Blood Will Tell (6 page)

The line of Jane's mouth tightened, and then relaxed. Her eyes snapped with malicious triumph. "I guess I'll have something to say to the judge about the degenerate home life you're providing for my son," she told Jack. "I'll wind up with full custody for sure this time. You should pick your whores more carefully, Jack."

"Jane." Jack's voice lashed out. "I said, back off."

Conversation in the restaurant slowed and heads turned in their direction. From the next table, Axenia smiled at Kate. It wasn't a friendly smile. Jack looked angry. Johnny shrank down into a miserable huddle. Into the growing silence Ekaterina leaned over to whisper in Kate's ear. "Would you like to leave?"

Their eyes met for a long, pregnant moment. Somewhere deep down Kate felt a bubble of frantic laughter rise to match the hilarity she could see in Ekaterina's eyes, and together they burst out laughing.

Jane's colorless skin flushed a dark, congested red right up to the roots of her colorless hair and her eyes narrowed to slits. Her date, a plump, uneasy man hiding behind a pair of glasses with thick tortoiseshell rims, tugged at her elbow. "Jane. Come on."

Jane glared at him. "Yes, let's. The food's much better at Sorrento's anyway." She turned on her heel. Over her shoulder she said to Jack, the sneer back, "See you in court."

The remark was largely wasted since Jack could barely hear her over Kate and Ekaterina, who were still laughing as Jane stalked out the door.

When the laughter had died down to the occasional hysterical hiccup, Jack judged it time to produce his piece de resistance, tickets to that evening's performance of the Whale Fat Follies. They adjourned forthwith to Spenard and the Fly By Night Club, where for the next three hours they were accosted by nothing more serious than woolly mammoths, tap-dancing outhouses and hum pies from hell. It wasn't until after Jack was asleep that night that Kate had time to wonder why the president and chief executive officer of Royal Petroleum Company was dining with a member of the Niniltna Native Association board, in company with Mathisen, one of the most notoriously corrupt lobbyists in the history of Alaskan politics.

The board member's motivations were unambiguous, as best exemplified by the watch Harvey had been wearing. She wondered who had given it to him, and decided it had probably been Mathisen, but she was willing to bet the funds for it could be traced back to John King by way of a lobbyist's fee.

She hadn't had a lot to do with Lew Mathisen, but she knew of him by reputation. Everyone did; he was on retainer for half the Outside corporations doing business in the state. RPetco was one of them.

The previous spring, Kate had worked for John King in Prudhoe Bay, tracking down a cocaine dealer who had been putting his half of the oil field into substance abuse orbit for months, a dealer his in-house security forces had been unable to apprehend. Kate had apprehended the dealer and the dealer's organization, as well as putting a halt to a sideline in the illegal obtaining and selling of Alaska Native artifacts from an archaeological site on the Arctic coastline. The job had resulted in satisfaction for John King and a more than satisfactory financial gain for herself. Oil companies might be immoral monoliths concerned only with making money, but they sure paid well. In fact, Kate had left RPetco with everyone except for the security chief in a more or less happy frame of mind, and she wondered why King had been so unhappy to see her at the restaurant this evening. She wondered if it had something to do with the wellhead on Tode Point, the remains of an unlawfully drilled test hole on the archaeological site. Maybe it was still there, in spite of King's agreement to move it. Maybe he had a guilty conscience over it, and that accounted for his surly behavior.

Somehow, Kate didn't think so.

It was evident that Axenia was on terms of intimacy with the lobbyist, who had to be at least thirty years older and infinitely wiser than her cousin in the ways of the world. Terms intimate enough that she would abandon her grandmother's company for his, in a public display of tacit disrespect that commanded not only Kate's dismay, but a small, secret, sneaking sense of awed admiration as well.

Two years before Axenia had begged Kate to get her out of the Park, away from Niniltna and a love affair gone bad and a lifestyle she loathed.

Unlike Kate, Axenia yearned for the bright lights of the big city.

Against Ekaterina's wishes, Kate had found her cousin a job with Kate's old employer, the Anchorage District Attorney's office. They had met twice the previous spring when Kate had been working for RPetco. Axenia hadn't talked much about herself then, and Kate had left it alone, old enough to know that when pushed, the first instinct of the young is to push back, hard.

It might be time to change tactics.

She thought again of Axenia and Mathisen's embrace over the dinner table. Beauty and the Beast.

It might be more than time.

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING KATE AND MUTT WENT FOR A walk down the Coastal Trail. Johnny went with them.

The bike path ran between Jack's townhouse and Westch ester Lagoon, splitting at the western edge of the lagoon. The right fork led uptown to Second Avenue. They took the left fork, past the KENI radio tower and through the tunnel beneath the Alaska Railroad tracks to emerge on Knik Arm. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the sun wasn't high enough yet to give it any color. Cook Inlet lay like a sheet of gray glass, stretching south to where sight ended and imagination began.

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish I was in school."

Kate grinned. "Thanks a lot."

Johnny flushed in the awkward way of an adolescent caught in a social faux pas. "I didn't mean it like that."

"I know you didn't."

They walked in silence for a few moments. "You've been to court," Johnny said.

Kate nodded. "Many times."

"What's it like?" Kate told him the truth. "Scary."

His stride broke. "Scary?"

"Sure." He didn't believe it. "You were scared?"

She didn't smile. "The law's a serious business, Johnny. In a criminal case, the kind I testified in when I was working for your dad, what you say under oath can change someone's life forever. You have to be right.

You bet it's scary."

They reached the bridge over Fish Creek and paused to watch the incoming tide sweep slowly and inexorably up the muddy channel. Mutt left the trail to investigate the trees lining the creek bed. Mallard ducks pecked up the goose grass growing on the mud flats. A container ship slowed almost to a halt off Point Mackenzie, waiting for a berth at the Port of Anchorage. Behind Mackenzie, a hundred and thirty miles to the north, Denali, attended by the lesser peaks of Foraker and Hunter, rose clear and cold and white against the horizon. A hundred miles closer, Susitna lay peaceful and calm beneath a soft blanket of snow.

"Susitna means ' lady," doesn't it?" Johnny said.

Kate nodded.

"Does a story go with it?" Kate smiled. "In Alaska, a story always goes with it, Johnny." "Tell me," he said.

A bird appeared from behind the tops of a stand of scrub spruce, wings fixed in a graceful glide, fierce eyes searching the tide line for breakfast. The brown wings stretched seven feet wingtip to wingtip, and the white head gleamed in the first, tentative rays of the morning sun.

Kate touched Johnny's arm and pointed. As she did, a second eagle slipped from behind the trees. The flocks of mallards became silent and very still, their fat bodies trying to blend in with the muddy bank. The first eagle slipped by, the second, both without striking.

"Must not be that hungry," Johnny said.

"Why work for it?" Kate said. "They're probably looking for dead salmon."

"Kind of late for silvers," Johnny said, eyes squinting after the eagles as they banked to follow the gravel bed of the Alaska Railroad.

"Kind of."

"What then?"

"Anything they can find." She grinned, remembering. "I saw one take off with a poodle, once."

"Ick!"

Kate shrugged. "Protein is protein."

The eagles were lost around the bend of Bootlegger's Cove. An enormous spiral of Canadian geese massed over Knik Arm already at a thousand feet and ascending higher into the sky between Carin Point and Point Mackenzie. "Listen," Kate said. In the still, early morning air, the plaintive honks came clearly to where they were standing.

Johnny's voice was soft. "Where are they going?"

"British Columbia, Washington, Oregon. Some of them as far as northern California."

"Thousands and thousands of miles. How do they know how to get there?

How do they know?"

Kate had no answer for him, and they watched in silence as the flock ended their upward spiral in a disciplined vee formation. The vee moved south, down the western side of Cook Inlet, by the long, still form of Susitna. A 737 roared off the runway at Anchorage International and the geese were heard no more. Johnny gave a long, drawn-out sigh. "So. Tell me."

"Tell you what?"

"The story that goes with Susitna."

"Oh. Well, let me see. It's been a long time since I've heard it myself." Kate leaned on the bridge railing, looking for inspiration at the long, sweeping outline of the woman slumbering peacefully beneath a white coverlet. Her right profile faced them, her hands were clasped at her waist. If you looked closely enough you could almost see her breast rise and fall. "Once upon a time, a couple of days ago," Kate began, and without knowing it slipped into a faint echo of the rhythmic chant of the storyteller.

"Once upon a time "A couple of days ago

"A young woman goes walking in those woods

"She has long black hair "She has big brown eyes

"She fills out a kuspuk pretty good, too "In those woods she meets a young man

"That young man he loves her right away "He is tall and handsome

"He is a good hunter and the fish they jump into his trap

"But that young woman she is afraid "She runs

"He says stop but she is afraid "She runs very fast

"He chases her "She runs to the mountains

"He chases her "She runs to the forest

"He chases her "She runs to the water and jumps in, all over wet

"She can't swim as fast as she runs "She starts to drown

"He sees this "He jumps in after her." Kate paused. "What happens?"

Johnny demanded. "Did they both drown?

What, Kate?"

Kate stared at Susitna. Just beyond the sleeping lady's feet, she thought she caught a glimpse of another mountain. "Then a bunch of belugas conics in the water ' They talks to that young man

"They says, What you do in that water?

"They says, You not salmon "They says, You not otter

"They says, You not whale "They says, You drown

"Young man cries out "He says, Help me to swim

"The beluga they looks at him "They sees he is strong and good

"They says, We help this one "They gives him gills to breathe

"They gives him fins to swim "They gives him blubber to be warm

"He is beluga then "He swims back to Susitna

"But them whales they takes too long to make up their minds "Susitna she is dead

"That young man who is beluga now he takes her upon his back "He carries her to that mountain

"He lays her down on top of that mountain

"He covers her with a blanket of snow "He lays down beside her

"They sleep together now "They sleep together now always

"That's all."

There was a long silence.

"Geez, Kate," Johnny said at last. "That's great. That's just--great.

And her name was Susitna?"

Kate nodded, sober as a judge. "The Sleeping Lady."

"What was the guy's name?"

"Beluga, of course."

"Beluga! Wow! There's another mountain behind Susitna called Beluga, did you know that?"

Kate looked again beyond Susitna's feet. "Yes."

"That's great," he repeated. "And belugas are the white whales that chase the salmon up the Knik every summer, right?"

"The very same."

"I never heard that story before."

Possibly because I just made it up, she thought but didn't say.

"How come I never heard that story before?" Without waiting for her to answer he said, a touch wistful, "We don't have anything like that. No stories or legends like that." He added, "White people, I mean."

She looked at him. "What do you call all those legends about Zeus and Athena and Hercules and the rest of them?"

"You mean like in the Ilyat and the Oddsea? Those are just baloney," he said, disparaging. "One-eyed monsters and singing rocks. No whales--" he pointed at Beluga "-or bears or eagles or--" he looked at Mutt, nose down, trotting along the creek "--wolves. Huh. They don't mean anything to me." "Just stories," she said. Clearly, Johnny stood in eminent danger of rejecting his tribal myths. This must be rectified. "Come with me."

"Where?" She didn't answer. Puzzled but willing, he followed her off the bridge and past the three benches tucked into the curve of the trail.

Between the thin layer of topsoil holding up the scrub spruce and the birch trees and the flat expanse of mud flats made of centuries of glacial silt washed down the Knik and Matanuska Rivers, there was a narrow strip of dark-grained sand, as much as ten feet wide in places, almost wide enough to merit the designation of "beach." Kate jumped the two-foot embankment.

"What are you doing?" Johnny said. He jumped down next to her, and scuffed at the sand with a doubtful foot.

She found a stick of driftwood and drew a long line in the sand. At the right end of the line she wrote the current year. Working backward, she broke the line into equal sections. Mutt, looking down at them from the bank, decided that this was going to take a while and trotted off to find something more interesting to occupy her time, like breakfast, in the form of a nice, plump, juicy rabbit.

"Each one of these is ten years," Kate said, pointing with the stick.

"One decade. What year were you born?" He told her. "Okay, so this is you," she said, making a mark just behind the first decade mark from the left. "When was your dad born?" He looked uncertain. "He's, what, forty-six?"