by Sue Henry
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to keep up with the demand for liquid refreshment—
proficiently mixing drinks, pulling drafts, and prying the tops from beer bottles to satisfy the thirst of his customers. The grin on his face, however, revealed that he was thoroughly enjoying the press and the relaxed good humor of the crowd, half of whom were regulars from the Knik Road area.
“Hey, Oscar. When’re you gonna start work on a
new Other Place?” a Budweiser drinker called from a seat halfway down the bar.
“Soon as the ground thaws,” he answered, placing a pitcher and four glasses on a barmaid’s tray, along with change for a twenty.
“Gonna have a pub-raising?”
“Sounds like a good idea. You gonna wire it for me, Jake?”
“Sure. I’ll work for beer.”
“Cheap at twice the price.”
“Okay—two beers, then.”
The man from the rental car took the only empty
stool, at the far end of the long bar, and glanced around as he waited for Oscar to deliver a bourbon and water to an already waiting customer, then pause in front of him to lay down a cocktail napkin.
“What’s your pleasure?”
“Got Coors?”
“Sure.”
The beer and a clean glass quickly appeared, along with a basket of buttery popcorn, but he ignored the glass and sipped slowly from the bottle, examining the faces around him for any he recognized.
On the next bar stool, a petite, lacquered blond in a
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green blouse set down her margarita, lit a cigarette, and looked up at him with a friendly smile.
“Nothing small about you, is there?”
He shrugged in response and smiled his agreement.
“New in town or on your way through?”
“Just passing.”
“So—welcome to beautiful downtown Wasilla.” She
offered a hand, cool and damp from the condensation on her glass. “Gloria Sorenson—Glory to my friends.”
He shook it briefly. “Greg . . . Holman.”
“Where you from, Greg?”
“Colorado.”
“Nice country. I went to college in Laramie. We
used to drive down to Denver for weekends.”
Holman nodded and sampled the popcorn, which
needed salt, still searching the room for anyone he knew.
When he didn’t respond, Glory gave him a quizzi-
cal, half-amused look. “Don’t say much, do you?”
He grinned. “Haven’t much to say.”
“Well . . . that’s okay. Who you looking for?”
“Thought I might see somebody I know.”
“You been here before?”
“Used to live around here ten years ago.”
“This place wasn’t Oscar’s then.”
“The Hangout.”
“That’s right.”
Greg Holman gave up searching the crowd and
turned back to the bar. “You know Jessie Arnold?” he asked casually.
“Hey, everybody knows Jessie. She’s an Iditarod
musher.”
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“That’s the one. Still live around here?”
“Has a place out on Knik Road. She a friend of
yours?”
“Just like to say hello.”
“She’s listed—Arnold Kennels.”
“Thanks.”
He drained the beer bottle in two swallows, left a tip for the bartender, and, before his new wanna-be friend Glory could think of another question, disappeared through the door into the night.
Billy Steward had spent the day on two long training runs with the usual mix of experienced and inex-perienced dogs, which several times had resulted in tangles and confusion among the ranks. Late in the afternoon, on the way back to Jessie’s cabin from the second run, everything was finally going smoothly when young Smut suddenly decided she didn’t want to pull anymore and began to drag against the tug line.
“Smut—let’s go, Smut,” he called to let her know he had noticed her misbehavior.
When she ignored him, he stopped the team and
walked forward to see what was causing the problem.
Maybe she had a sore foot, though she hadn’t been limping or favoring one. Stripping off her booties, he examined all four feet but found nothing amiss. The rest of her, which he checked carefully with knowledgeable fingers, was fine as well.
“There’s nothing the matter with you, girl. You’re okay. Let’s try it again.”
When he started the team, she continued to refuse
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and tried to sit down against the forward pull, becoming a burden to the rest of the team.
“Dammit, Smut. Cut it out.”
Halting them all, he went forward to stand beside her.
“What the heck’s wrong with you?”
The dog lay down in the snow and wouldn’t get up, resting her muzzle on her forepaws. It was clear she’d decided that she’d done enough for the day.
This was not acceptable, but Billy, tired from a full day of mushing, feeding, watering, and caring for dogs on the trail and back at the kennel, had no intention of putting a lot of time and energy into babying Smut out of her decision and back into action. Without further effort, he impatiently unhooked her from the gang line and put her in the sled, snapping the bag shut so that nothing but her head stuck out, then called up the rest of the team.
It took them less than an hour to arrive at the cabin, but Smut, always skittish and somewhat reluctant, had now learned that if she grew bored or tired of running, or didn’t like the trail, all she had to do was lie down and refuse to pull and she would be carried home by her teammates in warmth and comfort. She was developing an attitude that would be impossible to correct.
Smut would probably never have made a good mem-
ber of a racing team; some dogs just don’t have the heads for it. But it would take weeks of frustrated attention before Jessie would finally give up, drop her from training, and use her space on the line for other, more promising dogs. A good home would be found for Smut with someone who wanted a pet, not a working sled dog. Only the best eventually become the racing dogs that delight in pulling sleds for distance races all
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the way to Nome in the Iditarod or over the challenging trails of gold-rush country in the Yukon Quest. Luckily, a kennel of over forty, and puppies from several litters a year, gave Jessie enough choices to fill her teams with eager, dependable dogs. The others were sold, becoming a cash resource that made it possible to raise and train those that loved running and would quit only under the most adverse conditions. Many not even then.
Billy finished his long day by watering and feeding all the dogs, though he was too tired to socialize with them. Going up the steps in the glow of the halogen yard lights that came on in response to a motion sensor and lit half the dog yard, he noticed a white square of paper jammed between the door and its frame above the doorknob. Unlocking the door, he took it inside, turned on the lights, kicked off his boots, and unfolded it.
Jessie,
Mike Tatum has a wild hair up his ass over the Mulligan fire last night. I’m not sure what’s got him going, but I think we’d better talk about it—
and about your friend, whatever her name is.
Please call me when you get back from wherever you are.
Thanks,
Becker
The message had nothing to do with Billy. He laid it down on the round oak dining table, where Jessie would see it when she came home, and forgot it.
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Hungry, he baked a frozen pizza, ate all of it, then followed it with a large dish of chocolate ice cream, while watching an HBO movie on television. He fell asleep
on the sofa before it was over. At ten-thirty, he came to enough to turn off the lights and the television, pulled an afghan over himself, then slept so soundly that he didn’t even move at just after one in the morning, when the dogs began to bark in the yard.
The crash of something falling in back of the cabin near the storage shed finally roused him. At first he couldn’t figure out where he was, but he knew it wasn’t his own bed at home. In the dark of Jessie’s living room things looked strangely unfamiliar in silhouette against light from the yard that fell through the window in a pale square on the floor. Yawning and shaking his head, he got up and padded sleepily to look out.
In the yard lights, he could see nothing but the dogs that were awake and still barking by their boxes. Tux stood silently staring toward the back of the house.
What the hell?
He walked through the dark cabin to the window in the bedroom and looked out into the night. The woods were black and still. Nothing moved but a few
branches, swayed by a light breeze; and, as he
watched, a clump of snow fell from the side of a spruce, trailing granules like sugar through the air.
Everything not covered with snow showed up dark. As his vision adjusted to the dark, Billy noticed a line of tracks in the snow that seemed to have circled the cabin, coming close to it in a couple of places—below the window and near the back door—then disappearing behind the shed.
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On the opposite side of the storage shed was Jessie’s puppy pen and a smaller shed that she warmed and used for mothers with new litters. From somewhere there he heard a banging, like the pounding of a ham-mer on something of a wood-and-metal combination.
Someone was trying to break into either the maternity or the storage shed—probably the latter, since the maternity shed was empty and unlocked at the moment.
Suddenly wide awake, his first impulse was to go out to confront the intruder and see what was going on.
But he remembered the anger Tatum had displayed in the yard earlier that day and had second thoughts.
Jessie had said if the investigator came back he should call Phil Becker. It seemed a much better idea.
Grabbing a flashlight from the pocket of his coat by the front door, he went quickly to the cordless phone on Jessie’s desk, found the number on the list pinned to the wall, and called the troopers.
Though Becker was not in the office, they promised to get a message to him. In a few minutes, the phone rang under his hand, and Billy snatched it up before the ring was complete, hoping it wouldn’t be heard outside, where the pounding was still going on.
“Billy. What’s wrong?”
“Jessie said to call you if the investigator came back.
I don’t know if it’s him, but somebody’s trying to break into Jessie’s shed.”
“Where are you?”
“In the house. Jessie’s truck is gone, so maybe he doesn’t know I’m here—he’s making a lot of noise.”
“I’m on my way. Stay where you are. Don’t turn on a light and keep quiet.”
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In less than fifteen minutes Billy watched the patrol car pull into the drive. It would have been silent, had it not been for the cacophony of welcome from the dogs. The pounding had stopped soon after Billy’s phone call, and he had heard nothing more from outside. The dogs had settled down and the yard lights had gone off.
They blinked on again when Becker parked by the
front steps and got out. Billy cautiously opened the front door, but Becker waved him back and, carrying a large flashlight, went swiftly around the cabin to the shed. From the window Billy watched as he thoroughly examined the shed and the snowy ground
around it. He then followed the tracks out of Billy’s sight around the cabin.
“You can turn the lights on,” he told Billy, when he came in a few minutes later. “Whoever it was is
gone—but he’d have known I was here anyway from
all the yapping going on.”
“Gone? Did he get in? What fell? Something
crashed out there and woke me up.”
“Yeah, he got in. Jessie needs a better lock on that door. This one was pretty easy to bash open with a chunk of concrete. Get some clothes on so you can come look and see if anything’s missing.”
“How would I know?”
“Aren’t you in and out of there?”
“Yeah, but Jessie’s got a lot of stuff in there I don’t use.”
“Well, you can try.”
Billy did try but he couldn’t see that anything was gone or had even been moved.
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“Looks just like it did when I locked up tonight. Except for the door, I mean.”
Becker nodded as they closed the shed and went
back to the cabin.
“May have scared him off before he could get what he was looking for. Jessie can check what’s supposed to be there. Where is she, by the way? She get that note I left?”
Billy pointed to the note on the table. “She’s on an overnight with the dogs—and that friend of hers.”
“Where? Mike Tatum was out on the Glenn all
morning hunting for them.”
“Well . . .” Billy hesitated. “She sort of told him the wrong place,” he admitted, with a sidelong glance to assess Becker’s reaction.
The young trooper grinned. “Sounds like he gave
her a bad time.”
“He did. But she was tough—dared him to arrest her.”
“Yeah, that’s Jessie. So where are they, really?”
“Somewhere west of the Forks Roadhouse off Pe-
tersville Road.”
“Camping out?”
“In a cabin where Jessie used to live, I think.”
“Back tomorrow?”
“Or the next day. They didn’t know for sure.”
“Well, make sure she sees that note and has a look at the shed. And tell her to call me as soon as she gets back.”
“Will that Tatum guy come back here?” Billy
frowned at the idea.
“I don’t think so, but whoever pounded on that lock
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wasn’t Tatum,” Becker assured him. “He’s law enforcement.”
That settled it for Becker. Law enforcement didn’t break into people’s sheds in the middle of the night.
Judging from what he’d seen of Tatum that morning, Billy wasn’t so convinced, but he didn’t say so.
“You gonna be okay here alone?”
“Yeah. Besides, I’ve got the phone.” He nodded, reassuring himself, as much as Becker.
“Well, use it if you need it. You did the right thing to stay inside and call me.”
Becker left, but it was a long time and two more patrol calls before he stopped feeling uneasy, wondering who would break into Jessie’s shed and take nothing, and why someone circled her cabin first. The tracks looked remarkably similar to some they had found at the Mulligan fire, which did not ease his mind.
It was a very long time before Billy went back to sleep. The dogs woke him once again with their barking very early the next morning, but he heard and saw nothing unusual. When he was even brave enough to go out and check the shed door, he saw no sign of an intruder.
In the four o’clock silence of the early morning, a shadow slipped very quietly, one step at a time, from the shelter of the woods behind Jessie’s cabin. The furtive figure was almost to the back door, when a dog, sensing some unusual sound, began to bark and was soon joined by others. Covered by this racket, the shadowy figure moved very quickly along the back of the building, stepping in the boot prints Billy had seen from the bedroom
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window, and vanished into the crawl space beneath the cabin through a piece of skirting loosened earlier.
Listening carefully, the figure crou
ched motionless and listened to the soft sounds of Billy’s stocking feet overhead as he walked across the floor of the living room and continued to the bedroom window, where he stopped to look out. Seeing nothing he had not seen before, he went back to the living room.
The dogs were settling down, but the shadow held still and, waiting patiently, heard the front door open and the heavy thuds of Billy’s boots on the stairs. The scrunch of careful steps in the snow moved around the cabin to the shed, paused at its doors, then went back the way they had come. The cabin door thumped shut and the solid click of the deadlock was loud enough to be easily identified by the listener. Billy’s boots dropped one at a time and he padded back to the middle of the room, where, except for a creaking of the sofa as he lay down, the sounds ended.
For a long time the shadow did not move, but continued to listen. All was quiet. Then, finally, there was a faint, barely audible resonance from the room above.
The boy was snoring.
Then, with great care, the shadow moved. By gently, cautiously shaking a heavy plastic bag, wood shavings were almost soundlessly poured out and spread over the ground near one sturdy foundation piling. Opening a large square of light fabric allowed pre-crumpled newspaper to drift onto the shavings with hardly a whisper. From a canvas bag, a bottle of fluid was removed and taped to the piling, connected by wires to a digital timing device.
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The plastic bag and fabric were left, intended to burn with the rest, but the folded canvas bag went into the pocket of a jacket before the dark figure carefully checked the timer and pushed a button to set it running. Only seconds had blinked away, when the shadow slipped from under the cabin through the loose skirting, hesitated to listen, then went, carefully following its own earlier boot prints, so silently back into the woods that, though one dog woke enough to prick its ears and growl deep in its throat, it did not bark, and the rest dreamed on undisturbed.
So did Billy, warm and comfortably resting on Jessie’s big sofa—sleeping the sleep of ignorant confidence, dreaming the dreams of the safe and secure.
9
Q
PALE LIGHT FILTERED THROUGH CRACKS IN THE BO
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ARDED
up windows of Jessie’s old cabin in the Little Peters Hills when she woke the next morning, snuggled
warm in the heavy down sleeping bag she had spread out on the floor over an insulated foam pad the night before. They had managed to get in through a window with a loose latch and avoided having to make a cold camp in the snow. Though they had built a roaring fire in the stove to warm the place and cook dinner, it was now once again cold in the room. The banked coals needed more of the wood they had collected the night before to bring them back to life and warm the air that was so cold she could see the small, pale cloud of each exhaled breath. Reluctant to abandon her cozy cocoon, she lay still for a minute or two, looking around the space she could barely see in the early shadows.