Cold Company

by Sue Henry

  For the moment, all she could do was crouch in the vulnerable and uncomfortable position he had demanded and feel the tears that wouldn’t stop running down her face onto her hands that were quickly going numb from the pressure of the cuffs she had fastened too tightly.

  Oh, God, please, God. I promise I’ll be good. If he doesn’t…If…

  Teri couldn’t bear to think what if might be.

  She could only go on breathing, praying, living—and hoping to still be doing all those things when this was over.

  If…

  6

  WITH THE FOOTINGS POURED AND CURING, THE CABIN-BUILDING crew went to work the next morning to raise the forms necessary for pouring basement walls.

  J.B. began the day with bits and pieces of old Mario Lanza hits.

  “Give—me—some men—who are—stout—hearted—men,” he sang, cheerfully off-key but enthusiastic and in time with the strokes of his hammer.

  “Stouthearted but weak-brained, maybe,” Stevie commented to Jessie, who replenished her supply of nails and grinned at the green bandanna that contrasted brightly with her carroty hair.

  When they were finished, two days later, the truck once again arrived and backed up to dump concrete into the hopper of a pump that would force it through a long flexible hose, four inches in diameter, to wherever it was needed. A tall boom raised the hose high in the air and swung it into position across the thirty-foot width of the basement.

  Jessie was impressed with how fast the pour progressed, though it took three truckloads of concrete to finish the job. When the forms were full, she carried around a bucket of long, heavy, five-eighths-inch anchor bolts and, one by one, handed them up to J.B., who carefully measured and sank them into the top of the wet concrete, leaving the threaded ends extending above it. When it had set, they would be firmly attached to hold the sill and first logs securely to the foundation.

  When all the anchor bolts were correctly positioned, J.B. came down and stood on the edge of the excavation with Jessie, looking out across the finished work.

  “Looks good,” he commented. “Thanks for the help.”

  She let Tank off his tether in the kennel part of the yard, and J.B. knelt to pet him affectionately.

  “Hey, buddy. You’re a handsome devil.”

  Tank sat down next to Jessie, clearly knowing he was being admired, but accepted the tribute with his usual dignity.

  “This dog special?” Jason asked.

  “He’s my leader,” she told him. “Couldn’t run races without him.”

  “Must be exciting—running those long races.”

  He looked up at her with a smile, and she suddenly realized he was more interested in the conversation with her than in admiring Tank.

  “Mostly it’s a lot of hard work,” she told him, not completely comfortable with the attention. “Races are just the result of a lot of training and kennel care.”

  “But you like it?”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.”

  With relief, she noticed Prentice on his way across the yard.

  “Here comes Vic. I’d better see what he wants.”

  With Tank walking beside her, she moved away to meet the contractor and, while they talked for a few minutes about the next stages of building the basement, J.B. wandered off, whistling, to finish cleaning up for the day.

  With five or six days before the concrete was hard enough to remove the forms, the work temporarily came to a halt, giving Jessie a chance to spend some time working with her dogs. She got up early the next morning and soon was driving her four-wheeled ATV from the storage shed and attaching a gang line for a team to the front of it. With no snow on the ground, most mushers train their teams with ATVs during the warm months of the year, giving the dogs something to pull and the trainer something on which to ride.

  The dogs knew the ATV meant some of them were going for a run and were all instantly on their feet, barking and leaping with excited anticipation and the hope that Jessie would choose them to harness and hook to that gang line. Tank, with his usual dignity, sat waiting at the end of his tether, straining slightly against its restraint but confident that, as leader, he would soon be moved to his place at the front of the team.

  Carefully not making eye contact with the dogs she did not intend to take along and thereby raise their hopes, Jessie harnessed and moved ten dogs from their tethers to the gang line, one by one, Tank last, then walked back to start the ATV. After their long rest, the eager dogs were more than ready to run and pull. When she released the brake, they broke rules and took off without waiting for her signal, throwing themselves against their harnesses, yanking the gang line taut and the ATV forward with a jerk.

  “Whoa!” Jessie shouted, setting the brake and dragging them to a halt. “Wait,” she told them sternly. “Wait!” When most of them had stopped trying to move forward, she once again released the brake, with the same unruly result. It took two more enforced stops and a walk forward on her part to inform them in a firm voice that, without her permission, they were going nowhere, before they calmed down enough to wait for her direction. Then they waited, but unwillingly, and, as soon as she allowed, were once again pulling with all their strength, which made for a very fast start.

  As they reached the Knik Road end of the driveway and turned off onto a trail that ran beside it in a wide ditch, she let them run, knowing there was plenty of room for a mile or two for them to work off some of their enthusiasm. They flew along at a lope, with the ATV in neutral, and Jessie let them go, only slowing them when they had to come up out of the ditch to cross a neighbor’s driveway, where she looked both ways for traffic.

  As the winter accumulation of snow melted and disappeared, many sled dog training trails had vanished into tangles of brush, soggy bogs, and untravelable routes, leaving few choices. Summer running had to be done on established trails, many of which lay beside local roads and were also used by the three-and four-wheeled ATVs of local residents. That meant keeping a close eye out for careless joyriders—who were going somewhere in a hurry and paying little attention to dog team traffic—as well as for vehicles turning onto or off of the paved road beside which the dogs were running. It was difficult at times for drivers to see teams that were often below the level of the road, and Jessie refused to assume that they would slow down and give her mutts the right of way. She had never had an incident with a car or truck, but knew mushers who had, to their and their dogs’ detriment. Always she was glad when winter returned and she could take her teams back onto snow-covered wilderness trails, far from the danger and noise of motor vehicles. She looked forward to the first few training runs in the fall as the best of hundreds she made in a twelve-month cycle.

  But sled dogs require dedication year round and must be run with or without snow. How quickly they forgot and grew lazy, lying around a kennel. Their inattention to her commands was witness to that, a red flag that it was time to get back to regular coaching. The summer would be full of building, but if she was to have teams ready when the winter racing season began, she could not let it interfere completely with this normal activity.

  By the end of the afternoon, she had run three different teams for two hours each, in groups of young and older dogs, harnessing experienced dogs with rookies, and would run the rest tomorrow. Some dogs that had not been taken out on a run had been hooked up to the training wheel to exercise in circles, including some of last fall’s puppies, who were not yet ready to join a team. She was weary and hoarse from yelling commands that had, at times, been ignored or misinterpreted. As she drove the last team of the day up her driveway toward her kennel and construction site, she was not sorry to have this be the final run. It was time to water and care for all her animals, before going to the motor home to care for her own tired and hungry self.

  She was not unhappy, however, to see a state trooper’s car parked near the Winnebago and Phil Becker leaning against it, western hat tipped back, one ankle crossed over the other in a relax
ed stance, watching her approach.

  “Whoa, guys…whoa now. Hey, Phil. Been waiting long?” she asked, braking the ATV and dog team to a halt in front of her storage shed.

  “Nope. Passed you on the road headed this direction and figured you’d be back soon. Still looks silly to me to see dogs pulling one of those things with wheels.”

  “Well, it may look funny, but it’s great for training, as long as you stay on a trail. But it’s a heavy mother to haul out of the brush if the mutts make a wrong turn, as they did twice today.” She glanced at the jeans, civilian jacket, and western hat he was wearing. “Let me take care of these guys, and then I’ll find us a drink—if you’re off duty.”

  “Give you a hand?”

  “Sure. The whole crew’s gotta be watered. You can start on that while I get these guys out of harness, if you don’t mind.”

  He nodded, heading for the buckets standing by the outdoor tap.

  Half an hour later, chores done, they headed for the motor home, passing the excavation full of forms and drying concrete on the way. Becker hesitated on the edge of the pit.

  “You’ve got a ways to go. When do your logs show up?”

  “Next week.” Jessie grinned, brightening at the thought. “All cut, sized, numbered, and ready to raise.”

  As they walked on, she dug into a jeans pocket for the key but stopped before using it.

  Sitting on the step of the motor home stood a small vase from some florist, contents wrapped in typical green waxed paper.

  “Hey, somebody loves you,” Becker said. “Your birthday or something?”

  “No,” Jessie said, with a puzzled wrinkling of her forehead. “My birthday’s in October.”

  Picking the vase up, she opened the door and led the way inside, setting the offering on the table as she passed, headed for the galley, where she retrieved the bottle of Jameson’s.

  “This okay, Phil, or would you rather have a beer?”

  “Beer, please.” Becker removed the western hat and hung it up before sitting at the table.

  Jessie handed him a cold bottle of Killian’s from the refrigerator and, pouring herself a splash of the Irish whiskey, settled across the table from him. After raising her arms behind her head to stretch her back and shoulders, she leaned both elbows on the table, took a sip of the Jameson’s and sighed.

  “They ran me a merry chase. I’ve let their training go for a few days, and they were rested and full of the devil.” Reaching, she took the small green bud vase and stripped off the paper to reveal a single red rosebud, standing tall and just beginning to open. “This is a nice surprise. Wonder who sent it?”

  Seeing that there was no card attached to the flower or vase, she searched the green paper she had cast aside for some clue to the identity of the sender, but although there was an envelope bearing the florist’s name stapled to one corner, it was empty.

  “Card could’ve dropped off somewhere in the delivery truck,” Becker suggested. “Or else you’ve got a secret admirer.” His grin was full of mischief.

  Jessie felt herself flush and glanced at her watch to hide her unexpected reaction to his teasing. Six-thirty: too late to call the florist. “Well, it’s a treat, whoever sent it. I’ll check in the morning and find out.”

  “Good idea.” Becker took a long swallow of his beer, then reached to pull some folded pages from the pocket of the jacket he had tossed in a chair. As he smoothed them open on the table, Jessie pushed the rose and vase aside and leaned forward to look.

  “The autopsy report?”

  “Yes. Thought you’d like to know what John found. He tried to call but got no answer.”

  “I was out running today’s rodeo with clowns for a team. What’d he find?”

  “Well, it’s the body of an old man, all right. I won’t go into the justifications for that observation, but you know Timmons wouldn’t make a mistake.”

  “Sure. What else? Does he know how long ago it was buried?”

  “Not yet, but he’s estimating sometime between twenty and twenty-five years. There’s no sign of violence, no evidence of injury, no bullet or knife mark on any of the bones. No drugs or poisons showed up in the tests he ran. It looks like he just died naturally, but…” Becker frowned and hesitated.

  “But what?” Jessie asked, watching his easygoing expression shift to one of concern mixed with uncertainty.

  He glanced up, still frowning, and shuffled the papers on the table uneasily. “This is not for publication and it’s not in the report, because there’s no evidence. But you know how John gets hunches sometimes?”

  She nodded.

  “You mustn’t tell anyone, but I’ll tell you what he told me on the phone. The way the body was positioned, in a fetal curl, with the arms drawn into the chest and the knees pulled up, made him wonder if the old guy, whoever he is, might have frozen to death.”

  Jessie took a thoughtful sip of her whiskey, then shook her head. “He wasn’t buried in the winter. John said the ground couldn’t have been frozen when the grave was dug.”

  “That doesn’t mean he died when he was buried. Might have died in the winter, and whoever buried him waited for the ground to thaw. It’s possible. Many places in Alaska they don’t bury people who die in the winter. They store the bodies where they’ll stay frozen and bury them all at once in the spring.”

  “You’re right.” She sat up straighter, staring at him. “I’d forgotten that. One fall in Anchorage, they decided to dig a few graves before the ground froze, so they’d have them ready. But when it got cold, some homeless people moved in for shelter, even built fires to keep warm, so they went back to the cold storage idea.”

  “I remember.” Shuffling papers again, Becker found one in particular and held it out to her. “There were two other things. This is one.”

  It was a fax copy of a photograph, but the item on some kind of dark background was clear and identifiable: a pendant in the shape of a butterfly set with several light-colored stones, hanging on a delicate chain. Gold or silver, it was impossible to tell in black and white.

  “Gold,” Becker said in answer to her question. “John found it in the chest cavity, mixed with dirt that fell in as the body decomposed. He thinks it was probably laid or tossed into the grave on top of the old man, before the soil was shoveled back.”

  Jessie stared at the necklace in the picture, mystified. “That’s weird,” she commented, looking up at Becker, who nodded agreement. “It doesn’t look like something that would have anything to do with an old man, does it?”

  “No.”

  “You said two things. What else?”

  Becker gave her an oddly intense professional look and thought a moment before answering.

  “You’ve absolutely got to keep this to yourself. There were two threads in a loop around the wrist bones. From the adhesive he found on them, John knows they came from a piece of duct tape and thinks the wrists had been taped together and the tape removed before the guy was buried. Whoever pulled off the tape didn’t notice the threads.”

  “But that could mean that somebody…”

  “Killed him? That’s what it makes you think, all right. John wants to know who. He’s taking this one slow and careful. It may be a while till we know much more.”

  She laid the photo of the necklace on the table and stared at him, thinking hard. “Did John find out who he is?”

  “Not yet. Two Anchorage shooting victims and a guy somebody stabbed in Nome came into the lab all at once, day before yesterday, so he’s been swamped. Said to tell you he’d get back to it soon. What he actually said was, ‘The old guy’s been in the ground so long he won’t mind waiting awhile longer.’”

  Jessie smiled, hearing Timmons’s gravelly voice in the secondhand words.

  The conversation moved to other things—a girl Becker was dating, the construction under way in Jessie’s yard. It was half an hour before Becker left, off duty and headed home.

  She made herself some eggs, bacon, an
d hash browns. Becker had forgotten to take the picture of the butterfly necklace; it still lay on the table, and, fascinated, she examined it again as she ate, wondering how it had ever wound up in the lost grave of an old man who might have frozen to death, might have been murdered and buried sometime afterward, maybe around this same time of year.

  Tired and knowing she had another strenuous day with the dogs ahead of her, Jessie readied herself for bed. Then, before propping herself on pillows to read until she grew sleepy, she turned off the lights, opened the door, and stood looking out into the clearing with its surrounding birch trees, their slender trunks so white they almost glowed in the late northern light. As she watched the gray evening shadows steal color from the new green of the birch leaves, she was reminded that in about a week, the summer solstice would swing the year on its hinges again and the days would begin to shorten toward winter.

  From somewhere among the trees, a hint of wood smoke drifted in on a breath of breeze that whispered through the birch leaves—her neighbor taking comfort from the cool night air in the glow of a fire. The dog yard was quiet, all her mutts comfortably settled for the night.

  She took a deep breath and leaned against the metal door frame, content with what her senses brought her, and was rewarded with the soft call of an owl from somewhere close in the dark under the trees, like someone blowing gently into an empty bottle. Whoo. A silence. Then, whoo again. Such a deadly fierceness of feathers for a small bird, she thought as she listened, a silent shadow, armed like a Scythian with scimitar beak and talons, hunting in the night for the unwary mouse or shrew.

  “Good luck, owl.”