Bad Blood (17 page)

“Yes,” he said. “It was. It was on Court TV and
Dateline
and, for all I know,
Judge Judy.
The reporters were worse than mosquitoes and way more resistant to deet. I hope like hell I’m never involved with that high-profile a case ever again. Happy to leave those to Liam.”

“What made you think of it again?” she said, although again she was pretty sure she knew.

“I learned more than I really wanted to about what the average human being needs to survive,” he said. “It turns out we can live a long time without food. Without water, not so much. If it’s hot, dehydration can set in in an hour, and even a healthy person could be dead in three. Most you can live without water is six days.”

She thought about that house. Mitchell Halvorsen had been building for the view. On the edge of the wedge, facing south, he would have been able to see damn near all the way to Prince William Sound, the Gruening River at the foot of the cliff beneath the house, with the Quilaks cutting a ragged outline into the sky on his left, the Park rolling slowly downhill all the way to the Chugach Mountains on his right, and the Kanuyaq River coiling back and forth across the landscape in between.

“And no food and no water in that crawl space. He might have had a candy bar or a pack of gum or some Tic Tacs in his pocket. But nothing else.”

She swallowed, and suddenly felt very thirsty.

After a moment he said, seemingly at random, “That house is how far out of town, do you think?”

She thought. “A little under half a mile. Maybe a bit more, but not much. Can’t get much farther from Kuskulana in that direction and not fall over the edge.”

He nodded. “About what I figure, too,” he said. “I’m hoping he was dead in three hours, Kate.”

She met his eyes in sudden awareness.

“Because I’d hate to think he was nailed into that crawl space for six days, screaming for help the whole time, and nobody came.”

He let his head fall back against the couch. “Sometimes,” he told the ceiling, “sometimes I really, really hate this job.”

She was looking at him, the strong throat, the broad shoulders, the six-pack abs, the slim hips, the triangle of hair and sex almost hidden by her own. His arms were roped with muscle, and his hands long-fingered and strong. He didn’t look remotely harmless, even stark naked.

“Hey,” she said, leaning forward to let her breasts brush against his chest.

He raised his head. “Hey, yourself,” he said, well aware of what she was doing but sounding nonetheless a little halfhearted.

She put her fists on her hips and a glower on her face. “This is not the level of enthusiasm I have come to expect from you, Chopin.”

His hands came up to cup her ass. They felt warm and solid against her skin. “Well, you kinda wore me out today, Shugak.”

“You should talk,” she said, and leaned forward.

Against her lips he said, “What about my beauty sleep?”

She nipped at his lower lip. “We can sleep when we’re dead.”

Act IV

Fifteen

FRIDAY, JULY 13, VERY EARLY
IN THE MORNING

Kushtaka

It wasn’t your typical elopement.

For one thing, there was no waiting until the dark of night to cover their movements, because at this time of year there was no dark of night.

For another, she wasn’t climbing out from her bedroom window on a knotted sheet steadied by her lover below. There was no second floor on their house. For that matter, she didn’t have her own bedroom, just an alcove she shared with Auntie Nan.

For a third, they were already married.

It took all her formidable self-control to conceal that joyous secret over the next twelve hours. Even then in an unguarded moment, when she reached inside her shirt to touch the ring on the chain round her neck, the expression on her face caused her mother to say sharply, “Jennifer, wake up! I told you to start the bread!”

Jennifer had woken from her trance and she had started the bread, but as she assembled the ingredients, a chant ran through her mind:
This is the last time I will heat the water. This is the last time I will dissolve the yeast. This is the last time I will measure out the flour. This is the last time I will knead the dough. This is the last time I will do any of these things in this house. In this village.

It was already agreed between the two of them that they would leave the Park. No member of either family was going to accept their marriage. No member of either village would, for that matter.

Her mother, suspicious of happiness in any form but especially in faraway smiles on her daughter’s face, had been keeping a beady eye on Jennifer ever since she came back from the woods. Jennifer, so close to being free of her mother’s supervision forever, was tolerant, which only made her mother more suspicious. Her poor mother, who Jennifer was certain had never experienced a single happy moment in her own life, was only jealous, poor thing. Jealous of Jennifer’s youth and beauty and determined that neither would help Jennifer escape her destiny, one very like her mother’s own. She would marry a good boy from the village, very probably Rick Estes, and settle there and have babies and raise them and look after her parents when they got old. It was the way things were. It was the way things had always been. It was the way things would always be.

Her mother, poor thing, didn’t know that Jennifer had already confounded one of those requirements, and was about to turn her back on the rest of them and not just walk but run away.

Every moment of Jennifer’s life had been anchored by her parents’ expectations. She was mature enough to realize that this was partly because she was an only child. More siblings would definitely have helped to share the load, but that was not to be, and she learned very early on that if she was to get anything she wanted then she would have to fight for it.

It did seem as if everything she wanted was forbidden to her. The first time she’d picked up her dad’s rifle, it had felt natural and right, but by tradition she wasn’t allowed to go after the big game, the caribou and the moose and the bear that might help feed her family and the whole village. She’d known instinctively how to bait and set a trap so that no trace smell of human on it would warn the mink and the beaver away. When she trapped her first wolf, she’d had to let her dad take the credit. A strip of it was on the hood of the parka her mother had made her, and every time she put it on, it reminded her of the joy she had felt in being out on the trail in winter, the crunch of snowshoes on the crusty snow, the bite of cold air in her nostrils, the bright glint of sun on the ice crystals that lined the creeks, the clear, clear water running between the ice growing out from the banks. The joy of finding that her traps, the traps she had baited and set with her own hands, had outsmarted even the wolverine. There was joy, too, at home, in the curing of the pelts, in the speculation around the fire of what they would bring at auction, in thinking of what she would buy with her share.

Not that she ever got her own share. Everything went into a communal treasury that supported the family. That didn’t bother her. When you didn’t have much, you had to share to survive, and she never went cold or hungry or was without a roof over her head. But it would have been nice to be given some of the credit for keeping herself that way, that her skill with rifle and trap and fishing net had contributed to the health and welfare of the family.

To his credit, her father didn’t like it any more than she did, but she couldn’t help but wonder if it was more about the son he didn’t have than the daughter he did.

Other girls in other villages, she knew, were not forbidden these things. When the Kushtaka school had closed down and, with much misgiving, her parents had transferred her to the Kuskulana school, she had heard several of the Kuskulana girls talking about going hunting or fishing, usually with their fathers but sometimes with their mothers, too. Like everyone else, she’d heard the stories about the legendary Park rat Kate Shugak, upriver in Niniltna, who while not a hunter or a trapper or a fisherman by trade, per se, lived like a man, on her own terms, taking her own meat and her own fish and feeding herself with them through the winters.

A busybody, some people said. An avenging angel, said others. Whatever they called her, she waded into messes other people walked around and cleaned them up.

On Career Day, Sergeant Jim Chopin of the Niniltna trooper post had visited Kuskulana school and talked about being a trooper. The other girls swooned over his metaphysical product perfection, his blue eyes, his thick blond hair, his broad shoulders and narrow hips and long legs, the quick, easy grin that was beguiling without being flirtatious. Jennifer wasn’t a nun, she appreciated all those things, too, but mostly she was curious to see up close and personal a man who would attract the attention of a Kate Shugak and not be found wanting. He was smart and funny and he didn’t try to shine them on. “To be a cop is always to be other,” he had said.

Jennifer got that. Of everyone in Kushtaka, she was the most other. Because of her looks and her gender she was watched more critically, and because she was a chief’s daughter she was judged more harshly.

To be Kushtakan in the Park was always to be other, too.

And then she met Ryan. At Kuskulana she played guard on the girls’ basketball team; he played guard on the boys’. Both teams went to a regional tournament at one of the high schools in Ahtna, where both teams slept on the gym floor in sleeping bags, guarded on every side by chaperones.

Not that well guarded, however. It had been Jennifer’s first trip outside the Park, and she was not going to lose an opportunity to see the sights. Keeping her clothes on beneath her pajamas, she waited until everyone else was asleep before faking an old bathroom trick and ducking out a conveniently located back door.

Where, directly outside it, she literally ran into Ryan Christianson, who it turned out had his own escape plan.

That this was the very last person her family would want her associating with was only the icing on the cake. He was a boy. He was a Christianson. He was a Kuskulaner. Rebellion this sweet had never come her way before.

He’d been to Ahtna many times and he knew the quickest way downtown. On the way, they talked, and she discovered he knew how to read and he discovered that she knew who Robert Heinlein was. By the time they found the movie theater where, hallelujah,
The Avengers
was still playing, they were comfortable enough to share a bag of extortionately expensive popcorn. Afterwards, they found a video arcade where she clobbered him at
Asteroids,
and he had to defend himself when she accused him of letting her win. They found an open-all-night diner at a truck stop on the way back to the gym and spent the rest of the hours before dawn talking under the tired but benevolent eyes of a waitress who had been young once, too.

By the time they sneaked back into the gym, their chaperones none the wiser, they were both determined to further the relationship. It wasn’t easy, which was part of the allure. She couldn’t sit with him at lunch at school, because word would have beaten her back across the river, and her parents would have sent her to Chemawa the next day. He couldn’t walk her from school to the landing, because word of that would have beaten him back up the hill, and while his parents wouldn’t have sent him to a boarding school Outside, they might well have sent him to the boarding school in Galena.

So they met in secret, prearranged by notes passed discreetly from locker to locker, usually on the river, all that winter. He loved to hunt and fish and trap every bit as much as she did, which only strengthened the attraction between them. Those very few precious times when Jennifer managed to talk her father into letting her walk the trapline alone, she got word to Ryan and he met her and they walked it together.

They were young and madly in love and of course sex came into the mix early on. She would have, but he wouldn’t. “I want to marry you, Jennifer,” he had said. “I want us to build a cabin in the woods and spend the rest of our lives making our living there. Do you want kids?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

“I don’t know either,” he said, “but between the two of us, however many of us there are, no one’s going hungry.”

She smiled.

And then Tyler was killed on the fish wheel in Kushtaka, and word had just come across the river that they found Mitch Halvorsen in Kuskulana, nailed into the crawl space of his own house. Her whole being was made for sunlight and fresh air and open spaces. The thought of spending her last moments imprisoned underground with no way out made her flesh creep, and in a way made her need to escape the ever-constricting limits of Kushtaka even more urgent.

They’d met at Kuskulana landing the morning of Tyler Mack’s death.

“They’ll never let us be together,” she said.

“Then we run,” he said. He looked older when he said that, and his voice sounded deeper. “I looked it up. We’re both eighteen, so we’re of age. I’ll go up to Ahtna today and get a license.”

The original plan had been to take a skiff and go downriver, get to Cordova and be married there, and then go to Kasilof, where Ryan had a friend with a set net site. “We’ll have to work for our keep, but they’ll never find us there,” he had said. “When they get over it, we can come back, and build a cabin on the land my grandmother left to me.”

She’d heard his message on Park Air that morning, and then the flying pastor had come for Tyler’s service. Jennifer had sent Auntie Nan to Ryan. He had met her in the woods and Auntie Nan had brought the pastor to them, and she had married them there.

Jennifer had had to go back to Kushtaka until the fuss over Tyler’s services died down and people went back to their own homes, or she would have been missed. Much better to get away by night. It was two o’clock before she was certain everyone was asleep and she felt able to leave the house. She grabbed a stuffed backpack from the hollow beneath a spruce tree where she had stashed it on a trip to the outhouse earlier that evening. She slung it over her shoulders as she walked, following the trail that ran down the river’s edge.