A grave denied (5 page)

She became aware of his steady, unblinking scrutiny, and the smile went out like a light. It was replaced with a wary expression, shuttered, watchful. Vigilant, perhaps, was the most appropriate word. The watch was set, bayonets fixed, ready to repel invaders. He hid a grin. It suited him to have her on her guard around him. She wouldn’t have been worried if he didn’t constitute a threat. And Jim Chopin wanted very much to be a threat to Kate Shugak. If only in the most horizontal meaning of the word.

Their eyes met, and he smiled at her, a long, slow smile filled with memory and purpose.

The sizzle of moose burgers hitting olive oil filled the room, followed by the inviting smells of charred meat and garlic.

“Tell me what you know about Len Dreyer,” Jim said over coffee. They had remained at the table following dinner, which had been received with healthy noises of appreciation, to the chefs great pleasure.

“He was good at just about everything,” Kate said. “Mechanics, carpentry, fishing. He worked for everybody in the Park, I think, at one time or another. I think he helped Mandy out one year on the Iditarod when Chick was still drinking. He could turn his hand to pretty much any task.”

“I know all that. What else? Was he married? Divorced? Girlfriend? Children? How long had he been in the Park? When did he get here? Did he have any fights with anyone? Anybody mad at him? You know the drill, Kate.”

She did, indeed. “I haven’t heard anything like that. I knew who he was, he did work for me on the homestead, but we weren’t friends.”

“You didn’t like him?”

“It’s not that,” she said, taking refuge in a mouthful of coffee. He waited.

Johnny was on the couch, feet up, scribbling something into a notebook, earphones on, the so-called music he was listening to mercifully the faintest of annoying buzzes. Even in the Park, you couldn’t get away from Britney Spears. If Duracell ever stopped making batteries, every kid within twenty million acres would rise up in revolt.

“Len was kind of reserved,” Kate said. “He was polite, even friendly, but he didn’t volunteer information about himself. I don’t remember him hooking up with anyone, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Sometimes I only go into town to pick up my mail. Ask Bernie, he’ll know.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “That’s the problem.”

“What is?”

“I’ve got a hit-and-run outside Gulkana, one dead, one in critical condition in the hospital in Ahtna. I’ve got an aggravated assault in Spirit Mountain, where the husband’s screaming attempted murder but it’s looking more like battered wife syndrome and self-defense and I need time to find out for sure. I’ve got a guy busted for dealing wholesale amounts of coke out of a video store in Cordova, who says the owner was the dealer and so far as he knew he was just renting out movies, and I need to get into that.”

“There’s no mystery about Len Dreyer,” Kate said sharply, “you know he was murdered.”

“Yes, I do. Until the ME tells me different, I’m also pretty sure Dreyer wasn’t murdered recently, which lessens not only my chances of finding who killed him but—and that’s another thing. Why didn’t anyone notice he was missing? Why didn’t any flags go up?”

Kate shook her head. “That’s not unusual. Len probably holed up in the winter, like most of us do. You don’t see a lot of the Park rats from September to March, if you don’t count the regulars at Bernie’s. Even if someone went looking for him and didn’t find him home, they would figure he was out on a trap line or hunting caribou for the cache, or hell, even Outside on vacation. I hear Hawaii’s big with the crowd that has money.”

She added, “Or in Len’s case, doing a job for somebody. MIA isn’t a red flag offense in the Park. It doesn’t set off any alarms.” She gave him a hard look. “Usually.”

Jim had been primarily responsible for finding Kate when she had deliberately gone missing the previous year. “So?”

“So what?”

She bristled, and he repressed a grin. Betraying amusement would only irritate her further, and he needed her on the job. “So will you check out Len’s background for me? I’m going to be in the air most of next week, between Gulkana, Spirit Mountain, and Cordova.”

She wanted to say no, and he knew it. He watched her look over at Johnny, oblivious beneath his headphones, and he could almost hear the ka-ching of the cash register between her ears. Raising a kid was an expensive proposition, especially if you were anticipating a custody battle with his birth mother, and his birth mother hated your guts enough to be willing to spend every dime she could beg, borrow, or steal on getting her son back. Which reminded him of something else Jim had to talk to Kate about.

She looked back at him. “Usual rates?”

He only just stopped a satisfied smile from spreading across his face. “Of course. Keep track of your hours and expenses. I’ve got your Social Security number on file, and we’ll cut you a check when you submit your bill.”

The words were brisk and businesslike, but she examined them suspiciously for hidden meaning anyway. This time he did allow himself a full grin, a wide expanse of perfect teeth in a face tanned from exposure to sun and wind, crinkles at the corners of his eyes from staring through a windshield five thousand feet above sea level at an endless horizon, laugh lines fighting for space with the dimples on both sides of his mouth.

She caught herself staring at the dimples, bolted the rest of her coffee, and got to her feet in the same motion. “If that’s all, I’ve got some work to finish before dark.”

He rose with her. “Walk me out.” He jerked his head at Johnny.

Outside and far enough up the trail for Kate to feel that they were safely out of earshot, she said, “What?”

“Jane’s contacted a lawyer in Anchorage. He called me.”

She folded her arms across her chest, pushed out that Athabascan chin, and waited, her mouth a grim line.

“She hasn’t filed suit yet, but they are what he called ‘exploring the possibilities.” He says he thinks they can go before a judge and get an order remanding Johnny into Jane’s custody.“

She snorted. “Get Johnny to tell his story before that same judge and he’ll be thinking something else.”

“Kate, there was no abuse.”

“Depends on what you define as abuse,” she shot back.

“Kate.”

She shook her head angrily. “I promised him, Jim. I promised him.”

He didn’t make the mistake of thinking she was referring to Johnny. “I know you did.”

“Will they make you enforce the order?”

“They haven’t got it yet.”

“Will they?”

“They’ll try.” He pulled his cap on, settling it firmly down over thick dark blond hair cut neat and short. “But I believe my footwork is a little fancier than theirs.”

She looked up quickly. He smiled at her, and vanished up the trail. She was still standing there when she heard the distant sound of a truck door opening. The engine started, gears shifted, and the sound receded into the distance.

When she became aware that she was straining to hear it, she turned abruptly and went into the garage, where her big red Chevy pickup sat, hood open, waiting for a tune-up after a winter’s inactivity. Nuts and bolts, spark plugs and oil pans and ball joints. Now there were things a woman could make sense of.

She found a open-end box wrench and waded in.

“Is he going to make me go back?”

She jerked, banging her head on the hood. “Ouch. Damn it!” She peered around the hood.

Johnny’s figure was outlined against the bright evening. His face was in shadow. “What?” she said, rubbing her head.

“I heard him telling you that she got a lawyer. Is Jim going to make me go back to her?”

So much for speaking out of the hearing of the children. She stepped down from the chunk of railroad tie she used to bring engines into arms’ reach and found a rag to wipe her oily fingers. “No one’s going to make you do a goddamn thing.”

“That’s not good enough, Kate.” His voice rose. “I won’t go back. I won’t!”

She tossed the rag into the rag barrel. “Johnny—” When she turned back to him, he was gone.

“Great,” she said out loud. “Just great.”

Mutt, sitting like a sentinel in the doorway, cocked an inquisitive ear, disliked the quality of the vacuum Johnny had left behind in the air of the garage, and padded off.

“
Et tu
, Mutt?”

So this journal writing isn’t so bad. Ms. Doogan kinda leaves us alone if we’re doing it in class, which is a plus. It’s not that I don’t like her or that she’s a bad teacher. It’s just that the textbooks are so boring. If they could get Greg Bear to write our science textbook I could stand to read it. Or Robert Heinlein, except he’s dead.

Speaking of the dead. Jim Chopin came out for dinner on Friday, partly to talk to me about the body we found. I didn’t remember anything I hadn’t told him before but I remember from Dad how cops always like to check everything over again. Plus I think he might have been a little worried about me finding the body.

Finding the body was weird. First time I’ve ever seen somebody dead. The other kids either, I guess. I thought Andrea was going to hurl. Betty was pretty calm but then she never gets excited about anything. Except maybe Eric. Van was scared but she held it together.

I don’t believe in god or ghosts or anything like that. Still, that body was weird. There used to be somebody home and then there wasn’t. So there is something that makes us all us.

Mostly I think Jim came to see Kate. He practically walks into the wall when she’s in the room, always looking at her, always smiling at her. Probably wants to sleep with her. Dad did, it was Mush City when she was around. I remember once Dad made her get dressed up to go to some party or other when she was staying with us in town. Man, she was gorgeous, she had this sparkly red jacket on and her hair was all stylin‘, she looked as good as anyone you ever see watching the Oscars on TV, and Kate can shoot a moose, too. She’s got two guns in a rack over the door, a .30-06 rifle and a twelve-gauge pump action shotgun. She says we’ll take the shotgun with us when we go duck hunting down on the Kanuyaq River delta in the fall and I’ll have a chance to shoot it then. She says I have to know how to protect myself in case something happens to her. I can’t imagine anything ever happening to Kate Shugak. But then I couldn’t imagine anything ever happening to Dad, either.

Saw two eagles on Sunday on the way back from the outhouse. They looked like they were fighting. Kate said they were mating. They’d fly real high and then they’d sort of smoosh together and fall, and then before they got too close to the ground they’d break apart and fly up again. Kate says she knows where their nest is, downstream in the top of an old dead cottonwood tree. She says she’ll take me to see it in a week or so, after the eggs get laid. I drove the four-wheeler to Ruthe’s in the afternoon and she told me it can take an eagle nine or ten days to lay two or three eggs. She had some cool pictures, one of a raven stealing a salmon right out from under an eagle who was eating it. I like ravens, too, but eagles are the coolest. I remember when I stayed on the river with Kate’s aunties I saw an eagle swoop down on the surface of the water and snatch up a salmon in its claws. Red salmon weigh an average of eight pounds, Ruthe says. That’s a big load for something that only weighs fourteen pounds, even if it does have wings eight feet across. What’s delta vee for an eagle, I wonder?

I like the way Kate is never embarrassed to talk about stuff. Van didn’t even know where babies came from until I told her.

She’s fourteen, the same age as me, and she’s hanging with me, you’d think the Hagbergs would have told her. But then maybe the Hagbergs don’t know. They don’t have any kids of their own, maybe they haven’t figured out how it works. Maybe the eagles will give them a clue. Showing is better than telling anyway.

I’ve figured out a plan to stay in the Park. I haven’t told Kate. Showing her is better.

₄

Kate surveyed the charred remains of Leonard Dreyer’s shack and said one succinct word: “Shit.” It had been a small cabin made entirely of peeled spruce logs, and it had burned like one. She waded gingerly into the wreckage and found ice beneath the first layer of debris.

Mutt, lifting her lip, retreated to the far edge of the clearing and sat down to wait out Kate’s investigations with an expression of saintly patience on her face. Mutt had learned from a forest fire two years back that she didn’t like cleaning between sooty toes with her tongue.

There was nothing to be found beyond the square bulk of a small woodstove, upon which rested a cast-iron skillet. A lump of metal might once have been a coffeepot. Kate kicked a hole in the pile and bent over to sniff without much hope. She straightened up without having smelled anything except the memory of a fire of which the coals were only an old, old memory. “Damn it,” she said out loud.

And there was no sign of any kind of transportation. No truck, no four-wheeler, no snowmobile, there wasn’t as much as a bicycle or a pair of snowshoes. A handyman had to have something to haul tools around in. Dreyer must have gone to his death, as opposed to death coming to him.

Or not. Someone could have come here, shot Dreyer, and driven him to Grant Glacier in his own vehicle. Thinking of the rolling hills of moraine that surrounded the mouth of Grant Glacier, much of it covered in impenetrable stands of alder and birch and spruce and all of it an excellent hiding place for anything up to and including a belly dumper, she might have whimpered a little.