The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  Derek looked over at the girl. She was still wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, but she caught his eye and gave a vague smile.

  ‘What’s your name?’ The girl didn’t answer.

  The man said, ‘She don’t speak English,’ trying to come over helpful.

  Derek whirled round and waved his pistol at his bleeding member.

  ‘She sure as hell said all she needed to say to you.’

  He turned to the girl. ‘We’ll have you out of here any moment now.’ She came towards him, moving slowly. Her face was a blank and it was hard to tell whether she had even registered that Derek had said anything. For a moment Derek thought she was making for the bathroom but, as she got closer, she sprang for the door and was gone. He heard her leaping down the stairs, three at a time. Zach shot him a look, which said, want me to follow? He countered it with a no. The girl had no use for men right now.

  From the corner of his eye he saw the bald guy bracing himself, as if to make a play for the door. Zach must have seen the same thing. In a matter of a moment, the trooper lunged forward, flinging his back against the door, his pistol never leaving a direct line to its target. The bald guy’s face fell. His whole body sagged forward. He knew he was beat.

  Zach went over to him.

  ‘What’s your name, A-hole?’

  ‘Harry Larsen.’ The adrenaline rush caused by the bite was dissipating him now. His face was yellow and he looked scared. ‘Look, cut me some slack here, fellas. I’m gonna cooperate, OK? I’m just the little fella. I’m not gonna hold out on you guys.’

  Zach turned to Derek. ‘Harry Larsen says he’s just the little fella.’

  ‘He’s got that right,’ Derek said, winking.

  The man closed his eyes then took a deep breath.

  ‘Do us a favour, little fella, tuck yourself away, then put your hands behind your back.’

  Larsen did as he was told, gasping at the pain. Zach went over to him. ‘You touch me with those hands, I’ll kill you.’ He threaded on a plastic cuff and tightened it around Larsen’s wrists.

  ‘I guess we really should be checking out now, trooper,’ Derek said. He felt the beer he’d been drinking all night bubble up from his stomach and swallowed it back, hard. He turned to Larsen. ‘Don’t worry, we organized alternative accommodation for you. You’ll get a bunk and a shared john. Safety locks on all the doors. Better still, we won’t even charge.’

  The road was familiar to her now and in the last few days she had picked up enough experience to be able to drive it without fear of turning the vehicle over or ending up on the verge. Still, she was cautious turning off the highway and onto the tiny track leading up to the Russian Orthodox church at Eagle River. It was the middle of the night and the road, which hadn’t been properly ploughed since last snowfall, was well and truly iced over. The church wasn’t the main focus of her journey – she’d decided to go back to the Old Believer compound and to the buildings surrounded by high wire beyond it to take a sniff around while everyone was asleep – but since the church was more or less on route she thought she would visit Lucas Littlefish’s final resting place, and talk to the boy.

  She parked alongside the church, took her flashlight and made her way through the garden of spirit houses to the Littlefish plot. Lucas’s spirit house was blue, painted with geometric patterns most of which had been obscured by snow. Already, snow had piled on the roof then part-thawed, then piled again, leaving an odd crenellation of ice and new snow and giving the grave the look not so much of a house as of a tiny castle. The Littlefishes practised the version of the Russian Orthodoxy most common among their kind, a mix between the traditional church and native elements. She crouched down and shone her light through the window and saw there the blue and brown Athabascan weave shroud wrapped around the baby’s body, where they had removed him from the qalunaat coffin, the one demanded, she supposed, by the municipality, and laid him to rest in the old way.

  ‘Lucas,’ she said. ‘Qanulppit? How are you? Qiuviit? Are you cold?’ She spoke to him in her own language. It seemed more respectful. Somewhere above, an owl hooted. Startled by the sound, Edie strobed her flashlight up into the branches and caught a pair of bright, round eyes glinting out from a surround of pale feathers. The bird fell silent. Suddenly, she became aware of other noises; the rush of wind in the branches of the trees, the strangled bark of a fox nearby and, further off, the faint wail of a wolf. Then the owl rose from the tree, the burr of its wings like a death rattle.

  She turned back to the boy in the snow. ‘Whatever happened to you, Lucas, was wrong. And there are people here who are still not telling the truth about it and that compounds the wrong. I’m gonna do my best to find out what happened, kid. I’m gonna do it for you and I’m gonna do it for me. Tukisivit?’ His spirit would understand this.

  She pulled her parka tighter around her. The crowdedness of the night forest, the feeling of being spied on by creatures she couldn’t even name, spooked her some.

  She began to brush off the snow on the house, at first tenderly, then more urgently. Bit by bit, the spirit house emerged from under its wintery blanket. It looked cozier now, somehow, more loved. She swung the flashlight across the surface of the house, feeling better for unburying the boy. The shroud was fully visible from both sides. Above where the door might have been, she noticed a small, painted cross of the regular Orthodox Church, the kind the priest pointed out to her after Lucas’s funeral, the same cross that had been etched in grease on Lucas Littlefish’s body. The cross no Believer had used in 400 years.

  She stood up and blew air through her nose in frustration. There was nothing unexpected on Lucas Littlefish’s grave, no clues, no messages or signs. Back at the truck, she started the engine. While she’d been at the cemetery, a thick cloud had come over obscuring the moonlight. It was bitter dark, the kind of dark that seldom fell over Autisaq, where sea ice and glaciers reflected whatever little light the sky sent down. Halfway down the road in the direction of the Glenn Highway, she turned a corner and saw, in the distance, a thin, pulsing light which grew gradually brighter then took on a colour.

  Blue.

  Inside her chest the owl fluttered, beating its wings against bone. She braked hard, the metal tang of blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten her lip. The light swooshed across the windshield. Remembering Aileen’s warning, she felt chilled and panicky. The forces of nature, ice, the raging of the winds, the rough heave of an ocean, a wounded bear or musk ox, all these things she knew how to deal with. But when it came to cops, Edie Kiglatuk was clueless.

  She cut the engine and the lights. For what seemed like the longest time she just sat and watched the blue swish crossing her line of vision. Then, from in among the trees she saw a flashlight, heard the sound of male voices, footsteps crashing through the forest, the yelp of a dog.

  Two men in uniform and a police dog burst from the trees. They both caught sight of the vehicle at the same time and immediately froze. The one who wasn’t handling the dog drew his weapon. Beside him, the dog leapt on his leash, snarling and baring its teeth. She heard one of the men shouting at her to raise her hands and remain in her vehicle. Edie felt her breath catching in her throat. The police pistol was aimed right at her head. She did as she was told, slowly lifting her hands where the cops could see them. The one with the pistol advanced towards the vehicle. His partner stood in front of the car, with the dog at his side, his weapon glinting through the windshield.

  The door flew open. She heard the first cop scream at her to get out of the car with her hands raised. Everything felt warped now. There was no way to tell how much time had passed. She felt herself clamber out. The first cop came up, frisked her out, and then commanded her to lie on her belly on the ground while they searched the vehicle. The ice felt hard, then soft. Freezing water started seeping through her parka and onto her skin. When she looked up, the dog was right beside her, its foul breath on her face. She buried the urge to punch it. The handler was speaki
ng on his walkie-talkie while his partner went around inspecting the vehicle. She felt her skin begin to shiver. Someone was saying something to her. He repeated himself.

  ‘Your name, lady.’

  She answered. A hand squeezed in under her arm and she felt herself being lifted up onto her feet. She heard her name transmitted through the walkie-talkie.

  ‘What are you doing here with your engine off? It’s late.’

  ‘Taking a nap.’

  ‘Why are you travelling this late?’

  She told them she’d come from Anchorage to visit the cemetery.

  ‘I got a relative buried there.’

  ‘You come see your relative in the middle of the night?’

  She looked at the two men. Both were qalunaat.

  ‘He keeps different hours now he’s dead,’ she said.

  The two men glanced at one another, and then decided to let it drop. The first one said: ‘How long you been asleep for?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘You see anyone along this route, ma’am? I mean, any other vehicle, a pedestrian, anyone at all?’

  ‘I sleep with my eyes closed mostly. I guess I’m old-fashioned that way.’

  The walkie-talkie clicked back into life. The two men seemed to relax. Both cops reholstered their weapons. The dog handler pulled his dog in to his side and got it to play nice. Edie wiped herself down.

  ‘We got an escaped prisoner situation here.’ She immediately thought of Galloway. The warning glance exchanged by the two officers was enough to confirm her suspicions. ‘We gonna need you to drive on along back to Anchorage. You’ll come to a police roadblock just before you get there, but they’ll let you through.’

  For the first time, she became aware of the thrum of a helicopter.

  The dog handler opened the car door for her. She clambered back in and he shut the door. He motioned to her to start the car and open the window. When she did as she was told, he leaned in with a superior kind of smile on his face.

  ‘Next time you speak with that dead relative of yours, you might want to ask him to keep social hours.’

  23

  Back in Anchorage, Chuck Hillingberg was being called from his bed. It was Marsha and she sounded strained.

  ‘You didn’t hear the phone?’ His wife’s head appeared round the door.

  He hadn’t. His body, pushed to the limits by the past few days of stress, had skipped the doze stage and fallen directly into deep sleep. He felt groggy now, caught between competing demands for his attention, his conscious self awake already but some visceral part calling him back into unconsciousness.

  Marsha came in and perched on the end of the bed. ‘It’s Mackenzie.’

  He glanced at his watch, pushed the comforter aside and sat up, rubbing his hand over his forehead. It felt clammy; old sweat pooling in the furrows. He’d been on the phone to the police commissioner half the evening, then called Andy and hadn’t got to bed till 1 a.m. It was just after 3.15, he’d had approximately two hours’ sleep and it looked as though he wasn’t going to get much more tonight.

  He picked up the phone on the bedside table and pressed speakerphone.

  ‘This better be an emergency.’

  Mackenzie told it to him straight. As he spoke, Chuck felt some part of him fall away.

  ‘Tell me I’m still in the middle of some fucking nightmare,’ he said. His feeling of emptiness began to burn into a raw, red anger. ‘Let me get this right. You let the guy go?’ He had forgotten his part in setting up the Lodge, the savage, elemental pleasure he’d taken in the whole business, leastwise at the beginning, and felt a great rush of righteous rage towards Mackenzie and Schofield and all the other unimportant, small-minded, Alaska-bound men who had betrayed him, let him down.

  ‘Like I said, boss, we were moving the guy up to the facility at Eagle River.’ Mackenzie paused and changed tone before adding, ‘Which is what you wanted.’

  Chuck heard a yelp and realized it had come from his mouth. He took a deep breath and tried to quieten the pounding in his head. His voice, when it came, sounded like a rocket firing.

  ‘…You so much as try to pin this on me, I swear I will fry your ass so crisp it’s only fit for a bun and mayo.’

  ‘Mr Mayor, right now I’m just trying to get this mess cleaned up.’ He’d never heard Mackenzie sound so tortured or remorseful and never before considered how little he cared for the man or his feelings.

  ‘What you doing to recapture Galloway?’

  ‘I got the Highway Patrol sealing off roads; I got troopers sweeping the forest with dogs. One way or another, we gonna get that mofo back.’ He sounded as though he was near to tears. Chuck hated him all the more for that. He checked himself. The last thing he needed was someone important to him freaking out at a time like this. He’d scared Mackenzie enough for now. Didn’t want to tip the guy over the edge.

  ‘Have you gotten to the bottom of how this happened yet?’

  ‘Someone took their eye off the ball. It’s a screw-up. The Bureau of Judicial Services is blaming the Highway Patrol, and vice versa. The driver needed to stop for a bathroom break. I don’t know. It didn’t help that some kind of ice fog came over the whole place and there was one big whiteout, no one could see further than—’

  ‘Their overtime?’

  There was a pause, while Mackenzie picked himself up off the floor.

  ‘We got investigators in both Believer compounds, we got uniforms and body dogs out there and we’ve alerted the fugitive task force. There’s nowhere for this A-wipe to go.’

  ‘Except into the interior of the largest state in the Union.’

  Marsha, who had been sitting quietly absorbing all this, suddenly piped up. ‘You got the press on this contained, right? We got a two-time child murderer here, a serial killer. How you gonna make sure nothing gets out till you got this man back in custody?’

  There was a groan. Marsha jumped on it. ‘Say what?’ Her face was like some kind of glittering stone. Without waiting for a reply, she stood up and swept out of the room, signalling that she’d be right back.

  Quickly, Chuck flipped off the speakerphone. ‘Listen, I promised Marsha that nothing’s going to connect us to the Lodge. Ever.’ He lowered his voice and put all the power he had into what he said next. ‘I’m holding you responsible that the promise still stands.’

  The door swung open and Marsha reappeared holding an iPad. The movement woke the screen, which glowed ice blue in the half-light of the bedside lamp.

  ‘Hold on, Mac,’ Chuck said. He flipped speakerphone back on.

  Marsha clicked in a few keystrokes then let out a groan. ‘Holy moly.’ She slid the iPad towards him. He had to reach for his reading glasses to pick out any of the words then wished he hadn’t. Marsha was on Mommabears, the most popular Alaska parenting site. News of Peter Galloway’s escape was all over it. The Mommabears were going apeshit.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Mackenzie’s voice had completely broken now. ‘Believe me, I’m sorry. We got every uni available hunting this fucker down.’

  Marsha’s snort of contempt sounded like the blood-lust bark of a wounded bear. ‘Chief, We’re waaaay past the ass-covering stage. Come the start of the breakfast news shows, you’re gonna have every journalist in the entire state of Alaska looking right up your crack.’ She pulled her BlackBerry out of the pocket of her robe and hit the speed dial.

  ‘I’m aware it’s late.’ There was a look of absolute determination on her face. Chuck could tell from her tone she was talking to Andy Foulsham. ‘Call your computer guy, you know the one I mean.’ A short pause. ‘Yes now.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘We need him to crash a website.’

  Bonehead thumped his tail. Edie patted him on the head and ruffled his ears. Over in the corner by the sofa, the message light blinked. It was Derek.

  ‘I think we’ve got something. Call me.’

  She checked her watch. She was the only inuk she knew who wore one. Her stepson, Joe, used to tease her, saying becau
se she was half-white she wore one on her qalunaat side. It was 5 a.m. Her first thought was: Derek will still be in bed. Her second: So what.

  She dialled the number. He picked up. He’d been in bed twenty minutes and in the middle of one of his recurring dreams about a plane crash, he said. He sounded glad she was calling.

  ‘Where you been?’

  ‘You go first,’ she said.

  He didn’t argue. She listened to him detailing the operation at the Chukchi Motel. This was all news to her, but she was glad to hear Derek Palliser was finally taking action.

  Harry Larsen, the man Derek and Zach surprised with his pants down, was waiting in a cell at the Nome Police Department prior to being formally charged. Turned out, he was quite a squealer. Native of Wisconsin, he’d moved up to Nome five or six years before, taking up a position at a supplies company based out of the air terminal. He had prior for sexually assaulting a teenage girl down in Madison, and had spent three years in the pen down there and then got as far away as he could. He was cooperating, Derek said, out of a fear of being sent back to jail. He thought if he was a good boy the Nome police might just let him get away with a rap on the knuckles. At heart, he didn’t really believe he’d done anything wrong. Zach, who’d had sat through the questioning, said the creep kept insisting he was only getting a lousy blowjob and hadn’t fucked the girl, as though that made it any better.

  He’d been given the contact through a guy who came through the airport occasionally, a bush pilot, by the name of Bolvan. Guy with a long nose. Once or twice this Bolvan had passed some small cargo he wanted ignored through Larsen, who let it go for a small consideration. To return the favour Bolvan had given him a number to call. Larsen claimed he’d lost the number and only called it when it resurfaced some weeks later. In any case, he hadn’t seen Bolvan around for a while. He’d lost the number again and was unable to recall it.