Authors: Dana Stabenow
"I have to report the results of my investigation to my client, anyway."
He remembered that handful of crumpled dollar bills. "Right. What's going on, Kate?"
She settled herself more comfortably against the wall. The same guy was passed out with his head on the bar. Billy Ray Cyrus had taken Dwight Yoakum's place on the radio. The bartender polished his glass.
The air, cooler inside than out, smelled of stale cigarettes and the sour tang of spilled beer. Another man, red-faced and perspiring, came in and asked, "Am I on the Denali Highway?" The bartender pointed the glass at the map on the wall. The man walked over to look at it. From his expression, it didn't help much. He left, too.
"I talked to some folks yesterday, after church," Kate said. "Do you know what went on up here last year?"
"You mean that stuff at the school?"
"You know then. Tell me about it."
"I don't know much. One of the teachers--was it Seabolt?--was practicing evolution without a license or some such, and a bunch of the parents who go to that born-again Baptist church got up in arms to give creationism equal time. That's really about all I know, Kate. Nobody took any shots at anybody over it, so I didn't pay much attention." "Daniel Seabolt was the teacher," Kate said.
"And you think that had something to do with his death?"
"I don't know," Kate admitted. "But I have to start somewhere."
"Why?"
Silence.
"Look, Kate, the guy got caught out without his clothes on. Maybe he was enjoying the delights of nature alfresco. Maybe he was enjoying them a deux. Maybe--"
Kate could almost hear one wicked eyebrow go up and interrupted before Jim got seriously creative. "Why is his kid the only one to notice he's missing? Why didn't his father the pastor report his son's disappearance? Why didn't anyone else in Chistona? The population there is only about one hundred and eighty, everyone knows everyone else, somebody must have noticed he was missing."
"We don't know anything about him. Maybe he made a habit of splitting like this. Some people do, you know."
True, some people did. Kate was related to more than a few of them.
"Jim, who would know what went on at the school there last year?"
"Hell, I'd guess just about anyone in the area."
"They're not doing much talking."
"You interviewed everyone in the borough?" he said dryly.
"Not yet. There has to be some kind of superintendent for the school district. Do you know who it is, and where they're located?"
"Hang on a minute."
There was a click and someone started playing Muzak at her and she nearly hung up. Why didn't anyone ever play Jimmy Buffet or Cindy Lauper on hold? But no, it was always 101 Silver Strings playing Your Favorite Broadway Tunes. There were few things worse in life than listening to thirteen violins playing
"Too Darn Hot" from Kiss Me, Kate. She wondered if anyone had ever been driven to murder under the influence of Muzak.
The thought perked her up a little. An original defense, ranking right down there with Roger Mcaniff's, who had claimed to have massacred nine people under the influence of too much sugar ingested in the form of Hostess Twinkies, which to the jury had sounded like the standard diet of any six-year-old American child. It had taken them the sum total of thirty-seven minutes to bring in a guilty verdict on all nine counts of first degree murder. The judge had sentenced him to life plus ninety-nine years for each offense, and Mr. Mcaniff was presently enjoying the hospitality of the state at the Spring Creek Correctional Facility in Seward.
"Too Darn Hot" ended. Almost without pause the orchestra swung into
"There Is Nothing Like a Dame." Mcaniff really should have tried the Muzak defense instead. "No jury in the land would convict," she said out loud.
"Of what?" Chopper Jim said.
"Oh, you're back."
"You talking to yourself again?"
"I hear it's only when you start answering yourself that you're in trouble," she said. "What you got for me?"
"The district superintendent's name is Frances Sleighter. She's got an office in Fairbanks." He gave her the address. "You going up there?"
"Tomorrow," she said, deciding on the spot.
"It's June, Shugak," he reminded her.
"Damn, that's right, tourist season. There won't be an empty hotel room within a hundred miles."
"You know anybody there?" "Not anymore." She thought. "Wait a minute, I think I paid my alumni dues this year." She pulled out her wallet and fumbled through the plastic cards. "Yeah, I did, I'm current."
"So?"
"So that means I can stay in the dorm for forty five bucks a night. Do me a favor?"
"What?"
"Call the English department, see if Tom Winkle bleck is on campus this summer. If he is, tell him I'm coming, and ask him to make a reservation for me at the dorm." "Spell it." She did, and he said, "It's done. What if he's not there?"
"I'll wing it. If I have to, I can always sleep in the truck."
"Kate?"
"What?"
"Why?"
Good question, one it took her a while to answer. "The kid hired me to find out what happened to his father."
"You found out what happened to his father."
"No, I just found the body. I want to know how he died, and this business at the school might have had something to do with it." There was silence on the other end of the line. "Jim?"
"What?"
"How are the troopers calling it?"
"Kate, there is no evidence of foul play."
She was silent.
"Kate," he said, and she gritted her teeth at the saintly patience she heard in his voice. "If you want to walk around the Kanuyaq River delta in your birthday suit, that's pretty much your privilege." His voice deepened. "In fact, I'd pay real money to see it." He stopped there, but then Jim Chopin had always had an uncanny instinct for pushing things just as far as they would go and no farther. "In the meantime, I've got two traffic accidents involving three fatalities to investigate, one in Tok, the other in Slana. I've got what looks like a murder-suicide in Skolai. I've got a hiker missing in the Mentastas, I've got a shooting in Northway and another in Nabesna, I've got an eighty-four-year-old woman who fell into the Chistochina while she was white water rafting and has yet to be found, and I've got the Chitina villagers threatening the lives of the construction crew trying to finish that friggin' road to Cordova. I've got no time to waste on Daniel Sea bolt."
"Something else you could do, you could call Oklahoma and see if they have any record of the Seabolt family."
"What do I get for it if I do?"
"Trooper Chopin, are you attempting to trade sexual favors for services rendered?"
"Did I mention I've also got the Free the Earth League demanding unlimited, permit less entry into the Park, and who at last report were waving signs out in front of the Niniltna access road? Dan O'Brian'll have my ass if one of his precious rangers so much as sprains a toe."
"You do have fun in your job," Kate observed.
"You're going to Fairbanks, aren't you?"
"Yes." He sighed. "Good-bye and keep cold."
"All this encouragement and Robert Frost, too, how'd I get so lucky," she said, and hung up quick before he thought she was flirting with him.
Outside in the parking lot she was stunned into immobility by the sight of a fire-engine-red Porsche with a lot more people inside it than provided for by the designer. It skidded to a halt and the driver's door popped like the cork on a bottle. The contents spilled out and resolved into two men and three women. Kate could smell the booze coming off them from twenty feet away.
The driver spotted her. "Just what we need, folks, a native guide!" He weaved across the gravel on unsteady feet to where she stood. Mutt looked askance up at her and back toward the approaching horde, uncertain of how to deal with either.
The driver pronounced. "I am Dr. Higgins." He drew himself more or less upright. "My card."
Kate took it automatically. He was a dentist, it said, specializing in smile care. It really said that on the card: Specializing in Smile Care.
"This is my colleague, Dr. Sarton." Dr. Sarton bowed over Kate's hand, almost losing his balance, flinging out one arm to catch it again and making a near miss of Kate's left breast. She straightened him up with more haste than grace. Unheeding, Dr. Higgins said, "And this--" he drew the women forward "--is Pat, this is Lynn and this is Alison. Or maybe this is Alison and that is Lynn.
They're all so beautiful I forget." He leered. Alison, or maybe Lynn, yawned.
The two men wore tuxedos, although they'd lost their ties and cummerbunds. The three women wore dresses constructed of less material than a dishcloth although more than a napkin, sprinkled liberally with sequins, and heels so high Kate's calves ached just looking at them.
Dr. Higgins leaned down to look soulfully into Kate's eyes. She backed up a step to stay out of range of his breath. "The thing is," he said confidingly, "is we're looking for the Iditarod." After her abortive attempt to aid the French couple Kate had sworn off the tourist industry but this was a gambit even she could not refuse. "The Iditarod?"
"Yes. You know. The dogsled race?"
"I know," Kate agreed.
"Well." He waved a hand. "The girls wanted to see it. So we took a little drive up, and here we are!" He beamed at her, all innocent expectance.
Kate looked at him. She looked at his friends. She looked at the Porsche, which had California plates. She looked back at him and said gravely, "I'm terribly sorry, Dr. Higgins, you just missed it." By over three months. With great restraint, she managed to refrain from pointing out that the start was approximately two hundred miles farther down the road, as well.
"Nonsense," he replied, weaving a little on his feet. He waved a hand again, a regal, all encompassing gesture, his best. "The girls want to see it."
Never argue with a drunk. "Well," she replied solemnly, "if you're set on it, I suppose you could always stick around for the next one."
"Marvelous!" For a moment Kate was afraid he was going to kiss her.
"Absolutively splendid! Didja hear that, girls? Didja hear that, Howard?"
Howard and the girls heard. Howard looked at her adoringly. Kate murmured modestly that she was pleased to be of service.
Dr. Higgins leaned forward to looked deeply into her eyes. "I think you're wonderful. Isn't she wonderful, Howard?" Howard said she was. The girls were looking less bored now, possibly due to the fact that the mosquitoes had discovered their state of dress, or in this case, undress, and had assembled en masse for brunch and Bloody Marys. The three of them together looked like a cross between a windmill in a gale and both rotor blades of a helicopter.
Dr. Higgins, still gazing soulfully at Kate, was recalled to his duties as host. "Maybe just a beer while we wait then." He rocked back on his heels, recovered his balance, rocked forward on his toes, leaned in the direction of the tavern's front door and let gravity and inertia do the rest. Howard and the girls followed him in a stumbling mass.
Kate went over to the Porsche, turned off the engine and closed the door.
Simon Seabolt took the news of his only son's death without perceptible reaction, and Kate knew, because she was watching him very carefully indeed. He was watching her just as carefully, although it was some time before she realized it.
They sat across from each other, silent, in the room tucked into one corner of the log cabin that served as the pastor's study. One wall had a tiny window cut into the logs through which a minuscule amount of sunshine stretched tentatively inside, not enough to warm the monastic little cell and barely enough to illuminate the other three walls, which were bare. There was a desk and two chairs. The desk had a Bible on it, the King James version, and a copy of Cruden's Complete Concordance.
That was all. The desk and chairs were army surplus, painted battleship gray and as uncomfortable as they were unattractive.
The floor, like the rest of the house she had seen, was made of wooden planks, roughly planed, and Kate pitied the person who walked on it barefoot. Maybe Pastor Seabolt considered it a modern version of the hair shirt.
Splinters in the souls of your feet brought you closer to God, that kind of thing. Herself, she'd stick with her Nikes.
He had yet to say anything. She knew the trick; keep silent long enough, the other person felt compelled to fill that silence. Pastor Seabolt did not know with whom he was in competition, however. Alaska Native children learn by watching and listening. Direct questions are not often asked, and when words finally are used, they are honored and remembered and so not wasted in trivia. The lack of verbal communication could frustrate and bewilder an Anglo dealing with a Native for the first time, as witness the three classes Kate had dropped her first year in college because the teachers kept asking her questions.
It could also lead to the Anglo underestimating the Native, and it made Seabolt underestimate Kate. "My dear, what is it I can do for you? I know you must have sustained a severe shock, finding the body that way.
A dreadful thing." He shook his head. "I would not for the world have had it happen to you."
"It was a bit upsetting," Kate agreed, trying her best to look upset.
It was more of an effort than he made.
"Of course," he said.
She pasted a look of sympathetic inquiry on her face and leaned forward, all concern. "But Pastor Seabolt, how came your son to be up there in the first place?"
He looked sad. "I don't know. Perhaps he was walking in the woods and simply got caught out in the fire."
"With no clothes on?"
He looked at her sharply and she met his gaze with limpid innocence. He relaxed back into melancholy. "Had he no clothes on?"
She shook her head, as sad as he. "I'm afraid not." He thought. "Then perhaps they caught fire and he stripped them off as he ran."
"Perhaps," Kate agreed. She hesitated, and caused a puzzled frown to crease her brow. "It was a very dry summer, last summer."