4

Kate surveyed the charred remains of Leonard Dreyer’s shack and said one succinct word: “Shit.” It had been a small cabin made entirely of peeled spruce logs, and it had burned like one. She waded gingerly into the wreckage and found ice beneath the first layer of debris.

Mutt, lifting her lip, retreated to the far edge of the clearing and sat down to wait out Kate’s investigations with an expression of saintly patience on her face. Mutt had learned from a forest fire two years back that she didn’t like cleaning between sooty toes with her tongue.

There was nothing to be found beyond the square bulk of a small woodstove, upon which rested a cast-iron skillet. A lump of metal might once have been a coffeepot. Kate kicked a hole in the pile and bent over to sniff without much hope. She straightened up without having smelled anything except the memory of a fire of which the coals were only an old, old memory. “Damn it,” she said out loud.

And there was no sign of any kind of transportation. No truck, no four-wheeler, no snowmobile, there wasn’t as much as a bicycle or a pair of snowshoes. A handyman had to have something to haul tools around in. Dreyer must have gone to his death, as opposed to death coming to him.

Or not. Someone could have come here, shot Dreyer, and driven him to Grant Glacier in his own vehicle. Thinking of the rolling hills of moraine that surrounded the mouth of Grant Glacier, much of it covered in impenetrable stands of alder and birch and spruce and all of it an excellent hiding place for anything up to and including a belly dumper, she might have whimpered a little.

She drove up the road to talk to Howard Sampson, the next neighbor north of Dreyer’s. Howard, mending a net in his shop, had spent the winter in Anchorage and hadn’t seen Dreyer since the previous spring. “He ever do any work for you?” Kate said.

Howard tongued the wad of Copenhagen in his right cheek over to his left and spat a blob of brown fluid directly between Mutt’s forefeet. Mutt’s yellow eyes narrowed and her ears went back. “I do for myself,” Howard said.

Kate got Mutt out of there before Mutt did for both of them. Howard never had been what one might call neighborly.

The Gette homestead was on the downhill side of Dreyer’s cabin. It had been deserted for four years, but as Kate came up to the driveway she noticed a thin plume of smoke curling into the air. The drive in was challenging, as the brush and tree roots had been allowed to reclaim a greater part of the road, but she emerged into the clearing eventually to find two men standing in front of the cabin. One of them was holding a shotgun.

“Whoa.” She hit the brakes and rolled down the window. “Hello.”

The man with the shotgun peered suspiciously into the cab of the truck and recoiled when Mutt lifted her lip at him. “Jesus! Is that a wolf?”

“Only half,” Kate said.

“Jesus!”

“Don’t worry,” Kate said, lying with a straight face. “She’s harmless.”

“Well.” The man with the shotgun swallowed hard, and exchanged an apprehensive look with the other man. “Just keep her in the truck, okay?”

“Okay,” Kate said, and took that as an invitation to get out. She mistakenly didn’t tell Mutt she was supposed to stay in the truck. Mutt was out and standing next to Kate, shoulder to hip, yellow eyes fixed unwinkingly on the man with the shotgun before he could lodge a protest. He swallowed again instead, audibly this time.

Kate smiled at the other man. “Hi. I’m Kate Shugak.”

He smiled back. “I’m Keith Gette. The Neanderthal with the artillery is Oscar Jimenez.”

“Oh,” she said. “You must be the long-lost heir. Lotte and Lisa Gette’s cousins, am I right?” Lotte and Lisa Gette having been sisters who had inherited this homestead from their parents. Lisa was dead and Lotte long gone. At least Kate hoped she was.

Keith nodded. “That’s us. Or me. Oscar’s my partner.”

“Heard the lawyers had found an heir. We’ve been wondering when you’d show.” If ever. “Where are you from?”

“Seattle.”

She surveyed the cabin behind them. Four years of neglect lay heavily on it, but it had good bones. The greenhouse behind it was twice the size of the cabin and showed signs that it was being restored first. To the right of the greenhouse an area was being cleared of the heavy brush that always moved into cropland in the Arctic when people stopped tending to it. “How long have you been here?”

“Since last summer.”

She smiled. “You made it through your first winter.”

He grinned then. “Sure did. Although we did have a couple of interesting encounters with the wildlife.”

“Bears?”

“One.” He slapped his neck. “Although I’m thinking the mosquitoes are going to be worse than any bear.”

“Yeah,” she said, “you can shoot a bear.”

“And the moose.” He shook his head. “Do they eat everything, or just the stuff on our property?”

Kate laughed. “Whatever you particularly like that’s growing on your land, they’ll eat. They’re kind of perverse that way.”

Keith laughed, too. “Can we offer you some coffee?” he said.

“Sure, but another time. I’m kind of on a mission.” She looked directly at Oscar for the first time. “Could you point that thing somewhere else, please?”

Mutt, ever the diplomat, chose this moment to plump her butt down on the ground and scratch vigorously. Oscar took this as a sign of good faith and swung the double barrel maybe four inches to his left. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m a little spooked. And she sure does look like a wolf.”

“Only half,” Kate repeated. It had little or no effect on Oscar, who continued to regard Mutt with an uneasy eye.

“What can we help you with?” Keith said.

“When you guys came last fall, did you introduce yourself to your neighbors?”

“The one up we did. What’s his name, Carnation, no, Breyer, Dreyer-that’s it, Dreyer.”

“When?”

Keith looked at Oscar. “We got here the middle of July. The greenhouse roof had caved in and about half the glass was broken. When we went down to the post office we asked the postmistress, uh-”

“Bonnie Jeppsen?”

“That’s right, Bonnie. We asked her if she knew of anyone who could repair it.” His smile was rueful. “Neither of us is much good with a hammer. She told us to talk to Mr. Dreyer. He did a good job of it, too.”

“Had to pay him in cash, though, he wouldn’t take a check,” Oscar said. “There isn’t a cash machine in Niniltna, did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t,” Kate said.

“I had to write a check and have that pilot guy fly it into Ahtna and cash it for me at the bank and bring the cash back.”

“Imagine,” Kate said gravely. Oscar was oblivious but Keith gave her a sharp look, which she met with an innocent stare. “About Len Dreyer,” she said. “Did he mention any family or friends, or where he came from? Any arguments he might have gotten into with another Park rat?”

The men looked at each other, and gave a simultaneous shrug. “I don’t remember anything like that,” Keith said. “He showed up, and when he did, he worked. I was so grateful, I wasn’t about to ask any questions. We needed that greenhouse up and running.”

“Before winter?”

“Sure. We installed a couple of propane stoves at either end, and grew stuff straight through the year.”

“You must have laid in one hell of a lot of propane,” Kate said.

“Yeah, our biggest expense,” Oscar said gloomily. Gloom seemed to be key to his personality. “We’ll be lucky if we break even this year, even if we don’t draw salaries.”

Kate almost asked them what they were growing, but thought better of it just in time. “So you don’t remember any personal information about Len Dreyer.”

“I didn’t even know his first name was Len,” Oscar said.

“He’s good with corrugated plastic, though,” Keith said. “That roof is watertight.”

“He was good,” Kate said. “He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He was shot. With a shotgun.” She looked at Oscar, still holding what upon closer inspection proved to be a very old side-by-side with some very fancy silver work.

Oscar gulped and paled beneath his dark skin. “Well, I didn’t shoot him.”

“Didn’t say you did,” Kate said.

“Who are you, again?” Keith said.

“I’m Kate Shugak. I’m -assisting Jim Chopin, the state trooper posted to Niniltna, in his inquiries into Dreyer’s murder.”

Keith put a comforting hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Oscar. I don’t think Ms. Shugak-”

“Call me Kate.”

Keith smiled. “I don’t think Kate is going to clap us into irons just yet.”

“Do you remember any shots fired near here last fall?” They shook their heads. She nodded at the shotgun. “Have you fired that lately?”

Oscar proffered it mutely. Kate broke it open. It was unloaded, and dusty with disuse.

“It was my father’s,” Oscar said. “I don’t know what the right shells for it are. I don’t even know if it still shoots.”

Kate handed it back, thanked them for their time, and left.

“Burned down?” Bobby said. “Recently?”

Kate shook her head, earning a thwack from Dinah. She sat on a stool, enveloped in a sheet, while Dinah trimmed her hair. Katya slid from her knee and headed for the open door at flank speed. Her mother downed scissors long enough for an intercept and deposited Katya in a floodplain of toys in the living room. “It’s cold and wet, and I found some ice when I kicked around a little. I’d say somebody torched it last fall.”

“You sure somebody torched it?”

“Absent conclusive forensic evidence, no, I suppose not. However, considering that it was Len’s cabin, and that Len’s body has just been found under Grant Glacier, and that Len underwent a radical lungectomy with a shotgun sometime in the past year, yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

Unperturbed, Bobby said, “Where did he live, anyway? When I got him to do the roof, I got him through Bernie.”

“He hung out at the Roadhouse?”

“Who doesn’t? Where was his cabin?”

“Okay, you’re done, thank god,” Dinah said, whipping off the sheet. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to let your hair grow out again, Kate?”

The note of quiet desperation in Dinah’s voice was not lost on Kate but it failed to illicit the response Dinah was hoping for. “I’m absolutely sure,” Kate said. She wriggled away the stray hair that had insinuated itself inside the neck of her T-shirt and poured herself a cup of coffee.

Bobby had thwarted another of Katya’s escape attempts, and Kate followed them both into the living room to sprawl on a couch, of which there were two, parallel to each other across the vast expanse of hardwood floor, both wide enough for Kate’s Auntie Balasha and long enough for Chopper Jim. A huge rectangular window overlooked the yard that sloped down to Squaw Candy Creek. The Quilaks jutted up behind, rough-edged peaks still covered in snow. “He had a cabin up the Step road,” she said. “Just past the Gettes‘.”

“Oh yeah?” A broad grin spread across Bobby’s face. “Been up there lately?”

“I told you, I was just there.”

“No, not Dreyer’s place, the Gettes‘. Been there lately?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“The heirs showed up.”

“I know, I met them.”

“And?”

“And what? They’re babes in the woods, but pretty harmless, I thought. The Hispanic one is upset that there isn’t a cash machine in Niniltna. The Anglo one seems a little more relaxed. How long had Len Dreyer been in the Park, anyway?”

“You don’t know?”

She sighed. “What Abel didn’t teach me to do for myself, he did for me, carpentry, plumbing, mechanics, you name it. I never needed to hire on someone else until after he died, so I don’t have a clue how long Dreyer was here. Auntie Vi might. How about you?”

“Beats me. He nailed one hell of a shingle, I’ll say that for him. I hired him to fix the roof last October. He was finished the last day before the first snowfall. It was tight as a drum all last winter, not to mention which, warm as toast.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder and grinned. “Not easy, after I punched that hole in it.”

She followed the direction of his thumb to the post running up the center of the large A-frame, almost invisible beneath the lines of black cable linking all the electronic equipment on the circular console with the antennas hanging off the 112-foot tower outside. Bobby was the NOAA observer for the Park, or at least making daily reports to the National Weather Service in Anchorage was his excuse to the IRS every time he bought a new receiver. He also ran a nice little pirate radio station, hosting Park Air every evening, or whenever he felt that Park rats were in need of some gospel according to the Temptations. Or someone bribed him with a package of moose T-bones to air a for-sale ad.

Bobby had appeared in the Park the year Kate had graduated from high school, carrying a worn duffle bag with his name stenciled on it in big black letters, and a deed from the state of Alaska to forty acres on Squaw Candy Creek. He’d built this A-frame, installed enough electronic hardware to run JPL, and had copped the NOAA job right out from under Old Sam Dementieff. To top it off, he was the first black man many of the Park rats had ever seen.

Three things worked in his favor. He’d hired locally to build his A-frame. From the first day of broadcast he had traded want ads on Park Air for moose meat and salmon. And he’d lost both his legs below the knee to a Vietcong land mine.

“I think the men folk thought I wouldn’t be able to run after their women,” he’d told Kate years before. They’d been in bed together at the time. He’d grinned and reached out an arm to pull her in tight. “They were wrong about that, but by then it was too late.”

They were indeed, and it was, far too late, and when Dinah Cookman showed up in the Park three years earlier he’d taken one look and wedded and bedded her, not necessarily in that order. Dinah was white and twenty-five years younger than Bobby was, but so far as Kate could tell neither one of them had noticed. The result was the going-on-two tornado currently making her proud parents’ lives a living hell. “Don’t touch that!” Dinah said, leaping forward to catch the end table next to one of the couches from tilting forward and landing on her daughter’s head. Katya’s face puckered up and everyone held their breath. Precious little Katya had a yell that could frighten a bear into the next county.

Katya’s eye fell on Mutt, who knew the signs as well as everyone else and who was poised to rocket through the door as soon as the siren went off. She didn’t move fast enough. “Mutt!” Katya said, pointing.

“Mutt!” Dinah said gladly. “Come play with Katya! Come on, girl!”

Mutt looked at Kate, mute misery on her face, and slunk toward Katya, her tail as close to being between her legs as it ever got. She flopped down and Katya launched, landing on Mutt’s side with a force that caused a “Woof!” of expelled air and a wheezing, pitiful groan.

“Goddamn, woman, you’re letting the kid play with the wolves!” Bobby bellowed at Dinah.

Dinah raised an eyebrow. “Handing over to you, Dad,” she said, and retired behind the central console to her computer, where she was editing a twenty-minute video for the community health representative on the practices of safe sex, to be shown that fall to health classes at Niniltna Public School. She was trying to keep the opportunities for snickering to a minimum but the local high schoolers were a precocious bunch and it was hard going. The Niniltna Native Association was footing the bill, however, so she waded in with a light heart.

Bobby, deprived of a husband’s legitimate prey, shifted his sights. “And you,” he bellowed at Kate, “I keep telling you, no fucking wolves in the house!”

Kate tried not to wince away from the volume. Katya was truly a chip off the old block. She heard a low moan and looked around to see Katya pulling mightily on one of Mutt’s ears.

Hard-heartedly, she turned her back. “So Len Dreyer reshingled your roof?”

“Yeah.”

“Before the first snowfall, you said. When was that?”

“Lemme look.” He wheeled over to the console and pulled down one of a row of daily diaries from a shelf. “Let’s see. October twenty-third. Late last year.” He closed the diary and replaced it. “His cabin’s really burned down?”

“It really is.”

“Anything left?”

She shook head. “No. No papers, nothing. And he didn’t have much ID on him. Any, actually. The only reason we know his name is he worked for everyone.”

Bobby nodded. “Not much need for ID in the Park.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Although, now we’re going to have our own resident trooper, might pay to keep a driver’s license handy.”

She tried to look down her nose but it wasn’t long enough. “It might.” She jerked her head at the radio. “Call Anchorage for me?”

He grinned. “The game’s afoot!” he said. He turned on one wheel and docked into the radio console like a ship nosing into port, flipped switches and turned knobs without looking, and said over his shoulder, “Who’m I calling?”

“Brendan McCord. Got his number?”

“Babe, I got everyone’s number.”

A snort came from the other side of the console, followed by a long, lupine moan from the living room. Both were ignored.

“Brendan? Kate Shugak here.”

“Kate!” Brendan’s rich, full tenor rolled off the airwaves like an aria. “Long time no talk. What’re you up to, girl?”

Kate, mindful of the thousand ears listening in from Tok to Tanana, said, “I’m working a case. I need some information.”

“Oh. Ah. Well,” he boomed cheerfully, “I live to serve. What do you need?”

“Anything you can dig up on a Len Dreyer.”

“Got a Social Security number?”

“Nope.”

“Got a date of birth?”

“Nope.”

“Got a driver’s license number?”

“Nope.”

A brief pause. “Well, if it was easy, everybody^ be doing it.”

“Jim shipped the body to the ME yesterday. It was stuck in a glacier. His prints ought to be fairly well preserved.”

“Freeze-dried,” Brendan said respectfully. “Who do I call?”

Bobby nudged Kate to one side. “Brendan, this is Bobby.”

“No offense, Bobby, but I’d rather be talking to Kate.”

Bobby laughed. “You and me both, bubba. I’m on-line nowadays. When you get what she wants, email it to Bobby at parkair-dot-com. That way I can print it out for you,” he told Kate.

Kate, who liked computers, said, “Just like downtown.” She raised her voice. “Thanks, Brendan.”

His voice sank to a lecherous purr. “Come to town and you can thank me in person.”

Kate laughed. “I’ll be on the next plane.”

“You’re cutting into my action, McCord, I’m cutting you off,” Bobby said, and cleared to the sound of Brendan’s laughter. He cocked an eyebrow at Kate.

“Cut it out,” she said. “You’re starting to sound like Dolly Levi.”

“I didn’t say a word,” he said virtuously. “You working for Jim on this?”

She nodded, careful to keep her expression neutral. “Usual rates.”

She waited grimly for the ragging to start, but all he said was, “Hmmm. Didn’t you owe me some money?”

When the door closed behind her he checked on Katya, who had fallen asleep with her head beneath the coffee table, her little butt stuck up in the air, which inspired him to scoop his wife out of her chair and into his lap. The kiss that followed was long and enthusiastic. She squirmed halfheartedly before giving in.

He pulled back to look down at her flushed and smiling face. “Promise me you’ll never leave me.”

She laughed. “Where’s that coming from?”

He jerked his head at the door.

Her laugh faded. “You mean her and Jim?”

“Who else?”

“Ethan’s totally out of the picture?”

“What I hear, his wife’s got him on a leash so short he hardly ever gets off the homestead anymore.”

She was silent.

“What?”

“I don’t want Kate hurt,” she said.

“Hurt? Kate?” It was his turn to laugh.

She shoved herself off his lap and sat back down in front of the computer. Even the line of her spine looked angry, so he wasn’t surprised when her voice was curt. “You’re such a moron, Clark. You think Kate’s invulnerable?”

He took a chance and rolled over to slide his arms around her waist. He nuzzled her ear and whispered, “I think she can handle herself. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I’d like to handle you.”

She tried to shrug him off, and only managed to shrug off her clothes and into their bed. A while later he said, “Got some news.”

“Good or bad?” She raised her head to see if Katya was still out, and was reassured by the mound of little behind beneath the baby quilt the four aunties had made.

“Bad.”

She rolled up on an elbow. He was staring at the ceiling, his face set. She let her hand wander to afford some distraction from whatever it was that was making him unhappy.

“Cut that out,” he said without force.

“Tell me or I’ll quit.”

“All right, all right, Jesus! Some women.” He pulled her back down for a fierce kiss.

“Forget it,” she said, grabbing his hair and pulling. “Talk.”

“Ouch! Damn it! Jeez, you’re always beating up on me. You think you’d take it easier on a poor, helpless cripple with-”

She pulled harder. “Tell me.”

He sighed. “My brother’s coming.”

“Your brother?”

He nodded.

“You have a brother?”

He winced. “Yeah.”

“We’ve been married, what, going on two years, we have a child, and this is the first time you tell me you have a brother?” A murmur from Katya in the living room made her lower her voice. “Older or younger?”

“Older.”

“Does he have a name, this older brother?”

“Jeffrey.”

“Any other siblings I need to know about?”

“No.”

“This is like pulling teeth,” she said. “Talk to me, Clark. Why is it bad news that your older brother Jeffrey is coming to visit?”

“He’s not coming to visit. We don’t visit.”

“Then why is he coming?”

“He didn’t say, he just said he was coming.”

“Did he write, call, what?”

“I got a letter yesterday when I went into town to check the mail.”

She digested this. “When?”

“Tomorrow.”

She took a deep breath. “I appreciate all the advance notice there, Clark.”

“I didn’t get much either, Cookman, like I said, I just got the letter yesterday. I don’t even know how the hell he found me. I haven’t spoken to anyone there since before I joined up.”

Mistaking her silence, he added, “Don’t worry, he’s not staying here. I got him a room at Auntie Vi’s. With luck, you won’t even have to meet him.”

“I don’t mind if he stays with us, Bobby. Half the Park’s on the couch every other night as it is. Besides which, you’re his brother. Why wouldn’t he stay with us?”

“Because I wouldn’t invite him to.” When she would have said more, he said, “Let it alone, okay, Dinah? He has nothing to do with me.”

“He’s your family.”

There was a moment of silence so fraught that Dinah could feel the hairs on the back of her neck stand straight up. “Jeffrey Clark is not my family,” Bobby said, enunciating each word with exaggerated care. “That he is my brother is strictly an accident of birth. You are my family. Katya is my family. And Kate. Nobody else, and in particular no one from inside the city limits of Nutbush, Tennessee!”

She flinched a little at the volume of his response. He saw it and took a deep breath. When he spoke again his voice was lower and more controlled. “If I could have gotten away with it I never would have told you he was coming at all, but the way the Bush telegraph works, you’d have heard about the only other black man in the Park two seconds after he got off George.”

Dinah was the only child of two only children and her parents had died young, and the most family she’d known was beneath the roof she was living right now. To whistle family of any kind down the wind seemed to her the height of foolishness.

On the other hand, she knew something of the circumstances surrounding Bobby’s departure from Nutbush, Tennessee, which had resulted in him lying about his age to get into the army. It had also led, indirectly, to his residence in the Park, which was where she had found him, and she was inclined to regard whoever had helped make that happen with a benevolent eye.

On the whole, however, she thought that this might be one of those times when a smart wife stayed quiet.

He’d rolled to one side, his body so tense she could hear him glaring. She leaned over and kissed his spine. “Were you thinking you wanted dinner anytime soon?”

He looked at her over his shoulder and must have been reassured by what he saw on her face. “Hell, yes, I want dinner!” he said, the familiar bray back in full force. “You just worked ten pounds off me, woman, I need fuel!”

“Then get your butt into the kitchen and peel me some spuds.”

She took her time getting back into her clothes, knowing he was watching, and knowing too that Bobby was never so ready as when he just had. She was rewarded when a hand grabbed her elbow and tumbled her back into bed.

The last thing she thought before giving herself up to his single-minded possession was, “I’ll ask Kate to check this brother out. Then we’ll see.” And then she stopped thinking, because only a fool would not pay attention when Bobby got her horizontal, and Dinah Cookman was no fool.

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