Restless in the Grave (18 page)

“You’re a regular Get Out of Jail Free card, you are,” Kate said, and Mutt wagged her tail in agreement. “Although best not to test the theory, okay?”

They made it back to the apartment in due time and opened the door, which she had locked on the way out this time, with some caution. It was as she had left it, and she showered and changed and went back outside to throw a leg over the four-wheeler. Mutt hopped up behind and they headed out the road to the Newenham airport.

Unlike the Park road, unlike most any road not on the Railbelt in Alaska, this one was paved, the winter’s ice melting into soupy puddles as the sun warmed the black macadam. ATV slash snowmobile trails paralleled it on both sides, and Kate took every opportunity available to her, diving off first one side of the road and then the other, kicking snow halfway up the utility poles fenceposting the trails. There wasn’t a lot of traffic and she took advantage of it. She frightened the life out of a two-year-old moose who had just been kicked out by his mama and so was prone to nervousness, scattered a roost of magpies into a protesting cloud, and raced an arctic hare and won, or would have if the hare hadn’t recognized the better part of valor and veered off into the underbrush.

It occurred to Kate that there was cause to rejoice in investigating a case in which she was related to no one involved.

Chouinard’s voice rang in her ears.
Aren’t all Alaska Natives related?
She laughed out loud and hit the gas.

The road followed the river north of town for a little over a mile and then veered west and inland. Directly ahead, the Wood River Mountains formed a sharp, white outline against the pale blue horizon. The road widened into a broad turn that followed a row of buildings next to a long paved airstrip and finished up in the parking lot of what was obviously a terminal. A small plane was taking off from the strip. She pulled to one side, killed the engine, and watched it climb, circle back, land, and take off again. Somebody doing touch and goes, a student pilot, maybe, or maybe a commercial pilot doing their mandatory three full stops a month requirement to maintain their license to carry passengers. Or maybe that was at night? She kind of thought taildragger versus tricycle gear figured in there somewhere, too, which wasn’t surprising, given the number of times new pilots (and sometimes old ones who should know better) pranged a plane on landing because they forgot or never learned the difference.

She wasn’t a pilot. All she knew about flying was what she picked up riding shotgun next to George and Jim.

Why had she never learned to fly? God knows she spent enough time on airplanes. Her parents hadn’t flown and neither had Old Sam, but Abel Int-hout had been a pilot. He’d been busy teaching his own sons, though, and by the time he got Ethan in the air he was probably tired of teaching, or she was off at school. At any rate, the subject had never come up.

Be fair. She had never asked, and now never could. As always, there was that sharp, remembered pain at the memory of the old homesteader. As always, she acknowledged the pain, accepted it, didn’t try to deny it. It was the least she owed the old man. He’d given her her home back when her parents died, in defiance of none other than Ekaterina Shugak, not to mention the conventional wisdom of the Park that said no grade-school girl should be allowed to say where she would live. So what if he hadn’t taught her to fly.

She could still learn if she wanted to. Plenty of people learned later in life, mostly when they got to where they could afford it. Which she couldn’t, so she put the thought firmly from her mind, in spite of the enticing image of herself in the left seat, lifting off an airstrip bulldozed down the center of that flat piece of property to the east of her house, gaining the sky in her very own … what? What would she want to fly herself? Something that could get in and out of everywhere, on and off beaches, low and slow so she could beachcomb. Probably a Super Cub. Be nice to have a vehicle that could carry one and three-quarters of a ton of freight, and deliver it to a location less than a mile from her house.

Which brought her full circle, because last time she checked, a Super Cub was going for $130,000, and they weren’t building any more of them.

Aviation was as much a part of the Alaskan identity, zeitgeist, whatever you wanted to call it, as was oil production, gold mining, dog mushing, king salmon, and king crab. All of which, come to think of it, were made possible by aviation. What was the statistic Jim had quoted, something like one out of thirty-seven Alaskans had a pilot’s license? Kate still knew Park rats who had pilot licenses but not driver’s licenses. Admittedly, much of the time that was because the long arm of the law wasn’t that long in Alaska. Three hundred and eighty troopers stretched only so far, especially over a land mass twice the size of Texas, most it without roads. Which was why the Alaska State Troopers recruited as many pilots as they could get their hands on.

There were tie-downs for small planes on both sides of the runway. There were several small shacks behind some of the tie-downs, including one with a sign suspended from the roof, which read
NUSHUGAK AIR TAXI
. There was what Kate thought was a Piper Super Cub—she couldn’t see the tail—tied down in front of it, red and white, tail number 78 Zulu.

Chouinard had picked her up in Togiak in a Cessna 180. So she was a two-plane operation, and Kate knew from Chouinard’s conversation with McGuire the day before that Chouinard was rated in other aircraft.

Jo Dunaway’s pugnacious face swam into mind. If a reporter as experienced and as hard-nosed as Dunaway was worried enough about her best friend to fly down to Newenham in January, Chouinard might have more motive in the matter of the alleged murder of Finn Grant than Liam Campbell was letting on.

Like any cop, public or private, Kate was experienced at having people lie to her, even clients.

She found the access road and followed it to the other side of the runway. She got off the ATV and walked around Grant’s old hangar, to anyone watching looking for a place to take a leak.

The back door was locked. The side window wasn’t, although she’d bet large it hadn’t been opened since it was installed, as witness the nearly impenetrable thicket of alders that had been allowed to grow in front of it. Dirt and dead mosquitoes filled in the track and the slider squeaked and groaned in protest as she wrestled it open. She hoisted herself over the sill and into a cavernous space in which her every step echoed. It hadn’t been gutted, but it had been abandoned, nothing left but some indeterminate litter, an almost-empty spool of half-inch polypro, and one red metal, many-drawered tool chest. A door in the wall led into a utilitarian office, with army surplus desk and filing cabinets, all empty.

She went to the tool chest and opened a drawer at random, another. Socket wrenches in both inches and metric, tin snips, screwdrivers. She closed the last drawer and remembered similar tool chests in the garage below her apartment. No room for another tool chest there. Or someone was still using this hangar to work on aircraft.

She heard an engine approaching, and looked out the window to see Fred Grant pull up in a dark blue Dodge pickup that looked brand new. She was across the hangar and on the outside of the window and around the building thirty seconds later, where she walked toward the four-wheeler, ostentatiously buttoning up her jeans.

Fred Grant paused with his hand on the hangar office door.

Kate pretended she saw him for the first time. “Hey,” she said.

“What are you doing here?”

Kate nodded at the alders beside the hangar. “Couldn’t find a bathroom.”

His eyes narrowed. “Wait, you’re—”

“Kate Saracoff,” she said. “You’re Tina’s brother-in-law. Met you yesterday afternoon at Tina’s house, right? Frank?”

“Fred,” he said. “Fred Grant.” He looked from her to the hangar and back again. “What’re you doing out here?”

Kate shrugged. “Out for a ride. Getting acquainted with Newenham.” She climbed on the four-wheeler and started the engine and Mutt, who had been scouting the underbrush for a snack, trotted back to assume the position.

“Ready?” Kate said. Mutt took a mouthful of jacket by way of reply. “Okay, let’s go! See you around, Felix.”

She felt Fred Grant’s eyes on her all the way to the road.

She went back the way they had come, again with as much time off the road as on. For one thing, the road was wetter now after another hour of sun beating down on and heating up the black pavement beneath the snow and ice to make nice big puddles everywhere. For another, it’d been a while since she’d done any off-roading and a tune-up of ATV skills wouldn’t hurt, especially with what she had planned for later.

She navigated decorously through town—Campbell was getting in his vehicle in front of the trooper post and she avoided eye contact as assiduously as any shifty-eyed miscreant would—and opened up the throttle a bit on the road past the turnoff to Chouinard’s house, heading south down the west side of the Nushugak River.

When Chinook Air Force Base was built, the first barges had landed at Newenham to offload. They’d brought heavy equipment with them, backhoes, bulldozers, graders, loaders and shovels and dump trucks, everything they needed to build a road to the property twenty-five miles south, where the base would be constructed. At the head of the list was a stopgap runway long enough to handle planes big enough to carry any heavy equipment they needed, which they then used to build the two permanent runways and started airlifting everything in.

The air force stopped barging things to Newenham after that, but the road between the town and the base remained. When the base was commissioned, it soon became obvious that the major benefit the town of Newenham accrued from Chinook AFB was a higher rate of sexually transmitted diseases, not to mention a steadily increasing number of unintended pregnancies among high school girls. The town council got together with the base commander and agreed to plow up the road on both ends to stop the free flow of traffic between the two communities.

It never quite stopped it, of course, the hormonal drive to seek out new life and new civilizations and lay them being an irresistible force for young men far from home. The young women of Newenham were no less strongly influenced, but if the plowing up of the road didn’t make it impossible for the two to meet, it at least made it difficult.

The previous day Chouinard had IFR’d the remnants of that road, and had pointed it out to Kate and told her the story behind it. For someone unacquainted with the area, the only thing that could have been better was a ten-foot billboard with a bright red arrow marked
THIS WAY TO EAGLE AIR
! Kate appreciated the assistance. Better than AAA.

To all intents and purposes, Kate looked like any other Newenhamer that afternoon, out for a joyride with her dog on a sunny day. She was not the only one on the road, having passed a dozen others on ATVs, although most of them had plastic milk crates filled with groceries bungeed onto the rack in back. The few women ignored her. Every man gave her a second and sometimes a third glance, especially after they got a look at Mutt. “Biggest dude magnet on the planet,” Kate said over her shoulder, and Mutt looked as smug as she could with a mouthful of Kate’s jacket.

The road ended in a large cleared area that sloped down to the frozen edge of a wide creek that emptied into the Nushugak. The land and the water were both frozen over but it looked like a large gravel deposit had been discovered on the creek and thoroughly exploited, leaving behind a dozen deep bowls that looked from the multiple lines of tracks as if they were now being used to launch snow machines into orbit. Beyond the creek the landscape was a series of snow-covered tussocks and hillocks anywhere from five to a hundred feet high, Kate guessed made from the alluvial deposits first of glaciers and then from rivers, silted over in time and self-seeded with thick stands of alder and birch and cottonwood and willow.

At one time there must have been a bridge over the creek. Today, there was a nice track packed down from a winter’s-worth of four-wheeler and snow machine traffic that led up the near side of the creek. Kate turned right and followed it upstream. Just when the underbrush started making forward motion difficult, the track veered left across the creek, which had narrowed to four feet in width. It was accessed by a short but very steep drop, and the side opposite looked even steeper.

“Hop off, Mutt!” she said. There was a muffled but by no means unexcited “Woof!” from behind her and she heard a thump when Mutt hit the ground. She gunned the engine and let up on the brake. The ATV damn near popped a wheelie and launched itself down the slope with reckless abandon. There was a bump at the bottom just before the creek’s edge and later Kate had reason to suspect that it had been built there on purpose, because they hit the bump at full throttle and sailed into the air. She wasn’t sure they even touched the ice on the creek before landing with a hell of a thump on the other side. She stood on the pedals and leaned forward and kept the throttle firmly down, and the sturdy little ATV sped up the opposite bank.

She burst over the top to hit another bump and go airborne again. She whooped and hit the brake and pulled the handlebars around and threw her weight over, skidding to a picture perfect hockey stop that would have turned Wayne Gretzky a pale green with envy.

Mutt came over the top of the creek bank like she’d been launched from a catapult. “Mutt, don’t you dare!” Kate just had time to say before Mutt cannoned into her, knocking her off the four-wheeler and ass over teakettle into the scrub brush, where she showed no mercy.

It was fifteen minutes before Kate managed to regain the vertical and shake most of the snow out of her clothes. “You,” she told Mutt severely, “are a menace to society and civilization and forward motion of any kind.”

“Woof!” Mutt said, tongue lolling out in a lupine laugh.

Kate laughed back at her. “Okay, enough horseplay, let’s get back to work.”

Mutt followed her back to the four-wheeler, managing to catch the hem of Kate’s jeans in her teeth and dump her on her ass one more time. Mutt always had to have the last word.