A Fine and Bitter Snow

by Dana Stabenow

  “Hey,” a voice said from the deck.

  She looked up, to behold Jim Chopin peering at her through the window. She didn’t notice that the sight of him didn’t cause its usual knee-jerk antipathy. “Hey, yourself.”

  He came in. “What are you doing here?”

  She waved a hand. “Trying to clean up for when Ruthe gets home.”

  He looked at her and forbore from saying what was on both their minds.

  “You?” she said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I wanted to see if I’d remembered to lock the door.”

  “There’s no lock.”

  He examined the doorknob. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Dina didn’t believe in locks in the Bush. Said if she and Ruthe were both away from home and somebody got lost in a blizzard that she wanted them to be able to get in.”

  “I don’t know who’d stagger up this mountain in a blizzard, but it’s a nice thought.”

  “I caught a couple of guys poking through the rubble.”

  His eyes sharpened. “Who?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t know them. I ran them off.”

  “Get tags?”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t think they’ll be back. And I’ll get Bernie to spread the word that I’m looking after the place.”

  Which all by itself would be enough to keep the cabin and the surrounding property sacrosanct, Jim thought. At least for a while, at least until they knew if Ruthe would live.

  “I hear you got the guy,” she said.

  “Yeah. Knife in hand. Blood wasn’t even dry on it. Tests already confirmed Ruthe’s and Dina’s blood on it.”

  “That was quick.”

  “The governor himself called the crime lab. Love them or hate them, Ruthe and Dina helped make a lot of the history of this state. He ordered the flags to fly at half-staff today.”

  In spite of herself, Kate was impressed. “A nice gesture.”

  “Yeah, ought to pick him up a few more votes in the next election.” Gal’s head poked up over the back of the chair, and Jim said, “Hey, Gal, you came back! Good girl. Thank god. I couldn’t find her after she took off.”

  He told Kate what had happened, and she laughed, surprising both of them. He picked up Gal and sat down with her in his lap, where she immediately curled up, purring and kneading. Mutt padded over and rested her chin on the arm of the chair, and Jim freed a hand to scratch her ears.

  Kate sat down and started going through the paperwork again. When next she looked up, Jim had his head against the back of the chair and his eyes closed. Gal was curled into a soft black ball on his lap and Mutt was stretched out on the floor with her head on one of his feet.

  It was quite a domestic scene. Kate went back to the paperwork, but her mind was more on the man across from her.

  They called him “Chopper Jim” because of his preferred method of transportation, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, although he flew fixed-wing, too, and was reliable and skilled on both craft.

  They also called him “the Father of the Park,” for his equally reliable and skilled seduction of pretty much every available female inside Park boundaries. Although now that Kate thought of it, she couldn’t remember any children whose mothers claimed he had fathered them. A courtesy title, perhaps, and Kate was a little startled when the thought made her smile.

  He was originally from California, which figured. He had the same coloring as Ethan, only darker, and he was tall, also like Ethan, but he was much broader in the beam. He looked like a buff Beach Boy, and she’d bet he had spent his entire childhood in the water with a surfboard. What was he doing in Alaska, three thousand miles and one time zone away, with no sand, no surf, and no beach bunnies? It was a question she’d never asked him.

  He’d stuck. He’d been posted to the Park the year before she graduated from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and they had howdied when she spent her vacations in the Park, but they hadn’t really shook until she had quit working as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney and had come home with attitude to spare and a scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear. Unlike many of the Park rats, he hadn’t treated her as fragile, about to break. Instead, he’d made a move, she had rebuffed it, and that had set the pattern of their relationship—she couldn’t call it friendship, not even after Bering—from then until now.

  As a trooper, he had what she thought was a real understanding of the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law, and sometimes, she had to admit, the almost-inspired ability to enforce one without violating the other. That business with Cindy and Ben Bingley two breakups before. And Johnny this fall, when he had sided with the boy—and her—against the boy’s mother and legal guardian, in essence aiding and abetting what could be construed in a court of law as kidnapping.

  Emaa had approved of him, in her austere fashion. That alone was enough to guarantee Kate’s antagonism. For the first time, Kate wondered if it had been deliberate. Emaa had been a master manipulator, and while she was alive, Kate had fought a constant rear-guard action to keep her grandmother from taking over her life. Emaa had liked Jack, too. Although Kate had brought Jack home as a fait accompli, already a fixture in her life, and Emaa would have found acceptance more expedient than antagonism. Emaa had been the compleat political animal, even in her relationships with family members. A smile curled the corners of Kate’s mouth, and her eyes strayed again to the man sleeping across the table from her.

  Not that she would have felt differently about Jim if Emaa had not approved of him. She finished neatening up the paperwork and stacked it in a pile, dividing it by year with file folder separators. The pile was tall enough to teeter. She moved it to a corner, where she leaned it up against a wall and weighted it down with a frayed tome four inches thick, Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. What on earth had the old girls needed with that?

  The stove was burning low and she added a couple of logs before going to the kitchen and setting the kettle to boil. She was hungry, and with a glance over her shoulder, she pulled out a couple of cans of cream of tomato soup and a package of saltines. There was butter in the cooler outside, miraculously spared by the attacker, or perhaps just overlooked.

  Jim stirred when she set the tray down on the coffee table. “Hey,” he said, yawning. “Guess I fell asleep.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Soup’s on.”

  “Be right back.” He gently assisted Gal from his lap and stepped outside. Mutt, with similar intentions, and finding herself on the wrong side of the door, barked once. The door opened and she slipped out.

  “Mutt’s causing havoc with the local wildlife,” Jim said when he came back in. “I saw her flush out a couple of spruce hens. Good thing the girls aren’t here to see.”

  “What a phony. She’s not that hungry; she chowed down on the better part of a moose yesterday.”

  “Dogs just wanna have fun.”

  “That dog does. Have some soup and crackers.”

  “Thanks.”

  They ate in silence. “Thanks,” he said again when he was finished, sitting back and combing his hair back with one hand. “Sorry I fell asleep. I didn’t think I was that tired.”

  “You up all night with the perp?”

  “Higgins? Pretty much.”

  “That’s his name?”

  “Riley K. Higgins, that’s him.”

  “What set him off?”

  “He’s not talking.” He buttered another cracker. “He’s pretty pitiful, really. We got a make on his prints. He’s a vet, two tours in Vietnam, never really got back to the world. Came from Carbondale, Illinois, originally. His dad’s dead. I talked a little to his mom.”

  “How was she?”

  He bit into the cracker and chewed meditatively. “Like her son died in Vietnam and she’s been mourning his loss ever since. She sounds frail. I didn’t talk to her long. I called the local police chief. He said Higgins was on the s
treet, got picked up for pretty much everything at one time or another—indecent exposure for peeing in an alley, drunk in public, disturbing the peace. Got beat up once, bad enough to be in the hospital and dry out. Didn’t take. He also got run in for drugs a time or two, but only marijuana, nothing serious. Nothing expensive anyway. Nothing violent, either, which bothers me some. Usually there’s a pattern you can trace back when something like this happens.

  “The chief said he disappeared last summer. Said the family’s a good bunch and that they had done everything they could for him, but he thinks that by the time Higgins disappeared, they were tired and maybe a little relieved that he was gone. He’s got a sister and a brother, nieces and nephews. All still live in Carbondale. Mom, too. None of them made much of an effort to find him.” On the verge of buttering another cracker, Jim lost his appetite and put down the knife. “I don’t know what he was doing here. He doesn’t seem to have any visible means of support.”

  “He might have been one of Dina’s projects.”

  “‘Projects?’”

  Kate nodded. “They had those cabins up the hill, empty all winter. It bothered Dina, and maybe Ruthe, too, although she used to give Dina a hard time about Dina’s big idea.”

  “Which was?”

  Kate shrugged. “Nothing major. Dina thought the cabins ought to be put to some use is all.”

  “So they rented them out to drifters? What the hell were two lone women, one of them getting close to feeble, doing inviting weirdos to move in up the goddamn hill from them?”

  “They were careful,” Kate said. “Yeah, okay, obviously not careful enough this year. But they’d been doing it for years without incident.”

  “They have somebody up there every winter?”

  “Almost. One or two every year. They booted them out come breakup and the first paying customer.”

  “They stay booted?”

  “Pretty much. Dina told me one time that she was giving them breathing space, a chance to find their feet. See if they liked the Park enough to stay. She said ninety percent of them didn’t, and they never saw them again.” She smiled.

  “What?”

  “They let Mac Devlin stay up there the winter his cabin burned.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.”

  Jim smiled, too.

  “Well, I better get back to it,” Kate said.

  Jim looked around. “You’ve done a lot. Looks almost back to normal.” He noticed a little pile on the small table next to Dina’s chair. “What’s this?”

  Kate looked. “Oh, that. I’m getting some pictures together for Dina’s potlatch. They don’t have much in the way of people pictures.”

  “When is it?”

  “Saturday. At the school gym.”

  “Bernie’ll be annoyed.”

  “The Roadhouse is too small. Ruthe and Dina have been here too long and have too many friends.”

  “I suppose.” He hesitated. “Did you think about waiting?”

  “For what?”

  “Ruthe.”

  Kate paused. “Yeah,” she said, “I thought about it. But…I don’t know. Ruthe was—she is a ‘fish or cut bait’ kind of person. She’d say, Get it done.”

  “Not the sentimental type.”

  “No,” Kate said, smiling a little. “Dina was the idealist. Ruthe is always the pragmatist. The art of the practical, that’s Ruthe’s specialty.”

  “Yeah,” he said, giving the copy of National Geographic he held a reminiscent smile. The cover featured a story entitled “Gates of the Arctic National Park.” “I remember that about her.”

  There was a moment of electric silence.

  For no reason at all, the hair stood straight up on the back of his neck. He looked across the table to find her eyes fixed on him, narrowed and hostile. The look pulled him to his feet, ready for fight or flight. “Kate?”

  It was purely involuntary, a knee-jerk reaction. She didn’t stop to think about it; she just picked up the little tin lockbox and let fly. Its arc was swift and her aim was true. The box caught him just above the left eyebrow and burst open. A paper blizzard fluttered out and down.

  “Ouch!” Jim slapped a hand to his eye and rocked back a step. “That hurt! Damn it, Kate!”

  “Is there a woman left in this Park you haven’t slept with!” She grabbed a coffee mug and let fly with that, too.

  The mug missed, which was a good thing, since he never saw it coming. He heard it slam into the sink and shatter, though. Warm fluid was running down the side of his face and obscuring his vision. He took a stumbling step forward, trying to preempt future missiles. He nearly fell over the coffee table, which movement, fortuitously for him, caused her to miss his head with the big red Webster’s Unabridged. It hit his right shoulder instead.

  “Shit!”

  “What’s with all the noise?” Dandy Mike said, peeking in the door, and ducked back just in time to avoid the poker. It missed Jim, striking the wall next to the door instead and landing at his feet with a clang. “Never mind, none of my business, just checking in. I’ll be leaving now,” said Dandy Mike, his voice barely audible over the sound of feet rapidly retreating down the stairs.

  She’d snatched up an Aladdin lamp, the reservoir still half-filled with oil, when he tackled her and wrestled her onto the couch. The chimney fell off the lamp and miraculously did not break as it rolled beneath the table.

  “Stop it, Kate,” he said, breathing hard. “Damn it, I said stop it!”

  This as she dropped the lamp and he got an elbow to the jaw that made his teeth snap together painfully. He caught her hands and pushed them into the small of her back. She head-butted him. “Ouch! Jesus!” The only way to immobilize her was to lie on her full length, which he did. It wasn’t even funny how long he’d been waiting to get her horizontal and this was the only way he could get it done.

  “Get off me!”

  “What the hell is the matter with you!”

  She tried to knee him in the groin. He shifted at the last possible minute. “Kate,” he said. He was angry now. “Knock it off.”

  She heaved beneath him, trying to throw him off, and they both rolled to the floor, Kate on the bottom. She inhaled sharply. “Get off me!” He’d lost his grip on her hands in the fall, and she tried to hit him. He grabbed her hands again and held them over her head.

  “Jesus!” he said. “What the hell is the matter with you!”

  “Get off me, you son of a bitch! Get off!”

  Their eyes met, hers narrow and furious, his widening as realization struck.

  “You’re jealous,” he said.

  She erupted in a fury of denial, kicking, butting, hitting, elbows, knees, feet, everything in action. “Let me go!”

  He felt as if he were trying to hold on to an earthquake. “Christ! Stop it, Kate! Ouch!” This when she kicked him in the shin. “Kate!” She tried to head-butt him again. She was strong and agile, but he was bigger and getting angrier. After another attempt on his balls, he kneed her legs apart and pressed her down.

  She froze. He froze. Sight of the edge of the cliff they were about to go over came to them both at the same moment, but then he’d been hard since they hit the floor.

  “Kate,” he said, her name an unrecognizable husk of sound. He bent his head.

  “No!” She erupted again, fighting, clawing, even trying to bite him.

  Maybe it was the click of her teeth in his ear. Maybe it was just the result of all that friction. Whatever it was, something inside him slipped off the chain, something famished and feral and prowling, something totally out of his control. He could smell it, smell the need in her, the craving. It was as strong as his, as basic as his, and if it wasn’t, he didn’t care. He would take what he wanted anyway. His hand tightened around her wrists and she cried out. He used the other to yank up the hem of her shirt and tear off her bra. Her breasts were small and firm, the nipples hard and brown, and he took them into his mouth in turn, suckling as
if he were starving. She cried out again and arched up, her body a tense bow. He slid his hand between her legs and rubbed the heel of his hand hard against her. She screamed then, in ecstasy or outrage, her body pressing into him, her head pressed against the floor, and he went for the snap of her jeans before she could start fighting him again.

  But she wasn’t fighting him now. She had one hand free and knotted in his hair, holding his head still while she kissed him, her teeth and tongue voracious, one hand clawing at his shirt, one leg hooked around his waist. The coffee table got in the way and she kicked it over. It smacked into the unsteady pile of paperwork leaning up against the wall and the classics dictionary came crashing to the floor, barely missing their heads.

  Oblivious, she ran her teeth down the side of his neck and he nearly came then and there. “Wait, damn it, wait, wait,” he said, tugging desperately at her jeans. Her hips gave a quick wriggle and the jeans slid, oh thank god, all the way down; he managed to pull them off one leg before she went for his belt. One second he was free and in the next he was caught again, driving into her, the one place he’d wanted to be for a year and a half, longer than that, an eternity of wanting, back where it was tight and hot and wet and Kate, Kate, Kate.

  He was pretty sure she came again. He knew he had, hard enough to wonder why the floor hadn’t splintered beneath them. Hard enough to wonder if he’d hurt her.

  Jim Chopin in the sack was all about control, all about subtlety and skill and patience. He liked women, and he was self-aware enough to know that he was one up on most men in that he didn’t fear them, either. He liked the getting and giving of mutual pleasure, mutually arrived at, mutually satisfying. He was proud of that, taking a certain amount of smug satisfaction in his expertise. He was not into pain, he liked to take his time, and it just wasn’t any fun if his partner wasn’t enjoying herself as much as he was. Life was too short to have bad sex.