Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

Apparently, John had not been a proponent of the hard sell. As many years as he had in his business, he probably got most of his clients by word of mouth and repeat business.

There was a television and a VCR in a cabinet opposite the recliner. The shelf below the VCR was packed with tapes bearing tides like Ecstasy and Exposed and Insatiable. A do-it-yourselfer, John Letourneau. It was an effective means of soothing the savage, but lonesome. Resolutely, Kate turned her mind from thoughts of her and Jim on the floor of the mountain cabin.

She wandered back out into the living room to stare through the window at the river. This was a lonely place, or it felt like it to Kate. But really, what was loneliness anyway? She was alone a lot of the time, she was used to it, she liked it, and she was good at it. She preferred autonomy to dependence. At the homestead, she had books to read and music to listen to, bread to bake and snow to shovel, fish to pick and traps to check, a rifle to clean and moose to hunt, butcher, and pack. People seldom knocked at her door. Her nearest neighbor was, at any given time, a bull moose or a grizzly sow or the big bad gray wolf that kept trying to seduce Mutt into forsaking Kate and civilization for him and the call of the wild.

The great thing about the moose and the grizzly and the wolf was that they had not been gifted by their creator with the power of speech. They couldn’t make conversation. The moose might kick your ass and the grizzly might rip it off and the wolf might eat it, but they wouldn’t talk you to death while they got on with the job.

The main thing Kate had against people was that they talked too much and said too little.

She wondered now if she and John Letourneau had had that much in common.

She also wondered how much she and Jim Chopin had in common. Once upon a time, the immediate answer would have been a loud, definite “Nothing!” but Kate Shugak wasn’t into lying, not even to herself, and it was more than time that she took a good long look at this fatal attraction she seemed to be developing. Feeling panic close up the back of her throat, she beat it back and tried talking herself down.

For starters, Jim Chopin was nothing at all, in no respect, like Jack Morgan.

Except that he was tall. And in law enforcement. And had a deep voice. And was good at his job.

And was, she knew now, just as capable of firing her engine on all eight cylinders without taking his boots off. God. She closed her eyes and for a weak moment gave into memory. It had been like tigers mating, all teeth and claws. Who would have thought Jim Chopin, the man who raised self-discipline to a whole new level, could go that wild?

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.”

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.