this time, the one that faced away from the rubble pile. Something dug into her hip. It was a loose-leaf binder, Johnny’s. He must have forgotten it when he left for school that morning. Not surprising, as he’d been in quite the snit, or pretended to be. Not for lack of something better to do, because any minute now she was going to get up and climb into her truck and go looking for Jim, tell him she’d solved his case for him, she flipped open the notebook and began to read. Johnny’s writing was cramped but legible. She smiled at the first paragraph, and then she laughed out loud.

She was deep into it before she realized it was more of a diary than it was the journal his teacher had assigned them, and that the teacher would probably never see it, and that neither should she.

But about halfway in something started to niggle at the back of her brain. She flipped back to the beginning and began again. “Oh shit,” she whispered, “shit, shit, shit.”

She slammed the binder shut and leaped to her feet. Mutt was at the door a second later. Kate grabbed keys and windbreaker and they were gone.

₁₆

Are you sure about this?“ Vanessa yelled over Johnny’s shoulder. ”Sure,“ he replied the same way. ”You always start with the scene of the crime.“

“But you say Kate doesn’t think he was killed there.”

“You know what I mean.”

They hit a bump and she was almost bounced off. Four-wheelers were notoriously rough rides, and the road up to the Step was a notoriously rough road, if you could call something that was essentially two ruts with a grassy ridge between a road.

“I thought Betty Freedman was going to climb on behind me before we got out of there,” she yelled.

“No kidding. Did you tell her what we were doing?”

“No!” she said, indignantly.

“Sorry,” he said. “She was just so determined to come with. I thought maybe you said something.”

She had been hanging on to his waist. Now she removed her hands, and he felt her body, a pleasant warmth against his back, lean away from him. “You told me not to say anything. I didn’t say anything. I don’t go around blabbing our business to everyone.”