The Singing of the Dead (15 page)

Paula hesitated. “I don't know. Sometimes ideas sound kind of dumb when you say them out loud. Especially mine.”

“Try me. I promise not to laugh.”

Paula gave her a long look, glanced down at Mutt, gnawing on a T-bone with a blissful expression, and decided Kate was trustworthy. “I do a lot of research. Just recently I found a story about a woman who was murdered in Niniltna back in 1915, a woman they called ‘the Angel,’ one of the good-time girls who came up with the stampeders to mine the gold miners in the Yukon, and who came down to mine the copper miners along the Kanuyaq afterward.”She grinned. “You talk about Natives not wanting to admit the past, you should try to get some Anglo whose family has been in Alaska more than three generations to admit to having a good-time girl in theirs.”

“I remember hearing a little about that. A lot of the women who worked the Fairbanks Line wound up marrying into respectable society, or what passed for it back then, didn't they?”

“You better believe it,”Paula said, punctuating her statement with her pen. “Some of them had the guts and determination to climb the Chilkoot Trail and brave the Lake Bennett rapids right next to the men, and went on to marry some of the founding members of the state, and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are in public office and are running some of the biggest businesses around the state today.”

She leaned forward, her eyes bright with discovery. “You know what? I think my Gold Rush grandmother just became a dance-hall girl who was selling some on the side.”

“I'll buy your book,”Kate said. “And I'll read it, too.”

Paula flushed. “Thank you,”she said, ducking her head. “I mean, really. Thanks.”

K ate walked back to her room thinking that it was a shame that interludes and conversations like that one were few and far between. On the other hand, maybe one that good was what gave the job meaning. That and her paycheck, which was beginning to swell her bank balance to comfortable proportions. She was thinking about calling an attorney, maybe the one Jack had used in his fight for custody. Kate had never met her, but the way Jack had described her made her think of a pit bull. She would need a pit bull to go up against Jane.

Deep in thought, she walked right into Doug as he was coming out of Darlene's room. “Oh. Sorry.”

He caught her by the shoulders in an automatic gesture. “That's okay.”

Mutt snapped at him, a short sound, not loud, but the meeting of teeth was audible. He released Kate and stepped back.

She got a good look at him then, and saw that his shirt had been rebuttoned wrong, that while his jeans were zipped his snap was undone, his feet were bare, and his usually perfectly combed head of gray hair was tousled, as if someone had been hanging on to it recently with both hands. He held a towel in one hand.

“Lose your way to the bathroom?”Kate said.

He didn't even look embarrassed. “I guess.”

She snorted. Mutt, taking her cue, gave a soft growl. They watched him pad down the hall to the communal bathroom.

As a matter of security, she knew that Doug and Anne's room was the only one among the campaign staff that had its own bathroom.

Well, she was only there to look after the candidate's physical safety. She let herself into her own room and shucked out of her clothes and into an oversized T-shirt that hit her about midthigh, with a brightly colored parrot celebrating Jimmy Buffett's Y2K party on the front. As she was about to climb into bed, there was a knock at the door. She opened it and found Doug standing there. “You lost again?”she said.

“I just—let me talk to you for a minute, okay?”

She didn't want to be caught talking to the candidate's husband in her nightshirt after midnight, so against her better judgment she let him in. She didn't invite him to sit down but he did anyway, on the bed she had been ready to climb into, a violation of her personal space that she fully appreciated. Mutt didn't like it, either, but Kate made a gesture with her hand and Mutt lay back, chin on her paws, yellow eyes fixed unblinkingly on Doug.

“What do you want, Doug? It's been a long day, and I'd like to get some sleep.”

“Look,”he said, “I don't know what you thought you saw, but—”

“I know exactly what I saw,”Kate said. “I'm a grown-up; you don't have to pretty it up for me. In fact, please don't waste my time trying.”

“I wouldn't want you to—I'd hate to think you'd—”

“What? Tell Anne? That's not my job.”

“It's just that—”

“Doug, give it a rest and let me get to bed. If Anne can't keep you in her bed, it's not my business to tell her so.”

“It's not that,”he said.

Kate sighed. He was determined to tell her what it was.

“It's just that—Anne's kind of hard to live up to, you know?”

Kate maintained an unhelpful and she hoped unfriendly silence.

“Sometimes a man needs a little warmth, a little affection.” Kate yawned.

“Before the campaign all she had time for was her patients. And before that she only had time for the kids. Now she hasn't got time for anybody but those people in District 41 old enough to vote who haven't already signed onto her campaign.”

“I see,”Kate said.

“You do?”he said. He sounded plaintive without being selfpitying, wistful for those wonderful days when Anne had had time for him, reluctant but willing to sacrifice their relationship for the greater good of the community, only a man seeking some comfort in the trying days and weeks ahead.

Kate hoped she wouldn't vomit. “You have made it all very clear. Your wife doesn't understand you, and her campaign manager does. Go back to your own room now, please.”

He was good, he stayed in character, he kept the sad expression of the chronically misunderstood in place all the way to the door, where he paused to rest a hand on Kate's shoulder.

“Thanks for listening.”

She shrugged. His hand wouldn't move, and he was standing very close to her. “Doug,”she said, “in spite of your incredible sex appeal, I am going to give you two seconds to get out of this room. Then either I'm going to take you apart, or I'm going to cede that pleasure to Mutt. I promise you, either way, it will be painful.”

His smile was sorrowful as she took her place in the ranks of the legion of women who didn't understand him, and, finally, he left.

After that, she couldn't get to sleep. She understood, all right, better than either Doug or Darlene would like her to, she'd bet money on that. Doug was a rounder; she'd spotted that the minute she'd met him. Darlene, on the other hand, wanted her candidate elected and would do anything to make that happen, including sleep with the candidate's husband to keep the adultery in the family. Better than having him cat around among the constituency. Although he was probably doing that, too, a rounder rounded, that's what rounders do. She thought of Jim Chopin.

She tossed and turned and cursed Doug and Darlene equally, and wondered if Tracy knew. Kate didn't know much about politics but even she could see this was a campaign nightmare in the making.

She wondered if Anne knew. If she did, she also knew how to keep her feelings hidden. Or maybe she just didn't care. Maybe part of what Doug said was true; maybe Anne didn't have time for anyone but her would-be constituents.

Tony, bless his heart, in the interests of modernizing the Ahtna Lodge, had installed televisions in each room. With any luck there would be an old movie on. Instead she got a new one, with some guy running around peeling other people's faces off his own and blowing up things right, left, and center. It bored her in three minutes, and she turned it off and reached for the latest of many books that had accompanied her on the tour with Anne Gordaoff, the story of a Southern Baptist minister who hauled his wife and four daughters to the Congo in the fifties and proceeded to offend every single local custom that he possibly could and whose wife and daughters, naturally, suffered most for it. It reminded Kate of Pastor Seabolt and his son, Daniel, and his grandson, Matthew. She wondered, as she often did, how Matthew was doing, and felt again, as she always did, guilt that she had not been able to help him. It was an evocative book, all right, rich with personality and description, and Kate only dozed off because she hadn't had any real sleep in two nights.

She was wakened by a knock at the door. She groaned and rolled over to look at the clock on the night stand. Two-thirty in the morning. “Go away,”she said loudly, testing the need of whomever was waiting on the other side of the door.

The knock came again.

“Hell,”she said, and climbed out of bed to pull on her jeans. Mutt was already at the door, her nose pressed to the crack, and Kate kept the chain on when she opened it. “What?”

It was Darlene. Her hair was wet and hung in strings around her white face. She had another letter in her hand.

Poison Pen had struck again, and Kate had slept right through it.

* * *

“Anne found it on the floor of her room.”

“Where on the floor?”

“Just inside the door.”

Kate nodded, and read the letter again. PAY UP OR ILL TELL .

“He's here, Kate,”Darlene said. She was pacing, around the end of the bed to the window and back again.

Tell what? Kate was thinking. Pay what? And to whom? This was the first letter that sounded like blackmail. Did Poison Pen know about Darlene and Doug? It seemed odd, then, that the letter would not go to one of them. Or was Poison Pen under the impression that Anne Gordaoff would do anything to get elected, include pay to keep her husband's affair with her campaign manager a secret?

It was the same writing with the black marker pen, on the same sheet of stationery, inside the same envelope. No postmark this time.

“He's right here in this hotel,”Darlene said, pacing. “He must have followed us from the dinner.”

“Or he's been with you all along,”Kate murmured.

“What?”Darlene said, not understanding, or too worried to try to. “I'm calling the cops, Kate. I don't care what Jim says, this has gone on long enough. It's one thing when they come in the mail. But this guy went right to her room. I'm calling the cops,”she repeated.

“Ahtna's only got one,”Kate said dryly. She dressed: white T-shirt, black jeans, blue sweatshirt with the gold UAF nanook on the front, white anklets, black-and-white Nike tennis shoes. The face that looked back at her from the mirror over the dresser was tight-lipped, hazel eyes intent. Her hair needed trimming again. She gave it a few swift strokes with the brush, tucked it behind her ears, and forgot about it.

“What are you going to do?”Darlene said.

“I'm going to make a call,”Kate said, and went to the pay phone down the hall, where she dialed a number from memory.

“ 'lo,”a thick voice said after five rings.

“Kenny, wake up. It's Kate Shugak.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. “Ah shit,”the voice said finally, “who's dead now?”

“Nobody,”Kate said, and Kenny responded gloomily, “With you around it's only a matter of time.”

“Up yours, Hazen,”Kate said pleasantly. “Anne Gordaoff just got another letter.”

There was a brief silence. “At this hour?”

“Sorry.”

“Me, too. Who found it?”

“Anne. She got up to go to the bathroom. It had been slipped under her door.”

“And this couldn't wait until morning?”

“The whole campaign staff is in the Ahtna Lodge tonight, and I want to go around knocking on doors before they're awake enough to think up lies about their recent correspondence. I could use a uniform to back me up. More official, you know?”

“I know. You've got the letter?”

“And copies of the previous letters, and the envelopes they came in. And you might give Jim Chopin a call.”If she had to be up before the dawn, why shouldn't everyone else be?

“I'll be right down.”

“I owe you one, Kenny.”

“Don't kid yourself. You owe me at least ten, Shugak,”he said.

She gave him her room number and hung up. “Kenny Hazen's coming down, he's the Ahtna police chief. We're going to talk to the campaign staff one at a time, starting with Anne. And then we're going to talk to everyone else who rented a room in this trailer.”

“What?”Darlene stood up. “Why the staff? And we can't get Anne out of bed; it's almost three in the morning; she just got to bed and she's exhausted; she's got to get up early in the morning and go to—”

“I doubt that she's asleep after this,”Kate said, nodding at the letter, “and I don't care if she is. I want to talk to everyone to do with the campaign, ask them if they saw anything. We're all in the same trailer, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Good. Maybe we'll get lucky and somebody will have seen something.”

“Kate—”

“This is what you hired me for, Darlene,”Kate said, meeting her eyes squarely. “You said you were worried about Anne's safety. I admit, I wasn't very impressed by the threat. Then Jeff Hosford was murdered.”

That stopped Darlene. Kate got the distinct impression that Darlene had forgotten all about Jeff Hosford.

“Maybe Jeff's murder had something to do with the letters, maybe it didn't, but something is going on here. I don't know what it is, but I don't like it. As far as this letter is concerned, well, a lot of people in public life get threatening letters. Not a lot of people in public life get them shoved under their hotel room doors. This means whoever is writing the letters is very close by. If you want to catch him, this is the luckiest break we could have. The longer we wait, the colder the trail gets. I'm talking to all of them tonight, or this morning or whatever, I don't care what time it is.”

Darlene stared at her. “You think it's one of us,”she said. “I said he must have followed us from dinner and you said, ‘Or he's been with us all along.’ ”

Kate looked at her.

“Bullshit, Kate,”Darlene said, her voice rising. “That's just— that's bullshit. Who the hell working for us would do that? It makes no sense! We all want Anne elected; we're working our butts off to get her to Juneau. Who the hell among us is going to write her hate mail?”

Kate looked at her with no expression.