Kate had overheard a conversation when she was younger that made her aware that Dina and Ruthe were a couple, a pair, like husband and wife, only not. It was a thing she’d never heard of, a woman and a woman, and by that time, she knew her own predilection was strictly men, so it was hard for her to comprehend.
On the other hand, their relationship wasn’t hard for her to accept. They were still Dina and Ruthe, her grandmother’s friends, and hers. Ruthe was a great cook and Dina could outhike anything on two legs or four, and both of them could fly anything with wings. They were smart and they told funny stories, and when anyone in the Park needed help, they were there. She didn’t need to know anything about their sleeping arrangements to know that they were some of the best neighbors the Park had. Long winters made for intimate relationships over distances that would be unthinkable in a city suburb. Good neighbors were crucial.
Once Jack had come into Kate’s life, she had never looked at another man. Well. Before Dinah came on the scene, there had been that brief, intense interval with Bobby Clark, and then there was Ken Dahl, poor dead bastard. And if she were being completely honest, there had been one or two tense moments with Jim Chopin.
Maybe more than one or two. And maybe more than moments. And maybe one of them right here.
But that isn’t the point, she thought, rousing herself. The point was she couldn’t account for Dina’s sudden, brief marriage to John Letourneau. Chemistry? Propinquity? Dina deciding later in life to conform to the straight and narrow?
None of it seemed very likely. Nor was Kate ever apt to come up with a better answer, unless Ruthe woke up and knew it.
The little gray lockbox was sitting on one of the bookshelves. She got it and sat back down.
There was the marriage certificate, a few simple lines, Dina and John’s names, the date. Dina had been forty-five, John thirty-five.
Like John, Kate wondered why Dina had kept the certificate. A memento of one good month? A reminder of a lesson well learned?
She looked through the rest of the paperwork. A Social Security card. Two passports, both long out-of-date, although they had been well used in their time, from all over Europe to the Far East. A copy of the deed to the property of Camp Theodore. Two wills, in separate sealed envelopes, marked will on the outsides, “To Be Opened in the Event Of” in smaller writing below.
She opened Dina’s. It was a copy. It was also very short. Dina hadn’t owned a lot. Her interest in the camp went to Ruthe, unless Ruthe predeceased her, in which case it went into the Kanuyaq Land Trust, to be administered by the chief ranger of the Park and utilized as part of the national park as he or she saw fit. She directed that all of her possessions be sold, the proceeds also to go to the Kanuyaq Land Trust, with a few exceptions, noted in the attached list, items that she directed her executor to distribute.
Kate turned the page. The books went to Ruthe. There was some jewelry in a safety-deposit box in Anchorage, also bequeathed to Ruthe.
A note, added by hand and dated just this past November, said, “To Johnny Morgan, my photograph album, in the hope that he will continue to learn and grow.”
Kate had to blink away sudden tears. She was about to put the will back in the envelope, when a phrase caught her eye. “I declare that, except as otherwise provided for in this Will, I have intentionally and with full knowledge omitted to provide for any heirs of mine who may be living at the date of my death, and I direct that such persons, if any, shall take no part of my estate.”
Lawyers. Kate shook her head. Dina’s parents had died in an accident before World War II, and she had had no children of her own. If she and John had stayed married a little longer, it might have been a different story.
“Oh,” Kate said. She remembered now what she had thought of at the Roadhouse. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so silly.
At that moment, she realized that it might not have been such a good idea to have spoken so freely of John Letourneau while standing in the Roadhouse with god and everybody else listening in.
Perhaps she should have stayed in one of the cabins, within earshot of a big, strong state trooper who had within reach a great big gun.
The door opened. She knew who it was without turning around, but she turned around anyway.
Christie Turner stood in the doorway, rifle in hand.
Kate got to her feet, careful to make no sudden movement. “You’re John and Dina’s daughter,” she said.
Christie smiled. “So you figured it out, did you? I thought you might.” She stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her.
“You don’t seem too upset about it.”
Christie pushed her hood back. “I’ve heard a lot of stories about you since coming into the Park. As soon as I saw you with the trooper, I knew there might be trouble.” She smiled again. Her beautiful blue eyes held an expression that made the hair rise on the back of Kate’s neck. Where was Mutt? Please let her stay away, Kate thought, please, please, please.
“You killed Dina,” Kate said.
“Ah, my dear mother,” Christie said. She gave the cabin a critical look. “Imagine, choosing this over the place my loving father built for her. She really wasn’t worthy of me.”
“Why?” Kate said.
“Why?” Christie wasn’t as calm as she pretended to be. “Why? Oh, well, maybe because my loving mother gave me up for adoption to a couple of people who weren’t fit to raise a cockroach. Tell me, Kate, were you fucked at four?”
“Depends on what you mean by fucked,” Kate said.
Christie’s eyes narrowed. “Fucked, as in screwed, as in raped, a big fat cock in and up every possible orifice.” Her voice rose. “That’s what I mean by fucked?”
“Then no,” Kate said.
Christie reined in her fury. Her self-control was more frightening to Kate than a screaming fit would have been. “Of course you weren’t. You fight on the side of the downtrodden and the oppressed. God help anyone if they mistreat a child in your presence. You’d mount up and ride to the rescue in a heartbeat. That’s what you’re all about. Truth, justice, and the American way.”
It was an eerie echo of Bobby’s comment about the Vietnam War. “You sound like you’re pissed I wasn’t there.”
Christie laughed without humor. “Oh, you were there all right. You were there times ten, times twenty. All the lovely little policemen, and social workers, and lawyers, and judges. All of them so determined to do the right thing. All of them so totally without a clue.” Her seraphic blue eyes stared over Kate’s shoulder, unblinking, into the past. They held a blank, queer expression that was oddly familiar to Kate. She couldn’t identify it, and then she could. Riley Higgins had had that same mad look in his eye just before he had dived beneath his bunk.
He hadn’t held a rifle, though. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Kate said.
The blue eyes came back to her face, narrowing now.
“Heard all this crap before,” Kate said, and faked an elaborate yawn. There was no place to retreat, so attack was the only option. “It’s always god or somebody else’s fault with you people.”
Christie’s eyes narrowed in fury. “ ‘You people’?”
Good, Kate thought, get good and mad. She edged forward an inch, then another, unnoticed. “Yeah, you people who have to blame everything bad that happens in your lives on somebody else. The jails are full of you.”
Christie gripped the rifle. “I was four years old!”
“I heard.” Kate did her best to sound bored. “You can only blame so much on the way you were raised. Sooner or later, you have to start taking some responsibility for your own life.”