Whisper to the Blood (6 page)

"Yes, it is," she said smartly, and he had to laugh.

They drove home in a glow of delicious contentment. They got back to
Niniltna at about three thirty, safely past the hour school let out, and they
stopped by Auntie Vi's. They found her in her net loft, a length of salmon net
draped in front of her, thin green monofilament in a spool at her feet, the
needle a blur as she mended the holes put in it by last summer's salmon catch.
"Hey, girl," she said as they came up the stairs. "You want
job?"

"I've never mended nets before, Auntie," Vanessa said.

Auntie Vi waved a hand. "No problem, I teach. Tomorrow morning, you
come." She eyed Johnny. "What you want?"

Wise in the ways of Auntie Vi, Johnny was not put off by this brusque
inquiry, and told her she might have a paying guest shortly.

She grunted. "Maybe I got room, maybe I don't."

"Maybe he'll come and maybe he won't," Johnny said promptly.

"You watch that mouth before your elders!" Auntie Vi said, but he
saw the corners of her mouth twitch irrepressibly upward as they left.

When he drew up outside Annie Mike's, he made as if to kiss her. She warded
him off. "Not where people can see us," she said. "That kind of
thing should be private, and personal. Besides, we'd have to answer a bunch of
questions, and then Annie'd want to have the talk again, and she'd tell
Kate—"

He held up a hand in pretend despair. "Got the picture. I am
convinced." He smiled at her. "But you want to."

She laughed, and hesitated. "Listen, Johnny. This Greenbaugh guy?"

"Yeah?"

Her brow creased, and she looked down at her clasped hands. He waited. She
looked up and said simply, "He has eyes like a calculator."

There was a brief, startled silence.

"I don't know what that means," Johnny said tentatively. "I'm
guessing you don't like him?"

She chose not to answer him, or to answer only obliquely. "He gave you
a ride when you needed one, and he didn't try to mess with you. Those are good
things."

"But?"

She looked up to give him a grave smile. "I don't know, exactly. I just
get the feeling there is a lot more going on there than he lets on."

It was one thing for him to second-guess Greenbaugh's sudden appearance. It
was another to fall in with Van's doubts. Johnny snorted. "Him and every
second Park rat we know."

"Yeah." She slid out of the pickup. "Thanks again for today.
I had a good time."

"Me, too. Tomorrow?"

She shook her head. "I'd love to, but I'm working for Auntie Vi
tomorrow."

"Oh yeah, that's right."

"What do we say if they find out we skipped school?"

"Don't lie," he said. "Will Kate ground you?"

He grinned and patted the steering wheel, chock-full of sixteen years' worth
of bravado. "She can try."

FOUR

OCTOBER 15

W
hat?" Kate said. Auntie Joy
beamed at her. "You chairman of board, Katya." She applauded, and was
joined in that action immediately and with attitude by Old Sam Dementieff, more
moderately by Demetri Totemoff, and belatedly and without enthusiasm by Harvey
Meganack.
Harvey
was sitting on Kate's right and she could almost warm her hands on his
resentment. He was dressed in gray slacks and a white button-down shirt. He
hadn't actually put on a tie but there was the sense that he would have if he
knew the effort wouldn't have been wasted on the rest of them, not to mention
ridiculed by every Park rat who saw him that day.

Demetri sat on
Harvey
's
other side in jeans, blue flannel shirt, and dark blue fleece vest. Next to him
and across from Kate was Auntie Joy, a plump little brown bird with bright eyes
and long graying hair tucked into a neat bun skewered with lacquered red
chopsticks. The red matched her blouse, long-sleeved and loose over the elastic
waistband of black polyester slacks. Auntie Joy always matched and was always
comfortable.

Old Sam, dressed in Carhartt bib overalls and a faded black and red plaid
shirt worn bare at the elbows, sat exactly midway between Auntie Joy and Kate,
smelling aggressively of the summer's fishing season and not about to apologize
for it.

"Wait a minute," Kate said. At Auntie Joy's words, any outward
calmness of demeanor she had assumed before arriving at the Niniltna Native
Association building that morning had deserted her. Now something close to
panic was crawling over her skin with delicate spider feet. "I said I'd be
on the board. I didn't say I'd be chairman."

"You're the only one who could be, girl." Old Sam looked at
Harvey, who scowled at the top of the round table occupying center stage in the
Association board room. "The only other candidate failed to gather a
majority."

In spite of herself Kate's voice rose. "We didn't even vote yet."

"The board had an ad hoc meeting last night."

"Nobody told me."

Old Sam gave
Harvey
a sardonic look from beneath bristly brows. "Can't understand that."

"Anyway," Kate said, feeling desperate and not working real hard
to conceal it, "I thought the shareholders vote on who's chairman. The
same way we vote on board members."

Demetri, a short, stocky man with dark hair, steady eyes, and a stubborn
jaw, said, "In the event of the death of a current member of the board,
the bylaws allow the board to name a replacement. The candidate must be a
shareholder and must be of legal age. The bylaws also allow the board to name a
new chair. Both are interim appointments until the next annual shareholder
meeting, when the entire membership votes to accept or reject the slate of
officers."

"In January," Auntie Joy said helpfully, still beaming.

January, Kate thought numbly. January 15th. Three very long months from now.
"I wasn't here," she said. "I didn't get to vote."

"Wouldna mattered," Old Sam said, "you weren't on the board
yet, so you didn't have a vote anyway. And even if you were, the vote was three
to one," and he smiled, not at all amiably, at
Harvey
, whose grinding of teeth was audible.

"But—" Kate was beginning to feel like she was lost in the
middle of a Joseph Heller novel.

"It's done, girl," Old Sam said, and slid a piece of paper down
the table. "Let's get on with it. I've got other things to do today."

The piece of paper proved to be the agenda for the meeting, embossed with
the Niniltna Native Association logo.

The Association logo had been the subject of a great deal of controversy
when the Association was first formed over thirty years before. One group of
shareholders had held out for art, another for commerce, a third for culture, a
fourth for history, and a fifth for the artist of their choice, usually a near
relation. The divergent opinion resulted in a verbal fight at the first
shareholders meeting that very nearly ended in a riot which, legend had it,
Emaa quelled by sheer force of personality. The resulting logo, designed by
committee, was a jumbled ball of black silhouette images, a leaping salmon, a
browsing moose, a Sitka spruce, a jagged mountain with what might have been a
tiny mine entrance halfway up it, a dogsled with the musher snapping his whip
over the dogs' heads, a dancer with a drum, a seiner with its nets out, a gold
pan. That many images were, of necessity if there were to be anything written
on the rest of the page, minuscule, and as such difficult to identify. At first
glance the whole thing looked like a Rorschach inkblot. This had of course
pleased no one, but Ekaterina Shugak, Kate's grandmother and the first board
chair, had been impatient to move on to more important topics and had pushed it
through.

Kate said the first thing that came into her head. "God, that's
ugly"

Old Sam gave out with a stentorian guffaw. Auntie Joy's radiance dimmed a
trifle. Harvey and Demetri said nothing. Belatedly, Kate realized that all four
of them would have had their own opinions on the NNA logo long before Kate was
old enough to vote as a shareholder. She looked around, casting about
desperately for a less incendiary topic.

The Niniltna Native Association headquarters was a modest, rectangular
building two stories high. It had asphalt shingles, vinyl siding, vinyl
windows, and an arctic entryway, and was painted brown with white trim. It sat
on the side of a hill in back of the village, next to the state trooper's post
on the road to the airstrip.

The board met in a corner room upstairs, with windows in two walls, large
sliders equipped with screens. Through them could be seen the washed-out blue
sky and the thin sunlight of an arctic fall day, with the gathering edge of an
ominous bank of dark cloud. Snow was late this year, and the temperature was
dropping fast, putting pipes at risk of freezing all over the Park.

The room held a table, and like almost every project involving shareholder
funds, it was made from spruce bark beetle kill harvested from Association
lands. The blight had swept through spruce forests across southeastern and
southcentral
Alaska
over the last ten years the way the bubonic plague had swept over the world in
1350. Sensibly, the board had reasoned that if the spruce trees were going to
fall over dead anyway, they might as well put them to good use. There were
spruce bark beetle kill countertops, cupboards, floors, paneling, sleigh beds,
rocking chairs, and farmhouse tables in every public and private building in
the Park.

This table had been made by Demetri to Ekaterina's specific instructions,
round in shape, because Ekaterina didn't think there ought to be a head to a
table where sat equals, and modest in size, because Ekaterina disapproved of
large governing boards. Privately, Kate thought it was because Emaa knew that
smaller groups were more easily manipulated.

The table was sanded and polished to a satin gloss, although the individual
boards did have a tendency to bow occasionally. Annie Mike had been in the room
once when one of the boards, imperfectly dried, had split open with a crack
like a .30-06 going off. Demetri had mended it with epoxy but it could still be
seen, a narrow lightning bolt of rich dark brown running almost all the way
from Auntie Joy to Kate.

Annie, Association secretary-treasurer and its only full-time employee, was
there today, too, sitting at a small desk in the corner, taking notes on a
laptop. Annie's husband, Billy Mike, previous chair of the Niniltna Native
Association, had died last year of a massive coronary. They'd lost their son
Dandy the year before and after a double whammy like that everyone would have
understood if Annie had retreated into a life centered around her last two
children left at home. Both were orphans, both adopted. The baby boy, half
Korean, half African-American, was named Alexei for Annie's grandfather.
Vanessa Cox, who had lost first her parents to an automobile accident Outside
and then her last surviving relatives here in the Park, one to murder and the
other to jail, had been acquired the following year.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Annie had not retreated. Instead, she had
soldiered on, doing her duty by Association as secretary-treasurer and by Park
as an upstanding Park rat, first in line to offer aid and comfort to those in
need. She was pretty much an auntie in waiting, Kate thought. She looked up now
from her computer, and the sympathy in her expression made Kate realize that
the four board members were sitting in various states of impatience, waiting
for Kate to start the meeting.

She looked down at the agenda.
Reading
and approval of minutes.

Reports. Unfinished business. New business. How hard could this be? She sat
up straight and cleared her throat. "Okay. Somebody read the minutes so we
can approve them."

There was silence. Kate looked up. "What?"

There was a look of dawning realization in
Harvey
's eyes, along with a growing and
malicious amusement. "You have to call the meeting to order first."

"Oh. Uh, okay then. I call the meeting to order. Who reads the
minutes?" She looked at Annie. "You're the secretary, right, Annie?
You take the minutes, right? So you probably read them, too. So go ahead."

Another uncomfortable silence.
Harvey
settled back in his chair, folded his arms, and looked like someone sitting in
the front row of a Steve Martin concert, with balloons.

Harvey, fifty-three, born in Niniltna but raised in
Anchorage
, was a commercial fisherman like
Old Sam and a professional hunting guide like Demetri. Active in local
politics, a crony of district senator Pete Heiman, his past term on the state
board of fish and game had been notable for his vocal and vociferous and often
incendiary support of increasing the length of the hunting and fishing seasons
and upping the legal limits on anything with fur or fins. Ekaterina had backed
Harvey
's ascension to the
NNA board as a sop to pro-development voices in the Association, and had lived
to regret it when he openly supported development in Iqaluk. While he had his
adherents, there were among NNA shareholders people still suffering the effects
of the RPetCo Juneau oil spill who as vociferously disagreed.

Annie looked at Auntie Joy and the two women communed in silence for a
moment.

"What?" Kate said.

"You not read your minutes, Katya?" Auntie Joy said. "What
minutes?" Kate said.

Auntie Joy's radiance dimmed still further. "Viola bring you the
minutes, Katya."

"No, she didn't," Kate said indignantly.

Auntie Joy nodded. She wasn't enjoying herself. "Last month, Katya. One
U-Haul box."