by Breakup(lit)
resting casually on the gearshift, her other moving to lie almost
naturally along the back of the seat, causing his to drop away. A breeze
rippled through the tops of the trees, and in the distance they could
hear the sound of the two trucks laboring down the track toward them.
"We have a problem, and we take care of it. We don't bother the troopers
if we don't have to. We try not to have to."
"So I see." His voice was thick, and he shifted in his seat. He began to
lean toward her.
"The way I figure it happened is this," she said.
He paused, his face in shadow.
"When you found out your wife was screwing around, you decided to teach
her and her lover a lesson they would never forget. The last lesson they
would ever learn." She began to sound less and less like the Lorelei and
more and more like the big trooper with the cold blue eyes. "And you
decided to teach it to them where you were surest of your ground."
He didn't move, and she couldn't make out his expression. "So, last
fall, you brought her lover up here, probably on a hunt. And you left
him here to die."
She raised her left hand and tucked back a stray lock of hair that had
come free during their wild ride. The motion pulled the fabric of shirt
and wind breaker tight against her breast, and she saw his eyes drop
involuntarily. If he were standing in front of a firing squad and one of
the shooters was a woman, he would die taking her measurements with his
eyes. Kate knew a sudden sympathy for his dead wife.
She let the hand lying on the back of the seat slip down to his thigh.
He started. "And then you went back to town, and you watched your wife
grow frantic at the loss of her lover, and you were probably just
sympathetic enough to keep her from leaving you altogether." Something
in the quality of his silence changed,
221 and she said quickly, "Or perhaps you smothered her with affection.
It's always fun to make someone who has wronged you feel guilty."
She felt a muscle flex beneath her hand, and was satisfied. "Of course.
So that this spring, you could seduce her into coming to the Park for a
second honeymoon. To get away from it all, I think you said yesterday.
And you took her up to the mine. For a picnic lunch, you told her."
Her voice was like sandpaper, scraping at all the rough edges. "You
killed her there, and you made enough of a mess to fetch every bear
within ten square miles."
She gave his thigh a gentle squeeze, and dropped her voice to a raspy
whisper. "And then you came looking for me, or someone like me, to tell
your sorry story to." She paused, waiting.
He wanted to test her. She could see it in the set of his shoulders,
feel it in the tension of his thigh, could almost taste it on the tip of
her tongue.
The wind was increasing in volume, a real chinook by the warm feel of
it, the leading edge of the storm brewing in the Gulf. A cloud crossed
the face of the moon. The trees rustled, snow melted from branches like
rain, and a chunk of ice slid suddenly from the cabin to crash to the
ground beneath.
It broke his spell. He reached for the hand on his thigh and flattened
it against his crotch. He was hard, but then she'd known he would be.
"You can't prove anything."
"No, I can't," she said. The first ray from Bobby's headlights hit the
clearing. She tightened her hand and he gasped. "I don't have to prove
anything, Stewart. I know what happened. I've told you because I can't
bear the thought that you think you're so smart you've committed the
perfect crime and gotten away with it. You haven't."
Her hand tightened further. "Hey," he said, alarmed, and tried to pry
her loose.
She squeezed, hard, with her right hand and with her left
222 grabbed for a handful of his throat, her nails sinking deep into his
skin.
Stewart's whole body jolted with shock, and the first inkling of how
much he had underestimated her. This was not how he had imagined this
prolonged period of sexual titillation would end. The shock was closely
followed by fury, with the sudden realization that she'd played him like
a harp to just this end, but the fury was quickly supplanted by fear.
Her grip was unbelievably, terrifyingly strong for such a small woman.
He went limp, like an animal playing dead so the bear won't be
interested. It didn't work all that well with bears, as he had cause to
know, but it was the only option he had.
It wasn't working with this woman, either. Kate chuckled, and he
shivered at the sound. She tightened her right hand, and he whimpered.
She leaned closer, her lips brushing his ear, and dropped her voice.
"You think with your dick, Stewart. Not all that impressive an organ, is
it? After all, it led you here."
That stung his pride, and he choked and tried to twist away. She
tightened her grip again. He was still erect, he didn't seem to be able
to help it, but the skin of his throat gave beneath her nails, and a
warm trickle of fluid ran between her fingers. "This is how we take care
of problems in the Park, Stewart," she repeated. "We see something
wrong, we fix it. Don't come back here, or I'll fix all your problems,
once and for all." She squeezed again. "Got it?"
He gave a half-gasping, half-choking kind of gurgle. She took that as a
yes. "Good boy," she said, for all the world as if she were praising a
not very bright pet dog. She smiled at him for the last time and, one
hand on his crotch, one at his throat, raised him up and pitched him out
of the cab of the Cat.
He fell hard, and lay still for a moment, long enough for the trucks to
slam to a halt and empty their occupants into the yard. "Jesus Christ,
Shugak," Bobby said, trying to unfold his chair and stay between Dinah
and Stewart at the same time.
"He's not dead, is he?" Dan said, aghast.
223 "No," Jim said with more assurance than he felt, and was immensely
relieved when Stewart staggered to his feet.
When Jim would have helped him to one of the trucks, Kate's voice, a low
rasp of sound, came clearly over the sound of the Cat's idle.
"No. Let him walk."
Jim's hand dropped as he stared up at the dark figure in the cab.
The full moon was up high enough for the rest of them to watch in
silence as Stewart limped shakily out of the clearing, shoulders
hunched, hands clasped protectively over his crotch, something dark
staining the front of his shirt.
He bore only the very slightest resemblance to the tall, good- looking,
confident ladies' man who had left the Roadhouse two hours before.
224
The next morning she finished her taxes and made an early trip in to the
post office to drop her tax form into the mailbox, a whole day before
the deadline. She exited the post office feeling efficient and virtuous
and every inch the franchised American, and very nearly saluted the flag.
She got the hell out of Dodge unambushed by anybody bent on drafting her
to do good and returned to the homestead to rebuild the base of the
canvas she'd used for upholstering fabric when she'd built it years
before, so she improvised with a piece of olive drab Army blanket. She
hated sewing; consequently her stitches were small and neat, so as to
get the job done as fast as possible and not have to go back and redo it
later. Finished, it looked like a splotch of pond scum floating on a
blue lake. Or, if
225 she squinted, maybe a lily pad. She'd have to check the Sears
catalog for new material and reupholster the whole thing. Oh. Right.
There was no more Sears catalog. Great.
She set up the ladder again and sanded the Spackle on the ceiling patch.
There was a little less than a gallon of the flat white latex paint in
the garage, left over from the last time she'd painted the interior of
the cabin, more than enough to cover the area involved. She had been
right; the paint had faded and she had to paint the whole ceiling to
make it match. Fortunately, the cabin was only twenty-five feet square
and the loft ceiling was easily reached. At noon she took down the
ladder for what she devoutly hoped was the last time and trundled
everything back out through the slush to the garage.
The chinook had blown itself out by six that morning, leaving
temperatures in the upper forties and climbing. The roar of runoff down
the creek had increased and she climbed down the bank, shotgun in hand,
to assess the boulder situation. It looked solid, and a good thing, too,
because there would be no muscling of rocks against the force of that
water. Her judgment may have been influenced by the rustling of brush
she heard across the creek, and the infrequent grunts and groans of her
local grizzly, letting her know he was there.
The Park was just lousy with bears this spring.
Bad news for Carol Stewart.
The grizzly gave another grumble of discontent and Mutt barked sharply
from the top of the bank. "All right, all right, I'm going," she told
the grizzly. "All right, all right, I'm coming," she told Mutt.
There was no salvaging the Isuzu. Even the metal of the wheels was bent.
She started up one of the four-wheelers and towed the corpse to the
garbage dump a thousand feet from the clearing. She'd bury it as soon as
the ground thawed. At least until then it would be out of her sight.
A hammer and a fistful of nails and the cache was almost as good as new.
Two of the four legs were intact and quickly reattached. She fetched the
axe from the garage and shoved through
226
the brush to a stand of slender birch about a quarter of a mile from the
cabin. She found two of the right diameter and length, and felled them
and hauled them back to the clearing, where she stripped them of bark
and let them sit. It took fifteen minutes and a quarter of a can of Goop
to clean the sap from her hands.
"Oh to be anywhere else, now that spring is here." Mutt, curled up in a
patch of sunlight on the one dry piece of ground in the clearing, gave
her a quizzical look and tucked her nose back beneath her tail.
Like burying the truck, setting the cache back up would have to wait for
the ground to thaw. She checked the meat in the root cellar beneath the
garage. It was still mostly frozen. She pulled out a package of caribou
backstrap steaks for dinner. It was too much for her to eat alone, but
she felt she had earned a treat, and she didn't want her tenderest cut
of last fall's moose to thaw and spoil.
After lunch she pushed the snow machine into the garage and was draining
the tank of its remaining fuel so as to begin work on a patch when Mutt
gave a sharp warning bark from the yard. "What now?" she asked the
rafters, and went to see.
It was Bickford. He apologized for not making it out sooner. The thick
manila envelope held fifty thousand dollars exactly, in cash, half in
hundreds, half in fifties. Kate went dizzy at the sight of so much green
and hoped it didn't show.
She made Bickford wait while she counted it. He made her sign a receipt.
Honors about even, he departed, and she sincerely hoped that was the
last she was going to see of anyone for a while.
She went inside and sat down at the kitchen table to admire the cash and
think warm fuzzy thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Baker. After a nice long while
she tucked the money back in the envelope and got out pen and paper to
write two letters, the first a list of books to Rachel at Twice Told
Tales in Anchorage, the second a list of cassette tapes to Susan at
Metro Music, also in Anchorage.
She peeked in the manila envelope again. Surely there was enough there
to finance a trip into town. She could get a new tape
227 deck and a supply of batteries at Costco, have a Reuben at the
Downtown Deli, check out the latest in snow machines.
Spend quality time with Jack.
Blood suddenly humming with anticipation, she added notes to Rachel and
Susan not to mail her orders, she would pick them up in person.
The second envelope had just been sealed when Mutt barked again. Kate
swore. Was she never to be left in peace?
She went to the door and beheld Bobby jouncing into the clearing on his
wheelchair, Dinah trotting along behind.
Kate frowned at her. "Take it easy, you're walking for two now, you know."
Around Mutt's enthusiastic licks of welcome-every now and then her taste
in men showed signs of improving-Bobby managed to say, "I keep telling
her," and Dinah rolled her eyes.
"You got coffee?" Bobby demanded. At her nod he roared, "Well, don't
keep us standing out here in the cold, woman, pour it out!"
It wasn't cold, it was in fact getting fairly close to the Big Five- Oh,
as the much anticipated fifty-degree mark was known, but Kate resigned
herself to the inevitable and led the way inside without comment.
When they were all around the kitchen table, Bobby stirred in creamer
with a decisive hand and fixed Kate with a piercing stare. She met it
with a bland expression. "We've been playing this game of Clue," he said.
Kate raised an eyebrow.
"And we thought we'd try out one possible solution." He looked at Dinah.
"Carol Stewart," Dinah said.
"In the Park," Bobby said.
"With a bear," Dinah said, and giggled.
Bobby looked at Kate. "Well?"
"Well what?" Kate sampled her own coffee, rejoicing in the
228
fact that she had coffee again, not to mention corn Niblets and Darigold
butter, which would go fine with tonight's backstrap. She'd better boil
up some rice, too, seeing as how it looked like she was going to have
company for dinner.
More company than she'd thought. "Hi," Dan O'Brian said from the
doorway. Behind him could be seen the distinctive outline of a
round-crowned, flat-brimmed trooper hat.
Kate sighed. "Jim, it's breakup, you have to have business somewhere in
the Park other than on my homestead."
"Kenny Ellis in Glenallen's got me covered for today," he said, stepping
inside, immaculate as always.
"Ber
nie coming, too?" Kate said as she poured out.
"No, he's busy, puttying up the bullet holes in the bar." Jim pulled out
a chair and sat down.
Dan found an empty Blazo box and perched on it. "We had to promise to
stop in on the way back, though, and give him the straight scoop."
They all stared at her expectantly.
