Dana Stabenow - A Grave Denied

“Oh my god,” Virgil said. “Oh my god. Bobby, Dinah, I’m so sorry, I know you were good friends. Oh my god. This is awful. This is just… awful, I-”

“What are you doing here, Virgil?” Jim said.

A fine tremor ran through the older man’s body. “I am looking for Vanessa. She must have gone out after we went to bed, Telma went to get her up for school and she wasn’t there. We are worried sick, and then I remembered Kate telling us that that boy who is staying with her was friends with Vanessa, and I thought…”

“It’s okay,” Kate said, stepping from behind Jim’s bulk. “Vanessa’s right here.” She propelled the girl forward.

Virgil went gray, his knees gave out, and Billy had to catch his arm so he wouldn’t go all the way down. “Oh my god,” he said weakly. “Oh my god.”

Kate nudged Vanessa. The girl walked forward to stand next to Virgil. “I’m all right, Uncle Virgil,” she told him. “I wasn’t even here when it burned down. Johnny and I were camping out at-”

She stopped when Johnny nudged her.

Virgil laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Oh thank god,” he said, “oh thank god. I don’t know what I would have told Telma. Oh thank god.” He used her shoulder to regain his feet, moving like the old man he looked to be.

And not for the first time that morning, since she had seen the glow against the sky, since she had rolled into the clearing to see flames through the cabin windows, since she had with almost inconceivable stupidity walked into that fire to grab the photograph album off the shelf and the one-pound Darigold butter can off the kitchen table and the ivory otter from the windowsill and the guitar off the wall, since she had given up the cabin for lost, since she had backed the pickup and the snow machine and the four-wheeler out of danger, and watched fearfully for a spark to set one of the outbuildings on fire, since she had watched the flames consume the old dry logs and her lifelong home collapse in on itself, since she had driven the longest twenty-seven miles of her life to Bobby and Dinah’s house, since the even longer drive back, Kate thought of how terrible it could have been had Johnny been inside the cabin, asleep on the couch, when it had been torched.

She looked at Johnny, pale and stricken and looking much younger than he had when he was laying down the law to her up at the mine, and she knew exactly what Virgil was feeling, and a fine trembling seemed to move from his knees to hers.

A warm, steady grip took her by the elbow, and she heard Jim say in a far gender voice than she had yet heard that morning, “Sit down a minute, Kate.”

She didn’t remember anything clearly for a while after that.

She woke up on a couch in Bobby and Dinah’s living room much later that day, to be greeted by a blinding smile and another tug on her hair. “Kate,” Katya said with immense satisfaction. “Kate waked up! Kate play now!”

“Ouch?” Kate said.

“Shhhh, Katya,” Johnny said, coming around the corner at a dead run and scooping Katya up in his arms. “Come on, let’s go outside and play.”

“If’s okay,” Kate said, sitting up. “I’m awake.” She stretched and yawned. “What time is it?”

“About three.”

“In the afternoon? Man, I must have been tired.” She rubbed at the sore patch on her scalp where Katya had been pulling her hair. She smiled at the toddler beaming at her from Johnny’s arms. “You little monster. Come here and let me pull your hair.”

“You’re better,” Johnny said, relieved.

“Better?”

“You were practically comatose when Jim carried you in here this morning.”

“Jim carried me in?”

“Yeah. You went out in his front seat on the way here.”

“Oh.”

Dinah peered over the divider. “Ah, Kate Van Winkle awakes. Want a shower?”

Kate became aware of the sooty and smelly condition of her clothes. “I’d love a shower,” she said with feeling.

“Good. I’ve got a change of clothes in the bathroom for you.”

Kate had taken too many snowmelt baths in galvanized wash-tubs to take a hot shower for granted, and she stood with her face in the stream of water until she felt parboiled. Dinah’s shirt, a pale blue button-down affair, was too tight across the chest and her jeans were too loose in the hips, but they were clean and she was grateful. She came out of the bathroom refreshed. “I’ll need to get some new clothes,” she said, rolling up the sleeves of the shirt. “For me and Johnny.”

“Want to order them over the Internet?” Dinah nodded at the computer.

“Don’t you need a credit card to do that?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a credit card.”

Dinah smiled. “I do.” She shepherded Kate to the computer and Googled up the Eddie Bauer and Jockey websites. From there they went to Niketown, where they searched for Lady Cortez, except that the style was now called Cortez Basic and cost $35 more than the last time Kate had bought them. It took her a few profane moments to cope with the news, but they had them in size seven so she ordered her usual six pair and had them sent priority mail. “That takes care of me,” Kate said. “What about Johnny?”

Johnny had more fashion consciousness than Kate and he knew a lot more about surfing the ‘Net, so it took them until dinnertime to fill out his wardrobe. Dinah assured them both that they weren’t anywhere near her credit limit. Kate suspected she was lying, but by then Bobby had returned with Jim in tow, and they all sat down to eat chicken-fried caribou steaks and baked potatoes and a cherry pie baked by Bobby the day before.

Halfway through the meal Jim said, “You look fine.”

It was almost an accusation. “Why wouldn’t I?” Kate said, forking up another bite of steak. There was nothing like a near-death experience to make food taste better than it ever had. There were other human experiences it enhanced, too, but she wasn’t going anywhere near there.

He regarded her with a thoughtful expression. “No reason,” he said at last, a statement everyone at the table with the possible exception of Katya recognized as a bald-faced lie.

Dinner was finished in relative tranquility. Coffee was served in the living room. Everyone kept fussing around Kate. She accepted their attentions graciously, which made everyone nervous. Jim, pushed to the limit, was finally goaded into saying, “Don’t you want to ask me anything?”

She smiled at him, which expression made Bobby sit up with a jerk that rolled his chair back a few feet. “What about?”

“I mean what I said, Kate. Stay out of this investigation.” She smiled again, and his voice rose. “I fired you. I have terminated your contract with the state. You are no longer employed. Go back to the homestead and rebuild your cabin.”

She drank coffee. “You’re the boss.”

“Oh, Jesus God,” Bobby breathed, closing his eyes in a momentary lapse into belief.

Katya beamed from his lap. “Yeezuz god!”

Later, when Bobby, Dinah, and Katya had retired to bed, when Johnny was fast asleep beneath an afghan on one couch, Kate sat up next to a lamp on an end table next to hers, ostensibly reading Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, about a priest who was really a woman and who wasn’t really a priest, either. She liked the book except that one of her all-time favorite Erdrich characters got married to some rich white guy and left the Objibwe to live in the city. The upside was that the irritation this caused was enough to keep her awake until she could hear everyone breathing deeply and rhythmically in sync. She exchanged the book for a notepad and pen and started a list.

In early June Len Dreyer had repaired Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez’s greenhouse, as confirmed by Keith and Oscar.