Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  Silence.

  Kate took another drink. The Fresca was getting pretty low in the glass. She craned her neck to look at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got ten minutes left on my break. I was thinking of taking a little nap.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Dunaway said.

  Kate put some steel into her voice. “Sure you are. You’re leaving this room.”

  “I’m not done asking questions.”

  “Tonight you are.” Kate put her now-empty glass on the desk, let her head fall back against the chair, and closed her eyes. Probably what she should have done when Dunaway walked in.

  After a moment Dunaway’s chair creaked, and the door opened and closed again, shutting out the noise of the bar.

  Kate opened her eyes and looked down at Mutt. “Another fine mess I’ve gotten us into, did you say?”

  Mutt’s wise yellow eyes blinked up at her.

  “Don’t you just hate being right all the time?” Kate said.

  Dunaway had left the bar when she came out of Bill’s office, and Kate went back to work. She kept the bar clean, washed glasses, ran food and tickets, and made countless rounds with a loaded tray and an ingratiating smile, which might have been the most difficult part of the whole job. Her ass was patted, slapped, and pinched, and one of the two young men playing cribbage made repeated attempts to see her later. “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she told him.

  Well, maybe only his much older sister. His enthusiasm, if anything, increased. Cougar Town.

  At the end of the evening her back ached, her feet hurt, she smelled of soured beer and her own sweat, and she’d earned enough in tips to recoup the ATV rental, plus.

  She had against all expectation picked up some potentially useful local information. A lot of people were sleeping with a lot of other people, none of whom she knew. The mayor and the town council were on a cost-cutting frenzy, and a lot of their employees were busy drinking down their savings before they got laid off. The logic of that escaped Kate, but then she didn’t drink herself. Finn Grant’s recent demise was toasted over more than a few of the tables she waited on. Some were more celebratory than others, and those Kate paid special attention to, flirting if it would let her linger as the conversation played out.

  The consensus appeared to be that Finn Grant was as great a pilot as he was execrable a human being. One man did wonder out loud how an aircraft that somebody like Finn Grant flew every day could possibly have broken in flight, but he was very nearly laughed out of his chair and the conversation immediately degenerated into a round robin of stories of every time anyone at the table had been on a flight with mechanical difficulties. All of them, it appeared, most of them being Alaskans born and bred. Kate could have contributed a few stories of her own.

  “You heard about the fight, didn’t you? Finn going head-to-head with Wy Chouinard? I hear she threatened to kill him.”

  The speaker was a short thickset man with one gnarled hand wrapped around a bottle and the other a possessive presence on the knee of the woman seated next to him. Everyone at his table leaned in, and he gave a sage nod and burped for emphasis. “Fact. Day before he died. Mac McCormick was there, he heard it all.”

  “Who hasn’t threatened to kill Finn Grant?” another man said, and a third, leaning over the back of the booth who appeared more sober than the rest, said, “Consider the source. Never knew Mac not to dress up a story.”

  The first man, angry at having his story stepped on and probably unhappy at being made to look no-account in front of his girl, said, “Wasn’t the first argument they ever had, and she’s a pilot, and she’s in and out of Newenham airport every day.”

  Only too true, Kate thought.

  The speaker glared at her, and she aimed a bland smile at the table. “How’s everything, folks?” before giving the table an unnecessary swipe with a bar rag and moving on.

  So Campbell hadn’t been an alarmist when he said the town was talking about his wife’s very public and most unfortunately timed fight with Finn Grant. Of course, this was winter, in rural Alaska, and that was always the time and place when the most outrageous stories were made up of whole cloth, and when the bloodiest fights started over the most ridiculous causes. Cabin fever was as real a condition as it was pernicious and pervasive. Months of unrelenting dark and cold would do that to a community. The smaller and more isolated the community, the worse the symptoms.

  When Bill closed and locked the door behind the last customer, she cocked an eyebrow in Kate’s direction. “Well?”

  Kate stretched. “It’s one way to get to know the community fast, I’ll say that.”

  “Better than you ever wanted to,” Bill said, going back around behind the bar. “One for the road?”

  Kate looked at the clock. A little after midnight. Not near enough time for everyone back at massa’s house to be settled down snug in their beds. “Sure,” she said. She went into Bill’s office and got her cell phone out of her jacket pocket. There were a couple of missed calls, one from Jim with no message and another from Annie Mike with voice mail, asking her to call back whenever Kate got the message. She didn’t say why, but she sounded tense.

  Kate deleted the message instead.

  A tall cool glass filled with ice and Fresca waited for her at the bar. On the other side, Bill had pulled up a stool and uncapped a bottle of Alaskan Amber. “It’s good that you don’t drink,” she said. “Have you ever?”

  Kate shook her head, inhaling half her glass in one gulp. On your feet for six hours straight was a dehydrating experience.

  “Why not?”

  Kate looked up and met Bill’s eyes. In Bush Alaska, you didn’t ask people about their past prior to their arrival in your community. If they volunteered, well and good, but you didn’t outright ask. It was not considered good manners, especially when much of the time the new arrival was leaving something behind that did not bear close examination, like an angry spouse, or the law.

  On the other hand, Bill had given Kate a job at first sight, no questions asked. “Both my parents were alcoholics,” Kate said, “so I’ve got the gene. Always been terrified that it would get hold of me.”

  “But it’s more about control,” Bill said.

  It wasn’t a question. Kate’s smile was wry. “Partly.” She shrugged. “Maybe mostly.” She laughed a little. “Plus the stuff doesn’t even pass the nose test with me. Can’t stand the smell.”

  Bill’s laugh was big and belly-shaking, if she’d had a belly. “And you’re working in a bar.”

  “I needed a job.”

  Something in the quality of the silence that followed her words made her look up, to find that Bill was giving her a steady, assessing look. “Did you?” she said. “Because you’re not a village girl on the run from an abusive family life.”

  Crap, Kate thought, but the time for dissimulation was apparently over. “What gave me away?”

  Bill snorted. “Well, for one thing you’re not a girl, you’re a woman, and the only scar you’ve got is old. For another, you’re way too articulate and self-assured.” She nodded at the bar. “Nothing out there threw you, not even when Teddy grabbed your thigh. I’ve had a lot of waitstaff, and that alone would have any one of them either in tears or lying down and seeing how wide they could spread their legs.”

  She was being deliberately crude, eyes on Kate to see how she took it. Kate neither blushed nor took offense. She knew only too well the tendency of village girls—and boys—alone for the first time in the big city to embrace victimhood as a matter of survival.

  “And you’re not from Togiak, either,” Bill said. “At a guess, I’d say … Cordova? Prince William Sound, anyway.”

  And Bill was the Newenham magistrate, which meant she had her own bullshit detector all broken in and oiled up and ready to engage gears. Well, local authorities were never happy when they discovered they had been left out of the loop. “I used to work for the Anchorage DA,” Kate said. “Nine years ago I moved into priva
te practice.”

  “A PI, huh?” Bill said. “That fits. And you’re in Newenham because—?”

  So, off with the cape and the mask. Kate had known she would be found out; she just hadn’t figured it to be within twenty-four hours of hitting town. She made a mental note to be careful in her dealings with the magistrate slash bar owner from that moment on. “Liam Campbell hired me to look into Finn Grant’s death.”

  “Did he.” Bill Billington took a long, meditative pull at her beer. “Any particular reason I wasn’t told?”

  “You’d have to ask him,” Kate said, which both of them thought was a little craven of her. She covered by adding in a brisk, businesslike voice, “So let me ask you some questions. Do you think Finn Grant was murdered?”

  Bill slid the bar rag up and down the wooden surface of the bar. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I do know that practically everyone who knew him wanted the bastard dead. With the possible exception of Hugh Reid.”

  Kate conjured up the image of the eagerish middle-aged guy in the safari suit fawning over Gabe McGuire at Eagle Air. “Grant’s partner.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the wife?”

  “Tina?” The temperature in the bar dropped perceptibly.

  Kate refused to be intimidated. “We always look first at the spouse. And not without cause, as you well know. Being the magistrate and all.”

  For a split second Bill looked angry, and in the next moment she laughed. “Yeah. Well, not this time. I’ve known Tina since I landed in Disneyham, and a saner person never lived. She’s not capable of murdering someone, let alone her husband. However much she—”

  “However much she what?”

  Bill hesitated, then grimaced. “Ah, shit. He screwed around on her with every woman between Unalaska and Kaktovik who was dumb enough to fall for his lame line. He damn near bankrupted her family fortune half a dozen times, and he had to have been the world’s worst father, neglectful, abusive—hell, downright oblivious.” Bill sighed. “No, not a lot of love lost between Finn and Tina. But she didn’t kill him.”

  “Did she know how to?”

  Bill got down from her stool and pitched their empties in the trash. “Find me someone within a thousand miles who didn’t.”

  Means, motive, and opportunity. In Kate’s line of work, that was called three strikes. Prudently, she did not say so. “Who else looks good?”

  “Not Wy Chouinard, for damn sure,” Bill said.

  Mutt, snoozing at Kate’s feet, woke up with a snort at the snap in Bill’s voice. “I didn’t ask you who you thought didn’t do it,” Kate said, her own voice calm. “I’m asking who you think did. If anyone.”

  “Oh, hell,” Bill said. “I’m sorry.” She moved her shoulders as if she were trying to shake something off. “Hard when it comes that close to home.”

  Kate looked down to meet Mutt’s great yellow eyes and remembered the last time someone had taken a shot at her and hit her dog instead. “Yeah.”

  “Christ, if it comes to that, I had motive myself. Half of Southwest Alaska came here to drink off their mad after he screwed them over, and half of them showed up in my court the next morning. I have a lot more leisure time now that Finn Grant is good and dead.” Her laugh was more of a bark.

  “Was Grant really that irresistible?” Kate said.

  Bill shrugged, ashamed of her flash of temper. “I never saw the attraction myself, but I watched him operate over this bar for the last twenty years. He was a big man, big voice, big spender. When he wanted something, he went at it a hundred and ten percent.” Her brow creased. “He was always a dog, but the last two years it was like his appetite doubled right across the board. There weren’t enough women for him to lay, enough businesses he could gobble up, enough money he could spend on his new toy out at Chinook.”

  “You said he nearly bankrupted his wife’s family,” Kate said. “If that’s the case, where did he get the money to upgrade to something like that FBO out at Chinook?”

  “You’ve seen it, have you?”

  “We stopped there on the way here, Chouinard had a mail drop. Even met a movie star.”

  Bill’s head came up. “Gabe McGuire?”

  Kate, surprised, said, “You know him?”

  Bill tipped her head back and let loose with a long, reverential whistle.

  Kate’s laugh was a little forced. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You guess? What’s wrong with you, you gay or a man in disguise? The guy’s a walking, talking incitement to riot.”

  Kate remembered McGuire on the Chinook tarmac that morning and thought again how much he reminded her of Jack. “How long has he been coming to Newenham?”

  “Gabe?” Bill thought. “About five years, I think. Give or take.”

  “‘Gabe’?” Kate said, one eyebrow going up.

  “Yes, Gabe,” Bill said. “We’re by way of being friends now, but as you can guess, the man likes his privacy when he comes north. We don’t mention him much to outsiders. Anyway, to answer your question, Finn has—had been hauling him out to Outuchiwanet Lodge ever since Gabe made it big enough to afford it. He hides out there for anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks, hunting, fishing. Sleeping and reading, mostly, he told me once. No radios, no TV, no phones, no Internet access, just a lake and mountains and the lodge.” Bill smiled. “About as pissed off as I’ve ever seen Gabe was when Finn told him that GCI was expanding cell coverage to the Bush communities north of here.”

  “What kind of hunting and fishing is he going to do in January?” Kate said.

  “Like I said,” Bill said with emphasis, “mostly he’s hiding out. Take a pretty rabid fan to get to Outouchiwanet from Newenham without a plane, and nobody around here, including Finn Grant, has ever ratted him out. Or will,” she added. “They all know Moses would eviscerate them if they did.”

  “Who’s Moses?” Kate said.

  “Moses Alakuyak,” Bill said with an inscrutable smile. “He’s, ah, what you could call the city father.”

  “Haven’t met him,” Kate said.

  “Believe me, you will.”

  * * *

  The clear day had segued into a clear night, with a sky full of stars and no moon. Kate held the four-wheeler to a medium speed to keep down the noise. Most of the houses and all the businesses she passed were dark, the Newenhamers all snug in their beds.

  She pulled in next to the garage, parked under the stairs up to her apartment, and killed the engine. She peeked around the corner and cursed beneath her breath. The only lights on in the plantation house, on in any house within a mile radius were in the corner room with the television. Through a gap in the drapes, she could see the flicker of the television screen reflected against the glass of the windows.

  She slipped upstairs and doffed boots and jacket. The clock read a quarter to two. What the hell was Oren watching at a quarter to two in the goddamn morning? Kate hated satellite television, not least because it kept people up past their normal bedtime.

  She decided to wait an hour, and laid down for a nap.

  At 3 A.M. she was back at the foot of the stairs, peering around the corner at the house. The television was still on. Fuck this. She went around the back of the garage, crept across the open space between the buildings, and slid along the wall to where she could inch up and hoist an eyeball over the windowsill. Behind her, Mutt was a gray ghost drifting over the snow.

  The television was on, all right, and Oren was in the room, but he was out, head lolling against the back of the couch, mouth open in a snore she could hear through the glass. His legs were crossed on the coffee table in front of the couch, knocking over one of the six empty bottles of Bud Light sitting on the tabletop. Tall black men chased a basketball across the television screen. While she watched, one of them launched a court-length pass worthy of the Kanuyaq Kings.

  She dropped back down and duck-walked around the back of the house. The office window was dark. She forced herself to wait an
d watch for five very long minutes. No lights, no movement. She hadn’t seen a dog or any other pets when she’d been inside the house yesterday afternoon, and she was hoping there weren’t any.

  She tested the window. It was a vinyl sash-weight, as new as the rest of the house. True to form, it wasn’t locked and slid up soundlessly at a touch. She told herself that she really should feel guilty about abusing Tina’s innocent hospitality in this way.

  She really should. “Stay,” she whispered to Mutt. “And for god’s sake give us a shout if you hear anything.”

  Mutt measured the distance between the ground and the windowsill. “Stay,” Kate whispered again, with more force this time. “I mean it, Mutt. Guard.”

  As she turned to pull herself up through the window, she heard Mutt’s butt hit the snow with a disgruntled sound.

  She eeled inside, walking forward on her hands until she could get a foot beneath her, and crouched beneath the window, one hand on the sill, listening. The sound of the television came dimly through the walls but that was all. She rose and stood to one side of the window looking out at the unmoving neighborhood. Silent still, silent all. She went softly across to the door. Should she lock it, or no? If she woke Tina or Oren, a locked door would slow them down and give her time to escape, her caped crusader identity intact. But if she locked it, they would know someone had been there when they couldn’t get in. She left it unlocked. Best-case scenario, no one ever knew she was here, and Mutt was all the DEW Line she would ever need.

  She pulled out a pencil flashlight and went to the computer on the desk. Password protected. She tried Tina’s birthday, her children’s birthdays, Finn Grant’s birthday, which information she had provided herself with before she left the Park. None of them worked, which raised her opinion of Tina’s intelligence a notch.

  Which meant Kate did things the hard way. Never mind the Paperwork Reduction Act, the paperless society had not yet truly arrived, so she could. She turned to the first filing cabinet.

  One thing being chair of the Niniltna Native Association had taught her was how to read legal and financial documents.