A fine and bitter snow (23 page)

The ad took up a quarter of a page and was simple and direct: "We offer the world's best hunting and fishing, with experienced guides, no crowds, deluxe accommodations and gourmet meals." There was a picture of a big bull moose with a magnificent rack standing knee-deep in a tiny lake, with the Quilaks rearing up stunningly in the background. An 800 phone number appeared at the moose's feet.

Apparently, John had not been a proponent of the hard sell. As many years as he had in his business, he probably got most of his clients by word of mouth and repeat business.

There was a television and a VCR in a cabinet opposite the recliner. The shelf below the VCR was packed with tapes bearing tides like
Ecstasy
and
Exposed
and
Insatiable.
A do-it-yourselfer, John Letourneau. It was an effective means of soothing the savage, but lonesome. Resolutely, Kate turned her mind from thoughts of her and Jim on the floor of the mountain cabin.

She wandered back out into the living room to stare through the window at the river. This was a lonely place, or it felt like it to Kate. But really, what was loneliness anyway? She was alone a lot of the time, she was used to it, she liked it, and she was good at it. She preferred autonomy to dependence. At the homestead, she had books to read and music to listen to, bread to bake and snow to shovel, fish to pick and traps to check, a rifle to clean and moose to hunt, butcher, and pack. People seldom knocked at her door. Her nearest neighbor was, at any given time, a bull moose or a grizzly sow or the big bad gray wolf that kept trying to seduce Mutt into forsaking Kate and civilization for him and the call of the wild.

The great thing about the moose and the grizzly and the wolf was that they had not been gifted by their creator with the power of speech. They couldn't make conversation. The moose might kick your ass and the grizzly might rip it off and the wolf might eat it, but they wouldn't talk you to death while they got on with the job.

The main thing Kate had against people was that they talked too much and said too little.

She wondered now if she and John Letourneau had had that much in common.

She also wondered how much she and Jim Chopin had in common. Once upon a time, the immediate answer would have been a loud, definite "Nothing!" but Kate Shugak wasn't into lying, not even to herself, and it was more than time that she took a good long look at this fatal attraction she seemed to be developing. Feeling panic close up the back of her throat, she beat it back and tried talking herself down.

For starters, Jim Chopin was nothing at all, in no respect, like Jack Morgan.

Except that he was tall. And in law enforcement. And had a deep voice. And was good at his job.

And was, she knew now, just as capable of firing her engine on all eight cylinders without taking his boots off. God. She closed her eyes and for a weak moment gave into memory. It had been like tigers mating, all teeth and claws. Who would have thought Jim Chopin, the man who raised self-discipline to a whole new level, could go that wild?

And just what was that, that little feeling buried away in the back of her mind where she couldn't get at it? That couldn't be pride, could it? That she had done that to him, had caused him to lose control so completely, had shown him just how thin the veneer of civilization lay upon him?

Starting to get that panicky feeling again, she seized upon the indisputable fact that Jim was a rounder with positive relief. She was a one-man woman. He was a many-womaned man. Ergo, it would be very, very bad for her to enter into any kind of relationship with him. Maybe it was just pride, she didn't like looking down the road and seeing herself as one in a long line of Chopper Jim's ex-girlfriends, littering the Park from the Brooks Range to the Gulf of Alaska. So? Pride wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Neither was self-preservation. Maybe she was afraid that any relationship they developed would mean more to her than it would to him. Maybe she was afraid that down the road she would be dumped, good and hard.

She gave herself an annoyed shake. "I'm not afraid," she told the view. "It's not that at all."

The view remained serenely uncommunicative.

"Damn you, Jack!" she yelled. "Why'd you have to go and leave me here all alone?"

The words reverberated off glass and wood and rang in her ears. She closed her eyes against the sound and stood where she was, fists shoved into her pockets, rage and fear waging a battle for preeminence inside her.

Mutt's claws ticky-tacked across the wood floor. She paused next to Kate, who opened her eyes, took a deep, shaky sigh, and looked down, to see Mutt deposit a white knit hat on the floor at her feet.

"What's this?" Kate bent to pick it up.

It was a standard knit hat, a ribbed tube of two-ply white yarn pulled tight and tied off at one end and turned up into a brim at the other. Kate touched it experimentally. It was very soft, and fuzzy. Kate had a very faint acquaintance with yarn, as the four aunties were always either quilting or knitting. This might be angora, or have some angora in it. It wasn't synthetic; it didn't have that snag on her calluses.

She sniffed it. There was a faint flowery smell. She examined the inside of the brim and found a fair hair that was either pale blond or white.

She tried to imagine the hat on John Letourneau's head and failed. "Where did you find it, girl? Show me."

Mutt led her to the door. There was a bench next to it with a lid. Mutt nosed open the lid, and Kate saw that the compartment held a selection of hats, gloves, and scarves, some leather, some knit, some felt.

There were no matching gloves or scarf for the hat, but then, nothing in the bench matched anything else. They were all probably spares, some John had bought, some clients had left behind, available for future guests with chills. And probably each and every one had a different smell to it. Mutt gave her a pitiful look. "Not your fault, girl." Kate tossed the hat back inside and closed the lid.

John Letourneau's suicide might just be one of those little mysteries of life that remained unsolved. It comforted Kate, at least a little, to know they still existed. Unlike Jim Chopin, she didn't want everything to be neatly explained, all the loose ends tied up and tucked away. She liked to think she'd leave a mystery or two behind herself. Just not anytime soon.

"Come on," she said to Mutt. "Let's go say hi to Bernie."

11

The Roadhouse was packed to the rafters that afternoon. Dan O'Brian was at the bar, sitting as close as he could get to the serving station. Christie was all business, bestowing a smile on him in passing, the same smile she gave Kate on her way to a table, a loaded tray balanced on her right hand. The table the tray was headed for, Kate was interested to note, contained among its patrons one Pete Heiman. His face lit up as Christie approached, and her hand settled onto his shoulder in what seemed to Kate to be a very comfortable gesture.

Kate let Mutt lead the way to a seat next to Dan, who said, "What's this I hear about John Letourneau?"

"Only the truth, I'm sure," Kate said, looking over her shoulder at the table where Dandy and Scottie were holding forth before an admiring crowd, most of them women. For a place where the ratio of men to women was five to one, Dandy Mike got more than his share.

Christie arrived at Dandy's table with refills, and he smiled up at her, resting a familiar hand a little too low on her waist. She smiled down at him and shifted out of reach. Kate heard Dan sigh.

She looked at him and he grinned, although the expression held more than a little constraint. They were both remembering the interview in his office.

"Hey, Kate," Bernie said, sliding a glass in front of her that proved to hold Diet 7Up.

"Bernie," she said, "can I have some water?"

He cocked an eyebrow. "No profit in that."

"Club soda, then. With lime. I'll pay for the lime."

"Sure, but you're kinda breaking my streak, Kate," he said, and tossed a piece of beef jerky to the large grayears standing at attention next to Kate. A low "Woof!" and the ears disappeared.

Auntie Vi was there with one of her sons. Kate squinted through the dim light. Roger, she thought. Roger's wife was there, too, and three of their four children. Mary Balashoff was visiting from Alaganik—Mary must have given up on prying Old Sam loose from the Park—and she and Old Sam were pegging like mad in a fierce game of cribbage. The four Grosdidiers had commandeered their usual table with the ringside seat in front of the television set hanging from one corner of the room, groaning at a bad call by the referee of the football play-off game presently on the screen.

The door opened and Jim Chopin stepped inside. There was the usual lull when five-foot twenty-two inches of state trooper blue and gold stepped majestically into the room, but when it became apparent he wasn't there to arrest anyone, the noise soon regained its proper level and he was allowed to walk to the bar unmolested.

"Kate," he said.

Kate was aware that Dan had braced himself on the stool next to her. "You made it back."

"It stayed above minimums. Barely." He pulled off the ball cap with the trooper emblem on the front and ran his hand through his hair, which looked a little less immaculate than usual. "Bernie."

"Jim. Can't beat you off with a stick lately." Jim didn't offer an explanation for his presence that evening, and with the delicate tact required of the professional bartender, Bernie didn't ask. Besides, he had a pretty fair idea that he already knew. "What'll you have?"

Jim never drank on duty. It was an obligation he felt he owed the uniform, but it had been a long day and he would have killed for a long cold one. "Coke," he said finally, and sighed when he said it.

"You get out all right?" Kate said.

"Yeah. I missed the last plane into Anchorage, but Kenny Hazen put the body in the local meat locker and promised to get it on the first plane tomorrow." His Coke arrived and he looked at it sadly. "Not that an autopsy is going to tell us anything we don't already know." He allowed himself to take notice of Dan O'Brian. "Hey, Dan."

Dan shifted on his stool. "Hey, Jim."

A brief silence ensued.

"I went back out to the lodge," Kate said.

Jim looked at her, his eyes sharpening. "Why?"

"Because. I'm like you—I can't figure out why he did it. I looked through his papers, Jim. If he was dying of disease, he didn't know it. He had money in the bank; all his bills were paid, all his workman's comp up-to-date. He'd sent his chef and some of the long-term employees Christmas bonuses, the rest of them Harry and David fruit boxes. There's just no reason for what he did."

"Maybe he was lonely," Dan said, who had been listening and looked relieved, probably because the conversation had taken a turn away from him.

Lonely. There was that word again. Kate set her teeth and drank club soda. She wondered what a shot of scotch, neat, would do to firm up her backbone, and was immediately appalled that such a thought would come within thinking distance of her teetotaling brain. Just another example of how keeping bad company can decay your moral fiber, she told herself.

Jim saw her stiffen and wondered who'd shoved what poker up her spine. Lucky for him that he wasn't interested in easy. He wished he could have a beer. He wished he could have several. He wished he could take Kate Shugak to bed and not leave it for the foreseeable future.

Christie, taking a break, was standing next to Dan, who had his arm around her. Her bright blue eyes were watching as she listened. "Maybe Mr. Letourneau was just tired."

"He didn't have any business being tired," Kate said crossly. "He was only sixty something. For a Park rat, that's practically the prime of life. At sixty Park rats are just getting started. They quit jobs and go back to school, they go into business, they get married and start family, they—"

Dan snorted. "Right. John Letourneau, married, with children. That would have happened."

Jim said to Kate in a quiet voice, "What?"

She stared at their reflection in the mirror at the back of the bar. "I just thought—"

"What did you just think?"

"I—nothing." She shook her head. "No. Nothing."

"You sure?" Their eyes met in the mirror. "You looked like you were having an epiphany there for a second."

She smiled, a little rueful, but her smiles were rare in his direction and he'd take what he could get. "A crazy idea, nothing worth saying out loud." She raised her glass and drank. "So, Christie, how are you liking the Park?"