a Night Too Dark (2010) (11 page)

“Twice,” Kate said.
“I’m sorry?” Truax said.
“He married into the Park twice,” Kate said. “Twice within the last five months.”
There was a pause. “I’m guessing,” Truax said, “that the second time was without benefit of divorce from the first wife?”
“It was,” Kate said.
Truax sighed and looked at the ceiling for inspiration. “Well, Kate, you want me to fire him? Wait a minute, before I fire anyone, who is it?”
“Randy Randolph.”
“Randy Randolph?” Haynes said.
“Yes,” Kate said.
“Randy Randolph?” Truax said, sitting straight up in his chair. “My baker?”
“I’m afraid so,” Kate said.
Truax was incredulous and not afraid to show it. “Randy Randolph married twice over the last five months? Are you sure?”
“It’s who you are writing the paycheck in question to,” Kate said. “What’s the problem?”
“No problem,” Truax said, “it’s just—” There was a look of restrained hilarity on his face that made Kate curious and a little wary. Haynes, too, looked amused. He leaned over the intercom again. “Lyda, is Randy Randolph on shift yet?”
It took her a few moments, probably to look up the work schedule. “Yes, Vern.”
“Thanks.” Truax leaned back. “Holly, would you like to take Ms. Shugak around?”
Kate rose to her feet. “I appreciate that, but there’s no need. It’s not that big a camp. I’m sure I can find my way.”
Truax’s alarm at the prospect of Kate Shugak, Ace Detective, wandering around his mine without a keeper warred with his desire to assure Kate Shugak, chair of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association, that Global Harvest Resources Inc. had absolutely nothing to hide at the Suulutaq Mine. It took him a moment to reconcile these two viewpoints, during which Kate and Mutt had slipped out the door.

Six

Lyda was back at her desk. “Vern asked if you would show me around the mine, Ms. Blue,” Kate said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Mendacity was just one more service Kate offered. And she wanted to create an opportunity to speak with Lyda Blue alone.
Mutt’s head popped over the top of the desk. She and Lyda examined each other again. “Wolf?” Lyda said.
“Half,” Kate said.
Neither was unconscious of conversations dying natural deaths all around the large room as people took in the couple standing in front of reception. Everyone thought Mutt outweighed Kate, and everyone was right. Everyone worried over the possibility that Kate didn’t control Mutt, and everyone was wrong. Mostly. Everyone was also acquiring a line of sight to the nearest window or door in the event of any emergency of a lupine kind.
Lyda nodded, unsurprised and unalarmed. If she really was from Bering, she wouldn’t be either. “Vern is my boss, Ms. Shugak. What he says goes. What would you like to see first?”
“Are Dewayne Gammons’s belongings still here at the mine?”
Lyda Blue hesitated for a moment too long, and knew it. “Yes,” she said. “I—we didn’t know where he’d gone, and he didn’t fill in the next-of-kin blank on his employee form so we didn’t have anyone to send them to. I didn’t want to just throw them out.”
“May I see them, please?”
Lyda Blue led her to one of the modular bunkhouses, the equivalent of a wide, single-story trailer with rooms on both sides, a communal bathroom at one end, and a TV lounge at the other. Lyda opened the door to a room next to the lounge, which was cleared of furniture to do duty for storage. It was about three-quarters full of haphazardly stacked cleaning supplies. Tucked next to a crooked tower of forty-eight-roll packages of toilet paper was a large six-shelf unit made of heavy, chrome-plated steel, bolted together by an inexpert hand that had left all the shelves enough out of true to be noticeable but not enough to have everything on them on the floor unless the next earthquake was a big one. The shelves were jammed with what looked like personal gear, duffels, stuff sacks, daypacks, a couple of suitcases. “This is all Gammons’s stuff?” Kate said.
“No. Only this.” Lyda pulled down a canvas duffel and an Eddie Bauer daypack without checking the tags.
“This all?” A nod. Kate looked back at the shelves. “Who does the rest of it belong to?”
“Wayne Gammons isn’t the only employee to walk off the job at Suulutaq, Ms. Shugak,” Lyda said.
“You haven’t been in business out here for even a year,” Kate said.
“Some guys don’t last a week,” Lyda said. “Maybe they miss their wives or their girlfriends. Maybe they don’t like the isolation. Maybe they don’t like the no drugs or booze policy. Maybe they’re just pissed off they have to share the remote in the TV room.”
“You’d think hauling their stuff out with them wouldn’t take that much extra effort.”
“They know they’re coming out to the back of beyond when they take the job, and that they’ll be bunking in with a bunch of strangers. Chances are they’ve been on jobs like this before and they’re aware of what sometimes happens to personal possessions in communal living, so it’s not like they’ve brought their most treasured belongings with them in the first place. They know Vern is going to be angry at wasting employee orientation and training on them. They’re probably afraid that if they say they’re quitting he’ll make them walk back to Anchorage. So they leave their stuff so as not to draw attention that their last plane ride is one-way.” Lyda looked down at the bags. “What do you want to do with these?”
“Is there somewhere we can take them so I can look at what’s in them? A table would be good.”
Still silent, Lyda Blue led her to a small vacant office at the back of the main office building, furnished only with a rectangular folding table. There was no window and the only light was a single fluorescent tube dangling from a wire in the center of the ceiling, to the imminent danger of anyone walking beneath it. The room was cold, too, and on the wall next to the door Kate spotted a bundle of wires where a thermostat might one day go. Mutt cast a disparaging eye around the space and took a seat next to the door. It was warmer outside.
Kate moved the table so that the dangling fluorescent tube hung over it and heaved the bags up. Lyda Blue lingered by the door. “Is there anything else?”
“There will be,” Kate said, “but in the meantime why don’t you help me unpack his bags. Don’t close the door.”
Lyda, who had been about to do so, said, “Why not?”
“She won’t like it.”
Lyda looked down at Mutt, who was watching her with a narrow yellow stare.
“Just leave it open a crack. You packed these bags, didn’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
Kate shrugged. “Just a guess. You seem to be Vern’s first call for everything.”
Lyda hesitated for a moment longer, and then came to stand across the table. Kate didn’t look up, pulling at the strap on the duffel and spreading its contents across the table. Three pairs of jeans, half a dozen shirts, jockey shorts, long underwear, wool socks, all well worn but nothing in rags. A pair of flip-flops. An electric razor, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a tube of generic shampoo, a stick of equally generic deodorant, a can of shaving cream. “How well did you know Dewayne Gammons, Lyda?”
Lyda’s eyes widened. In the harsh light of the single bulb her face looked leached of all color.
In the daypack was an envelope filled with pay stubs, a checkbook with an account at the Last Frontier Bank in Ahtna showing fourteen grand to the good, and a book. Kate read the title out loud. “
The Portable Nietzsche
?” She put the book down. “At least he read.” She looked up.
A tear had traced its way down Lyda Blue’s cheek. “He does read,” she said. “You don’t know for sure yet whose body that was.”
“No,” Kate said, her voice as gentle as the scar on her throat would allow. “I don’t. How well did you know him, Lyda?”
“How did you know?”
“You called him Wayne,” Kate said.
Lyda reached up to touch her cheek and seemed surprised to find the tear. She wiped it away, not bothering much about her mascara. “I—we met when he was first hired. He drove up from Washington State with some of the other guys looking for work. He told me they’d heard the news about Global Harvest hiring and decided to share expenses on the trip north.”
“Who came with him?”
Lyda shrugged. “I remember one of them quit before Wayne did. I don’t remember his name. I can probably look it up for you.” She
bit her lip. If the body was Dewayne Gammons, he hadn’t quit. Lyda raised her chin and made an obvious effort to keep her voice steady. “Everybody’s hired through the office in Anchorage and they go through their orientation there, but I process all the paperwork, get them set up with their payroll taxes and stuff, give them their room assignments, so I’m usually the first person at the mine all the employees meet. And then, you know, we all eat together in the mess hall, and play pool or foosball together in one of the lounges. We’re just starting up here, so it’s only week on, week off, and we’re still in the early stages of exploration so the crew is still small. People tend to make friends fast.”
“So you and Wayne made friends.”
Lyda nodded, sniffled, and pulled a Kleenex from her pocket. She hunted in vain for a clean spot and settled for one grubby corner that nearly disintegrated under the onslaught. “He saw that I was Native, and he was curious.” She looked at Kate. “You know. In a nice way.”
“I know,” Kate said. “Were you more than friends?”
Lyda shook her head. “No. We hadn’t even met off the site.”
The “yet” was unspoken but implied.
Kate hesitated. “What was his attitude before he disappeared? Was he happy? Sad? Frightened? Excited?”
Lyda looked around for a trash can, didn’t find one, and pocketed the very used Kleenex instead. “He told me he suffered from depression.”
“Did he say he’d been diagnosed? Did he mention a doctor?”
“He didn’t believe in doctors,” Lyda said. “And he would never have checked himself into a hospital. He said that’s where people go to die, and that when he died he wanted to be outside, in the fresh air.”
Kate pulled out a piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to Lyda. “That’s a copy of the note that was found taped to the wheel of Wayne’s pickup.”
Lyda read it. It took her a lot longer than it should have, as if she was reading it over and over again.
“Is that Wayne’s handwriting, Lyda?”
“I—I don’t know. It’s just printing, isn’t it. Anybody could have written that.” Her hand dropped and she stared over Kate’s shoulder with blank eyes, the note fluttering to the floor.
Kate stooped to pick it up. “Did he have any other friends here in camp?”
“No. Not really.”
“You remember any of the other guys he drove up with?”
Lyda shrugged. It wasn’t an answer but Kate let it pass for now. “Any other friends?”
“Maybe the people he worked with. On jobs like this people who work in the same department tend to hang out together, eat meals together, watch TV together. He didn’t talk about anyone in particular.” She sighed. “But then it was like pulling teeth to get him to talk about himself anyway. He wanted to know about me.” Her lip trembled. “First time I ever met a guy who asked me questions about myself, and actually listened to the answers. You know?”
Kate was a woman. She knew.
“The thing is, he seemed to be cheering up a little, the longer he was here. At first he wouldn’t talk at all about the future, but lately we’d been talking about traveling somewhere together on our week off. Seattle, maybe, or Hawaii.”
Kate frowned. That certainly didn’t square with the note on the steering wheel, but then suicides weren’t famous for thinking linearly. “Why did you pretend not to know him?”
Lyda picked at a hangnail. “Pretty obvious I didn’t know him. I sure didn’t know he was going to walk out into the woods so he could lay down and die.” She glanced up at Kate. “Even the elders don’t do that anymore.”
Kate persisted. “But you didn’t want me to know you were friends. Why not?”
Lyda looked out the window of that stark, bare little room and sighed. “I don’t know. Before, we were just getting to know each other. A small camp like this is such a hot house, there’s nothing to do except gossip about what everyone else is doing. I’ve made that mistake before. I didn’t want to make it again, so we didn’t spend time alone where other people could see.” She was silent for a moment. “Now, if he really did this . . . I don’t think I want anyone to know that I could be friends with such a—”
“Such a what?”
She turned her head and Kate was surprised to see the beginnings of anger in the other woman’s eyes. “Such a loser.”
For the moment, Kate was silenced.
They repacked the duffel and the daypack and returned them to the storage room. Lyda had recovered most of her self-possession, although now and then she would take in a deep breath, blink hard, and let it out on a long, slow exhale. “What did you want to see next, Ms. Shugak?”
“It’s Kate, Lyda. Is it possible to see his room?”
Lyda nodded. “It’s still empty.”
“Empty” didn’t come close to describing it. It had been scoured clean of personality, not so much as a pinup of Britney Spears left on the walls.
The only thing that looked out of place was a flyer on the desk, a professionally produced glossy trifold leaflet with a circular logo on the facing page of a robed woman holding a globe. Kate opened it and bolded phrases leaped out at her: “growth mania,” “conspicuous consumption,” “Silent Spring,” “Ban the Bomb,” “Group of 10.” There was a membership form, with a space for the amount of the applicant’s donation. Kate flipped back to the leaflet’s facing page. “Gaea,” she said. “The onshore Greenpeace, the poor man’s Environmental
Defense Fund. We’ve been seeing these all over the Park. This Gaea group sure doesn’t like your mine.” She looked at Lyda. “Was your Wayne a closet greenie? Or maybe he was undercover for the opposition.”
It had been meant as a joke but Lyda snatched up the flyer, her cheeks flushing. “There are always naysayers,” she said, toeing the corporate line with what appeared to be genuine conviction. “This kind of organization is a lot more anticorporate than Global Harvest is antienvironment. It will take two years for us to put together an environmental impact statement that is going to cost Global Harvest millions of dollars to write and millions more to implement. This Gaea is just a bunch of loud nuts who figure if they make enough noise they can get other nuts to write them checks.”
“Okay,” Kate said. “How about showing me where Wayne worked. Maybe I could meet some of the people he worked with.”
They went out to the building on the end of the back row that was serving as the warehouse. It had been gutted down to a single large room, a wall-high sliding door cut in the side facing away from camp and a rough-and-ready dock with no railing and plenty of room between the twelve-by-twelves that formed its surface. Inside the door, an overturned wooden tote served as a counter, next to which hand trucks constantly appeared and disappeared as half a dozen employees filled orders brought to the dock by other employees in pickups and on forklifts and some who just walked up in filthy coveralls, hard hats, and Xtra Tuff boots.
They were all men and while it would be unfair to say that conversation ceased abruptly when Kate and Lyda appeared on the scene, all eyes were definitely upon them as they advanced up the steps to the dock and across the floor to the tote counter. “Hi, P.J.,” Lyda said. “This is Kate Shugak. Kate, this is P.J. Bourne. He was Wayne’s supervisor.”
“P.J.,” Kate said.
“Kate,” P.J. said. He was middle-aged and rotund without being soft, unshaven and not very clean. His near-together eyes were as dark as his hair, button-bright and narrowed in perpetual distrust, as if he suspected everyone he saw of having contraband duct-taped under their shirts. He wore Carhartt bibs over red flannel underwear and his cheek bulged with a wad of chewing tobacco. He spit often and without inhibition and the floor around the tote was stained a dark brown.
“They found Wayne’s truck abandoned near Niniltna,” Lyda said. “She wants to talk to the people he worked with.”
P.J. glared at Lyda. “I don’t fucking have time for this shit.”
“Vern said to give her every facility,” Lyda said. To her credit, she did not appear intimidated.
P.J. glared at Kate. “Yeah, fuck me, Vern’s not down here making sure fucking Rig 36 has enough fucking drill pipe to finish out the fucking day shift.”
“Yeah, fuck me,” Kate said, “like I don’t have fucking anything better to do than fucking hare around after some fucking whiny little bastard who decided to fucking off himself in my fucking backyard.”