The Hunger of Crows, page 20
She glances at Scott, still sitting behind the wheel, watching her reaction to the house. She can tell he’s proud, pleased that she’s impressed by it.
“It’s beautiful,” she says, admiring the house a while longer. “Isn’t there some shack owners association or something that’s going to fine you for putting on siding and window frames?”
He smiles. “People around here think that any man who would voluntarily paint his own house is insane. I get a pass because, even though I got fancy and went away to college in glamorous Anchorage, I came back here and fished. And I still work with tools for a living. My neighbors treat me like a favorite not-too-bright cousin.”
Carla peers up at the house. “Is it safe to leave the place empty when you go to work or go fishing? You said there are druggies around.”
“There are some rough types up the North Fork of the river, but most of the people here are decent enough,” he says. “My mother was a teacher at Anchor Point Elementary for about a hundred years. And my dad drove a heating oil truck. Everybody knew them both. Nobody messes with my house much. If I were an Anchorage lawyer or doctor stuffing my weekend fishing mansion with fine things, the punks would strip it to the framing.”
D’Angelo and the photograph momentarily forgotten, Carla sits and studies the house through the windshield, considering Scott’s account of the class structure here at Anchor Point. But mostly she’s thinking that she’s liking him way too much.
She steps out of the truck and parks the sunglasses on her nose. They walk to the foot of the porch stairs, the air thick with sunshine and the scent of the forest drying out after the rain. She can feel herself relaxing. Not even the bright sunshine bothers her now. Then a loud blast erupts nearby, and she yelps involuntarily, adrenaline coursing through her. It’s followed by two more nerve-rattling explosions. “What the hell was that?”
Scott takes her elbow. “Take it easy. Somebody up the road is sighting in a rifle. Or shooting his neighbor’s dog. Hopefully not his neighbor. You sort of get used to gunfire up here.” He smiles. “Welcome to Anchor Point. Home sweet well-armed home.”
Carla lets out a long breath. “Great to be here. Your house is lovely,” she says honestly. “Truly lovely.” They go up on the deck. Carla looks over at his garage, and beyond it the several huge yellow machines sitting around a small gravel pit. “What’s with all the heavy equipment?”
“The excavator and stuff?” He looks that way. “I use them for foundations and septic systems, water lines. Stuff like that.”
“Water lines. Ah, that’s encouraging.” She yanks off the blue bandanna. “I hope it means this yuppie hunting shack has a shower.” Suddenly self-conscious about her looks, she tries to pat her hair down. The short, matted tendrils are too springy. “I’d like to get the seawater out of what’s left of my hair sometime before I die for real.”
Scott pulls out his house keys. “Come on. I’ll show you the bathroom. While you’re in the shower, I’ll put something together for lunch.”
“Lunch? Screw lunch,” she says. “What time is cocktail hour around here?”
* * *
Scott’s house is nearly as woody inside as out. Wide plank floors, stained wood doors and frames, stained windowsills, even a wood ceiling throughout with a translucent, pale-white finish. Carla smells paint thinner and sawdust. No question a carpenter lives there. A tidy one. The house is as clean and orderly as his boat. She should’ve guessed.
In the entryway, a neat stack of firewood sits next to an even neater pile of newspapers. Muddy work shoes stand side by side on a shallow rubber tray next to a pair of clean lightweight loafers. He’s not even married anymore, and he takes off his shoes when he comes in? She resists commenting. He’s doing her a gigantic favor here. And everything about the house gives her a time-out-of-time feeling, like some safe, magical place from a fantasy. The feeling of security is almost too silly to think about. “This is nice, Scott.”
He kicks off his work shoes and puts the loafers on, looking at her sideways, maybe expecting a wisecrack to come on the heels of the compliment.
“No, really.” She holds his elbow for balance and climbs out of her Xtratufs and sets them in the mud tray next to his shoes. They walk into the stark, minimalistic living room. There’s an obviously new couch and a chair, both a safe tan-beige. A simple floor lamp with a creamy white shade. A wood coffee table, starkly barren.
“I had to take the old furniture out to redo the floors, and I ended up hauling it all to the Salvation Army store. My folks were the kind of people who bought furniture once every century or so.”
Carla smiles. Her mother buys furniture the way people shop for groceries. Weekly.
Amid all the wood is a black iron woodstove that looks like it’s never felt fire. And a gray metal cabinet almost as tall as Carla, two feet wide and nearly as deep. The word ORVIS is written above a big chrome dial. She gives Scott a quizzical look.
“A gun safe.”
“How decorative.” But she’s happy to be reminded that he does indeed own guns. However magical the place seems.
There are no rugs, no paintings or photos on the clean, off-white walls. She says, “It’s a nice place. Kind of sparse, though.”
“What do you mean?”
She hears the injured undertone. “I think I was expecting animal heads or fishing poles on the walls. You’re a single Alaskan guy, and you don’t even have pictures of yourself holding up dead fish?”
He looks at the walls, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“Teasing,” she says. “Jesus, Mr. Sensitive, I’m just saying I thought you’d have some faux-rustic Teddy Roosevelt crap.”
“There’s a dead porcupine on the road coming in. Been there a week. It’s very flat. Maybe I can nail it up somewhere.”
“That would be a stylish touch.”
She wanders into the kitchen. The white tile counter top is pristine. No dirty dishes. No dishes at all. Not even a water spot on the stainless-steel sink. There is a pot rack suspended from the ceiling over the counter, serious-looking copper pans dangling from it. A small round table with a clean black-and-white plaid tablecloth and four chairs. The room looks like it’s been staged by a real estate agent. She thinks of the magazine-strewn, used-coffee-cup-heaped chaos of Volker’s house. Never mind the nightmare of worn clothes she left draped over every piece of furniture in her now-abandoned apartment in Phoenix.
Maybe she should hire Scott to follow her around straightening up after her for the rest of her life. By the look he’s giving her right now, she has a feeling he’d sign up for that. Happily. She knows that look. He has a monster crush on her. She isn’t happy with how pleased that makes her feel. What the hell is wrong with her? Shire Kiminsky doesn’t need men to fawn over her.
She shakes off the thought. “How about I get that shower while you mix us a drink of some kind? Bloody Mary?”
“Come on.” He leads her up a set of dark-stained stairs and into a bedroom with a wood cathedral ceiling bleached like the rest of the house. A similarly whitewashed beam supports the ceiling, a white ceiling fan hanging from the center of it. The guy likes white.
Scott crosses the bedroom and heads for the adjacent bath. Carla gravitates instead to a window looking out on a valley behind the house, a small river winding through it. On the slope downhill, the tall evergreen trees that surround the house give way to smaller bushes and grasses. Across the bottomlands, she can see thickets of alders running all the way to the scraggly-topped trees that line both banks of the river. She recognizes their tall, uninterrupted trunks and the sudden baskets of jumbled limbs crowning their tops. Cottonwoods. They grow along the rivers in Arizona too and are favored by the Hopi Indians for carving ceremonial dolls and spiritual figures. Her mother once did a series of metal-and-glass sculptures loosely based on kachina dolls, flagrantly appropriating the Native culture. They were a big hit in Scottsdale.
Peering down the river valley, Carla can see the sleeping volcanoes across the bay partly veiled by clouds, looking old and spooky and terribly sad for some reason. People say it’s pure wilderness over there for hundreds of miles in any direction. No towns, no people. Maybe that’s where she should go. Where she would be safe, living in a cave with the bears. She dials her vision back to the valley below. There isn’t another house or building of any kind in sight, and she tries to let that lighten her crashing mood. Suddenly the seclusion of Scott’s house is losing its magic. Something is making her blue.
“You like the view?”
Carla turns to find Scott standing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Scott, you ever think about living someplace else, other than Alaska, I mean?”
“Nah, look at all I have.” He stops and grimaces. “Well, if I’d stayed married, I’d have a big beautiful house in town instead of this little one on a gravel pit. But I have a beautiful boat on a bay full of fish. I’ve got no debt, money in the bank. How many carpenters anywhere live that well? Alaska is blue-collar Nirvana.”
Carla thinks about it, thinks about the apartment in Phoenix and the fact that she’s still renting, driving an eighteen-year-old pickup truck. She’s happy for him, a little envious too. “You’re a lucky guy.”
She hears the water running in the shower. “That sounds like Nirvana calling to me.” She pulls the hoodie off over her head, unsnaps the straps on her Carhartt bibs, and walks into the bathroom.
“Towels.” Scott points to a stack of big green ones. “Use whatever you need.”
She brushes past him to the fogging glass shower enclosure. “Ah, wonderful.” She’s in the land of the wood elves now. And they have indoor plumbing.
CHAPTER
36
WHILE VOLKER PARKS Carla’s truck at the impound yard under the watchful eyes of Officer Kramer, D’Angelo scrutinizes the security measures around the cop shop. Volker turns the key over to Kramer and climbs into D’Angelo’s Camry. D’Angelo makes a show of waving a friendly good-bye to Kramer. He drives off with Volker cowering in the passenger seat.
“I couldn’t help it,” Volker whines. “I didn’t know the police would show up!”
D’Angelo shuts him up with a murderous stare. He could throw Volker out at the next corner, but investing a few minutes to drive him out the spit road to the Orca could ensure that Volker keeps all this under wraps. “Just shut up, George.”
Volker goes silent.
When they pull in behind the bar and stop, Volker points to the parking place that Carla’s truck occupied. It’s now filled with a big Winnebago, the rear of it wallpapered with what appear to be stickers from every national park in America. Volker gets his courage up enough to speak. “See? I told you I needed that parking spot.”
“I thought that was employee parking,” D’Angelo says to him.
“Are you kidding? When the tourists are spending money, nobody cares where anybody parks.”
“Okay,” D’Angelo says, “just so we’re clear on this: if you say a word about me, about any of this, to anyone at all …”
“I know, man! Mellow out, would you? How stupid do I look?”
D’Angelo has to smile. “Some advice? Don’t press people on that question.” He glares at Volker until he opens the passenger door and gets out.
Volker closes the door and leans into the open window. “Could I have my phone back?”
D’Angelo cuts him a fierce stare. “I need to borrow it for a while. What’s the password?”
“Six-nine-six-nine.” Volker pouts. “Can I ask you one question?”
“What?”
“What do you want from Carla’s truck?”
“Oh, that question,” D’Angelo says, and pulls away. He sees Volker giving him the finger in the rearview mirror. That makes him smile. Good. Let him vent his anger. Better than getting heroic and telling one of his cop friends that a scary stranger is asking questions about the missing Carla Merino.
He pulls onto the road and drives back to the base of the spit and on across the estuary slough. On the other side a sign indicates the way to the airport.
The little airport is at the end of the narrow road surrounded by muskeg and swampland. Small birds wheel and dip over the wind-bent grasses at the end of the runway. The parking lot is almost empty, and inside the terminal it’s quiet. No one there but one sleepy-eyed, middle-aged redhead poking at a computer keyboard behind the Bay Air Service ticket counter. The DEPARTURES AND ARRIVALS signboard above her shows that there will be no flights in or out of Homer for another three hours. D’Angelo pockets a parking envelope from the dispenser in the lobby and walks back outside.
In the long-term parking area, he wanders among the dozen or so vehicles, checking the dates on the paper slips on their dashboards. He finds a dark-brown Subaru hatchback of indeterminate age whose owners won’t be back in town for several days. That’s as much time as he needs. By then, either he finds that photo or Lundren’s muscle shows up and this whole thing goes another way. He’s hoping to avoid that.
As he fills in his blank parking slip with the license number and color of the rented Camry, a car approaches the airport. He stands still. It rolls on by to the UPS building a quarter mile farther down the road. Other than that, the area remains empty. A bird with long yellow legs launches off a stunted black spruce nearby, shrieking something that sounds like, I’m running, I’m running, I’m running. A crow waddles by between two parked cars, picking tidbits out of the pavement cracks, grumbling to itself. D’Angelo jimmies the door of the Subaru, breaks the ignition lock, and does what he needs to in order to start it.
He transfers his belongings into the Subaru, backs it out, and parks the Camry in its place with the new parking slip on the dashboard. Will it match the other half of the original deposited by its owners? No. But really, like Volker says, nobody’s checking those things during tourist season.
Folding his legs into the little hatchback is a crunch, but the car is perfect for blending into the town traffic. In his short time in Homer, he’s come to the conclusion that all locals drive either pickup trucks with wet dogs in the back or Subarus. Pity the Subaru owners with wet dogs.
He drives away in the Subaru. Whoever Phil Lundren sends to find him will be looking for the Camry. Whatever he’s driving, there’s no getting to Carla’s Toyota now. The impound yard is fenced, barbed wire on top. Lots of lights. Security cameras, of course. Getting to the truck is going to be a major undertaking. And he doesn’t even know if the photo is in it. So the next order of business is a visit to the one person who can tell him where it is—now that he knows she’s alive.
He kicks himself for letting her ride off in Crockett’s truck when he had the chance to follow them. Well, sometimes this job requires snap decisions. They aren’t always going to be good ones. Hours have been wasted, but he has a pretty good idea where Carla is. As he drives out of the airport, he pulls out Volker’s smartphone and Googles Crockett Construction, Homer, Alaska.
Driving through the business district of the town, he passes a restaurant called the Ethereal Eatery, and his thoughts turn to lunch. A sign says Enchilada Lunch Plate! He watches a teenage waitress with a long blond braid set food before tourists at a patio table. It makes him wonder who eats Mexican food cooked by Anglos two thousand miles north of the Mexican border. Although right now, he’d eat Chilean empanadas prepared by Laplanders.
The air vents in the Subaru funnel in food aromas. “Damn,” he mutters, and inhales deeply, taking as much sustenance as he can from the fumes.
He’s so hungry he wants to punch somebody.
PART III
ANCHOR POINT, ALASKA
CHAPTER
37
SCOTT IS TUCKING celery sticks into the Bloody Marys when Carla comes down the stairs wrapped in a big green bath towel, her hair bound in a smaller one. He looks up and stammers, “I … I … you look, er … better.” He runs his fingers through his hair.
She can see that he’s a goner. She should mind that, but she just doesn’t.
“I feel better,” she says. She takes a seat at the kitchen table. He sets her Bloody Mary in front of her. “Thanks.” She tastes the drink. “Perfect. You’re a good cook, a good carpenter, and a good bartender. Do you do everything well?” It’s shameless, but she can’t help doing it.
His face goes bright pink. “There’s more vodka in the freezer if you need it. I’m going to take a shower. You can throw your clothes in the washing machine.”
“Then what?” She yanks the small towel off and fluffs her now-short hair.
Scott stares for a few seconds before replying. A goner.
“When Shire gets here, we’ll talk to her about getting the picture out of your truck. And then we should wait here—maybe a few days, maybe a week or more before we try driving north—until you’re, you know, officially …” He makes a throat-slitting gesture with one hand.
“A week? I’m going to need something to get my mind off D’Angelo,” she says, and sips her drink. “Suggestions?”
Does he even know she’s flirting? He was married for ten years, never cheated on his wife. She’s being obvious, but he looks more confused than aroused. She decides to have mercy on him. “What do you do in your free time?”
“Free time?” He looks like he’s never heard of the concept. He laughs. “I’m either building, fixing, or painting something. My Wi-Fi is spotty, but I got custody of the DVDs in the divorce. I hope you like Mafia movies. There’s a Scrabble board around here somewhere.” He sighs. “Look, all I know is carpentry and fishing. That’s my life. One fascinating thing after another.” He turns to go upstairs.
