Dana Stabenow - A Grave Denied

The week before Labor Day he had worked a day for Laurel Meganack, down at the cafe. Kate wondered if he’d billed for a full eight hours or if he’d knocked off an hour for when Laurel had jumped him.

He seen some action that week, because that was the same week he worked on the paths around the Roadhouse, at which time he slept with Enid Koslowski twice, or at least Enid slept with him. Bernie had been forthcoming with the former information if not the latter, but however indifferent he was to the event, it was not a story he had cared to repeat to Kate. Possibly because he knew that he had triggered it by getting a little too serious about his affair with Laurel Meganack.

Later that month Old Sam had flown Dreyer/Duffy and Dandy Mike to Cordova to do some maintenance on the Freya. Kate knew a moment’s annoyance that Old Sam hadn’t hired her on instead, and then she remembered that she had only just returned from a summer in Bering, and had arrived to find Johnny Morgan on her doorstep to boot. In a rare moment of compassion Old Sam must have decided that she had enough on her plate.

In October Dreyer/Duffy had reshingled Bobby’s roof, finishing up on October 22nd.

Neither she nor Jim nor Dandy had been able to find anyone who had seen Dreyer/Duffy alive after that date.

She thought for a while about the girlfriends. In the Park there was Susie Brainerd, Cheryl Wright, Betsy Kvasnikof, and Laurel Meganack. Vicky Gordaoff in Cordova.

She thought about Vicky Gordaoff. She was one of those eighteen-year-olds who looked like they’d just started the seventh grade, or at least that was Kate’s recollection of her. Kate remembered Dreyer/Duffy as being well-spoken, not unintelligent, with a certain dry humor. And a lot of women had a thing for guys with tools; there was just something so capable about them, it led women to wonder what else they were good at. Vicky was young and impressionable, and there was the added coup of an older man noticing her, especially if her friends were watching.

It might behoove Kate to check into Vicky’s life a little, see if there had been a jealous boyfriend or a disapproving father. But then she could say that about all the women he’d slept with.

There was a gingerly sort of knock on the door that caused the whole RV to shake slightly. A look through the window found George Perry standing on the chunk of twelve-by-twelve doorstep someone had thoughtfully placed there. “Hey, George,” she said, opening the door.

“Woof!” Mutt said, on her feet and tail wagging vigorously.

“You didn’t even see me coming,” he said. “Shouldn’t you be on the lookout? Didn’t somebody just try to barbecue you recently?”

“Woof!” Mutt said again, emphatically.

“Even the dog knows,” George told Kate, and gave Mutt a thorough scratching behind the ears.

“Who do you think you are, Jim Chopin? Sit. Coffee?”

“Sure.” He wedged himself into the opposite booth and looked at the pile of paperwork covering the table. “You about got it all figured out?”

He sounded hopeful. “Why do you care?” she said, bringing pot and mug to the table and refilling her own. She set out Oreos and milk and sugar and he helped himself to all three.

“Well, hell, Kate, you’re one of my best customers. Gotta keep the seats full if I’m going to stay in business.” He stirred his coffee absorbedly.

“Uh-huh,” Kate said. She doctored her own coffee and waited. He didn’t say anything and she sipped coffee and waited some more.

Silence, as Kate had noted before, was the most underrated tool in the investigator’s toolbox. It had a way of creating a vacuum into which words were irresistibly sucked, and so long as the investigator kept her mouth shut, the words would perforce come from the witness. And unless Kate was very much mistaken, George Perry had just become a witness in the Leon Duffy murder investigation. So she sipped her coffee and let her eyes drift to the window and her mind drift to the scene outside. As an additional precaution she also kept her mouth full of Oreos. No sacrifice was too great for the investigation.

This year, May in the Park was looking a lot like Camelot in the song. It was only raining after sundown and then only in brief showers, just enough to help the ground thaw and the plants to raise eager heads to the sun, which so far had been remarkably reliable about showing its face every morning. Canada geese were arriving by the squadron and settling in for the summer on the Kanuyaq River delta, along with flights of every duck ever identified by the Audubon Society and a few Kate suspected were not. She hoped so, at any rate. There was far too little mystery left in the world as it was, and deep in her bones she knew that nature was not done with them yet.

She wondered if the sandhill cranes had arrived. Unknown to anyone, she kept an acre of ground mowed where her property line met the creek, not for a garden but for the sandhill cranes to land and feed. She might even have been not known to spread a few sackfuls of grain around the acre from time to time. She liked sandhill cranes, with their red foreheads and their long ungraceful legs. The Yupik called them the “Sunday turkey” and they were in fact Alaska’s largest game bird, but Kate never hunted them, at least not the ones who landed on her property. One of the few memories she had of her mother was of sitting in her mother’s lap at the edge of the mowed circle, hidden in a tangle of alder, listening to the cranes sing their rolling, rattling song and watching the awkward passion of their mating dance. Her father had grumbled, but Kate noticed that even after her mother died he kept the patch mowed.

The last thing she did before the first snowfall every year was mow the crane patch. Come to think of it, it was probably time to service the mower. It was always a little sluggish from having sat around all winter. There might even be some dried corn leftover from last year, if the mice hadn’t eaten it all.

George, who had begun to fidget, cleared his throat. “So.”

Kate turned and smiled at him, giving him the frill treatment. “So,” she said.

He shifted in his seat, uneasy beneath all that wattage. “So you asked me Sunday if Gary Drussell flew into the Park last fall.”

Everything inside Kate went still. “No, I just asked you when the last time was you had seen him in the Park.”

“Yeah. Well. I told you I hadn’t seen him since last breakup.”

“Yes.”

“I lied.”

Kate was silent.

George was examining the contents of his mug as if he could divine in which valley in Sumatra the beans had been picked. “Don’t even start with me,” he said.

Kate was silent.

“I mean it, I don’t want to hear it.”

Kate was silent.

“The last thing I need is a lecture on my civic duty.”

Kate was silent.

George shoved his mug away. “He’s a friend, okay? We’ve hunted together every fall going back, what, fifteen, sixteen years now. I know his wife, and I watched his daughters grow up. I mean from the time they were tiny babies, Kate.” He sat back and looked out the window. “I’m not much of a kid person. Never wanted marriage or anything that came with it. So I wasn’t thrilled when Gary asked if it’d be okay if we brought Alicia along on a caribou hunt.”

“Which one is that?”

“The oldest daughter. The smart one. Well, they’re all smart, but Alicia, well, she’s special. Regardless of the way things happened, I don’t think Gary’s sorry to have moved into town. Cheaper for her to live at home while she goes to college, and he really wanted college for Alicia.”

Kate waited.

“Anyway. Alicia was all of ten years old when Gary decides he’s going to make a hunter out of her. I tried to talk him out of taking her, but he was determined. So we did, and I’m here to tell you, that little girl hiked me right into the ground. I mean, she kept up, Kate, and she carried her own pack the whole time. She damn near outshot us, she like to use up her dad’s tags and then she started in on mine.” He shook his head at the memory. “That was one tough little girl. Shirley, now, she was the same, smart, even tougher than Alicia, bagged her a moose on her first hunt. Of course, it was a cow, but what can you do. We butchered her out without Dan nailing us, for a change. Those were good kids, Kate. Good company on the trail, too, knew when to talk and when to shut up, and when they talked they had something to say. I liked them both.”