“Until it did.”
“What I find hardest to take is that it was one of our own. Erland didn’t just open the door to it, he laid down a welcome mat and invited it in. He was born here. He’d lived here all his life. He was one of us. And yet…”
“And yet,” Jim said.
They lay in silence for a few moments, listening to the crackle of the fire. Two bald eagles had taken up residence in adjoining spruce trees at the edge of the yard and were conversing in the high-pitched, multi-toned chirps that sounded so odd coming from something that looked so fierce.
“‘The world is too much with us,’” Kate said.
Her voice was so low he could hear her. “What’s that?”
“‘The world is too much with us.’”
“Aha.” Gotta be a poem. Kate read poetry sometimes. When he’d asked her why she’d said because she liked it. He couldn’t even. “Where’s that from?”
“’s a poem by Tennyson. Or Shelley. Coleridge. One of the Romantics. ‘The world is too much with us; late and soon/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’”
She sounded exhausted. He ran his hand up and down her spine in slow, lazy strokes, enjoying the feel of the tension leaving her body, the way it seemed to heat up and elongate and achieve more mass against him as it did so. “Have you ever taken a vacation?”
The question seemed to startle her back into wakefulness. “What?”
“A vacation. Weeks, months even, spent in a place not your own, preferably exotic, definitely warm, not working, not anyone’s beck and call girl, just being.”
A brief silence. “Jack took me Outside once. Arizona and New Mexico. So different than here in every respect.”
“How long?”
“Two weeks.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“It was hot.” Her voice was getting drowsy. “And there were snakes.”
“Did you see any?”
“No. But I knew they were there. Waiting for me.”
He ran his hand up and down her spine, up and down. Her breathing began to slow and deepen.
No snakes in Hawaii, he thought. “And I could teach you to surf,” he said. What could be more romantic than that?
She answered him with a snore.
So they were staying here in this village in the middle of this place called Alaska, where there were big white bears like in the movie about the boy on the train, and other kinds of bears, too. There were big brown animals called moose that they saw on the way to school sometimes, and spotted, short-tailed cats with long legs and feet the size of tortillas, and round brown animals with needles for fur, and eagles with white heads and tails. It was everything he could do to keep Anna away from them, she wanted to pet them all. Too many Disney movies.
The swearing woman they knew now to call Tía Vi had come home, and Mami and David and Anna were living with her and taking care of her until she could care for herself. She might never be able to do that because she was so old, but they would stay with her as long as she needed them. David had made Mami promise.
They were staying in three bedrooms in the downstairs in the back, David and Anna next to each other and Mami across the hall. All three had locks on the insides of the doors and none on the outside. At least that was where they were supposed to be staying. For now they were all sleeping in the same bed in Mami’s room. If Tia Vi knew she didn’t say anything. She wasn’t getting downstairs much anyway.
They had been told that there would be no return to the border, or to Tegucigalpa. Someone very important was sponsoring them to become Americans, and everyone acted like it was already done. It sounded too good to be true and David wasn’t quite sure he believed them, but he didn’t say so to Mami and Anna.
In the meantime David and Anna were going to school, walking up the hill every day. The pretty girl who found them had made sure they had the right clothes to stay warm outside, and other presents appeared from time to time, like the two big round plastic disks with handles used to slide down hills. David got dumped into snowbank after snowbank but Anna loved them, flying down the slope and screaming all the way, so David took her to the sledding hill behind the school every Saturday morning whether it was snowing or not.
They studied English every night for an hour. Anna was picking it up the fastest and David, his pride stung, shouldered in until he caught up. Even Mami was overcoming her shyness, able to shop at the grocery store and to talk to the dark-haired woman with the wolf when she came to visit. Even the wolf seemed to understand them, but then that seemed to be how things worked in this new and strange and, David had to admit, fascinating place. The black man with the missing legs, Bobby, who lived on the other side of town, promised he would teach David how to fly once his legs were long enough to reach the pedals, and Dinah, his very white, much younger wife, was teaching David how to make movies on his new phone, and Katya, their daughter with the braids, was already Anna’s best friend. An older white woman, a friend of the wolf lady—David hadn’t screwed up enough courage to call her by her name yet—named Ruthe was going to teach him how to shoot a rifle.
Or maybe that was only what he thought she had said, because he couldn’t quite believe that, either. Or any of it. For now, it took everything he had to believe that they would always have enough to eat and a safe place to sleep, and no bad men coming to the door.
And if they did, they had locks. And Tía Vi.
There was a counselor that flew into the Park once a month to talk to him and Anna and Mami about how they got here and what happened to them along the way. She was a nice lady and she spoke Spanish but she had been born in el norte and she didn’t understand. David was reluctant to tell her everything. He didn’t want to tell anyone everything. Mami might, and Anna, too, and he was willing to believe that it would be good for them to do so.
But not him. David was the man of the family now. It was his job to look forward, not behind. It was his job to be alert, and strong, and wary. Because the bad men were always out there, at home and in el norte, in uniform and out of it. It was his job to protect Anna and Mami from them from now on.
So he would.
Acknowledgments
SO I STARTED A NONPROFIT. AND THEN, because this is what crime writers do, I immediately tried to figure out how to pervert it to be used in evil ways.
With the help (again) of Der Plotmeister, it was alarmingly easy.
Disclaimer: No actual nonprofits were harmed in the writing of this book, nor does the Bannister Foundation resemble any nonprofit in real life.
At least I sure as hell hope not.
My thanks to Barbara Peters for identifying all the gaping plot holes so I could backfill them in. A good editor’s price is far above rubies.
Kate’s thanks to Joyce White for sharing her fry bread recipe.
My thanks to Pati Crofut for the story about the night landing with the snow machines lined up along the runway.
Well. For all the stories, really.
My thanks to attorneys Andy Haas and Terri Spigelmyer for defining the responsibilities of a trustee.
I wish there was too little information out there on sex trafficking but the agony is that there is too much. There are articles on mainstream media everywhere, from the New York Times to USA Today to the BBC. The FBI and the US Marshals both have multiple posts on their websites, as do the United Nations and the European Commission.
There is every bit as much information out there on the opioid plague, from mainstream media to local, state, national, and international law enforcement websites.
The day I wrote these words I googled “how to make fentanyl” and got 11,900,000 results.
Goody.
About the Author
DANA STABENOW, born in Alaska and raised on a 75-foot fish tender, is the author of the award-winning, bestselling Kate Shugak series. The first book in the series, A Cold Day for Murder, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Contact Dana via her website:
www.stabenow.com.
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No Fixed Line (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 22) Page 24