by Henry, Sue
The woman who stepped from the patrol car was in her mid-forties, tall and slim. She stood very straight. As she walked across the yard with Becker, Jessie noticed that, though her hair was streaked with gray, she moved with the grace and posture of a dancer or a model. Her calm, dignified greeting was a nod, rather than a spoken hello, and her eyes narrowed slightly as, for a moment, she assessed the musher whom most of Alaska recognized, either by name or from newspaper or television pictures. When she finally spoke, her tone was low and strong.
“I saw you leave the starting gate in Anchorage the year you had such trouble on the Iditarod.”
Jessie watched as the crime lab van followed Becker’s car onto Knik Road and disappeared toward Wasilla. When she turned, she found Bonnie Russell looking not down the drive but into the basement excavation, strain drawing two deep vertical lines in her forehead above the bridge of her nose.
She glanced at Jessie and bit her lip. “You found a body in there?” she asked quietly.
“Yes. An old man. John Timmons thinks it was probably the original homesteader.”
“But he thinks there might be other bodies, or they wouldn’t be doing more digging here. Yes?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe my sister.”
Jessie felt her stomach turn over and her heart rate increase, as a surge of tension swept through her. She did not want to talk to this woman—about her lost sister, Robert Hansen, or the body of the old man.
“Do you think—” Bonnie began.
Jessie broke in. “Look, I’m not ready yet. I don’t want go to town in these clothes, smelling like a dog yard refugee. I’ve been working with my mutts all morning, and I need to wash and change. Why don’t you come in and have some iced tea while I clean up? It won’t take me long. We can hit the road in less than half an hour.”
Hearing herself babbling defensively, she stopped abruptly and there was a brief silence, as they looked at each other, Bonnie with a half smile and a hint of understanding in her eyes.
“I make you uncomfortable,” she said, turning toward the Winnebago. “It’s all right. I make a lot of people uncomfortable. I’d like some tea, thanks. Go ahead and do what you need to do. I don’t mind waiting.”
“I’m sorry,” Jessie stammered. “It’s just…”
“It’s okay,” Bonnie told her, the smile tightening slightly. “I’m used to it.”
When Jessie was ready and came back into the galley of the motor home, she found Bonnie still sitting at the table, staring out the window, her glass of iced tea only half gone. She looked up as Jessie paused in the doorway to button the sleeve of a plaid shirt.
“You lost somebody, didn’t you?” she asked quietly.
Jessie’s head snapped up in surprise. “How could you know that?”
“You get so you can tell. Recognizing another survivor isn’t hard if you know the signals. Want to talk about it?”
“No,” Jessie responded instantly, looking out the window into the branches of a nearby spruce that she didn’t see. “I had a sister too. But it was a long time ago.”
“Longer than twenty-three years, four months, and eighteen days?”
“Yes, but I don’t—”
“That’s all right. We all cope in different ways.” Bonnie rose and laid a hand on Jessie’s arm. “I left you my card.” She nodded to a small white rectangle on the table. “If you ever want to talk—need a friend—call me. Anytime.”
Jessie started to pick up the card and in the process brushed against a paper lying face down that Becker had left behind. It slid from the table to the floor and turned over, exposing the picture of the butterfly necklace Timmons had found within the chest cavity of the skeleton from the basement excavation. She leaned down quickly to retrieve it, but Bonnie Russell snatched the page from under her reaching fingers.
“Oh, God,” Bonnie breathed. Jessie straightened to see that all the color had left her face. She collapsed onto the bench where she had been sitting, pale enough to faint, and stared at the photograph of the necklace. She had it clenched in a hand that shook so much the paper rattled against the edge of the table.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered again. “Where did you get this? It’s my sister’s!” Bonnie added, more strongly. “I gave it to her, so I should know. Where did you get it? Tell me.”
The drive to Palmer seemed long and silent. Jessie was not sorry to leave Bonnie Russell at her car and go back to the veterinarian, who examined Bliss while they discussed the impending birth of the puppies. She was glad to have something else to fill her mind—anything else.
Jessie soon had another subject for speculation, however, for she arrived home to find another floral offering on the front step of the motor home: exactly like the first, with no indication of the identity of the sender. It gave her such an odd feeling that she stood staring at it blankly for a moment, before picking it up to carry inside. It was identical to the rose that had been delivered two days earlier and was now in full bloom, had even dropped a petal onto the dinette table.
Who the hell was sending these things? she wondered, suddenly feeling a lump of uneasiness in her stomach. The flower reminded her of other items, less attractive but no less anonymous, that had arrived the previous year, terrifying gifts and communications from a stalker. Alex had been there then to investigate and finally identify the perpetrator. Now she was alone and probably more vulnerable, though she knew that law enforcement friends were as close as the telephone.
Determined not to let the floral tributes unsettle her further, or to think anymore about Bonnie Russell or the old feelings of loss she had unexpectedly raised in Jessie, she securely locked the doors and went about her usual evening activities. But she closed the blinds so no one could look in and made sure the Smith & Wesson .44 pistol that she usually carried on the trail with her dogs was loaded and close at hand.
Still, it took her a long time to go to sleep. Every small sound seemed magnified and unfamiliar. By defining the things she didn’t want to consider she had given them significance, and each time she refused to recognize them they slipped back into her mind like a song she was sick and tired of hearing. It kept her awake and made her angry.
She couldn’t help wondering: If the necklace had been found with one body on her property, could another—Bonnie Russell’s sister—actually be buried somewhere nearby as well? I will not go there, she told herself, and made a new list of things to think about instead.
When she finally drifted off, she was mentally revisiting each and every community along the highway route from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to Anchorage, Alaska, in the order she had seen them on her trip in the Winnebago and declining to analyze the noises outside, recognizable or not.
There were a few that were not.
10
“THIS IS A NEW BODY, NOT ONE OF HANSEN’S,” TIMMONS observed of the floater the boys had found under the bridge. The lab assistants had bagged the woman and were loading her into the back of the crime lab van. “Be lucky to find bones of his—like the ones in Jessie’s basement. Whoever this is, she didn’t drown. There won’t be water in the lungs. She was shot in the back.”
Becker, standing next to the wheelchair, nodded. “Must have washed out somewhere upstream. We’ll have to get some people to see if they can discover where, but if the flow was high enough to wash her free, the site will still be under water.”
“True. And if that’s the case, she couldn’t have been buried very deep, if at all. May have just been left on the surface. Either would mean she was left this spring—or possibly earlier. Looks like the body’s been frozen, so it may have been last fall. Depends on where she came from upriver. I’ll let you know, when I’ve had a look at it.”
“You don’t suppose…” Becker frowned, speculation making him uneasy.
“That someone’s trying to lay one on Hansen?” Timmons shook his head and shrugged. “Don’t think so, though whoever killed her may have thought that might be a confusing
factor. Hansen’s still locked up tight in Seward and will be—no parole. Besides, one body does not make a serial killer. That’s old news, Phil, and just leaps to mind because she was in this particular area. Soon as we figure out who she is, we’ll probably be able to guess who killed her. Husband, boyfriend—you know.”
“Yeah. Well, sure.”
Still, as a breeze came up and he settled his western hat more securely, the thought bothered Becker.
No one in law enforcement liked working the Knik River area. Having a new body found there brought horror back, for the women Hansen had murdered and dumped still troubled the men who had searched for them, some of whom were consumed with the knowledge that somewhere out there were several they had never been able to find.
It haunted the families of the missing as well. One or two kept coming back over the years to walk the accessible riverbanks and those beyond the end of the road, looking, always looking, trying to locate some trace of a body—something to give them closure—something to bury. One mother refused to believe that her daughter had been one of Hansen’s victims at all, preferring to hope she was suffering from amnesia and would someday come home.
Bonnie Russell, the woman he had asked Jessie to drive back to Palmer, was not like that. She was certain Robert Hansen had killed her sister, Brenda, though he had not identified her picture or admitted remembering her name. If he had killed her, he seemed to have forgotten where he left her body or, for some sick reason, had refused to reveal it. After leading law enforcement officers on a helicopter search and gleefully showing them the burial places of a few of his victims—a process that excited him and sickened them—Hansen had refused to answer any more questions or reveal any more sites.
Anchorage police officers and Alaska State Troopers all knew Bonnie, for she had stayed in Anchorage and kept in touch, persistently and politely reminding them by her presence that her sister was still missing. Spring and fall, her car was familiar to people who lived along the old Knik River Road, parked at times in some pull-off when there was no snow cover and the water was low. A tall, solitary figure in a long dark coat, she would periodically be seen striding slowly across the flats, examining each possible burial site along a river drainage where sandbars shifted with the annual flood. To Becker, who had spotted her now and then, she seemed more haunting in her singular search than her sister, Brenda, who still lay hidden, her body abandoned and alone.
With a shudder, he returned to his car and headed across the bridge to his office in Palmer. Dark clouds were rolling over Pioneer Peak to the south, and it looked like rain.
A wind came up in the night, howling through the trees with enough force to send tremors through the motor home and wake Jessie from an uneasy sleep that had been difficult to achieve. She could hear rain rattling on the roof like small thunder. Pulling an extra pillow over her head, she tried to shut out the sounds, failed, and finally sat up, listening to a spruce branch scrape against the wall outside.
An empty food pan rattled across the yard and hit the side of a dog box with a clang that drew a gruff woof or two from its occupant, barely audible in the roar of the wind. A dead branch fell from some tree and flew through the air to thump onto the roof of the Winnebago.
Jessie remembered waking to a thunderstorm in a Canadian campground the preceding month, when she had gone south to drive the rig up the Alaska Highway for Vic Prentice. The night had been full of crashes, vivid flashes of lightning that split the sky, rain that pounded on the roof and ground outside, and the smell of ozone. Such storms are rare to South Central Alaska, and though she had delighted in that one, this night’s gusty cacophony was unwelcome. She had wanted the escape of sleep to stem the memories that crept insidiously into her mind. The wind and rain seemed a conspiracy of nature to thwart her.
Disgruntled and resentful, she swung her feet out of the warm bed onto the cool floor and padded into the galley, turning on the light over the stove as she passed. Switching on her CD and tape player, she searched her collection for something to drown out the voice of the wind, as well as the one in her head. Her hand, moving over the titles, hovered over an old James Taylor tape she had not played for a long time—hesitated, moved on, stopped, then returned to take the tape out of its plastic case and put it into the player. Turning up the sound, she put the kettle on for a cup of tea and sat down at the table to wait for it to boil.
It was a mistake, wasn’t it? This particular music was always a minefield of anguish. Jessie knew and played it anyway—remembering that someone had once said that if you make a painful thing hurt as much as it can, get it over with, then you know you can stand anything. Believing that was true, she sat very still till the second cut on the album, “Song for You Far Away,” began, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.
As Taylor sang the haunting lyrics, the anticipated agony was immediate; the same shock of emotional identification she had felt the first time she heard it. She was twelve years old and it was all there again—the confusion and isolation, the pain, and the loss. Not just the loss of the sweet baby sister, who had disappeared without a trace, but the parents whose attention had been obsessively focused on finding her, leaving Jessie with the guilt of remaining and of being alive, when her sister wasn’t.
“I had a sister…a long time ago,” she remembered saying to Bonnie Russell that afternoon.
I had a sister.
The pain that swept through her chest and throat was physical and intense, born of tension that curled her body in on itself until she was huddled, arms hugging her body, hands over her mouth, eyes tight shut.
Stop it! she told herself. You can deal with this. You don’t need anyone.
Another wave of grief and old familiar pain.
It wasn’t my…it wasn’t my…fault. I know they loved her best, but it wasn’t…
The kettle screamed from the stove and the song ended.
Enough! I’m not going back there now.
Slowly, half blinded and emotionally drained, Jessie got up, switched off the gas under the kettle, and replaced James Taylor with Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”—loud enough to drown most of the storm’s turmoil, inside and out.
The wind had stopped, but rain still drizzled next morning when Jessie woke up late, still tired. Her throat felt thick and scratchy, and she ached all over. Probably catching a cold, she thought, and decided to take the morning off, glad there wasn’t construction work waiting for her. Before the concrete foundations dried, maybe she could get rid of this infection by sleeping it off; at least she could rest and stay warm. She went out in boots and a raincoat to feed and water her dogs, then made herself a light breakfast and a cup of hot tea with honey and lemon. She was about to settle at the table with the pile of information from the city offices that she had collected two days before, when there was a light knock on the door.
Opening it, she found Bonnie Russell standing outside, her long, dark coat shiny with rain.
“I’m sorry to bother you again,” Bonnie apologized. “I was hoping to find John Timmons here this morning. But I also thought maybe we could talk.”
“About?”
“I tried to call Timmons, but he wasn’t in, so I wanted to ask you if they’ve really searched your property for another burial,” Bonnie told her. “I have to know if she’s here somewhere.”
“Your sister.” Jessie wanted less than anything she could think of to confront this particular topic, but how could she discourage the woman without seeming emotionally callous and lacking in sympathy?
“Yes.”
“They’re looking. Something came up yesterday and they had to leave, but Timmons said they’d be back soon to finish. Shall I tell them to let you know?”
“Would you?” Bonnie’s tense voice held a hint of pleading.
“Of course.”
Wind whipping around the motor home blew rain into Jessie’s face. She sneezed as she wiped it off. “Sorry. I’m catching a cold. John hasn’t been here si
nce yesterday.”
Disappointment and resignation showed in Bonnie’s eyes.
“Well, I can see it’s not a good time. If he shows up, just tell him I was here.”
“Sure,” Jessie agreed. She felt pressured to invite the other woman in, but wavered, not wanting to repeat her emotional session in the night with James Taylor. “I’m just not up to conversation at the moment, okay?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m headed up the river anyway.”
“Why?” Jessie asked, then belatedly chastised herself for the question, knowing that Bonnie’s sister might be hidden there.
“Oh, I like to walk there sometimes.” The answer came in a thin voice as Bonnie turned back toward the car she had parked in the drive. “Thanks.”
As Jessie stood in the door, watching her move away, a sudden wave of compassion overcame her.
“Bonnie,” she called impulsively.
The woman turned.
“Come on in, if you don’t mind risking a few germs.”
Bonnie came in. She hung her coat on a hook beside the door, accepted Jessie’s offer of tea, and stood looking down at the pile of papers on the table.
“What are you doing?” Bonnie asked.
“Trying to find out who owned this property from the time it was homesteaded,” Jessie told her. “I want to find out who the old man was—the body I found in the basement excavation.”
Handing Bonnie a steaming cup, she sat down at the table and waved the other woman to the bench on the other side.
“Somebody loves you twice,” Bonnie commented as she sat down, meaning the roses that had been pushed to the back of the table to accommodate the papers.
“Yeah, maybe. I’d like to know who.”
“Where did you get all this information?”
“At the assessor’s office in Palmer.”
Spreading out two large maps, one labeled OCCUPANCY OF LAND OWNERSHIP, MATANUSKA VALLEY, ALASKA, JUNE 1955, and another from 1936 by the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corporation that showed the location of tracts and roads, Jessie explained how they compared to a copy of a much older map with only a few of the early homesteads in the area roughly sketched in.