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.
Conveniently, she forgot that Jim had been sitting right next to her and had done his own share of flicking.
Of course Dandy’s pride had kicked in. Her attitude had been nothing less than a challenge to him. Her attitude had gotten him killed. Hubris, she thought Sophocles had called it. Whatever it was, she had it and it had gotten Dandy killed.
She had just given up on sleep and was rolling out of bed, the RV shuddering beneath the shifting weight of her 120 pounds, the movement causing Johnny to slide even further down in his bunk than he had been, when she heard the muted roar of an engine, a big one. Mutt, whose nose had been pressed to the door for some time, with attendant whining, gave a short, sharp yelp. “What the hell’s going on, girl?” Kate said, shrugging into a shirt and jamming her feet into her shoes. “Go get ‘em.” If someone was mowing down trees on her property with the blade of a Caterpillar tractor and without her permission, she would know the reason why before she was very much older. If she was lucky, she might get to shoot somebody.
Mutt shot out of the open door and across the clearing like a bullet out of a gun. She vanished up the trail, and shortly thereafter there was a loud yell of alarm followed by a lot of barking.
“What’s going on?” Johnny said, raising his head, his face flushed and his hair mashed to a conehead point.
“I don’t know,” Kate said grimly. “Someone’s got a Cat going. That can’t be good.” She reached for the.30-06 leaning against the door. “Better go back up Mutt.”
His eyes widened, all trace of sleepiness banished, and dove out of his bunk and into his clothes in the same moment. She thought about telling him to stay put, and she thought about how effective that would be, and said only, “Stay behind me. Especially stay behind the rifle.”
He gave her a look and she grinned at him. “Gotta say that. It’s part of the job.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He stayed close behind her up the trail, from the top of which there seemed to be coming a lot of noise of one kind or another.
They met Mac Devlin halfway down. Mutt was standing directly in front of the blade. She was barking and wagging her tail at the same time.
Kate felt as confused as Mutt looked. Behind Mac on his Cat there was quite a crowd: Dinah looking nervous, Billy Mike grinning, Annie Mike dispensing coffee and what looked like a mountain of fresh doughnuts, Auntie Vi and the other three aunties unloading coolers and boxes and grocery bags, Bernie and Enid unloading cases of pop and beer and bags of ice, Dan O’Brian with the whole gang down from the Step, including Dr. Millicent Nebeker McClanahan. Laurel Meganack had baked up a dozen pies, apple and cherry and pumpkin, and Auntie Balasha had a whole salmon carton of fry bread, fresh out of the frying pan if the steam rising off them was any indication.
“What are you all doing here?” Kate said. She caught a glimpse of vehicles lined up down the road and stepped forward. Yep, all the way down to the curve, where she had confronted Roger McAniffe years ago.
“Well, Kate,” Dinah said, shifting from foot to foot, “it’s like this.”
She paused.
“Like what?” Kate said. Next to her Johnny was starting to grin. “What’s going on?” she asked him.
“It’s like this, Kate,” Billy Mike said, taking pity on Dinah’s agony. “We’re going to build you a house today.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You can help,” he told her, “but don’t get in our way.”
She was so staggered that she let him push her gently but firmly to one side of the track.
Mac put the Cat in gear and finished carving out a track, finishing in a neat little circle that would be nice for parking. He roared backward up the trail, dragging the blade to smooth out the tracks, and someone Kate didn’t know pulled up in a dump truck loaded with gravel. Mac packed that down in about thirty minutes and then things really got lively.