Blood Will Tell (11 page)

She mounted the step to the porch and tried the handle. Locked. Without pause she turned and went around the house. The chain-link fence had a gate, unlocked. In the back, the fence divided the yard in half. Each unit had a sliding glass door leading onto a small, shared deck. She climbed the steps to the deck and tried the right-hand door. It slid open smoothly. Mutt stuck her nose in and curled her lip. "Stay," Kate told Mutt, who looked relieved.

The sliding door opened into the living room and it was immediately obvious that Jane was not a dedicated housekeeper. The coffee table was lost beneath a pile of magazines and catalogues that spilled onto the floor. A plastic basket of unfolded clothes sat on one end of the couch.

A television with a VCR on top of it and a cable box on top of the VCR dominated the room. Facing it was a recliner. On the floor next to the recliner was a plate with a gnawed pork chop bone on it. It went with the dust balls in every corner, the cigarette butts heaped in several ashtrays and the stained and matted carpet. The smell pretty much matched the look of the place.

Kate, who gave the word "neatnik" a whole new meaning, wondered if the squalor was due to Jane's natural talent or if she lived this way to spite Jack, making his property as unattractive as possible to prospective buyers. It had been Jack's home originally; he had moved out when they split up and had let her stay in the duplex rent-free so that Johnny would have a decent home with a yard to grow up in. Jane had repaid his generosity by contesting the title to the duplex when he had finally tried to put it up for sale. That case was on hold while the custody battle was being fought. Kate wondered how Jane was paying her lawyers. The litigation habit was an expensive one to maintain, and although Jane had a good job with the federal government, Kate was pretty sure it didn't pay that well. No job did.

She picked a fastidious path through the detritus to the door that led into the kitchen. The sink was stacked with dirty dishes. The table looked promising, piled high with mail, some opened, some not. Kate went past it and into the hallway that ended in the front door. She unlocked and opened the door for a look at the street. Silent still, silent all.

The bathroom was on the left of the hallway, Johnny's bedroom next to it. There was a single bed shoved into one corner, a nightstand next to it and a couple of cardboard boxes shoved under it with what Kate identified as Johnny's clothes dumped inside. A University of Alaska Anchorage Seawolves banner was tacked over the head of the bed. Two books sat on the nightstand, Between Planets and Star Rebel, but the nightstand was missing that essential of life, a reading lamp. Johnny must have read in bed by the overhead light, controlled by the switch just inside the door. When he wanted to go to sleep, he'd have to get up and cross a cold floor on bare feet to turn it off. Kate was appalled.

In her opinion, a reading lamp next to the bed was the absolute minimum required to qualify for a civilized lifestyle. An ironing board, a rickety rocking chair piled high with old National Geographies and Catholic Youth magazines and a copy machine filled up the rest of the room.

A copy machine. Jane's use of Johnny's room as a laundry and storage area while he wasn't there Kate found understandable, if tacky, but a copy machine made her ask herself what was wrong with this picture. She walked over to it and found the on off button. It took a couple of minutes to warm up, but it made a perfect copy of Kate's hand when it did. She pursed her lips. What did Jane need a copier for? Kate would have thought the federal building would have all the copy machines Jane could wish for, and she wouldn't have to pay for supplies. There were three reams of paper on the floor next to the copier, one open and half the paper used, and a cartridge of ink. Kate stooped to look at them.

Government issue, all right. There was no wastebasket, and no scrap of wastepaper lying around, in itself odd, considering the condition of the rest of the house.

The second bedroom, Jane's, was across the hall. The bed wasn't made.

The nightstand next to it yielded a well thumbed Bible and a tube of K-Y jelly squeezed almost all the way to the end. One drawer of the dresser contained an assortment of lingerie that gave Kate one possible answer to a question that had always puzzled her: why Jack had stayed married to Jane for as long as he had. There were several of those bra-panty things she'd found in Enakenty's love nest, all very skimpy, one of them with no crotch. Convenient. Maybe Jane was Enakenty's missing lover.

Kate liked that idea, a lot, so much so that she wasted an entire minute speculating on ways and means of tying Jane into Enakenty's death. It might be an idea whose time had come.

In contrast to the rest of the house, Jane's closet was a symphony of carefully hung two-and three-piece wool suits in discreet hues of gray and blue and black in summer and winter weights. Among the suits hung shirts in white and beige. Half of them had floppy ties at the neckline, the remainder buttoned up to the top. All were made of silk, and all but one were still in plastic bags from the dry cleaners. All the shirts had Nordstrom's labels, which was what every label in each of the suits read.

Kate shuddered. She bought her jeans and jackets from the Eddie Bauer catalogue and her T-shirts, socks and underwear from the Hanes discount catalogue. The only time she ever went in a store was to buy shoes, having found out the hard way that you can't order shoes by mail and expect them to fit worth a damn. Nordstrom's was beyond her ken and she wanted to keep it that way. She went back through to the living room and opened the sliding glass door. Mutt looked around, expectant. "Give me fifteen more minutes," Kate told her. Mutt sat down with a disgruntled thump.

Kate spent the fifteen minutes sorting through the mail heaped on the kitchen table, uncovering an adding machine, a couple of well-gnawed pens and an Oreo cookie along the way. She ate the cookie while she used one of the pens to write down account numbers and card limits and anything else she felt might be useful on the back of an empty envelope.

The bank statement was at the bottom of the pile and the balance in the checkbook opened her eyes. Ten thousand and change. Maybe she'd been wrong about the bureaucratic pay scale. Maybe she should hit Dan O'Brian up for a ranger job.

There was no evidence of a savings account, or investments of any kind other than the amount deducted from Jane's paycheck for retirement.

There was a slip of paper taped to the bottom of the adding machine, where Jane could not fail to find it. Neither could Kate. On it was a word, printed in block letters:

WAR DWELL Wardwell was Jane's maiden name. A smile tugged at the corners of Kate's mouth. In the last envelope in the pile, another missive from the bank included a plastic card and a four-digit number, 9148. The smile widened and Kate shook her head and clicked her tongue. "Leaving the back door open, leaving your credit card bills and your password and your brand new cash card and PIN number lying around where anyone could find them?

Jane, Jane, Jane. Somebody ought to teach you a sense of security."

Somebody was about to. She took pictures out of every window in the house and finished up the roll on the back yard, paying special attention to how the neighbors' windows overlooked the property. She was pretty sure she wouldn't need them but at this point everything was possible ammunition and Kate was arming for a long siege.

On the way out she paused at the pile of catalogues next to the easy chair in the living room. Considering the size of the pile, the risk was small that Jane might notice the absence of a few. Kate selected half a dozen, all with their very own 800 numbers.

Thirty minutes after she went into the duplex she was sliding the glass door shut behind her. Mutt trotted ahead to take the fence in one lope and was waiting at the Blazer when Kate opened the door. Mutt jumped up, Kate climbed in next to her, the engine turned over on the first try and thirty seconds later they were around the corner and out of sight, the street quiet and still behind them.

Kate looked over at Mutt. "It's a good thing for the law abiding citizens of this state that we didn't go in for a life of crime."

Mutt panted at her, tongue lolling out of a wide, wolfish grin.

They stopped at a gas station, where Kate squeezed a gallon into the mostly full gas tank and used up a handful of the station's paper towels to scrub off the dirt she'd daubed on Jack's tags.

The first floor of the Egan Convention Center reminded Kate of nothing so much as the livestock barn of the Alaska State Fair in August, sans cows and with folding chairs instead of stalls. Enormous banners hung from the ceiling, decorated with beads and feathers and elaborate embroidery and appliques, each representing a Native region or subsidiary or tribe. She craned her neck to admire the Southcentral Foundation banner, beautiful in blue suede, white beads and eagle feathers. The Raven banner hung next to it, made of some black material with a dull sheen, lavishly embroidered in silver beads.

The chairs fanned out from a rectangular stage set up against the far wall and were divided into sections for each corporation. Signs on six-foot poles indicated what region; NANA from the Kobuk, Bering Straits from the Seward Peninsula, Calista from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Aleut from the Aleutian Peninsula and the Chain, Bristol Bay from Bristol Bay, CIRI from Cook Inlet, Sealaska from the Panhandle, Ahtna and Doyon from the interior, Raven from interior-south central-southeastern, and the Arctic Slope. It was a largely wasted ordering as no one stuck to their assigned seating, preferring to circulate and visit with friends and family they hadn't seen since last year's convention. There were at least a thousand people in the cavernous room, all talking at once and laughing out loud and, truth to tell, not paying much attention to who was addressing them from the podium on the stage.

Of course, there hadn't been much to listen to. The mayor didn't show, and the convention chairman asked him in absentia for forgiveness for all our parking tickets. The governor did show but considering the condition of relations between the state government and the bush villages shouldn't have. He made his usual pitch for the development of Alaska's natural resources and everyone immediately thought of the RPetco Anchorage spill. He condemned the federal wetland policy and everyone immediately thought of the Copper River Highway debacle. He touted the jobs created by the Bering Sea fish processors and everyone immediately thought of the State Department of Fish and Game's closure of the Yukon River to subsistence fishing two months before, thereby eliminating the river villages' main food staple. He asked the audience if they really thought the government Outside knew better than their very own state government how to manage Alaskan resources, and several voices yelled

"Yes!" He carried on, oblivious, and departed to very little applause, all of it polite and from elders.

One senator didn't show, the other did, and Alaska's lone congressman phoned in his regrets from a duck hunt in Oregon. The convention chairman recaptured the podium to introduce the assistant secretary for Indian affairs with a funny story about the last secretary's Alaskan visit, when they all stood around the runway waiting for "the great white father" to land, and compared him to the present secretary, a Native American woman, whom he referred to as "the big brown mama." She didn't stamp offstage in a huff, which Kate thought diplomatic of her, and spoke for fifteen minutes on vital issues like tribal sovereignty and subsistence, which was probably why people actually stopped talking long enough to listen.

But then speakers who agreed to address the convention were usually well aware in advance of their competition, which wasn't only shareholder conversation. When the proceedings broke for lunch at noon, the shareholders would stream outside for hamburgers at Burger King and then combat shop through the Fifth Avenue Mall on the way back to the convention.

And today was only the beginning. Throughout the rest of the week there would be pre-dawn raids on Carr's and afternoon assaults on Costco and evening attacks on Fred Meyer. They'd held the convention in Fairbanks one year, Kate remembered, resulting in a near revolt of the membership.

What was the point of coming all the way in from the bush, on foot and by boat and snow machine and airplane and even a few diehard throwbacks by dog team, if you had no place to shop once you got there? It was not to be borne, and the next year the convention returned to Anchorage to stay, to the delight of local merchants and bush shoppers alike. It didn't hurt that the permanent fund dividend check came out at the same time. This year the PFD had been nine hundred and change, and Kate estimated that of the $475,000,000 cash money (representing one half of the yearly interest on the state's legislature-created, Prudhoe Bay-tax endowed Permanent Fund) distributed this year by the state of Alaska equally among its citizens, approximately half of it would be spent before the convention reconvened at one-thirty that afternoon.

If a disinterested onlooker didn't know better, they might think the annual Alaska Federation of Natives annual convention served no greater purpose than to provide a forum for long-lost friends and relatives to catch up on the news, and as an excuse to come to Anchorage and shop. To talk and to shop, Kate thought with a mental grin, that's our motto and we're sticking to it. On that note she waited until the dais was between speakers and took herself downstairs, where a crafts fair took up the entire basement of the convention center. There were tables jammed up against every wall and in lines down the center of the room, leaving very little space left over for customers, who jammed themselves in anyway. The room was redolent of the smoky, slightly acrid aroma of cured animal skins. There were seal mukluks, beaver hats, pelts of bear and strips of baleen, jewelry made of wood and antler and bone and ivory and beads and silver, kuspuks made of corduroy and trimmed with gold braid and edged with wolf and marten and mink, ivory carvings of whales and bears and seals and--oh, Kate halted, not moving even when three or four people bumped into her. She let them walk around.