A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  Kate slogged through the wet, shifting snow to reach around him. The twine was damp and crusted with sap as well, and after a few moments’ tugging, Kate pulled her knife and cut it. Jack uttered an inarticulate protest about destroying evidence. She stilled it with a single shake of her head. “We won’t need it.”

  He let the tree go and stood staring at her through narrowed eyes as it swung back and forth above them in steadily diminishing arcs. “You know who did it, don’t you.”

  It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t answer.

  *

  “You find it?” Bobby asked the moment they walked in.

  Kate nodded curtly. Mutt squatted next to the door, ears up, watching Kate’s every move with an intent yellow gaze.

  “You find her?”

  “Her who?” Jack inquired.

  “Didn’t look.”

  “Why not?”

  “I already know where she is.”

  “Where?”

  Kate jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “George hired her to take a climbing party up the Big Bump.”

  “Going up Angqaq Peak, eh?” Bobby shook his head. “Beats me why some people go to all that trouble just because it’s there. Me, I’ll settle for the Discovery Channel.” He cocked his head, eyeing her with a bright, inquisitive gaze, looking like a black-eyed, black-headed robin. “She really do it?”

  Kate nodded her head at the pillar of electronics that held up the center of the house. “Can you raise the Park on that thing?”

  Bobby was hurt. “I can raise Tranquility Base on that thing if I have to. Who you want to talk to?”

  “Dan O’Brian.”

  “Consider it done,” Bobby said grandly and rolled to the radio.

  Kate’s conversation with Dan O’Brian was short and terse. Jack’s lips set in a thin line as he listened. Bobby signed off when she was through, and Kate looked around from the radio. “Where’s your pack?”

  “In the closet in the corner. You going after her?”

  Kate opened the closet door, and like the Kanuyaq when the ice melted, its contents cascaded onto the floor in a fierce, joyous current of junk. She waded through it and pulled out an old canvas pack on a metal frame. “Got any longies?”

  “Left-hand drawer under the bed, right side. Where’d you find the rifle?”

  She found the long underwear and began to strip, as Bobby looked on, frankly admiring, and as Jack looked on, angry at both of them but smart enough to hide it, or try to. “I’m so slow I make glacial erosion look speedy,” Kate said, voice muffled in her sweater. She fumbled for the right holes in the longie top and shoved her hands through. “I was standing there looking at those trees, and I knew it had to be there somewhere. It had to be. Then last night, when I was talking to Eknaty and he was telling me about when Lottie took him hunting, I remembered how Abel taught me to keep game out of the reach of bear and wolves and wolverines while we were on a hunt. You got some wool socks?” This as she donned jeans over the longies.

  He watched until the last inch of skin was covered, and then, with a sigh of regret for all good things past, Bobby said, “I don’t have any feet, Kate.”

  “Right, sorry, I forgot.” She looked at Jack, who sat down and began unlacing his boots.

  “Find yourself a nice, young, supple, medium-sized birch,” Kate continued. “Bend it down, stake it out, tie your meat or your supplies or whatever you want to keep out of the reach of whoever or whatever walks below while you’re gone, and let it go. Simple, effective. I don’t know why it is, but nobody ever looks up. You got a vest?”

  “Eddie Bauer one-hundred percent pure goose down.”

  Kate smiled slightly. “Only the best.”

  “You bet.” He rolled over to the coatrack, snagged the vest and tossed it to her. “You tie something as bulky as a rifle to the top of a birch tree with no leaves on it, somebody’s going to see it eventually.”

  She pulled on the vest and snapped it closed. “Then you pick a spruce, one young enough to bend but old enough to have some height. Pick one in a clump of birch and spruce and cottonwood, all tangled up together, on a piece of state land anybody would be instantly jailed for trying to clear, and if you do it right you couldn’t see it from the air, let alone the ground.”

  Bobby shook his head. “Lot of traffic around there, air and ground. Sounds iffy to me.”

  “She was in a hurry.” Kate shrugged. “It’s hard to quarrel with success. Even I had a hard time figuring out what she did with it, and I’ve known Lottie all my life.”

  Jack was rummaging in his grip for spare socks. At Kate’s words, he paused, his thick eyebrows coming together in a frown. “You knew.”

  “Knew what?” Kate held up a pair of glove liners and paused, looking down at the pack.

  “You know who did it. You’ve always known.”

  “Oh for crying out loud, Jack,” she said, exasperated. “What’s the matter with you? What’s the first thing you taught me on the job? What’s Morgan’s First Law? ‘The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest.’ Of course I knew. I doubt that there was a soul in the Park, who thought about it for more than thirty straight seconds, who didn’t know who did it.”

  “Really,” Jack said between his teeth. “Mind telling me how?”

  She looked down at the glove liners, looked up at Bobby. “Take ’em,” he said. “Better to have ’em and not need ’em than the alternative.”

  She checked her watch. “We’ve got just enough time for a bedtime story. I’m only going to tell it once, so listen carefully.

  “Once upon a time, there was a man and a wife living in the Alaskan bush. They had two daughters. The oldest was a bear of a child, something over ten pounds at birth, and from the time she could walk and talk she was a taciturn, difficult person. I don’t think she ever was a girl.” Kate paused. “Although I’m not sure she ever was a woman, either.”

  Jack wanted to ask what the hell that meant, but Kate went on. “The younger daughter, born ten years later, was everything the elder was not. She was little, she was dainty, she was pretty, she was charming. She had all the social graces Lottie lacked.”

  Kate smiled. It was not a nice smile. “Naturally, her parents, in particular her father, who disapproved of unfemininity on male chauvinist principals, just loved Lisa to death.”

  “And Lottie?”

  “Oh, he tolerated Lottie. They both did. They put up with her. They were aware of their responsibilities as her parents, after all.” Jack flinched at the sarcasm in her voice. “At least her mother was. Her father ridiculed her, which just confirmed her sense of worthlessness. She became morbidly sensitive over her size—”

  “I’ve met her,” Jack said in a puzzled voice. “She’s not that big.” He tossed Kate the spare socks he’d pulled from his daypack.

  She caught them. “Thanks. Next to you, no. Next to Lisa? And she was next to Lisa every day of her life.”

  Jack nodded slowly.

  “Well. Lottie never behaved quote, normally, unquote. She was defensive, antagonistic and so hard to get along with that her family not unnaturally turned with immense relief to Lisa, who responded to the attention by getting better grades, going on to college and then choosing to return home to live. What about a tent?” she said to Bobby. “Just in case?”

  “There’s my survival kit.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You be careful with it, woman. I just bought it new.” He hauled at a bundle of what looked like fabric and short sticks in a fluorescent orange stuff bag. Another stuff bag appeared, this one with a sleeping bag and a rolled foam pad inside it.

  Kate strapped the bags to the bottom of the backpack as Bobby rolled into the kitchen and ransacked the cupboards for his camp cooking gear. “In all that time, Lottie, who I don’t think ever left the Park—”

  “Heads up.”

  She looked up just in time to field the cooking kit, and tucked it into a side pocket. Bobby piled a dozen foi
l packages of prepackaged food in his lap and wheeled them over.

  “Well, Lottie had no life except what was lived in Lisa’s shadow. Then along came Max Chaney, who for reasons unknown takes it into his head to fall in love with Lottie.”

  “What!” Even Bobby was staring at her.

  “Eknaty Kvasnikof was working for Lottie part-time. He says they had something going.” She shook her head. “They say there’s someone for everybody. Maybe Max was for Lottie. But…” She looked at Jack and grinned, a narrow, unamused little grin. “You knew this was coming, right? Lisa seduces Max away. Lottie befriends Eknaty Kvasnikof, and Lisa seduces him, too. Lisa puts their livelihood at risk shooting black bears for their bladders and walrus for their tusks and growing pot in felonious quantities and God knows what else. She puts every social relationship, every friend of the family at risk by screwing anything in the Park on two legs. You got any chocolate, Bobby?”

  Bobby looked offended. “It’s one of the four major food groups, right? Of course I have something with chocolate in it. You want gorp?”

  “All you got.”

  “Hershey bars?”

  Her head snapped up, and she looked at him hopefully. “I can go farther on a Hershey bar than I can on a porterhouse steak. You got some?”

  He produced half a box from the freezer like a magician producing a rabbit from a hat.

  “Meanwhile, back at the Tale of Two Sisters,” Jack prodded impatiently.

  Kate tucked the chocolate carefully into another pocket on the pack. “You know, Jack, if you treat someone like shit for long enough, pretty soon they’re going to start looking around for the bottom of a shoe to scrape themselves off of. The reverse,” she added, “holds true. If you treat someone like a saint for long enough, pretty soon they start believing their shit don’t stink. That was Lisa all over. She could do no wrong. All you had to do was ask her.

  “I’m sure Lottie protested Lisa’s behavior. I’m equally certain Lisa ignored those protests, when she didn’t laugh them off. After everything I’ve heard this past week, I wouldn’t put it past Lisa to have deliberately looked around for more and better ways to piss Lottie off. She enjoyed it.” Kate reached for Jack’s spare socks. She donned them on top of her own and the ones he’d taken off, and her feet barely fit back into her own boots. She shook her head, removed one pair, put her boots back on, and pulled the last pair of socks on over her boots. “It’s been a way of life,” she said, “for both of them. All the ego Lottie lost, Lisa got.” She rose to her feet and took a few investigatory steps. Her boots felt snug but not tight. The wool of the socks stretched over the soles of her boots squeaked against the hardwood floor. “Hardly any of this was news, to me or to anyone else who’s lived in the Park for the last twenty years.”

  She looked at Jack. “Yes, in answer to your question, I did know who killed Lisa Getty, almost from the first moment of being told she had not been killed by Roger McAniff. I defy you to find someone in the Park who didn’t.”

  Jack whipped his head around to stare accusingly at Bobby. “It was pretty obvious,” Bobby admitted.

  “You got a ski pole or something, Bobby?”

  “Right, Kate, I do so much skiing. How about a broom handle?”

  “If that’s what you got, that’s what I’ll take.”

  Reaching in back of the refrigerator, Bobby pulled out a broom and sawed off the handle with a serrated steak knife.

  Jack felt left out. Bobby and Kate seemed to understand all, he nothing. He paced off a length, turned and bellowed, “Mind telling me why the hell we’ve spent all this time running our asses off over a billion square acres of wilderness trying to find some other poor schmuck who might have killed her?”

  “Lottie’s dying, anyway.” Kate looked up and met Jack’s eyes and insisted, “Yes, spiritually, she is. She’s lost her foil.” Her voice was sad. “What happens when you look in the mirror and nothing looks back? She doesn’t have anyone left to hate, and I think hate is all that kept her going. Except maybe for those few weeks when she and Max Chaney were an item. But Max Chaney was only a man. Lisa was her sister. Men might come and men might go, but for better or worse, Lisa was her sister.”

  Kate looked up at Jack. “You bet I looked for somebody else. I wanted a hundred other somebodies to point at and say maybe. I didn’t want to have to put Lottie in jail, and I didn’t think she was a danger to anyone else.”

  “She took a shot at you!”

  “Yes,” Kate admitted. “But if she’d really wanted to kill me, she would have. Lottie hits what she aims at.”

  “Like Martin,” Bobby said.

  “Yes,” Kate said, almost wry, “in the last six months I’ve had more than my share of people shooting at me without meaning to get a hit.”

  “You’ve got to get into a different line of work,” Bobby agreed.

  “Will you two stop making like Stan and Ollie and get serious!”

  “She did shoot Max Chaney, before you could talk to him,” Bobby pointed out.

  “Yes.” Kate nodded, her smile fading. “Yes, Max Chaney is dead. Lottie must have known it was only a matter of time before I found out she’d been seeing him.”

  “You think he knew?”

  “I don’t know.” Kate shook her head. “I didn’t know him. And now he’s dead, and that is my fault.”

  “You didn’t pull the trigger.”

  “I could have stopped her. I should have. I didn’t.” The sound of a distant helicopter crept in beneath the door. She shrugged into her parka, donned glove liners and gloves and hoisted the pack to her back. “Now I have to, before she hurts someone else.”

  “Which way you going?” Bobby asked her.

  “Which way does Lottie usually take her climbing parties?”

  “Jesus, Kate. You could always wait for her to come down.”

  “I’m not sure she’s coming down. She knows I know the truth. I as good as told her so in the woods yesterday. She’ll know that by now I’ve found out about Chaney. No.” Kate shook her head. “I don’t think she’s coming down. Not the way she went up, anyway. The Canadian border’s on the other side of the Big Bump, remember, along with about two hundred thousand square miles of Yukon Territory. She gets that far, we’ll never find her.”

  “Be careful,” Bobby said. “Be awful goddam careful, Kate.”

  “I’m always careful, Bobby. Sometimes I’m not very smart, but I’m always careful.”

  Mutt was on her feet, tail curled tightly over her rump. The noise of the approaching helicopter increased as the door opened. Through it the two men could see a Llama touching lightly down in the center of the clearing, Dan O’Brian in a headset on the stick. Kate ducked her head and ran toward it.

  Jack said, “So which way is she going?”

  Bobby, an unaccustomed expression of worry on his broad face, said, “Up the Valley of Death.”

  “And just what the fuck is the Valley of Death?”

  “It’s a glacial valley leading up the southwest face of Angqaq Peak.” Bobby saw Jack’s expression and elaborated. “It’s a chronic avalanche trap. Hence the name. Climbers hate it, but it’s the best approach for the Bump.”

  “Great.” Jack started for the door, barefooted.

  Bobby’s voice halted him before he’d gone one step. “Do you know how to climb mountains?”

  Jack turned, and Bobby said, “Kate does. You’d just get in her way.”

  Jack stared at him, impotent and enraged. He didn’t have any real qualms about slugging a guy in a wheelchair, but Bobby was a friend. He swung around and, lacking a better target, put his fist through the wall next to the door.

  “It’s hell when us macho hero types have to let the heroine rescue herself, ain’t it?” Bobby said sympathetically. He turned his chair and said over his shoulder, “There’s tools and some Sheetrock in the workshop, when you get around to fixing that wall.”

  *

  She came up over the lip of Kantishna Calde
ra, the hollowed-out cone of an extinct volcano, and was reminded of the old Thunderbird myth, the giant birds who caught up whales in their claws and carried them off to the young waiting in their volcanic nests. No beat of giant wings stirred the cold, still air this afternoon, which burned into her lungs with every inhalation. Mutt paced next to her, her big pads leaving clear prints in the new powder. Mutt had been reluctant to get on the chopper, glum in getting off it and less than enthusiastic about the whole idea. She looked up at Kate. Are we having fun yet?

  “Sure,” Kate told her, and Mutt’s gloomy expression said that she was glad one of them thought so.

  Above them the Quilak Mountains clawed at the surface of the pale blue dome of the sky, and on every side they were confronted by the rough and tumble detritus left by the last remaining scions of the Ice Age. Talons of glaciers tore at the bosom of the earth, raking furrows of discontent in their attempt to deny their own recession, leaving behind jagged peaks covered with ice, narrow valleys filled with snow, and mounds of terminal moraine a thousand feet high.

  There was nothing benevolent or welcoming about the Quilak Mountains. Kate felt that they were daring her in, that the temerity of her very presence in their midst was her acceptance of that dare. Puffing, she paused to check the southern horizon. She saw not even a hint of a trace of a wisp of a cloud, for which she devoutly thanked the weather gods. She faced forward again, the snow crunching beneath her feet, and reached the lip of the caldera in another ten strides.

  Before her stretched the Valley of Death, a long narrow valley that from a distance looked like an enormous playground slide, cutting through surrounding ridges and cliffs to spill out over the foothills to the valley beneath.

  Close up, she could see the overhanging snow cornices topping the vertical walls of rock and ice on either side, the smooth floor carved into crevasses a thousand feet long and forty feet wide, lying in wait for the unwary climber beneath masking drifts of deep snow. There were icy pillars of seracs, graveled, ridged eskers of glacial moraine, and erratics, huge boulders carried along and dropped haphazardly by glaciers long since melted and gone. It was a rough, dangerous path stretching up the south face of the mountain.