A Grave Denied

“If it was easy, everybody do it,” Auntie Vi said. She pulled the second bowl of dough off the back of the stove where it had been set to rise. “You want some more fry bread?”

There was never a time when Kate didn’t.

9

It was a little after three when she emerged from Auntie Vi’s bed-and-breakfast, stuffed full of fry bread and information. For the moment, Joh

Really, the first thing she ought to do was go back to Dreyer’s cabin and investigate the scene more thoroughly. She went back to her own instead.

It looked, if anything, even more forlorn than it had the day before. Her cabin, the place she had been born into this world, where she had spent most of what little time she’d had with her parents, the place to which she had retreated as a child when Emaa had tried to force her into living in Niniltna, the womb to which she had fled from the stifling, swarming confines of college, the place waiting for her on long weekends and vacations between time on the job in Anchorage, the one place in the world able to heal the wounds inflicted by five and a half years of casework featuring raped and beaten women and abused children, her home, her center, her sanctuary, her refuge.

It was all that and more, and now it was a pile of smoking rubble, too.

“It’s only a cabin,” she said out loud. Mutt, standing with her shoulder pressed to Kate’s knee, looked up, gray plume of a tail waving ever so slightly. “Cabins can be rebuilt. All I need is some logs and some Sheetrock and some insulation. I could put in a flush toilet. I could even wire the place for electricity, finally hook it up to the generator like I’ve been threatening.”

She could do all those things, but deep down she knew that this cabin could never be rebuilt. Her father was dead, the hands that had raised the cabin’s walls long since crumbled to dust. Her mother, a good, kind, loving woman until the booze got hold of her, was no more. Emaa was gone, nevermore to darken the doorstep and blight Kate’s life with the reminder of her bounden duty to her tribe. And Jack, with whom she’d spent so many nights making thunder roll out of the bed in the loft. Seventy years of laughter and tears and memories had been reduced to ashes by a malicious, anonymous hand, and there was no way ever to get them back.

Which was why when she heard the footstep behind her, she turned and without any greeting pretty much hurled herself into Jim’s arms.

The angry words that had been ready to tumble out of his mouth since Bobby had run him to earth that morning and clued him into Kate’s continued involvement in the investigation of Len Dreyer’s murder were stilled when he looked down and saw that she was weeping.

She didn’t just weep. She cried. She sobbed. She pounded his chest like it was a punching bag. She cursed and she cried some more and then she cursed some more. It took a long time, and somewhere along the way his anger faded. He held her gently until the flood began to ebb, wishing he could think of something of comfort to say, knowing there was nothing. He settled for rubbing her back, and felt like a lame-ass good-for-nothing as he did so.

Finally she looked up. Her eyes were swollen and her nose was red and ru

“Oh,” she said, on a shuddering sigh.

Any minute now she would start to be embarrassed at losing her self-control in front of him. And then she would be angry with herself, but of course she’d take it out on him because, hey, he was there. He braced himself.

She ran a hand through her hair, matted from being mashed up against his uniform shirt, which was itself looking rather the worse for wear. “Were you looking for me?”

He tried to get past the fact that she was still leaning against him, firm and resilient and vital, every inch of her alive, if a little more subdued than he was used to. Had he been looking for her? It was hard to remember. He waited for her to pull free and say something nasty, something designed to push him away, anything, and the sooner the better.

She laid her cheek against his chest and closed her eyes.

It was a trap. It had to be a trap. She was resting her full weight against him. He could feel her breasts, her thighs, oh my god, she was putting her arms around his waist. He worried about her knees and what she might decide to do with one of them.

She rubbed her check against his chest and gave a long, deep sigh.

Mutt, who had for some strange reason of her own not monopolized Jim’s attention from the first moment of his appearance, gave the two of them a long, impenetrable look and vanished from the clearing.

The hell with it. Jim picked up Kate in one smooth, easy motion and walked over to sit down beneath a spruce tree with spreading branches overhead and fifty years’ worth of needles piled beneath. He settled her in his lap and her head naturally found a place on his shoulder. He thought carefully about what to do with his hands, until one curved just as naturally around her waist and she relaxed into it with another long, deep sigh. The other he rested on her hip, the curve of which fit into his palm like it had been designed specifically for that purpose.

Time passed. The sun shone. A soft breeze teased the fat buds on the branches of the trees. Birds sang and cawed and called. A porcupine rattled out of the woods, looked them over, and rattled back in again. Jim thought he heard a moose stripping bark from a willow tree. There was a distant crashing of brush like a bear might be passing through, and he gave some thought to pulling his weapon, but it might have woken Kate and the danger wasn’t clear and present enough to justify anything that drastic.

He’d never seen her sleeping before, not close up. Oh, she’d fallen asleep after they had made love last summer in Bering, but she’d been making love to someone else and he hadn’t been able to get out of that bunk fast enough. Then there had been the encounter on the floor of Ruthe Bauman’s cabin last January that had not involved any drowsiness at any moment on anyone’s part. He watched her face and made a discovery. She frowned a little in her sleep, did Kate, as if even then there were jobs to be done, problems to be solved, disputes to be settled.

Her golden skin was smooth and unblemished. Her brows were as black as her hair and as straight. Closed, her eyes looked less Asian than they did when she was awake. A strand of hair lay across a high, flat cheek and the wide, full mouth that was unsmiling but relaxed. That hair, that thick cap of pure black that had once hung to her waist in a fat braid. He’d had fantasies about that braid, which had disappeared a year and a half ago during a guided big game hunt when a bunch of homicidal computer executives-geeks with guns; he still had a hard time with the concept-had opened up on each other instead of the moose and Kate had been caught in the crossfire.