The Singing of the Dead (18 page)

He did and she slipped it into the slot on the side of the laptop and copied both files.

Jim sighed. “Why didn't you just ask him if you could?”

“Because then he might have to say no to me. I don't like making my friends uncomfortable.”

“Sure you don't,” Jim said beneath his breath, as Kate slipped the floppy into a pocket.

“You aren't my friend,” she said before she could stop herself.

There was another of those tense silences between the two of them that seemed to be popping up with uncomfortable regularity. “You got that right, if nothing else,” Jim said, his voice cool and his words clipped.

Kenny came back and picked up the expanding file folder that was also part of Paula Pawlowski's effects.

“Anything in there?” Kate said.

“Notes about Peter Heiman, mostly. About his brother, his dad, his grandfather. Mostly history, starting back in Fairbanks right after the Klondike. That what she was supposed to be looking up?”

“I think she was supposed to be finding out anything about Peter Heiman that would help Darlene beat him in the election.”

“I thought Anne Gordaoff was running against Pete.”

Kate smiled. “It's her face on the posters,” she said, and left it at that. “Mind if I take a look?”

Paula's handwriting was large and sprawling, with a lot of marginal notes surrounded by balloons with arrows pointing to other balloons and paragraphs. There were a few doodles here and there, asterisks, five-pointed stars, a hand-drawn game of Dots the likes of which Kate hadn't seen since grade school. “Think I could have copies of what's in here?” she asked Kenny.

“Oh, like the copy you made of the files on the laptop?” Kenny asked.

Kate refused to blush. “I was thinking more of a Xerox machine for the paperwork.”

“You might have asked.”

“But then you might have had to say no.”

“True.” To Jim Chopin's immense and visible disgust, Kenny waved her to the copy machine.

“Thanks, Kenny,” she said when she was done.

“I don't like this, Kate.” He stood in the center of the outer office, arms folded, his large figure dominating the space and infusing it with a sense of purposeful menace. “I get paid to keep a peaceful, prosperous community peaceful and prosperous. The community doesn't like it when somebody gets killed here, and I don't like it when the community doesn't like it.”

“I know.”

“Now there have been two murders.”

“Yes.”

“And I don't have a suspect for either one.”

“I know.”

“I don't like that, either.” Kenny spoke with deliberation, giving each word its due weight. He wouldn't be deflected and he wouldn't be rushed. Kate listened to him with a sober expression. Jim listened in without kibitzing, not something he would do for every other one of his brothers and sisters in arms. “I want this cleaned up, and quick. Okay, Billy Mike and the mayor and anybody who is anybody is telling me to low-key this, fine. But a man is dead, murdered. A woman's dead, murdered, and she lived here. I didn't know her, but that doesn't matter. She was one of mine.”

He raised his eyes to Kate's. “You're working for the campaign, Pawlowski was working for the campaign, you've got the best shot at figuring this out. Figure it out. Meantime, I'll get on forensics in town. She fought. Maybe some of all that blood isn't hers. Call me, every day; tell me what's going on.”

“All right.”

He gave her an envelope for the copies. “Thanks.”

“I've got the Cessna.” Jim Chopin said, staring into the air over her head. “Want a ride?”

After Gilbert and Sullivan, Anne and company had been scheduled to fly out to Niniltna, leaving Kate to follow how she could.

The best that Kate knew of Jim Chopin was that he was an excellent pilot, even of planes he'd never flown before and never would again, as witness their brief and, for lack of a better word, exhilarating flight together in a Lockheed C-130 the previous July. “I want to check out Paula's trailer again.” She looked at Kenny for permission. He considered, nodded.

The Airstream was on a lonely stretch of riverbank, no neighbors around for two miles in any direction. “We've already gone through it.”

“I know, but I want to look again.”

“Fine. I'd have to change my flight plan anyway.”

Kate left, followed by Mutt, who pasted a wet one on Jim in passing.

The two men watched them out of sight. She looked sad in repose, Jim thought, quieter, less irritable. He didn't like it.

Kenny looked at Jim and shook his head. “Boy, Chopin, you've got it bad.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jim said.

W hat do you drive?” she asked Tony.

“A Ford Escort, also known as a McCar,” he said.

“Could I borrow it for a couple of hours?”

“Sure.” He pitched her the keys. “Two door, dark blue, should be around back of the kitchen.”

“Thanks, Tony. I'll fill her up before I bring her back.”

At the Airstream, Kate ducked beneath the crime-scene tape and opened the door. Mutt looked at Kate pleadingly from the cement square that served as the trailer's front porch. “God knows you deserve it,” Kate said. “Take the afternoon off, girl. Go.” Mutt gave a joyous bark and in two leaps was in the underbrush. A spruce hen exploded upward, squawking indignantly. The hydraulic hinge pulled the door shut behind Kate and nudged her the rest of the way inside the tiny living room. She set the envelope containing the copies of Paula's notes down on the table and took a long, slow look around.

You had to train long and hard to see the rest of the room a body was laying in. Maybe Kate was out of practice, but she didn't remember the matching flowered print of the curtains and the sofa cushions on the two couches with the table between them. Poppies, it looked like, on a dense forest green background that gave the material the look of tapestry, and almost hid the bloodstain from view.

The corresponding bloodstain on the white linoleum-tile floor had dried a hard brown. She'd been shot once, had fallen to the couch, then to the floor. They'd found no evidence that she'd hit the table.

Bookcases, homemade but sturdily built and nicely finished with a natural stain and a light coating of varnish, filled every available inch of the wall space above the couch backs, between the windows, and below the ceiling. The books were alphabetized by author, all history, all about eras of Alaskan history, World War II, gold rush days, the Civil War. Some Kate recognized from her own library: The Thousand Mile War by Brian Garfield, The Flying North by Jean Potter, Pierre Berton's The Klondike Rush , his mother's I Married the Klondike , and Murray Morgan's Confederate Raider . Little yellow sticky notes festooned the pages, where passages had been marked in light pencil.

She saw an oversized book bound in leather with fading letters on the spine, which proved to be a copy of the duke of Abruzzi's account of his expedition to climb Mount St. Elias in 1897, a book Kate had given up on acquiring when Rachel at Twice Told Tales in Anchorage had told her it was priced on the Internet at seven hundred and fifty dollars. There were photographs, and she sat down on the unstained couch and leafed through them, pausing to read a paragraph here and there.

She replaced the book on the shelf with due reverence, and wondered what other treasures Paula had hidden away in her little tin hot dog. There was no filing cabinet, no notes. Everything Paula had been working on must have been either in the notebooks or on the laptop.

The kitchen cupboards were neatly organized, the dishes melamine, the pots and pans Paul Revere, the glassware Wal-Mart, the flatware Costco. In the little refrigerator fltted beneath the counter there was an aging block of cheddar cheese, a half-empty carton of eggs, and a bunch of green onions that looked like they were melting. The remainder of a loaf of Wonder Bread on the counter was dried hard. There was a box of Walker shortbread rounds in the cupboard, the only evidence of sin. The sink, the tiny gas stove and oven, everything was spotlessly clean. The countertops looked new, some kind of fake wood. The cupboard below was stocked with dish soap, clothes soap, bleach, paper towels, and plastic trash bags, all in giant economy-size boxes. Paula hated to shop, and bought large when she did so she wouldn't have to do so again any time soon. Kate's heart warmed to her, and hardened toward her killer.

Down the tiny hallway the bathroom was stocked with Ivory soap in hand-bar and bath-bar sizes, half-gallon jugs of generic shampoo and conditioner with pump handles, another half gallon of generic hand lotion on the sink. The single bed (more room for bookshelves) had two changes of sheets, one on and one in the clothes hamper, a quilt for summer and a down comforter for winter. Paula hadn't liked to shop, and she wasn't a prisoner of her possessions, and for no reason this realization made Kate's anger at Paula's killer run higher. Paula Pawlowski had refined living down to its essentials, so that she could concentrate on what mattered.

What mattered was books, if the bulk of the contents of the trailer was any indication. Shelves, built-in and freestanding, took up every available inch of floor space, were wedged between bed and wall, were mounted over all the windows. Every one of them was lined with books. It took Kate a while to see that they were in alphabetical order, clockwise from the door, starting with the five-shelf bookshelf nailed to the divider between the kitchen/living room and the bedroom, and ending with the two shelves mounted on brackets over the toilet in the bathroom. She saw Jane Austen, L. Frank Baum, Lois Mc-Masters Bujold, Bernard Cornwell by the door; Loren Estelman, Steven Gould, Robert Heinlein, Georgette Heyer (and now she was seriously angry), John D. MacDonald, L. M. Montgomery, Ellis Peters, J. K. Rowling, Sharon Shinn, Nevil Shute down one side of the little hallway, around and over the bed; Laura Ingalls Wilder and Don Winslow over the toilet.

There weren't that many people in the world who read for fun, who would rather read than watch television, who were physically incapable of walking past a bookstore. Kate had come to it late, a gift from a gifted English teacher at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, which meant that she had a keen sense of time wasted, a reverence for the art, and deep respect for those who practiced it. She looked at all of Paula Pawlowski's books and realized that Paula had been a lifelong friend of hers before they'd ever met. She found herself growing very calm.

I will find out who did this to you, she said silently to the spine of The Death and Life of Bobby Z . I will find out, and I will make them pay.

A knock at the door startled her. She went back into the hallway, and could make out a shape through the translucent glass pane in the door. “Who's there?” she called.

“It's me, Paula, open the damn door.” Another knock, impatient this time. “Look, I know you're mad at me, but—”

Kate opened the door and found a man staring up at her in surprise. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name is Kate,” she said. “What's yours?”

“Gordy Boothe, I—wait a minute. What are you doing in Paula's trailer? Where's Paula?” He craned his head to look around her. “Paula?”

She stepped outside and closed the door behind her. “How well did you know Paula Pawlowski, Mr. Boothe?”

“What?” Now he was staring down at her in bafflement and growing anger. “Look, what the hell is this? Where's Paula? Paula!” He banged on the door with his fist. “Paula, open this door!”

“Mr. Boothe. Mr. Boothe!” She put a hand on his arm. “She won't hear you. She's not here.”

“What do you mean, she's not here? She just got home last night; I drove her home from the Lodge.”

“Really,” Kate said. “What time was that?”

“I don't know, eleven, eleven-thirty.”

“Did you stay with her?”

“No.” He hadn't been happy about it, either, and he still wasn't. “She wouldn't let me. She said she'd had this great idea, and she wanted to work on it before she lost it.” He'd been watching Kate's expression. He was a pleasant-faced man in his mid-fifties, about five-ten, with a bald spot that made him look like he was tonsured and a body that looked like it had once played team sports in a desperate battle to stave off a middleaged spread. “Look, Miss—what did you say your name was?— what's going on here? Who are you?”

“Were you and Paula close, Mr. Boothe?” Kate looked behind him and saw the picnic table with two benches on either side of it. She moved toward it, and he followed her.

“We had a relationship, sort of,” he said. “We were good friends.”

“Which was it, were you friends or lovers?”

He was starting to get angry. “Look, I don't know what business that is of yours. Look here, what's—” His face paled, and the stuffing went out of him so suddenly that he collapsed on the nearest picnic bench. “Did you say ‘was’?”

“I'm sorry to tell you this, Mr. Boothe. Your friend met with an accident last night.”

He uttered a low groan. “A bear? Was it a bear?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because we heard one crashing through the bushes when I dropped her off last night. Is she okay? Where is she? Is she at the hospital?” He rose to his feet.

Kate pulled him back down. “Mr. Boothe, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but I'm afraid Paula is dead.”

He stared at her, his face very white. And then he burst into tears.

He was a history teacher at Ahtna High School and the coach for both the girls's and boys's volleyball teams. He'd met Paula three years before, when she came to him for help with some historical research for her novel, and they'd had an on-again, offagain relationship since. He was supposed to have met her at the airport when she flew in from Fairbanks the day before, with dinner at the Lodge to follow, and the rest of the night at his house, but their plans had gone awry when he'd been late getting back from a school trip to Kuik, and she had come up with her brilliant idea. “If I'd insisted she come home with me, she'd still be alive,” he said, blowing his nose. Fresh tears started down his face. “I should have made her come with me. Damn it!” He thumped the picnic table in sudden rage. “Damn it, damn it, damn it!”