Though Not Dead (30 page)

She made use of the facilities and went back inside to stoke the fire in the drum stove and light the lantern. She used more Bisquik, eggs, canned milk, a package of shredded cheese, and some canned green chilies to make a chile relleno pie, and washed it down with green tea, a new item in her pantry forced on her by Dinah Clark. It wasn’t bad if you didn’t mind grass-flavored water. Sweetened with honey it was almost tolerable.

She frowned down at her crossed ankles. Someone had known there was something to find at Old Sam’s house, had known it before she did. Three days after he’d died they came to his house to find her reading one of Judge Anglebrandt’s journals. They knocked her unconscious and took it.

It wasn’t what you could have called a professional hit. It wasn’t like they’d brought a sap with them. They’d used the first thing to hand, a piece of firewood. So, amateurs? But amateurs willing to commit assault, so either fairly earnest amateurs or ones unacquainted with Title 11, Chapter 41, Section 200 of the Alaska Statutes, and the penalties applied to the convicted thereof.

When they read the journal they had stolen from Old Sam’s house and found, presumably, nothing relevant to their purpose, they would have known that the attack and the theft had alerted her, that she herself would now be looking for whatever it was, too. They must have followed her to Ahtna, to Jane Silver’s office, from where they would have followed Jane Silver home. They’d waited to break into her house until Jane was gone, which argued some sense, and it was just Jane’s bad luck that she had forgotten something and had come back home to get it, and their bad luck that Jane was a fragile old woman.

Afterward … of course. Of course the incident on the road was related to the whole mess. Either they thought Kate had found whatever it was that Jane had—this map the asshole had asked her about that morning?—or they’d wanted to stop her from finding it, and they’d run her off the road. They must have left Niniltna before she had and waited on the other side of the Deadman until they’d seen her headlights.

Which again argued in favor of locals. Strangers wouldn’t know about the Deadman. The Deadman averaged about one Outsider a year, most of them fished alive and swearing out of either the ditch or the river.

And now this morning. They’d followed her all the way out from Niniltna, through the night. The one man’s outerwear and 110 were not new, which also made them, if not Park rats, people who had time served in the Bush.

She went back in her mind over every detail of his appearance. Male, at a guess white or part white. Five ten accounting for the thick soles of his boots. A hundred and fifty pounds, although that was iffy given the added bulk of parka and bibs. There had been nothing familiar about his voice, but she had noticed that he took every care to speak as little as possible, single syllables spoken in a near monotone, as if he were afraid she might recognize it.

Which meant that she knew him. Or had met him. Or that he knew she would meet him in future.

She thought about Pete Wheeler.

And she thought about Ben Gunn.

She was certain that neither had been this morning’s intruder, but Wheeler was in a position to be fully cognizant of Old Sam’s affairs. Old Sam had not been what anyone would call loquacious, especially with strangers, but he might have let something slip in conversation with his attorney, some reference to something valuable in his possession. He might even have said something about sending his heir on a scavenger hunt, for which Kate could cheerfully kill him stone dead all over again.

And Pete Wheeler could have decided to find it first.

And then there was Ben Gunn. What with the loss of Old Sam and Jane Silver dying in her arms, her emotions had been far too close to the surface, and she had said too much to the newspaperman. He had said his grandfather had kept a journal (Had that been everyone’s invariable habit back then?) of the life and times of the region, and when Kate had said she would like to read them one day he’d gone all vague. If he was really attempting a novel based on his grandfather’s life, he would have had the journal ready to hand. Had George Washington Gunn written about the theft of the icon? Had he known who had taken it? And had that information passed to his son by way of his journal?

And had Ben Gunn, upon hearing of Old Sam’s death, taken the first opportunity to come into the Park and look for it?

She remembered the monster truck parked in front of the
Adit
’s offices. It was white. She had been pretty sure the truck that had run her off the road had been dark. If Ben had run her off the road, that meant that he hadn’t found anything in the journal he had stolen.

Had the intruder this morning been Ben Gunn? And if so, who was his buddy? She didn’t know him well enough to know who he ran with. Kenny would.

She put down her mug to pick up the journal again, and leafed through it, pausing here and there to reread certain entries. Judge Anglebrandt had had a good sense of humor and a sly writing style. “Upon his incarceration in the Ahtna Jail, Mr. Selanoff was seized with such despair that he attempted to commit suicide by drowning himself in the toilet. He failed to succeed because he had to keep coming up for air.”

Kate laughed and closed the journal again, examining the cover and the spine. Well, if Old Sam had left the journal for her to find strictly for the entertainment value, he had been successful. For the life of her she couldn’t see how the entry about McCullough was supposed to help her find the icon, or this alleged map.

She looked up at the wall. He hadn’t made it easy for her to find, that was for sure. She had a dark suspicion that nothing else he’d left behind for her to find was going to be easy, either.

Had she mourned her loss a little less, she might have noticed the lift in her heart, the sharpening of her senses, the new intensity of the colors that came within her range of vision. She might have recognized the return of her curiosity, that most essential quality of the effective investigator, which had been dulled by recent cases without satisfactory resolutions, and blunted by the draining, enervating toil of being Everychair to every shareholder in the Niniltna Native Association.

Instead she just went to bed, and if she slept better that night on the hard floor of that derelict old cabin than she had since she’d been shanghaied onto the NNA board, even given the void left by Mutt’s continued absence, she wasn’t restless enough to notice.

Twenty

She rose with the sun the next morning and packed up after a breakfast of eggs and leftover chile relleno pie. The dishes washed with snowmelt, she lashed a tarp down over the trailer. The tarps she’d tacked to the walls of the cabin she left there for the next pilgrim. Who knew? It might even be herself.

She’d written a note on the inside of the wrapper of a Hershey bar, placed it inside a Ziploc bag, and duct-taped it to the door. The note read:

Welcome, stranger!

Feel free to use the cabin.

Leave it as you found it.

Thanks.

—Kate Shugak, owner

She hoped that the invitation and the implied threat, combined with her signature, would rein in the more sober of the backwoods adventurers who made it this far. The kids and the drunks would probably ignore anything less than lights and a siren, but you do what you can.

She had given some thought to changing her mind about the hidden space behind the loft support. Maybe it would have been better to pull it out and leave it on the floor, so that if the people looking for the so-called map returned, they could assume she’d found it and would not tear the cabin down looking for it. In the end she had nixed the idea out of fear someone might use it for fuel in the woodstove.

That cut might be the last thing Old Sam had made with his own hands.

If they did come back, with any luck they would assume she had it, period, and would pick up her trail again in Niniltna.

She climbed onto the snow machine and started the engine. It kicked over without a hint of protest at being used for target practice the day before. She put on her goggles and pulled up her hood, fastening it at her throat, fixing the windshield with a steadfast gaze.

Nothing.

She revved the engine.

Nothing.

She revved it again.

Still nothing.

She swallowed hard and moved out slowly, following her incoming track down to the dogleg and around the saddle.

On the other side, Mutt was sitting in the snow, her front paws placed just so, a certain inflexibility about her jaw.

Kate stopped.

They exchanged a long look. Kate broke first. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. I’ve been scared you’d get hurt again. I’ve been holding you back from doing your job, the job I trained you to do, because of it.” She swallowed hard, remembering that long, dark night spent laying on the steel examining table in the vet’s office, one arm around Mutt so she could reassure herself that her dog was still breathing. It hurt to get the words out. “That stops now. You’re back to being a full partner in the firm.”

Angry at having her hand forced, she hit the gas and the snow mobile slid out.

Next to her, Mutt maintained a steady pace.

*   *   *

Downhill, the twists and turns and the steep little hills seemed more appropriate for a luge. She took them slowly and with care, Mutt trotting alternately before and behind, nose sniffing the air. They were out of the mountains before noon. She stopped on the same rise where they’d stopped for lunch on the way in to check the duct tape over the bullet hole and top off the tank. Lunch was leftover biscuits from breakfast and hot soup from the thermos.

She kept it at a steady forty miles an hour, stopping to refuel twice, which she admitted to herself was verging on paranoia, but just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you. Empirical evidence recently received indicated rather the opposite, and she kept a sharp eye out for attackers hiding behind every tree and rock they passed.

At the last foothill, the trail of the Polaris headed south for the river instead of west for Niniltna.

She stopped to consider.

The pain of her newest wound had receded to a dull ache, and she could see clearly with both eyes. She felt as well as someone shot in the head less than twenty-four hours before could expect.

The sky was partly cloudy, the horizon unthreatening. There was enough gas left in the spare can to see her to the river and back to Niniltna.

She grinned. Why the hell not?

“Hop on,” she said to Mutt, and hit the gas.

It took a little over forty minutes, but when they got there Kate was presented with yet another mystery.

The Polaris tracks ran right over the edge of the river.

“What the hell,” she said, and investigated.

She had to climb down the bank and she nearly got her boots wet before she figured it out. They’d taken the snowgo off on a boat. There was an indentation in the gravel where they’d nosed it in, and more indentations in the snow that showed where they’d laid planks to run the snowgo on board.

Well, shit. Depending on how fast the boat was and which direction they’d headed, they were either at Ahtna or Alaganik by now.

Still, there wasn’t much traffic on the river this late in the year. A lot of Park rats had cabins on the river and paid attention to who went by when. She turned around, feeling not entirely without hope. But the Arctic Cat finally took umbrage, first at being holed by a bullet, and then by being patched with duct tape, and it gave up the ghost five miles short of Niniltna. Naturally no one was traveling on their own snowgo or four-wheeler within a light-year of her when it did. Five feet was too far to walk in the Park without supplies at this time of year, let alone five miles, so she loaded her pack and set it to one side while she tarped up the snowgo and the trailer yet again.

The light was failing by the time she entered the village. She made directly for the Grosdidiers, shedding pack and snowshoes at the door. When she entered the clinic’s waiting room everyone including the ill and injured backed up, as if the walls of the room weren’t strong enough to contain both Kate’s rage and them, too.

Matt appeared at this opportune moment and took in the situation at a glance. “Yeah,” he said. “Come right on in here, Kate.”

Mutt refused to be left behind, and in the exam room Matt gave her a wary glance. “Is she going to take a chunk out of me if I touch you?”

“She might,” Kate said, and rejoiced at the thought. Well, not about Mutt’s taking a chunk out of Matt, specifically, but about Mutt’s taking a chunk out of anyone on Kate’s behalf.

She climbed up on the table, and wondered if she was going to have the strength to climb down again. Matt worked quickly and efficiently, removing the Band-Aid Kate had put on, cleaning and disinfecting the wound and applying a more professional dressing. He insisted on checking her pupils and reflexes and questioned her closely about her behavior between now and the time she’d been shot. He appeared satisfied with her answers, gave her some painkillers and some antibiotics, and shouted down the hall, “Hey, guys, come on in here and get a load of this!”

The other three Grosdidiers trooped in to radiate an incandescent and entirely unnecessary delight at Kate Shugak in their infirmary twice in one week, both times with shiners you could see from the moon.

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Kate said. “Did any of you guys see a Polaris go through town, night before last? Two people on one machine, one large, one medium sized, dressed like they knew what they were doing, both armed, one of them with a Savage 110? Other one might have been a thirty-thirty. A hunting rifle, anyway.” She hadn’t been able to recover the bullet from the accidental shot the first intruder had fired, but she’d found the one that had ricocheted off her forehead embedded in the wall behind the green tarp.

An exchange of glances, a communal shaking of the head. “That who shot you?” Matt said.

“Yeah,” she said.

The brothers gave a collective shrug. “With all those guys coming through on their way to and from the Suulutaq, you never notice a stranger anymore,” Peter said.