a Night Too Dark (2010) (8 page)

“Yes.” Kate looked at Johnny and Van and the corners of her mouth quirked up in a smile. “And they knew perfectly well that it’d be hard to say no to paying jobs for the kids, once the kids heard about them.” She looked back at Annie, smile fading. “Let’s face it, Annie. Fish and Game projections aren’t good for the Kanuyaq runs this year. The economy’s tanked. Sure, Global Harvest is trying to buy their way into our good graces. But it’s a pretty good paycheck for someone their age, and it’s not like our kids have that many options. I can’t think of any Park rats whose lawns need mowing.”
Annie nodded again.
Johnny and Van held their breath.
Kate reached for another cookie, and paused for an appreciative moment to admire its golden brown perfection. Stevenson was right, sometimes it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive. “They’re going to pay that money to somebody, Annie.”
Annie reached for a second cookie herself. “True,” she said. “It might as well be our kids.”
Johnny and Van, recognizing victory, beamed.
Kate took a bite of cookie and let the lemon and sugar dissolve blissfully on her tongue. Although arriving had its own rewards.
It was at least a counterpoint to the uneasy feeling that she’d just consented to the thin end of the wedge.
Kate and Johnny pulled into the clearing at the homestead as Jim was getting out of his Blazer. As usual Mutt leaped from the cab of the pickup to lavish an ecstatic greeting, her tail wagging hard enough to start a Force 5 gale.
Although Kate couldn’t keep the smile from spreading across her own face, so who was she to talk. “I figured you’d be late. If you made it home at all.”
“I told Maggie the hell with it and sent her home.”
“Anybody left in the cells?”
“Well, since Maggie told me she sprung Willard to the custody of Eknaty Kvasnikof on your say-so, only Petey Jeppsen’s left. Especially since I refused to arrest the bigamist.”
Kate and Johnny exchanged a glance. “And thereby hangs a juicy tale,” Kate said.
“Yeah, but first I need a beer.”
They went inside, Johnny detouring through the shop, where his truck was in for maintenance. Kate hadn’t touched anything while he was at school. The deal was they’d do any necessary work on his pickup together, that was how he’d learn, but you had to watch her. She stole books you were reading, too.
Jim went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Alaskan Amber. Uncapping it, he tilted his head back and took a long swallow. He felt better immediately.
Kate was peeling Saran wrap off the top of a deep brown mixing bowl. She bent down and sniffed.
“What’s the latest yeasty masterpiece?”
She looked up and smiled at him. He didn’t see stars, he told himself, it was only his imagination. “Same as the last, only I halved the amount of yeast, and I’m going to knead the salt in between risings.”
“You might as well be speaking in tongues,” he said.
She laughed, the same low husky rasp that she’d rolled out at the Riverside earlier in the day. Mine, he thought, and even he couldn’t have said if he was referring to the laugh or to the woman. Both, probably. He wanted the whole package. Still. Amazing.
Constancy wasn’t exactly Jim Chopin’s middle name.
He went into the living room to consult the theater system with surround sound without which he had insisted no house was truly a home, and saw Johnny’s iPod in the sound dock. He hit Play and moments later Mos Def’s “Caldonia” from the soundtrack of
Lackawanna Blues
filled the air.
“Oh yeah,” Kate said, and he grinned at her through the pass-through.
“What’s for dinner?” he said.
“Fried Spam and eggs.”
“Excellent,” Johnny said, emerging from the bathroom to do a quick knee-drop to the beat.
Jim looked at Kate. “Hey, what can I tell you?” she said. “It’s my Native culture calling to me. You know Alaskans are second only to Hawaiians in consumption of Spam.”
“And I hear second only to Utah in downloading porn,” Johnny said, jumping into a hip slide across the floor to the door of his room, through which he slung his daypack.
“How we can hold our heads up in public ever again,” Jim said.
“I don’t want to know how you know that,” Kate said, looking at Johnny.
Johnny’s grin was cheeky. “Just wait till the Park gets online. Then we’ll be number one.”
She thought of the computers targeted for the school and shuddered. She’d floured the counter, sprinkled two teaspoons of salt over the flour, and turned out the dough. Before they had begun
construction, the Park rat house-raising committee had measured her from sole to waist and made the countertops Kate high, which coincidentally made it very convenient for Jim to stand behind her, slide his arms around her waist, and snug her head beneath his chin.
She stilled. “I’m covered in flour.”
“I don’t care.”
“Not to mention which,” Johnny said in pretend indignation, closing his bedroom door behind him with a distinct thud, “the kid’s standing right here.”
“True,” Jim said. He felt Kate relax against him, a warm, firm presence. God, she felt good.
“And waiting for the story about the bigamist.” Johnny looked at him, face eager. Troopers told the best stories, and he sensed this one would be a doozy.
He felt Kate stir. “Unhand me, sir.”
Reluctantly Jim let her go. He took his beer to the couch and stretched out so that he could watch Kate over the open counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. He took another swallow, and draped an arm around a furry neck conveniently offered. His women had him surrounded. He sighed. Mutt sighed. Eric Clapton started in on “Layla.” In the kitchen, Kate rolled her eyes and kneaded coarse salt into bread dough that she worried might be a tad bit too wet.
“So who is it?” Johnny said.
“The bigamist? Well, since both wives found out today and I’m guessing it’s going around the Park by Bush telegraph right now—” He paused. “You know, we should tune into Park Air tonight, see what Bobby’s got to say about it.”
“Who is it?”
“Because you know he’ll have something to say about it.”
“Jim!”
The chorus was loud enough to make one of Mutt’s ears twitch. It tickled his cheek, but that wasn’t why he laughed. “Actually, you don’t know him.”
“Oh.” Johnny was disappointed.
Kate looked at Jim. “But we know the wives.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Oh, yeah?” Johnny said, perking up again.
Jim looked at Kate, knowing this was where the story would lose some of its humor for her. “Suzy Moonin.”
“Crap,” she said. “Poor Suzy.”
“How many kids has she got now?”
“Three, I think. Or maybe it’s four. Anymore she sees me coming, she heads the other way. Plus I think she must be getting her booze somewhere else, because I haven’t seen her at the Roadhouse lately.” Kate’s eyes darkened. “You haven’t heard any rumors of a new bootlegger in town, have you?”
Jim shook his head. “No. But you know it’s just a matter of time, Kate. With Suulutaq bringing all these new people into the Park, all these young men making real money, some of them for the first time in their lives, drug and alcohol abuse is going to skyrocket.” He sighed. “Along with drug-related crime.”
Kate gave Johnny a severe look.
“What?” he said. “What’d I do?”
“It’s not what you haven’t done, it’s what you will do that worries me,” she said.
“Kate! I haven’t done anything!”
“You say that now.”
“Jeez. I’m not even old enough to drink.” He turned his back on her and said to Jim, “Who was the other wife?” He was only sixteen, he couldn’t even see twenty-one from there, and he was much more interested in the now.
Jim gave the ceiling a pensive stare. “You’d think the guy would be smart enough to know that all the mail for the Park funnels through the Niniltna post office.”
Kate and Johnny’s eyes met. “Bonnie Jeppsen?” they said together.
“Yep.”
“You’re kidding!”
“Nope.”
“But she just got divorced!”
“Evidently, she just got remarried.”
“No!” Kate and Johnny said together, savoring the horror of it all with unconcealed delight. Petey’s older sister wasn’t a Park favorite. This was partly because she had one of the few steady jobs around, and partly because you never knew when you walked into the post office if she was going to try to convert you to the ways of the Lord when all you wanted to do was pick up your mail. “Annie Mike said she saw them fighting in the post office. Was that why?”
Lynyrd Skynyrd started begging for three steps more. “Yes, it was. And while she wasn’t smart enough to know she was his second wife that month, she was smart enough to intercept his check when Global mailed it to him. Probably in violation of seven or eight federal laws, but I’m choosing to ignore that for the moment. Or until a U.S. postal inspector shows up on my doorstep.”
“Which,” Kate said, thinking out loud, “of course sent Suzy hotfoot to the post office to put a trace on the check. Bonnie kind of laying herself open to that by opening the post office for two hours on holidays because she knows everyone will be in town for the parade.”
“Exactly,” Jim said, a gracious nod going to this most apt pupil. This most apt pupil stuck out her tongue. “And between the two of them they had just enough brain to figure out that they were both married to the guy the check belonged to. So when they got done slapping each other around, Bonnie closed up the post office and they came down to the post.” He sought comfort in his beer.
“Were they loud?” Kate said, looking sympathetic.
“They were loud,” Jim said, with a shudder. “They were foulmouthed and abusive, too, to Maggie. And even to me.” He was wounded all over again at the memory. Women were never mean to Chopper Jim Chopin.
“How could they,” Kate said, and even Lenny Kravitz wanted to know who’s that lady. The aptness of the iPod’s musical commentary made her laugh.
“Yeah, yuck it up, Shugak,” he said, “but I’ve a mind to pitch this right in your lap.”
“I’ve got a job,” she said, and batted her eyelashes at him. “Got it just this afternoon.”
“True. Damn it.” He brooded in silence, and Johnny decided the fun part was over and departed for his room and the joys of Maroon 5 on his iPod. Up till now he accessed his iTunes account on Bobby Clark’s computer. But next fall, his own computer with his own Internet connection. iTunes, Facebook, World of Warcraft, he could hardly wait.
Jim put on a CD he had mixed under Johnny’s supervision.
“Jim,” Kate said in the kitchen, “about Petey. Did you catch him in the act of something?”
He made a disgusted sound. “Ah, Harvey reported seeing him and Howie cleaning out Feodor Williamson’s garage. You know Feodor’s been conspicuous by his absence lately, but that doesn’t mean it’s open season on his homestead, he’s probably just catting around Anchorage like usual. I couldn’t find Howie but I found Petey at the Roadhouse, and he wouldn’t give me a straight answer to anything I asked him. Pissed me off, so I locked him up on general principle.”
Kate nodded. About what she’d figured. “If I can find Petey a job, will you spring him?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Since when did you start saving
Jeppsens, Kate? So far as I know you haven’t spoken to Petey since he helped Cheryl shoot up the Roadhouse.”
She shrugged. “I went back to say hi to Willard and saw Petey there. It’s not easy for him, trying to come home after prison and make some kind of life for himself.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Jim said with an edge to his voice. “Good boys aren’t convicted of felonies.” Elvis weighed in on “Jailhouse Rock.”
Kate couldn’t disagree with him, but she said again, “If I could find him a job, would you spring him?”
Jim growled. In sympathy, Mutt growled, too. It forced a chuckle out of him. He scratched behind her ears, an effective therapy for irritation caused by idiots. “I suppose so. Maybe. If the job was in another state.” He looked at her. “You know, Kate, a smart judge once told me I could either be a cop or a social worker, but I couldn’t be both.”
“I’m not a cop,” she said. It sounded pretty lame even to her own ears so she changed the subject. “So, who is the bigamist? Somebody from the mine, I take it?”
“After Mandy fired Howie, she needed someone pronto to mind the site, so she flew to Anchorage and hit Job Service.”
“Oh god.”
“Yeah, I know. She did check with me to see if the two guys she hired had records. They were clean, so far as I could tell without fingerprints. She put ’em to work caretaking the site, and kept them on after breakup when the drill rigs and the building modules and the crews and the rest of the outfit showed up. It’s one of them. Baker by trade, so they put him to work in the kitchen when they went into operation. Name’s Randy Randolph.”
Kate laughed.
“Yeah, I know, kind of, what’s the word? When something sounds like it means? Onomatopoeic?”
Kate cast her mind back to those ghastly days in seventh-grade English. “Homophonic, I think you mean.”
“Yeah, whatever. Randy is Randy.” Jim shook his head and drank more beer.
“What he’s look like?” Kate said, curious. “Is he some kind of Greek god, or what?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him yet. I haven’t even seen him yet. Listen, Kate.”
“No,” she said.
“All I want is for you to talk to him, get his statement.”
“No,” she said.
“Both Suzy and Bonnie had marriage certificates. Suzy’s was in February and Bonnie’s was in March. Randolph’s name and signature on both. Didn’t even change it. Guy’s either gutsy or dumb, won’t know which until somebody talks to him.”
Kate reflected, covering the two loaf pans with Saran wrap and setting them in a warm corner to rise. “Mandy couldn’t have hired him before December. He didn’t waste any time.”
“Nope. Come on, Kate, you have to go out to the mine anyway.” He added craftily, “You can bill it as a separate investigation.”
She heaved a martyr’s sigh. “All right,” she said, as they had both known she would. “I’ll find him and talk to him for you. I’d like to see this Lothario for myself, anyway.”
She came around the counter and sauntered toward him. He admired her while she did so. Yeah, maybe she didn’t have the figure Laurel had, but when she wanted to, Kate could telegraph her intentions in a way that was little less than incitement to riot. Jim had watched plenty of women walk in his lifetime, both toward him and away, and he had never appreciated the amalgamation of brain and bone, muscle and flesh the way he did when it came wrapped in this particular package.
“Beat it,” she said to Mutt.
Mutt flounced over to the fireplace, scratched the aunties’ quilt
into a pile, turned around three times, and curled up with her back most pointedly toward them.