Restless in the Grave (16 page)

Nothing.

Which was irritating. Almost as much so as the fact that someone had got the drop on her, and even on Mutt. They must have heard the two of them coming up the stairs, grabbed her, and slammed the door against Mutt while they bagged her and tossed her in the freezer. Mutt would have launched herself in the door at the first sign of a crack. They’d probably caught her in midair and used the momentum of her forward velocity to sling her in on top of Kate.

Probably two people, then. Probably two men, too, or two really ballsy women.

What had they been looking for?

If they’d been checking up on her, they’d come up empty. All she had by way of identification was a forged Alaska driver’s license in the name of Kate Saracoff, home address a post office box in Anchorage, and her cell phone, and both of those she kept on her person.

She wondered if they had expected to find the apartment empty. It seemed likely, but she had a grudging respect for someone who had dealt so effectively with such an unpleasant surprise.

Mutt came in.

Two unpleasant surprises.

Kate got Mutt a bowl of water. Mutt gave a few laps to be polite and then collapsed on the braided rug with a disgruntled air.

“Didn’t find anything to sink your teeth into?” Kate said, sympathetic. “Don’t feel bad. Me, either.”

She undressed, remembered to plug in her cell phone, and rolled into bed.

Twelve

JANUARY 19

Newenham

It felt as if Kate had barely closed her eyes when someone started banging on her door. She blinked up at the ceiling, befuddled and disbelieving. The thump at the door came again, more demanding this time, and she yelled, “Wait a sec,” got into her jeans mostly by feel, and shrugged into her jacket on the way to the door in bare feet. Mutt was already there, growling and snapping a warm welcome. She unlocked and opened the door a crack. A gnarled brown hand shoved the door wide, and she dodged back before it clipped her on the chin. Mutt gave a full-throated bark with bass notes that should have raised Cliff Lee Burton right out of his grave.

The dyspeptic little man on the other side of the door glared down at Mutt. His face was as brown and gnarled as his hand, his dark eyes deep set and piercing. He wore a short-sleeved white T-shirt beneath a pair of denim bibs that looked like they’d been bought new in 1889, and a ball cap with a New Orleans Mardi Gras logo on it. “Shut your mouth, you big moron, don’t you know a friend when you see one?”

Mutt, astonishingly, shut her mouth.

He looked at Kate. “Get your ass dressed and downstairs.”

Kate gaped at him for a second, and then the red started to rise up the back of her neck. She shut her mouth, too. She also shut the door in his face, locked it, and went back to bed.

She was not allowed to go back to sleep, however, because the next sound was his foot hitting the door. This time she didn’t bother with jeans; she stalked to the door in her underwear and T-shirt and flung it open. “Listen, old man—”

“Listen my ass, you got about sixty seconds to get dressed and get your ass down here or you can walk to Liam and Wy’s.”

“I’m not going anywhere at this hour”—the light had barely touched the southeastern horizon, and the night before had been long and hard—“and I haven’t had three hours’ sleep, and who the hell are you, anyway?”

“Name’s Moses. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.” He pulled the door closed and she heard footsteps pattering briskly down the stairs.

“Moses,” she said out loud. She looked around and found Mutt, not exactly cowering, no, but certainly she had withdrawn to the opposite corner of the apartment, sitting half inside the bathroom, as far away as she could get from the front door and still be above the Grant garage. “Moses the sort-of mayor of Newenham? Or no, what was it she said, the city father? You think there’s only one?”

Mutt’s wide yellow eyes gave Kate to understand that she sincerely hoped so.

Kate’s eyes felt full of sand and her mouth tasted of rotten eggs. She never afterwards understood why but such was the force of the little man’s personality that she found herself staggering into the bathroom, brushing her teeth, washing her face, dressing and presenting herself and her dog in front of a red Nissan longbed with a white canopy. The red had faded a little pink and the white a little gray, but the cab was warm when Kate and Mutt climbed in. Mutt insisted on Kate getting in first.

“Hi,” Kate said, “I’m Kate Saracoff. Who are you, again?”

“Moses.” The longbed spun around on a dime and charged off down the road like a maiden lady goosed by a lecherous roué. Mutt gave a smothered yelp and pressed against Kate’s side.

“Moses Alakuyak.”

“Are you the Moses Bill Billington mentioned to me last night?”

He threw his head back with a loud cackle. “I’d by god better be.”

“Where are we going?”

“What, are you simple or something? I told you, we’re going to Wy and Liam’s.”

“The pilot and the trooper?”

“You know any other Wys or Liams in Newenham?” Kate didn’t know hardly anyone in Newenham, but before she could say so Moses took another turn at speed and the longbed settled into a long, death-defying skid that barely held them on to the road. If the ground hadn’t been frozen, he would have kicked gravel all the way to the Nushugak.

The buildings of Newenham passed in rapid review, cars, trucks, dogs, and pedestrians diving out of the way of the oncoming juggernaut, and then they were out of town again and on a road following the river south. Far too late in Kate’s estimation, the old man slammed on the brakes and threw the pickup into another long skid and stomped on the gas just in time to gun them up a road heading straight into the trees. Any comparisons to Kate’s recent snow machine trip from Niniltna to the homestead were disregarded because she wasn’t driving this time, and she hung on like grim death to the edge of the bench seat.

The trees thinned out in time, barely, to make way for the truck, and they bumped down the road more in the air than on the ground, before slamming to a halt. They were on a small bit of gravel before an old white clapboard house and an equally old white clapboard garage, beyond both of which could be seen a vast expanse of swift-moving river. Moses slammed the longbed into first and killed the engine. He was out of the truck and around the back to grab a bag before Kate had her door open. By the time she and Mutt were on the ground he was in the house.

“I guess we go in, too,” she said to Mutt.

Mutt dropped her head and looked shifty and cast meaningful glances at the forest of spruce and alder that crowded around the house. “Coward,” Kate said. Mutt vanished into the trees without so much as a backward glance.

Kate walked into the saliva-inducing smell of pancakes on the griddle and the homey sight of Campbell, dressed in sweats with a spatula in his hand. Kate couldn’t make up her mind which looked better, the man or the pancakes.

Chouinard was seated at a computer. There was a window open with a man’s face looking out of it. She glanced over her shoulder to give Kate a welcoming smile and turned back to say, “Five o’clock sounds fine, Ephraim, I’ll see you then.” She signed out and removed her headset. “Don’t know how I ever ran the business without the Internet. Morning, Kate.”

“Morning.”

The phone rang and Chouinard answered it. “Nushugak Air Taxi. Hey, Brad.”

Under cover of the subsequent one-sided conversation, in a low voice Kate said to Liam, “Mind telling me what I’m doing here?”

Before Liam could answer, Chouinard said, “Sure,” into her headset. “I’ve got a five o’clock flight scheduled for Silver Horn, I can pick him up right after. Say six o’clock? Great.”

She hung up and the old man came out of the bathroom dressed in some kind of black costume that made him look like a ninja, without the mask. “Well,” he said testily, “let’s get to it.”

Campbell turned off the grill, put the plate of pancakes into a warm oven, and removed his apron. He and Wy both donned rope-soled slip-on shoes and followed Moses out onto the deck, which seemed to float over a bank that dropped about a hundred feet to an ice-encrusted gravel beach below. Kate hadn’t eaten since the burger the day before and she made an instinctive move for the oven, only to be bellowed at from the deck. “Get your ass out here, Saracoff, goddammit!”

There was something awfully familiar in the echo of that bellow.

She got her ass out there to find Moses facing Chouinard and Campbell, the three of them standing with their knees bent and their arms bent at the elbow, hands cupped with the palms facing each other. Moses was glaring at her. It seemed to be his default expression.

Maybe her defenses were down due to starvation and sleep deprivation. Maybe the old man reminded her too much of Old Sam, in attitude if not in stature. Maybe it was cultural, she just couldn’t go up against an elder. Whatever the reason, Kate found herself planting her feet, bending her knees and elbows and raising her arms to cup her hands. When they started to move, she followed along as best she could, succeeding in tying herself into several spectacular knots and one time stepping momentarily off the edge of the deck. Luckily there was a railing, or next stop Dutch Harbor.

Kate did not believe organized exercise was necessary. She led an active life, and chopping enough wood to keep the fireplace in business through the winter was all by itself enough to keep a three-toed sloth fit for a gold medal in any Olympic sport you cared to name. She cross-country skied when she wanted to get somewhere without the aid of an internal combustion engine, she hunted out the back door of her house when she was hungry, and she’d taken her turn water-skiing on deck boards during Fourth of July celebrations on Alaganik Bay. There was the occasional run in Anchorage when she was restless and Mutt needed to shake out the urban fidgets, but she didn’t skip rope or do yoga or dance around in leotards to synthesized music with a bunch of other robots in the Niniltna gym on Monday and Wednesday evenings.

This was something else entirely. The cranky little demon seemed to be suspended on wires, his limbs manipulated by an invisible puppet master with, she had to admit, a considerable amount of grace and style. It looked easy. It wasn’t. For one thing, you didn’t stop until you got all the way through the exercise, and it had thirty-six separate movements. For another, you didn’t get to straighten your legs until you were done.

Moses named the movements as he performed them, which to Kate was the most ridiculous part of the exercise. Stork Spreads Its Wings? Turn and White Snake Puts Out Tongue? Shoot a Tiger with Bow? None of them made any sense, and half the time the movements had her looking the wrong way anyway, so she couldn’t see what she was supposed to be doing.

Moses was not content with having her follow along, oh no, he was constantly in her face, pushing her arms into position, pulling her shoulders back, kicking her feet apart, poking at the backs of her knees. This was accompanied by a steady stream of running commentary. “Bend those knees!” “Extend that arm!” “Root from below, suspend from above!” “Jesus, you look like you’re about to mate with a porcupine!”

She was so glad Mutt hadn’t followed her inside.

As they worked, the light increased across the horizon, highlighting the far bank of the river. The Kanuyaq River was not a small river, navigable at least by small boats all the way to Ahtna in summer. This river was immense by comparison, kingly even. It looked like cold molten rock, thick and roiling with gray glacial silt, moving in slow and stately fashion steadily downstream. The occasional glint from the rising sun sparkled from the small pieces of brash ice bobbing in its current.

On the left, upriver, mountains emerged from the night sky, shorter than her own but just as sharp edged and menacing. At first white ghosts against the dawn, with the rising of the sun they turned a slow, pale magenta, the brief glorious alpenglow of sunrise and sunset on a clear arctic day, before coalescing into the icy, ravenous peaks and ridges of their everyday clothes.

“You wanna do form or you wanna admire the view?” Moses said, glaring when he caught her not looking at him.

“I want to eat breakfast,” Kate said, glaring back.

He kept them at it for an hour, barking corrections to what he called everyone’s “form,” before snorting out a contemptuous, “Well, I guess that’ll have to do. Practice, practice, practice.” He brought his right fist into his left palm and bowed. Wy and Liam did the same in return, and Kate did her poor best to imitate them. When she straightened up again, painfully, he’d already gone back inside the house.

“What the hell were we just doing out here?” Kate said, massaging her thighs, trembling in their own personal earthquake. One way and another, she’d taken a hell of a beating over the last twenty-four hours. “And who the hell is that guy?”

Chouinard and Campbell exchanged a glance, and Kate couldn’t help but notice that both had barely broken a sweat, whereas her T-shirt was soaked through. “Beelzebub,” Campbell said. “Lucifer. Satan. He is called by many names.”

“Liam!” Chouinard said. To Kate she said, “He’s my grandfather. He, ah, takes some getting used to.”

“No shit,” Campbell said, and gave Kate a sympathetic look.

“I don’t understand why he brought me here,” Kate said. “I don’t even know how he knew I was here at all. Bill mentioned something about a Moses Alakuyak at work last night but he didn’t come into the bar. Did you tell him about me, or what?”

“Moses picks his own students,” Chouinard said.

“You mean victims,” Campbell said not quite beneath his breath.

“Liam!” To Kate, Chouinard said, “No telling with my grandfather. He—” She hesitated. “He knows things.”

Kate gave it up and limped back inside and Moses slammed out of the bathroom, his ninja costume back in the bag and himself dressed once more in his denim bibs. “What’s a man gotta do to get fed around this dump?”

They ate pancakes slathered in butter and maple syrup, the real stuff from Canada—“I’ve got a friend in the Mounties,” Campbell said—and link sausage on the side.