A fine and bitter snow (25 page)

He hadn't held a rifle, though. "Yeah, yeah, yeah," Kate said.

The blue eyes came back to her face, narrowing now.

"Heard all this crap before," Kate said, and faked an elaborate yawn. There was no place to retreat, so attack was the only option. "It's always god or somebody else's fault with you people."

Christie's eyes narrowed in fury. " 'You people'?"

Good, Kate thought, get good and mad. She edged forward an inch, then another, unnoticed. "Yeah, you people who have to blame everything bad that happens in your lives on somebody else. The jails are full of you."

Christie gripped the rifle. "I was four years old!"

"I heard." Kate did her best to sound bored. "You can only blame so much on the way you were raised. Sooner or later, you have to start taking some responsibility for your own life."

"What do you call this?" Christie worked the bolt on the rifle and peered into the chamber.

Kate could see the brass gleaming from where she stood. "So you take out your birth mother for something that happened to you that she didn't even know about? Why didn't you start with your adoptive mother?"

Christie's smile was sly. "Who says I didn't?"

Jesus. Kate measured the distance between them. Still too far for her to take Christie down before Christie could bring up the rifle. Plus, there was too much furniture in the way. Contrary to what appeared to be popular opinion, Kate did not leap tall buildings in a single bound. "How?" Kate said. "How did you get here? There weren't any tracks. Jim looked. So did I."

"Same way I got here tonight," Christie said. Her smile was smug. "Cross-country."

Kate remembered something Dan had said. "Skis," she said.

"I waited until snow was forecast, and then I came and I killed them both." She laughed, an excited, high-pitched giggle that was too much like the laugh Kate had heard in the bar. Like, and different. "Bernie knows I like to take my break outside, and the snow here is terrific. With the right wax, I can do four miles in twenty minutes. It didn't even take the whole lunch hour."

"And John?"

Christie shrugged. "Ah, yes, dear old Dad." Her smile was sharp. "He wanted me to move in with him. Can you believe that? I never got so much as a goddamn birthday card from him, ever, and it was a little too late for him to start playing father." Her smile was quicksilver and malicious. "Besides, I already know how to play daddy. I had a wonderful teacher."

"He didn't even know you existed," Kate said.

"He should have!" Christie shouted. "He should have," she said again, more quietly this time.

"What are you going to do now?"

"Well." Christie thought about it. "You're the only one who knows. I guess I'll have to kill you." She smiled again.

Kate was staring into the face of madness and she knew it. "Jim Chopin knows everything I know," she said. "He'll figure it out, sooner or later."

Christie laughed. "What he knows and what he can prove are two different things."

"They'll trace the rifle through the bullets."

"They'll have to find the bullet first. They'll have to find the rifle first. They'll have to find your body first, and I've got plans for that." She laughed again. "I've always got a plan, Kate."

Dan, Kate thought, talk about Dan. "You went after Dan because he was the chief ranger, and he could help you get easements so you can develop the land. The land you think you're going to inherit from your mother."

"And now my father," Christie said. "At first, all I wanted to do was kill them. I picked Riley up in Montana, and I saw right away how I could put him to work for me.

"Then I got here, and I saw how well-off both my loving parents were, and I thought, Why not me?" Her gaze turned inward, and Kate edged a little farther around the stove. "Why shouldn't all that lovely money come to me?" Her face contorted. "They owed me!"

Kate remembered Christie cozying up to Pete Heiman at the potlatch. "You're about to dump Dan, aren't you? For Pete Heiman."

Christie grimaced. "He wasn't supposed to get himself fired."

"And Pete has so much more power."

"There is that," the other woman admitted. "We helpless types do like a strong man to lean on."

"What if John hadn't killed himself?"

"He would have." Christie smiled again, and Kate repressed a shiver. "He had no idea who I was the first time I went to the lodge. I didn't tell him until after I'd been there twice."

Kate felt ill. "You didn't."

Christie laughed. "Of course I did. Like I said, I've had a lot of experience playing daddy. Be a shame not to put it to good use." She shrugged, managing to make it look graceful even from the inside of a parka. She'd kept her gloves on, too. Cold air was pouring in through the open door.

Kate tried not to shiver. "Whose rifle is that?"

"Whose do you think?"

Kate thought of the second empty cradle in John Letourneau's gun cabinet. No one would ever miss it.

Christie shook her hair out of her eyes, her face bright with triumph. "So, maybe six months, maybe a year from now, I'll 'discover' my parentage. Something drew me here to the Park, something irresistible, calling me. I didn't know what it was, but I just couldn't fight it. And look what I found—my one true love and my birth parents, at one blow! What a story, how romantic. They'll probably make a movie of the week out of it. I'll be happy to sell the rights to it, for a fair price."

Kate wondered why murderers were so in love with the sound of their own voices. Still, the longer Christie talked, the longer Kate had to figure out a plan. Any minute now, she would. She edged another inch across the floor. If she pounced, she could grab the barrel of the rifle; if she was lucky, maybe even before Christie could get off a shot. Or she could dive behind the couch. And do what? Throw books?

"Pete and I will marry, of course," Christie said dreamily. "He'll like the idea of a landed wife. And then we'll see what we can do about breaking that land trust and putting the land to more profitable use. Pete thinks the road into the Park should be paved, or so he was telling me this afternoon. We might even subdivide." Christie smiled. "Just this one little problem, then I'll be on my way."

Her eyes went flat. The barrel straightened, the muzzle zeroed in on Kate's chest, and her finger began to squeeze the trigger. Kate took a flying leap over the back of the couch, but not soon enough. Christie swung the rifle, following her. The shot thundered in the little room and filled it with the acrid smell of gun smoke. The bullet hit Kate in the side and lifted her up and back, slamming her into the bookcase. She fell behind the couch, caught beneath an avalanche of books.

"Damn it," she said, irritated. Looking down, she saw blood rapidly soaking the front of her shirt. It felt warm and wet. It was a new shirt, too, and Pendletons didn't come cheap. "Damn it," she said again, more mildly this time.

Christie's face appeared over the back of the couch, flushed, radiant, triumphant. As she raised the rifle a second time, Mutt juggernauted through the open door like an avenging angel and hit Christie in the small of the back, knocking her into the woodstove. There was a sizzle of burning skin and a cry.

Christie got off one more shot before the rifle spun out of her hands and landed beneath the table. She reached for it, but Mutt’s teeth sank in long before her arm hot there and the last thing Kate heard before the spreading pain pulled her under was Christie’s scream.

12

When Kate woke, it was to pain, the whole left side of her body infused with it. She muttered an inarticulate protest. She hated pain. Pain hurt. She tried to say so.

"It's all right," a voice said; "we'll give you something. Drink this."

She drank, felt the prick of a needle, slid back down into darkness.

She dreamed in bits and pieces. An anxious whining, a sandpapery tongue. Jim swearing. Hands hurting her, something tight around her chest. Hands on her shoulders. Hands on her feet. The jolting agony of a drive in the back of someone's truck. A strong arm holding her steady, a solid shoulder against her cheek. The drone of an airplane engine, with her flat on her back on the floor, her legs beneath the pilot's seat, her eyes staring up at the bare ribs of the fuselage.

Waking the second time, she found a woman staring down at her. "Hello, Kate," she said. "I'm Adrienne Giroux. I'm your doctor."

"Where—"

"At the hospital in Ahtna."

Kate tried to raise her head. "What happened to me?"

"You were shot," Giroux said without inflection. Her hand was steady on Kate's wrist. She had brown hair pulled back in a twist, a softly rounded figure beneath a starchy white coat.

Kate closed her eyes. "I remember now," she said after a moment. She opened her eyes. "What happened to the woman who shot me?"

"She's here, too, just down the hall. Under guard, so don't worry." Giroux hesitated. "She's in a lot worse shape than you are. We might wind up having to take off" her arm."

"Good," Kate said, and slid downward to darkness again.

When she woke up the third time, she was alone in the room. There was the muted clink of glassware and cutlery in the hall, and a moment later the door swung open. "Miss Shugak?" A round red face peered in. "Oh good, you're awake."

She was served lunch—a soggy ham sandwich, a tasteless macaroni salad, and a banana. She forced it all down because she knew the sooner she regained her strength, the sooner she could go home and cook for herself.

None of the meals that followed over the next day and a half were any better. She didn't have anything to read and there was nothing to watch on the television suspended from the ceiling over the foot of her bed. She was so bored, she could have screamed, and she was a little hurt that she hadn't had any visitors. Ruthe had had visitors non-stop.

Before dinner the next day, the door opened. Kate looked toward it and all she saw was a gray streak cannoning toward her. "Mutt!" she said, and was ashamed that her voice trembled. "Where did you come from?"

"I thought you could use some company," said a voice from the door. "I brought you some books, too." Jim Chopin set a sack on the table next to the bed.

Mutt had leapt to the bed and was nosing Kate all over, an anxious whine coming from her throat. "I'm all right, girl," Kate said, half laughing, half crying. She winced when a leg bumped into her side, but it was the best pain she'd ever felt and she wouldn't have traded it for no pain and no Mutt.

"She has to behave," Jim said. "I had to get a special dispensation from the doctor to get her in here."

"She'll behave," Kate said, knotting her hands in Mutt's ruff and shaking her. "Won't you, girl?" She looked up at
Jim.

He wouldn't meet her eyes. "Ethan told me to tell you that Johnny's fine. Johnny told me to tell you that Gal's fine. Giroux said I couldn't stay long, so I'll—" He jerked a head at the door and retreated a step.

"You brought Mutt to me?" To her horror, her voice began to quaver.

He shrugged. "Yeah. Well. I better go. I've got—"

By a sheer effort of will, she mastered her voice. "Jim."

He fell silent.

"Thank you," she whispered.

"You're welcome. I mean, it's nothing. I just, I—Jesus, Kate, I thought you were dead."

His face was pale and strained. "Mutt came for me; she practically took the door of the cabin off. She bullied me into my clothes and into Billy's Explorer and down the road. It was all her." He paused, thinking of the last time he and Mutt had ridden to Kate's rescue, not near long enough ago, when Kate had been dumped like so much garbage in a landfill outside Ahtna. He didn't know how many more times his heart was going to stand up to that.

"I thought you were dead," he repeated. "There was so much blood—all over you, all over the floor." He stopped again, then swallowed with difficulty. All over the floor where they had lain together just days before. "At first, I couldn't find a pulse." Mostly because he'd been so scared, but he wasn't going to say that. Not yet anyway. "I wrapped you up as best I could." He shook his head and gave a brief unhumorous laugh. "I couldn't find hardly anything to use for bandages—I'd used up pretty much everything they had on Ruthe. In the end, I tore my shirt into strips and used that."