Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  Not being very patient or generous either.

  She’s asking—demanding—an awful lot from me.

  Is she? If it hadn’t rained for two days—if Oscar’s hadn’t burned last night—if you’d gotten lots of sleep—would you feel this way?

  Yes—well, maybe not. But that’s not all of it.

  She paused in the process of pouring water into individual aluminum dog pans, considering. Anne clearly wanted her to understand and believe—to be on her side. But something about her old acquaintance’s watchful demeanor rang a tiny bell of discomfort and caution in the back of Jessie’s mind. She couldn’t tell if Anne’s obvious desire for acceptance and help would account for it, or if embarrassment and nerves could explain her slightly self-conscious, wheedling tone. She had not seen this woman for ten years—long enough to make a significant change in her outlook and approach—long enough for Jessie to need to become reacquainted with her before making judgments or commitments.

  Dammit, she thought. I don’t want to take off on some nutty trip miles from anywhere. I want to get on with training my young guys. If I interrupt their schedule now, I’ll have to do half of it over again, and long overnight runs are not part of the program yet.

  Well, give it some more time. Get her to talk some more—listen to her till tomorrow. Then make up your mind.

  But I just want to get rid of her, she realized.

  Maybe giving in and taking her where she wants to go will be the best and quickest way to get rid of her. How long would it take—a couple of days, maybe three?

  That’s possible. I guess I can at least think about it, she decided. Billy could stay with the dogs—make a couple of training runs a day till I get back, though that would cut what I wanted to do in half and they really need me. I could even go out this afternoon for at least one run.

  She put the buckets away, then went back to the middle of the yard to spend a minute or two with a few of her dogs. Every day she made sure to take time with each dog, giving it lots of affection, watching it move, assessing its attitude. At least a couple of times a week she checked each of them over physically, alert to any developing problems. Only by being familiar with each one’s normal condition could she detect any changes in their health and well-being.

  Pete stood up from a nap and stretched as she stopped beside him, gave her a doggy grin, and leaned against her leg as she checked his teeth. Mitts and Sunny, housed next to each other, greeted her with wriggles and friendly licks as she knelt to scratch their ears and under their chins. Their tails wagged like metronomes, as if she had been absent a week.

  “Good guys. You’re such good dogs. Glad it snowed again, aren’t you? Shall we just hook up a sled and take off—run away from home?”

  The idea was tempting, if escapist and impractical.

  Jessie’s conscience got the better of her, she sighed, and went back toward the house, hoping Anne had lunch ready by now and fervently wishing she hadn’t answered the phone the night before.

  4

  IN HER STOCKING FEET, JESSIE QUIETLY PACED THE WIDTH of her cabin, restless and unable to settle into the nap she had intended to take on the sofa. Seemingly exhausted by her travels and relieved to have made her request, Anne had eaten lunch, taken a quick shower, and fallen asleep almost before she could curl up under the colorful quilt on Jessie’s big brass bed. But before she slept, she had filled in some information about the ten years since they had seen each other.

  What she had revealed was incomplete and not pleasant—a one-sided litany of physical and emotional abuse that disturbed and discouraged Jessie as much as Anne seemed reluctant and troubled to be telling it. According to her, Greg Holman had always beaten her.

  “Not when we were first married—when we lived close to you. Oh, he smacked me once or twice, but only when I asked for it—and I really did, Jessie. You know me—I never could keep my mouth shut. I had it coming. It wasn’t till later that he got really mean.”

  She said they had left Alaska about a year after Jessie moved closer to town that spring—gone to Boulder, Colorado, where they rented a small house on the edge of town. Greg had found work as a carpenter, but, as Anne told it, he had refused to let her take a job—any job—though she had been offered one as a clerk in a bookstore.

  “He was afraid I’d tell somebody that he was hitting me,” she had told Jessie. “He refused to have a phone—afraid I’d use it to report him. He watched—wanted to know where I was all the time. We only had the truck and he always took it with him to work. He got more and more suspicious—like jealous of everyone: neighbors—though there weren’t more than a few—the checker at the grocery store; the guy who read the electric meter, for God’s sake. And he yelled at me. I never knew when he was going to hit me.

  “We moved three times in those years—each time farther away from town. I worked really hard to be good, to do what he wanted, but he kept beating me up. I tried my best to do things right, to be whatever he wanted, but he blamed me for everything—and he imagined a lot. I never knew what would set him off next. It was like living in a shooting gallery—if I cooked the wrong thing, if anything wasn’t clean or where he wanted it or put away right. Whatever I said—or didn’t say—it was bad. He put me in the hospital twice—broke my nose and fractured this cheekbone.”

  She laid a finger on the right side of her face and Jessie understood the asymmetry and the crooked smile.

  “But you saw people in the hospital. Why didn’t you tell someone—get away from him?”

  “—I didn’t want them to know either—you know? He promised we’d work it out—said it was our private business. He also said it was my fault, and if I told anyone he’d make me sorry. I was afraid of him, Jessie. Besides, it wasn’t all his fault. If I’d been able to do things right—keep him happy—he wouldn’t have hurt me, would he? He was always all torn up about hitting me—after. I felt like nothing—hated myself for making him mad. Why are men such children?”

  Like the release of swift water when the key log in a jam is pulled, Anne’s account of injury and hospitals, years of lies, constant fear, and finally escape and flight had poured out, accompanied by a flood of tears and caustic condemnation of both Greg and herself that had astonished and alarmed Jessie.

  Now she restlessly walked the floor, trying to decide what to think—and to do. Pausing at the window that faced the dog yard, she looked out at the inviting snow. She still wanted to harness up a team and take off into the wilds, leaving behind all the confusion and trouble she seemed to have walked abruptly into. Frowning and biting her lip, she resented being forced to deal with the uninvited trouble and stress, still waffling about making the trip into the wilderness with Anne. But then she’ll be gone—wherever—and I can get on with training, Jessie told herself.

  She would have liked to talk to Greg Holman, hear his side of the story, for her memories of him did not fit the pictures Anne had painted. When Jessie had moved into the nearby borrowed cabin for that single winter, the Holmans had still acted like newlyweds—touching each other in passing, glancing affectionately, deferring endearingly to each other.

  Greg Holman, a large bull of a man, had seemed an unusual dichotomy of efficient strength and a quiet sort of innocence; he was one of those people whose smooth skin never seems to age and gives them a childlike, ingenuous quality that suggests limited intelligence and prompts more-brawn-than-brain assumptions. A hardworking man, more comfortable outdoors than in, he had impressed Jessie as handy with his hands, capable of making or fixing almost anything. She had assumed he was completely, guilelessly in love with his spouse, and would not have suspected he was a wife beater.

  Behind his stillness, however, she had slowly come to recognize a shrewd and discerning astuteness—a keen mind that saw much, missed little. He had old eyes in that calm, youthful face. There was nothing lacking in his thinking, nothing inarticulate when he had something to say. Questioned, he had spoken briefly of his upbringing as an only child
in a remote location where he had learned wilderness craft through years of experience. His home schooling had ended at fourteen when his mother had died, but she had evidently succeeded in creating in him an eclectic love of reading. His self-education sometimes took off in unexpected directions—archaeology, electronics, the English Romantic poets, hydrology and the art of dousing, meteorology.

  As a couple, the Holmans had demonstrated the attraction of opposites: He was disinclined to small talk and what he considered unnecessary expenditures of energy; she tumbled, burbling, through life like a stream in spring thaw. Jessie had felt an amused connection with his quiet appreciation of Anne’s cheerful, sometimes theatrical verbalizations. But there had been a dark side, too, she recalled—remembering things that might help reconcile the contradictions now bothering her.

  Holman’s temper, though infrequent, had not flamed and died, but often smoldered and threatened to flare up long after others had forgotten what ignited it. He had nurtured, and sometimes exaggerated, grudges. He expounded on the crass stupidity of city dwellers and politicians that he insisted were maliciously intent upon restricting the traditionally free Alaskan lifestyle and turning the state into some law-infested supermarket. Jessie recollected coffee cups rattling as he pounded his angry frustration on the tabletop. She had avoided similar subjects thereafter.

  He had had no patience for procrastination, and halfhearted efforts offended him. To him, there was no excuse for not doing a thing as soon and as well as possible the first time. “Your life may depend on it,” she remembered his saying, and she agreed. More than once in a long-distance race she had been relieved that good preparation had kept her from trouble, even disaster, and had thought of Greg. But hadn’t there been something obsessive about his pursuit of perfection and insistence on action without delay? Could he actually have pounded more than a tabletop with his ham-like fist?

  There had been no obvious hint of the problems Anne had just described. Jessie recalled nothing more significant than a single visit when Anne had displayed a bruise on one cheekbone and a purpling eye. Asked about it, she had given a hoot of embarrassed laughter and said that you would think by now she would have learned to use an ax so it didn’t send a stick of kindling flying back in her face. Had her injury been caused by something other than airborne firewood?

  Jessie thought again of how different Anne had become. Her once-unsophisticated optimism had vanished. In its place was an angry, resentful, yet fearful and oddly apologetic person who reminded Jessie of a whipped dog she had once seen in the kennel of a poor excuse for a musher. When its master had come close, the animal had crouched, moving nothing but its terrified eyes, clearly hoping that total stillness would make it invisible.

  From her looks, Anne had clearly been beaten—or injured somehow. And along with her anger, she exhibited a strong thread of guilt. At times she’d seemed convinced that the abuse had been all her fault, that she’d deserved—had earned—the punishment Greg had inflicted on her, and if she had only done things differently it wouldn’t have happened. It made her assertions more disquieting and believable.

  And Jessie couldn’t shake the disturbing feeling that there was some calculation in Anne’s telling, as if an artful child were watching carefully to see how Jessie would react before deciding whether to tell the truth next…or a lie. There was something about the dispassionate way Anne had told parts of the story that made Jessie’s skin crawl, feeling she was being manipulated and disliking it. Was Greg responsible for Anne’s state of mind? Her fear of him seemed real to Jessie, at least. If she was telling the truth, he might very well show up. Then what? Would he be dangerous to them both? Was there some way she could find out?

  “If you think he might follow you, why come back here? Why not somewhere he’d never think of looking?” she had asked. “This place isn’t hard to find.”

  “I have to go back to the cabin,” Anne had answered. “Please, Jessie? I’ll go—disappear—somewhere else right after that—okay? I promise I will.”

  “Let me think about it a little more, Anne,” she had told her.

  As Jessie slumped tiredly onto the sofa and finally lay down, she heard her dogs start to bark and beyond their unmistakable announcement of company, the sound of a vehicle coming up the driveway. Going to the window, she watched a car with a fire department logo on the door pull up beside her truck. State Trooper Phil Becker and a lean man she didn’t recognize—both in civilian clothes—got out and came up the porch steps to the door. She opened it before their knock.

  “Hi, Phil.”

  “Hey, Jessie. Glad you’re home. This is Investigator Michael Tatum. Mike, Jessie Arnold.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ms. Arnold.”

  The hand he offered was strong but a little stiff, and, glancing down, Jessie saw that it bore the unmistakable, melted-looking scars that only fire and skin grafts create. Looking back to his face, she found no apology or defensiveness in his clear hazel eyes, but rather a wry cynicism, a hint of mocking watchfulness through which he assessed her reaction.

  “I was on the line before I became an inspector,” he offered in brief explanation.

  “You must have had a lot of long hard work in therapy with that.”

  “I did.” His nod and half smile seemed to include an approval of her response as well as agreement, but then he frowned suddenly and turned away, as if to avoid further discussion of his injury.

  She swung the door wide, inviting them inside. “Can I talk you guys into some coffee?”

  “Wouldn’t turn it down,” Becker accepted, leaving his boots at the door. “Haven’t got any of that carrot cake Alex was always bragging about, have you? Oops. Sorry,” he apologized as he saw her eyes narrow involuntarily at the familiar name.

  “That’s okay, Phil. No cake, but I’ve got oatmeal cookies—fresh yesterday.”

  “Great. If I recall, your cookies are way ahead of whatever’s in second place anyway.” He grinned, tossed his western hat on the sofa, and took a chair at the round oak dining table. Mike Tatum pulled out another and sat, laying down a notebook and pen.

  Jessie crossed swiftly to close the door to the bedroom so their conversation wouldn’t disturb Anne, then brought the coffeepot and a plastic container of cookies to the table and sat down across from them.

  “We need to hear what you know about last night’s fire, Jessie,” Phil said, dunking a cookie in his coffee. “You were one of the last people to leave the bar before it closed, right?”

  “Yes, but there were two or three people still playing darts and a guy asleep on one of the tables.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I didn’t know him. Oscar said it was a friend of someone’s.”

  “Drunk?”

  “No—nursing a cold, according to Oscar. Just tired, I think.”

  “Funny to be in a bar if he was that sick. What’d he look like?”

  “I didn’t see his face. Sorry. Is this an official interview, Phil?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess so. But we’re just collecting the usual kind of information—trying to get the people and timing straight.”

  “Did you find out who died?”

  “Not yet—lab’s working on it.”

  “I’ll help if I can, but I don’t know much. I didn’t see it start—didn’t get there until it was too late to put it out.”

  Tatum had been taking notes. Now he looked up and spoke in a quiet voice. “How long were you at the bar last night, Ms. Arnold?”

  Becker snagged two more cookies, leaned back in his chair, and let the investigator take over.

  “A couple of hours—maybe closer to three,” she answered. “And it’s just Jessie.”

  He smiled. “Okay—Jessie. And I’m just Mike. Can you tell me who else was there?”

  “Better. I made a list of everyone I could remember.”

  She brought him the list she had made the night before. “It was crowded.”

  “You talk to anyone in partic
ular?”

  She related the racing conversation at the table and the casual comments and teasing while shooting pool with Hank Peterson and the players they had defeated.

  “Anybody get mad about losing?”

  “Na-aw. We don’t play serious pool at Oscar’s.”

  “This list is everyone who was there while you were?”

  “I might have missed a few. People were coming and going.”

  “Oscar?” Becker asked.

  “Oh, right—Oscar, of course. He was the last person I spoke to.”

  “What about?”

  “Oh, just good-bye—how busy he’d been. He gave Tank some more jerky.”

  “Tank?” Tatum asked.

  “My lead dog. He and Oscar are tight.” She smiled, recalling the jerky.

  He frowned. “How well do you know Oscar Lee?”

  “Pretty well, I guess—casual friend. I’m one of his nearest neighbors and a regular.”

  “Ever any hint of money trouble from him?”

  “No.” She grinned, suddenly remembering. “Unless you count accidents. Once—a year or so ago—he lost a whole night’s cash and checks in a snowbank—didn’t know he’d dropped the bag on his way out. It finally showed up in the spring melt, and somebody carted it in from the parking lot.”

  “So, Oscar’s casual with his money. He’s lucky it was found by an honest man.”

  “I wouldn’t say casual,” Jessie told him, stung into defensiveness by his insinuation. “He’s not careless, if that’s what you mean. It was a mistake anybody could have made. Besides, it’s a good crowd of regulars—local people. They feel—felt—at home there. I can’t think of anyone who would steal from Oscar.”

  “How about this Peterson person?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “You say he came for your generator and pump.”

  “Yeah, he did. Pounded on the door till I thought he’d break it down, but the fire department got there before we could use them.”