Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

"Oh?"

  "Yeah." He hesitated, then went on. "She got the call and was born again and then she tried to convert me. It didn't take." The grin turned thin and sour, like good wine gone bad. "So now she prays for me."

  Kate shrugged. "Every little bit helps." He almost smiled, but not quite, and she trod warily. "Quite a sermon the pastor preaches."

  "Yeah," he said, and there was no trace of humor left. "Old Seabolt damns and blasts with the best of them."

  "I haven't been up this way in a while, but I don't remember the church being here before."

  "It wasn't here until seven years ago," he said shortly, red creeping up the back of his neck. "Sea bolt led a crusade or some damn thing up from Outside. About ten families altogether, they drove up the Alcan, bought Ralph Satrie's homestead and divided up the one hundred and thirty acres eleven ways."

  "Eleven?"

  "One part for the church."

  "Oh. Where they from, originally?"

  He shrugged, but there was a wariness in him that sparked her curiosity.

  She would have pursued it but in the distance came the sound of a plane and he cocked his head, listening intently.

  "Somebody you know?" Kate said, watching him.

  "Don't think so," he said, "it's a Super Cub, but it doesn't sound familiar."

  The three of them, man, woman and dog, waited, looking into the western sky until the white plane with the faded red trim came into view over the tops of the trees. "Seven Four Kilo," he said, squinting at the tail letters. "Nope, never saw it before." The engine throttled back and the flaps came down. "Better open up the store, they might buy something."

  It was a hint, and Kate, realizing confidences were at an end for the day, took it.

  As they came around the corner of the store, they surprised a woman in the act of picking up a garden hoe propped against the open door of the greenhouse. Not seeing them, she turned to walk away. "Hey," Russell said.

  She paused and looked over her shoulder. "Oh. Hi." She was in her late sixties, gray hair cropped short and permed in tight little curls, face weathered and brown from ten years of retirement. Her jeans were loose and faded. Her faded pink T-shirt commemorated the Alaska Highway's Fiftieth Anniversary.

  "Where do you think you're going with my hoe?" Russell said.

  The woman looked at the hoe as if she'd never seen it before. "This is your hoe?"

  "Yes." She said accusingly, "I thought this was a ghost town."

  "You thought wrong," Russell said, and retrieved his hoe.

  She wasn't embarrassed, watching him lean the hoe back up against the greenhouse with a speculative expression. "You're Indian, aren't you?"

  She looked over at Kate. "Both of you? Could you wait a second while I get my camera so I can take your picture?"

  Russell looked at Kate. Kate looked at Russell. They both looked back at the woman.

  "Ugh," Kate said.

  "How," Russell said.

  Mutt, having completed her social obligations, chose this moment to trot up, pausing next to Kate and examining the woman with a long, curious yellow stare. The woman paled. Mutt yawned widely. The woman turned and trotted around the building. Mutt gave Kate an inquiring glance. "Good girl," Kate said.

  Russell went back inside, and Kate arrived in the parking lot in time to see a Winnebago with Georgia plates kick gravel as it pulled out onto the road, going the wrong way if they wanted to get back to the main road, but it wasn't Kate's RV and it wasn't her problem. She just hoped she wouldn't have to help pull them out of a ditch on the way home.

  She turned and saw the hippie loitering with intent. "Hi." She paused.

  "Hi."

  "You're Kate Shugak."

  She was surprised. "You know who I am?"

  He shrugged, straddling a tree stump. "Everybody knows who you are."

  He looked her over, his eyes frankly assessing the possibilities and as frankly approving of them. "You the one who found the body?" She barely repressed a jump. "What?"

  "Rumor going around that a body was found. Heard some pickers out the road found it. Heard the trooper flew into Tanada and got picked up by a woman who looked like you. Heard the woman drove him back, accompanied by a body bag."

  "Heard a lot, didn't you?"

  He nodded. "I'm Brad Burns, by the way." He extended a hand. "Why don't you come out to my cabin, have a beer?"

  The Alaska bush equivalent of

  "What's your sign?" He was small and wiry, fined down to muscle and bone without being skinny. She noted again the ponytail, the plaid flannel shirt nearly worn through at the elbows, the jeans the same at the knee.

  His eyes were dark and shrewd, with the same intensity she'd noticed only in passing in the store, and he didn't smell. "I don't drink."

  His gaze was knowing. "I heard."

  "Then why ask?"

  He shrugged again. "Can't hurt to try. Well, then. Coffee? Tea?

  Me?" He grinned this time, confidently, cockily. "My cabin's a mile upriver from the second turnoff." Amused, Kate started to say, "Maybe some other time," and then caught the words back. He lived here, and although something told her he wasn't a member in good standing of the congregation of the Chistona Little Chapel, maybe he'd heard something over the mukluk telegraph.

  The same way he'd heard of her. "Okay," she said, "I'd like to see your cabin."

  He jerked a thumb at her truck. "Catch a ride?"

  She had to laugh.

  The three of them bumped down the road to the second turnoff, parked and walked down what was little more than a game trail. There was no sign of fire here.

  His cabin was small, just one room, perched precariously on the edge of a ten-foot bank, the wide, gray expanse of the Kanuyaq River, still swollen with spring runoff, rushing past below. The door had a sign on it:

  ERIC CLAP TON IS GOD Nope. Brad Burns probably didn't belong to the Chistona Little Chapel.

  Inside, the cabin was neat and clean, if somewhat spartan. The single bunk was built into the wall and made up beneath an olive green Army blanket, the corners of the pillowcase squared just so. "You were in the service," Kate said.

  He slipped a tape into the battery-operated boom box resting on a rough wood shelf above the bed and the sounds of the waltz version of "Layla" filled the room. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

  She pointed at the bunk. "I've been around vets before. Can you bounce a quarter off that thing?"

  "I could if I had a quarter, but Russell took my last one this afternoon."

  "Russell Gillespie?"

  He nodded without looking around.

  "I met his wife. She invited me to dinner." He paused in lighting a camp stove. "You religious?"

  She shook her head.

  "Then don't go."

  "Why?"

  "She's got a map of Chistona and suburbs. Red flags for sinners, blue flags for the saved. Sally rotates Sunday dinner invitations around the red flags, serving up scripture with the roast and biscuits, doing her bit to convert the ungodly into the path of righteousness." She heard the smile in his voice. "I rate the biggest flag on the map." "Glad I came here instead," Kate said.

  He gave her a once-over that was as blatant as it was suggestive. "Me, too." He waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, his eyes twinkling, and she grinned involuntarily, unable to take offense. He filled a kettle from a jerry can and put it on to boil.

  "She's a terrific cook, though," he added as an afterthought. "Sally.

  In case you get hungry. There are times when a sermon is a small price to pay for a full stomach." Kate smiled. "I'll keep it in mind."

  He spooned loose tea into a teapot. A rich, orangey aroma drifted through the room. "Mmm, that smells good. What is that?"

  "Samovar tea. The Kobuk Coffee Company mails me some from Anchorage every month."

  Over the door was a gun rack, holding a twelve gauge and a .30-06. A holster with a .22 in it hung next to the door. On the opposite wall was a bearskin, a nice one, soft and rich to
the touch. "You do your own tanning?"

  He nodded. A beaver's skin hung on another wall, a wolf's from a third.

  Mutt curled her lip and turned her back pointedly.

  A wood stove had been fashioned from a fifty five-gallon drum, matching the design of the honey bucket in the outhouse, the fish smoker on the riverbank and, its barrel sliced diagonally and mounted on a nose wheel, the wheelbarrow in the garden. A workbench with a disassembled trap sitting on it leaned up against the wall beneath the wolf pelt. An Olympia beer box spilled over with cassette tapes, another with paperback books. A gas lamp hung from the center of the ceiling, unlit, probably since May, maybe since April. Kate herself started turning her lamps off in March. Couldn't get a jump on spring too soon in Alaska.

  Groceries were stacked neatly in open shelves on the fourth wall, above and below the counter, which held a sink with a drain but no faucet. A bucket, half full of water, sat in the sink. "You have a well?"

  He nodded. "Good water?"

  "Fair." He grinned at her over his shoulder. "Gives the tea an interesting flavor."

  Kate took one of the two chairs next to the tiny table, all three handmade from spruce and sanded as smooth as a baby's behind. "You come here after you got out?"

  "By way of APD."

  She sat up. "You were a cop?" He nodded. "How long?"

  He turned, leaning against the counter, arms folded, and grinned at her again. "Long enough to hear all about Kate Shugak and her dog Mutt."

  Mutt, sitting just inside the door, put her ears up at mention of her name. Kate looked at Brad Burns. He was younger than she was, late twenties, she figured. She didn't remember him from her time with the D.A. so he must have come on board after she left. But she'd only been gone four years. She wondered why he'd left the force for the bush, but didn't want to talk about why she had, so she didn't ask.

  The kettle whistled and he strained the tea into two mugs. He held up a bottle of Grand Marnier. "Sure you don't want a shot?"

  She shook her head, and he shrugged and put the bottle back in its place on the shelf without adding any to his own mug, either, and brought both to the table and sat down. Kate sipped. Oranges and cloves, strong and sweet. "Mmm. Good stuff."

  He nodded. "What were you doing up here when you stumbled across the body? You live around Niniltna, don't you?"

  She ignored the second half of his question. "Picking mushrooms."

  "You and half the state and two-thirds of the rest of the country."

  "You, too?"

  He nodded. "Good for a little of the long green. Who was it? Daniel Seabolt?"

  Her head came up at that. "How did you know?"

  His bright brown eyes studied her for a moment. "I knew him."

  "You were friends?"

  "More or less." He shrugged. "He came down here a few times. Was interested in the subsistence lifestyle. Really interested. I figured him for a stayer." He nodded at the bearskin. "Helped me tan that.

  Didn't try to save my soul, either, which is more than I can say for the rest of that churchy bunch." He shook his head and drank tea. "The best thing about winter is that it snows me in and them out."

  She asked the question Russell Gillespie had not answered. "Where were they from originally? The Seabolts?"

  "I don't know, Idaho, Oklahoma, Iowa. One of those redneck states with vowels on both ends." "You mean like Alaska?" she said dryly, and he laughed.

  "I met Seabolt's grandson."

  "Yeah? Now there's a knockoff of the old man."

  "What about his father?"

  "Daniel?" She nodded, and he shook his head firmly. "Daniel was a human being. The fanatic skipped a generation in that family. He loved his father, but I didn't blame him when he went down the river."

  "Why?"

  He jerked his chin up the road. "He was teaching at the school--"

  "They've got a school?"

  "Yeah, a Molly Hootch, new three years ago. Chistona petitioned for eligibility when the population in the area started growing and the state came in and built it."

  "I didn't see it."

  "It's off the road, about halfway to Tanada. They wanted it as central to the population as possible, there's homesteads scattered all over the place, you know how it is. Anyway, there was some hoorah about what Daniel was teaching, and his father took exception, and got the whole congregation into it with him, and Daniel split."

  "Just left?"

  "Yeah."

  "Without even telling his son?"

  His eyes met hers. "That's what everybody said, Pastor Seabolt and all the churchy people." He paused, letting her think about that for a while. "They say he left in August, just before the school year started.

  I figure he thought he'd better get out on his own before they ran him out on a rail, tarred and feathered." Startled, Kate said, "What the hell was he teaching? Devil worship?"

  "Close enough. Dinosaurs, evolution, radical stuff like that."

  Kate remembered Sally Gillespie's white face, and her T. Rex son, and the cold, vigilant presence of Pastor Seabolt in the doorway of the church.

  Brad Burns added, "Dan told me once he was going up to Fairbanks, to arrange a tour of the museum there, or maybe get one of their fossilologists or whatever they call them to come down and give a talk.

  I think the Jesus freakers put a stop to it." He drank tea. "There was something about reading assignments, too, some of the parents wanted to ban some books from the school library."

  "Which ones?"

  He shrugged. "I don't remember exactly. I don't have kids myself, so I didn't pay much attention. Probably the usual suspects, works by those well known American subversives Mark Twain and J.D. Salinger."

  He eyed her over the rim of his mug. "Wouldn't mind a couple rug rats around the place, though. How about you?" She smiled and shook her head, waving a hand at Mutt, who had her chin on her paws and looked bored.

  "Got a roommate." She finished her tea and rose to her feet. "Thanks.

  I'd better be getting back, my friends will be wondering where I am." He tried to get her to stay for dinner, but she refused, as kindly as she could in the face of his disappointment. Company was hard to come by in the bush, and only reluctantly surrendered.

  "Come back anytime," he called after her, and she turned to wave. He stood, silhouetted in the door of his tiny cabin, the Kanuyaq, gray with glacial silt, flowing behind him.

  "Well?" Dinah said when Kate reappeared in camp.

  "Bill and Hilary Clinton are New Age heretics, America is a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were right, Matthew Seabolt is a choirboy."

  She held out a hand. "Got your Bible?"

  "Sure." Dinah pulled it out and handed it over, and watched Kate thumb through the pages. "What are you looking for?"

  "There's a story about Lot the pastor quoted from. I wanted to look it up. You know where it is?"

  "What, the one about his wife turning into a pillar of salt? Everybody knows that story, even devout pagans. Maybe especially devout pagans."