The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘You get what you needed?’ she asked.

  ‘She says she’s married?’

  ‘Terri says a great many things. At the moment, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s true and when it’s the illness talking. Most of them gradually settle. You come back in a few weeks’ time, she’ll probably be more able to talk.’

  ‘Has her family visited?’ Edie asked.

  ‘The family isn’t involved.’ The nurse’s eyes opened wider. The question had surprised her. ‘I would have assumed you’d have known this is a police matter.’ The receptionist must have buzzed through and told the unit to expect her.

  ‘Of course.’ Edie gave the woman a thin smile. ‘Just routine questions.’ She saw the nurse’s expression relax. ‘One more thing. Your professional opinion?’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Could someone in Terri’s condition harm their own child?’

  The nurse glanced about to check that none of the patients was near the door, then swiped her pass key across the scanner.

  ‘All kinds of people in all kinds of conditions see fit to hurt their kids, Officer Gomez,’ she said.

  10

  From the Green Shoots Clinic, Edie asked the taxi driver to take her to the Anchorage Women’s Correctional Facility. On arrival, she paid the fare, went up to the visitors’ booth and explained her purpose. An officer took her details and asked her to wait. The waiting room was a windowless box painted cucumber green and littered with posters announcing prisoners’ rights, security measures and the like. In one corner a woman in a business suit sat reading some papers. Edie took up the seat beside her. On the wall opposite, a vending machine throbbed away.

  She tried to use the time to focus on her visit to TaniaLee but the atmosphere first at the secure unit and now here at the Pen scrambled her thoughts. She guessed that almost everyone else shared a horror of being shut away but the Inuit horror of being locked up had to be, if anything, even greater. All the Inuit she knew would say they’d rather die than spend even a night behind bars, and they meant it. In part, she thought, this was because they lived so much of their lives out on land which had no boundaries. It was also because Inuit knew they were obliged to act within a law based on principles they often found incomprehensible. It wasn’t as though they wanted to break the law; it was more that they didn’t feel it was their law in the first place.

  She was sitting here waiting to pick up a dog she owned. But what did that really mean? Bonehead wasn’t her possession. Anytime he wanted to wander out on the tundra and try to make his own way, he was welcome to do so. People couldn’t own animals or things. Objects belonged to their spirits and, even then, only while the spirits chose to inhabit them. Rocks, land, sea; none of them could be held in perpetuity by inhabitants of the visible world because those inhabitants were themselves only temporary. Naturally, if you’d gone to the trouble of making a harpoon or flensing a seal, say, it was only fair that you got first dibs at its use, but to say that you owned that object was ridiculous.

  The door opened and Bonehead detonated out through the gap. Behind him a red-faced guard emerged, white-knuckled and panting, only just managing to keep hold of the leash.

  ‘Boy,’ said the guard, relieved to be handing over responsibility. ‘This animal is a rocket. You could use him to explore outer space. Might even make it as far as Jupiter.’

  Edie wrinkled her nose. ‘But then there’d be nothing to breathe but dog farts.’

  ‘You’re right,’ the guard said ruefully. ‘Pity.’

  She led the dog outside, patted him, took off the leash and inspected his paw. He was barely limping; the veterinarian had bandaged the wound and tied a padded bootie onto the injured foot, and Bonehead gave no indication of being in pain. Traffic roared by and there was the same, all-pervasive smell of diesel in the air. As she walked along the icy pavement, she felt herself shiver. It was the relief that came from knowing she would never again have to visit the place they’d just left.

  She thought: I could do with somewhere to think. And the dog needed to work off some of his pent-up energy. There was a path that wove between trees along the shoreline of Cook Inlet and she made her way down to it now. They went through a gate and she found herself instantly surrounded by forest, the only reminders of the big city a faint whiff of garlic and fuel and the sound of traffic. The dog bounded on ahead, turning circles through the snow. Edie walked along the path, allowing her mind to think back to the encounter with TaniaLee. The girl was very ill. Nothing she said could be taken at face value. But that didn’t mean that none of it was true. She’d said she was married to Fonseca, but she was too young for marriage. If Fonseca was her boyfriend, why hadn’t the police brought him in for questioning? But perhaps they had. She wondered if Fonseca was TaniaLee’s name for the man on the snowmobile, the one suspected by the police? But if he’d had anything to do with Lucas’s death, why would he have told TaniaLee that the Old Believers had taken him, effectively incriminating himself? And while it was true that elements of TaniaLee’s story seemed to corroborate the version of events that Detective Truro was keen to promote, her version encountered the same problems. The whole Devil-worshippers angle sounded too ornate, somehow, and the way she had recited it rehearsed. She thought back to the Dark Believer websites. If the boy had been sacrificed in some satanic rite, why had his body been left in a place where, sooner or later, it was bound to be found? She was absolutely sure from the absence of prints in the snow and the level of snow cover on the roof of the spirit house that the couple on the scooter had not left the boy, leastwise, not on the morning she had discovered the body. Then why did Detective Truro think that they had? There was something about the broken ice crystals on the body itself which told a story, too, though she wasn’t yet sure what.

  Suddenly, the light opened up. Without realizing it she’d climbed up to an elevated section of the path where the trees gave way to a low cliff at the shoreline. She stood for a while, facing the city, watching the clouds scudding between the scattering of scruffy skyscrapers emblazoned with the names of oil companies, glancing backwards towards the sheeny ice slicked across Cook Inlet. How tiny and raw the city looked, how shakily scattered along the shore. Whistling for Bonehead, she turned back and began to make her way towards the city. It struck her then, looking at the clot of buildings from a distance, that, for all its unconvincing bravado, its shimmery glass and sparkle, its concrete-covered walkways and heated garages, Anchorage was fundamentally no different from Autisaq, or from any of the other tiny, frozen hamlets she was familiar with, human settlements hopelessly outclassed by surroundings that were forever threatening to swallow them up. The only real difference, she saw now, was that Anchorage had done a deal with itself to ignore the obvious. She guessed that maybe some people were fooled by its air of invincibility, and felt glad that she was not among them.

  She reached the corner of her street and stopped, her breath catching in her throat, surprised to see the young woman with the long coat and braids who had been staring at her outside the cinema. As Edie approached, she backed off a little, her hand on her belly, wary of the dog and protective of her unborn cub, and Edie felt moved to grasp Bonehead’s ruff and yank him to her side. The young woman gave a grateful, nervous smile. She was more delicate-looking than Edie had recalled, her skin more sallow and with dark, unhappy circles under her eyes.

  Edie said, ‘If I invite you in to warm up for a few minutes, will you stop following me?’

  The young woman shifted about nervously, unable to make eye contact, but she did not make a move towards the apartment building.

  ‘My name is Natalia.’ The accent was American with some kind of other inflection, possibly Russian. She gave a small toss of her head towards a black Land Cruiser with privacy windows parked over the other side of the street. ‘Please come with us.’

  Edie felt herself stiffen. She looked over at the vehicle then at Natalia. The woman had serious back-up. This wasn’t w
hat she had expected at all.

  ‘Are you crazy? I don’t even know you.’ Her voice sounded more hostile than she’d intended. Beside her, Bonehead picked up the tension and began to growl.

  ‘You know what I am,’ Natalia said simply.

  Yes, that Edie knew. If the young woman’s outfit hadn’t been a giveaway, her archaic hairstyle and strange, hesitant mannerisms told their own story. She’d known it when she’d first seen her and this latest encounter only confirmed what she already knew. Natalia was Old Believer. Snippets of the Internet gossip she’d picked up, the sinister, paranoid descriptions of Dark Believer rituals, flashed through Edie’s mind. Instinctively she felt for the hunting knife she always carried in the pocket of her parka. A part of her was shouting ‘walk away’. She thought about making a dash into the building, but she had no idea who might be in the car and whether they carried weapons. She was a witness to a murder and now the people Detective Truro held responsible for the killing were begging her to get into their truck.

  Natalia shifted on her feet.

  ‘Please, we need your help,’ she said, cradling her belly with her hand.

  Edie met her gaze but her face was completely expressionless now, like new ice. She thought: I owe these people nothing. Less than nothing. They hadn’t even been kind enough to give her a ride to the safety of her snowbie when she’d been lost in the forest. Then she thought about crazy TaniaLee and her baby son, Lucas, left out in the woods, and realized this wasn’t about what she owed or didn’t owe the Old Believers, that it wasn’t about them at all. Edie thought about what Derek would say, the fuss he would make. Mostly, she thought about Sammy, about how by taking this on she was letting him down. All her focus should be on him right now. On the other hand, there was a limit to what she could actually do. She’d picked up Bonehead and there was nothing else outstanding right now. Besides, she wasn’t going to be the woman who turned her back on Lucas Littlefish. She’d already learned that lesson. If she hadn’t let Joe go out on his own with a man she knew to be irresponsible and a drinker, then he might still be here. She knew she couldn’t live with letting another child down. Sammy wouldn’t want that either. There was no bond she held more dear than her loyalty to the voiceless dead.

  She said, ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  Natalia took a deep breath and looked away.

  ‘OK,’ Edie said finally, reluctantly. ‘But the dog’s coming too.’

  A man was waiting in the driver’s seat of the truck and popped open the front passenger door as they approached. Natalia introduced her father, Anatoly Medvedev, and waved Edie into the front seat.

  ‘It’s better I sit in the back with the dog,’ Edie said. She was relieved to hear that Bonehead had stopped growling now. The animal was trained to scent out polar bears. He could smell fear and danger in equal measure. Right now, he was smelling neither.

  Natalia nodded and got into the front. The truck drew away from the kerb and pulled into the flow of traffic heading north along N Street towards the Glenn Highway. While he drove, Edie inspected Medvedev in the rear-view mirror. He was difficult to age. His hair was the colour of two-year snow, grey-white and mottled. He wore it short on top but the sideburns were long and ungroomed, culminating in a flossy beard of the kind Edie associated with pictures of the old Victorian explorers after a long overwintering in the Arctic. A life spent outdoors in the northern winds had given his skin a rough, almost reptilian patina. The eyes were an unsettling colour, new iceberg blue with milky intrusions. Every so often they flicked up to the rear-view mirror. He was either one of those rare people who were possessed of a preternatural calm, she thought, or he was a psychopath.

  They drove out of town and eventually turned onto a track road marked to the Hatcher Pass. The ice here, beyond the reach of the snowploughs that kept the main highway clear, was compacted and treacherous. Medvedev slipped the vehicle into four-wheel drive, but they skidded and slid along all the same. Soon, the trees closed in, shading the route ahead and they passed the curve in the road where Edie had first seen the spirit bear, then, a little further along, the spot where she’d emerged not far from where she found Lucas Littlefish’s body. Her mind backtracked to the couple on the snowmobile, looming out from the darkness of the trees. In her mind’s eye she saw the man, large and frosty, the woman sitting mute behind him, her silver fox mitts tensed around his body, their red and green tassels swinging in the momentum from the snowbie.

  Edie leaned forward ever so slightly and glanced in at the gap between the front seats. An identical pair of mitts lay in Natalia’s lap, moving softly up and down in time with her breath. She felt the sound coming from her mouth before she heard it.

  The young woman gave a faint smile. ‘I wondered when you would notice,’ she said. ‘I watched you, I saw you taking us in. You don’t miss much, do you, Edie Kiglatuk?’

  It was all suddenly very obvious. Edie’s gaze drifted down to Natalia’s belly.

  ‘Yes,’ the young woman said simply. ‘The man you saw on the snowmachine, the man the police have taken away, he’s my husband, Peter Galloway, and this’ – she patted her belly – ‘is his son.’

  Edie breathed in hard. For an instant she cursed herself for getting into the car. She suddenly felt very vulnerable, the only witness to a horrendous crime which could see a man go down for life as a child-killer, in the middle of the forest with two of the people who had most to lose if he was convicted. Then she thought about the spirit bear and the instant passed.

  They bumped along an unmade road, the snow chains gouging hard on the compacted snow, until at last they came to a break in the trees in the midst of which stood a large, ramshackle gate, gritty with rust. A young, thin man dressed in what Edie now knew to be the Old Believer costume of woollen overcoat and fur hat, with a rifle slung across his shoulder, opened the gate and waved them through. The truck swayed up a deeply rutted path, hemmed in on both sides by hemlock pines, before opening out into a clearing scattered with modest plank-built houses and, to one side, a school where children dressed in antiquated garb played with balls and hoops. Beside the school stood a clapboard church topped with an azure onion dome on which had been painted a thousand yellow stars.

  At the far edge of the clearing they reached a house a little larger than most of the others, with a view out across the whole scene. Anatoly drew alongside the front door and switched off the engine. Natalia got out and, holding her belly, opened the back door. Bonehead burst from the car and immediately began smelling the dirt.

  ‘We don’t allow dogs inside,’ Natalia said.

  Edie followed her hosts up and into the house. Anatoly disappeared into the dim light of the passageway, his thick cotton shirt billowing out from under his jacket like a cloud on a windy day. Natalia went after him, beckoning Edie to follow. They entered a panelled kitchen with a wooden table so large it virtually filled the space, and so polished with age that it dipped in the spots where generations of dinner plates had been laid. They sat in silence. They were alone now, Anatoly having slipped through a low door to one side of the kitchen and into another part of the house. The sound of distant voices leaked into the room. Shortly afterwards, Anatoly reappeared with a sallow-faced woman, dressed in some kind of housecoat edged with fur. Acknowledging them with a silent nod, the woman went to the counter and began to fiddle with what looked like an elaborate billy kettle.

  Placing four small glasses filled with strong, sweet brew on the table, the woman pointed to herself and said: ‘Natalia mother.’

  There was a short exchange between Natalia and her father in Russian, then, turning to Edie, the young woman said: ‘My husband, Peter Galloway, would never hurt children. He is a good Believer and a good husband.’

  Beside her Anatoly finished his tea and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. Edie saw him glance at Natalia and give an almost imperceptible nod.

  ‘We will tell you,’ Anatoly said. ‘Then you will help us.’

 
; It all started two years ago, he explained, when the Old Believers had been approached by a property developer called Tommy Schofield to sell a piece of shoreside property down near Homer. Galloway had been the point man for the Old Believers. Schofield wanted to develop the land into a resort for the cruise trade. The Old Believers weren’t interested in selling – the whole point of coming to Alaska had been so they could live separately from worldly things and other people – but Schofield kept returning with new terms. He seemed determined to turn the whole coast down at Kenai into some kind of theme park. After a year or so of pestering them with new offers, Schofield began to get vindictive. A bridge they’d constructed across a creek got damaged, the road they’d built into the compound had been broken up with a jackhammer, their perimeter fencing was constantly being breached and they lost cattle as a result. The Believers dealt with all of this intimidation with equanimity, fixing the fence, rebuilding the bridge and filling in the potholes in the road. They were used to being persecuted, and in ways infinitely more creative than this.

  ‘When none of that worked, he got really nasty,’ Medvedev said. ‘He had hired a group of Believers for a construction job in Meadow Lake. He went back to them and tried to turn them against the group in Homer, telling them that their brothers were blocking their way to a pile of money. He thought the group could be split, he thought we were just hillbillies.’

  Medvedev gulped down another glass of tea and went on. Instead of fragmenting, the Meadow Lake group went direct to Galloway and told him what Schofield was trying to do.

  ‘From then on, Schofield wanted to get Peter Galloway,’ Natalia said. ‘Peter was blocking the way to Schofield’s dream. He called and threatened him. One time he found a dead wolf on his doorstep.’

  ‘Did he report any of this?’

  Natalia smiled and shook her head. Her father answered the question.

  ‘We don’t get involved.’