Enid made coffee, a welcome reprieve from the designer water Kate had been swilling in the bar. It was good coffee, too, dark and rich, and familiar. “I get it from Homer,” Enid said.
“Captain’s Roast,” Kate said, and for an instant remembered the small bunkhouse in Bering, and rifling through Jim’s duffle for clues as to why he was there, too.
“Yeah,” Enid said, surprised. “How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess. Need to ask you some questions, Enid, if it’s okay?”
Having Kate Shugak show up on your doorstep wasn’t as bad as Dan Rather showing up with a camera crew, but it was a close second, and Enid had been nervous from the get-go. “Sure,” she said apprehensively. “What about?”
“Len Dreyer.” Kate watched as color receded from Enid’s face. In a voice carefully devoid of any emotion, she said, “I imagine you’ve heard that his body was discovered in Grant Glacier.”
Enid spoke through stiff lips. “I had heard.”
Kate waited, and when Enid said nothing more, prodded her on. “He was shot at point-blank range.”
If possible, Enid went even whiter. “Oh.”
“With a shotgun. Messy.”
“How… how awful,” Enid said. Her eyes were fixed and staring right at Kate, as if she was afraid to look at anything else. “I don’t know what I can tell you about him, Kate. I didn’t know him that well.”
Kate watched her from beneath lowered eyelids, and saw Enid look up and to her right. She snapped her gaze back immediately. Kate said, “Bernie says you had him do some work around the place last summer.”
“Oh. Yes, I… I suppose we did.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know, I -oh, of course. He laid down some new gravel for the paths.”
“I see.” Kate lapsed into that time-honored investigator’s trick, silence.
Enid was a good subject to practice it on: Innocent people usually are. She rushed to fill the silence with words. “He was only here a few days, I think. He did a good job, the paths are in great shape, even after the winter. Nice and level. I think he dug some of them out so they’d have a nice edge to them, so the gravel wouldn’t scatter.” Kate watched her realize she was babbling, watched her catch herself, and stop.
“When was he here?” Kate said. “What days?”
“I don’t know, Kate, last summer sometime.” Kate’s unthreatening manner gave Enid courage. “Why do you need to know?”
Kate shrugged. “I’m helping Jim figure out what happened. Dreyer was probably killed last year, since no one reports seeing him after the end of October. I’m putting together a timeline of his activities, where he worked, who he talked to, like that, in case someone knows something that might help us finger the killer.”
“Oh. Would you like some more coffee?”
Kate looked down at her mug, tJiree-quarters full. “Sure.” She waited until Enid was on her feet with her back turned before she looked around.
Through the doorway she could see the gun rack mounted on the wall. It had cradles for four weapons, all full. Two of the four were shotguns, a double and a single.
She faced forward just in time to hold out her mug for Enid to top off.
They were in the kitchen, a magnificent room of bleached wood and granite countertops and gleaming copper pots. Selling liquor had always been a profitable business. There was a corner bookcase filled with cookbooks, and a long table that seated twelve to serve dishes made from recipes in those books. Enid was the closest thing the Park had to a full-blown chef. Kate herself had sat down at this table to a chicken stew that Enid had called Sicilian and everyone else divine. Lots of garlic. Anything with a lot of garlic in it worked for Kate, who sometimes imagined she had something Mediterranean going on in her background. It was possible; there was everything else in there, including a Russian commissar and a Jewish tailor. There was also Uncle Dieter, whom everyone thought had been a Nazi in Germany sixty years before, but he was drooling away the rest of his life in the Sunset Apartments in Ahtna and nobody’d called Simon Wiesenthal, so they let it go.
Kate looked at Enid, who was fidgeting nicely. Blunt or oblique, she thought. Blunt. “You had an affair with Len Dreyer,” she said.
Enid, taken totally off guard first by the long silence and then by the direct attack, burst into tears. Kate looked around, found a box of Kleenex on the counter, and fetched it over. It took a while, but Enid eventually sobbed her way through the entire box and the whole story. “It wasn’t an affair,” she said, hiccupping.
“What was it then, a one-night stand?”
“No! No. It wasn’t anything like that. I just wanted-I just…” The words, backed up for a long time, flooded forth like a creek after breakup. “There’s always someone. There’s always been someone. It never lasts long but I know all the signs, I always know, and I always pretend I don’t, and I just got tired of it, you know?” Her eyes, red and swollen, appealed to Kate for understanding.
Kate looked at her gravely.
There was a tense moment, broken only by the sound of broken breathing. “And then,” Enid said, almost inaudibly, “and then there was Laurel.”
“Laurel Meganack?” Kate said.
“Yes.” Enid reached for more tissue. “I thought-he was more serious about her. It lasted a long time, longer than usual. I -I thought he might leave me for her.” Enid blew her nose. “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to talk to Bernie about it. I don’t know. I think I thought if I said something I might make it happen.”
If you don’t look straight at it, Kate thought, it doesn’t exist. “So along came Len.”
“God, it wasn’t like he was even that interested, I practically had to rape him. But he was right here, day after day. He had a nice body,” she said wistfully. “Nice shoulders when he took his shirt off. Strong arms. I went out one day, took him a cold can of pop, and I, well, I guess you could say I propositioned him. We went into one of the cabins, and well, we did it. The next day he came back and I took him into a cabin again. Only…”
Kate, keeping to herself her opinion of someone who chose to sleep around on her husband in her husband’s place of business, said, “Bernie walked in?”
Enid broke down again. “Yes,” she said, sobbing. “He walked in.” She raised tear-filled eyes. “He stood there looking at us.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing! He didn’t say anything! He stood there, and then he walked out again, like it didn’t mean a damn to him! He-” She started to sob again. “He even closed the door behind him. He closed it behind him, like he wanted to give us privacy! He wasn’t even angry!”
Or, given his predilection for screwing around himself, he wasn’t prepared to throw any stones, Kate thought. “Did you talk about it later?”
Enid, regaining some control, blew her nose and shook her head. “No. I tried, but he cut me off.”
And it had been festering ever since. In both of them, probably.
Well, Kate didn’t do therapy. She got to her feet. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Enid trailed after her like a lost puppy. “Is that all?”
“Yeah, pretty much. You said Dreyer didn’t mention any family or friends, or where he came from before he lived in the Park.”
“I don’t think Dreyer was his real name.”
Kate halted. “Really? Why?”
“A letter fell out of his pocket. You know. That first day. It was addressed to a Leon Duffy.”
Len Dreyer. Leon Duffy. Many people who assumed aliases chose names with the same initials. Easier to remember. “He say how old he was?”
Enid looked uncertain. “Uh, around my age, I think. Late forties, maybe? Maybe older.”