15

It was a big RV, a Winnebago, with a bunk over the cab and a double bed in back. There was a toilet, sink, and shower in the bathroom, a refrigerator beneath the counter, a propane stove, a small sink with running water, and a fixed table between two padded booths that would let down into a third bed if they needed it.

That was the good news. The bad news was that the window next to the table looked out on the charred ruin that had been her cabin.

It was Tuesday morning and Johnny had just headed out to school on Kate’s four-wheeler, after a spirited attempt to talk her into letting him take the pickup. “You’re fourteen,” she’d told him. “I’m just guessing on this, but I think the state would like you to wait a couple of years before you start riding around alone in my truck.”

“Roger Corley drives his father’s truck to school,” Johnny said pugnaciously.

In a perverse way she was enjoying the argument. Now that he had seen her fight dirty for him, now that he knew she was going to stick by him, he was testing her the way any ordinary teenager pushed the envelope with the most convenient adult. “One, you aren’t Roger Corley. Two, I’m not Ken Corley. Three, the Corleys live half a mile from the school, not twenty-five miles. Four, you’re fourteen. You haven’t even got your permit yet.”

“But-”

“No,” she said, and smiled. She’d watched friends who were parents deal with adolescents, and it appeared to her that in these kinds of situations a cheerful, uncomplicated, and definitive “no” had the most chance of success.

It worked, this time anyway. He sulked all the way out to the four-wheeler and yanked on the helmet she insisted he wear. She noticed he took a spare. Probably for Vanessa Cox. She wondered how the girl was getting along with the Hagbergs. Well, she looked clean, even if her clothes were Early American Depression, and well fed, even if Johnny did say that Vanessa ate a lot of PB &J. Telma might be dotty but she was still capable of adequate childcare. Still, Kate made a mental note to invite Vanessa over on a Saturday when she would be making her justly famous moose stew.

Except, of course, that she had no pots and pans left, no spices, and no canned goods with which to cook a meal. The RV had camping gear, suitable for freeze-dried food bought in foil envelopes from REI, but not much else. She looked down at the list she was making. Pots and pans. Dishes. She wondered if anyone even made the heavy ceramic fisherman’s mugs anymore. Flatware. Utensils.

Music. Her tape player was a lump of melted plastic, and her tapes were literally toast. She’d rescued the rifle, the guitar, and the photo album, but her books, oh, her books. Gone, almost all of them, gone. She’d stopped briefly into Twice Told Tales Saturday afternoon and grabbed up a bag full of books, but they wouldn’t last her long. A lot of the science fiction, like F.M. Busby’s Bran and Rissa series and Zenna Henderson’s People stories, was long out of print. Not to mention Little Fuzzy, Rite of Passage, and anything written by Georgette Heyer. Rachel thought that the Heinlein juveniles were still available and had promised to start looking in Anchorage and on the Internet for those and other tides, but some of Kate’s books had been with her since she’d discovered recreational reading in college, and she didn’t know if they could be replaced.

Still. Thanks to the kindness of their friends, they weren’t homeless, they weren’t hungry, and they weren’t by any means destitute. They had clothes, courtesy of Dinah’s computer and the United States Postal Service. Her tools and vehicles were unharmed. The good weather was holding, fair and dry. She supposed she should get a shovel out of the garage and start digging out the rubble and pegging out a floor plan for a new foundation. She’d never built a house before, and she was a lot better with engines than she was with cabinetry, but there was no way she could afford to hire a contractor out of Ahtna or Anchorage, and since Len Dreyer’s death there was no one else in the Park. She supposed she could rent Mac Devlin’s D-6 and just push the remains on out to her dump in the woods, but the trail to the dump was just wide enough for a four-wheeler in summer and a snow machine in winter and a blade would take out a lot of the trees on either side. She hated the thought of widening the path and taking out trees for no good reason.

She had to get a move on. Summer days were long but the season was short, and she and Johnny ought to be under a roof of their own before cold weather set in again.

She pushed the list to one side and took up another. It seemed the more she investigated the events leading up to Len Dreyer’s death, the more suspects she had. Detection was usually a process of elimination, not accretion, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was spinning her wheels. “Okay, Shugak,” she muttered to herself, “think it out.”

On the floor Mutt stirred.

“Listen up,” Kate told her. “Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.” She drew a fresh sheet toward her and began a timeline, starting at the bottom with Dreyer’s death and working up, on the theory that if she looked at the facts upside down they might reveal something new. “Means we’ve got. Dreyer was killed by a single blast from a shotgun fired at point-blank range. Ballistics thinks it might have been an older shotgun, which is just peachy, since every shotgun I’ve ever seen in the Park dates back to the gold rush.”

Mutt made a valiant attempt at interest.

“Don’t try so hard,” Kate told her. “We know from the ME that Dreyer’s been dead since fall, best guess late September, although there is leeway in both directions because he wintered under a glacier and that tends to affect the preservation-slash-deterioration of human tissue. He could have been left outside a night or two before he got stashed, or he could have been stuffed under the glacier the day he was shot. With me so far?”

Mutt cocked an ear.

“That, of course, is going to be the main problem in narrowing down opportunity. If we don’t know exactly when Dreyer was killed, it doesn’t matter who was doing what where and when in the Park last fall.”

Mutt cocked an eyebrow.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kate told her, “you’re thinking all we have to do is find a good, convincing motive strong enough to push someone into murder. Well, let me tell you, missy, there’s motive so thick on the ground I’m needing to get out my shovel.” She began to list names.

“In May, Dreyer did some remodeling on Gary Drussell’s house so Gary could sell his homestead and move to Anchorage. While he was there, Dreyer molested Gary’s youngest daughter. Gary knows it. So does Fran. I don’t know about the other two daughters, but sisters tend to talk to each other, and even if these sisters didn’t, I’m betting the first thing Gary did when he found out was ask the other two if Dreyer had molested them, too. All five Drussells have motive.” She tapped the pencil on the table. “I wonder when Gary found out. Right away, do you think? Or after they moved to Anchorage? Or sometime in between?”

She looked at Mutt. “I ask because I can see Gary catching Dreyer in the act and blasting him with a shotgun. Hell, I can see myself doing that. But what if he found out after the fact, like maybe not until fall, oh, say, September. Would he take his shotgun and get on a plane and come to the Park, kill Dreyer, hide his body beneath Grant Glacier, and leave? It argues a certain amount of cold-bloodedness that I’m not sure Gary Drussell is capable of.”

Mutt bared her teeth ever so slightly.

“Yeah, yeah,” Kate told her. “He could have hired you.”

Mutt yawned.

“But he didn’t.” She thought. “I’m not a father, but if Dreyer had gone for boys, and if he’d even looked at Johnny… Okay. Let’s move on.” She examined her notes. “Now we come to Bernie my-idiot-friend Koslowski, full-time and well-respected Park businessman, bartender, hotelier, and basketball coach, and part-time fool-arounder. He had what I think was a fairly serious affair-serious for Bernie, anyway-with Laurel Meganack. Laurel broke up with him because his marriage kept him from spending time with her. Shortly thereafter, she slept with Len Dreyer.”

Mutt sneezed.

“Let’s not quibble,” Kate told her. “She seduced him on the floor of the cafe kitchen, all right? My question is, is that enough to drive Bernie to murder? Of course not. But then along about-surprise! -September, Bernie hires Dreyer to regravel the paths between the cabins and the Roadhouse, at which time Enid, Bernie’s wife, seduces Dreyer, not once but twice.”

Mutt wore an expression of worldly wisdom.

“You’re right, of course,” Kate said. “Enid probably only slept with him the second time because Bernie didn’t catch them at it the first time. Not to be crude, but I wonder that Dreyer, with a record in very young things, could even get it up for Enid. Enid is tubby, gray-haired, and wrinkled. She looks sixty-five if she looks a day.” More tapping of the pencil. “Okay, Bernie catches him in the act, and the only surprise there is that Enid is more upset that Bernie isn’t upset than she is that Bernie caught her cheating.”

She bent a stern look upon her four-footed friend. “My question to you is this: Was Bernie’s lack of emotion when he caught Enid a put-on? Was he hiding how he really felt just to hurt back, and was he even then plotting a revenge involving the business end of a shotgun? Or” -Kate raised an admonitory finger-“was he still angry that his ex-girlfriend, one Ms. Laurel Meganack, slept with Len Dreyer? Did he perhaps feel a tad more proprietary toward the new cafe wench than he did his own wife? Did that feeling surpass any feeling he had about catching Enid in the act with Len, thus explaining his non-reaction reaction? Perhaps finding Enid with Len put the finishing touch on what he knew about Len and Laurel; perhaps finding Enid and Len together brought it all back and moved him finally to act. He knew all about the glacier from the bar talk every night, it would have been an obvious place to hide a body. Especially in the late fall, when you can’t count on the bears to clean up after you.”

Bernie was the source of many good, shrink-wrapped things to eat and Mutt wasn’t about to rat him out. She pretended to fall asleep.

“My feelings exactly,” Kate said. “Still. Have to keep him on the list.” She considered. “How about Enid? No. There’s no motive there. Dreyer had served his purpose when Bernie caught them, she was done with him, and it wasn’t like killing Dreyer would hide their, what, affair is too strong a word. Two-night stand.”

Mutt’s ear twitched.

Kate considered her notes. “And lest we forget,” she said, “there are the two strangers in our midst, Mr. Keith Gette and Mr. Oscar Jimenez, who urgently needed their greenhouse repaired first thing last spring. We have been to the old Gette homestead, Mutt. I think we both know what they’re growing in that greenhouse.”

Mutt looked up and wrinkled her nose.

“Exactly.” Kate brooded. “Here this slob inherits a perfectly good homestead from his deceased cousins and the first thing he and his buddy do is start a commercial dope farm. I mean, really. He might have done a little market research first, there’s no way he’s going to move that much weed in the Park, and if he decides to wholesale it in Alaska, it’s not like he can sell it out of the back of a pickup truck. I mean you can do that with Avon’s Skin-So-Soft, but there’s a market for Skin-So-Soft in mosquito season.”

Mutt looked patient.

Kate held up a hand, palm out. “I know, I know, I’m getting off the subject. My point is that if Dreyer saw what they were planting in that greenhouse, he could have blackmailed them to keep quiet about it. He probably wouldn’t have called it blackmail, of course, maybe just a small loan from time to time to keep him in beer. But they could have gotten tired of it.”

Mutt emitted a noise somewhere between a snort and a yip.

“You think it would have taken more than a summer’s worth of floating him loans for them to get tired enough of it to shoot him? May I remind you who held a shotgun on whom when we went up to the Gette place?”

Mutt lifted her lip in a sneer.

“True,” Kate admitted. “I don’t think that shotgun of Jimenez’s has been fired since the Eisenhower administration, either. Still. They had motive, damn it. I’m putting them on the list.”

Mutt laid her head back down, apparently defeated, but Kate knew better. She sat back and gazed out of the window, for the first time not seeing the burnt ruin that had been her home, which was at least one good thing to put to Dreyer’s credit. From high overhead an eagle called, a haunting, high-pitched sound, just before she plummeted down to snatch up a leveret from one of the snowshoe hares’ broods across the creek. The baby hare hadn’t lived long enough to learn caution in the open. He would never learn it now.

“You know,” Kate said, “it occurs to me that Len Dreyer had the perfect job for a predator. He ran tame in and out of every home in the Park. He saw us all in our jammies and bunny slippers and bed hair. He saw husbands fighting with their wives and kids beating up on their siblings. He knew who was having trouble paying the bills and who was drinking too much. A perfect opportunity for a predator. He could watch and wait and strike when it best suited him, because he would know when he was least likely to be caught.”

She looked at Mutt, who had sat up and fixed her with a steady yellow gaze. “He targeted young girls, prepubescent, slight of build. The women he slept with were of a similar physical type. I think we can rule out Enid and Laurel as contributory to his standard, as they seduced him.” The news about Dreyer’s real identity and past conviction would, given the reality of the Bush telegraph, soon be known across the Park. She didn’t want to be anywhere near Enid or Laurel when they heard it. “We should concentrate on the places we know he worked, where girls and women of that general description lived. There could be other parents besides Gary Drussell with a motive for murder.”

She shuffled through her notes and read down the list she had compiled that morning, combining what she had discovered from Bernie and Bonnie and the information that Dandy had culled from his ex-girlfriends.

In May, Dreyer/Duffy worked for the Drussells, during which time Kate was certain he had assaulted the youngest daughter. Early June saw him rototilling the Hagbergs’ garden, a yearly chore, and he was back a month later putting in a foundation for an outbuilding, in company with Dandy Mike. In July he also repaired the Gette greenhouse.

In August he did some work on George’s hangar, and installed Bonnie Jeppsen’s new toilet.

The week before Labor Day he had worked a day for Laurel Meganack, down at the cafe. Kate wondered if he’d billed for a full eight hours or if he’d knocked off an hour for when Laurel had jumped him.

He seen some action that week, because that was the same week he worked on the paths around the Roadhouse, at which time he slept with Enid Koslowski twice, or at least Enid slept with him. Bernie had been forthcoming with the former information if not the latter, but however indifferent he was to the event, it was not a story he had cared to repeat to Kate. Possibly because he knew that he had triggered it by getting a little too serious about his affair with Laurel Meganack.

Later that month Old Sam had flown Dreyer/Duffy and Dandy Mike to Cordova to do some maintenance on the Freya. Kate knew a moment’s annoyance that Old Sam hadn’t hired her on instead, and then she remembered that she had only just returned from a summer in Bering, and had arrived to find Johnny Morgan on her doorstep to boot. In a rare moment of compassion Old Sam must have decided that she had enough on her plate.

In October Dreyer/Duffy had reshingled Bobby’s roof, finishing up on October 22nd.

Neither she nor Jim nor Dandy had been able to find anyone who had seen Dreyer/Duffy alive after that date.

She thought for a while about the girlfriends. In the Park there was Susie Brainerd, Cheryl Wright, Betsy Kvasnikof, and Laurel Meganack. Vicky Gordaoff in Cordova.

She thought about Vicky Gordaoff. She was one of those eighteen-year-olds who looked like they’d just started the seventh grade, or at least that was Kate’s recollection of her. Kate remembered Dreyer/Duffy as being well-spoken, not unintelligent, with a certain dry humor. And a lot of women had a thing for guys with tools; there was just something so capable about them, it led women to wonder what else they were good at. Vicky was young and impressionable, and there was the added coup of an older man noticing her, especially if her friends were watching.

It might behoove Kate to check into Vicky’s life a little, see if there had been a jealous boyfriend or a disapproving father. But then she could say that about all the women he’d slept with.

There was a gingerly sort of knock on the door that caused the whole RV to shake slightly. A look through the window found George Perry standing on the chunk of twelve-by-twelve doorstep someone had thoughtfully placed there. “Hey, George,” she said, opening the door.

“Woof!” Mutt said, on her feet and tail wagging vigorously.

“You didn’t even see me coming,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be on the lookout? Didn’t somebody just try to barbecue you recently?”

“Woof!” Mutt said again, emphatically.

“Even the dog knows,” George told Kate, and gave Mutt a thorough scratching behind the ears.

“Who do you think you are, Jim Chopin? Sit. Coffee?”

“Sure.” He wedged himself into the opposite booth and looked at the pile of paperwork covering the table. “You about got it all figured out?”

He sounded hopeful. “Why do you care?” she said, bringing pot and mug to the table and refilling her own. She set out Oreos and milk and sugar and he helped himself to all three.

“Well, hell, Kate, you’re one of my best customers. Gotta keep the seats full if I’m going to stay in business.” He stirred his coffee absorbedly.

“Uh-huh,” Kate said. She doctored her own coffee and waited. He didn’t say anything and she sipped coffee and waited some more.

Silence, as Kate had noted before, was the most underrated tool in the investigator’s toolbox. It had a way of creating a vacuum into which words were irresistibly sucked, and so long as the investigator kept her mouth shut, the words would perforce come from the witness. And unless Kate was very much mistaken, George Perry had just become a witness in the Leon Duffy murder investigation. So she sipped her coffee and let her eyes drift to the window and her mind drift to the scene outside. As an additional precaution she also kept her mouth full of Oreos. No sacrifice was too great for the investigation.

This year, May in the Park was looking a lot like Camelot in the song. It was only raining after sundown and then only in brief showers, just enough to help the ground thaw and the plants to raise eager heads to the sun, which so far had been remarkably reliable about showing its face every morning. Canada geese were arriving by the squadron and settling in for the summer on the Kanuyaq River delta, along with flights of every duck ever identified by the Audubon Society and a few Kate suspected were not. She hoped so, at any rate. There was far too little mystery left in the world as it was, and deep in her bones she knew that nature was not done with them yet.

She wondered if the sandhill cranes had arrived. Unknown to anyone, she kept an acre of ground mowed where her property line met the creek, not for a garden but for the sandhill cranes to land and feed. She might even have been not known to spread a few sackfuls of grain around the acre from time to time. She liked sandhill cranes, with their red foreheads and their long ungraceful legs. The Yupik called them the “Sunday turkey” and they were in fact Alaska’s largest game bird, but Kate never hunted them, at least not the ones who landed on her property. One of the few memories she had of her mother was of sitting in her mother’s lap at the edge of the mowed circle, hidden in a tangle of alder, listening to the cranes sing their rolling, rattling song and watching the awkward passion of their mating dance. Her father had grumbled, but Kate noticed that even after her mother died he kept the patch mowed.

The last thing she did before the first snowfall every year was mow the crane patch. Come to think of it, it was probably time to service the mower. It was always a little sluggish from having sat around all winter. There might even be some dried corn leftover from last year, if the mice hadn’t eaten it all.

George, who had begun to fidget, cleared his throat. “So.”

Kate turned and smiled at him, giving him the frill treatment. “So,” she said.

He shifted in his seat, uneasy beneath all that wattage. “So you asked me Sunday if Gary Drussell flew into the Park last fall.”

Everything inside Kate went still. “No, I just asked you when the last time was you had seen him in the Park.”

“Yeah. Well. I told you I hadn’t seen him since last breakup.”

“Yes.”

“I lied.”

Kate was silent.

George was examining the contents of his mug as if he could divine in which valley in Sumatra the beans had been picked. “Don’t even start with me,” he said.

Kate was silent.

“I mean it, I don’t want to hear it.”

Kate was silent.

“The last thing I need is a lecture on my civic duty.”

Kate was silent.

George shoved his mug away. “He’s a friend, okay? We’ve hunted together every fall going back, what, fifteen, sixteen years now. I know his wife, and I watched his daughters grow up. I mean from the time they were tiny babies, Kate.” He sat back and looked out the window. “I’m not much of a kid person. Never wanted marriage or anything that came with it. So I wasn’t thrilled when Gary asked if it’d be okay if we brought Alicia along on a caribou hunt.”

“Which one is that?”

“The oldest daughter. The smart one. Well, they’re all smart, but Alicia, well, she’s special. Regardless of the way things happened, I don’t think Gary’s sorry to have moved into town. Cheaper for her to live at home while she goes to college, and he really wanted college for Alicia.”

Kate waited.

“Anyway. Alicia was all of ten years old when Gary decides he’s going to make a hunter out of her. I tried to talk him out of taking her, but he was determined. So we did, and I’m here to tell you, that little girl hiked me right into the ground. I mean, she kept up, Kate, and she carried her own pack the whole time. She damn near outshot us, she like to use up her dad’s tags and then she started in on mine.” He shook his head at the memory. “That was one tough little girl. Shirley, now, she was the same, smart, even tougher than Alicia, bagged her a moose on her first hunt. Of course, it was a cow, but what can you do. We butchered her out without Dan nailing us, for a change. Those were good kids, Kate. Good company on the trail, too, knew when to talk and when to shut up, and when they talked they had something to say. I liked them both.”

“What about the youngest daughter?”

“Tracy?” George’s face darkened. “I don’t know what happened with Tracy. I don’t know her as well as I do Alicia and Shirley. She never came on the hunt with us. I think maybe…”

“What? Come on, George, I need to know it all.”

“There isn’t any all,” he said. “Goddamn it. Gary Drussell is no murderer. Even if he was…”

“What about Tracy?” Kate said, inexorably.

His face creased with what looked like pain. “Tracy… she’s the baby, you know? I think the last kid in any family is spoiled, mostly I think because the parents are tired of laying down the law to the other kids by then and they slack off. Also because it’s their last kid and they want to. Anyway, she was pretty and she knew it, especially when she hit her teens. Fran used to worry about her flirting; Gary mostly shrugged it off.” He leaned forward again, anxious to explain all of it so that there would be no misunderstanding, so Kate would think only good thoughts of his friend and his friend’s family. “She wasn’t obnoxious about it, Kate. Tracy, I mean. She wasn’t as bright as the other two and she knew it.”

“So she tried to make up for it with her looks?”

“Yes,” George said. “I mean, no. Oh, hell. I guess so. It doesn’t mean she deserved what happened.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Kate said. “What did happen?”

“Shit,” George said wretchedly. “I promised Gary I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Mutt let out a soft whine. “Tell me,” Kate said gently. “It won’t go any further than it has to.”

What had happened, as near as anyone could figure from what Tracy said, which wasn’t much, was that overnight Tracy Drussell had changed from a pretty, ordinary teenaged girl into Linda Blair. “It was like a nightmare, Gary said,” George said, voice so low Kate had to lean forward to catch the words. “She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, shut herself up in her room. Then Fran noticed she, uh, she, well, you know.”

“She missed her period,” Kate said.

He nodded.

There had been no signs of a baby at the Drussells’ Anchorage home. “Oh, crap,” she said. And how inadequate was that?

He nodded again. “They were in Anchorage by then. She was only eleven weeks along, so it was fairly easy, although Fran said Gary like to kill some guy with a sign outside the clinic. Tracy told them then, of course. Said it was her fault, she’d been flirting with Dreyer, and he took her up on her offer.”

Kate thought of little Vicky Gordaoff in Cordova.

“Only it wasn’t an offer,” George said. His hands had become fists during the telling. He looked down and noticed, and straightened them out again.

“Why did it take Gary so long to come looking for Dreyer?” Kate said.

George looked blank.

“You said she was eleven weeks along when she told them. Dreyer worked for them in May. I’m guessing that’s when he raped Tracy.”

George winced away from the word but he nodded.

“School let out the first week of June, Gary and family moved to Anchorage the day after high school graduation. They must have found out about the middle to end of July.” She looked at him for confirmation. He nodded again. “So how is it that Gary didn’t come looking for Dreyer until over two months later?”

“Because she didn’t tell them who the man was,” he said, snapping the words off. “Otherwise he and his shotgun would have been on the next plane.”

“He was traveling with a shotgun, was he?” Kate said.

George looked at her. She wasn’t used to being looked at with that expression by people she considered her friends. I have to ask, she told him silently, you know I do.

“Yes,” George said, his voice icily precise, “he was traveling with his shotgun.”

“I see. And what day in October would that have been?”

His hand was shaking slightly when he thrust it into the pocket of his begrimed overalls. It was still shaking when he brought out the yellow slip of paper. He shoved it across the table and wriggled out of the booth.

She looked down. It was a copy of a ticket for Chugach Air Taxi Service, roundtrip Anchorage-Niniltna-Anchorage, in the name of Gary Drussell, and it was dated October 24th.

The day after the first snowfall of last winter, according to Bobby’s NOAA records. The date after which they had determined Leon Duffy aka Len Dreyer had never been seen again in the Park.

She became aware that George had not left. She looked up to see him standing in the open doorway.

He was staring at the burned pile of lumber that had been her cabin, and her father’s cabin before that, and what could have been her grave. As if he could feel her eyes on him, he said without turning around, “I’m sorry, Kate.”

“So am I, George.” She hesitated, and then spoke. “Did Gary come back to the Park again?”

He nodded, still without turning around.

“Last week?”

He nodded again. “He said it was to clear up some paperwork with the guy who bought the homestead. He was in and out in a day.”

“Which day?”

“The day your cabin burned. But he was gone,” George said desperately, “he was gone by then.”

“Did you fly him out?”

He hesitated, and then shook his head. “No,” he said in a whisper. “He flew Spernak that time.”

He looked at her, his expression miserable. He started to speak, and then shook his head again.

The door swung shut gently behind him.

After a while she got up and washed out the mugs.

So there it was. She thought of Tracy Drussell sprawled on that couch in Anchorage, convinced that she had invited the assault inflicted upon her, when all she had been doing was testing her wings. It wasn’t her fault that the sky had opened up and swallowed her whole. Kate hoped like hell that Fran had called Colleen.

And she hoped like hell no one else needed Colleen’s services before this was over.

She needed to find Jim and fill him in, but whenever she thought about getting up, she sat back down again. If it were left up to her she’d have given Drussell a medal. At least she would have before he tried to burn her cabin down with her and Johnny in it.

She was sitting on the other side of the booth this time, the one that faced away from the rubble pile. Something dug into her hip. It was a loose-leaf binder, Johnny’s. He must have forgotten it when he left for school that morning. Not surprising, as he’d been in quite the snit, or pretended to be. Not for lack of something better to do, because any minute now she was going to get up and climb into her truck and go looking for Jim, tell him she’d solved his case for him, she flipped open the notebook and began to read. Johnny’s writing was cramped but legible. She smiled at the first paragraph, and then she laughed out loud.

She was deep into it before she realized it was more of a diary than it was the journal his teacher had assigned them, and that the teacher would probably never see it, and that neither should she.

But about halfway in something started to niggle at the back of her brain. She flipped back to the beginning and began again. “Oh shit,” she whispered, “shit, shit, shit.”

She slammed the binder shut and leaped to her feet. Mutt was at the door a second later. Kate grabbed keys and windbreaker and they were gone.

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