a Night Too Dark (2010) (3 page)

Auntie Vi shook her head. “They need beds for mine workers going in going out. Get stuck because of weather maybe, got business in Niniltna maybe, only house in town with enough beds for sure.” Head jerk toward the outer office. “She say save them money to buy instead of rent. She ask price. I tell her. She write check.”
Kate’s mouth opened and closed a few times with nothing coming out, which pretty much expressed her immediate reaction. Viola Moonin, lifetime Park rat, one of the original founders of the NNA, one of the grand dames of her mixed tribe of Aleuts, Athabascans, Tlingits, Haidas, and one lone Tsimshian. Not to mention the stray infusions from Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. Subsistence fisher, hunter, trapper, net mender, world-class quilter, and all-around entrepreneur, owner and proprietor of the village of Niniltna’s first and only bed-and-breakfast establishment.
Viola Moonin, one of the four aunties, the de facto moral center
of the Park, the court of its first and last appeal, and for a brief moment mercifully past, its Star Chamber.
Viola Moonin, the first to speak out against the Suulutaq Mine and the danger it represented to the environment and the lifestyle of the Park.
Viola Moonin, the first to sell out.
Outside the door Kate heard Mutt give a whine with the hint of a growl on the end of it, audible enough that she must have her nose jammed into the crack. Mutt didn’t like being shut on the other side of any door between her and Kate. “What are you going to do?” she said.
Another jerk of the head. “Run it for them. They pay me.” Auntie Vi smiled, and the resultant baring of teeth engendered a remarkable resemblance to the half husky half wolf on the other side of the door. “They pay good.”
Haynes and Maggie turned their heads when the door to Jim’s office opened again. Mutt thrust her nose beneath Kate’s hand and the feel of that thick gray pelt against her skin steadied her. She took a deep breath and looked at Maggie. “She’s made up her mind. It’s a fair offer. Let’s get this done.”
Maggie notarized the bill of sale, Kate witnessed it, and Maggie made copies for everyone.
Kate folded hers into quarters and was tucking it into a hip pocket when the front door opened again. All four women looked around and beheld Father Smith, who removed his stained leather hat with undeniable grace. “Ladies.”
“Mr. Smith,” Maggie said, accent on the honorific. Kate nodded, Auntie Vi stared right through him, and when no introduction was forthcoming Haynes said, “Holly Haynes, Suulutaq Mine.”
“Father Smith of Beaver Creek.”
In spite of his attention to his manners Father Smith looked less
affable than usual. In fact, Kate thought, he looked downright worried.
“How can I help you, Mr. Smith?” Maggie said.
“I found an abandoned truck on the road into my homestead,” he said.
They listened to his story in silence. Maggie looked at Kate. “I don’t know when Jim’ll be back.”
“You go find that one now or dead him,” Auntie Vi said. “Maybe dead already anyway.”
Haynes’s eyes widened, but as usual Auntie Vi had summed it up in a manner that would have pleased Strunk and White. “When was the last time you were down that road, Mr. Smith?” Kate said.
He thought. “Ten days ago.”
“Your family been into town since you been gone?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it. Nothing to come into town for.”
He met her eyes with a bland expression, and whatever opinions Kate might have had about his family’s need to leave their remote homestead she had learned the hard way last year to keep to herself. “So, the pickup might have been abandoned there an hour after you left,” she said.
He nodded.
“Or an hour before you got there.” Kate looked at Maggie. “I’ll go get a Grosdidier, and then we’ll go up and get Dan O’Brian.” The four Grosdidier brothers were the Park’s EMT team, and Dan O’Brian was the Park’s chief ranger.
Maggie nodded. “I’ll tell Jim what’s up when he gets back.”
The Grosdidier driveway was full so Kate had to park on the road. Smith waited in the pickup. Mutt followed Kate.
It was a two-story, two-bathroom, four-bedroom house, typical of the post–log cabin construction boom in the Park in the mid-
seventies. It was always cheaper to go up, requiring a smaller foundation in construction and less in the way of heat in operation. A detached garage the size of a small hangar stood to the left. Both buildings fronted the river. An aging but sturdy dock was built on the bank, to which was moored a thirty-six-foot drifter named
Audra Sue
, resplendent in a brand-new coat of white paint. Kate paused with her hand on the door for a closer look. Yes, the brand-new red trim line began at the bow with a square cross. She had to smile.
She pushed open the door and stepped into a small room crowded with mismatched chairs that had all seen better days. A large empty wooden spool sat in the middle of the room, laden with magazines ranging from
Guns & Ammo
to
Cosmopolitan
. The
Redbook
issue facing Kate’s direction had a picture of the original Charlie’s Angels on it.
Kate had barely enough time to see that several of the chairs were occupied before a small form impacted her legs with such force she almost went over backward. “Kate! Kate! Kate!”
“Katya!” She scooped up the four-year-old and tossed her in the air.
Katya laughed her delightful chuckling laugh. “Do it again!”
Kate did it again and then set her down with a grunt. “You’re getting too big for shot put, girlfriend.”
Katya was promptly attacked by Mutt, who used her nose to roll Katya around the room. Katya giggled some more, and squealed when her
South Park
T-shirt rode up and Mutt’s wet nose pressed against her bare back.
Kate smiled at Dinah. “Hey. The brat okay?”
Dinah, a wispy, blue-eyed blonde, Bobby Clark’s wife, Katya’s mother, and a practicing videographer, looked up from
Time
magazine’s special report edition on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to smile and shake her head. “She needed her polio booster.”
“Where’s Bobby?”
“On the air.”
“Oh yeah? What frequency?”
Dinah shrugged. “You know it changes every day.”
“I know.”
Eknaty Kvasnikof was there, elbow resting on the arm of his chair, holding a hand wrapped in a bloody piece of cloth straight up. He nodded. “Kate.”
“Natty.” She nodded at his hand and raised her eyebrows.
He grimaced. “Working on the engine. Trying to work a bolt loose.” He shook his head.
He looked tired, and there was an anxious crease in his forehead. A recent graduate of Niniltna High, Eknaty was skippering the family drifter for the first time this summer. He was the oldest, there were five younger sisters and brothers back home, and a father with lung cancer.
Kate thought for a moment, while Mutt stepped up and pushed her nose beneath Natty’s hand. He rubbed her ears, a faint smile lightening his features.
“Would Willard be any use to you, Natty?” Kate said.
Natty looked up. “Jesus, Kate.” It was all he said, but it was heartfelt.
She nodded. “He’s up the post. Tell Maggie I said to release him into your custody. You have to keep him working, you understand? You can’t let him stray off on his own, you’ve got to keep tabs on him.”
Natty looked uncertain. “What about when the job’s done?”
“We’ll worry about that then. Shouldn’t be a problem so long as you keep him in cookies and candy bars. Keep him busy and out of trouble, and he’ll keep your engine purring like a cat on overtime.” Her hand rested on his shoulder for a brief moment. She turned to the woman sitting a few chairs down. “Ulanie.”
Ulanie Anahonak was a thin, tense woman with scant dark hair, a
sallow complexion, and a gaze so intense Kate had often wondered if she were myopic. “Kate,” she said, and turned back to leafing through an issue of
Ladies’ Home Journal
with Nancy Reagan on the cover.
The door to the clinic opened and Matt Grosdidier’s voice was heard. “If you’d come here right away, Phyllis, right when you knew—”
“I told you, I didn’t—” The woman’s tearful voice came to an abrupt halt when Phyllis Lestinkof turned her head and met Ulanie Anahonak’s eyes.
There was a brief silence that felt somehow uncomfortable, although Kate did not know why. “Hey, Phyllis,” Kate said.
Phyllis looked away from Ulanie, it seemed with something of an effort. Her smile was strained. “Hey, Kate.” A plump young woman with a round, brown face and hair in a pixie cut that made her look like a post–Frank Sinatra Mia Farrow, if Mia had been Aleut, Phyllis was, for a miracle, sober. She didn’t look happy, although Kate hoped it wasn’t because of lack of alcohol.
Phyllis glanced at Matt and flushed. She took a deep, albeit shaky breath and summoned up a smile, looking straight at Kate and only at Kate. “Nice to see you,” she said, “gotta go, Auntie’s waiting on me.”
The door closed softly behind her on its hydraulic hinge.
“Kate,” Matt said. “What’s up?”
He met her eyes with apparent frankness, but she noticed he was showing a little color, too. She refrained from casting a meaningful look at the door that had closed behind Phyllis Lestinkof and said instead, “Got somebody lost in the woods up near the Smith place. I want a Grosdidier to go with when we go looking for him, in case he’s hurt when we find him.”
Matt blinked at her, tilted his head back, and raised his voice, already a fine, stentorian baritone. “Mark, Luke, Pete! Get the lead out, let’s clear the waiting room.”
Thirty minutes later Eknaty had stitches and a bandage and
Katya a red spot on her upper arm and a cherry lollipop. Ulanie had departed on Phyllis’s heels without treatment or explanation. The four Grosdidier brothers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Peter, took no notice, they were too busy hoping out loud that they’d find the driver of the truck alive. Barely alive, preferably, with multiple open wounds. Broken bones would be a bonus, an open fracture best of all, multiple open fractures nirvana. They checked the massive aluminum tool chest bolted in the back of their fire-engine-yellow (custom painted) Chevy Silverado, in which was stowed a vast array of medical paraphernalia that for all anyone in the Park knew included a cure for cancer. For sure no Grosdidier had ever dived inside it and come up at a loss for what was needed at the scene. The Niniltna Native Association had paid for most of it. Kate had a sneaking suspicion that the NNA had paid for the Silverado, too, but she’d never had the heart to go back and look at the records to be sure.
“All present and accounted for!” Mark said.
“Lock and load!” Luke said.
“Let’s roll!” Peter said.
Matt said, “Okay, boys, let’s saddle up.” The four of them piled into the two bench seats of the extended cab, Matt as usual at the wheel, and if they could have peeled out they would have. As it was, gravel sprayed the wall of the garage and everything hanging on it received yet another layer of chips and dings. They stayed on Kate’s bumper all the way up to the Step, where the two-car convoy parked in front of the group of prefabricated buildings that made up Park headquarters. Tucked against a Quilak foothill, the Canadian border at their back and the Park rolling out before them in all its glory, the view was superb out of any window. The Step, a wide, level ridge running north-south, had enough room for a dirt strip big enough for a Cessna 180 to get out with a full load of confiscated bear bladders, moose racks, walrus tusks, and fur pelts illegally harvested from wolves, wolverines, beaver, mink, and marten.
Dan was in his office.
He was not alone. Standing, or rather slumping across the desk from him, was a sad sack of a guy, midforties, brown hair and eyes, medium height, medium build, with a chin and a waist that both showed distinct signs of regular meals. His chin also bore trace evidence of having tried to grow a beard but it just wasn’t in the cards. His Carhartt overalls were worn at the elbows and knees and looked as if they had begun life on a far smaller man. His boots were used, the toe of the right boot having been punctured with what might have been the claw of a hammer, or maybe a hatchet. He carried threadbare musher gloves leaking down feathers that when donned would reach to his elbows and a flapped cap with the right earflap missing.
He was arguing with the chief ranger. Any Park rat could have told him that was a lost cause. “You want to hike up to Bright Lake?” Dan said. “At this time of year? With the snow still twelve feet deep in some places? Why?”
“I like the name,” the guy said.
Dan was rendered momentarily speechless.
“It doesn’t matter where I want to go,” the guy said. “You told me to come back when I got geared up. Well, here I am, all geared up.”
Dan surveyed said gear, which looked like it had been excavated from the nearest trash pile, and didn’t bother to hide his contempt. “Mr. Davis, you said you wanted to spend a month covering a hundred miles in the Park. I’m telling you that, uh, gear you’ve managed to scare up from god knows where won’t last you fifty feet.”
“You saw my tent,” the guy said, “it’s a good one.”
“It was a good one,” Dan said.
“And I’ve got an emergency locator transmitter.” This last was said with a good deal of pride.
“Yeah,” Dan said, “well, I’m not signing any permit for you just so I can come haul your ass out when you stumble into trouble, which sure as shit you will, and set off your ELT, which also sure as
shit you will. Now get out of my goddamn office, and don’t come back until you’ve got a fucking clue as to what you’re doing!”
Kate thought of Maggie. Happy Memorial Day, everybody.
Davis, red-faced and sullen, clumped past Kate and the Grosdidiers without speaking. His boots weren’t laced and they must have been too big because one of them almost slipped off his foot. He tripped on the threshold and the Grosdidiers might have had their first Kate-related case of the day then and there if Pete and Matt hadn’t caught him and set him upright again. He yanked his arms free of their grasp and clumped off without a word of thanks.
Dan looked around and acquired Kate as a target. “And what the hell do you want?”
A little over medium height, thickset without being fat, red hair cut in a buzz, and bright blue eyes glowering from beneath a shelf of a brow, the chief ranger of the Park was not to be trifled with in this mood. She told him what the hell she wanted without excess verbiage. The Grosdidier boys kept their mouths shut. It seemed safest.
“Fuck me,” Dan said, his mouth a tight line. “Not another one.”
“Another one?” Kate said. She didn’t want to set him off again but this sounded interesting. And possibly relevant.