The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  She flipped open the morning’s Courier. The front page was dominated by a picture of a grizzly making his way through a crate of garbage, under the headline ‘Humans Encroaching On Bear Territory’. Beneath the bear story there was a piece about whether or not it was possible to predict the amount of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend into the future and a link to an Iditarod competitor’s training programme for next year’s race. It was almost as though the extraordinary events of the past month – the deaths of Lucas Littlefish and Vasilly Chuchin, Dark Believer Fever and the protests of the Mommabears, the ‘suicide’ of Tommy Schofield, the stalled sale of land to Byron Hallstrom—which was a fraud investigation still pending—even the fatal plane crash of the most popular gubernatorial challenger for years – none of that had ever happened. It had snowed and the landscape was clean once more. North to the Future. Who cared about the past?

  She felt a presence to her left and looked up to see Detective Truro taking a seat at her table.

  ‘Howdy.’

  He asked after Derek and Sammy and commiserated with her on the state of her hands. He seemed larger, she thought, or maybe it was just that he took up more space now. He’d allowed his hair to grow out a little and was no longer wearing his Christian pin.

  ‘You give up on God?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, smiling, ‘I’m just more relaxed about God not giving up on me.’

  The Alaska Investigations Bureau had acknowledged his contribution to the indictment of Marsha Hillingberg and hired him at senior investigator grade with the possibility of a promotion in six months. Hillingberg, meanwhile, was at the Anchorage Women’s Penitentiary, spending her supervised work hours looking after the residents at the Pen’s dog pound.

  Stacey came bundling up with coffee and a tea refill for Edie and they ordered breakfast: pancakes for Truro, reindeer sausages for Edie, with double bacon on the side.

  ‘DA says we got all the evidence we need on the death of Vasilly Chuchin. The forensics on Chuck Hillingberg’s airplane crash came in inconclusive. And without a body or any other evidence the bureau will decide to close the Tommy Schofield case before too long.’

  ‘What happened to the girls, Lena and Olga?’

  ‘Lena’s application for leave to remain is being fast-tracked. Olga has a daughter born here. She’s gonna be OK.’

  ‘And the Stegner kid?’

  ‘Social services is still trying to trace the mother. Lena’s been pretty helpful with leads. She and Katerina talked a lot when they were at the Lodge. They think they know which town the girl came from in Russia. They’ve talked about putting up posters of the kid’s tattoo.’

  ‘I guess there’s no chance of Mackenzie getting a guided tour of the wrong side of the law?’

  Truro washed down the last of his pancakes with some coffee.

  ‘Last I heard he’d retired to Panama.’

  ‘I guess there are some things no one can fix.’

  ‘No one but God,’ Truro said. He gave her a smile.

  She let it pass. God, the spirit world, nature, truth, whatever you liked to call it, there had to be some order somewhere. If you didn’t believe that, you really were lost.

  Truro wiped his mouth on his napkin and rose to leave. He stuck out his hand, gave a brisk laugh at the reddened, distorted fingers held up sheepishly in return and instead, leaning in, he placed a solitary kiss on Edie’s cheek.

  ‘I’ll see you at the trial.’

  She watched him leave. Moments later, Stacey reappeared to clear away the plates.

  ‘You about set to pick up that cute old canine o’ yours? I got him in the staff locker room at the back.’

  Edie gave her a warm smile.

  ‘When you’re ready.’

  Stacey wiped her hands on her apron. Her eyes were shiny with tears. She took Edie along a narrow corridor, past the kitchen and a storage area, until they reached a grey fire door. The dog had already scented them and was scrabbling at the other side and squealing like a chased pig.

  ‘He’s pleased to see you,’ Stacey said quietly.

  In fact, the dog seemed more thrilled by his reunion with Stacey, leaping and twirling about her like a puppy, Stacey laughing and patting him on the flanks. Bonehead came to rest leaning up against her legs, his muzzle on her thigh, the lower part of his body still snaking joyously to and fro.

  ‘I’m gonna miss this great hunk of dogmeat,’ she said sadly, scratching the dog’s head. ‘The walks we’ve been on. He has a sixth sense, you know, he can find his way back from anywhere.’

  Bonehead’s wild youth tracking polar bears out on the tundra was behind him and Edie thought about how his life might be back in Autisaq. She’d sled him for a few more years, then, when he began to slow, she’d have to shoot him. That was just the way things were up there. Everything had to earn its keep. No back-ups, no spares, no second chances.

  ‘I guess maybe I could leave him,’ she said.

  The waitress’s face lit up like the first sunrise of the year.

  ‘Straight up?’

  ‘Only if you want.’

  She turned to the dog, grasped his head in both hands, and kissed him. ‘Looks like you and me just got it together.’ The dog’s tail spun like a helicopter blade.

  Edie gave him a pat goodbye. ‘Lucky dog,’ she said. She meant it.

  Outside, the ice was beginning to break up. Where the piles from the ploughs lay, the edges were already rotting away, the seepage twisting in salty liquid ropes along the street. Spring was coming to Anchorage, though Edie wouldn’t be there to see it. Beneath the persistent aroma of gasoline, the smell of the air had changed. It was piney now, and something spicy came in off the ice on Cook Inlet.

  Otis and Annalisa Littlefish were already in the hotel lobby, waiting for her. Annalisa had oiled her hair and put on a pair of beaded earrings and greeted Edie nervously. The two women exchanged a few awkward pleasantries. Otis was exactly as she’d remembered him: craggy and internal, his stiff hip reflecting something, she thought, about the workings of his heart. They’d come early for a reason. Annalisa needed to say one or two things that needed to be said, straighten a few things up. No wonder she was nervous.

  They took a corner cluster of chairs at one end of the lobby and ordered coffee. While they were waiting for it to arrive, Annalisa messed about with her earrings. A server came and put a large French press and some cups and saucers on the table, then left them. Annalisa took up one of the cups and passed it to Edie. Her hand was trembling.

  ‘I’m a plain-talking type,’ Edie said, as much to put Annalisa out of her misery as anything, ‘so why don’t you just say what you need to say?’

  ‘I guess we want to say sorry and also thank you.’ Annalisa Littlefish’s eyes flicked to her husband for affirmation. Otis Littlefish blinked.

  ‘Let’s start with the regrets, then we can end on a high.’

  Annalisa closed her eyes. The pain on her face was just awful to see. When she opened her eyes, there were tears in them.

  ‘I’m sorry I lied to you about how Lucas died.’

  Edie couldn’t quite bring herself to forgive just yet. If Annalisa had been more honest, it could have saved her a great deal of trouble. Still, the woman was protecting her daughter. Any mother would have done the same thing.

  ‘Understood,’ she said. ‘Now, about that gratitude part?’

  Annalisa cracked a smile.

  ‘Thank you for trying to get justice for our grandson. And thank you for keeping the truth to yourself.’

  Edie sat back and sucked that in for a moment. It felt about as good as a bath in a summer lake to hear it.

  ‘Let’s go see TaniaLee,’ she said.

  The girl was in the visiting room at the Pinewood unit. She was still fragile, but her eyes were bright and engaged and she had a new kind of presence. Edie could tell TaniaLee had re-entered the world and it was clear she had detected this change in herself, too. She’d woven strips of decorative
fur through her braid and put on a bead necklace. She embraced her parents then came over to where Edie was standing. Her smile suddenly vanished.

  ‘What happened to your hands?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Edie said. ‘I’ll tell you some other time.’ She’d given a lot of thought to the version of events she wanted to tell TaniaLee, and the events of the past few weeks didn’t figure in it.

  ‘I know Tommy Schofield – Fonseca – is dead,’ TaniaLee said. ‘That’s OK. When I was sick, a lot of things went through my head which had no place there.’

  Annalisa was smiling at her daughter, a look of pride in her eyes. Even Otis had split his lips a little.

  Edie turned to the parents. ‘You mind if me and TaniaLee have ten minutes together?’ She sat on the sofa in the visiting room and motioned for TaniaLee to come and sit beside her.

  ‘I want to tell you a story,’ Edie said. ‘I’ve never told this story to anyone before, and I don’t know if it’ll be helpful or not, but I have a hunch that maybe, later on, much later, it will be, so I want you to remember it.’

  TaniaLee sat silent and expectant, her eyes solemn.

  Edie started quietly. ‘It’s about a woman, not as young as you, but young all the same. She got together with someone she loved, but they shouldn’t ever have been together because the two of them drank, and each encouraged the other. Because they drank, they didn’t take enough care of the kids he already had. Why would they? They were too busy drinking.’

  Edie shifted her position.

  ‘The woman got pregnant, but she didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t know what she felt about the responsibility of having a baby, didn’t want to face up to the prospect of having to give up her drinking. No one noticed her belly swelling because she lived in a place where they wore lots of clothes. Her husband didn’t notice. At night, he was usually just passed out on the sofa anyway. And then, one day, when the woman was about five months gone, she took herself off fishing. It was summer, so she went by boat and camped along the shoreline. Leastwise, she told everyone she was going fishing. But she kept her real motivation a secret, even from herself.

  ‘The first night the woman was away, she put up camp, but she didn’t bother to eat, didn’t bother to do anything much but drink. She’d got her hands on some hooch. You know what that is?’

  TaniaLee shrugged. ‘Alcohol, I guess.’

  ‘Homebrew. Bad, bad stuff. Real strong and nasty. But that didn’t matter to the woman. She just drank that stuff down till she passed out, then she was woken by an awful pain. It was like someone had stuck a knife in her belly and pulled out her guts. Really, it was an agony. The pain went on for a long time, cramps, spasms, and when it was gone, so was the baby. Passed right through her, just like the liquor.’

  It was odd to say it now, for the first time, as though the words had only just come to Edie on the wind.

  ‘What did you do?’ TaniaLee said quietly.

  ‘I buried her. I dug into the tundra and I left my daughter there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ TaniaLee said.

  ‘Yeah, me too. But you know what? For years I hated myself for what I did so I drank to try and forget, and that made me hate myself more. But in the last few weeks, since I found Lucas’s body in the forest, I’ve stopped hating myself. What I’m thinking now, some people go out of their way to do awful things. They plot and plan. A few of them even get pleasure from it. But most of us, we just stumble through making mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes we make are terrible, but they’re still mistakes.’

  TaniaLee looked at her gently, then she said, ‘Will you come visit?’

  Edie looked at her straight. ‘No. But there’s a part of me that will never leave.’

  TaniaLee took this in. It seemed to make sense to her. ‘You mind if I talk to that part every now and then?’

  ‘I’d be offended if you didn’t.’ Edie leaned in. ‘Bye, TaniaLee Littlefish.’

  ‘Bye, Edie.’

  TaniaLee’s parents saw her outside. There had been some unexpected heavy snow in the hour or so they’d been inside and it lay on the ground thick and untrodden.

  ‘I’ll give you a ride back,’ Otis said, heading towards their truck, his bad hip lending him a kind of pimp roll. She followed his footsteps. For such a large man he had surprisingly dainty feet. She had a sudden flashback to the churchyard in Eagle River, to Otis Littlefish and Marsha Hillingberg deep in conversation.

  And then she knew.

  It was Otis Littlefish who had killed Tommy Schofield. Maybe Marsha Hillingberg put him up to it, but he’d had reason enough on his own. He must have parked up along the main road and made his way through the woods to Tommy’s cabin, then hollered for him. When Tommy came out, he must have pulled his hunting rifle and marched his employer around to the field-dressing shed and killed him right there and then. All the blood in the world in that shed. Tommy’s wouldn’t make any difference. The way she could see it now, he laced on Tommy’s shoes, then he’d driven up to the lake, and he’d gone out onto the ice, carved out a hole, slid back along the ice on his ass so as not to leave any prints, and clambered onto a pair of kids’ stilts and made his way back to the road, leaving only moose prints behind. He and Marsha must have already agreed that she would arrange to pick up the body, take it up to Meadow Lake and try to pass it off as Peter Galloway.

  Frontier justice. A lifetime of being underpaid and undervalued, an abused daughter and a dead grandson, avenged in the killing of one man. And everyone looking the other way.

  Otis Littlefish had just pulled off the perfect crime.

  She smiled to herself. ‘You know what, Otis? Don’t worry about the ride. I’ll call for a cab.’

  He looked surprised, then grateful. ‘Well, OK then.’

  ‘I’d like to shake your hand before I go,’ she said. ‘And I would if my own weren’t so beat up.’

  He tipped his hat. ‘Goodbye, Edie Kiglatuk.’

  ‘Goodbye, Otis Littlefish.’

  She watched him walk back into the clinic to fetch his daughter home.

  The taxi dropped her back at the hotel where Derek and Sammy were already in the lobby, waiting for her.

  ‘We’re all settled up,’ Derek said, ‘ready to go.’

  They followed the bellhop with the luggage cart past the reception desk and towards the exit. As Edie strode past the gift shop, she caught something from the corner of her eye, a white bear standing alone on a shelf just inside the door.

  Whistling to Derek and Sammy, who were already ahead, she yelled, ‘I’ll catch up!’ and went into the store.

  The assistant was a young qalunaat girl with short, glossy moose-coloured hair and a pleasant, freckled complexion. She got the bear down from the shelf and handed it to Edie. It was a tacky souvenir, made of stuffed rabbit fur, stitched up crudely, and with tiny beads sewn in a collar around the neck.

  ‘I guess it’s supposed to be a polar bear,’ the assistant said.

  ‘Maybe.’ Edie smiled, pulled out her purse and handed over the money.

  ‘Is it a gift?’

  Edie thought about this. ‘Yeah, that’s exactly it. A gift.’ She thanked the assistant, jammed the bear into her day pack and went out into the cool Alaska spring air where Derek and Sammy were waiting for her. Then she threaded her arms through the arms of her two friends and said:

  ‘Let’s go home.’

  Acknowledgments

  Alaska writer Nancy Lord made my trip to her glorious home state both possible and fruitful. Thanks also to Ken Lord, Pam and Larry Brodie in Homer and to Kristine Rawert and family in Nome for their hospitality and for their generosity in sharing their very deep knowledge of, and love for, Alaska.

  I owe a great debt of gratitude, as ever, to Simon Booker and Dr. Tai Bridgeman for seeing me through various drafts of the manuscript.

  Thanks to Peter Robinson, Stephen Edwards, Margaret Halton, Alex Goodwin and the staff of Rogers, Coleridge and White and to Kim Witherspoon, Willi
am Callahan and the staff of Inkwell Management. Very many thanks are also due to Maria Rejt, Sophie Orme, Eli Dryden, Chloe Healy and the team at Mantle and to Kathryn Court, Tara Singh and the team at Penguin USA.

  Any errors are mine.

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