Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

  Sally said something else and Kate had to ask her to repeat herself.

  "I said, would you like to come to Sunday dinner? My husband's the postmaster, we live in back of the post office, you could come about five--"

  "I'm T. Rex and I'm going to chomp you up! Grrrr!" Standing up on his tiptoes, arching his arms into claws, the older boy chased the smaller boys behind Kate. The two smaller boys shrieked with delighted terror and ran for their lives.

  Sally's face went white and for a moment Kate thought she might faint.

  "Brandon!" She grabbed the biggest boy by the back of his shirt as he dashed past her.

  Startled, he overbalanced and would have fallen if she hadn't been holding him up. "What, Mom? What's the matter?"

  "Don't you ever let me hear you say that again! We don't talk about those kinds of things and you know it!" She swatted him ineffectively, hampered by the baby, and cast an apprehensive look behind her at the church. In the doorway stood Pastor Sea bolt, regarding her impassively, and if possible her face went even whiter. She gathered her children up and with the barest of farewells marched her family homeward.

  Seabolt's gaze shifted to Kate. His eyes were the coldest blue she'd ever seen, cold and clear and assessing, and without thinking she laid a hand on Mutt's head, a real and reassuring presence at her side. She stood a little straighter, pulled her shoulders a little squarer, lifted her chin a little higher beneath that coldly speculative gaze.

  She would not scuttle away in fear from the challenge issued by those eyes, although later she wondered why fear, and later still, why the challenge. A challenge that was almost a dare. As if he were invulnerable, and knew it.

  Someone touched him on the shoulder and he broke off the staring match to talk to a parishioner. Kate felt what amounted to a physical release that actually had her rocking back on her heels, just a little, just enough to make itself felt. She turned and made for the truck, shaken and determined not to show it.

  She had her hand on the door when she heard her name, and turned to see Matthew Seabolt. He looked over his shoulder to reassure himself that his grandfather was no longer standing in the doorway of the church. He wasn't, and Matthew turned back to Kate. "Have you found my father?"

  She busied herself, opening the door, sitting on the foot board, retying one shoelace that had gone limp beneath the Right Reverend Seabolt's fiery rhetoric. "Tell me again when he went missing. Everything you can remember."

  "I wasn't here, I was at Bible camp."

  She looked up. "So he was here when you left?" He nodded. "And gone when you came back." He nodded again. "Do you remember the dates?"

  He frowned, blond brows knitting in concentration. "Bible camp always starts the first Monday in August."

  "How long does it last?"

  "Two weeks."

  Kate looked at him, blond hair gleaming in the sun like a helmet, blue eyes sharp as the point of a sword, a little champion for Christ in the making. "Matthew, is this the first time you've told anyone that your father is missing?"

  "Yes."

  "And you haven't seen your father since last August?" He nodded. "Why did you wait so long? Why hasn't someone else said something? This is a small community. I presume everyone knows everyone else."

  For the first time she saw a trace of vulnerability in those steady blue eyes. "Grandfather says Dad abandoned me, and that I shouldn't talk about him."

  "Does he know where your father went?"

  He shook his head.

  She tried again. "Does he have any ideas where he might be?" "I told you," he said, lips tightening. "We don't talk about him."

  The light morning breeze had dissipated beneath the hot sun and a stray mosquito wandered by, to settle almost desultorily on Matthew Seabolt's arm. He felt the sting and pinched it off between thumb and forefinger.

  A smear of blood stained his skin.

  "Do you think your father abandoned you?"

  The answer was firm and direct. "No. Dad wouldn't do that. He wouldn't leave me without a word."

  Another mosquito took the first one's place. The boy smacked it and it fell to the ground. The place where the first one had bitten was already red and swelling. Kate nodded at it. "They like you."

  He looked down at the bite and rubbed it with one finger. He looked up again, more animated than Kate had yet seen him. "That's nothing. You should see Dad. When he gets bit first thing in the spring his eyes and his hands swell shut. One time when we were picking salmon berries the mosquitoes bit him so bad his ankles swelled over his shoes and we thought we were going to have to cut them off him. We used to order Cutter's by the case."

  "Used to?"

  His gaze slid away. "Well. Dad wasn't home this year, so ... " He watched a third mosquito buzz around Kate, give an almost visible shrug and zero in on the back of his neck. He swiped at it and missed. "They don't bother you much."

  She shook her head. "No. Not much."

  "You're lucky." They stood in silence for a moment. "You know what happened to him, don't you."

  She met his eyes. "I think so."

  He looked back down at his arm, rubbing the bite. When next he spoke his voice was almost inaudible. "He's dead, isn't he."

  "I don't know for sure, Matthew," she said, "and I don't want to say anything until I am absolutely sure."

  "Matthew." His grandfather's voice carried clearly, effortlessly to them across the expanse of parking lot.

  It was like watching special effects in a movie, one person usurping the face and body of another in a seamless meld of shifting flesh. The vulnerable little boy stiffened into a champion for Christ, a soldier for God. His spine stiffened, his chin came up, even his voice deepened.

  "I've got to go."

  On a mission from God, no doubt. "All right," Kate said. "I might know something more in a couple of days. I'll come and tell you if I do."

  "God bless you." He hesitated, looking from her to the tall, spare man with the shock of white hair standing in the doorway to the little church, the tiny steeple stretching overhead like an extension of his backbone. "If he's dead, it's God's will, and I must learn to accept it." He saw her expression and repeated stubbornly, "It's God's will."

  He turned and walked back to the church, steps firm, chin up, spine straight. The door closed behind him.

  So it was God's will, was it? Kate thought.

  Maybe.

  Then again, maybe not.

  The post office was closed but the general store it cohabited with was open and doing a rousing trade that Sunday afternoon, or as rousing a business as a one-room store does in the Alaskan bush when the salmon are running. The building was a structure typical of the bush, beginning with a double-wide trailer, a lean-to built on to the double-wide, a log room added to the lean to, and a prefab with slick metal siding going up into a dizzying second story added on to the log room. The four different roof levels were crowned with five chimneys and a satellite dish, and the various eaves were hung with--Kate counted--seventeen sets of wind chimes that tinkled monotonously in the light breeze. There was a weather vane in the

  CHAPTER 4.

  Gold and silver and dresses may be trusted to a messenger, but not boleti.

  --Martial shape of a rooster; that afternoon its beak pointed into the southeast.

  Except for the chimes, it all reminded her a little of her grandmother's house in Niniltna. The eaves of her grandmother's house were festooned with racks and skulls, the first kills of anyone related to Ekaterina by blood within the last fifty years. The antlers from Kate's own first deer, a gracefully balanced four-pointer, neat but not gaudy, were positioned near the ridgepole. Kate could still taste the steaks. Best meat she'd ever eaten.

  The store occupied the log cabin part of this preposterous structure, and it was packed so solid with shelves so crammed with goods there was barely room enough for customers, but they managed to wedge themselves inside, fill their arms with purchases and wait in a line that grew steadily
longer in front of a counter with one register and one man working that register. He was short and stocky, with straight dark hair, big brown eyes, and a taciturn expression alleviated by a sudden and infrequent grin that relaxed his whole face and turned him from wood into flesh. "Russell, how much for these spinners?" somebody called from the back, holding up a box of silver lures.

  "Price on the box," Russell said, ringing up a carton of Kools and a case of Rainier.

  "No, it's not."

  "Look on the shelf underneath."

  A housewife dueled with two toddlers over a box of Captain Crunch. She won, only to refight the same battle over a bag of Doritos. Kate and Mutt stood to one side, out of the line of fire.

  A plane sounded overhead. Without looking up Russell said, "There's Slim with that new 185."

  The thin man with the ponytail and the intense look who was next in line paused in counting out money. "Didn't I hear tell where he stole it off some poor guy for only sixty-five grand?" Russell nodded and the hippie shook his head in admiration. "With less than six hundred hours on the engine. Damn. He could turn the sucker around for eighty-five tomorrow.

  Like money in the bank."

  "Don't think he wants to, he says it always starts." Another plane approached and the storekeeper cocked his head a little, listening.

  After a moment his brow smoothed out. "Butch in the Tri pacer. Been a while since he's been up."

  "Wonder if he brought his wife," the hippie said.

  "We can only hope."

  The hippie gathered up his dried apricots, gorp and stone cut oatmeal and headed for the door, pausing on his way for a long, appreciative look at Kate. The housewife wrestled her kids two throws out of three for a bag of butterscotch drops, won, and arrived at the counter flushed with triumph. Behind her back, the four-year-old swiped a Snickers bar and hid it in his pocket. Something in the air triggered the suspicious instinct alert in every mother when her back is turned and her head snapped around and she stared down at him sternly. He stood it for maybe ten seconds before caving, pulled the candy bar out of his pocket and put it back on the shelf, red-faced. She nodded once, sternly, and then spoiled the effect by getting two fruit wraps from the top shelf and handing them over, one each. Their faces lit up. It wasn't chocolate but it wasn't a bad second best. They grabbed for the goodies and streaked out the door quick before she changed her mind.

  Russell rang up her order and ducked around the counter to hold the door open for her as she staggered through, arms full of bags. He let it swing shut and looked at Kate, standing patiently next to the counter.

  "Something I can help you with?"

  "I'm Kate Shugak," she said. "I met your wife at church this morning."

  "Kate Shugak?" She nodded. "Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?" She nodded again. He took in the color of her skin and the epicanthic folds of her eyes, she the slant of his cheekbones and the thick, straight black hair. He didn't say, "Aleut?" and she didn't say, "Athabaskan?" but they both relaxed a little, the way people of color always do when the door closes after the last white person has left the room.

  Her eyes traveled past him to the wall in back of the counter. "Is that a hunter's tunic?"

  He turned to look. "Yeah."

  They looked at it some more, silent, taking their time. It was worth it, a testament to hundreds of hours of painstaking, eye-straining, finger-cramping labor. It was made of caribou hide, tanned to ivory.

  Red, white and blue beads were worked around the collar in a pattern that sort of resembled the Russian Orthodox cross, or maybe those were birds; Kate wasn't sure. The seams at shoulders, armholes and underarms were heavily fringed and hung with dyed porcupine quills. Dentalium shells gleamed from a sort of a breastplate, and something in the order in which they were sewn to the hide hinted at the shape of a fish. You could see the fish better if you didn't look straight at the design.

  "Your grandfather's?" she said after a while. He nodded. "I saw Chief William in one of those last year. He had leggings, dancing slippers, even a nose ping The work on it reminds me of this one."

  "Maybe by the same hand," he said.

  "Maybe. It's looks about the same age. A lot of this stuff around?"

  "Some. What there is, people don't bring out much."

  "Why do you?"

  "I like to look at it."

  "You ever wear it?"

  He shook his head. "It's too small for me. I'm always afraid I'll split the seams." He turned to face the counter and her. "You need something?"

  "Got any Diet 7Up?"

  "In the cooler."

  She got a can, paid for it and popped the top. "Like I was saying, I met your wife in church this morning."

  His face closed up. "Oh?"

  Kate ignored the uncompromising syllable. "Yeah, she invited me to dinner but she took off before I could tell her I can't make it today."

  She gave him one of her very best smiles. "I just stopped by to see if maybe I could weasel a rain check out of her."

  He wilted visibly in the presence of that smile, a force of nature Jack Morgan could have told him was lethal and always effective. It was much like Chopper Jim's grin, but Kate would never have admitted that, even if Jack had had the guts to draw a comparison between the two.

  "She's in the house, I can go get her."

  "Nah, I've got to get back or my picking partners will think I'm slacking off on them." She drank some pop. From outside the door came a low, impatient

  "Woof."

  Kate looked for beef jerky and had to settle for a package of teriyaki pepperoni. She stripped off the shrink wrap and opened the door. Mutt caught the stick of meat neatly in her teeth.

  She felt Russell Gillespie come up behind her. "Nice dog. Got some wolf in him."

  "Her. Half."

  "You breed her?"

  "Not intentionally." Russell smiled, that sudden, transforming expression that seemed momentarily to change him into a different person. "Come around back.

  Got something to show you."

  "Okay."

  He locked up the store and took her around back and of course there were about a hundred dogs staked out over an acre of ground cleared between tree stumps, and of course Mutt had to exchange greetings with each and every one of them, reminding Kate yet again of Ekaterina Moonin Shugak working the room at the Alaska Federation of Natives' annual convention.

  No nose went un sniffed and no tail, either, and Kate was thankful they were well past Mutt's estrus. One old lop-eared male did give an exploratory growl, which Mutt dealt with summarily.

  The male yipped and jumped away from the nipping teeth, and Mutt moved on.

  Russell Gillespie watched, standing next to Kate. "She'd make one hell of a lead dog. You do any mushing?"

  "No. You?" A disingenuous question, since she'd seen the sled and the harnesses hung on the wall, as well as the dog pot fashioned from a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  "Some."

  "Race?"

  "Some." As with most mushers she had known and loved, the urge to show off his dogs was irresistible, and it was twenty minutes of dog talk before Kate judged it safe to raise the topic again. "I didn't see you at church. Did I miss you?" "I don't go," he said flatly. "I leave that to the wife."