Dana Stabenow - A Grave Denied

“What about the youngest daughter?”

“Tracy?” George’s face darkened. “I don’t know what happened with Tracy. I don’t know her as well as I do Alicia and Shirley. She never came on the hunt with us. I think maybe…”

“What? Come on, George, I need to know it all.”

“There isn’t any all,” he said. “Goddamn it. Gary Drussell is no murderer. Even if he was…”

“What about Tracy?” Kate said, inexorably.

His face creased with what looked like pain. “Tracy… she’s the baby, you know? I think the last kid in any family is spoiled, mostly I think because the parents are tired of laying down the law to the other kids by then and they slack off. Also because it’s their last kid and they want to. Anyway, she was pretty and she knew it, especially when she hit her teens. Fran used to worry about her flirting; Gary mostly shrugged it off.” He leaned forward again, anxious to explain all of it so that there would be no misunderstanding, so Kate would think only good thoughts of his friend and his friend’s family. “She wasn’t obnoxious about it, Kate. Tracy, I mean. She wasn’t as bright as the other two and she knew it.”

“So she tried to make up for it with her looks?”

“Yes,” George said. “I mean, no. Oh, hell. I guess so. It doesn’t mean she deserved what happened.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Kate said. “What did happen?”

“Shit,” George said wretchedly. “I promised Gary I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Mutt let out a soft whine. “Tell me,” Kate said gently. “It won’t go any further than it has to.”

What had happened, as near as anyone could figure from what Tracy said, which wasn’t much, was that overnight Tracy Drussell had changed from a pretty, ordinary teenaged girl into Linda Blair. “It was like a nightmare, Gary said,” George said, voice so low Kate had to lean forward to catch the words. “She wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t eat, shut herself up in her room. Then Fran noticed she, uh, she, well, you know.”

“She missed her period,” Kate said.

He nodded.

There had been no signs of a baby at the Drussells’ Anchorage home. “Oh, crap,” she said. And how inadequate was that?

He nodded again. “They were in Anchorage by then. She was only eleven weeks along, so it was fairly easy, although Fran said Gary like to kill some guy with a sign outside the clinic. Tracy told them then, of course. Said it was her fault, she’d been flirting with Dreyer, and he took her up on her offer.”

Kate thought of little Vicky Gordaoff in Cordova.

“Only it wasn’t an offer,” George said. His hands had become fists during the telling. He looked down and noticed, and straightened them out again.

“Why did it take Gary so long to come looking for Dreyer?” Kate said.

George looked blank.

“You said she was eleven weeks along when she told them. Dreyer worked for them in May. I’m guessing that’s when he raped Tracy.”

George winced away from the word but he nodded.

“School let out the first week of June, Gary and family moved to Anchorage the day after high school graduation. They must have found out about the middle to end of July.” She looked at him for confirmation. He nodded again. “So how is it that Gary didn’t come looking for Dreyer until over two months later?”

“Because she didn’t tell them who the man was,” he said, snapping the words off. “Otherwise he and his shotgun would have been on the next plane.”

“He was traveling with a shotgun, was he?” Kate said.

George looked at her. She wasn’t used to being looked at with that expression by people she considered her friends. I have to ask, she told him silently, you know I do.

“Yes,” George said, his voice icily precise, “he was traveling with his shotgun.”

“I see. And what day in October would that have been?”

His hand was shaking slightly when he thrust it into the pocket of his begrimed overalls. It was still shaking when he brought out the yellow slip of paper. He shoved it across the table and wriggled out of the booth.

She looked down. It was a copy of a ticket for Chugach Air Taxi Service, roundtrip Anchorage-Niniltna-Anchorage, in the name of Gary Drussell, and it was dated October 24th.

The day after the first snowfall of last winter, according to Bobby’s NOAA records. The date after which they had determined Leon Duffy aka Len Dreyer had never been seen again in the Park.

She became aware that George had not left. She looked up to see him standing in the open doorway.

He was staring at the burned pile of lumber that had been her cabin, and her father’s cabin before that, and what could have been her grave. As if he could feel her eyes on him, he said without turning around, “I’m sorry, Kate.”

“So am I, George.” She hesitated, and then spoke. “Did Gary come back to the Park again?”

He nodded, still without turning around.

“Last week?”

He nodded again. “He said it was to clear up some paperwork with the guy who bought the homestead. He was in and out in a day.”

“Which day?”

“The day your cabin burned. But he was gone,” George said desperately, “he was gone by then.”

“Did you fly him out?”

He hesitated, and then shook his head. “No,” he said in a whisper. “He flew Spernak that time.”

He looked at her, his expression miserable. He started to speak, and then shook his head again.

The door swung shut gently behind him.

After a while she got up and washed out the mugs.

So there it was. She thought of Tracy Drussell sprawled on that couch in Anchorage, convinced that she had invited the assault inflicted upon her, when all she had been doing was testing her wings. It wasn’t her fault that the sky had opened up and swallowed her whole. Kate hoped like hell that Fran had called Colleen.

And she hoped like hell no one else needed Colleen’s services before this was over.

She needed to find Jim and fill him in, but whenever she thought about getting up, she sat back down again. If it were left up to her she’d have given Drussell a medal. At least she would have before he tried to burn her cabin down with her and Johnny in it.

She was sitting on the other side of the booth this time, the one that faced away from the rubble pile. Something dug into her hip. It was a loose-leaf binder, Johnny’s. He must have forgotten it when he left for school that morning. Not surprising, as he’d been in quite the snit, or pretended to be. Not for lack of something better to do, because any minute now she was going to get up and climb into her truck and go looking for Jim, tell him she’d solved his case for him, she flipped open the notebook and began to read. Johnny’s writing was cramped but legible. She smiled at the first paragraph, and then she laughed out loud.

She was deep into it before she realized it was more of a diary than it was the journal his teacher had assigned them, and that the teacher would probably never see it, and that neither should she.

But about halfway in something started to niggle at the back of her brain. She flipped back to the beginning and began again. “Oh shit,” she whispered, “shit, shit, shit.”

She slammed the binder shut and leaped to her feet. Mutt was at the door a second later. Kate grabbed keys and windbreaker and they were gone.

Are you sure about this?“ Vanessa yelled over Johnny’s shoulder. ”Sure,“ he replied the same way. ”You always start with the scene of the crime.“

“But you say Kate doesn’t think he was killed there.”

“You know what I mean.”

They hit a bump and she was almost bounced off. Four-wheelers were notoriously rough rides, and the road up to the Step was a notoriously rough road, if you could call something that was essentially two ruts with a grassy ridge between a road.