“Oh. Okay. Sure. Fine. Um, say around ten?”
“Plane at the trooper hangar at Lake Hood?”
He nodded.
“See you there.”
“Okay. Ten. Tomorrow. Right, see you then.”
She smiled.
He turned and blundered out of the door. His palms hadn’t been that sweaty since he was seventeen and asked Beverly Dobbyn to the prom.
Kate watched him run into the door frame, apologize to it, walk into a man on his way inside, apologize to him, and trip over the edge of the sidewalk.
Sometimes it was just too easy.
Kate had arranged to meet Jane at another restaurant, hoping that everyone would be less inclined toward making a scene in a public place. She’d picked Denny’s on Northern Lights. She’d never been there and it had a large and rapid customer turnover, which meant that the odds were good she wouldn’t see anyone she knew and that if she did see them, they wouldn’t be there for long. There were in addition two ways out of the parking lot if it so happened that she needed them. She circled the block twice but saw no evidence of massive SWAT team deployment. Maybe Jane hadn’t called the cops. She parked in the space closest to the driveway leading onto Denali Street. If they had to make a getaway and they made it as far as the car, she could duck across Denali into the Sears Mall parking lot, do a little bobbing and weaving, jump across Northern Lights onto a side street, hit Fireweed and grab the New Seward north. Of course, that wouldn’t help if they went back to Jack’s town house, where everyone in the law enforcement community knew he had lived, and it wasn’t like there were more than two roads out of town anyway. “Hot pursuit” didn’t have quite the same ring to it in Alaska as it did elsewhere.
At this point she pulled herself together and gave herself a mental scolding. There would be no question of hot pursuit because there would be no need to escape. She and Jane and Johnny were going to sit down and discuss the situation like two civilized adults and one marginally civilized adolescent. She closed her eyes to Mutt’s pleading expression, locked her into the Subaru, and followed Johnny into the restaurant.
“You bitch” Jane hissed as Kate sat down opposite her.
“I’m out of here,” Johnny said.
“Like hell you are,” Kate said, grabbing his arm and forcing him into the seat next to her.
“You stole my son!”
It was a light between-lunch-and-dinner crowd but heads were turning in their direction. “Please keep your voice down, Jane,” Kate said.
“Or what? You’ll call the cops? Here’s a thought. Let’s call the cops!”
Jane was a tall, slim woman with white blond hair, skin color that was almost albino, and dark blue eyes with the lids weighted down with thick eyeliner and thicker mascara. She was dressed in blazer, slacks, and a soft white roll-neck sweater. She looked like she’d just stepped out of Nordstrom. Kate, remembering the inside of Jane’s closet, thought it was a good chance that she had. “Okay, Jane, let’s call the cops,” she said.
“What!” Johnny said.
“Why not?” Kate said, holding Jane’s angry gaze. “They’ll come. You’ll accuse me of kidnapping. Johnny will accuse you of abuse. You’ll tell your story, he’ll tell his story, I’ll tell my story, and after a while we’ll all wind up in front of a judge. Until we do, Johnny’ll probably be stuck into some foster care home with people he doesn’t know and other fostered kids who have already graduated from B &E 101 and are ready to move on to bigger and better things. Johnny’ll find it educational.”
“At least they’ll put you in jail where you belong!”
The waitress, a woman in her seventies with bright eyes buried in a sea of wrinkles and a wisp of gray hair confined neatly beneath a cap, said brightly, “Take your order, please?”
“Coffee all around,” Kate said with a smile, “thanks.”
“You bet, sweetie.” Granny moved on to the next table.
Kate considered Jane’s last remark with a judicial impartiality that wasn’t wholly assumed. “No,” she said at last, giving her head a shake, “I don’t think they’ll put me in jail, Jane. For one thing, I was a part of the law enforcement community in Anchorage for five and a half years. If they don’t know me, they’ve heard of me. No, I don’t think I’ll be put in jail.”
“You’re a kidnapper.” Jane smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, and her voice dropped to an even less pleasant purr. “And who knows what else you’ve been doing to him, stuck on that homestead out in the middle of nowhere.” She ignored Johnny’s gasp. “An older woman, a young boy. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before.”
Johnny went white to the lips. “You wouldn’t,” he said with difficulty. “You-you couldn’t.”
Jane had yet even to look at her son. She was watching Kate like a cat watched a mouse.
Kate displayed neither shock nor anger. She’d been expecting Kate waved a dismissing hand. “But really, a decent copy machine would be a legitimate operating expense, seeing as how government copy machines need access codes to operate, which makes it easy to track who’s copying what.”
Johnny, without knowing why or how it had happened, recognized in a dim way that the balance of power had shifted, and began to breathe again. Everything was going to be all right.
At that point Jane’s language deteriorated. The only good news was that she was keeping her voice down. Johnny listened with strict attention. The next time Lyle Paine put Van’s Carhartts down, Johnny was going to melt down his eardrums.
Eventually even Jane ran out of new and interesting ways to describe Kate’s relationship with her ancestors and had to fall back on the tried and true. “You fucking bitch,” she whispered, the words coming out in a long hiss. “Do you know how long it took for me to get my credit straightened out? And all that stuff you ordered on my Visa card! And the money you took out of my bank account! You’re nothing more than a common thief!”
At that Kate did wince. “Surely not common,” she said.
Johnny almost laughed.
“I won’t pay you a dime in child support,” Jane said.
Johnny wanted to shout in triumph. He felt a warning kick beneath the table and swallowed it.
“No one’s asking you to,” Kate replied evenly.
Jane turned on Johnny. “I won’t pay for you to go to college, either.”
He met his mother’s eyes with a flinty composure that surprised and pleased Kate. “Dad had a college fund set aside for me. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you for a dime.”
“We’re heading back to the Park tomorrow,” Kate said. “If you like, Johnny could write a few times a year, letting you know how he’s getting on.”
“Like hell I could,” Johnny said, feeling his oats.
“I don’t care if I never hear from the ungrateful little bastard ever again,” Jane said. Seriously stung, she was eager to hurt back.
Johnny, now that he knew he was safe, tried to imitate Kate’s composure. “If I had anything to be grateful for, I’d be hurt by that remark,” he said.
“Okay,” Kate said, getting to her feet before the blood on the table was more real than imagined. “We’re done here. Goodbye, Jane.”
She hustled the boy out of the restaurant and into the Subaru, and they were out of the parking lot and speeding down Northern Lights Boulevard before she realized she’d stuck Jane with the bill.
Johnny would never know how relieved she had been that it had not been necessary to reveal what else she had found in that burglary of Jane’s house. There were some things a son should not know about his mother.