The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  ‘She wants to talk to you,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Olga?’

  ‘The girl in Anchorage. The one who was hiding her baby. Lena’s her friend. I gave them the number here.’

  ‘But she asked for me.’

  ‘I might have mentioned you.’ Derek gave her a sheepish look. ‘I thought she’d be more likely to call a woman.’

  Edie took the phone back and spoke into it. ‘Lena, are you in trouble?’

  ‘Not yet, but soon maybe. We have CCTV tape. For your research. Maybe you get something done. You should see it.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  There was a pause. Edie thought she could hear a baby crying in the background, then Lena said, ‘The man, your friend, he knows.’

  36

  ‘Edie.’ Stacey’s smile beamed from the service entrance. She was dressed in black, as usual, but she’d partly dyed her hair white now, and shaved a swathe down one side of her skull. In spite of all this, or maybe because of it, she looked dazzlingly pretty. In one hand she was holding a box. This she offered up to Edie.

  ‘Some ribs, a coupla orders of reindeer chilli, figured you’d be hungry. It’s on me.’

  Edie thanked her. ‘Why did you switch to late shift?’

  Stacey pulled a face. ‘Half the staff called in sick. I guess they wanted to watch the Iditarod finish on the TV. I decided I could use the extra money.’ They moved across to a door in the back of the building. There were some kids taking turns with a pair of stilts in the parking lot. Stacey gave them a wave.

  ‘Those guys make me laugh. They’re always here,’ she said, drawing a set of keys from a chain in her apron pocket. ‘I sneak ’em out some food sometimes.’ One of the kids took a tumble from the stilts, got right back on, laughing.

  Edie turned the key in the door and Bonehead came bounding out, his sinuous body snaking joyously back and forth. She bent down. ‘Look at you, big guy. Thanks for keeping him.’

  Stacey caught her bottom lip with her teeth. ‘I’m glad you’re back but I’m gonna miss this old hound. We had such fun together. Boy, that dog likes to walk!’ She took a breath and, thumbing the back entrance to the cafe, said, ‘I guess I should be getting back.’ Then she added, ‘Old Bonehead and me, we’re pals. Bring him back any time.’ Her eyebrows went up into a pleading expression. ‘Please?’

  Edie waited till the waitress was back inside, then she clipped on Bonehead’s lead and they began to make their way in the boys’ direction through the parking lot. The surface had been ploughed but a thin layer of snow had fallen since then and wolf tracks ran all the way through it.

  ‘Hey, kids.’ They dropped their stilts and came over. There were three, all boys, probably around eleven, dressed in the Alaska uniform of jeans and down parkas with bobble hats. Good-looking kids, well cared for. One of them reached out and began patting Bonehead.

  ‘You see those prints?’ She pointed to the litter of wolf prints on the lot. ‘There’s wolves come around this way. Heading for the trash cans maybe. Most likely they won’t bother you, but maybe you wanna think about getting back home?’

  The three boys burst out laughing and kept on bellowing so hard they had to clutch their stomachs. That set Bonehead off.

  Edie felt herself redden. ‘Aw, kids, c’mon, wha’d I say?’ But this only set the boys off all over again. Edie bent down and looked at the prints. There was no doubt in her mind they belonged to wolves, but now she could see not only that there was no gait in them, no order, and they were all of front paws. She walked over and picked up the stilts. On the base was stamped the classic lupine four elongated toes spread wide. One of the boys came running over.

  ‘Hey! They’re ours!’

  She handed the stilts to the boy. ‘They got other types like this in the store?’

  ‘Sure,’ the boy said, giving her the kind of disdainful look kids reserve for stupid adults. ‘Lynx, moose, whatever.’

  A bigger thought had begun taking shape in her mind. The moose tracks on the shoreline of the lake. She loaded Bonehead into the back of the truck and reached for the nature guide she kept in the glovebox. The tracks of everything living on Ellesmere Island were as familiar to her as the sound of a northeast wind blowing across the ice, but the first time she’d seen moose tracks was only a few days ago. From the guide it appeared that the front and back footprints were strikingly similar, but she could see straight away now that the distance between the prints on the lake was slightly off. Which could only mean that the prints up at the lake had been faked. Someone had walked onto that ice in shoes and come back off it wearing stilts.

  She turned off McRae onto Spenard Road and headed south. The strip malls and buildings on either side of the street began looking distinctly seedy. Eventually, she came to the row of old houses Derek had described, and pulled off the road. In front of her were steps up to a shabby door. She climbed the rises slowly, listening out for voices or movement coming from inside the building. Her instincts told her there was no one home. After waiting a few moments she knocked. Again, nothing. The thought occurred to her that maybe she’d got the wrong place, the world of blocks and grids being so unfamiliar to someone brought up in a two-street settlement in the midst of thousands of miles of tundra that she’d just mistaken one spot for another. She pulled out Derek’s written instructions and in her mind retraced the drive but every reworking brought her back here. She knocked again and when no amount of stamping could keep out the cold any longer, she turned and went back down the steps.

  Back at the studio she called Derek and gave him the news. He sounded relieved to hear her voice.

  ‘I’ll go back over there again later.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till the morning? I don’t like the thought of you around that place after dark.’

  She laughed.

  ‘I been handling polar bears half my life, I think I can handle this.’

  Derek said, ‘Polar bears aren’t motivated by money.’

  ‘That’s ’cause polar bears are smart.’

  ‘Listen, Edie, I know you better than you think. Seems to me you got some reason to be chasing this thing, I mean something you’re not talking about. I haven’t asked you about it—’

  ‘Because you know I won’t tell you,’ she interrupted.

  He gave a sigh, long and full of irritation, and tinged with something else, too.

  ‘I may be dumb but I got a good nose and I don’t like the way this smells,’ she said. ‘I sensed at the time there was something wrong with those prints but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It was the gait. Whoever left those prints had problems with his right hip. Could have been Schofield, I guess, but then there was the lack of splash ice.’ She told Derek about the kids in the parking lot behind the Snowy Owl.

  ‘You think Schofield faked his own death?’

  ‘If he just intended to disappear, why would he have put a guard outside his office? You ask me, Tommy Schofield was intending to lie low for a few days until the thing with the Stegners blew over, then he was planning on coming back.’

  Derek paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘Instead of which…’

  Edie said, ‘I’m thinking that field-dressing shed we looked in on at the back of Tommy Schofield’s cabin, that’d be an ideal place to kill a man. There’d be blood all over that shed. Animal blood or Tommy Schofield’s blood, hard to tell which, particularly if you clean up afterwards. I’m saying someone had scrubbed that shed very recently and fixed on a new padlock.’

  ‘Who?’ Derek said.

  ‘Take your pick.’ They ran through the list of possibilities. Of the clients of the Lodge the only one they had identified was Police Chief Mackenzie but any one of them might have had reason to do away with Schofield. There were the Schofield’s associates, the two Russian men Derek had seen at the Chukchi Motel. Then there was Galloway.

  ‘Why would Galloway stage Schofield’s suicide? He’s already got a two-murder tag on him. What’s another in the bag?’
<
br />   ‘I think we can count Galloway out.’

  They fell silent for a while, lost in thought. Then Edie said, ‘But say Mackenzie, or whoever else at the Lodge, needed Galloway and Schofield off the scene, only they couldn’t find Galloway.’

  ‘So…’

  ‘So how’s about that person, or people, get rid of Schofield, make it look like a suicide, release the body to the Old Believers as Galloway and make a big song and dance in the media of closing the case.’

  ‘What do the Believers get out of it?’

  ‘Exactly what they need. They get the APD off Galloway’s back.’

  Derek thought about this for a moment. ‘Then they get their man the hell out of Alaska.’

  ‘Which can’t be all that difficult to do when you got a vast, unpoliced international border on either side.’

  ‘But how would you ever prove that’s what happened?’

  ‘According to the Orthodoxy, the body of a deceased Christian must be returned to the earth. The Old Believers have some issues with the Orthodox Church but on that they agree. They won’t cremate their dead. I read that when I was doing research. All you’d have to do to prove it would be to dig up the body of “Peter Galloway” and I’d be prepared to bet that you’d find someone remarkably like Tommy Schofield.’

  Derek paused. ‘The Believers would never agree to a disinterment.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have to. You forget, Derek, that even in Alaska there’s a thing called the law.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in the law?’

  ‘I don’t. I believe in justice.’

  In the background Edie could hear the sound of Zach’s voice and some high-pitched baby noises. Good noises, she thought, the best.

  After the call, Edie made some hot tea and sat on the sofa thinking. Then, on a whim, she got up, went over to the small chest where she’d stashed the papers she’d removed from Tommy Schofield’s office and checked through them once again, stopping when she came to notepaper headed ‘Kachemak Properties’. Director: Tommy R Schofield. On the paper were some scribbled notes, what looked like points of discussion, and clipped underneath was what seemed to be an agreement between Kachemak and someone with the unusual name of Tryggve.

  She wondered how much Schofield’s assistant, Sharon Steadman, might be able to tell her. Now that her boss was presumed dead, she might be more willing to talk.

  Sharon answered on the second ring. Edie didn’t have to introduce herself.

  ‘So, we took your advice, went to see Annalisa Littlefish.’ Edie imagined Sharon sitting on her pink chair in her pink bathrobe. It made it easier to do what she was about to do.

  ‘Like I said before, I don’t know much.’ Sharon’s tone seemed a good deal less perky now.

  ‘Let’s see. We got human trafficking, procurement of children for sex, statutory rape.’

  ‘I don’t know about any of that.’

  ‘You know enough to go down as an accessory after the fact.’ The term came from the TV cop shows Edie watched with Sammy sometimes, on a dark night, for want of anything better to do.

  There was a pause down the line, then Sharon said, ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘You ever want another job in Homer, Sharon, you better start talking.’

  ‘I already told you what I know.’ Sharon meant to sound authoritative but came across as both resentful and terrified.

  ‘Kachemak Properties mean anything to you?’

  ‘Sure. It was some kind of shell company Tommy, Mr Schofield, set up to deal with Mr Hallstrom.’

  ‘Byron Hallstrom?’

  ‘Yeah. Tommy never had the kind of money you’d need to buy the shoreline land and develop it. He was only ever acting as an agent.’

  ‘But the Old Believers didn’t want to sell. Tommy Schofield was trying to blackmail Peter Galloway and the other Believers into selling that land?’

  Sharon fell silent. Finally, she said, ‘I think Mr Schofield would have thought of it more in the way of persuasion.’

  ‘Tell me about Trygvve. That Hallstrom’s outfit?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anyone else involved?’

  There was a pause, then Sharon came back on. ‘At one point, Mrs Hillingberg tried to muscle in on it somehow. But she and Tommy had a fight about it.’

  ‘What do you mean, they had a fight about it?’

  ‘I heard Tommy, like, going apeshit on the phone. Mr Schofield never much liked Mrs Hillingberg.’

  ‘They have some history together?’

  ‘I guess they were at high school at the same time.’ Sharon hesitated.

  ‘And?’

  ‘My parents once told me there was this rumour that he kinda fell for her but she was mean to him.’

  ‘She was mean?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Sharon said, defensively. ‘Tommy had some sort of a breakdown, my parents said, he had to leave school. It was because of that he didn’t go to college.’

  ‘Because she was mean?’

  ‘Mr Schofield was a loner. He got teased a lot about his legs. But he had a dog. My parents said Marsha paid some local psycho to take a baseball bat to the dog’s legs. They left the dog on Tommy’s porch with a note calling him a cripple and told him to stick to his own kind.’

  Edie left Bonehead in the studio and drove south to the old, run-down house at the end of Spenard Road. The lot was empty and a light covering of snow had obliterated her earlier tracks. Newer, fresher tracks led into the house. She felt her pulse quicken. Lena was in. Reaching the small platform outside the door, she paused for a moment, knocked and heard the sound of footsteps approaching. No light came on inside, but the door opened and someone stood just inside the doorway.

  ‘Come in,’ a female voice said.

  Even as she stepped inside, Edie Kiglatuk knew she’d been a fool. An instant later, too short a time for her to turn around, she felt a rush of air and heard a cracking sound. Then nothing.

  37

  He was in the car going east towards Merrill Field when his personal BlackBerry buzzed and Marsha’s ID came up.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘how’s the Slope?’ For the past twenty-four hours his wife had been on a whistle-stop tour of the north, basing herself in Nome and from there making visits out to Kotzebue, Barrow and the North Slope oilfields. Chuck was intending to fly up there in a couple of days’ time. It was important for the Hillingberg campaign to be seen to be supportive of the oil business in general, given how much of Alaska’s wealth depended on it.

  Marsha said the Slope was looking good. ‘They’re as pissed with Shippon as we are. All on message. Too old, too set in his ways, Alaska needs a new broom. ’ She let out a little laugh. ‘Well heck, they’re about to get one.’

  They were passing the headquarters of the APD now. Chuck peered out the window, pleased not to see any demonstrators. His work BlackBerry buzzed. An email from April to say that all the arrangements were in place and she’d meet him at the terminal building in Nome. Andy, April and the rest of his team had flown up there on the morning’s scheduled flight out of Anchorage. Chuck had decided to fly himself up later in his Cessna Stationair. It was a good way to present himself as an independent, all-Alaska kind of a guy, cut a bit of a dash.

  ‘I gotta go,’ he said. ‘See you at the hotel in Nome in about three hours?’

  ‘Take your time,’ Marsha said.

  Being driven through the familiar streets, blank and icy in their late winter garb, Chuck thought what a relief it would be to get away from Anchorage. He hadn’t been a bad mayor in the circumstances, but it was time to leave the role to someone who really loved the city. The Alaska state motto ‘North to the Future’ didn’t include him or his future. The way Chuck saw it, oil and politics had polluted the state without making it powerful. For him, the years ahead all lay to the south, first as Governor of Alaska in Juneau, then in Washington DC. As the driver pulled into the public zone at the airstrip, then rolled on into the VIP area, he cou
ld feel a new start making its way inexorably toward him like spindrift rushing in off the sea.

  His maintenance engineer, Foggy Banks, had the Stationair’s sidepanel off and was checking the hardware around the elevator bell crank. Chuck was fond of the guy. Banks was one of those increasingly rare men, an old-time sourdough Alaskan who loved hunting and the outdoors, could turn his hand to more or less anything from house-building to salmon-smoking, and took pride in his work. He was always grimy and never seemed to have a woman around long enough to make him take a wash, but that didn’t bother Chuck. Foggy Banks and his ilk were the blood and guts of the North Star State. He’d often thought that if Alaska had been populated with men like Foggy, he wouldn’t be so keen to leave. It was all the others, the petty bureaucrats, the strutting oilmen, the tree-huggers, the hydroponics nuts, the libertarians, East Coast environmentalists and the pseudo-sophisticates, who made Alaska intolerable.

  He strolled over with what he hoped was a big, generous-hearted smile on his face.

  ‘Good to see ya, boss,’ Banks said, wiping his hands on an oily cloth and slapping a huge, greasy palm into Chuck’s cleaner, more tender one. ‘Real sorry, but I got called away a while for an emergency, so I’m running a little behind.’

  Chuck tried hard to keep up his smile. He knew he should ask about the emergency, but couldn’t get up the energy for it.

  ‘Give me twenty minutes?’ Banks said.

  Chuck nodded, went round to the office side, glad-handed all the folk he needed to keep sweet, dropped off his flight plan and checked the latest weather forecast. Looked like it was going to stay partly cloudy with a variable force 3 wind. No precipitation expected. Pretty perfect flying weather for the end of March.

  He asked permission to take over an empty desk and began to check through the speech he was due to make at the Iditarod champion’s dinner but he soon found his thoughts distracted by the events of the past few days. He saw the Lodge now as a bizarre aberration that he’d allowed himself to get sucked into, a monstrous hydra-headed thing at the centre of which lurked Tommy Schofield. It was a relief, at least, to know that the man was dead. Schofield had always been a hustler, a loser with pretensions. He thought himself back to the time, it seemed so distant now, when he’d made a play for Marsha. Ha! He allowed himself the luxury of examining the shiny, luxurious heft of the power he’d held over Schofield in the years that followed. Something jolted him out of his reverie, an uncomfortable little reminder of how rapidly and with what utter ruthlessness Marsha had decided Schofield’s fate. He stood up, took a deep breath and tried to turn the feeling around, reminding himself how much he’d benefited from that. Never had his path to power been clearer.