Whisper to the Blood (44 page)

She looked at Auntie Edna and her eyes hardened. "My personal life is
my own affair, Auntie. Don't you tell me who I can or can't have a relationship
with ever again."

The other three aunties looked at Auntie Edna in surprise. Kate looked at
Auntie Vi. "I'm not going to be the next Association chair for life,
Auntie. In case, you know, you didn't hear me the first sixteen times."

Lastly, she looked at Auntie Joy. "And thanks for being the only auntie
who didn't try to rearrange my life, Auntie Joy. I appreciate it." She
left.

A
s she was leaving the gym she felt
someone touch her sleeve, and turned to see Harvey Meganack. "It wasn't a
landslide, Kate," he said. "You only won by four votes. Next time
it'll be different."

"Yeah," she said, "next time I won't be running."

He snorted his disbelief and walked away.

Why was it so difficult for anyone to believe that she didn't want it, any
of it, not the power, not the glory, not the responsibility, none of it?

She thought again of Tikani vanishing slowly down the years, its patriarch
starving to death, its youth wasted from a lack of occupation, sinking into a
life of poverty and despair. Too many villages were going the same way. If
something didn't change, if someone didn't bring in more jobs to the Park, they
would vanish, too.

Niniltna could be on that list one day.

She turned and looked at the crowded room, the chairs shoved against the
walls, filled with people gossiping with neighbors over plates of fry bread and
smoked fish and mac and cheese, exchanging family news at the laden tables when
they went back for seconds. Elly Aguilar, Auntie Edna's granddaughter, was
sitting next to Martin Shugak, her belly pushing out almost to her knees. She
smiled shyly in answer to a question Martin asked, and took his hand and put it
on her belly. A second later he jumped, and they both laughed.

Kate shook her head. Every now and then Martin made her think that there
might be more than a loser residing in that body after all.

The basketballs were out, a line of kids from eight to eighty doing layups,
jumping, hooking them in, bouncing them off the backboard, and then by some
unspoken osmosis the layup line re-formed in the key and it was free throws.
Free throws win ball games. One of Coach Bernie Koslowski's immutable laws.

A little girl in a pink kuspuk skittered out of the crowd and careened into
Kate's legs with such force that she bounced back and landed on her fanny on
the floor. She looked up, eyes wide, too surprised to cry. Kate laughed and
tossed the girl up into her arms. "Hey," she said, softly chiding.
"Watch where you're going, you could hurt somebody."

The little girl stared at her wide-eyed, one finger in her mouth, a little
snot leaking out of her nose, before wriggling free and careening off in a
different direction.

Kate opened the door and went outside.

Not on her watch.

TWENTY-NINE

T
hat night the Roadhouse was packed to
the rafters. Everyone was back in their accustomed places, Old Sam with the
other old farts at the table beneath the television, the aunties working on the
new quilt at the round table in the corner, Bernie behind the bar. "I hear
you kicked Association ass today, Kate," he said with a faint
approximation of his old self.

"Not kicked ass, Bernie," she said, and gave it some thought.
"Gently but firmly encouraged the shareholders to walk in the proper
direction. Me and Robert's Rules of Order." Next to her, Jim grinned.

"What'll it be?" Bernie said, and they ordered all around. After a
bit a couple of guys got out the beater guitars Bernie kept in the back and
started singing from the Beatles' songbook, and a while later the belly dancers
showed up, and from the jukebox Jimmy Buffett started threatening to go to
Mexico again. Demetri stepped up next to Kate, gave her his reserved smile, and
ordered a beer. Harvey Meganack was sitting at a table with Mandy and Chick,
and from the nauseous expression Mandy had to repress from time to time Kate
gathered that he was holding forth with his usual know-it-all swagger to GHRI's
new representative to the Park. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

"True what I heard?" Jim said, following her gaze. "You're
going to make him boss of that mine advisory panel you're putting
together?"

Kate toasted
Harvey
with her Diet 7UP. Taken aback, he was a beat late in returning the salute, but
return it he did. "Keep your friends close," she said, "and your
enemies closer."

"You'll have to watch him."

"I always do. What do we hear about Gallagher?"

"Greenbaugh."

"Whatever."

"He's lawyered up."

"Who?"

"Frank Rickard."

Kate winced. "Is Rickard the biggest asshole magnet in the state, or
what?"

Jim shrugged. "If
Alaska
fails to
convict on the Macleod murder,
Idaho
's
drooling at the prospect of indicting him on the truck stop homicides."

"Will Johnny have to testify?"

"Maybe." Jim raised his beer. "Here's hoping nobody else shows
up from his hitch north, okay?"

"I heard that." They clinked glasses.

At the end of the bar Nick Waterbury sat hunched over his beer, a full one
waiting to one side, no Eve in sight. "Poor bastard," she said.

She looked past him at the aunties, receiving obeisances from a train of
Park rats on their way home or to Ahtna from that day's meeting. "Howie
isn't here tonight," she said. "He wasn't at the shareholders meeting
today, either."

"Even Howie's smart enough to figure it'd be a good idea to stay out of
the aunties' way for a while," Jim said dryly.

She looked back at Nick. At that same moment he raised his head and met her
eyes, and she was struck by the similarity she saw between him and Al Sheldon.
They were nothing alike physically, one tall, the other short, one dark, the
other fair, one white, the other Native. They reminded her of Bernie, come to
think of it. The loss of a child told the same story on all three faces in
sunken eyes, drawn complexion, the agony of loss, the absence of hope.

She gasped. "Jesus Christ," she said.

"What?" Jim said. He looked from Kate to Nick and back to Kate.
"Kate?"

T
hey borrowed one of Bernie's cabins
out back. Nick followed them there without protest. When asked the direct
question, he confessed without surprise, in a flat monotone that had all the
life leached out of it, a monotone that reminded Kate only too painfully of the
interview with Al Sheldon.

Yes, he'd been at the post office that morning. Along with everyone else
waiting for their mail he'd heard that Louis Deem was going to go free.

He'd sat in his pickup down the street from the trooper post, and when Louis
Deem walked out and started up the road to the Step on foot, Nick had taken his
shotgun and followed.

"I stayed far enough behind so he wouldn't hear me," Nick said.
"When we were a couple of miles out of town, I caught up with him. And I
shot him."

He didn't look at either of them as he sat there, big, gnarled hands hanging
between his knees. He got up and followed Jim obediently out to Nick's truck
and watched silently as Jim took his shotgun from the rack in the back window.

Later, at the post, he repeated his words and signed the statement and
shuffled into the cell vacated when Greenbaugh was moved to
Anchorage
. He lay down on the bunk, clasped his
hands on his chest, and closed his eyes. He looked ready to be placed in a
coffin.

Kate and Jim gaped at him for some moments before Jim recalled himself and
closed and locked the door. Back in his office he repeated Kate's totally
inadequate words with force and feeling. "Jesus Christ. I feel like I
ought to be fired. Hell, I feel like I ought to resign in protest of my own
total and complete incompetence and malfeasance and just all around general stupidity."

He dropped his head into his hands. His voice sounded tinny and far away.
"This is what comes of crossing the line, Kate. You think the right reason
trumps doing the wrong thing, and then you never get to the truth, when the
truth is mostly a good thing and almost always the best thing to get to."

"I can't believe I missed it," Kate said, still dazed.

"I will never do something like that again." Jim said it like he
was taking a vow. "I don't care what the provocation is. I don't care if
the perp is Satan himself. Never ever again."

"He was sitting right there in the courtroom when the verdict came
down," Kate said.

"I was so sure I knew how Louis Deem died. I was so sure I knew who did
it, and why, and I worked so hard to prove otherwise that I couldn't even see
who had the biggest motive of all."

"We all saw how angry Nick was," Kate said. "It's Morgan's
First Law. 'The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest.' And I
was so blinded by my hatred of Louis Deem that I didn't even think of it."

They sat in silence, trying to move beyond stunned disbelief to acceptance.

Kate looked up and said, "We have to tell Bernie."

He felt his expression change. "What?" she said.

"Nothing," he said. "You're right. We have to tell Bernie,
and the aunties. And Howie, the little weasel."

L
ater that night he lay in bed next to
Kate and wondered why he hadn't told her about Willard right then and there. It
had been the perfect moment.

There were lots of reasons.

It would hurt her.

It would hurt the aunties, because she would surely tell them.

It would hurt Willard, who would very likely wind up in long-term,
court-mandated psychiatric care somewhere that wasn't the Park and might not
even be Alaska, which would very probably kill him. He was cared for where he
was, more or less, and absent the fell influence of Louis Deem was unlikely to
be incited to burglary and murder a second time. His trigger was dead and
buried.

And telling wouldn't change anything. Enid and Fitz would still be dead.

All telling Kate about Willard would do was make him feel better. Carrying
around a secret this big was a blight and a burden. It weighed on him, preyed
on his mind, made him feel guilty, which made him feel cranky and snappish.
Confession was good for the soul, and all that crap.

Still, he was a big, strong man. He'd taken an oath to serve and to protect.

But what it all came down to, really, was that telling Kate about Willard
would hurt her.

It wasn't that he hadn't wanted to sleep with Talia Macleod. Attractive and
willing and every bit the dog he was, how could he resist her? More to the
point, why on earth would he? No doubt that it would have been a very enjoyable
evening. Who would it have hurt? Not Talia. Not Jim.
Not
Park
society, or he'd have been stoned to death by now.

Hard questions. Easy answer, though.

Kate. He hadn't slept with Talia because Kate would have been hurt.

Funny how more and more often the focus of serving and protecting, for him,
came down to serving and protecting Kate Shugak.

He rolled over and slid an arm around her waist, pulling her into the curve
of his body, tucking his knees into the backs of hers. He nuzzled the nape of
her neck, and she made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a purr.

He slept.

A MONTH LATER

ANCHORAGE
,
AK
(AP): Global Harvest Resources Inc.
(GHRI), the world's second largest gold producer, announced today the results
of supplementary exploratory drilling in the Suulutaq Mine during last summer's
drilling season.

A clearly euphoric Bruce O'Malley, GHRI's chief executive officer, said that
core samples taken by the five rigs working 17 new holes had still not
discovered the limits of the Suulutaq deposits. O'Malley said that GHRI would
be mobilizing two more drill rigs next year. "It's now the second largest
mine of this type in the world," O'Malley said. "If we keep drilling,
we might get to be the largest."

GHRI currently estimates that the Suulutaq ore deposit contains 42.6 billion
pounds of copper, 39.6 million ounces of gold, and 2.7 billion pounds of
molybdenum. The gold alone at current prices is estimated to be worth over $35
billion. GHRI is estimating that it will take $3 billion to $5 billion to
develop the mine, and hundreds of millions of dollars to operate it.
"Global Harvest is in this for the long term," O'Malley said.
"We'll see in the next five generations of Alaskans."

Suulutaq is located on state lands near the Iqaluk Wildlife Refuge and the
headwaters of the
Gruening
River
, one of the major tributaries of the
Kanuyaq
River
,
home of the world-renowned run of
Kanuyaq
River
red salmon. The
confluence of the two rivers is the calving grounds of the
Gruening
River
caribou herd.

Significant opposition is developing among local residents, including
fishermen, hunters, trappers, and some Alaska Natives who are concerned that
by-products of the toxins used in the mining process will pollute the
groundwaters that are the source of the Kanuyaq and irreparably harm salmon and
other wildlife.

The Kanuyaq salmon fishery is currently valued at $110 million.