A Grave Denied

Kate tossed the jerky back. “Mutt’s over at Auntie Vi’s with Katya and Joh

Bernie gave Jeffrey Clark one last look, decided it would be unwise to meddle with a volcano that close to eruption, and busied himself with filling glasses. “How’s the hunt going?”

She gave him a long, considering look, and gave a nonanswer. “We’re taking the night off.”

“Oh. Ah. Well. Here you go.” He shoved the tray at her and answered a call for another round at the opposite end of the bar, a look of barely suppressed relief on his face.

She delivered the drinks and stood for a moment, indecisive. “What, you’re waiting for a fucking invitation!” Bobby roared.

She jerked her head. “Gotta flush,” she said, but when she got to the back of the room she ignored the door into the rest room and went out onto the back porch instead. A set of stairs led down into the rest of Bernie’s domain.

There were two neat rows of cabins, each big enough for a queen-sized bed and a bathroom, which could not, contrary to rumor, be rented by the hour. There were two covered picnic areas with brick barbecues, and tables and benches made of logs sawn in half. A neatly gravelled trail led through a stand of birch trees to a two-story house built of imported cedar, fronted with a large deck held down by a full suite of wrought-iron lawn furniture and an enormous gas grill. Kate went up a wide stair-case laden with deep, square flower boxes at tastefully interspersed points and knocked gently on the French double doors. After a few moments they opened. “Hello, Kate.” “Hi, Enid. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

11

Enid Elliot Koslowski was a Park rat, and a daughter and a granddaughter of more Park rats who were all now either working on the TransAlaska Pipeline or in Prudhoe Bay, or in the Pioneer Home in Anchorage, eating Doritos and watching Jerry Springer on cable. She was as white as you could get without bleach, her forebears having determined early on to retain racial purity insofar as that did not preclude amicable trading relations with the Alaska Natives who made up the majority of the customers who came into the general store.

The general store had been built by her grandfather, a Canathan of Scots descent whose ancestors had emigrated to America fleeing from the heavy hand of British tyra

He brought his wife with him, who quietly expired giving him his second son, who died shortly thereafter. He sent his one remaining son Outside to school, who returned eventually with a degree in history and an acceptably white wife. They had one child, Enid.

The store provided the Elliotts with a reasonably good living until it burned down one spring day in 1970. Enid’s father, who had never cared much for living in the Bush, put the property up for sale and moved to Anchorage. There were no takers until Bernie Koslowski, fleeing the repercussions of burning his draft card on the steps of the U.S. Capitol that same year, came to the Park with a fistful of cash (the provenance of which no sensible Park rat inquired after) looking for a place to build a bar.

Enid flew into the Park to close the deal for her father. She didn’t like living in Anchorage, and Bernie, if a draft-dodger, was white, thereby gaining her father’s approval, so she married him. They had three children and appeared reasonably content.

Kate, however, knew a little about what went on beneath that placid Koslowski surface. Bernie wasn’t a Cassanova on the order of Jim or Dandy but he did have an eye for the ladies, and there had been the occasional foray over the fence. He blithely imagined Enid knew nothing of these extramarital activities, but Kate had good cause to know that Enid was not as clueless as she made herself appear. Bernie was a good provider and a good father, though, and Enid had no wish to tend bar herself. She wasn’t the first wife Kate had met who had decided to turn a blind eye to her husband’s extracurricular activities. Didn’t mean she liked it, though.

Enid made coffee, a welcome reprieve from the designer water Kate had been swilling in the bar. It was good coffee, too, dark and rich, and familiar. “I get it from Homer,” Enid said.

“Captain’s Roast,” Kate said, and for an instant remembered the small bunkhouse in Bering, and rifling through Jim’s duffle for clues as to why he was there, too.

“Yeah,” Enid said, surprised. “How’d you know?”

“Lucky guess. Need to ask you some questions, Enid, if it’s okay?”

Having Kate Shugak show up on your doorstep wasn’t as bad as Dan Rather showing up with a camera crew, but it was a close second, and Enid had been nervous from the get-go. “Sure,” she said apprehensively. “What about?”

“Len Dreyer.” Kate watched as color receded from Enid’s face. In a voice carefully devoid of any emotion, she said, “I imagine you’ve heard that his body was discovered in Grant Glacier.”

Enid spoke through stiff lips. “I had heard.”

Kate waited, and when Enid said nothing more, prodded her on. “He was shot at point-blank range.”

If possible, Enid went even whiter. “Oh.”

“With a shotgun. Messy.”

“How… how awful,” Enid said. Her eyes were fixed and staring right at Kate, as if she was afraid to look at anything else. “I don’t know what I can tell you about him, Kate. I didn’t know him that well.”

Kate watched her from beneath lowered eyelids, and saw Enid look up and to her right. She snapped her gaze back immediately. Kate said, “Bernie says you had him do some work around the place last summer.”

“Oh. Yes, I… I suppose we did.”

“What did he do?”

“I don’t know, I -oh, of course. He laid down some new gravel for the paths.”

“I see.” Kate lapsed into that time-honored investigator’s trick, silence.

Enid was a good subject to practice it on: I

“When was he here?” Kate said. “What days?”

“I don’t know, Kate, last summer sometime.” Kate’s unthreatening ma

Kate shrugged. “I’m helping Jim figure out what happened. Dreyer was probably killed last year, since no one reports seeing him after the end of October. I’m putting together a timeline of his activities, where he worked, who he talked to, like that, in case someone knows something that might help us finger the killer.”

“Oh. Would you like some more coffee?”

Kate looked down at her mug, tJiree-quarters full. “Sure.” She waited until Enid was on her feet with her back turned before she looked around.

Through the doorway she could see the gun rack mounted on the wall. It had cradles for four weapons, all full. Two of the four were shotguns, a double and a single.

She faced forward just in time to hold out her mug for Enid to top off.

They were in the kitchen, a magnificent room of bleached wood and granite countertops and gleaming copper pots. Selling liquor had always been a profitable business. There was a corner bookcase filled with cookbooks, and a long table that seated twelve to serve dishes made from recipes in those books. Enid was the closest thing the Park had to a full-blown chef. Kate herself had sat down at this table to a chicken stew that Enid had called Sicilian and everyone else divine. Lots of garlic. Anything with a lot of garlic in it worked for Kate, who sometimes imagined she had something Mediterranean going on in her background. It was possible; there was everything else in there, including a Russian commissar and a Jewish tailor. There was also Uncle Dieter, whom everyone thought had been a Nazi in Germany sixty years before, but he was drooling away the rest of his life in the Sunset Apartments in Ahtna and nobody’d called Simon Wiesenthal, so they let it go.