A Cold Day for Murder

by Dana Stabenow

  The three men gathered around the kitchen table and played cutthroat pinochle. Chick got a double run during the first game, a thousand aces during the second and shot the moon not once but twice during the third. Jack sighed and got out his wallet, again. Bobby, glowering, growled, “Goddam cardsharp.”

  Chick, abashed at beggaring the man who had just fed him the best dinner he’d had in two weeks, or perhaps apprehensive that the offer of a bed for the night might be revoked, offered to return it all, but Bobby wouldn’t hear of it. “No, really,” he said through his teeth, “if I went out playing pinochle any way but through the back door, it would feel unnatural. Ask Kate.”

  The three men turned to look at her. Kate had finished reading the minutes and was sitting, motionless, staring blindly into the fire. Her face was pale and so without expression Jack thought she might be asleep, until he saw that Mutt was sitting in front of her, staring into Kate’s face with her yellow eyes wide and unblinking. As he watched, Mutt turned her head and looked at him and whined. It was a muted, anxious little whine, unlike anything he’d heard Mutt say before. A full-throated, head-back, moon-calling howl couldn’t have brought him up out of his chair any faster.

  He hesitated, and then with an elaborate show of casualness he strolled across the room to stand next to Mutt. “Finished reading?” he said, stooping to pick up the file folder.

  She didn’t answer. He tried again. “Find anything interesting?”

  She said nothing.

  “Kate? What is it?”

  Kate stirred, and turned to look at Bobby. “Bobby, how cold has it been the last two weeks?”

  Bobby, still smarting, said nastily, “Weather you want? Weather you got.” He wheeled himself over to his place of business, mumbling to himself. He flipped through the weather charts, the figures of which he radioed in daily to Anchorage, and compared their figures with the data compiler he mailed in from Niniltna once a month. “What you want, winds, temp, what?”

  “Temperature.”

  “Been below freezing since November 21, when this cold snap set in. Below average snowfall, zip in this case.”

  Kate listened without looking at him. Her continued lack of expression alarmed Jack, and he tossed the committee’s minutes aside and sat down next to her. He put a tentative arm around her shoulders, and when she didn’t shrug it away he was really alarmed. “Kate?”

  A switch closed, a thread snapped, the other shoe dropped. Kate closed her eyes and folded her arms across her stomach and bent forward, hugging herself.

  “Kate?” Jack said.

  “What the hell?” Bobby said.

  “What’s going on?” Chick said, bewildered. “What’s the matter with a cold spell? We have them all the time. It’s hell on the dogs’ feet, but it sure speeds up the races.”

  Mutt hopped up on the couch on Kate’s other side and put her cold nose against Kate’s cheek, whining anxiously.

  Bobby wheeled his chair around smartly and sent it whizzing over in front of Kate. He said, gently for Bobby, “Woman, you look like you’re about to make a call on the porcelain phone. Put your head down between your knees before you pass out.” Kate pulled feebly at his hands, and he said, “Okay, then put your head down between my knees.”

  Kate’s laugh was closer to hysteria than humor. Bobby looked at Jack with a worried expression.

  Jack got up and went to stand next to the fireplace. His large frame was backlit by the flames and his shadow loomed large over the room. “You know what happened.” His face was in shadow, his deep voice disembodied, unemotional, but nevertheless commanding a response.

  Bobby shot him an angry glance, but Kate’s answer forestalled him. “Yes,” she said. Bobby had never heard his indomitable Kate sound so hopeless, not even when she had told him she would never sing again. “I think I do.”

  Again that depersonalized demand. “Where’s the kid?”

  Again the despairing answer. “Dead.”

  “And Ken?”

  She looked up and met his hard blue gaze. “Dead.”

  There was silence. Chick reached stealthily for the bottle of Wild Turkey and refilled his glass.

  Jack sat down heavily on the edge of the hearth and was transformed from demanding, authoritative giant to weary, unhappy mortal. “Well, hell, Kate,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Both of them?”

  “I think so.” There was silence, and then she said, “And I think I know where they are.”

  “And who put them there?”

  She was silent a long time. When she spoke, it was one single, rough syllable. “Yes.”

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and crossed his feet at the ankles. Unseen by them, his hands clenched into fists. “All right, Kate,” he said, his words even. “Run it down for me.”

  When she finished speaking, Bobby said flatly, “You’re nuts,” and Chick, whom they had all forgotten was there, laughed out loud.

  Jack, his face a mask, said curtly, “And Ken?”

  Kate sat up, moving like an old woman, and rose to her feet. She walked across to the windows and looked out. The scene outside could have been painted by Sydney Lawrence, all plump white snowdrifts, thickly clustered scrub spruce, a waning white moon balanced on the edge of the Quilaks as it made ready to slip out of the sky. Mutt padded after her and squatted at her feet, her nose lifted, yellow gaze fixed unwaveringly on Kate’s face. “Ken was a good investigator,” she said at last. Her lips compressed into a thin, bitter smile. “Better than me.”

  “And?” For all his fatigue, Jack was inexorable.

  Kate shook her head. “What I couldn’t see at first because I was too close to it, was what he saw in a straight line, simple cause and effect. I think it killed him.”

  Her words trailed away into shadow and silence. There was a long pause. A log split, crackled and hissed in the fireplace.

  Jack stirred. “So we go out there tomorrow? Confront him?”

  She shook her head. “The bodies first. We have to be sure.” She looked at Jack, her brown eyes blind with a kind of anguish. He had to fight not to reach out to her. “I’ll need your help.”

  She climbed on her Super Jag the next morning. Mutt hopped up behind her and Jack followed on Bobby’s Polaris. No one said much of anything, and Bobby saw them off without heaping any more abuse on Kate’s reconstruction of events. He remained skeptical, but worried with it, and took it out on his hapless and hung-over houseguest, shaking him awake and handing him a broom.

  “Fall cleaning?” Chick said, befuddled and still not entirely sober. “It’s almost Christmas.”

  “So I got a little behind,” Bobby barked.

  “Mandy’s gonna kill me,” Chick pleaded, “I’ve gotta get home.”

  “After the sweeping,” Bobby said, and a miserable but obedient Chick went to work with the broom.

  For eight sleepless hours Kate had replayed the evidence in her head, trying to find a way around it, over it, away from it, trying to make it mean anything but what she knew in her heart to be the exact, unvarnished truth. The night before she lay on one section of Bobby’s couch and Jack lay on another, Chick snoring between them, wrapped up in a sleeping bag on the floor. Each knew the other was awake, but they did not speak once through all the long hours of the night, while the fire popped and hissed on the hearth, when a wolf howled far away, as the moon crept from the sky.

  However much she tried, she had not been able to hold back the morning. She took her time on the trail, covering each of the thirty miles from Bobby’s homestead deliberately, taking time to appreciate the slowly lightening sky, the graceful arcs of tree limbs bowed beneath glittering frost, the ponderous dignity of a cow moose in snow up to her shoulders, munching on an alder. The cold of the morning seemed to seep ever more deeply into her bones, until she felt as numb on the outside as she did on the inside. She was grateful for it, although she did stop once to check her hands and feet to make sure. Every digit was warm and vital and vibrant. Everything M
ark Miller and Kenneth Dahl were not. Behind her she could hear the steady purr of Jack on the Polaris, but she never once turned around to look.

  Halfway to their destination they came across a yearling moose who had broken his left foreleg jumping from a high bank. He was alive, but only just, and he barely blinked when Kate pulled up and reached for her rifle. Not so the wolverine gnawing on the calf’s broken leg, who snarled and feinted a lunge at them. Mutt growled deep in her throat from her perch behind Kate.

  “Quiet, girl,” Kate said. She put one bullet between the yearling’s eyes and let another dust snow into the wolverine’s face. He snarled again but stayed where he was.

  “Aren’t you going to shoot him?” Jack said from behind her. “I thought you hated wolverines.”

  “I do.”

  “Well?”

  She watched the wolverine turn a contemptuous back to them and tear into the dead yearling’s throat. She did not flinch at the steaming gush of blood that followed to stain the white snow and the wolverine’s thick pelt and the young moose’s brown hide. “First come, first served.” And then she said, “He’s only protecting what’s his.” She put the Jag in gear and rolled off.

  She circled around Mandy’s homestead, following what she remembered to be the rough track left by the surveyors marking the property line between Abel’s homestead and Mandy’s lodge. The ice over Silver Bottom Creek was frozen hard, the snow on either side equally so. The day was clear and calm. They saw no one. After a while Kate found the clearing that marked the start of the well-trodden trail that led up to the high cliffs, cliffs that in places towered hundreds of feet over the Kanuyaq River. Abel was always going up to the Lost Wife to chip away at some vein or other, looking without any urgency for the streak that would lead him to El Dorado. She took her thumb off the throttle and waited for Jack to catch up to her.

  “This the way?” he said, peeling his ice-encrusted muffler away from his beard so he could speak clearly.

  She nodded without turning and gunned the Jag up the trail.

  It took them fifteen minutes to reach the mine, fifteen minutes of steep, narrow trail hemmed in on both sides with fir and birch. It climbed steadily, switching back and forth. Kate had to lean sharply into each turn to get the Jag safely around the corners, and her shoulders were aching by the time she was finally able to pull up. Her hands were cramped on the controls; it took a few fumbles to shut down the engine. Jack slid to a halt next to her and did the same, and except for Mutt’s panting breaths peace of a sort broke out.

  It was a larger clearing than the one at the foot of the trail, neatly shoveled and well packed. A layer of snow hid the pile of railroad ties ripped up by Abel’s father when the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad stopped running in 1938. Another layer covered the heap of tailings raised up from the mine. Hemlocks clustered thickly at the edge of a well-defined circle, and behind them the foothills rose rapidly into the Quilak Mountains, blue-white and haughty in the pale, thin light of morning.

  “The forest primeval,” Jack said, and shivered. “Jesus, it’s cold.”

  Kate got off her machine and walked toward the depression lying up against the base of the cliff. The entrance to the Lost Wife was the size of a double door, framed in railroad ties and set into the face of a short, crumbling wall of rock and gravel. A set of parallel metal tracks led inside. A small cart on metal wheels stood just outside, filled with broken rocks and debris.

  Kate pulled the cart back. Inside the mine’s entrance a wide hole gaped, opening straight down into the ground. It looked black and bottomless.

  “How do we get down?” Jack said from behind her.

  “There’s a dumbwaiter kind of gadget.”

  Jack swallowed. “How deep is that damn thing, anyway?” he asked in a gruff voice.

  “It’s sunk about a hundred and fifty feet, the last time we measured,” she said. “There are tunnels leading off from three or four different levels.”

  “Oh.”

  She looked at him. “You don’t have to go,” she said. “The dumbwaiter can take only one of us at a time, anyway, and I weigh less. And I’ve been down it before.” She saw shame and relief wash over his face in equal parts. “Don’t,” she said, laying one mittened hand on his arm.

  He looked at her and she saw some of the shame recede. She squeezed his arm and let go. “I’m going to need a flashlight. Abel disconnects the generator from the mine in September so all the power will go to the homestead during the winter.”

  She turned toward the entrance and saw Mutt’s ears go up and the dog’s head swivel toward the woods, and with an intuition she was never able to account for afterward she threw herself sideways, knocking Jack down a split second before they heard the crack of a rifle and a bullet’s thud into the timber holding up the roof of the mine. There was a shower of ice shards from the branches of trees clinging to the cliff above the entrance of the mine. Instinctively Kate rolled for cover, into the mine, away from the downpour, and slid over the edge of the open shaft.

  For one grateful moment she felt the solid presence of the dumbwaiter platform beneath her, before it gave way in little jerks and bounces as the tackle slid over a rope spliced with many repairs. “Jack!” she yelled. “Help!” For a terrifying second a new section of rope ran freely through the tackle and it felt as if the bottom had dropped out of her universe. Her head snapped up to see the open square of light at the top of the shaft receding rapidly, and she screamed, “Jack! Grab the rope!”

  There was no answer. Kate came alive and beat the air wildly, scrabbled at the walls of the shaft, until by some miracle one of her flailing hands swatted the loose line. She grabbed for it and her progress halted abruptly, jarring her teeth. For a moment she was absolutely still.

  The slick fabric of her gloves slid down the rope one inch, another.

  Moving very, very slowly, lifting one finger at a time from the rope, she ditched the gloves and wound first one hand and then the other around her slender lifeline.

  The dumbwaiter creaked a little in protest, and stopped sliding.

  She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against knotted knuckles. Her breathing sounded like a steam engine in her ears. She tried to bring it under control. Her legs and lower body still lay on top of the dumbwaiter. The muscles in her arms contorted painfully as she tried to put all her weight on the rope.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said out loud. “I just might talk my way out of this after all.”

  Her head swam in dizzy relief and, teeth clenched, she waited for the dizziness to pass. She became aware of Mutt barking hysterically from the top of the shaft, but no other sound. She gathered all her strength. “Jack!” she yelled. He didn’t answer. “Jack!” she yelled again. “Damn you if you picked now to get shot I’ll kill you!” She craned her head, straining to see up the shaft, the rope pressing into her cheek.

  His head was suddenly silhouetted next to Mutt’s against the light at the top of the shaft. He had her flashlight in his hand, and he switched it on and played it over the inside of the shaft. It was a long, long way down before he found Kate dangling at the end of her rope, her white face raised to his, her eyes staring up at him. “Oh God,” he said. Mutt whined anxiously next to him.

  “Jack,” she said hoarsely, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he said, the struggle for control obvious in his voice. “Yes, I can hear you.”

  “Okay. Something’s wrong with the dumbwaiter, the rope’s broke or something. Can you grab the safety?”

  “The what?”

  “The safety—the rope tied off to the cleat next to the entrance.”

  “Oh God,” he said again, the light of the flash playing over her, and she heard him swallow.

  Suddenly she realized what was wrong with him. “Jack!”

  “Okay, honey, I’m on it. Just hang on, sweetheart.”

  His head disappeared. So did the light, and Kate was plunged once more into darkness. She controlled a
wave of hysteria and, sweating with the strain, lifted herself to put a little slack in the rope and take another turn of it around her lower wrist.

  She waited. Seconds stretched into hours, minutes into days. Beads of sweat ran into her eyes and off her nose and chin. The dumbwaiter quivered beneath her, reminding her of a lead dog in a race before the starting gun was fired.

  Jack’s head reappeared and with it the infinitely welcome beam of the flashlight. “Okay, I’ve got the end of the rope on belay around a tree. I’m going to take it off the cleat now, so you’re going to drop a little.”

  “Jack?” she said, her voice coming from a long distance.

  “What?”

  “Jack?” she said again.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “I’ll leave the flashlight this time, I had to use it to find the cleat before. Just hang on.”

  His head disappeared again. She waited, her eyes closed, the muscles in her arms trembling. The rope jerked between her hands and loosened, and again the bottom fell out of her world. She couldn’t stifle the scream that bubbled to her lips.

  The dumbwaiter fell again and her with it. It slammed to an abrupt stop four or five feet farther down the shaft. Sharp pain clawed at her wrists, and she cried out. She slipped across the top of the tiny platform and thudded into the opposite wall of the shaft. Rocks loosened and fell. A long time later she heard them hit bottom. Her wrists, her entire arms were numb. After a moment she felt a warm, dripping moisture where the rope was wound.

  “Kate?” Jack yelled. “Kate?”

  She couldn’t speak. He fumbled with the flashlight so that the beam was trained at her. Her head was leaning against her forearms, and he couldn’t see her face. “Kate, answer me. You’ve got to help me with your feet when I start hauling on this rope. Kate, say something, talk to me!”

  “All right,” she said in a faint voice. “I heard you.”