by Sue Henry
As she strained against the roof, every muscle
tensed and laboring to its limit, she realized she was furiously angry. Unable to waste breath on words, she swore mentally and found herself rhythmically rocking with every curse against the planks that imprisoned her. Come on, you son of a bitch. Dammit to hell. I will not die in here. Her knees began to ache—her head throbbed. She closed her eyes and pushed till she thought she might pass out and fall from her perch.
Something gave, suddenly, behind her shoulders.
One of the planks shrieked a complaint of pulled nails and sprang loose, ripping the exterior roofing paper and shingles with it. She sustained the pressure, and the other plank went as well.
Hanging her head out of the hole she had made, she gulped breaths of fresh air, while smoke poured out
BENEATH THE ASHES
295
past her into the sunshine. The opening was narrow—
just two planks wide—but it would serve. They could get out through it.
Looking down, she saw Tank below on the ground
and heard him bark.
Over the all-but-overwhelming rage of the fire, a faint cry from inside, “Jessie-e. Don’t le-eave me-e. I’ll be go-o-od.”
And Jessie knew that she must risk going back down into what was becoming an inferno—one that she had fed with the additional oxygen by the escape hatch she had created. The fire bellowed and howled its wrath.
Against all her instincts that screamed get out, she knew she could not live with herself unless she went into the hell below her feet to try to save a woman who had lied to her, stolen from her, might hate her enough to have set her house on fire, and who had tried to frame her for the murder of Mike Tatum.
26
Q
THE SNOW SHE HAD FALLEN INTO FROM THE ROOF OF THE
cabin was cool and soothing on her cheek and blistered hand. Jessie wanted to stay where she was, gasping clean air into her parched lungs, but there was heat, too—growing stronger as the fire finally engulfed the cabin. She heard a wall collapse. Suddenly a shower of sparks and bits of burning ash and cinders were falling all around, hissing as they hit the snow. She knew she must move or be further burned.
Anne Holman spoke from somewhere beyond her
sight.
“No. You can’t ask me that, dammit. You just tried to burn me to ashes. Why can’t you just go away and leave me alone?”
Jessie raised her aching head, got to her knees, and crawled away from the burning building, then sat back into a drift to see who the woman was addressing.
Greg Holman, dressed in a black snowmachine suit, tears running down his face, stood staring at his wife.
In his hands was the metal box that held the fragile 296
BENEATH THE ASHES
297
bones of the child that Anne had dug out of the ground farther up the hill—that she had told Jessie was not his.
“Why?” he said. “Just tell me why. And for once in your life don’t lie to me.”
In Anne’s steady hands, the rifle that Jessie had thrown from the hole in the roof, before going back to help her to safety, was leveled at him, her finger on the trigger. Her expression was as cold and full of hatred as any Jessie had ever seen.
“Because you wanted it so much,” she told him con-temptuously. “Because you wouldn’t let me get rid of it.”
“But why tell me now?”
“Because you won’t let me go. I want to go, but you keep getting in my way.”
“You know I can’t let you go—and why.”
“I know you think you can’t. But now you’ll have to—won’t you?”
As Jessie watched, he stared at her for a long minute without speaking. Then, as if repeating something he had said before, he said, very gently, “No. I can’t do that. You know why I can’t. Give me the gun now, Anne, and let’s go home.”
“No, you big, dumb bastard. Not now—not ever.”
The report of the rifle was unexpected. Jessie started to get to her feet, but fell as an ankle she’d injured in her leap from the roof collapsed, tumbling her back into the drift with a yelp. From where she landed, she saw Greg Holman fall facedown, the metal box hitting the frozen ground first, breaking open, and spilling the small white bones it contained into the snow, white on white, sliding, scattering, disappearing against it.
298
SUE HENRY
The shot had caught him in the center of the chest.
He had fallen silently, and lay silent and unmoving with ash falling on him out of the still air.
Anne stared down at him without a change of ex-
pression—as if she had just killed a rabid dog or swat-ted a fly. Then she turned and caught sight of Jessie sitting in the snow behind her.
“And you,” she said in a curiously conversational tone. “What shall I do with you?”
The barrel of the rifle came slowly up to point directly at Jessie’s chest.
“You and him.” She gave a short jerk of her head toward Greg’s still form. “You thought I wouldn’t ever know that when you lived here he stopped at your place when he went down the hill—or came back up it.
Thought I was really stupid, didn’t you?”
“That’s not true,” Jessie said carefully, knowing she couldn’t run or escape. “Greg and I never—”
“Still won’t admit it? He wouldn’t either. But . . .
never mind. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Slowly she shook her head and shifted her grip on the rifle.
“I could have left you in there,” Jessie told her flatly,
“and let you die. But I went back, made you climb—
even when you fought me—and dragged you out.
When you tried to climb over me to get out and shoved me off the beam, I climbed back again and helped you.”
“So you think I owe you? I think it’s the other way around. Maybe you should’ve left me.”
“Maybe I should have . . . but—”
The whine of a snowmachine engine grew suddenly
BENEATH THE ASHES
299
loud enough to be heard over the fire. Jessie and Anne both looked toward the sound and saw Hank Peterson come sailing through the trees and into the open space by the burning cabin. Without hesitation, seeing the rifle turned on Jessie, he increased his speed and drove straight at Anne.
She lowered the barrel and took a few quick steps backward and, as she dodged, Jessie distinctly saw Greg Holman move his arm. Peterson’s snowmachine passed almost close enough to knock her down, but missed. He was too close for Anne to shoot, so she turned the rifle quickly and swung the stock at him instead. As it glanced off his left arm she lost her grip on the barrel; the gun flew from her hands over Greg’s body, and landed near a spruce.
Immediately she sprang after it, but, as she leaped across Greg, he rolled over and threw an arm into her path, knocking her feet from under her. She landed, rolling clumsily like a rag doll in a wild gyration of arms and legs, tumbled to a stop against Greg’s parked snowmachine, hit her face against one of its skis, and flopped over onto her back.
For a moment she lay stunned, a trickle of blood showing up a startling red against the whiteness of her skin.
“No,” Greg said sharply, and coughed. His voice
was weak but clear enough for Jessie to hear. “No more, Anne. It’s got to end now.”
Peterson stopped his snowmachine, got off, and removed his goggles.
“What the hell is going on here?” he asked, but got no answer.
Greg was facing Anne as she stared at him white-
300
SUE HENRY
faced from where she lay. Jessie was watching them both.
Anne pushed herself into a sitting position and
swiped at the cut on her cheek, smearing blood across the back of her bare hand. Then she got to her feet, walked over, and stood looking down at Greg in a sort of disdainful am
usement. Reaching out, she wiped her blood across his mouth.
“Still in my way?” she asked. Then in a strange, calm, and agreeable tone—with a hint of malicious intent to humiliate and hurt—she said, “Be careful what you wish for.”
She whirled and began to walk toward the holocaust the cabin had become.
Hank Peterson raced across the space between them, and attempted to bring her down before she could reach the burning cabin—but failed by inches.
She did not give him a glance or try to avoid the tackle that dropped him just out of reach of her feet, but walked on straight into the roaring inferno. With an odd half smile on her face, like a person going somewhere they have anticipated with pleasure, she disappeared into the flames and never made a sound.
27
Q
ON A WARM DAY THREE WEEKS LA
, J
TER
ESSIE AND HANK
Peterson drove two teams of dogs up the slopes of the Little Peters Hills, left the dogs resting in the sun by the remains of the Holman cabin, and walked west through the trees and across the open space to a large rock to fulfill a promise she had made. He carried a shovel and she, a metal box.
When they had dug the hole and put the box back
where Jessie had been asked to leave it—where it belonged—she stood for a minute feeling the rightness of their action. Nothing was said, no prayer or scripture recited, but there were the sounds of small birds in the nearby trees and a gurgle of water melting unseen and running under what was left of the snow on the south side of the hill.
She walked to the edge of the open space, where the slope fell more steeply away to the wide valley far below, and watched a pair of ravens playing tag on the currents of the breeze, their rough cries carrying faintly up the hill to her ears. There always seemed to be 301
302
SUE HENRY
ravens—a comforting constant. Beneath them, an almost invisible reddish haze seemed to cling to the bare branches of the birch, a precursor of new green leaves that would soon open to cover them. Grass would
spring up when the snow had disappeared, smoothing the sharp lines of rocks and rough ground, and all would be new and seemingly unspoiled again.
Even through the blackened rubble that was left of the two cabins, new life would appear and shove its way up to cover and gradually swallow up the ugly scars. Wishing she could lay her memory down with them for similar treatment, Jessie turned away and walked back through the trees with Peterson to the fire they had built for making tea.
“Greg should be buried there, too,” Peterson said, thoughtfully.
“I asked him before he died. He didn’t want to be.”
“Why?”
“He said—and I quote—‘She’ll walk up there, you
know. I don’t think it would be right for us to be so close. She took my son’s life—she’ll look after him. I took hers—so let her be. It’s all she wanted from me.’ ”
“Je-e-ez. You believe that kind of stuff?”
Jessie noted his shiver and shrugged.
“But she did kill Tatum and start the fires that killed the other two, right?”
“She started all the fires except mine and the last one up here. Greg told MacDonald when he was still in the hospital. Anne held grudges and in her mind nothing was ever her fault. She hated Buzz Martin because he told Tatum about her after the fire ten years ago and aimed the investigation in her direction to keep it away
BENEATH THE ASHES
303
from Cal Mulligan. Mulligan didn’t support her when they questioned him—angry—grieving over his kids, maybe. Greg never really knew if she set that fire or not, but he believed she did.”
“She didn’t start yours? I thought she did.”
“No, Greg confirmed that one, too. Tatum is the only person who could have started it, trying to frame Anne—or get me. He was really angry at me for protecting her.”
“Is that what you were doing?”
“No. But that’s how it looked to him.” Jessie
grinned. “He wasn’t too pleased when I hit him either.”
“But Tatum? He was a fireman—an investigator.”
“MacDonald says it’s not so big a step from fighting to lighting fires. Both firefighters and arsonists usually have some kind of fascination with it. Tatum’s turned into an obsession.
“And, yeah, he set mine. He’d kept track of Anne for the last ten years—always knew where she was. Every once in a while she’d get a newspaper clipping in the mail about an arson in MatSu with a question mark penciled in the margin, and she’d know who’d sent them. He never let her forget. She came back to kill him—to finally get him off her back. Would have done it a long time ago, I guess, but Greg kept such a close watch on her that she couldn’t. It’s why they left Alaska. She finally got away, but he followed her, knowing where she’d go, and he tried to protect her.
Even helped her meet me at the airport and make me think she’d just come in on a plane, so I’d buy her story. He thought she’d be okay with me. When Tatum burned my house it let her get away from both of us.”
304
SUE HENRY
“He knew what she was capable of—had done—and
stuck around all that time?”
“He loved her, Hank. Even when she tried her best to make him leave her—got beat up by other guys she was sleeping with and telling him about it—he cared.”
“So she killed Tatum.”
Jessie shook her head and was quiet for a moment.
“No. Greg did that. He was afraid she’d get caught, so he did it for her. But he knew he couldn’t live with it, so he set up the cabin fire. He meant them to die together. Then I came along and got in the way. He was sorry for that, too, but it had gone too far, so he just nailed up the door and would have taken his own life when he was sure it was over for Anne—and me. But we got out.”
“What a mess. How’d Anne get so hung up on fire?”
Again, Jessie shrugged. “Who knows?”
But she was remembering what Greg Holman had
told her before he died.
“She was haunted by fire—terrified but fascinated, too. When she set fires, she was in control of what terrified her. She had nightmares that woke her up
screaming. I think she cut herself as sort of a preven-tion as well as a punishment—thought that, if she hurt herself, maybe the thing she was so afraid of wouldn’t hurt her.” Jessie sighed. Another memory she wouldn’t mind not having.
“We’re all afraid of something, Hank. Let’s go
home, before it gets dark.”
He got up and looked around. “So—she’ll walk up here, huh?”
She ignored him, except for a tolerant glance.
BENEATH THE ASHES
305
“You coming to Oscar’s tomorrow for the ground
breaking?”
“Of course. Did he tell you he’s decided to call it
‘The Night My Drink Caught Fire’? He even got permission from Bill Spear, the designer, who thought it was a hoot.”
Peterson dumped a shovelful of snow on the coals that were left, carefully extinguishing every spark and stirring them to be sure the fire was out.
“I heard that,” he said, with a mischievous grin. “But it’ll be ‘The Other Place’ again in a couple of months.”
“Yeah—I know.”
Acknowledgments
Q
With sincere thanks to:
Greg MacDonald, fire investigator for the Fire Prevention Division of Anchorage Fire Department, for generous information and assistance on the technical details of arson.
Bridget Bushue, for the loan of her fire boots.
Susan Desinger, at the Forks Roadhouse, Mile 18.7
Petersville Road, Trapper Creek, for information on the Peters Creek area of the Susitna Valley.
Marcia Colson, at the Loussac Public Library, for help in my attempt to
identify the Peters for which Peters Creek, Petersville, Peters Hills, Little Peters Hills, Peters Dome, Peters Glacier, Peters Pass, and Peters Bench were named. William John Peters was a topographer and explorer in charge of USGS exploration in Alaska from 1898 to 1901. At least Peters Glacier, 306
BENEATH THE ASHES
307
north of Mount McKinley, was named for him in 1902
by Alfred Hulfe Brooks (for whom the Brooks Range is named). There is an indication, however, that Peters Creek, which lies on the south side of the mountain, may have been named in 1906 for an otherwise name-less prospector.
Mark Pfeffer, for sharing Susitna Valley snowma-
chine tales, sublime to hair-raising. More powder to you, Mark.
Jeff Baldwin, supervisor of technical services, MTA Solutions, for information about Iridium Satellite telephones and their use.
Barbara Hedges, for information on the wonderful birds of the Alaskan winter.
Bear Claw, at Great Northern Guns, for information on the Winchester Model 70 Pre 64 rifle, its 30.06-caliber ammunition, and the sentimental value it might hold.
And Sue Hilton for being such a great friend.
About the Author
SUE HENRY, whose award-winning Alaska
mysteries have received the highest praise from
readers and critics alike, has lived in Alaska for almost thirty years, and brings history, Alaskan lore, and the majestic beauty of the vast landscape to her mysteries. She lives in Anchorage.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive
information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise for SUE HENRY and BENEATH THE ASHES
Extraordinary! . . . [Henry’s] grasp of tense story-telling and strong characterization matches her with Sue Grafton. Give her a try—she’ll challenge your powers of perception and deduction.”
Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph