Страница 52 из 67
Next up was the chief of police, who was prepared to accede that some recognition must be given to those felons convicted of even the most heinous crimes for their attempts to redeem themselves, and that on the whole the APD was behind the governor’s decision.
“Back to you, John,” said the reporter, and the screen went to a commercial. Jim clicked off the remote and looked at Kate.
“The governor’s been in office for almost a year,” she said. “Why wait until now to commute her sentence?”
“Why indeed?” Jim said.
“Unless, of course,” Kate said, gathering steam, “it had something to do not with the merits of her case but with her daughter’s hiring a private investigator to take a new look at the case?”
“What are you thinking now?”
“I’m thinking,” Kate said grimly, “that Victoria didn’t set that fire. I’m thinking someone else did. I’m thinking they’re still around. I’m thinking if Erland didn’t do it himself, he knows who did, and I’m thinking he’s determined I won’t find out.”
“I’m thinking he’s wrong,” Jim said. “But then that’s just me.”
17
“There’s always a third possibility,” Max said.
He sounded grumpy, but that might have been because Kate had gotten him out of bed. They sat alone in the cafeteria at the Pioneer Home, both of them hunched over mugs of coffee.
“What third?” Kate said, sounding a little cranky herself. “I’ve got too much information going on here as it is.”
“What if Charlotte did it herself?”
Kate stared at him for so long, he began to get a little nervous. “You’re not going to cry or anything, are you?”
“Why,” Kate said finally, almost despairing, “why on earth would you think that Charlotte had set the fire that killed her brother? And why oh why would she ever have hired me to find her out?”
“Maybe she wanted to use you as her confessor,” Max said. “It happens.”
Kate knew that. It didn’t make her any happier to hear Max say it.
“Or maybe she really did want her mom out of the clink, and she figured it had been so long that even if you did find out enough to get her mom out, you’d never find out who really committed the crime.”
“My head hurts,” Kate said. “And I want to go home.” “Don’t blame you,” Max said. “So do I, and I don’t even have one.”
Gloom settled in over the table.
She could go home, she thought, sitting in the Subaru in the street outside. Victoria was out of jail, even if Charlotte was dead. Kurt had regained consciousness, and although he remembered little of the events leading up to the shooting and nothing at all about getting shot, the doctor, whom she’d spoken to earlier, had assured Kate that in traumas such as these, the memory often did return a little at a time. They would have to be patient.
Everyone wanted her to go home, Jim, Brendan, even Max had told her to pack it in. Mutt put her cold nose on Kate’s cheek and gave an imploring whine. Nobody wanted her to stay in Anchorage.
But she couldn’t let it go. She knew someone was ru
So, wearily, because she hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep the night before, Kate went back to the town house to lay in supplies, and trundled back up the hillside to park inside a stand of alder down the road from Charlotte and Emily’s house. It was a little after 8:30 in the morning. After two hours, she’d finished Last Standing Woman by Winona LaDuke and a bottle of water, watched a moose cow with two leggy calves graze on alder bark off her right front bumper, eaten a chicken sandwich, watched three magpies chase off the moose, peed in the bushes, read a quarter of Lamb by Christopher Moore, and seen a big brown dog trailing a leash come kiyüng out of the underbrush with a small but irritated black bear close on his trail.
“Stay,” Kate said.
Mutt, who had long since abandoned the Subaru for the shade it cast, yawned wide enough for Kate to hear it from Mutt’s sprawled position beneath the car, just like she’d never given any thought to adding a new parameter to that chase.
The sun beat down on the roof of the Subaru. Kate had all the windows open, but she was still sweating into the driver’s seat. In the distance, the sounds muffled by trees, mothers would call to children, men would call for dogs, car doors would slam and engines would start. Kate would peer hopefully through the foliage, only to sink back disappointed when whoever it was left from the wrong house.
At 2:30 in the afternoon, a gold two-door Eldorado came almost silently up the road and turned into Charlotte’s driveway. Kate got out of the Subaru and slipped through the trees to the edge of the clearing surrounding the house. Fifteen minutes later, Erland opened the door of the Cadillac for Emily. The Cadillac purred down the driveway and vanished.
Kate didn’t wait. “Mutt,” she said, and Mutt emerged from out of the bushes. “Guard,” Kate said, and headed for the house. The front door was locked. So was the back door. A sliding glass door that opened from the master bedroom onto the upstairs deck was not, and Kate, proud that she was barely breathing hard from the climb up the crossbars, stepped inside.
The bedroom held a king-size bed with a matching suite of furniture, including a vanity and a dresser. Kate rifled through all the drawers and then the closet without discovering anything more exciting than a cutout bra that looked like it would be awfully uncomfortable. The master bath was cluttered with various oils, ointments, creams, lotions, and every brand of makeup Kate had ever seen advertised in a magazine.
The guest bedroom down the hall was neat, clean, and impersonal. The closet had a shelf full of wrapping paper, ribbon, and items marked with sticky notes reading “Sandy for Christmas” and “Carolyn for her birthday” and “Cathy for her birthday” and “CathyO for the di
There was a desk in the middle of the room and file cabinets lined all the walls except one, which had a bookcase filled floor to ceiling with cookbooks. Kate remembered that Charlotte was a caterer. She went to the desk and opened the first drawer that came to hand and found a big red book of lined pages full of writing Kate recognized from Charlotte’s check. Each page was dated. Sometimes you just got lucky.
She sat down and found the date of Charlotte’s death. From there, she worked backward, slowly and methodically, one eye on the clock.
All the Monday entries began the same way: “Went out to Eagle River, tried to see Mom.”
Kate closed the diary and looked around. There was a shelf full of similar diaries. She pulled down a few and leafed through them. Every Monday began with the very same entry: “Went out to Eagle River, tried to see Mom.”
There were only twenty-two diaries on the shelf, so Kate couldn’t confirm that Charlotte had been trying to see her mother every Monday for the past thirty years, but it was a safe bet.
She went back to the current year and began reading steadily, with critical attention to detail, from the first of January. Some of it was personal: “Emily and I talked. She’s working too much, too many late nights. I hardly ever see her anymore, and I don’t like it. She’s promised to cut back.” Some of it was business: “Catered the Williams-Lujon wedding. Everyone really liked the cheese puffs, so I’m including them in the A menu from now on.” Some of it was social: “Took the governor’s wife to lunch in hopes of interesting her in establishing a culinary arts school at UAA. We could use a friend at court, and she actually admitted to cooking the occasional-meal, so fingers are crossed.” Some of it was trivial. “Shopping at Nordie’s with Chris, who always makes me buy more than I should. But oh, how could I resist that little black dress! Emily will drool!”