A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  “Came to pick up my mail. Ralph told me you’d just brought it in. I thought I’d stop over, say hi.”

  He cocked his head at her. “You looking for work? I’ve got two groups up on the Bump already and a third coming in tomorrow. I could use another guide.”

  “That’s right, it is that time of year.”

  “No shit Sherlock.” He gave the Cessna a damning glare. “That’s why I need this old bucket of bolts up and running. So? What say? Can I put you on the payroll?”

  She shook her head. “Nah. I’m almost three hundred bucks to the good this year. I can wait for the kings to hit fresh water.”

  He sighed. “Everybody’s flush this spring. Whatever happened to the good old days, when you could count on half the Park rats drinking up their summer savings and being broke by February 1st?”

  “I don’t know, I guess they really are the good old days.”

  He eyed her with a gloomy expression. “It’s your fault. You busted that bootlegger last winter and now everybody has to go to the Roadhouse. And Bernie won’t let anyone mush home drunk.”

  “Guilty as charged,” she said with a faint smile. She paused. “I hear you tried to land in the middle of the fireworks last week.” He looked blank and she gestured vaguely behind her. “When McAniff went ape and shot all those people.”

  His face darkened. “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me about it?” He looked at her, surprised and a little disgusted, and she shook her head at once. “No, it’s not that.” She hesitated. Jack had advised discretion, but the word was going to get around sooner or later. For all she knew, the police were holding a press conference in Anchorage as she spoke. “Lisa Getty was shot by a different rifle than the rest of the victims.”

  It took George a moment. “A different rifle?” he asked. “You mean McAniff didn’t shoot her?”

  “No.”

  He looked a little at a loss. “Well then, who did?”

  She shrugged. “They don’t know. I’m looking into it. That’s why I need to know what you saw that day.”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said slowly. “You mean we got another killer still on the loose?” She nodded. “Christ.” He tossed the screwdriver into the toolbox. “You want some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  He led the way into his office, and she sat down on the old couch, patched so many times it was hard to tell where the Naugahyde left off and the duct tape began. He handed her a cup and sat behind his desk. “If you’re working with the cops, you’ve probably seen my statement. I don’t know what I can add to it.”

  Kate settled back and sipped at her coffee. It tasted like three-in-one-oil. “I’ve always liked ‘I-was-there’ stories. Just tell me what happened.”

  He was right; he couldn’t add much more than what he’d said in his statement. The Cessna, so full of mail he’d had to take out the two back rows of seats, had been maybe a hundred yards off the south end of the airstrip when a bullet smashed into the windshield. Another hit the fuselage, by which time he’d figured out what was happening. “I thought for a minute I was back on a short final at Khe Sanh,” he said, shuddering. “I pushed in the throttle and pulled the stick as far back into my lower intestine as it would go and I was out there.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she observed. “In your statement, you say you circled for a while.”

  “Yeah, I got up out of range and put her into a slow turn. I saw two bodies laying out on the edge of the strip. I think I caught a glimpse of Lisa’s body through the trees. You know she always wears—wore those flashy fluorescent bibs and parkas from North Face that practically glow in the dark.” He took a deep breath. “And I saw a guy take off through the woods on a Polaris. All the time I’m on the radio, trying to raise the troopers. I got Chopper Jim, and he told me to go to Tok. I was happy to oblige.”

  “When’d you get back?”

  “That evening.” He shook his head. “Place was a zoo. There was about a hundred cops crawling around with all that sumbitchin’ yellow tape they like to string everywhere, couldn’t taxi in a straight line without fouling in it to save your life. Body bags all over everywhere. Place looked like Tan Son Nhut in ’68.” He tried to shrug, but it turned into a shiver. “That guy McAniff was out of his fucking mind.”

  “Guess so,” she said in a neutral voice, trying not to think of the killer lying in the slush and snow at her feet, crying because his mouth was bleeding.

  George set his mug down and reached for a rag, wiping ineffectually at the grease on his hands. “It was creepy as hell, there at first. People standing around, too shocked to be angry. Cops all business, taking statements, putting everything they found in Ziploc bags. I saw one trooper bagging some snow.” He paused, his eyes remote. “Everybody else was just standing around, watching. Steve Syms’s girlfriend from Ahtna, what’s her name—”

  “Cindy. Beerbohm.”

  “Yeah, apparently Steve was due to fly out to see her that night. She flew in instead and had hysterics from one end of the strip to the other. Can’t blame her, but it didn’t help things much. Your grandma finally took her home and put her to bed.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “Emaa does what needs to be done.”

  “She is a good old gal,” George agreed.

  I wouldn’t go that far, Kate thought.

  “Everybody came from every homestead between here and Ahtna, and half Ahtna did, too. All standing around in a big circle like a herd of cows looking at something strange come into their pasture. Weird looking, you know?”

  Kate nodded. It sounded depressingly like any crime scene she’d ever been at

  “They were here for days, the whole bunch of them, and then they all left, in something like ten minutes, in a couple of Twin Otters.” He shook his head. “It was quiet out there for maybe a day, and then by God if they didn’t all come back.”

  “Who all?”

  “Everybody all. Cops to go over the ground again, who knows why. Everybody else came to watch the cops. I’m not sure Lottie ever did leave.”

  Kate stirred. “Maybe she had more cause to stay than most.”

  “Yeah, I know she and Lisa were pretty close. It was creepy though. She didn’t move, she didn’t talk. She just stood there, watching. When it got dark and the cops borrowed a generator and started stringing lights, some of the folks tried to get her to go home. I don’t think she even heard them. She just stood there, like this huge statue. She looked like… I don’t know, Lot’s wife, maybe?” He gave an involuntary shudder and looked over at Kate with a sheepish expression. “Sorry. Between Cindy screaming and yelling on one side and Lottie acting like the specter at the feast on the other… it was, well, creepy,” he repeated.

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Hell with that. You and I are alive, right?”

  “Right.”

  “In spite of the fact that now we got us another crazy person on the loose with a gun.” Kate got the impression he still didn’t quite believe it, an impression confirmed by his next words. “You sure I can’t talk you into a job? I got a bunch of Koreans up at the base camp. Their second time,” he added. “They didn’t make the summit last year.”

  She snorted and shook her head. “No, thanks. I never do second-timers.”

  He sighed. “Can’t say’s I blame you. They’re always so friggin’ determined they’re gonna make it this time, they don’t care if it’s blowing a blizzard up top and you can’t see a foot in front of your face.” He thought. “Maybe I can get Lottie to take ’em up.”

  Kate hesitated in the doorway. “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “She’s gotta eat, like the rest of us, and she’s one of the best there is up on the Bump.” He shrugged. “Probably be better for her to be working than sitting around the house moping.”

  “She might not be in the right mood to entertain,” Kate suggested. “Especially now.”

  “She never is. But she will get my climbers up and back in one pi
ece.”

  “True. I’m going up to see her when I leave here,” Kate said. “Want me to tell her to check in?”

  “Do that.” He eyed her sharply. “She know yet?” Kate shook her head. “And you get to tell her. That’s not a job I’d wish on my worst enemy. Well, tell her I’ll be gone this afternoon but I’ll be back here tomorrow morning, and to look me up if she wants the job.”

  *

  Kate walked down the airstrip and a little way into the stand of trees, and halted. She stood very still, looking around. There were birch and diamond willow and alder and cottonwood and scrub spruce. The branches of the deciduous trees were as yet leafless, but their bark was beginning to darken over the subcutaneous flow of running sap. The evergreens were thickly needled and a deep, dark green, except at the tip of each branch, where spring was beginning to emerge in a new growth of lighter green. It looked the very picture of serene renewal, not at all a scene for massacre, or for cold-blooded, opportunistic murder.

  She looked up and could barely see the sky through the branches tangled overhead. It was silly, she knew, but Kate suddenly felt as if she were intruding where she was not wanted. There was an almost conscious feeling of resistance, a feeling of… what? Possessiveness? A hoarding of secrets hardly won?

  She shook herself. At this rate, her imagination would be putting in for overtime. Hearing a plane in the distance, she collected her mail and headed up the river at a decorous pace. She was not looking forward to her next interview.

  *

  Next to Lottie, Kate felt dainty. Next to Lottie Getty, Sasquatch would have felt dainty. Lottie was big, six feet tall in her stocking feet, and weighed in at a hundred and ninety pounds, most of it muscle from years of hauling nets and packing game out through the bush. Her features were an odd contrast to the rest of her; she had large, widely spaced eyes of an innocent blue, fair skin showing not half her forty years, and a way of walking and talking slow that led the uninitiated into thinking she thought slow as well.

  “Hi, Lottie.” At first Kate thought Lottie wasn’t going to let her in. After a long, tense pause, Lottie stepped back and motioned her inside. Another wave of the hand directed her toward a worn easy chair sitting to one side of an old iron wood stove that Lottie’s father must have brought with him when he came to the Park in ’52. Kate sat down, got back up again and removed a box of rifle shells, a Prince William Sound tide-book, a half-eaten, molding Hostess fruit pie, a photograph album, a tattered Harlequin romance and a gray cat, and sat back down.

  Lottie sat opposite her, large, silent, impassive. Kate let her eyes wander around the interior of the cabin. It was larger than her own. The loft was enclosed, with a proper staircase leading up to it, doors led off a hallway in the back of the house, and the kitchen was separated from the living room by a counter lined with stools. Every available horizontal surface was covered with the detritus of bush life; Kate saw a dismantled beaver trap on the kitchen counter, with fur still stuck to the jaws. A dozen or more rifles, from a petite and, if the shine of its stock were any indication, brand new twenty-two to a silver-mounted over-and-under 12-gauge-30.06 combination were stacked in racks nailed to every available vertical surface. Knives in leather scabbards dangled next to the rifles, salmon filleting knives with white plastic grips, skinning knives with handles of some kind of antler, what looked like a Bowie knife with a handle intricately carved from fossil ivory. A mounted moose head hung over the wood stove, and caribou, goat and sheep heads festooned the other walls, most with coats, mittens and more knives hung from their racks. Any wall that dared show a bare face to the world had been promptly veiled with a dusty hide; black bear, brown bear, wolf, wolverine, coyote, an unexpected rattlesnake.

  A wooden rocking chair with a splintered seat sat next, to a couch, patched like George’s where the springs had come through, this one with black electrician’s tape. From what she could see of the kitchen, Kate didn’t think the table had been cleared or the dishes washed in months. Every corner of the room was filled; with spiderwebs on the ceiling and dust balls on the floor.

  The house looked like Fairbanks after the flood and before the cleanup. A movement caught the corner of her eye; the gray cat was sitting at her feet with her tail curled around her paws, watching Kate with large, unblinking green eyes. “I’m not moving,” Kate told her, although she did sympathize. The chair she was sitting in was, so far as she could see, the only place in the house where one could sit down in relative comfort.

  The cat yawned and began to wash. She could wait.

  “I heard you caught him,” a voice like a dull knife said. It took Kate a moment to realize it was Lottie’s voice.

  She looked up and met the wide blue stare. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  “You should have killed him when you had the chance.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Kate said steadily.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “But you got him.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long pause. “At least you got him,” Lottie said, still in that dull voice.

  “Lottie,” Kate said, and stopped. How to say it? she thought, and tried again. “I wanted to stop by and see how you were.”

  “Why?”

  Kate floundered. “We grew up together. Lisa and I went through school together. I just thought—”

  “We’ve never been that close,” Lottie pointed out.

  “Not since school, no.” Kate bit her lip. “I’m sorry about Lisa, though. You lived together all your lives. It must hurt like hell.”

  Lottie’s face remained blank, a caricature china doll. For lack of something better to do, Kate leaned forward to pick up the photograph album she had removed from the chair. The gray cat had curled up on it, and her green eyes promised retribution for this second disruption of her morning nap. “May I?” Lottie said nothing, and Kate opened the album and began to leaf through it. “God, some of these are old. Look at these… what did they call them? Tintypes?”

  “Sepia prints,” Lottie said. She rose and drifted over to stand behind Kate’s shoulder.

  “Who’s this hunk? Wow. He looks like Charles Lindbergh.”

  “My grandfather.” Lottie paused, and then said almost reluctantly, “My mother’s father.”

  “Nice smile. You look kind of like him.”

  “He was a prick,” Lottie said flatly. “He was a drunk. My mother told me she eloped with my father because my father was the first person who ever said he loved her.”

  Kate’s hands stilled for a moment before turning the page. “Who’s this with the hat? Thing must’ve weighed ten pounds with all those ruffles and bows.”

  “My great-grandmother.”

  Kate peeled away the transparency and looked at the back of the picture. She whistled. “This picture was taken in 1900.” She squinted again at it. “You look kind of like her, too.” She turned the page and laughed. “There must be six yards of fabric in that old nightgown, or whatever it is, and look at all those tiny buttons on his boots. That kid looks so clean he could squeak. Bet he stayed that way for about five minutes.” Kate could feel Lottie leaning over her shoulder, and she paged forward. “These clothes look World War Two-ish; these must be your parents. Weird colors.”

  “Tinted.”

  “Right.” Kate flipped through more pages, and slowed down. “Lisa?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate frowned a little. “Where is she? I don’t recognize the place.”

  A pause. “The first five summers of our lives we spent out at the cannery on Mummy Island.”

  Kate looked again and couldn’t help smiling. “Lisa sure didn’t like clothes much, did she?”

  “No.” A pause. “The cannery superintendent was always calling Mom to tell him Lisa had her clothes off again and was running around the dock naked.”

  Kate kept her eyes fixed on the page. “And where are you?”

  “Over there. In back and to the le
ft.”

  “With your clothes on.”

  Somehow the joke fell flat. “Yes.”

  Kate’s finger ran down to the bottom of the page. “Your mother and father. That’s you on your father’s lap?”

  “Yes. One of the few times he could bear to touch his fat, dumb kid.”

  Kate turned the page and said with relief, “School pictures! Were we ever really that young?”

  The pictures of the two sisters, arranged chronologically and side by side, showed a maturing process far kinder to the younger sister than to the elder. Lisa ripened. Lottie weathered. Lisa grew from a plump baby cuteness to a girlish prettiness to real beauty. Lottie just grew, taller and wider. Lisa was slender, and there was a lissome quality to her form, in the way her golden scarf of hair lay on her shoulders, in the bend of her long, slender neck, in the graceful disposal of her arms, that made her look as if she were moving even as she posed for a still picture. Lottie in her pictures seemed rooted, immobile, static, her body massive and graceless. Lisa’s eyes sparkled, her cheeks dimpled, her smile was wide and filled with a secret glee that made one wonder what was so amusing. Kate remembered the effect to be even more irritating in person.

  She looked until the end of the album, but she never found a single picture of Lottie smiling. As near as Kate could tell, Lottie had been born with a scowl. Or no, not a scowl, that was too strong. Maybe she just never learned to smile, which wasn’t quite the same thing. Through the years, her face only became squarer and more stolid. There was no secret fun in Lottie’s face, no mischief, in fact little animation of any kind. What struck Kate most was the quality of speechless endurance in that static expression.

  She looked up and saw it repeated in the face across from her, and closed the album with a snap. “Thanks for letting me look at this,” she said out loud. “I like looking at old pictures, don’t you?”