by Henry, Sue
It was very still in the kitchen, until Loomis drew a deep breath and leaned forward with an air of apology and an odd hint of collusion.
“Sir, do you have any idea where Patrick McMurdock might have gone?”
The old man stared at him in disbelief. “Like I’d tell you, if I did? And it’s Cutler—he kept his real father’s name.”
“Look, Mr. Dalton…” He held up a hand to stop another flood of words that were obviously about to start. “No—give me a turn, okay? I’m fairly new in this department—came in from Denver a little over a year ago. I’ve been assigned specifically to this case and—just between you and me—the chief has an idea that…ah…well, that we should be looking into it more closely, let’s say. McMurdock says that the kid knocked him out with a baseball bat, then killed his mother. Maybe that doesn’t quite fit with what we found at the scene, or a couple of rumors I’ve heard—okay? Maybe we’d better wait to hear the other side of the story—right? But to do that, I’ve got to find Patrick—Cutler. So if you’ve got any ideas, I need to hear them.”
“I’m supposed to believe that?”
“I certainly hope you’ll give it a chance. Otherwise he may not have one.”
It took a while, but there was something different about Loomis, something sincere about him that gave the old man a glimmer of hope for the boy. When the detective left, he knew everything Dalton knew about the two friends Patrick hung around with in Cody and the best friend—Dave somebody—whose family had moved to someplace he couldn’t remember in Alaska.
A day later McMurdock came home from the hospital. Late that evening, when he tossed a bag in his Chevy Suburban, drove away, and didn’t return, the old man was watching. But when he tried to call Loomis, there was no answer to his message, and a second call told him only that the detective was out of town—sorry.
He went back to his gardening, wondering if he had been conned into making a bad mistake. It worried him in the night, hindered his sleep that was always uneasy anyway. But there were no more sounds of any kind from the house next door. Empty and silent, it sat dark, uninhabited, and he finally stopped bothering to peer through the crack in the bathroom window each time he made a trip to the toilet or walked the floor to ease the ache in his legs.
But he wished he knew where Patrick had gone—wished he was young again and could have been of some good to any of them—even himself.
2
SOMETIME DURING A NIGHT IN EARLY MAY, JESSIE Arnold was jerked awake from sound sleep by the sudden roar of rain hitting the fiberglass roof over her head. She rolled over, disoriented by the unfamiliar sound and unaccustomed to the firmness of the bed on which she lay. A flare of lightning lit the world outside and, in narrow bands that fell like a camera flash through the slats of a venetian blind, a green blanket she did not immediately recognize. A reverberating crash of thunder so loud it hurt the ears was quickly followed by another lightning bolt.
Sitting up, she heard her Alaskan husky, Tank, shift position on the floor beside her, and recognized the interior of the Winnebago motor home she had driven from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to the Dutch Creek RV Park a little over a hundred miles north of the border between northern Idaho and British Columbia.
Throwing back the green blanket, Jessie jumped up to crank the bathroom vent closed and, through the opening, saw a jagged bolt of lightning split the sky as the cover came down and shut out the raindrops that were splashing in from above. Quickly she padded barefoot to a second vent in the front part of the motor home and closed it as well.
Brushing dampness from her short, honey blond hair, she headed back toward her bed. His dark silhouette told her that Tank was awake and alert to the cacophony outside, for he was sitting up and his ears twitched at the next reverberating growl of thunder. Thunderstorms seldom occurred where Jessie lived in Alaska, but as a child she had learned to love their power and excitement almost as much as Fourth of July fireworks and was not unhappy to find herself in the midst of one now. Tank, evidently, was not so sure about it.
“Hey, guy, it’s just a lot of noise,” she told him, laying a soothing hand on his head.
He licked her wrist but remained attentive, reassured but not completely satisfied that all was well.
Through the slats of the blind beside her bed, she peered out into the tumultuous dark, delighted with the sound and light show passing overhead, and was instantly rewarded with an almost blinding flash that lit up the campground surroundings as bright as daylight—trees, grass, two other nearby motor homes, a picnic table and fire pit, a figure hurrying with a coat over its head from the direction of the washroom. Reaching, she raised the blind, cranked the window—which swung out from the bottom—as wide as it would go, and settled down cross legged on the bed to enjoy the pyrotechnics and the cool fresh air that washed over her with a hint of ozone, damp earth, and vegetation.
Slowly, over the next half hour, the storm passed to the east and the staccato of the rain lessened to a faint soft patter. Water dripping from the tree under which she had parked tapped intermittently on the roof. Leaving the vents closed and the window partially open, satisfied with her middle-of-the-night experience, Jessie lay back down, snuggled into her warm bed. She closed her eyes and, drifting back to sleep, considered the unexpected series of events that had brought her from Knik Road in the Matanuska Valley of Alaska to this unaccustomed place, bed, and thunderstorm.
Three days before, with the help of her friends Hank Peterson and Oscar Lee, she had finished clearing away the charred remains of what had been her log cabin until a few weeks earlier, when an arsonist had burned it to blackened rubble, destroying almost everything she owned. Though the ground was soaked with rain, it was not yet thawed deeply enough for Hank to dig space for a basement, but most of the snow was gone, except for a few filthy remnants of what had been the deepest drifts, and cleanup had been possible. So, Jessie and Oscar had employed her chain saw to cut up the larger pieces of the little that was left of the burned logs, while Hank used his Bobcat to shove them into a pile for burning and to load anything that could not be burned into a truck to be hauled to the dump.
Work completed, the three had stood surveying the results of their efforts, clothing grimy with the soot and charcoal the fire had created.
“That should do it for now,” Hank said, leaning on the tire of his Bobcat and pulling off his dirty gloves to dig for a crumpled, half-empty package of cigarettes in his jacket pocket.
Raising an arm, Jessie wiped the sweat from her forehead with her sleeve, leaving another dark streak on her already grubby face. “How long till we can start?” she asked, pleased with the results of their labor but impatiently wishing they could begin to rebuild immediately. “I’ve got to give Vic some idea when they can start raising logs.”
Since the fire, she had been living in a large canvas tent, hauled in and set up by a generous neighbor, but sorely missed the cozy log cabin she had helped to build and hated the destruction site. It was a relief now to have the remains of it cleared away and know she would not be constantly reminded of the fire every time she went outside to work with the sled dogs in her sizable kennel. With a contractor, she had been busily planning the construction of a new cabin to be financed with insurance money from the old, but spring had come late to Alaska this year. For most of April it had seemed the snow would never completely disappear nor the sleet and rain stop falling, and breakup had clung for weeks with a tenacious grip.
“Depends on the weather. If it gets warm and dries out—another three weeks or so. If it goes on raining and I dig the hole too soon, there’ll be nothing but mud and the sides’ll cave in.” He shook his head at the idea. “Besides, it’d be too wet to pour concrete.”
“So we wait and hope for warm and dry.” Oscar looked up at him, frowning thoughtfully as he kicked at a puddle of standing water.
“Yeah,” Hank agreed. “It’ll be at least a month—maybe more—before we have a basement poured and the forms off. Som
etime the first couple of weeks in June, I guess.”
Jessie scowled and sighed, discouraged and frustrated.
As they stood contemplating with resignation the uncertainties of construction during this late spring, a pickup turned off Knik Road, rocked its way through the muddy potholes of the driveway, and stopped beside them. Vic Prentice, the contractor in charge of Jessie’s building project, a barrel-chested man wearing a red plaid jacket and a baseball cap, climbed out of the truck and lifted a hand in greeting as he came to join them, splashing heedlessly through the puddles in his black rubber breakup boots.
“Hey, nice job, guys. Looks like you’re about ready to dig a basement—ah—if it ever dries out.” Vic’s voice, soft and slow, hinted of a past spent in some sunny southern state and belied his rugged appearance, but Jessie knew from experience that he could raise it to a bellow if necessary.
For a few minutes they discussed the timing of the planned basement construction, but Vic obviously had something else on his mind and soon got to it in his easygoing manner.
“I’ve—ah—run into a snag, Jessie. We got us some time before we put this place up, so I figured you’d—ah—maybe take on a job for me. I’ll knock a chunk off the bill if you will.”
“What kind of a job, Vic?” It wasn’t in character for him to ask for help.
“We-ell”—he scrubbed at the top of his head self-consciously with the baseball cap and pulled it back over his bald spot—“I had this motor home, you see, that I been hauling around for fifteen years to sites like this one here to use for a project office. But last fall it really fell apart—roof leaking pretty bad, engine won’t run—couldn’t even take it hunting. So I ordered a new thirty-one-foot Winnebago from where they make ’em in Iowa—ah—costs less than buying it here, ya know. I was going to fly down and drive it back—but I’ve got a project in Eagle River that I can’t take off from right now or it won’t get done in time to start your place. Anyhow, I got to thinking maybe you’d go instead—bring it back up the highway for me…”
“From Iowa?” Jessie asked, frowning as she considered the long stretches of unpleasantly crowded midwestern highways that such a drive would involve and how much she disliked that kind of traffic.
“No—no, not Iowa. The company’s agreed to have somebody drive it to Idaho, so you’d pick it up in Coeur d’Alene. It’s the part through Canada and Alaska that’ll cost me big bucks to hire a professional driver for—and I don’t want to depend on some tourist that I never met who doesn’t know the road. I know you know trucks. Waddaya think?”
Prentice grinned, settled back on his heels, and folded his arms, awaiting Jessie’s reaction to what he clearly saw as the perfect answer to the problem and was pleased with himself for thinking up.
Jessie, amused at his purposeful satisfaction, had to smile as she considered the idea and how typical it was of Vic Prentice to intertwine the give of one project with the take of another in finding a solution.
Part of her reason for choosing him as her contractor for such a big job was that he approached both his work and life as a series of challenges—problems to be solved in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. If anything would ensure that enough of the cabin would be completed to allow her to move into it in the fall—and spend the winter finishing the inside—it was this characteristic approach of Vic’s. The necessities would be his top priority. He would work hard to be sure that the log walls would be up, roof on, doors and windows installed, plumbing and electrical done, and furnace functioning in the basement by the time snow fell. The cosmetics and conveniences—paint, trim, shelves, cupboards, and all the odds and ends—could wait to be done in a more leisurely fashion, and she planned to do most of them herself.
Because of the short northern building season and the high cost of materials and construction, half of Alaska was built this way. Rural people often lived in unfinished houses—some that were never completed because their owners became so used to raw plywood walls and floors that they never got around to it.
With growing enthusiasm Jessie considered the motor home transportation job Vic had just presented to her. It would give her a project to focus on during the weeks before they could start building walls—something that needed to be done. It would also help finance some of the things that the old cabin had lacked—the concrete for a basement, for instance. She didn’t need to ask how much of a chunk he would knock off her bill, knowing it would be more than fair.
The idea of this particular trip was also appealing for other, more personal reasons. She had driven the Alaska Highway three times in the past, once in the fall, once in the spring, and once in the dead of winter—but never alone. Though she had not traveled its length in a motor home, the fall trip had involved a camper on a pickup, and she had enjoyed being able to stop and stay in places along the way without searching out a rented room each evening in some lodge or motel and eating nothing but restaurant food. Camping overnight by a river or lake or some other scenic spot had been much more to her liking. The enormous and ever-changing wilderness through which the highway ran had been captivating, and she had been fascinated by the way each season had defined the varied and mostly uninhabited land along its route. A motor home would be even better than the camper, with a kitchen and bathroom handy and a roof over her head in all kinds of weather. It would at least be fun to try, and doing it alone would give her more opportunity than ever to concentrate on the country through which she would be passing.
Thirty-one feet was a medium-sized rig, not that different from the school bus she had once driven for several winters to earn the money to set up her kennel and sled dog racing business. The idea of maneuvering a motor home did not particularly concern her, especially as many sections of the highway had been widened and paved in the last ten or fifteen years. Except for one or two spots still under construction, it was now for the most part smooth and easy driving all the way from the Lower Forty-Eight to Alaska. This was a job she could comfortably do and a trip she would enjoy making, especially if she didn’t have to rush through it.
“When do you want it here, Vic?” she asked, giving away her capitulation with her smile and the eagerness in her voice. “If we’ve got a month before we can start on the logs, I’d rather not push it—take a couple of easy weeks.”
“Take three, if you want. It’ll be parked here at your place all summer anyway.”
“Two would be fine. If it dries out soon, I don’t want to miss the basement pour. But I’d like to stop at a place or two I’ve gone right by on other trips. Could I take Tank along for company?”
“That lead dog of yours? No problem. Tinker’ll spend most of the summer in it with me.”
The dog Vic referred to and doted on was a lilliputian Yorkshire terrier, who often kept him company on the job. The decided contrast in their sizes and appearance had always amused those who knew him, but Tinker, true to his breed, exhibited astonishing audacity and bravado in challenging far larger adversaries, animal or human, with courage well outweighing his size.
“So you’ll do it—right?” Vic returned to the question at hand, as tenacious as his pet.
Jessie grinned and nodded her agreement. “Why not? Billy Steward can take care of my mutts—puppies and all. It’s too soggy for training runs. When do you want me to go?”
“They called from Idaho yesterday,” Prentice told her with a satisfied expression. “It’s there.”
Two days later Jessie and Tank had flown to Seattle, then into Coeur d’Alene, and taxied to the local dealer where the Winnebago was waiting as promised. There she had used part of the afternoon to assure herself that the motor home’s automotive and coach systems were functioning correctly and that she knew how to use them all—thanks to a two-hour session with a patient and knowledgeable mechanic and the dealer’s best instruction. Before leaving she had paid a visit to their RV shop and purchased chemicals for the holding tanks, toilet paper that would dissolve and flush out without clogging, a
hose for the potable water system, and a heavy-duty extension cord. She also picked up extra filters, belts, and fuses for all the systems, and containers of oil, brake, and transmission fluids, all recommended by Vic Prentice. “If you have ’em, you’ll probably never need ’em.”
The rest of the day was spent in a nearby shopping mall checking off a long list of other things she and Prentice had agreed would be necessary for the trip or should be added for later use. “Might as well get this stuff down there, where it’s less expensive,” he had said when they finished brainstorming. “This is all stuff I want in the rig for moose hunting this fall, and you’ll want most of it on the way up.”
So Jessie had filled shopping carts with pillows, sheets, blankets, and towels; a few pots and pans and other cooking equipment; a broom, dishwashing detergent, and window cleaner; and a few items of her own, including several paperback mysteries, a road atlas, a copy of The Milepost—the travel authority for anyone heading north—a large flashlight and batteries, and—remembering that she had wondered about the elevations of the road on past trips—an altimeter for the dashboard. At a nearby supermarket she stocked up on basic cooking supplies and food for herself and Tank, thankful that the Winnebago’s refrigerator and small freezer would allow her to carry dairy products and meat. Wheeling a shopping cart through the aisles of the unfamiliar store, she enjoyed picking out meals for herself with travel in mind, noticing things she might have overlooked at home as well as old favorites.
By late afternoon, loaded up with essentials, she had found a nearby RV park in which to spend the night, fed and watered Tank, cooked her first meal on the brand-new gas stove, and spent the evening stowing her purchases in the compact storage the motor home provided. The toiletries, clothes, and camera that she had brought along in a large duffel soon resided in convenient cupboards and closets. She then practiced hooking up the rig to the campground’s electrical, water, and sewage systems and was satisfied that all was in order and she was ready to travel.
