Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

Mutt raised one bored eyebrow. Mutt wasn’t into shopping.

She drove to Twice Told Tales and spent another, much more halcyon hour browsing through the store, the resulting pile large enough to require three boxes. Kate, reaching for a book on a high shelf, couldn’t hold back a small moan. “Are you all right?” Rachel said.

“I’m fine. Sore is all. Must have overdone the exercise yesterday,” Kate said blandly, and if Rachel saw the little smile on her face, she was tactful enough not to say so.

The total due made Kate wince and Rachel smile. Kate paid extra to have most of the books mailed book rate to her post office box in Niniltna, keeping out half a dozen to read while she was in town, including two biographies, one of Shakespeare and one of Douglas Bader, the legless flying ace of World War II. Kate’s reading habits were nothing if not eclectic.

Rachel tipped her off to a good antique store and Kate returned home just after four o’clock, the gloating owner of five Wagner cast-iron skillets, each one a different size, and one glass lid that didn’t fit any of them. The cast-iron pots and pans she had inherited from her parents had been lost in the fire, and she was determined to replace them all. Apart from the sentiment, she didn’t really know how to cook in anything else.

The car Jim had parked in the drive yesterday evening was gone. Good.

She smiled to herself and went upstairs to change the sheets. When she was done, she stood for a moment looking down at the bed.

Everything she’d demanded of him, he had given. She remembered some of what he’d given and felt a wave of heat begin deep and low and spread up and out. She looked down and saw that her nipples had beaded against the fabric of her T-shirt, and she laughed out loud. The man had talent. More than that, he had consideration, not to mention courage. Most men would have been afraid to give that much. Too many men were afraid of strong women. Too many men were afraid of her.

Jim didn’t get it yet, but he was a smart man and he would eventually. In the meantime, she didn’t mind torturing him a little. She wondered how long it would take him to find an excuse to come back. Probably he had enough strength of will to stay away for a day or two, and there was always the job, which could call him away at any moment. As long as people kept misbehaving on the front page of the Anchorage Daily News, they were both in business.

Which reminded her of her own job. She looked at her watch. It was 4:30 p.m. Her stomach growled. Intensive shopping burned up bacon and eggs fast, and she’d missed lunch. Still, her body felt tender in various places, and she delayed dinner to run a hot bath. Showers were all very well, but a hot bath was good for what ailed you.

She crawled in and closed her eyes, dozing until the water cooled. One of the great things about coming to Anchorage was having a hot bath at Jack’s, all over wet, submerged up to her nostrils like a hippopotamus, her hair spreading out around her head in a floating fan.

But she had an honest-to-god bathroom in the Park now, two of them, in fact, and one even had its own tub. The realization made her a little wistful. Who was it who had said that joy was sharper when it was conditional? Oh, right. That renowned American philosopher Travis McGee, although in a much different context. Regardless, he was right. Life was made precious by the prospect of death. Baths in Anchorage had been made precious by the lack of baths in the Park. No more.

She ran more hot water into the tub and inched back down into it with a voluptuous groan. She remembered feeling like this when she and Jack had been apart for a long time, exhausted and aching in every muscle and very pleased with herself.

She thought about that. She had slept with Jim Chopin in the same bed in which she had spent many nights with Jack Morgan. She felt no shame, no sense of betrayal; in fact, if she listened closely, she thought she might hear Jack applauding, although the voyeuristic implications of that weren’t very attractive.

“I miss you, you son of a bitch,” she said out loud. “But I’m moving on.” A lone tear slid down her cheek, and she let herself slip beneath the water, allowing the curative power of heat to melt away, at least for a while, her aches and pains and guilt at being so vibrantly alive beneath sun, moon, and stars when Jack was so cold and so dead in the dark, dank ground.

She toweled off her melancholy and slipped into a pair of clean underwear and another of Jack’s blue plaid flannel shirts, of which he appeared to have had approximately two dozen, rolling the sleeves up to her elbow. Thick gray socks completed her ensemble, and she surveyed the result in the mirror, not without satisfaction. Who knew this outfit could be so seductive? Besides, high sixties or not, Anchorage was heading into fall, termination dust would be on the mountains with the next hard rain, and the nights were beginning to tend toward chilly.

She went back downstairs, opened the two-inch-thick New York strip she’d bought at City Market, dredged it in olive oil, and rolled it in a combination of herbs and garlic powder. She turned the oven on, set it for 350 degrees, put the steak in, and set the timer for an hour. A bunch of spinach in a pot with a few tablespoons of water at the bottom of it for when the steak came out of the oven and dinner would be served.

She curled up on the living room sofa with the telephone and the witness list Brendan had given her. Reminding herself to find a way of thanking him that didn’t include actual coitus, she dialed the first name on the list.

She hung up the phone when the timer went off an hour later. The steak was perfect, done to a pale pink on the inside, the oil having crisped the herbs to a nice crust. The spinach went limp five minutes after she turned on the burner and she tossed it with some red wine vinegar. She sat down at the table with a glass of apple juice and ate slowly, relishing every mouthful, as she reviewed the phone calls.

There were twenty names on Brendan’s list. Kate suspected the round number was due to Brendan’s decision to stop, rather than to the actual number of witnesses. Eight of the names were marked “Deceased” and a date of death was noted beside each, and many of the voices Kate spoke to were definitely older.

“It was all so long ago,” one woman had said fretfully. “I can barely remember what I was doing last month, let alone thirty years ago.”

“I’m headed out of town indefinitely,” one man had told her before hanging up.

“Kate Shugak?” a determinedly sultry voice had said. “Ekaterina’s grand-daughter? Your grandmother and I were very good friends; we sat on several boards together. How lovely to speak to you, dear. Perhaps you’d like to come over for dinner one evening while you’re in town. My husband would love to meet you. He’s done some work for the Raven Corporation. He’s an attorney, you know.”

One woman hung up on her. Kate checked the name for future reference. Another said strongly, “I still can’t believe Victoria could do something so horrible as to kill her own child. I don’t even want to think about it, much less describe it all over again to some stranger,” and then she hung up. Kate checked that name, too. Memories strong enough to provide either reaction were worth further investigation.

One man had said sharply, “Does Erland know about this?”

Erland was Victoria’s brother. “I don’t know, sir. I’ve been retained by his niece, Charlotte.”

There was a moment of electric silence. “What the hell does she think she’s playing at? Erland is not going to be happy about this.”

And then he hung up on her.

Kate remembered Victoria’s anger at her appearance and wondered if Charlotte had told anyone in her family what she was doing.