A Fine and Bitter Snow

by Dana Stabenow

  “George was there an—” Dandy looked at his watch “Jesus, was it only fifty minutes ago? He just brought the mail in from Ahtna. That’s why I was here—I was bringing them their mail, like I do.” Dandy looked down at Ruthe. He might have been about to cry. “It’s usually good for a piece of Ruthe’s pie.”

  “Was he turning it around?” At Dandy’s blank look, Jim reined in his impatience. “George. Was he turning the plane around for a return trip?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Like I said, commandeer the first plane you see and get Ruthe to the hospital in Ahtna. If there isn’t a plane there, call the post in Tok. The dispatcher’ll know what to do. I’m trying to remember who’s on the Niniltna ERT team.”

  “Uh, the Grosdidier brothers, they live closest to the airstrip.”

  “Good. Make someone go get ’em if you have to wait for a plane. Don’t let her get cold.” Jim went to the driver’s seat. Billy’s new car had come loaded; he turned on the rear heaters full blast. “Get going.”

  Dandy’s panicked expression hardened. “Okay, Jim.” He all but saluted and piled in.

  “Give her as smooth a ride as possible,” Jim said to Dan, closing the door behind him. “I don’t know how long those bandages are going to last, and you don’t want to jolt them off and have her start bleeding again.”

  “Okay, Jim,” Dan said. He, too, had benefited from the snapped orders. The Explorer’s engine turned over and the vehicle inched forward down the track and disappeared almost immediately into the trees.

  Jim climbed the stairs to the cabin. It was cold inside, and he pushed the door closed, not without some difficulty, because of the rubble in the way. Everything that had been on a shelf anywhere in the cabin was off it, books, mugs, dishes, pots and pans, cans of food, sacks of flour and sugar and rice, flatware, decks of cards, the top hat token from a Monopoly game, a cribbage board. He took photographs from the door and then picked his way across the debris and took more pictures of Dina’s body.

  This was the worst part of living where you worked, especially when you worked in law enforcement. Acts of violence were almost always committed against someone you knew, and what was sometimes worse, by someone you knew. He closed his eyes briefly. What if he was wrong? What if Dan O’Brian, contrary to every instinct Jim had, innate or developed on the job, had assaulted the two women? He’d been a practicing police officer for long enough to realize that anyone can kill, given the right motivation.

  Dina had been a crusty old broad with a salty tongue, a ribald sense of humor, and a fount of stories that reflected no good on anyone elected or appointed to public office since Alaska had become a state. Jim had spent more than a few hours sitting at a Roadhouse table with Dina Willner, listening to those tales, tales that went all the way back to the first days of Camp Teddy, and even further back to her days as a WASP in World War II, first in Texas and then in Florida. She had forgotten more about flying than he would ever learn, and she was willing to share. He had liked her. He had liked her a lot, and now someone had killed her. It made him angry, the way murder always made him angry. There, he thought, there was motivation for you.

  He righted the couch and placed Dina’s body on it. Her limbs were loose—rigor had not set in—which meant that the killer was not long gone. He thought of Dan, jolting down the hill in the back of the Explorer. He found in a heap behind the couch a homemade quilt that looked like something the four aunties would make. He spread it over her, then stood silently before her for a few moments.

  A draft of cold air made him shiver, and he looked around, noticing for the first time that the back door was open, too. He unbuckled the flap of his holster and stepped to it. Unlike the front door, this one was solid wood, no window, no line of sight. He pushed it open cautiously with his left hand, his weapon drawn and held next to his thigh. The bottom of the door scraped over packed-down snow. There was no movement beyond it. He stepped out on the porch.

  It was smaller than the front porch and shadowed by the overhanging trees. A narrow path led through them and up the precipitous slope to the outhouse, a neat wooden structure painted brown, with only the bottom half of a door. Jim thought that was odd until he climbed up and saw the view, which began at the cabin’s ridgepole and continued on, if you had the imagination for it, all the way to Prince William Sound.

  He looked down at the cabin and saw what he’d missed when he had stepped outside: an overturned plate, with what looked like some kind of stew spilled next to it. He slid back down and looked. Yes, stew—meat, some carrots, potatoes, celery, and onions in a thick gravy. He touched it. It was frosting over, but it wasn’t quite frozen.

  Were Dina and Ruthe in the habit of eating their lunch on the back porch? He thought it unlikely, especially in midwinter, but if he was wrong, why only one plate? And what had caused the spill? Had Ruthe or Dina been outside eating as the assailant entered through the front door? Had the beginning of the attack startled whoever was on the back porch into dropping the plate and then walking in on the scene?

  Unsatisfied, he turned around and surveyed the hillside again. There was the trail to the outhouse, trodden down so that the surface was hard, with more snow piled waist-high on either side. There weren’t any other tracks, except—wait a minute. He went up the trail again, this time at a trot, and discovered that the trail continued on behind the outhouse and farther up the hill. This trail was not so well packed down, showing separate footprints marking a far less frequent passage.

  He was a big man with long legs. The snow was very deep and the hill very steep. His progress was slow. Once, the trail narrowed in, so that it seemed as if he wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the trees.

  It was a glorious afternoon. The trees were thick with frost, ghosts of their original selves. The sky was clear and cold and the dull blue, off-white of a glacier’s face with the sun on it. The sun itself was a flat flaxen disk, low on the horizon, leached of light and warmth.

  Fighting the spruce all the way, he emerged finally, out of breath and soaked in his own sweat, on a miniature plateau. On this plateau, the trees had been thinned out to make way for a scattering of tiny cabins, all with snow up to their eaves. From one of the chimneys, a spiral of smoke whispered up into the clear blue sky. The trail led directly to it.

  He unholstered his weapon again when he was ten feet from the door. He didn’t see how whoever lived there could not have heard him coming, given the water buffalo nature of his approach, but he made himself wait and listen for signs of life.

  There was a lot of yellow snow around the door, as if the resident couldn’t be bothered to break a trail to the outhouse. He peered into the window cut into the wall next to it. It was covered with a blanket of some kind. He looked in the window on the other side of the door. Same thing.

  The door opened out, naturally. He would have traded warm feet for the portable ram in his Cruiser back in Tok.

  He paused for a moment of procedural reflection. Was he in hot pursuit? Did he have to knock and identify, or not? More importantly, if he knocked, was whoever lived there standing on the other side with a shotgun?

  Snow was collecting inside the tops of his boots and the sweat was freezing on his spine. The hell with it. He thumped on the door. “Hello? Anybody home? This is Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin. Open the door, please.”

  There was no reply, and no movement from within.

  The silence of an Arctic winter day in the Bush, when no breeze stirred the air and the sun beat down coldly over all, that was a silence to be reckoned with. It was a silence with unfriendly eyes that glared out at you for disturbing it. When a magpie yelled at him from a nearby tree, he nearly jumped out of his skin. Annoyed, he thumped on the door again. “Police! Open up!”

  There was loud, wild Wraaaaaoooowl right next to his head. He jumped back to the edge of the porch and slipped off the top step. His arms wind-milled wildly and he fell heavily on his back. “Son of a bitch!�
�

  There was another inhuman howl, and a black house cat jumped down from a timber just below the roof of the porch. Her hair standing straight out from her body, she looked like a big black porcupine. Her eyes were wild and her fur was stained red. She hit the porch once, bounced off it and landed on his chest, leaving red paw prints on his dark blue jacket, bounced off again and landed on the trail, skimming over the snow as if it wasn’t there and vanishing into the trees at a dead run.

  “Oh shit,” he said, remembering Dina and Ruthe’s cat for the first time. They had called her Galadriel, after Ruthe’s favorite wood witch, and over the years the name had naturally been shortened to Gal. She was a longtime member of the family and, what was even more important, a legendary greeter of Camp Teddy’s summer guests. Gal had purred from the laps of the rich and powerful for a decade. If Ruthe survived, Gal would be the first person Ruthe would want to see. He wallowed around until he managed to get to his feet. “Gal! Here, kitty! Come on, Gal, you know me! Come on back now!”

  From inside the cabin came a faint sound—a whimper, perhaps a moan? He whipped around, discovered his hand was empty, and had to go rooting for his weapon. He found it, then had to clear the muzzle and the trigger guard of snow. He hoped the damn thing didn’t explode in his hand if he had to fire it.

  What was that sound he had heard? Perhaps nothing at all? Jim climbed to the porch again and tried the handle of the door. The latch gave.

  “Hello the house. This is Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin. I’m coming inside.” The door swung open, creaking.

  The sound came again, definitely a whimper this time. He brought his weapon up two-handed and pointed it inside before entering. “This is state trooper Jim Chopin. Who’s in here?”

  There was another whimper, and then his eyes adjusted from the blazing sun of the exterior to the murky darkness of the interior of the cabin. It was tiny, ten feet to a side, with twin beds pushed against two walls, a small table and a captain’s chair set against a third. A small cast-iron woodstove stood in one corner next to a nearly empty wood box. Scrolled wooden shelves were fixed to two walls, and there were three windows, all of them iced over on the inside. To the right of the door was a counter with a two-burner propane hot plate, a tin bowl, and a plastic jug half-full of what looked like water. There was a kettle on the hot plate. A box of Lipton’s tea bags, a container of dried lemon peel, and a jar of honey sat on the counter. On the wall above was a propane lamp.

  One of the beds was neatly made, the other heaped with an olive drab duffel bag stenciled US ARMY in black Marks-A-Lot, white T-shirts, a couple of plaid men’s shirts, a pair of jeans, shorts, and a few pair of thick wool socks, which looked uncomfortably like the ones on the body of the woman in the cabin down the hill. Everything was neatly folded and laid out with almost geometrical precision in relation to everything else.

  The stove was giving off very little heat, which was probably why the man was crouched down next to it, wedged against the wall between the stove and the table, and why Jim almost missed him. He was a little man, very thin, and Jim would have mistaken him for a heap of clothes had the man not whimpered again.

  His hair was dirty blond going gray and hadn’t been washed or cut in a while. His eyes peered out from behind it, feral, shifty, shy, not meeting Jim’s.

  He whimpered again.

  “Sir,” Jim said, lowering his weapon. “I’m Alaska state trooper Jim Chopin, and…”

  His voice faded out as he took a step forward.

  The front of the man’s clothing was covered in a dark substance that looked like dried blood.

  So was the knife he held.

  Without realizing it, Jim raised his gun. “All right, sir, could you put the knife down, please?”

  Another whimper.

  “Sir, put the knife down. Now.”

  The man pushed himself into his corner, drawing up his knees and hiding behind his arms. He mumbled something.

  “What? Sir, I couldn’t hear you. What did you say?”

  Dazed eyes blinked up at him. He mumbled something else.

  It sounded like “angels,” “angels” and something else. Jim swore to himself. He didn’t want to put himself within striking range of someone who was seeing angelic apparitions, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of choice, other than shooting the man outright. He transferred the Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter automatic to his left hand and took a step forward. “I’m going to take the knife, sir, all right? That’s it, just relax. No one’s going to hurt you. That’s right, just hand it over. Let’s everybody stay calm and no one will get hurt.”

  He continued with a steady stream of soothing babble as he inched forward, making no sudden movements as he bent his knees and reached out with his right hand, hoping he wasn’t reaching out with it for the last time. “That’s right, sir, just keep calm, keep still—”

  The man pushed against the floor with his feet in a sudden movement that took ten years off Jim’s life. “Sir. Sir. Please stay still. You might cut yourself, and we don’t want that, do we?” He continued to move forward and the man continued to cringe away, his face buried in his arms, the knife clenched in his left fist. Jim’s hand was two feet away, one foot, six inches. “That’s it, sir, stay very still.”

  He took hold of the knife at the part of the handle protruding above the man’s hand. More whimpering, more cringing, but to Jim’s infinite relief, the man’s grip relaxed and the knife slid free.

  Jim took a deep breath. He took several. “Okay. That’s good.” He backed away and stood up. He always kept a couple of gallon-size Ziplocs in his inside pocket, and he placed the knife in one of them. He wrapped a second bag around the first and stored the bundle in a pocket. “Sir? Sir? Could you stand up? Come on, sir, I won’t hurt you.” He took a chance and holstered his weapon. “Come on. Stand up now.”

  He pulled the man to his feet. The man came up without resistance. His hair fell back and Jim saw that his face was stained with tears. “Did you hurt the cat?” the man said.

  “No, sir,” Jim said, surprised at the intelligible sentence. “She’s down at the main house by now.” He devoutly hoped he was telling the truth. “Sir, what is your name?”

  The man stared at him. “What?”

  “What is your name? Who are you? What are you doing in this cabin?”

  The man looked around him, a sudden wide smile that was as bright as it was meaningless spreading across his face. “Isn’t this a nice place? The nicest I ever stayed in.” He shivered. “Cold, though.”

  He was older than Jim had first thought. His face was lined and his beard and hair were an untrimmed tangle of curls that fell to his shoulders and chest. He looked like a cross between a mad scientist and the Count of Monte Cristo before the escape. He smelled of wood smoke and urine. Jim looked down and saw that the man had wet his pants.

  “You shouldn’t entertain angels unawares,” the man said suddenly.

  Jim looked at him askance. The man flashed his mad smile again. “You know why?”

  “No,” Jim said. “Why?”

  The man’s voice dropped to a confiding level. “Because they can turn out to be the devil.”

  Come to think of it, the guy looked more like Rasputin than the Count. “Okay, sir, let’s go back down to the lodge.”

  The man cringed and tried to pull free. “No! No, I don’t want to go there! The devil’s there!”

  “Not anymore,” Jim said.

  On the way back, all he could think of was how relieved he was that Dan O’Brian was off the hook.

  And how not wrong he had been to let him go with Ruthe.

  6

  The news of the attack on Dina Willner and Ruthe Bauman and of Dina’s death swept around the Park faster than if it had been broadcast on Park Air. The news that Trooper Jim Chopin had a suspect in custody swiftly succeeded it.

  Kate heard it from Johnny, who came home from town with the news the following afternoon. She sat down hard and
stared at nothing for several long moments. Johnny shifted from foot to foot, uneasy at the vacant expression on her face. “Kate?” he said tentatively. “Are you all right?”

  She said nothing.

  “Kate,” he said, and stepped forward to touch her on the shoulder.

  She looked at him. “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  Two of her grandmother’s oldest friends had just been butchered, one of them to death, the other to near death. “Yes,” she said, summoning up a smile from who knew where. “I’m all right, Johnny.”

  He watched her indecisively for a moment. “Want some cocoa?”

  “What? No, I don’t think so.”

  “’Cause I was going to make some for myself.”

  She saw from the look on his face that he needed something to do. “I’ll take some tea. Some Lemon Zinger, with honey.”

  He brightened. “Great. I can do that.” He went to the woodstove and checked the kettle, which was always left to steam gently at the back. “Almost full,” he said. He got out two mugs, measured Nestlé’s and evaporated milk into one and honey into another. He put the tag of the tea bag underneath the bottom of the mug with honey in it. “So when you pour the water in, the string and tag don’t go in, too,” he said. He looked over his shoulder. Kate was back to staring into space.

  It was the first time Johnny had had to carry news of the dead and dying to anyone, and the task made him feel very odd. He wondered if Kate had felt like this when she had come to tell him his father had been killed. For the first time, he wondered how she had managed. She’d almost been killed, too, or so they said, because she had never mentioned it. She’d been moving slowly and carefully that day, he remembered, as if it hurt to do normal stuff like walk and sit. She’d had bandages on her arm, her hands and face had been skinned and bruised, and the hair that used to hang to her waist in a big fat black braid had been sheared off, all raggedy, not even and neat like it was now. He wondered who had cut it off, and why. He wondered why she didn’t let it grow back.