Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  She pulled herself up with a jerk. No time to let her mind wander. What was keeping the lid shut? She thought about what else was in the apartment. Bed, chairs, end table. They could have piled some furniture on the lid, weighing it down. But they would have slid when she popped the lid, and she hadn’t heard the sound of anything sliding.

  Wait a minute. In the space between the end of the freezer and the wall there had been some lengths of two-by-fours. Left over from the remodel, Tina had said. Of course. Easy enough for someone to slam down the lid and jam one of the two-by-fours between the wall and the lid of the freezer.

  She kicked the lid again. Again a brief, blessed bit of fresh air, again the lid snapped right back down.

  Had they had time to nail the ends down? Things had gotten a little confused there for a bit. Kate had no real recollection of the sounds of a hammer. Maybe there had been nails already in the two-by-four. Convenient.

  Kate was pretty strong, but she might not be strong enough to kick loose a two-by-four.

  What was she strong enough for?

  Her cell phone was in the pocket of her jeans. With more wriggling, yelping, and cursing, she managed to get it out, the whole time mortally afraid she would drop it. It was so hot in the small enclosed space that she was sweating freely, and both she and Mutt were breathing too fast. She braced her butt against the bottom of the freezer and jammed both feet against the freezer lid, cracking it open that fraction of an inch. It was awkward and her muscles strained at the effort because she didn’t have enough room to straighten her legs and lock her knees. The resulting tiny bit of air was more than worth it, though.

  She wedged her arm up to where she could see the face of her phone, and pressed the ON button.

  One bar. Figured. Could have been NO SERVICE, though. She pressed 1.

  By a miracle the phone at the other end rang, and rang again.

  The third ring was interrupted by an angry male in full cry. “Maggie, whoever went in the ditch at this hour can fucking well wait until I’ve had some more sleep!”

  “It’s me,” Kate said.

  “Oh.” A brief pause. “Sorry.”

  “Lots of 911 calls?”

  “You could say that.” She heard him roll over and yawn. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” Kate said. “I’m locked inside a chest freezer.”

  A brief silence. “I beg your pardon?”

  Kate repeated herself, and waited.

  When next he spoke, Jim sounded resigned. “You’re not kidding, are you.”

  “Alas,” Kate said, “no, I am not.” It was getting hot inside the freezer. Next to her, Mutt, hearing the voice of her personal god, whined loudly enough to be heard in Niniltna without benefit of phone.

  “Anybody in there with you?”

  “Just Mutt,” she said.

  “You really aren’t kidding,” he said. “How long have you been in there?”

  “Hard to tell,” Kate said, “things got somewhat confused. Maybe five minutes.”

  “Really,” Jim said. “How is it you are still breathing?”

  “I’ve managed to crack the lid,” Kate said. “As long as my gluteus maximus holds up we’re okay.”

  “Several responses fairly leap to mind.”

  “You may compliment me on my very fine ass when I get home.”

  “Deal. Shall I call Newenham 911? Believe me, I’d enjoy that.”

  “No, I got a plan.”

  “What kind of a plan?”

  “An effective one, I hope. But if I don’t call back in five minutes, send in the marines.”

  She turned off the phone and wriggled around until she could get it back into her pocket. She put her arms around Mutt and pulled her as close as possible. Mutt gave something approaching a squeal. “Hang on, girl,” she said, and started rocking the two of them back and forth. After a couple of rocks she got some momentum going and they started hitting the sides of the freezer hard.

  At first the freezer barely moved, and Kate despaired. Freezers weren’t that heavy, an airtight plastic container and some refrigeration coils, this shouldn’t be that hard.

  She kept it up. The rocking motion gathered its own momentum. Pretty soon, the chest freezer began to rock, too.

  Mutt didn’t fight her but she wasn’t happy, either, and she said so by yipping in Kate’s ear, conveniently located right next to Mutt’s muzzle and making Kate’s head ring most unpleasantly. She held on and kept rocking, working up her very own personal free surface effect, until the two of them were slamming into the sides of the freezer, THUD-thud, THUD-thud, THUD-thud.

  After what seemed like an hour but was probably only sixty seconds, the freezer lifted up just a tiny bit, only to fall back when its back feet hit the wall. But Kate had felt it and she redoubled their efforts, slamming against the side of the freezer harder and harder and harder, walking the freezer across the floor of the apartment, away from the wall a micrometer at a time, until the freezer was far enough away from the wall that the back feet cleared it when their combined weights slammed into the side and it toppled over on its side with a resounding crash.

  Kate and Mutt spilled out between where the open lid of the freezer was propped open against the floor and the freezer itself, and lay prone for some moments, taking in air in great, thankful gulps.

  When she felt like she could make it all the way there, Kate crawled to the pole lamp next to the recliner and turned it on. She took her first close look at the chest freezer. Their rocking had walked it away from the wall a good twelve inches before the bottom back of the freezer had cleared the wall. The Sheetrock on the wall showed multiple horizontal impressions where the freezer had struck.

  “Good thing Tina didn’t make me pay a security deposit,” Kate said, a little light-headed.

  Mutt got to her feet and shook herself all over, rearranging every hair back into its proper place. She looked outraged and indignant, and she looked at Kate as if to say, Well?

  “Thank god there was linoleum on the floor,” Kate told her. “We’d never have done it on wall-to-wall carpeting.”

  Mutt did not feel that this was an adequate response.

  Kate called Jim. “We’re out, we’re okay, stand down.”

  She hung up and surveyed the mess, her right shoulder and hip and knee warning of spectacular bruises on their way.

  She investigated and sure enough found a length of two-by-four on the floor between the wall and the freezer. No nails, but there was a corresponding dimple on the lid of the freezer, and another on the wall in back of the freezer, enough to keep the two-by-four from skidding. Or maybe she just hadn’t kicked hard enough.

  “We haven’t even been here twenty-four hours,” she said. “That’s a record for inciting someone into assault and battery.”

  The once spare, neat apartment now looked like a disaster area. The bed had been ripped apart, the mattress lying catawampus, half on the box springs, half on the floor. All the cabinets in the little kitchen stood open, everything in them scattered across the counter, the table, and the floor. Kate’s bag had been opened and dumped, and her belongings were everywhere.

  “Even for us,” Kate said a little plaintively.

  For a toss of this magnitude, taking a knife to the mattress and the recliner would have been at minimum the logical next step, but perhaps her walking in the door had interrupted them.

  She looked at her phone. It was a little after 4 A.M. At a rough estimate, she and Mutt had been in the freezer for ten, fifteen minutes at most.

  She looked around the apartment. This had taken longer than fifteen minutes. Which meant she and Mutt had walked in in mid-rampage, and that said rampagers had fled immediately after said rampagers’ attempt to turn Kate and Mutt into next winter’s entrées.

  She heard a whine and looked around. Mutt was standing at the door, her nose pressed up against the crack. “They’re long gone, girl,” she said, but she opened the door. Mutt was out of it like
an arrow, shooting down the stairs and quartering the area around the garage. If there was any scent to be picked up, at least Mutt would recognize it again. Kate propped the door open a crack against Mutt’s return and started cleaning up.

  It was well past five when she was done, and in the process she had had some interesting thoughts, although it was early days for any conclusions.

  She hadn’t been in town for twenty-four hours. It seemed unlikely that she’d been made in that short a time. Not impossible, but unlikely. She—and Mutt—were fairly well known in other parts of Alaska.

  There were three people in town who did know who she was. Liam Campbell. Jo Dunaway. Bill Billington.

  Campbell and Billington she discounted immediately. Dunaway took a little longer, but for the life of her she couldn’t imagine Dunaway hiring a couple of toughs even to satisfy her reporter’s curiosity as to what Kate was doing in town.

  If all three of them were out, then either someone else had made her, or …

  She paused in the act of sweeping creamer into the dustpan.

  Or this toss had nothing to do with her.

  If it wasn’t about her, who was it about?

  She boiled water and made some chamomile tea sweetened with honey, both found in the cupboard. The tea tasted just about as bad as one might expect of herbs steeped in hot water. She wondered if Newenham had a coffee roaster, or an espresso stand, or at the very least imported Kaladi Brothers from Anchorage. It was probably too much to hope for Captain’s Coffee from Homer. She added more honey on the theory that it couldn’t make it any worse and sat down in the recliner. She put up the footrest. She thought she deserved it.

  This apartment, according to Tina Grant, had been built for the oldest daughter of the house, Irene, the woman in the photograph on the hall table. The soldier killed in action in Afghanistan. What was it Tina had said? We had it finished off so my daughter would have a little privacy when she came home on leave.

  Had Irene ever stayed in this apartment? Kate thought not. It had seemed such a sterile place when she first walked in—no plants, no photos, no personal possessions of any kind. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find the toilet seat sealed with a paper band.

  But the garage itself had been around for a while, longer than that model of the antebellum South next door, certainly. Someone else could have hidden something here, and perhaps have failed to recover it before the space was remodeled into the apartment.

  Kate put down her tea and spent the next half hour going over every surface in the room, checking for hidden squares in the linoleum floor, hollow spaces in the walls, movable tiles in the ceiling that might lift up and reveal something squirreled away. She looked inside all the cupboards, knocking against the bottoms and sides, and checked the bottoms of all the drawers. She checked to see if the medicine cabinet in the bathroom came out of the wall, a dodge she’d seen on the job in Anchorage with the DA’s office many years ago.

  Nothing.

  Which was irritating. Almost as much so as the fact that someone had got the drop on her, and even on Mutt. They must have heard the two of them coming up the stairs, grabbed her, and slammed the door against Mutt while they bagged her and tossed her in the freezer. Mutt would have launched herself in the door at the first sign of a crack. They’d probably caught her in midair and used the momentum of her forward velocity to sling her in on top of Kate.

  Probably two people, then. Probably two men, too, or two really ballsy women.

  What had they been looking for?

  If they’d been checking up on her, they’d come up empty. All she had by way of identification was a forged Alaska driver’s license in the name of Kate Saracoff, home address a post office box in Anchorage, and her cell phone, and both of those she kept on her person.

  She wondered if they had expected to find the apartment empty. It seemed likely, but she had a grudging respect for someone who had dealt so effectively with such an unpleasant surprise.

  Mutt came in.

  Two unpleasant surprises.

  Kate got Mutt a bowl of water. Mutt gave a few laps to be polite and then collapsed on the braided rug with a disgruntled air.

  “Didn’t find anything to sink your teeth into?” Kate said, sympathetic. “Don’t feel bad. Me, either.”

  She undressed, remembered to plug in her cell phone, and rolled into bed.

  Twelve

  JANUARY 19

  Newenham

  It felt as if Kate had barely closed her eyes when someone started banging on her door. She blinked up at the ceiling, befuddled and disbelieving. The thump at the door came again, more demanding this time, and she yelled, “Wait a sec,” got into her jeans mostly by feel, and shrugged into her jacket on the way to the door in bare feet. Mutt was already there, growling and snapping a warm welcome. She unlocked and opened the door a crack. A gnarled brown hand shoved the door wide, and she dodged back before it clipped her on the chin. Mutt gave a full-throated bark with bass notes that should have raised Cliff Lee Burton right out of his grave.

  The dyspeptic little man on the other side of the door glared down at Mutt. His face was as brown and gnarled as his hand, his dark eyes deep set and piercing. He wore a short-sleeved white T-shirt beneath a pair of denim bibs that looked like they’d been bought new in 1889, and a ball cap with a New Orleans Mardi Gras logo on it. “Shut your mouth, you big moron, don’t you know a friend when you see one?”

  Mutt, astonishingly, shut her mouth.

  He looked at Kate. “Get your ass dressed and downstairs.”

  Kate gaped at him for a second, and then the red started to rise up the back of her neck. She shut her mouth, too. She also shut the door in his face, locked it, and went back to bed.

  She was not allowed to go back to sleep, however, because the next sound was his foot hitting the door. This time she didn’t bother with jeans; she stalked to the door in her underwear and T-shirt and flung it open. “Listen, old man—”

  “Listen my ass, you got about sixty seconds to get dressed and get your ass down here or you can walk to Liam and Wy’s.”

  “I’m not going anywhere at this hour”—the light had barely touched the southeastern horizon, and the night before had been long and hard—“and I haven’t had three hours’ sleep, and who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Name’s Moses. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.” He pulled the door closed and she heard footsteps pattering briskly down the stairs.

  “Moses,” she said out loud. She looked around and found Mutt, not exactly cowering, no, but certainly she had withdrawn to the opposite corner of the apartment, sitting half inside the bathroom, as far away as she could get from the front door and still be above the Grant garage. “Moses the sort-of mayor of Newenham? Or no, what was it she said, the city father? You think there’s only one?”

  Mutt’s wide yellow eyes gave Kate to understand that she sincerely hoped so.

  Kate’s eyes felt full of sand and her mouth tasted of rotten eggs. She never afterwards understood why but such was the force of the little man’s personality that she found herself staggering into the bathroom, brushing her teeth, washing her face, dressing and presenting herself and her dog in front of a red Nissan longbed with a white canopy. The red had faded a little pink and the white a little gray, but the cab was warm when Kate and Mutt climbed in. Mutt insisted on Kate getting in first.

  “Hi,” Kate said, “I’m Kate Saracoff. Who are you, again?”

  “Moses.” The longbed spun around on a dime and charged off down the road like a maiden lady goosed by a lecherous roué. Mutt gave a smothered yelp and pressed against Kate’s side.

  “Moses Alakuyak.”

  “Are you the Moses Bill Billington mentioned to me last night?”

  He threw his head back with a loud cackle. “I’d by god better be.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “What, are you simple or something? I told you, we’re going to Wy and Liam’s.”

&
nbsp; “The pilot and the trooper?”

  “You know any other Wys or Liams in Newenham?” Kate didn’t know hardly anyone in Newenham, but before she could say so Moses took another turn at speed and the longbed settled into a long, death-defying skid that barely held them on to the road. If the ground hadn’t been frozen, he would have kicked gravel all the way to the Nushugak.

  The buildings of Newenham passed in rapid review, cars, trucks, dogs, and pedestrians diving out of the way of the oncoming juggernaut, and then they were out of town again and on a road following the river south. Far too late in Kate’s estimation, the old man slammed on the brakes and threw the pickup into another long skid and stomped on the gas just in time to gun them up a road heading straight into the trees. Any comparisons to Kate’s recent snow machine trip from Niniltna to the homestead were disregarded because she wasn’t driving this time, and she hung on like grim death to the edge of the bench seat.

  The trees thinned out in time, barely, to make way for the truck, and they bumped down the road more in the air than on the ground, before slamming to a halt. They were on a small bit of gravel before an old white clapboard house and an equally old white clapboard garage, beyond both of which could be seen a vast expanse of swift-moving river. Moses slammed the longbed into first and killed the engine. He was out of the truck and around the back to grab a bag before Kate had her door open. By the time she and Mutt were on the ground he was in the house.

  “I guess we go in, too,” she said to Mutt.

  Mutt dropped her head and looked shifty and cast meaningful glances at the forest of spruce and alder that crowded around the house. “Coward,” Kate said. Mutt vanished into the trees without so much as a backward glance.

  Kate walked into the saliva-inducing smell of pancakes on the griddle and the homey sight of Campbell, dressed in sweats with a spatula in his hand. Kate couldn’t make up her mind which looked better, the man or the pancakes.