A Fine and Bitter Snow

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 Nestle’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.

He knew Ruthe and Dina, too, maybe not as well as Kate, but well enough. He’d been to their cabin several times since he’d moved to the Park, and he’d liked the two ladies, even if they were older than God. Dina had started right in on him, wanting to know how much he knew about the Park and what lived in it. He was interested, and she didn’t talk down to him, so he didn’t mind. She had showed him a photo album that started out with weird little rectangular black-and-white pictures and ended up with normal ones- in color, with digital date stamps in the corners. There were pictures of bears and moose, and one of two bald eagles fighting each other in the air, only Dina had said they were mating. There was a picture of Dina standing twenty feet in front of a walrus haul, with what must have been thousands of walrus, and a picture of Ruthe standing in what looked like the middle of a vast herd of caribou, the animals stretching out all around her, over an immense plain, as far as the eye could see. A mink peeked out of a snowbank; a beaver got caught slapping his tail; a wolverine, fangs bared, looked like he was about to charge. “He was, too,” Dina had said, cackling; “we barely got out of there in time.”

There were pictures of tracks of every kind-in the mud of spring and the swamp of summer, but mostly in the snow: the long stride and enormous feet of a wolf, the smaller prints of a fox, and the tiny prints of a vole.

In one picture, the hip-hopping tracks of an arctic hare vanished, just stopped altogether. “See?” Dina had said, pointing. Feathered ends of wing tips left a ghostly clue in the show on either side of the tracks.

“Wow,” Johnny had said, awed.

“A golden eagle, from the wingspan. Aquila chrysaetos,” Dina had said, and she had made him repeat the words until he had the pronunciation correct. “Of the family Accipitridae.”

“I’ve only ever seen bald eagles,” he had said humbly, and when she’d turned the page, there was a picture of a golden eagle in flight, at about five hundred feet up, the photo shot from the window of a plane. He could see part of one strut.

“Is that a Super Cub?” he said.

Dina was impressed. “Yes.”

“Is it yours?”

She nodded. “It’s at the strip in Niniltna. How did you know it was a Cub?”

He looked back at the picture of the golden eagle. “My dad was a pilot.”

“I know. I met him. He drove a Cessna, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. A one seventy-two.”

“I remember. Lycoming conversion.”

“Yeah.”

“Sweet little plane. What happened to it?”

“My mom sold it when my dad died.”

The kitchen timer had dinged then and Ruthe had taken a sheet of cookies out of the oven, the best oatmeal cookies he’d ever eaten. She sent him home with a bagful. She was pretty, and as smart as Dina. He’d liked them both, and he was sorry there would be no more evenings spent at their cabin eating fresh-baked goodies out of the oven and looking at pictures of otters sliding down a snowbank into a creek.

The tea had steeped and melted the honey and he’d stirred all the lumps out of the cocoa. He added marsh-mallows to the cocoa and carried both mugs to the table, sitting down across from her. “How long did you know them?”

“Hmm? What?” She looked down and saw the mug. “Oh. Thanks.” She curved her hands around it, warming her fingers, which felt suddenly cold.

“So how long did you know them?”

“Ruthe and Dina?” She stared down at the surface of the tea, a golden yellow. “All my life. They were friends of my grandmother.”

He nodded, very serious, and wiped marshmallow from his mouth. “Emaa.”

“Yes.”

“And she’s dead, too.”

“Yes.”

“Is the tea all right?”

“What? Oh.” She sipped at the tea for form’s sake. “Yes, it’s fine. Thanks, Johnny.”

“You’re welcome.”

She put up a hand to rub her forehead. “It’s hard to believe. They seemed, I don’t know, larger than life. Like they’d live forever.”

“Like Dad,” Johnny said, nodding.

She looked at him then. “What?”

“Like Dad,” Johnny repeated. She didn’t think he knew it when a tear slid down his cheek. “He was like, I don’t know, God. I didn’t think anything could hurt him. Well, except you.”

He was only fourteen and he’d been orphaned by one parent and had orphaned himself from the second as a deliberate act. He was trying so hard to act grown-up, to take matters like divorce and separation and death in his stride, to be independent and autonomous and to move on and keep moving without looking back. Kate knew the feeling.

She didn’t make the mistake of denying she’d ever hurt his father, and she didn’t try to apologize. “I know. He was kind of… indestructible, I guess.”

“Except when he died,” Johnny said.

“Except when he died,” Kate said.

“Can you tell me now?” Johnny said in a low voice. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I told you what happened, Johnny. Those hunters we were guiding started shooting at each other, and we got in the way.”

“All of it, this time,” Johnny said.

She met the blue eyes fixed so determinedly on her face, saw the pleading look in them. His whole body was tensed with the need to know of his father’s last hours on earth. It wasn’t that she hadn’t meant to tell him the whole story one day, when he was older and could handle it. And she could handle telling it.

“Can you? Please, Kate?”

It seemed, after all, that she could.

She followed Johnny into town the next morning, waving good-bye as he took the turn for the school gym, where Billy was having his new baby party. Johnny wanted to learn to dance, and Park Air had announced there might be dancing. Besides, he liked Billy, and he thought it was cool that he had a new baby all the way from Korea. He’d looked up Korea on Kate’s atlas, so he felt ready.

Kate’s first stop was the Step. She walked into Dan’s office, Mutt at her heels, to find the ranger with his feet propped on the sill of the window and his hands laced behind his head. He had a moody expression on his face. “Hey,” she said.

He dropped his feet but not his hands, until Mutt insisted on a head scratch. “Hey.”

Kate sat down opposite him. “I heard.”

“I figured.”

“You okay?”

“I been suspended.”

“What?”

He tossed her a sheet of paper with the National Park Service letterhead; it was addressed to the chief ranger and placed him on suspension indefinitely, pending the outcome of the criminal investigation into the death of Dina Willner. Kate looked up. “I thought Jim had a suspect in custody.”

“He does.”

“Then what’s this crap?”

“Any stick’ll do to beat a dog with, Kate.” He looked at Mutt. “Sorry, babe. They want to get rid of me. It’s probably enough that I stumbled into the middle of a murder. Guilt by association.”

Kate tossed the paper into the garbage can. “You’re not going to put up with this shit, are you?”

“Well,” Dan said, shifting his gaze from the window to Kate, “there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. Of course, I’m the only one on duty at this time of year, and it’ll take a while before they find someone qualified to take over. I doubt that any of the suits in Anchorage are going to want to leave the bright lights and the big city to baby-sit in the wilderness.”

“Dan.”

“Kate-”

“You may be going to put up with this, but I’m not.”

He drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “I went there to ask Dina and Ruthe for their help in keeping this job. You got me so fired up last time we talked that I figured you were right, that I ought to fight for it, not just sit back and let my friends carry the weight. But now I don’t know. Dina’s dead, Kate, and Ruthe might die. Two great old broads, one gone, one maybe gone. Nothing else seems all that important right now.”

Kate leaned forward. “Dina and Ruthe would be the first to tell you that the land is what’s important, Dan. Not us. The land. We’re only custodians, and temporary ones at that. We do the best we can and then we pass the job along to the next generation. I don’t think you’re ready to hand off just yet.”

He looked at her with the faint glimmer of his old smile. “You be careful there, Shugak. You’re starting to sound like your grandmother.”

She sat back. “Did you see the guy Jim brought in?”

He shook his head.

“Did you see anything yourself?”

“No.” He seemed about to say something else, then repeated firmly, “No. I didn’t see anything. It doesn’t matter, really, if I saw anything or didn’t see anything. Jim got the guy. Crazy bastard, sounds like,” he added as an afterthought.

It sounded like the truth, she thought as she made her way back down the trail from the Step. It also sounded like Dan was trying to convince himself that it was. Which was crazy. Like Dan said, Jim got the guy, had him in custody in Ahtna. Case closed.

The sky had clouded over in the night and the temperature had warmed up to ten above, and if the rising barometer at the homestead was working right, there was a storm coming in off the Gulf. She drove through Niniltna to the turnoff and then, for the second time that week, negotiated the narrow track to the little cabin perched high on the side of the mountain. The snow in the yard was packed down hard from the passage of many vehicles, wheeled and tracked, and there were a couple of snow machines already parked there. She stopped hers and climbed the stairs.

There were two strange men in the house, men she’d never seen before. They swung around, startled, when the door opened. “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” she said.

They were both in their early twenties, hairy and with the aroma of an unwashed winter about them. They hadn’t bothered to doff their Carhartt jackets, bib overalls or their knit caps, only their identical pairs of black leather gloves. “Just poking around,” one of them said. “Seeing if there’s something we can use.”

Both of them were looking at Mutt, who was standing at Kate’s side and looking both of them over with a long, considering stare. Mutt was half wolf, and when she wanted to, she let it show. Sensing Kate’s rising anger, she bared a little fang.

The man who had spoken visibly paled. “Look, we’re not doing anything wrong. The two old ladies are dead, they don’t have any relatives, and-”

“Wrong,” Kate said flatly. “I’m their relative. Get out.”

He tried to bluster. “Who the hell are you anyway? You’ll just take all the good stuff if-”

“Russ,” the other man said.

“Well, hell, Gabe, we got here first. We’re not going to turn around and-”

“That’s Kate Shugak.”

“What?”

The other man nodded at Kate. “That’s Kate Shugak.”

“Oh.” Russ gulped. “And that must be-”

“Mutt.”

Mutt had perfected the art of the unblinking stare. It could be unnerving.

“Oh.” Russ gulped again. “Actually, we were just leaving.”

“That we were,” the second man said, and beat him out the door.

Mutt looked up at Kate and raised an eyebrow. Kate shook her head. “Not worth it.” Mutt gave an almost-perceptible shrug. “Find Gal,” Kate said. Mutt looked disgusted and stalked out, disapproval evident in the slightly backward set of her ears.

The room looked as if it had been hit by a chinook, one of the spring storms that roared up out of the Gulf like a lion and proceeded to blow everything in front of it out of the way. There wasn’t really any good place to start. Kate shed parka, bib, and boots and rolled up her sleeves. Finding that someone had banked the embers in the woodstove, she loaded it with wood, and waded in.

The bookshelves were freestanding and had been pulled down, but they’d been emptied of books and so were easy enough to stand back up. She began putting books in at random, figuring they could be organized later. She righted furniture, replaced the canned goods and pots, pans, and dishes-plastic, a good thing-in the cupboards, and cleaned up those supplies that had been spilled, mostly flour-both wheat and white, it looked like. Most of a forty-eight-ounce bag of chocolate chips was spilled across the floor, too. She swept it all up and into a garbage bag, which she tied off and put on the porch. The bears were asleep, and she’d get the bag to the dump before they woke up again in the spring.

A lone bunny slipper, one of its ears lopsided, was sitting on its side under the woodstove. Kate fished it out and put it on a shelf, unable to stop the tears from welling in her eyes. She conducted a search but couldn’t find the other one. Maybe it was with Dina’s body.

There didn’t seem to be a dish towel to be found, or a towel of any kind, and then she remembered. Ruthe had been hurt, and transported to the hospital. Someone had probably used them for bandages. She climbed the ladder to the loft and discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that the chinook had hit here, as well. The two beds were off their stands, a pillow leaked feathers, and clothes had been emptied from closets and drawers and were strewn all over the floor. The blankets were gone. Ruthe again, she figured. She got the beds back on their stands, the clothes back into place, and as much of the leaky pillow and its errant feathers as possible into another garbage bag.

When Ruthe got better, Kate didn’t want her coming home to a destroyed house. If she didn’t get better… No, she would.

She went to the top of the ladder and turned around, hands on the posts, foot on the first rung, and gave the loft a long look. Pale light leaked in from a skylight in the ceiling.

Why the loft? The two women had been assaulted downstairs. Why beat up on two women and then trash the loft? Seemed like overkill. She winced at the word. Dan had called the perp a “crazy bastard.” That could be all it was. Enough crazy bastards came into the Park and misbehaved that it was usually enough of an explanation, requiring the full-time attention of three troopers and more than a few tribal policemen. Hell, there were enough of the homegrown variety to keep everyone in business, never mind the newbies.

She climbed down the ladder and began to try to make sense of some of the letters and paperwork that she had piled on the coffee table. There were advisory reports on this and that species of wildlife, letters asking for endorsements in political campaigns and for a presence at fundraisers, some from candidates whose names made Kate’s eyebrows go up. There were fat files on various parks and refuges, environmental-impact studies on a couple of construction projects, including a hiking trail someone wanted to run down the side of the Kanuyaq River from Ahtna all the way to Cordova; it would run partway along the existing roadbed into the Park.

She noticed for the first time that Ruthe and Dina had no family photographs, no pictures of mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers or sisters. She shrugged. Maybe they were both orphans. Still, it seemed odd. Everybody had pictures of people, at least a few. Ruthe and Dina’s albums were of plants, animals, glaciers, avalanches, and mountain-tops, and if there were people in them, they were usually Ruthe or Dina.

Then she found one with both of them and Ekaterina, posing in front of the Kanuyaq Copper Mine, along with a crowd of other people. The beaver-hatted man on Emaa’s right must be Mudhole Smith, the Bush pilot from Cordova. All four aunties were there, three with their husbands, who were still living at the time. Demetri Totemoff and John Letourneau were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, which would put the date back in the days before they’d split their guiding business and gone their separate ways. John was standing next to Dina and laughing down at her. Anastasia was next to Demetri, looking up at him with a soft smile. Demetri’s arm was draped tentatively around her, as if he had yet to be convinced that he had the right. He probably still feared the appearance of Anastasia’s father with a gun, which, from everything Kate had heard, would have been just like Frank Korsakovakof. A protective father and a good man. Anastasia had found it hard to go up against him, so the story went, but Demetri had prevailed, and in the end, Frank had come around. And now both Frank and Anastasia were gone. She made a mental note to stop in and see Demetri soon.

In the photograph, the polyester clothes and the hair, either board-straight or permed to a curlicue, put the time in the mid- to late seventies. They all looked tanned and fit, and so very vigorous. So alive. There was a man standing to the right and a little behind Ekaterina. Kate took a closer look. Ray Chevak, from Bering. Emaa’s-what? Even back then, he wasn’t young enough to be called “boyfriend.”

It was unnerving to see how far back Ray and Ekaterina’s relationship went. Kate hadn’t known about it until after Emaa’s death, and she didn’t want to know more, didn’t want her imagination to work out any of the details.

She heard a noise on the porch and went to the door. Mutt was on the top step, Gal between her front paws, her face screwed up into an expression of deep distaste as Mutt washed her with a raspy pink tongue. They both became aware of Kate at the same moment. Gal sprang away and hissed. Grr, Mutt said in return. Gal jerked her tail and padded between Kate’s legs. She gave an imperious meow, but when Kate got her some food, she barely waved a whisker over it before going right to Ruthe’s chair and curling up.

“Welcome home,” Kate said. She was immensely relieved. She didn’t want to have to tell Ruthe that Gal had disappeared. She bent to give the cat a scratch behind the ears and found her fur damp to the touch from Mutt’s ministrations. She looked over at Mutt. “You make a pretty good nurse.”

Mutt gave an elaborate yawn, and cleaned up Gal’s food with a single swipe of her tongue. It was all show, because Kate knew for a fact that Mutt had dined very nicely the day before on the remains of a moose carcass not a mile from the homestead.

She noticed a book she had missed beneath the sofa and bent down to pick it up. Wedged under the couch was a narrow tin box, of the size to hold standard file folders. It was locked. Kate looked for a key in hopes that there might be names and numbers for her to call-not that either Dina or Ruthe had ever referred to having anyone to call in the event of, other than each other. There was a key rack with hooks sprouting from little tin chickadees, with airplane keys, snow machine keys, and truck keys, but no keys to fit the tin box. She set the box to one side, not feeling things were to the point that she had to break into it.

“Hey,” a voice said from the deck.

She looked up, to behold Jim Chopin peering at her through the window. She didn’t notice that the sight of him didn’t cause its usual knee-jerk antipathy. “Hey, yourself.”

He came in. “What are you doing here?”

She waved a hand. “Trying to clean up for when Ruthe gets home.”

He looked at her and forbore from saying what was on both their minds.

“You?” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I wanted to see if I’d remembered to lock the door.”

“There’s no lock.”

He examined the doorknob. “I’ll be damned.”

“Dina didn’t believe in locks in the Bush. Said if she and Ruthe were both away from home and somebody got lost in a blizzard that she wanted them to be able to get in.”

“I don’t know who’d stagger up this mountain in a blizzard, but it’s a nice thought.”

“I caught a couple of guys poking through the rubble.”

His eyes sharpened. “Who?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know them. I ran them off.”

“Get tags?”

She shook her head again. “I don’t think they’ll be back. And I’ll get Bernie to spread the word that I’m looking after the place.”

Which all by itself would be enough to keep the cabin and the surrounding property sacrosanct, Jim thought. At least for a while, at least until they knew if Ruthe would live.

“I hear you got the guy,” she said.

“Yeah. Knife in hand. Blood wasn’t even dry on it. Tests already confirmed Ruthe’s and Dina’s blood on it.”

“That was quick.”

“The governor himself called the crime lab. Love them or hate them, Ruthe and Dina helped make a lot of the history of this state. He ordered the flags to fly at half-staff today.”

In spite of herself, Kate was impressed. “A nice gesture.”

“Yeah, ought to pick him up a few more votes in the next election.” Gal’s head poked up over the back of the chair, and Jim said, “Hey, Gal, you came back! Good girl. Thank god. I couldn’t find her after she took off.”

He told Kate what had happened, and she laughed, surprising both of them. He picked up Gal and sat down with her in his lap, where she immediately curled up, purring and kneading. Mutt padded over and rested her chin on the arm of the chair, and Jim freed a hand to scratch her ears.

Kate sat down and started going through the paperwork again. When next she looked up, Jim had his head against the back of the chair and his eyes closed. Gal was curled into a soft black ball on his lap and Mutt was stretched out on the floor with her head on one of his feet.

It was quite a domestic scene. Kate went back to the paperwork, but her mind was more on the man across from her.

They called him “Chopper Jim” because of his preferred method of transportation, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, although he flew fixed-wing, too, and was reliable and skilled on both craft.

They also called him “the Father of the Park,” for his equally reliable and skilled seduction of pretty much every available female inside Park boundaries. Although now that Kate thought of it, she couldn’t remember any children whose mothers claimed he had fathered them. A courtesy title, perhaps, and Kate was a little startled when the thought made her smile.

He was originally from California, which figured. He had the same coloring as Ethan, only darker, and he was tall, also like Ethan, but he was much broader in the beam. He looked like a buff Beach Boy, and she’d bet he had spent his entire childhood in the water with a surfboard. What was he doing in Alaska, three thousand miles and one time zone away, with no sand, no surf, and no beach bunnies? It was a question she’d never asked him.

He’d stuck. He’d been posted to the Park the year before she graduated from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and they had howdied when she spent her vacations in the Park, but they hadn’t really shook until she had quit working as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney and had come home with attitude to spare and a scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear. Unlike many of the Park rats, he hadn’t treated her as fragile, about to break. Instead, he’d made a move, she had rebuffed it, and that had set the pattern of their relationship-she couldn’t call it friendship, not even after Bering-from then until now.

As a trooper, he had what she thought was a real understanding of the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law, and sometimes, she had to admit, the almost-inspired ability to enforce one without violating the other. That business with Cindy and Ben Bingley two breakups before. And Johnny this fall, when he had sided with the boy-and her-against the boy’s mother and legal guardian, in essence aiding and abetting what could be construed in a court of law as kidnapping.

Emaa had approved of him, in her austere fashion. That alone was enough to guarantee Kate’s antagonism. For the first time, Kate wondered if it had been deliberate. Emaa had been a master manipulator, and while she was alive, Kate had fought a constant rear-guard action to keep her grandmother from taking over her life. Emaa had liked Jack, too. Although Kate had brought Jack home as a fait accompli, already a fixture in her life, and Emaa would have found acceptance more expedient than antagonism. Emaa had been the complete political animal, even in her relationships with family members. A smile curled the corners of Kate’s mouth, and her eyes strayed again to the man sleeping across the table from her.

Not that she would have felt differently about Jim if Emaa had not approved of him. She finished neatening up the paperwork and stacked it in a pile, dividing it by year with file folder separators. The pile was tall enough to teeter. She moved it to a corner, where she leaned it up against a wall and weighted it down with a frayed tome four inches thick, Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. What on earth had the old girls needed with that?

The stove was burning low and she added a couple of logs before going to the kitchen and setting the kettle to boil. She was hungry, and with a glance over her shoulder, she pulled out a couple of cans of cream of tomato soup and a package of saltines. There was butter in the cooler outside, miraculously spared by the attacker, or perhaps just overlooked.

Jim stirred when she set the tray down on the coffee table. “Hey,” he said, yawning. “Guess I fell asleep.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Soup’s on.”

“Be right back.” He gently assisted Gal from his lap and stepped outside. Mutt, with similar intentions, and finding herself on the wrong side of the door, barked once. The door opened and she slipped out.

“Mutt’s causing havoc with the local wildlife,” Jim said when he came back in. “I saw her flush out a couple of spruce hens. Good thing the girls aren’t here to see.”

“What a phony. She’s not that hungry; she chowed down on the better part of a moose yesterday.”

“Dogs just wanna have fun.”

“That dog does. Have some soup and crackers.”

“Thanks.”

They ate in silence. “Thanks,” he said again when he was finished, sitting back and combing his hair back with one hand. “Sorry I fell asleep. I didn’t think I was that tired.”

“You up all night with the perp?”

“Higgins? Pretty much.”

“That’s his name?”

“Riley K. Higgins, that’s him.”

“What set him off?”

“He’s not talking.” He buttered another cracker. “He’s pretty pitiful, really. We got a make on his prints. He’s a vet, two tours in Vietnam, never really got back to the world. Came from Carbondale, Illinois, originally. His dad’s dead. I talked a little to his mom.”

“How was she?”

He bit into the cracker and chewed meditatively. “Like her son died in Vietnam and she’s been mourning his loss ever since. She sounds frail. I didn’t talk to her long. I called the local police chief. He said Higgins was on the street, got picked up for pretty much everything at one time or another-indecent exposure for peeing in an alley, drunk in public, disturbing the peace. Got beat up once, bad enough to be in the hospital and dry out. Didn’t take. He also got run in for drugs a time or two, but only marijuana, nothing serious. Nothing expensive anyway. Nothing violent, either, which bothers me some. Usually there’s a pattern you can trace back when something like this happens.

“The chief said he disappeared last summer. Said the family’s a good bunch and that they had done everything they could for him, but he thinks that by the time Higgins disappeared, they were tired and maybe a little relieved that he was gone. He’s got a sister and a brother, nieces and nephews. All still live in Carbondale. Mom, too. None of them made much of an effort to find him.” On the verge of buttering another cracker, Jim lost his appetite and put down the knife. “I don’t know what he was doing here. He doesn’t seem to have any visible means of support.”

“He might have been one of Dina’s projects.”

“ ‘Projects?” “

Kate nodded. “They had those cabins up the hill, empty all winter. It bothered Dina, and maybe Ruthe, too, although she used to give Dina a hard time about Dina’s big idea.”

“Which was?”

Kate shrugged. “Nothing major. Dina thought the cabins ought to be put to some use is all.”

“So they rented them out to drifters? What the hell were two lone women, one of them getting close to feeble, doing inviting weirdos to move in up the goddamn hill from them?”

“They were careful,” Kate said. “Yeah, okay, obviously not careful enough this year. But they’d been doing it for years without incident.”

“They have somebody up there every winter?”

“Almost. One or two every year. They booted them out come breakup and the first paying customer.”

“They stay booted?”

“Pretty much. Dina told me one time that she was giving them breathing space, a chance to find their feet. See if they liked the Park enough to stay. She said ninety percent of them didn’t, and they never saw them again.” She smiled.

“What?”

“They let Mac Devlin stay up there the winter his cabin burned.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

Jim smiled, too.

“Well, I better get back to it,” Kate said.

Jim looked around. “You’ve done a lot. Looks almost back to normal.” He noticed a little pile on the small table next to Dina’s chair. “What’s this?”

Kate looked. “Oh, that. I’m getting some pictures together for Dina’s potlatch. They don’t have much in the way of people pictures.”

“When is it?”

“Saturday. At the school gym.”

“Bernie’ll be annoyed.”

“The Roadhouse is too small. Ruthe and Dina have been here too long and have too many friends.”

“I suppose.” He hesitated. “Did you think about waiting?”

“For what?”

“Ruthe.”

Kate paused. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought about it. But… I don’t know. Ruthe was-she is a ‘fish or cut bait’ kind of person. She’d say, Get it done.”

“Not the sentimental type.”

“No,” Kate said, smiling a little. “Dina was the idealist. Ruthe is always the pragmatist. The art of the practical, that’s Ruthe’s specialty.”

“Yeah,” he said, giving the copy of National Geographic he held a reminiscent smile. The cover featured a story entitled “Gates of the Arctic National Park.” “I remember that about her.”

There was a moment of electric silence.

For no reason at all, the hair stood straight up on the back of his neck. He looked across the table to find her eyes fixed on him, narrowed and hostile. The look pulled him to his feet, ready for fight or flight. “Kate?”

It was purely involuntary, a knee-jerk reaction. She didn’t stop to think about it; she just picked up the little tin lockbox and let fly. Its arc was swift and her aim was true. The box caught him just above the left eyebrow and burst open. A paper blizzard fluttered out and down.

“Ouch!” Jim slapped a hand to his eye and rocked back a step. “That hurt! Damn it, Kate!”

“Is there a woman left in this Park you haven’t slept with!” She grabbed a coffee mug and let fly with that, too.

The mug missed, which was a good thing, since he never saw it coming. He heard it slam into the sink and shatter, though. Warm fluid was running down the side of his face and obscuring his vision. He took a stumbling step forward, trying to preempt future missiles. He nearly fell over the coffee table, which movement, fortuitously for him, caused her to miss his head with the big red Webster’s Unabridged. It hit his right shoulder instead.

“Shit!”

“What’s with all the noise?” Dandy Mike said, peeking in the door, and ducked back just in time to avoid the poker. It missed Jim, striking the wall next to the door instead and landing at his feet with a clang. “Never mind, none of my business, just checking in. I’ll be leaving now,” said Dandy Mike, his voice barely audible over the sound of feet rapidly retreating down the stairs.

She’d snatched up an Aladdin lamp, the reservoir still half-filled with oil, when he tackled her and wrestled her onto the couch. The chimney fell off the lamp and miraculously did not break as it rolled beneath the table.

“Stop it, Kate,” he said, breathing hard. “Damn it, I said stop it!”

This as she dropped the lamp and he got an elbow to the jaw that made his teeth snap together painfully. He caught her hands and pushed them into the small of her back. She head-butted him. “Ouch! Jesus!” The only way to immobilize her was to lie on her full length, which he did. It wasn’t even funny how long he’d been waiting to get her horizontal and this was the only way he could get it done.

“Get off me!”

“What the hell is the matter with you!”

She tried to knee him in the groin. He shifted at the last possible minute. “Kate,” he said. He was angry now. “Knock it off.”

She heaved beneath him, trying to throw him off, and they both rolled to the floor, Kate on the bottom. She inhaled sharply. “Get off me!” He’d lost his grip on her hands in the fall, and she tried to hit him. He grabbed her hands again and held them over her head.

“Jesus!” he said. “What the hell is the matter with you!”

“Get off me, you son of a bitch! Get off!”

Their eyes met, hers narrow and furious, his widening as realization struck.

“You’re jealous,” he said.

She erupted in a fury of denial, kicking, butting, hitting, elbows, knees, feet, everything in action. “Let me go!”

He felt as if he were trying to hold on to an earthquake. “Christ! Stop it, Kate! Ouch!” This when she kicked him in the shin. “Kate!” She tried to head-butt him again. She was strong and agile, but he was bigger and getting angrier. After another attempt on his balls, he kneed her legs apart and pressed her down.

She froze. He froze. Sight of the edge of the cliff they were about to go over came to them both at the same moment, but then he’d been hard since they hit the floor.

“Kate,” he said, her name an unrecognizable husk of sound. He bent his head.

“No!” She erupted again, fighting, clawing, even trying to bite him.

Maybe it was the click of her teeth in his ear. Maybe it was just the result of all that friction. Whatever it was, something inside him slipped off the chain, something famished and feral and prowling, something totally out of his control. He could smell it, smell the need in her, the craving. It was as strong as his, as basic as his, and if it wasn’t, he didn’t care. He would take what he wanted anyway. His hand tightened around her wrists and she cried out. He used the other to yank up the hem of her shirt and tear off her bra. Her breasts were small and firm, the nipples hard and brown, and he took them into his mouth in turn, suckling as if he were starving. She cried out again and arched up, her body a tense bow. He slid his hand between her legs and rubbed the heel of his hand hard against her. She screamed then, in ecstasy or outrage, her body pressing into him, her head pressed against the floor, and he went for the snap of her jeans before she could start fighting him again.

But she wasn’t fighting him now. She had one hand free and knotted in his hair, holding his head still while she kissed him, her teeth and tongue voracious, one hand clawing at his shirt, one leg hooked around his waist. The coffee table got in the way and she kicked it over. It smacked into the unsteady pile of paperwork leaning up against the wall and the classics dictionary came crashing to the floor, barely missing their heads.

Oblivious, she ran her teeth down the side of his neck and he nearly came then and there. “Wait, damn it, wait, wait,” he said, tugging desperately at her jeans. Her hips gave a quick wriggle and the jeans slid, oh thank god, all the way down; he managed to pull them off one leg before she went for his belt. One second he was free and in the next he was caught again, driving into her, the one place he’d wanted to be for a year and a half, longer than that, an eternity of wanting, back where it was tight and hot and wet and Kate, Kate, Kate.

He was pretty sure she came again. He knew he had, hard enough to wonder why the floor hadn’t splintered beneath them. Hard enough to wonder if he’d hurt her.

Jim Chopin in the sack was all about control, all about subtlety and skill and patience. He liked women, and he was self-aware enough to know that he was one up on most men in that he didn’t fear them, either. He liked the getting and giving of mutual pleasure, mutually arrived at, mutually satisfying. He was proud of that, taking a certain amount of smug satisfaction in his expertise. He was not into pain, he liked to take his time, and it just wasn’t any fun if his partner wasn’t enjoying herself as much as he was. Life was too short to have bad sex.

But this time, this one time, he had been hasty, rough, and reckless, frantic to get at her, ridden by a red devil of lust that whipped him on and over the edge into madness. This time, he had displayed all the refinement and sophistication of a moose in rut. This time, he still had most of his clothes on.

So much for control. So much for finesse. Ah, shit.

He summoned the strength from somewhere and raised his head to look down at her. Her eyes were closed, her neat cap of hair a tangled dark halo. Her lips were swollen and parted as she gulped in air. A pulse beat frantically at the base of her throat, and he couldn’t resist-he had to bend his head and settle his mouth over it, sucking at the warm, throbbing lifeblood beneath the skin. He could hear her breathing. He could feel her hands on his back, the sting of the scratches she’d left there. She radiated heat like a furnace. He could smell her, the aroma that to him was redolent of a cold draft beer after a long, hot day, a piece of Auntie Vi’s fry bread, Bobby’s special caribou steaks, quick-fried in hot oil and then baked in a wine and cream sauce, a shot of Ruthe’s framboise-every good thing to eat and drink he’d ever had in his life, that’s what Kate Shugak smelled like to Jim Chopin. Her pulse beat against his tongue and he wanted to eat her alive. For the first time, he understood the eroticism underlying the story of Dracula, and the unexpected thought made him laugh low in his throat.

He felt her lashes flutter, and he looked up, to see her eyes open.

“Hey,” he said, gentling his voice.

She didn’t say anything, and that scared him.

“I’m sorry I was so rough.” He traced a finger down her cheek. There was blood. It was his, from his temple, where she’d connected with the box. It didn’t seem to matter much now. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” she said, her voice a thread of sound.

“Good.” He lowered his head and kissed her slowly, deeply, thoroughly, feeling himself begin to harden inside her again. Jesus, he thought, not again, no way, not this quick. Not since I was fifteen anyway. He was more than willing to go with it, though, until he felt her hand against his chest, pushing, and raised his head again. “What?”

“No,” she said again, and pushed him off her to wriggle free. She caught him unawares and he rolled into the coffee table, catching the back of his head on a corner.

“Ouch! Damn it!” He grabbed the back of his head. “Didn’t we do this already?”

She didn’t apologize, just reached for her clothes and skinnied into them as fast as she could.

“Kate.” She didn’t answer. “Kate,” he said, rising to his feet. He’d lost his tie, one shoulder seam of his shirt was ripped, and he had to grab at his pants before they fell down. “What’s wrong?”

She gave him a hunted look. “Nothing’s wrong. I have to go is all. Where’s my other shoe?”

“Kate.” He reached for her and she stepped quickly out of range. “Wait.”

“No. This can’t happen.”

“Why not?” he said, starting to get angry again and trying to tamp it down. He’d just had the most exciting sexual experience of his life and now the cause of it was about to walk out the door. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one little bit. “And I’m pretty sure it already did.”

“It was a mistake.” She swallowed and shoved the hair out of her face. “I shouldn’t have thrown the box at you. I-I shouldn’t have done a lot of things. I-I’m sorry, I have to go.”

“Like hell!” He reached for her again and would have caught her if he hadn’t stumbled over her other shoe.

“Oh, good,” she said, and scooped it up. Gal hissed from the loft, to which she had retreated when the shooting war began. Kate retrieved her and tucked her inside her parka.

“Kate, don’t go!”

The slam of the door was her reply. The cabin shook beneath the weight of her hasty steps on the stairs. Her snow machine roared into life a moment later, followed by a surprised yip, probably from Mutt.

“Shit!” Jim said. His left eye had crusted over so that he could barely see out of it. “Shit,” he repeated. “Shit, shit, shit.”

He cleaned himself up as best he could, checking his reflection in the little mirror on the kitchen wall. Yeah, he was going to have a shiner. His shoulder was sore, too. He thought at first it was from where she had hit him with the dictionary, until he investigated and saw the teeth marks. He didn’t even remember her biting him.

Well, his uniform was going to require some serious rehab. “Not to mention my life,” he said out loud. He sighed heavily and began to clean up, stacking the papers back beneath the dictionary, righting the table, picking up the papers that had scattered from the tin lockbox.

One caught his attention, a thick piece of parchment beginning to turn yellow with age. He read it twice, disbelieving his eyes, and a third time, just to be sure.

“Jesus Christ,” he said blankly. He stared around the room as if he’d never seen it before. He read the piece of paper again. Was this a joke? This had to be a joke. “Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.”

The door opened. Dandy Mike peeped in. “Is it safe to come in now? It’s freezing out here.”

“What?” Jim remembered Dandy poking his head in the door in the middle of his very own personal firestorm. “Oh. Yeah. Sure. Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” Dandy sidled inside and cast a wary look around. He seemed surprised at the relative order that reigned inside the little cabin. “I saw Kate leaving, so I figured it was safe to come up.”

Oh no. “Were you outside all this time?”

Dandy’s eyes slid away. “No. Well, kinda. Well, okay, yeah, I was. What was she so mad about anyway?”

Dandy Mike was, Jim’s own activities in that field notwithstanding, the biggest rounder in the Park. He knew women. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, either. Jim repressed a sigh. It’d be all over the Park before sunset, which on this day was less than an hour away. One more thing for Kate to be pissed about.

Although, now that he thought about it… Jim felt a smile spread slowly across his face. If word got at least as far as Ethan Int-Hout, that would be okay with him.

“Jim?” Dandy said.

“What are you doing here anyway, Dandy?”

“Who, me? Oh, I don’t know, I heard you were in town, and I figured you’d be up here, and, you know, I was first on the scene, so I…” His voice trailed off when he noticed Jim’s stare. “Well, I wondered if you could use some help is all. I can see you had help, so I’ll go.”

“Dandy.”

Dandy stopped, his hand on the door.

“What’s up?”

Dandy turned, pulling off his knit cap and examining the brim as if his soul depended on an even rib stitch. “I hear you’re moving your post to the Park.”

Oh, hell. Billy Mike hadn’t waited to spread the word, and who would he tell but his own son? His own chronically out-of-work son. “News travels fast.”

“Yeah. So I was wondering…”

“Wondering what?”

Dandy shifted his weight. “Well, if maybe you’d be hiring. Like, I don’t know, an assistant.”

Jim was momentarily dumbfounded. “You want a job?” he said, heavily stressing the first and last words.

Dandy flushed. “Well, I might. Maybe. I guess. Yes.” He shifted his feet. “I’m thinking about getting married, and-”

Jim stared at him. “I beg your pardon?” Dandy started to speak, but Jim waved him to silence. There was nothing wrong with Jim’s hearing, either. “Never mind, I don’t think I’ll still be standing if I hear it twice.”

He took a long look at the floor, vaguely surprised that there wasn’t a charred outline of his and Kate’s bodies marking the spot. He still wasn’t sure he hadn’t died and gone to heaven right there.

“I’ve got some calls to make. Let’s head back into town.”