Edie laughed. ‘Sometimes I wonder.’ Stacey was qalunaat, of course, and so belonged to another world, but there was something about her sparky energy and hungry, angry eyes which reminded Edie of her younger self and for a moment she longed to tell Stacey about the spirit bear and what she’d found in the forest and why she hadn’t slept all night. But the door swung open and another customer came in and the moment passed.
To kill time while she waited for breakfast, Edie leafed through the Sunday edition of the Anchorage Courier. The front page was dominated by Iditarod news. Steve Nicols, the favorite to win the race, had already pulled ahead, passing the checkpoint at Yentna as the paper went to press. By now, he’d be heading into the foothills of the Alaska Range. Below that was a piece about some newly published stats on sexual assault and rape in the city reaching twice the national average. Way down at the foot of the page was a small single column piece noting that the opening ceremony had brought a surprise when a ‘distressed native’ had launched herself at Anchorage Mayor Chuck Hillingberg. At the foot of the piece was a link to the leader inside, which was titled ‘Hillingberg a Breath of Fresh Air’, but Edie couldn’t be bothered to stick with the article long enough to find out why. Instead she flipped back through the pages looking for something about the discovery of the dead baby and found it in a single paragraph, at the bottom of page 4 beside the fold edge.
The body of Lucas Littlefish, four-month-old son of Homer native TaniaLee Littlefish, was found by a passer-by in forest north of Wasilla on Saturday. The body was wrapped in ornate ceremonial cloth and hidden in a traditional spirit house. A spokesman for the Anchorage Police Department confirmed that they are treating the death as suspicious and are questioning a 54-year-old man believed to be from the Old Believer community near Meadow Lake.
They got his age wrong. The baby wasn’t four months. Edie rolled his name around her tongue, felt the sounds catching in her throat. Lucas Littlefish. It wasn’t the kind of name you easily forget. Knowing it made his case more pressing to her. She thought about his spirit, roaming the forest, stuck halfway between the worlds of the living and the dead with only a bear the colour of old smoke for comfort and company.
After breakfast she walked back to an Internet cafe a couple of blocks away, paid for an hour of surfing time and sat down to find out what she could about the Old Believers. Others, she knew, qalunaat certainly, but Inuit too, would think she’d gone a little crazy. But she didn’t feel crazy. She felt driven.
It wasn’t as easy as she’d imagined to pin down a complete story. There were dozens of websites on the Old Believers but they all appeared to vary in the details. From what she could gather by patching together the numerous partial accounts, the group had fallen out with the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church in the mid-seventeenth century over what seemed to Edie to be arcane details about the shape of the Orthodox Cross. The Old Believers worshipped before a cross with a footrest and a head bar, which they claimed was the only true representation of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. By contrast, the Orthodox Church held that the original cross carried only a head bar. There were other differences too. The Old Believers had abolished the priesthood, preferring to confer religious authority on community elders on a rotating basis. Unsurprisingly, the Orthodox Church didn’t think much of that, and the Old Believers had found themselves shunned. Eventually they felt they had no choice but to quit Russia altogether for some part of the world where they would be free to practise what they regarded as their purer, more ancient version of the Orthodoxy. So far as Edie could tell, they’d been wandering across the globe ever since.
From time to time groups had broken away eager to find somewhere even more removed from what they increasingly saw as the polluting effects of modern society, which they called the Outside. One such group had left Alberta in the 1970s and seemed to have found the peace and separateness they craved in Alaska.
Until now.
Edie was about to log off, when a pop-up appeared enclosing a website address. Clicking the link produced a dark screen which then automatically redirected her to the website of an organization calling itself SpiritCleanse. There, embedded in what seemed to be a list of links to websites offering exorcism services, were the hyperlinked words ‘Old Believers’. Following the link took Edie to a blog headlined Old or Dark? She scanned the piece. The text seemed to be suggesting that a group calling itself the Dark Believers had splintered off from the main sect a few years before. Among the questionable practices of this new group, so the blogger said, were animal sacrifice and a number of unspecified satanic rituals.
Nut job. Edie closed the page and was just about to get up from her chair when some lingering curiosity caused her to turn back to the screen and google the words Dark Believers. A stream of URLs for blogs and discussion threads instantly scrolled up the screen. The Dark Believers, it seemed, were more than the paranoid fantasies of a single blogger. She clicked on a few links. The discussions were vague and, without exception, conspiratorial in tone. A few were accompanied by images of texts written on what looked like animal skin, strange configurations of Russian script and symbols variously deciphered, and by ancient-looking Russian icons. Others incorporated images of the Old Believers in their outlandish costumes. She was in the middle of reading, clicking between the various versions, when the administrator, a solemn-looking man in his early twenties with yellow, fox eyes, came over. Edie checked her watch. There were ten minutes left on her hour.
‘I’m sorry, man, but I’m gonna have to ask you to, like, leave.’
‘What?’ She felt floored.
Fox eyes shrugged sheepishly. ‘Look, man, if it was me, I’d be, like, cool with whatever, but my boss freaks out about this kind of thing.’ He reached across her and closed down the website. ‘Yeah, see, all that Dark Believer satanist stuff? My boss goes ape about that.’
She returned his shrug with one of her own and, trying not to sound as rattled as she was, she said it was OK, she’d done with looking at the stuff anyway, but the young man hovered over her, rubbing his palms together, a look of profound unease on his face that indicated he wasn’t done.
‘I’m cool about refunding your minutes, but I just gotta ask you to leave.’
She stood up and moved towards the entrance. At the door he nodded to her obligingly. As she turned onto the street she saw him bend down and pull the computer plug.
Sensitive topic, this Dark Believers thing.
Edie made her way back to the studio. There was a message on the answering machine from Derek, asking her to call. She dialled his number and he picked up right away.
‘How you doing?’
‘OK,’ she lied.
‘Zach told me they got a suspect, some guy called Peter Galloway, the fella you saw on the snowbie.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It was in the paper.’
‘Zach’s sources say they’ll want to formally arrest him and put the whole thing to bed soon as they can. Eyes of the world on Alaska right now and all.’
Edie’s heart sank. She felt bad that she hadn’t mentioned the lack of footprints around the house and the unexplained crust of broken ice crystals on the body to Detective Truro. On the other hand, who was to say that it would have made any difference? Truro would almost certainly know things she didn’t. He’d have had his reasons for thinking the Galloway fella was involved.
She mentioned what she’d found in the Internet cafe and the reaction of the clerk to it. Derek sounded wary.
‘It was me, I’d stay away from that stuff, Edie.’
‘But it isn’t you.’
‘No.’ He paused sufficiently long to make his disapproval clear, then moved the discussion on to the news about Bonehead. It was particularly disappointing because Edie knew that the old dog probably didn’t have many races left in him. Once he started slowing down, she’d have to let him go. She laughed to herself at the euphemism. A qalunaat habit, that. Maybe something she’d picked up early on from P
eter, her qalunaat father. What would actually happen was that, once Bonehead stopped being able to pull his weight on the sled, she’d have no choice but to shoot him.
One of the bush pilots had volunteered to bring the dog to Anchorage in mid-afternoon along with some supplies. The race administrators would take him directly from the airport to the Anchorage Women’s Correctional Facility. Edie would need to go and fetch him when she could but there was no hurry about it. They’d keep him at the centre for a day or two.
‘Why don’t you come up to Nome for a coupla days, meet the race folks up here?’
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But I got stuff to do.’
‘Like what?’ he said.
‘Like picking up Bonehead.’
‘Did you hear what I just said? They’ll keep the dog.’ There was a pause. ‘Edie, tell me you’re not gonna get yourself wrapped up any more in this dead baby case.’
She felt a sudden stab of irritation and hurt, the feeling of being ridden roughshod over by someone who preferred to close his eyes. ‘Don’t you think it’s too late to be asking me that?’ Her voice sounded strained and angry but so what, it was an accurate reflection of how she was feeling. ‘Given how I found the kid’s body and all. Or maybe you’d forgotten?’
He sighed but said nothing. There was nothing more to be said.
She sat in the studio awhile just staring into the middle distance then decided that wasn’t going to get her anywhere. There was something depressing about the low ceiling and cheap, bland fittings, the constant buzz of sound coming from the studios on either side. Right now, she had a need for distraction.
Remembering an advertisement for a silent film festival she’d seen earlier in the Courier, she made her way out and onto K Street towards the downtown picture house. At the box office she pushed a ten-dollar bill through the gap in the glass and asked for one adult. The cashier, a young woman with a pierced tongue, handed her a ticket then pointed down a dark corridor.
‘Screen two.’
The theatre was empty but for three or four people and she realized that, in her distracted state, she’d forgotten to ask which movie was showing, but the lights went down and it felt warm and so she settled in.
Edie’s experience of the movies had been out of the ordinary, even for a girl growing up on the most northerly landmass on the planet. Back in the day, her father, Peter, had set up a film club in what was then the tiny community centre in Autisaq. This was before video or DVDs, when all movies came in aluminium cans and had to be spooled through projectors. She didn’t know how her father came by the films, except in so far as he was qalunaat, a white man, and so had access to these things, but the movies he showed were almost always the classic silent comedies. Whether that was a reflection of his taste or simply what he could get his hands on, she didn’t know.
Once a month, everyone in the village who wasn’t out hunting would turn up with their mugs, help themselves to sweet hot tea and a few hard-boiled ptarmigan eggs and find a space on caribou skins on the floor, the children perching on their parents’ laps, rapt expressions on their faces. One of her few memories of her father was of sitting in the warmth of his lap, the taste of sugar in her mouth and the rapture of the flickering images on the screen. These days, when she wanted to feel accompanied, she had only to put a Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin movie on her DVD player and those golden moments of her childhood all came flooding back.
Up on the screen, the title faded up.
Charlie Chaplin in The Kid.
A thin bolt of shock shot up from her feet and settled in her chest, winding up her heart like the key turned on a clockwork toy. It seemed too much to imagine that the one film she’d been drawn to see, the story of an abandoned baby and his distraught mother, was nothing more than a coincidence. The spirits sent messages, she believed that.
An hour or so later, she was back out on the street. The sunshine had been replaced by low cloud and it was warmer, maybe even warm enough to snow. Pulling off her sealskin parka, she wrapped it around her waist then stopped and closed her eyes for a moment, drinking in the cool air. When she opened them she noticed a young woman sitting on a bench on the other side of the road whose face seemed oddly familiar. She had a mass of dark blonde hair pulled into braids and she was heavily pregnant. Her face, which was moon-like and searching, and entirely without make-up, was as pale as a winter fox but there were crescents of deep purple under her eyes. Edie tried to place her, then remembered. It was the same woman who had been hanging around in the foyer of the cinema when Edie came in. They’d made eye contact for a brief moment and the young woman had turned away. Now, Edie had the strong impression that the young woman wanted to talk with her.
Edie reached the edge of the sidewalk, and swung her head, remembering that in the city you had to watch out for the traffic. An ice truck swooshed by, klaxon hooting; tyre chains clicking on the salty blacktop. By the time it had passed, the young woman had left the bench on the opposite side of the sidewalk and was making her way down the road. Edie called out ‘Hey!’ but the girl just kept on walking, so she crossed the road and for a moment made to follow her, but the girl stepped up her pace and the moment was lost.
Back at the studio Edie heated up some hot, sugary tea and thought about the movie and the young woman. Maybe she’d been wrong about her. About the movie, about spirit guides, about everything. Still, the whole day had rattled her somehow. She felt disorientated, unsafe, as though she was stuck in a dream from which she couldn’t wake. Finally, she punched in Derek’s number in Nome. The voicemail came on. She checked her watch.
‘Police, it’s me.’ She opened her mouth, then closed it again. ‘You know what? Just forget I called, OK?’
6
Derek Palliser strode past the massed ranks of hacks tapping away at their laptops and into the support team area at the Iditarod’s Nome HQ. He took in the still, stale air, which, like the air of hotel conference rooms everywhere, smelled of cleaning fluids. The atmosphere was anything but still. Teams of men and women, even children, hovered over the screens on which the various positions of the competitors were plotted.
Derek sat at one of the terminals, entered Sammy’s race number and keyed in a password. Immediately, his location popped up on a map of the race route, along with his average speed – 3.87 miles per hour – and the time and number of minutes he’d been stopped at each checkpoint. A pop-up window gave the various meteorological details at his current location.
Derek closed the window. The stats were useful in themselves but naturally they said nothing about what running the race was really like. Derek wondered if knowing he was being tracked somehow dimmed Sammy’s experience. From his own perspective, it would, he thought. One of the joys of the spring patrols he was required to undertake as part of his duties as Ellesmere Island Police Sergeant and Chief Wildlife Officer, was the liberating sense of being out of touch with everyone for days at a time. There were moments, when he was being plagued by the usually petty demands of small town policing, when he could transport himself back to the days and nights out on the remotest corners of his territory and experience again the intensity of being alone in nature.
He got up from his station and went over to the coffee machine. The race director, Aileen Logan, came up beside him and winked. He lifted the cup from the machine and passed it over to her.
‘I’m guessing you need this more than me right now.’ She smiled and took the cup.
‘Ha, it is kinda crazy. We got some Japanese film crew whose interpreter’s got sick.’ She took a sip of the coffee and looked soothed for a moment, then asked, ruefully, ‘I don’t guess you know anyone round here speaks passable Japanese?’
Derek saw her scan his name badge, reminding herself of his name.
‘You guys got off to a rough start.’ Her face bore an expression of sympathy. ‘I heard your teammate has been helping the PD down in Anchorage. That poor baby. Some bad shit going down there.’ She waited till Dere
k slid his coffee cup from the machine then went on, ‘You ask me, Alaska’s the greatest place on earth, but we got our fair share of kooks. Maybe more than most.’ She leaned in, her breath moist and coffee-scented, and lowered her voice. ‘Folks around here don’t like those Old Believer types much. Been rumours about them for years.’
Derek was about to ask her to expand when a woman in her mid-thirties, whom Derek recognized from the info pack as Chrissie Caley, one of the associate directors of the race, bustled up and excusing the interruption requested Aileen’s attention on some urgent matter. Raising her brows in an expression of genial exasperation, the director excused herself, and the two women went off in the direction of the press room.
Seeing he’d get no more from either woman, at least for now, Derek walked out into the salted lot, with its fringe of deep, dirty snowdrift, keyed his snowmobile into action, and made his way slowly back along Front Street.
The town of Nome, Alaska, was larger and more developed than Kuujuaq, the remote Ellesmere Island settlement where Derek had lived most of his life, but it felt immediately familiar. Irrespective of their exact geography, tundra settlements seemed to share the same three or four characteristics: a desolate, disposable quality, almost but not quite like a lack of self-esteem, a sense of insignificance, of being dwarfed and outclassed by the landscape all around and a weird feeling of absolute licence, which persisted despite the fact that you could be in no doubt that news of your every splutter and fart was likely to be all around town before you’d had a chance to do so much as pull up your pants.
He passed the post office and a branch of Subway, and, on the opposite side, a fast-food place offering Japanese pizza. A handful of people trudged up and down the pavement but, for the most part, the street was pretty quiet. Everyone seemed to be in one of the five or six shabby-looking drinking hutches strewn along the street’s shorefront side, establishments with cutesy names like ‘The Northern Lights’ and ‘The Husky’, their windows rivers of condensation through which you could see indistinct shapes swarming.
The Boy in the Snow Page 4