She stared at him, puzzled.
The Riley kitchen was a warm, crowded, and friendly place, with a woodstove for heat and a propane stove for cooking. The table was homemade beetle kill spruce and big enough to seat eight comfortably, covered with a tacked-down sheet of blue-checked oilcloth. The cupboards were homemade beetle kill, too, like the table a little clunky but sanded and polished to a smooth finish that had been darkened by years of cooking oil and wood smoke. Faded linoleum covered the floor and the walls were a pale yellow, chipped and peeling, on which faded patches showed signs of photographs added and moved around over the years. Dishes were stacked in a wide porcelain farmer's sink that was rather the worse for wear. Underneath the table were two dogs of indeterminate breeding, still and wary but unafraid of Mutt, who was sitting next to Kate, her ears up as if she were listening to and understanding the conversation. She looked up at Kate, yellow eyes meeting hazel, and one ear went back inquisitively. Kate put a hand on her ruff, and looked back at the table.
Grandma Riley looked like one of the aunties, round, brown and wrinkled, a woman of spirit and substance. Like the aunties, she had time served in the Park, and was a repository of knowledge about all the rats who lived therein going back generations, extending to fourth cousins five times removed who now lived in Bowling Green, Kentucky. When a Park rat wanted to draw a family tree, Grandma Riley was everyone's first stop. She'd been failing lately, which was why the extended stay in the elder health care facility in Ahtna, and Kate had the feeling that this might be her last trip south.
Art was the grandson of a white stampeder, a handsome, reckless fellow with a slight limp, known in Dawson City as Riley the Gimp, from New York, who had met and married a local beauty from Tok. They'd moved to the Park to work at the Kanuyaq copper mine, and had stayed on after the mine had closed in 1936, to homestead on the river and raise a family. Grandma Riley had married their son, Arthur Sr., and their children, beginning with Art Jr., had inherited their share of their grandparents' looks.
Christine Riley had been an army brat, born in Anchorage. She had met Art at the University of Alaska and he had brought her home to the river the year they graduated. She was a woman of quiet beauty, still slim and with a full head of pure white hair that was always neatly dressed in a braid wound around her head like a crown. Kate didn't think it had been cut in Christine's lifetime. She worked in the tanning shed next to the house, curing the wolf and mink and beaver and lynx skins Jim brought home, preparing them for sale at fur auctions in Anchorage.
It was, in short, an almost idyllic life for the three of them, two born to it and one who had adopted it wholeheartedly. Kate would have thought that any threat to the life they had built so painstakingly over the years would have roused them to the same incendiary level as the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons.
Instead, she was surrounded by a calm so placid it was almost grating. She looked at each of them in turn and was met by an identical bland stare. "What's going on here?" she said.
Art made an elaborate show of perplexity. "Why, nothing, Kate. We're not happy about what happened, but we know you and Jim will catch whoever did this and make it right."
Christine and Grandma Riley nodded and chorused their agreement, though Grandma Riley wouldn't look up from her mug.
"What about the grandbaby?" Kate said. "You gonna let an attack on her slide, too?"
Art's eyes hardened momentarily, and then his face smoothed out. "We'd left her with a neighbor, as it happens," he said. "We wish we could help you, Kate, but you know how it is. It all happened so fast. I wouldn't worry." He glanced at his mother, smiling. "Grandma always says, what goes around comes around." He drank coffee and grinned. "I hear you had a high old time of it at your first board meeting."
"Jesus," Kate said, "did somebody take out an ad?"
Art laughed and rose to his feet.
Kate, caught by surprise, rose, too. Since when did folks in the Bush urge winter visitors out the door? Usually they were so glad to see anybody they insisted they stay for a week.
It was almost eleven when she hit the river, Mutt on the seat and the sled attached, hiding from the windchill created by her forward motion behind the windshield.
What the hell had that been all about? It was almost as if…
The snow machine slowed abruptly as her thumb relaxed on the throttle.
It was almost as if they hadn't wanted her to find the attackers.
No, she thought, that wasn't it, not exactly.
It was as if they were recommending that she not waste her time.
And the only reason for them to think that she was wasting her time was that the attackers had already been caught. And dealt with.
Maybe already somebody stop them.
"Oh, no," Kate said.
Mutt gave an interrogatory whine.
Kate hit the throttle.
But when she stopped at the Jeffersons ' again, no trace of the fire-breathing dragon she'd left the day before remained. Ike was now smiling and affable. "No luck, Kate? That's a shame. Well, tomorrow's another day."
And when she got to the Kaltaks in Double Eagle, Ken was equally and eerily serene. He wasn't carrying his rifle anymore, either. "Well, sometimes there's just nothing to be done about a situation, Kate. I expect they were all from Anchorage. You know how those people are, no sense of private property. I'm guessing they'll get what's coming to them one day."
"Ken," she said with what she thought was pretty fair restraint, "when I was here yesterday you were breathing fire and smoke and threatening to shoot on sight. Now you're sounding like Mahatma Gandhi. What happened between then and now?"
He scratched his chin meditatively. "Maybe I got religion." He smiled, a slow stretch of his lips that was more a baring of his teeth than an expression of humor. "You know. Turn the other cheek?"
Frustrated, she took her leave, and Ken saw her out. "Hey," he said, "you still seeing Jim socially?"
She floundered for an answer. "I… I… sort of," she said. "Yeah."
"Oh. I just wondered."
"Why?"
He gave a vague shrug. "Hear tell he was getting all friendly with the mine woman in the Club Bar in Cordova a couple days back. Probably nothing. I expect they'll have a lot to do with each other once the mine gets going."
He smiled again. There was just the merest hint of pity about it, and it ruffled Kate's feathers. She made a brusque farewell and left
That smile was before her eyes as she headed out on the river.
She thought about that smile for at least a mile, about what it might mean, along with the reception she had received at the Rileys' and the change in attitude at the Jeffersons' and the Kaltaks'.
Wait a minute, she thought. Wait just a damn minute here.
That remark about Jim and her. It had been more than the usual Park rat interest in the affairs of their fellows. It had been designed to distract her from the attacks.
And it had worked, too.
Distract her from what, though?
She thought about it for another mile, and then she turned around and headed south again, running slow and close to the west bank, seeing many sets of tracks. She followed it as far as Red Run before she turned again and headed north, this time hugging the east bank. Again, many sets of tracks, could be hunters, trappers, ice fishermen, kids out joyriding, people visiting village to village. Nothing that looked out of the ordinary or intrinsically suspicious. She did find a large section of snow in a willow thicket that looked beaten down, as if a lot of snow machines had rendezvoused there, or as if a few had been there more than once. There was an empty bottle of Yukon Jack frozen into the snow under a tree. Not your usual Park tipple, for one thing it was too expensive, but Kate took it anyway. "Anything?" she said to Mutt.
Mutt had been trotting back and forth, nose to the snow. She looked at Kate and sneezed.