Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  “So she killed Tatum.”

  Jessie shook her head and was quiet for a moment. “No. Greg did that. He was afraid she’d get caught, so he did it for her. But he knew he couldn’t live with it, so he set up the cabin fire. He meant them to die together. Then I came along and got in the way. He was sorry for that, too, but it had gone too far, so he just nailed up the door and would have taken his own life when he was sure it was over for Anne—and me. But we got out.”

  “What a mess. How’d Anne get so hung up on fire?”

  Again, Jessie shrugged. “Who knows?”

  But she was remembering what Greg Holman had told her before he died.

  “She was haunted by fire—terrified but fascinated, too. When she set fires, she was in control of what terrified her. She had nightmares that woke her up screaming. I think she cut herself as sort of a prevention as well as a punishment—thought that, if she hurt herself, maybe the thing she was so afraid of wouldn’t hurt her.” Jessie sighed. Another memory she wouldn’t mind not having.

  “We’re all afraid of something, Hank. Let’s go home, before it gets dark.”

  He got up and looked around. “So—she’ll walk up here, huh?”

  She ignored him, except for a tolerant glance.

  “You coming to Oscar’s tomorrow for the ground breaking?”

  “Of course. Did he tell you he’s decided to call it ‘The Night My Drink Caught Fire’? He even got permission from Bill Spear, the designer, who thought it was a hoot.”

  Peterson dumped a shovelful of snow on the coals that were left, carefully extinguishing every spark and stirring them to be sure the fire was out.

  “I heard that,” he said, with a mischievous grin. “But it’ll be ‘The Other Place’ again in a couple of months.”

  “Yeah—I know.”

  —8 Dead North (2002)

  DEAD NORTH. Copyright © 2001 by Sue Henry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Microsoft Reader February 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-136809-7

  Acknowledgments

  WITH SINCERE THANKS TO:

  Barbara Hedges, Kate Grilley, Alice Abbott, and cousin Jack Ellis, for company and assistance in researching the Alaska Highway from Anchorage to the Lower Forty-Eight and back, twice.

  The many people of the United States and Canada met along the way or contacted afterward, who provided insight into the character of the communities, residents, and travelers on the long road north.

  Claire McNab, my favorite Aussie, for assistance with “down under” slanguage.

  David Hett and Carolyn Allen at Dawson Peaks Northern Resort (Mile 769.6/1282.5 km) east of Teslin, Yukon Territory, for remarkable hospitality and generosity in sharing their wonderful resort home, experiences, and rhubarb pie.

  Aayric Hooten, RV Consultant of A&M RV Center, Anchorage, for assistance in understanding many different makes and models of motor homes, their operating systems and options.

  Wade Cobb of The Bicycle Shop in Anchorage for information on bicycles and equipment for long-distance trips, and for putting me in contact with:

  Skip Thomason, who bicycles year-round in Anchorage, often travels the wilderness on two wheels, and who referred me to:

  Dave and Barbara Taylor, former Alaskans, who pedaled part of the Alaska Highway on a bicycle-built-for-two on their honeymoon trip and generously shared their memories and photos of that trip.

  Chuck Foger, Crown West, Inc., authorized dealer for Precision Craft Log Structures and Lodge Logs, for information on materials and the building of log structures.

  Mike Davis, Operations Manager for Lynden Transport, for detailed information on the big rigs that haul heavy commercial loads from Canada and the Lower Forty-Eight to Alaska on the Alaska Highway—what they carry, who drives them, fascinating tales of past trips.

  Marilyn Howard of the Dawson Creek Visitor Information Centre.

  Larry B. Ballard, Area Manager, Bridges, British Columbia Ministry of Highways and Transportation, for information on the height and history of the Kiskatinaw Bridge.

  And to my son Eric, for his research assistance, for putting up with my sometimes backward and excessive methods of collecting information, and for patiently keeping a sense of humor—but particularly for designing the map in this book.

  Map

  This one’s for my friend

  and sometime travel companion

  Barbara Hedges

  with love and thanks

  for always being there

  That black bear in the field of sunflowers

  wouldn’t have been half so funny without you

  It is also dedicated in

  loving memory to my dear

  friend Alice Abbott

  1

  THE OLD MAN WOKE STILL TIRED FROM A RESTLESS sleep in the back bedroom of his small house on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, and grumbled to himself as he rolled over, seeking comfort in a new position. His legs were aching again and there was a charley horse in his right foot. He slid down far enough in the bed to brace it against the footboard and push hard against the cramped muscles of the arch, stretching them until the spasm finally eased, then for a while longer, just to make sure it wouldn’t immediately return.

  Wide awake now, he pushed himself to a sitting position so he could swing his feet painfully out of the bed, stood up, and tottered toward the bathroom. Couldn’t sleep through the night anymore without his bladder waking him at least twice. A couple of times lately he had even dreamed that he got up and made it to the toilet, only to come suddenly awake in the middle of the action and find himself lying shamefully in a wet spot like some goddammed kid. The doctor said there was nothing really wrong, that it was just age and a body that couldn’t be entirely depended on anymore—but it worried him anyway.

  Young medical whippersnapper—maybe he’d missed something. Whippersnapper? Where the hell had that come from? He’d never said whippersnapper in his life. Even beginning to sound old, he chided himself.

  As he stood poised for action, one hand braced on the door frame, he realized that, through the slightly open bathroom window, he was faintly hearing voices from the house next door—angry voices, one male, one female. They were at it again. If they had to fight, why did they always have to do it in the middle of the night? But he knew why.

  That bastard McMurdock came off his shift with the Cody Police Department at midnight. At least one night a week he would come home, have a snort or two, and provoke his wife into an argument that rapidly turned physical—pounding out frustrations and aggression on her that would have had him up on charges had he done it on the job. Sometimes lately the hostility wound up involving her young son, Patrick, who hated his stepfather and, now that he was older and bigger, sometimes came to her defense.

  Finished with his business, the old man flushed the toilet and, impatient for the rush of water in the tank to stop so he could listen, flipped off the bathroom light and went to the window. Working to raise it as far as it would go, he peered out into thirty feet of dark yard between the two houses, worried about the woman, but more about the boy. The upstairs bedroom light was on next door and he could almost, but not quite, make out the sense of McMurdock’s belligerent shouting. The tank water quit running and he heard McMurdock’s wife wail in pain and her body thump against a wall.

  A dim light came on in Patrick’s basement room and the old man hoped the youngster would stay put and out of harm’s way. His interference would only make things worse, as usual. Though he might divert some of
his stepfather’s brutality from his mother, he was not large or strong enough to stop him, to do what the old man longed to do—though he knew he was no more up to the job of giving McMurdock a taste of his own savagery than the boy.

  He would call the police—if the dammed police would do anything. But from sad experience he knew they wouldn’t arrest one of their own—he’d already tried that twice to no avail. All it had earned him was a threat across the back fence from McMurdock and embarrassed pleading from young Patrick not to call his stepfather’s friends again.

  He was a good kid, really. Showed up unasked on a regular basis to mow the old man’s lawn when he mowed his own, sometimes helped out with things too heavy for the old man to lift or too high for him to reach anymore, or ran a few errands. Then they would sit in the kitchen over a glass of juice or soda, talking—though never about what went on in the night next door. Patrick tried to act as if everything was perfectly normal, but his casual smile often didn’t erase the hurt and confusion in his eyes, as he shied away from anything approaching the secret he was clearly ashamed of and bent on keeping to himself.

  The old man knew that Patrick had been in trouble once for helping to spray-paint four-letter words on a police car parked outside a restaurant where the two officers who drove it were taking a dinner break. That particular mischief made some sense when you thought about it—acting out, he’d heard it called—a kind of getting back. A black eye and bruises from McMurdock were the result, and the old man had fervently wished that there were something he could…

  Another cry from next door interrupted his thoughts, accompanied by the sharp splintering of glass, then the shriek was abruptly cut off. Something heavy fell, then there was silence. The elongated shadow of a person passed over the shade that covered the window. There were no further sounds from the upstairs room.

  The old man waited, listening in the dark, but the episode appeared to be over. Tomorrow, and for several days, she would not leave the house, hiding out inside. If he, or anyone, knocked, there would be no answer. Then any lingering cuts and bruises would be the result of a fall—an accident—her own clumsiness. And young Patrick would make himself scarce, probably with those two friends of his, hoping not to cause further trouble.

  When there was nothing more to be heard or seen, the old man closed the window to its normal narrow crack and padded back to bed, lay down, and tried to go back to sleep, fighting disgust and impotent fury. Most of his anger was, of course, directed at McMurdock, though there was some disdain reserved for Patrick’s mother—for putting herself in this situation and staying there, risking her son as well as herself. Why the hell didn’t she leave—just take Patrick and go? Even if the house belonged to her, it could be worked out later and wasn’t worth staying for. It made no sense to him at all. For three years, off and on, he had been made glaringly aware of the violence that haunted the family next door, and it was growing worse, not better—a bomb ready to go off and cripple or kill someone, if something didn’t change.

  Well, perhaps it would soon—he comforted himself with the thought that Patrick was about to graduate from high school. He had heard McMurdock yelling contemptuously that after that benchmark Patrick would be on his own—that he was through supporting a lazy kid—that Patrick would have to get out, find a place of his own, and a job.

  The old man sighed and shifted again in his bed. Getting up had not helped the ache in his legs, but the cramp in his foot had not returned as it sometimes did, driving him crazy with its persistent intensity. Consciously, he made himself relax and turned his mind to other things. He began to lay out the garden he was about to plant. Two rows of carrots this year—good for the eyes, and his weren’t as sharp as they’d once been. Maybe he’d try some of those cherry tomatoes instead of just the regular kind. He’d already loosened the soil in his bean patch, turned it over, ready to plant runner beans, which would climb up strings on the side of his storage shed. Visualizing a summer’s worth of fresh lettuce, spinach, radishes, and cucumbers, he fell into a light, uneasy sleep.

  He did not see the light in the upstairs bedroom go off, or the one in Patrick’s basement room stay on for some time afterward. When it finally went off, he did not hear the back door open and close quietly—didn’t see the dark figure slip into his backyard, where it remained beside his shed for a few minutes hidden in the shadows, then went on between the two houses to the street. Though booted, the feet made little sound on the sidewalk as they hurried away, and the huddled figure of young Patrick disappeared into the night beyond the streetlight at the corner.

  The old man was unaware that the upstairs bedroom light came on again some time later. But a siren coming up the street woke him as the gray light of early morning made it just possible to see the shape of the house next door, the driveway full of police cars, an ambulance, and the coroner’s wagon, and many people going hurriedly in and out. From the window he saw McMurdock assisted into the ambulance and whisked away. And much later in the morning, he watched a covered body carried out the front door and learned over the back fence, to his relief, that it was not Patrick but his mother they had taken to the morgue.

  Patrick, it seemed, had disappeared—had taken a few things, including the money from his stepfather’s wallet, along with his own small savings, and run off. Patrick, according to Officer McMurdock, had battered and killed his mother with a baseball bat he’d carried up from the basement and tried to kill his stepfather, knocking him cold and sending him to the hospital for a day. It was everyone’s gossip in a town the size of Cody—how you could just never tell about kids and what they might do these days—how even with a policeman for a stepfather…

  The old man thought differently. He didn’t believe a word of it, but no one asked him, so he kept his mouth shut. If they found Patrick, there would be time for talking. If not, who could he talk to anyway and, especially, what could he prove? Nothing. All he could do was wait and see, but he sincerely hoped Patrick would be all right, wherever he was, and that they wouldn’t find him.

  He liked that boy.

  The next afternoon, when the old man was neatly stretching string from nail to nail on the side of his shed to support the beans he had just planted, a detective came around the side of the house into the backyard. He was so nonregulation that at first the old man thought he was probably a salesman of some kind.

  Daniel Loomis was a quiet man in his late thirties, slender and fit, with broad shoulders. He had a manner of slow speaking that almost, but not quite, hid the quickness of intellect and wry humor that shone in the half-lidded eyes that peered out under the brim of a baseball cap, above a slightly hooked nose and scrubby mustache. He wore a black windbreaker and moved almost silently across the small patch of grass near the back door to the path between the old man’s two raised garden plots, where his feet finally made a sound on the pebbles, attracting the old man’s attention. He did not respond, but continued to fasten the string to the nails and waited.

  “Mr. Dalton?”

  One last knot in the string before he turned to watch the stranger cover the last few feet of the path.

  “You selling something I don’t want?”

  “Detective Loomis, CPD. Got a minute?”

  Slicing the string at the knot, he folded his knife, blade worn thin with years of use, slipped it into his pants pocket, and carefully wound the dangling string back onto its spool.

  “’Spose you better come on in.”

  They settled at the kitchen table with the last of the breakfast decaf—Loomis’s black, the old man’s with sugar and low-fat milk. He stirred it slowly for a time after the sugar had dissolved, watching the spoon follow the shape of the cup. “This about what happened next door?”

  “Thought you might have heard or seen something we should know about.”

  “Why would you think that?” But he knew the defensive tone that crept in had given him away.

  The detective waited until Dalton raised his head to meet t
he question in his eyes. It was easier to see, now that he had removed the cap and laid it on the edge of the table.

  “Never wanted anything from me before.”

  “Nobody died before, Mr. Dalton.” The tone was soft, with a note of regret that suddenly infuriated the old man.

  “Nobody should have died last night. You had plenty of warning. I called before—not that it did any damn good.”

  A silence hung for a few seconds over the table. With a habit of the solitary, the old man sucked the liquid from the spoon and laid it on the Formica beside the cup and saucer. His shoulders slumped and he suddenly looked even older than his years.

  “When did you call, sir?”

  “Last year—summer. Then again sometime in October.”

  “There’s no record of your calls on file.”

  “Doesn’t mean I didn’t make ’em,” he retorted, scowling.

  “No—it doesn’t.” A frown wrinkled the detective’s brow. “What exactly did you report?”

  “That he was beating on her, of course,” the old man snapped, the anger and resentment boiling again. “I may be half-blind, but I’m not deaf.”

  “So you did hear things from next door. How about last night?”

  “Same thing. Her yelling when he hit her.”

  “The son, Patrick, you mean?” A mild question.

  Dalton jerked to rigidity in his chair and almost quivered in indignation. “Never! That boy would never have hurt his mother. He was her only defense, and he suffered for it, too.”

  It all came pouring out then in a jumble—the sounds in the night of McMurdock battering his wife and stepson, the boy’s attempts to protect his mother, reports ignored, calls responded to late, if at all, the old man’s frustration at being unable to do anything but watch and listen.

  “You cops killed that woman—McMurdock’s buddies.” He spit the word out like something rotten he had accidentally tasted. “Not Patrick. Sure as I sit here, you killed her by letting it go on happening and pretending it wasn’t.” One fist of arthritic fingers at the end of a scrawny arm pounded the table top until the coffee made waves in the cup and spilled over into his saucer. Then the thumping grew weaker until he finally left his hand lying limp for a second or two before raising it to swipe at the helpless, angry tears below the thick lenses of his glasses. “You bastards are worse than McMurdock.”