Play with fire, p.20
Play with Fire, page 20
“How far from Chistona?”
Kate looked at Jim. “A little over four miles by road. Maybe one, one and a half, cross-country?”
The trooper nodded. “About that.”
Ekaterina looked at him. “I hear no one reported him missing.”
He looked at her, a slight smile on his face. “No.”
“So you didn’t even know he was.”
“Not until Kate told me she found him.”
Ekaterina turned to Kate. “How did you know who he was?”
“His son hired me to find him.”
“Oh.” Ekaterina frowned. “The little boy?”
Kate nodded.
“Not his father, Daniel’s father, I mean?” Joy exclaimed.
“No, the boy. Said his father had been gone since last year. Said he’d heard how I used to do this kind of work, and he wanted me to find his father for him.” Kate chased a lump of cocoa around the rim of her mug with a spoon, captured it and mashed it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She swallowed the burst of chocolatey flavor reluctantly. “One morning, Dinah and I are out picking mushrooms and we stumble across the body. That night, this kid comes into camp and wants me to find his father.”
“That was easy,” Jim observed.
“I thought so,” Kate said, a trifle grimly.
“Daniel Seabolt was the son of the church pastor, Simon Seabolt,” Ekaterina said.
“Yeah.”
“And was the father of the boy, Matthew,” Ekaterina, who liked to have things made perfectly clear, said.
“Yes.”
“He taught at the school,” Joy said.
“We know. I’ve just been talking to his boss in Fairbanks.”
“There was a big fuss up there year before last about what he was teaching in the school,” Joy said.
“We know that, too. Jim and I have just been talking to Philippa Cotton, who used to be on the school board up there, before they moved down here.”
Joy nodded. “That old man caused a bunch of trouble for those folks. Good folks, too, most of them.”
“What do you know of him, Auntie?” Kate said. “You live right down the road from Chistona. You must get up there sometimes.”
“We went up for services right after they got the church built,” she said.
“Really?” Kate raised her eyebrows. “You attended a sermon?”
Joy nodded. “The first one he gave. It was the first church to open in the area in a long time. We were all very excited about it. The whole family”— that would make twenty-three people altogether, if Kate remembered correctly—”we all dressed up in our best clothes and piled into four cars and drove up Sunday morning.” She stopped, pressing her lips together.
Watching her, Kate said gently, “What happened, Auntie?”
Ekaterina put a restraining hand on Joy’s arm.
Joy shook her head. “No, it’s all right.” She looked back at Kate. “He said we had to destroy our totems, our clan hats, our button blankets. We had to burn them all.”
“What? Why?”
“Because they were idols. ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ he said.” She looked at Ekaterina and shrugged. “I wanted to get up and walk out, but you don’t do that. You just don’t do that to a man of God.”
“So you stayed.”
“Yes.”
“What happened next?”
Joy was speaking more to Ekaterina now, twisting to face her. Ekaterina kept her steady gaze on Joy’s face, her hand on Joy’s arm. One of the kids wandered in from the hubbub in the next room and gave the sober group at the table a curious look. Kate jerked her head at him and he made a face and went out again.
“What happened next, Joy?” Ekaterina repeated.
“Next? Next, he told us we couldn’t dance anymore.”
Ekaterina’s mouth tightened into a thin line. She shifted and her chair creaked. “Why not?”
“He said we were worshipping Satan when we danced.”
Kate thought back to the potlatch in Niniltna the year before, the one Ekaterina had called in honor of Roger McAniff’s victims. There had been dancing, and she had joined it. The drums had called to her and she had answered their beat with joy in motion, sharing the dance with her friends and family and tribe, comforting the sorrowful, paying respect to loved ones now gone, saying good-bye. And later the dance on top of the mountain, her head touching the sky, the world at her feet.
The knowledge that Pastor Simon Seabolt would have disapproved lent extra zest to a memory she already cherished.
“When the service was over,” Joy said, “I stayed behind to talk to him, to try to make him understand. I told him the designs on the button blankets and tunics and the dance robes weren’t objects of worship, they identified the wearer’s clan. I told him totems identified the clan of the home they were put up in front of. Sometimes they told stories, sometimes they marked a special day in the family’s or the tribe’s history, but they were never graven images of idols, and they had more to do with our culture than with our religion.”
“What did he say?”
Joy sighed. “He had an answer for everything, and always with scripture to back him up. He said cultural pride was a sin against God. He quoted Revelations, and how we wouldn’t be dancing in heaven in a button blanket. Everyone laughed.”
Hearing the pain in her voice, Kate could barely look at her aunt.
“Everyone laughed,” Joy repeated, her voice soft and sad. “I’ve never been so hurt.” Ekaterina’s hand moved down Joy’s arm to close over her hand. Joy held on tight. “I’ve never felt so humiliated. It was like he was ignoring all the Anglos and preaching directly at us, the Natives, the only sinners in the room. And our only sin, so far as I could tell, was in being born and raised Native.”
She drained her mug and set it back down on the table gently. “I never went back. Not ever.”
“When was that, Auntie?”
Joy blinked at her. “When?” She came back to the present. “Oh, let me see, I think he was here a year before the church went up. I suppose, 1989? It was winter. I remember, the road was icy. We almost went into the ditch a half a dozen times. One of the cars did, and we had to stop and push it out.”
Ekaterina looked at Kate. “You think Pastor Seabolt had something to do with his son’s death.” Kate nodded. “What?”
Kate shrugged. “I have no proof of anything, Emaa. It’s just a hunch.”
“You know?” Joy said suddenly. “When the pastor stood up there and said, ‘Thou shalt not worship any other god before me?’” She looked at Kate. “It was like he meant himself. We should not worship any other god before him, personally.”
And his son refused to worship at the shrine, Kate thought.
*
Outside, Jim paused with one hand on the door of the cruiser. “What now?”
“Now nothing,” she said. “Like I told Emaa, there’s no proof of anything, Jim. Do you want to go up to Chistona and charge Seabolt with not reporting a missing person? It’s not exactly a Class A felony, is it? Seabolt says his son was distraught over the death of his wife. He says he thought he ran away because he couldn’t live with it anymore. Okay, he didn’t pass this information on to his grandson, but that’s not exactly a crime, either. And,” she added, “I forgot to tell you. I was fired.”
“What?”
“Yeah, three days ago. Matthew Seabolt said he’d hired me to find his father. I’d found him, he said, so I could stop looking. I said didn’t he want to know how his father died, and he said no. I said I wouldn’t stop, and he condemned me for the sin of pride and fired me.”
He frowned. “You think his grandfather put him up to it?”
“At this point, I think we can assume that anything Matthew does, he’s been put up to by his grandfather.”
“Except hire you in the first place,” he pointed out. He adjusted the brim of his hat. Beneath it, his eyes were direct and a little stern. “You need to remember, Kate, he’s lost his mother and his father. Maybe he’s just hanging on with both hands to the only person he’s got left.”
And it was that thought that kept at her all during the drive up the road to the Chistona turnoff, as the clouds dissipated and the sky acquired that soft clarity it always got after a hard rain. Through it the mountains looked higher and more sharply edged, the valleys and passes between as if they went on forever, to Shangri-La and beyond. A wisp of mist threaded through a stand of spruce and settled into a green hollow for the night. A ray of sun filtered through the broken overcast, another, and soon the clouds were on the run. The sky was a neutral shade of blue, with little color and less substance, a sky without stars, a sky in waiting.
Oblivious to it all, Kate drove and thought and drove some more.
Matthew Seabolt had hired her to find his father. She had. She had exhausted all possible avenues on the question of how he got there in the first place, followed up every lead, questioned all the usual suspects. She might have another go at Sally Gillespie, whom she was convinced knew more than she was telling, but the woman was frightened, terrified, really, and a creature of Seabolt’s to boot. She held out no serious hopes of Sally Gillespie.
Morgan’s Third Law came unbidden and unwelcome to mind. “In every murder some questions always go unanswered, usually the ones that are the most interesting.”
Kate disliked unanswered questions. That dislike had helped make her the star of the D.A.’s office during her tenure as an investigator there. It had also led to her departure: A question concerning the stability of a father had sent her looking for the answer over the blade of his knife.
It was settled. Jim was right. Best to let the boy resume some semblance of a normal life. He was fed, housed, cared for, not abused in any way.
Unless you counted the gray matter between his ears.
“No.” She hit the steering wheel with the palm of her hand. Mutt looked over at her, ears up, eyes wide. “Sorry, girl,” Kate said, stretching to ruffle the thick fur. She faced forward, both hands back on the wheel, jaw set.
No. Pursuing the circumstances of Seabolt’s death would at this point be nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence. She would not cater to her own curiosity in this matter.
She would let it go.
Kate walked into the clearing as the sun played a lazy game of tag with the horizon. Bobby took one look at her face and said, “So how’s Jack?”
Ten
This is the picture of the Cat that walked by himself walking by his wild lone through the Wet Wild Woods and waving his wild tail. There is nothing else in the picture except some toadstools. They had to grow there because the woods were so wet.
—Rudyard Kipling
“SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK,” Bobby said the next morning. “One more day’s picking?”
Dinah groaned. Her shiner had faded. Now it just looked as if someone had tattooed an iris around her eye.
“Come on,” Bobby cajoled. He produced a fistful of cash and waved it beneath her nose. His face had returned to normal, and Kate was glad to see them both moving easier.
“No,” Bobby had told her the night before, “no more trouble. They didn’t know you’d left and taken Mutt with you, of course. And they probably knew they could only take us by surprise like that once.” He had patted his shotgun significantly.
“One more day,” Bobby said imploringly now.
“Another couple hundred or so.”
“Mushrooms?”
“Dollars. Just enough to lay in a few supplies on the way home. Then we’ll head into the Park. I promise. I swear. I vow. I attest. I take my oath. I give testimony.”
“I’ll only do it if you won’t give testimony,” Dinah growled. Until that moment Kate wasn’t aware that the wraithlike blonde knew how to growl. It was obvious she’d been spending entirely too much time with Bobby.
“Picking’s about over anyhow,” Bobby said. “Masterson says we’ve flooded the market, and he’s about to pack up and go home.”
“How’d you do while I was gone?”
“Fair. We got my chair far enough back in the woods where I could get down and outpick her.” He winked at Kate. “Closer to the ground, you know.”
“Yes,” Dinah told Kate, “he took a perverse thrill out of filling up buckets which I then had to haul down the hill to the van.”
“Hey.” Bobby spread his hands and did his best to look wounded. “I can’t help it if I’m a helpless cripple.”
“You’re not a cripple, you’re an opportunist,” Kate told him.
That was about as serious as the conversation got the rest of the day. By unspoken consent they picked away from the site where the body had been. It was another hot one, the temperature rising to eighty degrees by two o’clock, according to the zipper thermometer on Bobby’s jacket. All the buckets were full by then and they knocked off and bathed in the creek and drank cans and cans of beer and Diet 7-Up and generally lazed away the rest of the afternoon.
At five-thirty they were ready to go sell mushrooms. Dinah stood at the edge of the clearing, staring down across the broad expanse of the Kanuyaq River valley and at the mountains rising in blue-white splendor beyond. She looked unnatural, standing there without her camera, taking it all in with both her own eyes instead of one of Japanese manufacture, but her awed expression was just right.
“God in heaven,” she said, and it was more of a prayer than a curse, “I have never seen anything so beautiful in all of my life.” She gave a long, drawn-out sigh and turned to look at them. Her smile dazzled. “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.”
