Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  It took no time to settle into a routine, and she picked up a steady clientele with no trouble. Several of her clients fell in love with her and proposed.

  Why not? she often thought. It wasn’t as if it didn’t happen on a regular basis, girls of the Line marrying into the first gentlemen of Alaska, retiring into a quieter life of housewifery and gardening, even motherhood for some of them not too old to bear children.

  But in the end she refused them all, wary of ever again ceding power over her life to anyone else, no matter how charming he seemed on the surface. In the meantime, the Dawson Darling plied her trade, saved her money, and raised her son. In 1910 he celebrated his eleventh birthday, and no one looking at him that day, covered with dirt from playing hide-and-seek in Lily MacGregor’s yard with Lily MacGregor’s many and various children, would recognize him for the sickly child she had carried from Nome those long years ago.

  Tuesday of the week following Percy’s eleventh birthday she looked up from the pink silk settee upon which she displayed her wares, and saw Matt staring back at her through the plate-glass window.

  11

  The truck tore down the road as the needle on the speedometer swung hard to the right and stayed there. How long had he dawdled at the trailer, trying to figure out what had happened? Five minutes? Ten? How fast had the green truck been traveling? Fifty, sixty miles an hour? Faster?

  There was only one highway, but there were hundreds of roads, marked and unmarked, leading off it. How far? Which one? Mutt, her nose into the wind, barked encouragement. SuperMutt, his own personal DEW Line, his Early Kate Detector.

  He didn’t want to call what he felt panic. He didn’t want the disappearance of one woman, of one person, to have this clutch on his gut. He was worried, of course he was. He would be worried about anyone he’d gone looking for and been unable to find. Leaving a Force 10 mess behind. Leaving her canine soul mate behind.

  Get a grip, Chopin, he told himself, and made a desperate effort to think rationally. Who had come on Kate at the trailer? Had they kidnapped her? If so, why? Had she seen them? Were they disposing of a witness? If that were the case, what possible reason could they have for keeping her alive?

  An ancient Ford Ranchero pulled onto the highway a foolish three hundred yards in front of him, and Jim pulled into the left lane and slowed down to eighty miles an hour to pass. There was a white, frightened blur in the driver’s side window and then it was gone.

  His lights picked the letters of signs out of the dark as they flashed past. 14 MILES TO AHTNA. FOOD, PHONE, LODGING, RV DUMP, arrow pointing right.

  The truck spit gravel in every direction as he wheeled into the parking lot of the Ernestine Creek Lodge. Two campers, one Winnebago, a pickup, and a van. No green truck. No road around the back. He pulled into a circle and roared back out to the highway.

  Fluorescent snow guide on the left, marking an access road. He pulled in, drove a hustled feet over a series of rocky craters, saw nothing, heard nothing (Mutt was growling and snapping at the open driver’s window, her teeth five inches from his ear), put the truck into reverse, and backed out onto the highway again.

  REST STOP, ONE THOUSAND FEET. No cars in front of the toilets. He got out anyway and ran to open the doors, Mutt barking at him, she didn’t smell Kate, had to check anyway, had to, great place to dump a body. Women’s, empty. Men’s, empty. Dumpster, a few empty cans and bottles, a few candy wrappers, an empty box of Kleenex, nothing else. Back in the truck, back on the highway.

  Miles flashed past. He almost hit a cow moose and calf crossing the road. He left his foot on the gas. SCENIC VIEW-POINT, ONE MELE. No cars, no trucks, no one. When he slowed, Mutt barked once, sharp, admonitory. Don’t stop here. He stepped on the gas.

  AHTNA LANDFILL, NEXT RIGHT.

  Mutt exploded, and when he hit the brakes she didn’t wait. She went over the side and vanished down the access road. The truck skidded to a halt twenty feet past the turnoff.

  Landfill. Dump. Mountains of discards of modern life. Great place to lose a body.

  He cursed the truck into reverse and didn’t bother turning around, just backed down the road to the Ahtna landfill with the gas pedal all the way down. He oversteered and almost hit a tree on one side of the road, overcorrected and almost hit another on the other side. He came into a clearing at full throttle. He hit something, bounced the ass end of the truck up in the air, came down again, hard. It sounded like something might have fallen off. Might not. He snapped off the engine without bothering to let out the clutch. It bucked and snorted, and he baled out before it dieseled to a halt. “Mutt? Where are you, girl? Mutt? Kate? Are you here? Kate? Kate!”

  The truck had highcentered on a pile of garbage that looked as if it had been pushed off the back of a pickup truck similar in size and height to the one he was driving. The driver’s side rear tire was off the ground. Worry about that later. “Mutt? Mutt? Kate!”

  The Ahtna Landfill was a hole in the ground, a natural one, falling off from a steep, crumbling wall of hard-packed dirt. The stench was strong and sour. He stood on the edge and squinted into the twilight. “Mutt?”

  He heard a yelp, and cursed himself for leaving his flashlight in the Cessna. “Mutt?” A movement caught his eye, off to his right. “Mutt, is that you?”

  She yelped, and he broke into a stumbling run, around the edge of the drop-off to where it degenerated into a steep, jumbled slide of debris. He scrambled down into the pit, grabbing at handholds wherever he found them, a tree root, a poushki bush that gave beneath his weight and sent him slipping into a mess of something that smelled like he didn’t want to know what it was, a rusty old bedspring that cut his hand. Mutt barked encouragement, providing him with a beacon and he moved toward it, stepping from a mound of garbage bags to the top of an old gas range. He tripped on a floor lamp minus a shade and fell face forward, picked himself up, and went on.

  Mutt sounded nearer. “Where is she, girl?” he said, panting. Mutt let loose with a flurry of barks and yips and yells, interspersed with worrying at a dark lump laying between two mountains of trash. She growled at him when he got to her finally. No gratitude.

  “It’s all right, girl,” he said, praying it was, falling more than dropping to his knees. He touched the lump and felt plastic, and remembered the dark green trash bags strewn across the kitchen floor of the trailer. “Oh shit, no,” he said and tore at it. She was curled inside in a fetal position, and she was wet, he thought with sweat. He found her throat, felt for a pulse.

  There was one, strong and slow and steady, and the wave of relief that swept over him then made him feel like he was drowning. Immediately in its wake was anger, so powerful and so vicious that he wanted to kill her. How had she let herself be sandbagged like this? How could she have been so careless of her own safety? Anybody would think she had a death wish, last September at George Perry’s hunting camp, now here in Ahtna. What the hell was wrong with the woman? Plenty, and he couldn’t wait to tell her, in detail.

  He struggled for control, for breath. Mutt licked at Kate’s face, whining. When he thought he could lay hands on her without doing serious bodily injury, he managed to get Kate into a fireman’s lift, how later he would never know. Then began the nightmare journey back, during which he found even more things to trip over and fall into than he had on the way there. Almost to the edge of the pit, he thought close to where he had climbed and slid down, he heard the sound of a engine. “Hey,” he yelled. “Down here!”

  He was answered by a thrown garbage bag, which exploded on contact four feet away and which sprayed all three of them with something liquid that smelled like sour milk.

  “Hey!” he bellowed. “There’s somebody down here!” but the vehicle was already leaving.

  “You miserable—” Jim stood where he was and called the driver every name he could think of and some he made up on the spot. He threatened him with arrest for assaulting a police officer, fleeing the scene of an accident, and being a deaf motherfucke
r whose father’s identity was in serious doubt. He promised him no bail and no parole. The driver didn’t hear him, and didn’t come back, on the whole a good thing for both of them.

  When he ran out of steam, he felt better. Over his shoulder, Kate uttered a faint groan.

  “Hang on, girl,” he said, and began the grim climb up the steep bank, in the dark, with a hundred-pound sack of potatoes over his shoulder. When he got back to his truck, he set her down carefully in the cab and told her, “You have not been a fun date.”

  The potatoes stirred. “Jim?”

  His heart leaped. “Kate? Can you hear me?”

  “Of course I can hear you,” she said, sounding fretful “I can smell you, too.”

  His laugh was short but heartfelt. “You should talk.”

  “Where are we? What are you doing here? What—where’s Mutt?”

  Mutt wormed her way in between them and lavished Kate’s face with her tongue. For once, Jim envied her.

  “What happened?” Kate said, when Mutt finally calmed down. “Where are we?” She blinked at her surroundings. “Whose truck is this, and why am I laying in it?”

  He told her.

  She was silent.

  “Was somebody in the trailer with you?”

  “No, I—no.”

  “What is the last thing you remember?” A brief silence. “Kate?”

  “I was reading a book, I think.”

  “Reading a book?”

  “Well, she had a lot of them, and I didn’t find anything else, and I was there and so were they, so . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  “I see. You were reading a book,” he said, his voice very calm. “Did you, while you were reading this book, notice if anyone joined you in the trailer?”

  “I—no.”

  “No one did, or you didn’t notice?”

  “No one did.”

  “Right. You didn’t notice. Either that, or you stuffed yourself in a garbage sack and dumped yourself in the landfill.” The rage was back. He tamped it down.

  At every scene, your first act is to establish your authority. State Trooper 101, first day. For some reason, Kate Shugak could make him forget every rule he’d ever learned in class or on the job. For one brief, sweet moment he was tempted to finish the job whoever had started that afternoon. He mastered the impulse, and was proud of himself, and then was mad all over again.

  In a level voice he said, “Did you find anything in the trailer?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think a minute. No, I—no. Nothing but books. That’s what she had most of.”

  “Did you dump them on the floor?”

  “What?”

  “Pawlowski’s books. Did you dump them on the floor?”

  “No! I would never—she had some old books, one was . . . do you mean somebody pulled them off the shelves?”

  “Yes. All of them.”

  “The same person who attacked me?”

  “That would be my professional opinion, yes.”

  She grabbed the steering wheel and pulled herself erect. The dome light was burned out, and she couldn’t see Jim’s face. “Come on, we have to get back there.”

  “Like hell, we have to get you to a hospital.”

  “You don’t understand, Jim. Some of those books were really valuable.”

  “I don’t care if the covers were made of gold and the pages were made of silver! Your shoulder’s messed up, something could be broken, you’ve got scrapes and bruises everywhere. When’s the last time you had a tetanus shot?”

  “Last year,” she said, annoyed, her voice stronger now. With Jim bellowing on one side and Mutt yipping anxiously on the other, she was not feeling at the top of her game. “It’s okay,” she said to Mutt.

  “Okay my ass! You—”

  “Jim,” she said. It was one word, his name, flat, devoid of emotion. It meant business.

  It stopped him, mercifully, at least for the moment. “What?”

  “Shut up. Please. I’ve got a hell of a headache, and you yelling and her yipping makes it worse.”

  He dropped his voice but he was still mad. “Why won’t you go to the hospital? Give me one good goddamn reason!”

  She felt an insane desire to laugh at the hissed whisper. That way lay a descent into hysteria, and she fought it back. “If you’d been stuffed into a trash bag and tossed into the city dump like last week’s garbage, would you be in a hurry to tell anyone about it?”

  They compromised, and went back to Ahtna. As Jim pointed out, they were all in need of a change of clothes. Kate took a shower. Mutt took a bath. Jim borrowed jeans and a sweatshirt from Kenny Hazen, who dropped Jim’s uniform off at the only dry cleaners in town the following morning. There was no ridding his boots of the smell, though; for months afterward he would look down and see flies buzzing around his ankles.

  Kate checked on the whereabouts of the other campaign staffers, who were all present and accounted for at another basketball game at the gym. Halftime and Anne was working the bleachers, Darlene at her elbow, Erin in tow, Doug chasing some skirt on the opposite side of the room, Tom at the center of an admiring group of teenage girls, Tracy snapping pictures, getting names, keeping one eye on the schedule.

  Darlene saw her first, and looked furious. “Where the hell have you been?” she said beneath her breath when Kate reached her side.

  “I got tied up,” Kate said without a smile.

  “Yeah, well, you’re supposed to be watching out for Anne, and you can’t do that if you’re not here!”

  “You’re right. Want to fire me? Oh wait, that’s right, you can’t, you don’t pay me. Put a lid on it, Darlene,” she added, when Darlene’s face darkened and she opened her mouth to retort. “Where do you go after this?”

  “Back to the hotel,” Darlene said, putting on a false smile when Anne turned to give them a curious look.

  “Fine, I’ll see you back there.”

  “You’re leaving again? What about Anne, damn it?”

  “Don’t let her wade too far into the crowd.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be back to the hotel later.”

  With difficulty, Darlene bit back whatever she had been going to say, but Kate could feel the other woman’s eyes boring into her back all the way to the door.

  “Why don’t the two of you just shoot it out at thirty paces and be done with it?” Kenny said. “What’s going on there, anyway?”

  Kate, feeling generous since she’d been the last to score, said, “Oh, I don’t know. Personality conflict, I guess.”

  The four of them drove back out to Paula’s trailer, carrying with them Paula’s laptop and notes retrieved from the cop shop on the way. As Kate had expected, the manila envelope containing the copies of Paula’s disk and notes were gone.

  Seeing the picnic table triggered her memory, and she told them about Gordy Boothe. “So she was tucked in by midnight,” Kenny said. “And she didn’t own a car. And the letter to Anne was discovered at two-thirty. Well, hell, I don’t know. I suppose she could have walked in,”

  “It’s five miles, Kenny, and she didn’t look like an athlete to me.”

  “Or someone could be trying to throw suspicion her way. Maybe it was supposed to look like suicide.”

  “She killed herself because she felt guilty she was trying to blackmail Anne Gordaoff? Come on, Kenny.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Disgruntled, Kenny squeezed behind the table, apparently not noticing that he was sitting on the stain left by Paula’s blood.

  “Think blackmail material was what they were looking for?” Kate said, more to be saying something than because she needed an answer.

  “She was looking up stuff on Peter Heiman. Could be she found out something he doesn’t want us to know, and told someone who told him.”

  “She was also looking up stuff on Anne,” Kate said, picking books up, straightening bent pages, and slipping them back onto shelves. Jim leaned up against the sink, staring at nothing with
a frown on his face. “Hey,” Kate said. “Books. On shelves.”

  He looked at her. “What? Oh. Yeah, what the hell, okay.”

  “She had them arranged alphabetically by author, starting there.” She pointed at the now righted shelf.

  Jim muttered something under his breath, but he bent to the task. Like Kate, he rifled through each book before he put it back on the shelf, looking for anything the hurricane might have missed. He found nothing. Kate got the nonfiction section reshelved and sat down with Paula’s handwritten notes. Kenny had plugged in Paula’s computer and was calling up files and scrolling through them, lips pursed in concentration.

  After fifteen minutes various aches and pains began to make themselves felt, and Kate put the kettle on for tea. Paula had Lipton and honey in the cupboard. She made three cups. “Thanks,” Kenny said, reading through a file. “Did you know Peter Heiman lost his brother in Vietnam?”

  “You didn’t? It’s part of the family legend. The Heimans have been around a while.”

  “I was in Anchorage then, and I never bothered with the news. Never do now, for that matter. Reporters are all a bunch of kids who’ve majored in anorexia and minored in big hair.” He drank some tea. “Ever notice how they’re always talking to each other instead of you? Start all their sound bites with ‘Well, Maria’?”

  “Well, no,” Kate said. “I don’t have television out on the homestead.”

  “Smart woman.” He went back to the computer.

  The bathroom had been tidied. The bedroom was still half in chaos. Jim had put the mattress and the springs back on the frame and was sitting down, immersed in Most Secret. She set the mug at his feet. “Finding any clues as to who killed Paula?” she said. He grunted something without looking up.

  The tea was hot and sweet, and woke her up enough to go back to Paula’s notes.

  The three-subject spiral notebooks took her right back to college: shiny red cover, wide-ruled pages, rounded corners, stingy bits of paper caught in the wire spine from pages being torn out. Paula was not a very organized note-taker, sprawling across margins, crowding interpolations between graphs, adding a comment that related to a subject where there was no more room and so had to be jammed into the bottom of the page or written into the margin of the following page, connecting the two by a number or a letter or an asterisk or a pound sign. The notebook was liberally adorned with such signs, and Kate did a lot of paging back and forth trying to reconstruct Paula’s train of thought. It was like playing connect the dots without the dots.