a Night Too Dark (2010) (28 page)

“Ulanie,” Kate said, “what were you doing at the Suulutaq Mine on July sixth?”
Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t this, and Ulanie paled visibly.
“You were with the superintendent, Vern Truax. You looked pretty cozy. Want to tell me what that was about?”
Ulanie found her voice. “You were spying on me? Who do you think you are? Where do you get off, spying on me?”
Kate shook her head. “I wasn’t spying on you, Ulanie. Believe me when I tell you I have better things to do than follow you around. I was at the Suulutaq on business. Which kind of underscores my point.” She leaned forward and caught the other woman’s gaze, holding it with her own. “Ulanie, hear me. This conversation has nothing to do with you and me or any disagreements we might have about running this organization. The Niniltna Native Association must speak with one voice. The Suulutaq Mine is changing the Park right now, while we’re sitting here, and it will continue to change it in ways we don’t expect and cannot anticipate. Our way of life is in the process of being fractured into a thousand pieces, and we’re barely beginning to reassemble those pieces into something new, something the shape of which we can’t even see from here.”
Ulanie bridled. “I don’t see what that has to do with my visiting the mine. Mr. Truax has made the board welcome there any time we care to visit.” She gave Kate a defiant stare. “That’s all I was doing. Visiting.”
Kate nodded. “All right, Ulanie. I’ll do you the courtesy of believing you. This time.” She leaned forward and dropped her voice. “But Vernon Truax looked very happy to see you that day, very happy indeed. If I find that you have been passing privileged information about the activities of this Association to him or anyone else who
works for Suulutaq or Global Harvest or the Slana Alliance for the Preservation of Black Cats, I will run you off this board so fast it will make your head swim.” Kate sat back, her eyes cold. “And then I’ll go to work on you.”
Ulanie’s face flushed an ugly red. She stood up, shoving her seat back so hard it banged off the wall. “I don’t need you or anybody else telling me how to behave, Kate Shugak. You’re just like your grandmother, thinking you know what’s best for everybody. Well, I’ve got news for you, there are plenty of people who don’t think so, and maybe we’ll band together and run you off this board!”
“I can hardly wait,” Kate said.
Ulanie didn’t have an irony button and was missing a sense of humor anyway. She snatched up her papers and stormed toward the door.
“Ulanie,” Kate said.
Ulanie wanted to keep going, but something in Kate’s voice halted her. She turned and her glare should have melted Kate to slag and her chair along with it.
Not noticeably melted, Kate said, aware that she was throwing down the gauntlet and equally aware there was no way around it, “Lay off the Grosdidiers’ clinic.”
“Abstinence is the only—”
“I don’t care.”
“Millions of murdered babies—”
“I. Don’t. Care.” The quiet force of Kate’s voice stopped Ulanie in mid-spate. “Abstinence, birth control, abortion, these are private, personal issues that have nothing to do with the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association. I won’t allow you to start a culture war among the Association shareholders, Ulanie. I know your reputation, and even if I didn’t I’d have your behavior at this board meeting to instruct me. You’re a backbiting little rabble-rouser with a talent for sowing division and none at all for governance.”
Ulanie looked like her head was going to explode. Kate only wished it were physically possible. “The clinic is off limits. You’re perfectly free to find something else to stir the shit about. Preferably a legitimate issue like education or jobs. But lay off the Grosdidier boys. They’ve been instrumental in a wholesale rise in good health stats across the Park, across race, age, and gender. The life of every Park rat, shareholder and nonshareholder alike, is better because of what those boys are doing. I won’t have that fouled by anyone for political advantage.” She paused. “Or for the sake of plain old meanness.”
“It’s a free country! I can say anything I want to anyone I want!”
“You sure can,” Kate said. “So can I. I could, for example, ask you about your visits to Vern Truax at the Suulutaq Mine in front of the board.”
Ulanie snarled.
“Better, in front of all the shareholders at the January meeting.”
The slamming of the boardroom door shook the entire building.
Kate looked at Annie. “You think she heard anything I said?”
Annie smiled and shook her head. “Kate?”
“What?”
“Are the Grosdidier boys performing abortions in that clinic of theirs?”
Kate thought back to that morning.
If you’d come here right away
, Matt had said to Phyllis. “Not abortions, no, but if you made me guess, I say they have morning-after pills available.”
Annie was silent, and Kate was forced to ask the question. “You got a problem with it if they are, Annie? Alaska’s a pro-choice state. We legalized abortion a year before Roe.”
“I’m hazy on the relevant law,” Annie said. “Can EMT-2s do abortions?”
“Licensed MDs only, in a state-approved hospital or facility.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annie said, “but we got the clinic approved by HHS last year. The argument to do so was in the remote
possibility that a surgical procedure was necessary, if for whatever reason we couldn’t get the patient out of the Park to a hospital. Doc Oc signed off on it.”
Doc Oc was Dr. Octavius Francesco Botticelli, an Italian-American transplant who had moved to Ahtna from Philadelphia twenty-five years before. He’d married a Park rat, opened a clinic, and settled in for the duration. A recognized authority on Alaskan maladies from alcoholism to tuberculosis, he sat on the state medical board and had personally overseen the construction and staffing of the Ahtna General Hospital.
Kate smiled. “I remember. He said it was the best-equipped clinic he’d ever seen, and that he could perform anything in it with the possible exception of open-heart surgery, and he wouldn’t even rule that out.” She shrugged. “You know how he talks. He called the boys docs in a box. But he was pretty impressed. He signed off on it the first day and he rammed it through the state medical board in a week.”
“Well,” Annie said. “I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“We should have expected this,” Kate said. “Or something like it. There are always going to be people like Ulanie, thinking the world has to run on their clock.”
“You can’t think of everything, Kate.”
“Emaa could,” Kate said.
“You’re not Ekaterina,” Annie said, and smiled to take the sting out of her words.
Kate stacked the papers in front of her into a loose file. “What’s next, do you think? She gonna go after those abnormal godless homos Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez?”
“Now that,” Annie said, very firm, “is seriously not allowed. Their basil makes the best pesto in the world, and I will not have that meddled with.”
“Good point,” Kate said. “I wonder if Ulanie’s into pasta.”
Annie saved the minutes, closed her laptop, and sat back to regard it with a thoughtful frown. “You were right to challenge her. I don’t say you couldn’t have done it with a little more tact, but it had to be done. You had to slap her down, hard.”
“I’ll probably have to do it again, too,” Kate said. It was not something she was looking forward to.
“And again, and again,” Annie said. “As a matter of curiosity, why didn’t you call her out in front of the board?”
Kate sighed. “I would have if I’d thought the vote was going her way.”
Annie raised an eyebrow. “There’s more of your grandmother in you than you’ll admit, Kate Shugak.”
Annie unplugged her computer and the two women rose to their feet and made their way to the door.
“Annie?”
“What?”
“Tell me there is such a clause.”
Annie was all elaborate surprise. “Of course there is, Kate. Paragraph C, subsection D, clause 1J, in the operations section of the bylaws. You can look it up in your own copy.”
She gave a faint smile. “And you should.”
Emaa was a steamroller,” Kate said, “and I’m a sledgehammer. It’s about time the Association had a diplomat running things.”
“You grooming Annie to take over?” Jim said, careful to keep his tone free of any opinion one way or the other. Unless and until it involved bloodshed, the trooper in him shied away from getting involved in anything to do with the Association.
He looked at Kate. Well. Anything to do with the Association other than sleeping with the chair of the board.
She was making bread to the sound of the hammered piano chords
in John Hiatt’s “Have a Little Faith in Me,” good old-fashioned yeast bread for toast, his favorite, especially when they had some of Auntie Joy’s nagoonberry jam in the pantry. They did, he knew because he’d investigated when he’d walked in the door and seen Kate up to her elbows in bread dough.
That wasn’t why she was making this particular bread, though. She was making this particular bread because it required serious kneading, and kneading bread dough was as close to therapy as Kate would ever get. Whenever she came home pissed off, he got great toast the next morning, and sometimes the night before. “Did you know about the boys giving out birth control?”
She gave him a brief, irritated look. “They’ve been teaching classes in it at the school, Jim.”
“But you’re worried about this audit.”
She slammed the dough down with unnecessary vigor.
“Is this one of those moments when the trooper is supposed to take a backseat, and the boyfriend step up?”
She looked at him.
“ ’Cause you know I ain’t never doing that again,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know. Never mind. What’s the latest on Lyda?”
“We’re two weeks out and nothing,” he said. He eyed her with some caution. She had been so adamant that Lyda Blue had not committed suicide, but really, what else had this bizarre series of events been about but suicide, personal and professional? “My boss is making noises I should split the difference and call it accidental. He pointed out, not without reason, that however squeaky clean Jules keeps his kitchen, mistakes will happen. And her dad told me that she’d almost died of the same thing twice before, once when she was a kid and once when she was working at a mine Outside. She was a new hire for Global at one of their other sites.”
“Somewhere in Montana.”
“Yeah. Truax confirmed it.”
Apropos of nothing she said, “I think Truax and Haynes got a thing.”
The music switched to Dion’s “If I Should Fall Behind.” He always felt like he should be on a fifties street corner in New York City when he heard that song. “Truax and Haynes, huh?” He thought about it. “Their thing have any bearing on Lyda’s death that you can see?”
“No.” She kneaded. “Was Brillo able to do an analysis on the crumbs you found next to her bed?”
“Traces of peanut oil.”
She sighed. “So. Accident, suicide, murder. Pick one.”
“Afraid so.”
“Hard on Jules.”
“Yes.”
She went back to kneading the dough, and he retired to the couch with the latest Codex Alera book, having won the three-way wrestle over the most recent Amazon box with absolutely no shame over his superior size and strength. Between the Canim, the Vord, and Invidia Aquitaine, Tavi’s problems were way worse than his, thank god. Perspective, even if fictional, was a wonderful thing.
Later, when red salmon filet, fresh greens from the garden, and bread out of the oven was on the table, she smiled at him over their laden plates. “Good to have you home.”
“Good to be home.”
They ate in silence for a few moments, but he’d seen her expression. “What?”
She gave a half smile and shook her head.
He actually put down his fork. “What?”
“This is your first night home in a week.”
He was taken aback. “It’s the job.”
She sat back, laughing. “It wasn’t an accusation, just an observation.”
Reassured by her laughter, he said, “What, then?”
She picked up his hand and brought it to her mouth. Her lips tickled the skin of his palm and he tried not to jerk free. Her tongue traced his lifeline, and then her teeth closed over the mound at the base of his thumb and bit down, hard.
The near pain shot straight to his groin. “Jesus, Kate.” His heart rate doubled and he was having difficulty breathing.
She soothed the wound with her tongue and released his hand. “I missed you, is all.” She went back to her food, all innocence and unconcern, although the corners of her wide, full mouth were perhaps a little more indented than before.
He blinked down at his plate, trying to focus. The bass on Queen’s “We Will Rock You” beat up through the soles of his feet. He picked up his fork but that only made him more conscious of the throb in his hand, which only made him more conscious of the sudden and acutely uncomfortable fit of his pants.
“Fuck this,” he said. He shoved his plate back, stood up, and reached for her, all in one smooth motion. It might have been harder if she’d fought him, but no, she came laughing into his arms. She laughed harder when he cleared the table with a sweep of one arm and threw her down on it.
One thing that could be said in favor of the Suulutaq Mine, this summer the kid wasn’t around to cramp his style.

Twenty

LABOR DAY

The day was clear, the air cool, and the leaves on the alders and the aspens had turned a brilliant yellow-gold. Old Sam had been waiting for most of the morning, and he was going to keep on waiting until that big, fat bull moose he had scouted in the area came ambling out of the woods and wandered in front of his sights.
There was some delicacy about this particular operation, as moose season in this section of Park didn’t open for another two weeks, but Old Sam wasn’t trophy hunting, he was hunting for meat. This of course made all the difference, and only tightasses like Chief Ranger Dan O’Brian would say otherwise.
The location was near the clearing where the bones of the lost guy, whoever the hell he had turned out to be, had been found last spring. He had stumbled across plenty of moose sign when he’d been tracking that griz, most likely the result of the come-hither effect of the Park’s biggest stands of diamond willow, a good five acres of prime moose browse. It hadn’t been an area that easy to get
to, until the Smiths bladed in their trail, which meant that the area hadn’t been hunted much, which meant the moose were that much more plentiful, less wary than moose in other areas of the Park, and fat.
It also meant less bushwhacking on the way in and a shorter distance to pack the meat out. Old Sam wouldn’t have admitted it at gunpoint but his stamina was wearing a mite thin. A passable trail a convenient mile from ground zero was something that was growing more attractive every year.
His purpose was twofold. He was hunting for the cache as well as for his annual end-of-season barbecue, where tradition entailed roasting a whole moose quarter on a rotating spit of his own design over an open pit. Old Sam liked his meat crisp on the outside and bloody close to the bone, and this took time and care. Near the end of the process the word went forth, to Kate and Jim and Johnny, Bobby and Dinah and Katya, Ruthe Bauman, the four aunties if they hadn’t pissed him off too much lately, some of the less annoying of his fellow board members, Bernie and his kids, and other select Park rats. Although Old Sam wouldn’t have thought of it that way, it was one of the Park’s premier social events of the year, to which an invitation was a coveted prize.
And woe betide the Park rat who showed up without one. The Kanuyaq River was an easy toss from the cabin.
Old Sam hated party crashers.
Now, maybe he could have waited until the season opened, but if he wanted to have the barbecue before the temperature dropped below freezing in the daytime he had to build in some time to let the meat hang. Hence the highly satisfactory illegality of the situation. Old Sam grinned to himself. There wasn’t much he loved more than putting one over on the goddamn Parks Service. Unless it was running a scam on the Fish and Game. That this hunt would be a twofer only added to his enjoyment of the day.
It was Labor Day, and everyone was in town for the parade and the salmon bake at the gym and the farmer’s market and craft fair at the school. Unless he’d managed to finagle a way out of it Chopper Jim would be leading the parade in his white Blazer, and the Grosdidier boys would be bringing up the rear in their fire-engine-yellow Silverado with the mobile pharmacy in the back. In between Miss Niniltna would be holding court on the back of a flatbed draped with the school colors of blue and gold, the Kanuyaq Kings varsity and junior varsity teams would be dribbling in formation behind her, and the Suulutaq Mine would be swaggering behind them and tossing candy like they worked for Hershey’s. Every kid in Niniltna with a bike or a trike would be dressed in last year’s Halloween costumes and part of the parade only when they weren’t scrabbling for their share of the candy.
He was sorry to miss the fry bread and smoked fish at the gym, but he figured everyone felt that way, especially Chopper Jim and Dan O’Brian, which considerably improved his chances for a nice, quiet, successful hunt.
Yes, he had been there a few hours, and he expected to be there a few hours more, but he was in no hurry, and he was a man who enjoyed his own company. His thoughts ranged freely across the years and the Park and all of the people in it. He thought of people who had gone, like Emaa, and of people who should have been gone a lot sooner, like Louis Deem, and of people still around, like Kate.
He was a mite concerned about Kate. She had a habit of rescuing people, which was all right in moderation, but not so much when you went into it wholesale. It was particularly aggravating when it substituted a greenhorn for an experienced deckhand just about the time the first salmon hit fresh water.
Although he had to admit that Petey Jeppsen and Phyllis Lestinkof had not been completely worthless on the
Freya
this past summer. They were both clumsy and ignorant, of course, practically
couldn’t tell a humpy from a dog at the start of the season, but they’d shouldered in and worked hard. Neither one had taken their first paycheck to the bars uptown when they delivered in Cordova, and when they got seasick they remembered to puke to leeward. Further, when Kate had joined them for the silver season in August, neither Petey nor Phyllis had complained at being bumped down to second and third on deck. Petey’d had no problem taking orders from Kate, either. Sometimes the male of the species could get a little uppity when placed in an inferior position to the female, especially on the deck of a fishing boat in Prince William Sound.
He heard the brush rustling before he saw it moving. He pulled the Winchester tight into his shoulder, finger on the trigger.
He was rewarded when the biggest sumbitchin moose he’d seen in ten years strolled out like the king of the forest. Lordy, was he beautiful, a thick shining brown hide, a graceful, evenly balanced rack richly covered in velvet that was only now beginning to fray and peel, moving with a princely stride on haunches that would feed a family of four for six months.
Old Sam smiled, blew out a long quiet breath, and centered the front sight on one big brown eye.
It was an hour later, when he’d gutted the bull and pulled the skin halfway down the carcass, that he found the bullet hole.
Now, this wasn’t necessarily unheard of. Plenty of clueless assholes wandering around the Park with too much gun and no idea how to use it. Not to mention a lack of backbone to go after one they’d wounded, as was right and proper, hell, in Old Sam’s book a moral obligation.
Old Sam hated bad shots.
The hide had closed up over the hole the bullet had made going in, which was why he didn’t see it until he pulled the skin down. The flesh had closed up after it, too, which told him the shot wasn’t recent. It took a bit of finesse to extract the bullet without ruining
the surrounding meat, and when he had it he sat back on his haunches and looked at the piece of metal he was holding between a bloodstained thumb and forefinger.
It was a little bullet. Damn little, a .22 if Old Sam was any judge, and he was. Who the hell went up against a moose with a .22?
He remembered the pistol Jim had found in the clearing, which wasn’t more than half a mile from this very spot. It had tripped up Jim, and it had probably tripped him up a month before that.
He remembered Kate talking about the two guys tarryhooting off into the woods, one a suicide until he changed his mind and the other with a gun so he could change it back again. He remembered mention of a hoofprint in the skull that had been found. He examined the four hoofs on his moose. He didn’t find anything except grass stains and pine needles.
He sat back and gave thought. Well, now, he was in something of a pickle, wasn’t he. The moose was illegal, no doubt about that. If he took the bullet in and handed it over to the authorities, he’d have to say where he got it, and that illegality would become clear. There could be consequences, which could affect his barbecue.
But the bullet might be evidence of some kind in this crazy-ass case of Kate and Jim’s, where there didn’t seem to be any crime committed other than spying on a gold mine. It was difficult to get himself worked up over that.
Old Sam hated being a responsible citizen.
He cut the feet off at the first joint and put them in a game bag. The bullet he tucked into the pocket of his shirt and buttoned the flap after it just to be sure.
And then he went back to butchering out the moose.
Old Sam hated waste worst of all.
Kate looked at the bullet, and at the package wrapped in white butcher paper labeled 5# ROST in black Marks-A-Lot. “I’m as susceptible
to bribes as the next law enforcement professional, Uncle, but you know I’m going to have to tell him where I got it.”
“Yeah, I know, but not before I get it all hung. Ain’t nobody, even Dan O’Brian, going to take it then. Not if they want some of my barbecue.”
Because despite the years-long war between Old Sam and the Parks Service, Dan O’Brian was one ranger who had a standing invitation to the barbecue.
Old Sam nodded at the roast. “That’s the part the bullet come out of. Leave it sit out a day or two, it ought to be just about right.” He left.
Mutt stuck her head over the counter and sniffed interestedly at the roast.
“Go catch your own,” Kate told her. She put the roast on a shelf up high and then, because Mutt was sulking, said, “Want to go into town?”
Well, shit.” Jim looked at the bullet Kate had placed on the desk in front of him. “I thought we were done with that goddamn uncase.”
It took until the following Saturday, the day of Old Sam’s barbecue, before the report came back from ballistics. The bullet taken out of the moose had indeed been fired from the pistol Jim had found in the clearing with the body. Kate had driven in early, and the two of them sat in his office, digesting the news in silence.
At length, Jim stirred. “Okay. As crazy as I thought your theory was, I’m bound to say it’s looking more like that’s the way it went down. Allen had earned enough money from his various employers, it was time to leave, and he set up Gammons to take the fall so they wouldn’t come looking for him if they found out he’d been double-crossing them both.”
“All neat and tidy,” she said, almost a growl.
“Boy, Kate, you really want to arrest someone out at the Suulutaq in the worst way, don’t you?”
“Don’t you?” she said.
“Not as bad as you do,” he said. “I’m guessing it’s because you hate the Suulutaq Mine so much.”
She looked up, startled. “What are you talking about? I don’t hate the mine.”
Jim had been thinking about what Old Sam had told him back in July, thinking and watching Kate and listening to her, and thinking some more. “Yeah you do. You hate that goddamn mine worse than anyone else in the Park. Oh, I know, you haven’t said so, and you’ve been the voice of reason and responsibility when you’re in your board chair persona. But you hate it like poison. You see it changing the Park out of all recognition, and you see the dollar signs lighting up the eyes of your shareholders, Auntie Edna selling takeout, Auntie Balasha selling souvenirs, Auntie Vi plain selling out. You hate every bit of it. If you could you’d shut Suulutaq down and boot Global Harvest not just out of the Park but out of the whole goddamn state.
“And it’s not because you really believe the mine will destroy the land or the wildlife. You want jobs for Park rats, industry for a tax base so there can be schools and hospitals and libraries. But you’d rather do without all of that stuff than have the Park change on you. You’d rather do without than have your life changed as much as that mine is going to change it.”
He leaned back in his chair and rubbed both hands over his face and linked them behind his head, looking at her with that impartial cop stare that could do a whole character dissection without ever touching a scalpel. “Failing that, you want there to have been a murder. You want me to haul Truax and Haynes in here and charge them with everything from murder to polluting your personal environment.”
Kate’s mouth opened and closed a couple of times. “That’s just not true,” she said. Was it? She rallied. “I liked that girl. I spent more
time with her than you did, and I don’t believe she would have killed herself.”
“You’re still not even comfortable with your new house, Kate. Face it. There isn’t a nickel’s worth of difference between your attitude to the mine and Gaea’s.”
“You’re wrong,” she said.
“Why is Howie Katelnikof still walking around on two good legs?”
“What?” Kate was really confused now.
“He shot at your truck. He put you and Johnny in the ditch and Mutt in the clinic. We both know it. Hell, every Park rat with an IQ over two digits knows it. We’ve all been holding our breaths for the last year, year and a half, to see what you’re going to do about it. I myself have lived in daily expectation of scraping his remains up off some back road with a shovel, and I say a nightly prayer that you won’t leave any evidence behind I’ll have to act on.”
“What the hell’s this got to do with the mine and how I feel about it?”
“Howie’s a Park rat, one of your own whether you like it or not, so he can take a shot at you and get away with it. A Suulutaq miner, that’s a different story. You’ll move mountains for a perp walk featuring one of them.”
The silence this time was a little more fraught. Kate tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t leave her wide open to more incoming. Too much of his ammunition was already finding its target. “Has her mother stopped calling?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Who gets Allen’s money?”
“There’s a sister. She said he was a better brother to her dead than he ever was alive.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Not what I’d choose for my epitaph. But then I suppose
the dumb bastard thought he’d never need one. He was going to live forever under a palm tree somewhere.” He made some additional notes to the Allen file, saved it, copied it, and closed it. “So. You hanging around town until it’s time to go to Old Sam’s?”
“God no,” Kate said, relieved that they seemed to be well and truly off the topic of her relationship to the Suulutaq Mine. Fucking mine was taking over every conversation she was in lately. “I’m heading back home. That is, if you’re done psychoanalyzing me, doctor.” She realized too late that there was maybe a little too much edge on the remark and rushed to fill the awkward silence following it. “I have to go back anyway, I’m supposed to make rhubarb sorbet for the barbecue.”
That proved a useful distraction. “Got enough rhubarb left in the freezer?” he said, looking anxious. “I’m sure you could pick up extra from Annie or Auntie Vi if you need it. Or Dinah.”