A Cold Day for Murder (6 page)

Travel in Alaska is a matter of ceaseless caveats and cyclic qualifications. Thus the Kanuyaq River was navigable only as far as Niniltna, sixty-five miles upriver from its mouth on Prince William Sound, and then only by flat-bottomed riverboats or skiffs, and then only from the beginning of June until the end of September. By the first of November the river was frozen over; by December it was a crazy quilt of broken bergs. The townspeople crossed freely from bank to bank, and it stayed that way until breakup in March or April or, in years when winter outstayed its welcome, maybe even May.

Twenty, even ten years before, the town had been little more than a collection of shacks and the only building wired for electricity was the school. But in 1971 Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. ANCSA settled forty million acres of land and a billion dollars on the six different ethnic groups of Alaska, ostensibly as compensation for the loss of lands historically occupied by their ancestors. The cynical saw it as a bribe to get the tribes to withdraw their objections to the construction of the TransAlaska Pipeline smack down the center of the state and, not coincidentally, all those Alaskan aboriginal hunting grounds.

Since that time, Niniltna’s face had been radically altered. The town still had its percentage of two-by-four tar-paper shacks, heated by stoves made from fifty-five-gallon drums, but the majority of the buildings in Niniltna were now descended from a prefabricated lineage whose embryos were fertilized somewhere outside, usually in Seattle, after which they were shipped by SeaLand to Seward and via the Alaska Railroad to Anchorage. By then full-size modules, they were either trucked down the old railroad bed when the snow melted or barged up the river to Niniltna when the river ice melted in the spring. There they were borne into the full glory of single-story, tin-sided and tin-roofed American dream homes. Any extras were brought in by air, which was why an ordinary single-family dwelling in Niniltna could cost three times the price of a comparable dwelling in San Jose, California.

There isn’t a lot of timber in Alaska outside of the Panhandle, and much of what is left barely gets thick enough through the trunk to use for fuel, let alone to employ in constructing a home. The prefab buildings were instantly identifiable by a uniform pale blue metal siding, and were all connected by a writhing mass of overhead wiring to the town’s generator, in a building that produced an immense cloud of smoke which never completely dispersed in the still, frozen winter air.

There was one grocery store, where you could buy bananas for a dollar a pound and avocados for two dollars each. Both had been airfreighted in twice, once from Outside, the second time from Anchorage. The school was the only building with two stories, and its gym doubled as city hall, community center and, on occasion, jail. There was a landing just before the bend in the Kanuyaq, a broad sandy stretch where fishermen beached their boats to work on the hulls, stretched their nets for mending and, when the salmon were running, landed their fish. Just beyond this landing, Kate cut the engine of her snow machine and dismounted. She stood on a small rise in front of the beach and looked down on the tumble of buildings. She could have found her way around Niniltna blindfolded, in the dark. Today she could turn her back on it, and did.

Kate’s grandmother’s home, a loose, sprawling edifice which was most certainly not sided with blue tin, stood just yards from the stretch of beach. It had started out a tiny, one-room log cabin, made from anemic little birch and scrub spruce logs chinked with moss and river clay. This cabin had been added on to every ten years or so to encompass the ever larger generations of Moonins and Shugaks, and looked it. Over the rise of riverbank it hunkered down beneath a collection of roofs with differing pitches variously shingled with asphalt, cedar and split logs. It was surrounded by discarded fifty-five-gallon Chevron drums, Blazo boxes, old tires and odd lengths of lumber more precious than gold, which were never thrown away and if stolen could result in charges and countercharges of assault, if not murder.

At her side Mutt looked up at Kate inquiringly, her plumed tail curled up over her rump in a question mark. “Just because you’ve never been afraid of anything in your life doesn’t mean I haven’t been,” Kate admonished her. Mutt cocked her head. “Sit,” Kate said. Mutt squatted obediently, watching as Kate wiped her feet carefully on the doormat, squared her shoulders, lifted her chin and went in. The front door opened into a snow porch, which led directly into the house’s all-purpose room, the kitchen.

Ekaterina Moonin Shugak sat where she’d always sat, in a chair backed up against the wall, between the oil stove and the kitchen table. Her hair was dark and skinned back into a bun. Her eyes were like Kate’s, light brown and impenetrable at will. She had three chins and as many stomachs, and sat with her knees apart, her feet planted firmly on the faded and patched linoleum floor.

“So,” she greeted her namesake. “Katya.”

“Emaa.” Kate bent down to kiss the surprisingly youthful skin of the old woman’s cheek. “You look well.”

“You would know that already if you chose to live at home among your own people.”

Kate unzipped her snowsuit and sat down in the chair opposite her grandmother’s, not replying. There wasn’t any point in it; the argument was as old as she was, and Kate hadn’t come here for a fight. She looked across the table, her face expressionless, her eyes calm.

The old woman was eighty years old as near as anyone had been able to figure, as even that traveling social security representative hadn’t been able to get her to divulge her birthdate. And although no one with even the dimmest spark of self-preservation would ever dare insinuate that Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was growing senile, after eighty years some people tended to ideas that were fixed and immutable, and to hang on to them with their fingernails, teeth and toes. Kate reminded herself of this salient fact for the one thousandth time, and made what she hoped was a peace offering. “Is there cocoa?”

Her grandmother’s stern expression lightened. She rose to her feet and moved deliberately to the stove, the floor creaking beneath her weight. Her back, Kate noticed, was as straight as it had ever been, her head as high, and as proud. She pulled the teakettle forward from the back of the stove, filled it at the sink and put it on to boil. From the shelf over the stove she took a cast-iron skillet and a large bowl covered with a dishcloth. She removed the cloth to reveal a mound of rising bread dough, and cut off a piece. She poured oil into the skillet and let it heat, rolled the remaining dough into loaves and put them in the oven. When the grease began to sputter she tore off chunks of the dough she had retained and fried it a golden brown on both sides. She put the pieces on a chipped plate and set it on the table with a cube of butter and a shaker of powdered sugar. By then the water was boiling. From a cupboard she took two mugs, a can of evaporated milk and a 48-ounce can of Nestle’s Quik. She put three heaping teaspoonfuls of the powdered chocolate in each mug, punched holes in the can of milk and half filled the mugs, topping them off the rest of the way with boiling water. Steam rose and the smell of sweet chocolate mingled with the aroma of fried bread and made Kate’s mouth water. Ekaterina reached for a spoon.

“Don’t, emaa,” Kate said, reaching for the mug, the first completely natural movement she’d made and the first completely natural words she’d spoken since arriving. “You know I like it lumpy.” She took the spoon out of the mug, took a piece of fried bread from the plate, dipped it and took a bite, as absorbed in the right balance of cocoa to fried bread at thirty years of age as she had been at three. She smiled at the memory, and said around a mouthful of bread, “It’s quiet here today, emaa. Where is everyone? Usually you’re crawling with kids and supplicants.”

Her grandmother blew on her cocoa and sipped it. “It’s early, the kids are still in school. What’s a supplicant?”

Kate grinned. “One who grovels in return for a favor.”

“Oh.” The old woman thought it over, and permitted a gratified smile to cross her face.

Kate’s free hand sifted through the drift of papers on the kitchen table, and came up with a two-page document typed on legal-size paper. She read the first paragraph, read it a second time, and raised her eyes to look again at the old woman. “I thought this was a dead issue.”

Ekaterina twitched the paper out of her granddaughter’s hand and placed it out of reach. “Not quite. Not yet.”

“I thought Billy and the rest of the council voted it down.”

“They did,” Ekaterina said, taking a sip of her cocoa with the air of a connoisseur.

Kate sighed. “Oh, emaa.”

Her grandmother looked up. “You still think it’s a joke?”

“Oh, no, emaa,” Kate said, without the trace of a smile. “I don’t think of it as a joke.”

“What, then?”

Kate was silent in her turn. At last she said, “We invent so many prejudices on our own. Do we really need to impose new ones from the top down?” Ekaterina said nothing, and Kate said slowly, feeling her way, “Emaa, someday you are going to have to drag yourself, kicking and screaming if necessary, into this century. You want to keep the family at home, keep the tribe together and make the old values what they were.” She leaned forward, her fists on the table, and spoke earnestly, looking straightly into eyes so like her own. “It’s not going to happen. We have too much now, too many snow machines, too many prefabs, too many satellite dishes bringing in too many television channels, showing the kids what they don’t have. There’s no going back. We’ve got to go forward, bringing what we can of the past with us, yes, but we’ve got to go forward. It’s the only way we’re going to survive.”

Ekaterina nodded, and Kate, exasperated, said, “I hate it when you do that. I talk myself blue in the face and you nod and smile and nod and smile, and then you go on and do whatever you were going to do in the first place. It’s infuriating.”

Ekaterina nodded and smiled, and Kate gave a reluctant smile. “You’re impossible, emaa.”

“What you mean is that I am almost as stubborn as you are, Katya.”

Kate’s smile faded. “Maybe that is what I mean.” She drank her cocoa. “Emaa,” she said, knowing she was wasting her time but unable to leave her argument unfinished, “if you persist on this course, you will divide the people in the Park. Only this time it won’t be the greenies versus the strip miners and the lumberjacks, or the sports fishermen versus the commercial fishermen, or the Park rats versus Outsiders. This”—she indicated the paper—“this will split the races themselves, right down the middle. ANCSA was bad enough for the Anglos to reconcile themselves to. Some never have, and it’s hard to blame them. They don’t get quarterly dividends from Native associations, and can’t take their kids to ANS for free medical care. And now you want tribal sovereignty? One law for us, another for them? Do you want to start a war?”

Her grandmother smiled, a long, slow smile, and refrained from nodding. “Perhaps only a little one,” she said mildly. “Enough to wake up the Aleuts to their exploitation.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “‘Exploitation’? Is that this month’s new buzzword? And don’t try that us-against-the-world, preserve-the-purity-of-the-race bullshit on me, emaa. Your great-great-grandfather was a hundred percent Russian cossack, your uncle was a Jewish cobbler who came north with the Gold Rush, and your sister married a Norwegian fisherman. We Aleuts are about as pure of ancestry as one of Abel’s dogs.” Before Ekaterina could reply Kate raised her hands palms out. “Okay. I’m sorry. Let’s drop it. It’s none of my business anyway. I will not let you suck me into this argument again.” She fortified herself with a gulp of cocoa and choked over a lump. “I’m here because I need a favor myself, emaa,” she said.

“You are a supplicant,” Ekaterina stated, with a faint smile.

Kate couldn’t help grinning. “I guess I am. I’m looking for someone. Two someones. One of them was a new ranger for the Park; he’d been here about six months before he went missing. His name was Mark Miller, Anglo, small, thin, dark hair, hazel eyes, twenty-one years old. Have you met him?”

Her grandmother took another sip of her cocoa and sat for a moment, not speaking. “Mark Miller,” she said at last, mouthing the name as if it spoiled the taste of her drink. Her eyelids were lowered, hiding her eyes. She looked almost asleep, and only thirty years of personal experience kept Kate from thinking she was.

The room was warm, and Kate unbuttoned the top buttons of her shirt. The kettle steamed on the back of the stove, the smell of baking bread teased her nostrils, the early afternoon sun sent thin, searching tendrils through the windows, and her grandmother was taking too long to answer.

“Did you know him?” Kate probed, not changing her relaxed position but alert for every word, every movement her grandmother might make. She liked this job less and less with every passing moment, but Ken was missing and it was her fault. No. She gave herself a mental shake. He was a grown man, and she had never minimized the dangers of the Park and its inhabitants, be they on four legs or two, which not least dangerous of the two-legged variety was the old woman sitting across from her now. She jumped when Ekaterina at last decided to speak.

She spoke slowly, deliberately, as if remembrance of the events were coming to her as she talked. “Xenia was seeing some young Outsider a month or two ago.”

“What was his name?”

The old woman shrugged, her eyes on the strong, wrinkled hands wrapped around her mug.

Kate said patiently, “Was it Miller, emaa?”

There was a long silence, and then the old woman said, “It might have been.”

Kate’s mind was busy creating and discarding scenarios. “A month or two, that fits. He hasn’t been heard from in six weeks.” Kate looked keenly at the old woman. “So he was seeing Xenia, was he?”

“Yes.” Her grandmother did not elaborate, and from her manner Kate knew she had said her last word on the subject.

“Well,” Kate said, “I guess the next step is to find Xenia and talk to her.”

“You said you were looking for two people.”