Restless in the Grave (11 page)

She could have slacked off—it wasn’t like she was going to be slinging beer to off-season fishermen forever—but it wasn’t in her to do a job badly, so she found a moment to be grateful there was no smoking at Bill’s and dug into it as if it were going to be her life’s work.

At eight o’clock a short, plump blonde with sharp green eyes and curly blond hair came in with Liam Campbell and Wyanet Chouinard, and the three of them settled into a booth. Campbell was in civilian clothes, and looked just as devastatingly attractive in them as he did in his uniform.

Chouinard smiled and said, “Hi, Kate. I see Bill put you to work.” She’d changed out of her bibs into a blouse and slacks, and her hair had been freed from its ponytail to tumble gloriously over her shoulders.

“That she did,” Kate said. “Thanks for the tip.”

“This is Kate Saracoff,” Chouinard told her companions. “She flew in from Togiak with me this afternoon. I heard Laura Nanalook took off again and Bill was short-staffed, so I sent her here. Kate, this is my husband, Liam Campbell, and my friend, Jo Dunaway.”

Campbell nodded, as if to a stranger. The blonde kept looking at her, a frown spreading across her face. “What can I get you?” Kate said.

No one at the table looked at the menus she offered. “Jalapeño burger with onion rings, and an iced tea,” Chouinard said.

“Who were you thinking of sleeping with tonight, again?” Campbell said. “Cheeseburger and fries, and two fingers of Glenmorangie.”

The blonde was still staring at Kate.

“Jo?” Chouinard said. “You hungry?”

“Patty melt, green salad, blue cheese on the side, and a margarita, blended, with salt.”

Kate could feel the blonde’s eyes boring into her back as she went to deliver the order. They ate and drank and didn’t linger.

By nine o’clock most of the booths were filled and a drunken couple was trying and failing to keep up with the Black Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling” blaring out from the sound system. Up till then, the drink orders had been mostly beer. When the women drinkers showed up, the orders for Cosmos, Island Breezes, and Appletinis started coming. Whatever happened to a nice glass of chardonnay? In Niniltna, the height of drinking sophistication was the Middle Finger, and you had to earn one by climbing Big Bump. Like getting fifteen thousand feet straight up in the air all by itself wasn’t enough of a high.

In Newenham, apparently palates were more refined.

At ten o’clock the blonde came back in. She went to the bar, acquired a stool from an inebriated fisherman ten years her junior with a hip bump and a dazzling smile, and ordered a beer, which she proceeded to nurse. A few minutes later, Bill told Kate to take fifteen minutes in her office with her feet up, handed her a fizzing glass of Fresca and ice, and pushed her in that direction.

Kate had just sat down in Bill’s chair and put her feet up on Bill’s desk when Dunaway came in behind her and closed the door. She stood there, hand on the doorknob, watching Mutt sit down next to Kate and rest her head on Kate’s thigh. “Hello, Kate,” she said. “I don’t remember the dog.”

Kate took a big swallow of her drink. The bubbles tickled pleasantly at the back of her throat.

“Wy says your last name is Saracoff, but it isn’t. It’s Shugak.” Kate remained silent, and the blonde said, “You don’t remember me.”

It was a statement, not a question, so Kate didn’t say anything.

“Anchorage,” the other woman said, sitting down across from Kate and putting her own feet up. She’d brought her beer with her and it rested on her belly, clasped between her hands. “Eight years ago. You were testifying at the inquest of the death of Cornelius Bradley, the guy who cut your throat.” She looked at it. “The scar’s faded a lot.”

In lieu of reaching up to touch the scar, a tell she’d thought she had rid herself of, Kate took a drink.

“It was the only court case I ever reported on,” the blonde said.

Kate stopped with her drink halfway to her mouth. “Joan Dunaway.”

“Jo,” the other woman said. “Just Jo is fine. Did you see the story?”

“I saw it.”

“The city editor butchered it before it went to print.”

“Always the editor’s fault,” Kate said, and smiled without humor. “At least that’s what every reporter I’ve ever met says.”

“Edna Buchanan says there are three rules for the rookie journalist,” Joan Dunaway said. “One, never trust an editor. Two, never trust an editor.” Her smile was bleak. “Bet you can guess the third one.”

“Bet I can,” Kate said. “You still a reporter?”

“You still a private investigator?”

So she knew that much. Kate raised her glass and sipped. Her lower back ached from all the bending and lifting. Her own personal masseur, alas, was at present somewhat east of her current location.

“Are you working, here in Newenham, on a case?” Dunaway asked.

“Are you working, here in Newenham, on a story?” Kate asked.

They stared at each other some more. Mutt’s ears flicked at the back and forth, but she left her head on Kate’s knee.

“Because,” Dunaway said, “I doubt very much that you’ve left your home, your adopted son, and your state trooper roommate to take up the profession of bartending six hundred miles away.”

She’d done her homework, damn her for being a good reporter. “I doubt very much that you flew three hundred miles into the Alaskan Bush in January just to visit friends.”

“Depends on the friend.” Dunaway took a sip of her beer. “Does your case have anything to do with Eagle Air?”

Kate didn’t flinch, but it was a near thing. “Does your story have anything to do with Eagle Air?”

Silence.

Kate took another drink. The Fresca was getting pretty low in the glass. She craned her neck to look at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got ten minutes left on my break. I was thinking of taking a little nap.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Dunaway said.

Kate put some steel into her voice. “Sure you are. You’re leaving this room.”

“I’m not done asking questions.”

“Tonight you are.” Kate put her now-empty glass on the desk, let her head fall back against the chair, and closed her eyes. Probably what she should have done when Dunaway walked in.

After a moment Dunaway’s chair creaked, and the door opened and closed again, shutting out the noise of the bar.

Kate opened her eyes and looked down at Mutt. “Another fine mess I’ve gotten us into, did you say?”

Mutt’s wise yellow eyes blinked up at her.

“Don’t you just hate being right all the time?” Kate said.

Dunaway had left the bar when she came out of Bill’s office, and Kate went back to work. She kept the bar clean, washed glasses, ran food and tickets, and made countless rounds with a loaded tray and an ingratiating smile, which might have been the most difficult part of the whole job. Her ass was patted, slapped, and pinched, and one of the two young men playing cribbage made repeated attempts to see her later. “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she told him.

Well, maybe only his much older sister. His enthusiasm, if anything, increased.
Cougar Town
.

At the end of the evening her back ached, her feet hurt, she smelled of soured beer and her own sweat, and she’d earned enough in tips to recoup the ATV rental, plus.

She had against all expectation picked up some potentially useful local information. A lot of people were sleeping with a lot of other people, none of whom she knew. The mayor and the town council were on a cost-cutting frenzy, and a lot of their employees were busy drinking down their savings before they got laid off. The logic of that escaped Kate, but then she didn’t drink herself. Finn Grant’s recent demise was toasted over more than a few of the tables she waited on. Some were more celebratory than others, and those Kate paid special attention to, flirting if it would let her linger as the conversation played out.

The consensus appeared to be that Finn Grant was as great a pilot as he was execrable a human being. One man did wonder out loud how an aircraft that somebody like Finn Grant flew every day could possibly have broken in flight, but he was very nearly laughed out of his chair and the conversation immediately degenerated into a round robin of stories of every time anyone at the table had been on a flight with mechanical difficulties. All of them, it appeared, most of them being Alaskans born and bred. Kate could have contributed a few stories of her own.

“You heard about the fight, didn’t you? Finn going head-to-head with Wy Chouinard? I hear she threatened to kill him.”

The speaker was a short thickset man with one gnarled hand wrapped around a bottle and the other a possessive presence on the knee of the woman seated next to him. Everyone at his table leaned in, and he gave a sage nod and burped for emphasis. “Fact. Day before he died. Mac McCormick was there, he heard it all.”

“Who hasn’t threatened to kill Finn Grant?” another man said, and a third, leaning over the back of the booth who appeared more sober than the rest, said, “Consider the source. Never knew Mac not to dress up a story.”

The first man, angry at having his story stepped on and probably unhappy at being made to look no-account in front of his girl, said, “Wasn’t the first argument they ever had, and she’s a pilot, and she’s in and out of Newenham airport every day.”

Only too true, Kate thought.

The speaker glared at her, and she aimed a bland smile at the table. “How’s everything, folks?” before giving the table an unnecessary swipe with a bar rag and moving on.

So Campbell hadn’t been an alarmist when he said the town was talking about his wife’s very public and most unfortunately timed fight with Finn Grant. Of course, this was winter, in rural Alaska, and that was always the time and place when the most outrageous stories were made up of whole cloth, and when the bloodiest fights started over the most ridiculous causes. Cabin fever was as real a condition as it was pernicious and pervasive. Months of unrelenting dark and cold would do that to a community. The smaller and more isolated the community, the worse the symptoms.

When Bill closed and locked the door behind the last customer, she cocked an eyebrow in Kate’s direction. “Well?”

Kate stretched. “It’s one way to get to know the community fast, I’ll say that.”

“Better than you ever wanted to,” Bill said, going back around behind the bar. “One for the road?”

Kate looked at the clock. A little after midnight. Not near enough time for everyone back at massa’s house to be settled down snug in their beds. “Sure,” she said. She went into Bill’s office and got her cell phone out of her jacket pocket. There were a couple of missed calls, one from Jim with no message and another from Annie Mike with voice mail, asking her to call back whenever Kate got the message. She didn’t say why, but she sounded tense.

Kate deleted the message instead.

A tall cool glass filled with ice and Fresca waited for her at the bar. On the other side, Bill had pulled up a stool and uncapped a bottle of Alaskan Amber. “It’s good that you don’t drink,” she said. “Have you ever?”

Kate shook her head, inhaling half her glass in one gulp. On your feet for six hours straight was a dehydrating experience.

“Why not?”

Kate looked up and met Bill’s eyes. In Bush Alaska, you didn’t ask people about their past prior to their arrival in your community. If they volunteered, well and good, but you didn’t outright ask. It was not considered good manners, especially when much of the time the new arrival was leaving something behind that did not bear close examination, like an angry spouse, or the law.

On the other hand, Bill had given Kate a job at first sight, no questions asked. “Both my parents were alcoholics,” Kate said, “so I’ve got the gene. Always been terrified that it would get hold of me.”

“But it’s more about control,” Bill said.

It wasn’t a question. Kate’s smile was wry. “Partly.” She shrugged. “Maybe mostly.” She laughed a little. “Plus the stuff doesn’t even pass the nose test with me. Can’t stand the smell.”

Bill’s laugh was big and belly-shaking, if she’d had a belly. “And you’re working in a bar.”

“I needed a job.”

Something in the quality of the silence that followed her words made her look up, to find that Bill was giving her a steady, assessing look. “Did you?” she said. “Because you’re not a village girl on the run from an abusive family life.”

Crap,
Kate thought, but the time for dissimulation was apparently over. “What gave me away?”

Bill snorted. “Well, for one thing you’re not a girl, you’re a woman, and the only scar you’ve got is old. For another, you’re way too articulate and self-assured.” She nodded at the bar. “Nothing out there threw you, not even when Teddy grabbed your thigh. I’ve had a lot of waitstaff, and that alone would have any one of them either in tears or lying down and seeing how wide they could spread their legs.”

She was being deliberately crude, eyes on Kate to see how she took it. Kate neither blushed nor took offense. She knew only too well the tendency of village girls—and boys—alone for the first time in the big city to embrace victimhood as a matter of survival.

“And you’re not from Togiak, either,” Bill said. “At a guess, I’d say … Cordova? Prince William Sound, anyway.”

And Bill was the Newenham magistrate, which meant she had her own bullshit detector all broken in and oiled up and ready to engage gears. Well, local authorities were never happy when they discovered they had been left out of the loop. “I used to work for the Anchorage DA,” Kate said. “Nine years ago I moved into private practice.”

“A PI, huh?” Bill said. “That fits. And you’re in Newenham because—?”

So, off with the cape and the mask. Kate had known she would be found out; she just hadn’t figured it to be within twenty-four hours of hitting town. She made a mental note to be careful in her dealings with the magistrate slash bar owner from that moment on. “Liam Campbell hired me to look into Finn Grant’s death.”

“Did he.” Bill Billington took a long, meditative pull at her beer. “Any particular reason I wasn’t told?”

“You’d have to ask him,” Kate said, which both of them thought was a little craven of her. She covered by adding in a brisk, businesslike voice, “So let me ask you some questions. Do you think Finn Grant was murdered?”