The Singing of the Dead (13 page)

“Who?”

“Eddie P.”

Jim sat up, dislodging Mutt's adoring head, which had been resting on his knee. She gave him a reproachful look. “Edgar P. Dischner?”

“That's the guy.”

“If he was working for Eddie P.,he was bent,” Jim said.

“Tell me something I don't know, Chopin, ” Kate said. “ Brendan McCord's going to ask around about him. I'm supposed to call him back on Monday.” She looked at Kenny. “I'll let you know what he says.”

“Eddie P.,” Jim said. He pulled off the blue ball cap with the trooper seal on the front and ran his hand through his hair, a thick, dark mane he kept trimmed to just within the regulation length and no shorter. “If Eddie P. is mixed up in this, things just got a whole lot more complicated. Eddie P. is asshole buddies with every mover and shaker around. Well. The ones not already in jail.”

“Damn it,” Kenny said. “I hate this political shit. Give me a straight-forward Spenard divorce every time.”

Kate shrugged. “Absent physical evidence, and no witnesses . . .” Her voice trailed away.

“I really do not like this,” Kenny said.

“Me, either, ” Jim said. He looked at Kate. “How's life on the campaign trail?”

“Haven't had to throw myself in front of a bullet yet.” An unfortunate choice of words, given the present situation, but she didn't eat them.

“Keep it that way.” Jim got to his feet, nodded to Kenny. “Keep in touch. Let me know what McCord has to say.”

“Will do.” The door closed, and Mutt stood with her nose pressed to the crack. She wasn't whining, exactly, but she was definitely hankering.

“Mutt,” Kate said, and Mutt abandoned the crack with reluctance and returned, to plunk down with a deserted air.

“What do you do next?” Kenny said.

Kate shrugged. “I've got a job. They've already paid me. I'll do it. I'll keep my eyes open. You and I both know that the killer was most likely someone he knew. Which means someone connected with the campaign.”

“With Dischner involved . . .”

“I admit, it throws us a curve. Still.”

“Still,” he agreed. “I'll start talking to the list of names you collected at the gym. In the meantime? Watch your back, Kate.”

She grabbed Mutt's ruff and shook it. Mutt's great tongue lolled out as she laughed up at Kate. “I've got Mutt to do that for me.”

They spent the first two weeks of October traveling around the Park. Kate had never been on a campaign trail, and within the first week she knew enough to know that she'd never go on another, no matter how good the pay was. Anne knocked on the door of every homestead on the road to Glenallen. She visited every house in the village of Niniltna. She visited the Step so Dan O'Brian could harangue her on the issue of subsistence, although he pretty much phoned it in because he was one of the few rangers in the state smart enough to manage his park with the advice of Park elders, Native and non-Native alike. When Billy Mike told him the black bear population in the Quilak foothills had dropped by a quarter of what it had been twenty years ago, Dan closed the Park to black bear hunts for five straight seasons, until the black bear population had turned around, and even then he allowed hunting only by subsistence permit the first two years. For a fed, Dan O'Brien looked suspiciously like one of their own to Park rats. Peter Heiman, who had a lot of financial supporters who lived in Anchorage and hunted in the Park, had been trying to get him fired for the last eight years.

There wasn't a meeting or an event or a festival, no matter how small, that Anne missed during those two weeks. The Park Sledders snow machine club met in Valdez and she was there, keeping her mouth shut when they voted unanimously to forward a request to the state legislature to open the entire Park to snow machining. When Auntie Joy hosted a quilting bee in Glenallen, Anne was there, needle in hand. That night a pair of instructors showed up from the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Anchorage to teach the cha-cha at the Nickel Creek Lodge, and Kate had the privilege of watching Anne and Doug fumble their way through crossover breaks. She was then treated to the sight of Doug hitting on the female instructor, a buxom blonde named Cheryl who won Kate's heart when she transformed Doug's attentions into a request for further instruction and proceeded to work his ass off, literally, with thirty minutes' focus on Latin motion. Doug hobbled off the floor looking like he'd thrown his back out. Anne, working the room a table at a time, didn't appear to notice.

The Plum Bob Lake Mycological Society met for a seminar, and Anne took a test on how to recognize the good morel mushroom and passed it. The Tok Little Theater staged a presentation of Bus Stop and Anne was in the front row. The annual dinner of the Park Pioneers was held in Eureka and Anne was the featured speaker. She never drove by a bar, always stopping to go in and introduce herself.

Each day began at breakfast with whatever passed for the local chamber of commerce in whatever village or town they had gone to bed in the night before. This was usually followed by an appearance at the local school, talking to the high school civics class. Lunch, invariably hamburgers with the fat congealing on them or very bad pizza, was eaten on the run, unless it was eaten in the school's cafeteria.

The afternoons were dedicated either to travel to the next town, village, homestead, or wide spot in the road, or to more knocking on doors. Dinners were command performances by the candidate before organizations with names like the FAS Support Group, the Alaska Miners Association, Mutts and Mushers, and the Nabesna Hospital Guild. Entrées featured chicken in every imaginable form and halibut way past its prime, with vegetables fresh out of the can. Kate had never eaten so much bad food for so long in her life.

Darlene was at the candidate's elbow at every stop, during every appearance, cueing her at every event. Kate saw Darlene whisper the name of a voter five seconds before that voter got to Anne, and watched Anne call the voter by name with an outstretched hand and a beaming smile that contrived to give the impression she reserved that smile only for them. When somebody asked Anne a question she couldn't answer, Darlene was ready with the relevant information or with a smile of her own, and a “We'll get back to you on that, Mr. Corley.” When during one of the high school visits Tom made a move on a girl who was obviously underage, Darlene broke it up and led Tom, scowling, back to stand in his mother's shadow.

Posters began to appear, on the windows and walls of bars and restaurants, on posts stuck into the ground in front of people's homes, plastered on telephone poles. There were buttons, too, metal rounds with Anne's picture on a blue field and red letters that said, VOTE GORDAOFF ! Kate began to see bumper stickers— PUT GORDAOFF IN HER PLACE — THE STATE SENATE !— on the occasional truck and not a few four-wheelers. She picked up a copy of the Ahtna Tribune at the end of their first week on the road and found a full page ad on page three, Anne Gordaoff and her whole family grinning at the camera with a caption that read,“Alaskans for Alaska! Vote Gordaoff for State Senate!” The next week the same page, a different picture, this one of Anne alone, much younger and dressed in nurse's whites. “Anne Gordaoff has Made a Career out of Caring for Alaskans—Vote Gordaoff for State Senate!”

Kate slept in a lot of different beds, and some were comfortable and some were not. She ate a lot of her meals standing up or out of a bag. She became sick of the sight of the back of Anne Gordaoff's head. She became very tired of Darlene getting her up at five every morning to prep her on the day's schedule. Doug Gordaoff hit on her. Tom Gordaoff hit on her. Erin Gordaoff drifted around like a ghost, white, wan, tear-stained, bereft. Anne refused to let the young woman go home and grieve, insisting Erin stay with the campaign. Kate couldn't decide if this was the best solution Anne could devise to comfort her daughter and not stop campaigning, or if it was because Erin's bereavement gave the campaign more sympathy, or if Erin's presence went to show that while Jeff Hosford was gone, he was not forgotten, and by extension, Anne's loyalty to her employees, past, present, and future.

Kate still couldn't decide if she liked Anne Gordaoff or not. She had thought so, that evening at Bobby's when Anne had spoken in such forceful manner against the cult of the Native victim, something Kate had despised all her life. Since then, she had seen too much of Anne the pragmatic politician to leave her admiration undiluted. It was easier to draw her paycheck, watch the crowds for potential assassins, and not think about it. As a result Kate played a lot of late-night, cutthroat pinochle with Tracy Huffman and George Perry, whom Anne had hired to be the campaign's chief pilot. Anne Gordaoff was wise in the ways of local hire, yet another hot-button issue in a state with too many Outside employers.

Anne herself was tireless. She spoke with patience to students, she addressed their parents as equals, and she listened with respect to elders. There were a lot of Republicans in the district and she marched up to their doors, too, and Kate was surprised when none were actually slammed in her face. It seemed that Anne Gordaoff was determined to speak to every single person who lived in District 41. She wanted the job, and she was willing to work hard to get it. Kate had to respect her for it, but thought that eating freezer-burnt halibut every other night might be too high a price to pay.

Once in a while Kate saw people she knew. Demetri nodded at her from a seated crowd in the Niniltna High School gym. Auntie Balasha brought her hot fry bread at a potlatch in Gakona. At a home show in Glenallen a big, beefy man in Carhartt's that looked as if he'd just finished fileting a dozen silvers picked her up off her feet and squeezed the breath out of her.

“Hey, Burt, ” Kate said. “Mind putting me down now?”

He laughed, a big, booming laugh, and she thumped down once more on terra firma. “The last time I saw you, you were fresh outa Anchorage with a scar across your neck made you look like you'd gone one on one with a grizzly.” He poked a blunt forefinger at the open collar of the blue plaid shirt she wore over a white T-shirt, and she endured it because Burt Kennedy had known her as long as anyone had and had been around longer than most. “Looks better now.”

“Yeah.”

“So how the hell are you?”

“I'm good.”

“I'm glad.”

“Thanks,” she said, and meant it, for the tact that kept his concern brief. “How's the mine?”

He flapped a dismissive hand. “Price of gold what it is, I oughta pay people to buy what I dig out.” A sly grin kept her from taking him seriously. He jerked his chin in Anne Gordaoff's direction. “You working for her?”

“Sort of,” she said, realizing for the first time that her presence on the Gordaoff campaign trail could be taken as an endorsement by Ekaterina Shugak's granddaughter. She caught Darlene watching with a smug expression, and cursed herself for her own naiveté. A political animal she was not, that gene of Emaa's having passed her by.

“Well, hell, introduce us,” Burt said. Kate did; Anne seduced him by knowing that day's price per troy ounce of gold, silver, and platinum and per pound of lead, and Darlene looked even more smug. For just an instant Kate debated heading for the first flight out. Her most recent paycheck crackled in her pocket. She gritted her teeth and carried on.

One memorable evening in Tanada members from the congregation of the Chistona Little Chapel picketed the opening of a new branch of Planned Parenthood, to which Anne, to her credit, was lending her presence. Kate looked for Pastor Seabolt and wasn't surprised when she didn't find him. Seabolt's selfimposed role was always as the man behind the curtain, the unseen hand pulling the invisible strings. She wondered about his grandson, which led inevitably to thoughts of Johnny.

She'd seen him twice, on flying trips into Niniltna. He still looked at her like he hated her guts. He still refused to leave. Ethan said they were getting along fine, just fine. “No, his mom hasn't been around. Word is she had to go back to Anchorage so she didn't lose her job.” He looked down at her and his face softened. “The best thing you can do for him is to leave him alone,” he told Kate.

“I don't want to leave him alone so much he starts to think I don't care.”

“First thing you do when he gets here is take a job that'll keep you off the homestead and all over the Park. He's thinking that already.”

Kate set her teeth. “I explained, I told him why—”

“He's fourteen. Explanations don't mean shit to a fourteen-year-old. Leave him alone, Kate. He's going to school, pulling down okay grades in spite of not liking it much. He's tall for his age so Bernie's after him to try out for the junior varsity basketball team. That'll help.”

“You're getting along okay?”

Ethan grinned. “Oh yeah, we're getting along fine. He hates women almost as much as I do.”

She laughed in spite of herself.

“You should do that more often, Kate, ” he said, looking down into her face.

“What, totally screw up a fourteen-year-old boy, and get myself arrested for kidnapping while I'm at it?”

“Laugh,” he said. “You look good when you laugh.”

“Johnny,” she yelled toward the stairs, “I'm leaving!” Johnny didn't come down to say good-bye. Ethan shrugged and raised a brow. “Give him time.”

She knew Ethan was right, but it didn't make any difference. She felt like she was letting Jack down.

The murderer of Jeff Hosford was still at large. Brendan McCord had been unable to add much to his initial report of the dead attorney. He'd been in the state seven years, for five of those years working for Seese, Dischner, first as a clerk and then, when he finally passed the bar, as an attorney. He owned a condo in Park Place, an uptown Anchorage neighborhood with very high rents. He'd been unmarried and something of a ladies' man. “I'm sorry, Kate, ” Brendan had said. “Hosford was practically the invisible man. I ran a check on him through Motznik and he owned one car, a Ford Explorer; he voted in every election; he paid his taxes in full and on time. He wasn't a member of any political party that I can discover. I went over to his condo and talked to a few of his neighbors. They said he was out of town a lot.”