The Singing of the Dead (27 page)

“Serves Frank right,” Dinah said.

“Yeah, but I'll have to pull it out.” Kate bailed out of the truck, barely pausing to close the door as Mutt launched herself out of the back and hit the trail running. “Mutt! Don't kill her!”

Dinah's laugh petered out at the expression on Kate's face. “She wouldn't,” she said. “Would she?”

Kate pounded past her without answering.

“Goddamn!” she heard Bobby yell when she was halfway down the trail. “It's the goddamn First Division of the goddamn Lupine Cavalry! You go, girl!”

Kate's worst fears were confirmed when she stumbled into the clearing, lungs burning, eyes tearing, to find Jane standing in the open door to the cabin, faced down by a Mutt standing on tiptoe, hackles stiff and straight up, head down between hunched shoulders, ears flattened, teeth bared, a steady, rumbling growl issuing promises of the most alarming kind. Kate almost felt sorry for Jane, frozen and white-faced, too terrified even to attempt to slam the door in Mutt's face.

“Mutt,” Kate said.

Mutt snapped. The sound of teeth meeting was audible to everyone in the clearing. The growl changed to a snarl and escalated in volume.

“Whoa,” Bobby said, grin fading.

“Kate, do something,” Dinah said.

“Mutt!” Kate said. She made a large circle, coming around to where Mutt could see her before she approached. She didn't make the mistake of reaching out a hand. “Off,” she said.

The snarl abated a fraction.

Kate put more whip into her voice. “Off!” she said. “Now, Mutt.”

The snarl deteriorated into a low, throaty rumble, and then ceased.

Everyone relaxed except Jane. “Well,” Bobby said, grinning at Kate, “she sure knows who she doesn't like.”

Kate looked at Jane. “What are you doing here, Jane? Jane?”

Jane tore her gaze away from Mutt and blinked at them. “I— I'm—I'm looking for Johnny.” Her voice sounded much higher and less certain than it had the last time Kate had heard it. When was that? One month ago? Two? She seemed to realize it, and pulled herself together. “I'm looking for my son. Where is he?”

“He isn't here,” Kate said with exact truth.

Jane's eyes were deep blue and had thick, straight whiteblonde lashes, but they were marred by being too close together and by the expression of sheer malice they displayed every time she was in Kate's presence. “I know you know where he is. You give him back to me now!”

“He isn't here,” Kate repeated. “I assume you looked through the cabin.”

“Someone's hiding him for you, then!”

The best defense is a good offense, and Kate was a bad liar anyway. “So he's missing, your son,” she said. “For how long?”

Thrown off her stride, Jane said, “That's none of your business. You—”

“I agree, it's yours,” Kate said, “and you don't appear to be minding it. Did he run away, Jane?”

Jane stared at her.

“Has he done it more than once?” Kate said. “Like he did in Anchorage? I remember one time you took his shoes away so he wouldn't run away to his dad, and he did anyway. Barefoot. In March.”

Jane flushed a deep red. Her mouth opened and closed without any sound coming out. Kate pursued her advantage. “Has he come back the other times? Does he usually run to the same place?”

“He didn't get this far last time,” Jane said without thinking. “But that—”

“So he's done it more than once,” Kate said, anger simmering under her skin. “If he's making a career out of running away then he's obviously unhappy. What have you done about that?”

“He's a kid; he does what I tell him!”

“Not noticeably,” Kate said.

Bobby choked.

Jane's eyes narrowed. “You know where he is. I'm going to have you arrested for kidnapping.”

“Fine,” Kate said, “but in the meantime, you're trespassing. Get off my land.”

“You—”

“Mutt,” Kate said, and next to her Mutt went back up on tiptoe and kick-started the growl.

Jane looked furious and frustrated, but she stepped out of the doorway and sidled around the edge of the clearing, never once presenting her back to Mutt. When she reached the trail, she said, “I'll be back.”

“We'll be here,” Kate said.

As Jane vanished up the trail, she remembered Frank's Dodge, high-centered on the edge of the turnaround. Dinah remembered at the same moment, and touched Kate's arm. “I'll take care of it,” she said, and followed Jane.

“Mutt,” Kate said, and Mutt arrowed away from her side.

“Kate,” Bobby said, sounding nervous for what might have been the first time in Kate's memory.

“It's okay,” she said. “She's all right now. Besides, Jane can use a little reminder of why it's not a good idea to wander off into the woods by herself. Especially private property in those woods.”

“I thought Mutt was going to eat her alive. Remind me never to piss her off.”

Kate shrugged, stretching a little to ease the tension between her shoulder blades. “I could use some tea. How about you?”

“I could use a goddamn fifth of Scotch,” he said.

Kate got the ramp from where it leaned next to the door and set it over the doorstep. When Bobby rolled to the top, he found Kate standing in the middle of the mess Jane had left behind. Books and tapes had been pulled from the shelves, the cushions had been tumbled from the built-in couch, canned goods shoved to the floor.

“What, she thought Johnny had hidden behind the Selected Poems of Robert Frost , or maybe the baked beans?” he said.

The look on Kate's face could be best described as unpleasant, and truth to tell, it scared him more than Mutt's growl. He hoped Jane had had the good sense to move herself out of range.

“I should have turned Mutt loose,” Kate said in a very soft voice.

Bobby shook his head. “Nah. She would have fallen backward, and there would have been blood and guts all over the cabin. Blood's hell on books.” He gave the wheels of his chair a brisk roll into the kitchen. “I'll start the tea; you start on the living room.”

Kate had the couch back together and some of the books and tapes replaced by the time Dinah showed up, but there was still enough disorder left for Dinah to purse her lips in a soundless whistle. Bobby sent her one of those meaningful looks reserved for the married of the species, and she closed her mouth on whatever she had been about to say and went to restore the canned goods to their cupboards. By the time the kettle whistled, the room looked almost normal, and Kate was restored to at least the semblance of her customary calm, until they sat down around the table, and she discovered that Jane had dumped the contents of the one-pound Darigold butter can and had taken off with two of the five twenty-dollar bills that had been in it.

“A petty thief,” Bobby said, not without pleasure.

“Might have known it,” Dinah agreed.

They both watched Kate from the corners of their eyes, like home canners watching as the steam built up beneath the lid of an old pressure cooker that might or might not be still working at optimum capacity.

It took a while, but the color eventually faded from her face. She looked around at Mutt, draped across the threshold of the open door, dappled with afternoon sun, and told her, “Next time, she's lunch.”

Mutt flopped a lazy tail in agreement.

Relieved, Bobby squirted honey into his mug. “That's my girls.”

“I have to say that I hate it that she knows the way here,” Kate said, taking the honey in turn.

“Yeah, well, wait till Frank gets a load of what she did to his truck. It'll be a while before he rents it out again for a six-pack of beer.”

Bobby raised an eyebrow. Dinah told him. When he stopped laughing, he said, “What is it about you that drives her so nuts, Kate?”

“Her son doesn't like her,” Kate said.

“And he does like you?”

She thought of Johnny since he'd arrived in the Park. “He used to.”

“Where is he, anyway?” Bobby said.

“Either in school or with Ethan.” Bobby started to laugh all over again. “You mean all she had to do was go up to the school?”

Kate shrugged. “She doesn't give a shit about the kid. She wants to get in my face.”

Dinah was more practical. “What are you going to do about her?”

Kate sipped her tea. It was hot and sweet and burned all the way down, soothing nerves rubbed raw over the past few days. “I don't know yet.”

“You're not going to let her take him.”

Kate looked up and gave a short, unhumorous laugh. “She's got to find him first.”

“How many times has he run off?” Bobby said.

“He won't say. I think he's been trying to ever since she shipped him out to Arizona to stay with her mother last fall after his father died.”

Bobby winced. “Arizona. Jesus. A hundred and ten in the shade.”

“Yeah,” Dinah said, deadpan, “but it's a dry heat.”

“Yeah, right.” Bobby looked at Kate. “He going to stay here?”

Kate chose to answer in the oblique. “Jane won't give up. She'll be back, and next time she'll bring the cops.”

“Not Chopper Jim she won't,” Bobby said.

“Why not?” Kate said. “He's the law; the law's on her side.”

“Kate.”

She tried not to feel ashamed, and didn't succeed very well. “Whatever. But she will be back, Bobby. She hates my guts. She wants to do me dirt, as much as possible. It's not about the kid at all.”

Unsmiling, Dinah said, “Then you make it be.”

Kate, arrested, stared at her for a moment. “You're absolutely right,” she said. “Of course you're right. It's not about her, it's not about me, it's about Johnny.”

“Parents,” Bobby said with an exaggerated shudder. “I don't know why anybody has them. I hope that kid is nothing like his mom.”

Again Kate thought of Johnny's bitter anger. “In some things, he is.”

“That's learned, Kate,” Dinah said.

Kate's face was bleak. “Who are you if you can't be proud of your parents? Of your family?”

Bobby snorted. “Don't ask me,” he said, and too late Kate remembered the right-wing couple in the conservative backwoods town in Tennessee whose rigid belief system had driven their only son out of the house, the town, and the country, to fight in a war in which he didn't believe, to suffer wounds beyond all repair, and to relocate in a place as far from the land of his birth as he could get.

He was lucky. He was alive. His girlfriend, instead of running with him, had climbed into the bathtub and cut her wrists.

“I forgot,” Kate told him. “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” he said, shaking his head. “The expectations people place on their offspring can be truly horrendous. Too bad there's no school parents have to go to before they have kids.”

“What about the expectations people place on their ancestors?” Dinah said, studying the surface of her tea.

They both looked at her. “What?”

She looked at Kate. “Your parents.”

Kate stiffened. “What about them?”

“See? You look like Mutt did facing down Jane. You ever try to badmouth Jane to Johnny?”

“No,” Kate said immediately, and then had to think about her answer. “No,” she said again, more slowly this time. She's your mother, Johnny. You will speak of her with respect . “You can't do that,” she told Dinah. “It doesn't matter how bad a kid is treated, there is still some part of them that loves their parents, some part that needs to believe they are loved in return.” She paused, >reflecting back on the five and a half years she had spent in Anchorage trying to protect underage victims of abuse. “That five and a half years I worked in sex crimes, I saw every imaginable evil inflicted on kids, from newborn babies to teenagers. Not one of whom ever wanted to leave home. Hardly any of the ones who were old enough to talk would admit to the abuse in the first place.”

Bobby and Dinah exchanged glances. Kate never spoke of her work in Anchorage. She'd had had nightmares about it on Bobby's couch a time or two, and Bobby had made mention of it to Dinah. They both had imagination enough to know that they would never know just how awful it had been.

“That wasn't exactly what I meant,” Dinah said with caution. “But I guess it works.”

Kate looked up. “Oh?”

“If kids whose parents beat up on them are that protective of their parents, how protective are they going to be of their grandparents? Their great-grandparents?”

“I'm not tracking here,” Kate said.

“Makes two of us,” Bobby said.

Dinah reached into the capacious pocket of the rusty black duster that made her look like the trail driver out of a Zane Grey novel and pulled out a sheaf of paper. “I printed it out.”

“Printed what out?” Kate accepted the bundle of paper and leafed through it.

“From the disk you left last night.”

“Oh.” Kate sat up and shoved her mug to one side. “What is this?”

“It's the report of an inquest.”

“Whose?”

“Anne Gordaoff's great-grandmother.”

“You're kidding.”

“No. And get this.” Dinah paused for dramatic effect.

“What,” Kate said, in no mood.

“She was murdered,” Dinah said, trying her best not to sound absolutely thrilled at the very idea.

“No shit,” Bobby said. “Cool.”

Kate was less impressed. “One of her tricks, I suppose.”

“What?” Bobby said. “Anne Gordaoff's great-grandma was a hooker?”

“A dance-hall girl,” Kate said, “down at the Northern Light.”

“Goddamn,” Bobby said, a slow grin breaking across his face. “Goodie Anne Gordaoff's great-grandma made 'em pay for the privilege. Who'd a thunk it?”

Niniltna

April 1915

Testimony taken at the inquest on the body of Mrs. Angel Beecham, also know as the Dawson Darling, Ap
ril 9, 1915, before Joseph D. Brittain, U.S. Commissioner for the Fairbanks Precinct, Fourth Judicial Division, Territory of Alaska.

When THEODORE OLDS, being first duly sworn, testified as follows
:

Q. Where do you reside, Mr. Olds?

A. The town of Niniltna, sir.

Q. What is your occupation?

A. I am a dairyman, sir.

Q. Relax, Mr. Olds, I don't bite.

A. Sorry, sir.

Q. Do you deliver milk in Niniltna?

A. Yes, sir. Twice a day, sir.