Whisper to the Blood (15 page)

"Everybody does," Kate said. "Helps that everybody gets one.
Makes them feel real proprietary about the fund. If their lawyer had wanted
them to get a fair trial, he should have petitioned for a change of venue, to a
courtroom out of state."

"Uh-huh," Pete said, clearly not attending.

"Something you wanted, Pete?"

He did his best to look wounded. "Can't I just sit down and have a
friendly cup of coffee?"

"No," Kate said.

To his credit, Pete laughed. "Yeah, okay, you never were one for the
bullshit, Katie. Okay." He faced her squarely. "I hear you're the new
chair of the Niniltna Association board of directors."

"Interim," Kate said. "Interim chair. The membership may
decide differently when they vote in January." As she devoutly hoped they
would.

"Yeah, okay, interim. But you're chair now."

"I am. What do you want, Pete?"

He cocked an eye. "Word is it was a pretty interesting first
meeting."

Kate stiffened. "That wouldn't be any of your business, now, Pete,
would it?"

"No," he said hastily. "None at all."

His thoughts were pretty plain on his face. Kate Shugak had once had a
pretty robust sense of humor, and instead of squashing his interest in the
board meeting she had only ratcheted it up a notch. He wouldn't rest until he
got all the gory details, and he'd probably be telling the story for years to
come, too. Him and Harvey, it would be like getting it in stereo. Wonderful.
"So?" she said.

He shrugged, but the tension in his shoulders gave him away. "Well, as
the new NNA chair, a lot of us are wondering what kind of stand you're going to
take on the Suulutaq Mine."

Her eyebrows raised. "That would be my business," she said
blandly. "And the board's, and the shareholders'. Why do you ask?"

He snorted. "Ah, Jesus, Katie, you know damn well why I'm asking.
Global Harvest is going to bring a lot of jobs into my district."

"And a three-by-five-mile open pit mine into my backyard," Kate
said.

"Ah, shit," he said, half in distaste, half in dismay. "You
ain't gonna fight them on it, are you?"

"I don't know what I'm going to do yet, Pete," Kate said. She
drained her mug and rose to her feet. "And even if I did, I wouldn't tell
you before I told the board and my fellow shareholders."

He snatched up her check as she was reaching for it. "I'll get
that."

"No." The receipt tore a little as she pulled it from his hand.
"I'll get it."

His hurt feelings were well simulated, she had to give him that much.
"Shit, Katie, I've bought you coffee before."

"I wasn't chair of the board, before," she said.

She paid for her espresso and left.

Outside Auntie Balasha was making obeisance to Mutt, who was accepting it
with a gracious air. "Hey, Auntie," Kate said, giving her a hug.

"Katya," Auntie Balasha said. "The dog, she look good.
Nothing bad left over from last year?"

Last year Mutt had been shot and almost killed, requiring surgery and a
week's recovery at the vet's in Ahtna, a traumatic period that Kate even now
had difficulty reliving. "She's fine, Auntie." Kate looked up and
down the narrow little street to see if anyone was in listening distance. There
wasn't, but she lowered her voice anyway. "Listen, Auntie, have any of you
seen anything of the Smith girls?"

Auntie Balasha's face darkened. "Vi keeping watch. She go out to Smith
place once a week. She even get parents to say okay for the girls to come to
her house after school sometime. When they come, they talk to Desiree."

Desiree was the school's nurse practitioner, and Auntie Balasha's
granddaughter. "What does Desiree say?"

Auntie Balasha's lips tightened and she said sternly, "Desiree never
talk about patients."

"Auntie."

Auntie Balasha sighed. "Desiree say they don't talk much, but they do
talk some. She say this is little bit of good. Maybe better later."

Kate felt a tightness in her chest ease. "Good. That's good, Auntie. I
was keeping tabs last winter but this summer I was fishing and then I was
working and—" She stopped making excuses. "I'm glad you and
Desiree and Auntie Vi are keeping tabs on them." She hesitated. "Do
they still refuse to tell their parents about what Louis did to them?"

"They don't tell parents nothing," Auntie Balasha said succinctly.

There were twenty-one kids in the Smith family. Kate wondered if it was
harder or easier to keep secrets in a family that size. Easier to hide them in
the noise, or harder to hide because of all the noses standing by to sniff them
out? She hoped for Chloe and Hannah's sakes that when their parents did find
out the girls got all the love and support they needed, but she'd seen the
family in action and she doubted it. She had Father Smith pegged as a greedy
opportunist, and Mother Smith as someone who had perfected the art of going
along. "How about you, Auntie?" she said out loud. "Everything
okay?"

"All well."

But Auntie Balasha seemed preoccupied. Kate looked at her, standing there in
her homemade calico kuspuk, lavishly trimmed with gaudy gold rickrack and
lustrous marten that she had probably trapped and tanned herself. Like all the
aunties she was comfortably plump, with long graying hair she kept bundled out
of her face, round cheeks a pleasing walnut brown, clad in skin that was by now
wrinkled like a walnut, too. She was missing a tooth, and there was a faint
scar on her left check, remnants of her marriage. It had ended when he had gone
down the boat ramp in Cordova, drunk as a skunk, tripped over his own feet, and
drowned in the harbor, leaving her with three children to feed and clothe and
shepherd into adulthood. She had succeeded, partly because she'd had the love
and support of the extended family of Park rats, and partly because she would
have sold herself on the streets of Spenard before she let her children go cold
or hungry. What Kate considered most remarkable was that she'd never heard
Auntie Balasha whine or complain. She just kept on keeping on, and when her own
children were grown and gone like Auntie Joy she had progressed to an
enthusiastic and indiscriminate adoption of every stray that wandered across
her path, strays like Martin, and Willard, and evidently now Howie, who of
course lost no time in exploiting the situation.

That thought roused Kate's protective spirit like nothing else. If Willard
and Howie were stealing fuel from Auntie Balasha again, this time she wouldn't
just beat Willard to the ground, she would eviscerate him. "What is it,
Auntie? Is there a problem? Something I can help you with?"

Auntie Balasha raised her enormous brown eyes, liquid with love and concern.
"I worry about you, Katya."

Kate was taken aback. "Worry about me?" She even laughed a little.
"Why? I'm fine."

"You live so far out of town." Auntie Balasha gestured vaguely in
the general direction of Kate's homestead. "If you get in trouble, who
help you? Who come when you call? You should live in town. I live here. Vi live
here. Joy, Edna live here. You get in trouble, we help you. We drop by more
often, check up on you, see if you okay."

The prospect of the aunties dropping in at any hour of the day or night to
check up on her froze the blood in Kate's veins. Trying to speak amiably, she
said, "That's a nice thought, Auntie, and I thank you for it, but you know
I've got Johnny with me now." Driven to it, she added, "And Jim
Chopin stops by now and then."

This artless addition got the skeptical look it deserved. "But you
chair of Association now, Katya."

Kate stiffened. "Yes."

Balasha, ignoring the warning signs, carried on. "Position of responsibility.
People need to talk to you about something, where you are? Far away! Can't walk
there, have to drive truck or snowgo. If shareholders need you, if emergency
happens, long time it takes to come get you. You should move to town."

"Auntie," Kate said, "I've got to go, I've got some business
down the road. I'll see you later, okay? Mutt. Up."

It came out as more of an order than a request and a startled Mutt scrambled
to her feet. Kate climbed on in front of her and pressed the starter. The roar
of the engine drowned out Auntie Bal-asha's further remonstrances. Kate smiled
tightly, tossed her a cheerful wave, and got the hell out of town.

But not out of Dodge, as it turned out. One step into the Roadhouse she
walked slap into Martin Shugak, who smirked at her. "Madam Chair. Got a
motion I'd like to run by you. Or do I mean over you?"

She told him what to do with his motion and marched up to the bar, ears
burning from the snickering that came from Martin's knot of misfits,
malcontents, and misdemeanors in waiting, a group that encouraged Martin to
temporarily forget all the ways she could hurt him if she put her mind to it.

"Kate," Bernie said. He'd undoubtedly heard the story, too, but he
was a little wiser in the ways of Kate Shugak than Martin was and he refrained
from comment. With her usual insouciance Mutt reared up, paws on the bar, and
panted at Bernie, who snagged the usual package of beef jerky and tossed it her
way. He put a can of Diet 7UP and a glass full of ice in front of Kate and
moved down to the end of the bar, where Nick Waterbury sat, arms around what
appeared to be not his first beer of the day. She frowned and checked the clock
on the wall. Not even three o'clock. Nick was a lot of things but he wasn't a
boozer. "Hey, Nick," she said. "How you doing."

"Fine, Kate. No worries." He didn't look up and his dreary voice
contradicted his words. "How's Eve?"

"She's fine. We're just fine."

Since they'd lost their daughter Mary two years before at the hands of Louis
Deem, who had walked on the charge, Kate doubted the veracity of that
statement. "Tell her I'll be out in a couple of days. I'm jonesing for her
coffee cake."

"Sure," Nick said. "Whatever."

Now that it seemed safe Bernie slid back down the bar. "How are you
holding up?" she said.

He didn't blow her off and he didn't sugarcoat it. "I'm
maintaining."

"Just maintaining?"

"It'll do. For now, it'll have to."

"The kids?"

He thought about his answer for a moment or two. "Quieter," he
said finally.

"That doesn't sound good."

"It isn't," he said without rancor. He raised a hand, palm up, and
let it drop. "But what can we expect. Their mother and brother were
murdered last year. And they don't even get to spit in the eye of the asshole
who did it."

"At least he's dead," Kate said.

Bernie met her eyes, his own empty of expression. "That he is."

G
od, it was cold. The frigid air bit
through the windshield of the snow machine and all five layers of his clothing
with the ferocity of a wolverine biting into flesh, and it felt just that
hungry, that angry, and that voracious. He wore a balaclava and a knit cap
inside his hood and his face was still cold. Beneath his down parka with the
wolf-trimmed hood and a down bib overall guaranteed to twenty below, he wore a
Gore-Tex Pro Shell and a pair of ski pants, and beneath them Patagonia
Capilene, the ne plus ultra in long underwear. His boots were Sorel Caribous
rated to forty below, and inside his winter mitts he wore heated gloves powered
by a D battery guaranteed to keep his hands warm for five hours, minimum.

Nevertheless, the only truly warm part of his body was in fact his back, and
that was because Van was snuggled against it, her arms wrapped tightly around
his waist. "You okay?" he yelled over the noise of the engine.

"Great!" she yelled back. "Isn't it gorgeous?"

She could talk, she was all warm and comfy back there with him as her wind
foil, but she did have a point.

The white swath of snow-covered ice wound through a landscape of low banks
and rounded foothills. Thick stands of willow flashed by, leaving Johnny with
retinal after-impressions of enormous brown lumps, moose in groups of four and
five, curled up in the snow, conserving energy, waiting out the cold snap before
they got up to feed again. High overhead, a bald eagle soared, looking for the
unwary rabbit or that foolish pika who had been improvident in preparing for
winter and whom hunger had forced out to feed. Eagles mostly ate fish, Johnny
knew, but with the Kanuyaq frozen solid and the salmon out to sea anyway the
eagles made do with what was on the ground. Or in the garbage dump. Maybe
Benjamin Franklin was right, maybe the turkey should have been the national
bird.

It was a clear, cold, calm day, the sky a pale, sere blue. The sun was up
after ten and in bed before four, and in the few brief hours that it traveled
above the horizon its reflection off the snow felt sharp enough to draw blood.
They all wore goggles with polarized lenses to guard against snow blindness.

Ahead of them Ruthe goosed her Arctic Cat with the verve and enthusiasm of a
woman half her age, following truck trails when there were any, breaking new
trail where the wind had blown the snow into sculptured drifts that were so
beautiful and otherworldly that it seemed a shame to Johnny to destroy them.
Ruthe skimmed their tops or plowed through their bases without a backward
glance, resulting in explosions of snow that momentarily obliterated the trail.
When now and then he managed to pull even with her he could see the grin
beneath her goggles. "She's loving this," Van shouted.

He felt an answering grin spread over his face. "Yes, she is!"

There was traffic on the river that day, other snow machines as well as
pickups and four-wheelers and one guy on cross-country skis towing a sled. When
asked, he said he was from
Anchorage
,
just out for a weekend wilderness experience. He seemed rational, which was
unexpected, and shared with them some homemade fudge that even frozen solid
melted in the mouth like chocolate silk. It could have been a highway anywhere
north of the fifty-three, if there wasn't the occasional guy fishing through a
hole he'd chopped in the ice, hoping for a mess of whitefish for dinner.