“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.
“Home tomorrow,” she said out loud, and felt good about it for the first time since the cabin burned down.
After Johnny had gone to bed and Kate was alone in the living room, Terminator playing on Jack’s VCR, she muted the television, picked up the phone, and dialed a number from memory, keeping mental fingers crossed. When a woman answered, she breathed a sigh of relief. “Fran, it’s Kate Shugak. Please don’t hang up, and please don’t let Gary know it’s me.”
There was a long silence, but no click and no dial tone. Background noise included voices and the inevitable television. Kate said, “If you can, get to a paper and pencil.” There was another long silence, followed by scrabbling sounds. “I know a counselor who works with kids who have been sexually abused. Her name’s Colleen Diemer.” She recited the number once, waited, and repeated it. “She’s very good. If you and Gary need to talk, she can refer you to someone who counsels adults. But whether you two do or not, get your daughter to her, or to someone like her.” She paused, and continued with difficulty. “There are things she just can’t say to you or to Gary. Things that need to be said. Colleen Diemer. Her office is in one of the medical buildings on Lake Otis, just north of Tudor. Her staff is really good about working out payment. There are all kinds of state and federal programs to subsidize the fees.”
Fran said nothing.
Kate took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “Colleen is very trustworthy, Fran. She’ll understand about Gary. She won’t call the house, she won’t send you a bill there.”
“Who’s that, honey?” Gary’s voice said in the background.
“No, thank you,” Fran said, “we’re happy with our long distance service as it is. Good-bye.”
There might have been a whisper of a “thank you” as Kate hung up the phone, but it might also have been her imagination. She went back to Terminator, which was a positive haven of peace and nonviolence compared to some of the homes she’d been into on the job.
She only hoped she had not visited one of them this afternoon.
14
Dandy was still torqued at what he saw as Jim Chopin’s patronizing dismissal of Dandy’s services. He was so torqued that he had slept alone the night before in spite of overtures on the parts of two different women.
His bed was located in the apartment he’d fitted up over the warehouse that sat on the five acres of land he’d received as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1972 back when he was all of nine years old. The five acres sat on the river, and his father had built the warehouse as a place to park his fishing boat during the winter. Dandy’s apartment had started life as a net loft, but then the Native Association had begun paying dividends and Billy had started paying someone else to mend his gear, and Dandy had asked for the space. Billy shrugged. It was Dandy’s land, after all.