A grave denied (6 page)

She drove up the road to talk to Howard Sampson, the next neighbor north of Dreyer’s. Howard, mending a net in his shop, had spent the winter in Anchorage and hadn’t seen Dreyer since the previous spring. “He ever do any work for you?” Kate said.

Howard tongued the wad of Copenhagen in his right cheek over to his left and spat a blob of brown fluid directly between Mutt’s forefeet. Mutt’s yellow eyes narrowed and her ears went back. “I do for myself,” Howard said.

Kate got Mutt out of there before Mutt did for both of them. Howard never had been what one might call neighborly.

The Gette homestead was on the downhill side of Dreyer’s cabin. It had been deserted for four years, but as Kate came up to the driveway she noticed a thin plume of smoke curling into the air. The drive in was challenging, as the brush and tree roots had been allowed to reclaim a greater part of the road, but she emerged into the clearing eventually to find two men standing in front of the cabin. One of them was holding a shotgun.

“Whoa.” She hit the brakes and rolled down the window. “Hello.”

The man with the shotgun peered suspiciously into the cab of the truck and recoiled when Mutt lifted her lip at him. “Jesus! Is that a wolf?”

“Only half,” Kate said.

“Jesus!”

“Don’t worry,” Kate said, lying with a straight face. “She’s harmless.”

“Well.” The man with the shotgun swallowed hard, and exchanged an apprehensive look with the other man. “Just keep her in the truck, okay?”

“Okay,” Kate said, and took that as an invitation to get out. She mistakenly didn’t tell Mutt she was supposed to stay in the truck. Mutt was out and standing next to Kate, shoulder to hip, yellow eyes fixed unwinkingly on the man with the shotgun before he could lodge a protest. He swallowed again instead, audibly this time.

Kate smiled at the other man. “Hi. I’m Kate Shugak.”

He smiled back. “I’m Keith Gette. The Neanderthal with the artillery is Oscar Jimenez.”

“Oh,” she said. “You must be the long-lost heir. Lotte and Lisa Gette’s cousins, am I right?” Lotte and Lisa Gette having been sisters who had inherited this homestead from their parents. Lisa was dead and Lotte long gone. At least Kate hoped she was.

Keith nodded. “That’s us. Or me. Oscar’s my partner.”

“Heard the lawyers had found an heir. We’ve been wondering when you’d show.” If ever. “Where are you from?”

“Seattle.”

She surveyed the cabin behind them. Four years of neglect lay heavily on it, but it had good bones. The greenhouse behind it was twice the size of the cabin and showed signs that it was being restored first. To the right of the greenhouse an area was being cleared of the heavy brush that always moved into cropland in the Arctic when people stopped tending to it. “How long have you been here?”

“Since last summer.”

She smiled. “You made it through your first winter.”

He grinned then. “Sure did. Although we did have a couple of interesting encounters with the wildlife.”

“Bears?”

“One.” He slapped his neck. “Although I’m thinking the mosquitoes are going to be worse than any bear.”

“Yeah,” she said, “you can shoot a bear.”

“And the moose.” He shook his head. “Do they eat everything, or just the stuff on our property?”

Kate laughed. “Whatever you particularly like that’s growing on your land, they’ll eat. They’re kind of perverse that way.”

Keith laughed, too. “Can we offer you some coffee?” he said.

“Sure, but another time. I’m kind of on a mission.” She looked directly at Oscar for the first time. “Could you point that thing somewhere else, please?”

Mutt, ever the diplomat, chose this moment to plump her butt down on the ground and scratch vigorously. Oscar took this as a sign of good faith and swung the double barrel maybe four inches to his left. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little spooked. And she sure does look like a wolf.”

“Only half,” Kate repeated. It had little or no effect on Oscar, who continued to regard Mutt with an uneasy eye.

“What can we help you with?” Keith said.

“When you guys came last fall, did you introduce yourself to your neighbors?”

“The one up we did. What’s his name, Carnation, no, Breyer, Dreyer—that’s it, Dreyer.”

“When?”

Keith looked at Oscar. “We got here the middle of July. The greenhouse roof had caved in and about half the glass was broken. When we went down to the post office we asked the postmistress, uh—”

“Bonnie Jeppsen?”

“That’s right, Bonnie. We asked her if she knew of anyone who could repair it.” His smile was rueful. “Neither of us is much good with a hammer. She told us to talk to Mr. Dreyer. He did a good job of it, too.”

“Had to pay him in cash, though, he wouldn’t take a check,” Oscar said. “There isn’t a cash machine in Niniltna, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t,” Kate said.

“I had to write a check and have that pilot guy fly it into Ahtna and cash it for me at the bank and bring the cash back.”

“Imagine,” Kate said gravely. Oscar was oblivious but Keith gave her a sharp look, which she met with an innocent stare. “About Len Dreyer,” she said. “Did he mention any family or friends, or where he came from? Any arguments he might have gotten into with another Park rat?”

The men looked at each other, and gave a simultaneous shrug. “I don’t remember anything like that,” Keith said. “He showed up, and when he did, he worked. I was so grateful, I wasn’t about to ask any questions. We needed that greenhouse up and running.”

“Before winter?”

“Sure. We installed a couple of propane stoves at either end, and grew stuff straight through the year.”

“You must have laid in one hell of a lot of propane,” Kate said.

“Yeah, our biggest expense,” Oscar said gloomily. Gloom seemed to be key to his personality. “We’ll be lucky if we break even this year, even if we don’t draw salaries.”

Kate almost asked them what they were growing, but thought better of it just in time. “So you don’t remember any personal information about Len Dreyer.”

“I didn’t even know his first name was Len,” Oscar said.

“He’s good with corrugated plastic, though,” Keith said. “That roof is watertight.”

“He was good,” Kate said. “He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He was shot. With a shotgun.” She looked at Oscar, still holding what upon closer inspection proved to be a very old side-by-side with some very fancy silver work.

Oscar gulped and paled beneath his dark skin. “Well, I didn’t shoot him.”

“Didn’t say you did,” Kate said.

“Who are you, again?” Keith said.

“I’m Kate Shugak. I’m —assisting Jim Chopin, the state trooper posted to Niniltna, in his inquiries into Dreyer’s murder.”

Keith put a comforting hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Oscar. I don’t think Ms. Shugak—”

“Call me Kate.”

Keith smiled. “I don’t think Kate is going to clap us into irons just yet.”

“Do you remember any shots fired near here last fall?” They shook their heads. She nodded at the shotgun. “Have you fired that lately?”

Oscar proffered it mutely. Kate broke it open. It was unloaded, and dusty with disuse.

“It was my father’s,” Oscar said. “I don’t know what the right shells for it are. I don’t even know if it still shoots.”

Kate handed it back, thanked them for their time, and left.

“Burned down?” Bobby said. “Recently?”

Kate shook her head, earning a thwack from Dinah. She sat on a stool, enveloped in a sheet, while Dinah trimmed her hair. Katya slid from her knee and headed for the open door at flank speed. Her mother downed scissors long enough for an intercept and deposited Katya in a floodplain of toys in the living room. “It’s cold and wet, and I found some ice when I kicked around a little. I’d say somebody torched it last fall.”

“You sure somebody torched it?”

“Absent conclusive forensic evidence, no, I suppose not. However, considering that it was Len’s cabin, and that Len’s body has just been found under Grant Glacier, and that Len underwent a radical lungectomy with a shotgun sometime in the past year, yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

Unperturbed, Bobby said, “Where did he live, anyway? When I got him to do the roof, I got him through Bernie.”

“He hung out at the Roadhouse?”

“Who doesn’t? Where was his cabin?”

“Okay, you’re done, thank god,” Dinah said, whipping off the sheet. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to let your hair grow out again, Kate?”

The note of quiet desperation in Dinah’s voice was not lost on Kate but it failed to illicit the response Dinah was hoping for. “I’m absolutely sure,” Kate said. She wriggled away the stray hair that had insinuated itself inside the neck of her T-shirt and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Bobby had thwarted another of Katya’s escape attempts, and Kate followed them both into the living room to sprawl on a couch, of which there were two, parallel to each other across the vast expanse of hardwood floor, both wide enough for Kate’s Auntie Balasha and long enough for Chopper Jim. A huge rectangular window overlooked the yard that sloped down to Squaw Candy Creek. The Quilaks jutted up behind, rough-edged peaks still covered in snow. “He had a cabin up the Step road,” she said. “Just past the Gettes‘.”

“Oh yeah?” A broad grin spread across Bobby’s face. “Been up there lately?”

“I told you, I was just there.”

“No, not Dreyer’s place, the Gettes‘. Been there lately?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“The heirs showed up.”

“I know, I met them.”

“And?”

“And what? They’re babes in the woods, but pretty harmless, I thought. The Hispanic one is upset that there isn’t a cash machine in Niniltna. The Anglo one seems a little more relaxed. How long had Len Dreyer been in the Park, anyway?”

“You don’t know?”

She sighed. “What Abel didn’t teach me to do for myself, he did for me, carpentry, plumbing, mechanics, you name it. I never needed to hire on someone else until after he died, so I don’t have a clue how long Dreyer was here. Auntie Vi might. How about you?”

“Beats me. He nailed one hell of a shingle, I’ll say that for him. I hired him to fix the roof last October. He was finished the last day before the first snowfall. It was tight as a drum all last winter, not to mention which, warm as toast.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and grinned. “Not easy, after I punched that hole in it.”

She followed the direction of his thumb to the post running up the center of the large A-frame, almost invisible beneath the lines of black cable linking all the electronic equipment on the circular console with the antennas hanging off the 112-foot tower outside. Bobby was the NOAA observer for the Park, or at least making daily reports to the National Weather Service in Anchorage was his excuse to the IRS every time he bought a new receiver. He also ran a nice little pirate radio station, hosting Park Air every evening, or whenever he felt that Park rats were in need of some gospel according to the Temptations. Or someone bribed him with a package of moose T-bones to air a for-sale ad.

Bobby had appeared in the Park the year Kate had graduated from high school, carrying a worn duffle bag with his name stenciled on it in big black letters, and a deed from the state of Alaska to forty acres on Squaw Candy Creek. He’d built this A-frame, installed enough electronic hardware to run JPL, and had copped the NOAA job right out from under Old Sam Dementieff. To top it off, he was the first black man many of the Park rats had ever seen.

Three things worked in his favor. He’d hired locally to build his A-frame. From the first day of broadcast he had traded want ads on Park Air for moose meat and salmon. And he’d lost both his legs below the knee to a Vietcong land mine.

“I think the men folk thought I wouldn’t be able to run after their women,” he’d told Kate years before. They’d been in bed together at the time. He’d grinned and reached out an arm to pull her in tight. “They were wrong about that, but by then it was too late.”

They were indeed, and it was, far too late, and when Dinah Cookman showed up in the Park three years earlier he’d taken one look and wedded and bedded her, not necessarily in that order. Dinah was white and twenty-five years younger than Bobby was, but so far as Kate could tell neither one of them had noticed. The result was the going-on-two tornado currently making her proud parents’ lives a living hell. “Don’t touch that!” Dinah said, leaping forward to catch the end table next to one of the couches from tilting forward and landing on her daughter’s head. Katya’s face puckered up and everyone held their breath. Precious little Katya had a yell that could frighten a bear into the next county.

Katya’s eye fell on Mutt, who knew the signs as well as everyone else and who was poised to rocket through the door as soon as the siren went off. She didn’t move fast enough. “Mutt!” Katya said, pointing.

“Mutt!” Dinah said gladly. “Come play with Katya! Come on, girl!”

Mutt looked at Kate, mute misery on her face, and slunk toward Katya, her tail as close to being between her legs as it ever got. She flopped down and Katya launched, landing on Mutt’s side with a force that caused a “Woof!” of expelled air and a wheezing, pitiful groan.