“Ordering,” Bobby said, “ordering. There’s a difference.”
“Whatever it sounded like, he was begging. His father, your father is dying. He could even be dead by now.”
There was a brief silence. Finally Bobby said, “Dad always did like him best.”
Relieved, Dinah laughed a little harder than the jest deserved.
Bobby looked at her. “So you think I ought to go home, too?”
Dinah chose her words carefully, knowing they would live to haunt her marriage if she got them wrong. “I want a life with you, Bobby, a long one. You brought a lot of baggage with you. I don’t care, it’s who you are.” She smiled a little. “It’s part of why I love you. But I also think it’s time to get rid of some of it, so it doesn’t weigh us down.”
“Why, Dinah,” Bobby said, “that’s fucking poetry.”
Dinah reddened. “I mean it, Clark.”
Bobby, sober now, said, “I know you do, Dinah.” He rolled over to her and lifted both her and the baby into his lap.
Kate walked past them. “You’ll think about it?” she heard Dinah say.
“No,” Bobby said, jaw coming out. “I’ll go. If I think about it, I won’t.”
20
The morning Bobby left, Dinah decided she needed something to occupy her time, otherwise she’d sit around waiting for Bobby to call and say they were moving back to Nut-bush, Tennessee. It wasn’t the call she feared so much as the move. She had fallen in love at first sight with Alaska, and she didn’t want to leave it. Not to mention which, Jeffrey’s reaction to the undeniable fact of her overwhelming whiteness had been somewhat daunting. She could deal with that, and with any hundred other people who reacted that way, too, but how would those same people treat Katya?
She looked down at her daughter, a hot heavy sprawl in her arms, a little milky drool coming from one corner of her mouth. Love pierced her like a knife. If anyone in Nutbush, Tennessee dared, if they dared to say something hurtful to Katya, if anyone dared to call her half-and-half or half-breed or mongrel, Katya’s mother would…
“What would Katya’s mother do?” she said out loud. Katya stirred, and Dinah gathered in her child’s rambling limbs and tucked her into her own bed. Then she went for a pad and paper and started making a list. She liked making lists as much as Kate Shugak, and this one was a list Kate would get behind.
At least she hoped so.
She spent the next week on the Internet and the phone, talking to suppliers in Anchorage and a trucking firm in Ahtna that boasted enough vehicles for her purposes. The following week she strapped Katya into the children’s seat, strapped the seat into the truck, and drove around the Park knocking on doors. Her plan was met with enthusiasm and near universal approval, mostly under the heading of “Jeeze, I wish I’d thought of that.”
She stopped by the trooper post to touch base with Jim Chopin. He listened courteously and agreed to everything she suggested. She came away with a crease between her brows. Something was seriously wrong there. Jim was a pretty even keel kind of a guy. The only time she’d seem him angry was with Kate Shugak, who seemed to know where every button on his control panel was located and exactly when to push which one. At the moment, he had his guard up. Dinah wondered if he had his guard up with Kate. She wondered about that little smile she’d seen on Kate’s face.
She hesitated before knocking on Billy Mike’s door, but he received her idea with hosannahs, and he and Annie convened the Native Association’s board of directors and essentially made her plan happen. Afterward she realized that she’d done them a favor. Anything was better than sitting around grieving. Billy even managed to pull some string that connected to the manufacturer Outside that bumped their order to the top of the list. It came into the Port of Anchorage on board the CSX Anchorage the following week, and the shipping firm, mindful of maintaining good community relations in a place as small as Alaska, took care to see that the shipment was first out of the hold and first off the dock. A day later it was in Ahtna, and by then the road into the Park had dried out enough to grade. This time Old Sam pulled a string-Dinah suspected the driver was an old drinking buddy of his -and the grader stationed at the state highway maintenance facility outside Ahtna led the parade, and a parade it was. First the grader, then a fleet of flatbeds and a couple of semis, followed by a dozen rigs of varying age and shape, all riding very low on their axels.
Dinah and Billy and nearly everyone else in the Park met them at the trailhead. “Does she know we’re coming?” Billy said.
“She doesn’t know anything about this,” Dinah said. “I’m terrified she’s going to kill me.”
Billy Mike looked a little older and a little more tired, but the grin that split his round moon face was still broad. “But not very,” he said.
She laughed. “No, not very,” she said.
He squinted at the sky, clear and blue and filled with the beginning of a long summer day. “Picked a good day for it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The long-term forecast looks good, too. I think the gods are backing us up on this one, Billy.”
“God,” he said, staring at the horizon. “One’s enough.”
The grader ground by, continued a hundred feet down the road, and pulled to a halt. The driver swung out and down and trotted back.
“Need to finish that road, don’tcha Bud?” Billy said, quizzical.
Bud Riley grinned. “No way am I missing out on this. Kate helped a friend of mine out of a thing in Anchorage one time.”
The parade ground to a halt, dust rising, but not so much as anybody sneezed, and the driver of the lead flatbed jumped to the ground. “Dinah Cookman? Jake Bradley, Ahtna Fast Freight. Got a delivery for you.” He made an elaborate show of producing a clipboard. “Sign here, please.”
A shout of laughter started in the crowd behind Dinah and spread down the line of vehicles. Billy showed Jake the road in. Jake scratched his head. “Well, hell, could be worse, I expect.” He spat and shifted a wad of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. “We’ve all got come-alongs, so we won’t get stuck and stay stuck. And it ain’t like we ain’t done this kind of thing before. Probably should take out a few of those trees. Think she’ll go for that?”
“Probably, but it don’t have to be that hard,” someone said, and Dinah turned to see Mac Devlin puffing up. She looked beyond him and saw his D-6 Caterpillar tractor idling up the road, the sound of its approach hidden only by the convoy. He looked at Dinah and raised a brow.
“Why not,” she said, and stood back. If Kate was going to kill her, let it be for more than one reason. Besides, Bobby’s truck had been stuck on that damn game trail down to Kate’s cabin more than once.
Mac hustled back to the D-6 and put it in gear, and they made room for him to start down the trail.
She’d spent most of the night like she had most nights recently, wide awake and staring at the ceiling. It was bothering her, how she’d missed Dreyer’s predilection for children. After five and a half years working sex crimes in Anchorage, many of them involving children, she should have spotted him out of the gate. Why hadn’t she?
And then there was Virgil. She’d waltzed right on into the lion’s den, riding to the rescue of a girl who didn’t need one, and was cold-cocked by a shovel -a number two shovel!-for her pains. It was downright embarrassing.
At four a.m. Mutt got tired of listening to her thrash around and sat up to give Kate a look. “Are we losing it, girl?” Kate asked her. “Are we slowing up? Do we just not have the stuff anymore?”
Mutt raised an eyebrow and lay down with her back turned pointedly to Kate. Evidently she wasn’t past her prime.
And Dandy, that harmless, ambitionless rounder, dead. She shouldn’t have warned him off so firmly. She should have pulled him into the investigation instead of pushing him out. She’d probably offended every molecule of his testosterone by shutting him down so hard. He’d found real information for them. True, none of it had helped solve the case, but still, he’d hustled for them and she’d flicked him off like a bug.