what was obviously a severe inner struggle, Jack bent his head over his
plate and continued eating.
She waited until they finished and, amid thunderous silence, cleared the
table, washed the dishes and dried them. Reaching for her parka, she
paused in the doorway. "Now," she said, sweetly malicious, "can I trust
you two to behave while I'm gone?"
There was a flood of profanity and at least one solid object thudded
against the door she hurriedly pulled closed behind her. "Maybe not,"
she told Mutt, "but boys will be boys."
Mutt gave a reproving growl and turned to stalk stiffly down the drive,
disapproval evident in every line of her body. Bloody but unbowed, Kate
followed.
She found Johnny Wu the only place he could be, at Auntie Viola's. Her
aunt rented out her three spare bedrooms (shared bath, included
breakfast) for the highway-robbery amount of $100 a night during those
winter months when the Niniltna Lodge was closed. There was nowhere else
in town to stay, and you either anted up with a smile or you slept out
in the cold. Kate came in just as he was settling his bill, and from the
satisfied expression on Aunt Viola's face he had paid in cash. Auntie
Viola always preferred cash. She inquired if Mr. Wu cared for a receipt,
and beamed to hear that he did not. The cash vanished into a convenient
pocket, and she shook Wu's hand heartily and invited his speedy return
to her establishment. Over his shoulder she caught sight of Kate in the
entryway, stamping slush from her feet. "Kate!" she said with a wide
grin. "I didn't know you were in town. This is Mr. Wu, from Outside."
"No, ma'am, I told you before, I'm from Hawaii. How do," he said to
Kate, before his eyes widened in
recognition. "Didn't I buy you a drink yesterday at the Roadhouse?"
"You sure did, and I thank you," Kate told him. She gave Auntie Viola, a
short, plump woman with a shrewd twinkle in her brown eyes, a quick
kiss. "Auntie, could I use your living room? I want to talk to Mr. Wu
for a minute."
"Sure, honey, no problem, take your time." Auntie Viola hurried past
them to open the door into the living room and ushered them inside. She
hesitated in the doorway, flicking at some imaginary dust on the buffet
hutch, until Kate assisted her out, closing the door firmly behind her.
Her business with Wu did not take long and they were both very pleased.
with each other at its conclusion. Kate even gave him a ride to the
airstrip on the back of the Jag, turned him over to George Perry
personally, helped load his bulging duffel bag into the now reassembled
Cessna and waited until it was off the ground.
She gave a final wave as it disappeared into the west. When she lowered
her eyes, her gaze became tangled and caught in the stand of trees at
the far end of the strip. Their tops clustered together against the
almost colorless sky, and their trunks hugged the ground, presenting a
stiff, united front. Her good humor faded and her arm dropped to her
side. On an impulse she walked forward. All the evidence there was was
in the state crime lab in Palmer; she'd seen the inventories and the
results of the tests in Jack's files. There was nothing left to look at
in the copse that had seen so much blood spilled just ten days before.
She told herself all this, and kept walking.
It was another still day, a bare hint of a breeze stirring the air, the
sun warm on her back. She entered the woods as she had before,
carefully, silently, respectfully, Mutt leading the way. Much of the
winter snowpack had melted beneath the onslaught of so many pairs of feet
over the last days, leaving bare, hard ground still frozen beneath the
melting slush.
Kate paused and cocked her head. Voices came from somewhere inside the
copse. There was a distant, single pop that made her flinch. Low,
smothered laughter followed. It was not a pleasant sound. Mutt's ears
went up and, her pulse quickening, Kate pushed her way back between the
branches.
Kate caught the limb of a birch across her cheek, a spruce elbowed her
in the side, a knot of alders tried to trip her up. She fought her way
in, ducking and weaving, until she came to the heart of the copse. There
she halted, out of breath.
A group of half a dozen women stood in a small circle; surprised faces
turned to look at her. A short, plump brunette held a bottle of
champagne, the cork out. The rest of the women held glasses filled to
the brim with golden bubbling liquid. They gaped at her, until the
brunette asked, a little unsteadily, "Come to join in the celebration,
Kate?"
"What celebration, Enid?"
Enid gestured with the bottle in a way that made Kate realize that the
celebration had begun at the Roadhouse much earlier in the day, perhaps
even the previous night. "In memorium." She stumbled over the word, and
the rest of the group helped her out-"That's right, in
memorium"-although none of them were in much better shape.
Kate looked around and realized they were on the site, or very close to
it, where Lisa Getty's body had been found. Incredulous, she asked, "In
honor of Lisa Getty?"
Enid snickered. "Hell no." She topped off her glass with an unsteady
flourish, emptying the bottle to the last drop. "In honor of Roger
McAniff, bless his heart, who shot that fucking bitch and killed her
dead. He got it right one time, right, girls?"
"Hear, hear," someone said, and someone else said,
"I'm just sorry it was so quick."
Kate couldn't find a single unfamiliar face. There was .Enid, Bernie's
wife; there was Sarah, Pete Kvasnikof's wife; there was Susan Moore,
Jimmy Bartlett's room mate-for-life; there was Luz Santos, who had been
engaged to Chuck Moonin; there was Betty Sue Brady, Lee's widow; and
there was Denise Smithson, whose husband Phil had worked as Lisa's
deckhand and then got off the boat in Cordova and got on a plane to
Anchorage and never come back. It was a fairly representative
cross-section of the Park-tall and short, fair and dark, thin and plump,
old and young-with nothing in common but their concentrated hatred of
Lisa Getty. "To McAniff!" Enid said, her glass held high, and "To
McAniff!" the other women responded. They drank deeply, and when the
glasses were drained to the last drop, they threw them against the trunk
of a large fir, to shatter and fall to the ground in a glittering,
broken shower that mingled with the half-ice, half-slush layer of snow
until it was impossible to tell where the shards of glass left off and
the crusty snow began.
There was `a shout of approval and cheers and congratulatory smacks on
the back, but the circle did not break and their expressions did not
ease. They hunched over their hatred, cradling it jealously. It was a
malignant, ugly thing to see. Kate felt sick, and it wasn't her wound.
"Ladies, I think you'd better head on home. You're not driving
yourselves, are you?"
Enid giggled, and hiccupped. "Hell, no, Bernie took
all our keys away. We hi
tched a ride in."
"Have you got a ride home?" That stumped them. "Well," Kate said, "go on
up to the post office. Ralph'll find somebody going your way."
Enid shrugged and grinned, pushing a hand of hair
out of her eyes. "Okay."
As the circle began to break up, Kate couldn't resist
saying, "McAniff didn't kill Lisa Getty."
"What?"
"The cops tested McAniff's rifle. The bullet that killed
Lisa Getty came from a different
She watched them carefully, but once they believed
her, the response was collectively and, so far as Kate
could see, completely surprised. Enid was the first to recover from the
news, and she waved a dismissing hand. "Doesn't matter. Whoever did it,
did the whole
Park a favor."
That seemed to be the general consensus, and the
women stumbled off, crashing through the trees with
fine disregard for either environmental preservation or
personal safety.
Kate stood where she was, breathing deeply, trying
to quell her roiling stomach. She had known Lisa was
disliked among her own sex in the Park, but until today she had had no
idea just how much. Her skin crawled and
she wished she could take a bath. She raised her head,
fixing her gaze on the small patch of sky the treetops
allowed to show through.
branch cracked behind her, and she whirled, her
thumping.
Mutt's ruff expanded. Kate straightened and put
calming hand on her head.
Lottie was rooted in place, as if she had grown there
among the scrub spruce and mountain hemlock and diamond willow,
gathering her own rings of age over
the short summers and the long winters. Her eyes were
squeezed shut. Her pale skin looked waxen. She was as
still and as hushed as the trees clustered thickly around
her, abetting her silence.
That silence felt reverent but less than serene. "Lottie,"
Kate said, her voice a bare thread of sound. She cleared
her throat, the sound rasping across the stillness. "I'm
sorry you had to see that." She paused. "Lottie, you
shouldn't be here."
The urgency in her voice got through. Lottie stirred. Her blue eyes
opened, and she looked around. It took her a moment to focus, and when
she did, her gaze fixed on the bandage on Kate's right temple, and then
slid past without comment or question.
"Lottie," Kate said, "go home. Lisa's dead. You can't change that by
hanging around here. It's not ..." She hesitated, searching for the
right word. "It's not healthy. I'll . . ." Again she hesitated. "I'll
take care of this. Go on home now."
No response. Kate swore beneath her breath and looked around for
inspiration. The surrounding trees presented a blank face in solidarity
with Lottie. Kate decided to go for shock value. "I hear Lisa was seeing
something of Max Chaney before she died."
The instantaneous change of expression on Lottie's usually stolid face
astounded her. The skin reddened, the lips drew back into a snarl.
Lottie's hands curled into claws, and Kate felt all the hair on the back
of her
neck rise. Mutt took a pace forward, getting between the two woman,
facing Lottie and uttering one sharp, warning bark.
"Okay, Mutt," Kate said, putting a hand on the dog's back. "It's all
right, girl. It's okay." She looked up at Lottie, and given their
difference in height it was quite a way up, which Kate was aware of as
never before. "Isn't it?" Lottie didn't reply, and Kate repeated, "Isn't
it okay, Lottie?"
Still with that near-snarl on her face, Lottie looked from the dog to
Kate and back again. Some of the tension went out of her. Her hands
uncurled. "No, it's not okay, Kate," she said in her dull, thick voice.
"It's not okay, and it's never going to be okay again."
She left, crashing blindly and indifferently through the trees, breaking
branches off with her shoulders and crushing last year's seedlings
beneath her boots. Kate, shaken down to her core for the second time in the
space of half an hour, retraced her path through trees that seemed a lot
less hostile to her exit than they had to her entrance.
The seat of the Jag felt steady beneath her, and she leaned forward over
the handlebars, her eyes closed, thinking hard. Max Chaney. Max Chaney,
who had taken Mark Miller's place in the Parks Service when the latter
had been killed the year before. Opening her eyes, she sat up straight
and asked Mutt, "How about a trip up to the Step? We can stop at Neil's
on the way."
In fact they made several stops on the way up to Park Service
headquarters, at small homesteads scattered along the rough track that
once was had been a roadbed, when the Kanuyaq & Northern Railroad ran
between the copper and silver mines in the foothills of the Quilak
Mountains and the port of Cordova on the coast of Prince William Sound.
It was maintained only during the summer, and the half-frozen, broken
surface of ice and mud was rutted and mushy. It was slow going, and
sometimes Mutt had to walk while Kate got off and pushed their way out
of yet another rut.
At the first homestead, a one-room cabin in the middle of a clearing
still littered with the stumps of newly fallen trees, they were greeted
with a sullen hostility that Kate wisely ignored. "Neil," she said
patiently, "you know and I know what you've got growing out back. It's
what's growing out back of half a dozen homesteads that I know of up and
down this road. Because the troopers haven't spotted it from the air yet
doesn't mean they couldn't, if someone gave them a tip as to where to
look. Five'll get you ten Chopper Jim knows all about it already, and
just hasn't had the time or the inclination to bother. If someone makes
a complaint, he'll have to." She waited.
The white, ropey scar that bisected her throat was just visible in the
opening of her collar. It began to itch
beneath his fixed gaze. "Lisa Getty was a competitor, Neil," Kate said,
still patient. "Somebody killed her, and it wasn't McAniff." Jack may
have wanted to keep Lisa's murder quiet, but he hadn't been shot at.
Kate was done with discretion.
"You think I did it?" Neil, a burly, ponytailed man, said with a glower.
"You tell me. Where were you that morning?'.' "I was here."
"Did you have company?"
He hesitated, and shook his head.
But Kate saw that hesitation and snapped, "Dammit, Neil, I don't care if
you were making a sell. I'm not going to turn you or the buyer in if you
were. Somebody killed Lisa Getty, and it wasn't Roger McAniff. Who was
here that morning? Who's your alibi? I'll talk to them, and if I'm
satisfied they're telling the truth, that'll be the end of it. Come on,
Neil, you know my word's good."
He hesitated a moment longer and then said with patent reluctance, "Jeff
Talbot came by that morning. He bought a couple lids and split."
"What time?"
He shrugged. "Ten. Maybe ten-thirty."
Which would not have left Neil enou
gh time to make the scene of Lisa's
murder and home again to sell dope to Jeff Talbot.
As she left the cabin, Kate eyed the gun rack above the door. It held a
twelve-gauge, pump-action shotgun, much like her own, with enough
firepower to take the heart out of most predators, especially the
two-legged. kind. The homesteader in her approved, if the investigator
in her deplored this further evidence in support of Neil's innocence.
She hadn't seen any other firearms inside. He could have tossed it down
a convenient abandoned mine shaft, but she didn't think so. Neil Miles
was representative of the Park's resident dope growers, a group
collectively notorious for a nonviolent lifestyle.
The guy was a vegetarian, for God's sake.
greatly provoked, Kate couldn't see how someone who, when he couldn't
bring himself to shoot a moose if he were starving to death, could shoot
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw Page 15