by Jon L. Breen
“Thank you. Does the jury have any questions they would like to ask this witness?”
One man, portly, grizzled, raised his hand. “Was Horrell wearing a survival suit?”
Quinn shook his head. “No.”
“Were any of your crew?”
“No.”
“Do you have survival suits on board?”
“Yes.”
“Enough for everyone?”
Quinn’s expression hardened. “Yes.”
“Where?”
Quinn bit the words off. “In the portside galley locker.”
“Everybody know where they are?”
“Yes.”
“Everybody know how to put them on?”
“I run a survival suit drill the day before the season starts. I always do.”
“Then why wasn’t Horrell wearing one?”
“You know damn well why, Warren,” Quinn snapped. “They’re too bulky to work in.”
This was what came of holding a jury trial in a town small enough for everyone to know everyone else. “Gentlemen,” Bill said.
“I’m done, Your Honor,” the juror said, sitting back in his chair with the air of a righteous pigeon.
One at a time, Bill called Horrell’s fellow deckhands to the stand. One by one, they corroborated Quinn’s testimony. As the third left the stand, the Horrell daughter buried her face in her mother’s shoulder.
Bill consulted the witness list. “Lieutenant Commander Richard Klessens?”
The man in the blue uniform came forward to take the oath. He had round pink cheeks and wide-spaced round blue eyes. He didn’t look old enough to drive a car, let alone a helicopter, but a pilot he was. In command of the Search and Rescue helicopter that had flown to the scene of Horrell’s disappearance, he testified that they had spent the daylight hours of the better part of two days searching for Horrell’s body. They had spotted two of the Jeri A.’s life rings, an empty plastic bottle of Coke, and a homemade buoy made of a Clorox bottle painted fluorescent orange, but no Eli Horrell.
Next up was paramedic Joe Gould, a thin, intense young man with the fanatical look of a medieval martyr. He spoke in a laconic monotone that negated the impact of what he had to say. Two minutes was his estimate of how long Horrell would have had in the Bering Sea in January without a survival suit or a raft. “After that, hypothermia sets in, the victim becomes disoriented, can’t tell which way is up, loses consciousness, and drowns.” It was Joe Gould’s educated opinion that Eli Sylvester Horrell was dead a minimum of twenty-two minutes after he went into the water. At that point the youngest Horrell son left the courtroom at a run. Mrs. Horrell looked at the older son and he followed his brother.
Gould was the last name on the witness list. The clock showed twenty minutes after ten. Bill felt as if it ought to be much, much later. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the testimony of the witness in this case. Do you have any questions?” She was beginning to feel restive beneath the steady gaze of the sixth juror, who hadn’t looked away from her once during the testimony of the witnesses. She consulted the jury list. “Mr.—Alakuyak?” She stumbled a little over the name.
His gaze unwavering, showing no shame at being caught staring and no perceptible alarm at being confronted, he said, “Nope. No questions.”
Ruffled but determined to retain at least the facade of impervious judicial calm, she said, “Anyone else?” No one else. “Very well. You may retire to the jury room”—a glorified reference to the conference room reached through the door in the wall on her left, which was even smaller and dingier than her courtroom, not to mention less well furnished—“to deliberate your verdict. Court is in recess.”
She waited until the jury had filed out. To Mrs. Horrell she said, “I don’t think they’ll be long, ma’am. Why don’t you take a break, get yourself a drink of water, stretch your legs?” She nodded at the daughter. “There are pop and snack machines down the hall to the left.”
Mrs. Horrell managed a smile. “Thank you.” She and her daughter waited for Bill to rise and then stood and shuffled out, heads together, arms around each other, moving like two old women. The paramedic had already left, as had Horrell’s three crewmates, immediately following their testimony. Trooper Reynoldson, Commander Klessens, and Enrique Quinn sat where they were, Reynoldson and Klessens conversing in low tones, Quinn staring at the floor over folded arms. His face was pale beneath its outdoor tan and there were shadows beneath his eyes. Bill paused in front of him. “Are you all right, Captain Quinn?”
He started, and stared up at her. “What?”
“Are you all right? Do you feel ill?”
“Oh. No. No.” He sighed. “This is the first time I’ve lost a member of my crew. I keep thinking there was something I could have done.”
“Was there?”
He looked startled again by her blunt question. “No,” he said quickly. “No. There wasn’t.”
“Well, then?”
The lines of his face eased a little. She turned to walk away, and to her back he said, “Your Honor?”
She looked over her shoulder.
“Thanks.”
Bill retired to her chambers, another tiny, airless room with just enough space for a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet, and busied herself with paperwork.
When she looked up again, it was ten to twelve. She frowned, and rose to open the door.
The widow and her children were back. Reynoldson was gone; Klessens looked impatient. Enrique Quinn was now sitting next to Mrs. Horrell, patting her shoulder with a kind of helpless awkwardness as she wept silently into a Kleenex. The kids looked miserable, but they were also young enough to begin to be bored, and restless with it.
In the chair next to the door into the jurors’ room, Hattie Bishop dozed, her head against the wall, her mouth slightly open, a soft snore issuing forth. Bill let her own door close with a loud thud and when she opened it again Hattie was sitting upright, blinking. “Bailiff,” Bill said, beckoning. Hattie, looking sheepish, got to her feet and crossed the courtroom. Bill closed the door behind her.
“Any messages from the jury?”
“No,” Hattie said, relieved that she wasn’t going to be chewed out for sleeping on the job. “No, Your Honor,” she added hastily.
“Hmm.” Bill pursed her lips and tapped her foot. “Go knock on their door, ask them if there is any testimony they would like to review, or if I can help them in any other way.”
She waited. The jury probably wanted lunch on the state, and were drawing out their deliberations to include the noon hour. Not in my courtroom, she thought.
The door opened and Hattie looked in, bright-eyed and bursting with news.
“Well?” Bill said.
“They say they’re deadlocked, Your Honor!”
Bill stared for long enough to make Hattie fidget. “They say they are what?”
“Deadlocked!” Hattie repeated in the same thrilled accents. This was better than Court TV off the satellite.
Bill’s lips thinned. “Call them into the courtroom. Now.”
The jury filed back in and took their seats. Bill looked at the portly juror. “Is there a problem, Mr. Foreman?” Her tone indicated that it would be better for them all if there wasn’t.
The portly juror—what the hell was his name? She consulted the jury list. Warren Ollestad. Mr. Ollestad shifted uncomfortably in his chair.
“Well?” she demanded.
Ollestad cast a fleeting look at his fellow jurors. “I’m afraid so, Your Honor.”
Bill felt rather than saw new tears forming in Mrs. Horrell’s eyes. “Explain,” she snapped.
“Well, we seem to be deadlocked.”
“Really,” Bill said. “How extremely interesting. Dead-locked on what, precisely?”
“Well—” Ollestad floundered for a moment. “Five of us are willing to sign the verdict. The sixth isn’t.”
Bill looked down the row of jurors with a sense of fatalism. Yes
, the sixth juror was still staring at her, that dark, intense, irritatingly knowing stare. She’d never seen him in her life before this day; what right did he have to that look of possession, that air of knowledge? “Mr. Alakuyak—”
“That’s Ah-LAH-coo-YAK,” he said.
“Mr. Alakuyak, what’s your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem, Your Honor.”
She resisted the impulse to glare. “Then why can’t you join the other jurors in a reasonable presumption of Mr. Horrell’s death?”
“It’s not his death I can’t agree to,” Alakuyak said, “it’s the manner of it.”
“What?” gasped Mrs. Horrell.
“What the hell?” Captain Quinn said.
“Your Honor,” Klessens said in protest.
Bill waved them all to silence. “‘The manner of it?’ Mr. Alakuyak, four people saw him go over the side of the Jeri A. in high winds and heavy seas halfway between Dutch Harbor and St. Paul Island. An extensive search by four boats and one helicopter failed to locate him, alive or dead.”
“I know that. My voices tell me something different.”
Bill stared. “Voices?”
“Yes.”
“What voices?”
“The voices that talk to me.”
“You hear voices?”
“Yes.”
The silence that followed didn’t seem to weigh on the sixth juror as much as it did on everyone else. “You mean like Joan of Arc?” Bill said at last.
He grinned. The jolt of that grin nearly knocked her out of her chair.
“What the hell is going on here?” Quinn said, starting to his feet. “Who is this nutcase—”
“Sit down, Captain Quinn,” Bill said sternly, recalled to her office and her sworn duty. He sat.
“Your Honor—” One of the two women on the jury spoke up, a young woman with the Tatar features of the upriver Yupik. Her voice was so soft as to be barely audible.
“Yes”—Bill consulted the jury list—“Ms. Nickolai.”
“If Uncle’s voices say there is something wrong, then there is something wrong,” Mary Nickolai said, still in that same soft voice.
Ollestad said warningly, “Mary—”
“Warren,” she said, still in that soft voice, “I let you talk me into agreeing in the jury room, but maybe we should listen to Uncle.”
Moses Alakuyak kept that steady, watchful, aware gaze on the magistrate, and said nothing more.
For her part, Bill felt things were getting out of control. She didn’t like it. She did what she always did when things got out of control, when she’d suffered her third miscarriage, when her husband had been laid off at Boeing, when he had hit her. She went on the attack.
She leaned forward, pressing her hands flat against the table in front of her, and fixing the sixth juror with an unyielding stare. “Mr. Alakuyak, do you have any evidence to support your feelings?”
“They aren’t feelings, they’re voices.”
This time she didn’t resist and did glare. “Then do these voices have a shred of hard evidence to back up what they have told you?”
He was silent. Mrs. Horrell was sobbing, the children looked miserable, Quinn furious. Klessens looked like he was struggling not to burst out laughing. “Mr. Alakuyak, this proceeding is solely to determine the fact of Eli Sylvester Horrell’s death. Do you have any reason to believe he is still alive?” When he remained silent, she repeated, “Do you?”
“No.”
“Do you have any reason to doubt the evidence given by the paramedic who testified before you this morning? Do you think that Mr. Horrell could have survived in the conditions in which he went overboard?” Again he was silent, and in spite of her determination to remain calm and in control Bill could hear her voice rising. “Do you, Mr. Alakuyak?”
“No.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that the three deck-hands and the captain of the Jeri A. were mistaken in their separate eyewitness accounts of Mr. Horrell’s disappearance?”
“No.”
“Do you have any evidence to offer that the United States Coast Guard was negligent in its search for a survivor?”
“No.”
“You have no doubt, then, that Eli Horrell is dead.”
Alakuyak ran a hand through a thick mane of already rumpled dark hair. “No.”
Bill sat and folded her hands on the table, shoulders square, severely erect. “As I explained to you in my instructions to the jury before the hearing, Mr. Alakuyak, and may I remind you that when I asked, you had no questions about them, this jury has only to determine the fact of death, not the cause or the manner of death. The fact of death. In other words,” she said, leaning forward again and for a moment forgetting who else was in the room, “I don’t care if your little voices told you that Scotty beamed Mr. Horrell onto the bridge of the Enterprise two seconds after he went into the water. The preponderance of the evidence, evidence which you have just admitted you accept, leads us to presume Mr. Horrell’s death.”
The younger Horrell son was out of the room for the second time, and Bill was recalled to the grieving family’s presence. “Do you understand, Mr. Alakuyak?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” he said.
“Good,” she snapped. “Then get in that jury room and bring me back a verdict form with six signatures at the bottom.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
And then he did something very odd. He smiled at her, a smile one part rueful, one part apologetic, another part something she couldn’t identify but that seemed familiar to her, as if she’d seen it in her own mirror. For a split second she wondered where they had met before, and re-assured herself that they hadn’t. Of course they hadn’t. She would have remembered that smile.
Two
Sec. 25.24.050. Grounds for divorce. A divorce may be granted for any of the following grounds: . . . (2) adultery; (3) conviction of a felony; (4) willful desertion for a period of one year; (5) either (A) cruel and inhuman treatment calculated to impair health or endanger life; (B) personal indignities rendering life burdensome; or (C) incompatibility of temperament . . .
—Alaska Statutes, Marital and Domestic Relations
He aimed it at her again that evening from the open door of her office at Bill’s Bar and Grill. “Hey, girl.”
She sat back in her chair. “Mr. Alakuyak.” She over-looked the familiarity of his address as she had laid off her judicial robes for the more casual dress of the owner and proprietor of the best bar in Newenham. There were only two, so the competition wasn’t fierce.
“Try Moses,” he suggested. “Easier to pronounce.”
He stood about five-seven, not much taller than she was, weight about one-sixty, she thought, most of it muscle and bone. Gray eyes narrowed between Yupik folds, something she saw in many of Newenham’s polyglot faces, dark hair graying at the temples. She thought he was older than she was, but she couldn’t tell by how much. He was dressed in frayed and faded jeans, a blue plaid wool shirt worn at the elbows, and Sorel boots, pretty much the standard uniform for a Bristol Bay fisher.
In turn, he took his time surveying the long swath of silver hair combed straight back from her brow to fall softly around her shoulders, the full breasts barely contained by a powder-blue T-shirt with “Bourbon Street” scrawled in sparkling pale green letters across the chest, the narrow waist nipped in by a wide leather belt. He made no effort to hide his admiration; he even craned his neck for a better view of her skintight front button Levi’s. “I’m going to find that black tent you were wearing this morning and burn it.”
She found herself doing something she hadn’t done in years, something she had thought that at fifty-three she was no longer capable of doing at all. She blushed.
He grinned. His was an angel’s grin, but only if the angel’s name was Lucifer. “Buy me a beer?”
Three
Sec. 25.05.0301. Form of solemnization. In the solemnization of marriage no particular form is
required except that the parties shall assent or declare in the presence of each other and the person solemnizing the marriage and in the presence of at least two competent witnesses that they take each other to be husband and wife. A competent witness for this purpose is a person of sound mind capable of understanding the seriousness of the ceremony. At the time of the ceremony, the person solemnizing the marriage shall complete the certification on the original marriage certificate. The person solemnizing the marriage and the two attending witnesses shall sign the original marriage certificate and the necessary copies.
—Alaska Statutes, Alaska Marriage Code
The couple had elected to take the traditional vows, Bill noticed as she looked at the ceremony clipped to the back of the marriage license. Short and sweet, no invocations to the goddess, no praising of Allah, no chanting for Buddha. Good. “Send them in,” she told Hattie, who a year into Bill’s term of office had proved to be her most reliable bailiff, and who needed the extra money to supplement her Social Security pension anyway. So Hattie dozed off while the jury deliberated behind the door at her back, so what? She could be passing them newspapers with stories about the case being heard on the front page, something that had happened during a recent trial in Fairbanks. Everything was relative.
Bill waited as Hattie left the courtroom. It was the end of the day, a long, cold dark day the January following Eli Horrell’s death. The luck of the draw hadn’t tossed many wedding ceremonies her way; she was glad to go home on a note of optimism. She believed in marriage as long as she wasn’t the one saying “I do.”
And Moses returned from Anchorage this afternoon. She smiled as she thought back to the day in this very court when they had first met, when for a terrifying moment she had thought she was going to have to find out if a simple magistrate had the authority to issue a directed verdict or even declare a mistrial, all because of this half Anglo, half Yupik hearer of voices.
He’d moved into her small home on the bluff of the Nushugak River a month after that day. The only times they had been apart since was when he went to fish camp in August and this last trip to Anchorage to see the dentist at the military hospital on Elmendorf Air Force Base. He’d been gone four days. It wasn’t his fault that it felt like four months.