“They’re just kids.”
Auntie Vi looked at her with a raised brow. “And you just a kid when Ethan come home from college.”
Kate made a face. “I talked to him.”
“Good.” Auntie Vi slid the loaves into the oven and set the timer. “Which girl is Johnny’s friend?”
“Vanessa Cox.”
“Ah.” Auntie Vi, wiping down the breadboard, nodded sadly. “Poor girl.”
“Why poor?”
“She lose her parents in a car wreck Outside. That make anyone a poor girl.”
Kate couldn’t argue with that. “At least she had somewhere to go.”
Auntie Vi made a face. “The Hagbergs.”
“What’s wrong with the Hagbergs?”
“Nothing,” Auntie Vi said, “nothing. But she is young. They old. And that Virgil, he don’t care nothing about nothing except Telma. And Telma, she care nothing about nothing, I don’t think.” She fixed a stern look on Kate. “You watch out for that girl, Katya. She start feeling lonely, she start being around your boy more, and you know what happen then.”
“She’s Johnny’s friend,” Kate said. “I’m not going to forbid her on the premises.”
“Didn’t say you should,” Auntie Vi said promptly. “Who said I said you should do that? Maybe a good thing, that, with her and your boy. Both not from Park.” She ruminated in silence for a moment. “I hear something about Virgil Hagberg,” she said, her brows knit. “I think he selling the homestead.”
“You’re kidding. I was just out there yesterday, Auntie. He didn’t say a word about it.”
“Virgil thinking since they don’t have kids they leave the homestead to that land conservancy Ruthe run.”
“Really,” Kate said. “I bet Ruthe loves that plan.”
“They talking to her about it. Virgil, he anxious that the land stay as it is, and that they don’t trade it down the line for something better.”
“Ruthe wouldn’t do that.”
Auntie Vi gave her a look. “Ruthe Bauman do anything and everything she can to carve out the biggest chunk of leave-it-alone in the state, Katya.”
“Yes, Auntie,” Kate said. “What else?”
What else was, Budd Davies getting collared by Dan O’Brian for taking too many beavers the winter before last. Kate winced. “Ouch. What’d Dan do to him?”
“Not too bad. Take the pelts, confiscate Budd’s traps, and fine him five thousand dollars.”
“No jail time?”
Auntie Vi shook her head. “No jail. Dan says that Budd get no lawyer, pay up without whining, Budd and him are good.”
Kate had to laugh. Justice, Park style. “Is Budd pissed?”
Auntie Vi gave this judicious consideration, and shook her head. “No.” A glimmer of a smile. “I see Harvey on my last trip into Ahtna. He say Budd has order for more traps.”
What else was, the security guard who was patrolling the TransAlaska Pipeline on his snow machine getting caught in a whiteout February before last, flipping his machine, breaking his leg, and crawling two miles to the road for help, where he got run over by a vanload of college students taking the scenic route from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to a basketball game with perennial rival University of Alaska Anchorage. The guard had only recently recovered the ability to speak and to sit up. Opinion was divided in the Park as to whether his wife thought that was a good thing, since in the interim she had taken up with a freight handler for Frontier Airlines in Atka.
What else was all this and more, and Kate tried to correlate the inundation of information with what she had learned from Bonnie Jeppsen and what she had picked up from her previous interviews. Budd and the security guard didn’t show up on Bonnie’s list so she tentatively eliminated them, which reduced the list of people she was going to have to talk to, but not by much. She sighed.
“If it was easy, everybody do it,” Auntie Vi said. She pulled the second bowl of dough off the back of the stove where it had been set to rise. “You want some more fry bread?”
There was never a time when Kate didn’t.
9
It was a little after three when she emerged from Auntie Vi’s bed-and-breakfast, stuffed full of fry bread and information. For the moment, Johnny was tucked safely away at Bobby’s. She stood next to the truck, her hand on the door handle. Mutt watched her face with wise eyes. So many people to talk to, and she had to stay out of Jim Chopin’s way while she did. She looked at the cross-referenced list of names and thought about the geography involved. She could start at the Roadhouse and work north. Or on the Step and work south. Or in Niniltna and work west.
Really, the first thing she ought to do was go back to Dreyer’s cabin and investigate the scene more thoroughly. She went back to her own instead.
It looked, if anything, even more forlorn than it had the day before. Her cabin, the place she had been born into this world, where she had spent most of what little time she’d had with her parents, the place to which she had retreated as a child when Emaa had tried to force her into living in Niniltna, the womb to which she had fled from the stifling, swarming confines of college, the place waiting for her on long weekends and vacations between time on the job in Anchorage, the one place in the world able to heal the wounds inflicted by five and a half years of casework featuring raped and beaten women and abused children, her home, her center, her sanctuary, her refuge.
It was all that and more, and now it was a pile of smoking rubble, too.
“It’s only a cabin,” she said out loud. Mutt, standing with her shoulder pressed to Kate’s knee, looked up, gray plume of a tail waving ever so slightly. “Cabins can be rebuilt. All I need is some logs and some Sheetrock and some insulation. I could put in a flush toilet. I could even wire the place for electricity, finally hook it up to the generator like I’ve been threatening.”
She could do all those things, but deep down she knew that this cabin could never be rebuilt. Her father was dead, the hands that had raised the cabin’s walls long since crumbled to dust. Her mother, a good, kind, loving woman until the booze got hold of her, was no more. Emaa was gone, nevermore to darken the doorstep and blight Kate’s life with the reminder of her bounden duty to her tribe. And Jack, with whom she’d spent so many nights making thunder roll out of the bed in the loft. Seventy years of laughter and tears and memories had been reduced to ashes by a malicious, anonymous hand, and there was no way ever to get them back.
Which was why when she heard the footstep behind her, she turned and without any greeting pretty much hurled herself into Jim’s arms.
The angry words that had been ready to tumble out of his mouth since Bobby had run him to earth that morning and clued him into Kate’s continued involvement in the investigation of Len Dreyer’s murder were stilled when he looked down and saw that she was weeping.
She didn’t just weep. She cried. She sobbed. She pounded his chest like it was a punching bag. She cursed and she cried some more and then she cursed some more. It took a long time, and somewhere along the way his anger faded. He held her gently until the flood began to ebb, wishing he could think of something of comfort to say, knowing there was nothing. He settled for rubbing her back, and felt like a lame-ass good-for-nothing as he did so.
Finally she looked up. Her eyes were swollen and her nose was red and running. She was not a pretty sight. “Sorry,” she said in a husk of a voice. He winced inwardly when she wiped her nose on the sleeve of the blue shirt that looked familiar, just not on Kate. It didn’t fit very well, or it fit very well, depending on your point of view, and then he damned himself for an insensitive bastard and put resolutely from his mind any thought of unfitting shirts. It helped to look over her shoulder at the ruin, so he did. “I just missed you at Auntie Vi’s,” he said.