Breakup. Part 25

"Especially if he's as smart as you think he is, and loved her up in front of all their friends in town. No motive."

"Oh yes there was," Kate said. s.e.x or money, she thought, the two most popular motives for murder. She was pretty sure it was one of Morgan's Laws, but she couldn't remember which one. She'd have to ask Jack the next time she saw him. Soon, she thought. Tomorrow would be good.

"Whether anyone saw it or not, there was motive up the wazoo."

"Come on, Kate," Dan said. "A lot of wives screw around on their husbands. A lot of husbands don't take them out and feed them to bears."

"A lot of husbands don't have Stewart's ego." Kate remembered Stewart forcing her hand against his erection. It had been a taunt, a blatant provocation, his response to her challenge. He must have thought she just wouldn't be able to resist all that male pulchritude and would fling herself on him. She'd met men like him before, men whose certain, unwavering belief in their own irresistibility formed the pillar of their existence. It was imprudent to disillusion them, imprudent and dangerous and potentially fatal. As Carol Stewart and Nathan Harrigan had discovered, at the cost of their lives. "It's all ego with him."

"And how," Dinah said from the doorway. Her face was pale, but she met Bobby's questioning look with a rea.s.suring smile. "Mr. Stewart thinks very well of himself. What was it Bernie called him? Something movie starish?"

"Redfordy," Dan supplied.

Dinah nodded. "Right. And he'd encourage the resemblance. King stud.

He'd take adultery as a personal affront. Especially if the guy worked for him."

"And especially if they did it here," Kate said, waving a hand to indicate the Park. "Stewart's very own personal hunting ground. Adding insult to injury."

"I wonder," Dinah said thoughtfully.

"What?"

237 "If maybe Carol Stewart didn't bring Nathan Harrigan here for that very reason. Stewart's kind always screw around. Maybe she was making a point, taking her lover on her husband's own ground."

Kate's mouth twisted up at one corner. "If she did, her revenge was very short-lived."

Jim tossed the Swiss Army knife down in disgust and folded his arms. He didn't want to believe any of it, not because it wasn't true, but because he was afraid that it was and he had not a shred of hard evidence to back any of it up.

"He make it back to Niniltna?" Kate said.

"Stewart?" At her nod, the trooper nodded.

"Too bad. I was kind of hoping that bear would show up again." Her smile was cold. "Mandy's dad, who has been big-game hunting in Africa, a.s.sures me that once a lion tastes human flesh it won't eat anything else. Be nice if the same held true for bears. In this one case, anyway."

"Where is he now?" Dan said. "Stewart."

"Back in Anchorage," Jim said. "No help for it, Dan," he said in response to the ranger's disbelieving look. "No probable cause, no hard evidence of foul play. He cooperated fully. Couldn't hold him."

"As a matter of curiosity," Kate said, "was Carol Stewart insured?"

"Yes, but just a standard policy through his business. He had an identical policy, and they both took them out years ago."

"Ought to pay for both trips, out and back," Kate said coolly. "Like I said. Smart."

Dinah made an inarticulate protest, quickly smothered. Bobby caught her hand and glared at Kate.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Jim said suddenly, and brought his fist down hard on the table in an uncharacteristic display of temper. Everybody jumped.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h."

Kate thought of Pastor Seabolt, and of the long, hot June days in Chistona. "Something I learned last summer, Jim," she said.

238.

"What?"

"Sometimes? There's just no cure for a situation."

He didn't like it. None of them did.

Dan broke the silence this time. "What did Stewart say to you last night, Kate?"

"Nothing," she said, with perfect truth. "Nothing at all."

Bobby said shrewdly, "What did you say to him?"

She chose her words with care. "I suggested he make this his last visit to the Park."

"Breathing the air here might be hazardous to his health, is that it?"

Bobby barked out a humorless laugh. "So might riding shotgun on that d.a.m.n D-6 with you on the throttle. Jesus, Shugak, when I said you should take executive action, I didn't mean you should take it on a Caterpillar tractor. You got a death wish or what? My eyes about dropped out of my head when you took off outta that barn." He looked her over critically, and added, "You sure that was really you in your body last night?"

"Maybe it was her evil twin," Dinah suggested, recovering enough to join in. "Brought out by the full moon."

"I figured the Antichrist," Dan said.

"Nah, pod person," Jim said, adding hastily, "Not that I would know, since of course I wasn't there."

The taut atmosphere of frustration and anger eased to where laughter and friends.h.i.+p might be possible once again.

Kate drained her mug and pushed back her chair. "It's moose backstrap for dinner. Who's staying?"

They were gone by nine, and there was still enough light left for Kate and Mutt to walk out back and sit down on the large, smooth boulder embedded in the edge of the creek bank. Overhead the sky turned from blue to pink to orange to red and back to blue again. The stars came out one at a time, Venus first, brighter than every other body in the sky, save the sun and the moon.

239 Soon the stars would be burned out of the sky by the light of the midnight sun, and Venus would fade into the east for the summer. Kate had an affinity for the stars, for the constellations, especially for Orion. As a little girl she had pictured him standing, harpoon in hand, poised at the water's edge, intent on spearing his next meal. Much later, in Masterpieces of World Literature at the University of Fairbanks, she had learned he was supposed to be carrying a sword and s.h.i.+eld, and still later that he raped one of the Pleiades, or maybe it was Artemis, the first in a long line of the disillusionments that come with growing up and leaving the magic behind.

Breakup certainly qualified. The season was supposed to be one of hope and renewal, spent gathering rosebuds while ye may. Instead, it all too often degenerated into destruction and despair. It had been a clear, cold April night when her mother had begun the long walk home from a party, only to pa.s.s out at the side of the road and die of exposure.

Well, she thought with cold satisfaction, it might have taken thirty years, but she had paid back for her mother, in spades. It had been a long time since they'd had a bootlegger in the Park.

Her satisfaction was fleeting. People got away with murder during breakup. People got away with murder and then got away. First Lottie Gette, now Mark Stewart. Kate s.h.i.+fted restlessly on her rock. Failure was not an option open to her, and yet here it was, staring her in the face, and for an instant panic clawed at the back of her throat.

She beat it down before it could take over. All right, it had been three days of frustration, personal and professional. And s.e.xual. This last was going to be the easiest to relieve; as soon as the homestead was in decent enough shape she was headed into town in her brand-new, slightly bruised truck. She would go into Niniltna to tell Bobby to call Jack and let him know she was coming. Jack was a smart man; by the time she managed the two hundred-odd miles into town he would have farmed his son out to a friend's 240 house for the duration. She had a sudden vision of going through his front door like a conquering army and her need was so great she couldn't even smile.

Hormones had even more to answer for than Charles II and Walt Disney.

But it was the personal and professional frustration that nagged at her most. What was her profession nowadays? She'd been absent from the DA's staff for, what, four years now. In the blank marked "Occupation" on her tax form she had written "private investigator" for the first time, mostly because the bulk of last year's income had been earned in that capacity, but the truth was she didn't even have a Pi's license. h.e.l.l, in Alaska, there wasn't any such creature, there was only a state business license, available to anyone who could fill out the form and produce fifty bucks. That was it, that was all you needed, bing, bang, boom, you were in the peeper business.

But if she wasn't a private investigator, what was she?

And then there was the acute personal frustration of being thrust into a position of responsibility for the tribe, of shouldering duties and a.s.suming obligations she had never sought and had certainly never wanted. It wasn't just the tribe, either, it was the whole G.o.ddam Park, Native and white, cheechako and sourdough, ranger and miner and homesteader, fisher folk and fish hawk. Predicaments R Us, You Bring 'Em, We Fix 'Em, K. Shugak, Proprietor. Meetings Mediated, Marriages Counseled, Murders Solved. She didn't even have to advertise, they came, bringing their baggage with them, whether she wanted them to or not.

The first shoot-out at Bernie's flashed through her mind. n.o.body had told her to break it up. There had been fifty, sixty people in the Roadhouse that night. Any one of them could have taken the initiative, could have restored the peace, but no, Kate Shugak had ridden to the rescue yet again. Or crawled, in this case. And of course she had had to answer Mandy's cri de coeur, and there was no denying Billy Mike, invested with all the weight and majesty of tribal tradition, and Dan seemed to take it for granted that 241 it was her job to bring Mark Stewart to justice, and how could she stand by and let Bernie get shot up a second time, and even that p.r.i.c.k Jim Chopin regarded her as Tonto to his Lone Ranger, and . . . oh, the h.e.l.l with it.

The h.e.l.l with all of it.

Twenty feet below, cold, crystal water rushed downstream between narrow banks. From beneath a budding salmonberry bush, a snowshoe hare poked its head out, coat already turning brown for the coming season. An eagle pa.s.sing high overhead called out a melancholy good night.

A pa.s.sing breeze caught at the branch of a fir tree. It reached down and brushed her cheek, the needles scratching gently at her skin.

"Emaa?" Kate said softly.

At her knee Mutt stirred, looking up at her with patient yellow eyes, and unthinkingly she knotted a rea.s.suring hand in the coa.r.s.e ruff.

The bark of the branch smelled strongly of resin. "Emaa," Kate said into the gathering night, "they lean on me. All of them, they lean on me. How do I stand against it? How did you, all those years?"

The silence was the silence of the living land, water tumbling stone, wind through the trees, the chatter of squirrels, and the song was almost lost in it.

She sat up straight, watchful, waiting, listening. It came again, three pure descending notes, floating to her on the wisp of a breeze. The golden-crowned sparrow, the spring-is-here bird, the first one of the year.

It sounded again, nearer this time. Her eyes groped for it in the dusky twilight, and after a moment there it was, six inches long, light brown with darker streaks on its plump body and a golden one on its head. It perched at the end of an insubstantial alder twig, swaying a little as it c.o.c.ked its head, looking at Kate alternately from each bright eye.

The song sounded again, Spring is here, here is spring. That 242 was its job, to usher in spring in song. That was what it had been made for, what it was best at. It might dream of being an eagle, soaring, aloof, detached, but it was the spring-is-here bird, and it sang the news from the branch of an alder.

Kate let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. "All right, Emaa."

She got to her feet, and in a flutter of wings the sparrow was gone. "I love you, Emaa," Kate said, raising her voice. "I miss you."

Mutt trotted ahead. Kate paused, shotgun cradled in the crook of one arm, and looked over her shoulder at the fading outline of the mountains, the lambent glow of the rising moon.

"I need you," she said, almost whispering the words.

Her only answer was the song again, three notes, coming clearly over the wind in the trees, the howl of a distant wolf, the drip of melting snow.

It was enough.

It would have to be.

243.

Set against the stunning backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, the newest Kate Shugak mystery unfolds during the time of year locals love to hate: spring thaw.

"Stabenow offers a knowing portrait of Alaska, its soul-stirring landscape and fascinating culture."

-The Seattle Times "An intriguing blend of modern morality tale and ageless legend . . .

The talented Stabenow tells a riveting tale that's as satisfying to the soul as it is to the intellect," Booklist proclaimed of last year's Blood Will Tell. In Breakup, Kate Shugak's loyalties-to the land, her heritage, her home-are put to the test when a series of mishaps lead to murder.

April in Alaska is typically a period of rebirth and renewal, and after the long winter Kate has nothing more strenuous on her agenda than paying her taxes. But mayhem abounds as the meltoff flows; this year's thaw is accompanied by rampaging bears, family feuds, and a plane crash quite literally in Kate's own backyard. What begins as a series of headaches escalates into possible murder when a dead body is found near her homestead.

Initially unwilling to involve herself in the investigation, preferring in- ' write off each odd occurrence as a peculiarity, 244 yet she continues irresistibly to seek the truth. Compelled by her friends to act as problem solver and guided by the spirit of her Aleut grandmother, she finds herself slowly taking on the role of clan leader, a post she is bound to by honor and blood.

As breakup becomes increasingly fraught with danger and destruction, Kate must decide whether she can cross the line from pa.s.sive observer to instrument of change, a.s.suming the role of elder as the mantle of responsibility is pa.s.sed. Breakup proves once again that Dana Stabenow is "Alaska's finest mystery writer' {Anchorage Daily News).

Dana Stabenow is the author of six other Kate Shugak mysteries: A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, Dead in the Water, A Cold- Blooded Business, Play with Fire, and Blood Will Tell. She lives in Anchorage.

Jacket design and ill.u.s.tration Honi Werner Photograph of the author Linda Longstaff G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS.

a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

ALSO BY DANA STABENOW.

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Blindfold Game

The Kate Shugak Series

A Deeper Sleep

A Taint in the Blood

A Grave Denied

A Fine and Bitter Snow

The Singing of the Dead