Breakup

by Dana Stabenow

  “Nope,” Dan said heavily, “not pretty at all.” He quietly refolded the tarp around the body. He looked up and surprised a look of fierce concentration on her face. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He waited, but that was all she was going to say. “So.” He nodded at the still figure in the tarp. “When did you find her?”

  With a slight shock Kate realized that it was almost six o’clock. “Less than two hours ago. Her husband said they went up to take a look at the mine this morning, and the bear attacked them.”

  Dan frowned. “Tourists?”

  “I don’t know. That’s him.” Kate nodded at the man leaning up against the post office wall just out of earshot. The little crowd of sympathizers had dispersed once the mail started being sorted, and he was alone again, head back against the logs, hands in his pockets, eyes closed. “He hasn’t said much.”

  “The bear just attacked them? Without provocation?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said. “I didn’t hang around to see if the bear wanted to make it two for two. And I’ve got Mandy’s parents with me.”

  Dan brightened. “You’ve got the Original Eastern Establishment Royalty Couple with you?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, as the two emerged from the post office, bulging bags indicating that the gift shop that took up the right side of the post office had not gone unpatronized. “Allow me to introduce you. Mr. and Mrs. Baker, this is Dan O’Brian, chief ranger of the Park.”

  “Hello,” Dan said, shaking hands and looking over their matching right-off-the-L. L. Bean-rack safari outfits, soaked behinds and all, with an appreciative eye. “Nice to meet you. Hell of a musher, that daughter of yours. Don’t often run into that much guts and talent walking around on two legs. You must be proud.”

  That this was not a thought that had previously occurred to them was obvious from the startled expression on their faces. Kate reflected that both generations of the Baker family had a lot to learn.

  Dan’s gaze wandered past them to the widower, who had remained apart from the rest of them, face averted. “How’s he holding up?”

  “He’s on his feet,” Kate said.

  Dan nodded. “Shows something. What’s his name?”

  “I asked. He hasn’t said anything yet.”

  “Probably in shock, poor bastard.” Dan walked over and held out a hand. “Dan O’Brien, chief ranger. I’m sorry about your wife, Mr… . ?”

  “Stewart.” The man stirred and gave a long, heavy sigh. “Mark Stewart.”

  He shook hands with Dan, and Kate stepped forward. “Kate Shugak.”

  “Oh. Right. I’m sorry, I—I just couldn’t talk before.”

  “It’s all right,” Kate said. “I understand.”

  “Mark Stewart,” he repeated unnecessarily. “I guess I should thank you.”

  “No need,” she said, adding, “I just wish I could have gotten there sooner.” She didn’t mean it, and Dan at least was fully aware that she didn’t, but it was the kind of thing one said at times like these.

  Stewart’s grip was warm and dry and so strong it was almost painful. The man was of medium height with well-defined shoulders topping a rangy frame. He had dark eyes beneath thick dark brows, a wealth of dark hair that fell in a careless swath that must have cost $150 in some Anchorage salon, and a wide, full-lipped mouth that undoubtedly spread into a charming smile. That mouth was held rigidly now in a straight, expressionless line that matched the bleak, unfocused look in his eyes.

  At least, bleak and unfocused until they looked at Kate. As their eyes met, a flash of visceral awareness leapt between them. Kate very carefully freed her hand and took what she hoped was an unobtrusive step back. Damn, damn, damn.

  “I know you’ve just been through a horrible experience,” Dan said to Stewart, “but can you give us an idea of what happened? If we’ve got a rogue bear on the roam in the Park, I need to know about it.”

  Mark Stewart looked down, long, thick lashes shadowing his cheeks. “I—You’re right, it was horrible. I—” He paused, and drew in a long breath.

  “Mr. Stewart,” Dan said, as if he couldn’t help himself, “didn’t you bring a rifle with you? A pistol, even? Some kind of weapon for your own defense? Surely you must have known that this was an area known for its bear population?”

  Stewart looked at the ground. “No,” he whispered.

  Dan met Kate’s eyes and shook his head. Tourists.

  “It’s all so awful,” Stewart muttered. “We came up here to be alone, get away from everything. This morning was so nice, we decided to walk up to the mine with a picnic lunch. And then we got to the mine, and the bear came out of the woods, came right at us, and Carol—”

  “You said she was on the roof,” Kate said. “When you first saw us.”

  He nodded miserably. “I gave her a leg up the side of one of those old houses. I told her to stay there while I went for help. It—the bear must have climbed up after her. I never would have left her if I’d thought—I never—Then I heard your truck and—” His face twisted.

  “It’s okay,” Dan said with quick sympathy. “Never mind. We can talk about it later.”

  Stewart hid his face in his hands.

  Dan was right, the poor bastard probably was in shock. Coldly ashamed of her momentary awareness of him as an attractive man, and disregarding his equally obvious appreciation of her as an attractive woman, Kate said, “The trooper’s on his way.”

  Stewart’s head snapped up. “Trooper?”

  “Chopper Jim?” Dan said, and Kate nodded. “The trooper from Tok,” he told Stewart. “Jim Chopin.”

  “How’d you talk to him?” Stewart said. “I thought—Are there phones in Niniltna?”

  “I called him from the NorthCom earth station.” Kate indicated the tower just visible over the tops of the trees clustered between the airstrip and the village.

  “The troopers are always called in on cases of accidental death,” Dan said.

  “Of course,” Stewart said, head bent again. “Of course they are. Sorry, I’m still a little out of it.”

  Dan regarded him with a puzzled air. “You know, I could swear—We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

  Stewart shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Dan’s brows came together but he shrugged. “If you say so.”

  The Bakers had wandered across the strip to watch George swab out the inside of his plane. Kate hoped George had simmered down some, but the rigid set of his shoulders didn’t look promising, in which case she hoped the Bakers would restrain any impulse they might have toward commentary. She wondered what Mandy was going to say when she heard the tale of the day’s adventures. Somehow she felt that a fatal bear attack, a plane wreck and an attempted homicide were not what Mandy had had in mind when she sent her parents out that afternoon.

  Dan strolled a little way down the runway, inviting Kate with a jerk of his head to join him. “So what did Mandy bribe you with to get you to play tour guide?”

  She fell into step next to him. “The loan of her truck.”

  Dan grinned. “That’s right, yours is slightly out of commission, isn’t it?” He looked at Mandy’s brand-new Ford. The windshield had a horizontal crack in it that started in front of the steering wheel and progressed all the way across to the passenger side. The driver’s-side door was crumpled in and sported two bullet holes. The black plastic bumper was cracked right down the middle. Dan inspected the claw marks on the hood with a professional eye.

  “Yeah,” Kate said, “we had our close encounter with the bear, too.”

  His head snapped up. “Same bear?”

  She nodded. “I think so. The way the road switches back, about the time she hit us she could have come straight down the slope from where I found the body.” She paused. “She had blood on her face and muzzle, and what looked like flesh between her claws.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Not a pretty sight,” Kate agreed, and took a deep breath to steady h
er stomach. “Still, hard to get too upset over bears acting like bears.”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t believe it any more than she did, but in the face of nature red in tooth and claw he was damned if he’d let Kate outmacho him. “‘She?’”

  “It was a female, a big one, six, seven hundred pounds.”

  “Which way was she heading?”

  “West, last I saw.”

  Dan’s brows snapped together. “West from the mine?”

  “West from a mile or so down the mine road.”

  “Heading away from the village, then.”

  “Last I saw,” Kate repeated. They both knew how futile it was to try to predict the path a bear might take.

  “You scare her off her kill?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. You know what the road’s like, and I had the truck in second gear. We were pretty noisy.”

  “And bears do tend to get a little cranky when their meals are interrupted,” Dan observed.

  Kate remembered the enraged grizzly, standing on her hind legs, claws extended, showing off a very long, very sharp, very fine set of teeth and an even finer set of lungs.

  Dan stood back and surveyed the truck again. “You’re awful goddam hard on trucks, Shugak.” He poked a finger into one of the bullet holes, and looked at Kate with a raised eyebrow.

  She made a face. “Ben Bingley went on a toot on his kids’ corporation dividends, apparently. George had just brought him back—” She told him about the ground loop and from his delighted grin knew his next stop would be George’s hangar. “Anyway, they’d just flown in from Ahtna when Cindy showed up. She wanted to discuss the matter. Over a Smith and Wesson.”

  “My, my,” Dan said. “Bet the Bakers enjoyed that.” He smiled slowly. “Kate Shugak, tour guide. Wish I could have been along for the whole ride. Did they say if they enjoyed themselves? They signed up for a raft trip down the Kanuyaq yet? You could probably dump them in along about Chitina without half trying, get’em wet all over, maybe even get’em drowned. Worth a try, don’t you think?”

  Chopper Jim’s arrival spared her the necessity of a suitably discourteous reply. The Bell Jet Ranger settled down and Jim was out before the rotors stopped turning. To Kate he said, “Just couldn’t wait to see me again, could you?”

  Dan laughed. “My words exactly.”

  Jim hitched up his gun belt. “What have we got?”

  They told him. He walked over to the truck and unwrapped the body. He looked at it without expression, and listened to Mark Stewart’s story with even less expression.

  Kate and Dan helped Jim load Carol Stewart’s body into the back of the chopper. Stewart got into the passenger seat and the trooper closed it after him. Instead of walking around to the pilot’s side, he walked out from beneath the rotors and motioned to Kate. “He say the bear come after him, too?”

  “He said something about shoving her up on the roof of one of the staff houses out back of the mine while he went for help. Other than that, he hasn’t said much of anything.”

  Chopper Jim was silent for a moment, staring at the end of the runway, brows knit. “Okay. I’ll fly him and the body to Tok. I got an emergency call about a wreck on Sikonsina Pass. Some asshole’s boat slid off the trailer and front-ended a tractor-trailer full of liquid oxygen.” He adjusted the brim of his hat with a flick of his fingers, in a crisp, somewhat exasperated manner that suggested he’d like to square away life in all of rural Alaska, or at least that part under his jurisdiction, in the same no-nonsense, no-action-wasted fashion. “I just love breakup.”

  They looked at the helicopter, Stewart waiting, silent and staring, the tarp-wrapped body of his wife invisible behind him.

  “He said they came up here to get away from it all,” Kate said.

  Jim’s grin was taut and mirthless. “Didn’t get quite far enough, did they?”

  Seven

  THERE WAS A LOT MORE TRAFFIC ON THE ROAD between the village and the Roadhouse than there was on the road between the village and the mine, so it was in better shape, with most of the winter’s ice broken up and potholes smoothed out to no more than on average a foot deep. It was twenty-seven miles from Niniltna, and exactly nine feet and three inches outside tribal jurisdiction, which location made it the only legally licensed purveyor of liquor in twenty million acres of Park. A square, solid building with a corrugated tin roof, a satellite dish perched on one corner and a haphazard jumble of tiny rental cabins and Bernie’s home out back, it made up in atmosphere what it lacked in architectural aesthetics.

  There were no dogsleds and no snow machines visible in the parking lot. There were three rows of vehicles, beginning with a blue Chevy crew cab pickup.

  Kate’s face brightened. “Great, Bobby’s here. Bobby Clark, a friend of Mandy’s and mine,” she explained to the Bakers.

  At the end of the same row there was a fifty-foot Pace Arrow motor home with Pennsylvania plates, proudly displaying the wear and tear of twelve hundred miles of Alcan and another four hundred miles of Alaska dirt road. Kate shook her head. They were coming up earlier every year, and it was getting so you couldn’t get them to leave once they’d come. Welcome to Alaska, now go home. Her eye traveled to the vehicle opposite the RV. “That goddam Frank Scully,” she said before she thought.

  Mr. Baker cleared his throat. “And who is Frank Scully, Ms. Shugak?”

  “He moved up from Washington last year, bought Greg Migaiolo’s cabin.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Baker looked inquiring.

  Kate pointed. “He drives that Cherokee Chief over there, and he still hasn’t got Alaska plates on it. That always ticks me off, people move out into the Bush and think they can get away without paying for a new license and registration.”

  They pulled in between a rusty black Ranchero and a rustier brown Plymouth sedan with both bumpers missing. Kate put the truck in second and shut off the engine. The Ford was running well even if the driver’s-side door still wouldn’t open. “Now, folks, remember what I told you, the Roadhouse isn’t exactly what you’re used to. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather head on back to Niniltna? My Auntie Vi makes great cocoa, not to mention fry bread.”

  “Ms. Shugak,” Mrs. Baker said, displaying a hitherto unsuspected firmness, “if you are a friend of Amanda’s, you know she doesn’t keep liquor at the lodge.”

  “Yes,” Kate said meekly. “I mean, no.”

  “Well, after what we saw this afternoon, I for one would kill for a drink.”

  “I for two,” Mr. Baker added.

  They smiled at Kate. If they weren’t careful, they were going to upgrade from stereotypes to real live human beings before the day was over. Kate grinned. “I’d kill for some rational conversation myself. Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  But at the door to the Roadhouse, Mr. Baker paused. “Ms. Shugak—”

  “Yes, Mr. Baker?”

  “That woman at the mine—”

  “Yes?”

  “Was it our bear that killed her? The one that ran into us on the road?”

  Kate briefly considered lying, and quickly discarded the notion. “Probably.”

  “There was blood on her muzzle.”

  “Yes.”

  “That woman’s blood.”

  “Yes.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Baker exchanged glances. “Will someone go after the bear, try to kill it?”

  Kate looked surprised. “Why?”

  Mr. Baker blinked. “Well, naturally, I assumed—I’ve been hunting in Africa, Ms. Shugak. When a lion becomes a man-killer, the only thing to do is to hunt it down and kill it, otherwise it will go on killing men.”

  Kate sighed. “Mr. Baker, an Alaskan grizzly eats anything that doesn’t move out of the way in time, animal, vegetable or mineral. That includes bugs, canned goods, canteens, backpacks and people, as well as any and every other mammal that comes down the pike. Protein is protein. They’re a perambulating appetite with a serious advantage in speed and armament. Most of the time they leave us
alone. Sometimes they don’t.”

  Mrs. Baker regarded her with a quizzical expression. “It doesn’t appear to upset you very much, Ms. Shugak.”

  Kate shrugged, and repeated what she had said to Dan, this time with more conviction. “Hard to get upset over bears acting like bears. Comes with the territory. It’s not pretty, but then nature often isn’t.”

  The Roadhouse door opened abruptly into the conversation, almost catching Mrs. Baker on the nose and smacking into Kate’s reflexively upraised hand. A man somersaulted out of the building to roll down the steps and fetch up flat on his back in a puddle of muddy slush. There was a slurred curse.

  The Bakers regarded the outcast for an expressionless moment before Mr. Baker reached for the door, which was swinging slowly closed, and pulled it open with a polite inclination of his head. Mrs. Baker swept through, with Kate bringing up the rear, feeling like a very minor courtier in an exceptionally regal retinue.

  Inside, the bar was three deep, there wasn’t an empty table in the joint, and the floor was jammed with dancers in Pendleton shirts, Levi’s and wafflestompers, the men distinguished from the women only by their beards. On a twenty-four-inch television screen suspended from one corner of the roof Steven Seagal was putting out an oil rig fire in a series of actions that would have put his ass into orbit on any oil field other than Hollywood’s. An enthusiastic audience led by Old Sam Dementieff was improvising new dialogue. Half a dozen older women sat in a circle quilting, mugs of hot buttered rum at their elbows, Auntie Vi firmly guiding the gathered needles in some complicated knot. She looked up, saw Kate and beckoned. Kate deliberately mistook the gesture and waved back airily.

  Another crowd stood around two pool tables in the back, the crack of ball on ball muted by the occasional flush of a distant toilet. Jimmy Buffett was on the jukebox, wanting to go where it’s warm, accompanied by half a dozen tone-deaf backup singers who felt the same way, including Frank Scully, evidently suffering no guilt feelings whatever at not contributing his share to the state treasury.