One of which was unleashed when Kate closed the door behind her. “So, Katya,” Auntie Vi said without preamble, “you thinking about what I say?”
“I thinking plenty about what you say, Auntie.”
“You don’t mock, Katya,” Auntie Vi said sharply. “This too important for making fun.”
“I’m sorry, Auntie,” Kate said. She put on hot water for tea and got out the cookies and her self-control.
Auntie Vi sat down at the table, very erect. It took an inordinately long time for the water to boil. Kate was sure there was a metaphor in there somewhere. She brought the tea and cookies to the table and sat down, grateful for silence. It gave her a brief space of time to gather her composure, on the ragged edge after Johnny’s startling news.
Jim was Bernie’s alibi? How convenient was that?
Auntie Vi took a sip of tea and a bite of a cookie and pushed both away. “There is board meeting next week, Katya. You should go.”
“I got thrown out of the last board meeting I went to, Auntie.”
A finger poked her shoulder, hard. “This time you be quiet. Listen. Learn.” She gave a sharp nod.
“Auntie, I’ve never been an officer of a group. I’ve never joined a group I could be an officer of. I wasn’t even on the student council in high school.”
Auntie Vi was unyielding. “You learn.”
Swish, two points, Auntie Vi.
They sipped more tea, munched more cookie. Johnny poked a cautious head out the door of his room, smelled the tension in the air, retreated noiselessly back behind his moat and pulled up the drawbridge. Mutt, after trotting over to greet Auntie Vi, had returned to the rag rug in front of the fireplace, and to all appearances was soundly asleep with her nose beneath her tail.
Kate cast about for a topic to divert Auntie Vi. “I was thinking about Emaa today, Auntie. I was wondering what she would think about Louis Deem.”
“I tell you exactly what Ekaterina would say,” Auntie Vi said, in the manner of one bringing the sermon down from the mount. “That Louis a bad boy, very bad, bad for his wives, bad for their families, bad for the village, for the tribe, for the Park. You think it bad that he dead? No! Good! Good for girl children! Good for families! Good for village!”
“I know, Auntie. But I was wondering if she would think the way he died was right.”
Auntie Vi’s face darkened. “You like this always, even little girl Katya poking her nose in everywhere, nobody’s business is theirs it isn’t hers, too. Good that you became police detective. Good, I say to Ekaterina, good all the aunties and uncles say. Nosy girl grow up into nosy woman, go to work at nosy job. Good. Maybe help peoples. That good, too. Maybe, Ekaterina say, maybe she come home and help her peoples. We all say, that be very good!”
Kate dropped her forehead into her hand.
Auntie Vi didn’t notice. “But then you don’t come home. No. You stay in Anchorage.”
“I’m here now, Auntie,” Kate said tiredly to the surface of the table. “I’ve been here for almost seven years. Don’t you think you could maybe, oh, I don’t know, let that go?”
“Anchorage!” Auntie Vi said, curling her lip. “Your people here, but you stay there. And then you come home!” Auntie Vi waved her mug in emphasis. Some of the tea splashed on the table. Auntie Vi took no notice. “Finally you come home. Because you hurt.” An indignant forefinger stabbed in the direction of the scar on Kate’s throat. “You hurt, almost you die, so you come home. You want healing. Good, we say. But you don’t come home, you stay out here. Twenty-five miles from your family, your peoples, you stay. Alone, no one to help, no way we know if you well or if you die.”
Auntie Vi seized another cookie. “So. We get you puppy.” The finger stabbed at Mutt, who didn’t so much as twitch an ear. Kate envied her deeply, and hoped Auntie Vi didn’t notice that Mutt’s bedding consisted of a quilt painstakingly handmade stitch by excruciatingly small stitch for their Katya by her aunties. “You get better. All right. We forgive. You work for your peoples. You do good for them. Mostly. Partly. Some of the time. Little bits anyway. But respected, you are. Honored, you are.” Auntie Vi glared. “Loved, you are!”
When Auntie Vi got really wound up she started sounding like Yoda. Kate wondered if Willard, the Star Wars fanatic, had ever heard Auntie Vi on a roll. Probably not. He was such an aunties’ pet. They’d never yell at him. She hid a sigh and stirred more sugar into her tea.
“When I ask you to do more for your peoples, Katya, this is what you do, this craziness, what is this, Katya. Louis bad man. Bad! He hurt many peoples. He would have hurt many more. Johnny, he threaten. You! That puppy! Good that he is dead. We all know this.” Auntie Vi finished her cookie in one angry bite. “Except you!”
“I didn’t say that, Auntie,” Kate said, startled, but her words were swept under by the flood. “It’s not like I’m going after his killer.”
It’s not like anyone is, she thought.
There was a brief silence. Auntie Vi studied the tea in her mug and seemed to come to a decision. “This Louis Deem a very bad man, Katya.” Her voice had become very soft.
“I know that, Auntie. None better.”
“A very bad man,” Auntie Vi repeated. “The Smith girl. She come to me.”
“Abigail? When? Oh God, don’t tell me she’s changing her story again?”
“Not Abigail. Chloe. At the potlatch for Bernie’s boy.” She added, as an afterthought, “And wife.”
“Chloe?”
“You know how the girls always talk to me. If I know them, if I don’t, they always talk to me.”
“Yes.” Kate thought back to the potluck, and vaguely remembered seeing Auntie Vi with Chloe. “Why would she need to—?” Kate stopped.
The silence hung heavy in the room. At last Kate said, almost imploringly, “No. No, Auntie.”
Inexorable, Auntie Vi nodded once, up and down. “Yes. I see Chloe at potlatch for Enid and Fitz. She looking like she lost her last friend, so I bring her fry bread. She look at my fry bread and she start to cry. I take her out back. She tell me.”
Kate remembered the Smiths turning out in force at the potlatch. She remembered how annoyed she had been that they had pushed themselves into the Park’s social life without invitation.
“Not only Chloe,” Auntie Vi said in a hard voice. “The little girl, Hannah, too.”
Without knowing how she got there, Kate found herself on her feet, shouting. “What did this guy think he was doing, marrying into a fucking harem?”
Mutt scrambled up and shot like an arrow to Kate’s side. She stood, four feet planted squarely, barking and growling in every direction. She even snapped at Auntie Vi.
“Shame on you, Mutt,” Auntie Vi said sharply. “You don’t know who are your friends?”
Mutt barked at her, ears flattened against her head. She had heard the pain and outrage in Kate’s voice, and Auntie Vi was the only other person in the room.
Auntie Vi sat very still.
Kate looked up to see Johnny standing in the door of his bedroom, his face white. He swallowed, and said, his voice very small, “Is everything all right?”
Kate put a shaking hand on Mutt’s head. Bit by bit she brought herself back under control. She sat down again and concentrated on breathing in and breathing out. Mutt had stopped growling, but she remained on guard, hackles raised. “Yes. We’re fine, Johnny. Everything’s all right.”
He looked doubtful.
“Go back into your room,” she said. “Please. Just for a few more minutes.”
“I didn’t know the boy is there,” Auntie Vi said.
It was as much of an apology as Kate would get, and she knew it.
She remembered the last look she’d had at Chloe and Hannah, pinch-faced, shivering and crying, clutching to their elder sister’s hands like it was their last hope of salvation. They had been terrified and brutalized, and a great part of their lives would be spent in learning that they had been victimized, that they bore
no responsibility for what had happened to them no matter how guilty they felt. An even greater part of their lives would involve trying to regain some sense of confidence in their own authority, learning to say no with the certainty that they were in the right, that they could make it stick.
And the rest of it would be spent learning how to trust again.
From now on, their lives would be all about the rape, and the dice were weighted far more in favor of their failing to survive it emotionally. Kate had worked too long in the DA’s office in Anchorage with hundreds of victims just like Chloe and Hannah to harbor any illusions. As they entered their teens, they’d start rebelling against what have you got. They’d become sexually promiscuous. There was a better than even chance they’d get into substance abuse, and if it turned into a habit, they’d rob and sell themselves and very possibly murder to support it. They’d be at risk for everything from herpes to AIDS. Statistically, they were destined to have children too young, and those children would inevitably repeat the cycle begun by their parents, a cycle that they would then hand down to their children, also born too soon, culminating in a downward, self-replicating spiral that seemed to have no end.
Maybe Kate was wrong. She hoped fervently that she was. But the damage of the kind that Louis Deem had inflicted almost never stopped with one generation.
When Kate could trust herself to speak in a reasonable tone, she said, “The other girls? The littlest ones?” “Chloe and Hannah little enough, Katya.” At Auntie Vi’s reproving tone, Mutt’s ears twitched. She was the only one allowed to speak to Kate like that. Kate knotted a hand in her ruff, as much for her own comfort as to enforce Mutt’s restraint. “Yes,” she said. “But the others?”
“Chloe and Hannah say not. We hope.”
We hope. Of course Auntie Vi would have told the other aunties. Kate thought back to that morning at the Smiths’ house, with Chloe and Hannah holding fast to Abigail’s hands, her determination not to let them go.
Not to let them down a second time, Kate realized now. To atone for the monster she had helped bring into the house. “That’s why Abigail changed her story,” Kate said. “Did you know that? That she said she wasn’t with Louis Deem the night Enid and Fitz were killed after all? It’s not generally known because Louis wound up dead shortly thereafter, but she repudiated her statement that she was with him that night.”
“Ah.” Auntie Vi sat back. “She know.”
“She was lying,” Kate said slowly, remembering the hard expression on Abigail’s face. “She said she’d been with him other nights. When Jim and I went out to talk with her the day after Dan O’Brien found Louis Deem’s body, Abigail said she just hadn’t been with him that night. I didn’t believe her.” She looked at Auntie Vi. “I don’t believe her now. Chloe and Hannah told her about Louis, and Abigail changed her story, said she lied about being with him so he wouldn’t have an alibi for Enid and Fitz’s murders.” She paused, thinking. “Why wouldn’t she just tell Jim the truth?”
She knew the answer before Auntie Vi gave it to her. “I swear to those girls no one else ever know.”
Not counting aunties, who were well practiced in keeping their own counsel. “Their parents?”
Auntie Vi shook her head.
“They should know.”
“Girls say no. No one know. Ever.”
Someone would, though. One day the girls would weary of holding it all inside, of maintaining the facade. One or the other or all three of them would crack, and all the poison would spew out all over everyone within reach, and then there would be no hiding anything. “Better they tell their parents now. We could get them some counseling.”
“They say no.”
“They should be tested.”
“Balasha’s granddaughter Desiree a nurse practitioner at the school clinic. I will get girls to her somehow. She not talk.”
Kate started to say something.
Auntie Vi overrode her ruthlessly. “Their choice, Katya. If you believe nothing else, you believe that.” She rose to her feet and said with decision, “Board meeting next week, Katya. You be there.”
Auntie Vi’s SUV was barely out of sight when Kate said, “Johnny? I’m driving into town. I won’t be long, okay?”
He reappeared in his doorway. “Is everything all right, Kate?”
“Everything’s fine. You okay here on your own?” His smile was wan. “I am now.” Her answering smile was grim. “Good. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Stay,” she told Mutt.
“Oh hey, Kate, you don’t have to—”
Affronted, Mutt flounced back to the fireplace, pawed the quilt into a pile, and lay down with her back pointedly to Kate.
“Great,” Kate said, “another country heard from.” She grabbed her jacket and headed for the door.
FOURTEEN
Halfway to Niniltna, Kate rounded a corner and found Willard’s rusty old International stalled in the middle of the road. He was changing the left rear tire. She stopped behind him so that her headlights would help him see what he was doing in the near dark, shut off the engine, and got out.
He looked up and saw her. “Hey, Kate!”
His hands were quick and deft on the lug wrench, and the nuts clattered into the hubcap like a pinball machine ringing up points. Kate stood by on the jack and the flat was off and the spare on in two swift, sure movements.
He locked down the last nut and hoisted the flat into the back, carefully wiped down the wrench and replaced it in the toolbox bolted to the back of the cab. He disconnected the jack, wiped it down just as carefully, disassembled it, and stowed it.
He beamed at Kate, who couldn’t help but beam back. They were both happy she hadn’t caught him doing anything she’d have to bust him for.
“Nice job,” Kate said, and Willard beamed some more.
“I like working with my hands,” he said, patting the tire fondly. “They aren’t so dumb as the rest of me.”
“Hey,” she said, pointing. “Where’s Darth?”
His smile faded a little, and he patted his shirt pocket, where Anakin Skywalker in Jedi robes peeped out. “It’s Anakin, Kate.”
“Yeah, but didn’t it used to be Darth Vader? What happened to him? He was a permanent resident there for a while.”
Willard’s voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “You know, Kate, a lot of people make that mistake. Everybody thinks it’s Darth, but it’s always Anakin on the inside. Anakin’s a good guy.”
He was so earnest, so sincere, so totally Willard, and Kate understood perhaps for the first time why Auntie Balasha, how all four aunties could love him enough to forgive him almost anything.
“Anakin’s a good guy, Kate,” Willard said again. “That black mask is just a disguise. It makes people think bad things about him. But it’s Anakin underneath. And Anakin’s a good guy.”
“Yes, Willard,” Kate said gently. “Anakin’s a good guy.”
Jim looked down at his desk, where the Louis Deem case file was spread out. He’d been putting it into order before tucking it away. Almost a week old now, it was colder than Barrow in January. Barring a confession, no one was ever going to find out who killed Louis Deem. The killer could start bragging, of course, but Jim didn’t see that happening, either.
No, Louis Deem’s murderer had got away with it. What’s more, he got away with it on Jim’s watch, and Jim had already heard about it from his CO in Anchorage. “Two cold cases in one year, that’s about your record, isn’t it, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I should think you’d want to see to it that this didn’t happen again, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Makes the force look bad. I don’t like having to go ask the legislature for funds for a service with a reputation of not getting its man.”
“No, sir. I will continue investigating the case, sir.”
The mellow tones of his superior’s voice, so apt for film at ten, became a little testy. “Like hell you will, Chopin
. You’ll get on with the job at hand.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’re spread thin enough as it is, we don’t need our officers wasting their time on crap like this. Louis Deem was an asshole and whoever shot him did us a favor.” A pause. “No one says this in public, of course.”
“Of course not, sir.”
Another pause. “Well. Carry on, then.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
He closed the Deem file and set it aside. The Koslowski file was much thicker. He spread the photographs out for a last look.
A sound at the door made him raise his head.
“Hey,” Kate said. She hesitated in the doorway, as if she wasn’t sure of her welcome. It wasn’t a feeling she was accustomed to, and it showed.
She gathered her courage and took a chance. “Been missing you.”
“Me, too,”
It wasn’t that she sensed a lack of sincerity, but there was something else going on here. In the best Kate fashion, she decided on a frontal attack. “Are we done?”
His first line of defense was bewilderment. “What? What do you mean?”
“Come on. You haven’t been out to the house in three days.”
His second line of defense was humor, beginning with an unconvincing laugh. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been busy as hell, is all. You know what this time of year is like. Half the women in the Park toughed out the winter with men they’ve now learned even breakup can’t make look good, and all the men in the Park have cabin fever because we’re gaining daylight to the tune of six minutes a day and it’s still too cold to be outside working on their boats or mending their gear. Stir some booze in, and I’m on call twenty-four-seven.”
Her eyes narrowed. “That’s not it, either.”
His third line of defense was bluster. If she were being fanciful, she would have said that it was underlaid with fear. “What’s the big deal? It’s not like we’re living together.” Very unwisely, he gave a snort and added, “Jesus, anybody’d think we were married, the way you’re carrying on.”
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