He leaned forward to give her knee a sharp rap. “There’s almost always tomorrow.”
She made one more stop on the way to the airport.
“Hello, Emily,” she said, when Charlotte’s partner opened the door.
Emily’s hand went to her mouth. There was almost nothing left of the smart, aggressive attorney Kate had met just days ago. Emily looked as if she hadn’t showered since the day of Charlotte’s death. She was dressed in the same gray sweats Charlotte had been wearing the first time Kate had visited this house. Her hair was lank and her face was colorless. She’d aged ten years since the last time Kate had seen her. “Oh,” she said listlessly. “It’s you.” She walked away from the door without closing it behind her.
“Stay,” Kate said to Mutt in a soft voice, and followed Emily into the living room where she had curled up on the couch beneath a worn quilt decorated with illustrations of Holly Hobby.
“What do you want?” Emily said, still in that listless, disinterested voice.
“Has anyone told you what happened?”
Emily shook her head.
Kate told her everything.
“Oliver?” Emily said. “Oliver killed his own brother?”
“Knock it off, Emily,” Kate said.
Frightened eyes raised to meet Kate’s. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You knew it was Oliver all along,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you figured it out, maybe it came out of being his law partner, maybe he let something slip at the office one day, but you knew.”
Emily’s eyes filled with tears.
“You were Charlotte’s heir,” Kate said. “You knew about Oliver, and when Charlotte died, you confronted Erland. You threatened to expose Oliver. He threatened to contest Charlotte’s will if you talked to me or anyone else about it. Stalemate.”
She waited. Emily picked at a loose thread on the afghan. “This house is so big, so expensive, I couldn’t afford it on my own. And I wanted to keep it, it’s all I have left of her now-”
“Surely not all,” Kate said, looking at Emily with equal parts pity and disgust.
“You don’t understand! I have to maintain a certain standard of living, I have to entertain, it’s expected by my clients!”
“So you let Erland walk away from the cold-blooded murder of the person you loved most in the world. You did that for a house? For a career?”
Emily’s face crumpled. “Don’t,” she said, warding off Kate with a shaking hand. “No more.”
Her face was contorted with pain and grief, but superceding them both was an agonizing, overwhelming guilt. She had betrayed Charlotte in life by keeping her knowledge of Oliver’s guilt a secret, and betrayed her again in death by bowing to Erland’s blackmail, and what that meant was only now becoming clear to her.
There was nothing Kate could say that would make Emily feel any worse, and suddenly the desire to do so receded. She turned and left. Behind her she could hear Emily dissolve into helpless, racking sobs.
By the time Kate hit the door, she was running.
He saw the cab and knew it was them. He busied himself with preflighting the Cessna. He was back in full trooper regalia, from the perfectly centered set of the ball cap with the trooper insignia on his head to the glossy black of his half boots, and in between everything blue pressed to a knife-edge crease and everything gold polished to a high gleam. He was the very model of a modern major general, only in this case an Alaska State Trooper sergeant, and no apologies to either Gilbert or Sullivan, thank you very much.
It felt like armor, and he welcomed it. This was it, he told himself. No more putting it off, no more allowing her to fog his mind with sex, no more following her up the stairs of that town house and down onto that enormous bed in the master bedroom. No more losing himself in that firm muscle beneath smooth skin, those tip-tilted hazel eyes, that rich ripe mouth.
He yanked his wandering imagination back under control. They were done. There had never been a “they.” He wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the fact that he’d spent some time with Kate Shugak, a night or two-okay, six, and he wasn’t such an asshole that he couldn’t say good-bye nicely when he had to. He wasn’t one of those guys who just walked away when it was over. No, by God, he took his leave properly, like a gentleman, and he would do no less with Kate Shugak.
The thing was, he didn’t want a relationship. He’d never wanted one. We are what our parents make us, somebody once said, and it was true. His parents were your typical suburban couple who’d had their one token child, raised him to be a functioning, productive adult, and then agreed to coexist for the rest of their lives in the neutral zone they had made of their ranch-style home. He’d never wanted anything that subdued, that lacking in passion, that colorless. If that was what marriage was about, and he had no evidence to the contrary-Bobby and Dinah Clark were clearly an aberration, Billy and Annie Mike the exception that broke the rule-then he wanted none of it.
He didn’t want passion, either, none of that headlong, the world well lost, only for you in mine eyes nonsense. Deliberately, he willed to mind Virgil and Telma Hagberg. If passion meant you were instantly blind to all of your lover’s faults, up to and including infanticide, he didn’t want any part of that, either.
No. Better to pursue a more cautious middle road, a series of well, better not call them relationships. Affairs, perhaps? How about good old carnal knowledge? Scratch the itch and move on. There was nothing wrong with single, footloose, and fancy-free.
“Look at Old Sam Dementieff,” he told the gas tank. “He must be a hundred and three, and he still scuttles down to Alaganik Bay and gets it on with Mary Balashoff every chance he gets. And that’s only when she doesn’t send word via Park Air to meet her in Anchorage first. He looks perfectly happy to me.”
The gas tank remained blandly nonresponsive.
The cab stopped on the tarmac and Kate got out. Mutt trotted over to greet Jim, who was on a stepladder, topping off the gas tank in the left wing.
Kate remembered Max’s words. “There’s almost always tomorrow.”
He was right. Tomorrow always came, and there was only one time when you didn’t see it. William, Eugene, and Charlotte were dead. Emaa was dead. Her parents were dead.
Jack was dead.
But all that was yesterday, and yesterday was past praying for. She was alive.
She looked over at the Cessna, at Jim Chopin in glorious blue and gold, checking something beneath the cowling.
Jim was alive.
Mutt gave a distinctly feminine little yip, front paws as high as she could get on the ladder, begging for attention, and Jim dropped an absent hand to pull on her ears. Kate smiled, a long, slow, anticipatory smile.
Mutt was right. So was Max. Much better to focus on today.
She saw Jim spot her, and her smile widened at his expression.
Today, there was a chance of joining the Mile High Club.
Dana Stabenow
