Whisper to the Blood (23 page)

"Did I?" He shook his head, and produced a sheepish grin.
"Probably a hangover from them corking me last summer. The Johansen
brothers are a waste of space, true, but I didn't have any reason to suspect
them more than anybody else. Still don't."

She stared at him, puzzled.

The Riley kitchen was a warm, crowded, and friendly place, with a woodstove
for heat and a propane stove for cooking. The table was homemade beetle kill
spruce and big enough to seat eight comfortably, covered with a tacked-down
sheet of blue-checked oilcloth. The cupboards were homemade beetle kill, too,
like the table a little clunky but sanded and polished to a smooth finish that
had been darkened by years of cooking oil and wood smoke. Faded linoleum
covered the floor and the walls were a pale yellow, chipped and peeling, on
which faded patches showed signs of photographs added and moved around over the
years. Dishes were stacked in a wide porcelain farmer's sink that was rather
the worse for wear. Underneath the table were two dogs of indeterminate
breeding, still and wary but unafraid of Mutt, who was sitting next to Kate,
her ears up as if she were listening to and understanding the conversation. She
looked up at Kate, yellow eyes meeting hazel, and one ear went back
inquisitively. Kate put a hand on her ruff, and looked back at the table.

Grandma Riley looked like one of the aunties, round, brown and wrinkled, a
woman of spirit and substance. Like the aunties, she had time served in the
Park, and was a repository of knowledge about all the rats who lived therein
going back generations, extending to fourth cousins five times removed who now
lived in
Bowling Green
,
Kentucky
. When a Park rat wanted to draw a
family tree, Grandma Riley was everyone's first stop. She'd been failing
lately, which was why the extended stay in the elder health care facility in
Ahtna, and Kate had the feeling that this might be her last trip south.

Art was the grandson of a white stampeder, a handsome, reckless fellow with
a slight limp, known in
Dawson
City
as Riley the Gimp, from
New York
, who had met and married a local
beauty from Tok. They'd moved to the Park to work at the Kanuyaq copper mine,
and had stayed on after the mine had closed in 1936, to homestead on the river
and raise a family. Grandma Riley had married their son, Arthur Sr., and their
children, beginning with Art Jr., had inherited their share of their
grandparents' looks.

Christine Riley had been an army brat, born in
Anchorage
. She had met Art at the
University
of
Alaska
and he had brought her home to
the river the year they graduated. She was a woman of quiet beauty, still slim
and with a full head of pure white hair that was always neatly dressed in a
braid wound around her head like a crown. Kate didn't think it had been cut in
Christine's lifetime. She worked in the tanning shed next to the house, curing
the wolf and mink and beaver and lynx skins Jim brought home, preparing them
for sale at fur auctions in
Anchorage
.

It was, in short, an almost idyllic life for the three of them, two born to
it and one who had adopted it wholeheartedly. Kate would have thought that any
threat to the life they had built so painstakingly over the years would have
roused them to the same incendiary level as the Kaltaks and the Jeffersons.

Instead, she was surrounded by a calm so placid it was almost grating. She
looked at each of them in turn and was met by an identical bland stare.
"What's going on here?" she said.

Art made an elaborate show of perplexity. "Why, nothing, Kate. We're
not happy about what happened, but we know you and Jim will catch whoever did
this and make it right."

Christine and Grandma Riley nodded and chorused their agreement, though
Grandma Riley wouldn't look up from her mug.

"What about the grandbaby?" Kate said. "You gonna let an
attack on her slide, too?"

Art's eyes hardened momentarily, and then his face smoothed out. "We'd
left her with a neighbor, as it happens," he said. "We wish we could
help you, Kate, but you know how it is. It all happened so fast. I wouldn't
worry." He glanced at his mother, smiling. "Grandma always says, what
goes around comes around." He drank coffee and grinned. "I hear you
had a high old time of it at your first board meeting."

"Jesus," Kate said, "did somebody take out an ad?"

Art laughed and rose to his feet.

Kate, caught by surprise, rose, too. Since when did folks in the Bush urge
winter visitors out the door? Usually they were so glad to see anybody they
insisted they stay for a week.

It was almost eleven when she hit the river, Mutt on the seat and the sled
attached, hiding from the windchill created by her forward motion behind the
windshield.

What the hell had that been all about? It was almost as if. . .

The snow machine slowed abruptly as her thumb relaxed on the throttle.

It was almost as if they hadn't wanted her to find the attackers.

No, she thought, that wasn't it, not exactly.

It was as if they were recommending that she not waste her time.

And the only reason for them to think that she was wasting her time was that
the attackers had already been caught. And dealt with.

Maybe already somebody stop them.

"Oh, no," Kate said.

Mutt gave an interrogatory whine.

Kate hit the throttle.

But when she stopped at the
Jeffersons
'
again, no trace of the fire-breathing dragon she'd left the day before
remained. Ike was now smiling and affable. "No luck, Kate? That's a shame.
Well, tomorrow's another day."

And when she got to the Kaltaks in Double Eagle, Ken was equally and eerily
serene. He wasn't carrying his rifle anymore, either. "Well, sometimes
there's just nothing to be done about a situation, Kate. I expect they were all
from
Anchorage
.
You know how those people are, no sense of private property. I'm guessing
they'll get what's coming to them one day."

"Ken," she said with what she thought was pretty fair restraint,
"when I was here yesterday you were breathing fire and smoke and
threatening to shoot on sight. Now you're sounding like Mahatma Gandhi. What
happened between then and now?"

He scratched his chin meditatively. "Maybe I got religion." He
smiled, a slow stretch of his lips that was more a baring of his teeth than an
expression of humor. "You know. Turn the other cheek?"

Frustrated, she took her leave, and Ken saw her out. "Hey," he
said, "you still seeing Jim socially?"

She floundered for an answer. "I . . . I . . . sort of," she said.
"Yeah."

"Oh. I just wondered."

"Why?"

He gave a vague shrug. "Hear tell he was getting all friendly with the
mine woman in the Club Bar in Cordova a couple days back. Probably nothing. I
expect they'll have a lot to do with each other once the mine gets going."

He smiled again. There was just the merest hint of pity about it, and it
ruffled Kate's feathers. She made a brusque farewell and left

That smile was before her eyes as she headed out on the river.

She thought about that smile for at least a mile, about what it might mean,
along with the reception she had received at the Rileys' and the change in
attitude at the Jeffersons' and the Kaltaks'.

Wait a minute, she thought. Wait just a damn minute here.

That remark about Jim and her. It had been more than the usual Park rat
interest in the affairs of their fellows. It had been designed to distract her
from the attacks.

And it had worked, too.

Distract her from what, though?

She thought about it for another mile, and then she turned around and headed
south again, running slow and close to the west bank, seeing many sets of
tracks. She followed it as far as Red Run before she turned again and headed
north, this time hugging the east bank. Again, many sets of tracks, could be
hunters, trappers, ice fishermen, kids out joyriding, people visiting village
to village. Nothing that looked out of the ordinary or intrinsically
suspicious. She did find a large section of snow in a willow thicket that
looked beaten down, as if a lot of snow machines had rendezvoused there, or as
if a few had been there more than once. There was an empty bottle of Yukon Jack
frozen into the snow under a tree. Not your usual Park tipple, for one thing it
was too expensive, but Kate took it anyway. "Anything?" she said to
Mutt.

Mutt had been trotting back and forth, nose to the snow. She looked at Kate
and sneezed.

When they got back out on the river Kate looked up and saw a line of dark,
encroaching cloud. "That's why it felt warmer," she said, unzipping
the throat of her parka just a little.

Mutt gave a soft whine and touched a cold nose to Kate's cheek.

She pointed the machine north and opened up the throttle, Pausing only to
gas up in Niniltna. People waved and called from their seats in pickups and on
snow machines and four-wheelers. She waved but didn't stop to talk, just kept
going north as fast as she could push it without blowing a track. She was
airborne more than once where a crack had caused a bump in the ice and blowing
snow had built up a hummock. Mutt found it very exhilarating, on occasion
leaping from the back of the snow machine before she was thrown and galloping
alongside with her tongue lolling out of her mouth, waiting for Kate to slow
down so she could jump back on.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, the sun getting low on the
southeastern horizon, when she came to a tiny cluster of buildings perched
between the Kanuyaq and a narrow, high-banked creek. Overgrown with brush and
trees, the half-dozen houses were little more than tumbledown shacks,
originally built of logs and over the years patched with whatever was handy-tar
paper, pink fiberglass insulation, plywood, shingles fashioned from Blazo
boxes, now and then a sheet of Tyvek. Some of it had been applied with duct
tape. Someone in the village must have scored a pile of corrugated tin because
it was on every roof, although it was stained and aging.

About twenty miles short of the halfway point between Ahtna and Niniltna,
Tikani was a forlorn place, unkempt, unloved, a line in the Bush drawn decades
before that had since blown away on the wind. It supported thirty souls in its
peak years, most of them named Johansen for the Norwegian stampeder who settled
there in 1906 with his Gwitchin bride. Isolated, insular, and xenophobic in the
extreme, Tikani was the product of years of inbreeding and the blood feuds that
result when close families fight over too small a piece of what is to begin
with a very small pie. They had been too proud and too stubborn to sign on to
ANCSA, relying instead on the ownership of their homes and on property being
grandfathered in around them when Jimmy Carter signed the d-2 lands bill in
1980. As a result, the unincorporated village sat on the original hundred and
sixty acres their great-grandfather had proved up on under the Homestead Act,
and no more. They weren't one of the 220 recognized tribes of
Alaska
, and they received no federal funding
as a group over and above what was funneled through the Bureau of Indian
Affairs and the Indian Health Service. Refusing to sign off on ANCSA meant they
hadn't shared in the billion dollars and the forty-four million acres that had
been distributed by the federal government in the ANCSA settlement.

The rationale given by the senior surviving Johansen, Vidar, eldest son of
Nils and Almira, was that signing on to ANCSA effaced any future rights
signatory Native tribes had to Alaskan lands. He wasn't willing to do that, and
he wasn't alone, as several other Alaskan Native villages had refused to go
along with ANCSA as well. They had all suffered for it financially, but they
still had their pride.

Pride didn't fill a belly.

They'd lost their school five years before due to low enrollment. The
school, the largest building in the village, sat a little apart, its roof
visible over the trees. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, and it
had that forlorn, defenseless air all abandoned buildings in the
Arctic
do just before the roof falls in. No one was in
sight, in spite of the fact that the wind was calm and her engine had to be
audible to anyone indoors.

"Off," Kate said, and Mutt hopped off to allow Kate to negotiate
the rudimentary trail up the bank alone.

There weren't any streets per se, just a narrow track postholed through the
snow. She parked the snow machine to one side and slipped the key into the
pocket of her parka, the first time she had done so since she had bought the
machine.

She waited. No one appeared. No curtain moved at a window. There was no
chunk of an ax, no clank of tool, only a tiny breeze teasing at a strand of her
hair. If there had been a sign hanging from the front of one of the cabins, it
would have been creaking. Any second now a tumbleweed would come rolling down
the street.

Her thighs were sore from straddling the snowgo seat for so long and it felt
good to stretch. "Hey, girl, come here," she said in a loud voice.
Mutt trotted over, looking a little quizzical, and Kate said, still in a voice
raised to carry, "That's my good girl. Think there's a cup of coffee in
this town with my name on it?"

Still no one came to greet her, and when enough time had passed for
politeness' sake she walked to the largest house in the village, the only one
showing smoke from its chimney, and knocked on the door. While she waited, she
noticed that the woodpile at the side of the house didn't seem near high enough
for November, not with six more months of cold weather to get through.