The Shaman's Knife (13 page)

I left the note telling Bouvier what I was up to and took the van. I knocked on the door of number 5 and was told by the huge woman who answered that cops were a pain in the ass, and to fuck off, she'd told Barker and Bouvier all she knew, which was nothing. In number 4 a thin and evasive Inuk with untidy hair and mustache just stood there shaking his head and saying he and his wife also had told police all he knew, which was nothing. Number 1 was empty. Number 3 was still locked on the grisly aftermath of the murders that the forensics guy and I would open tomorrow. That left one house in which, all along, I had pinned hopes for more information. I knocked on Annie's door.

“I thought you might come and see us!” Annie Kavyok said happily. Big hug, and surely I could stay for dinner, she urged. Sleep here again too, any time I wished to get away, relax. She was talking as if I was going to be here forever, which with all due respect I hoped would not be the case. And my mother? she asked. I told her the disturbing news, but that I hoped it would be better tomorrow. Her boy and girl hung back, smiling at me in the warm kitchen. Tonight she was serving a baked Arctic char stuffed with bread crumbs mixed with fennel. We ate fish, rice, bannock, pie, drank tea.

If she'd been someone I knew better, things might have gone faster. I might have mentioned that I had spent some time that day with Jonassie the shaman, might even have mentioned the missing knife in case she ever heard or saw anything of such a knife; but I did not. In talking of the food at the hotel I did mention Margaret, and thought I noted a brief darkening of Annie's determinedly upbeat manner. Why? Or did I just imagine that?

Eventually, when the kids had gone to the TV set and we were drinking tea in the kitchen, I had to face that I had come there for a purpose. There was a lot to like in Annie, as if I hadn't judged that already, and now the time had come to learn more of what she knew.

I said, “I'm wondering if you can help me with something.”

Her smile evaporated. Her face was full of regret.

“Not much about that night, as you know. I was right out of it. I keep thinking if I hadn't been, none of this might have happened.”

Without mentioning that the information came from Margaret, I told her that I understood that sometimes Dennis brought girls home and sneaked them in past Thelma when she was asleep.

“That's right,” she said quietly. “I sometimes saw them. I don't always sleep like the dead.”

“You saw some well enough to know who they were?”

She nodded several times, slowly, even reluctantly. “You know, my work here, a lot of it is with families with troubles at home, money or drink or kids that get into trouble. I've been here three years now. There's hardly anybody in town I don't know. Also, I'm a member of the Inumerit.”

I felt a flash of interest. The Inumerit. In some settlements committees going by that old Inuit name were making a comeback. In the old days, before northern courts began to travel more and more to try cases where they had happened, if someone offended the rules or taboos of a settlement the Inumerit would deal with the case. It was like a loose committee of a dozen, more or less, of a settlement's most mature and respected people. They would gather in one place, summon the miscreant, and simply talk turkey.

I'd often pictured it. There in the middle would be some miserable male or female offender facing the entire power structure of the settlement. They'd be talking quietly but insistently and the accused would be listening, maybe arguing, but vastly outgunned. In a court case I'd once been part of, a defense witness, a psychiatrist, had summarized the Inumerit process as “continuing confrontational counseling,” with the emphasis on “continuing.” The message from the elders would be that their community could only exist in comfort and safety if certain rules were obeyed by all. The rules and ethics of decent Inuit life would be hammered home by elder after elder, world without end, the aim being to get the offender to promise to go straight. It worked more often than not, the prize being that without involving the official law at all the offender would be allowed to reform among his own people. At the same time the community would keep a person that some of them, relatives, friends, did not wish to lose no matter what he or she had done.

Cheaper and better than penitentiaries by a long shot.

Should this fail, however, the Inumerit of old could and sometimes did exercise its final solution: ban the accused from community life, tell him or her to get out and make a life elsewhere. This was a step that, in the open tundra in cruel weather and with little or no food available, sometimes had fatal consequences.

With the coming of police and courts to even the smallest settlements, the Inumerit system vanished for a time; but in recent years it had arisen again in some communities, using modern counseling methods to head off trouble, if possible, before the law got involved. Some judges now routinely sought opinions from the Inumerit, the opinions usually being to go easy on jail terms and let the community have a go at rehabilitating one of its own.

When a judge does go easy, sometimes the prosecution appeals and then legal arguments about the status and effectiveness of the Inumerit make it into court records. If a defense lawyer thinks he can make some yards by invoking the Inumerit as a traditional form of counseling by elders that has proved more effective among native people than putting people in jail, he uses Inumerit witnesses in seeking a lighter sentence. If a crown attorney thinks his prosecution case can be helped by pooh-poohing the Inumerit as being just a way of avoiding the punishment the law calls for, he'll argue that way.

When Annie Kavyok told me she served in the local Inumerit, then, it meant that she would know in individual detail those local people who got into trouble, what kind of trouble it was, and how they reacted to insistence that they must reform.

I told her what I had in mind, that it would help me if I could learn what usually happened when Dennis led someone, innocent or experienced, up those stairs next door; what inducements he might have used; whether other men were ever involved. To learn that, I had to have names. “The whole idea is to bring me closer to understanding what happened that night,” I said. “How it could have happened. Who could have been involved.”

“I don't know . . .” She faltered. “I don't know whether the effectiveness of what I do here, both in and out of the Inumerit, could survive . . . I've spent these years trying to get the people to trust me, let me help.”

She paused, thinking it out. Silently, I tried to lead her thoughts and responsibilities a step or two past her apprehensions. Whether I succeeded, or whether she got there all on her own, I don't know. But she got there.

“On the other hand,” she said, thinking aloud, “by getting this murderer even at the cost of hurting some people, maybe others will be saved.”

I let out a long breath. “Could you give me a list of girls or men you've seen Dennis bringing home?”

She paused for one more instant, then reached for a notepad near her telephone and began to list the names. I read them as she wrote, hesitantly, pausing to think; Sarah, Agnes, Leah, Maisie . . . Maisie!

She might have caught my surprise. “Maisie was a little different,” she said, looking up. “I was still watching only a few minutes later when she came running out, which was not really a surprise to me. Some others I saw a lot more than once. I only did see Maisie the once.”

Which, of course, was more than Maisie had told Margaret about. Or had Margaret been telling me less than she knew because it might place Maisie among the murder suspects? She also hadn't told me about the flying football player in Calgary. I wondered if there was more untold about Maisie.

Around eight or a little later, still with daylight outside from the setting sun, Annie's phone rang. “I didn't want to call and interrupt something,” Bouvier said. “But I thought you'd like to know. Davidee rode in on a snowmobile a little while ago, pulled up at his parents' home, went in, and hasn't come out. So I guess he's staying there.”

It was hard to avoid some sense of shock that he would be moving back in with the family whose life he had damaged so much. There might be places in the world where such a prodigal son would come back and be accepted again, but I didn't know any.

“I'm coming in,” I said. “See you in a few minutes.”

When I got there and parked the van I walked over to the window that faced up the misty hill to the house that Bouvier had pointed out to me earlier, which now once again housed Davidee.

Bouvier, watching me, said nothing.

Still, Davidee. I had to start somewhere. I kept hearing his name but so far had never spoken to him—or seen him except that once, so briefly. Now he was so close to the detachment that if he did stay there Bouvier and I and anyone else in here would often see him coming and going. I was thinking of incidents, habits that might tell me something. Did he usually walk fast, slow, run, amble? Was he usually alone or with people? Would he be ever, never, or often seen with his father or mother or sister or sister's little daughter?

I thought about it a little more as I looked out of the window at the house where some kind of drama would be going on now, quietly or otherwise. A dim light showed through the kitchen window at Davidee's house, with an occasional shape moving around inside.

“I think I'll go up and meet the famous Davidee,” I said. Bouvier got up immediately, thought he should come, too. I said no. I pulled on parka, hat, and mitts. When I stepped outside and headed toward the house the sky was darkening and a cold wind rising.

Bouvier would be watching. All he would see was me trudging up the slope. A dog chained outside one of the other houses set up a frantic barking. When I got to the house the outer door wasn't latched. In the vestibule there was the usual jumble of clothing on wall hooks. I could hear voices from inside. I moved some boots out of the way and knocked. The voices ceased and the door was opened a few seconds later by a young woman carrying a child.

I took her to be Debbie. She looked to be around twenty, not especially pretty but smiling, cheerful-looking, with thick spectacles, her hair in neat plaits, wearing jeans and a beaded vest over a clean yellow blouse. The table had not yet been cleared after their meal. Davidee was not in evidence. Sitting at the table behind Debbie were the man and woman I'd seen only from a distance. Both looked old far beyond their years, which couldn't have been much past the late forties, being parents of Davidee and Debbie.

The man was particularly wasted-looking, thin, showing ruined teeth when his mouth dropped open. He looked scared. Maybe this was his permanent expression. He was dressed in filthy pants, shirt, layers of pullover store-bought clothing, and slippers of worn sealskin. The woman at the table had not turned her head but was glancing at me sideways from under thick eyebrows. She was wearing a neat handknit sweater with a pattern of caribou and polar bears and foxes across the breast. A ribbon was tied around thick graying hair that hung, not untidily, to her shoulders. Her sleeves were folded back on painfully thin, almost fleshless forearms. Large veins stood out on the backs of her long-fingered hands.

The bright-looking very young girl Debbie had been carrying I figured to be Julie, the one Bouvier had told me about, the one with the pink sunglasses (not now in evidence, of course). She had a round and well-fed look, bright eyes, the kind of apple cheeks that shine out of glossy government-produced tourist publications purporting to show the happy real people of the north. The table was strewn with remains of their meal: teapot, a plate of bannock, margarine, a milk jug, mugs, a platter with still one piece of fried fish on it.

Until then, no one had spoken. I said in Inuktitut that I was a visiting police and had come to speak with Davidee.

The girl I'd taken to be Debbie looked at me sharply and went back to the table with the young child in her arms. Where was Davidee? Had he gone out unnoticed? Then there was a sleepy groan back in the house and the sound of feet hitting the floor. I thought maybe he'd been asleep, roused by my knock on the door, or my voice. A straggling curtain to one of the back rooms was pulled aside. Davidee stood in the doorway in jeans, a singlet, and thick gray woolen socks. His expression was that of someone whose sleep has been disturbed and who didn't particularly like it, but there was nothing overtly antagonistic in his manner. The half-bald head showed hair brushed over his ears on both sides from where it ended in mid-scalp.

“Looking for Davidee?” he asked.

“Matteesie Kitologitak, RCMP,” I said. “I'm working on the murders. Thought you might help with a couple of things.”

“I'm not Davidee,” he said. He had an open, assured smile beneath a thin mustache that curled down past the edges of his lips. “I'm Byron Anolak, Debbie's boyfriend, and I don't know anything about the murders.”

“He
is
Davidee,” Debbie said, quietly.

For an instant, Davidee glared at her. Then he sighed in an exaggerated way, but still smiled. “Just joking.”

“Don't joke with me about these murders,” I said. We locked eyes. He did not drop his. Neither did I drop mine. If Debbie hadn't walked between us waving her hands and saying, “Oh, for Christ's sake,” maybe we would be there yet.

“I've got a few questions,” I said.

“So ask ahead,” Davidee said in English.

First I studied him. Even though I wouldn't have been fooled into taking him as Byron Anolak, Debbie had stuck her knife in. And it was a knife. Whatever he felt about her, he seemed to hide it. What she thought about him, I could see from her eyes, was open contempt. What would ever make him think that she, of all people, would go along with the gag that he was not Davidee?

She spoke again. “If you had believed that he was Byron and had asked if we had any idea where you might find him, we would have answered, ‘Who ever knows where Davidee is?' The real Davidee, I mean. Which is true, as you can see.” A reference, I thought, to his companionable manner.