by Sue Henry
As they drove the short distance to the Other Place, they took turns telling her the tale of how the bar’s name had come to be through the reluctance of its patrons to call it anything else.
“You’ll like it,” Jessie told her. “It’s a gathering place for half the mushers here in the valley and their fans and friends. There’s always something going on at the Other Place.”
It was half full of people when they walked in the door a few minutes later, many of them mushers enthusing over the snow that had finally fallen and had a good chance of sticking if the temperature gave it a chance.
“Another foot and we’ll be in business for the winter,” Lynn Ehlers was saying to another kennel owner who was seated next to him at the bar. “Hey, Jessie. Ready for the season to start?”
“You bet. I’m tired of four-wheeling behind my guys. Time to get them back in front of a sled. Think snow!”
She introduced him to Maxie, who smiled as she took the hand he offered. “I recognize the name. You ran the Yukon Quest with Jessie a year or two back, right?”
“Ran with?” Jessie corrected. “He practically saved my life on that one.”
“Hi, Lynn,” Alex said, and nodded in his direction, his hands too full of three drinks, Jameson for Maxie and bottles of Killian’s for Jessie and himself, to shake hands.
They found a table in the middle of the room and settled comfortably.
“Where’s Tank?” Oscar questioned, coming out from behind the bar with a piece of jerky in his hand.
“Sorry, Oscar. We left him home this time. Only room for three in Alex’s pickup.”
“Well, take this home for him so he won’t have hurt feelings.”
Introduced to Maxie, he also found a reason to connect her to Jessie.
“You came up the highway with her the year they were building her a new house, didn’t you?”
Alex grinned and threw up his hands in a gesture of defeat.
“It’s true,” he said, chuckling. “It’s all true. And it’s not just here in the valley. I think the whole state’s full of people with less than six degrees of separation. All you have to do is ask the right question about someone and the person you’re asking either knows them or they know someone who does.”
“Here comes another illustration of that theory,” Jessie agreed, as Hank Peterson came across the room from the pool table, where he had just won a game.
“Hey, Jessie,” he said. “I bet this is your friend Ms. McNabb from Homer, right?”
“Just Maxie, please,” she told him, as the laughter rose and fell once again. “I’m beginning to feel right at home at this Other Place, so I’d best be on a first-degree-name basis.”
Hank had soon enticed Jessie to the pool table, where she proceeded to thrash him two games in a row and was about to continue the streak with a third.
“She’s very good,” Maxie commented.
“She says it’s more luck than talent,” Alex said and grinned, setting a fresh drink for her and a Killian’s for himself on the table before sitting down across from her. “What you’re seeing is an ongoing, never-ending battle. They don’t really care who wins. They just like to play and are about equally good at it. You should have been here to see the night there was a small earthquake. It rolled the ball she needed to sink for the win right into the pocket without her help.”
He was quiet for a minute; then he leaned forward with a serious expression.
“I’d like to ask you a favor, Maxie,” he said quietly.
“Ask away,” she told him. “I think I’ve an idea what you’re aiming at already.”
“You may at that,” he said, nodding. “You’re pretty insightful.”
“You’d like me to stay around for a few more than two days,” she said. “Till you catch whoever killed that young man on the hill behind your house, right?”
“Exactly right. There are a couple of reasons why. One is that I think whoever killed Thompson is pretty ruthless and will be more so and running scared at this point. Scared enough to run my partner, Becker, off the road and shoot a hole in the window of his truck. And enough to compromise the steering and brakes of a motorcycle that sent a woman off the road and into a tree that killed her between here and Sutton. If the same person is the one who took back the handgun from Jessie on the hill two days ago, then I’m justifiably concerned.
“The second reason is Jessie herself. You know how stubbornly curious and independent she is. I can’t protect her all the time…”
“You wouldn’t want to,” Maxie interjected. “Neither would I.”
“No, you’re right. I wouldn’t, and wouldn’t want you to. But, nonetheless, it concerns me that she might get herself into a dangerous situation unintentionally. With you around she wouldn’t be as tempted—at least less so.”
They sat looking at each other thoughtfully for a moment.
Then Maxie spoke seriously.
“Yes. The answer is yes, I will stay as long as you both feel it necessary and as it relieves your mind. But I mean both. I want her to know what you’ve asked me—also the terms under which I’ve agreed. I’m not comfortable otherwise. It’s got to be open and aboveboard or not at all. Okay?”
He frowned at her while he took in her terms, then he nodded.
“I can accept that if she does. Thanks, Maxie. We’ll talk about it later, at home.”
“Good. Now—I see an empty dartboard holding up the wall over there. You up for a game where you could get beat by a senior citizen?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ALEX WENT OUT EARLY AGAIN ON THURSDAY MORNING, LEAVING Maxie at the table, taking her time over a second cup of coffee after breakfast, which he had cooked.
Jessie, who had gone out to take care of feeding the dogs and to bring Tank into the house to keep Stretch company, came back inside smiling and rosy-cheeked from the cold as she kissed him good-bye at the door.
“Have a good day, Trooper. We’ll keep the home fires burning, but if we’re not here, you might try the Other Place.”
“You going to take a team out today?”
“Maybe. It snowed another two inches last night and that’s probably not enough to keep from wearing out runners on rocks and rough spots on the big trails. But it might be fun to take Maxie for a ride on the local ones. Another four inches and there’ll be no keeping me off the sled runners—along with everyone else who runs dogs.”
“Well, stay warm then. Bye, Maxie. Have a good day.”
After refilling her own cup with coffee and topping off Maxie’s, Jessie returned to her chair and leaned forward, both elbows on the table, cup between both hands, settling in to enjoy the company of the older woman she liked so much.
Tank and Stretch were already snoozing peacefully on the rag rug in front of the sofa.
“As if they hadn’t just had a full night’s sleep,” Maxie said and smiled. “Stretch usually keeps my feet warm at the foot of the bed, but here he prefers that spot on the rug when Tank’s inside.”
“We can take them out for a walk later,” Jessie suggested. “Before they get fat and lazy?”
“Not bloody likely, that,” Maxie said, a comment that held a bit of the accent and words she had picked up from Daniel, her second husband, an Australian expatriate.
Jessie’s expression grew serious, and she abruptly changed the subject. “What do you think of all this about Donny Thompson?”
“Now there’s a curly question,” came the response, once again tinged with a suggestion of Aussie. “Give me a bit to mull it over. I do think, though, that Alex is right and you must leave it to him and the law to answer the questions and solve it, which I’m sure he’s doing capably, yes?”
“Absolutely. Still, it happening here on home ground haunts me.”
“I’m sure it does. Remember how uneasy I was thinking that someone had been in my house while I was in Hawaii? Then it turned out to be completely explainable, didn’t it? When you have an explanation for this situation it will seem much
different, I assure you.”
“Well, I hope so. Still…oh, hell! Let’s talk about something else. How’s your son, Joe, and his lady, Sharon? I really liked her—and him too, of course.”
“They’re both fine and decided to come up for Christmas this year when they found out I meant to spend a northern winter and would be here. You and Alex should come to Homer and make it five. That would be a treat!”
“We’d love to. But if I can find someone to take care of my mutts for ten days or so, we may go to Idaho and spend the holidays with Alex’s mother. She’s alone now that his father has passed on.”
“Where does she live?”
“In Salmon, right where the panhandle widens into the lower part of the state, very close to the border with Montana. If you go north over Lost Trail Pass, you come down into the south end of the Bitterroot Valley.”
“Interesting. I came through that way on my way north last June, but had no idea that Salmon was where Alex is from. Had I known, I could have stopped and visited with his mother. It’s beautiful country. You should go and see it.”
They proceeded to catch up on what had been part of their separate lives since last they met, enjoying every minute of it.
In downtown Palmer, at the troopers’ office, Alex first called the hospital to see how Becker was doing and found him ready to, as he put it, “get sprung from here.”
“It’s a little soon, isn’t it? How soon does the doctor say you’ll be ready to leave?” Alex asked, not surprised at his partner’s frustration. Becker, an active sort, had always disliked enforced idleness.
“Maybe tomorrow, he says, but probably the next day. I feel pretty good though. Think I could go now, except for the cast they’re going to put on later, when the swelling goes down some. I wanna go home!”
Alex couldn’t help laughing.
“You sound like an old bear who wants to get back into his own cave for the winter,” he teased Becker. “You know you’re not going to be ready to come back to work for a while yet, so why not take it easy? There won’t be any pretty nurses at your place to bring you food and baby you—and fewer visitors with flowers.”
“That’s a point,” Becker agreed. “Still…”
The call ended with Alex agreeing to bring him something to read.
“If you could stop at Annabel’s in Wasilla and pick up Lee Child’s latest thriller that Carol’s holding for me, I’d owe you big-time. Plus, I’d promise to stop whining for at least another day or two, if necessary.”
“I’ll do that later this morning,” Alex promised.
He then focused his attention on making a list of anyone he could think of who could possibly know anything at all to do with Donny Thompson’s death—or who might know someone who did.
He missed his partner. Discussing their cases together was often helpful to both in providing different perspectives. Maybe, he decided thoughtfully, this degree of separation thing could be made to work to his advantage. There was something—and probably more than one something—that he was simply not seeing, or had yet to learn about the situation. The details he had gathered didn’t seem to fit together in building a reasonable pattern, so he spent part of an hour making a chart of exactly what he knew and did not know, and trying to organize it into some kind of order on paper.
First he listed all the people he could think of who might have something to do, directly or peripherally, with the case, or know someone who did. Then he thought about each of them individually and added what he knew or suspected about each.
There was Bill Thompson, of course, and his family. Bill, it seemed, was a traditional, head-of-household sort of person who was fairly strict with his children, disliked handguns, and evidently disapproved of bikers like the Road Pirates.
His wife, Helen, would probably back him up on those things and was unlikely to know much that would be of help. But if she did, she might be inclined to keep it to herself.
Their children presented other questions.
If Sally knew that Donny was riding with the bikers, then all or some of her brothers might know it too, and other things their parents did not.
What little Alex knew of Carl, the oldest, seemed to indicate that he pretty much followed his father’s example of likes and dislikes, disapproving of the Road Pirates and his brother Donny’s connection with them. As bartender at the Aces Wild, in a position to observe and learn about the bikers, he probably knew more than Donny, or his buddy, Jeff Malone, thought he did. Putting a question mark next to Carl’s name to remind himself to have a chat with him as soon as possible, perhaps after the funeral Saturday afternoon, Alex moved on to the next in order of age.
He knew even less about Garth, except what he had seen of him at their house when he and Becker had gone with the news of Donny’s death. From that observation he thought that Garth must pretty much follow his father’s lead as well. He was the one, after all, who worked the most with Bill Thompson and had been at the Alpine Inn with him.
As Alex looked at his list of the family names it occurred to him that the Thompson children seemed to be divided into two groups according to age. Carl and Garth were the eldest, Garth a full two years older than the next in age, Leonard, or Lee, as he was called. The three youngest, Lee, Sally, and Donny, were nearer in age, only a year or a bit more between them. There seemed to be a separation in attitude as well, as Carl and Garth formed a trio with their father in values, while Lee, Sally, and Donny formed another, less strict group.
Lee was another uncertainty in Alex’s mind and received another question mark. He was the pivotal sibling, probably feeling a certain amount of desire to please his father and to fit in with his older brothers, but conforming more to the position and way of thinking of the younger two. He had, according to Pete the bartender, been at the Alpine with Malone on Monday night, talking seriously about something, which had provided Malone with an alibi when Becker was run off the road near the Matanuska River Bridge. As one of the three younger Thompson children, he had probably known about his brother’s ties with the Road Pirates, as did his sister, Sally.
Sally had evidently grown up closest to her brother Donny, and was willing to overlook his deviations from his father’s values, as she herself had done in choosing to bring the roses on her own to mourn her sibling in her own way. Still, it seemed she was not apparently willing to incur her father’s disapproval in letting him know that she had done so—twice.
Donny Thompson, it seemed, had been the wild child of the family, the one most likely to bend or break the rules his father laid down and go his own way. Being the youngest, he had probably been babied by the rest of the family, who would have found his antics amusing and assumed he would outgrow them. Later, “rebellious” would probably be a good word to describe his attitudes and behavior.
Looking at the others on his list of names, he shook his head in dissatisfaction.
Jeff Malone had left as many questions as he provided answers concerning his relationship with Donny and the events of the weekend he was killed. What had he been talking to Donny’s brother Lee about at the Alpine Inn on Monday night? Could he have been there again on Tuesday before the earthquake to meddle with the steering and brakes on the motorcycle Sharon Parker had driven off the road? Pete had not been forthcoming with that information.
This question raised another in his mind that stopped him cold, remembering something he had meant to pursue but that in the aftermath of the quake and its demands on his time and efforts had completely forgotten.
Now he suddenly remembered the sound of the door closing at the Alpine Inn, the rumble of a motorcycle starting up outside and taking off on the road to Palmer. There had been something about it that bothered him at the time, but he had later assumed that it had been Sharon Parker, who he had found not long afterward where she had died in her flight off the road and into the tree.
But there had been a motorcycle he had noticed on arrival that had been parked in front of the building, n
ot on the side, where it would have been out of sight. Had there been two of them? If so, whose had been parked in front, whose had been out of sight, and which had he heard leave? According to the mechanic who examined Parker’s machine, someone had tampered with the brakes and steering. Was that second person the one who had disabled it to a lethal extent? If it had been Malone…why?
Sharon Parker! Sharon! Hadn’t that been the name of the woman who took over behind the bar for Pete on the day he and Becker had stopped after apprising the Thompsons of Donny’s death? He knew it was. But was it the same woman who had died in the motorcycle wreck on Tuesday? He thought it must be. If the bike parked in front of the bar was Malone’s—or anyone else who rode with the Road Pirates—why would Sharon have been a target?
He drew a circle around her name to make finding out a priority.
Robin Fenneli was next on the list, and her name received its own circle before he even started writing down the reasons for it. Where was she? Why was she making herself so elusive that even her boyfriend, Malone, hadn’t been able to find her? Or had he?
Alex was frowning at the implications of that thought and what it might mean as he picked up the phone to make a call to one person he knew who might be of assistance in getting information on both these women and whether there was any connection between them—and a few others, including Malone.
It was definitely past time for answers that made sense, and Hank Peterson, a gregarious sort who lived alone, and spent a lot of time in the valley pubs, could be an extremely good source of information.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
ALEX’S CALL GOT HIM NOTHING BUT AN ANSWERING MACHINE that promised its owner would “get back to you as soon as I can,” so he shrugged on his coat, took the list he had been making, and headed out the door. It was too early to try the pubs Hank usually frequented, but ten minutes took him halfway to Wasilla on the highway that connected it most directly to Palmer. Turning west on a side road, he soon arrived at the small house he knew Peterson rented. If he wasn’t answering his phone there was a very small chance he might be there anyway, but it was worth a try.