“Maybe he was lonely,” Dan said, who had been listening and looked relieved, probably because the conversation had taken a turn away from him.
Lonely. There was that word again. Kate set her teeth and drank club soda. She wondered what a shot of scotch, neat, would do to firm up her backbone, and was immediately appalled that such a thought would come within thinking distance of her teetotaling brain. Just another example of how keeping bad company can decay your moral fiber, she told herself.
Jim saw her stiffen and wondered who’d shoved what poker up her spine. Lucky for him that he wasn’t interested in easy. He wished he could have a beer. He wished he could have several. He wished he could take Kate Shugak to bed and not leave it for the foreseeable future.
Christie, taking a break, was standing next to Dan, who had his arm around her. Her bright blue eyes were watching as she listened. “Maybe Mr. Letourneau was just tired.”
“He didn’t have any business being tired,” Kate said crossly. “He was only sixty something. For a Park rat, that’s practically the prime of life. At sixty Park rats are just getting started. They quit jobs and go back to school, they go into business, they get married and start family, they-”
Dan snorted. “Right. John Letourneau, married, with children. That would have happened.”
Jim said to Kate in a quiet voice, “What?”
She stared at their reflection in the mirror at the back of the bar. “I just thought-”
“What did you just think?”
“I-nothing.” She shook her head. “No. Nothing.”
“You sure?” Their eyes met in the mirror. “You looked like you were having an epiphany there for a second.”
She smiled, a little rueful, but her smiles were rare in his direction and he’d take what he could get. “A crazy idea, nothing worth saying out loud.” She raised her glass and drank. “So, Christie, how are you liking the Park?”
Christie gave Dan a long, sultry look. “I’m liking what I’ve found here.”
Dan actually quivered all over. With difficulty, Kate refrained from rolling her eyes. Kick me, hit me, beat me; I’ll love you anyway and maybe even because of it. What was it with guys and the stick-and-carrot treatment? Christie had been all over Pete Heiman at the potlatch, and the Bush telegraph being what it was, Kate couldn’t believe Dan hadn’t heard about it. What did Dan think all that action over at Dandy’s and Pete’s tables was about? Men. Were they blind, or was it just that they couldn’t see?
Whatever. It wasn’t any of her business, thank god. Kate got a refill and enticed Bernie into a long, detailed discussion on the possibilities of Niniltna bringing home the state’s Class C men’s varsity basketball championship. Seldovia was this year’s favorite, with Chuathbaluk a close second, but Bernie was confident his team would pull it out.
Basketball, now there was a game men could play.
And ought to stick to.
When she left the Roadhouse an hour later, the sun had set behind the clouds and it was beginning to snow again, the remnants of the storm that had been coming off the Gulf in fits and starts since the day after they had found Dina and Ruthe.
Kate loved falling snow. She loved the look of it, light, powdery flakes that seemed to vanish as they floated gracefully to the ground. She loved the feel of it, the wet, cool shock as it touched the skin of her upturned face. She loved the way it seemed to displace sound. No airplane ever seemed so loud in the falling snow, no boat, truck, or snow machine. Falling snow toned a shout down to a murmur and then absorbed the murmur, imposing its own sweet, silent hush on a noisy world.
She stood motionless next to the snow machine, her face turned to the sky, until Mutt nudged her hand in a purposeful manner. She sighed and mounted. Mutt leapt up behind her and gave her an encouraging look. “You have no soul,” Kate told her as she started the engine.
Jim was going to rent one of Bernie’s cabins for the night. Kate had given it some thought but then decided to head back to Bobby’s, snow or no snow. Not that she didn’t trust herself, but she’d feel better with twenty-seven miles between her and the trooper.
There wasn’t much traffic-a couple of other snow machines and a dogsled going in the other direction, but the rest of the road was theirs. Snowflakes made white streaks in the headlights. A pair of eyes flashed out at them from beneath the heavily frosted skirts of a spruce tree. An arctic hare bounded across the road, giving Kate just enough time to let up on the gas without sending Mutt over her shoulder and jackknifing the trailer.
They came to a stop just a few feet short of the turnoff to Camp Teddy.
She meditated for a few moments, looking at the narrow trail that snaked up the hill to Dina and Ruthe’s aerie. “We’ll just be a few minutes,” she said to Mutt.
Mutt gave the impression that she was prepared to put up with the detour, for a price to be negotiated later.
It amazed her how normal the inside of the cabin looked. There ought at least to be the scorched outline of two bodies beneath the coffee table.
“Knock it off, Shugak,” she said to herself sternly, and then was embarrassed when Mutt gave her a quizzical look. “I talk to you, don’t I?” she asked her.
Mutt gave her a long, assessing look, beneath which Kate tried not to squirm, and went to stand in front of the door. “Fine,” Kate said. “Go chase birds. Leave me all alone here, talking to my ghosts.”
Mutt did. No dependence could be placed on laying a guilt trip on a dog that was mostly wolf. Kate shut the door firmly behind her, not really trying to catch the tip of Mutt’s tail in the door, but not trying really hard not to, either.
She leaned on the door handle and surveyed the cabin. At least it didn’t look as if anyone else had shown up to appropriate whatever was lying around. She’d made sure that Bernie spread the word that the cabin was under her protection, but all the same, she thought she had a padlock and a hasp rattling around the garage at home that she might fit to the front door, and maybe a bolt for the back door, as well. There had been a time when the cabin could have stood empty for weeks, months, maybe even years without suffering any harm. She hoped that time was still here, but she no longer had as much faith in the notion that she had once had.
Kate started a fire in the woodstove and brewed a cup of tea on the gas hot plate, added honey, and, not without some qualms, sat down in Dina’s chair.
She had never looked at the cabin from this angle before. Dina’s chair sat to the left of the woodstove and faced the northeast corner of the cabin. It was a great location from which to view the tides of the books on the shelves. The stove sat in the middle of the room, its exposed stovepipe chimney going straight up to the ceiling, which acted as a great heat radiator and provided a central location around which the furniture and fixtures would be arranged. Still, it seemed odd to Kate that with two enormous picture windows that took up practically the whole south wall of the cabin, the chairs Dina and Ruthe sat in most often faced in the opposite direction. Kate would have taken advantage of the view.
Although there would be more privacy at the back of the cabin, if you had guests who used the deck outside to look at the view, too. Kate put up the footrest and cupped the mug in her hands.
She compared John Letourneau’s enormous, barely lived in lodge to this cabin. Here, there was just enough room for Dina and Ruthe. When friends came to stay, they were put up in one of the cabins on the hill. The paying guests took their meals in the mess hall above the cabins; the friends dined with Dina and Ruthe below. John, so far as Kate knew, had had no visitors, other than guys like Dandy who were always looking for something to borrow. Certainly he had none who were invited to stay for free.
The lodge had all the echoing charm of an airport waiting lounge. The cabin was dusty and cluttered and crowded to the point that you couldn’t take a step without knocking over a stack of magazines, but it was a lot friendlier than the lodge. If the building was a reflection of the man, Kate could well understand the qualities Dina had found lacking in John.