Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  Kate hadn't heard this many words come out of Ekaterina's mouth all at once in years. "Enough, Dinah," she said. "People are going to think that thing is permanently attached."

  "Okay." Dinah lowered the camera. "This tape is almost full, anyway."

  Her eyes were bright and excited. "There's stories all over this place just walking around on two legs. See that girl over there? She quit her job waitressing to pick mushrooms. Said she could make more money.

  And that guy? He builds log homes. He says the rain made them stop, so he's picking mushrooms instead. That guy cuts and sells firewood, but he said he can always cut wood. He says it's been two good years for Chistona, the first year they made money fighting the fire for the BLM, and now they're picking mushrooms for two bucks a pound."

  She hesitated, shooting Kate a doubtful glance, and said hesitantly, as if suggesting something she knew to be in dubious taste, "Kate, nobody around here sets fires on purpose, do they?"

  "Good heavens, no," Kate said. "Who's that guy?" She nodded at a tall, spare man with a high, smooth forehead and a full head of pure white hair.

  Diverted, as Kate had meant her to be, Dinah said, "The guy who looks like an Old Testament prophet? I don't know. Kid next to him looks like a choirboy, though, doesn't he? Say, that's the same kid, isn't it?"

  It was. The boy was back, standing at the old man's elbow, his fair, soft curls clustering around rosy cheeks and blue eyes. He looked positively cherubic, and at the same time the family resemblance between the two was evident in the broad brows, in the firm chin, in the expressive blue eyes that in the boy's face were wide and curious and in the man's, stern and curiously grim. Kate wondered how long it would be before the boy's eyes became like the man's.

  The boy looked up suddenly and their eyes met. He didn't blush or duck his head or grab his grandfather's leg or do any of the things children do when confronted with the interest of strangers, and Kate revised her estimate of his age upward, to ten, maybe even eleven.

  Fortunately the transformation of the boy's eyes from curious to grim was no concern of hers. "Look, it's our turn. Help me lift the buckets up on the flatbed. Emaa? Are you staying with Auntie Joy?" Ekaterina nodded, and Kate said, "Tell her I'll come visit on my way home. Come on, Dinah, tote that barge, lift that bale."

  Bobby cooked lavishly that evening, roasting caribou in a Dutch oven over hot coals, stirring up a raspberry vinegar-white wine sauce in the interim out of the two crates of supplies he had insisted were essential to civilized life as we know it, at home or in the bush. The smell made Kate's mouth water, and was almost enough to make her forgive him for coercing her into hauling the crates up the hill to the campsite. The roast was served with a morel garnish, or rather, as Bobby explained,

  "We like a little meat with our mushrooms." Dinah, her mouth full, said indistinctly, "It tastes so good I don't want to swallow. Bobby? Marry me."

  "You only want me for my cooking."

  "Damn straight. And there's no 'only' about it." Kate didn't say anything at all. Afterward, the three of them lay around the fire in the setting sun, too stuffed to move, listening to thunder rumble at them from the edge of the horizon.

  They could see the rain come down from where they were, thin gray sheets of it hanging between the campsite and the Quilaks, turned to silver gilt by the slanting rays of the sun. "Well," Dinah said, burping without excuse, "that beats anything I ever bought out of the produce section at Safeway. Agaricus bisporus has nothing on Morchella elata."

  Nobody asked but she told them anyway. "Agaricus bisporus is the cultivated mushroom. The one you get at your local grocery store for two-ninety-eight a pound."

  Kate stirred herself enough to say, "Did you bring that desk encyclopedia you said you had in the van?"

  Dinah waved a hand in the general direction of her backpack. With a burst of energy that left her exhausted, Kate snagged the pack by one strap and dragged it to her. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia was on top of the pile inside. "Oh God," Bobby moaned, hiding his eyes, "not you, too."

  "What you looking up?" Dinah said.

  "Hillel," Kate replied absently. "Here he is. Hillel, flourished--I love that word, who knows now if he flourished or he withered on the vine?--from thirty b.c. to ten A.D. Born in Babylonia, he was a Jewish scholar and president of the Sanhedrin, which fostered a systematic, liberal--I wonder what liberal was in thirty B. C.?"

  "Probably advocated crucifixion over burning," Bobby said lazily.

  "--liberal interpretation of Hebrew Scripture, and was the spiritual and ethical leader of his generation. Shammai opposed his teachings."

  "Who the hell was Shammai?"

  Kate, taking that as an invitation, turned to the S's. "Shammai was a leader of the Sanhedrin who adopted a style of interpretation of Halakah that opposed the teachings of Hillel."

  "So Hillel flourished in spite of Shammai," Dinah suggested.

  Unheeding, Kate said, "And what, you ask, was the Halakah? It just so happens--" she turned back to the His. "Aha. Halakah, or halacha"--she spelled it for their edification--"refers to that part of the Talmud concerned with personal, communal and international activities, as well as with religious observance.

  Also known as the oral Law, as codified in the Mishna." Kate turned to the M's. "Mishna, Mishna, sounds like a Hari Krishna chant. Here we go.

  The Mishna's the basic textbook of Jewish life and thought, covers agriculture, marriage and divorce, and all civil and criminal matters."

  Dinah said, "So if you wanted to know when to plant your corn, sing a psalm, party hearty, get hitched or hang a thief, you consulted the Mishna and it told you."

  "I guess."

  "Sort of like the Marine Bible," Bobby said admiringly, and at Dinah's questioning look added, "The Marine Battle Skills Training Handbook.

  You're issued one in boot camp. Covers everything from digging latrines to kissing brass ass. Where'd you hear about this guy Hillel?" he asked Kate.

  "I was reading about him on my soap bottle," Kate replied blandly, and Bobby, after one incredulous stare, flopped back with a theatrical groan, but not without grabbing Dinah on his way down.

  "May I ask you a personal question, Kate?" Dinah said, snuggling into Bobby's embrace with what Kate considered a disgustingly content expression on her face.

  "No," Kate said.

  "Where'd you get that scar on your throat?"

  There was a brief silence. "A knife fight," Kate said finally. "Three years ago. Almost four, now."

  "Tell me about it?"

  Another silence. "I caught a child molester in the act. He had a knife."

  Dinah winced. "Ouch."

  Kate's mouth curled up at one corner, and Bobby, watching curiously, was surprised. "I'll say."

  "What happened to him?"

  "I took the knife away from him."

  "He in jail?"

  Kate shook her head. "Dead."

  Dinah didn't ask how; she didn't have to.

  Kate stared at the fire for a moment, and then raised her eyes, meeting the blonde's with growing awareness. "You're good."

  "You sure as hell are," Bobby agreed. He'd heard that story once, the first time he'd seen the scar. Then it had been new and swollen and red and angry, especially angry, but it had paled by comparison to Kate's barely restrained, all-consuming rage. By virtue of their long friendship he had been owed an explanation. She had given one, in short, terse sentences, every word of which cost her more than she could afford to pay, and Bobby had a strong enough sense of self-preservation and a high enough value of Kate's continuing friendship never to raise the subject again.

  And now this blonde, from Outside no less, the rawest of cheechakos, the most innocent of Alaskan naifs, a literal babe in the woods, had asked a few simple questions and gotten the whole story, all of it, simply and succinctly and more, gotten it without attitude or resentment. "Real good," he said.

  She nodded, taking the compliment as simple fact, without a t
race of false modesty. "I know. It's what I do." She looked beyond Kate and her face lit up. "Oh! Look!"

  Kate turned and beheld a full rainbow, a slender arch of primary colors stretching from the Canadian border to Tonsina. It was a delicate, perfect thing, and the three of them were held captive by the sight.

  Bobby had a slight smile on his dark face, Dinah looked dazed with delight, and Kate, after a moment, recognized a feeling of proprietary pride.

  The sun, taking its own sweet time, finally intersected the horizon and the rainbow began to dim. Dinah let out a sigh of pure rapture. "A full rainbow at twenty minutes past eleven in the evening. Only in Alaska."

  Later, drifting off to sleep in her tent, Kate heard Bobby say in a cranky voice, "Just what the hell was the Sanhedrin, anyway?"

  The next day was a repeat of the previous six at slightly lower temperatures. Mutt roused from her state of heat-induced stupor and nipped Kate's behind as she bent over a patch of morels. Kate abandoned a bucket not half full and gave chase. For fifteen minutes they played tag, moving deeper into the blackened forest and becoming totally covered in black soot, until Kate tripped over a branch and went sprawling on her face. Spitting out ash, she raised her head to see Mutt staring down at her with an expression of gathering delight.

  Kate could just imagine what she looked like, and told the half breed,

  "You should talk! You look like you've been hit with a bucket of creosote."

  Then she noticed the mushrooms. Morels, hundreds of them, thousands of them, a virtual carpet of them. She jumped to her feet. "Dinah! Bring the buckets! There be fungi here!"

  One clump of mushrooms perched on an elongated mound and seemed to grow thicker there than anywhere else. Kate waded toward it and began to pick.

  "Kate! Kate, where are you? I found another sign! Amos 5:24!" "Right here! I--" Kate paused, her hands full of mushrooms. Next to her, the wolf-husky hybrid froze, head lowering between her shoulders, hackles rising, ears flattening, as a low, continuous growl issued from deep in her throat.

  "Kate?" Dinah stumbled into the clearing, three empty buckets dangling from each hand. "Wow! Shroom heaven! I found another sign, Kate, Amos

  5:24. Kate? What is it? What's wrong?"

  "Stay there." Kate rose to her feet, and at the other woman's involuntary step forward repeated sharply, "Stay there."

  "What is it?" Dinah said.

  "Someone's body."

  CHAPTER 2.

  As a safeguard, all should be eaten with a draught of olive oil and soda or lye ashes, for even the edible sorts are difficult of digestion and generally pass whole with the excrement.

  --Dioscorides

  "Dinah?"

  The blonde's face was white and pinched. Kate had to say her name a third time before she looked up from the body to meet Kate's eyes. "Go get your camera."

  The blue eyes widened. "What?"

  "Go get your camera," Kate repeated.

  "You want me to photograph--it?" Dinah swallowed.

  "Yes. Go get it."

  Dinah swallowed again, opened her mouth to protest, met Kate's hard stare, closed her mouth and went to get her camera. Kate turned back to the body. Mutt, nose wrinkled, lips drawn back from her teeth, growled again. "Easy, girl."

  She was squatting at what would have been the hips. Now that she knew what she was looking at, she could see the legs, the left one drawn up, a horsetail sprouting from just behind the bend of his knee. Her eyes traveled back up his torso. Both arms were outflung, as if he'd tripped and tried at the last moment to catch himself as he fell forward. The little mounds that would be his hands cradled between them half a dozen shoots of fireweed the color of lime sherbet. He was covered with black ash turning silver, dissolving into the forest floor, becoming one flesh with the earth, fertilizing the fireweed, fodder for Morchella esculenta.

  There was something about his pose, the raised knee, the outflung arms, a sense of vulnerability. Dead, almost literally ashes to ashes, he seemed still to be moving, still to be in flight. Flight from what?

  Had he been chased by a bear? Running in front of the fire?

  She frowned. When had it become a he?

  A moment later Dinah came crashing back. Breathing hard, she skidded to a halt next to Kate and raised the camera. "What do you want me to shoot?"

  "Can you get me and the body in the same shot?"

  Dinah backed up a step, another, focusing the lens. "Yes."

  Kate raised her voice. "I'm Kate Shugak, it's June sixteenth, the location is just under two miles east of Cat's Creek." She pointed.

  "That's north. Chis tona is about a mile that way cross-country. It's--" she looked at her watch "--nine forty-five a.m. Dinah Cookman and I were picking mushrooms when I stumbled across the body." She looked over her shoulder. "Is the mike picking up my voice?"

  Dinah, her voice steadier now that she was viewing things through a lens, said, "Yes."

  "Can you get a shot of the whole clearing?"

  "Yeah." Dinah panned slowly around, coming to rest again on Kate and the body.

  "From the width of the shoulders and hips I'd guess male. Can't tell race or age. He doesn't appear to be much burned, the fire must have jumped a spot here. There's plenty of ash, though, and from the ash and the mushrooms growing in the ash I'd say he's been here since last summer. Something's been chewing on his ass, probably after death, probably before freeze-up." She took a breath, held it, and leaned closer to pluck a few mushrooms free. Ash came up with them, leaving a gash of putrefying human flesh behind. There was no mistaking that smell, ever. Even with her breath held against it Kate felt it invading her nostrils, her lungs. Mutt, with olfactory senses ten times more evolved than her own, gave a distressed whine and backed up to stand beside Dinah.

  "Decay is advanced," Kate said tightly. Pulling her sleeve down over her hand, she held her breath and reached out to lift up an arm. There was a sickening, sucking sound. For one horrible moment Kate feared that the arm had separated from the body at the shoulder.

  "There doesn't appear to be any ash beneath the body, so my best guess is it was here before last year's fire. Probably caught out in the fire.

  Dumb bastard."

  Something tickled at the back of her brain, some unanswered question that jumped up and down and demanded her attention, but the smell was increasing and increasingly bad and she was afraid if she didn't back off she would vomit. She rose, brushing ash from her knees, and looked at Dinah. "You can quit."

  Dinah lowered the camera, relief on her face. "You're not going to look closer?"

  "He'll fall apart if I roll him over."

  "Kate?"

  "What?"

  "Why didn't the bears get him?"

  "What?" "You said they'd eat anything that would sit still for it." She jerked her chin at the body. "Why not him?"

  "Good question," Kate said, wishing one had. "They would have, if they'd stumbled across him first."

  "Instead of which, we did."

  "Just lucky, I guess," Kate agreed. "It may be he just this week thawed out. It stayed cold late this year, and the dirt and the ash forms a pretty good layer of insulation. Not to mention the mushrooms.

  Even Mutt didn't smell it until we were right on it. During the winter--" She shrugged. "Bears sleep through the winter, body's frozen and snowed over. He'd sit until spring."