She laughed and said, “You have, Abel, all my life.”
“Get out of here,” he told her, affronted.
“I have to,” she said, gulping down the rest of her coffee and rising to her feet in one movement. “I’m going to stop in to see Chick and Mandy on my way, and I’d better leave now if I want to make it into Niniltna this afternoon.”
“Chick’s in jail.”
Kate paused in the act of zipping her jumpsuit. “What for this time?”
“I ain’t saying nothing.” Abel cleared his throat and shrugged. “But I heard tell it was more of the usual. Disturbing the peace. Drunk and disorderly. Resisting—”
“—arrest. Assaulting a police officer,” Kate said, and sighed. “Where?”
“Anchorage.”
“I thought Mandy had Chick restricted to the homestead this winter.”
Abel opened his front door and looked lazily at the sky, eyes narrowed, basking in the weak sunlight. “Demetri Totemoff found her brand spanking new snow machine run into a ditch close to Tana.”
“Hoo boy.”
“Yup. So far, she’s refused to make his bail.”
· · ·
Mandy Baker’s homestead was large and sprawling and cluttered and looked unkempt even beneath the saving grace of winter snow. It was surrounded by birch trees, and to almost every narrow trunk was tethered a dog, and every dog was taking notice as Kate came down the trail. They whined, yelped, barked, yipped, growled, snarled and howled, hurling themselves against their harnesses, lips curled back from their teeth. Like Abel’s pack they were all huskies or husky mix, and their tails curled over their rumps like so many vigorously waving ostrich plumes.
Kate pulled up and stopped the Super Jag five feet from one large, white, eager specimen, who promptly flung himself into a frenzy of slavering warning. Mutt jumped down from behind Kate, sniffed the air in his general direction, yawned, turned around three times, lay down and curled herself into a ball with her nose beneath her tail, and to all appearances fell asleep, inches from his snapping teeth. Affronted by this display of sangfroid, the huge canine hurled himself against the length of his chain and yapped hysterical threats of bloodletting and slaughter. Kate stepped around Mutt and cuffed him lightly on the jaw, whereupon he dropped to his belly as if felled by an axe handle and groveled ingratiatingly. “Calm down, Hardhead. Anybody’d think you hadn’t seen a friend come down that path in years.”
“He hasn’t,” a calm voice said behind her, and with a grin Kate turned.
“What’s with him? You’d think I was a total stranger.”
“Where do you think he got his name? He’s not bright enough to recognize a friend,” Mandy said dryly. “He’s just barely bright enough to pull a sled.”
“Not lead dog material,” Kate suggested.
“Not hardly.”
“You make up your mind to run in the Beargrease next month?”
Mandy shook her head. “I’m saving them up for the Iditarod in March.”
Kate grinned. “Butcher’s going to love to hear that.”
Mandy grinned back. “Ah, she’s not greedy, she’s won four times. She’ll figure it’s my turn. Swensen might be a little annoyed, though. You know how he feels about women mushers.”
She was a tall, lean, rangy woman, dressed in flannel shirt, jeans and boots that laced up to her knees. She had thick, straight, brown hair cut squarely around a face with big, strong bones, a structure that reminded Kate of a well-built cabin—sturdy, weatherproof and able to stand up to the worst winter storm. Her gray eyes were deeply set and shrewd and enveloped in wrinkles. The wrinkles were deceptive; Mandy was two years Kate’s junior, and the wrinkles came from years of staring into an arctic sun low on the horizon, from the back of a dogsled on a long, cold trail that led everywhere but home.
“Come on in, Kate,” she said. “I’m cleaning lamp chimneys. You can help.”
“Oh goody,” Kate said, following her inside.
“I’m almost done,” Mandy assured her. “This is one job I never get a jump on. In winter it’s dark all day and I keep the lamps lit from the time I get up until the time I go to bed. In summer the sun shines around the clock and it gets so bright I have to pull the shades and light the lamps anyway. I can’t win.” Without changing her inflection Mandy added, “When we’re done in here, you can help me move Chick’s stuff back into the cabin.”
“Oh, Mandy.”
The younger woman shook her head firmly. “He knows the rules. Sober, he sleeps with me. Drunk, he’s out in the cold.”
“Doesn’t matter where his stuff is here when he’s in jail in Anchorage,” Kate observed in a mild voice. “How long has he been in now?”
“Fifteen days.”
“When are you going to make bail for the poor bastard?”
“I’ve got to get his stuff moved first.”
“Oh,” Kate said, and added, “in that case I’ll help you move it.”
They worked in companionable silence for the twenty minutes it took to shift Chick’s belongings, which consisted of a number of beer boxes filled with clothes that smelled strongly of dog, a battered transistor radio and a half-empty box of batteries, a grimy deck of playing cards, a set of carving tools, a walrus tusk with a cribbage board carved on one side, and every book ever written by Louis L’Amour. Afterward they relaxed over coffee and sandwiches in the lodge kitchen, a large, smoke-stained room in which it paid to be short, as pots and pans hung from the ceiling the way stalactites hung from the roof of a cave. “He wrecked my new snow machine, did you hear?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean really wrecked it, Kate. It looks like he bounced it off every tree between here and Tana. The damn thing took most of my purse from last year’s Yukon Quest.” She chewed her last bite of sandwich and swallowed. “What really pisses me off is that he insists he didn’t do it.”
“Didn’t get drunk and go to Anchorage?” Kate asked.
“No, he admits to that.”
“And a good thing, too.”
“Mmm. No, he says he didn’t take the Polaris.”
“What does he say happened?”
“That he hitched a ride with a couple of hunters in a Snowcat to Ahtna and took the train in from there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Gray eyes surveyed Kate shrewdly. “What brings you down the road today?”
Kate looked down into her coffee cup. “Jack Morgan showed up yesterday morning, wanting me to look for a ranger who’s been missing in the Park for six weeks.” Mandy grunted. “Yeah, I know,” Kate said, “but the kid’s father is a congressman Outside and nudged the FBI. Their local rep knew Jack and he sent Ken Dahl after the kid. Now Ken’s missing, too.”
“Ken Dahl,” Mandy said. “That the blond bombshell of Beacon Hill Dahl?”
“Yeah. Mark Miller’s the ranger’s name. You ever meet him?”
“Little guy, dark, too young, kind of an environmental Jerry Falwell?”
Kate smiled. “I don’t know about the Falwell part, but the rest matches the description. What do you mean, too young? Too young for what?”
“Too young to tell everybody how to run the Park.” Mandy’s laugh was short and humorless. “He testified in favor of developing the Park before that House subcommittee in Niniltna in October.”
“Say anything that might get him killed?”
Mandy shot her a reproachful look. “Come now, Kate. He’s a ranger. He’s been trained not to say much that wouldn’t.”
“Wonderful. What did he say, exactly?”
Mandy sat back in her chair and linked her hands behind her head. “Imagine the scene, if you will. The school gym, and Billy Mike’s got it all tarted up in red, white and blue crepe paper. There’s a long table set up on the stage, and a lectern facing it for the witnesses, and every folding chair in the Park unfolded on our brand new gym floor.”
“Bet Bernie had a few things to say about that.
”
“Bet your ass. So all these Park rats get up and swear on their ancestors how the Park is their home and how improving the railroad grade into a real highway is going to ruin the quality of life for everyone and how the Alaska Railroad kills all those moose every winter and what makes this committee think a new road wouldn’t be a danger to caribou migration, and so on and so on and so on. You get the general idea. Then Miller gets up, this intense little fucker from Outside, and contradicts everything that had been said before and actually has the gall to produce facts and figures, goddam statistics, can you imagine, to back up his theories. Yes, indeedy, he told us all how to run this here Park, like we’d never heard the words ‘game management’ put together in a sentence before.”
Kate gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Mandy, the only game management you’ve ever been involved in is not getting caught when you run out of dog food and go caribou hunting in April. Between you and Abel I’m surprised there’s anything left on four feet inside the Park.”
Mandy grinned and for a moment looked like a little girl with her hand caught in the cookie jar. “Between you and me, so am I, Kate,” she admitted. “Abel and me and the poachers.”
“What poachers?” Kate said.
“Didn’t Abel tell you?” Mandy said. “Couple weeks ago there was a whole hell of a lot of shooting going on up by the old Lost Wife Mine. It was calm that day and sound carried, you know the way it does in winter, and I heard it all. It wasn’t me, and Abel told me it wasn’t him, so…”
Kate said, amused, “He’s got a haunch hanging from his cache right now.”
“That old buzzard,” Mandy said, disgusted. “You should have seen those big old blue eyes. ‘Who me? Shoot game out of season?’ And he thunders off all indignant. I actually felt bad about accusing him.”
“Well,” Kate said fairly, “it looks more the size of a moose haunch than a caribou, I’ll give him that.” She sighed, and said, “As for Miller, I hope you know you’ve just expanded my roster of suspects to include everyone in the Park.”
“Surely not everyone,” Mandy said.
“Give me a for instance.”
“Abel,” Mandy said with a straight face, and they both burst out laughing. When they sobered enough to be able to speak, Mandy said, “Did I tell you I knew Ken Dahl Outside?”
“No,” Kate said, surprised. “In Massachusetts?”
“Uh-huh,” Mandy said, grinning. “His family and mine were very close. In fact, Mother was kind of hoping for an alliance.”
“She wanted you to marry him?”
“Back when she still thought I was going to graduate from Vassar and make my debut in a pink satin dress with a chiffon overskirt. I think she was hoping Ken would marry me, actually,” Mandy said reflectively. “I think she thought he might be able to save me from L. L. Bean, where she and Dad had failed.”
“He never told me. Were you tempted?”
“Nah. I was too involved with Robert Service at the time.”
Kate laughed. “I’d like to meet your mother, Mandy. When are you going to break down and invite your folks up here?”
“Are you kidding? Mother thinks there are still buffalo in Buffalo.”
“They’ve got to be proud of your racing.”
Mandy shrugged. “If it doesn’t happen on the track at Saratoga or offshore at Newport, it doesn’t happen.”
“Oh.”
Later, standing in the doorway, she said, “Kate?”
Kate straddled her machine and looked up. “What?”
“What about Jack?”
The faint smile vanished from Kate’s face. “What about him?”
“Did the temperature around here just drop sharply in the last five seconds?” Mandy wondered aloud. “Maybe I should have said, What about you and Jack?”
“There is no me and Jack.”
“Well, excuse me. I’m always making the mistake of believing what I see with my own eyes.”
“It’s a no go, Mandy,” Kate said. “We don’t agree on anything important.”
“Kate,” Mandy said, “it’s important whether he puts the toilet paper on the roller to roll from the top or the bottom. The rest is ground rules and gravy.”
“Easy for you to say,” Kate grumbled, and fired up the Super Jag.
“Only because it’s true,” Mandy yelled after her.
Three
NINILTNA WAS A VILLAGE of eight hundred inhabitants that doubled in population in the summer when the salmon were running. This made it a metropolis by Alaskan bush standards. Its buildings crouched together on the flat, boggy muskeg at the edge of the Kanuyaq River—the river that served as the drainage ditch to the Park, the river into which all glaciers eventually melted and into which all creeks and streams flowed. It was the river up which the Chinook and sockeye and silver and humpy and dog salmon migrated to lay their eggs and die or to be tangled in set nets and air-freighted to Anchorage, there to be cleaned and frozen and shipped to restaurants and supermarkets half a world away. Usually the fishermen were Aleut and Athabascan and Tlingit Indians who fished with centuries-old squatters’ rights. Occasionally a sports fisherman flew in, fished his limit and turned his catch over to one of half a dozen Native women who would filet it and smoke it, rendering it tough and stringy and delicious. It was said that smoked salmon was not real smoked salmon unless your jaw ached and your house smelled for a minimum of three days afterward.
Travel in Alaska is a matter of ceaseless caveats and cyclic qualifications. Thus the Kanuyaq River was navigable only as far as Niniltna, sixty-five miles upriver from its mouth on Prince William Sound, and then only by flat-bottomed riverboats or skiffs, and then only from the beginning of June until the end of September. By the first of November the river was frozen over; by December it was a crazy quilt of broken bergs. The townspeople crossed freely from bank to bank, and it stayed that way until breakup in March or April or, in years when winter outstayed its welcome, maybe even May.
Twenty, even ten years before, the town had been little more than a collection of shacks and the only building wired for electricity was the school. But in 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. ANCSA settled forty million acres of land and a billion dollars on the six different ethnic groups of Alaska, ostensibly as compensation for the loss of lands historically occupied by their ancestors. The cynical saw it as a bribe to get the tribes to withdraw their objections to the construction of the TransAlaska Pipeline smack down the center of the state and, not coincidentally, all those Alaskan aboriginal hunting grounds.
Since that time, Niniltna’s face had been radically altered. The town still had its percentage of two-by-four tar-paper shacks, heated by stoves made from fifty-five-gallon drums, but the majority of the buildings in Niniltna were now descended from a prefabricated lineage whose embryos were fertilized somewhere outside, usually in Seattle, after which they were shipped by SeaLand to Seward and via the Alaska Railroad to Anchorage. By then full-size modules, they were either trucked down the old railroad bed when the snow melted or barged up the river to Niniltna when the river ice melted in the spring. There they were borne into the full glory of single-story, tin-sided and tin-roofed American dream homes. Any extras were brought in by air, which was why an ordinary single-family dwelling in Niniltna could cost three times the price of a comparable dwelling in San Jose, California.
There isn’t a lot of timber in Alaska outside of the Panhandle, and much of what is left barely gets thick enough through the trunk to use for fuel, let alone to employ in constructing a home. The prefab buildings were instantly identifiable by a uniform pale blue metal siding, and were all connected by a writhing mass of overhead wiring to the town’s generator, in a building that produced an immense cloud of smoke which never completely dispersed in the still, frozen winter air.
There was one grocery store, where you could buy bananas for a dollar a pound and avocados for two dollars each. Both had been airfreighted in twice, once from
Outside, the second time from Anchorage. The school was the only building with two stories, and its gym doubled as city hall, community center and, on occasion, jail. There was a landing just before the bend in the Kanuyaq, a broad sandy stretch where fishermen beached their boats to work on the hulls, stretched their nets for mending and, when the salmon were running, landed their fish. Just beyond this landing, Kate cut the engine of her snow machine and dismounted. She stood on a small rise in front of the beach and looked down on the tumble of buildings. She could have found her way around Niniltna blindfolded, in the dark. Today she could turn her back on it, and did.
Kate’s grandmother’s home, a loose, sprawling edifice which was most certainly not sided with blue tin, stood just yards from the stretch of beach. It had started out a tiny, one-room log cabin, made from anemic little birch and scrub spruce logs chinked with moss and river clay. This cabin had been added on to every ten years or so to encompass the ever larger generations of Moonins and Shugaks, and looked it. Over the rise of riverbank it hunkered down beneath a collection of roofs with differing pitches variously shingled with asphalt, cedar and split logs. It was surrounded by discarded fifty-five-gallon Chevron drums, Blazo boxes, old tires and odd lengths of lumber more precious than gold, which were never thrown away and if stolen could result in charges and countercharges of assault, if not murder.
At her side Mutt looked up at Kate inquiringly, her plumed tail curled up over her rump in a question mark. “Just because you’ve never been afraid of anything in your life doesn’t mean I haven’t been,” Kate admonished her. Mutt cocked her head. “Sit,” Kate said. Mutt squatted obediently, watching as Kate wiped her feet carefully on the doormat, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin and went in. The front door opened into a snow porch, which led directly into the house’s all-purpose room, the kitchen.
Ekaterina Moonin Shugak sat where she’d always sat, in a chair backed up against the wall, between the oil stove and the kitchen table. Her hair was dark and skinned back into a bun. Her eyes were like Kate’s, light brown and impenetrable at will. She had three chins and as many stomachs, and sat with her knees apart, her feet planted firmly on the faded and patched linoleum floor.
A Cold Day for Murder (Kate Shugak #1) Page 4