Singing of the Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “All date-stamped except the first one, and you kept the envelope for that one, too. Smart,” Jim said. “We appreciate smart in law enforcement.”

  She smiled again.

  He examined the envelopes, all of them stapled to the backs of the letters. “All postmarked Ahtna. Well, I’ll give the post office there a call. You never know, somebody might have noticed something.”

  “You don’t sound very optimistic.”

  “I’m not. The Ahtna post office handles all the mail that goes into and comes out of the Park. That’s, what, three thousand people, a little less? And these are pretty anonymous letters, Darlene.”

  “What about the handwriting? Isn’t there an expert you can send them to, figure out who wrote them?”

  “Sure, and I will,” he said, stuffing them into an evidence bag. “Today. But unless and until the state crime lab already has a sample of the perp’s writing to compare them to, we’re SOL as far as identifying the writer.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  He looked at her. What he wanted to say was, “You’ve been watching too much television,” but what he said instead, patiently, was, “Who opened these?”

  “The candidate, the first one.” She thought. “The rest were opened by volunteers, I think. Oh.”

  “Right. And then they got passed up or down the food chain to you, and then your assistant had to file them. There are probably ten sets of fingerprints on every letter, and we can’t even be sure that every letter has the same set of ten.” He sealed the bag. “Have you fingerprinted your staff?”

  An expression of revulsion crossed her face. It was a very nice face otherwise, black eyes set in a broad, flat face with a tiny pug nose and a merry mouth, hair in a permed black frizz standing out around it. She was thick through the body and short, although her erect posture made her seem taller. She carried weight, did Darlene Shelikof, and not necessarily just body weight. Her jeans were faded but clean, the blazer over it a conservative navy blue, the shirt beneath a paler blue and open at the throat. Ivory dangled from her ears and adorned her lapel and both wrists.

  She had been leaning forward, just a little, and now she leaned back, just a little, not enough to give the impression she was in any way relaxed. “What about protection?”

  “What about it?”

  For the first time she allowed herself to look angry. He admired her control. “How much can you give us?”

  “Darlene, you worked for the AG. You know exactly how much protection we can give you.”

  Her mouth thinned. “The threats are escalating, in delivery and in degree.”

  “Yes.”

  “Chances are he—or she—will try to make contact.”

  “Chances are he—or she—already has.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “How long has Anne been on the campaign trail? She announced in June, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “What day in June?”

  “The sixteenth.”

  “The first of those envelopes is dated June twenty-seventh.”

  She thought about it. “So he’s been following her since the beginning?”

  “That’d be my guess. She’s been doing the usual things politicians do, going to church in Chitina, walking the bars in Cordova, shaking hands and kissing babies and promising to throw the bums out, like they all do.” Darlene looked indignant. He waved away whatever comment she had been about to make about her candidate being all new and improved and completely different. He’d been an Alaska state trooper for going on twenty years; he’d seen a lot of political campaigns whistle-stop through; he had seen every single candidate of every political party (and in Alaska there were about seventeen separate and distinct political parties with more springing up every year), and he had seen every successful candidate as a first order of Juneau business cuddle up with the lobbyist with the most money to spend. Call him a cynic, but he didn’t see anything changing just because this candidate was a woman and a Native and homegrown.

  Juneau seemed to have that inevitable and invariable effect on elected officials, he reflected. Or maybe it was just political office everywhere, because the nation as a whole seemed to be in about the same shape. Substitute Washington, D.C, for Juneau and what did you get? Bill Clinton for president. Jesus. It wasn’t that Clinton was a rounder that bothered him so much, it was that he’d been so awful goddamn inept at it. If you’re going to philander, he thought now, for crissake do it with some style.

  “So we have to wait until he takes a shot at her before you’ll do anything?” Darlene said.

  “It’s a big step from writing a nasty letter to someone popping off with a thirty-ought-six.” He held up a hand to forestall further commentary. “What I will do is put the word out to all the local law enforcement agencies that your candidate’s getting hate mail, that it’s personal, and, yes, that it is increasing in amount and degree.”

  She gave an impatient snort. “What’s that get us?”

  He was starting to get a little annoyed. “Nothing, if you don’t call ahead to let the local agencies know when you’ll be there.”

  She glared, and he sighed to himself. No point in getting the person who was very probably going to sit at the right hand of the next senator from District 41 mad at him. “I’ll e-mail all the troopers in the area, and all the police chiefs. I’ll give you a list of names and numbers, and I’ll tell them you’ll call when you know your candidate will be speaking in their jurisdiction. You need to call every time, Darlene,” he said with quiet force. “They can’t plan to look out for you if they don’t know you’re coming. They’ve got jobs, full-time ones, already.” He thought about the suicide by cop in Valdez. “Full-time jobs,” he repeated. “You releasing this information to the press?” She hesitated, and he groaned. “Don’t tell me you think that this is going to get her the sympathy vote?”

  She had the grace to flush.

  “All you’ll do is get him off,” he warned. “That’s what he wants, attention, film at eleven.”

  “Or she,” she reminded him.

  He looked at her in sudden suspicion. She read his thought before he could speak it out loud. “Fuck you, Chopin,” she said, her voice rising.

  “Okay,” he said, patting the air. “Okay. Sorry. Just a thought, a dumb one, I admit, but—”

  “As if I would—as if Anne would—just fuck you, Chopin!” She shot to her feet and marched to the door. Hand on the knob, she turned and said, spitting the words like knives, “Thanks for nothing. If—when Anne gets into office, if this asshole doesn’t kill her first, we’ll remember this when it comes time to look at the budget for the Department of Public Safety. I’d say trooper salaries and step rates for Bush posts are way overdue for review.”

  “Darlene!”

  His voice, cracking like a whip, stopped her halfway out the door. She looked back, very ready to escalate hostilities.

  “If you’re that worried, if you really think Anne’s in danger . . .”

  She didn’t move. “What?”

  “What about hiring security for the campaign?”

  “You mean like guards?”

  “I mean like one guard.” The one he was thinking of wouldn’t need any help.

  She let go of the handle, and the door hissed closed on its hydraulic hinge. “You suggesting someone in particular?”

  He just looked at her and, being a well-trained law enforcement professional of intensive and lengthy experience, was able to pinpoint the exact moment when realization dawned.

  Also because she said, “Oh fuck, no.”

  “She knows the Park,” Jim said. “Who she isn’t related to she’s drinking buddies with.” He thought of Amanda and Chick, Bobby and Dinah, Bernie. Old Sam, the quintessential Alaskan old fart, Auntie Vi, the quintessential Alaskan old fartette. Dan O’Brien, the only national-park ranger in Alaska to survive the change of federal administrations and gain the affection if not the actual res
pect of Park rats. George Perry the air taxi pilot, next to whom Jim had stood on that airstrip south of Denali last September. He banished that memory the next instant, or told himself he had. “If she was a drinking kind of woman, that is.”

  “Not her.”

  “She’s probably related to Anne, come to that.”

  Darlene’s voice rose. “Not her, Jim.”

  He was surprised at her vehemence. “Who else?” he said. “She’s a teetotaler. She a local. She’s a Native. She has a reputation—”

  “Oh yeah, she’s got a reputation, all right, a well-deserved one.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.” Curious, the curse of any good cop, he went fishing. “You sound like you know her.”

  She opened her mouth, met his eyes, and closed it again. “I knew her,” she said at last.

  He waited hopefully. No weapon in the cop’s arsenal worked better than the expectant silence.

  “We went to school together.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “I didn’t know you were from Niniltna.”

  “In Fairbanks. UAF.”

  He gave a neutral kind of grunt, and waited again. In the ensuing stony silence, he wondered why the feud. If one person hating a second person who, so far as Jim knew, was indifferent to the first person’s existence, could be called a feud. Did Kate crib from Darlene’s test? Wear Darlene’s favorite sweater without permission? Steal Darlene’s boyfriend? It irritated him that he would like to know, to add to his fund of Kate Shugak lore. Said irritation moved him to say, “Just a suggestion.”

  “A bad one,” she snapped.

  “No,” he said, suddenly weary. “Just a suggestion.”

  2

  Sit still,” Dinah said, yanking Kate’s head around by a fistful of hair.

  “Ouch!” Kate, wedged into Katya’s high chair, muttered something beneath her breath.

  “Stop whining,” Dinah said, no sympathy in face or voice. “It wasn’t my idea to give you a crew cut.”

  “It’s not a crew cut.”

  “It might as well be. Why don’t you let it grow out again?”

  Trooper Chopper Jim Chopin, watching from where he leaned against the wall with his arms folded, saw a shadow pass across Kate’s face.

  Kate looked up and met his eyes. She felt cold metal slide between her nape and her hair, heard the crunch of shears. Her skin prickled. “I like it short,” she said.

  Something in her voice kept Dinah from pursuing the subject. “Well, if you’re going to keep it this short, you’re going to need a trim once a month. If you’re going to get a trim once a month, you have to sit still for it.” Dinah paused, hand holding scissors the way Van Gogh might have held his brush in a pause between stars, and looked Kate over with a critical frown.

  “You look like you’re putting the final touches to a masterpiece that’s going to sell to Bill Gates,” Jim said, echoing Kate’s thought in a manner she found more than a little eerie. “It’s just a haircut.”

  Dinah extended the scissors. “You want to give it a try?”

  He held up both hands, palms out. “No way. I like living.”

  “Then put a lid on it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jim shifted, and Kate saw the gleam of a shield. As usual, Jim was immaculately turned out in the blue-and-gold uniform of his service. As usual, he looked like a recruitment poster. Not as usual, his presence sent a definite ripple of unease up her spine. She looked away.

  A pillar ran through the center of the house, around which a built-in counter supported a variety of electronic gadgets, including radios, VCRs, tape decks, a turntable, monitors both television and computer, music in vinyl, cassette, and CD format, and boxes of parts and tools. It should have been a mess, but it was very well organized, with hooks on the pillar to hang the tools from and sets of Rubbermaid drawers beneath the counter to store parts in. Lines to the satellite dish and the antennas mounted on the one-hundred-twelve-foot tower outside snaked up the pillar and disappeared through the roof.

  At the console in the center of this mess, Bobby flicked a few switches. There was some kind of electronic whine and into the mike Bobby said, “Okay, folks, it’s show time. Bobby’s all talk, all the time, when it isn’t all music all the time, one and only Park Air. Coming to you live once a month, or whenever I feel like broadcasting a little pirate air. Lately, I’ve been feeling like it a lot. That’s right, it’s election season again, god help us. In less than two months we elect a new president and reelect our congressman-for-life. And with me tonight is one of the candidates for the office of state senator from District 41. Yes, all you Park rats and ratettes, that’s your very own election district. Remember, if you don’t vote, you can’t bitch, and what’s a democracy without bitching?” He adjusted the fuzzy black microphone hanging from the articulated metal arm. “Anne Gordaoff, how the hell are you?”

  “I’m fine, Bobby. Thanks for having me on the show.”

  “Couldn’t hardly not, seeing as how you’re going up against my boy, Pete Heiman. What’s wrong with him? He’s been in, what, two terms now? What can you do that he can’t do better with the benefit of experience and seniority?”

  Anne Gordaoff smiled. “Gee, Bobby, according to you, everybody who isn’t one of the good old boys ought to just fold their tents and steal away by dark of night.”

  Anne Gordaoff’s campaign manager stood two feet away, a sheaf of paperwork cradled in one arm, a pencil tucked behind one ear and another in her hand, alert, attentive, following every word of the discussion as if it were being broadcast live on 60 Minutes.

  “Not in this lifetime,” Kate said.

  “Quit muttering,” Dinah said. A judicious snip, one more, and she stood back with the air of Hercules finishing up his twelfth labor. Kate, no less relieved, extricated herself from the high chair and removed the dishcloth from round her neck.

  Dinah put the shears away and scooped up her daughter in the same motion, a plump little coffee-with-cream-colored toddler with tight black curls and a broad, merry grin exactly like her father’s. Little of Dinah’s ethereal blondness had been reproduced in her daughter, if you didn’t count the blue, blue eyes. Kate tried to remember what she’d learned about recessive genes in high school biology, and failed. Didn’t matter; whatever the ingredients, the result was superb.

  “Kate,” Jim said.

  “Not in this lifetime,” she repeated, watching Dinah and Katya blow bubbles at each other, an oasis of tranquility in the crowded, noisy house.

  “Her boss needs help. Your kind of help.”

  “Let her hire a rent-a-cop.”

  “You know the Park the way a rent-a-cop from Anchorage never would.”

  “You sleeping with her, Jim? You afraid you’re going to lose your latest main squeeze?”

  He looked at this short, lithe woman with the golden skin, the eyes like hazel almonds, the neat cap of shining black hair, and the old white scar across her throat, and felt an unfamiliar sensation rise up in his chest. He investigated. Anger. Fury, maybe. Might even have been rage. “No,” he said, his voice clipped. “I’m not sleeping with her.”

  “Sorry,” Kate said, not sounding sorry at all. “Given past history, it was a logical assumption.”

  Darlene must have heard her, or at least the tone of Kate’s voice had registered, because she raised her head to look at Kate. Their gazes met and held, identical impassive stares that gave nothing away to curious onlookers, of which there were more than one.

  Darlene looked away first. “Not in this lifetime,” Kate said for the third time. “Dinah, you got any coffee made?”

  “Sure.”

  The immense A-frame on the bank of Squaw Candy Creek was lit up like a Christmas tree, and cars and trucks spilled over from the yard across the little wooden bridge and down both sides of the creek. Inside, the kitchen table had been extended with sawhorses and a piece of plywood, the whole covered by a series of disposable tablecloths in a garish red-and-blue plaid patte
rn.

  Bobby didn’t like doors so there were only two: one to the outside and one to the bathroom. Both were wider than normal doors, and the countertops and tables were low to the ground, as was all the furniture, all the better for someone who’d lost both legs below the knee in Vietnam and who now relied on a wheelchair for locomotion. Well, two, actually, a new racing model for when he was sober and a twenty-year-old clunker for when he was hungover.

  “How are you, Kate?” Dinah said, keen eyes examining Kate for signs of wear and tear. Katya fussed and Dinah gave her a carrot to gnaw on.

  “I’m okay, Dinah,” Kate said, a little wearily. “Really, I’m okay.” The inspection continued in silence, with the addition of one upwardly mobile eyebrow. “All right,” she said. “I miss him, is that what you want to hear? I miss him like hell. I’ll always miss him. But almost the last thing he said to me was that life goes on.”

  “Jack is dead,” Jim had said. “You aren’t.” She did not look over her shoulder to see if he had heard her. “I’m home now.” She looked at Dinah and tried to smile. “It would help a great deal if my friends didn’t treat me like I’m about to break.”

  “You were.”

  “I’m not now.”

  Dinah, a slender blonde who was about as white as Bobby was black, seemed to make up her mind. “Fine,” she said. “Hey, kid.”

  Johnny appeared at her elbow to regard the spread on the extended table with wide eyes. There was caribou sausage, smoked fish, moose steaks, deer stew, blood stew, mulligan stew, fry bread, zucchini bread, homemade bread, cranberry bread, date nut bread, banana bread, raisin bread, macaroni salad, carrot salad, potato salad, three-bean salad, pickles dill and sweet, olives black and green, cubed cheeses cheddar and jack, chocolate cake, pineapple upside-down cake, apple and cherry and Boston cream pies. And that was just on the table. It didn’t include the counters full of chips and dips overflowing into the living room.

  “Help yourself,” Dinah said, and Johnny said “You bet,” and picked up a paper plate and a plastic fork to wade in with the infinite appetite of the fourteen-year old.