She stood still, staring down at the empty and half-empty dishes.
If he could be believed, he hadn't slept with Talia Macleod.
One of the reasons she had a hard time believing it was that she couldn't understand why not. It was what Jim did, it was who he was. He was a dog. He admitted it. For a long time, he had positively gloried in it. The Father of the Park might be only an honorific, but it was certainly true in spirit. Kate would need double the fingers and toes to count the names of the women he'd been involved with over the years.
So, why wouldn't he sleep with Talia Macleod? The question was baffling, and unanswerable.
The cinnamon in the streusel topping teased at her nostrils, and her stomach growled in response. She started to cut a wedge and then put down the knife and got out a fork. She carried the cake tin to the table with the fresh cup of coffee and waded in.
Howie could have made it up. It wouldn't have been the first time he had indulged in creative fiction to divert attention from his own indiscretions.
She shoved the coffee cake away. Then why did she feel so sick? So apprehensive? So terrified?
She donned boots, parka, hat, and gloves and poured coffee into an insulated mug, dosing it with enough half-and-half to make café au lait. Mutt trotted over and Kate let them out the door, snagging a blue plastic boat cushion from the bench on the deck on the way.
Around the back of the house she postholed through the snow to the little bluff that overlooked the creek running in back of her house. Frozen solid, the resulting chasm looked like a lightning bolt imprisoned in the earth. Bare birch and aspen branches bent beneath the weight of frost, spruce trees slowly dying from the spruce bark beetle infestation were transformed into fairy-tale homes for elves and wizards. An arctic hare peeped out from a blueberry thicket, nose quivering, and freezing into immobility when it felt the weight of Mutt's interested eye. On the eastern horizon the Quilaks loomed large and menacing, mercenaries in arms to the gathering clouds overhead. Another battle for winter in the Park's near future was imminent, or the portents lied.
"Why do I think he's telling the truth?" Kate said out loud. "I'm not even fighting it."
For some reason, she remembered the trip down the river, talking to the Kaltaks, the Jeffersons, the Rileys. As sure as she was sitting here, they were to the last man, woman, and child convinced that the Johansens were responsible for the attacks. And to the last man, woman, and child they were equally convinced that the Johansens had been brought to account for their crimes.
Kate was afraid that they were right. Someone had decided on their own to take care of the problem.
"Like the aunties," she said out loud, feeling sick again. She swallowed hard. "Like the aunties might have taken care of Louis Deem."
Kate thought back to her visit to Vidar Johansen, that cranky, lonely old man, the village built by his family emptying out two and three at a time around him. The school was gone. The post office was gone, mail delivered now to Niniltna. She could see the Johansen boys of Tikani, descendants of some of the oldest blood in the Park, getting hungrier and hungrier, too proud and too contrary to ask for help, until the only option seemed to be to forage for food and fuel wherever they could find it. From whomever they had to take it, even their neighbors.
And even if they hadn't, which she didn't know for a fact, she could see how they would be the obvious suspects.
If it was the Johansens, it would make sense that all the attacks occurred south of Niniltna, none of them north. Efficient predators know enough not to hunt too close to home. It frightens the game.
An eagle soared overhead on outspread wings, a soft presence on the minimal winter thermals generated by the rising sun. He spotted the hare and dipped his right wing, banking down into a swooping, tightening spiral. The hare vanished, snow falling from the trembling branches of the blueberry bush. The eagle straightened out and beat his wings to regain his original altitude, moving on. There would be another hare, or a squirrel, or a fox. There always was. Eagles, card-carrying carnivores, scavengers, opportunists, weren't picky about their food.
If someone had in fact constituted themselves judge, jury, and executioner in the matter of the snow machine attacks on the Kanuyaq River, that someone would have to be identified and warned against such action in future. She remembered Jim's complaints about Park rats taking justice into their own hands. Demetri attacking Smith for blading his beaver line. Bonnie Jeppsen keying the truck of the kid who as a prank put a dead salmon into the drop box. Arliss Kalifonsky putting a (probably well deserved, Kate thought) bullet into Mickey the next time he raised his hand to her. Dan O'Brien kicking a poacher's ass for trying to sell him a bear bladder.
They were all classic examples of Newton 's third law, and a hundred years ago these equal and opposite reactions would have earned nothing more than an approving nod from passersby, even if those passersby were territorial policemen. In their time the TPs were even more thin on the ground than their descendants, the state troopers, and welcomed all the help they got so long as it didn't make them more work.
Today, there was a trooper post in the Park, with a trooper assigned to it full time, and the Bill of Rights was more than just a paper under glass in the National Archives in Washington, D.G. Jim was right. He should be the first call people made, and for a while he had been, or so it seemed to Kate. What had changed?
A fat, glossy raven spoke from a nearby treetop. He had a lot to say in croaks and clicks and chuckles, slipping effortlessly from one raven dialect to another. Mutt's ears twitched and she gave the raven a hard look. The raven chattered on regardless, not unaware but not afraid, either. Even Mutt couldn't climb a tree.
"Maybe Talia turned him down," Kate said. That was it, it had to be. Jim had made his move, and Talia had declined with thanks.
Kate remembered Macleod's manner with the men on the board that morning. She'd definitely had a thing with Demetri at some point, and she'd been flirting with Old Sam, probably fifty years her senior. She remembered with painful clarity the intimacy between Jim and Macleod she'd seen at Bobby's house.
No, Kate didn't think Talia Macleod would have turned down Jim Chopin. She would have tripped Jim and beat him to the ground first.
And then another thought struck her, almost blinding in its force. "Oh, god," she said. "Oh, god."
Mutt looked at her in concern. It wasn't a tone of voice she was accustomed to hearing. She nudged Kate with her head and gave a soft, anxious whine.
"I believe Howie? And I don't believe Jim?"
She had to close her eyes while the world righted itself around her, and when she opened them again she was determined to banish thoughts of Jim Chopin from her mind, at least for the present. She reacquired her train of thought and held on grimly, determined not to be thrown off track this time.
Park rats were a self-sufficient bunch, no question, but Kate would never have described them as lawless. In fact, out here on what was still pretty much a frontier, people had more of a tendency to abide by the rules than not. When your nearest neighbor lives five miles away, the golden rule in particular became not just a nice adage but a way of life. There was no phone to pick up and call 911, even if there were a firehouse or a hospital within driving distance, which there wasn't, and even if there was a road between the fire-house or the hospital and your house, which there also wasn't. When you got into trouble you were going to need help. You wouldn't get it if you had a reputation for breaking the rules, for helping yourself to a neighbor's vegetable patch when she was out fishing, say, or making off with a cord of wood when they were on a Costco run, or cleaning out the cache when they were in Anchorage getting their eyes checked. Or draining their fuel tanks when they were on vacation.