And just what was that, that little feeling buried away in the back of her mind where she couldn’t get at it? That couldn’t be pride, could it? That she had done that to him, had caused him to lose control so completely, had shown him just how thin the veneer of civilization lay upon him?
Starting to get that panicky feeling again, she seized upon the indisputable fact that Jim was a rounder with positive relief. She was a one-man woman. He was a many-womaned man. Ergo, it would be very, very bad for her to enter into any kind of relationship with him. Maybe it was just pride, she didn’t like looking down the road and seeing herself as one in a long line of Chopper Jim’s ex-girlfriends, littering the Park from the Brooks Range to the Gulf of Alaska. So? Pride wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Neither was self-preservation. Maybe she was afraid that any relationship they developed would mean more to her than it would to him. Maybe she was afraid that down the road she would be dumped, good and hard.
She gave herself an annoyed shake. “I’m not afraid,” she told the view. “It’s not that at all.”
The view remained serenely uncommunicative.
“Damn you, Jack!” she yelled. “Why’d you have to go and leave me here all alone?”
The words reverberated off glass and wood and rang in her ears. She closed her eyes against the sound and stood where she was, fists shoved into her pockets, rage and fear waging a battle for preeminence inside her.
Mutt’s claws ticky-tacked across the wood floor. She paused next to Kate, who opened her eyes, took a deep, shaky sigh, and looked down, to see Mutt deposit a white knit hat on the floor at her feet.
“What’s this?” Kate bent to pick it up.
It was a standard knit hat, a ribbed tube of two-ply white yarn pulled tight and tied off at one end and turned up into a brim at the other. Kate touched it experimentally. It was very soft, and fuzzy. Kate had a very faint acquaintance with yarn, as the four aunties were always either quilting or knitting. This might be angora, or have some angora in it. It wasn’t synthetic; it didn’t have that snag on her calluses.
She sniffed it. There was a faint flowery smell. She examined the inside of the brim and found a fair hair that was either pale blond or white.
She tried to imagine the hat on John Letourneau’s head and failed. “Where did you find it, girl? Show me.”
Mutt led her to the door. There was a bench next to it with a lid. Mutt nosed open the lid, and Kate saw that the compartment held a selection of hats, gloves, and scarves, some leather, some knit, some felt.
There were no matching gloves or scarf for the hat, but then, nothing in the bench matched anything else. They were all probably spares, some John had bought, some clients had left behind, available for future guests with chills. And probably each and every one had a different smell to it. Mutt gave her a pitiful look. “Not your fault, girl.” Kate tossed the hat back inside and closed the lid.
John Letourneau’s suicide might just be one of those little mysteries of life that remained unsolved. It comforted Kate, at least a little, to know they still existed. Unlike Jim Chopin, she didn’t want everything to be neatly explained, all the loose ends tied up and tucked away. She liked to think she’d leave a mystery or two behind herself. Just not anytime soon.
“Come on,” she said to Mutt. “Let’s go say hi to Bernie.”
11
The Roadhouse was packed to the rafters that afternoon. Dan O’Brian was at the bar, sitting as close as he could get to the serving station. Christie was all business, bestowing a smile on him in passing, the same smile she gave Kate on her way to a table, a loaded tray balanced on her right hand. The table the tray was headed for, Kate was interested to note, contained among its patrons one Pete Heiman. His face lit up as Christie approached, and her hand settled onto his shoulder in what seemed to Kate to be a very comfortable gesture.
Kate let Mutt lead the way to a seat next to Dan, who said, “What’s this I hear about John Letourneau?”
“Only the truth, I’m sure,” Kate said, looking over her shoulder at the table where Dandy and Scottie were holding forth before an admiring crowd, most of them women. For a place where the ratio of men to women was five to one, Dandy Mike got more than his share.
Christie arrived at Dandy’s table with refills, and he smiled up at her, resting a familiar hand a little too low on her waist. She smiled down at him and shifted out of reach. Kate heard Dan sigh.
She looked at him and he grinned, although the expression held more than a little constraint. They were both remembering the interview in his office.
“Hey, Kate,” Bernie said, sliding a glass in front of her that proved to hold Diet 7Up.
“Bernie,” she said, “can I have some water?”
He cocked an eyebrow. “No profit in that.”
“Club soda, then. With lime. I’ll pay for the lime.”
“Sure, but you’re kinda breaking my streak, Kate,” he said, and tossed a piece of beef jerky to the large grayears standing at attention next to Kate. A low “Woof!” and the ears disappeared.
Auntie Vi was there with one of her sons. Kate squinted through the dim light. Roger, she thought. Roger’s wife was there, too, and three of their four children. Mary Balashoff was visiting from Alaganik-Mary must have given up on prying Old Sam loose from the Park-and she and Old Sam were pegging like mad in a fierce game of cribbage. The four Grosdidiers had commandeered their usual table with the ringside seat in front of the television set hanging from one corner of the room, groaning at a bad call by the referee of the football play-off game presently on the screen.
The door opened and Jim Chopin stepped inside. There was the usual lull when five-foot twenty-two inches of state trooper blue and gold stepped majestically into the room, but when it became apparent he wasn’t there to arrest anyone, the noise soon regained its proper level and he was allowed to walk to the bar unmolested.
“Kate,” he said.
Kate was aware that Dan had braced himself on the stool next to her. “You made it back.”
“It stayed above minimums. Barely.” He pulled off the ball cap with the trooper emblem on the front and ran his hand through his hair, which looked a little less immaculate than usual. “Bernie.”
“Jim. Can’t beat you off with a stick lately.” Jim didn’t offer an explanation for his presence that evening, and with the delicate tact required of the professional bartender, Bernie didn’t ask. Besides, he had a pretty fair idea that he already knew. “What’ll you have?”
Jim never drank on duty. It was an obligation he felt he owed the uniform, but it had been a long day and he would have killed for a long cold one. “Coke,” he said finally, and sighed when he said it.
“You get out all right?” Kate said.
“Yeah. I missed the last plane into Anchorage, but Kenny Hazen put the body in the local meat locker and promised to get it on the first plane tomorrow.” His Coke arrived and he looked at it sadly. “Not that an autopsy is going to tell us anything we don’t already know.” He allowed himself to take notice of Dan O’Brian. “Hey, Dan.”
Dan shifted on his stool. “Hey, Jim.”
A brief silence ensued.
“I went back out to the lodge,” Kate said.
Jim looked at her, his eyes sharpening. “Why?”
“Because. I’m like you-I can’t figure out why he did it. I looked through his papers, Jim. If he was dying of disease, he didn’t know it. He had money in the bank; all his bills were paid, all his workman’s comp up-to-date. He’d sent his chef and some of the long-term employees Christmas bonuses, the rest of them Harry and David fruit boxes. There’s just no reason for what he did.”