Season of Death (30 page)

Emma frowned. “Uncle was right. You don’t believe.”

“Well …” Ray tried to think of a polite way to explain that no, he didn’t believe in superstitious mumbo jumbo. He was a college graduate. A police officer. A citizen of the modern world.

Ray had once been assisted by a shaman in an investigation of a
real
murder. Aside from that, and three decades of Grandfather rambling on about
tuungak
and
piinjilak,
he had never paid much attention to, much less placed stock in, the supernatural.

“Believe not por-tant,” Uncle suggested. “You Light-walka. You protect Keera.”

“Right …” he groaned. Setting his fork down, he wiped his mouth with the paper napkin. “Thank you for lunch. It was delicious. But now I have to be going.”

Uncle jabbed a finger at him. “You wait.” His eyebrows rose. “Till after dee-sert.”

“But I have to find a radio and …”

“No got radio,” Uncle said. “Got cell phone though.” He shifted in his chair, produced a cellular, and handed it to Ray. “Stand up.”

Ray squinted at him, then glanced at Emma. “Huh?”

“Stand up. Better re-spection.”

“Reception,” Emma corrected with a smile. “If you sit, there’s more static.” She rose to clear the plates and attend to dessert while Uncle extracted his dentures and inspected them for food particles. Ray stood there, feeling like Dorothy mired in Oz.

He dialed in his calling-card number from memory, still taken aback by the fact that an aging “seer” carried a Motorola. The line rang three times, and Ray was on the verge of hanging up, and skipping out—
pte-dee-sert—
when Betty answered. “Barrow PD.”

“Betty …? Ray.”

“Hey, there. How’s the potlatch?”

Ray glanced at Uncle. He was working a tiny strip of caribou out of the back molars with a penknife. “Oh, just great.”

“Your buddies just radioed in. They’re about thirty minutes out. Sounds like things got a little hairy. According to Lewis, you’re all lucky to be alive.”

“Lewis is lucky to be alive in more ways than one.”

She laughed. “He said you were hanging around to do some police work?”

“Yeah. Sort of. Did Lewis mention how Billy Bob was doing?”

“Said he was doing fine. There’s a doctor waiting at the airport to patch him up.”

“Good.” Ray started to sit down but a surge of static forced him up again.

“Ray? You still there?”

“Yeah. Listen Betty, I need you to do me a favor. I need you to contact the State Historic Preservation Office in Juneau. See if a Mark Farrell has been in there recently.”

There was a pause then, “Will do. Is there a number where I can reach you?”

Ray frowned. If he hung around for dessert … “Yeah. If you can get right back to me.” He read her the number on the phone. “Say, what about that missing-person report?”

“Nothing’s been filed. No one lost in the central Bush in the past two weeks.”

“Okay.” Ray watched as Emma glided in with four plates of blackberry pie. She set one at the empty seat.Apparently the invisible caribou spirit had a sweet tooth. “Well … See what you can turn up in Juneau. I’ll be waiting to hear.”

“Sure thing, honey. Talk to you in ten.”

After pressing
END
, Ray repeated the procedure, entering his calling card, and dialing a number. Emma had returned to the kitchen, probably for coffee. Uncle was replacing his dentures, cursing as he fought to get them straight.

“Hello?!” a distraught voice answered on the first ring.

“Margaret?”

“Ray? Oh, I was so worried.”

“About what?”

“About you. I thought something had happened. Where are you?”

“Kanayut.”

“When are you coming home?” She sniffed several times.

“Are you crying?”

“I … I was … Before you called.”

“Why?”

“I told you, I was worried.”

Although Margaret sometimes worried, she seldom wept in concern for his safety.

“I … I had a dream …” she admitted.

Aha! He knew that something had driven her to tears. “What sort of dream?”

“It was horrible. You were floating in space with this … this … head. It was ghastly. A head—no body or anything. And it was kind of chasing you. You were trying to get away, to swim away.”

“I thought I was in space,” he said, sighing at the chillingly familiar description.

“A watery kind of space. Anyway, when you finally got to dry land, there was this girl waiting for you. She was just a kid, maybe ten. And she took you into the woods. You were looking for someone. Someone evil. And you … you … you found them.”

“Margaret, it was just a dream, okay?”

“That’s not all.”

Great … “Listen, honey, you know what we read about the first trimester …”

“Raymond Attla! I am not being overly emotional!” she shouted back.

“Okay … Settle down …”

She blew air into the phone. “Anyway, in the last part of the dream, you were running from this … this person with an ax.”

Person with an ax? “Jack Nicholson?”

“Raymond!” she warned. After a deep breath, she asked tenderly. “When are you coming home?”

Emma had retaken her seat, and Uncle was digging into his pie. “As soon as I can.”

“Be careful.”

“I always am,” he responded glibly.

“No. I mean it, Ray. Be careful. That dream may not have meant a thing. But … I’ve got a bad feeling about what you’re doing.”

Ray wondered how she could have a bad feeling about it when she didn’t even know what it was. “Okay. I’ll be careful.”

“I love you.”

“Love you too.” Snapping the phone shut, he sat down and addressed his dessert.

“You listen woman,” Uncle muttered. “She friend Light. Know Nahani evil.”

Uncle had obviously been eavesdropping on the conversation. “Right,” Ray patronized. He tried the pie. It was as good as it smelled.

There was a noise down the hall, and the floor creaked as someone approached.

“Sorry I’m late, Uncle.” It was a girl. She was maybe eight or ten, dressed in a ceremonial skirt, her long black hair held in check by a beaded headband.

Uncle replied in Athabascan, then motioned her to the empty chair. “Dis Raymond Attla,” he told her. “Light-walka.” Another sentence of Athabascan followed.

The girl’s eyebrows rose.

Grinning at Ray, Uncle said, “Dis Keera.”

Ray smiled, relieved that she was a real person, not a spirit. “Nice to meet you.”

“You go together,” Uncle said, lifting a forkful of blackberries and crust.

“Go together?” Ray wondered aloud. Where? To the potlatch?

Uncle nodded curtly. “Hunt find Nahani.”

THIRTY-TWO

R
AY’S CONFUSION WAS
complete. Uncle expected this girl to help him find Farrell’s murderer, the evil woodsman? This was getting irritating. “I really have to be going.”

“First tell crates,” Uncle said.

The girl sat up straight in her chair and looked at Ray with two piecing brown eyes. She suddenly seemed much older. Ten years more mature than her actual age.

“I found the crates one day after school,” she began. “I was walking along the river with some of my friends, and we saw them stacked in the bushes. There were branches over them, like they were supposed to be hidden. They had funny markings on the sides. Not English. Not Athabascan. Some kind of Asian language, I think.

“Excuse me.” She took a long drink of juice. “The dancing made me thirsty.”

Ray nodded. Keera was cute, seemingly normal. He wondered how that was possible in this household. Maybe she didn’t live here. Maybe she visited on holidays.

“Anyway, we tried to open one, but it was nailed shut. Finally we got a rock and pried one of the boards off.

Usually I wouldn’t do that. It’s wrong to bother other people’s things. But this time, I had a special feeling. The Voice told me to open it.”

“Voice?”

“Keera too is a seer,” Emma explained.

“She see into spirits,” Uncle insisted. “I teach.”

Bingo! Another loon. Spirits … Voices … If the girl was hearing voices, she needed professional help, not praise from her elders or training in shamanism.

“Inside we saw bones. Then someone came up the trail and we ran away.”

Fascinating, Ray thought. He could see the lead article in
National Geographic
: Athabascan Sybil discovers crate full of bones. Earthshaking.

“What do you think?” Emma prodded.

Ray wanted to tell her that he thought the entire family was short on marbles. Instead, he shrugged. “Maybe someone gathered up some caribou carcasses.”

“I don’t think they were caribou,” Keera said. She reached into a skirt pocket, pulled out a three-inch-long, off-white stone and handed it across the table to Ray.

“What is it?” he asked, squinting.

“I took it from the crate,” she admitted, blushing. “The Voice said it was all right.”

Examining it, Ray decided that the girl was probably right. Not about it being okay to steal something from the crate or about listening to and obeying disembodied voices. But about the identity of the bone. It didn’t appear to be from a caribou. It almost looked like a finger. A fossilized human digit. Either that or a petrified moose dropping.

“The others were mostly longer,” Keera said.

“You’re sure they were bones?”

“The Voice said so,” she said soberly. “The Voice said they were from people.”

This Voice was handy to have around, Ray decided. Insanity had its benefits.

Without provocation, Uncle suddenly hijacked the conversation. launching into a rambling tale about ho Raven had tricked Whale. The clever bird had lured Whale by claiming that the two of them were cousins. To prove this, he had them compare mouths. When Whale stupidly opened his, Raven flew in and took up residence in the mammal’s stomach, and spent several days slowly consuming his host from the inside. Eventually he cut out the Whale’s heart, killing him.

Uncle related the graphic fable in broken English, apparently for Ray’s benefit. When he had finished, he looked at Ray expectantly. “Know meaning?”

More like, “no” meaning,
Ray thought. The moral seemed to be keep your mouth shut.

“Know meaning?” Uncle demanded. He mumbled something in Athabascan. Then, “Nahani … Raven and Whale … Same. But not same.”

Ray felt a headache coming on. There was supposed to be some link between the business about the villainous woodsman and this myth that pitted Raven against Whale?

“I have to get going,” he said in something of a whine. This was torture. Rising, he extended his hand. “Emma, wonderful meal. It was nice to meet you.” Turning, he faced Uncle. “It was nice to meet you too.”

Uncle sniffed at his hand. “You go Keera. Help hunt Nahani. She wait long. You slow come.”

“She’ll have to look for Nahani on her own. I’ve got to get back to Barrow.”

Uncle was horrified. “No! Must got Light-walka. Protect. No Light-walka, Nahani steal. Keera stealed.”

“I can’t go without you,” Keera explained. “The Voice says so.”

“Please,” Emma implored. “You must.”

Ray blinked at them. Hunt for Nahani? These people actually expected him to set out into the wilderness and beat the bushes in search of some mythological character? That was crazy. And conducting this ludicrous hunt with a prepubescent girl …?” Surely this was a joke.

“Must go,” Uncle implored gravely. “Much important. We wait long. Must go.”

Whatever. It was obvious that Uncle was out of his tree. The same with Emma and Keera. Humoring them might be the best strategy. He was ready to do just about anything in order to break out of the Colchuck asylum for the mentally deranged. Even agree to play nursemaid to a young, promising, seer. Maybe he could deposit Keera with Jackie Miller. Then it would just be a matter of lining up a floatplane and …

Uncle grunted as the cellular buzzed. He pushed the device at Ray.

Flipping it open, he hit the receive button. “Betty?’’ he nearly plead.

“Your Dr. Farrell never made it to Juneau,” she reported. “Or at least, if he did, he never checked into a hotel or filed any papers. I contacted the usual Bush plane services. Nobody flew a Dr. Farrell out of Kanayut.”