It was Tuesday morning and Johnny had just headed out to school on Kate’s four-wheeler, after a spirited attempt to talk her into letting him take the pickup. “You’re fourteen,” she’d told him. “I’m just guessing on this, but I think the state would like you to wait a couple of years before you start riding around alone in my truck.”
“Roger Corley drives his father’s truck to school,” Johnny said pugnaciously.
In a perverse way she was enjoying the argument. Now that he had seen her fight dirty for him, now that he knew she was going to stick by him, he was testing her the way any ordinary teenager pushed the envelope with the most convenient adult. “One, you aren’t Roger Corley. Two, I’m not Ken Corley. Three, the Corleys live half a mile from the school, not twenty-five miles. Four, you’re fourteen. You haven’t even got your permit yet.”
“But-”
“No,” she said, and smiled. She’d watched friends who were parents deal with adolescents, and it appeared to her that in these kinds of situations a cheerful, uncomplicated, and definitive “no” had the most chance of success.
It worked, this time anyway. He sulked all the way out to the four-wheeler and yanked on the helmet she insisted he wear. She noticed he took a spare. Probably for Vanessa Cox. She wondered how the girl was getting along with the Hagbergs. Well, she looked clean, even if her clothes were Early American Depression, and well fed, even if Johnny did say that Vanessa ate a lot of PB &J. Telma might be dotty but she was still capable of adequate childcare. Still, Kate made a mental note to invite Vanessa over on a Saturday when she would be making her justly famous moose stew.
Except, of course, that she had no pots and pans left, no spices, and no canned goods with which to cook a meal. The RV had camping gear, suitable for freeze-dried food bought in foil envelopes from REI, but not much else. She looked down at the list she was making. Pots and pans. Dishes. She wondered if anyone even made the heavy ceramic fisherman’s mugs anymore. Flatware. Utensils.
Music. Her tape player was a lump of melted plastic, and her tapes were literally toast. She’d rescued the rifle, the guitar, and the photo album, but her books, oh, her books. Gone, almost all of them, gone. She’d stopped briefly into Twice Told Tales Saturday afternoon and grabbed up a bag full of books, but they wouldn’t last her long. A lot of the science fiction, like F.M. Busby’s Bran and Rissa series and Zenna Henderson’s People stories, was long out of print. Not to mention Little Fuzzy, Rite of Passage, and anything written by Georgette Heyer. Rachel thought that the Heinlein juveniles were still available and had promised to start looking in Anchorage and on the Internet for those and other tides, but some of Kate’s books had been with her since she’d discovered recreational reading in college, and she didn’t know if they could be replaced.
Still. Thanks to the kindness of their friends, they weren’t homeless, they weren’t hungry, and they weren’t by any means destitute. They had clothes, courtesy of Dinah’s computer and the United States Postal Service. Her tools and vehicles were unharmed. The good weather was holding, fair and dry. She supposed she should get a shovel out of the garage and start digging out the rubble and pegging out a floor plan for a new foundation. She’d never built a house before, and she was a lot better with engines than she was with cabinetry, but there was no way she could afford to hire a contractor out of Ahtna or Anchorage, and since Len Dreyer’s death there was no one else in the Park. She supposed she could rent Mac Devlin’s D-6 and just push the remains on out to her dump in the woods, but the trail to the dump was just wide enough for a four-wheeler in summer and a snow machine in winter and a blade would take out a lot of the trees on either side. She hated the thought of widening the path and taking out trees for no good reason.
She had to get a move on. Summer days were long but the season was short, and she and Johnny ought to be under a roof of their own before cold weather set in again.
She pushed the list to one side and took up another. It seemed the more she investigated the events leading up to Len Dreyer’s death, the more suspects she had. Detection was usually a process of elimination, not accretion, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was spinning her wheels. “Okay, Shugak,” she muttered to herself, “think it out.”
On the floor Mutt stirred.
“Listen up,” Kate told her. “Maybe you’ll catch something I missed.” She drew a fresh sheet toward her and began a timeline, starting at the bottom with Dreyer’s death and working up, on the theory that if she looked at the facts upside down they might reveal something new. “Means we’ve got. Dreyer was killed by a single blast from a shotgun fired at point-blank range. Ballistics thinks it might have been an older shotgun, which is just peachy, since every shotgun I’ve ever seen in the Park dates back to the gold rush.”
Mutt made a valiant attempt at interest.
“Don’t try so hard,” Kate told her. “We know from the ME that Dreyer’s been dead since fall, best guess late September, although there is leeway in both directions because he wintered under a glacier and that tends to affect the preservation-slash-deterioration of human tissue. He could have been left outside a night or two before he got stashed, or he could have been stuffed under the glacier the day he was shot. With me so far?”
Mutt cocked an ear.
“That, of course, is going to be the main problem in narrowing down opportunity. If we don’t know exactly when Dreyer was killed, it doesn’t matter who was doing what where and when in the Park last fall.”
Mutt cocked an eyebrow.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Kate told her, “you’re thinking all we have to do is find a good, convincing motive strong enough to push someone into murder. Well, let me tell you, missy, there’s motive so thick on the ground I’m needing to get out my shovel.” She began to list names.
“In May, Dreyer did some remodeling on Gary Drussell’s house so Gary could sell his homestead and move to Anchorage. While he was there, Dreyer molested Gary’s youngest daughter. Gary knows it. So does Fran. I don’t know about the other two daughters, but sisters tend to talk to each other, and even if these sisters didn’t, I’m betting the first thing Gary did when he found out was ask the other two if Dreyer had molested them, too. All five Drussells have motive.” She tapped the pencil on the table. “I wonder when Gary found out. Right away, do you think? Or after they moved to Anchorage? Or sometime in between?”
She looked at Mutt. “I ask because I can see Gary catching Dreyer in the act and blasting him with a shotgun. Hell, I can see myself doing that. But what if he found out after the fact, like maybe not until fall, oh, say, September. Would he take his shotgun and get on a plane and come to the Park, kill Dreyer, hide his body beneath Grant Glacier, and leave? It argues a certain amount of cold-bloodedness that I’m not sure Gary Drussell is capable of.”
Mutt bared her teeth ever so slightly.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kate told her. “He could have hired you.”
Mutt yawned.
“But he didn’t.” She thought. “I’m not a father, but if Dreyer had gone for boys, and if he’d even looked at Johnny… Okay. Let’s move on.” She examined her notes. “Now we come to Bernie my-idiot-friend Koslowski, full-time and well-respected Park businessman, bartender, hotelier, and basketball coach, and part-time fool-arounder. He had what I think was a fairly serious affair-serious for Bernie, anyway-with Laurel Meganack. Laurel broke up with him because his marriage kept him from spending time with her. Shortly thereafter, she slept with Len Dreyer.”
Mutt sneezed.
“Let’s not quibble,” Kate told her. “She seduced him on the floor of the cafe kitchen, all right? My question is, is that enough to drive Bernie to murder? Of course not. But then along about-surprise! -September, Bernie hires Dreyer to regravel the paths between the cabins and the Roadhouse, at which time Enid, Bernie’s wife, seduces Dreyer, not once but twice.”