A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  This time she turned and walked down the rise. Kate watched her pass inside the doors of the admin building with a crease between her brows.

  “So, we leaving any time this century?” George said. “My time’s money these days, Kate.”

  Seven

  So,” Jim said, “he had a girlfriend.”

  “Suicides have been known to have girlfriends,” Kate said.

  “She also said he was depressed. His boss said he was subdued, and so did at least one of his coworkers.”

  “His boss said he didn’t say much,” Jim said. “Doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing.”

  “His buddy the bigamist baker said he was sad.”

  “His buddy the bigamist baker also counseled him to marry to cheer himself up. Consider the source.”

  They were in his office in the post, Kate across the desk with her feet up on it and Mutt sitting next to Jim, her eyes closed in bliss as he fondled her ears. For a brief moment Kate imagined those hands fondling her own ears, and with an effort brought her attention back to the matter at hand. They were doing the devil’s advocate thing, Kate taking the role of devil. Typecasting. “You don’t want him to have been the victim of foul play, do you?”

  “I really don’t,” Jim said.

  “Even if he might have been?”

  He looked at her, puzzled. “Kate, everything you’ve said points to suicide.”

  “Lyda Blue didn’t recognize the writing on Gammons’s note.”

  He rolled his eyes. “She didn’t recognize his printing.”

  She was reaching and the bad part was she knew it. On a lesser woman her expression would have been called a pout. “What’s really bothering you?” he said.

  “Hell,” she said, impatient more with her own qualms than with him questioning them. “I don’t know, Jim, I guess I’m just suspicious of anything this neat. Father Smith finds the truck. We find the body. The ME finds the identity. The girlfriend and the coworkers say he was depressed. Case closed.” She made a face. “We all want it to be a suicide because it’s coming on summer and we’re so busy we don’t even have time to sleep and suicide would be so much less bother for us.” She jerked her shoulders, like she was trying to shake something off. “Life is seldom neat.”

  “I direct your attention to the Occam’s razor of police work,” he said. “The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”

  “What about that round I found in the pickup?”

  “Kate. Come on. Show me a truck anywhere in the Bush that doesn’t have a round of ammunition rolling around on the floor.”

  “Where’s the gun? And who did it belong to?”

  “Lacking evidence he was shot, that doesn’t seem relevant.”

  “Where did he keep his truck? He couldn’t get it out to the mine, he had to leave it parked somewhere in town.”

  “Probably,” Jim said. “Again, relevance?”

  She thought of whatever it was that Lyda had started to tell her at the airstrip, but she could imagine his reaction if she repeated that nonconversation to him here.

  “I won’t close this case if you tell me not to, Kate,” he said. “I just don’t see anywhere to go with it.”

  “Nope,” Dan O’Brian said from the doorway. He flopped down in the chair next to Kate and put his feet up next to hers. “Fine bunch of detectives we have here. I was eavesdropping and you didn’t even notice. So you heard back from the ME?”

  “Yep,” Jim said. “According to Brillo, the guy you found was A positive.”

  “Which matches Gammons’s health records in his employee file,” Kate said.

  “So it is him,” Dan said.

  “It would appear so,” Jim said.

  “And he marched off into the wild to kill himself.”

  “So he wrote.”

  “And Papa Grizzly took him up on his invitation.”

  “Looks like.”

  “Dumb bastard,” Dan said.

  “Dead dumb bastard,” Jim said.

  And that would seem to be that.

  Jim propped his own feet up. It was his damn desk. “But at least it means I can put this one to bed. Be nice if they were all this easy.”

  Kate and Dan both perked up. “More bigamists?” Kate said.

  Dan swiveled around to stare at Kate. “Bigamists?”

  So then of course he had to be told all, and when he stopped laughing he said, “Life in the fast lane. Man, the Park is starting to look just like downtown.”

  Which didn’t come out as quite the joke he had intended, and provoked an uneasy silence that lasted a little longer than it should have while they all thought about what looking just like downtown would mean to the trooper post, the Parks Service, and the Niniltna Native Association’s resident shareholders. The silence was broken by Maggie, who appeared in the doorway to look at Jim with an expression somewhere between sorrow and pity.

  “What?” Jim said with foreboding.

  “Maybe nothing,” Maggie said, but they could all tell she didn’t really mean it. “I got a call from Cindy Bingley.”

  “Not Willard,” Jim said, willing it to be so.

  “No, not Willard,” Maggie said, “but she says your presence is required to stop a riot.”

  So they adjourned to Bingley Mercantile down the hill and around the corner from the post, where a crowd large by Park standards was found milling near the steps that led to the double glass doors. A quick professional glance took the crowd’s temperature. Edgy but not violent. Jim took his time getting out of the white Blazer with the seal of the Alaska Department of Public Safety on the door, and when he got out took a little longer to settle the trooper badge on his ball cap directly over his eyes, and a little longer than that to hitch the gun belt around his waist. The gravitas was implied.

  A respectful silence fell over the crowd at this manifestation of the might and majesty of the Alaska State Troopers, followed by a definite diminution of tension. He strode forward with a ground-eating stride that caused the people in his path to simply melt away. It didn’t hurt that Mutt had abandoned Kate to trot at his heels, head up, tail held at the ne plus ultra angle, adding her natural imperiousness to his state-sanctioned authority.

  They mounted the steps, silver gray husky-wolf and blue-and-gold-clad Alaska State Trooper. At the top, they paused deliberately, looking over the crowd with a stern and daunting eye, a double-barreled assault from which grown men quailed.

  Satisfied, Jim turned to pull open the door.

  It opened outward with a gratifying vigor, in fact so gratifying that it was yanked out of his hand and banged back against the outside wall, hitting hard enough to crack the glass. The impetus shoved Jim backward, causing him to tread on Mutt’s toes. She let out a series of startled yips, leaped into the air, and came down directly behind him.

  What bowled out of the door resembled nothing so much as a human cannonball, very large in diameter and with many moving parts, most of them whaling on other moving parts. Punching, kicking, elbowing, kneeing, yelling, screaming, swearing, it was a mesmerizing concatenation of self-directed human energy and single-minded enthusiasm. Kate, fascinated, decided that cannonball was the wrong analogy, it was more like a fight in a Batman comic book. She thought she might even see “Pow!” and “Bam!” rising up out of the fracas.

  That seething ball of human rage rolled right out the door and into Chopper Jim Chopin. Jim was standing in front of Mutt. Mutt was standing on the very edge of the top step. The ball hit Jim. He lost his balance. Mutt caught the backs of his knees and in another startled scramble tried to get out of the way in several different directions at once. Jim pitched back into a flawless backward somersault, any Olympic judge who wasn’t sitting on the pairs competition for ice skating would have been ashamed to give it less than a 9.9.

  Sergeant Jim Chopin, pride of the Alaska State Troopers, the law of the land in blue and gold, thereafter ascribed a perfect circle, his head and his feet spinning 360 degrees around a
straight torso in a movement that Kate dimly remembered from some long-forgotten math class as angular motion. His constant velocity was such as to defy enough gravity to miss every single one of the eight steps leading up to the Bingley Mercantile entrance, and so in his favor were the laws of physics this day that he made a neat two-point landing with both feet smack on the ground, facing in exactly the same direction from which he had originally launched.

  A long time ago Kate remembered him saying that one of the first things they taught cadets at the trooper academy was that when a trooper arrived at the scene, the first thing they must do was establish an air of authority. Today, Jim had approximately two and a half seconds to appreciate this undeniable achievement before the human cannonball boiled right down the steps, hit him with all the force of a runaway train, and flattened him on his back in the dirt and the mud and the half-melted snow.

  Mutt, also a victim of physics, was already off balance when Jim flipped over her, and was sucked thereafter into the cannonball’s turbulent wake. She avoided landing in the middle of it by a levitational feat heretofore only achieved by Nadia Comaneci, and managed to jump clean over the melee. She landed running, a gray streak close to light speed, and she didn’t stop until she got to Kate, behind whom she promptly took refuge, uttering a distinctly un-Muttlike whine.

  Those nearer to the action were too busy diving for cover to receive a clear impression of events. Kate, standing next to the door of her truck, and Dan, standing next to the door of his, got the wide-screen version and were able thereafter to replay the events of that afternoon in glorious Technicolor detail for the benefit of many, many enthralled audiences at Bernie’s Roadhouse. Under pressure they would admit that their recounting of events was something of a reconstruction, as both of them had been laughing so hard at the time that their vision was somewhat blurred.

  Jim, flat on his back beneath what felt like a swarm of spitting, hissing, feral cats, took a moment to realize just what had happened and just where he was. He took another moment to muster a sense of ill use, and a third to summon a swell of outrage, enhanced by the realization that the front of his heretofore immaculate uniform now had several well-outlined footprints on it, and more than a few splashes of blood. He used this as motivation to rise to his feet, attaining the vertical in a single indignant moment, then opened his mouth and gave speech. “All right. That’s ENOUGH.”

  Mild words, maybe, but given full voice by a pissed-off state trooper in full regalia, they did not fail of effect. The human cannonball resolved into, of course, Suzy Moonin, Bonnie Jeppsen, and a third woman of whose identity he was unaware. The brief lull dissolved when Bonnie slapped Suzy and Suzy slugged the third woman. Jim grabbed Bonnie and Suzy by the scruffs of their necks, lifted them up off their feet, and banged their heads together, one time, hard.

  Suzy screamed, Bonnie started to cry, and the third woman took the opportunity to kick Bonnie in the shins and elbow Suzy in the groin. Jim only had two hands and Bonnie and Suzy seemed subdued, at least for the moment, so he dropped them and picked up the third woman by a large handful of jacket, fleece vest, and turtleneck. “Lady! Calm down!” He shook her once for emphasis.

  Her head rocked back hard. She stopped writhing and glared at him.

  “Who the hell are you, anyway?” he said.

  Tears glittered in her eyes and threatened to fall in floods. “My name,” she said, her voice trembling, her breast heaving, “is Mrs! Randy! Randolph!”

  He stared at her for a long moment, her feet dangling a good six inches above the ground. “Oh hell,” he said, and then he dropped her, too.

  And on that note, the Park’s Memorial Day weekend was over.

  Eight

  FOURTH OF JULY

  There was tremendous scope for a fertile imagination in being the sole owner and proprietor of 160 acres in a place where daylight in summer went almost 24/7. Plants avid to exploit the photosynthetic process exploded out of the ground almost before you could step back out of their way. Every year Kate reveled in the act of throwing out a handful of seeds and telling them, “Show me what you’ve got.” Sometimes the shrews and the sparrows got to the seeds first, but often enough she was rewarded on her rambles over the homestead by a tiny burst of color on her peripheral vision. A California poppy, say, reaching up through the surrounding grass on a single trembling stem, a triumphant shout in Creamsicle orange. Or she might stumble onto a clump of pink pussytoes curled up next to a tall, elegant delphinium, the deep blue of an Arctic summer solstice sky at midnight. Three years before she’d planted a Philippe Rivoire peony, mostly because she liked the name. Then a single, six-inch stem with four modest leaves that had cost her $2.49 at Auntie Balasha’s annual spring garage sale, she’d stuck it into the ground in a clear spot next to a stand of diamond willow a mile from her cabin and walked away.

  Last summer when she and Mutt had made their annual hike to the Lost Wife Mine to make sure the entrance was still securely blocked against the unwary or the reckless wilderness explorer, she was rewarded with a brilliant splash of red so bright that for just a second she had thought it was a brush fire. The single stem had morphed into a bloom-covered bush that was taller than she was and as wide as her two arms outstretched. On the way home she had cut half a dozen stems and back at the house stuck them in a decorative plastic bucket, over which Johnny pretended to warm his hands every night for a week.

  The wildflowers needed no encouragement. The deep purple spire of monkshood, its cluster of closed blooms giving off an air of mystery, appeared and disappeared around every bend of trail. Dainty forget-me-nots clustered half-hidden on the shadowy edges of tree and shrub, tiny pale blue flowers delicate by contrast to almost everything else in the forest. Fireweed revealed itself in unexpected patches of blazing magenta, and western columbine spread across any otherwise unoccupied space to duke it out with chocolate lilies and Sitka roses. Military rows of arctic lupine had shouldered aside every other single living plant in their march to line the trail between road and homestead, and Kate was fighting a delaying action to prevent their conquering the clearing in front of the house.

  After an idyllic month of sun leavened by comfortably spaced periods of soft, almost warm rain, the garden burst to overflowing. Rhubarb with leaves the size of elephant ears formed a lush line at the garden’s edge. Strawberries, tiny scarlet gems nestled in clusters of furry leaves, enjoyed the shade of a strategic grouping of white birch. Raspberry canes leaned heavily against tomato cages co-opted for the purpose beneath the prospect of a bumper crop come August. Blueberry bushes drooped beneath the weight of fruit promising to be the size of Kate’s thumb in a month’s time. The potato patch was a riot of leaf, the carrots a sturdy row of feathery tops, the cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli pushing each other for room.

  The half-dozen rugosa roses her mother had planted the summer following Kate’s birth were now a waist-high hedge next to the rock seat at the cliff’s edge and in ebullient and aromatic bloom. The rock was warm from the sun and she wriggled her backside into it with hedonistic pleasure, adjusted the throw pillow between her lower back and the natural shelf formed by the rock, and allowed herself to be seduced by the strong, sweet scent of the roses. A bee nuzzled the front of her T-shirt, a mosquito whined past her ear, and a golden-crowned sparrow trilled nearby. Water tumbled and jostled its way downstream between the narrow, rocky banks below, and she smiled without opening her eyes. If the weather held, the swimming hole would be warm enough for skinnydipping by tomorrow. Maybe even by this afternoon.

  There was a low murmur from the radio perched nearby. Bobby Clark was narrating the Fourth of July parade on Park Air Live. “And here comes the veterans’ float, Jeff Talbot driving his Army surplus jeep—HOO-ah!—with Demetri Totemoff and George Perry in the back throwing candy hard enough to overshoot the Kanuyaq River. Ouch! Goddammit, Perry, watch where the hell you’re throwing that stuff! Ouch!”

  A background murmur, probably Bobby’s wife D
inah in soothe mode. One of them had to remember Bobby was on the air, although since it was a pirate radio station that changed broadcast frequency pretty much daily it wasn’t like the Federal Communications Commission was ever going to catch up with him. A delighted scream too close to the mike made Kate and Mutt both jump. Bobby and Dinah’s four-year-old daughter, Katya, named for Kate. Delivered by Kate, if it came to that, and on the day of her parents’ wedding, no less, at which Kate had not only officiated but also stood up for both bride and groom. That had been one fraught day.

  “Oh, well now.” Bobby’s rich baritone rolled out of the radio. “Here comes Max Chaney’s flatbed bearing Miss Niniltna, whose day job is Luba Lindeman, and let me tell you gentlemen who couldn’t make the parade today, you should see the red dress our own pride of Niniltna is almost wearing. All the way to China, guys, no shit—ouch! Goddammit, Dinah!”

  “Goddammitdinah!” Katya said.

  Park Air vanished from the airwaves for a few seconds, but Kate, veteran of many a Niniltna parade, could fill in the blanks. Luba would be perched on a pile of last year’s tanned wolf, beaver, mink, and marten hides donated by local trappers who hadn’t been able to unload them at the Fur Rendezvous fur auction in February. She would be wearing the gold-nugget and walrus-ivory crown made by local carver Thor Moonin. She would be attended by five other Niniltna High girls, all of them doing some combination of pageant, royal, and papal wave. They’d be giggling a lot.

  They also represented six of the seven girls in the junior-senior class of Niniltna High. Vanessa would not be forming one of Luba’s court, not because she wouldn’t have been an ornament to float, town, and event, but because she and Johnny were both working out at Suulutaq. There at least was one reason to be grateful to the mine. Kate didn’t have to go into town for the parade.

  The parade would be led by a bad-tempered Maggie Montgomery in uniform driving Jim’s Blazer. Jim had avoided leading the parade this time by contriving to have Kenny Hazen call him to Ahtna for an assist on an apprehension.