Fatal Thaw (8 page)

"Sepia prints," Lottie said. She rose and drifted over to stand behind Kate's shoulder.

"Who's this hunk? Wow. He looks like Charles Findbergh."

"My grandfather." Lottie paused, and then said almost reluctantly, "My mother's father."

"Nice smile. You look kind of like him."

"He was a prick," Lottie said flatly. "He was a drunk. My mother told me she eloped with my father because my father was the first person who ever said he loved her."

Kate's hands stilled for a moment before turning the page. "Who's this with the hat? Thing must've weighed ten pounds with all those ruffles and bows."

"My great-grandmother." Kate peeled away the transparency and looked at the back of the picture.

She whistled. "This picture was taken in 1900." She squinted again at it. "You look kind of like her, too." She turned the page and laughed.

"There must be six yards of fabric in that old nightgown, or whatever it is, and look at all those tiny buttons on his boots. That kid looks so clean he could squeak. Bet he stayed that way for about five minutes." Kate could feel Lottie leaning over her shoulder, and she paged forward. "These clothes look World War Two-ish; these must be your parents. Weird colors."

"Tinted." "Right." Kate flipped through more pages, and slowed down. "Lisa?"

"Yes. " Kate frowned a little. "Where is she? I don't recognize the place."

A pause. "The first five summers of our lives we spent out at the cannery on Mummy Island."

Kate looked again and couldn't help smiling. "Lisa sure didn't like clothes much, did she?"

"No." A pause. "The cannery superintendent was always calling Mom to tell him Lisa had her clothes off again and was running around the dock naked."

Kate kept her eyes fixed on the page. "And where are you?"

"Over there. In back and to the left." "With your clothes on."

Somehow the joke fell flat. "Yes."

Kate's finger ran down to the bottom of the page. "Your mother and father. That's you on your father's lap?" "Yes. One of the few, times he could bear to touch his fat, dumb kid."

Kate turned the page and said with relief, "School pictures I Were we ever really that young?"

The pictures of the two sisters, arranged chronologically and side by side, showed a maturing process far kinder to the younger sister than to the elder. Lisa ripened. Lottie weathered. Lisa grew from a plump baby cuteness to a girlish prettiness to real beauty. Lottie just grew, taller and wider. Lisa was slender, and there was a lissome quality to her form, in the way her golden scarf of hair lay on her shoulders, in the bend of her long, slender neck, in the graceful disposal of her arms, that made her look as if she were moving even as she posed for a still picture. Lottie in her pictures seemed rooted, immobile, static, her body massive and graceless. Lisa's eyes sparkled, her cheeks dimpled, her smile was wide and filled with a secret glee that made one wonder what was so amusing.

Kate remembered the effect to be even more irritating in person.

She looked until the end of the album, but she never found a single picture of Lottie smiling. As near as Kate could tell, Lottie had been born with a scowl. Or no, not a scowl, that was too strong. Maybe she just never learned to smile, which wasn't quite the same thing. Through the years, her face only became squarer and more stolid. There was no secret fun in Lottie's face, no mischief, in fact little animation of any kind. What struck Kate most was the quality of speechless endurance in that static expression.

She looked up and saw it repeated in the face across from her, and closed the album with a snap. "Thanks for letting me look at this," she said out loud. "I like looking at old pictures, don't you?"

"No." You must have had the album out for some reason, Kate thought, but refrained from saying so. Although, looking around, she wasn't sure anything in this house was ever really put away. "Was Lisa seeing anybody when she ... Was there someone special lately?"

Lottie's lips twisted in a humorless travesty of a smile. "When wasn't there?"

"Anyone in particular?" "What's it to you?"

"Just wondering, Lottie," Kate said in a level voice. In a way she was relieved at Lottie's hostility; any thing was better than that inanimate, somehow face less shell. "I knew she was seeing Chopper Jim," she lied.

"Who wasn't seeing him, at one time or another?"

"Well, there's me," Kate said, smiling. The shell seemed to crack a little. "That's right. I remember, you never did much like standing in line." "And then there's you, so that makes two of us." Kate tried without success to see through the crack in the shell to what was beneath.

"Lisa's thing with Jim ended in February." Lottie's voice was without expression.

"Anyone since then?"

"It's nobody's business if there was or there wasn't," Lottie said, her fists clenching. "None of it matters now. Lisa's dead. Why don't you just butt out?"

Lottie was entitled to her grief, and suddenly Kate felt disgusted with her intrusion into that grief. "I'm sorry, Lottie," she said, rising to her feet. From the corner of one eye she caught a glimpse of a gray streak and turned to see the cat curling into a neat ball in the warm place Kate's bottom had left. Kate smiled and turned to share it with Lottie. There was no response from that bleak face. "I'm sorry," Kate repeated, her smile fading. "Oh yeah, I saw George Perry on my way out here. He told me to tell you he needs a guide for a party of Koreans climbing Angqaq."

'Al "North or south peak?" ` "He didn't say. They're two-timers, though.

George said to stop by the hangar tomorrow morning if you're interested." Kate gestured at the foil-wrapped package she'd carried in with her. "I brought you some bread. Just baked a batch last week."

Without expression Lottie jerked her thumb at the kitchen table, and obediently Kate walked over to it. The table wasn't just crowded with the detritus of life; it was stacked with casserole dishes, none of them touched. Some were just beginning to go green on top.

"Why do people always bring food?" Lottie said from behind her.

Kate shrugged. "I don't know. Because they want to do something, and it's something to do." She hesitated, almost spoke, and thought, The hell with it. It can wait. She turned and went to the door.

"Kate," Lottie said.

Kate paused and looked over her shoulder..

"Why?" Lottie said. "Why did he do it?" She took a step forward and repeated in that earnest, little-girl voice, "Can you tell me why?" With her hand on the knob, Kate debated with the grain of the wood in the door for a reply. "I don't know, Lottie. Who knows what's going on in the head of someone like that? He's just another crazy. They happen along sometimes." She looked up and sucked in her breath.

Lottie's pale features seemed blunted somehow, bludgeoned by circumstance into numb acceptance. "Why?" she repeated, looking directly at Kate for the first time. "Why did he do it?"

Kate, abashed in the presence of so much grief and pain and rage, shook her head without replying. She had no answers for Lottie.

Outside, Mutt nudged her head against Kate's hand, but Kate stood where she was, listening. There was no sound from inside the house, nothing to indicate that Lottie had descended from her mountain of grief. Kate turned to her left and went around to the back, moving quietly along the slippery paths. The backyard of the Getty homestead looked pretty much like her own, although much less neat. A tumble of empty, rusting fifty-five-gallon drums and five-gallon Blazo tins stood heaped beneath a concealing, albeit rap idly melting, layer of snow. There was an open garage filled with hand tools, a small tractor, a snow machine with a trailer attached, and an old ceramic toilet bowl, minus the tank. There were two small windows over the workbench, both of them so festooned with cobwebs and years of grime that the light they shed on the inside was negligible.

In front of the barn, hands in her pockets, Kate stared around, her gaze unfocused, letting the feel of the place sink in. It was like a hundred other homesteads all over the Alaskan bush. There was a food cache, a fuel cache, a woodpile, a generator shack and a barn, none of which contained anything out of the ordinary. There was even a satellite dish on the roof of the main house, and Kate wondered idly how much it cost in fuel to run the generator through the winter. She'd given some thought to installing a dish herself, if only for MTV and VH-1 and the Nashville Network.

A honking wedge of Canadian geese flew into view. They were early, but there were a few newly opened leads in the marsh next to Niniltna. It definitely was spring.

Her eyes followed the flock and caught in a thinning of the treetops behind the barn. She walked around and found a greenhouse, close to and not much smaller than the barn, built of two-by-fours and plastic siding. A profusion of greenery showed through the translucent walls.

From the outside, the tall plants filling up the interior in leafy profusion looked like tomato plants.

From the inside, they did not. "Son of a bitch," Kate said, more in sorrow than in anger.

She returned to the barn and pulled and shoved her way into the clutter, making no attempt to keep her activities quiet. She moved a crate of eggs to one side, lifted a sack of potatoes into a corner and boosted a barrel of flour which the mice had found before her onto the crate. She found what she was looking for stacked high in the far right corner, beneath a lashed-down tarp.

She came out of the barn beating the dust out of her clothes and looked up to find Lottie watching her, mute. Kate didn't apologize. She jerked her head toward the greenhouse. "Did you know? Were you partners?" Lottie said nothing, and Kate forgot about shielding Lottie from the news.

"Lottie, McAniff didn't shoot Lisa." The other woman's head snapped up, and Kate nodded grimly. "That's right. The police ran a test on the bullets they found. They know that the one that killed Lisa came from a different gun."

Lottie didn't move, didn't speak; her expression didn't change. It infuriated Kate. "Lottie! If you two were wholesaling dope out of your backyard, any fights you had with one-time or potential customers give us one hell of a list of suspects! Who were you selling to?"

When Lottie still didn't answer, Kate, exasperated, went to her and shook. her. It was like trying to shake Angqaq Peak. "Talk to me!"

Lottie's face seemed to crumple, her voice to Kate had to strain to hear her. "What?" she said. "What did you say?"

Again the stumbling, shrunken voice. "Are you going to tell?"

"Oh hell," Kate said, disgusted, and left.

SHE could hear the noise from Bobby's house all the way down to where Squaw Creek joined the Kanuyaq River. Its main component seemed to be stentorian male voices doing a lot of whooping and yelling of song lyrics that were faint but audible, even above the noise of the Jag's engine, and which grew steadily louder as she approached the house. Just to be on the safe side, Kate parked the Jag down by the creek and walked the remaining distance to the ramp that led up to the front door.

It was a large cedar A-frame, its roof festooned with a writhing cluster of wiring that led to a 112-foot metal' tower rising starkly up out of the backyard like the skeleton of a spaceship. Mounted on the tower were two white Drum like apparatuses facing west and south. A satellite TV dish, pointing low on the Alaskan horizon to pick up equatorial-orbit satellite transmissions, hung precariously from a crossbar above and behind the microwave shots. Antennae of one kind or another took up what little space there was left, and the whole thing looked top-heavy and Leaning Tower of Pisaish.

The closer Kate came the louder the noise got, and the less melodic the singing. Country Joe McDonald and the Fish were leading the chorus in a verse urging mothers to be the first one on their block to have their boy come home in a box. Normally Kate would have opened the door with out knocking and gone in. Today something told her this might be unwise.

The music stopped abruptly, and from inside the house somebody yelled, "Hey, Bobby, I think it's time to call it down." There was a deafening avalanche of approving raspberries, oinks and rebel yells.

"Okay, okay, you guys," Kate heard Bobby say in his customary roar.

Mutt, standing next to her, recognized his voice and her ears went up and she looked at Kate with a quizzical expression. Kate sat down on the porch railing and prepared to listen to Bobby call whatever it was down.

Mutt, knowing what was waiting for her in Bobby's wood box next to the fireplace inside, sat down herself with a disgruntled thump. There was a kind of rustling from inside the house, as if many were arranging themselves to listen, and then Bobby's big bass voice, fifty decibels lower than it generally was and unnaturally solemn, began to speak.

"January 30, 1968," he intoned. "Tet, the Asian Lunar New Year, begins.

The VC break into dry cleaners and steal ARVN uniforms to wear during the attack. They bring out hidden weapons and test-fire them during the holiday fireworks." He paused. "That night, it begins. The VC attack a hundred major cities and towns in the Central Highlands and Lowlands of South Vietnam." Someone screamed. There was no other word for it, and it was instantly answered by other screams rising together in a single, united, animal howl. Mutt was instantly on her feet, ears back, yellow eyes wide and alarmed. With a hand she noticed was shaking a little, Kate smoothed the hair down on the back of her neck and patted Mutt's head.

Bobby's voice resumed. "January 31, Day 2. The VC attack in Saigon, Hue and the Mekong Delta. They attack and hold the American embassy in Saigon for six hours against Marine counterattack. In two weeks, the VC fights its way into every town and village in South Vietnam." Bobby paused. "Westmoreland calls for 206,000 more troops and another 15 tactical fighter squadrons."

There was another chorus, one of whistles and jeers and boos. "But hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today goes on television and says there is light at the end of the tunnel!" somebody yelled.

Bobby raised his voice over the resulting uproar. "March 16. My Lai."