by Play
Madame started screaming, first at Kate, then at Monsieur, then at Kate again. It didn't take an advanced degree in French to figure out the content, not when you took the hand gestures in context. Monsieur kept his head bent against the storm and his eyes fixed on the ground; Kate felt sorry for him but Mutt felt sorrier and uttered one deep, brief
"WOOF."
It was remarkable the attention one woof got when it came from a half-husky, half-wolf hybrid with a set of healthy white teeth, most of which were displayed to advantage in a wide, panting grin. Madame stopped screaming in mid-invective, glaring from Mutt to Kate to Monsieur, who was still regarding the ground with fascination. Ten long, slow seconds ticked by. With an angry sob Madame whirled and stumbled to the car.
Monsieur stirred. Kate touched his arm. "Je regrette, monsieur, je regrette mine fois, but--" He looked up and the words caught in her throat. Monsieur was working hard to look subdued but there was a definite twinkle lurking at the back of his eyes. "Monsieur?" she said uncertainly.
He gave another bow, caught her hand in his, the one covered with red tokens of Pauvre Petit Chien's affection, and raised it to his lips. It was the first time Kate had ever had her hand kissed and after she got over the shock she kind of enjoyed it, which was a good thing, because he kissed it again. "Bonjour, mademoiselle," he said warmly. "Merci mine fois pour un vi site tres agreable." He pressed her hand between both of his and smiled. "Tres, tres agreable."
He released her hand, marched to the car with a stride like William the Conqueror, opened the driver's side door, told Madame to move over to the passenger seat, got in, started the car and drove off, pulling onto the road with a definite flourish. A moment later there was nothing but a thin, ephemeral haze of dust hanging a foot above the ground to show where they had been.
Kate tried to fight it and lost. Her head fell back and she started to laugh, large, loud whoops that echoed off the parking lot and mildly alarmed Mama Moose. Her eyes streamed, her belly hurt, she gasped for breath and off she went again. And that was how Chopper Jim found her when the Bell Jet Ranger settled down in front of the gas pump.
"Phew." "Yeah, I know," Kate said, voice muffled behind the mask.
Chopper Jim, immaculate in dark blue pants with a gold stripe down the outside seams, dark blue tie knotted meticulously over pale blue shirt, tie clipped with a gold seal of the State of Alaska, flat brim of his round-crowned hat adjusted at precisely the right angle, stood with his hands riding his gun belt, pistol grip gleaming in the afternoon sun.
He looked trim and calm and authoritative. He wasn't even sweating.
Kate resented it.
They stood in the little clearing, the acrid scent of the morels losing to the rising stench of fleshy decay.
His calm, level gaze matched his voice. "You clear away some of the mushrooms?"
"Enough to be sure of what I was looking at. Dinah got it all on the tape. Dinah Cookman, Jim Chopin. He's the state trooper assigned to the Park."
He looked past her at the blonde. "How do."
She met his eyes, pale but composed. "Sir."
His smile had too much charm and far too many teeth in it for any woman in her right mind to trust. It was also guaranteed of effect. Kate, who congratulated herself on her own immunity to that smile every chance she got, watched with something between exasperation and amusement as a pink flush began somewhere below Dinah's collar and rose to her cheeks. "Call me Jim," he said in his deep voice.
"Jim," she said obediently, a stunned look in her dazed blue eyes. Kate cleared her throat and Dinah blinked. "Right. Yes. Uh, Bobby says overnight temperatures have dropped below forty every night until last Wednesday."
Jim dropped his gaze back to the body. "Which is why it's only just starting to smell." He produced a pair of white rubber gloves and pulled them on. Walking around to the head of the body, he squatted and reached out to pluck more mushrooms out of the way. "I didn't know mushrooms would grow on flesh."
Behind them Dinah cleared her throat. "Saprobic." Chopper Jim looked at her and she blushed again but retained enough composure to produce from the bottomless pocket of her gray duster a book Kate recognized as Fun with Fungi. "Means mushrooms that live on decayed vegetable or animal matter. A lot of them do."
Chopper Jim gave her an approving smile, and her blush deepened.
"Although these aren't necessarily growing off the er, body."
"Why not?"
"Mushrooms propagate themselves through spores. The spores germinate into threads called mycelia. Some mycologists believe that the mycelia are always present, and that it only takes the requisite conditions to bring the fruiting bodies, that is, the mushrooms, forth."
Jim's warm gaze rested on Dinah's face. "And what are the requisite conditions?" "Well." Dinah paged through the book. "It says here that when the temperature gets up to between forty degrees and sixty degrees Fahrenheit and there has been a lot of rain, but not too much, the strings begin to generate the caps and stems, or the fruiting bodies of the mushroom."
The trooper looked back at the body, a meditative expression on his face.
"These are morels," Dinah volunteered. "They're not exactly predictable, but they do tend to show up the year following a forest fire, if the fire was in the spring or the fall, and if the rain comes along at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right amounts."
"Temperamental little buggers, aren't they," Jim murmured.
"Yes. They can't be grown domestically."
He reached out one hand and brushed at what might have been a shoulder.
Dinah flinched. His brows snapped together, and he plucked some more, clearing the area that might have been the remains of someone's back.
He pulled, carefully, at the burned, decaying flesh, until it separated into what might have been a torso and an arm. He moved to the feet and brushed them free of fungi and ash, and stood looking, a frown drawing his eyebrows together in a straight line.
Kate moved to stand next to him, staring. "Dammit, that was what was tickling my funny bone. I knew there was something strange." "What?"
Dinah said, coming a step closer.
"He doesn't have any clothes on."
Kate helped Chopper Jim roll the body into a body bag and tote it back to the truck. She drove him back to Tanada and helped load it into the chopper. He paused, one hand on the door. "Where'd you pick up the blonde?" "We didn't," Kate said, and when he raised one eyebrow said reluctantly--but after all, Bobby was a grown man and Dinah was a grown woman and it wasn't like it was love ever after now, was it-"She picked us up, at our first delivery. She drove up the Alcan this spring and ran out of money paying Canada prices for gas. She stopped to pick mushrooms to earn enough to get her to Anchorage."
"What's she do?"
"I think she just got out of school."
"Looking for adventure in whatever comes her way?"
Reluctantly, Kate had to laugh. "I don't think she waits for it to come to her."
"My kind of woman." He hoisted himself up into the pilot's seat and spoke again, one hand on the open door. "I'm flying direct to Anchorage."
She nodded. "I'll call tomorrow."
"I'll push it, but you know Metzger." She almost smiled.
"Something else," he said.
"What?"
He readjusted his hat to throw a more perfectly aligned shadow over his face. Beneath the flat brim, his eyes were keen and direct. "I checked before I left. There are no missing person reports from Chistona. Not this year. Not last year. Not the year before. The closest I've got is a report of a missing wife from Tok, and I know where she is, and she doesn't want to be found."
"No one else?"
He shook his head. "No one. Everybody for a hundred miles around is present and accounted for."
Her brow creased. "What about smoke jumpers Were any lost during the fire last year?" "Nope." He smiled faintly at her expression. "I know.
Why isn't anything ever easy?"
>
She stood back and listened to the whine of the engine, felt the breeze generated by the increasing spin of the rotors, watched as the craft rose up vertically and lifted out over the trees, bound south southwest.
CHAPTER 3.
Fungi which grow in the meadows are best; it is not well to trust others.
--Horace obby looked offended. "Excuse me. Are you trying to con me into believing this guy was shroomed to death?" Kate smiled involuntarily.
"No, Bobby. Just that he's been there a while."
He cocked an intelligent eyebrow in her direction and stopped fooling around. "You think he got caught in the fire."
She frowned at the can of pop in her hand. "That's what I thought at first."
"What made you change your mind?"
"There was no ash beneath his body. And he doesn't have any clothes on."
He stared at her. "What?"
"He doesn't have any clothes on," Kate repeated.
"Shoes, shorts, nothing. He's naked." He thought this over, frowning in his turn. "Maybe he was swimming in the creek," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "Maybe he underestimated the speed of the fire and it caught up with him and he made a run for it and didn't make it."
"Maybe."
"You don't sound convinced."
Kate swallowed some Diet 7-Up. It went down cold and clean and not too sweet. "Aside from the fact that that kind of behavior is almost too dumb to believe--"
"Almost but not quite," he interrupted, "as you well know from thirty-three years of personal experience in the Alaskan bush."
"Aside from that fact," she repeated, "Chopper Jim says there are no reports of missing persons within a hundred miles of Chistona." And Bobby, of course, said immediately, "How about smoke jumpers There were over a hundred of them fighting that fire last fall."
"He's checking. He doesn't think so."
"What do you think happened?" "I don't know," she said firmly, "and what's more, I don't care." She grinned at him. "I'm more interested in what's for dinner. What is for dinner?"
"Yeah," Dinah said, "I'm starved."
So Bobby whipped up a moose pot roast with potatoes and onions and carrots and celery and no mushrooms. They emptied the pot and sat back, watching the fire burn down to red coals and the sun travel around the horizon, which reminded Kate of her close encounter of the third kind with the French aliens.
"Nature red in tooth and claw," Dinah said, a little awed, but not as awed as she would have been before their own close encounter with the bear.
When Bobby stopped laughing he said, his natural bellow restored, "Good for the moose! And good for that goddam eagle, too! Fuck the French every chance we get is what I say!"
"What have you got against the French?" Dinah wanted to know.
"Everything!" Bobby bellowed. "Dien Bien Phu! Ho Chi Minh! They stuck us with Ngo Dinh Diem and never looked back!" "Who?" Dinah said.
He was arrested in mid-roar and stared at her. It was one of the few times Kate had ever seen Bobby Clark lose his cool. "How old did you say you were?" She smiled at him, half urchin, half siren. "Old enough."
"I oughtta demand to see some ID," he mumbled and leaned back against a tree, conveying the impression that he was no longer young enough to sit upright, and as an afterthought snagged Dinah on his way back. He tucked in his chin to peer at her. "You know who Jerry Lewis is?" Dinah said, a little stiffly, "Of course I know who Jerry Lewis is." "Well," Bobby said with relish, "the French like Jerry Lewis. They think he's a genius."
"So do I," Dinah said, even more stiffly.
"Good God!"
Kate wondered if the happy couple was going to survive the night. A movement at the edge of the clearing caught her eye and she looked up.
Standing just inside the ring of trees, face gleaming whitely in the half-twilight, a young boy stared gravely back at her.
It was the choirboy from Chistona.
The three of them gaped at him.
Kate opened her mouth but the boy beat her to it. "Are you Kate Shugak?"
Startled, Kate said, "Yes."
His blue eyes looked past her, at Bobby, lingering on the black skin and the thigh stumps, and at Dinah, at her white skin and the way she snuggled into the crook of Bobby's arm, before returning to Kate. "The Kate Shugak?" Amused, Kate said gravely, "I believe so."
"The one who got the bootlegger in Niniltna that time?"
Kate's eyes narrowed. "Yes."
The boy gave a single, crisp nod, and Dinah sat up and unobtrusively reached for the camera. "My grandfather says you were an agent of God."
He paused and added, sounding for the first time like his age,
"Everybody else says you're the best." He met her eyes squarely. "I should have thanked you yesterday."
"No need."
He shook his head and said sternly, "Thank you."
"You're welcome," Kate murmured, since it was obviously expected.
"Who the hell are you," Bobby demanded, "and what are you doing out alone at this time of night?"
Dinah rolled film. Kate was struck again at how poised the boy was. In her experience few adults reached that level of self-possession. He looked eight, acted twelve or older and was probably ten. She wondered what had caused the early onset of maturation. She wondered if she wanted to know.
"Well?" Bobby said. "What's your name? Where's your folks?"
The boy ignored him, fixing Kate again with that unnerving blue stare.
"My name is Matthew Sea bolt. I want you to find my father."
For a moment the campsite was still but for the hum of Dinah's camera.
All trace of amusement gone, Kate eyed the boy, who stood unflinching, meeting her look for look. "Your father is missing?"
He nodded.
"For how long?"
"Since last August." The camera never paused. Bobby stirred and shot Kate a look. She gave him a slight shake of her head and he subsided.
"Who is your father?"
"His name is Daniel. Daniel Seabolt."
"And he's been missing ten months, almost a year?"
The boy nodded, and Kate stared at him, a frown creasing her brow.
Chopper Jim had said there were no missing person reports from anywhere in the area. "Does your father live in Chistona?"
"Yes."
Again Bobby stirred and again Kate shot him a quelling look. "And your mother?"
His voice was flat. "She's dead." "I'm sorry," Kate said automatically.
She thought. "So if your father's missing and your mother's dead, who do you live with?"