It seemed, after all, that she could.
She followed Johnny into town the next morning, waving good-bye as he took the turn for the school gym, where Billy was having his new baby party. Johnny wanted to learn to dance, and Park Air had announced there might be dancing. Besides, he liked Billy, and he thought it was cool that he had a new baby all the way from Korea. He’d looked up Korea on Kate’s atlas, so he felt ready.
Kate’s first stop was the Step. She walked into Dan’s office, Mutt at her heels, to find the ranger with his feet propped on the sill of the window and his hands laced behind his head. He had a moody expression on his face. “Hey,” she said.
He dropped his feet but not his hands, until Mutt insisted on a head scratch. “Hey.”
Kate sat down opposite him. “I heard.”
“I figured.”
“You okay?”
“I been suspended.”
“What?”
He tossed her a sheet of paper with the National Park Service letterhead; it was addressed to the chief ranger and placed him on suspension indefinitely, pending the outcome of the criminal investigation into the death of Dina Willner. Kate looked up. “I thought Jim had a suspect in custody.”
“He does.”
“Then what’s this crap?”
“Any stick’ll do to beat a dog with, Kate.” He looked at Mutt. “Sorry, babe. They want to get rid of me. It’s probably enough that I stumbled into the middle of a murder. Guilt by association.”
Kate tossed the paper into the garbage can. “You’re not going to put up with this shit, are you?”
“Well,” Dan said, shifting his gaze from the window to Kate, “there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. Of course, I’m the only one on duty at this time of year, and it’ll take a while before they find someone qualified to take over. I doubt that any of the suits in Anchorage are going to want to leave the bright lights and the big city to baby-sit in the wilderness.”
“Dan.”
“Kate-”
“You may be going to put up with this, but I’m not.”
He drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. “I went there to ask Dina and Ruthe for their help in keeping this job. You got me so fired up last time we talked that I figured you were right, that I ought to fight for it, not just sit back and let my friends carry the weight. But now I don’t know. Dina’s dead, Kate, and Ruthe might die. Two great old broads, one gone, one maybe gone. Nothing else seems all that important right now.”
Kate leaned forward. “Dina and Ruthe would be the first to tell you that the land is what’s important, Dan. Not us. The land. We’re only custodians, and temporary ones at that. We do the best we can and then we pass the job along to the next generation. I don’t think you’re ready to hand off just yet.”
He looked at her with the faint glimmer of his old smile. “You be careful there, Shugak. You’re starting to sound like your grandmother.”
She sat back. “Did you see the guy Jim brought in?”
He shook his head.
“Did you see anything yourself?”
“No.” He seemed about to say something else, then repeated firmly, “No. I didn’t see anything. It doesn’t matter, really, if I saw anything or didn’t see anything. Jim got the guy. Crazy bastard, sounds like,” he added as an afterthought.
It sounded like the truth, she thought as she made her way back down the trail from the Step. It also sounded like Dan was trying to convince himself that it was. Which was crazy. Like Dan said, Jim got the guy, had him in custody in Ahtna. Case closed.
The sky had clouded over in the night and the temperature had warmed up to ten above, and if the rising barometer at the homestead was working right, there was a storm coming in off the Gulf. She drove through Niniltna to the turnoff and then, for the second time that week, negotiated the narrow track to the little cabin perched high on the side of the mountain. The snow in the yard was packed down hard from the passage of many vehicles, wheeled and tracked, and there were a couple of snow machines already parked there. She stopped hers and climbed the stairs.
There were two strange men in the house, men she’d never seen before. They swung around, startled, when the door opened. “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” she said.
They were both in their early twenties, hairy and with the aroma of an unwashed winter about them. They hadn’t bothered to doff their Carhartt jackets, bib overalls or their knit caps, only their identical pairs of black leather gloves. “Just poking around,” one of them said. “Seeing if there’s something we can use.”
Both of them were looking at Mutt, who was standing at Kate’s side and looking both of them over with a long, considering stare. Mutt was half wolf, and when she wanted to, she let it show. Sensing Kate’s rising anger, she bared a little fang.
The man who had spoken visibly paled. “Look, we’re not doing anything wrong. The two old ladies are dead, they don’t have any relatives, and-”
“Wrong,” Kate said flatly. “I’m their relative. Get out.”
He tried to bluster. “Who the hell are you anyway? You’ll just take all the good stuff if-”
“Russ,” the other man said.
“Well, hell, Gabe, we got here first. We’re not going to turn around and-”
“That’s Kate Shugak.”
“What?”
The other man nodded at Kate. “That’s Kate Shugak.”
“Oh.” Russ gulped. “And that must be-”
“Mutt.”
Mutt had perfected the art of the unblinking stare. It could be unnerving.
“Oh.” Russ gulped again. “Actually, we were just leaving.”
“That we were,” the second man said, and beat him out the door.
Mutt looked up at Kate and raised an eyebrow. Kate shook her head. “Not worth it.” Mutt gave an almost-perceptible shrug. “Find Gal,” Kate said. Mutt looked disgusted and stalked out, disapproval evident in the slightly backward set of her ears.
The room looked as if it had been hit by a chinook, one of the spring storms that roared up out of the Gulf like a lion and proceeded to blow everything in front of it out of the way. There wasn’t really any good place to start. Kate shed parka, bib, and boots and rolled up her sleeves. Finding that someone had banked the embers in the woodstove, she loaded it with wood, and waded in.
The bookshelves were freestanding and had been pulled down, but they’d been emptied of books and so were easy enough to stand back up. She began putting books in at random, figuring they could be organized later. She righted furniture, replaced the canned goods and pots, pans, and dishes-plastic, a good thing-in the cupboards, and cleaned up those supplies that had been spilled, mostly flour-both wheat and white, it looked like. Most of a forty-eight-ounce bag of chocolate chips was spilled across the floor, too. She swept it all up and into a garbage bag, which she tied off and put on the porch. The bears were asleep, and she’d get the bag to the dump before they woke up again in the spring.
A lone bunny slipper, one of its ears lopsided, was sitting on its side under the woodstove. Kate fished it out and put it on a shelf, unable to stop the tears from welling in her eyes. She conducted a search but couldn’t find the other one. Maybe it was with Dina’s body.
There didn’t seem to be a dish towel to be found, or a towel of any kind, and then she remembered. Ruthe had been hurt, and transported to the hospital. Someone had probably used them for bandages. She climbed the ladder to the loft and discovered, somewhat to her surprise, that the chinook had hit here, as well. The two beds were off their stands, a pillow leaked feathers, and clothes had been emptied from closets and drawers and were strewn all over the floor. The blankets were gone. Ruthe again, she figured. She got the beds back on their stands, the clothes back into place, and as much of the leaky pillow and its errant feathers as possible into another garbage bag.