A grave denied (10 page)

“The trooper? What for?”

“Well.” There was something so civilized about the Hagbergs’ house, a neat log cabin, exterior logs freshly oiled, interior Sheet-rock freshly painted, floors freshly scrubbed, that made it difficult to utter the word “murder” within its walls. “It appears that Mr. Dreyer was a victim of homicide.”

Virgil stared at her. “Well, for gosh sakes.” The expression would have sounded quaint coming from anyone except Virgil Hagberg. It also added ten years to his age.

“Yes.”

“What a terrible thing to have happen to someone.”

“Yes,” Kate said.

Virgil cast around looking for something else to say. “Who did it?”

“That’s just it. We don’t know. His body was discovered inside the mouth of Grant Glacier.”

“Well, for gosh sakes,” Virgil said again.

“So the trooper has asked me to trace Mr. Dreyer’s last movements. And Dandy Mike said he and Dreyer had done some work for you last summer.”

“Of course, of course,” Virgil said. He made an obvious effort to gather his thoughts. “It was in July, around the middle of the month, I think. Mr. Dreyer and Dandy Mike came out and put in the foundation and did the framing and the roof. I wanted to put in some tomatoes.” His chest puffed out a little. “We got ourselves a daughter to feed now, you know.”

At that moment a thin girl with a pale, solemn face came into the kitchen. “Have you met Vanessa? Vanessa Cox, this is Kate Shugak.”

Woman and girl exchanged nods.

“Our cousin’s only child,” Virgil added in a hushed voice, as if Vanessa wasn’t standing at the counter directly behind him. “There was a tragedy, you know. Both her parents were killed.”

He raised his voice. “Did you want something, Vanessa?”

“One of Aunt Telma’s cookies,” Vanessa said.

“Sure, go on, help yourself.” Virgil turned back to Kate. “Her grandparents were dead, and she was all alone in the world. It looked like she was going to have to go into foster care until we said we would take her. I would not put a dog into foster care.”

He patted Telma’s hand. Telma smiled her agreement.

Vanessa reached into a drawer and pulled out a Ziploc bag. She proceeded to fill it with cookies from Sylvester’s head. Both Telma and Virgil had their backs to her and her movements were noiseless and efficient. When the bag was full, Vanessa vanished again.

“A lovely girl,” Virgil said. “And so quiet around the house. Is it not so, Telma?”

Telma smiled her agreement.

“Johnny…” Kate said, and then she was stumped at what to call Johnny. He wasn’t her son, he wasn’t even a relative. “Johnny Morgan, the boy who is living with me, is in Vanessa’s class. He’s talked about her some.” In fact, Kate thought, Vanessa was with Johnny when he discovered the body. Had Vanessa not told the Hagbergs about it?

“All good things, I hope,” Virgil said, smiling at Telma.

Telma smiled back. Telma smiled a lot.

“Of course, all good things,” Kate said, and shifted into investigator mode. She asked the usual questions and got the usual answers. No, Dreyer hadn’t mentioned family or friends. No, he hadn’t said where he was from. He’d showed up when he was called, and he’d done what he’d hired on to do and that well, he’d been paid in cash, and then he’d left.

The ideal handyman, Kate thought. Why on earth would anyone want to kill him? She drained her mug and got to her feet. “Thanks for the coffee and the cookies, Telma. Virgil.”

“Kate. I am sorry we could not help more.”

“You and everybody else,” Kate said.

She climbed into her truck and sat in thought for a moment. Bonnie Jeppsen had sent Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez to Bobby. After to the Roadhouse, and particularly for those who didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t drink, the postmistress was the next best contact point for the Park. Everybody got mail.

The most conversation Kate had had lately with Bonnie Jeppsen was “Hi” when she picked up and dropped off her mail. Perhaps that should change.

Of course, there were reasons why Bonnie Jeppsen might be perfectly happy to live out the rest of her life on a “Hi, how’ve you been” basis with Kate.

“But she’s probably forgotten all about that by now,” Kate said out loud.

Mutt stuck her cold nose in Kate’s ear. Kate fended her off. “All right, all right, we’re going.” She started the truck and set off.

They got home at nine o’clock to find Johnny gone.

₆

Dear Kate,“ the note on the kitchen table began.

I’m not going back Outside to live with my grandmother. I’m not going to Anchorage to live with my mom. I’m staying in the Park. No judge who doesn’t know me or you or my mom is going to make decisions about my future. It’s my “—
‘my was in capitals and underlined—
^v
future. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. I’m in a safe place, I brought my sleeping bag, and I have lots of food.

Kate sighed. “Oh, hell.” There was a P.S.

I’m sorry, but I took the .30-06. I left you the shotgun so you should be okay. I promise I’ll pay you for any ammunition I use.

Kate’s blood didn’t exactly run cold but she could feel frost forming on her veins. “Okay,” she said, letting the note fall to the table.

She stepped to the door. The clearing was void of life. She stepped outside and took a deep breath. “MUUUUUUUTT!”

It took Mutt precisely seventeen seconds, trotting back and forth with her nose to the ground, to pick up Johnny’s scent from the T-shirt Kate held out to her, to where the boy’s smell from it led into the bushes. It took them forty-six minutes, Kate on the four-wheeler with Mutt loping ahead to track him down to his camp in the entrance of the Lost Wife Mine. Kate didn’t know what that was in regular time but she felt she’d aged at least a year door-to-door.

Mutt got to him before Kate did, and by the time Kate killed the engine and climbed off, Johnny was prone beneath an onslaught of sandpapery tongue. “Off! Help! Mutt! Yuck! Get off me!”

Mutt backed off, tail wagging furiously. Johnny got up and brushed pine needles from his jeans. “Traitor,” he told Mutt. She heard what he meant instead of what he said and woofed again.

“Good girl,” Kate said with a laudatory scratch behind the ears. “Go ahead. You’ve earned it.”

In response to a signal, Mutt launched herself into the brush and flushed a bunch of rabbits from a peaceful browse. She wasn’t really hungry, but they didn’t know that and scattered in a starburst of white tails.

Johnny was the first to regain his composure. “Would you like some coffee?”

Kate, now that she could see Johnny had not, after all, shot his eye out with the .30-06, decided firstly that Johnny could live, and secondly that she must retain rights to the grown-up in this situation. As such, she would not lose her temper. She chanted that six or seven times to herself, and when it finally took replied, “Sounds good.”

It was after ten o’clock and the sun was as near to setting as it ever got in May at that latitude. The mine entrance was high on a hill and commanded a sweeping view of the valley leading up to the plateau known as the Step, and the Quilak Mountains beyond. The sky was without color, neither the blue of day nor the black of night, and no stars shone save
the
faint golden glow of the one setting behind the hill the mine tunneled into.

The camp, Kate had to admit, was a cozy affair. Johnny had built up a sleeping platform on spruce boughs, cushioned with a tarp, a Thermarest, and a sleeping bag, set just inside the overhang of the cave out of the dew and the rain. A little fire pit was lined neatly with flat rocks he must have hauled up from the creek in back of the homestead. Canned goods were lined up like soldiers on a shelf made from two weather-stained Blazo boxes, both of which Kate recognized as having been salvaged from the dwindling stack behind the shop. He’d brought his CD player and a carrier full of CDs. Kate saw a bargain pack of batteries for the player and for his book light, which had been folded into the paperback copy of
A Civil Campaign
that sat on his sleeping bag.

No way had he moved this much stuff up here in one day. He’d been planning this for some time.

Mutt had interrupted him in the middle of writing in a notebook, which lay open on the ground. Kate picked it up along with the pen she found a few feet away, only to have Johnny remove both from her hands. He wasn’t abrupt about it, or embarrassed, just polite, and firm.

She took a deep breath and reminded herself again that she was the grown-up here.

“Here,” he said, “take my seat.” Gravely, he proffered a rough but recognizable chair, with back, sliced out of a round section of tree trunk with what had probably been her chain saw.

Kate’s sense of humor got the better of her at this point. “Thank you, Mr. Crusoe,” she said. She sat down. Her butt overlapped both sides but it got the job done. She waited while the water boiled in a saucepan, and didn’t offer to help measure coffee into the filter. The resulting brew threatened to remove the enamel from her teeth, but that was okay because that was how she liked it. She added some evaporated milk from a can and sipped. He did, too.

She wondered when he’d moved on from cocoa to coffee. “Nice camp,” she said.

“Thanks,” Johnny said.

“You’ve been planning this for a while.”

He nodded. “Ever since she showed up in the Park last fall.”

“That long? I’m impressed. But then your father was quite a planner, too.”

“He told me patience was the most important thing when you wanted something. He told me not to rush, that rushing just got you nowhere faster.”

Kate thought of Jack Morgan, of all the time he’d served for her after she’d left Anchorage, and him. Eighteen months he had waited, until exactly the right event had drawn her back into his orbit, by the time when she’d been willing to allow herself to be drawn. It had worked, too. “Smart man, your father.”

“I think so.”

Mutt came padding back up the hill and flopped down next to Kate with a sigh of satisfaction. Kate let her hand drop down into the thick gray coat. As always, the warm, solid bulk pressed against her side was comfort and consolation, reassurance and support. Mutt was her alter ego, her backup man, her sister, her friend. Her savior, on more than one occasion.

Kate wished Mutt could save her now. She felt as if she were walking through a mine field, that wherever she put a foot down there was the possibility of an explosion that would destroy forever what fragile relationship she had managed to build with Johnny Morgan. She didn’t mind making him mad, but she didn’t want to alienate him. “I’ve been talking to some people today,” she said.

“Yeah? Who?”

“People who knew Len Dreyer.”

He’d all but forgotten the body in the glacier under the pressure of more important affairs. “Len Dreyer?” He caught himself. “Oh. Yeah. The dead guy.”

Kate nodded, and took a sip of coffee.

“So,” Johnny said, curious in spite of himself. “What did they say?”

“Not much,” she said. “It’s weird. Everybody knew him but nobody really knew him. Near as I can figure, he worked at one time or another for pretty much every Park rat with a building or a boat. They all paid him in cash. All of them were referred to him by either Bernie or Bonnie.”

“Who’s Bonnie?”

“The postmistress.”

“Oh. Mrs. Jeppsen.”

“Yeah. Nobody can remember him having a girlfriend. Nobody remembers him having a friend-friend. Nobody can remember him mentioning family. Nobody knows where he came from. Every single person I’ve talked to so far says he showed up when he said he would and he did the work well. Nobody’s complained about him overcharging, so I’m guessing he worked for a reasonable rate.”

“What about where he lives? Have you checked that out? There might be papers and stuff.”

“There might have been, if his cabin hadn’t burned down.”

“Oh. Ohhhhh,” Johnny said, and his eyes brightened, so that he looked more like fourteen calendar years old and less like a wary fourteen going on forty. “You mean someone burned it down so you wouldn’t find out anything about him?”

“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t like coincidences. I find someone shooting Len Dreyer and his cabin burning down coincidental in the extreme.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said, his brows knit. “When did the cabin burn down?”