Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

“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.”

“What do you call this?” Christie worked the bolt on the rifle and peered into the chamber.

Kate could see the brass gleaming from where she stood. “So you take out your birth mother for something that happened to you that she didn’t even know about? Why didn’t you start with your adoptive mother?”

Christie’s smile was sly. “Who says I didn’t?”

Jesus. Kate measured the distance between them. Still too far for her to take Christie down before Christie could bring up the rifle. Plus, there was too much furniture in the way. Contrary to what appeared to be popular opinion, Kate did not leap tall buildings in a single bound. “How?” Kate said. “How did you get here? There weren’t any tracks. Jim looked. So did I.”

“Same way I got here tonight,” Christie said. Her smile was smug. “Cross-country.”

Kate remembered something Dan had said. “Skis,” she said.

“I waited until snow was forecast, and then I came and I killed them both.” She laughed, an excited, high-pitched giggle that was too much like the laugh Kate had heard in the bar. Like, and different. “Bernie knows I like to take my break outside, and the snow here is terrific. With the right wax, I can do four miles in twenty minutes. It didn’t even take the whole lunch hour.”

“And John?”

Christie shrugged. “Ah, yes, dear old Dad.” Her smile was sharp. “He wanted me to move in with him. Can you believe that? I never got so much as a goddamn birthday card from him, ever, and it was a little too late for him to start playing father.” Her smile was quicksilver and malicious. “Besides, I already know how to play daddy. I had a wonderful teacher.”

“He didn’t even know you existed,” Kate said.

“He should have!” Christie shouted. “He should have,” she said again, more quietly this time.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Well.” Christie thought about it. “You’re the only one who knows. I guess I’ll have to kill you.” She smiled again.

Kate was staring into the face of madness and she knew it. “Jim Chopin knows everything I know,” she said. “He’ll figure it out, sooner or later.”

Christie laughed. “What he knows and what he can prove are two different things.”

“They’ll trace the rifle through the bullets.”

“They’ll have to find the bullet first. They’ll have to find the rifle first. They’ll have to find your body first, and I’ve got plans for that.” She laughed again. “I’ve always got a plan, Kate.”

Dan, Kate thought, talk about Dan. “You went after Dan because he was the chief ranger, and he could help you get easements so you can develop the land. The land you think you’re going to inherit from your mother.”

“And now my father,” Christie said. “At first, all I wanted to do was kill them. I picked Riley up in Montana, and I saw right away how I could put him to work for me.

“Then I got here, and I saw how well-off both my loving parents were, and I thought, Why not me?” Her gaze turned inward, and Kate edged a little farther around the stove. “Why shouldn’t all that lovely money come to me?” Her face contorted. “They owed me!”

Kate remembered Christie cozying up to Pete Heiman at the potlatch. “You’re about to dump Dan, aren’t you? For Pete Heiman.”

Christie grimaced. “He wasn’t supposed to get himself fired.”

“And Pete has so much more power.”

“There is that,” the other woman admitted. “We helpless types do like a strong man to lean on.”

“What if John hadn’t killed himself?”

“He would have.” Christie smiled again, and Kate repressed a shiver. “He had no idea who I was the first time I went to the lodge. I didn’t tell him until after I’d been there twice.”

Kate felt ill. “You didn’t.”

Christie laughed. “Of course I did. Like I said, I’ve had a lot of experience playing daddy. Be a shame not to put it to good use.” She shrugged, managing to make it look graceful even from the inside of a parka. She’d kept her gloves on, too. Cold air was pouring in through the open door.

Kate tried not to shiver. “Whose rifle is that?”

“Whose do you think?”

Kate thought of the second empty cradle in John Letourneau’s gun cabinet. No one would ever miss it.

Christie shook her hair out of her eyes, her face bright with triumph. “So, maybe six months, maybe a year from now, I’ll ‘discover’ my parentage. Something drew me here to the Park, something irresistible, calling me. I didn’t know what it was, but I just couldn’t fight it. And look what I found-my one true love and my birth parents, at one blow! What a story, how romantic. They’ll probably make a movie of the week out of it. I’ll be happy to sell the rights to it, for a fair price.”