A Cold Day for Murder (4 page)

“I can’t wake up grumpy like ordinary people?” she demanded.

You never do, Mutt told her.

Kate sighed heavily and sat down on the snow machine. “You’re right, Mutt,” she said, holding out her hand. Mutt trotted over to stick her head under it. “But just because I’ve come to a decision and settled on a course of action doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Of course not, Mutt said.

“I need somebody to blame,” Kate said.

Anybody but me, Mutt said agreeably.

“How about Jack?”

Mutt looked doubtful, but the more Kate thought about it, the more likely and attractive a candidate Jack Morgan seemed. He had made it impossible for her to refuse to leave her warm and comfortable and private sanctuary, in the dead of winter, to get him out of a mess he himself had made, in a place she habitually avoided, teeming with too many people she had no wish to see. That she was working again for Jack poured salt in the wound. When she had seen him yesterday it had taken every ounce of self-control she had not to shame the very name of bush hospitality by refusing him so much as a cup of coffee.

“And I do too have someone to talk to,” she said suddenly to Mutt. “I’ve got you. Vow of silence my ass.”

Mutt licked her face with a large, wet and understanding tongue. Kate went back to work on the Jag.

The next time she pressed the starter the engine turned over, coughed twice and settled into a loud purr. She unhitched the sled and pushed the snow machine out of the shop. She checked the survival gear in its locker, took out the mosquito net that she had neglected to remove after the first frost and added a toothbrush and a change of underwear. She checked to see that the door to the cabin was unlocked. It was.

She couldn’t think of anything else to delay her departure. She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “Ready, Mutt?”

Mutt was always ready to go anywhere. She leaped up behind Kate and with a roar of sound and a jerk they were off. It was another translucent arctic morning, the sky lightening imperceptibly toward the southeast but not yet prepared to commit to the full, grayish-pink flush of dawn.

· · ·

Abel Int-Hout’s homestead was three times the size of the one Kate had inherited from her father. It was located on an idyllic site at the head of a long, deep lake backed up against a Quilak foothill. Beginning where the lake left off, in six months there would be a wide, green strip of manicured grass, long enough to accommodate a twin-engine Beechcraft. Abel’s current Cessna would be tied down close to the house, if that year it wasn’t a Beaver on floats moored in the lake. This winter it was a Super Cub on skis, and the snow on the airstrip was solidly packed down with countless takeoffs and landings as Abel’s friends from around the state flew in and out on visits.

Abel’s house was no cabin. It had a screen door and windows, red-painted clapboard sides, a wide veranda running around three sides of the building, running hot and cold water and, most wonderful of all, an indoor flush toilet. The garden was modest as well, only an acre in size, covered in black plastic in summer, with neatly placed punctures through which Abel bullied the broccoli and the cauliflower into emerging. The greenhouse had more square feet than the house; there Abel grew tomatoes and pumpkins and one summer of glorious memory had even managed to produce some minuscule ears of sweet corn. The rows of peas and raspberries behind the greenhouse and the strawberry patch that threatened one day to overgrow the airstrip didn’t seem hardly worth mentioning. A little way up the hill was a small cemetery, where two generations of Int-Houts lay at rest after long, productive lives of panning for gold, trapping beaver and marten and fishing for salmon and king crab. The most recent headstone was that of Abel’s wife, Anna, dead three years.

Where Kate’s cabin and outbuildings looked neat and well kept, Abel’s looked like an advertisement for
Better Homesteads and Gardens
, and she never saw it without a sternly repressed pang of envy.

Abel didn’t hold with snow machines so Kate left hers by the side of the rough-packed snow of the railroad bed and walked down the trail to the homestead. Mutt bounced along next to her, snapping at branches encased in delicate crystal shells and causing showers of the tinkling fragments to cascade down over them, looking up at Kate with an expression that just begged for play. Kate chased after her, and they were both out of breath when they reached the homestead. They were instantly surrounded by a large pack of dogs, most of them huskies or husky breeds, all trying to jump up on both of them at once and all barking a loud and vociferous welcome.

Mutt put up with it for about sixty seconds and then cut loose with a single sharp, shrill bark of her own. There was instantaneous silence. Half the pack flattened their ears and wagged conciliating tails, and the other half lay down, rolled over and waved their paws in the air. Mutt looked up at Kate with a smug expression.

“Yes, you are truly wonderful,” Kate told her.

He’d heard them coming, and was waiting at the door. “What the hell you doing here?”

“Nice to see you, too, Abel.”

He harrumphed loudly and gestured at her full arms. “What’d you bring me?”

“Six loaves of bread,” she said, handing them over, “not that I should give you anything when I haven’t had my moose roast.”

“What the hell you going on about now, girl?”

She gestured at the long bundle encased in canvas, hanging from the bottom of his cache, the size of a haunch off a well-fed bull. “I thought I always got the first roast off the moose.” He looked from the bundle to her and his leathery cheeks flushed. She said, laughing a little, “Better not let the fish hawks find you with that hanging there, Abel. They catch you hunting moose out of season, they’ll take away your Cub and your Winchester and put you in jail for the rest of your life.”

“Hell, girl,” he said, giving her a tight grin, “you know I’m a subsistence hunter. Since they passed that law in 1980 I can shoot what I want, when I want in the Park, as long as I need it to eat.”

She laughed again and held out her arms, and he snorted and came forward to give her a hug that bruised her ribs. “Come on in then, girl, if you’re done making me out to be some kind of crook.”

Abel Int-Hout looked like a fierce old eagle, his thinning white hair skinned back over his head, his proud beak of a nose jutting from between two faded but still very sharp blue eyes. Kate thought, not for the first time, that Abel Int-Hout stood on the front doorstep of his homestead the same way Tennyson’s eagle clasped the crag with crooked hands, proud, possessive and fiercely protective of him and his.

He led the way into his kitchen. “What are you up to?” he said, pouring coffee into thick mugs. He set out a can of Carnation evaporated milk, a bowl of sugar, one spoon and a carton of Ding Dongs.

Kate drew a chair up to the table and rested her elbows on the oilskin tablecloth. “I’m on my way in to see emaaqa,” she said.

His head came up and he looked at her out of his sharp old eyes. “You’re going in to Niniltna?”

“Yes.”

“Been a while since you’ve been home.”

She said carefully, forgetting for a moment who she was speaking to, “Niniltna isn’t home, Abel. It’s only where I was born.”

He snorted. “If you hate it all that much, why’d you pick the middle of the winter to mush in?”

“I’m not mushing.”

He snorted again. “I heard. I swear, girl, I don’t know why you bother with them infernal machines. They’re dirty, noisy as hell, can’t reproduce themselves, and they sure as shit ain’t much company.”

“No, Abel,” she agreed in a meek voice, and refrained from pointing out that his Super Cub made more noise than half a dozen snow machines in full cry, and it couldn’t reproduce itself, either. But then, it wasn’t as if she loved the old man for his consistency.

Except for a flock of a dozen tame geese, seven cats and innumerable dogs, Abel lived quite alone on the homestead. He was a retired seiner whose children, disdaining the life of the backwoods, had all migrated to Cordova and Anchorage and Outside. Abel stayed where he was. It was his home. It was his life.

Abel had married into Kate’s mother’s family, and he was Kate’s first cousin once removed or just her second cousin, they’d never decided which. Her father drowned in Prince William Sound when Kate was eight. Her mother had died two years before, and her grandmother had decreed that Kate would move to Niniltna and live with her. Eight-year-old Kate had stated flatly that she wouldn’t go. Into this confrontation between irresistible force and immovable object stepped Abel. Abel took Kate into his home, letting her return to her father’s homestead on weekends, making no other distinction between her and his own children unless it was that he liked her more than he did his own. They certainly had more in common.

Abel, lacking children with like interests, taught Kate everything her father was always going to but never quite had the time for. He taught her how to hunt the Sitka black-tailed deer by sitting still at the base of a tree, for hours if need be, to lull the deer into making the first move. How to mend gill nets so the sockeyes stayed put until they were picked, instead of ripping it to shreds so you had to go even deeper in debt to the cannery for new gear. How to gut a moose without slicing open the organs and making a green, smelly mess out of the process, and how to skin it, and how to cut it so that you got roasts and steaks instead of, as happened on her first two tries, a winter’s supply of mooseburger.

She watched him pour the coffee, caught between affection and amusement. He looked up, his eyes glinting. “No comment? Not up to fighting with me today, is that it, girl?” Kate grinned without answering. “So why are you going to see Ekaterina?”

She drank coffee. “I’m looking for somebody.”

“Who?”

“Two somebodies, actually, a park ranger named Mark Miller and an investigator for the Anchorage D.A.’s office. You know him; you met him the last time you were over to the cabin. Kenneth Dahl?”

Abel was slow to answer. He looked at her, his eyes fixed on her face. “Yeah, I remember, I guess,” he said, picking his words with care. “The Kennedy clone from Boston. More teeth than brains.” He watched Kate redden with open satisfaction. “Why you looking for him? He owe you some money?”

Kate took a deep breath and held it. It was bad enough that she had introduced Kenneth Dahl to the Park in the first place, and why; she remembered Jack’s last words to her the day before and cringed away from that “why.” It was bad enough that her encouragement had led Ken to believe he knew his way around it, and its residents. It was worse that she knew he had come in after the ranger to prove a point to her. Ken had been missing more than two weeks, two weeks of record low temperatures and no snow. Letting Abel pick a fight over her love life would only delay Ken’s being found that much longer. She exhaled slowly, and said in a mild voice, “You ever meet the ranger?”

“Might have,” Abel said, looking disappointed. “They all look alike to me. What you want with him?”

“He’s missing. Jack sent Ken in to look for him, and now Ken’s missing, too. I’m going in for the Anchorage D.A., on loan to the FBI.”

“The FBI?”

She grinned. “Don’t look so nervous, Abel. So far as I know, the FBI still lets the Fish and Game handle out-of-season hunting violations. Yeah, the missing ranger’s father is a U.S. congressman, and he got the FBI on it. Jack Morgan came to see me yesterday with one of J. Edgar’s finest in tow.”

Abel gave her a long, keen look. “Morgan, is it? How’d they come in? Nobody landed here yesterday.”

She shook her head and warded off the offer of a Ding Dong with an inward shudder. Abel never ate anything that wasn’t covered in sugar or deep-fried. “They drove to Ahtna and took a snow machine over the railroad tracks to Tana and then followed the old railroad grade to my place.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Morgan better watch that shit with the tracks. Essy Beerbohm got himself run over last month by the Fairbanks train.”

She winced. “I hadn’t heard. Hauling supplies?”

“Yup.”

“How is Cindy taking it?”

Abel’s mouth turned down. “She moved in with Sandy Mike last week.”

Kate looked at him and said, “Don’t be so judgmental, Abel. It’s not easy getting into a cold bed night after night.”

Abel’s spine stiffened and he glared at her. “I know that better than her, and come to think of it, better than you, too, girl.”

Kate, already regretting speaking up in favor of a woman she’d never liked that much anyway, said hastily, “How about this cold spell?”

Abel, as all true Alaskans are by talk of the weather, was immediately diverted. “It’s a bitch, ain’t it? If it don’t snow again pretty soon, spring runoff’s going to be lousy. At this rate the creeks’ll be running so low we won’t see so much as a scale next spring, let alone a whole fish.” He paused, and said, “This ranger, what’d you say his name was?”

“Mark Miller. You remember him?”

Abel considered. “I believe he just might be the fella I found in the Lost Wife this summer.”

Kate looked at him, surprised. “What was he doing in that old widow-maker?”

“I asked him that,” Abel replied, “just before I chased his ass down Shamrock Mountain with my twelve-gauge.” Abel cocked his head. “He kept yelling something about the Lame Dog Lode.”

Kate groaned gently. “I suppose whoever suckered him with that old chestnut sold him a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, too.”

“It don’t matter. Someone was bound to try it on him, the way they do all the cheechakos.” Abel gave a sardonic grin. “Offhand I’d say he don’t care whether it’s true or not, anymore. How long’s he been gone?”

“About six weeks. Ken’s been gone for two plus.”

Abel snorted. “That ranger probably got drunk and fell into a snowbank on the way home from the Roadhouse.” His teeth shut with a snap, and after a moment he said gruffly, “Sorry, girl.”

She shook her head. “It’s all right, Abel. That was my first thought. But now there’s Ken gone, too.” She gave him a tight smile and quoted one of his favorite sayings back at him. “Something smells and it ain’t squaw candy.”