Play With Fire (7 page)

"Temperamental little buggers, aren't they," Jim murmured.

"Yes. They can't be grown domestically."

He reached out one hand and brushed at what might have been a shoulder.

Dinah flinched. His brows snapped together, and he plucked some more, clearing the area that might have been the remains of someone's back.

He pulled, carefully, at the burned, decaying flesh, until it separated into what might have been a torso and an arm. He moved to the feet and brushed them free of fungi and ash, and stood looking, a frown drawing his eyebrows together in a straight line.

Kate moved to stand next to him, staring. "Dammit, that was what was tickling my funny bone. I knew there was something strange." "What?"

Dinah said, coming a step closer.

"He doesn't have any clothes on."

Kate helped Chopper Jim roll the body into a body bag and tote it back to the truck. She drove him back to Tanada and helped load it into the chopper. He paused, one hand on the door. "Where'd you pick up the blonde?" "We didn't," Kate said, and when he raised one eyebrow said reluctantly--but after all, Bobby was a grown man and Dinah was a grown woman and it wasn't like it was love ever after now, was it-"She picked us up, at our first delivery. She drove up the Alcan this spring and ran out of money paying Canada prices for gas. She stopped to pick mushrooms to earn enough to get her to Anchorage."

"What's she do?"

"I think she just got out of school."

"Looking for adventure in whatever comes her way?"

Reluctantly, Kate had to laugh. "I don't think she waits for it to come to her."

"My kind of woman." He hoisted himself up into the pilot's seat and spoke again, one hand on the open door. "I'm flying direct to Anchorage."

She nodded. "I'll call tomorrow."

"I'll push it, but you know Metzger." She almost smiled.

"Something else," he said.

"What?"

He readjusted his hat to throw a more perfectly aligned shadow over his face. Beneath the flat brim, his eyes were keen and direct. "I checked before I left. There are no missing person reports from Chistona. Not this year. Not last year. Not the year before. The closest I've got is a report of a missing wife from Tok, and I know where she is, and she doesn't want to be found."

"No one else?"

He shook his head. "No one. Everybody for a hundred miles around is present and accounted for."

Her brow creased. "What about smoke jumpers Were any lost during the fire last year?" "Nope." He smiled faintly at her expression. "I know.

Why isn't anything ever easy?"

She stood back and listened to the whine of the engine, felt the breeze generated by the increasing spin of the rotors, watched as the craft rose up vertically and lifted out over the trees, bound south southwest.

Fungi which grow in the meadows are best; it is not well to trust others.

--Horace obby looked offended. "Excuse me. Are you trying to con me into believing this guy was shroomed to death?" Kate smiled involuntarily.

"No, Bobby. Just that he's been there a while."

He cocked an intelligent eyebrow in her direction and stopped fooling around. "You think he got caught in the fire."

She frowned at the can of pop in her hand. "That's what I thought at first."

"What made you change your mind?"

"There was no ash beneath his body. And he doesn't have any clothes on."

He stared at her. "What?"

"He doesn't have any clothes on," Kate repeated.

"Shoes, shorts, nothing. He's naked." He thought this over, frowning in his turn. "Maybe he was swimming in the creek," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. "Maybe he underestimated the speed of the fire and it caught up with him and he made a run for it and didn't make it."

"Maybe."

"You don't sound convinced."

Kate swallowed some Diet 7-Up. It went down cold and clean and not too sweet. "Aside from the fact that that kind of behavior is almost too dumb to believe--"

"Almost but not quite," he interrupted, "as you well know from thirty-three years of personal experience in the Alaskan bush."

"Aside from that fact," she repeated, "Chopper Jim says there are no reports of missing persons within a hundred miles of Chistona." And Bobby, of course, said immediately, "How about smoke jumpers There were over a hundred of them fighting that fire last fall."

"He's checking. He doesn't think so."

"What do you think happened?" "I don't know," she said firmly, "and what's more, I don't care." She grinned at him. "I'm more interested in what's for dinner. What is for dinner?"

"Yeah," Dinah said, "I'm starved."

So Bobby whipped up a moose pot roast with potatoes and onions and carrots and celery and no mushrooms. They emptied the pot and sat back, watching the fire burn down to red coals and the sun travel around the horizon, which reminded Kate of her close encounter of the third kind with the French aliens.

"Nature red in tooth and claw," Dinah said, a little awed, but not as awed as she would have been before their own close encounter with the bear.

When Bobby stopped laughing he said, his natural bellow restored, "Good for the moose! And good for that goddam eagle, too! Fuck the French every chance we get is what I say!"

"What have you got against the French?" Dinah wanted to know.

"Everything!" Bobby bellowed. "Dien Bien Phu! Ho Chi Minh! They stuck us with Ngo Dinh Diem and never looked back!" "Who?" Dinah said.

He was arrested in mid-roar and stared at her. It was one of the few times Kate had ever seen Bobby Clark lose his cool. "How old did you say you were?" She smiled at him, half urchin, half siren. "Old enough."

"I oughtta demand to see some ID," he mumbled and leaned back against a tree, conveying the impression that he was no longer young enough to sit upright, and as an afterthought snagged Dinah on his way back. He tucked in his chin to peer at her. "You know who Jerry Lewis is?" Dinah said, a little stiffly, "Of course I know who Jerry Lewis is." "Well," Bobby said with relish, "the French like Jerry Lewis. They think he's a genius."

"So do I," Dinah said, even more stiffly.

"Good God!"

Kate wondered if the happy couple was going to survive the night. A movement at the edge of the clearing caught her eye and she looked up.

Standing just inside the ring of trees, face gleaming whitely in the half-twilight, a young boy stared gravely back at her.

It was the choirboy from Chistona.

The three of them gaped at him.

Kate opened her mouth but the boy beat her to it. "Are you Kate Shugak?"

Startled, Kate said, "Yes."

His blue eyes looked past her, at Bobby, lingering on the black skin and the thigh stumps, and at Dinah, at her white skin and the way she snuggled into the crook of Bobby's arm, before returning to Kate. "The Kate Shugak?" Amused, Kate said gravely, "I believe so."

"The one who got the bootlegger in Niniltna that time?"

Kate's eyes narrowed. "Yes."

The boy gave a single, crisp nod, and Dinah sat up and unobtrusively reached for the camera. "My grandfather says you were an agent of God."

He paused and added, sounding for the first time like his age,

"Everybody else says you're the best." He met her eyes squarely. "I should have thanked you yesterday."

"No need."

He shook his head and said sternly, "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Kate murmured, since it was obviously expected.

"Who the hell are you," Bobby demanded, "and what are you doing out alone at this time of night?"

Dinah rolled film. Kate was struck again at how poised the boy was. In her experience few adults reached that level of self-possession. He looked eight, acted twelve or older and was probably ten. She wondered what had caused the early onset of maturation. She wondered if she wanted to know.

"Well?" Bobby said. "What's your name? Where's your folks?"

The boy ignored him, fixing Kate again with that unnerving blue stare.

"My name is Matthew Sea bolt. I want you to find my father."

For a moment the campsite was still but for the hum of Dinah's camera.

All trace of amusement gone, Kate eyed the boy, who stood unflinching, meeting her look for look. "Your father is missing?"

He nodded.

"For how long?"

"Since last August." The camera never paused. Bobby stirred and shot Kate a look. She gave him a slight shake of her head and he subsided.

"Who is your father?"

"His name is Daniel. Daniel Seabolt."

"And he's been missing ten months, almost a year?"

The boy nodded, and Kate stared at him, a frown creasing her brow.

Chopper Jim had said there were no missing person reports from anywhere in the area. "Does your father live in Chistona?"

"Yes."

Again Bobby stirred and again Kate shot him a quelling look. "And your mother?"

His voice was flat. "She's dead." "I'm sorry," Kate said automatically.

She thought. "So if your father's missing and your mother's dead, who do you live with?"

"My grandfather. Simon Seabolt."

This time Bobby would not be silenced. "That preacher guy from the Chistona Little Chapel?"

The boy nodded, and Dinah stopped rolling and said, "Was he the man you were with yesterday afternoon at the Tanada Tavern?"

The boy nodded again, and Dinah shot Kate a triumphant look. "Told you he looked like an Old Testament prophet."

Not so sotto voce Bobby muttered, "A Bible- thumper. Just what we need.

Jesus Christ."

The boy looked disapproving.

Kate said, "Does your grandfather know where your father went?"

He shook his head. "Nobody does. They woke up one morning and he was gone."

"You haven't heard anything from him?"

The boy shook his head again. "No one has."

"He didn't leave a note?"

Another shake.

"He hasn't written you or your grandfather?"

A third shake.

It sounded to Kate like the usual case of dropout syndrome, but for the body in the mushrooms. The Body in the Mushrooms; it sounded like the title of an Agatha Christie novel. She wondered what Miss. Marple would have thought of this case. Not that this was a case, or anything remotely resembling one, she reminded herself, and contradicted that thought with her next question. "Matthew," she said carefully, keeping her ruined voice as gentle as she could, "your father has been missing for over a year. I'm sure your grandfather has talked to the state troopers, and if they can't--" She stopped. The boy was shaking his head, a very definite shake, back and forth, one time only, but for all that, a gesture that held absolute certainty. "He didn't talk to the troopers?"

Matthew didn't reply, just shook his head.

"If he didn't talk to the troopers, Matthew," she said as gently as she knew how, "chances are he knows where your father is. If he didn't file a missing person's report, it might mean that your father doesn't want to be found."

He shook his head some more.

Kate, un admiring of the rigid set of his spine, said, "Then what does your grandfather think happened to your father?"

The blue eyes didn't waver and the young voice had lost none of its moral certainty. "He doesn't know."

Not only was the spine rigid, the jaw was out thrust and pugnacious.

Kate regarded both for a long, thoughtful moment. If the kid got any more tense he might break. "How did you get here?"

"On my bike."

"Your grandfather know where you are?" He shook his head and she sighed.

"We'd better get you home before he finds out you're gone and starts to worry." She rose to her feet and dusted off the seat of her pants.

"I can ride home."

She gave him an affable smile. "Sure you can. With me, in my truck.

We'll put your bike in the back."

He hesitated a moment before giving in. "Okay." She got the impression he had more to say, but a sidelong glance at Dinah, face hidden behind her camera, and a glowering, hostile Bobby restrained him. "God bless you both, brother and sister."

"I'm not your brother," Bobby snapped.

"We are all brothers and sisters in the eyes of the Lord."

Kate got the boy down the hill before Bobby melted his ears. As she lifted the fat-tired mountain bike into the back of the pickup the boy said, "I'm hiring you."

The bike settled into the bed of the pickup with ease. She looked up and met the steady blue gaze. "You mean your grandfather isn't." "No." He said it firmly, without equivocation.

She looked at him in silence for a moment. He stood there like Peter at the gates, inflexible, unyielding, unswerving in his devotion to duty.

Only the righteous and the godly got by.

"All right," she said at last. "Get in."

In the half-dawn, half-dusk twilight that passes for night in Alaska in the summer, it took Kate that much longer to negotiate the distance between the turnaround and Chistona. The store and the church were deserted. "No, don't," the boy said sharply when Kate would have pulled into the parking lot next to the church. "Drive a little down the road."

"That your grandfather's house?" Kate nodded at the log cabin sitting in back of the simple white frame church. He said it was, and she said,

"Then here we stop and I don't move until I see you inside the front door."

His lips tightened. "Okay, but you can't come in."

"I don't want to," she said, opening the door and getting out. She pulled the bike out of the back and stood it up.

He took it from her and looked up at her, hesitating. "Will you find my father for me?"

Kate didn't have the heart to tell him she was fairly certain she already had. Time enough for that when she was sure. "Yes."

Leaning the bike against his hip, he dug in the pocket of his jeans and produced a fistful of crumpled bills. "Here," he said. "I can pay."

"Good," she said, and accepted the money. When she counted it later it came to thirty-four dollars, all in dollar bills, all covered with the grime that is standard issue in ten-year-old pockets.