The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘But you’re getting involved now.’

  ‘Now we have no choice.’

  Edie took a sip of her tea. It was bitter and at the same time syrupy sweet. ‘So you think this Schofield guy pinned the boy’s death on your husband?’

  ‘Yes,’ Natalia said. ‘That’s why we need to know exactly what you said to the police.’

  Natalia cut a look at her father. Her eyes were large and fluid. Edie caught Natalia’s gaze and sensed the young woman was holding something back.

  Natalia swallowed hard. ‘Mostly, we don’t like to get involved with the Outside unless we have to, but Peter is different. He hasn’t been a Believer all his life. He wanted to make up for…’ She hesitated. ‘…for his life before. He volunteered at a literacy project when we were living down at the compound near Homer. He taught TaniaLee Littlefish to read.’

  Edie felt Natalia’s hand on her arm. She thought about the pattern of snowdrift around the spirit house, about the thin layering of iced snow on the roof. It hadn’t been left at the same time as she’d encountered Peter and Natalia in the forest, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have left it some other time.

  ‘Think about it, Edie Kiglatuk. If we had left the baby there, would Peter have directed you to take the path right beside the body?’

  Edie closed her eyes for a moment. Her mind was full of contradictory ideas. Part of her wanted to believe this young woman but nothing she had said proved anything. What if she and Galloway had wanted Edie to find the body? There was no way of knowing one way or another.

  ‘I’m not going to lie to the police,’ she said.

  Natalia took her hand from Edie’s arm.

  ‘We’re not asking you to lie,’ she said. A coldness had crept into her voice.

  Edie turned to the old man. ‘I need you to take me back to Anchorage now,’ she said.

  Outside, it was already dark. Bonehead rose to greet her and flapped his tail. They passed the journey in silence. Anatoly Medvedev stopped the truck opposite her building. As she was about to get out, he reached out an arm to waylay her.

  ‘Four hundred years we have been persecuted,’ he said quietly and fixed Edie with a look which contained centuries of sadness. ‘We came to Alaska and finally thought it had stopped. For forty years we have lived here, paying our taxes with no trouble.’

  She got out of the car and let Bonehead out of the back.

  Then she knocked on the driver’s side window. There was a question in her mind that still needed answering but which she hadn’t wanted to ask until she was safely back on her own ground.

  ‘Who’s Fonseca?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. Nothing he’d done, no movement or change of expression on his face, suggested he was lying.

  She stood back from the truck and watched him drive away. Tomorrow, she would go back to Detective Truro and tell him about the snowdrift around the spirit house. She would tell him about the absence of tracks, about the ice crystals on the baby’s body, about the pattern of ice on the frozen skin.

  And then she would never speak with anyone from the Old Believers again.

  11

  Edie got Derek out of bed.

  ‘It’s 4 a.m.’ The policeman sounded hung-over.

  Edie feigned surprise. ‘I guess I was just having so much fun I forgot to go to bed.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She didn’t want to get into all that now. ‘How’s Sammy doing?’

  ‘What? You rang at 4 a.m. to ask me that?’ His voice had sobered up, now he just sounded rattled. ‘Last I heard, he left McGrath. Why?’

  ‘Because it’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ He loaded the word with as much sarcasm as it would carry. ‘You remembered.’ She heard him yawn. There was a pause while he lit a cigarette and took a long toke. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘you didn’t deserve that. What you got?’

  She filled him in on the visit to TaniaLee Littlefish and the Believer compound. He listened without interruption then, in an urgent voice, said: ‘Edie, you found a boy in the snow and you told the APD what you saw. You did everything that could have been asked of you. We don’t know anything about these people, we don’t know how this place works. Let’s just do what we came to do and get the hell out.’

  It sounded good the way he said it. She only wished she could make it work that way.

  ‘Listen, I need your advice. You think I can use my experience driving snowbies to rent a car?’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ he said, sounding stupefied. ‘Edie, you don’t have a licence.’

  ‘I thought so.’ She took a breath. ‘OK, so here’s what I need you to do.’

  At 5 a.m. a bleary-eyed guy with a face full of old acne scars came along to open up the Anchorage branch of Pimp-my-Wreck. He looked admiringly at Bonehead.

  ‘You hunt with that dog?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The guy raised his eyebrows, impressed. He leaned down and patted Bonehead on the back, then, applying himself to opening up the premises, said, ‘What, ducks, geese?’

  ‘Polar bears.’

  ‘Ha!’ He shook his head and laughed, waving her into the office. ‘You’re funny.’ Then, directing her to a seat in the waiting area, he added, ‘I’m Arnaldo and I’ll be right with you, funny lady.’

  There was some coffee from the night before still sitting in the drip jug, but the place smelled like stale vomit. Edie leaned over, helped herself to the coffee, opened eight little sugar bags and dumped them in the Styrofoam cup. While Arnaldo flustered about she took a look around the office and found what she needed. Then Arnaldo settled in his swing seat on the other side of the counter and took in a deep breath.

  ‘OK, Lady Polar Bear, so how can I help you today?’

  She sipped at the cup, then spat back the contents and told him why she’d come.

  ‘How’re you spelling Palliser?’ Arnaldo plugged the name into the keyboard and pulled up the emailed reservation.

  ‘You the secondary driver?’ He squinted at the screen, took a closer look. ‘Oh, that’s weird, we don’t have a name for you.’

  The reservation clerk looked up.

  ‘We’ll need Mr Palliser to sign off on the reservation.’

  ‘No problem. It’s Police Sergeant Palliser by the way.’ She looked about, pretending to fix on a document pinned to the wall, then went nearer.

  ‘Your fire safety certificate needs renewing. Technically, it’s illegal, but I guess you know that.’

  From the corner of her eye she saw him hesitate, unsure how to proceed. Then, with her hunter’s instinct, stepping in for the kill, she flipped Patricia Gomez’s ID onto the desk.

  ‘Sergeant Palliser just got pulled away on a job but listen, we need that rental real quick, OK? Wish I could tell you more but it’s sensitive. Operations.’

  Arnaldo checked the time, trying to work out whether this was something he should wake his boss for, dithered for a few moments then decided to let it pass.

  ‘Driver’s licence?’

  She flashed him an indulgent look. ‘You heard of a police officer without a licence? That’d be kinda like a seal without a flipper. Wouldn’t get too far.’

  Arnaldo looked confused for a moment then saw that she was smiling at him and joined in the joke. Forgetting he hadn’t actually seen the licence, he reached over and pulled the rental agreement papers out of the printer, got her to sign, passed her a set of keys and pointed to a beat-up dirty-white truck in the lot.

  She let herself in, bundled Bonehead onto the back seat and sat for a while, inspecting the control panel. It looked more complicated than a snowbie, all right, but everyone south of Iqaluit did it, so how hard could it be? She turned the key in the ignition. Immediately, a loud rumbling started up from the engine. An inspection of the gear pattern seemed to suggest that R might be a good gear to try. She cranked into it and began to back out. The truck moved backwards, lurched, shuddered then quit. A repeat of the pro
cess was more successful, though this time she took off the side mirror of the vehicle next door. Changing gears, she turned the wheel, jackhammered down the driveway and slammed on the brake. The vehicle stopped but the engine cut out. She keyed it into action again, feeling proud of herself for being such a quick learner. As the truck creaked out of the parking lot, from out of the far corner of her eye she spotted Arnaldo holding the blinds apart and staring through the gap between, slack-jawed.

  Edie had already done her research. She knew it was six hours’ drive from Anchorage to Homer. She figured that this gave her three hundred and sixty minutes in which to practise her driving, by which time she’d be expert. The key, she realized pretty quickly, was to try to avoid crashing in the meantime.

  In the city, the snowploughs had just finished their early morning route, so the roads were clear, the lights were on and there was very little traffic. The truck spluttered between signals. Each time it stalled she fired it up again and carried on. Pretty soon she had left the last of the southern suburbs behind and was driving south with the great expanse of Cook Inlet to her right, the ice lit up in the last fade of morning moonlight. At Bird she stopped to eat a breakfast of reindeer chilli at an Indian place just off the road. The truck went a little too far into a heap of snowdrift but the nice Indian guy who ran the breakfast place helped to tow her out and gave her a little lesson in avoiding drift. For a while after the going was slow. While she was used to driving in the semi-dark – in Autisaq the sun set in mid-October and didn’t rise again till mid-February – the depth of the snow and the height of the vehicle gave her the odd, disconcerting sensation of hovering above the ground. Once or twice the vehicle sheared to one side of the road or the other and ricocheted off deep drift, but Edie now understood to brake into the slide, rather than fight against it and, since there was no traffic coming the other way, there was no harm done. A couple of times she had to stop for a moose in the road and, once, for a lynx making its way home after a night of hunting. By seven the sun was fully up and she found herself driving along a river valley between mountains, with spruce and alder forest stretching up the slopes on either side.

  At Cooper Landing she stopped and called the offices of Schofield Developments in Homer, told an executive assistant there her story, and was given an appointment with Schofield for 11.30. Her plan was to quiz Schofield about the coastal development, maybe even ask him about Galloway, but without him suspecting she had any interest in the death of Lucas Littlefish, or in Galloway’s arrest. She filled her flask with hot sweet tea at a roadhouse and let Bonehead out while she checked her oil and snow chains. There was a moment, there, when she wondered what the hell she was doing, but it passed and she was on the road once more, heading south across the Kenai Peninsula to Homer.

  Six and a half hours after she’d first started out, she found herself on a reveal overlooking the patchy ice of Kachemak Bay to the spectacular peaks of the Kenai Mountains with their toothy summits and milky glacial bowls. The sun was moving across the sea ice, lighting it up in a glow of magnesium flare. To the east, a long spit thrust out into the bay like an eagle claw.

  Following instructions given to her by the woman she’d spoken to on the phone, she drove through the town, which was bigger than Autisaq, but not by all that much, and onto the Spit, where she found a parking spot beside a cheerful disarray of old-time berthings, fish sheds and chandleries. Leaving the dog in the car Edie wandered along the promenade shouldering the road, past souvenir shops selling everything from frozen halibut cheeks to adventure trips to the Kenai Fjords National Park across the bay, towards the ferry port with a large billboard advertising last year’s summer schedule of sailings southwestwards to Kodiak and Dutch Harbor and northeast to Valdez. At the end of the Spit, so incongruous her head had somehow blanked them till now, stood a development of vacation condos, striking in their ugliness, which blocked the view out across the bay.

  An old qalunaat guy with a huge wispy beard and bow legs shuffled by, stopped and turned back to talk to her.

  ‘If you’re looking for something, most likely I’ll be able to tell you.’

  ‘I’m looking for Tommy Schofield’s office.’

  The old man rounded on her. His eyes were so mean now she thought he might hit her. ‘What you want see that moose turd for?’ The index finger of his right hand came up and began pecking the air. He began to splutter with rage. ‘I’ll tell you something, missy,’ he continued. ‘Give that squirt of salmon spunk his head, this whole place…’ he passed a hand in an arc over the Spit and out into the bay ‘…gonna look like freakin’ Florida. Just one big golf course surrounded by condos about as gorgeous as them carbuncles up there, and trash stores selling plastic grizzlies made in goddammed Shanghai.’ He snorted and closed his eyes, no doubt imagining the scene. ‘Him and that cruise ship jerk-off.’ He took a step towards her, so close now she could smell the chewing tobacco on his breath. The finger began pumping at her. ‘What d’you freakin’ think about that?’

  She held her ground. ‘Tell me where Tommy Schofield’s office is, mister, I’ll freakin’ think whatever you freakin’ want me to.’

  He looked at her for a second, then burst into great peals of laughter, his gut trembling with the effort of his amusement. The finger slalomed around until it was pointing to a duck-egg coloured clapboard building on the other side of the road.

  An old-fashioned brass bell tinkled above the door of the office of Tommy Schofield Developments. She waited a moment. From the other side of the road she could hear the old man shouting:

  ‘No flies on you, missy, no flies at all!’

  Pushing the door with her hand, she let herself in. The only associate currently present was an old moose head, which explained the sticky note on the front door reading ‘Back Soon’. Edie took a seat in a small waiting area and brushed the creases out of a cheap business suit she’d bought in a thrift store on the outskirts of Anchorage. As it turned out, she didn’t have long to wait. Two voices and three sets of footsteps approached on the boardwalk, then the door swung open and a short man with a shock of lustrous hair and chiselled features appeared. Beneath his Craghopper khakis Edie could see that one of his legs – the left – was bowed and shrivelled and he stood with his weight balanced on the one good leg. The short man scoped around the office then turned his attention to Edie. ‘Where’s Sharon?’

  There was an awkward pause, which no one seemed to know how to fill. Eventually, Edie stuck out a hand.

  ‘I’m your eleven-thirty,’ she said. ‘Maggie Inukpuk, Tourist Development Officer from the Nunavut Chamber of Commerce. The fact-finding mission to talk about waterside development tie-ins with the cruise industry?’

  Schofield looked confused for a moment, then took a deep breath, clearly remembering and regretting saying yes.

  A well-kept man in his sixties with faded movie-star looks and a tall, strikingly pretty blonde in her thirties appeared at the door.

  ‘Byron, I’m real sorry.’ Schofield shot his friend an apologetic look. ‘I forgot.’ The movie star’s face darkened like he wasn’t much used to memory lapses among his subordinates.

  ‘Join you in ten minutes?’

  Schofield watched the couple leave, still in their orbit, unable to speak till they’d gone.

  ‘You want to talk to a real visionary, you talk to Byron Hallstrom,’ Schofield said, pointing out of the door at the receding figure. ‘He’s already got a huge stretch of coast down near Sitka and he’s looking to expand here. You should see it down there. He’s cleared the top coat…’

  ‘Top coat?’

  ‘The trees, all that forest shit. He’s put in spas, boutique retail, holiday condos, golf courses. Kept one or two specimen pines, set beautiful landscaping around them. The Cabo San Lucas of the north. Gorgeous. You should go there.’ He cut a look at his watch again. Judging by the old man outside Schofield’s offices there were people in Homer who didn’t think of Byron Hallstrom as quite the local hero
Tommy Schofield made him out to be. Edie made a note to remember the name and said nothing.

  ‘Where’d you say you’re from?’ Now that he wasn’t talking about Hallstrom, Schofield seemed distracted and uneasy.

  ‘Nunavut.’

  He stared blankly, then gathered himself. ‘Well, I can only give you ten minutes.’

  He showed her into an office crammed with papers and architectural plans. Across the walls were hung trophy salmon and pictures of Schofield demonstrating the size of his catch, but always, Edie noticed, with his bad leg out of view of the camera. The developer sat down in a padded leatherette chair on the other side of his desk.

  ‘So…’

  ‘Actually, it’s more your line I’m interested in, the land development end.’ He nodded and seemed relieved to be asked something on which he, not Hallstrom, was the authority. She sat back while he rattled on for a bit, waiting for a natural break, then she said:

  ‘I guess all that bad publicity must have hurt your plans some?’

  Schofield’s face clouded over. He glanced at the clock again, checked himself and assumed a look of bewilderment.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘That poor boy, the one who got picked up in the forest. Wasn’t the mother from round here, TaniaLee Littlefish, is it?’

  Schofield’s face set into a mask. His eyes scooted around the ceiling and he began shifting around in his seat. After what he judged to be a suitable interval he shook his head.

  ‘No, no, I can’t say I’ve been following that story. The name’s not familiar to me, I’m afraid.’ He smiled thinly and gestured towards the door. ‘I guess that answers your question. Now, Miss Inukpuk, I’m a little pressed for time.’

  ‘Name Fonseca mean anything to you?’

  ‘Like I said, miss, I can’t say I’ve been following that story.’ He had risen from his chair now and was standing by the open door, his mouth clamped firmly shut.

  12

  Edie left Bonehead in the rental in the car park at the Homer Safeway and walked through the entrance turnstiles past a pile of local newspapers. TaniaLee had mentioned the store, and Edie wondered now if someone might remember her. She asked around among the shelf stackers and got a few ‘No’s and blank looks, but struck lucky with a woman at the deli. Yeah, TaniaLee had worked there one time when she was still at junior high, but she hadn’t lasted long.