A Fine and Bitter Snow

by Dana Stabenow

  John Letourneau’s suicide might just be one of those little mysteries of life that remained unsolved. It comforted Kate, at least a little, to know they still existed. Unlike Jim Chopin, she didn’t want everything to be neatly explained, all the loose ends tied up and tucked away. She liked to think she’d leave a mystery or two behind herself. Just not anytime soon.

  “Come on,” she said to Mutt. “Let’s go say hi to Bernie.”

  11

  The Roadhouse was packed to the rafters that afternoon. Dan O’Brian was at the bar, sitting as close as he could get to the serving station. Christie was all business, bestowing a smile on him in passing, the same smile she gave Kate on her way to a table, a loaded tray balanced on her right hand. The table the tray was headed for, Kate was interested to note, contained among its patrons one Pete Heiman. His face lit up as Christie approached, and her hand settled onto his shoulder in what seemed to Kate to be a very comfortable gesture.

  Kate let Mutt lead the way to a seat next to Dan, who said, “What’s this I hear about John Letourneau?”

  “Only the truth, I’m sure,” Kate said, looking over her shoulder at the table where Dandy and Scottie were holding forth before an admiring crowd, most of them women. For a place where the ratio of men to women was five to one, Dandy Mike got more than his share.

  Christie arrived at Dandy’s table with refills, and he smiled up at her, resting a familiar hand a little too low on her waist. She smiled down at him and shifted out of reach. Kate heard Dan sigh.

  She looked at him and he grinned, although the expression held more than a little constraint. They were both remembering the interview in his office.

  “Hey, Kate,” Bernie said, sliding a glass in front of her that proved to hold Diet 7Up.

  “Bernie,” she said, “can I have some water?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “No profit in that.”

  “Club soda, then. With lime. I’ll pay for the lime.”

  “Sure, but you’re kinda breaking my streak, Kate,” he said, and tossed a piece of beef jerky to the large grayears standing at attention next to Kate. A low “Woof!” and the ears disappeared.

  Auntie Vi was there with one of her sons. Kate squinted through the dim light. Roger, she thought. Roger’s wife was there, too, and three of their four children. Mary Balashoff was visiting from Alaganik—Mary must have given up on prying Old Sam loose from the Park—and she and Old Sam were pegging like mad in a fierce game of cribbage. The four Grosdidiers had commandeered their usual table with the ringside seat in front of the television set hanging from one corner of the room, groaning at a bad call by the referee of the football play-off game presently on the screen.

  The door opened and Jim Chopin stepped inside. There was the usual lull when five-foot twenty-two inches of state trooper blue and gold stepped majestically into the room, but when it became apparent he wasn’t there to arrest anyone, the noise soon regained its proper level and he was allowed to walk to the bar unmolested.

  “Kate,” he said.

  Kate was aware that Dan had braced himself on the stool next to her. “You made it back.”

  “It stayed above minimums. Barely.” He pulled off the ball cap with the trooper emblem on the front and ran his hand through his hair, which looked a little less immaculate than usual. “Bernie.”

  “Jim. Can’t beat you off with a stick lately.” Jim didn’t offer an explanation for his presence that evening, and with the delicate tact required of the professional bartender, Bernie didn’t ask. Besides, he had a pretty fair idea that he already knew. “What’ll you have?”

  Jim never drank on duty. It was an obligation he felt he owed the uniform, but it had been a long day and he would have killed for a long cold one. “Coke,” he said finally, and sighed when he said it.

  “You get out all right?” Kate said.

  “Yeah. I missed the last plane into Anchorage, but Kenny Hazen put the body in the local meat locker and promised to get it on the first plane tomorrow.” His Coke arrived and he looked at it sadly. “Not that an autopsy is going to tell us anything we don’t already know.” He allowed himself to take notice of Dan O’Brian. “Hey, Dan.”

  Dan shifted on his stool. “Hey, Jim.”

  A brief silence ensued.

  “I went back out to the lodge,” Kate said.

  Jim looked at her, his eyes sharpening. “Why?”

  “Because. I’m like you—I can’t figure out why he did it. I looked through his papers, Jim. If he was dying of disease, he didn’t know it. He had money in the bank; all his bills were paid, all his workman’s comp up-to-date. He’d sent his chef and some of the long-term employees Christmas bonuses, the rest of them Harry and David fruit boxes. There’s just no reason for what he did.”

  “Maybe he was lonely,” Dan said, who had been listening and looked relieved, probably because the conversation had taken a turn away from him.

  Lonely. There was that word again. Kate set her teeth and drank club soda. She wondered what a shot of scotch, neat, would do to firm up her backbone, and was immediately appalled that such a thought would come within thinking distance of her teetotaling brain. Just another example of how keeping bad company can decay your moral fiber, she told herself.

  Jim saw her stiffen and wondered who’d shoved what poker up her spine. Lucky for him that he wasn’t interested in easy. He wished he could have a beer. He wished he could have several. He wished he could take Kate Shugak to bed and not leave it for the foreseeable future.

  Christie, taking a break, was standing next to Dan, who had his arm around her. Her bright blue eyes were watching as she listened. “Maybe Mr. Letourneau was just tired.”

  “He didn’t have any business being tired,” Kate said crossly. “He was only sixty something. For a Park rat, that’s practically the prime of life. At sixty Park rats are just getting started. They quit jobs and go back to school, they go into business, they get married and start family, they—”

  Dan snorted. “Right. John Letourneau, married, with children. That would have happened.”

  Jim said to Kate in a quiet voice, “What?”

  She stared at their reflection in the mirror at the back of the bar. “I just thought—”

  “What did you just think?”

  “I—nothing.” She shook her head. “No. Nothing.”

  “You sure?” Their eyes met in the mirror. “You looked like you were having an epiphany there for a second.”

  She smiled, a little rueful, but her smiles were rare in his direction and he’d take what he could get. “A crazy idea, nothing worth saying out loud.” She raised her glass and drank. “So, Christie, how are you liking the Park?”

  Christie gave Dan a long, sultry look. “I’m liking what I’ve found here.”

  Dan actually quivered all over. With difficulty, Kate refrained from rolling her eyes. Kick me, hit me, beat me; I’ll love you anyway and maybe even because of it. What was it with guys and the stick-and-carrot treatment? Christie had been all over Pete Heiman at the potlatch, and the Bush telegraph being what it was, Kate couldn’t believe Dan hadn’t heard about it. What did Dan think all that action over at Dandy’s and Pete’s tables was about? Men. Were they blind, or was it just that they couldn’t see?

  Whatever. It wasn’t any of her business, thank god. Kate got a refill and enticed Bernie into a long, detailed discussion on the possibilities of Niniltna bringing home the state’s Class C men’s varsity basketball championship. Seldovia was this year’s favorite, with Chuathbaluk a close second, but Bernie was confident his team would pull it out.

  Basketball, now there was a game men could play.

  And ought to stick to.

  When she left the Roadhouse an hour later, the sun had set behind the clouds and it was beginning to snow again, the remnants of the storm that had been coming off the Gulf in fits and starts since the day after they had found Dina and Ruthe.

  Kate loved falling snow. She loved the look of it, light,
powdery flakes that seemed to vanish as they floated gracefully to the ground. She loved the feel of it, the wet, cool shock as it touched the skin of her upturned face. She loved the way it seemed to displace sound. No airplane ever seemed so loud in the falling snow, no boat, truck, or snow machine. Falling snow toned a shout down to a murmur and then absorbed the murmur, imposing its own sweet, silent hush on a noisy world.

  She stood motionless next to the snow machine, her face turned to the sky, until Mutt nudged her hand in a purposeful manner. She sighed and mounted. Mutt leapt up behind her and gave her an encouraging look. “You have no soul,” Kate told her as she started the engine.

  Jim was going to rent one of Bernie’s cabins for the night. Kate had given it some thought but then decided to head back to Bobby’s, snow or no snow. Not that she didn’t trust herself, but she’d feel better with twenty-seven miles between her and the trooper.

  There wasn’t much traffic—a couple of other snow machines and a dogsled going in the other direction, but the rest of the road was theirs. Snowflakes made white streaks in the headlights. A pair of eyes flashed out at them from beneath the heavily frosted skirts of a spruce tree. An arctic hare bounded across the road, giving Kate just enough time to let up on the gas without sending Mutt over her shoulder and jackknifing the trailer.

  They came to a stop just a few feet short of the turnoff to Camp Teddy.

  She meditated for a few moments, looking at the narrow trail that snaked up the hill to Dina and Ruthe’s aerie. “We’ll just be a few minutes,” she said to Mutt.

  Mutt gave the impression that she was prepared to put up with the detour, for a price to be negotiated later.

  It amazed her how normal the inside of the cabin looked. There ought at least to be the scorched outline of two bodies beneath the coffee table.

  “Knock it off, Shugak,” she said to herself sternly, and then was embarrassed when Mutt gave her a quizzical look. “I talk to you, don’t I?” she asked her.

  Mutt gave her a long, assessing look, beneath which Kate tried not to squirm, and went to stand in front of the door. “Fine,” Kate said. “Go chase birds. Leave me all alone here, talking to my ghosts.”

  Mutt did. No dependence could be placed on laying a guilt trip on a dog that was mostly wolf. Kate shut the door firmly behind her, not really trying to catch the tip of Mutt’s tail in the door, but not trying really hard not to, either.

  She leaned on the door handle and surveyed the cabin. At least it didn’t look as if anyone else had shown up to appropriate whatever was lying around. She’d made sure that Bernie spread the word that the cabin was under her protection, but all the same, she thought she had a padlock and a hasp rattling around the garage at home that she might fit to the front door, and maybe a bolt for the back door, as well. There had been a time when the cabin could have stood empty for weeks, months, maybe even years without suffering any harm. She hoped that time was still here, but she no longer had as much faith in the notion that she had once had.

  Kate started a fire in the woodstove and brewed a cup of tea on the gas hot plate, added honey, and, not without some qualms, sat down in Dina’s chair.

  She had never looked at the cabin from this angle before. Dina’s chair sat to the left of the woodstove and faced the northeast corner of the cabin. It was a great location from which to view the titles of the books on the shelves. The stove sat in the middle of the room, its exposed stovepipe chimney going straight up to the ceiling, which acted as a great heat radiator and provided a central location around which the furniture and fixtures would be arranged. Still, it seemed odd to Kate that with two enormous picture windows that took up practically the whole south wall of the cabin, the chairs Dina and Ruthe sat in most often faced in the opposite direction. Kate would have taken advantage of the view.

  Although there would be more privacy at the back of the cabin, if you had guests who used the deck outside to look at the view, too. Kate put up the footrest and cupped the mug in her hands.

  She compared John Letourneau’s enormous, barely lived in lodge to this cabin. Here, there was just enough room for Dina and Ruthe. When friends came to stay, they were put up in one of the cabins on the hill. The paying guests took their meals in the mess hall above the cabins; the friends dined with Dina and Ruthe below. John, so far as Kate knew, had had no visitors, other than guys like Dandy who were always looking for something to borrow. Certainly he had none who were invited to stay for free.

  The lodge had all the echoing charm of an airport waiting lounge. The cabin was dusty and cluttered and crowded to the point that you couldn’t take a step without knocking over a stack of magazines, but it was a lot friendlier than the lodge. If the building was a reflection of the man, Kate could well understand the qualities Dina had found lacking in John.

  Kate had overheard a conversation when she was younger that made her aware that Dina and Ruthe were a couple, a pair, like husband and wife, only not. It was a thing she’d never heard of, a woman and a woman, and by that time, she knew her own predilection was strictly men, so it was hard for her to comprehend.

  On the other hand, their relationship wasn’t hard for her to accept. They were still Dina and Ruthe, her grandmother’s friends, and hers. Ruthe was a great cook and Dina could outhike anything on two legs or four, and both of them could fly anything with wings. They were smart and they told funny stories, and when anyone in the Park needed help, they were there. She didn’t need to know anything about their sleeping arrangements to know that they were some of the best neighbors the Park had. Long winters made for intimate relationships over distances that would be unthinkable in a city suburb. Good neighbors were crucial.

  Once Jack had come into Kate’s life, she had never looked at another man. Well. Before Dinah came on the scene, there had been that brief, intense interval with Bobby Clark, and then there was Ken Dahl, poor dead bastard. And if she were being completely honest, there had been one or two tense moments with Jim Chopin.

  Maybe more than one or two. And maybe more than moments. And maybe one of them right here.

  But that isn’t the point, she thought, rousing herself. The point was she couldn’t account for Dina’s sudden, brief marriage to John Letourneau. Chemistry? Propinquity? Dina deciding later in life to conform to the straight and narrow?

  None of it seemed very likely. Nor was Kate ever apt to come up with a better answer, unless Ruthe woke up and knew it.

  The little gray lockbox was sitting on one of the bookshelves. She got it and sat back down.

  There was the marriage certificate, a few simple lines, Dina and John’s names, the date. Dina had been forty-five, John thirty-five.

  Like John, Kate wondered why Dina had kept the certificate. A memento of one good month? A reminder of a lesson well learned?

  She looked through the rest of the paperwork. A Social Security card. Two passports, both long out-of-date, although they had been well used in their time, from all over Europe to the Far East. A copy of the deed to the property of Camp Theodore. Two wills, in separate sealed envelopes, marked WILL on the outsides, “To Be Opened in the Event Of” in smaller writing below.

  She opened Dina’s. It was a copy. It was also very short. Dina hadn’t owned a lot. Her interest in the camp went to Ruthe, unless Ruthe predeceased her, in which case it went into the Kanuyaq Land Trust, to be administered by the chief ranger of the Park and utilized as part of the national park as he or she saw fit. She directed that all of her possessions be sold, the proceeds also to go to the Kanuyaq Land Trust, with a few exceptions, noted in the attached list, items that she directed her executor to distribute.

  Kate turned the page. The books went to Ruthe. There was some jewelry in a safety-deposit box in Anchorage, also bequeathed to Ruthe.

  A note, added by hand and dated just this past November, said, “To Johnny Morgan, my photo graph album, in the hope that he will continue to learn and grow.”

  Kate had to blink away sudden tears. Sh
e was about to put the will back in the envelope, when a phrase caught her eye. “I declare that, except as otherwise provided for in this Will, I have intentionally and with full knowledge omitted to provide for any heirs of mine who may be living at the date of my death, and I direct that such persons, if any, shall take no part of my estate.”

  Lawyers. Kate shook her head. Dina’s parents had died in an accident before World War II, and she had had no children of her own. If she and John had stayed married a little longer, it might have been a different story.

  “Oh,” Kate said. She remembered now what she had thought of at the Roadhouse. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so silly.

  At that moment, she realized that it might not have been such a good idea to have spoken so freely of John Letourneau while standing in the Roadhouse with god and everybody else listening in.

  Perhaps she should have stayed in one of the cabins, within earshot of a big, strong state trooper who had within reach a great big gun.

  The door opened. She knew who it was without turning around, but she turned around anyway.

  Christie Turner stood in the doorway, rifle in hand.

  Kate got to her feet, careful to make no sudden movement. “You’re John and Dina’s daughter,” she said.

  Christie smiled. “So you figured it out, did you? I thought you might.” She stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her.

  “You don’t seem too upset about it.”

  Christie pushed her hood back. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about you since coming into the Park. As soon as I saw you with the trooper, I knew there might be trouble.” She smiled again. Her beautiful blue eyes held an expression that made the hair rise on the back of Kate’s neck. Where was Mutt? Please let her stay away, Kate thought, please, please, please.

  “You killed Dina,” Kate said.

  “Ah, my dear mother,” Christie said. She gave the cabin a critical look. “Imagine, choosing this over the place my loving father built for her. She really wasn’t worthy of me.”