I don’t think I’ve seen Dreyer since last fall,“ Bernie said. ”September, maybe? Maybe later.“ ”He stop in for a drink?“
“He was working for me. Hauled and laid gravel on the paths between the cabins and the outhouses, and the Roadhouse and my house. They were starting to get a little boggy.”
The Roadhouse was one big square room with exposed beams, a bar down one side, tables around two others, and a small dance floor covered with Sorel scuff marks. A thirty-two-inch television hung from the ceiling, blaring a basketball game.
“Isn’t basketball season ever over?” Kate said unwisely.
There was a sign behind the bar that proclaimed free throws win ball games, and Bernie, in his spare time the coach of the Kanuyaq Kings, swore to the precept with a fervor only previously matched by medieval saints. “Basketball?” he said, politely incredulous. “Over?”
“Sorry,” Kate said. “I forgot myself there for a moment. I’m all better now. About Dreyer.”
“Basketball is never over, Kate,” he said. “Basketball is the one true thing. Basketball is the only game where brains and brawn are equal. Basketball-”
“Bernie-”
“Not to mention which, basketball is the only sport where the ball is big enough you can actually keep your eye on it. I mean to say, have you ever watched a football game? Or baseball? Now there’s a ball you could shove up a-”
“Yes, yes,” Kate said hastily. “You’re absolutely right. Couldn’t be righter if you were the governor. But about Len Dreyer-”
Bernie, deciding he’d ridden that horse long enough, capitulated. “Like I said, last time I saw him was August, shoveling pea gravel. I think I paid him off around Labor Day.”
There was a note in his voice she couldn’t identify. “Check or cash?”
He gave her a look.
“Right,” Kate said, “of course cash, what was I thinking.” She was thinking a check was traceable and that cash was not, and that she’d like to have just one piece of paper with Dreyer’s prints on it. “Probably didn’t make him sign a W-2, either,” she said with no hope at all.
“What, you’re working for the IRS nowadays?” Bernie inspected an imaginary spot on the glass he was polishing. “Is it true he caught a shotgun blast to the chest?”
“That news already out, is it?”
“Well, hell, Kate, there were a few kids around when the body was found.”
“And some of them play for you,” Kate said. “Yeah, I get it. Anyway, yes. Front and center.”
“Ouch.”
She frowned. “You know him well?”
He shrugged. “Well as anybody, I guess.”
He met her eyes with a look of such studied indifference that she stiffened. “He hang with any particular Park rats?”
“Didn’t have many friends that I noticed.” Somebody yelled for a refill, and as he moved down the bar Kate thought she heard him say, “Not a big surprise.”
She watched him pull a tray full of beers and amble over to the table in front of the television, where sat the four Grosdidier brothers and Old Sam Dementieff, taking turns calling the play-by-play and not hesitating to revile the ancestry of the referees every time a whistle blew.
She heard a song she liked, a woman singing about sweet misery, and she wandered over to the jukebox to see who it was.
“Play a song for you, Kate?” George Perry appeared next to her, smoothing out a bill in preparation for feeding it into the slot.
“I like this one,” she said.
“Yeah, Michelle Branch, great album. Want me to pick up one for you next time I’m in Ahtna?”
“Sure. George, did you know Len Dreyer?”
“Len? Yeah, sure. Well.” He shrugged. “He did some work on the hangar for me last August, after that idiot from Anchorage tried to taxi through the wall.” He fixed her with an appraising eye. “This an official interrogation?”
She made a face. “I’m asking some questions for the trooper.”
“Working for Jim, huh?”
“Yes.”
The flatness of the syllable warned him to go no further down that road, and unlike Bobby, George Perry was a man who liked a quiet life.
“Did Dreyer ever talk to you about friends, his birthday, his parents’ names, his hometown, anything? Maybe you needed his Social Security number to make his payroll deductions?”
He grinned at the hopeful note in her voice. “Nope, sorry. Len worked on a strictly cash basis. For me, anyway.”
“For everybody, is what I’m hearing,” Kate said glumly.
At that moment Brenda Souders walked in, all tits and ass and big hair, and George deserted Kate without a backward glance.
“Hey, girl,” someone said. “Looking for a job?”
“I’ve got one, damn it,” Kate said, and turned to face Old Sam. He wasn’t any taller than she was and he probably weighed less, but in this case size didn’t matter. Old Sam Dementieff had a personal authority that sprang directly from the unshakeable conviction that he was right. All the time. The annoying thing was that he usually was.
“You hear about Len Dreyer?” she asked him.
“Who hasn’t?”
“The trooper wants me to ask around.”
Old Sam raised an eyebrow, which made him look even more like a demented leprechaun. “Len Dreyer, huh? Hear he got it point-blank with a shotgun.”
The Bush telegraph, contrary to form, was keeping it right. Usually by now the weapon should have been metamorphosed into a Federation phaser. “Yeah.”
“I didn’t know him much. Him and Dandy came to Cordova to help me tear down the mast and boom on the Freya when I put her in dry dock last September. I was wanting to get the job done before the first snow. Good worker.”
“You didn’t like him?” Kate said, replying more to the feeling behind the words than the words themselves.
Old Sam drained his beer and looked sadly at the empty bottle.
“Come on, Uncle, I’ll buy you another.” She led the way back to the bar and got him a refill. “Tell me about Dreyer.”
“Not much to tell,” Old Sam said. “Showed up on time, knew enough about hydraulics so’s I could trust him with the winch, kept showing up until the job was done. Smiled a lot.”
“That’s it?” Kate said.
“He smiled a lot,” Old Sam repeated, “and he didn’t seem interested in women.”
“He was gay?”
“Didn’t say that,” Old Sam said. “Just I remember one day young Luba Hardt came sashaying by, you know like she does.”
“Young” Luba Hardt was fifty-five if she was a day, but then Old Sam was about a thousand. Everyone looked young to him.
“It was July, and hot,” Old Sam said with relish. “She had her jeans cut up to there and T-shirt cut down to there.” He smacked his lips, and shook his head. “Dreyer barely looked up to say hi.”
It was an exercise in self-control to keep her face straight. “I suppose he could have been playing hard to get.”
Old Sam shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“Just because he didn’t look at women doesn’t mean he didn’t like them.”
“Didn’t say he didn’t like them,” Sam said. “Just wasn’t interested. Saw it happen a couple of other times, although I admit I mighta been looking for it after that. Can’t be too careful these days, Kate. Guy was gay, he mighta made a pass at me.”
This time Kate resorted to prayer to maintain control. “Thanks, Uncle,” she managed to say, and he took his beer back to the game just in time.
Dandy Mike was in one corner, nuzzling at the neck of a pretty girl, Sally Osterlund, if Kate was not mistaken, Auntie Balasha’s granddaughter. She looked around for a calendar. It was Monday. Quilting night at the Roadhouse was Wednesday. Sally was safe from her grandmother, if not from Dandy.
Well, Sally was of age or Bernie wouldn’t have allowed her to set foot inside the Roadhouse door. Still, Kate wasn’t averse to throwing a monkey wrench into the situation. Dandy Mike spread it around a little too generously for safety’s sake. She walked over to the table. “Hey, Dandy.”
Dandy’s right hand, caught in the act of sliding up the back of Sally’s T-shirt, descended again to a more discreet level. He didn’t dump Sally out of his lap onto the floor, though. “Hey, Kate. You know Sally.”
“Hey, Sally.”
“Hey, Kate.” Sally sprawled back in Dandy’s lap and gave Kate a companionable grin.
So much for the monkey wrench. “Dandy, did you know Len Dreyer?”
“Sure,” Dandy said. “Everybody knew Len.” He caught on. “You checking into his death?”
“I’m asking a few questions is all.”
“Jim ask you to?”
Since Jim Chopin had moved his base of operations to Niniltna, Dandy’s father Billy had been after Jim to put Dandy to work as his assistant. Billy was Niniltna’s tribal chief and not someone Jim wanted to irrevocably piss off, so he was ducking the issue by saying he wanted a bona fide VPSO, or village public safety officer, one trained in criminal statute and procedure at the state trooper academy in Sitka, to back him up. Not, he didn’t say, a rounder of epic proportions whose penchant for partying was only exceeded by his passion for gossip. Although the latter quality could be considered an asset in the law enforcement line of work, Jim absolutely did not want the details of whatever case he was working made known all over the Park. If he hired Dandy Mike, he might as well get Bobby to broadcast them nightly over Park Air.
Jim had in fact been so circumspect that Billy now regarded the situation as a done deal, with the result that Dandy, used to his father fixing little things like DUIs and unplanned parenthood for him, regarded himself as Jim’s de facto right-hand man. It followed that he did not look kindly upon Kate when she infringed on what he considered to be his territory.
He was in for a serious reality check in the near future, Kate thought, but that was Jim’s job, not hers. “Yes, Jim wants me to find out what I can about Len, who his friends were, the jobs he worked lately. What can you tell me?”
The hand on Sally’s waist regained the ability to move. Sally squirmed. Dandy bent his head and whispered something in her ear, and she giggled.
Kate pulled over a chair from another table and sat down, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. She kept her gaze steady, and she said nothing.
Dandy threaded his hand through Sally’s hair, artfully styled into a mop to look like she’d just gotten out of bed, and kissed her. It took a long time and involved a lot of tongue accompanied by, Kate had to admit, some very nice hand work. His technique, though somewhat lacking in spontaneity, appeared effective. Sally’s eyes were glazed and she whimpered a protest when Dandy raised his head. He gave Kate a challenging look.
She yawned, covering her mouth politely with one hand.
He looked exasperated. “Jesus, Kate, you could give us a little room.”
“You should get a room,” Kate said. “Right after you tell me anything you know about Len Dreyer.”
He sighed and looked down at Sally. “How about you get us a couple more beers, honeybunch?” He kissed her pout away and got her started toward the bar with an encouraging pat on the behind. “I didn’t know Len well,” he said. “We worked a couple jobs together, some construction up on the Step for Dan O’Brian, some fixer-upper stuff for Gary Drussell, some foundation work for the Hagbergs.”
“Old Sam says you did some work on the Freya, too.”
“Oh yeah, forgot about that. Last September, maybe? Old Sam had her in dry dock. He flew us both down.” Dandy grinned. “I like Cordova. It’s a great little town.”
Translated into Dandyspeak, that meant one or more willing women per block.
“Did Len socialize any?”
“Not that I noticed. He was always on time for work, I remember that. It got to be really annoying after a while.” A sly grin appeared. “I oversleep a lot.”
The grin creased his cheeks and lit his eyes and displayed a full set of white, even teeth to best advantage. He was a good-looking, well-spoken man, and not for the first time Kate wondered why she’d always been immune to his charm. She hadn’t even had a crush on him in high school like all the other girls. He had no focus, she thought, and no ambition beyond the next beer and the next girl.
She wondered if there was any White Anglo-Saxon Protestant in her background. Certainly some ancestor had hardwired her with a respect for the work ethic that wouldn’t quit. The jury was still out on how grateful she was for it. “Anything else you can tell me?” she said. “What’d he do for fun? Who did he hang with? He ever married? Have a girlfriend? Did he read? Did he listen to music? What did he spend his money on?”
“He never mentioned a wife or a girlfriend. Hell, I never saw him with a man friend. He didn’t like Megadeath. He did like Poison, or at least he liked ‘Something to Believe In’ when I played it. Asked me to play it again. He didn’t smoke. Never saw him drunk.” Dandy thought. “I don’t know, Kate, when it comes right down to it, Len Dreyer could’ve taught dull to a brick.” He looked over her shoulder to where Sally was standing at the bar, waiting on beer and flirting with Bart Grosdidier. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a previous engagement.”
“Dandy.” She restrained him with one hand. “There’s nothing else you can tell me?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
You’re lying to me, you miserable little shit, Kate thought. Should she warn him to keep his nose out of it, or not? Not, she decided. Riding herd on Dandy Mike wasn’t her job, and he wouldn’t listen to her anyway.
She made it back to Bobby’s just as Dinah was pulling steaks off the barbecue.
Bobby shoved a fistful of paper at Kate. “Brendan came through.”
She looked at the first page. “Great,” she said with a sigh. “There are eleven Dreyers in the system. None of them are named Leonard.”
“It would certainly be easier on you if he was on the lam, with a rap sheet a mile long,” Bobby agreed.
Kate mumbled something that might have been “Oh, shut up,” and turned the page. “Okay,” she said after a minute. “This is weird. According to Brendan, Dreyer never had a driver’s license.” She paged through more of the pile. “And I don’t see a vehicle registration, either.” She looked at Bobby. “He must have had transportation. Any handyman has to have something to haul his tools around in.” She thought. “I seem to remember, what, a pickup, maybe?”
Bobby frowned. “Yeah, he had a truck. Old Chevy, I think it was, a V8 crew cab with a long bed. A 1981, maybe? Maybe 1982. It might have been silver originally, but that might just have been the primer he was using to patch the rust.”
Kate looked at Dinah. Dinah grinned. Men couldn’t tell you the color of a woman’s eyes they’d spent the previous night with but they never forgot a vehicle. She looked back at the paperwork. “He never applied for a hunting or a fishing license, either. No moose permits, no bear tags.”
“Doesn’t mean he didn’t hunt and fish, Kate,” Bobby said very dryly.
“No, but still.”
“Not everyone hunts and fishes, either. Even in Alaska. Hell, I let everyone else do my hunting and fishing for me. What?” he said, when Kate looked too long at the page.
Kate read the entry for the third time, and it wasn’t because it was hard to read, as Bobby’s printer was working fine. “He never applied for a permanent fund dividend.”
“What!” Bobby roared. “Even a hermit like Dreyer knew enough to stick his hand out for free money!” He would have said more, but the concept of not applying for the permanent fund dividend shocked him into what for Bobby was speechlessness, and well it might. The permanent fund dividend was paid out to each Alaska resident every year from interest earned on oil pumped from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields, which sat on leased state lands. The annual dividend over the past twenty years had varied from $300 to almost $2,000, and no Alaskan, whether you agreed with the program or not, failed at the very least to apply for it.
Bobby gave her a shrewd look. “You know what this means, don’t you?”
“I know exactly what it means,” Kate said. “It means his name wasn’t Leonard Dreyer.”
“Dinner,” Dinah said, bringing in a platterful of steaks from the porch, “is served.”
“I got to thinking after you left,” Bobby said, handing Kate a plate to dry. The dinner dishes had been cleared away, and Dinah was readying Katya for bed. “I think maybe Dreyer was in ‘Nam.”
“Yeah?” She put the plate away and got handed a bowl.
“I was working in the yard the day he was working on the roof, and I had the portable CD player on the porch with CCR on. ”Run Through the Jungle‘ was playing, and he sang along to it. Hell, we both did. When it was over he looked down at me and said, “Lord it was a nightmare,” and I said ’The devil was on the loose,“ and he said, ”Got that right,“ and I went back to my bonfire and he went back to stapling shingles.”
“That’s all?”
“If you were there, that’s enough.” He pulled the plug and let the water gurgle down the drain.
Kate thought about it as she hung the dish towel on the handle of the refrigerator. The only other personal information on Dreyer she had discovered was that he’d liked a song by another band, who was it… Poison, that was it. It rang a bell with her but she couldn’t place it. She’d have to look through her tapes when she got back to the cabin.
“Kate?”
She looked around to see Bobby jerk his head toward the porch. Dinah was billing and cooing to Katya and didn’t notice them leave, or pretended not to.
Kate perched on the porch railing and inhaled spring air. It had been another sunny day, temperatures in the mid to upper fifties. That was one thing she liked about living in interior Alaska, it warmed up faster and got hotter than the coastal communities. “What?” she said.
Bobby rolled the tires on his chair back and forth some. He radiated an aura of deep discomfort. Kate wondered what was coming. Was Dinah pregnant again? If so, why the long face? Was he finally, at long last, low on cash? She did a mental calculation, figuring out how much she could spare from what she needed to keep in reserve to wage a custody fight.
“It’s about my brother,” he said, the words bursting out of him like champagne following a cork, only not quite as effervescent.
Kate stared at him, mouth slightly open.
“What?” he said defensively.
She got her jaw back up and her voice working again. “You have a brother?”
He scowled. “Why does everyone keep saying that? Yes. I have a brother. And he’s coming to town. Tomorrow.”
“Oh.” For the life of her, Kate couldn’t think of what next to say.
Bobby stewed for a moment. “Name’s Jeffrey. Not Jeff, not Jeffie, Jeffrey.”
“Okay.”
“Jeffrey Washington Clark. Washington was my mama’s family name. It’s my middle name, too.”
“Okay,” Kate repeated. “So,” she said, venturing out cautiously, “great, your brother’s coming. Be the first time he’s visited the Park, right?” Oh no, she thought, realizing suddenly what was in the wind. He wanted her to give his brother the dollar and a quarter tour. She remembered what had happened the last time she’d toured a friend’s relatives around the Park, and shuddered.
“When’s the last time you saw a black man in the Park besides me?” he snapped.
Never.
“So yeah, it’s his first trip in.” He fixed her with a piercing gaze. “This won’t be pleasure, Kate. It’ll be business. Family, yes, but business. He wants something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
Kate looked over his head to see Dinah standing on the other side of the screen door. She raised an eyebrow. Dinah shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Kate looked back at Bobby. “So your brother’s coming and it won’t be fun. Sounds like your ordinary, run of the mill Park family to me.”
He gave a short bark of laughter. “I wanted to warn you,” he said, and she thought she saw an unusual trace of color beneath his skin. Robert Washington Clark might just be embarrassed, for probably the first time since Kate had known him.
She might have paused to savor the moment had he not been so obviously uncomfortable. “Warn me about what?”
He shifted in his chair. “He’s a bigot, Kate. A bad one. He’s my father all over again. He doesn’t know where I live, who I live among, who my friends are, or-”
“Or, perhaps, to whom you are married?” Kate said delicately.
Bobby cast an involuntary look over his shoulder, but Dinah had moved away from the door. “That, too. I didn’t even know he knew where I was. I don’t know how the hell he found me. God knows I’ve had no truck with those people since I joined the army.”
Kate detected some Tennessee in Bobby’s speech, which only appeared in times of acute stress. “What do you need me to do?” He looked up and she gave a faint smile. “Anything, Bobby. You want me to run him out of town the minute he gets here? I’ll meet his plane.”
He laughed again, but this time it was genuine. “What I wouldn’t give to see that, old Jeffie hustled back into a plane by an unblack female half his size.” He sighed. “Much as I’d like that, no.”
“Then what?”
“I’ve got him over at Auntie Vi’s. I don’t want him here. The man has no manners.”
Kate understood. Bobby had a lot of good will going on in the Park. He was afraid his brother was going to step all over that, and he wanted her to make sure it didn’t happen. “No problem,” she said, sliding to her feet.
He looked at her, worried. “Sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said, and looked at him affectionately. There wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for Bobby Clark.
“No,” he said, “I meant are you sure you can keep it together when he starts insulting the slant of your eyes and the color of your skin.”
She laughed. “Oh Bobby,” she said, still laughing as she went down the steps, Mutt at her side. “If a whole country full of white folks hasn’t managed to irretrievably piss me off, one lone black man isn’t going to, either. I’ll spread the word.”
“Thanks, Kate,” he said, raising his voice as she climbed into her truck. “I owe you one.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Clark, you owe me all!” she yelled out the window, and headed down the road.
The Hagbergs’ homestead was one of the oldest in the Park, though the Hagbergs themselves were relatively new to it, having moved there only in the late ‘70s. It was the old Barker place, Kate remembered as she drove down the narrow track from the road. The Barkers had originally come north in the gold rush, taking the route up and over from Valdez via mule train, and by the time they got to what would become the Park they’d gotten tired. Mrs. Barker, according to legend, had tied up her skirts to show a prettily turned ankle and served pancakes hot off a griddle she’d hauled to Alaska from San Francisco. Mr. Barker played the squeeze box and sang sea chanties. By the time the rush had dwindled to a trickle, they’d amassed a sum large enough to homestead. They’d been good pioneers, so it was said, until Mrs. Barker decided seven children were enough and ran off to Fairbanks, where it was said she and her ankles prospered on the Line. Mr. Barker held down the home fort, raised the kids, and on his deathbed enjoined his daughters to be true to their husbands and his sons never to trust a woman. Two of the sons joined Castner’s Cutthroats and both died on Attu in World War II. The third son stayed home to marry off his sisters. This wasn’t difficult, as women were in even shorter supply in Alaska during the war than they were in normal times. The third son, name of Ezra, stayed single and made a living trapping beaver and wolf. He’d died suddenly of pancreatic cancer in 1976, and his sister, Telma, who had married a Norwegian fisherman from Valdez, moved in that same summer with her husband, Virgil.
Virgil and Telma Hagberg were in their fifties now, although Kate thought they looked older, especially Virgil, with his stooped shoulders and his thinning strands of ash gray hair. He didn’t talk much. Telma spoke even less than Virgil. She smiled a lot, though, which held within it the memory of a once-startling beauty, now faded, almost overgrown, as if the weeds had overtaken the rose too soon.
Virgil was known for the wooden toys he carved from birch and spruce, models of airplanes and trucks and bulldozers and the like, finely crafted with moving parts, sanded to a deep, satiny finish, and sold to Park rats at the school’s Christmas bazaar for next to nothing. Telma, so far as Kate could remember, sat in the background and never sold anything.
Situated on a south-facing slope on the opposite side of the road from Kate’s homestead, it was about halfway between Kate’s place and Niniltna and the sun was still up, so it seemed efficient to stop there on her way home. Kate knew the Hag-bergs to say hi to at the post office, but that was about it. It was one of the Park’s greatest attractions, the ability to disappear into the undergrowth if you wanted to. It was also, Kate reflected on the doorstep of the Hagberg home, one of the greatest disadvantages to the practicing detective.
“Kate,” Virgil said when he opened the door to Kate’s knock.
“Hi, Virgil. How you been?”
He was surprised to see her but his manners were too good to ask her what she wanted. He invited her in. She told Mutt to wait on the porch, and followed Virgil inside. They passed a room with two workbenches and a set of shelves filled with hand-carved objects. “Still working at the carving, I see,” she said.
He stopped and smiled. “Oh, yes. I make the toys for the children. They like them, and it makes a little money for Telma.”
He led the way into the kitchen and Kate took the chair offered at the kitchen table. “Telma,” he said, raising his voice. “We have company.”
Telma came in and smiled at Kate. “Hello, Kate.”
“Hi, Telma.”
“Would you like some coffee and cookies?” Telma’s voice was perfectly normal but her eyes were off, just a little, exactly how Kate couldn’t quite figure. They were a washed-out blue and placid as a pond, but unlike the pond they were all surface and no depth.
“Sure, Telma, I’d love some,” Kate said, and cringed to hear the note of false heartiness in her voice. Just so did one speak to the simpleminded.
Virgil seemed not to notice. He kissed Telma’s cheek, a quiet salutation in the manner of one making willing, worshipful obeisance to a god. It might not have grated so much if Kate hadn’t just come from Bobby and Dinah’s, where the kisses were loud and lusty and generally led to something horizontal, or looked like they would as soon as the kissers got rid of their company. Virgil’s kiss was just too damn reverential for Kate’s taste.
She thought back to the last time Jim Chopin had kissed her. Nothing reverential about Jim’s kisses, nosireebob. But best not to think of it, or of what happened after, and who was she to dictate how people kissed one another, anyway? She shook her mind free and settled herself to being as pleasant as she could possibly be.
While Telma brewed the coffee and got down mugs, Kate and Virgil talked about the coming fishing season, and how the dip netters and the sports fishermen and the subsistence fishers were cutting into the commercial fishing action. From there they moved on to hunting, and the gay abandon with which the rangers opened and closed the moose, deer, and caribou seasons. “I was talking to a man in Ahtna,” Virgil said, traces of Norway still present in his slow, deliberate speech. “He tells me there are more deer on the Kanuyaq delta than he has ever seen. What happens if there is no managed harvest, if they are allowed to eat up all their food supply?” He gave his head a solemn, mournful shake. “I am glad that I can afford to buy beef in Ahtna, Kate, because I do not believe I can support us any longer with my rifle and my shotgun.”
They agreed that hunting to eat in Alaska as it had been traditionally practiced was very probably doomed. Telma relieved their mutual despondency with coffee and peanut butter cookies produced from a large ceramic jar cast in the shape of Sylvester the Cat’s head.
Kate swallowed and said, “Great cookies, Telma.”
Telma smiled her thanks.
“I was wondering if the two of you could help me with something.”
“If we can, sure, Kate,” Virgil said.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard about Len Dreyer.”
“Dreyer?” Virgil said slowly.
“The guy who used to fix things. Houses, trucks, snow machines, boat engines.” Virgil still looked blank. “I understood that he and Dandy Mike did some work for you last summer.”
Virgil’s brow cleared. “Oh. The handyman.”
“Yes.”
“He helped me build our new greenhouse.” Virgil nodded several times. “What about him?”
“Well.” Kate fortified herself with a sip of coffee, which was dark and rich and laced with just the right amount of evaporated milk. “To start with, he’s dead.”
“Oh.” Virgil looked at Telma, putting a hand over hers, as if she needed comforting after the shock of Kate’s announcement. “I did not know that. I am sorry to hear it.”
Telma smiled her sympathy.
Clearly trying for politeness, Virgil said, “Were you friends?”
“No. I was like you, he did some work for me, and beyond that I didn’t know much about him personally. The thing is, the trooper has asked me to ask around about him.”
“The trooper? What for?”
“Well.” There was something so civilized about the Hagbergs’ house, a neat log cabin, exterior logs freshly oiled, interior Sheet-rock freshly painted, floors freshly scrubbed, that made it difficult to utter the word “murder” within its walls. “It appears that Mr. Dreyer was a victim of homicide.”
Virgil stared at her. “Well, for gosh sakes.” The expression would have sounded quaint coming from anyone except Virgil Hagberg. It also added ten years to his age.
“Yes.”
“What a terrible thing to have happen to someone.”
“Yes,” Kate said.
Virgil cast around looking for something else to say. “Who did it?”
“That’s just it. We don’t know. His body was discovered inside the mouth of Grant Glacier.”
“Well, for gosh sakes,” Virgil said again.
“So the trooper has asked me to trace Mr. Dreyer’s last movements. And Dandy Mike said he and Dreyer had done some work for you last summer.”
“Of course, of course,” Virgil said. He made an obvious effort to gather his thoughts. “It was in July, around the middle of the month, I think. Mr. Dreyer and Dandy Mike came out and put in the foundation and did the framing and the roof. I wanted to put in some tomatoes.” His chest puffed out a little. “We got ourselves a daughter to feed now, you know.”
At that moment a thin girl with a pale, solemn face came into the kitchen. “Have you met Vanessa? Vanessa Cox, this is Kate Shugak.”
Woman and girl exchanged nods.
“Our cousin’s only child,” Virgil added in a hushed voice, as if Vanessa wasn’t standing at the counter directly behind him. “There was a tragedy, you know. Both her parents were killed.”
He raised his voice. “Did you want something, Vanessa?”
“One of Aunt Telma’s cookies,” Vanessa said.
“Sure, go on, help yourself.” Virgil turned back to Kate. “Her grandparents were dead, and she was all alone in the world. It looked like she was going to have to go into foster care until we said we would take her. I would not put a dog into foster care.”
He patted Telma’s hand. Telma smiled her agreement.
Vanessa reached into a drawer and pulled out a Ziploc bag. She proceeded to fill it with cookies from Sylvester’s head. Both Telma and Virgil had their backs to her and her movements were noiseless and efficient. When the bag was full, Vanessa vanished again.
“A lovely girl,” Virgil said. “And so quiet around the house. Is it not so, Telma?”
Telma smiled her agreement.
“Johnny…” Kate said, and then she was stumped at what to call Johnny. He wasn’t her son, he wasn’t even a relative. “Johnny Morgan, the boy who is living with me, is in Vanessa’s class. He’s talked about her some.” In fact, Kate thought, Vanessa was with Johnny when he discovered the body. Had Vanessa not told the Hagbergs about it?
“All good things, I hope,” Virgil said, smiling at Telma.
Telma smiled back. Telma smiled a lot.
“Of course, all good things,” Kate said, and shifted into investigator mode. She asked the usual questions and got the usual answers. No, Dreyer hadn’t mentioned family or friends. No, he hadn’t said where he was from. He’d showed up when he was called, and he’d done what he’d hired on to do and that well, he’d been paid in cash, and then he’d left.
The ideal handyman, Kate thought. Why on earth would anyone want to kill him? She drained her mug and got to her feet. “Thanks for the coffee and the cookies, Telma. Virgil.”
“Kate. I am sorry we could not help more.”
“You and everybody else,” Kate said.
She climbed into her truck and sat in thought for a moment. Bonnie Jeppsen had sent Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez to Bobby. After to the Roadhouse, and particularly for those who didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t drink, the postmistress was the next best contact point for the Park. Everybody got mail.
The most conversation Kate had had lately with Bonnie Jeppsen was “Hi” when she picked up and dropped off her mail. Perhaps that should change.
Of course, there were reasons why Bonnie Jeppsen might be perfectly happy to live out the rest of her life on a “Hi, how’ve you been” basis with Kate.
“But she’s probably forgotten all about that by now,” Kate said out loud.
Mutt stuck her cold nose in Kate’s ear. Kate fended her off. “All right, all right, we’re going.” She started the truck and set off.
They got home at nine o’clock to find Johnny gone.