A Cold Day for Murder

by Dana Stabenow

  He sagged against the shaft opening. “Thank God. Did you hear what I said about helping me?”

  “Yes,” she muttered.

  “What?”

  “Yes, I heard you.”

  Jack stared down, down, down the shaft, and the distance finally caught up with him. “Oh God, I’m going to puke,” he groaned.

  “Not now!” Kate shouted, galvanized. “Pull, goddam you!”

  But there was a choking and burping sound above her. Kate jerked back but a cascade of warm, gloppy fluid grazed her cheek and spilled down over her parka front anyway.

  It was possible that if Jack had worked it out a year in advance he could not have done anything to take Kate’s mind more thoroughly off her present situation. She forgot that she was dangling precariously over a mine shaft a hundred and fifty feet deep. She forgot that someone had shot at her moments before. She forgot that she needed every ounce of strength and courage just to keep herself alive. She cursed Jack Morgan. She called the legitimacy of his birth into question, swore to kill him if she ever got out of this mine alive, and promised fervently if she died to kill him anyway. She was loud, fluent and impassioned. Bobby would have been proud of her. Not for nothing was Kate Shugak Abel Int-hout’s foster daughter.

  “Feel better now, you prick?” she yelled finally.

  Jack cleared his throat and, sounding apologetic, called down to her, “I do, actually. You got the safety?”

  She fumbled among the various ropes attached to the block. “Give it a tug. Okay, got it.” Carefully, cautiously, she unwrapped her end from its cleat on the dumbwaiter platform. The line felt smooth and slender and fragile between her burning palms, but she was going to have to trust it—there was no other way out for her. She pulled herself up with her arms, lifting her body clear of the dumbwaiter. She wound one foot in the now dangling end of the safety. Cautiously she increased her weight on that foot. The line slid at first, then held. She breathed again.

  All her weight was now on the safety. She waited for the dumbwaiter to crash down to the bottom of the shaft. It dropped a foot, creaking ominously.

  “Kate?”

  The flashlight blinded her. “I’m on the safety. Start pulling.”

  “Hang on.” His head disappeared again.

  “Like I had a choice,” she muttered to herself. She tried to get some kind of purchase on the wall of the shaft with her free boot.

  His voice came to her as from a great distance. “Ready?”

  “Of course I’m ready, you—”

  “Okay, here goes!”

  She felt the rope bite again into the skin of her hands, and braced her free leg. Painfully she inched her way up the wall of the shaft, scrabbling with her foot to take advantage of every depression in the sheer face, every nubbin of rock, every marginally rough spot. The rope stripped her wrists of any remaining skin; her arms and back screamed under the strain. It seemed like forever, but was actually less than three minutes before she tumbled out of the mouth of the shaft.

  She caught a confused glimpse of Mutt with the far end of the safety gripped between bared teeth before Jack dropped the rope and pounced on her. Fists knotted in her parka, he hauled her away from the mouth of the mineshaft, down the tracks, out of the entrance of the Lost Wife Mine and twenty feet down the trail before she managed to get him stopped.

  “Jack! Jack! Jack, it’s all right. I’m okay, I’m safe. Stop now. Stop.” Mutt trotted next to them, uttering short, distressed barks.

  Jack slowed down finally, and stopped. He gazed down at her, haggard and exhausted, and no one had ever looked that good to her before in all her thirty years of living. “I’m okay,” she repeated. “Take it easy. I’m all right now. We’re both all right.”

  She tugged at his arm. He crumpled next to her, falling to his knees and dropping his head on her shoulder. His arms came around to hold her so tightly she couldn’t breathe. Mutt touched her cold nose to Kate’s cheek and whined. Kate put her other arm around her dog. “Hush now,” she told them both, hugging as much of them as she could and rocking back and forth. “Hush now. Everything’s all right now.”

  They stayed that way for a long time, until the chill of the snow-covered ground penetrated her snowsuit and she began to shiver. Jack felt her tremble and pulled away to look into her face. “Kate,” he said, tugging off a mitten and cupping her cheek in one large palm. “Oh, Kate.” He leaned forward and touched her lips with his and rested his forehead against hers. “Oh, Kate.”

  “I’m hungry,” she said. “I don’t know why, but I’m starving. Could you find something for us to eat?”

  He struggled wearily to his feet and fetched the first aid kit from the Polaris. He cleaned and bandaged her wrists and palms and pulled her sleeves back down. He got the canteen from the Jag and she drank from it thirstily. The three of them demolished two packages of beef jerky, made serious inroads on a ziploc bag full of Bobby’s homemade trail mix and shared a Hershey bar for dessert.

  “I’ll go down this time,” Jack announced firmly as he cleared up the debris from their meal.

  Cleaning her face and the front of her snowsuit with handfuls of snow, Kate looked over at the entrance to the Lost Wife. He watched her. “I’m going and that’s that,” he said, his voice raising. “There’s a pulley hanging over the shaft. I’ll rig up a sling with the main line off the dumbwaiter and lower myself down.”

  “We don’t have to go down now,” she said, shifting her gaze to his face. “Before we weren’t sure.”

  He was silent for a moment. “And now we are?”

  She dropped her head and wished she could cry. “I am.”

  The homestead had not changed in three days. There had been no snow here, either, and the hard-packed surface around the buildings showed little difference between visitors who had come and gone six weeks ago, two weeks ago or two days ago. Kate walked slowly, with Mutt trotting in front of her. After strenuous protests, Jack had reluctantly agreed to remain at the top of the trail.

  Abel was waiting for her on his doorstep with a rough hug and a mug of coffee. She accepted both and followed him inside, where her knees were shaking so that she had to lean up against the kitchen counter to steady herself. She couldn’t look at him. She let her eyes wander around the room. They stopped at the coatrack. “You’ve already been out this morning, Abel.”

  He looked at her, a trace of uneasiness in the fierce, faded blue eyes, a trace, almost, of fear. She’d never seen such an expression on his face before, and it hurt her. For the first time she saw, or allowed herself to see, the age spots on the backs of his gnarled hands, the imperceptible tremor in the way he held his head, the slight stoop of his shoulders. Abel had looked older than God for the last thirty years, that was nothing new, but he had never seemed vulnerable until now. “How’d you know that, girl?”

  She pointed. “Snow melting off your boots.”

  “Oh.” They stared at his boots together. Abel drew himself up and smiled at her. “Want some lunch, girl?”

  “No, Abel,” she said. Her body stopped trembling and all at once she felt unnaturally calm. “I can’t stay. I told you, I’m looking for someone. I’ve got to keep looking for them until I find them.”

  He snorted. His cheeks were ruddy with the cold and his thinning hair was mussed. “Some damn park ranger and a guy poking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Not much loss if you never find them, seems to me.”

  Kate said steadily, “I’ve just come from your daddy’s old silver mine, Abel.”

  He kept his head down, unwilling or unable to look at her. “Now why would you want to go messing around up there?” he said at last.

  “Because I thought I’d find two bodies at the bottom of the shaft, Abel,” she said. She met the old man’s fierce blue gaze without flinching. “One belongs to a park ranger named Mark Miller. The other belongs to an investigator attached to the Anchorage District Attorney’s Office who came up here looking for him, named Kenneth Dahl.”<
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  The old man tried to laugh. “Dead folks on my property that I don’t know about! Girl, I think you worked for them ambulance chasers in town for too long; you’re seeing bodies everywhere.”

  “Oh, I think you know about them, Abel. I think you put them there.”

  Abel exploded, his face turning a deep, congested red. “What! Why, what’s got into you, girl, I never did no such—”

  Kate went on as if he hadn’t interrupted her, her voice a dead, husky monotone. “You had a run-in with Miller at the committee hearing in Niniltna. He wanted to make the Park a park; you want to keep it your own private homestead. He wanted to let people in; you want to keep them out. I read your testimony, Abel. You were angry, maybe as angry as you’ve ever been, and that’s pretty angry.”

  Her voice broke. She steadied it and went on, dry-eyed. “I figure Miller came up here, maybe that night, maybe even the next morning, early, driving his Land Cruiser, to argue with you some more. He knew your family has a lot of clout in Juneau. He probably wanted to try to swing you around to his side, help out his holy cause. You argued.” She looked at him, trying to smile. “You’ve got a temper, Abel. Maybe he was so young and enthusiastic that you knew he was going to win just by outlasting you, or maybe he was just too much of an Outsider for you to stomach, or maybe you were afraid his congressman father pulled too much weight and you’d lose it all. Maybe all those things. At any rate, he made you mad, and—”

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” the old man interrupted her suddenly, his body slumping. For a moment Kate thought he was going to fall where he stood, and she put out a steadying hand. “He was standing right where you are, drinking my coffee and eating my Twinkies and spouting all that crap about public access, and how federal lands belonged to all the people and not just the ones who wanted to keep their own private…fiefdoms, I think he called them. Why couldn’t he talk plain English while he was at it?”

  Abel shook his head like a bear trying to shake off a persistent bee. “I was so damn mad I don’t remember exactly what he said. I had the coffeepot in my hand, and I was talking with it, you know how I do. He must have thought I was going to clobber him with it because the next thing I know, he’s backing up and tripping over a chair and falling down and banging himself on the oven door. I always keep it open in the winter, Kate, you know that. He caught his head right on the corner. He was dead before I touched him. It was an accident, Kate. That damn oven door and his own foolishness was what killed him. I could see somebody already’d been banging on him, his face was all busted up. He must have been feeling kinda woozy already, and lost his balance. It was an accident,” he repeated. “Just a damn fool accident, that’s all.”

  Kate set her coffee down and stepped away from the stove. “If it was an accident, why didn’t you tell Dan O’Brian, or Chopper Jim?”

  His eyes slid away. “Oh hell, girl. After we’d gone at it bare-knuckled at that hearing, do you think anybody would believe me when I told them the kid tripped over his own feet?”

  “You could have tried.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Abel said, almost sulky.

  She waited, and when he said nothing else she continued. “The next morning you used the Land Cruiser to haul Miller’s body up to the Lost Wife. Then you loaded your sled and the dogs into the back and drove to the Roadhouse before Bernie was up. You hitched up the dogs and went down the road a little or maybe into the woods, and waited for the bar to open so Bernie could see you mush up for your weekly shot of bourbon.”

  Her rough voice was dispassionate. Kate was beyond hurling accusations. She waited, but he said nothing. She had to ask the question she had been dreading. “What about Kenneth Dahl?”

  Abel’s eyes narrowed. He looked feral, even savage. “I caught him up to the Lost Wife two weeks ago and he says he wants to go down her. I tell him no and he says he’s going down her anyway. What call’s he got trespassing on my property, tell me that! So I pull down on him with the Winchester.”

  “And you missed, and he ran,” Kate said. “So you kept shooting.”

  “Yeah,” Abel said, surprised. “How’d you know?”

  “Mandy heard you shooting. She said it sounded like a bunch of poachers. You got him after all, though, didn’t you?”

  Abel said nothing.

  “I figure by the time you got him you were on Mandy’s land and too tired to take him all the way back up the hill. So you snuck into the lodge and stole her new snow machine. You used it to drag Ken’s body back here. You sacked it up in a game bag and hung it under the cache to freeze so it would be easier to get up to the mine. Then you took the snow machine out and wrecked it, so Mandy would think Chick had done it. Nice of Chick to go on a bender right about then, wasn’t it? And then you came home. You’re not young anymore, Abel. That was why Ken’s body was still hanging beneath the cache when I came.”

  Abel said nothing.

  “Oh, Abel,” she said, closing her eyes. “I fought like hell not to believe it was you, but everywhere I looked, there you were. Testifying before the committee. Next door when Mandy’s snow machine was stolen. At the Roadhouse the morning Miller’s Toyota reappeared. I just couldn’t get away from you.”

  “My pa was a Ninety-Niner, girl,” he said. At his tone she opened her eyes and saw tears in his. “He left Nome and came up the Yukon and down the Kanuyaq and found this place and staked it for his own. Anna and I built on to the place and raised our family here. This place will be Abel Junior’s someday. I gotta hold it for him, no matter what.”

  She said, and there was a great weariness in her voice, “To the extent of murder?”

  “Oh hell, Kate,” he said scornfully, “killing a park ranger in Alaska ain’t the same thing as murder and you know it. They ain’t much better than fish hawks, and your own father accounted for at least one of them. God knows,” the old man said with a mixture of bewilderment and exhaustion, “God knows that however many of them we run off ten more spring up in their place. They’re like that goddam Greek thing you used to tell me about, the one where you cut off his head, two more grows in its place. Remember?”

  “The Hydra,” Kate said. Her voice broke. “Oh, Abel.”

  “Kate,” the old man said, almost pitifully, and for Kate that was worse than all the rest. “Kate,” he repeated, “we let them rangers come in here and make them surveys and put in them campgrounds and pretty soon we’ll be up to our ass in Winnebagoes. And if that happens I might as well move to Anchorage and buy one of them trailers across from the Northway Mall and let the Cessnas from Merrill Field land on my head all day and police cars run their sirens around me all night. I can’t let that happen.” Kate was silent, and he said, begging her, “Tell me you understand what I’m saying, girl.”

  She said softly, “I can understand the ranger, Abel. I can even believe you when you say it was an accident. But Ken?”

  “He found out! He came up here, nosing around, asking questions. When I found him poking into the Lost Wife…” Abel’s voice trailed off and he was silent. Finally he said, pleading, “I knew you was shacking up with him, girl, but what else could I do?”

  “When you followed me into Niniltna, it wasn’t because you were afraid I might get hurt. It was because you were afraid of what I might find out. And then when you heard it was Martin who was shooting at us at the NorthCom shack, you figured that would be enough to convince me that Martin killed Miller and Dahl, so you came home. But just in case, you sabotaged the dumbwaiter, and stood guard.” She raised her head and stared straight into his eyes. “And then you shot at me to make me fall.”

  “I been meaning to fix that dumbwaiter for weeks,” Abel said quickly, “and I wasn’t trying to kill you, I was just warning you off, trying to scare you a little.”

  Kate almost laughed. “That’s the second time this week someone’s shot at me and not meant to kill me.” She shook her head. “Maybe you and Martin should get together.”

  Abel stiffened. “It’
s so easy for you, Kate,” he said, his old, thin voice rising. “The Native Claims Act gave you land and money, the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid your way to Anchorage when you were sick and took care of your medical bills when you got well, your father left you a home. I’ve had to work for everything I’ve got and then fight to keep it! Don’t look down your nose at me for that!”

  Kate looked at Abel, the man greatly responsible for the woman she was. She shook her head. “I am sick and tired of people telling me how easy I’ve had it. Emaa, Xenia, Martin, the rest of my family. Now you. None of you tried to take out a student loan and had the loan officer at the bank tell you you had to have a white cosigner. None of you had to sit in a history class and listen to the white Outside teacher tell you how the Aleuts spread their legs for Alexander Baranov. And none of you has ever had a welder from Tulsa, Oklahoma, call you a nigger. You’re white in a white world, Abel, so don’t talk to me about easy.” Kate turned abruptly and went to the door.

  “Where are you going, Kate?”

  “To the village. To tell Billy Mike what I found out. So he can call Chopper Jim, and they can come up here and recover the bodies.”

  “No you ain’t. Kate?”

  She stepped through the door. She heard him moving behind her, heard him grunt when he got down his rifle, heard the sharp click of metal against metal. Next to her Mutt growled and tensed as if to leap.

  “No, Mutt,” Kate said in a cold, gentle voice. “Come.”

  “Kate, don’t do it, I’m tellin’ you.”

  The dog looked from Abel to Kate and back again. “Come,” Kate repeated.

  Dry-eyed, her spine straight, she took one step, another, a third. Mutt fell in next to her mistress, her puzzled yellow eyes lifted to Kate’s, her plume of a tail curled over her back into a question mark.

  “I’ll shoot, Kate, I swear I will.”

  Kate stumbled, recovered, and walked on, her pulse drumming high up in her throat. If Abel actually was capable of killing her, she’d rather be dead anyway.