Breakup

by Dana Stabenow

  He wanted to test her. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, feel it in the tension of his thigh, could almost taste it on the tip of her tongue.

  The wind was increasing in volume, a real chinook by the warm feel of it, the leading edge of the storm brewing in the Gulf. A cloud crossed the face of the moon. The trees rustled, snow melted from branches like rain, and a chunk of ice slid suddenly from the cabin to crash to the ground beneath.

  It broke his spell. He reached for the hand on his thigh and flattened it against his crotch. He was hard, but then she’d known he would be. “You can’t prove anything.”

  “No, I can’t,” she said. The first ray from Bobby’s headlights hit the clearing. She tightened her hand and he gasped. “I don’t have to prove anything, Stewart. I know what happened. I’ve told you because I can’t bear the thought that you think you’re so smart you’ve committed the perfect crime and gotten away with it. You haven’t.”

  Her hand tightened further. “Hey,” he said, alarmed, and tried to pry her loose.

  She squeezed, hard, with her right hand and with her left grabbed for a handful of his throat, her nails sinking deep into his skin.

  Stewart’s whole body jolted with shock, and the first inkling of how much he had underestimated her. This was not how he had imagined this prolonged period of sexual titillation would end. The shock was closely followed by fury, with the sudden realization that she’d played him like a harp to just this end, but the fury was quickly supplanted by fear. Her grip was unbelievably, terrifyingly strong for such a small woman.

  He went limp, like an animal playing dead so the bear won’t be interested. It didn’t work all that well with bears, as he had cause to know, but it was the only option he had.

  It wasn’t working with this woman, either. Kate chuckled, and he shivered at the sound. She tightened her right hand, and he whimpered. She leaned closer, her lips brushing his ear, and dropped her voice. “You think with your dick, Stewart. Not all that impressive an organ, is it? After all, it led you here.”

  That stung his pride, and he choked and tried to twist away. She tightened her grip again. He was still erect, he didn’t seem to be able to help it, but the skin of his throat gave beneath her nails, and a warm trickle of fluid ran between her fingers. “This is how we take care of problems in the Park, Stewart,” she repeated. “We see something wrong, we fix it. Don’t come back here, or I’ll fix all your problems, once and for all.” She squeezed again. “Got it?”

  He gave a half-gasping, half-choking kind of gurgle. She took that as a yes. “Good boy,” she said, for all the world as if she were praising a not very bright pet dog. She smiled at him for the last time and, one hand on his crotch, one at his throat, raised him up and pitched him out of the cab of the Cat.

  He fell hard, and lay still for a moment, long enough for the trucks to slam to a halt and empty their occupants into the yard. “Jesus Christ, Shugak,” Bobby said, trying to unfold his chair and stay between Dinah and Stewart at the same time.

  “He’s not dead, is he?” Dan said, aghast.

  “No,” Jim said with more assurance than he felt, and was immensely relieved when Stewart staggered to his feet.

  When Jim would have helped him to one of the trucks, Kate’s voice, a low rasp of sound, came clearly over the sound of the Cat’s idle.

  “No. Let him walk.”

  Jim’s hand dropped as he stared up at the dark figure in the cab.

  The full moon was up high enough for the rest of them to watch in silence as Stewart limped shakily out of the clearing, shoulders hunched, hands clasped protectively over his crotch, something dark staining the front of his shirt.

  He bore only the very slightest resemblance to the tall, good-looking, confident ladies’ man who had left the Roadhouse two hours before.

  Eighteen

  THE NEXT MORNING SHE FINISHED HER TAXES and made an early trip in to the post office to drop her tax form into the mailbox, a whole day before the deadline. She exited the post office feeling efficient and virtuous and every inch the franchised American, and very nearly saluted the flag.

  She got the hell out of Dodge unambushed by anybody bent on drafting her to do good and returned to the homestead to rebuild the base of the couch with plywood and two-by-fours. There was no more of the blue canvas she’d used for upholstering fabric when she’d built it years before, so she improvised with a piece of olive drab Army blanket. She hated sewing; consequently her stitches were small and neat, so as to get the job done as fast as possible and not have to go back and redo it later. Finished, it looked like a splotch of pond scum floating on a blue lake. Or, if she squinted, maybe a lily pad. She’d have to check the Sears catalog for new material and reupholster the whole thing. Oh. Right. There was no more Sears catalog. Great.

  She set up the ladder again and sanded the Spackle on the ceiling patch. There was a little less than a gallon of the flat white latex paint in the garage, left over from the last time she’d painted the interior of the cabin, more than enough to cover the area involved. She had been right; the paint had faded and she had to paint the whole ceiling to make it match. Fortunately, the cabin was only twenty-five feet square and the loft ceiling was easily reached. At noon she took down the ladder for what she devoutly hoped was the last time and trundled everything back out through the slush to the garage.

  The chinook had blown itself out by six that morning, leaving temperatures in the upper forties and climbing. The roar of runoff down the creek had increased and she climbed down the bank, shotgun in hand, to assess the boulder situation. It looked solid, and a good thing, too, because there would be no muscling of rocks against the force of that water. Her judgment may have been influenced by the rustling of brush she heard across the creek, and the infrequent grunts and groans of her local grizzly, letting her know he was there.

  The Park was just lousy with bears this spring.

  Bad news for Carol Stewart.

  The grizzly gave another grumble of discontent and Mutt barked sharply from the top of the bank. “All right, all right, I’m going,” she told the grizzly. “All right, all right, I’m coming,” she told Mutt.

  There was no salvaging the Isuzu. Even the metal of the wheels was bent. She started up one of the four-wheelers and towed the corpse to the garbage dump a thousand feet from the clearing. She’d bury it as soon as the ground thawed. At least until then it would be out of her sight.

  A hammer and a fistful of nails and the cache was almost as good as new. Two of the four legs were intact and quickly reattached. She fetched the axe from the garage and shoved through the brush to a stand of slender birch about a quarter of a mile from the cabin. She found two of the right diameter and length, and felled them and hauled them back to the clearing, where she stripped them of bark and let them sit. It took fifteen minutes and a quarter of a can of Goop to clean the sap from her hands.

  “Oh to be anywhere else, now that spring is here.” Mutt, curled up in a patch of sunlight on the one dry piece of ground in the clearing, gave her a quizzical look and tucked her nose back beneath her tail.

  Like burying the truck, setting the cache back up would have to wait for the ground to thaw. She checked the meat in the root cellar beneath the garage. It was still mostly frozen. She pulled out a package of caribou backstrap steaks for dinner. It was too much for her to eat alone, but she felt she had earned a treat, and she didn’t want her tenderest cut of last fall’s moose to thaw and spoil.

  After lunch she pushed the snow machine into the garage and was draining the tank of its remaining fuel so as to begin work on a patch when Mutt gave a sharp warning bark from the yard. “What now?” she asked the rafters, and went to see.

  It was Bickford. He apologized for not making it out sooner. The thick manila envelope held fifty thousand dollars exactly, in cash, half in hundreds, half in fifties. Kate went dizzy at the sight of so much green and hoped it didn’t show.

  She made Bickford wait whi
le she counted it. He made her sign a receipt. Honors about even, he departed, and she sincerely hoped that was the last she was going to see of anyone for a while.

  She went inside and sat down at the kitchen table to admire the cash and think warm fuzzy thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Baker. After a nice long while she tucked the money back in the envelope and got out pen and paper to write two letters, the first a list of books to Rachel at Twice Told Tales in Anchorage, the second a list of cassette tapes to Susan at Metro Music, also in Anchorage.

  She peeked in the manila envelope again. Surely there was enough there to finance a trip into town. She could get a new tape deck and a supply of batteries at Costco, have a Reuben at the Downtown Deli, check out the latest in snow machines.

  Spend quality time with Jack.

  Blood suddenly humming with anticipation, she added notes to Rachel and Susan not to mail her orders, she would pick them up in person.

  The second envelope had just been sealed when Mutt barked again. Kate swore. Was she never to be left in peace?

  She went to the door and beheld Bobby jouncing into the clearing on his wheelchair, Dinah trotting along behind.

  Kate frowned at her. “Take it easy, you’re walking for two now, you know.”

  Around Mutt’s enthusiastic licks of welcome—every now and then her taste in men showed signs of improving—Bobby managed to say, “I keep telling her,” and Dinah rolled her eyes.

  “You got coffee?” Bobby demanded. At her nod he roared, “Well, don’t keep us standing out here in the cold, woman, pour it out!”

  It wasn’t cold, it was in fact getting fairly close to the Big Five-Oh, as the much anticipated fifty-degree mark was known, but Kate resigned herself to the inevitable and led the way inside without comment.

  When they were all around the kitchen table, Bobby stirred in creamer with a decisive hand and fixed Kate with a piercing stare. She met it with a bland expression. “We’ve been playing this game of Clue,” he said.

  Kate raised an eyebrow.

  “And we thought we’d try out one possible solution.” He looked at Dinah.

  “Carol Stewart,” Dinah said.

  “In the Park,” Bobby said.

  “With a bear,” Dinah said, and giggled.

  Bobby looked at Kate. “Well?”

  “Well what?” Kate sampled her own coffee, rejoicing in the fact that she had coffee again, not to mention corn Niblets and Darigold butter, which would go fine with tonight’s backstrap. She’d better boil up some rice, too, seeing as how it looked like she was going to have company for dinner.

  More company than she’d thought. “Hi,” Dan O’Brian said from the doorway. Behind him could be seen the distinctive outline of a round-crowned, flat-brimmed trooper hat.

  Kate sighed. “Jim, it’s breakup, you have to have business somewhere in the Park other than on my homestead.”

  “Kenny Ellis in Glenallen’s got me covered for today,” he said, stepping inside, immaculate as always.

  “Bernie coming, too?” Kate said as she poured out.

  “No, he’s busy, puttying up the bullet holes in the bar.” Jim pulled out a chair and sat down.

  Dan found an empty Blazo box and perched on it. “We had to promise to stop in on the way back, though, and give him the straight scoop.”

  They all stared at her expectantly.

  “So,” Bobby said.

  “Carol Stewart,” Dinah said. “Actually Mark, because you’re supposed to say whodunnit first.”

  “In the Park,” Bobby said.

  “With a bear,” Dinah, Dan and Jim said together.

  Nobody laughed this time. After a pause, Jim added, “We know he did it, Kate. You know how. Tell.”

  She rubbed a hand over her face and sighed again. “I never would have figured it out if Earlybird hadn’t dropped that engine on me,” she said. “But it was the sardine that really put it all together. Finally.”

  “Sardine?”

  “Sardine?”

  “You didn’t tell me about any sardine,” Dan said accusingly.

  “Wait a minute,” Jim said. “Last night, when Viola—”

  “Yes.” Kate nodded. To the others she explained, “Auntie Vi said Sardine was the name of the guy Carol Stewart came to the Park with last spring. But then she said no, that wasn’t right, and then she couldn’t remember what was.”

  Bobby thought it over and didn’t get it. He said so.

  “I didn’t, either, at first. Then there was the shoot-out.” She fortified herself with a Fig Newton. There was a forty-eight-ounce bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard but what with one thing and another she had yet to get around to baking. With luck, she could seduce Jack into baking for her, chocolate chip cookies being his specialty.

  “And,” Jim prodded.

  “And, I’ve always found that flying bullets really focus my attention, you know? I was lying there in back of the bar, and I remembered sardine is a kind of herring.”

  The other four exchanged speaking glances. “Hooligan,” Kate said, unperturbed, “is also another name for herring, right?”

  “Yeah,” Dan said, brow furrowed, “or it’s a family member, or something like that.”

  “And hooligan sounds pretty close to Harrigan, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate leaned back and stared at him. “Ring any bells?”

  Dan stared back, bewildered. “No, I—”

  “Kate—” Jim said.

  “Wait a minute!” Dan said, sitting bolt upright. “Of course! Harrigan, Nathan Harrigan! That was the name of the pilot! The one who flew Stewart into the Park last fall!”

  “Yes.” Kate waited for Dan to fill in the rest of them on his first meeting with Stewart and Stewart’s pilot.

  Jim’s brows snapped together. “Wait a minute. You mean Nathan Harrigan, your DB”—he pointed at Kate—“was the same guy you”—the trooper pointed at the ranger—“saw with Mark Stewart in the Park last fall?”

  Kate refrained from repeating yet again that Nathan Harrigan wasn’t her dead body, and simply nodded. “Yes. And, according to Auntie Vi, Harrigan was also in the Park with Carol Stewart last spring. According to Dan, he was back, this time with Mark, Carol’s husband, six months later.” She drank coffee. “And Stewart, Dan informs me, has had permits for moose, caribou and bear, not to mention fishing licenses, in this game management unit for the last ten years. You were right, Dan, he’s an experienced hunter. There was no excuse for him to go up to the mine unarmed.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jim said. “Wait just a damn minute. Are you talking about a double homicide here? You think Stewart killed his wife and Harrigan, too?”

  “I know he did,” she said, and polished off the cookie and reached for a second. “You said the coroner said Harrigan was an electrician in Anchorage. Bernie says Mark Stewart is a long-time contractor, also in Anchorage, one of the good old boys who went into business during the oil boom in the seventies. He put up the Roadhouse back when they were both starting out.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Bernie was telling us about it, day before yesterday,” Bobby said.

  Kate nodded. “Anyway, Anchorage isn’t that big a town, so my best guess is Harrigan probably worked for Stewart at one time or another. Probably how Harrigan met Stewart’s wife, too.”

  Bobby and Dinah and Dan exclaimed together, but Bobby’s stentorian bellow naturally won out. “Harrigan, who you’re saying is the dead body got found out here the day the sky fell, was screwing Carol Stewart?”

  Kate nodded again. “Yeah, and right here in the Park, too. Auntie Vi said she’d met Carol before, on a visit to the Park last spring, only she wasn’t with Mark, she was with some guy called—”

  “Sardine!”

  “Only she remembered by association, a sardine is a hooligan, and hooligan sounds close enough to Harrigan.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Jim said. “You’re saying Harrigan actually came out h
unting to the same place he’d been screwing the wife of the guy who invited him on the hunting trip?”

  Kate shrugged. “I don’t know much about Harrigan, but I do know enough about contract hiring that he’d think there might be a job in it if he accepted Stewart’s invitation.”

  “He was taking an awful chance,” Dan said.

  “Dumb,” Bobby said. “Dumb to come back to the Park with Stewart, dumb, dumb, dumb.”

  Kate’s smile was thin and noticeably lacking in amusement. “Stewart probably insisted on it.”

  The three men didn’t get it, but Dinah did. “Returning to the scene of the crime?”

  Kate nodded. “First with Harrigan, then with his wife. Rubbing their noses in it.”

  They thought about that for a while. “If you’re right, this guy’s some kind of sadist,” Dan said.

  “Some kind,” Kate agreed.

  Dinah shuddered.

  “Dumb,” Bobby insisted. “If I’d been Harrigan, I would have run a mile from the guy.”

  “Maybe,” Kate said. “Maybe not. You read the papers. The state economy hasn’t been the same since the pipeline years. Construction jobs are few and far between. If he needed the work, and if he thought the hunting trip meant work, Harrigan would want to believe Stewart knew nothing of the affair. He’d will himself to believe it.”

  “You’re guessing,” Jim said flatly, leaning back in his chair. He sounded disappointed.

  “About all the Anchorage stuff, yes,” Kate said. “Did you get a positive ID on the body?”

  Jim nodded abstractedly. “It came in this morning. It is Nathan Harrigan. But—” He fell silent.

  Kate finished her cookie. “Two wounds, the coroner said. One blow to the head, hard enough to knock him unconscious, not hard enough to kill him. While he was out, another blow to his leg, hard enough to break it, to incapacitate him, so Stewart could walk away and let it look like an accident.”

  Jim thought about it, and gave a slow nod.

  “Maybe Stewart waited until Harrigan woke up, maybe he was gone when Harrigan woke up, and so was anything Harrigan could have eaten, or used for warmth, or for shelter. So Harrigan lay where he was and waited for death.”