A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “So who is it?” Johnny said.

  “The bigamist? Well, since both wives found out today and I’m guessing it’s going around the Park by Bush telegraph right now—” He paused. “You know, we should tune into Park Air to night, see what Bobby’s got to say about it.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Because you know he’ll have something to say about it.”

  “Jim!”

  The chorus was loud enough to make one of Mutt’s ears twitch. It tickled his cheek, but that wasn’t why he laughed. “Actually, you don’t know him.”

  “Oh.” Johnny was disappointed.

  Kate looked at Jim. “But we know the wives.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Johnny said, perking up again.

  Jim looked at Kate, knowing this was where the story would lose some of its humor for her. “Suzy Moonin.”

  “Crap,” she said. “Poor Suzy.”

  “How many kids has she got now?”

  “Three, I think. Or maybe it’s four. Anymore she sees me coming, she heads the other way. Plus I think she must be getting her booze somewhere else, because I haven’t seen her at the Roadhouse lately.” Kate’s eyes darkened. “You haven’t heard any rumors of a new bootlegger in town, have you?”

  Jim shook his head. “No. But you know it’s just a matter of time, Kate. With Suulutaq bringing all these new people into the Park, all these young men making real money, some of them for the first time in their lives, drug and alcohol abuse is going to skyrocket.” He sighed. “Along with drug-related crime.”

  Kate gave Johnny a severe look.

  “What?” he said. “What’d I do?”

  “It’s not what you haven’t done, it’s what you will do that worries me,” she said.

  “Kate! I haven’t done anything!”

  “You say that now.”

  “Jeez. I’m not even old enough to drink.” He turned his back on her and said to Jim, “Who was the other wife?” He was only sixteen, he couldn’t even see twenty-one from there, and he was much more interested in the now.

  Jim gave the ceiling a pensive stare. “You’d think the guy would be smart enough to know that all the mail for the Park funnels through the Niniltna post office.”

  Kate and Johnny’s eyes met. “Bonnie Jeppsen?” they said together. “Yep.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope.”

  “But she just got divorced!”

  “Evidently, she just got remarried.”

  “No!” Kate and Johnny said together, savoring the horror of it all with unconcealed delight. Petey’s older sister wasn’t a Park favorite. This was partly because she had one of the few steady jobs around, and partly because you never knew when you walked into the post office if she was going to try to convert you to the ways of the Lord when all you wanted to do was pick up your mail. “Annie Mike said she saw them fighting in the post office. Was that why?”

  Lynyrd Skynyrd started begging for three steps more. “Yes, it was. And while she wasn’t smart enough to know she was his second wife that month, she was smart enough to intercept his check when Global mailed it to him. Probably in violation of seven or eight federal laws, but I’m choosing to ignore that for the moment. Or until a U.S. postal inspector shows up on my doorstep.”

  “Which,” Kate said, thinking out loud, “of course sent Suzy hot-foot to the post office to put a trace on the check. Bonnie kind of laying herself open to that by opening the post office for two hours on holidays because she knows everyone will be in town for the parade.”

  “Exactly,” Jim said, a gracious nod going to this most apt pupil. This most apt pupil stuck out her tongue. “And between the two of them they had just enough brain to figure out that they were both married to the guy the check belonged to. So when they got done slapping each other around, Bonnie closed up the post office and they came down to the post.” He sought comfort in his beer.

  “Were they loud?” Kate said, looking sympathetic.

  “They were loud,” Jim said, with a shudder. “They were foul-mouthed and abusive, too, to Maggie. And even to me.” He was wounded all over again at the memory. Women were never mean to Chopper Jim Chopin.

  “How could they,” Kate said, and even Lenny Kravitz wanted to know who’s that lady. The aptness of the iPod’s musical commentary made her laugh.

  “Yeah, yuck it up, Shugak,” he said, “but I’ve a mind to pitch this right in your lap.”

  “I’ve got a job,” she said, and batted her eyelashes at him. “Got it just this afternoon.”

  “True. Damn it.” He brooded in silence, and Johnny decided the fun part was over and departed for his room and the joys of Maroon 5 on his iPod. Up till now he accessed his iTunes account on Bobby Clark’s computer. But next fall, his own computer with his own Internet connection. iTunes, Facebook, World of Warcraft, he could hardly wait.

  Jim put on a CD he had mixed under Johnny’s supervision.

  “Jim,” Kate said in the kitchen, “about Petey. Did you catch him in the act of something?”

  He made a disgusted sound. “Ah, Harvey reported seeing him and Howie cleaning out Feodor Williamson’s garage. You know Feodor’s been conspicuous by his absence lately, but that doesn’t mean it’s open season on his homestead, he’s probably just catting around Anchorage like usual. I couldn’t find Howie but I found Petey at the Roadhouse, and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer to anything I asked him. Pissed me off, so I locked him up on general principle.”

  Kate nodded. About what she’d figured. “If I can find Petey a job, will you spring him?”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Since when did you start saving Jeppsens, Kate? So far as I know you haven’t spoken to Petey since he helped Cheryl shoot up the Roadhouse.”

  She shrugged. “I went back to say hi to Willard and saw Petey there. It’s not easy for him, trying to come home after prison and make some kind of life for himself.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” Jim said with an edge to his voice. “Good boys aren’t convicted of felonies.” Elvis weighed in on “Jailhouse Rock.”

  Kate couldn’t disagree with him, but she said again, “If I could find him a job, would you spring him?”

  Jim growled. In sympathy, Mutt growled, too. It forced a chuckle out of him. He scratched behind her ears, an effective therapy for irritation caused by idiots. “I suppose so. Maybe. If the job was in another state.” He looked at her. “You know, Kate, a smart judge once told me I could either be a cop or a social worker, but I couldn’t be both.”

  “I’m not a cop,” she said. It sounded pretty lame even to her own ears so she changed the subject. “So, who is the bigamist? Somebody from the mine, I take it?”

  “After Mandy fired Howie, she needed someone pronto to mind the site, so she flew to Anchorage and hit Job Service.”

  “Oh god.”

  “Yeah, I know. She did check with me to see if the two guys she hired had records. They were clean, so far as I could tell without fingerprints. She put ’em to work caretaking the site, and kept them on after breakup when the drill rigs and the building modules and the crews and the rest of the outfit showed up. It’s one of them. Baker by trade, so they put him to work in the kitchen when they went into operation. Name’s Randy Randolph.”

  Kate laughed.

  “Yeah, I know, kind of, what’s the word? When something sounds like it means? Onomatopoeic?”

  Kate cast her mind back to those ghastly days in seventh-grade English. “Homophonic, I think you mean.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Randy is Randy.” Jim shook his head and drank more beer.

  “What he’s look like?” Kate said, curious. “Is he some kind of Greek god, or what?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him yet. I haven’t even seen him yet. Listen, Kate.”

  “No,” she said.

  “All I want is for you to talk to him, get his statement.”


  “No,” she said.

  “Both Suzy and Bonnie had marriage certificates. Suzy’s was in February and Bonnie’s was in March. Randolph’s name and signature on both. Didn’t even change it. Guy’s either gutsy or dumb, won’t know which until somebody talks to him.”

  Kate reflected, covering the two loaf pans with Saran wrap and setting them in a warm corner to rise. “Mandy couldn’t have hired him before December. He didn’t waste any time.”

  “Nope. Come on, Kate, you have to go out to the mine anyway.” He added craftily, “You can bill it as a separate investigation.”

  She heaved a martyr’s sigh. “All right,” she said, as they had both known she would. “I’ll find him and talk to him for you. I’d like to see this Lothario for myself, anyway.”

  She came around the counter and sauntered toward him. He admired her while she did so. Yeah, maybe she didn’t have the figure Laurel had, but when she wanted to, Kate could telegraph her intentions in a way that was little less than incitement to riot. Jim had watched plenty of women walk in his lifetime, both toward him and away, and he had never appreciated the amalgamation of brain and bone, muscle and flesh the way he did when it came wrapped in this particular package.

  “Beat it,” she said to Mutt.

  Mutt flounced over to the fireplace, scratched the aunties’ quilt into a pile, turned around three times, and curled up with her back most pointedly toward them.

  Kate smiled down at Jim. Just like that, Jim got hard. And she knew it, he could tell by the deepening indentations at the corners of that wide, full-lipped mouth. “Jesus, woman,” he said. If he wasn’t flustered, it was as close as he ever got.

  “What can I say,” she said, “I have special powers.” He was pulled to a sitting position with a fistful of shirt and she climbed aboard. She settled into the saddle and looped her arms around his neck, her eyes laughing down at him.

  He could feel the heat of her through her clothes, through his, and he fairly wallowed in her scent, a combination of wood smoke, a faint tang of verbena from the soap she used, and today the yeasty smell of bread. “Jesus, woman,” he said again, or mumbled it into her neck. The line of her scar brushed his cheek and he pulled back to trace it with his lips.

  She shivered against him, her head falling back. “Possibly we should take this upstairs.”

  “Possibly we should.” He was pulling her T-shirt free of her jeans.

  “I mean before the kid comes out and catches us going at it on the couch.”

  “Yeah.” Her breasts were firm and warm, the nipples hard against his palms.

  “Might give him ideas.”

  “That’d be bad.” He slid his hands down to her hips and pulled her tight against him. God, even through two pairs of jeans he could feel how ready she was for him.

  She pulled back to look at him through her lashes. “And you know how much I hate being interrupted in my work.”

  “Me, too.” He hooked an arm beneath her butt and got to his feet, and Mos Def serenaded them with “Destination Love” all the way up the stairs.

  Five

  Jim went whistling off to work the following morning, the spring back in his step and the sparkle back in his eye. Kate tried not to sigh as she watched him go, escorted to his ride by his other love slave. Mutt stood and watched, abandoned in the clearing, tail slowing in sorrow as the Blazer drove into the trees and out of sight.

  He was such a cliché, tall, blond, blue-eyed, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip, a real California boy. You expected him to get out the surfboard any minute, if not for the blue-and-gold uniform and the ball cap with the seal of the Alaska Department of Public Safety on it. And the gun on one side, the bear spray on the other, and the handcuffs tucked into the back of his belt. Not to mention the indefinable air of authority, the confident, easy stride, the quick reflexes at need, the sudden, unexpected strength of body and mind.

  The seductive smile that was a weapon all on its own.

  No, her own sense of well-being could not be denied, now could it. She laughed a little at herself. Was that all it took, a little “How was your day, dear?” and some great sex? They hadn’t even bothered to come back downstairs for dinner. Jim had made them an enormous breakfast, eggs, chicken-fried caribou steak, gravy, and most of one of her loaves of bread, which had risen to alarming heights by morning, baked quickly in a hot oven, sliced too soon, toasted and slathered with butter. Nectar and ambrosia, he’d said. Manna from heaven, she’d said. Oho, so I’m heaven, am I? he’d said, and the food cooled on its plates while he demonstrated.

  “So, did the earth move?” Johnny said next to her, making her jump.

  She laughed but she blushed a little, too. “None of your business.”

  He mock grumbled around the kitchen. “Didn’t even get any dinner last night. I’m a growing boy, I’m starving, do I have to stay starved?”

  She opened the oven and pulled out a full plate that had been keeping warm against this moment. “I’ll make you some toast while you get started on this.”

  “That’s more like it.” He carried the plate to the table and dug in.

  They cleaned up, got dressed, and headed for town. Kate dropped Johnny at the school, one week to go before summer vacation. He hesitated with his hand on the open door. “So, we can apply for the job?”

  She nodded.

  “And you’ll tell Old Sam?”

  “No. You’ll do that yourself.”

  “Dang,” he said. “Worth a try.”

  “Would have thought less of you if you hadn’t,” she said. “Later.”

  The Chugach Air Taxi hangar itself hadn’t changed at all. It was the activity in and around it that made the scene look like a stop-motion video by Dinah Clark.

  The hangar, a square box two stories high, had a much smaller box attached to its front right corner. A black, hand-lettered sign on a white background read OFFICE over the door of the small box, and on the wall of the big box overhead a larger, fading sign, CHUGACH AIR TAXI SERVICE, INC.

  The hangar doors were open, revealing not the familiar Cessna 206 nor the equally familiar Piper Super Cub but instead a de Havilland Single Otter. Kate looked closer. No, her eyes did not deceive her, it was in fact a turbo.

  Nearby, a de Havilland Beaver on wheels was warming up, with a pilot she’d never met giving her the once-over through the wind-shield. From where she stood, it looked like every seat was full.

  She went into the hangar and found George, tall, skinny, shovel-shaped unshaven jaw, lank dark hair thinning out on top. He still looked like George in oil-stained striped overalls and a greasy pair of Sorels. What didn’t look like George was the rectangular piece of electronic equipment sprouting from his right ear. It bristled with knobs and dials and extruded an antenna from one end.

  “Yeah,” he said into it, “yeah, I know, but I need you now. Whatever they’re paying you, I’ll double it, just get here tomorrow.” Mutt trotted forward and shoved her head beneath his free hand. He looked down, saw her, and then looked around for Kate. “Okay? Good. I’ll see you on Thursday. Gotta go.” He pressed a button. “Hey, Mutt.” A rough scratch behind the ears had Mutt’s tail wagging. “Hey, Kate.”

  “Hey, George.” She nodded at the device. “Is that a satellite phone?”

  He looked at it, too. “Yeah.” His expression was somewhere between proud and sheepish.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Just like downtown.”

  “Listen, Kate,” he said, “I’m glad you’re here. I need to talk to you about something.”

  “What?”

  “We need cell phone service in the Park.”

  “You been talking to Dan O’Brian?”

  “Who? No, I been talking to everyone, and we’re all saying the same thing.”

  Kate had a cell phone. She’d bought one in Anchorage a couple of years before. It worked in Anchorage. It didn’t work in the Park. She tried to remember when she’d seen it last, and came up blank. “I’m sure that as soon
as AT&T figures out how to make a cell phone system pay for itself in the Park, they’ll be knocking at the door.”

  “They are knocking,” he said. “Didn’t Demetri tell you?”

  “No.” Other than the quick glimpse she’d caught at the café the day before, she hadn’t seen much of Demetri lately, and never long enough for serious talk. This time of year he was usually up at his lodge in the Quilak foothills, getting ready for the summer influx of fly-in trophy fishermen. She wondered, not for the first time, what the lodge was pulling down every year. Demetri had had some big names up there, names even Kate, lacking satellite television and Internet access, recognized, including movie stars, rock bands, business moguls, European royalty, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and those among the rich and famous whose main purpose in life seemed to be getting on the covers of Us and People. Clients in those zip codes didn’t go anywhere on the cheap.

  George flapped his hand in front of her face. “Hello? Anybody in there? ACS Alaska told Demetri that they’re working on a plan to put a cell tower in every village along the river from Ahtna down to Chulyin, and from there hopscotch them overland to the mine.” He held up his sat phone. “I can’t keep up with the business on this thing, Kate, everybody I need to keep in touch with has a cell phone.”

  Behind them the Beaver roared down the runway and lifted ponderously into the air, on a heading south-southeast.

  A four-wheeler with a tow hitch was pulling the Otter out of the hangar. She had seen neither four-wheeler nor driver before. “Impressive.”

  “You have no idea,” he said. “Can’t hardly find Otters anymore, single or twin. Everybody’s got them working, there just ain’t any for sale. I had to fly to fucking Finland in February to find this one.”

  “Finland?” Kate said.

  “Well, actually, Cameroon.”

  “Cameroon?” Kate said.

  “Well, by way of Paris,” George said, and spoiled his deprecating tone with a wide grin.

  “George,” Kate said, “what the hell have you been up to?”

  “No,” he said, in a manner that could only be described as coy, “that should be, ‘George, where the hell have you been?’ And the answer is almost all the way around the world.” He grinned again. “And in a hell of a lot less than eighty days.”