A grave denied (22 page)

From that point on there was a mutual unspoken agreement that no serious business would be discussed, no Dreyer, no Jeffrey, no Jane, no abusive husbands or dope-dealing video renters or arsonous murderers. There was flirting, between Bobby and Dinah and between Jim and Dinah and between Bobby and Kate. There might even have been a little between Kate and Jim. The stories started tall and got taller. Dinah danced with Bobby again, and then Jim, and then Old Sam, who had patented a kind of schottische-rhumba combination that was the dread of every woman in the Park.

After a while it got crowded enough that Bernie missed a signal for another round and Kate went to the bar. Bernie was busy filling a tray, and while she was waiting she said hello to the man glowering into a glass of beer.

He nodded, a single, straight-up-and-down movement, his ill humor making his black face look like a thunderhead, ready to shoot lightning at any moment. “Ms. Shugak.”

“Didn’t see you come in,” she said. She thought about asking him to join their table. She thought better of it.

“Robert did.”

Ah. If so, Bobby had not mentioned it to the rest of them, which told its own story. She looked down the bar and caught Bernie’s eye. He held up one finger, made a circular motion, raised his eyebrows. She nodded.

“You appear to have some influence with my brother,” Jeffrey said stiffly.

Hating to ask favors of an inferior, Kate thought. “Nobody has influence on Bobby Clark,” she said. “He’s his own man. He does what he wants, when he wants.”

She could tell he was resisting the impulse to glare. “Nevertheless,” he said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell him you think it’s a good idea to see his father alive one last time.”

“I don’t know that it is,” Kate said.

This time he didn’t resist. “He’s his father. He wants to see his second son before he dies. That can’t be too hard even for you to understand.”

It was the “even for you” that did it. “You hate it that he’s happy, don’t you,” she said, looking at him as if she were peering through a microscope. “You could have handled it better if he were broke, hungry, maybe homeless. Instead he’s got a home and a wife — ”

He snorted.

“ — and a child, and a life. Your father made Tennessee so unliveable for him that he escaped into the army, and war, to get away from it. Just out of curiosity, did you know he’d left both legs in Vietnam before you came? Did your father know?

Did either of you bother to find out where he went and what he did when he left you?“

“He ran away.”

“Which at this point only confirms my already high opinion of his intelligence,” Kate said, and watched with interest as his face flushed red enough to be seen even given the already dark color of his skin and the dim light of the bar.

Fortunately, Bernie finally scooted down the counter to toss her a package of beef jerky. He felt the tension between her and Jeffrey Clark and gave her a quizzical look.

Kate tossed the jerky back. “Mutt’s over at Auntie Vi’s with Katya and Johnny,” she said. “But thanks.”

Bernie gave Jeffrey Clark one last look, decided it would be unwise to meddle with a volcano that close to eruption, and busied himself with filling glasses. “How’s the hunt going?”

She gave him a long, considering look, and gave a nonanswer. “We’re taking the night off.”

“Oh. Ah. Well. Here you go.” He shoved the tray at her and answered a call for another round at the opposite end of the bar, a look of barely suppressed relief on his face.

She delivered the drinks and stood for a moment, indecisive. “What, you’re waiting for a fucking invitation!” Bobby roared.

She jerked her head. “Gotta flush,” she said, but when she got to the back of the room she ignored the door into the rest room and went out onto the back porch instead. A set of stairs led down into the rest of Bernie’s domain.

There were two neat rows of cabins, each big enough for a queen-sized bed and a bathroom, which could not, contrary to rumor, be rented by the hour. There were two covered picnic areas with brick barbecues, and tables and benches made of logs sawn in half. A neatly gravelled trail led through a stand of birch trees to a two-story house built of imported cedar, fronted with a large deck held down by a full suite of wrought-iron lawn furniture and an enormous gas grill. Kate went up a wide stair-case laden with deep, square flower boxes at tastefully interspersed points and knocked gently on the French double doors. After a few moments they opened. “Hello, Kate.” “Hi, Enid. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

₁₁

Enid Elliot Koslowski was a Park rat, and a daughter and a granddaughter of more Park rats who were all now either working on the TransAlaska Pipeline or in Prudhoe Bay, or in the Pioneer Home in Anchorage, eating Doritos and watching Jerry Springer on cable. She was as white as you could get without bleach, her forebears having determined early on to retain racial purity insofar as that did not preclude amicable trading relations with the Alaska Natives who made up the majority of the customers who came into the general store.

The general store had been built by her grandfather, a Canathan of Scots descent whose ancestors had emigrated to America fleeing from the heavy hand of British tyranny. Her grandfather emigrated to Alaska fleeing what he perceived to be the Frenchizization (his word) of the Canathan nation. “At least in Alaska,” he opined famously, or infamously depending on the race of the listener, “a white man can be white.”

He brought his wife with him, who quietly expired giving him his second son, who died shortly thereafter. He sent his one remaining son Outside to school, who returned eventually with a degree in history and an acceptably white wife. They had one child, Enid.

The store provided the Elliotts with a reasonably good living until it burned down one spring day in 1970. Enid’s father, who had never cared much for living in the Bush, put the property up for sale and moved to Anchorage. There were no takers until Bernie Koslowski, fleeing the repercussions of burning his draft card on the steps of the U.S. Capitol that same year, came to the Park with a fistful of cash (the provenance of which no sensible Park rat inquired after) looking for a place to build a bar.

Enid flew into the Park to close the deal for her father. She didn’t like living in Anchorage, and Bernie, if a draft-dodger, was white, thereby gaining her father’s approval, so she married him. They had three children and appeared reasonably content.

Kate, however, knew a little about what went on beneath that placid Koslowski surface. Bernie wasn’t a Cassanova on the order of Jim or Dandy but he did have an eye for the ladies, and there had been the occasional foray over the fence. He blithely imagined Enid knew nothing of these extramarital activities, but Kate had good cause to know that Enid was not as clueless as she made herself appear. Bernie was a good provider and a good father, though, and Enid had no wish to tend bar herself. She wasn’t the first wife Kate had met who had decided to turn a blind eye to her husband’s extracurricular activities. Didn’t mean she liked it, though.

Enid made coffee, a welcome reprieve from the designer water Kate had been swilling in the bar. It was good coffee, too, dark and rich, and familiar. “I get it from Homer,” Enid said.

“Captain’s Roast,” Kate said, and for an instant remembered the small bunkhouse in Bering, and rifling through Jim’s duffle for clues as to why he was there, too.

“Yeah,” Enid said, surprised. “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess. Need to ask you some questions, Enid, if it’s okay?”

Having Kate Shugak show up on your doorstep wasn’t as bad as Dan Rather showing up with a camera crew, but it was a close second, and Enid had been nervous from the get-go. “Sure,” she said apprehensively. “What about?”

“Len Dreyer.” Kate watched as color receded from Enid’s face. In a voice carefully devoid of any emotion, she said, “I imagine you’ve heard that his body was discovered in Grant Glacier.”

Enid spoke through stiff lips. “I had heard.”

Kate waited, and when Enid said nothing more, prodded her on. “He was shot at point-blank range.”

If possible, Enid went even whiter. “Oh.”

“With a shotgun. Messy.”

“How… how awful,” Enid said. Her eyes were fixed and staring right at Kate, as if she was afraid to look at anything else. “I don’t know what I can tell you about him, Kate. I didn’t know him that well.”

Kate watched her from beneath lowered eyelids, and saw Enid look up and to her right. She snapped her gaze back immediately. Kate said, “Bernie says you had him do some work around the place last summer.”

“Oh. Yes, I… I suppose we did.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know, I —oh, of course. He laid down some new gravel for the paths.”

“I see.” Kate lapsed into that time-honored investigator’s trick, silence.

Enid was a good subject to practice it on: Innocent people usually are. She rushed to fill the silence with words. “He was only here a few days, I think. He did a good job, the paths are in great shape, even after the winter. Nice and level. I think he dug some of them out so they’d have a nice edge to them, so the gravel wouldn’t scatter.” Kate watched her realize she was babbling, watched her catch herself, and stop.

“When was he here?” Kate said. “What days?”

“I don’t know, Kate, last summer sometime.” Kate’s unthreatening manner gave Enid courage. “Why do you need to know?”

Kate shrugged. “I’m helping Jim figure out what happened. Dreyer was probably killed last year, since no one reports seeing him after the end of October. I’m putting together a timeline of his activities, where he worked, who he talked to, like that, in case someone knows something that might help us finger the killer.”

“Oh. Would you like some more coffee?”

Kate looked down at her mug, tJiree-quarters full. “Sure.” She waited until Enid was on her feet with her back turned before she looked around.

Through the doorway she could see the gun rack mounted on the wall. It had cradles for four weapons, all full. Two of the four were shotguns, a double and a single.

She faced forward just in time to hold out her mug for Enid to top off.

They were in the kitchen, a magnificent room of bleached wood and granite countertops and gleaming copper pots. Selling liquor had always been a profitable business. There was a corner bookcase filled with cookbooks, and a long table that seated twelve to serve dishes made from recipes in those books. Enid was the closest thing the Park had to a full-blown chef. Kate herself had sat down at this table to a chicken stew that Enid had called Sicilian and everyone else divine. Lots of garlic. Anything with a lot of garlic in it worked for Kate, who sometimes imagined she had something Mediterranean going on in her background. It was possible; there was everything else in there, including a Russian commissar and a Jewish tailor. There was also Uncle Dieter, whom everyone thought had been a Nazi in Germany sixty years before, but he was drooling away the rest of his life in the Sunset Apartments in Ahtna and nobody’d called Simon Wiesenthal, so they let it go.

Kate looked at Enid, who was fidgeting nicely. Blunt or oblique, she thought. Blunt. “You had an affair with Len Dreyer,” she said.

Enid, taken totally off guard first by the long silence and then by the direct attack, burst into tears. Kate looked around, found a box of Kleenex on the counter, and fetched it over. It took a while, but Enid eventually sobbed her way through the entire box and the whole story. “It wasn’t an affair,” she said, hiccupping.

“What was it then, a one-night stand?”

“No! No. It wasn’t anything like that. I just wanted—I just…” The words, backed up for a long time, flooded forth like a creek after breakup. “There’s always someone. There’s always been someone. It never lasts long but I know all the signs, I always know, and I always pretend I don’t, and I just got tired of it, you know?” Her eyes, red and swollen, appealed to Kate for understanding.

Kate looked at her gravely.

There was a tense moment, broken only by the sound of broken breathing. “And then,” Enid said, almost inaudibly, “and then there was Laurel.”

“Laurel Meganack?” Kate said.

“Yes.” Enid reached for more tissue. “I thought—he was more serious about her. It lasted a long time, longer than usual. I —I thought he might leave me for her.” Enid blew her nose. “I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to talk to Bernie about it. I don’t know. I think I thought if I said something I might make it happen.”

If you don’t look straight at it, Kate thought, it doesn’t exist. “So along came Len.”

“God, it wasn’t like he was even that interested, I practically had to rape him. But he was right here, day after day. He had a nice body,” she said wistfully. “Nice shoulders when he took his shirt off. Strong arms. I went out one day, took him a cold can of pop, and I, well, I guess you could say I propositioned him. We went into one of the cabins, and well, we did it. The next day he came back and I took him into a cabin again. Only…”

Kate, keeping to herself her opinion of someone who chose to sleep around on her husband in her husband’s place of business, said, “Bernie walked in?”

Enid broke down again. “Yes,” she said, sobbing. “He walked in.” She raised tear-filled eyes. “He stood there looking at us.”