A Cold Day For Murder Part 3

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Gray eyes surveyed Kate shrewdly. "What brings you down the road today?"

Kate looked down into her coffee cup. "Jack Morgan showed up yesterday morning, wanting me to look for a ranger who's been missing in the Park for six weeks." Mandy grunted. "Yeah, I know," Kate said, "but the kid's father is a congressman Outside and nudged the FBI. Their local rep knew Jack and he sent Ken Dahl after the kid. Now Ken's missing, too."

"Ken Dahl," Mandy said. "That the blond bombsh.e.l.l of Beacon Hill Dahl?"

"Yeah. Mark Miller's the ranger's name. You ever meet him?"

"Little guy, dark, too young, kind of an environmental Jerry Falwell?"

Kate smiled. "I don't know about the Falwell part, but the rest matches the description. What do you mean, too young? Too young for what?"

"Too young to tell everybody how to run the Park." Mandy's laugh was short and humorless. "He testified in favor of developing the Park before that House subcommittee in Niniltna in October."

"Say anything that might get him killed?"

Mandy shot her a reproachful look. "Come now, Kate. He's a ranger.

He's been trained not to say much that wouldn't."

"Wonderful. What did he say, exactly?"

Mandy sat back in her chair and linked her hands behind her head.

"Imagine the scene, if you will. The school gym, and Billy Mike's got it all tar ted up in red, white and blue crepe paper. There's a long table set up on the stage, and a lectern facing it for the witnesses, and every folding chair in the Park unfolded on our brand new gym floor."

"Bet Bernie had a few things to say about that."

"Bet your a.s.s. So all these Park rats get up and swear on their ancestors how the Park is their home and how improving the railroad grade into a real highway is going to ruin the quality of life for everyone and how the Alaska Railroad kills all those moose every winter and what makes this committee think a new road wouldn't be a danger to caribou migration, and so on and so on and so on. You get the general idea. Then Miller gets up, this intense little f.u.c.ker from Outside, and contradicts everything that had been said before and actually has the gall to produce facts and figures, G.o.ddam statistics, can you imagine, to back up his theories. Yes, indeedy, he told us all how to run this here Park, like we'd never heard the words 'game management' put together in a sentence before."

Kate gave a sharp bark of laughter. "Mandy, the only game management you've ever been involved in is not getting caught when you run out of dog food and go caribou hunting in April. Between you and Abel I'm surprised there's anything left on four feet inside the Park."

Mandy grinned and for a moment looked like a little girl with her hand caught in the cookie jar. "Between you and me, so am I, Kate," she admitted. "Abel and me and the poachers."

"What poachers?" Kate said.

"Didn't Abel tell you?" Mandy said. "Couple weeks ago there was a whole h.e.l.l of a lot of shooting going on up by the old Lost Wife Mine.

It was calm that day and sound carried, you know the way it does in winter, and I heard it all. It wasn't me, and Abel told me it wasn't him, so ..."

Kate said, amused, "He's got a haunch hanging from his cache right now."

"That old buzzard," Mandy said, disgusted. "You should have seen those big old blue eyes. "Who me? Shoot game out of season?" And he thunders off all indignant. I actually felt bad about accusing him."

"Well," Kate said fairly, "it looks more the size of a moose haunch than a caribou, I'll give him that." She sighed, and said, "As for Miller, I hope you know you've just expanded my roster of suspects to include everyone in the Park."

"Surely not everyone," Mandy said.

"Give me a for instance."

"Abel," Mandy said with a straight face, and they both burst out laughing. When they sobered enough to be able to speak, Mandy said, "Did I tell you I knew Ken Dahl Outside?"

"No," Kate said, surprised. "In Ma.s.sachusetts?"

"Uh-huh," Mandy said, grinning. "His family and mine were very close.

In fact, Mother was kind of hoping for an alliance."

"She wanted you to marry him?"

"Back when she still thought I was going to graduate from Va.s.sar and make my debut in a pink satin dress with a chiffon overskirt. I think she was hoping Ken would marry me, actually," Mandy said reflectively.

"I think she thought he might be able to save me from L. L. Bean, where she and Dad had failed."

"He never told me. Were you tempted?"

"Nah. I was too involved with Robert Service at the time."

Kate laughed. "I'd like to meet your mother, Mandy. When are you going to break down and invite your folks up here?"

"Are you kidding? Mother thinks there are still buffalo in Buffalo."

"They've got to be proud of your racing."

Mandy shrugged. "If it doesn't happen on the track at Saratoga or offsh.o.r.e at Newport, it doesn't happen."

"Oh."

Later, standing in the doorway, she said, "Kate?"

Kate straddled her machine and looked up. "What?"

"What about Jack?"

The faint smile vanished from Kate's face. "What about him?"

"Did the temperature around here just drop sharply in the last five seconds?" Mandy wondered aloud. "Maybe I should have said, What about you and Jack?"

"There is no me and Jack."

"Well, excuse me. I'm always making the mistake of believing what I see with my own eyes."

"It's a no go, Mandy," Kate said. "We don't agree on anything important."

"Kate," Mandy said, "it's important whether he puts the toilet paper on the roller to roll from the top or the bottom. The rest is ground rules and gravy."

"Easy for you to say," Kate grumbled, and fired up the Super Jag.

"Only because it's true," Mandy yelled after her.

THREE.

Niniltna was a village of eight hundred inhabitants that doubled in population in the summer when the salmon were running. This made it a metropolis by Alaskan bush standards. Its buildings crouched together on the flat, boggy muskeg at the edge of the Kanuyaq River--the river that served as the drainage ditch to the Park, the river into which all glaciers eventually melted and into which all creeks and streams flowed. It was the river up which the chinook and sockeye and silver and humpy and dog salmon migrated to lay their eggs and die or to be tangled in set nets and air-freighted to Anchorage, there to be cleaned and frozen and shipped to restaurants and supermarkets half a world away. Usually the fishermen were Aleut and Athabascan and Tlingit Indians who fished with centuries-old squatters' rights. Occasionally a sports fisherman flew in, fished his limit and turned his catch over to one of half a dozen Native women who would filet it and smoke it, rendering it tough and stringy and delicious. It was said that smoked salmon was not real smoked salmon unless your jaw ached and your house smelled for a minimum of three days afterward.

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 pa.s.sed 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 Trans Alaska 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 Sea Land 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 ma.s.s 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 air freighted 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 c.h.i.n.ked with moss and river clay.

This cabin had been added on to every ten years or so to encompa.s.s 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 counter charges of a.s.sault, 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 c.o.c.ked 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 birth date. 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 b.u.t.ter 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 doc.u.ment 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 a.s.sociations, 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 bulls.h.i.t 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 unb.u.t.toned the top b.u.t.tons of her shirt.