Cold Company

by Sue Henry

  The iceberg stayed where it landed, impaled in the sand and silt, but Caswell’s plane slid into the flood, where it was tumbled and rolled down the valley, parts of it rising and sinking in the muddy water till it finally disappeared altogether.

  The water rose until it reached Jessie and pooled around her, tugging gently at the sand around her legs, but was no immediate threat. It was cold and numbed some of the pain of her knee, so she simply sat and waited till Hank came splashing up with Stevie, ankle-deep in water. Becker and Pat also waded over to where she sat and moved to see what they could do for Dell Mitchell, whom the water had not reached.

  When the helicopter flew in, there was just enough room for it to land. The paramedics collected Jessie, Stevie, and Dell, leaving the other three to walk back to where they had left their vehicles. Everything else, explanations included, could wait until later—or until the water went down.

  31

  ON A SUNNY MORNING IN AUGUST, JESSIE ARNOLD stood in her yard and, with appreciation and relief, assessed the finished log cabin that stood before her. She had just turned from watching Vic Prentice steer the Winnebago motor home down the drive and onto Knik Road, on his way to another building site, leaving her alone on her property for the first time in months.

  The new cabin rose in the footprint of the old, chinked and sealed against the weather, windows and doors installed, front porch protected beneath its overhanging roof, broad steps leading up from the ground. On the porch sat a bench, a small table, and three outdoor chairs, including a rocker that had been a gift from Oscar at a surprise housewarming party the previous evening. The symmetry of the green metal roof with its pair of dormers pleased her, as did the color of the new logs that formed the walls, strong and stable, above the basement.

  Now that she had examined the exterior of her new residence, it was time to go inside, for there were still finishing touches to be added and decisions to be made, though not as many as Jessie had anticipated. The construction had seemed endless and, at the same time, quickly over. Winter would soon be on the way and she was glad to know that, once again, she would be secure and warm.

  As she crossed to where Tank stood at the end of his tether, she limped a little, favoring the knee in which she had torn a tendon in her fall down Mount Palmer in June. The injury had required surgery and had taken her out of the construction game for several long weeks when she was unable to do much more than let it heal and watch the work go on without her. Now, even though she wore a brace, she remained cautious, knowing it would be months until the tendon healed completely and the surgeon declared her fit. There would be no sled dog racing this winter, no training runs, no heavy kennel work.

  As she released Tank to come indoors with her, she looked out over her empty dog yard and missed the rest of her mutts. Except for a few old-timers, they had been trucked away to join those of Lynn Ehlers, who had offered to care for them with the help of the friend whose kennel he shared.

  Lynn had spent a lot of time with Jessie during the summer. At first, when she came home from three days in the hospital, he had showed up every evening to take care of her, making as casual an assumption as the one he had made after the plane crash. When she began to be able to do more for herself, his visits dropped off to three or four evenings a week—his days full of kennel chores for more dogs than he had anticipated. He was easygoing about their relationship, never demanding, never pushy. She had no idea where their friendship would lead, if it led anywhere, and they had not discussed it, which was fine with her, and comfortable.

  It’s going to be a quiet winter, Jessie thought, as she moved to the steps and cautiously climbed them, slowed by the brace. What am I going to do with myself? But refusing to allow her thinking to drift in that direction, she turned it back to her new house.

  The door was painted green to match the roof, and on it hung a shiny brass knocker in the shape of another log cabin, ARNOLD engraved over its tiny door. The knocker had arrived shortly after her old cabin burned, sent from Minnesota by a family friend, Janet Korpi, when she learned that Jessie planned to rebuild. Here’s a little cabin, while you wait for the bigger new one, she had written. Hope you’ll soon be able to put it on the door where it belongs. Jessie loved it and had kept it as a promise, not only of an eventual completion of her building project but of the generous spirit of friends in distant places. She smiled as she opened the door, first giving it a single rap with the knocker that echoed slightly in the large room into which she stepped.

  Inside, the evidence of friends was overwhelming. Dozens of people had come the night before, bringing a party with them: food, drink, and gifts of all kinds, knowing how much Jessie had lost in the fire.

  Hank and Stevie had showed up with a huge sofa similar to the one that had burned. He had found it in some secondhand furniture shop and successfully refinished its wooden frame and retied the springs, while Stevie applied new upholstery and made a whole herd of colorful pillows. They had lugged it in with much assistance and laughter and deposited it in front of the potbellied woodstove—one of the few things Jessie had been able to rescue from the ashes and refurbish.

  From where she stood by the door, Jessie could see that atop that stove sat another salvaged item, a cast-iron dragon—repainted bright green during her period of enforced inactivity. Returned to its rightful place, its base filled with water, it would huff and puff humidifying steam from its nostrils through the freeze-dried winter months.

  Ben and Linda Caswell had greeted her with hugs and a whole new set of pots and pans. “You’ll need them for these,” Linda told her, depositing a box of vegetables from her garden in the kitchen.

  Cas was doing well, his injuries from the crash healed, and Linda said he was driving her crazy with proposals for a new plane. “He’s like a kid in a candy store,” she said, grinning. “Everything he looks at is bigger and shinier. He can’t make up his mind.”

  Oscar arrived with several things besides the rocker: a keg of beer, a huge kettle of his famous chili, and a bright red sweatshirt with OSCAR’S OTHER PLACE lettered across the front. His new pub had been open for almost a month, thanks to the help of his many patrons, who had splashed paint, built shelves, moved in a new pool table and bar stools, and generally got in each other’s way to get it done in record time. Winter was coming, and there was unanimous determination that their favorite watering hole be open before the snow fell.

  When it was, they had celebrated appropriately, then turned their attention to Jessie’s place, arriving in droves to hang lighting fixtures, splash more paint, install kitchen cupboards and countertops, and lay carpeting. Whatever needed doing, they did, leaving Jessie to direct their efforts from a recliner, provided by Vic Prentice, to support her injured knee. The volunteer work crew finished in days what would have taken her all winter to accomplish.

  With part of the insurance money from her old house, Jessie had picked out a big brass bed to replace the one destroyed in the fire. Across it she had spread her favorite quilt, snatched in her escape from the burning cabin. With both hands she smoothed it—bright with silver stars scattered across a representation of the northern lights that swept diagonally across—and felt at home.

  There were many other gifts, serious and humorous, that had not been there the day before, and most of the evening full of friends and fun had given Jessie a great deal of pleasure. It had also included two surprises: one a shocker of questionable taste and the other supremely welcome. Both had included flowers.

  The first had come with reporter Gary Huddleston, who arrived when the housewarming party was well under way. Jessie, busy talking to Linda Caswell in the kitchen, didn’t see him come in. He walked directly across the room and, when she turned in response to his greeting, handed her a vase containing a single red rose.

  She stood staring at it, appalled, color draining from her face, unable to say a word. Then she simply opened her hand and let it fall to shatter into fragments on the floor.

 
“What the hell!” Lynn Ehlers had seen and attempted to intercept the tasteless gift but arrived too late. He grabbed Huddleston by the arm and swung him around. “Are you crazy or just totally sleazy?” he demanded.

  Jessie’s friends and neighbors grew silent, startled and listening.

  “I’m just trying to apologize,” the reporter said defensively, yanking his arm away.

  “Well, of all the stupid—”

  “Lynn?” Jessie had recovered her voice and laid a hand on his shoulder. “I think this is a little different than it seems. Isn’t it, Mr. Huddleston?”

  She paused to stare at him, narrowly evaluating his embarrassed expression. Under her direct assessment, he flushed a deeper shade of red and looked down at the remains of the vase littering the floor between them. She nodded, satisfied that what she had finally figured out was correct. “You sent, or brought, those other three roses, didn’t you?”

  “I was just trying to apologize,” he burst out. “I didn’t know…I didn’t mean—”

  “You didn’t mean to break into the motor home I was living in? You didn’t mean to scare me half to death?” Jessie asked him, interrupting his stammered attempt to explain.

  “I thought—”

  “Somehow, I don’t really care what you thought,” she told him in disgust. “It was unforgivable. Now I’d like you to leave my house.”

  The reporter wheeled and walked back out the door without another word.

  Linda Caswell, with mop and dustpan, removed the floral remains from the floor, conversation resumed, and the party continued.

  “Jessie?” Lynn questioned quietly. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she assured him. “We’ll talk about it later, but it’s good to know about the roses, don’t you think? He’s a worm, but it’s still a relief. He brought them—but J.B. broke in to spray them with that evil-smelling stuff.”

  The second surprise guest was warmly welcomed by Jessie and everyone who knew him. For the first time since their terrible day on the river, Dell Mitchell came back to Jessie’s house. He stepped through the door in the latter stages of the party and presented Jessie with a huge bouquet of bright blooms in a crystal vase.

  “Not a rose among ’em,” he told her, with a reassuring smile. “Just flowers that smell good naturally.”

  As soon as the resulting laughter faded, Jessie had to explain the wave of amusement that had followed his pronouncement.

  She was glad to know he would be okay, though he still tired easily. They sat together, not saying much, but enjoying the enthusiastic group that moved and talked around them.

  She had seen him only once, at a distance, since their mutual helicopter ride to a hospital in Anchorage. The skeletal remains removed from the grave Jessie had found in her woods had indeed turned out to be the sister for whom Bonnie Russell had searched for so long, so she and Jo-Jo were laid to rest in an Anchorage cemetery at the same time. Phil Becker had taken Jessie to the simple ceremony, which no family member had attended. Dell had been there as well, but had disappeared after the service before she had an opportunity to speak to him.

  They had been in the hospital at the same time and she knew his condition had been critical for several days, a result of the blood he had lost and the long hours of exposure and cold. When he was safely recovering, he had told Becker what he knew and what he believed about J.B. Between them and the rest of the evidence, they had worked out a theory that Becker had, in turn, shared with Jessie long before Huddleston appeared at her housewarming party.

  “We’ll never be able to prove that J.B. had anything to do with the old man’s death,” Becker had told her, one evening in July, leaning on his elbows at the table in the Winnebago, a beer in hand. “But Dell is convinced he was responsible and thinks it has something to do with the women J.B. was killing at the time. Jo-Jo Miller may have been the first.”

  “But why did he bury her in these woods?” Jessie had asked, resettling her injured leg, which was propped on a pillowed stool in front of her. “He never lived here.”

  “Need help with that?” Becker had asked, nodding toward her leg.

  “Nope, I got it, thanks. Why didn’t he bury her up the river, like the rest?”

  “We wondered about that,” Becker had continued. “From some old records, we found out that he was evidently renting a place across the road from this property. We can’t know for sure, but he probably thought James O’Dell’s woods would be a good hiding place with no way to trace the body back to him. Dell and I think that somehow the old guy must have found out. Maybe he found Jo-Jo’s grave in his woods, maybe he even witnessed the burial. So we guess J.B. killed him to shut him up. From what Timmons learned when he examined the bones you found in the excavation, J.B. wanted it to look like a natural death, with no wounds on the body. He must have taped the old man up and left him out in the woods somewhere to freeze to death in his underwear. Then in the spring he buried the body on the south side of the cabin, where the ground thawed earliest. After that, having developed a taste for it, he went on killing women, copycatting Hansen’s style and hoping his victims would be attributed to Hansen.”

  “What was the deal with the roses?” Jessie had asked. “He must have had a reason for sending them to his intended victims.”

  Becker had taken a long sip of his beer, considering.

  “Well, we can’t ask him now, but serial killing, like rape, is a lot about power and being able to get away with it. Some serial killers take souvenirs, like the butterfly necklace. Some contact the police to take credit for their murders. They like to be recognized as smarter than law enforcement. The roses were probably like that for J.B., a way to say I’m coming to get you and there’s nothing you can do about it. Who knows?”

  “So he was coming after me?”

  “If he sent you the roses.”

  Jessie had stared at him, startled. “You think he didn’t?”

  Becker had shaken his head. “I’ve given it some thought. It may be a total coincidence. The other roses came from an Anchorage florist.”

  “But J.B. was working out here and I live out here. Wouldn’t a local florist make sense?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. You got any other ideas?”

  She had given up speculation upon finding out that the unknown killer was sending roses to his victims. Going back to wondering who might have sent them was too much. She could not know she would soon learn that Becker was right and her roses hadn’t actually come from J.B.—just their artificial scent.

  “Who cares?” She had sighed. “Maybe someday we’ll find out for sure.”

  “Whatever. If you do find out, let me know.”

  “Sure.” She had moved on to a more important question. “What made Dell suspect him back when he killed Bonnie’s sister? Was Dell living with his uncle?” Jessie had frowned in confusion. There didn’t seem to be a connection between the two men.

  “No,” Becker had explained. “But the old man told his nephew there was a guy he didn’t like who was hanging around before any of this happened. James O’Dell valued his privacy and resented the intrusion. He said this kid was bothering him. But Dell never met him, just wondered about it after his uncle disappeared. He went to the trouble of checking up on J.B. and didn’t like what he found out. He watched J.B. and there were suspicious things that happened, but nothing that would definitely point to him.

  “Then Hansen was arrested and convicted and the killing stopped, so Dell, unable to prove anything, let it go. But when he read in an Oregon paper that women were disappearing again in Anchorage, he came back convinced that J.B. was responsible. When Dell located him, he got himself hired onto Vic Prentice’s construction crew and watched, collecting information on his own till he knew he was right, but still couldn’t prove it. Your finding the old man’s bones was part of what persuaded him. He went upriver after J.B. because he was afraid we’d never catch him or be able to make a case if we did. Dell may have been right about that,” Becker had
admitted ruefully. “It would have been better if he’d trusted us and told us what he knew, but he wasn’t about to let J.B. get away a second time, whatever it cost him.”

  Jessie had considered it thoughtfully. “He’s lucky he didn’t get himself killed.”

  “Yeah. Well—he almost did.”

  She thought about it again, as she sat next to Dell at the party, glad he had come and was doing well.

  “Dell,” she said, remembering there was one thing she had meant to ask him at the cemetery in Anchorage. “Have you buried your uncle’s remains yet?”

  “No.” He smiled a little sadly. “I will, though, before I leave Alaska.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “I’ve got a good year-round job waiting for me in Oregon. But my Uncle Jim loved this state, so I think I’ll leave him in Alaska. He was a great old guy—opinionated but fair, always fair.”

  He grinned, remembering the man he had loved.

  “Where will you leave him?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’ll figure it out.”

  Jessie considered for a moment, then asked hesitantly, “Would you like to bury him here somewhere, on familiar ground?”

  Surprised at the suggestion, Dell turned to see if she was serious.

  “Are you sure you’d be okay with that?”

  She nodded. “It seems sort of fitting, doesn’t it?”

  He had agreed, pleased and grateful. Jessie knew that sometime in the next week or two, before the ground froze, they would find a suitable spot in the woods and lay James O’Dell to rest in a place he had known and loved.

  She also knew that having his grave on her property wouldn’t bother her—not at all.