KS17.5 - Cherchez la Femme

by Dana Stabenow

  “Shut up,” Kate said.

  They shut up.

  “She and Albert eloped,” Kate said.

  “What?”

  “What!”

  “They took the Mary B. to Cordova. Dulcey was hiding below when Boris and Auntie Edna saw Albert heading down river.” She looked at Jim. “Whatever you said to him that day convinced him to talk to Dulcey.”

  He waited. Nathan waited. Boris waited. Finally Jim said, “And?”

  “Jim,” she said. “It’s Dulcey.”

  “Oh,” he said, and then repeated, “Oh.”

  “It turned into a very long talk. It lasted all night.” Her expression dared him to laugh which, recalling the disturbed state of Dulcey’s sleeping loft, he was hard put to it not to do. “The next morning Albert, uh, tripped and hit his head on the corner of the coffee table in front of the couch.”

  Jim remembered the goo solidified on the corner of the coffee table.

  “Albert’s got a shiner on him the color of an eggplant and he still can’t see out of that eye. Dulcey mopped him up as best she could and they got on the Mary B. and went downriver and to Cordova, where they were married that afternoon.” She sat back and watched their various reactions, not without a certain satisfaction. “Boris, when you found all that blood, you said it was Nathan just for meanness. You knew he was working up at the lodge, didn’t you?”

  Boris wouldn’t look at her. He wouldn’t look at anyone.

  “Nathan, Jim tells me you jumped Boris here at the post and he had to pepper spray you to pull you off him.”

  Nathan wasn’t making eye contact, either.

  “One way or another, you boys have made a spectacle of yourselves and caused a great deal of annoyance for the whole Park for the last six months. There will be consequences.”

  Everybody wondered what that meant. They were not held in suspense for long.

  “I talked to a few people on my way back here, and we’ve come up with something that looks a little like justice.” Kate looked at Nathan. “Nathan, you’re going to caretake Demetri’s lodge for him this winter. You get minimum wage, board and room, and a box of books. I’d recommend at least one of them be written by Deepak Chopra.”

  “Who else is going to be there?”

  “No one.”

  Nathan swallowed hard. “I’m going to be up there all alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t go.” He looked at Boris, at Jim. “I won’t go, Kate.”

  “Yeah, you will,” she said. “You earned this, Nathan. You’ve pretty much proved yourself unfit for human companionship, at least in the short term. Take this winter and think about it.”

  She looked at his younger brother. “Boris, the mayor of Cordova has finally convinced Shitting Seagull to use up his accrued vacation time. You’ll be the acting harbormaster from October one to April one, and yes, that does include keeping space open in transient parking for alien spaceships on their way through to Delta Epsilon. You’ll be living in Gull’s quarters in the harbor and you’ll be on call twenty-four seven for the whole six months.”

  “What! Why, you—”

  “I can think of no punishment better suited to fit your crime than to spend six months serving the public. You’d better be polite to them. If I get to hear of otherwise… ” She let the words trail off into an artistic silence.

  · · ·

  “So Dulcey Kineen’s alive and well and in Cordova with Albert Balluta?” Jim said in his office. Mutt, the half gray wolf half husky who let Kate live with her, was watching her favorite man with the usual adoring look in her great yellow eyes.

  “No, actually, she’s in Anchorage. They both are.”

  “What for?”

  “They’re at the Division of Family and Youth Services, applying for custody of Dulcey’s younger siblings.”

  “Really.” Jim let the word stretch out. “So that was her price.”

  Kate shrugged.

  “And Albert’s?”

  “Ratio of men to women in the Park used to be seven to one. Since the mine opened it’s probably more like twenty to one. And you know how long most women stay here who weren’t born to it.”

  “Um. Well, Albert’s got one of his very own now. Let’s hope he doesn’t know he has a tiger by the tail.”

  “Think about it,” Kate said. “Albert’s the head of his family. Dulcey’s the head of hers. They do sort of fit. I don’t know that it’s a happy ending, but it may actually be the right one.”

  “Well, you have to hand it to her. She went through every guy in the Park until she found the right one. And speaking of tigers, just what happened that morning?”

  “Well.” Kate looked as if she were trying to decide how much it was good for him to know. “As near as I can figure, Dulcey made the mistake of smiling at Albert on their way out the door, which naturally Albert regarded as an invitation to kiss her. One thing led to another and they still had an hour to make the tide, so things got a little… athletic out.”

  He let his eyes drop down over her body, lingering here and there. “I can see how that might happen.”

  Her answering smile was long and slow and full of promise.

  · · ·

  Jim left the boys locked in the cells, dimmed the lights and went home, promising to let them out the next morning.

  An hour passed. Another. The July sun tracked around the walls, lessening in intensity but still omnipresent.

  Of course Nathan spoke first, and of course it was conciliatory. “She sure was cute.” He spoke of Dulcey in the past tense, as if she was dead.

  A long silence. “Yeeaaaah,” Boris said, drawing it out. “Did you see that little tattoo on the inside of her—”

  “Yes, Boris,” Nathan said. “I saw it.” He sighed and rolled over to look at his brother through the bars.

  “I guess now all three of us have seen it.”

  Silence. A reluctant rumble sounded from the other cell.

  A moment later, they were both laughing.

  Excerpt

  If you enjoyed “Cherchez la Femme,” we think you’ll like Breakup. It’s a novel in the popular Kate Shugak series by Dana Stabenow, and it’s now available as an e-book at stabenow.com.

  Breakup

  KATE SURVEYED THE YARD in front of her cabin and uttered one word. “Breakup.”

  Affection for the season was lacking in the tone of her voice.

  Ah yes, breakup, that halcyon season including but not necessarily limited to March and April, when all of Alaska melts into a 586,412-square-mile pile of slush. The temperature reaches the double digits and for a miracle stays there, daylight increases by five minutes and forty-four seconds every twenty-four hours, and after a winter’s worth of five-hour days all you want to do is go outside and stay there for the rest of your natural life. But it’s too late for the snow machine and too early for the truck, and meltoff is swelling the rivers until flooding threatens banks, bars and all downstream communities—muskrat, beaver and man. The meat cache is almost empty and the salmon aren’t up the creek yet. All you can do is sit and watch your yard reappear, along with a winter’s worth of debris until now hidden by an artistic layer of snow, all of which used to be frozen so it didn’t smell.

  “The best thing about breakup,” Kate said, “is that it’s after winter and before summer.”

  Mutt wasn’t paying attention. There was a flash of tail fur on the other side of the yard and the 140-pound half-husky, half-wolf was off with a crunch of brush to chase down the careless hare who had made it. Breakup for Mutt meant bigger breakfasts. Breakup for Mutt meant outside instead of inside. Breakup for Mutt meant a possible close encounter with the gray timber wolf with the roving eye who had beguiled her two springs before, then left her flat with a litter of pups. All five had been turned over to Mandy a nanosecond after weaning. One had been on the second-place team into Nome the month before.

  Kate tried not to feel resentful at being abandoned. It was just th
at it seemed someone ought to have been present, looking on with sympathy as she plodded through the million and one tasks produced by the season’s first chinook, which had blown in from the Gulf of Alaska the night before at sixty-two miles per hour and toppled the woodpile into the meat cache, so that the miniature cabin on stilts looked knock-kneed.

  The chinook had also awakened the female grizzly wintering in a den on a knoll across the creek. Kate had heard her grousing at five that morning. She was hungry, no doubt, and a knock-kneed cache was probably just the ticket to fill her belly until the first salmon hit fresh water.

  And speaking of water, before Kate started work on the truck she had to check on the creek out back. With the coming of the chinook the ice had broken, and the subsequent roar of runoff was clearly audible from her doorstep. The previous fall had brought record rain, and the boulders that shored up her side of the creek had been loosened to the point of destabilizing the creek bank, but before she could do anything about it she’d had to go to Anchorage, and by the time she got back the creek had been frozen over.

  Before her lumbar vertebrae could start to protest at the mere prospect of such abuse, she went to take a look, shoving her way through the underbrush that closed in around the back of the cabin to the top of the short cliff overlooking the course of the stream.

  From the top of the bank at least, the situation did not look that bad. The tumble of boulders, some of them as tall as she was, broke the current, supported the bank and excavated and maintained a small backwater just downstream within the arm of the outcropping, good for salmon tickling and skinny-dipping.

  The thought of skinny-dipping called up a memory from the previous summer, one that included Jack Morgan, whose behind had suffered from sunburn that evening. He hadn’t complained.

  She flapped the collar of her shirt. It had to be forty degrees. A veritable heat wave. No wonder she was feeling flushed. There was a length of three-quarter-inch polypro fastened to evenly spaced posts leading down the side of the bank, and she went down backwards, breathless not just from the exertion, light of foot and heart.

  Up close she was happy to see that the situation looked even less dire. The two boulders that formed the point of the mini-peninsula had shifted, but it looked now as if they had merely to settle in even more firmly than before. No collapsed banks, no rocks sucked into midstream. She scaled the natural breakwater and to her delight found that the alteration had caused the backwater to increase in size and depth, just a little, just enough to increase her crawl from four overhand strokes to five, and Jack’s from two to three.

  Or just enough to catch her.

  “Get a grip,” she said, shifting inside clothes that had fit perfectly well when she put them on that morning. It was her own fault for reading Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell late into the previous night. Those damn Cavalier poets were always headfirst in love with somebody, and none of them had the least sense of moderation. Charles II had a lot to answer for.

  It was Jack’s fault, too, for not being here, right here where she could get her hands on him.

  A rueful grin spread across her face. If Jack had the least idea of her mood he’d be on the next plane.

  The water at her feet was so clear it was almost invisible, crisped at the edges with a layer of frosty ice, and she bent over to scoop up a handful. It was tart and oh so cold all the way down. Smiling, she splashed a second handful over her face.

  Over the rush of water came a kind of snuffling grunt. Her hand stilled in the act of scooping up more water, and very, very slowly she looked up.

  Fifty feet away, standing in midstream, thick, silvered hide spiked with water, a female grizzly stared back.

  Ten feet downstream of mama came the bawl of a cub.

  Five more feet downstream came the answering bawl of its twin. Neither of them looked more than a day out of the den.

  Involuntarily, Kate stood straight up and reached for her shotgun.

  It wasn’t there.

  The grizzly allowed Kate just enough time to remember exactly where it was—in the gun rack above the door of the cabin—before she dropped down to all fours in the water and charged.

  There was a bark and a scrambling sound from the top of the bank. “NO, Mutt!” Kate roared, a shaft of pure terror spearing through her. “STAY!”

  The bear stopped abruptly in midstream and reared up on her hind legs, so immediately on the heels of Kate’s command to Mutt that a bubble of hysterical laughter caught at the back of her throat. The bear’s lips peeled back to reveal a gleaming set of very sharp teeth that snapped in her direction. When they came together it sounded like the bite of an axe blade sinking into wood.

  All thought of laughter gone, Kate backed up a step, casting a quick glance at the bank behind her. It wasn’t as tall or as steep as the bank down to the outcropping, but it was still taller than she was and lined along its edge with a tangled section of alder and diamond willow, with no line to aid her ascent. Mutt barked again, and again Kate yelled, “NO! STAY!” without turning around, because she purely hated turning her back on a bear. She took another step back and began to speak in what she hoped was a soothing monotone. “It’s okay, girl, it’s all right, you’re between me and your cubs, I can’t get to them, it’s all right, I mean you no harm, settle down now and I’ll get out of your face, just calm down and—”

  There was another roar from the grizzly and she dropped down on all four feet with a tremendous splash and charged again, water fountaining up on either side.

  “Oh shit,” Kate said, and on the spot invented a technique for climbing a steep creek bank backwards that might not have been recognized by any international mountaineering organization but got her up and over the lip of the bank a split second before the bear, moving too fast now to stop, crashed headfirst into the wall of dirt with such force that a large section of it caved in on her.

  It didn’t improve her disposition any, but Kate wasn’t hanging around to watch. On hands and knees she wriggled through the undergrowth, branches scraping at her face and tugging at her hair, nails broken, knuckles split and bleeding, all the while listening to the outraged roaring of the grizzly behind her. The sound provided unlimited fuel for forward motion. Kate broke through the other side of the brush and collapsed, only to be pounced upon by an anxious Mutt, who thrust a nose beneath Kate’s side and flipped her like a landed halibut, sniffing her from head to toe in between bellowing threats to the grizzly. Between the growling of the infuriated grizzly, the bawling of the terrified cubs and Mutt’s challenging howls, Kate’s eardrums would never be the same.

  “It’s okay, girl,” Kate said, as Mutt nosed her over for the second time. “It’s all right. Calm down, now. Come on, calm down. Mutt, dammit, knock it off!”

  Mutt ceased triage with a hurt look. Unhindered, Kate managed to get to her feet and stagger to the cabin to retrieve the shotgun. She got back in time to listen as the grizzly proceeded to tear up an additional six feet of creek bank, which from the sound of it included the felling of a great deal of timber, before taking her frightened offspring in charge and marching them off in the opposite direction. They heard her baying defiance for a good fifteen minutes, and then it faded only as she put distance between her family and Kate’s homestead.

  It took every second of that fifteen minutes for Kate to swallow her heart, control her respiration and amass sufficient authority over her muscles to still her knees. Her jeans were soaked through with snowmelt, her shirt with perspiration. Her blood thudded against her eardrums and the walls of her veins. With every indrawn breath oxygen fizzed along her pulmonary arteries. She felt ten feet tall and covered with hair. She felt as naked and defenseless as a newborn babe. She was terrified, she was exhilarated, she was most definitely alive.

  Biography

  Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and after having a grand old time w
orking in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields on the North Slope of Alaska, making an obscene amount of money and going to Hawaii a lot, found it in writing.

  Her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar award, her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and her twenty-eighth novel and nineteenth Kate Shugak novel, Restless in the Grave, will be released in February 2012.

  Find her on the web at stabenow.com.

  Bibliography

  Kate Shugak Mysteries

  A Cold Day for Murder

  A Fatal Thaw

  Dead in the Water

  A Cold-Blooded Business

  Play with Fire

  Blood Will Tell

  Breakup

  Killing Grounds

  Hunter’s Moon

  Midnight Come Again

  The Singing of the Dead

  A Fine and Bitter Snow

  A Grave Denied

  A Taint in the Blood

  A Deeper Sleep

  Whisper to the Blood

  A Night Too Dark

  Though Not Dead

  Restless in the Grave (2012)

  Liam Campbell Mysteries

  Fire and Ice

  So Sure of Death

  Nothing Gold Can Stay

  Better to Rest

  Star Svensdotter Series

  Second Star

  A Handful of Stars

  Red Planet Run

  Other Novels

  Blindfold Game

  Prepared for Rage

  Copyright

  If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy. They are reasonably priced and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.

  This digital edition (v1.0) of “Cherchez la Femme” was published by Gere Donovan Press in 2011.