Authors: Dana Stabenow
"Thanks," she said simply.
"Thank you," Bobby said.
It was meant to have been pure sexual innuendo, a Bobby Clark specialty, and instead it came out with a funny little twist on the end that turned it into something else. Dinah met his eyes and there was something in the way they looked at each other that made Kate simultaneously be happy for them both and wish she was somewhere else.
It was almost enough to make her forget Daniel Seabolt.
Almost.
She cleared her throat and said briskly, "We'd better get these shrooms up to the tavern before the buyer bugs out on us."
Dinah followed her down the hill, buckets in both hands. Bobby put on his racing gloves, balanced a bucket behind and before and slipped and slid and crashed through the brush down the hill to a halt next to the driver's side door. He grinned up at Kate cockily, and she had to laugh.
They squeezed the buckets and Mutt and Bobby's chair into the back of the truck and the three of them into the cab and set out. They were agreeably surprised when they saw the flatbed in the parking lot in front of the Gillespies' store in Chistona. "Hey, great," Dinah said,
"we don't have to drive all the way to Tanada."
There were fewer cars than there had been in front of the tavern and the line to sell was much shorter. The man on the back of the truck confirmed Bobby's words: the mushroom picking season was about over.
"Yeah," he said, "after tonight, I'll have as much as I can handle alone, and so far as I know, I'm the last one buying."
"How much?" Bobby said.
"Buck and a quarter."
"What!"
The man shrugged. "Take it or leave it. I'm the last one buying, and I'm too tired to argue."
He looked it, and nobody wanted to drive all the way to Tanada to see if he was lying about being the last buyer.
They unloaded the buckets and got into line. Kate heard a door slam shut and turned to see Sally Gillespie and her children come out of the store and walk in their direction.
She had thought that she'd handled it. She'd thought she was under control. She'd thought she was going to leave it alone. She waited until Sally looked up and saw her. "Hello, Sally."
The other woman jumped, halted, changed color, took another step, halted again. She didn't want to look at Kate but her eyes slid in that direction anyway. "Hello." She hitched her baby up on her hip.
"I thought you left."
"I did."
"Oh."
"Don't you want to know where I went?"
"Why should I care?" But she did, eyes fixed almost painfully on Kate's face.
"I went to Fairbanks to see Frances Sleighter." She watched Sally's expression change with satisfaction. "And then I went to Glennallen.
To talk to Philippa Cotton. I know a lot more about what went on here last year than I did before."
One of her children tugged at her skirt and she dropped a hand to his head. She looked back at Kate with beseeching eyes. "Why won't you let it go? There's nothing you can do about it now. Just let it go."
"I was hired to do a job," Kate said, and even to her own ears it sounded priggish.
"The problem is over now," Sally said earnestly. "It was never much more than a personality conflict to begin with, and all those people are gone."
"And one of them is dead," Kate said. "How convenient for anyone whose personality he conflicted with."
Sally flushed beet red. "If you'll excuse me, we have to get to Bible study," she said with a poor assumption of dignity. She hitched up the baby again and grabbed somebody's hand and whisked past Kate, marching down the road toward the beckoning spire. Onward Christian soldier.
"Why don't you pick on somebody your own size," Bobby said.
Kate's instantaneous rage surprised them all, not least herself. She rounded on him. "Daniel Seabolt is dead." Her voice was rising. Heads turned and she lowered it to a raspy whisper and pointed a finger at Sally's retreating back. "She knows what happened to him. For all I know she could be an accessory. At the very least, she's concealing evidence.
I will pick until the scab comes off this goddam town if I want; if I want I will pick until it fucking well bleeds." She paused for breath, glaring down at him.
He looked at her without expression for a long moment. "Okay," he said finally, and patted the air with his palms. "I give."
She straightened, furious with herself for losing her temper. "I'm sorry."
"Me, too. I was out of line."
"No. I was." The anger drained out of her and she put both hands on the arms of his chair and leaned down to rest her forehead against his.
"I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
"Never." He kissed her, a big, smacking kiss that made her feel better, but not much.
Dinah raised an eyebrow, and Kate, embarrassingly near to tears, said,
"Relax. He'll only run around on you when you're not looking." "I resemble that remark," Bobby said, and they all laughed, if a bit hysterically.
The line was short but everyone had had the same idea, to load up for the final day, and it was over an hour before Kate handed the last bucket up to be weighed.
"Hey," she heard someone say, "what's that?"
She turned her head. A black column of smoke billowed up, parallel to the white spire of the church.
"Oh my God, it's a fire!"
"A fire!"
"The church!"
"Somebody sound the alarm!"
"Somebody get on the radio!"
Kate ran for the truck, buckets forgotten. Bobby hoisted himself into the cab while Dinah tossed his chair in the back. Mutt leapt in beside it, Kate jammed the truck in gear and spit gravel pulling out.
The church was a quarter of a mile down the road and they were there in less than a minute. Kate slammed on the brakes and the Isuzu slid to a halt on the loose gravel. The three of them stared at the scene in front of them. Bobby broke the silence. "What the hell's going on here?"
There was a fire, and it was a burner, but it had been deliberately set, a pile of wood doused with gas they could smell from inside the cab.
Kate opened the door and got out. "Mutt," she said, and Mutt jumped down to stand next to her. "Stay close, girl."
Mutt gave an uneasy woof. Little fires she could tolerate. Big ones made her ruff stand up. Dinah lifted Bobby's chair out of the bed and set it down next to the open door. He walked his knuckles down into it and the three of them moved toward the fire as other vehicles arrived.
A group of people formed a ring around the fire, the tallest of whom was the Right Reverend Pastor Simon Seabolt. Matthew stood next to him.
There were twenty children and twice as many adults, and all of them were feeding the flames of the fire.
Kate looked closer. Feeding the flames with books and albums of music.
She recognized a Michael Jackson CD, a book with a picture of Albert Einstein on the cover. One woman tossed in what looked like a small totem. A bottle of vodka was thrown in and shattered and flames roared up, just in time to be recorded for posterity by Dinah's camera. It recorded everything faithfully, so faithfully that Kate couldn't bear to watch it, even long afterward, even with the filter of the medium between her and the event.
The images were burned forever into her memory: the light of the fire turning the faces of the crowd into gilded masks, the fixed look in their wide, staring eyes, lips half-open in the ecstasy of ritual sacrifice. Seabolt's voice, too, was recorded clearly, deep, demanding, a call to arms. "Show your children the devil must be cast out and committed to the everlasting fire of damnation!" he shouted above the crackle and roar of the flames. "The dangers of failing to instruct them in God's holy laws are great! If we don't take advantage of this opportunity, Satan will!"
There was a chorus of amens. A flame jumped up and someone screamed.
"Satan! I see the serpent!" A woman fell to her knees, her head buried in her hands.
The red light of the fire reflected back on Sea bolt's face, casting it in exaggerated shadows so that his eyebrows and the lines that bracketed his mouth looked carved and deep.
A gilt album Kate recognized as
"Elvis' Greatest Hits" went into the flames. Elvis and Jesus, she thought, remembering the line from the Henley song Jack had quoted, they kind of look the same. She just hadn't been aware until now that she was required to make a choice.
A Nirvana T-shirt went in, followed by half a dozen cassette tapes.
Kate saw one woman about to throw in a book she recognized from her own library, a copy of The Riverside Shakespeare. She started forward with an inarticulate protest and Bobby grabbed her arm. "No, Kate," he said, his voice low, his gaze as fierce as Seabolt's.
"But--"
"No." His deep voice was inflexible. "You try to stop this and you'll be the next thing they toss on that fire."
Unexpectedly Mutt erupted, barking ferociously. She lunged forward and Kate was only just in time to catch her ruff, one arm knotted in the fur at the back of Mutt's neck, the other still caught in Bobby's hard grasp.
"What the hell!" A big, beefy man who had just tossed a half dozen paperbacks into the fire jumped back. "You better watch that dog, lady!"
Mutt barked wildly, straining, pulling so strongly that Kate grabbed her with both hands, Bobby still gripping one arm. "Quiet, girl," she said urgently. But Mutt would not quiet, and suddenly Kate knew. She stared at the man, at Mutt, at the man again. "You son of a bitch," she said softly.
"What?" Dinah said. "What's wrong?"
Wary, the man looked at Mutt, backing up a step. "You mind that dog, you hear!"
Kate almost let Mutt go. The temptation was so great to just open her hands, loosen her grip, turn Mutt loose. It could always take a while to get her under control. A big strong animal like that, as tiny and frail as Kate could look when she put her mind to it, no one could blame her.
She almost did it. She came so close. She saw the fear the big, beefy man tried to cover with bluster, and she knew Mutt wouldn't stop with him. Mutt's nose worked far too well for that. Four men had attacked the camp that night, and not for one moment did she doubt that the other three were present here, too.
Sally Gillespie burst into the ring of people surrounding the fire, a bundle wadded at her breast. She hurled it up and in the air it unfolded enough to reveal itself as the hunter's tunic that had once graced the wall of Russell's store.
Kate screamed, the involuntary sound torn out of her ruined throat.
"No!" Mutt barked again. "Sally, no, don't, DON'T!"
"No, Kate," Bobby said again, hanging on with a grip like grim death.
"It's too late." She knew he was right and stopped fighting him, swaying on her feet, watching with anguished eyes. The flames licked at the dentalium shells, the beads melted, the porcupine quills flared up and were consumed The caustic smell of burnt hide mingled with the wood smoke and spread across the parking lot.
She raised a hand and discovered her cheek was wet.
They watched until the last book was thrown, until the last cassette tape melted, until the last T-shirt burst into flame. They watched until the flames began to die down, until the wood beneath had collapsed into a pile of smoldering embers. Only then did people began to drift away in ones, twos, families. Many stopped to shake Seabolt's hand, to receive his blessing.
Bobby's grip had loosened and before he could stop her Kate pulled free and went around the dying fire to confront Matthew Seabolt. "You wanted to know what happened to your father," she said, traces of tears still on her face. She pointed at his grandfather. "This man killed him."
"No," the boy said in a small voice.
"Yes," Kate said relentlessly. "Yes, he did, and you know it. You told me how he did it. You know it, and I know it, and everyone in this town knows it. Your father loved you, and your grandfather killed him." She grabbed Matthew by his shoulders and shook him once, hard.
"Don't forget," she said fiercely. Bobby's hands pulled at her. "And don't forgive!"
The last sight she had of Matthew Seabolt was of him standing next to his grandfather, blue eyes wide and wild, as Bobby and Dinah dragged her away. "Don't forget, Matthew!"
Bobby muscled her into the truck. "Jesus, Kate! Let it alone!" He pulled himself up and slammed the door and grabbed her again before she went out the other side. He shook her once, hard. "What the hell do you think you're doing! The kid's barely ten! You think he needs to hear somebody say something like that about his grandfather, the only family he's got left, the guy he's got to live with? Jesus!"
Dinah drove.
When they came to the Gillespies' store Kate said suddenly, "Stop."
"What?"
"Stop the goddam truck!"
They slid to a halt and Kate was out and running before Dinah and Bobby knew what happened. She went around to the back and slammed through the door without knocking.
The Gillespies were all sitting in their living room and looked up at her, at first startled, and then not. Sally's eyes were the first to fall. Kate looked at Russell. "I want to know what happened to Daniel Seabolt."
"I don't--" he began.
Her voice cracked like a whip. "I want to know what happened to Daniel Seabolt!"
The words hung in the air, written in the fire and smoke of burnt offerings.
She glared at him and he glared back. His shoulders were rigid, his jaw taut, and then in the next moment all the fight seemed to drain out of him. He slumped back in his chair, shaking his head so that it was almost a nervous twitch.
"Russell," Sally said, her voice pleading.
He shook his head again, this time a slow movement that spoke of a bone-deep weariness. "She knows most of it. She might as well know the rest."
"Russell, no."
He raised his head and Sally flushed beneath the contempt in his eyes.
There was a fresh bruise on her left cheek. Kate wondered dispassionately if she'd received it during the theft of the hunter's tunic or after she'd returned home without it. Either way, she could not find it in her heart to care.