Restless in the Grave (10 page)

In short, a style of architecture one did not expect to see in a town the size of Newenham, especially a town that far from road and rail and slave cabins. Kate didn’t have a clue what hints the exterior gave to the interior, but so far as she could tell, no one was looking out the dozen or so windows that faced the garage. She wondered briefly if Tina’s daughter Irene had had a say in the construction of her apartment, and if so, if she had demanded that no window be on the facing wall of the apartment upstairs. Not much privacy otherwise from that battery of glass.

Kate pulled her head back and sidled around the garage in the other direction until she reached the door in the side. Another quick look at the house assured her that she remained unobserved for the moment, and she slipped inside. The red Honda ATV was squeezed into the only available space near the overhead door. As in most Alaskan garages, parking any vehicle inside it was way down on the list of purposes for which it had been built. She saw two snow machines on a trailer, a bench the length of the garage laden with parts and black grease in roughly equal measure, three red metal toolboxes made of stacking drawers that were each taller than Kate, a motorcycle missing its front fork, and various and sundry engines in various states of disrepair, some of which might have come out of airplanes. There were tundra tires sitting on top of a pair of wheel skis on one corner. The floats Kate had already seen out back. A metal skiff hung from the ceiling, as did a homemade framework of two-by-fours that held more lumber, two-by-fours, four-by-fours, and two-by-twelves, along with a lot of odd lengths of various kinds of molding.

No wonder they’d left the chest freezer upstairs.

The side door had a push-button lock. She pushed it and pulled the door closed and tried the handle. Locked.

She sidled back around the building and up the stairs and took a shower, dried her hair, and put on clean clothes, including her tightest T-shirt. She knew that much about bartending.

“Okay,” she said to Mutt. “Time to go to work.”

Mutt scrambled to her feet from the braided rug in the middle of the room she had staked out as her own and wagged her tail hard enough to beat out the rhythm for “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

They left the apartment and walked around the garage, where Kate tried the door. It was locked. “Damn,” she said out loud but not loudly. She looked over her shoulder at the house and tried the handle again, making it obvious. Nobody looking.

They walked around to the front of the house and went up the front steps, Kate feeling a distinct lack of crinoline about her person. She knocked on the door before she saw the bell pull, an ornate brass lion’s paw, which she then pulled. There came a tolling inside reminiscent of Quasimodo in the belfry at Notre Dame. “Transylvania Six-Five Thousand,” she said to Mutt.

She heard footsteps and the door opened, surprisingly with nary a creak nor a groan. Behind it was the young man from the booth at the bar. “Hi,” Kate said. “Looking for Tina?”

He eyed her without favor. “What for?”

She smiled at him. It had no effect, which was not what she was accustomed to. She heard voices from the back of the house, and raised her own voice enough to be heard there. “I just rented the apartment over the garage, and Tina said I could rent her spare ATV, too.”

“Who is it, Oren?” Tina came up behind him. “Oh, hello, Kate.”

“Hi,” Kate said, looking behind her.

Another woman and the older man from the booth came into the hall behind Tina. He was of medium height and built like a wrestler, with thick dark eyebrows, a broad nose that had been flattened a time or two, and a swarthy, frowning countenance. She was petite, trim, with cornflower blue eyes and blond hair the color of a particularly fine pale ale that hung to her waist in an absolutely straight silken swath. Her manner said she was Tina’s age, but her looks were holding steady at forty.

“Oh,” Tina said, “of course, I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry; she just sounded tired. “Kate, this is my friend Jeannie Penney. She’s our local librarian. And this is my husband’s brother, Fred Grant. This is Kate Saracoff. She just moved into Irene’s apartment.”

Fred put a casual hand on Tina’s shoulder. Just as casually, Tina slid from beneath it. “Is there a problem?” He eyed Mutt. Mutt eyed him back with interest. Jeannie Penney might have been hiding a smile behind her hand.

“I’m sorry,” Kate said to Tina, “I was going to take the ATV back to Bill’s, but the garage door is locked.”

“Locked?” Tina looked bewildered. “That door’s never locked.”

Kate gave an apologetic shrug.

“Well, come on in, I’ll try to find the key,” Tina said, which was exactly what Kate had been hoping for. “Oh, Kate, this is my son, Oren. Oren, this is Kate Saracoff.”

She disappeared back down the hall, followed by Fred and Jeannie.

Kate and Oren nodded at each other. Mutt, standing a little behind Kate, regarded him with bored indifference. Mutt’s asshole detector was every bit the equal of Kate’s bullshit detector, and Kate filed Mutt’s reaction away for future reference.

There was a lot of family resemblance between Oren Grant and his mother, but it was all one step removed, as if he were the last copy made before the cartridge ran out of ink. He seemed somehow faded, almost in places even missing. He was tall but not so tall as his mother, had less hair with more gray in it, was the same kind of lean except that his lean looked flabby. His eyes were a little less brown, his cheekbones not so high, his jaw not so firm. He wore khakis and a white oxford shirt under a sweater vest, everything clean and neatly pressed, and somehow it all added up to his mother being the real deal while he tagged along behind, a wannabe, almost, maybe even an impostor.

Kate had met men like him before, the children of wildly successful parents. Usually no one had ever told them no, and later had never failed to buy them out of whatever trouble they’d gotten themselves into. If they didn’t cut themselves loose young and start staking out their own lives, and they almost never did, the lure of a bought-and-paid-for lifestyle too strong, they grew older existing in their parents’ shadows, becoming steadily more dissatisfied and increasingly whinier with each passing year.

Oren Grant looked like the whiny type.

Kate smiled at him. He frowned back at her. She decided to push it. “Is there a problem? Or you just don’t like Natives?”

He flushed darkly, and called after his mother, “I can get the garage door opener in the car, Mom.”

Her voice reached them from the back of the house. “But then she won’t be able to get back in when she comes home after work.” Her voice dropped then, but Kate heard her say, “I should probably start getting rid of some keys in this drawer.”

The words sounded exhausted, and there was a murmur in a feminine voice.

“Wait here,” Oren said, like Kate might start casing the joint the moment she was left alone.

Well, she had every intention of doing so. She smiled at him with all her teeth, the full treatment. He frowned back and went into a door on the right. Kate looked beyond him and saw a living room furnished with what looked like real leather couches and a seventy-inch flat-screen television on the wall over a rock fireplace. The door closed in her face and there was the immediate sound of an announcer calling an NBA basketball game from behind it.

She was standing in a hall whose ceiling reached up into the second story. A wide staircase with a very nice stained wooden bannister curved down one side of the room. The walls above it were covered with Alaska artwork, everything from Fred Machetanz to Anuktuvuk face masks, and what might be an original Sydney Laurence painting. A life-size sea otter carved from whale vertebrae leaned on his thick tail in one corner, and the beak of an eagle protruded a good six inches from an Alvin Amason painting in another. That beak had kid-size disaster written all over it. At a guess, Tina didn’t have any grandchildren.

A corner table stood between the front door and the TV room. An oval mirror in a gilt frame leaned into the corner. On the shelf below was a wide wicker basket full of knit hats and leather gloves and a single lime green YakTrax. On the table itself was a small blue pottery bowl with two rings of keys in it.

A photograph sat next to the bowl, of a young woman in uniform, U.S. Army, Kate thought, although she wasn’t that ept with the armed forces. The young woman wore a maroon beret with a black band and stood in front of an American flag with her hands clasped behind her. She wore no makeup and what hair she had was tucked behind her ears, but there was no hiding her essential femininity or the fact that she was her mother’s daughter. The lines of her face, her wide brow, her small, straight nose, her firm jaw were all clearly defined. She met the camera’s lens squarely, no shrinking or flinching. This copy was as fresh and crisp as the original.

The photograph wasn’t draped in black, no badges or wings or other soldier’s mementos, no burning candles. Nothing of the shrine about this photograph. It spoke for itself.

This would be the eldest daughter, Irene. Killed in November in Afghanistan.

The Grants really were having a lousy year, and Kate felt a twinge of conscience that she was very probably about to add to it.

But only a twinge. She stepped back from the photograph and looked around. Bedrooms upstairs, kitchen in back from what she could see. There was a closed door on her left. She opened it. It faced west, maybe a little west by south, which meant it would get all the light there was during the winter and all the light there ever would be the rest of the year. It was a craft room, filled with baskets of yarn and beads in clear plastic parts drawers and half-finished bracelets and stranded tams spread across the surface of three long folding tables. A thirteen-inch television–DVD player combo stood on the corner of one table, and a bookcase on the wall in back of it was filled with DVDs and pattern books. A recliner covered in brown corduroy worn smooth stood next to a floor lamp, a pile of paperbacks on the floor next to it. Kate tilted her head to read the spines. Susan Elizabeth Phillips, David Weber, Lindsey Davis, Charlaine Harris. Eclectic escapism. If those authors couldn’t pull you out of the life you were living, you were well and truly stuck.

Tina’s room, if she had to guess. Kate liked it.

She pulled the door closed again and moved softly to the next room. The door opened silently onto the office, which held a large desk and two filing cabinets and bookshelves against each wall.

Bingo.

She took note of the two sash-weight windows on the exterior wall before pulling the door closed again. When Tina returned to the hall alone, Kate was standing in exactly the spot she had been when Tina left her, Mutt sitting next to her, both of them the very picture of innocence. She looked up from the photograph of the woman in uniform when Tina reappeared. “Your daughter?” she said.

Tina’s expression didn’t change. “Yes.”

“The resemblance is very strong.”

“Yes.”

The TV room door opened and Oren reappeared. He followed their gaze to the photograph of his sister. “I told her that beret made her look like Che Guevara.” He laughed.

His mother did not. “Let’s try this,” she said, holding up a key. “It’s marked garage, but who knows.”

Kate followed Tina outside and around the house to the garage. The key worked and Tina said, “Put it on the ring with the house key.” She showed Kate the button for the garage door. “There are two gas stations, one across from the AC and the other on the road to the airport. The airport one is cheaper. Outside the city limits, so no city tax.”

“Thanks,” Kate said with perfect truth. “I appreciate it.”

Tina made a dismissive gesture and returned to Tara.

The ATV was either new or had been kept in extremely good condition. Kate unscrewed the gas cap and rocked it back and forth. Low on gas, but enough to get her to work with a stop to fill up on the way.

Nine

JANUARY 18, THAT EVENING

Newenham

It was almost seven by the time she got back to Bill’s. It was a Tuesday night and the crowd amounted to the same guy asleep on the same stool at the bar and two younger men playing cribbage in a booth, who stopped pegging long enough to examine Kate with interest. She put her jacket in Bill’s office, Mutt took up station at the end of the bar, and Bill indoctrinated her into the mysteries of waitressing. “All people want is the right drink fast. Try to keep the orders straight and you’ll be fine.” Bill looked her over. “You’ll probably get your share of come-ons from the customers. Don’t take any crap. If someone persists in giving it—”

“If I can’t take care of it, and I can,” Kate said, “don’t forget I brought my own personal bouncer.” They both looked at Mutt.

Bill looked back at Kate, a latent twinkle in her blue eyes. “You’ll do,” she said.

There were never more than twenty-five customers at one time that evening, but Kate had never worked so hard in her life. She was constantly in motion physically and constantly on the alert mentally to the wave of a hand, a call for a round, keeping straight who ordered what at what table or booth, adding up a tab, figuring out change. There was a knack to carrying the tray, which strangely enough felt equally heavy loaded with full glasses as with empty ones. Most of the bar’s patrons were regulars, they knew what they wanted and they knew the menu, and they were patient with Kate only up to a point. And then there were the passes, covert and overt, the oh-so-accidental brush of a hand against her hip, the inadvertent brush of a head against her breast.

Kate was accustomed to being underestimated where her reputation did not precede her. She was short, she was a woman, and she was a Native. Now she was a waitress, too, and evidently waitress was not only a job regarded with automatic disdain, it was also a job with a pheromone signature that flagged down every male between the ages of seven and seventy. It added an extra layer of distraction to a job she already didn’t know how to do, but she gritted her teeth and smiled and remembered Jim’s orders.
Just try to wrap it up in a week, otherwise I might have to come down there and clear it myself.
The thought of Sergeant Jim Chopin walking in the door in all his blue-and-gold glory made her smile a lot more genuine, which went some way toward increasing her tips, too.