by Неизвестный
His expression didn’t change. “I didn’t forge anybody’s name.”
Kris turned in her chair and searched through the folds of the parka for the inner pocket. She unzipped it and pulled out the copies Justin had made of Ben and Ezekiel’s stubs. She found one with Ben’s signature on it and another with Ezekiel’s forged signature, and one of Ezekiel’s own stubs. She placed them before him.
“You signed this.” She tapped Ben’s stub that Ezekiel had signed.
Ezekiel stared at her.
“The Longevity Bonus check is pretty important to you, isn’t it?” she asked, looking around the cabin. Anywhere else but Alaska, it’d be the worst kind of squalor.
Let him think about it. She got up, lifting her teacup and moved away sipping the tea. No sugar. She walked to the sink, but couldn’t find any on the shelves. She dumped the tea out; it trickled into the slop bucket below, and rinsed the cup with clean water from a pot and laid it upside down on the plywood counter. A towel hung from a nail; she dried her hands.
It was too soft.
She touched it again and then lifted it off the nail and raised it to the light. It was a diaper. Old and worn, with fraying edges, but a diaper. Who used cloth diapers? Kris wadded it in her fist and walked back to the table, easing into her chair.
The photocopies were lying on the table untouched.
“Why did you forge Ben’s signature?” she said, this time with more strength in her voice.
“Who are you?” Ezekiel’s voice was low.
“These will get you thrown off the program,” she said.
“Do you think you can set me against Ben Stewart?”
“Whatever you tell me, I’ll keep quiet. Nothing goes to the cops.”
“They don’t concern me.”
“Ben brought Corvus here, didn’t he?”
“Talk to Ben.”
“He’s my brother, Ezekiel,” she said, softly.
“Talk to Ben.”
“Why did Ben bring him here?”
“I never saw the boy.”
“Explain this, then.” Kris placed the diaper in the middle of the table on top of the photocopies. He looked at it, his eyes hidden behind the reflected flame of the lanterns on his lenses.
“It’s a diaper,” she said.
“I see that.”
“Corvus’s diaper.”
“I buy rags at the Salvation Army. Twenty-five cents a bundle. It came from there.”
“You don’t buy rags at the Salvation Army. You don’t buy anything.”
“Suit yourself.” Ezekiel stood, blew across the lantern chimneys blowing out the flames, and picked his gloves up from the table. “I have wood to split.”
Kris gathered up the diaper and photocopies, and stuffed them in a pocket. She stood, fumbling for the parka’s zipper. She was shaking, and she wasn’t sure why. Ezekiel stood with his hand on the door latch, looking down at her, the light in the cabin too weak to illuminate his face.
Kris approached him, pushing her hands into her mittens. He didn’t move.
“Kris Gabriel,” he said. “Go home. This isn’t for you to know.” Then he was gone, out the door and into the cold air.
Kris pulled the door shut after her. Ezekiel had vanished. When the dogs scented her, they howled, launching themselves against their chains. Their fury followed her to the road.
__________
Barrett looked up through the rain at Stewart’s house squatting in the black and broken shrubs on the steep hillside above him. The window overlooking the channel stared vacantly into the morning darkness. No light shone in it; the house looked dead. He’d tried to call, but Stewart had no number, listed or unlisted.
He started up the stairs. After his talk with Justin the day before, he’d called the hospital, but Stewart had been sedated. When he called this morning, he learned that Stewart had walked out before six; the staff hadn’t been able to stop him. Barrett wondered at the toughness of the old trappers, remembering Huntington’s story of the Native elder whose skin was so leathered it turned a hypodermic needle. Life in the bush was a different order of existence.
Stewart was probably back in bed asleep, but Barrett had wanted answers on Monday and today was Thursday; he wasn’t going to wait any longer.
It wasn’t Stewart, though, who disturbed him; it was Lambale. What the hell could he have done that Vern could blackmail him for? It would be easier to blackmail a Hallmark gift card. Barrett stopped on the stairs, ignoring the rain driving into his back. The question had nagged him all day yesterday. It had to be something to do with Evie. Which meant that there had to be some connection to the AWARE shelter; there was nowhere else that they could’ve met. But he’d spent all of yesterday afternoon there and learned nothing. Yes, Lambale had been friendly with Evie, but he’d been friendly with many of the women he got to know during the construction of the new wing. No one had seen or suspected anything out of the ordinary.
Did Kris know what Vern Jones had had on Lambale? Justin had convinced him that they hadn’t found any pictures or other evidence in the shack, although Kris may have found something in the loft in addition to the leather purse that she hadn’t told Justin about. Barrett started up the stairs again. If Lambale had done something to Evie, what would Kris want from him? Money? More likely it would have been blood; vengeance was more her style. But what could she do to him? She’d had only two hours. Lambale logged off his computer at five-sixteen and Justin had guessed that her footprints on his steps had half an hour’s worth of new snow in them by the time he’d gotten home at eight. Two hours and fifteen minutes.
Barrett’d had people crawling over the city again yesterday. The airport, the harbor—fishing and pleasure boats—hotels, friends’ houses; they hadn’t found a single lead. The Mercedes had been towed to the police garage and was being taken apart by forensics. No report yet, but he didn’t have much hope. Lambale had vanished.
What did Kris do? What could she do in two hours, in the middle of town, with a man twice her size?
At the house, Barrett took a couple of deep breaths to quiet his breathing and then raised his fist to bang on the door loud enough to wake Stewart. But before he knocked, Stewart called to him from inside and Barrett turned the handle and went in.
A single kerosene lamp sat on a chair close to Stewart and cast a dim glow into the small room’s darkness. He sat stiffly in a chair by the wood stove facing the window. Even in the shadowed light, his face looked drawn and sunken. Barrett took off his dripping hat and raincoat and hung them on a nail. Stewart nodded to the chair with the lamp on it and Barrett lifted the glass lantern, setting it between them on the floor, and sat down.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Stewart pointed to several bottles of pills on the windowsill.
“I’m surprised to see you sitting up. In fact, I’m surprised to see you at home.”
“That was not a good place to be,” Stewart said, his voice raspy.
“I’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Stewart.”
Stewart was silent.
“You misled us,” Barrett said. “And you have hidden from us facts material to this investigation.” Barrett paused, waiting for a response. There was none; he continued. “You were down the Point Bishop trail forty minutes, not twenty as you’d claimed. What were you doing there during those additional twenty minutes?”
Through the shadows, Barrett saw Stewart’s lips tremble and then slowly form his words.
“Saying good-bye,” he said.
Stewart’s simple declaration, so full of pain and loss, momentarily silenced Barrett.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, but when Stewart didn’t answer, he didn’t press.
“Why didn’t you tell us that you and Ms. Gabriel had a son together?”
Again Stewart’s lips trembled and it took seconds before he could speak.
“Does Kris …?” he asked.
“Yes. She found her mother’s pu
rse with the lock of his hair. That’s how we found out.”
Stewart’s eyes dropped to the floor. An unfelt draft guttered the lantern flame and the shadows on Stewart’s face wavered.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your son and your relationship with Ms. Gabriel, Mr. Stewart?”
“Do you think I killed her?” Stewart lifted his head and held Barrett’s eyes with his own. Even in the dim light the pupils were unnaturally large.
Barrett was irritated and didn’t spare him. “The circumstantial evidence is compelling,” he said. “Your whereabouts on Tuesday can’t be corroborated. Since she knew you, it would have been extremely easy for you to get her down to Thane. It was you, of all people, who discovered the body; you lied about the length of time you were down the trail on Wednesday and you were there long enough to destroy any evidence you might have left the previous day. You attempted to hide your relationship with Gabriel—including the fact that you had a child with her, which suggests jealousy as a motive for the murder, since she had become involved with another man. In fact, your arrival in Juneau only a few weeks after they arrived indicates that you probably followed them here from Fairbanks. No grand jury would have difficulty returning an indictment for murder on this evidence.”
Rain, hard as gravel, splattered against the window and Stewart turned to watch the water stream in crooked runnels down the glass. Barrett waited for him to speak; when he didn’t, Barrett spoke again, sharply, trying to force answers out of the old man. “Why didn’t you tell me about Evie and Corvus?”
“Where’s Kris?” Stewart asked.
Barrett straightened in frustration. Stewart had too many painkillers in him.
“She’s in Fairbanks,” he said.
Stewart’s head lumbered around, concern pricking through his stupor.
“She’s looking for Corvus,” Barrett explained.
“Corvus?” What was that in his voice? Barrett tried to hear it again. Surprise? Fear?
“Yes. She knows about Ezekiel Damon. She knows that you spent the winter Corvus disappeared at your cabin in the Brooks Range and she knows that Damon forged your signature on your Longevity Bonus Stubs.”
“She knows?”
Stewart was worried; Barrett could hear it now. Worried for whom? Himself? For Kris?
“Why did you leave Evie and go back into the bush?” Barrett pushed, trying to break through Stewart’s haze.
He didn’t answer right away.
“We lost Corvus. We...she started drinking. I...” Stewart stumbled, confused. “It was too much,” he said. He looked at his hands lying limply in his lap. “There was so much I didn’t know,” he said at last, defeat naked in his voice.
Barrett was suddenly embarrassed. The old man’s soul was exposed, laid open by the painkillers. But he continued to press. “Why did you have Damon sign your stubs? Why didn’t you just go on remote and pick up your checks when you came out?”
Stewart stared into the darkness. Barrett waited him out.
“To pay the rent,” he said softly. “Evie’s rent.”
Barrett sat with him watching the light thicken into the dull gray of predawn. He sat until he could see the mountains across the channel emerge from the dark and the rain falling in cold, unrelieved sheets from clouds sagging from the sky as if tired of lifting their own weight. When it was time to go, he asked Stewart if there were anything he could do for him, knowing beforehand the answer would be no.
Then, as he stood, he said as an aside, “Do you remember Loren Lambale? The man who paid for Evie’s funeral?”
Stewart looked up at him.
“He’s missing. He disappeared Monday evening.” Barrett was going to say more, but decided not to. What could it mean to the old man?
He snugged the door closed and hunched his shoulders against the rain as he started down the long line of steps.
__________
From behind the rain-splattered glass, Ben watched Barrett jog downwards through the broken bushes that hid the stairs. He saw him vanish behind the shrubs at the bottom and re-emerge on the street below, walking carefully, skidding once, down the steep road toward the Baranof Hotel until he merged into the morning gloom.
Ben dropped his eyes into the thick tangle of brambles that covered the hillside below him. Salmonberry, thimbleberry, and the tall growing goat’s beard. They lay before him, dead and lifeless, victims of the flattening wind, the pelting rain, and comfortless cold. He could not remember when their stalks and branches, coursing with sap, had stood erect and unbowed—their green leaves lifted to a warm sun. He looked up. Against the muddy gray of the clouds he saw a raven, black as the arctic night, lift to the wind and then fall in wild corkscrews toward the water below. Before it was seized by the waves, it extended its wings, catching the wind, and was hurled back into the sky.
He turned from the window to the cabinet by the door. Underneath it, on the uncluttered little table, lay a telephone book and the telephone unconnected to the rest of the world. He knew that there was nothing behind the cabinet door. He pushed himself to his feet with the cane they had given him and hobbled, three-legged, to the cabinet. Its knob was above his bowed head and he reached for it without looking up and pulled the door open. The bottom shelf, level with his raised eyes, was empty. He reached his hand in, quivering, leaf-like, and swept it across the unpainted wood. His pistol was gone.
Oh, Kris.
__________
Christ, four and a half and still in diapers. Kris lifted her foot off the pedal; the curves were coming too fast. What was going on? She pulled a mitten off with her teeth and shook a cigarette out of the pack. The driver’s side window was thick with the frosted moisture of her breath; she cracked it to let the smoke out and shivered when the cold air sliced in. Corvus had been at Ezekiel’s and he must have been there after he had disappeared—otherwise Ezekiel wouldn’t have denied it.
Did Ben steal his own kid? It looked like he had it all set up: he gave the tannery a month’s notice, he had a place to hide him—maybe he even had Ezekiel drive to town that night to pick the boy up so Ben didn’t have to leave the apartment. But then what? Why steal your own kid?
Ben couldn’t have left Corvus with Ezekiel for long; he didn’t look like he’d be into changing diapers. Ben had to have gotten Corvus out of there before going up to his cabin—which would have been by the end of the month, before he got his December Bonus. Kris blew smoke into the windshield. Annie was sure to smell it. The car sped over a rise and Kris glimpsed the top curve of the sun, sharp and pale behind a thin overcast, coming up through the trees.
Did he take Corvus with him into the bush?
What else could he have done? He didn’t have any other choice. Kris braked the Subaru and pulled off the road. In the glove compartment, she found a tattered road map of Alaska. Half of the folded panels had frayed off and she hunted through them looking for the pieces she needed. If he’d taken the boy with him, he couldn’t have flown in; Corvus’d be seen. She fit the panels together on her lap. So he had to get in another way. The Elliott Highway continued north from Ezekiel’s cabin until it reached Livengood where the haul road to the oil fields on the North Slope started. To the west was Allakaket where Ben’s river, the Alatna, drained into the Koyukuk. With a mittened hand, she traced the Koyukuk backwards through Bettles to where it forked; both the south and middle forks cut the haul road just below the Brooks Range. Kris measured it off with the edge of the mitten. About fifty miles down the Koyukuk from the haul road to Allakaket. Ezekiel could have run him and a dog team up to one of the forks in his truck and from there it was a straight run by sled to the village. It wouldn’t have taken Ben two days.
Then what?
Kris looked through the cracked windshield. Down the road were a couple of ravens picking at some road kill. They hopped on and off the flattened animal tugging at frozen pieces of flesh.
Allakaket—it was a Native village. If Evie couldn’t do it, couldn’t raise a kid
with the alcohol disease, then maybe Ben gave him to a Native friend to raise—and if Evie wanted to keep him—not give him up to a stranger—that would have been why Ben had to sneak him out of the apartment. When Kris was a kid, the state had taken her away from Evie twice—and both times Evie struggled helplessly with the social worker before collapsing on the floor crying. Kris had figured Evie didn’t want to lose the welfare money she got when Kris was at home. But she and Ben weren’t on welfare, she had nothing to lose if she lost Corvus. Except Corvus.
Kris released the brake and drove back onto the road, accelerating over the road kill and scattering the ravens.
Corvus had to be alive.
When Kris arrived back in Fairbanks, she drove straight to the airport. The parking lot was half-empty; she left the Subaru idling and walked across the lot to the entrance. The counters for the local carriers that flew charters and scheduled routes out to the villages were off to the side. At the Frontier Flying desk, a woman working her way through a stack of forms told her that all the seats for the afternoon flight into Allakaket had been taken by the Venetie basketball team. So Kris bought a ticket for the next morning.
“You’re not local, are you?” the woman asked.
Kris shook her head.
“Do you have a place to stay? There’s nothing there, no hotels or anything. And they won’t let you sleep in the school without prearranging it. The Venetie team has probably taken it over anyway.”
Kris’s face hardened, people were always trying to talk her out of things.
"You know what you want to do,” the woman said. “Is talk to Nancy Kestrel at TCC. We fly her in all the time. She might have an idea. Do you know where TCC is? Tanana Chiefs Council?”
Kris vaguely remembered that TCC was a Native organization that worked in the villages. “Is it still downtown by the river?” she asked; she remembered it being close to the youth shelter.
“Yes, around Noble Street.” The woman pulled out a business card and wrote Kestrel’s name on the back. “Talk to her and if you need to make changes to your ticket let me know by this afternoon.”