A grave denied (39 page)

“No,” Bobby said, jaw coming out. “I’ll go. If I think about it, I won’t.”

₂₀

The morning Bobby left, Dinah decided she needed something to occupy her time, otherwise she’d sit around waiting for Bobby to call and say they were moving back to Nut-bush, Tennessee. It wasn’t the call she feared so much as the move. She had fallen in love at first sight with Alaska, and she didn’t want to leave it. Not to mention which, Jeffrey’s reaction to the undeniable fact of her overwhelming whiteness had been somewhat daunting. She could deal with that, and with any hundred other people who reacted that way, too, but how would those same people treat Katya?

She looked down at her daughter, a hot heavy sprawl in her arms, a little milky drool coming from one corner of her mouth. Love pierced her like a knife. If anyone in Nutbush, Tennessee dared, if they dared to say something hurtful to Katya, if anyone dared to call her half-and-half or half-breed or mongrel, Katya’s mother would…

“What would Katya’s mother do?” she said out loud. Katya stirred, and Dinah gathered in her child’s rambling limbs and tucked her into her own bed. Then she went for a pad and paper and started making a list. She liked making lists as much as Kate Shugak, and this one was a list Kate would get behind.

At least she hoped so.

She spent the next week on the Internet and the phone, talking to suppliers in Anchorage and a trucking firm in Ahtna that boasted enough vehicles for her purposes. The following week she strapped Katya into the children’s seat, strapped the seat into the truck, and drove around the Park knocking on doors. Her plan was met with enthusiasm and near universal approval, mostly under the heading of “Jeeze, I wish I’d thought of that.”

She stopped by the trooper post to touch base with Jim Chopin. He listened courteously and agreed to everything she suggested. She came away with a crease between her brows. Something was seriously wrong there. Jim was a pretty even keel kind of a guy. The only time she’d seem him angry was with Kate Shugak, who seemed to know where every button on his control panel was located and exactly when to push which one. At the moment, he had his guard up. Dinah wondered if he had his guard up with Kate. She wondered about that little smile she’d seen on Kate’s face.

She hesitated before knocking on Billy Mike’s door, but he received her idea with hosannahs, and he and Annie convened the Native Association’s board of directors and essentially made her plan happen. Afterward she realized that she’d done them a favor. Anything was better than sitting around grieving. Billy even managed to pull some string that connected to the manufacturer Outside that bumped their order to the top of the list. It came into the Port of Anchorage on board the
CSX Anchorage
the following week, and the shipping firm, mindful of maintaining good community relations in a place as small as Alaska, took care to see that the shipment was first out of the hold and first off the dock. A day later it was in Ahtna, and by then the road into the Park had dried out enough to grade. This time Old Sam pulled a string—Dinah suspected the driver was an old drinking buddy of his —and the grader stationed at the state highway maintenance facility outside Ahtna led the parade, and a parade it was. First the grader, then a fleet of flatbeds and a couple of semis, followed by a dozen rigs of varying age and shape, all riding very low on their axels.

Dinah and Billy and nearly everyone else in the Park met them at the trailhead. “Does she know we’re coming?” Billy said.

“She doesn’t know anything about this,” Dinah said. “I’m terrified she’s going to kill me.”

Billy Mike looked a little older and a little more tired, but the grin that split his round moon face was still broad. “But not very,” he said.

She laughed. “No, not very,” she said.

He squinted at the sky, clear and blue and filled with the beginning of a long summer day. “Picked a good day for it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “The long-term forecast looks good, too. I think the gods are backing us up on this one, Billy.”

“God,” he said, staring at the horizon. “One’s enough.”

The grader ground by, continued a hundred feet down the road, and pulled to a halt. The driver swung out and down and trotted back.

“Need to finish that road, don’tcha Bud?” Billy said, quizzical.

Bud Riley grinned. “No way am I missing out on this. Kate helped a friend of mine out of a thing in Anchorage one time.”

The parade ground to a halt, dust rising, but not so much as anybody sneezed, and the driver of the lead flatbed jumped to the ground. “Dinah Cookman? Jake Bradley, Ahtna Fast Freight. Got a delivery for you.” He made an elaborate show of producing a clipboard. “Sign here, please.”

A shout of laughter started in the crowd behind Dinah and spread down the line of vehicles. Billy showed Jake the road in. Jake scratched his head. “Well, hell, could be worse, I expect.” He spat and shifted a wad of chewing tobacco from one cheek to the other. “We’ve all got come-alongs, so we won’t get stuck and stay stuck. And it ain’t like we ain’t done this kind of thing before. Probably should take out a few of those trees. Think she’ll go for that?”

“Probably, but it don’t have to be that hard,” someone said, and Dinah turned to see Mac Devlin puffing up. She looked beyond him and saw his D-6 Caterpillar tractor idling up the road, the sound of its approach hidden only by the convoy. He looked at Dinah and raised a brow.

“Why not,” she said, and stood back. If Kate was going to kill her, let it be for more than one reason. Besides, Bobby’s truck had been stuck on that damn game trail down to Kate’s cabin more than once.

Mac hustled back to the D-6 and put it in gear, and they made room for him to start down the trail.

She’d spent most of the night like she had most nights recently, wide awake and staring at the ceiling. It was bothering her, how she’d missed Dreyer’s predilection for children. After five and a half years working sex crimes in Anchorage, many of them involving children, she should have spotted him out of the gate. Why hadn’t she?

And then there was Virgil. She’d waltzed right on into the lion’s den, riding to the rescue of a girl who didn’t need one, and was cold-cocked by a shovel —a number two shovel!—for her pains. It was downright embarrassing.

At four a.m. Mutt got tired of listening to her thrash around and sat up to give Kate a look. “Are we losing it, girl?” Kate asked her. “Are we slowing up? Do we just not have the stuff anymore?”

Mutt raised an eyebrow and lay down with her back turned pointedly to Kate. Evidently she wasn’t past her prime.

And Dandy, that harmless, ambitionless rounder, dead. She shouldn’t have warned him off so firmly. She should have pulled him into the investigation instead of pushing him out. She’d probably offended every molecule of his testosterone by shutting him down so hard. He’d found real information for them. True, none of it had helped solve the case, but still, he’d hustled for them and she’d flicked him off like a bug.

Conveniently, she forgot that Jim had been sitting right next to her and had done his own share of flicking.

Of course Dandy’s pride had kicked in. Her attitude had been nothing less than a challenge to him. Her attitude had gotten him killed. Hubris, she thought Sophocles had called it. Whatever it was, she had it and it had gotten Dandy killed.

She had just given up on sleep and was rolling out of bed, the RV shuddering beneath the shifting weight of her 120 pounds, the movement causing Johnny to slide even further down in his bunk than he had been, when she heard the muted roar of an engine, a big one. Mutt, whose nose had been pressed to the door for some time, with attendant whining, gave a short, sharp yelp. “What the hell’s going on, girl?” Kate said, shrugging into a shirt and jamming her feet into her shoes. “Go get ‘em.” If someone was mowing down trees on her property with the blade of a Caterpillar tractor and without her permission, she would know the reason why before she was very much older. If she was lucky, she might get to shoot somebody.

Mutt shot out of the open door and across the clearing like a bullet out of a gun. She vanished up the trail, and shortly thereafter there was a loud yell of alarm followed by a lot of barking.

“What’s going on?” Johnny said, raising his head, his face flushed and his hair mashed to a conehead point.

“I don’t know,” Kate said grimly. “Someone’s got a Cat going. That can’t be good.” She reached for the .30-06 leaning against the door. “Better go back up Mutt.”

His eyes widened, all trace of sleepiness banished, and dove out of his bunk and into his clothes in the same moment. She thought about telling him to stay put, and she thought about how effective that would be, and said only, “Stay behind me. Especially stay behind the rifle.”

He gave her a look and she grinned at him. “Gotta say that. It’s part of the job.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He stayed close behind her up the trail, from
the
top of which there seemed to be coming a lot of noise of one kind or another.

They met Mac Devlin halfway down. Mutt was standing directly in front of the blade. She was barking and wagging her tail at the same time.

Kate felt as confused as Mutt looked. Behind Mac on his Cat there was quite a crowd: Dinah looking nervous, Billy Mike grinning, Annie Mike dispensing coffee and what looked like a mountain of fresh doughnuts, Auntie Vi and the other three aunties unloading coolers and boxes and grocery bags, Bernie and Enid unloading cases of pop and beer and bags of ice, Dan O’Brian with the whole gang down from the Step, including Dr. Millicent Nebeker McClanahan. Laurel Meganack had baked up a dozen pies, apple and cherry and pumpkin, and Auntie Balasha had a whole salmon carton of fry bread, fresh out of the frying pan if the steam rising off them was any indication.

“What are you all doing here?” Kate said. She caught a glimpse of vehicles lined up down the road and stepped forward. Yep, all the way down to the curve, where she had confronted Roger McAniffe years ago.

“Well, Kate,” Dinah said, shifting from foot to foot, “it’s like this.”

She paused.

“Like what?” Kate said. Next to her Johnny was starting to grin. “What’s going on?” she asked him.

“It’s like this, Kate,” Billy Mike said, taking pity on Dinah’s agony. “We’re going to build you a house today.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You can help,” he told her, “but don’t get in our way.”

She was so staggered that she let him push her gently but firmly to one side of the track.

Mac put the Cat in gear and finished carving out a track, finishing in a neat little circle that would be nice for parking. He roared backward up the trail, dragging the blade to smooth out the tracks, and someone Kate didn’t know pulled up in a dump truck loaded with gravel. Mac packed that down in about thirty minutes and then things really got lively.

Kate had had the well redug and a septic tank put in. The foundation was in over them by that evening. They let the cement cure overnight. Tents sprung up like mushrooms all the way back to the road, and some slept in their trucks, but they all stayed.

“It’s a Lindel Cedar home, Kate,” Dinah told her the next morning. She was still nervous, still unsure. “It’s got two bedrooms and two bathrooms, one full, one three-quarter.”

“Bathrooms?” Kate said.

“And it’s got a loft, just like your old cabin,” Dinah said. “Well, okay, maybe not just like it, but it’s a loft. There’s a covered porch in back that we’re going to extend all the way around to a deck in front.”

“A deck?” Kate said.

“It’s twenty-five by forty-one, only sixteen feet longer than your cabin, which makes it thirteen hundred seventy-one square feet total,” Dinah said. “Four hundred forty-five up and nine hundred twenty-six down.” She saw Kate’s expression and added hurriedly, “I know it’s big, especially compared to the cabin, but you need the extra room now that you’ve got Johnny living with you. You’ll get used to it, I know you will, and pretty soon you won’t even notice—”

“Dinah.”

“Yes, Kate.” With a valiant effort Dinah stilled the trembling in her knees.

“Thank you.” Kate kissed her on both cheeks and hugged her. “Thank you very much.”

“Oh.” Dinah blushed. “Ah. Okay. Good. You’re happy.”

“Tell me how I’m paying for this and I’ll be even happier.”

“Oh.” Dinah’s eyes slid to one side. “Well, you’d have to talk to Billy Mike about that.”

Billy Mike said, “Well, you’d have to talk to Auntie Vi about that.”

Auntie Vi said, “Well, you’d have to talk to Pete Heiman about that.”

“Pete Heiman isn’t here,” Kate said, and then realized the implication. “Wait. Wait just a damn minute here. You mean to tell me you’re putting my new house up
with federal money)
For crissake, Auntie! What if they find out?”

Auntie Vi gave her niece a pitying look. “Katya, for such a bright girl you are not very smart.”

The frame was up by noon, the trusses, with the help of the cherry picker, four hours later. All they would let Kate do was bring people drinks, so she did. “Thanks, Kate,” Bill Bingley said, laying down a screw gun and flat-footing the Coke she handed him. He wiped his mouth and grinned at her. “Thirsty work, this.”

His wife Cindy was working next to him, and smiled her thanks.