by Stan Jones
He wondered at the old language, and asked her if it was from the Bible.
Another bark-laugh. “The Bible was written by men. Shakespeare’s girlfriend wrote that.”
He started to ask about it, but dismissed it as another detour, and shook his head. “Whoever she was, she was wrong. It’s not all men.”
“It’s enough men.”
She sat up and stared out into the weather. “You know what his favorite place was? The school. He’d take me with him when he went in to grade papers or work on his lesson plans at night or on the weekends.”
She pulled her rain hood forward and shrank inside it. “When I was little, it was so wonderful. The classroom was just his place— his papers, his books, the smell of his aftershave. If it was winter, he’d kick his mukluks off at the door and I’d put them on and clump around while he worked and I’d picture how my husband would be just like him. Little did I know my husband would be him.”
She gave one of her short mirthless laughs. “So I stopped going to the school and he had to do the best he could around the house. He would follow me into the bathroom sometimes and I got to where I just wouldn’t go if he was home. For four years it was like that. The doctors at the hospital up there treated me for chronic constipation, but I just threw away the medicine and waited for school the next day. But nothing really worked. Love will always find a way, eh?”
Active walked to the rock and sat down again, but said nothing.
“Did you ever hear the story of reflected man, Nathan?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Aunt Agnes told me the story after it started.” Grace dropped her eyes to her hands and spoke softly. “She couldn’t do anything really, but she told me this story, and I guess it helped a little.”
She looked up at him, eyes glistening but not crying now. He nodded.
“Once there was a man whose friends decided to play a joke on him. So they crept into his house while he was asleep and with charcoal from the fire, they marked his face so it looked like he was tattooed.” With two fingers, she traced imaginary vertical lines below her lips. “You know how women would tattoo their chins in the old days?”
“I’ve seen it in books.”
“In books.” She paused, then shook her head. “My grandmother had them. Anyway, this man’s friends marked him up to look like a woman. The next day he went out hunting and he came to a lake. Feeling thirsty, he started to put his lips to the water when he saw the face of a beautiful woman in the lake. But when he reached out to touch her, she vanished.”
“The next day, and the day after, he told his wife he was going hunting again. By now, she was in on the joke and said nothing, so he returned to the lake, but the beautiful woman always vanished at his touch. Finally, he could stand it no longer, so he jumped in the lake to be with her.”
Active digested this for a few seconds. “And then?”
“His friends had been following him around all this time to see the effect of their joke. They all had a good laugh at his foolishness. So did he.”
“So he didn’t drown.”
Grace shook her head with a smile that seemed to say Nathan Active was naive indeed. “Of course not. But if I ever tell a daughter of my own this story, I’m sure going to drown the son of a bitch!” She laughed one of her unpleasant laughs, then was silent for a long time.
“How could you function in school, the straight-A grades, Miss North World, with all that going on at home?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought if I made myself the perfect girl, he’d see how precious that was and leave me alone.” She shook her head and shrugged. “Plus, anything to get out of the house, right?”
He grimaced and she picked up the berry branch again, crushed one of the tiny green globes and sniffed it.
“Will you help if we investigate this?”
“You mean make a formal statement, testify in court with him . . with him sitting there?”
Active nodded.
She shuddered. “No. I’ve never talked about this since I told Aunt Aggie and she showed me how to put it in the secret compartment. I don’t ever want to talk about it again. I don’t know why I talked to you. You seemed so … so trustable, I guess. You felt right, somehow.”
She tasted one of the green berries, then spat it out with a grimace. “What do you think would happen if I did testify?”
“Well, you’re the only witness, although I suppose Aunt Agnes’ testimony would help some, and your mother, if she’d say anything about what you told her, unless - - is Jeanie buried in Chukchi?”
“No, he had her cremated. Why?” She looked at him. “Oh, you’re thinking of DNA testing on the baby?”
He nodded. “Maybe Jason thought of it, too.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, I guess you’re it, then. Could you do it?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t before, except to Ida and Aunt Agnes. The thought of challenging him head-on, his power, what he did, you know, it puts a kind of hold over you, a paralysis. You say to yourself, ‘If he touches me again, I’ll scream,’ and then he does touch you again and once again you’re helpless. Kind of numb and somewhere else. Gone.” She shuddered. “I don’t know. What would happen in court?”
He shook his head. “The defense attorney, any decent defense attorney …”
“Yeah,” she said with another bitter laugh. “I can hear it now. ‘On one hand, we have Amazing Grace Palmer of Four Street, favorite of soldiers and anyone else with a bottle of Bacardi, more recently living under the name of a dead person whose Oil Dividends and other assets she has converted to her own use. And on the other hand, I give you my client, Jason Palmer, educator, one-time mayor of Chukchi, board member of the Chukchi Senior Center and a founder of the Katonak 300 Sled-Dog Race.’ Ah, fuck.”
Just then a troubling question occurred to him, so troubling he decided to let the hypothetical defense attorney ask it. “And I suppose they’d point out it was your father who asked me to come after you. Why would he, if he …?
She nodded. “Good question and I haven’t a clue about the answer, except that he’s crazy. Maybe he wants to say he’s sorry, maybe he wants me back again. Evil is opaque, Nathan. You can’t see into it. I can’t, anyway.”
She shuddered, then closed her eyes. “Or maybe it really is because Ida is sick and he thinks we can all just pretend it never happened.” She opened her eyes and wiped them and shook her head firmly. “Whatever it is, I’m not coming back. I never want to talk about this again or see him again. Or testify in court. No.”
He fumbled inside his rain coat and produced a business card. “Take this. It’s got our toll-free number in Chukchi on it. Call me if you change your mind.”
“That’s all right, I won’t be needing it. “ She pushed the card back to him and looked into his eyes. “And if I do, I memorized it when I was composing Nathan’s Song.”
She put a hand on his thigh and even through his clothing the touch reached him. He stirred, and felt ridiculous.
“That sounded sort of like goodbye,” she said. “What about tonight?”
He put a hand over hers, which was small and cold and wet, and curled slightly under his own, as if seeking shelter. He put her hand back in her own lap. “This might become a case, turn from personal to professional, you know.”
“No, I said! No case. No investigation. No nothing!”
She touched his thigh again.
“But if intimacy is so difficult for you …” He removed her hand again.
“Sorry.” She shrugged and stared straight ahead. “I keep hoping. You know, normal relations with a normal man, to complete my recovery, and there haven’t been any relations, of any kind, except with women, which doesn’t really count, since I became Angie Ramos, but I think I could become a passionate lover, a soulmate, I believe some capacity for joy is still alive in me if I can just … if I can just un-twist myself and—well, you came all this way.”
<
br /> She stood and started down the path towards the Triangle. After a few steps she stopped and half-turned to look at him. “Some other time, maybe.” A silver flash, and she set off down the path again.
“Maybe,” he told the back of her slicker.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Active left Dutch Harbor on an unscheduled flight the ticket agent said had come in with a load of cargo. It lifted off at three a.m. in a period of relative calm, with very little rain, no delay, and no sign of the departure panic that had gripped Captain Ross and his passengers two days earlier.
Dennis Johnson had told Active when he called the night before that the Finest’s goalie was working a week of midwatches, so Active took a taxi from the airport straight to the Ben Boeke Ice Arena, where the Finest were playing this time. By six-thirty, he was in his favorite position on the rink, squarely in front of the cage of steel pipe and rope netting that was the entire focus of the opposing team. They were the Slopers, the same team the Finest had played the previous Friday, and made up mostly of oil workers on the two-week break between stints on the North Slope.
Active liked playing goalie for two reasons. One, not much skating was involved, so being rusty wasn’t as much of a handicap as it had been on Friday, when he had played defenseman with such a striking lack of distinction that he had ended up unconscious after the Slopers body-checked him against the sideboard.
Second, he didn’t have to exhaust himself chasing after the action. All he had to do was squat in front of the goal and wait, and let the action come to him.
There were periods of inaction when the game was between the bluelines, or at the other goal, but he enjoyed those, too. They gave him time to work over the enormous problem of Grace Palmer. Was there any way to settle the question of whether Angie Ramos had been pushed into the path of the snowplow to launch the identity switch that Grace had conducted so successfully - - two of the Slopers broke out of a melee at the far end of the rink and sped in his direction, slapping the puck back and forth between them to keep it away from the pursuing Finest.
It was like watching a train or perhaps a rotary snowplow bear down on him, but he didn’t mind. He almost hoped the Sloper with the puck would skate straight into him, but, no, the opposing player fired and veered off. The puck stayed on the ice, and Active caught it with his stick. It bounced feebly out into the melee now building in front of the Finest’s goal. A jumble of grunts, slams, sticks whacking together, skates scraping on the ice and finally another Sloper scooped up the puck and fired it back at Active, this time in the air.
Active dropped to his knees and caught it on his chest pad—a satisfying ‘thump’ that reverberated momentarily in his thorax— and fell on it, protecting it until the referee whistled for a face-off.
The Finest’s left wing was a little quicker or luckier with his stick and the action moved downrink again, toward the Slopers’ goal.
Active adjusted his gear and returned to the problem of Grace Palmer’s identity switch and its connection with the death of Angie Ramos.
Here in Anchorage it was easy not to be distracted by the fact that Grace Palmer had smiled just so, that she had offered sex, that he had noticed the tiny waist and the scent of lavender, that he had longed to brush his palm over the otter-fur hair. Here on the ice at the Boeke, it was easy to tell himself none of these things changed the facts.
And the fact was, if it had been Angie Ramos he found on the slimeline in Dutch Harbor, he was pretty sure he would at this moment be pounding on the Anchorage Police Department and Officer Dennis Johnson to open a homicide investigation into the grisly death of Grace Palmer by rotary snowplow.
Yet he knew that - - this time it was a single Sloper heading his way, an amazingly fast skater who left both the Finest and his fellow Slopers behind as he raced down the sideboard and lofted a shot at such speed Active was not conscious of actually seeing it. He merely reacted to a streak coming at him and got some glove on it, but not enough glove. The puck ricocheted off the mitt and struck the rim of the goal and bounced into the net.
The Slopers cheered and whacked their sticks together, while the Finest glared at Active or at his sponsor.
“Told ya he had too fucking many teeth to be a hockey player,” one of the Finest said to Dennis. Active didn’t see who said it, but it sounded like Taylor, who had also been disgusted by Active’s performance as defenseman the week before and whose jaws, top and bottom, were devoid of teeth in the front.
The teams moved out to center rink to face off. The referee dropped the puck and one of the Finest got a stick on it and the action moved to the far end of the rink.
Yet, he reminded himself as he resumed the problem of Grace Palmer and Angie Ramos, he knew that if he were back in the cafeteria at the Triangle bunkhouse at this moment with Grace Palmer flashing her dark eyes at him and telling him she had nothing to do with Angie Ramos’s death, he would believe her completely, just as he had known with blazing, agonizing—but mistaken—certainty that Grace Palmer was dead when he saw the photograph of the angel tattoo on the breast of Heavenly Doe.
Which proved only that he couldn’t be certain of anything where Grace Palmer was concerned. But she had said at least one thing that could, in all objectivity, be described as a lead, a checkable lead. Perhaps Dennis Johnson could find out if there was support in the records for Grace’s claim that she and Angie had talked to a motorist a few minutes before the rotary snowplow had arrived, a motorist who appeared to be calling the police on a cell phone as he drove off after having been told to go fuck himself and to give the same advice to the police - - Active dropped into his squat again as the puck, not clearly in the control of either the Slopers or the Finest, came shooting down the ice towards him, a gaggle of players from both teams racing after it.
After the game, he and Dennis Johnson decided on breakfast at Gwennie’s Old Alaska Restaurant, a two-story landmark not far from the airport. Gwennie’s was famed for an inexplicable wishing pond complete with wooden bridge, real water and a stuffed grizzly eating a stuffed salmon, for enormous portions, for lack of pretense, and—most comfortingly of all to Active after his costly passage through Dutch Harbor—for low prices.
“So she’s alive.” Dennis shook his head in amazement as an elderly waitress with violent red hair walked away from their second-floor table, still scribbling down the details of two orders for reindeer sausage and eggs, the mild sausage to go with Active’s scrambled, the Cajun Red Hot with Dennis’s over-easy. “But how can that be after all … well, you know, the files.”
Active had told him a little about it during the call from Dutch Harbor the day before, a little more this morning when Dennis had picked him up at the airport, a little more on the way to Gwennie’s. But it had been sketchy and jumbled. Maybe telling it from beginning to end would help him untangle it, help him distill his feelings out of it enough to see the facts.
So he laid it out for Dennis, arranging it in chronological order as best he could, leaving nothing out, until he came to Grace Palmer’s invitation to spend the night. That was personal, so what would be the point of telling Dennis, except to make himself feel foolish, but about what, exactly?
“Yeah, so you’re going for a walk in the rain?” Dennis was saying. Active realized he had been silent for several seconds as he tried to argue himself into leaving it out of the story.
“And?” Dennis persisted. Maybe he was being a cop, now, sensing that whatever was behind the silence was more important than the words that had preceded it.
Was it? The invitation, or hint, had come a day after Grace Palmer had told him the snowplow story, a day after he had questioned her about the story, a moment after he had asked about the mysterious cell-phone call that didn’t show up in the police files. Had she wrapped him in that lavender-scented cloud of sexual possibility to - - ?
“She offered to go to bed with me.”
Dennis’s eyebrows shot up and he leaned back slightly. “Jesus Christ! Did y
ou do it?”
Active shook his head and swallowed some coffee. Just then the elderly redhead returned with their orders, huge steaming plates that gave off maddening aromas of reindeer fat and the grease the eggs were fried in, the sorts of smells that ordinarily revolted him. But now, after flying most of the night and playing hockey for two hours on nothing but a package of macadamia nuts and two cups of Aleutian Air coffee, those same smells were the breath of heaven. He plunged into the food like a fast center driving down-rink with the puck.
“Lemmee fee at fiffer,” Dennis said a few minutes later, around a mouthful of over-easy, spraying some towards Active in the process.
Active was grateful to see the yellow globules fall short of his plate, although a suspicious ripple spread across his coffee cup. “What?” he said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?”
Dennis chewed and swallowed and tried again. “Let me see that picture.”
Active tried to look mystified, but Dennis said, “Come on, you know what I mean.”
Active dug into his briefcase and passed Dennis the envelope Jason Palmer had turned over back in Chukchi. Dennis flipped though the pictures, pulled one out, and held it where they could both see it. It was the mural shot—eighteen-year old Grace Palmer on the bluff over Chukchi.
“And she still looks like this?”
Active took the picture and studied it. “Yes, basically. She’s older, but the Four Street look is gone, except for a little scar here.” He touched his cheekbone. “And she’s not a girl any more.”
He handed the picture back to Dennis
“And where is Wendy when the most beautiful woman in Alaska makes you this astounding offer?”
“This is the second night, and Wendy is nowhere to be seen. Grace tells me Wendy has moved out.”