Free The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow

strictly a guy thing. “What Johnny doesn't realize is, Jane hates my guts. She showed up last night at Bobby's. Now that she knows he's with me, she won't stop looking.”
    “Happy Mother's Day.”
    “Yeah.”
    “She going to show up out here?”
    “Not here, not yet. My place, maybe.”
    “So you want him here when she does.”
    She nodded. “The reason I'm leaving myself is, I've got a job. Sooner or later, I'm going to have to hire a lawyer. That takes money.”
    Ethan scratched his chin. “He's pissed at you, isn't he.”
    It wasn't a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yeah.” It was a relief to share it with someone else, even Ethan. “Yes, he is.”
    “Mad because his dad went with you and got killed.” Again, it wasn't a question.
    “Yes.”
    “All your fault.”
    She nodded.
    “Like my dad,” he said, surprising her. “That was all your fault, too.”
    She gaped at him. Never once had any of the Int-Hout boys pointed the finger at her for Abel's death. Not once had any of them so much as whispered the possibility that she might be to blame for his suicide, that if she had let sleeping park rangers and Anchorage investigators lie, Abel might be alive today. Abel, and now Jack. Her fault, she thought bleakly. Her most grievous fault.
    “No, it wasn't,” Ethan said, surprising her. “Dad was Dad, an unreconstructed Alaska old fart who never got past 1925 in his thinking. Miller, maybe, was an accident. Dahl was deliberate. He wasn't going to live with that any longer than he had to whether you caught him out or not.”
    She felt a slackening of tension in her gut she hadn't known was there. His next words made her tighten up again.
    “Last year, you got in the middle of a bunch of crazies. You're lucky to be alive yourself.” He turned to go, and over his shoulder he said,“And I was damn sorry to hear about Jack Morgan, Kate. Everybody says he was a hell of a good man. I liked him, what I saw of him, when we met at Bernie's that time.”
    She watched him walk down the trail and she thought, Sure you did.
    About as much as she had liked Margaret.

 
5
    K ate hadn't been in Ahtna since the April before last, when the engine fell off a 747 and crashed through the roof of her cabin, along with fifty thousand dollars in compensation that had to be deposited to her account at the Last Frontier Bank. The teller had goggled at the stack of cash, and the manager had to be called over to okay the transaction. He did, after telling Kate three times that all deposits of more than five thousand dollars had to be reported to the IRS. Kate was sure that the moment she left the building they'd been running the numbers on the bills.
    After repairs to the homestead and the truck, a new snow machine, tires all around for the four-wheeler, a truck load of new tools, a year's supply of canned goods, and a steady line of mostly deserving Park rats with their hands out, there was less than two thousand left, but when she'd gone to Anchorage that April she'd had money to burn. She'd taken Jack to dinner every night. She'd insisted on buying him a cut-and-style at Jeri's, where he'd once forced her into the chair. When he said, barely a jest,“Just so long as you don't make me wear lingerie,” she'd taken him to Nordstrom and had him parade back and forth in a series of sports jackets and yuppy chinos. She would have taken him over to the shoe section if he hadn't rebelled. “Paybacks are hell,” she'd said.
    “I got paid back that night,” he'd growled.
    The 172 hit an air pocket, and she was jolted out of her reverie. The pilot, a tall, thin man in oil-stained coveralls with a lantern jaw in perpetual need of a shave touched the yoke absentmindedly, not looking up from the book he was reading. Kate had already checked out the title. Round the Bend by Nevil Shute. One of George Perry's favorite authors, along with Earnest K. Gann. Both men wrote about flying like they'd held a plane up in the air a time or