by Sue Henry
As half expected, Hank was not at his house, but he had left a note taped to the door for Stevie Duncan, which Alex took the liberty of reading. Evidently he had gone to work at the same job she was working and she had been expected to give him a ride, but he had decided to take his own wheels and left the note to tell her so. The last sentence asked her to “tell Vic I’m coming, but will be late—have something that has to be done in town.”
Vic, Alex knew, had to be Vic Prentice, the contractor who had built Jessie’s new log house and who lived in Palmer and often had projects in the Mat-Su Valley, as well as other locations around south central Alaska. Jessie had mentioned that Stevie was working for him on an older house he was renovating somewhere off the Old Glenn Highway near what locals called the butte. A quick phone call reached Prentice on his cell phone and gave Alex the location.
I’ll kill two birds with one stone, he thought as he drove back through Palmer, headed in that direction, remembering that Malone had said Robin Fenneli lived on Bodenburg Loop Road, which was also off the Old Glenn Highway, in “one of those old log houses a mile or two around the loop on the butte side of the road.” It shouldn’t be hard to find her place after he talked with Hank. Hank might know where it was, for that matter. It always surprised Alex just how much Hank did know about just about everybody. He was a prime source of one-degree-separation information.
When he reached the construction site, a two-story house just over half a mile on a side road off the Old Glenn Highway, the yard was busy with workers. As expected, Vic Prentice knew how to get a job done fast and well, so the number of people engaged in the project wasn’t a surprise to Alex.
The outside of the building had been stripped and a lumber company truck was preparing to unload a pile of new siding from its tilting bed onto several old four-by-fours that would keep it from resting on ground that was wet and muddy from the skift of new snow that had fallen in the night.
High overhead, four men were stripping old shingles from the roof. Directly behind them, four more were efficiently attaching new ones to the roof. A worker with a forklift was raising more bundles of roofing from pallets on the ground. Evidently Vic intended that they should have it weatherproof by the end of the day and didn’t hesitate to hire enough labor to get it done.
There was a smell of fresh paint in the air, and through an open door and two windows Alex caught glimpses of painters at work in what appeared to be a living room.
He saw Prentice, in coveralls and a warm work jacket, talking with Stevie Duncan, who was similarly dressed and holding a clipboard. Behind them, from a panel truck with the logo of a Palmer hardware store, a man unloaded a stainless steel sink and took it into the kitchen through a side door. Another followed with a roll of vinyl destined for new countertops.
“Hey, Jensen,” Prentice called out, noticing the trooper approaching. “Looking for work?”
“Nope. Sorry, Vic, but I’ve got enough on my plate for the time being—though at the rate it’s progressing I might be better off taking you up on that offer.”
As the two shook hands, Stevie grinned as she teased Prentice, knowing him well. “Good save, Alex. He’s a real slave driver.”
“Yeah, but I make it worth your while, don’t I?” the contractor questioned with a mock scowl. “Be gone, Stevie Wonderful, and take care of ordering that water heater and a new window for the bathroom, once you get the measurements.”
“Yes, sir! Right away, sir!” She gave him a saucy salute and was gone.
No wonder Prentice never lacks for workers, Alex thought as Vic turned to him with a smile, he treats people well.
“That Stevie. Nobody works harder, or does a better job,” Vic said. “What can I do you for, Alex?”
“Well, actually I’m looking for Hank Peterson,” he answered. “He around somewhere? I need a few minutes of his time for answers to some questions on a case I’m working.”
Prentice shook his head. “Sorry. He’s not here. Asked Stevie to tell me he had something important to do in town and would be late. He’ll be along, but probably not until after noon, from what she said. I just put him on the crew yesterday so I’m not surprised that there was a thing or two he had to take care of before starting.”
“Any idea what?”
“Nope. Stevie didn’t know either, but it’s okay with me. Everybody has personal priorities and lives to live. He’ll be along as soon as he takes care of whatever it is. Good worker. I’ll hire Hank when I can get him. He knows that and doesn’t abuse it.”
“When he gets here,” Alex said, “will you tell him I need to see him after work? If he’ll stop at the Aces, I can arrange to meet him there.”
“Sure. We’ll knock off here around five thirty. That okay?”
Alex agreed it was and was turning to go when a call to Prentice from one of the roofers made him pause and look up at two faces that were looking down from the already shingled edge.
“Hey, Vic. I’m out of nails for the gun. You got some more down there?”
“Hold on, Sean. I’ll send some up on the lift. Eric, you out too?”
“Totally.”
“Sorry, Alex,” Prentice said, already in motion. “Can’t have these guys sitting on their hands. I’ll tell Hank to meet you.”
“Thanks, Vic.”
Driving west a mile or two, Alex soon came to the turnoff to Bodenburg Loop Road and took a right onto it. For several miles he drove along it, looking carefully for an older house that could belong to Robin Fenneli and checking the rural mailboxes for her name. Halfway along the northern part of the loop road he finally came to one with FENNELI printed in block letters on the side.
South, down a long gravel drive, half hidden in a small grove of tall cottonwoods, he could see a log structure, its single story low to the ground and weathered gray with age. Most of the snow that had fallen in the night was melted, but there were no tracks of a vehicle in the drive, so no one had come from or gone to the residence since the day before at the latest.
Getting out of his truck, he opened the mailbox and retrieved what appeared to be a couple of days’ mail from inside, mostly flyers and advertisements of a kind that most people toss away in annoyance without reading. There were two envelopes with windows revealing Robin’s name and address, probably bills or bank statements, he decided, nothing personal. He replaced them in the box and closed its door.
Turning onto the drive, he drove the length of it into a yard, where it made a left into an open space in front of another log structure that was obviously meant as a garage, with a double door that would open outward and a small four-paned window on the side toward the house.
He got out of his truck and stood, looking around. It was very still except for a pair of ravens holding a raucous conversation from their perch high on a limb of one of the trees. Instinctively, he felt there was no one at home, but hesitated long enough to examine the place in some detail.
He could see no recent footprints anywhere in the muddy parking area or mud tracks on the path that was formed of cement pavers and ended at a step in front of the cabin door.
A heavy lock secured the double doors of the garage.
He walked across to its window and peered into the dark interior. The glass was coated with accumulated grime, but after rubbing at it with a gloved hand he could see enough to tell there was a car inside, dark blue or black, and that a narrow workbench attached to the wall beneath the window was littered with old paint cans, a few tools, and oily-looking rags. A scattering of faded plastic flowers lay incongruously among the tools, and at one end a red helmet like those worn by motorcycle riders sat abandoned and covered with dust.
Red. Interesting. Maybe she thought red would not go well with the black worn by the Road Pirates. Probably she had another, a black one, like the one worn by Sharon Parker.
Her motorcycle was not inside the garage. This was worthy of note, as she certainly couldn’t have taken both if she was alone when she left the plac
e, whenever that had been. Wherever she had gone, she had gone on the motorcycle Malone had told him she owned.
Leaving the garage, he walked up the path to the house and knocked loudly on the front door.
As expected, no one answered.
There is a silence that occupies an empty house and Jensen recognized it, had expected it and that no one would come to the door in answer to his knock. It was clear Fenneli had been absent, as Malone had said, for at least a couple of days.
He tried the door. It was, as anticipated, locked securely.
Stepping to one side, he cupped his hand around his face and peered through a front window that showed him the interior through half-drawn curtains. The inside was clean and tidy, but totally and surprisingly empty of personality. Most houses reflect the people who live in them, and you can tell a lot about them by examining their place of residence, of safety, where they feel most at ease and themselves.
This house, though aged and small, told more about the person who had built it years before than it did about the woman who now owned and lived in it. It clearly had just four rooms: the living room into which Jensen looked, a kitchen he could see part of through a doorway opposite the front door, a bedroom through another to the left, and probably a bathroom out of sight in the rear.
The living room furniture was average in design and color, mostly brown and not new. The carpet was brown with worn areas in the obvious places most trafficked. That was also the color of the sofa and a couple of chairs, with a pillow or two in blue. The walls were plain white and held no decorative pictures or photographs of family. There were no houseplants, no knickknacks, no books or magazines, no sound system, no television, nothing personal at all that he could tell, except a pair of leather gloves on an end table by the front door, as if Fenneli had dropped them there on her way in or out, perhaps meaning to put them away somewhere later.
Through a window in the rear of the kitchen he could see that the trees were thick and fairly close behind it. He walked around the side of the house to that window and was surprised to find it unlocked. Raising the lower half, he leaned in to take a look at the part of the kitchen he had not been able to see from the front window. It was clean and empty, the cupboard doors all shut and the countertop bare of clutter. Not so much as a cookbook lay in sight.
The only thing he noticed, with his face inside the house, was a faint and interesting hint of something herbal in the air—rosemary, or lavender perhaps—pleasant, but unexpected in this impersonal residence.
Taken aback at the blandness of the house, Jensen stepped away, closed the window, walked around to the front, and stood thinking as he looked back up the drive he had come down from Bodenburg Loop Road, but saw little of it. The fact that the house revealed almost nothing of its resident made him feel somehow sad and a little incredulous. What kind of person was this Robin Fenneli anyway? Her name, Robin, had caused him to assume a cheerful, attractive idea of her that was now in contradiction to what her living space had told him.
Maybe he was evaluating it incorrectly, he thought suddenly. Maybe it revealed much more than he was assuming. Could the lack of personality in her living space really reflect the same sort of deficit in her as a person? It certainly was not his idea of the kind of woman in whom Malone would be interested. What a pair of opposites they must make, if this proved true.
Or did it simply mirror a woman whose character was distinctly at odds with the name she had been given?
What a cold thought!
He shuddered, suddenly wanting very much to be away from this place and its blankness.
Walking swiftly to his truck, he climbed in, turned it around, and drove quickly back to the road at the end of the drive without looking back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THERE WAS NO NEED TO GO WEST TO PETER’S CREEK AND LOOK up Robin Fenneli’s brother, Alex determined on his way back into Palmer. Malone said he had already checked that possibility and come up empty—she hadn’t been there. A phone call to the insurance office where she worked had told him she was not there either, and had not been since the previous Friday.
So where the hell was she, he grumbled to himself, and did it matter?
Evidently it did to Malone, who had been looking for her for days. Was his concern what was making it an issue for Alex as well, or was it simply because he’d still like to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in confirming Malone’s whereabouts on the Friday night Donny Thompson died and Fenneli was the person who could verify it?
It seemed that he might be giving himself a bad case of tunnel vision. There were other things and people besides Fenneli that he should be paying attention to and it was time to do so.
Who had tampered with Sharon Parker’s motorcycle, for instance? Who was the person who must have been at the Alpine Inn before the earthquake on Tuesday? And why had Pete refused to tell him who it was? Keep his own counsel, indeed! There were times when that attitude was out of line, and this was one of them. Perhaps it was time to confront Pete again and…
Crossing the Matanuska River Bridge, he dropped that idea as he thought of Becker and suddenly realized he was ignoring a superior source of assistance.
If he couldn’t talk to Hank, who knew everybody, or knew someone who did, until late that afternoon, rather than make the drive to Sutton, which might or might not be worth it, he could at least talk to Becker, who was bored and restless in the hospital and would welcome the chance to speculate on the things his partner had learned, or needed to learn. He would probably, as usual, have ideas Alex hadn’t come up with. It was part of why they worked well together, and he missed it.
Encouraged and relieved with this idea, he drove through Palmer and on to Wasilla, where he stopped at Annabel’s bookstore, Carol and Richard Kenney’s terrific source of hundreds of new and used books. He picked up the one Becker had requested, and one he knew Jessie had been looking for. Then, though he was tempted to do a little of his own shelf reading, he gave it up and, in much better spirits, headed for home, where he intended to have lunch before going to the hospital.
A couple of hours earlier, Jessie and Maxie, noticing it was not snowing and the sun was making an attempt to peek through spaces in the clouds that covered most of the sky, decided to dress warmly and take their dogs for a walk.
“Where shall we go?” Jessie asked when they were standing on the porch.
“Well…ah…,” said Maxie, with a hesitant and concerned expression. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to see the place where that poor young man was killed.”
“You would?”
“Yes, I would. I know it sounds rather morbid. But his death sort of haunts me and I’d like to have a real place in mind instead of my imagination. I’m sure it’s much less disturbing for real.”
“It is,” Jessie agreed. “That’s really a lovely part of the woods.”
So up the trail, on which Alex and Sally had left their footprints the day before, they went, past the house and storage sheds where Jessie kept her sleds, harnesses, and other gear, and on into the woods.
The birch, now bare of their leaves except for a few that still clung, displayed lacy patterns of branches and twigs against the sky. Dark green spruce were interspersed here and there between the pale trunks of their deciduous neighbors. The small amount of snow that had fallen between them also made a pleasing contrast.
“How nice it is,” Maxie said, “to be able to walk from your house right into the trees.”
Jessie nodded and started to answer, but a scolding from overhead reminded her that there were still a few squirrels about, and the small birds, chickadees, siskins, and sparrows, many of which did not migrate south for the winter, were making cheerful sounds. Several larger birds also remained—the omnipresent ravens, a few magpies, jays, and, though seldom seen, snowy owls that did most of their hunting at night or late in the day. Jessie recalled a story for Maxie about a cross-country skier who had his fur hat snatched from his head one evening by
a hunting owl that left talon wounds on his head and flew away with his headgear, thinking it had captured dinner.
They climbed on a little farther.
“Here’s the log I was sitting on when whoever it was demanded that I return the handgun I had found,” Jessie said, stopping in front of it. “I still think it might have been a woman.”
“Looks like it might have been where Sally was also sitting when Alex found her.”
It was, for the larger prints of his boots stopped there, where he had turned around to accompany the young woman down the hill to the house.
Around a curve in the trail, they came finally to the place where Donny Thompson’s body had been rudely disturbed by the passing of Jessie’s team in training.
She pointed out where it had lain in the snow, turned over by the sled’s brake, exposing the carpet of yellow leaves beneath.
There was really nothing left to indicate what had transpired at that location. The thin new snow had covered any blood that remained on the leaves or ground, along with any other reminder that a man had died there not quite a week earlier.
The only tracks around the spot were those that obviously belonged to Sally Thompson, coming up to and going back down from where her brother had died.
It was very still, except for a slight breeze that whispered through the denuded birch, rattling a branch against another somewhere close at hand. The sun shone briefly through a space in the slow-moving clouds to light up the place temporarily.
A raven swooped its blackness through it, casting a swiftly moving shadow on the ground, coasting downhill as it rode the air currents, but making almost no sound in passing.
The two women stood in silence for a minute or two. Then Maxie turned completely around in an unhurried circle where she stood, looking carefully at the forest that surrounded them, the hill beyond the upper trail that paralleled the highway that lay out of sight far below in front of Jessie’s house.