Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw
Page 8
"You should have killed him when you had the chance." "So I've been
told," Kate said steadily.
"But you didn't." "No.
"But you got him." "Yes."
There was a long pause. "At least you got him," Lottie said, still in
that dull voice.
"Lottie," Kate said, and stopped. How to say it? she thought, and tried
again. "I wanted to stop by and see how you were."
Kate floundered. "We grew up together. Lisa and I went through school
together. I just thought-"
"We've never been that close," Lottie pointed out. "Not since school,
no." Kate bit her lip. "I'm sorry about Lisa, though. You lived together
all your lives. It must hurt like hell."
Lottie's face remained blank, a caricature china doll. For lack of
something better to do, Kate leaned forward to pick up the photograph
album she had removed from the chair. The gray cat had curled up on it,
and her green eyes promised retribution for this second disruption of
her morning nap. "May I?" Lottie said nothing, and Kate opened the album
and began to leaf through it. "God, some of these are old. Look at these
. . . what did they call them? Tintypes?"
"Sepia prints," Lottie said. She rose and drifted over to stand behind
Kate's shoulder.
"Who's this hunk? Wow. He looks like Charles Findbergh."
"My grandfather." Lottie paused, and then said almost reluctantly, "My
mother's father."
"Nice smile. You look kind of like him."
"He was a prick," Lottie said flatly. "He was a drunk. My mother told me
she eloped with my father because my father was the first person who
ever said he loved her."
Kate's hands stilled for a moment before turning the page. "Who's this
with the hat? Thing must've weighed ten pounds with all those ruffles
and bows."
"My great-grandmother."
Kate peeled away the transparency and looked at the back of the picture.
She whistled. "This picture was taken in 1900." She squinted again at
it. "You look kind of like her, too." She turned the page and laughed.
"There must be six yards of fabric in that old nightgown, or whatever it
is, and look at all those tiny buttons on his boots. That kid looks so
clean he could squeak. Bet he stayed that way for
about five minutes." Kate could feel Lottie leaning over her shoulder,
and she paged forward. "These clothes look World War Two-ish; these must
be your parents. Weird colors."
"Tinted." "Right." Kate flipped through more pages, and slowed down. "Lisa?"
"Yes. "
Kate frowned a little. "Where is she? I don't recognize the place."
A pause. "The first five summers of our lives we spent out at the
cannery on Mummy Island."
Kate looked again and couldn't help smiling. "Lisa sure didn't like
clothes much, did she?"
"No." A pause. "The cannery superintendent was always calling Mom to
tell him Lisa had her clothes off again and was running around the dock
naked."
Kate kept her eyes fixed on the page. "And where are you?"
"Over there. In back and to the left." "With your clothes on."
Somehow the joke fell flat. "Yes."
Kate's finger ran down to the bottom of the page. "Your mother and
father. That's you on your father's lap?" "Yes. One of the few, times he
could bear to touch his fat, dumb kid."
Kate turned the page and said with relief, "School pictures I Were we
ever really that young?"
The pictures of the two sisters, arranged chronologically and side by
side, showed a maturing process far kinder to the younger sister than to
the elder. Lisa ripened. Lottie weathered. Lisa grew from a plump baby
cuteness to a girlish prettiness to real beauty. Lottie just grew,
taller and wider. Lisa was slender, and there was a lissome quality to
her form, in the way her golden scarf of hair lay on her shoulders, in
the bend of her long, slender neck, in the graceful disposal of her
arms, that made her look as
if she were moving even as she posed for a still picture. Lottie in her
pictures seemed rooted, immobile, static, her body massive and
graceless. Lisa's eyes sparkled, her cheeks dimpled, her smile was wide
and filled with a secret glee that made one wonder what was so amusing.
Kate remembered the effect to be even more irritating in person.
She looked until the end of the album, but she never found a single
picture of Lottie smiling. As near as Kate could tell, Lottie had been
born with a scowl. Or no, not a scowl, that was too strong. Maybe she
just never learned to smile, which wasn't quite the same thing. Through
the years, her face only became squarer and more stolid. There was no
secret fun in Lottie's face, no mischief, in fact little animation of
any kind. What struck Kate most was the quality of speechless endurance
in that static expression.
She looked up and saw it repeated in the face across from her, and
closed the album with a snap. "Thanks for letting me look at this," she
said out loud. "I like looking at old pictures, don't you?"
"No." You must have had the album out for some reason, Kate thought, but
refrained from saying so. Although, looking around, she wasn't sure
anything in this house was ever really put away. "Was Lisa seeing
anybody when she ... Was there someone special lately?"
Lottie's lips twisted in a humorless travesty of a smile. "When wasn't
there?"
"Anyone in particular?" "What's it to you?"
"Just wondering, Lottie," Kate said in a level voice. In a way she was
relieved at Lottie's hostility; any thing was better than that
inanimate, somehow face less shell. "I knew she was seeing Chopper Jim,"
she lied.
"Who wasn't seeing him, at one time or another?"
"Well, there's me," Kate said, smiling.
The shell seemed to crack a little. "That's right. I remember, you never
did much like standing in line." "And then there's you, so that makes
two of us." Kate
tried without success to see through the crack in the shell to what was
beneath.
"Lisa's thing with Jim ended in February." Lottie's voice was without
expression.
"Anyone since then?"
"It's nobody's business if there was or there wasn't," Lottie said, her
fists clenching. "None of it matters now. Lisa's dead. Why don't you
just butt out?"
Lottie was entitled to her grief, and suddenly Kate felt disgusted with
her intrusion into that grief. "I'm sorry, Lottie," she said, rising to
her feet. From the corner of one eye she caught a glimpse of a gray
streak and turned to see the cat curling into a neat ball in the warm
place Kate's bottom had left. Kate smiled and turned to share it with
Lottie. There was no response from that bleak face. "I'm sorry," Kate
repeated, her smile fading. "Oh yeah, I saw George Perry on my way out
here. He told me to tell you he needs a guide for a party of Koreans
climbing Angqaq."
'Al "North or south peak?" ` "He didn't say. They're two-timers, though.
George
said to stop by the hangar tomorrow morning if you're interested." Kate
> gestured at the foil-wrapped package she'd carried in with her. "I
brought you some bread. Just baked a batch last week."
Without expression Lottie jerked her thumb at the kitchen table, and
obediently Kate walked over to it. The table wasn't just crowded with
the detritus of life; it
was stacked with casserole dishes, none of them touched. Some were just
beginning to go green on top.
"Why do people always bring food?" Lottie said from behind her.
Kate shrugged. "I don't know. Because they want to
do something, and it's something to do." She hesitated, almost spoke,
and thought, The hell with it. It can wait. She turned and went to the
door.
"Kate," Lottie said.
Kate paused and looked over her shoulder..
"Why?" Lottie said. "Why did he do it?" She took a step forward and
repeated in that earnest, little-girl voice, "Can you tell me why?"
With her hand on the knob, Kate debated with the grain of the wood in
the door for a reply. "I don't know, Lottie. Who knows what's going on
in the head of someone like that? He's just another crazy. They happen
along sometimes." She looked up and sucked in her breath.
Lottie's pale features seemed blunted somehow, bludgeoned by
circumstance into numb acceptance. "Why?" she repeated, looking directly
at Kate for the first time. "Why did he do it?"
Kate, abashed in the presence of so much grief and pain and rage, shook
her head without replying. She had no answers for Lottie.
Outside, Mutt nudged her head against Kate's hand, but Kate stood where
she was, listening. There was no sound from inside the house, nothing to
indicate that Lottie had descended from her mountain of grief. Kate
turned to her left and went around to the back, moving quietly along the
slippery paths.
The backyard of the Getty homestead looked pretty much like her own,
although much less neat. A tumble of empty, rusting fifty-five-gallon
drums and five-gallon Blazo tins stood heaped beneath a concealing,
albeit rap idly melting, layer of snow. There was an open garage filled
with hand tools, a small tractor, a snow machine with a trailer
attached, and an old ceramic toilet bowl, minus the tank. There were two
small windows over the workbench, both of them so festooned with cobwebs
and years of grime that the light they shed on the inside was negligible.
In front of the barn, hands in her pockets, Kate stared around, her gaze
unfocused, letting the feel of the place sink in. It was like a hundred
other homesteads all over the Alaskan bush. There was a food cache, a
fuel cache, a woodpile, a generator shack and a barn, none of which
contained anything out of the ordinary. There was even a satellite dish
on the roof of the main house, and Kate wondered idly how much it cost
in fuel to run the generator through the winter. She'd given some
thought to installing a dish herself, if only for MTV and VH-1 and the
Nashville Network.
A honking wedge of Canadian geese flew into view. They were early, but
there were a few newly opened leads in the marsh next to Niniltna. It
definitely was spring.
Her eyes followed the flock and caught in a thinning of the treetops
behind the barn. She walked around and found a greenhouse, close to and
not much smaller than the barn, built of two-by-fours and plastic
siding. A profusion of greenery showed through the translucent walls.
From the outside, the tall plants filling up the interior in leafy
profusion looked like tomato plants.
From the inside, they did not.
"Son of a bitch," Kate said, more in sorrow than in anger.
She returned to the barn and pulled and shoved her way into the clutter,
making no attempt to keep her activities quiet. She moved a crate of
eggs to one side, lifted a sack of potatoes into a corner and boosted a
barrel of flour which the mice had found before her onto the crate. She
found what she was looking for stacked high in the far right corner,
beneath a lashed-down tarp.
She came out of the barn beating the dust out of her clothes and looked
up to find Lottie watching her, mute. Kate didn't apologize. She jerked
her head toward the greenhouse. "Did you know? Were you partners?" Lottie
said nothing, and Kate forgot about shielding Lottie from the news.
"Lottie, McAniff didn't shoot Lisa." The other woman's head snapped up,
and Kate nodded grimly. "That's right. The police ran a test on the
bullets they found. They know that the one that killed Lisa came from a
different gun."
Lottie didn't move, didn't speak; her expression didn't
change. It infuriated Kate. "Lottie! If you two were wholesaling dope
out of your backyard, any fights you had with one-time or potential
customers give us one hell
of a list of suspects! Who were you selling to?"
When Lottie still didn't answer, Kate, exasperated, went to her and
shook. her. It was like trying to shake Angqaq Peak. "Talk to me!"
Lottie's face seemed to crumple, her voice to
Kate had to strain to hear her. "What?" she said. "What
did you say?"
Again the stumbling, shrunken voice. "Are you going
to tell?"
"Oh hell," Kate said, disgusted, and left.
SHE could hear the noise from Bobby's house all the way down to where
Squaw Creek joined the Kanuyaq River. Its main component seemed to be
stentorian male voices doing a lot of whooping and yelling of song
lyrics that were faint but audible, even above the noise of the Jag's
engine, and which grew steadily louder as she approached the house. Just
to be on the safe side, Kate parked the Jag down by the creek and walked
the remaining distance to the ramp that led up to the front door.
It was a large cedar A-frame, its roof festooned with a writhing cluster
of wiring that led to a 112-foot metal' tower rising starkly up out of
the backyard like the skeleton of a spaceship. Mounted on the tower were
two white Drum like apparatuses facing west and south. A satellite TV
dish, pointing low on the Alaskan horizon to pick up equatorial-orbit
satellite transmissions, hung precariously from a crossbar above and
behind the microwave shots. Antennae of one kind or another took up what
little space there was left, and the whole thing looked top-heavy and
Leaning Tower of Pisaish.
The closer Kate came the louder the noise got, and the less melodic the
singing. Country Joe McDonald and the Fish were leading the chorus in a
verse urging mothers to be the first one on their block to have their
boy come home
in a box. Normally Kate would have opened the door with out knocking and
gone in. Today something told her this might be unwise.
The music stopped abruptly, and from inside the house somebody yelled,
"Hey, Bobby, I think it's time to call it down." There was a deafening
avalanche of approving raspberries, oinks and rebel yells.
"Okay, okay, you guys," Kate heard Bobby say in his customary roar.
Mutt, standing next to her, recognized his voice and her ears went up
and she looked at Kate with a quizzical expres
sion. Kate sat down on the
porch railing and prepared to listen to Bobby call whatever it was down.
Mutt, knowing what was waiting for her in Bobby's wood box next to the
fireplace inside, sat down herself with a disgruntled thump. There was a
kind of rustling from inside the house, as if many were arranging
themselves to listen, and then Bobby's big bass voice, fifty decibels
lower than it generally was and unnaturally solemn, began to speak.
"January 30, 1968," he intoned. "Tet, the Asian Lunar New Year, begins.
The VC break into dry cleaners and steal ARVN uniforms to wear during