“And John?”
Christie shrugged. “Ah, yes, dear old Dad.” Her smile was sharp. “He wanted me to move in with him. Can you believe that? I never got so much as a goddamn birthday card from him, ever, and it was a little too late for him to start playing father.” Her smile was quicksilver and malicious. “Besides, I already know how to play daddy. I had a wonderful teacher.”
“He didn’t even know you existed,” Kate said.
“He should have!” Christie shouted. “He should have,” she said again, more quietly this time.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Well.” Christie thought about it. “You’re the only one who knows. I guess I’ll have to kill you.” She smiled again.
Kate was staring into the face of madness and she knew it. “Jim Chopin knows everything I know,” she said. “He’ll figure it out, sooner or later.”
Christie laughed. “What he knows and what he can prove are two different things.”
“They’ll trace the rifle through the bullets.”
“They’ll have to find the bullet first. They’ll have to find the rifle first. They’ll have to find your body first, and I’ve got plans for that.” She laughed again. “I’ve always got a plan, Kate.”
Dan, Kate thought, talk about Dan. “You went after Dan because he was the chief ranger, and he could help you get easements so you can develop the land. The land you think you’re going to inherit from your mother.”
“And now my father,” Christie said. “At first, all I wanted to do was kill them. I picked Riley up in Montana, and I saw right away how I could put him to work for me.
“Then I got here, and I saw how well-off both my loving parents were, and I thought, Why not me?” Her gaze turned inward, and Kate edged a little farther around the stove. “Why shouldn’t all that lovely money come to me?” Her face contorted. “They owed me!”
Kate remembered Christie cozying up to Pete Heiman at the potlatch. “You’re about to dump Dan, aren’t you? For Pete Heiman.”
Christie grimaced. “He wasn’t supposed to get himself fired.”
“And Pete has so much more power.”
“There is that,” the other woman admitted. “We helpless types do like a strong man to lean on.”
“What if John hadn’t killed himself?”
“He would have.” Christie smiled again, and Kate repressed a shiver. “He had no idea who I was the first time I went to the lodge. I didn’t tell him until after I’d been there twice.”
Kate felt ill. “You didn’t.”
Christie laughed. “Of course I did. Like I said, I’ve had a lot of experience playing daddy. Be a shame not to put it to good use.” She shrugged, managing to make it look graceful even from the inside of a parka. She’d kept her gloves on, too. Cold air was pouring in through the open door.
Kate tried not to shiver. “Whose rifle is that?”
“Whose do you think?”
Kate thought of the second empty cradle in John Letourneau’s gun cabinet. No one would ever miss it.
Christie shook her hair out of her eyes, her face bright with triumph. “So, maybe six months, maybe a year from now, I’ll ‘discover’ my parentage. Something drew me here to the Park, something irresistible, calling me. I didn’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t fight it. And look what I found-my one true love and my birth parents, at one blow! What a story, how romantic. They’ll probably make a movie of the week out of it. I’ll be happy to sell the rights to it, for a fair price.”
Kate wondered why murderers were so in love with the sound of their own voices. Still, the longer Christie talked, the longer Kate had to figure out a plan. Any minute now, she would. She edged another inch across the floor. If she pounced, she could grab the barrel of the rifle; if she was lucky, maybe even before Christie could get off a shot. Or she could dive behind the couch. And do what? Throw books?
“Pete and I will marry, of course,” Christie said dreamily. “He’ll like the idea of a landed wife. And then we’ll see what we can do about breaking that land trust and putting the land to more profitable use. Pete thinks the road into the Park should be paved, or so he was telling me this afternoon. We might even subdivide.” Christie smiled. “Just this one little problem, then I’ll be on my way.”
Her eyes went flat. The barrel straightened, the muzzle zeroed in on Kate’s chest, and her finger began to squeeze the trigger. Kate took a flying leap over the back of the couch, but not soon enough. Christie swung the rifle, following her. The shot thundered in the little room and filled it with the acrid smell of gun smoke. The bullet hit Kate in the side and lifted her up and back, slamming her into the bookcase. She fell behind the couch, caught beneath an avalanche of books.
“Damn it,” she said, irritated. Looking down, she saw blood rapidly soaking the front of her shirt. It felt warm and wet. It was a new shirt, too, and Pendletons didn’t come cheap. “Damn it,” she said again, more mildly this time.
Christie’s face appeared over the back of the couch, flushed, radiant, triumphant. As she raised the rifle a second time, Mutt juggernauted through the open door like an avenging angel and hit Christie in the small of the back, knocking her into the woodstove. There was a sizzle of burning skin and a cry.
Christie got off one more shot before the rifle spun out of her hands and landed beneath the table. She reached for it, but Mutt’s teeth sank in long before her arm hot there and the last thing Kate heard before the spreading pain pulled her under was Christie’s scream.
12
When Kate woke, it was to pain, the whole left side of her body infused with it. She muttered an inarticulate protest. She hated pain. Pain hurt. She tried to say so.
“It’s all right,” a voice said; “we’ll give you something. Drink this.”
She drank, felt the prick of a needle, slid back down into darkness.
She dreamed in bits and pieces. An anxious whining, a sandpapery tongue. Jim swearing. Hands hurting her, something tight around her chest. Hands on her shoulders. Hands on her feet. The jolting agony of a drive in the back of someone’s truck. A strong arm holding her steady, a solid shoulder against her cheek. The drone of an airplane engine, with her flat on her back on the floor, her legs beneath the pilot’s seat, her eyes staring up at the bare ribs of the fuselage.
Waking the second time, she found a woman staring down at her. “Hello, Kate,” she said. “I’m Adrienne Giroux. I’m your doctor.”
“Where-”
“At the hospital in Ahtna.”
Kate tried to raise her head. “What happened to me?”
“You were shot,” Giroux said without inflection. Her hand was steady on Kate’s wrist. She had brown hair pulled back in a twist, a softly rounded figure beneath a starchy white coat.
Kate closed her eyes. “I remember now,” she said after a moment. She opened her eyes. “What happened to the woman who shot me?”
“She’s here, too, just down the hall. Under guard, so don’t worry.” Giroux hesitated. “She’s in a lot worse shape than you are. We might wind up having to take off” her arm.“
“Good,” Kate said, and slid downward to darkness again.
When she woke up the third time, she was alone in the room. There was the muted clink of glassware and cutlery in the hall, and a moment later the door swung open. “Miss Shugak?” A round red face peered in. “Oh good, you’re awake.”
She was served lunch-a soggy ham sandwich, a tasteless macaroni salad, and a banana. She forced it all down because she knew the sooner she regained her strength, the sooner she could go home and cook for herself.
None of the meals that followed over the next day and a half were any better. She didn’t have anything to read and there was nothing to watch on the television suspended from the ceiling over the foot of her bed. She was so bored, she could have screamed, and she was a little hurt that she hadn’t had any visitors. Ruthe had had visitors non-stop.