Play With Fire (26 page)

There was a map on the wall opposite, a map of Chistona and the surrounding area, the map Brad Burns had spoken of, the map with red flags for the sinners, blue flags for the saved. She wondered if the flag for Daniel Seabolt was still up. She wondered how many other unsatisfactory residents of Chistona had been flagged for disposal.

They could get away with it, at least for a while, as isolated as they were. They could do it. There was no one to stop them.

No one had stopped them last time.

"Tell her," Russell said.

Sally said, "At least let me put the kids to bed."

"Let them stay," he said, his voice heavy.

"Russell, no, they're too young--"

"Let them stay." The three words were flat and final, and she was silenced.

Dinah and Bobby came up behind Kate to stand in the doorway. Happy, even eager for the interruption, Sally said, smile stretched into a travesty of hospitality, "Would you like to sit down? I could get you some coffee and--"

Kate almost choked on the disgust she felt. "No."

Sally flinched beneath the single syllable, and looked imploringly again at her husband.

"Tell her," he said again. "Tell her what you did, all for the love of God. Show your children what their mother is."

Sally broke down then. It was hard to make out the words between the sobs but Kate understood enough to wish she couldn't understand any of it. She'd asked for it, though, and she stood there and took it, all of it, all there was to take.

"He sent Matthew away," Sally said between sobs. "Along with all the rest of the children, to Bible camp. And then we waited until the first fishing period was called and everyone else was gone. We waited a day, and then we went down to the little trailer Daniel and Matthew were living in. He was surprised to see us, but he invited us inside.

He even offered us coffee."

She broke down again, and they waited. When it was obvious nobody was leaving until the story was finished, she resumed. "We warned him of the consequences of his actions. We gave him one last chance to stop teaching those lies about the creation and all that other filth." She sobbed again. "He refused. He was very nice about it, but he said no."

She swallowed. "So we stripped him of his clothes." One of the children made a noise. Russell held out an arm and the little boy rushed into it.

Sally watched the boy with hungry eyes. "He fought us. He was young and strong, and he fought." She rubbed one shoulder with an absent hand, as if an old bruise suddenly pained her. "It took four of us to hold him while we locked the door. He kept trying to get in the car with us. Then he started running next to us and we had to floor it to get back to our houses and lock the doors."

She folded her arms across her chest and bent over them. Her voice dropped. "He was outside here for a while. I heard him. He banged on the door and yelled. Then he screamed and begged me to let him in. He tried breaking a window but it was too small for him to fit in and all it did was cut his arm. I cleaned up the blood the next morning."

The cuts on Seabolt's upper right arm, Kate thought.

She looked around, her eyes haunted. "It wasn't supposed to take so long. He was allergic to mosquitoes, his father told us so. He should have died right away. But he didn't. When he screamed, I'll never forget when he screamed--" Her voice caught on the word and she wept silently, hands pressed against her ears.

Why hadn't he tried to break in somewhere else? Kate wondered. The answer was as simple and as terrible as the Alaskan bush itself. It was a long way between cabins in Chistona. There was the church, and the store, and then there were acres of trees and swamp and miles of river and gravel road before the next outpost of civilization.

Seabolt's best chance would have been to return to the church and the pastor's cabin and try to get in there, but in a very short time the allergic reaction would have set in, and it is never easy to think clearly when you can't breathe. Kate had had first-hand experience of that not long ago, inside a crab pot ten fathoms below and dropping fast.

It was amazing Daniel Seabolt had made it as far as he did, naked and ill, a mile and more crosscountry from the church and the store. And by the time he had followed Sally and her lynch mob down the rough gravel road, his bare feet would have been torn and bloody, and that wouldn't have helped either.

Sally rocked a little, back and forth. "After a while, he went away, and I didn't hear him anymore."

Kate felt sick, suffocated. From the expressions of revulsion on the other faces in the room, she wasn't alone. A second boy crawled into his father's lap.

"Who reserved the privilege of shoving him out the door?" Kate said thinly. "His father?" "Oh, no," Sally said, shocked out of her misery.

"Pastor Seabolt wasn't there. He wasn't with us that evening. He was in Glennallen, lecturing at the Bible college."

They stared at her, dumbfounded, and she said, turning peevish, "I don't know why you're all looking at me like that. We were serving God. Daniel was a blasphemer and a corrupting influence on our children. He was a tool of Satan. He had to be destroyed."

She was like a child reciting scripture by rote.

Bobby stirred. "You ever hear of a little verse that goes, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord'?"

"We are but instruments o/the Lord," Sally said, and again her voice was the voice of a child, obedient and well disciplined. Kate looked at Russell and then as swiftly away, unwilling to witness what she saw there.

Sally sat back against the couch, looking around the room with wide eyes, as if awakening from a bad dream. With a sigh she said, "Gosh, I feel better." She stretched and yawned. "I feel like I could get some sleep now."

Kate wasn't sure she was ever going to be able to sleep again. She looked at Russell, all pity gone, lips pressed together against a rising gorge. He was waiting for it; he flung up one hand, warding her off. "I wasn't here."

The whip was back in Kate's voice. "Where were you?"

"I was dip-netting for silvers in the Kanuyaq that day. I didn't know anything about it until I got home the next morning, and right after that the storm came, and the lightning, and we had the fire to fight."

"Why didn't you tell someone what happened?"

He became angry in his turn, angry and defensive. He pointed at Sally.

"That is my wife, God help me. These are my kids." He waved a hand.

"This is my home. That's my store. Those people are my neighbors. I have to live here. Besides--" He fell silent.

"Besides what?"

He sat back a little, squaring his shoulders, and raised his eyes.

There was a quality of patient endurance there that she had not seen before, a quiet, stubborn determination in the thrust of his jaw, a sort of immovability in the set of the stocky shoulders. With a small shock she realized that in this moment he resembled Ekaterina. "They won't last."

"Who won't last?"

"The Jesus freakers. The born-agains. The Bible thumpers. Remember the Russian Orthodox priests when they came and told us we didn't have to pay taxes to the Czar if we went to their church? Remember the missionaries when they came and forbade us to dance? Where are they now?" He answered his own question. "They're gone, all of them, and we still dance at the pot latches We still carve our totems and bead our shirts. We outlasted the priests. We outlasted the missionaries.

They're all gone and we're still here. We'll outlast these bastards, too."

"Oh Russell, Russell," Sally whispered. "I will pray for you, that God will forgive you that blasphemy."

He stood up and for a moment Kate thought he was going to strike his wife. And then she thought he might take a swing at her. An angry red ran up under his skin, his eyes narrowed and his right hand curled into a fist and rose a foot or so in the air. He trembled with the desire to hit, to strike out blindly, she could see it in his eyes, and she stiffened. Next to her Bobby gripped his wheels, as if to roll between them. Dinah put one hand on his shoulder, and he stilled.

They stared at each other.

The fist unclenched and fell to his side. "We'll outlast them," Russell said, tired now. "They'll be gone, and we'll still be here."

Kate's shoulders slumped, the anger draining out of her in her turn.

"Maybe you're right," she said, her voice the barest thread of sound.

"But it doesn't make Daniel Seabolt any less dead."

They were back at camp before anyone spoke. "What are we going to do?"

Dinah said in a subdued voice, standing next to the fire pit and looking around at the campsite as if she'd never seen it before.

"Nothing," Kate said.

Dinah stared at her. "Nothing? They killed him, Kate. They killed him, as sure as if they'd held a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. We have to do something." "What?" Bobby said.

"Call the trooper," she said hotly. "Have him arrest them. Try them for murder."

"Just because they told us about it don't mean they'll tell the trooper.

Russell won't. You heard him. His wife. His kids. His neighbors. His home." "Bobby's right," Kate said softly. She felt tired and old.

"Nothing for us to do now but pack up and go home."

"The sooner the better," Bobby agreed grimly, "before those yahoos get ideas in their heads about coming up here and finishing us off for good." "But--" Dinah said.

"But nothing," Bobby said, his voice still grim. "Welcome to Alaska.

You said it yourself. Nature red in tooth and claw."

"I meant animals," Dinah said in a small voice.

"What do you call us?" He looked at Kate. "You knew, didn't you."

"I saw a mosquito bite the kid on the arm. He swelled up like a poisoned pup. He told me his dad was even worse."

"And something like that would be known in the family."

"Yes."

"He would have known. Daniel. When they did it to him."

"Yes."

There was silence. Dinah said, the words wrenched out of her, "Can you imagine what it was like, his last moments--"

"Yes," Kate said shortly, "we can imagine."

Moving together in unspoken accord they broke camp, washing the mushroom buckets out in the cold, clear water of the creek, sacking up the last of the garbage and stowing it in the back of Kate's truck, rolling the sleeping bags, taking down the tents.

Dinah found her paperback copy of the Bible and stood frowning down at the fine print. "Here it is."

"What?"

She read, "

"But let judgement run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."

" She closed the book.

"Amos," Bobby said. "Chapter 5, verse 24."

Kate stared at Dinah, who looked solemnly back, and then she remembered.

"So somebody did come looking for him."

Dinah gave a somber nod. "And they even put up a tombstone, of sorts."

"What?" Bobby said. Dinah told him of the sign they had found, tacked to a nearby tree, the day they had stumbled across Daniel Seabolt's body.

To their surprise, Bobby's face turned dark red. The muscles in his neck bulged. He looked as if he were about to explode.

Kate looked at Dinah, who spread her hands and looked confused and a little frightened. "Bobby. What is it? What's wrong?"

"Those bastards." His jaw muscles worked. "It's a verse Martin Luther King used a lot," he said tightly. "I think he said it at the Lincoln Memorial that day in August. "Let judgement run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream." It's even on the Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery." Fury got the better of him again and he hit the arm of his chair with enough force to make him bounce up off the seat.

That felt good so he did it again. He looked up in time to see them exchange a wary glance and made a visible effort to tone it down.

He was only partially successful. "I'm sorry, I ... " He tried to shrug off the tension in his shoulders. "I don't know, in this context, that particular verse just seems so--"

"Blasphemous?" Dinah suggested.

"Sacrilegious?" Kate suggested.

"Fanatical?"

"Egotistical?"

"Profane?"

"Insane?"

There was a brief, tense silence. "Yeah." Bobby inhaled and blew out a big breath. "Yeah. All of the above." Dinah said, voice somber, "Even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose."

Winklebleck was right. Will always had the last word.

Dinah pocketed the Bible and they worked together to collapse and pack Bobby's tent. The last aluminum rod went into the stuff sack. Kate sat back on her heels and pulled the drawstring tight, and suddenly, uninvited, unwelcome, Daniel Sea bolt's last moments came back to her, running, running, running, every man's hand against him, every door closed to him, feeling the sting of a thousand thousand bites, running, running, running, breath short and labored, skin scraped and torn, and then, mercifully, darkness and death.

She found she had to hold herself upright with one hand on the trunk of a tree. "I hate this," she said violently, "I feel so helpless, so impotent. I hate this."

Bobby, having regained his poise, tucked the remnants of the package of Fig Newtons into the cooler. When he was done, he gave Kate an appraising look. "Your problem is you're a little in love with him."

"Who?" Dinah said.

"Daniel Seabolt."

Kate opened her mouth to deny it, met Bobby's hard brown gaze, and closed it again. It was true. Daniel Seabolt had loved his wife and his son. He'd been a born teacher, a profession Kate revered. He'd even loved his father enough to stay when his father had stolen his son's allegiance. He'd had enough family loyalty not to involve anyone else in their personal, private fight, and had fought back on his own terms, with his own tools. Loving, loyal, intelligent, he'd been an admirable man, and now he was gone.

She didn't even know what he looked like. She'd never seen so much as a wallet photo of him. Matthew had never offered, and there had been none in sight when she visited Seabolt.

Maybe love wasn't the right word. Maybe it was only that she mourned the passing of a good man.