by Неизвестный
When she broke through the trees, she was on the high bluff down river a short ways from Ben’s cabin. The plane was farther up; it’d stopped where the snow machine trail climbed the bank and took off into the woods up to the clearing. Two people were fitting a covering over the engine cowling. One was wearing a blue parka that looked like a uniform. A state trooper, she was certain, but the plane wasn’t marked. The other’s parka looked normal, but when his hood fell back, as he was stretching a bungee from the engine cover to a wing strut, Kris saw a pink circle of scalp.
Barrett.
He must have found Lambale; he must know she’d killed him.
After they’d gotten the engine covering on, they clambered up the bank and disappeared into the woods. Neither had snowshoes. Would they be able to track her? She looked back at her footprints in the snow. Her prints were all around the cabin; it’d take them a while to find the fresh ones heading out from behind the tool shed.
How long could they let the engine cool before it wouldn’t start in the cold?
She heard a shout. Through the trees, the cabin was less than a hundred yards away. The shout came again, indistinct, but it sounded like “Kris.” They shouted together the third time and she heard her name clearly. Kris crept along the top of the bank, ready to duck into the woods if they appeared again on the path to the plane. The bluff lowered and flattened out as it approached the opening in the trees through which the cabin looked down the river. She could hear a voice talking now. It was Barrett’s. He shouted again.
“Kris, I just want to talk to you.”
They came all the way out here to talk to her?
A pistol fired; she jumped. Assholes. A gun wasn’t going to bring her in. It fired again and then was silent. Kris waited, hunched in the snow, balling her hands in her mittens and wiggling her toes; she’d have to get inside soon.
It was quiet. They were probably in the cabin warming up and going through her stuff. She dug the snow out from under a tree and squatted in the hole fastening her eyes on her trail behind her. If they tracked her, she wanted to see them coming.
The sun had set and the sky had become a bluish-gray when she heard their voices again. The sounds vanished into the woods and Kris watched the point where the trail came out onto the river. They appeared, walking awkwardly, trying to step in the foot holes they’d made going up. Kris was close enough now to see their breaths fog the air. The blue parka took off the engine cover while Barrett rooted around inside the plane. He dumped a red rubber bag into the snow, jumped down after it, and dragged it up the path a ways. The two shook mittened hands and the blue parka got in and started the engine. The prop kicked once or twice before the engine caught and it accelerated into a blur.
“No,” she said out loud. The plane skidded around in a tight arc, accelerated and raced down river; in seconds it lifted into the air and the noise of its prop faded quickly into the arctic silence. Barrett hefted the red bag onto his shoulder and climbed back up the bank into the woods.
Two minutes later she heard the cabin door close behind him.
__________
Justin took a late lunch. He marked himself out on the staff board, scribbling in 3:30 for the time he expected to be back. Unless someone’s computer blew up, no one would miss him for a couple of hours. He stopped on the loading dock to zipper his jacket and squint through the rain at the flanks of Mount Juneau. The snow line was still below the clouds, about fifteen hundred feet: low enough to be adding snow at Eaglecrest, but he didn’t think it’d add enough to open the ski area before Thanksgiving.
He jumped off the loading dock and headed up Main Street to Chicken Ridge. Justin had gone up to Eaglecrest the day before, Sunday, hoping to blow the crud out of his head that had been plugging it since Barrett had forced him to tell what he and Kris had found at Vern’s shack. The last few days had been rough. He’d alternated between humiliation and self-recrimination for caving into Barrett so quickly, anger at Kris for not telling Barrett herself, and hurt that she’d lied to him and taken off to Fairbanks without saying good-bye. The whole sour mess had stewed in his head and he’d spent Thursday and Friday staring uselessly at his computer during the day and twisting in his sheets at night.
Saturday, when he went into the office to try and catch up, was no better and he realized that he needed to beat himself sore in order to clear his mind. So yesterday he’d loaded his gear into the car and driven up to the ski lodge. He fitted skins onto his skis and hiked up to the ridges. Fat, wet flakes were falling; the snow on the ground was thick and pasty; mashed potatoes would have been easier to ski, and he stuck to the steeper runs in the west bowl to have enough momentum to crank his boards through the turns. The exercise helped. By the time he came down, sloppy wet, cold, and tired, an intracranial truce had been called and the demons in his head were stilled. Barrett, he knew, was just doing his job and, realistically, Justin should’ve told him everything from the start. Kris, whatever her feelings toward him might be, was chasing things more important to her—Evie and Corvus—than he was. Christ, he thought when he’d reached the end of the skiable snow and bent to release his bindings, her mother had just been murdered. What did Kübler-Ross figure? Eighteen months for the grieving process. It hadn’t been two weeks yet; romance wouldn’t be on her agenda for a while.
At the top of Chicken Ridge, he searched Seventh until he found his Subaru parked with the driver’s side against the guardrail. He opened the door, knocking it against the metal, and squeezed in, catching a pocket zipper on the door. He turned the car around in the street and drove down Goldbelt, letting it coast the hills and around the curves until it slowed where Twelfth leveled out; he touched the gas pedal to keep it moving. At Glacier Avenue he turned right, splashing through puddles backed up against the curb, and a few minutes later pulled off onto the shoulder and killed the engine.
Below him sat the AWARE shelter, a blocky concrete structure that looked like an army barracks. To the left was Lambale’s new wing; rain had eroded gullies in the muddy hillside where the contractor had stripped away the grass.
Kris.
An embarrassed breath escaped through his teeth, fogging the windshield. He’d thought the fight with Vern had brought them closer together. And when she’d shown up at his apartment Monday and seemed so comfortable with him, he’d been certain.
But nope; he was just the best available patsy. Someone to use for an alibi.
Enough, he said to himself, irritated. Let’s not get started again.
Justin shivered; the car was cooling down. He wiped the fog off his side window and peered again through the rain at the AWARE building, its hard angles warped by the water running down the window. Yesterday evening, after warming up in the shower and eating dinner, he flow-charted everything he knew about Evie’s murder on old report layouts—large sheets of graph paper he used when he was designing a new system. It didn’t take long before the sheets were covered with an unintelligible spaghetti of different possibilities as he drew lines between different people, events, and evidence. Late in the evening, tired and frustrated, he pushed them away. Sherlock Holmes had said that speculating without data was like racing an engine without its transmission engaged: it produces lots of heat and noise but no forward progress.
But the charts had identified the key piece of data that he lacked: The route Kris’s letter to Evie had taken after it arrived at AWARE. Justin was convinced that it was too coincidental for Evie’s murder to have happened the day before Kris showed up in Juneau; the day before Vern tried to kill Kris. “There are no coincidences in life,” Ross Macdonald had once said. “The web of causality is almost infinitely exact.”
Clearly someone wanted them both dead. Justin was now convinced it was Vern. It wasn’t Ben because Ben hadn’t even known Kris was alive, much less that she was coming back to Alaska. Vern, however, since he’d read Kris’s letter to Evie, had known.
So, the question was: How did Vern get Kris’s letter? If Jus
tin could answer that, he might be able to tell if someone other than Vern had read it; if not, then Vern was the murderer because the coincidence of Evie’s murder and Kris’s arrival and his attack on her happening all in the same twenty-four period was simply too great otherwise.
Justin opened the door. Holding the hood of his raincoat by its visor to keep it from blowing off, he splashed through the water coursing in chevrons down the drive. He was nervous; there didn’t seem to be a tactful way to ask how the letter had gotten into Vern’s hands without sounding like he was accusing them of violating feminism PC by giving a letter addressed to a woman to a man.
The front door was locked. He pushed the bell and waited. It opened and a young woman, in her early twenties, with dusty blonde hair and a colony of studs in one ear, looked out at him expectantly. He gave her his name and asked to see a manager or supervisor. She let him in and he stood inside the door, letting himself drip while she went to a desk and spoke into the phone. After she hung up, she told him that someone would be in in a minute and then, looking at the puddles around his feet, made an unappreciative comment about the weather, which, in November, is the only kind of comment one can make about it.
A side door opened and a woman of medium height, blue eyes, and gray hair pulled back into a ponytail walked toward him with a questioning look. “Margie Shaker.” She held out her hand.
“Justin Palmer,” he said. “I’m a friend of Kris Gabriel’s whose mother, Evie Gabriel, stayed here a couple times in the last few months.” Justin had decided to be straightforward, telling her exactly what he wanted. AWARE was certain to have confidentiality rules they wouldn’t break without a good reason.
Shaker’s face didn’t register Evie’s name. Don’t ask, don’t tell.
“AWARE may have a piece of information that might point to Evie’s killer,” he said. Shaker’s eyes became guarded and Justin quickly told her about the letter and how he’d found it.
“How do you know Evie didn’t pick it up here and show it to Vern?” she asked.
“Because there was no reason to hide the letter except to hide it from her,” he said. “And I’m certain she didn’t know about the hiding place under the floor because Vern was sure to keep control of the money—he was hiding it from her too.”
Shaker nodded; Justin figured she knew well enough about men controlling money. He watched her carefully, gauging her reaction.
“I would feel more comfortable talking to the police about this,” she said.
“I understand. I called Barrett this morning, but he’s in Fairbanks.”
“Maybe it’s not important then.”
“No, it’s important,” Justin said, too emphatically. “He just didn’t think of it.”
Shaker’s expression grew impatient.
“I could call him in Fairbanks and if he thought—” Justin started.
“I would need to talk to my board,” Shaker said.
Liability. Or just an ugly mess if the letter had gotten out of their hands and into Vern’s in the wrong way. “Fine. I’ll call him and let him get in touch with you if he thinks it’s an issue.” Justin shook her hand and then fumbled with his zipper and hood, while Shaker left through the door she’d entered. Once his hood was on, he walked over to the desk and, reaching out his hand, said to the woman with the studs, “I didn’t get your name.”
“Kelly Lamoreau.”
“French-Irish?” he asked.
“French-Canadian. No Irish.” She smiled back.
He waited until seven-thirty that evening before calling both Lamoreaus in the phone book. He got Kelly’s mother, who gave him Kelly’s phone number, which was listed in her housemate’s name.
“Kelly,” he said when he recognized her hello. “Justin Palmer.”
“I knew you would call,” she said right away.
“I wasn’t too subtle?” Justin asked.
“No,” Kelly said.
“I understand that Ms. Shaker has to be cautious, but it’s not really a big deal for the shelter,” Justin started.
“It’s not me you want to talk to,” Kelly interrupted, trying to brush him off. “It’s Sheridy Bunker. She was volunteering when Ms. Gabriel was in the shelter. She’s got a paying job now and doesn’t come in anymore.”
“Do you–”
“Yes,” and she gave him the number.
“Thanks.”
“It’s OK.”
Justin punched in Sheridy’s number. When she answered, he told her what it was he wanted without mentioning Shaker’s worries.
“I gave the letter to Mrs. Lambale,” she said.
“Alvilde Lambale?” Justin was startled.
“She asked me to call her when it came so she could take it to Ms. Gabriel, who’d left the shelter by then and was living somewhere out in the Valley.”
“You can do that? Give a letter to some else?” Justin asked.
“Not usually. But the Lambales were like gods there. And they were pretty good friends with her.”
“Friends with Evie?” Justin asked, surprised again.
“Oh yeah. They didn’t make it too obvious and Mrs. Lambale was a little stand-offish, but that’s just her.”
Justin squinted at the blank screen of his TV, thinking. Friends? Of course, the blackmail had to be something sexual. Christ, what a slime: a battered woman.
“So you gave it to Mrs. Lambale?” he asked.
“Yes, she picked it up the day it arrived.”
“Do you remember about when that was?”
The line was silent. “I’d guess the third week of October,” she said slowly.
That made sense. Evie had left the shelter in September and Kris had said that Vern had gotten out of Lemon Creek Prison in early October.
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” Justin hung up and slumped back on the couch, quietly triumphant. Alvilde must have handed the letter to Vern when she dropped it off, or he pulled it out of Evie’s hands after Alvilde left. No one else knew Kris was coming to town, so Vern murdered Evie.
Assuming, he caught himself, assuming that the timing of Evie’s murder and the attack on Kris was not some ungodly coincidence.
__________
Kris was in trouble.
She rose and hiked back through the snow to the snow machine trail and re-climbed the hill. It put some warmth back into her, but the bite of the air was more menacing now. Barrett had her trapped. She could not survive the night outside. By morning, she’d be frozen as solid as her grandfather had been when he’d rolled his truck and couldn’t break out.
The sun had set and the light was fading; in another hour it would be dark. It wasn’t likely that Barrett would come looking for her. All he had to do was wait and she’d come to him. She had nothing. Not a candy bar; not a match. The lighters that Ringer had given her were heaped on the counter next to her oatmeal and powdered milk.
Damn, it was cold.
She walked down the hill, turned around, walked back up it. She did it again. By the time the last light had faded from the sky, she’d packed hard steps into the snow and her feet could find them in the dark. The movement didn’t warm her, but it slowed the cold creeping into her hands and feet. The tip of her nose stung like it was being squeezed by pliers. When she breathed through her mouth, the air burned her lungs. When the pain of breathing became too much, she turned her head sideways in the hood and breathed into the padded fabric. The warm air she exhaled blew back against her face, but when she turned again to look out of the hood’s tiny opening, the moisture that had condensed on her face evaporated, freezing her skin.
She walked up and down. The familiar knot of hunger twisted her stomach. How many nights had she gone to sleep with it? Not for years now. Not since she’d started working. Manuel, jeez, how are you all doing? Have you got the dispatching figured out? What day is it—it must be getting close to Thanksgiving. I’ll be back soon. A few more days is all.
Up and down. She wobbled, fell to her knees, her mind fo
gged; when it cleared she dragged herself to her feet without pulling her hands from her pockets. Her snow steps had worn away and now she climbed up and down on rocks and frozen soil.
God, she was cold.
She was shivering now. It’s when you stop shivering that you worry: Ringer again. She clamped her jaw to still it and the muscles on the side of her face twitched and jumped until they broke it free and her teeth clacked uncontrollably. Now, every time she re-climbed the hill, she fell to her knees. Sometimes her feet shot out from under her and she pitched forward, landing on a shoulder she twisted around to take her fall.
At some point in the night, she knew she couldn’t go on. She fell and did not get up, lying in the snow and shivering beyond control. How many hours until daylight? Five? Ten? And then what? It wouldn’t warm. Barrett wouldn’t leave. She’d still be cold. She rolled, labored to her feet, which were senseless in her boots, and staggered down the hill back to the cabin. The window was dark and nothing moved inside when she peeked in. Barely felt, the inner warmth of the cabin leaked through the glass. She pressed against it, unwilling to leave the frail heat. Unwilling to give in to Barrett.
She heard the single snap of a pocket of sap exploding in the wood stove and when she ignored the cold and focused, she could smell the smoke coming out of the stovepipe.
Smoke.
Moving quietly around the cabin, her jaw clenched, she found the stovepipe where it emerged horizontally from the logs of the back wall. It stuck out more than a foot before it turned upwards again, ending two or three feet above the roof. Wires, looped around the pipe and tacked into the wall, supported it. Kris grasped the vertical section above the elbow and gently tried to turn it. Nothing happened. She leaned her weight into it and gently pushed and pulled until the joint began to loosen. Patiently, and desperately quiet, she worked it back and forth, hoping the sound wouldn’t carry down the pipe and resonate in the cabin. When it was fully loose, she lifted as she twisted. The pipe edges, rusted with age, rasped as she pulled them apart. Every few turns, she stopped and listened, but heard no sound from Barrett.