A grave denied (19 page)

But I don’t think that’s what Kate meant.

She thinks that since Dinah ordered us replacement clothes on her computer and that she’s still got her grandmother’s album and her dad’s guitar and that ivory otter and the cash can that she’s fine, but she’s not. When she doesn’t know anyone’s looking at her, she gets this look on her face, kind of angry but cold, too. Jim fired her and then they met up at the homestead and something happened and he rehired her, so now she’s going all over the Park and talking to everyone that ever spoke to Dreyer in their whole lives. Bobby says she is obsessing and Dinah says she’ll come out of it. They’re both worried, I can tell. And Bobby’s brother sure isn’t helping. He called Katya a mongrel. She better not know what that means. She better not remember him saying it. If someday she asks me, I’ll tell her it’s the best kind of dog there is, like Mutt, the best of all different kinds mixed into one smarter and stronger than all the rest.

I didn’t know black people could be prejudiced against white people.

I asked if I could ride along while she did her interviews and Kate said I had to go to school but that wasn’t why. I’m not a baby. I could find out stuff, and nobody pays any attention to teenage boys unless they think we’re drinking or doping or screwing around or stealing a car. I bet people would talk to me who wouldn’t talk to Kate. Like Jim said, I picked up some stuff from Dad, I can handle myself.

I snuck a peek at her notebook and she’s got a timeline drawn up of all the places Dreyer worked. One of the places was Van’s uncle and aunt’s. I asked her about him but she says she doesn’t hardly remember him.

The Canathan geese have been flying in. I looked them up in the ADF&G wildlife notebook on Dinah’s computer and there are six different species, including one called the cackling Canada geese which I really love the name of and I wished it nested here but the notebook says not. I think ours are dusky, six to eight pounds each.

I like the sound they make, they sound like spring. When I was living with Dad on Westchester Lagoon in Anchorage they used to come sliding in on the lagoon before the ice melted. Most of them took off as soon as they refueled (like jets) but some of them stayed and built nests. When the babies were born they’d hook up with other goose families that you could see sometimes in parks and on ball fields. Most of them were all head down in the grass, but there was always one adult with its head straight up, watching out for the others, and if you get too close it makes a noise and they all start moving away.

I was thinking about geese that day last fall that Mom showed up at Bobby’s. Everybody in the Park was at his house that day, and almost every one of them got in her way when she was trying to catch up to me. Most of them didn’t even know me.

But they knew Kate.

Geese mate for life, Ruthe says. Only if one of a pair dies, they change partners. There are so many in Anchorage that they let Alaska Natives harvest eggs from the nest and give them to elders to eat, but they’ve got to be sneaky about it because if they take the eggs too early the geese will lay more.

When Kate was with my dad, my dad never brought anyone else home and I’m pretty sure he never stayed over anywhere else. There were long times when they didn’t see each other, too. Most people get married, like Bobby and Dinah. I figure since Dad married Mom that he would have liked to have married Kate, too, so she must not have wanted to.

I look at Kate and I see why my dad wanted her and why Jim wants her. A couple of times I looked up from the couch in the cabin and saw her getting dressed. I tried not to look but she is so beautiful, so strong and so smart and so tough. She can do anything. There’s no one like her.

I bet she’d be surprised if I found out something about Dreyer that would help find out who killed him.

₁₀

Dandy Mike’s real name was Daniel. It was a good, solid name straight out of the Bible, like all of Billy and Annie Mike’s kids’ names were, but it hadn’t taken, possibly because someone less likely to march into a lion’s den it would be hard to find in all twenty million acres of Park land. Dandy was handsome, good-looking, and charming. He was also incurably lazy, and a confirmed rounder whose romantic exploits had livened up many an evening at the Roadhouse and provided a news-starved Park with many a tale. His only serious competition was Jim Chopin, who seemed recently to have hung up his zipper, at least temporarily, which brought even more public scrutiny to bear on Dandy’s ongoing game of musical beds, especially in winter when there was nothing to do, if you didn’t want to beat up on your wife and kids, that is.

Dandy earned just enough money fishing and odd-jobbing not to draw welfare, for which his mother would have laid into him big-time. She was already torqued enough at her youngest child for being caught growing a commercial crop of marijuana in his dorm room at UAF. He’d come home to serve out his sentence and had never gone back. As opposed to the three times he had. His personal best was three straight semesters without being suspended. The dean of students, a woman not without a sense of humor but whose patience Dandy had tried pretty far when he made a move on her, too, had told his parents that girls wasn’t a recognized major.

He was also generous to a fault, buying drinks at the Road-house, buying beaded earrings from Bonnie Jeppson for all his girlfriends, buying wooden toys from Virgil Hagberg for the many children in his extended family, who it must be said all seemed to adore him.

He was thirty-four years old and he’d never held down a job that required filling out a W-2 form or onto a relationship that had lasted longer than a month. His employers found him to be reliable and reasonably skilled. “He’s no ball of fire,” Old Sam had been heard to say between beers, “but a slow simmer gets the job done, too, even if it does take a little longer.” His ex-girlfriends, while legion inside and out of the Park never seemed to take the end of the affair to heart, were delighted to bask in the glow of his attention, even knowing that the end was near from the moment she took him to her bed. There was something so disarming about his affection for the opposite sex. He just flat out loved women, all women, of any size, shape, or age. He wasn’t afraid of them, either, unlike most men, and he was more than willing to demonstrate that love to the red-shift limit.

He wasn’t a cheater, he was a serial monogamist, remaining true to his current flame so long as she was current, which also worked well for him. “You look incredible, what have you been up to?” Bernie Koslowski heard one of Dandy’s exes say to another woman on the other side of the bar. The second woman had smiled. “Dandy,” she had said simply, and the first woman had actually laughed. “At least he listened,” he’d heard a much-married woman and mother of five say on another occasion, “even if it was only for two weeks.”

Which was why no one could understand why he wanted to go to work for trooper Jim Chopin. Jim was a devil with the ladies, no doubt, but not even his worst enemy had ever accused him of laziness. God, just look at this past week. He’d been in and out of Cordova three times, ensuring that that drug dealer wouldn’t be selling no dope to no kids again anytime soon, inside video boxes or out of them. Apprehending that abusive husband hadn’t been no picnic, neither, said the old farts in the Roadhouse, heads shaking over the black eye he’d brought back from Spirit Mountain, although there were still some amongst them who thought what went on between a man and his wife ought to stay private. “What,” said Old Sam, “until she’s dead?” and changed tables.

Along with the black eye, Jim had brought back a split lip and the husband, trussed like a calf for branding in the back of the Bell Jet Ranger, there being no level land worthy of the name anywhere near Spirit Mountain for a fixed-wing aircraft to land. Jim didn’t look too upset at being whaled on, they had to admit, in fact was downright pleasant to one and all when he climbed out onto the Niniltna airstrip and hauled the husband out after him, like maybe he’d apprehended his suspect with a little extra enthusiasm that day and it had brought him some peace.

Which wasn’t what he was going to get a lot of if he succeeded in his pursuit of Kate Shugak, if in fact that was what he was doing. It was a puzzle what was going on there. “Kate ain’t easy,” one old fart opined.

“If she was easy, everybody^ be doing her,” someone else offered. There was a lot of snickering and Old Sam changed tables again.

In between, Jim was being run ragged, what with the notorious breakup blues winding down to a grand finale of wife beatings, child abuse, drunk driving, illegal hunting, theft, burglary, armed robbery, assault, rape, and now, for crissake, a murder, and if rumor were true, the attempted murder of Kate Shugak herself, resulting in the loss of her ancestral cabin. Jim would find out who did it; they had perfect faith in him. They just weren’t sure Jim would get to the perpetrator first, and if he didn’t, well, wasn’t going to be much left to do except clean up the mess. “Whoever done it ought to just cut his own throat right now and be done with it,” somebody said, and there was pretty much universal agreement at the sentiment. This time, Old Sam stayed where he was.

No, Jim wasn’t lazy, and he didn’t have a lazy man’s job. It was a mystery why Dandy Mike would want to work for him, when it would surely to god have him out of bed far oftener than he would like.

In truth, Dandy Mike was in the unenviable position of being spoiled rotten from birth. Annie loved children, and the only reason she had stopped having them was that her obstetrician had spoken to her husband to such purpose that Billy had gotten a vasectomy the following day. It was the one time Annie had come anywhere near leaving him, and it didn’t matter that the doctor had told Billy that her chances of carrying another child to full term were slim to none and the odds were in favor of it killing them both. “He said that last time and it was my easiest delivery ever!” she flashed. It a took a year of living on tiptoe for Billy to be forgiven, and another eighteen years, after the last child was grown and out of the house, for the full price to come due, which was the adoption of a baby from Korea, the product of a Korean mother and an American soldier, unwanted by either parent. Well, hell, Billy liked kids, too, and the house didn’t feel right not smelling of dirty diapers and baby formula, and the little girl, whom Annie had named Mary for her mother, was the cutest thing he’d ever seen.

Between a new daughter in the house and his duties as tribal chief and president and chief operating officer of the Niniltna Native Association, which was negotiating some big-time contracts with a lumber company and a minerals exploration outfit for activities to take place on Association lands, Billy Mike didn’t have a lot of time for any of his older children, most of whom had gone on to college and were now living in Anchorage, where they had indoor plumbing and cable. He had still less time for Dandy, his problem child, who seemed perfectly happy to spend as much of the rest of his life horizontal as he could.

It vexed Billy, but he did his best for Dandy, putting the screws to Jim Chopin to hire his son once the new trooper post was built. Jim wasn’t notorious for bowing to pressure, and it wasn’t like Billy was going to make life tough for someone who was opening a full-time, fully-staffed trooper office in Niniltna, either. There were less than three hundred troopers in the entire state of Alaska, and when most villages the size of Niniltna had trouble, they had to wait days and sometimes weeks for the law to respond. Oh no, while Billy Mike wasn’t averse to exerting a little paternal coercion, no way was he going to screw up the stationing of a law enforcement professional in beautiful downtown Niniltna. Especially when he hadn’t even had to lobby for it; this had all been Jim’s idea.

Plus the Department of Public Safety had hired the contractor through the Niniltna Native Association, and was already sending out feelers for a cleaning staff. Plus Jim was going to need a place to stay, and so would any prisoners he apprehended in the course of his duty, and Billy was already preparing a bid to submit to the State Department of Corrections to house and feed the accused Jim brought in.

So the upshot was that Billy didn’t know why Dandy wanted the job so badly, either, but in the best of all parental worlds his problem child would have realized the error of his ways, turned over a new leaf, and settled down to become a useful member of society. He might even take an interest in tribal affairs, Billy thought, allowing himself to dream.

In truth?

Dandy wanted the job because he wanted to wear a uniform.

He wanted to wear a uniform because his only competition for the ladies’ favors had been a man in uniform named Jim Chopin, he of the blue and gold, with the Mountie hat and the shiny gold badge, and the big black nine-millimeter strapped to his side. If Dandy had heard one indrawn breath from whatever cozy bundle he had tucked into his arm whenever Jim walked in the Roadhouse door in full regalia, he’d heard a thousand.

Plus, he’d always liked John Wayne.

Plus, how hard could it be? He envisioned a comfortable chair behind a desk, where he would mostly answer the phone and send Jim out on calls.

Plus, there was that very nice state salary, and that even nicer package of state benefits, including retirement, which would add up even faster because they were so far out in the Bush. He could kick back and start drawing a paycheck for doing nothing by the time he was fifty.

Plus, who died and made Kate Shugak god? There was no rule of which Dandy was aware that just because Kate had once investigated sex crimes for the district attorney in Anchorage that she automatically got whatever extra job came with the new trooper post in Niniltna.