Breakup. Part 23

She didn't turn the Cat's engine off, liking its dangerous growl, as if at any moment it might throw off the leash and head out on its own.

The warm, heavy hand on the back of her neck tightened. She felt rather than saw the almost feline ripple of awareness that ran over him, and smiled to herself.

"That's how we take care of problems in the Park, Mr. Stewart," she said, leaning back against the seat, and with the words 220 her several selves merged back into one. Her mind felt extremely clear. She turned toward the man seated next to her, her left hand resting casually on the gears.h.i.+ft, her other moving to lie almost naturally along the back of the seat, causing his to drop away. A breeze rippled through the tops of the trees, and in the distance they could hear the sound of the two trucks laboring down the track toward them.

"We have a problem, and we take care of it. We don't bother the troopers if we don't have to. We try not to have to."

"So I see." His voice was thick, and he s.h.i.+fted in his seat. He began to lean toward her.

"The way I figure it happened is this," she said.

He paused, his face in shadow.

"When you found out your wife was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around, you decided to teach her and her lover a lesson they would never forget. The last lesson they would ever learn." She began to sound less and less like the Lorelei and more and more like the big trooper with the cold blue eyes. "And you decided to teach it to them where you were surest of your ground."

He didn't move, and she couldn't make out his expression. "So, last fall, you brought her lover up here, probably on a hunt. And you left him here to die."

She raised her left hand and tucked back a stray lock of hair that had come free during their wild ride. The motion pulled the fabric of s.h.i.+rt and wind breaker tight against her breast, and she saw his eyes drop involuntarily. If he were standing in front of a firing squad and one of the shooters was a woman, he would die taking her measurements with his eyes. Kate knew a sudden sympathy for his dead wife.

She let the hand lying on the back of the seat slip down to his thigh.

He started. "And then you went back to town, and you watched your wife grow frantic at the loss of her lover, and you were probably just sympathetic enough to keep her from leaving you altogether." Something in the quality of his silence changed, 221 and she said quickly, "Or perhaps you smothered her with affection.

It's always fun to make someone who has wronged you feel guilty."

She felt a muscle flex beneath her hand, and was satisfied. "Of course.

So that this spring, you could seduce her into coming to the Park for a second honeymoon. To get away from it all, I think you said yesterday.

And you took her up to the mine. For a picnic lunch, you told her."

Her voice was like sandpaper, sc.r.a.ping at all the rough edges. "You killed her there, and you made enough of a mess to fetch every bear within ten square miles."

She gave his thigh a gentle squeeze, and dropped her voice to a raspy whisper. "And then you came looking for me, or someone like me, to tell your sorry story to." She paused, waiting.

He wanted to test her. She could see it in the set of his shoulders, feel it in the tension of his thigh, could almost taste it on the tip of her tongue.

The wind was increasing in volume, a real chinook by the warm feel of it, the leading edge of the storm brewing in the Gulf. A cloud crossed the face of the moon. The trees rustled, snow melted from branches like rain, and a chunk of ice slid suddenly from the cabin to crash to the ground beneath.

It broke his spell. He reached for the hand on his thigh and flattened it against his crotch. He was hard, but then she'd known he would be.

"You can't prove anything."

"No, I can't," she said. The first ray from Bobby's headlights. .h.i.t the clearing. She tightened her hand and he gasped. "I don't have to prove anything, Stewart. I know what happened. I've told you because I can't bear the thought that you think you're so smart you've committed the perfect crime and gotten away with it. You haven't."

Her hand tightened further. "Hey," he said, alarmed, and tried to pry her loose.

She squeezed, hard, with her right hand and with her left 222 grabbed for a handful of his throat, her nails sinking deep into his skin.

Stewart's whole body jolted with shock, and the first inkling of how much he had underestimated her. This was not how he had imagined this prolonged period of s.e.xual t.i.tillation would end. The shock was closely followed by fury, with the sudden realization that she'd played him like a harp to just this end, but the fury was quickly supplanted by fear.

Her grip was unbelievably, terrifyingly strong for such a small woman.

He went limp, like an animal playing dead so the bear won't be interested. It didn't work all that well with bears, as he had cause to know, but it was the only option he had.

It wasn't working with this woman, either. Kate chuckled, and he s.h.i.+vered at the sound. She tightened her right hand, and he whimpered.

She leaned closer, her lips brus.h.i.+ng his ear, and dropped her voice.

"You think with your d.i.c.k, Stewart. Not all that impressive an organ, is it? After all, it led you here."

That stung his pride, and he choked and tried to twist away. She tightened her grip again. He was still erect, he didn't seem to be able to help it, but the skin of his throat gave beneath her nails, and a warm trickle of fluid ran between her fingers. "This is how we take care of problems in the Park, Stewart," she repeated. "We see something wrong, we fix it. Don't come back here, or I'll fix all your problems, once and for all." She squeezed again. "Got it?"

He gave a half-gasping, half-choking kind of gurgle. She took that as a yes. "Good boy," she said, for all the world as if she were praising a not very bright pet dog. She smiled at him for the last time and, one hand on his crotch, one at his throat, raised him up and pitched him out of the cab of the Cat.

He fell hard, and lay still for a moment, long enough for the trucks to slam to a halt and empty their occupants into the yard. "Jesus Christ, Shugak," Bobby said, trying to unfold his chair and stay between Dinah and Stewart at the same time.

"He's not dead, is he?" Dan said, aghast.

223 "No," Jim said with more a.s.surance than he felt, and was immensely relieved when Stewart staggered to his feet.

When Jim would have helped him to one of the trucks, Kate's voice, a low rasp of sound, came clearly over the sound of the Cat's idle.

"No. Let him walk."

Jim's hand dropped as he stared up at the dark figure in the cab.

The full moon was up high enough for the rest of them to watch in silence as Stewart limped shakily out of the clearing, shoulders hunched, hands clasped protectively over his crotch, something dark staining the front of his s.h.i.+rt.

He bore only the very slightest resemblance to the tall, good- looking, confident ladies' man who had left the Roadhouse two hours before.

224.

The next morning she finished her taxes and made an early trip in to the post office to drop her tax form into the mailbox, a whole day before the deadline. She exited the post office feeling efficient and virtuous and every inch the franchised American, and very nearly saluted the flag.

She got the h.e.l.l out of Dodge unambushed by anybody bent on drafting her to do good and returned to the homestead to rebuild the base of the couch with plywood and two-by-fours. There was no more of the blue canvas she'd used for upholstering fabric when she'd built it years before, so she improvised with a piece of olive drab Army blanket. She hated sewing; consequently her st.i.tches were small and neat, so as to get the job done as fast as possible and not have to go back and redo it later. Finished, it looked like a splotch of pond sc.u.m floating on a blue lake. Or, if 225 she squinted, maybe a lily pad. She'd have to check the Sears catalog for new material and reupholster the whole thing. Oh. Right.

There was no more Sears catalog. Great.

She set up the ladder again and sanded the s.p.a.ckle on the ceiling patch.

There was a little less than a gallon of the flat white latex paint in the garage, left over from the last time she'd painted the interior of the cabin, more than enough to cover the area involved. She had been right; the paint had faded and she had to paint the whole ceiling to make it match. Fortunately, the cabin was only twenty-five feet square and the loft ceiling was easily reached. At noon she took down the ladder for what she devoutly hoped was the last time and trundled everything back out through the slush to the garage.

The chinook had blown itself out by six that morning, leaving temperatures in the upper forties and climbing. The roar of runoff down the creek had increased and she climbed down the bank, shotgun in hand, to a.s.sess the boulder situation. It looked solid, and a good thing, too, because there would be no muscling of rocks against the force of that water. Her judgment may have been influenced by the rustling of brush she heard across the creek, and the infrequent grunts and groans of her local grizzly, letting her know he was there.

The Park was just lousy with bears this spring.

Bad news for Carol Stewart.

The grizzly gave another grumble of discontent and Mutt barked sharply from the top of the bank. "All right, all right, I'm going," she told the grizzly. "All right, all right, I'm coming," she told Mutt.

There was no salvaging the Isuzu. Even the metal of the wheels was bent.

She started up one of the four-wheelers and towed the corpse to the garbage dump a thousand feet from the clearing. She'd bury it as soon as the ground thawed. At least until then it would be out of her sight.

A hammer and a fistful of nails and the cache was almost as good as new.

Two of the four legs were intact and quickly reattached. She fetched the axe from the garage and shoved through 226.

the brush to a stand of slender birch about a quarter of a mile from the cabin. She found two of the right diameter and length, and felled them and hauled them back to the clearing, where she stripped them of bark and let them sit. It took fifteen minutes and a quarter of a can of Goop to clean the sap from her hands.

"Oh to be anywhere else, now that spring is here." Mutt, curled up in a patch of sunlight on the one dry piece of ground in the clearing, gave her a quizzical look and tucked her nose back beneath her tail.

Like burying the truck, setting the cache back up would have to wait for the ground to thaw. She checked the meat in the root cellar beneath the garage. It was still mostly frozen. She pulled out a package of caribou backstrap steaks for dinner. It was too much for her to eat alone, but she felt she had earned a treat, and she didn't want her tenderest cut of last fall's moose to thaw and spoil.

After lunch she pushed the snow machine into the garage and was draining the tank of its remaining fuel so as to begin work on a patch when Mutt gave a sharp warning bark from the yard. "What now?" she asked the rafters, and went to see.

It was Bickford. He apologized for not making it out sooner. The thick manila envelope held fifty thousand dollars exactly, in cash, half in hundreds, half in fifties. Kate went dizzy at the sight of so much green and hoped it didn't show.

She made Bickford wait while she counted it. He made her sign a receipt.

Honors about even, he departed, and she sincerely hoped that was the last she was going to see of anyone for a while.

She went inside and sat down at the kitchen table to admire the cash and think warm fuzzy thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Baker. After a nice long while she tucked the money back in the envelope and got out pen and paper to write two letters, the first a list of books to Rachel at Twice Told Tales in Anchorage, the second a list of ca.s.sette tapes to Susan at Metro Music, also in Anchorage.

She peeked in the manila envelope again. Surely there was enough there to finance a trip into town. She could get a new tape 227 deck and a supply of batteries at Costco, have a Reuben at the Downtown Deli, check out the latest in snow machines.

Spend quality time with Jack.

Blood suddenly humming with antic.i.p.ation, she added notes to Rachel and Susan not to mail her orders, she would pick them up in person.

The second envelope had just been sealed when Mutt barked again. Kate swore. Was she never to be left in peace?

She went to the door and beheld Bobby jouncing into the clearing on his wheelchair, Dinah trotting along behind.

Kate frowned at her. "Take it easy, you're walking for two now, you know."

Around Mutt's enthusiastic licks of welcome-every now and then her taste in men showed signs of improving-Bobby managed to say, "I keep telling her," and Dinah rolled her eyes.

"You got coffee?" Bobby demanded. At her nod he roared, "Well, don't keep us standing out here in the cold, woman, pour it out!"

It wasn't cold, it was in fact getting fairly close to the Big Five- Oh, as the much antic.i.p.ated fifty-degree mark was known, but Kate resigned herself to the inevitable and led the way inside without comment.

When they were all around the kitchen table, Bobby stirred in creamer with a decisive hand and fixed Kate with a piercing stare. She met it with a bland expression. "We've been playing this game of Clue," he said.

Kate raised an eyebrow.

"And we thought we'd try out one possible solution." He looked at Dinah.

"Carol Stewart," Dinah said.

"In the Park," Bobby said.

"With a bear," Dinah said, and giggled.

Bobby looked at Kate. "Well?"

"Well what?" Kate sampled her own coffee, rejoicing in the 228.

fact that she had coffee again, not to mention corn Niblets and Darigold b.u.t.ter, which would go fine with tonight's backstrap. She'd better boil up some rice, too, seeing as how it looked like she was going to have company for dinner.

More company than she'd thought. "Hi," Dan O'Brian said from the doorway. Behind him could be seen the distinctive outline of a round-crowned, flat-brimmed trooper hat.

Kate sighed. "Jim, it's breakup, you have to have business somewhere in the Park other than on my homestead."

"Kenny Ellis in Glenallen's got me covered for today," he said, stepping inside, immaculate as always.

"Bernie coming, too?" Kate said as she poured out.

"No, he's busy, puttying up the bullet holes in the bar." Jim pulled out a chair and sat down.

Dan found an empty Blazo box and perched on it. "We had to promise to stop in on the way back, though, and give him the straight scoop."

They all stared at her expectantly.

"So," Bobby said.

"Carol Stewart," Dinah said. "Actually Mark, because you're supposed to say whodunnit first."

"In the Park," Bobby said.

"With a bear," Dinah, Dan and Jim said together.

n.o.body laughed this time. After a pause, Jim added, "We know he did it, Kate. You know how. Tell."

She rubbed a hand over her face and sighed again. "I never would have figured it out if Earlybird hadn't dropped that engine on me," she said.

"But it was the sardine that really put it all together. Finally."

"Sardine?"

"Sardine?"

"You didn't tell me about any sardine," Dan said accusingly.

"Wait a minute," Jim said. "Last night, when Viola-"

"Yes." Kate nodded. To the others she explained, "Auntie Vi 229 said Sardine was the name of the guy Carol Stewart came to the Park with last spring. But then she said no, that wasn't right, and then she couldn't remember what was."