Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas

by M. J. McGrath

  From the bank of cameras, Dillard led them to an OB truck parked just shy of the race starting line. Already knots of people had gathered on either side, stamping off the cold and chattering excitedly about who they were tipping to win the race. Chuck’s director of communications, Andy Foulsham, had reminded him over breakfast that he and Marsha were scheduled to do a joint interview on KTMS, the local TV station. At the door to the truck Chuck stopped and waved Marsha in before him. Over the long years of their marriage, he thought, they’d really got the public affection thing off to a fine art. It made his heart sing to think how good they’d got. Who would believe that they hadn’t actually kissed and meant it since they were college students together at U of Alaska? In the world of municipal and state politics they were a roaring success, their marriage often referred to as one of the most stable partnerships around—and in a way it was. All kinds of things held marriages together. Among them, secrets.

  He’d already got the most challenging part of the day over, giving a speech at the soft start of the Iditarod race down in Anchorage early that morning, timed to make the breakfast news shows. Unlike the official start, this earlier, soft start in Anchorage was all about family. Parents got to take their kids to pat the dogs and ride with the competitors’ sleds for a while. His speech then had been all about Alaska’s rugged community spirit, how the Iditarod, a race whose proud origins in an epic emergency medical run to get supplies of diphtheria vaccine to the remote settlement of Nome, epitomized Alaskan grit and generosity. The speech had gone well, he’d been able to harness the positive energy of the morning whilst subtly allying himself with the courage and tenacity of those original sledders. The message he hoped he’d left in Anchorage was that a vote for Chuck Hillingberg in the upcoming gubernatorial race was a vote for the spirit of the Iditarod.

  As the Hillingbergs clambered onto the truck, Chuck decided to let Marsha do most of the talking. He listened to his wife charming the interviewer with a few of the downhome huntin’ and shootin’ stories of her youth. In fact, she’d not been hunting very much, certainly not as much as Chuck, who’d spent a great deal of his adolescene taking out his rage on everything from muskrat to moose, but Marsha always made a great job of playing up her rugged, homestead raising and, since she was an only child and both her adoptive parents were dead, there was no one left to contradict her. Unlike him, she didn’t have to fake her enthusiasm for the state. She’d always said to him that there weren’t many places in America where you could do more or less as you pleased and get away with it. Living in the frontier state really was like the tourist brochures suggested, ‘Beyond Your Dreams, Within Your Reach’. The trick, Marsha always said, was to ensure that nothing was beyond your dreams.

  He had first noticed her as a bright, determined sixteen-year-old during her campaign for Prom President at Wasilla High. She was beautiful then, he thought, her long, chestnut hair thick and glossy, the slim waist unspoiled by age, but it wasn’t her looks which attracted him so much as the streak of ruthlessness he detected in her smile. The story of her adoption moved him because he could see how absolutely determined she was to fit in, to change the circumstances of her birth: to become an Alaskan. From that first meeting at the Prom President stump, he knew she was going places and she wasn’t going to let anyone stop her.

  They’d split up briefly when he’d got the intern job at the Washington offices of Steven Horowitz, the Republican junior senator from South Carolina, but she’d taken him back when he returned, broken, carrying the burden of his own hickness. He and Marsha had got married later that year. It wasn’t a marriage of convenience so much as a confluence of mutual interest.

  For the last year, this interest had been focused on the gubernatorial contest. Up to a few weeks ago, the incumbent, Tom Shippon, had been looking pretty invincible. The Shippons were Alaska royalty, a genuine ‘sourdough’ family, Alaskans before Alaska officially became a state in 1958. Tom’s father, Scoot, had been closely involved in Alaska politics since before then. The Shippons had fingers in every pie from the salmon fishery through timber to oil and gas exploration. About the only enterprise they weren’t directly involved in was tourism and leisure. Pussy business, Tom Shippon called it, though only ever in private.

  Chuck had neither the advantages of incumbency nor the kind of pedigree which automatically got you where you wanted to go in state politics. It was hard for a boy from New Jersey to go against that and hope to win. Other outsiders had tried but few had succeeded and they’d usually been blocked from taking up top positions. He looked too much like a cheechako, a greenhorn. In the early stages of the campaign, there were those who had even accused him of abandoning Alaska by going Outside to Washington, which, given that it was twenty years ago, was just ridiculous. But Alaskans did persist in thinking of themselves as separate and apart. You were either for them or against them, which was why the episode in Washington was seen by some blowhards as an act of treachery even now.

  Over the past year, he’d had to work twice as hard to convince them that he was Alaskan at heart, which was all the more difficult given that it wasn’t true. As councilman, then Mayor of Anchorage, it wasn’t all that difficult for his opponents to set him up as a big city man, remote from the concerns of real Alaskans. Which was where Marsha had come in. Her genuine enthusiasm for the state had helped make him look like more of an all-state kind of a guy. The image uplift had assisted him in tangible ways, not least of which was in campaign funding. He was aware that no amount of schmoozing or reassuring patter about the depth of his devotion to the forty-ninth state would encourage the wealthy sourdoughs of Alaska to put their hands in their pockets for his gubernatorial campaign to the degree to which they had done almost automatically for Shippon, but he’d been able to raise enough to at least present a challenge. Until last week his campaign team would have said, even on the most optimistic forecasts, that the chances of him ousting Shippon were pretty low, but that was before the unemployment figures came out and the polls showed Shippon’s popularity starting to go south. Somewhere in all those stats was an opportunity, the biggest opportunity of Chuck Hillingberg’s life. But the campaign needed money to be able to push it through, which was why, after he’d fired the Iditarod starting gun, he was heading directly to a $10,000-a-plate luncheon back at the Sheraton in downtown Anchorage. He’d already given his fundraising speech dozens of times. The message was the one business people and entrepreneurs always wanted to hear. Alaska needed to rein back state spending and find new and innovative ways for private enterprise to grow and develop. But now there was a new energy to it, fuelled by the belief that he just might win. Over breakfast, Marsha, his communications director Andy Foulsham and himself had decided that his lunchtime speech needed to reflect the campaign’s new confidence. He was intending to say that the Alaska state motto, North to the Future, meant North to a future only Chuck Hillingberg, as governor, could deliver.

  He climbed down the steps of the OB unit back out into the cold sun of the Alaskan March morning. In the fifteen minutes that he and Marsha had been in the mobile studio, the crowd had swelled considerably and he was pleased to see a bank of TV cameras in the press enclosure. Walking from the unit along the barricade, he was flattered to observe friendly and familiar faces pressing forward to say hi or shake his hand, until he remembered that Andy had fixed it that way. Well, never mind. The TV crews didn’t know the difference.

  The fact that the race soft-started in Anchorage gave Chuck one of his few advantages over Tom Shippon and he meant to make the most of it. As mayor of the city, it was easy for him to take ownership of the race, even when it moved to its official start in Wasilla, and there was nothing that Shippon, stuck in the governor’s residence way down in Juneau, could do about it. The race was huge statewise, but it also had considerable national and international reach. The Iditarod may not be the only dog race on the planet, but it was the one with the richest provenance and in many people’s eyes the only one that
really counted. Folk who had no interest at all in dog races had heard of the Great Race of Mercy, the heroic five-and-a-half-day trek during the fierce winter of 1925, when 20 mushers and 150 dogs rushed to bring diphtheria antitoxin 675 miles across the Alaskan ice to the remote gold-rush town of Nome and thereby prevent an epidemic. And even if people didn’t know the details of the event, many had seen Balto, the lead dog in the final relay team, immortalized in bronze in New York’s Central Park. Since the first race commemorating the Great Race of Mercy in 1973, the Iditarod had grown enormously in terms of the number of competitors and, more significantly for Chuck, in terms of its profile. Back in the twenties, live news of the epic journey was broadcast on the new medium of radio. Now, TV crews flew in from all over world and, with the twenty-four-hour news cycle, they had plenty of time to fill. Within minutes of the start of the race, clips would be all over the Internet and he, Chuck, hoped to figure in at least some of them. Wasn’t Andy always telling him that maintaining a healthy Internet profile was as critical to electoral success in the twenty-first century as cross-country stump tours had been for politicians in the nineteenth and twentieth, a cheap and dynamic platform from which the Hillingberg campaign could spin blogs and tweets non-stop from now until election day. Take command of the blogosphere and the twittersphere and you were already halfway there. Wasn’t that how Obama had done it?

  Mayor Dillard led them over to inspect the dog teams and to talk to a couple of the big hitters: Steve Nicols, the favorite and last year’s winner, and the challenger, Duncan Wright. While Chuck busied himself with the two frontrunners, Dillard’s mousy wife took Marsha to connect with one or two of the stragglers whom Andy Foulsham had previously identified as having some kind of news potential, one a widow whose husband had been killed in a rig accident up on the North Slope oilfield, another a native man who’d come all the way from High Arctic Canada and was running the race in tribute to his dead son.

  That done, Chuck and Marsha made their way up to the podium by the starting line. The crowd was roaring now, eyes fixed on the line-up of dogs and sleds and the heroic sledders who were about to set off on their epic, two-week, 1150-mile journey through mountain ranges and ice fields, through the rocky scree of the Farewell Burn, along the great ice ribbon of the Yukon River and through the shifting pan of Norton Sound to the finish at Nome, knowing that of the ninety-seven teams in the race, somewhere between twenty and forty would be forced to drop out.

  Dillard climbed the steps onto the podium and began the introductions. Someone flipped on the rousing music and on a signal from Andy Foulsham, Chuck and Marsha followed Dillard up the steps hand in hand, Chuck grinning and nodding in acknowledgement, Marsha smiling mutely by his side. As the dog handlers began bringing out the teams, Chuck moved to the microphone and said his piece, then he raised the starting gun and fired into the air. A tremendous chorus of shouts from the mushers and howls from the dogs came up from the track, followed by the whoosh of sled runners on compacted snow. As the sleds flashed by, the dogs straining at their harnesses and picking up speed as they spun further into the distance, the crowd went crazy.

  Chuck stood back and was so absorbed in the furore he didn’t notice the tiny, good-looking native woman in a sealskin parka pushing her way through the crowd, frantically waving her arms and shouting, until she was almost on him.

  3

  A woman brandishing a clipboard emerged from a door at the back of the Anchorage Police Department offices in downtown and called for ‘Edith Kiglake’.

  Edie swung her head round, nodded, then slung her parka over her arm and stood. It was 8 p.m., and she’d been waiting in the public area of the building since just after midday. The find in the woods had shaken her up, but she hadn’t yet felt the full force of what had happened. It was like being wounded. Even when you knew you should be hurting like crazy, the adrenaline numbed the pain. Right now, her predominant sensations were those of tiredness and hunger and above all else the sense of being assailed by heat and noise. Her study of Alaska’s wildlife hadn’t prepared her for the thrum and muddle of its urban jungle. There was a perpetual churn of human noise down here which made her feel crowded out and irritable. For eight hours she’d been at the mercy of the treble of the vending machines, the PA system, the swooshing of the automatic doors and the congregation of drunks and hookers who flowed in and out like a restless tide.

  ‘Ms Kiglake?’ The woman’s gaze was narrow and impatient. She was plump and native, not Inuit – the nose was too prominent for that – and her dismissive air was that of a person who’d been eating hard times for breakfast and had forgotten there was any other kind.

  ‘It’s Kiglatuk,’ Edie said.

  The woman checked her clipboard, nodded and waved Edie through. On the other side was an open-plan office studded with workstations where men and women were talking on the phone or gazing at their screens, a few typing. A handful of uniformed officers stood among them, deep in conversation.

  The woman led her past the cubicles to a room at the back. Here a balding man of about fifty sat at a single table studying a file. His face hinted at a kind of conservative intelligence, Edie thought, the lines and folds of skin like a frozen sea swell, indicative of a narrow range of facial reactions. Used to keeping his feelings to himself, she thought. He stood up, held out a hand, introduced himself as Detective Bob Truro and motioned Edie to sit.

  ‘Can Kathy here get you anything?’ the detective said casually. ‘Coffee? A soda?’

  ‘I’m guessing you don’t have any sealmeat soup, or maybe a roast flipper?’ Edie asked, though she already knew the answer to this. Inexplicably, Alaskans seemed to think of themselves as northerners, but from everything she’d seen, Alaska was a southern place, rimed here and there with Northern frost, but southern at its core. The look Truro shot his colleague only confirmed her suspicions. Already they thought of her as slightly mad.

  ‘We can probably find you a hamburger,’ he said drily.

  Edie scoped out the room, feeling weird now, anaesthetized, spaced out. A few hours ago she’d been following a spirit bear who’d led her to a dead boy lying in a yellow house in the snow.

  ‘Let me explain to you why you’re here,’ Truro continued, as though it wasn’t obvious. He went on. Wasilla came under the auspices of the Anchorage metropolitan district and since this was a serious case, the APD had taken over the investigation from the Wasilla police and it was this that in part explained the delay in interviewing her. Truro had read the notes from that morning and there were a few things he needed to clarify. He took out some papers from an embossed leather binder, and then flipped the cover closed. The embossing read ‘Paradise Gospel Church of the Holy…’ The rest was too faded to make out.

  ‘The man and woman on the snowmachine…’

  ‘…mobile, it was a snowmobile.’

  He looked tired. His voice was impatient. ‘In Alaska we call them snowmachines.’ He ran a hand around the back of his neck. ‘So, these Old Believers…’

  Edie leaned forward in her seat. ‘They didn’t tell me they were Old Believers.’

  Truro wiped his neck again.

  ‘The notes say that, once he’d pulled you off Mayor Hillingberg, for which, incidentally, the mayor has been kind enough not to press charges, you told Trooper Wilde that the couple on the snowmachine were Old Believers.’

  Edie shrugged. ‘The man on the snowmobile said something about being on Old Believer land, but I don’t even know what that means.’

  Truro bit his lip.

  The door sprang open and Kathy came in carrying a tray. On it were two burgers wrapped in yellow waxed paper.

  Detective Truro allowed Edie a moment to eat, watching her slide the meat out from under its doughy parka, pushing everything that wasn’t meat back inside the wrapper. The burgers brought Edie back to earth a little, so that instead of feeling spacey, she now felt a rush of horror at her find in the forest.

  ‘OK,’ Truro said. ‘Let’s
start again.’ He turned on a camera. ‘Why are you here, Miss Kiglatuk?’

  ‘Because my stepson broke his finger.’ She bit into the second burger. The satisfying, fatty meatiness soon gave way to a revolting tang of chemicals. She spat it back out onto the bun and pushed it away. ‘My ex-stepson if you want to be completely accurate. Which I’m sure you do, detective. My ex-stepson, Willa, broke his finger, so I had to step in.’

  ‘I meant, what’s the purpose of your visit?’

  She turned to him. His gaze came back at her, calm, without emotion.

  ‘It’s like I told the trooper. I came for the Iditarod, as backup to Sammy Inukpuk. Officially he’s my ex too…’

  The detective gave her a pained look and held up his hand.

  ‘If you could just answer my questions.’ His tone was not altogether kind. Edie felt the bile rising.

  ‘Listen, detective, I was born in Autisaq on Ellesmere Island. Seventy people live in Autisaq. Before this trip, I’d left Ellesmere twice, once to go to Iqaluit, the second time to go to Greenland. I watch TV, I teach at the school, but your world, this world, is hot and crowded and noisy and you eat stuff that doesn’t even resemble food and I found a dead baby and then had to wait outside in your corridor for eight hours.’

  Truro sighed but looked chastened.

  ‘I’ll try to bear that in mind.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You know who the mother is yet?’ Edie said. Suddenly it seemed important to tell the woman how peaceful her baby had looked, how it seemed he hadn’t suffered.

  ‘We’re tracing her right now.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to her.’

  ‘Miss Kiglatuk,’ Truro sighed, as though commanding infinite reserves of patience. ‘First off, this is a police investigation into a possible homicide. Second, I need you to answer my questions. I do not need you to make demands.’