A fine and bitter snow (15 page)

He told Kate what had happened, and she laughed, surprising both of them. He picked up Gal and sat down with her in his lap, where she immediately curled up, purring and kneading. Mutt padded over and rested her chin on the arm of the chair, and Jim freed a hand to scratch her ears.

Kate sat down and started going through the paperwork again. When next she looked up, Jim had his head against the back of the chair and his eyes closed. Gal was curled into a soft black ball on his lap and Mutt was stretched out on the floor with her head on one of his feet.

It was quite a domestic scene. Kate went back to the paperwork, but her mind was more on the man across from her.

They called him "Chopper Jim" because of his preferred method of transportation, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, although he flew fixed-wing, too, and was reliable and skilled on both craft.

They also called him "the Father of the Park," for his equally reliable and skilled seduction of pretty much every available female inside Park boundaries. Although now that Kate thought of it, she couldn't remember any children whose mothers claimed he had fathered them. A courtesy title, perhaps, and Kate was a little startled when the thought made her smile.

He was originally from California, which figured. He had the same coloring as Ethan, only darker, and he was tall, also like Ethan, but he was much broader in the beam. He looked like a buff Beach Boy, and she'd bet he had spent his entire childhood in the water with a surfboard. What was he doing in Alaska, three thousand miles and one time zone away, with no sand, no surf, and no beach bunnies? It was a question she'd never asked him.

He'd stuck. He'd been posted to the Park the year before she graduated from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and they had howdied when she spent her vacations in the Park, but they hadn't really shook until she had quit working as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney and had come home with attitude to spare and a scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear. Unlike many of the Park rats, he hadn't treated her as fragile, about to break. Instead, he'd made a move, she had rebuffed it, and that had set the pattern of their relationship—she couldn't call it friendship, not even after Bering—from then until now.

As a trooper, he had what she thought was a real understanding of the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law, and sometimes, she had to admit, the almost-inspired ability to enforce one without violating the other. That business with Cindy and Ben Bingley two breakups before. And Johnny this fall, when he had sided with the boy—and her—against the boy's mother and legal guardian, in essence aiding and abetting what could be construed in a court of law as kidnapping.

Emaa had approved of him, in her austere fashion. That alone was enough to guarantee Kate's antagonism. For the first time, Kate wondered if it had been deliberate. Emaa had been a master manipulator, and while she was alive, Kate had fought a constant rear-guard action to keep her grandmother from taking over her life. Emaa had liked Jack, too. Although Kate had brought Jack home as a fait accompli, already a fixture in her life, and Emaa would have found acceptance more expedient than antagonism. Emaa had been the complete political animal, even in her relationships with family members. A smile curled the corners of Kate's mouth, and her eyes strayed again to the man sleeping across the table from her.

Not that she would have felt differently about Jim if Emaa had not approved of him. She finished neatening up the paperwork and stacked it in a pile, dividing it by year with file folder separators. The pile was tall enough to teeter. She moved it to a corner, where she leaned it up against a wall and weighted it down with a frayed tome four inches thick,
Harper's Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities.
What on earth had the old girls needed with that?

The stove was burning low and she added a couple of logs before going to the kitchen and setting the kettle to boil. She was hungry, and with a glance over her shoulder, she pulled out a couple of cans of cream of tomato soup and a package of saltines. There was butter in the cooler outside, miraculously spared by the attacker, or perhaps just overlooked.

Jim stirred when she set the tray down on the coffee table. "Hey," he said, yawning. "Guess I fell asleep."

"Yeah," she said. "Soup's on."

"Be right back." He gently assisted Gal from his lap and stepped outside. Mutt, with similar intentions, and finding herself on the wrong side of the door, barked once. The door opened and she slipped out.

"Mutt's causing havoc with the local wildlife," Jim said when he came back in. "I saw her flush out a couple of spruce hens. Good thing the girls aren't here to see."

"What a phony. She's not that hungry; she chowed down on the better part of a moose yesterday."

"Dogs just wanna have fun."

"That dog does. Have some soup and crackers."

"Thanks."

They ate in silence. "Thanks," he said again when he was finished, sitting back and combing his hair back with one hand. "Sorry I fell asleep. I didn't think I was that tired."

"You up all night with the perp?"

"Higgins? Pretty much."

"That's his name?"

"Riley K. Higgins, that's him."

"What set him off?"

"He's not talking." He buttered another cracker. "He's pretty pitiful, really. We got a make on his prints. He's a vet, two tours in Vietnam, never really got back to the world. Came from Carbondale, Illinois, originally. His dad's dead. I talked a little to his mom."

"How was she?"

He bit into the cracker and chewed meditatively. "Like her son died in Vietnam and she's been mourning his loss ever since. She sounds frail. I didn't talk to her long. I called the local police chief. He said Higgins was on the street, got picked up for pretty much everything at one time or another—indecent exposure for peeing in an alley, drunk in public, disturbing the peace. Got beat up once, bad enough to be in the hospital and dry out. Didn't take. He also got run in for drugs a time or two, but only marijuana, nothing serious. Nothing expensive anyway. Nothing violent, either, which bothers me some. Usually there's a pattern you can trace back when something like this happens.

"The chief said he disappeared last summer. Said the family's a good bunch and that they had done everything they could for him, but he thinks that by the time Higgins disappeared, they were tired and maybe a little relieved that he was gone. He's got a sister and a brother, nieces and nephews. All still live in Carbondale. Mom, too. None of them made much of an effort to find him." On the verge of buttering another cracker, Jim lost his appetite and put down the knife. "I don't know what he was doing here. He doesn't seem to have any visible means of support."

"He might have been one of Dina's projects."

" 'Projects?' "

Kate nodded. "They had those cabins up the hill, empty all winter. It bothered Dina, and maybe Ruthe, too, although she used to give Dina a hard time about Dina's big idea."

"Which was?"

Kate shrugged. "Nothing major. Dina thought the cabins ought to be put to some use is all."

"So they rented them out to drifters? What the hell were two lone women, one of them getting close to feeble, doing inviting weirdos to move in up the goddamn hill from them?"

"They were careful," Kate said. "Yeah, okay, obviously not careful enough this year. But they'd been doing it for years without incident."

"They have somebody up there every winter?"

"Almost. One or two every year. They booted them out come breakup and the first paying customer."

"They stay booted?"

"Pretty much. Dina told me one time that she was giving them breathing space, a chance to find their feet. See if they liked the Park enough to stay. She said ninety percent of them didn't, and they never saw them again." She smiled.

"What?"

"They let Mac Devlin stay up there the winter his cabin burned."

"You're kidding me."

"Nope."

Jim smiled, too.

"Well, I better get back to it," Kate said.

Jim looked around. "You've done a lot. Looks almost back to normal." He noticed a little pile on the small table next to Dina's chair. "What's this?"

Kate looked. "Oh, that. I'm getting some pictures together for Dina's potlatch. They don't have much in the way of people pictures."

"When is it?"

"Saturday. At the school gym."

"Bernie'll be annoyed."

"The Roadhouse is too small. Ruthe and Dina have been here too long and have too many friends."

"I suppose." He hesitated. "Did you think about waiting?"

"For what?"

"Ruthe."

Kate paused. "Yeah," she said, "I thought about it. But ... I don't know. Ruthe was—she is a 'fish or cut bait' kind of person. She'd say, Get it done."

"Not the sentimental type."

"No," Kate said, smiling a little. "Dina was the idealist. Ruthe is always the pragmatist. The art of the practical, that's Ruthe's specialty."