A fine and bitter snow (13 page)

Jim took a deep breath. He took several. "Okay. That's good." He backed away and stood up. He always kept a couple of gallon-size Ziplocs in his inside pocket, and he placed the knife in one of them. He wrapped a second bag around the first and stored the bundle in a pocket. "Sir? Sir? Could you stand up? Come on, sir, I won't hurt you." He took a chance and holstered his weapon. "Come on. Stand up now."

He pulled the man to his feet. The man came up without resistance. His hair fell back and Jim saw that his face was stained with tears. "Did you hurt the cat?" the man said.

"No, sir," Jim said, surprised at the intelligible sentence. "She's down at the main house by now." He devoutly hoped he was telling the truth. "Sir, what is your name?"

The man stared at him. "What?"

"What is your name? Who are you? What are you doing in this cabin?"

The man looked around him, a sudden wide smile that was as bright as it was meaningless spreading across his face. "Isn't this a nice place? The nicest I ever stayed in." He shivered. "Cold, though."

He was older than Jim had first thought. His face was lined and his beard and hair were an untrimmed tangle of curls that fell to his shoulders and chest. He looked like a cross between a mad scientist and the Count of Monte Cristo before the escape. He smelled of wood smoke and urine. Jim looked down and saw that the man had wet his pants.

"You shouldn't entertain angels unawares," the man said suddenly.

Jim looked at him askance. The man flashed his mad smile again. "You know why?"

"No," Jim said. "Why?"

The man's voice dropped to a confiding level. "Because they can turn out to be the devil."

Come to think of it, the guy looked more like Rasputin
than the Count. "Okay, sir, let's go back down to the lodge."

The man cringed and tried to pull free. "No! No, I don't want to go there! The devil's there!"

"Not anymore," Jim said.

On the way back, all he could think of was how relieved he was that Dan O'Brian was off the hook.

And how not wrong he had been to let him go with Ruthe.

6

The news of the attack on Dina Willner and Ruthe Bauman and of Dina's death swept around the Park faster than if it had been broadcast on Park Air. The news that Trooper Jim Chopin had a suspect in custody swiftly succeeded it.

Kate heard it from Johnny, who came home from town with the news the following afternoon. She sat down hard and stared at nothing for several long moments. Johnny shifted from foot to foot, uneasy at the vacant expression on her face. "Kate?" he said tentatively. "Are you all right?"

She said nothing.

"Kate," he said, and stepped forward to touch her on the shoulder.

She looked at him. "What?"

"Are you all right?"

Two of her grandmother's oldest friends had just been butchered, one of them to death, the other to near death. "Yes," she said, summoning up a smile from who knew where. "I'm all right, Johnny."

He watched her indecisively for a moment. "Want some cocoa?"

"What? No, I don't think so."

" 'Cause I was going to make some for myself."

She saw from the look on his face that he needed something to do. "I'll take some tea. Some Lemon Zinger, with honey."

He brightened. "Great. I can do that." He went to the woodstove and checked the kettle, which was always left to steam gently at the back. "Almost full," he said. He got out two mugs, measured Nestle's and evaporated milk into one and honey into another. He put the tag of the tea bag underneath the bottom of the mug with honey in it. "So when you pour the water in, the string and tag don't go in, too," he said. He looked over his shoulder. Kate was back to staring into space.

It was the first time Johnny had had to carry news of the dead and dying to anyone, and the task made him feel very odd. He wondered if Kate had felt like this when she had come to tell him his father had been killed. For the first time, he wondered how she had managed. She'd almost been killed, too, or so they said, because she had never mentioned it. She'd been moving slowly and carefully that day, he remembered, as if it hurt to do normal stuff like walk and sit. She'd had bandages on her arm, her hands and face had been skinned and bruised, and the hair that used to hang to her waist in a big fat black braid had been sheared off, all raggedy, not even and neat like it was now. He wondered who had cut it off, and why. He wondered why she didn't let it grow back.

He knew Ruthe and Dina, too, maybe not as well as Kate, but well enough. He'd been to their cabin several times since he'd moved to the Park, and he'd liked the two ladies, even if they were older than God. Dina had started right in on him, wanting to know how much he knew about the Park and what lived in it. He was interested, and she didn't talk down to him, so he didn't mind. She had showed him a photo album that started out with weird little rectangular black-and-white pictures and ended up with normal ones— in color, with digital date stamps in the corners. There were pictures of bears and moose, and one of two bald eagles fighting each other in the air, only Dina had said they were mating. There was a picture of Dina standing twenty feet in front of a walrus haul, with what must have been thousands of walrus, and a picture of Ruthe standing in what looked like the middle of a vast herd of caribou, the animals stretching out all around her, over an immense plain, as far as the eye could see. A mink peeked out of a snowbank; a beaver got caught slapping his tail; a wolverine, fangs bared, looked like he was about to charge. "He was, too," Dina had said, cackling; "we barely got out of there in time."

There were pictures of tracks of every kind—in the mud of spring and the swamp of summer, but mostly in the snow: the long stride and enormous feet of a wolf, the smaller prints of a fox, and the tiny prints of a vole.

In one picture, the hip-hopping tracks of an arctic hare vanished, just stopped altogether. "See?" Dina had said, pointing. Feathered ends of wing tips left a ghostly clue in the show on either side of the tracks.

"Wow," Johnny had said, awed.

"A golden eagle, from the wingspan.
Aquila chrysaetos,"
Dina had said, and she had made him repeat the words until he had the pronunciation correct. "Of the family Accipitridae."

"I've only ever seen bald eagles," he had said humbly, and when she'd turned the page, there was a picture of a golden eagle in flight, at about five hundred feet up, the photo shot from the window of a plane. He could see part of one strut.

"Is that a Super Cub?" he said.

Dina was impressed. "Yes."

"Is it yours?"

She nodded. "It's at the strip in Niniltna. How did you know it was a Cub?"

He looked back at the picture of the golden eagle. "My dad was a pilot."

"I know. I met him. He drove a Cessna, didn't he?"

"Yeah. A one seventy-two."

"I remember. Lycoming conversion."

"Yeah."

"Sweet little plane. What happened to it?"

"My mom sold it when my dad died."

The kitchen timer had dinged then and Ruthe had taken a sheet of cookies out of the oven, the best oatmeal cookies he'd ever eaten. She sent him home with a bagful. She was pretty, and as smart as Dina. He'd liked them both, and he was sorry there would be no more evenings spent at their cabin eating fresh-baked goodies out of the oven and looking at pictures of otters sliding down a snowbank into a creek.

The tea had steeped and melted the honey and he'd stirred all the lumps out of the cocoa. He added marsh-mallows to the cocoa and carried both mugs to the table, sitting down across from her. "How long did you know them?"

"Hmm? What?" She looked down and saw the mug. "Oh. Thanks." She curved her hands around it, warming her fingers, which felt suddenly cold.

"So how long did you know them?"

"Ruthe and Dina?" She stared down at the surface of the tea, a golden yellow. "All my life. They were friends of my grandmother."

He nodded, very serious, and wiped marshmallow from his mouth. "Emaa."

"Yes."

"And she's dead, too."

"Yes."

"Is the tea all right?"

"What? Oh." She sipped at the tea for form's sake. "Yes, it's fine. Thanks, Johnny."

"You're welcome."

She put up a hand to rub her forehead. "It's hard to believe. They seemed, I don't know, larger than life. Like they'd live forever."

"Like Dad," Johnny said, nodding.

She looked at him then. "What?"

"Like Dad," Johnny repeated. She didn't think he knew it when a tear slid down his cheek. "He was like, I don't know, God. I didn't think anything could hurt him. Well, except you."

He was only fourteen and he'd been orphaned by one parent and had orphaned himself from the second as a deliberate act. He was trying so hard to act grown-up, to take matters like divorce and separation and death in his stride, to be independent and autonomous and to move on and keep moving without looking back. Kate knew the feeling.

She didn't make the mistake of denying she'd ever hurt his father, and she didn't try to apologize. "I know. He was kind of. . . indestructible, I guess."

"Except when he died," Johnny said.

"Except when he died," Kate said.

"Can you tell me now?" Johnny said in a low voice. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"I told you what happened, Johnny. Those hunters we were guiding started shooting at each other, and we got in the way."

"All of it, this time," Johnny said.

She met the blue eyes fixed so determinedly on her face, saw the pleading look in them. His whole body was tensed with the need to know of his father's last hours on earth. It wasn't that she hadn't meant to tell him the whole story one day, when he was older and could handle it. And she could handle telling it.

"Can you? Please, Kate?"

It seemed, after all, that she could.

She followed Johnny into town the next morning, waving good-bye as he took the turn for the school gym, where Billy was having his new baby party. Johnny wanted to learn to dance, and Park Air had announced there might be dancing. Besides, he liked Billy, and he thought it was cool that he had a new baby all the way from Korea. He'd looked up Korea on Kate's atlas, so he felt ready.

Kate's first stop was the Step. She walked into Dan's office, Mutt at her heels, to find the ranger with his feet propped on the sill of the window and his hands laced behind his head. He had a moody expression on his face. "Hey," she said.

He dropped his feet but not his hands, until Mutt insisted on a head scratch. "Hey."

Kate sat down opposite him. "I heard."

"I figured."

"You okay?"

"I been suspended."

"What?"

He tossed her a sheet of paper with the National Park Service letterhead; it was addressed to the chief ranger and placed him on suspension indefinitely, pending the outcome of the criminal investigation into the death of Dina Willner. Kate looked up. "I thought Jim had a suspect in custody."

"He does."

"Then what's this crap?"

"Any stick'll do to beat a dog with, Kate." He looked at Mutt. "Sorry, babe. They want to get rid of me. It's probably enough that I stumbled into the middle of a murder. Guilt by association."

Kate tossed the paper into the garbage can. "You're not going to put up with this shit, are you?"

"Well," Dan said, shifting his gaze from the window to Kate, "there's not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. Of course, I'm the only one on duty at this time of year, and it'll take a while before they find someone qualified to take over. I doubt that any of the suits in Anchorage are going to want to leave the bright lights and the big city to baby-sit in the wilderness."

"Dan."

"Kate—"

"You may be going to put up with this, but I'm not."

He drew a deep breath and expelled it slowly. "I went there to ask Dina and Ruthe for their help in keeping this job. You got me so fired up last time we talked that I figured you were right, that I ought to fight for it, not just sit back and let my friends carry the weight. But now I don't know. Dina's
dead,
Kate, and Ruthe might die. Two great old broads, one gone, one maybe gone. Nothing else seems all that important right now."