Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  A ghastly silence fell over the room. It was an incongruous setting for this discussion, stainless steel cupboards, counters, sinks, and appliances, with here and there evidence of hasty meal prep, a few elbows of macaroni, a lone potato chip, a brilliant purple spill of grape Kool-Aid mix.

  The four aunties exchanged sidelong glances and by some secret signal agreed to maintain a wary silence. Kate hadn’t really expected anything else. This confrontation was about the future, not the past.

  “If you did, you took the law into your own hands,” she said. “You set yourselves up as judge, jury, and executioner.” She paused, giving Auntie Vi a chance to break into her standard accusation about Kate not doing her job and the aunties having to step in. Auntie Vi glared but did not speak.

  “Have you noticed what’s happened since?” she said. “It’s spreading, this vigilantism of yours. It’s like an infection, spreading across the Park like some kind of disease. You settle the score with Louis, then Mary Bingley decides she can handle Willard’s shoplifting on her own, Demetri beats the crap out of Father Smith for blading his trapline, Bonnie keys the truck of the kid who put a salmon in the mailbox, Arliss shoots Mickey before he hits her again.”

  Kate shook her head. “And then you do it again.”

  She waited, watching as they exchanged sidelong glances. “Yeah, you get the Grosdidier boys to track down the Johansens and beat on them.”

  Their heads snapped around at that, all right. “Don’t bother denying it. You did, I know you did, we’ll leave it at that.”

  She frowned at the floor for a moment, and looked up again. “Don’t you see, Aunties? You’re the center. If you don’t hold, it’s almost like you give permission for things to fall apart.”

  “We tell no one,” Auntie Joy said, and then at a fiery glance from Auntie Vi, her mouth shut again with an audible snap.

  “Auntie,” Kate said with admirable patience, “this is the Park. You sneeze on one side of it, five minutes later on the other side of it you’re dying of pneumonia. Did you really think you could keep it a secret? Any of it?”

  Again she looked at Auntie Vi, and again Auntie Vi remained silent, although it was pretty obvious the top would blow off the bottle in the not-too-distant future.

  “Okay,” Kate said. “Best we say nothing more about this, to anyone. For the record, Howie ratted you out, and then reneged on his confession. Now he’s saying he didn’t kill Louis at all, and Jim and I halfway believe him. He and Willard only have one shotgun out at their place, and we checked. The shot in the shells they’ve got doesn’t match the shot that was found in Louis’s body.”

  The expressions that crossed their faces were interesting, to say the least. Shock, surprise, then anger. “He’s been blackmailing you, hasn’t he?” Kate said. It was what she’d realized that evening, moments before Old Sam came in the door to tell them about Macleod’s murder. “Saying he’ll tell if you don’t give him money?”

  Again, she read her answer on their faces. “Well, now that you know we know, you don’t have to pay him any more.”

  She looked at them, at these four doughty, indomitable forces of nature, Balasha in her seventies the youngest, the rest of them over the eighty mark. They’d been a power in Kate’s life from her birth. She could count on one hand the times she’d gone up against them, and never without guilt or remorse. It grieved her now to have to lay down the law to them, but someone had to.

  “Insofar as what happened out there today,” she said, and they looked up at the grim note in her voice. She nodded at the door. “They confirmed me in office, Aunties. You got what you wanted. And you’ll get it for two more years.”

  “Katya—” Auntie Vi said.

  “Two more years,” Kate said again, her voice not rising but her tone inflexible, “the time remaining in Billy Mike’s term of office. Then I step down.” She surveyed their consternation with no little satisfaction, and maybe just a hint of a tremor that she might be wrong about this. Only now was she beginning to wonder about Ekaterina’s choices when she had been named to the board. Was it, after all, what she had really wanted? Or had it been forced on her, too?

  She banished the niggling doubts and said firmly, “Two years is long enough to find and groom the next chair, and bring them up to speed. Two years is long enough to build a policy to ensure that Global Harvest treats fairly with us over the Suulutaq Mine.”

  “That mine not a done deal, Katya,” Auntie Vi said sternly.

  “No,” Kate said, “and I imagine you and a bunch of other people are going to have a lot to say about that over the next fifty years.”

  “Somebody strong needed to guide the people during that time,” Auntie Vi said.

  “A lot of strong people will be necessary,” Kate said. “I’m not Emaa, Aunties.” She said it again just to be sure they heard her, whether they believed it or not. “I’m not Emaa. She was Association chair for twenty years, and after a while she got so she thought she’d been anointed rather than elected.”

  This was heresy. There were shocked and reproachful looks. Okay, fine. “You remember Mark Miller, Aunties? The park ranger who went missing seven years ago? Yes, I can see that you do. She was willing to have an innocent man convicted of that crime rather than see one of her own go down for it.”

  They didn’t say anything, and prudently, she didn’t ask them if they had approved of Emaa’s actions. “I’m not Emaa,” Kate said again. “I won’t ever be Emaa. I’ll do what I can for the shareholders, for the Association, for the Park during the next two years, and I’ll do my best to handpick a competent successor. But you should also know one of the first things I’m going to do is propose an amendment to the bylaws for term limits for board and chair. Two terms, max, and then they’re out. George Washington was right about that.”

  “What!”

  “Katya, this lousy idea, you—”

  “Ekaterina would roll in her grave!”

  “Then she rolls,” Kate said. “No one should be in power for that long, Aunties. After too long, the people holding office start to feel invincible, arrogant, as if the power is theirs by right and not by the consent of the governed. One shareholder, one vote. One board member, two terms.”

  “Won’t pass,” Auntie Vi said.

  “Yes, it will, Auntie,” Kate said. “If I have to convince every shareholder one at a time, baby to elder, including every one of you, yes, it will.”

  They looked to a woman spitting mad, even Auntie Joy. Kate grinned at them, although it was an expression lacking any real amusement. “You wanted me to be on the board. You wanted me to be chair. Be careful what you wish for, Aunties. You might just get it.”

  She went to the door and paused for her parting shot. “Oh, and on a personal note.”

  She looked at Auntie Balasha. “I’m not moving into town, Auntie. I like my homestead, and I’ve got all the company I want or need. I don’t want to be any closer to family. I don’t want to be any closer to the other shareholders, or to the Association office. I’m right where I want to be, and I’m going to stay there.”

  She looked at Auntie Edna and her eyes hardened. “My personal life is my own affair, Auntie. Don’t you tell me who I can or can’t have a relationship with ever again.”

  The other three aunties looked at Auntie Edna in surprise. Kate looked at Auntie Vi. “I’m not going to be the next Association chair for life, Auntie. In case, you know, you didn’t hear me the first sixteen times.”

  Lastly, she looked at Auntie Joy. “And thanks for being the only auntie who didn’t try to rearrange my life, Auntie Joy. I appreciate it.”

  She left.

  As she was leaving the gym she felt someone touch her sleeve, and turned to see Harvey Meganack. “It wasn’t a landslide, Kate,” he said. “You only won by four votes. Next time it’ll be different.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “next time I won’t be running.”

  He snorted his disbelief and walked away.

 
Why was it so difficult for anyone to believe that she didn’t want it, any of it, not the power, not the glory, not the responsibility, none of it?

  She thought again of Tikani vanishing slowly down the years, its patriarch starving to death, its youth wasted from a lack of occupation, sinking into a life of poverty and despair. Too many villages were going the same way. If something didn’t change, if someone didn’t bring in more jobs to the Park, they would vanish, too.

  Niniltna could be on that list one day.

  She turned and looked at the crowded room, the chairs shoved against the walls, filled with people gossiping with neighbors over plates of fry bread and smoked fish and mac and cheese, exchanging family news at the laden tables when they went back for seconds. Elly Aguilar, Auntie Edna’s granddaughter, was sitting next to Martin Shugak, her belly pushing out almost to her knees. She smiled shyly in answer to a question Martin asked, and took his hand and put it on her belly. A second later he jumped, and they both laughed.

  Kate shook her head. Every now and then Martin made her think that there might be more than a loser residing in that body after all.

  The basketballs were out, a line of kids from eight to eighty doing layups, jumping, hooking them in, bouncing them off the backboard, and then by some unspoken osmosis the layup line re-formed in the key and it was free throws. Free throws win ball games. One of Coach Bernie Koslowski’s immutable laws.

  A little girl in a pink kuspuk skittered out of the crowd and careened into Kate’s legs with such force that she bounced back and landed on her fanny on the floor. She looked up, eyes wide, too surprised to cry. Kate laughed and tossed the girl up into her arms. “Hey,” she said, softly chiding. “Watch where you’re going, you could hurt somebody.”

  The little girl stared at her wide-eyed, one finger in her mouth, a little snot leaking out of her nose, before wriggling free and careening off in a different direction.

  Kate opened the door and went outside.

  Not on her watch.

  CHAPTER 29

  That night the Roadhouse was packed to the rafters. Everyone was back in their accustomed places, Old Sam with the other old farts at the table beneath the television, the aunties working on the new quilt at the round table in the corner, Bernie behind the bar. “I hear you kicked Association ass today, Kate,” he said with a faint approximation of his old self.

  “Not kicked ass, Bernie,” she said, and gave it some thought. “Gently but firmly encouraged the shareholders to walk in the proper direction. Me and Robert’s Rules of Order.”

  Next to her, Jim grinned.

  “What’ll it be?” Bernie said, and they ordered all around. After a bit, a couple of guys got out the beater guitars Bernie kept in the back and started singing from the Beatles’ songbook, and a while later the belly dancers showed up, and from the jukebox Jimmy Buffett started threatening to go to Mexico again. Demetri stepped up next to Kate, gave her his reserved smile, and ordered a beer. Harvey Meganack was sitting at a table with Mandy and Chick, and from the nauseous expression Mandy had to repress from time to time Kate gathered that he was holding forth with his usual know-it-all swagger to GHRI’s new representative to the Park. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.

  “True what I heard?” Jim said, following her gaze. “You’re going to make him boss of that mine advisory panel you’re putting together?”

  Kate toasted Harvey with her Diet 7UP. Taken aback, he was a beat late in returning the salute, but return it he did. “Keep your friends close,” she said, “and your enemies closer.”

  “You’ll have to watch him.”

  “I always do. What do we hear about Gallagher?”

  “Greenbaugh.”

  “Whatever.”

  “He’s lawyered up.”

  “Who?”

  “Frank Rickard.”

  Kate winced. “Is Rickard the biggest asshole magnet in the state, or what?”

  Jim shrugged. “If Alaska fails to convict on the Macleod murder, Idaho’s drooling at the prospect of indicting him on the truck stop homicides.”

  “Will Johnny have to testify?”

  “Maybe.” Jim raised his beer. “Here’s hoping nobody else shows up from his hitch north, okay?”

  “I heard that.” They clinked glasses.

  At the end of the bar Nick Waterbury sat hunched over his beer, a full one waiting to one side, no Eve in sight. “Poor bastard,” she said.

  She looked past him at the aunties, receiving obeisances from a train of Park rats on their way home or to Ahtna from that day’s meeting. “Howie isn’t here tonight,” she said. “He wasn’t at the shareholders’ meeting today, either.”

  “Even Howie’s smart enough to figure it’d be a good idea to stay out of the aunties’ way for a while,” Jim said dryly.

  She looked back at Nick. At that same moment he raised his head and met her eyes, and she was struck by the similarity she saw between him and Al Sheldon. They were nothing alike physically, one tall, the other short, one dark, the other fair, one white, the other Native. They reminded her of Bernie, come to think of it. The loss of a child told the same story on all three faces in sunken eyes, drawn complexion, the agony of loss, the absence of hope.

  She gasped. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “What?” Jim said. He looked from Kate to Nick and back to Kate. “Kate?”

  They borrowed one of Bernie’s cabins out back. Nick followed them there without protest. When asked the direct question, he confessed without surprise, in a flat monotone that had all the life leached out of it, a monotone that reminded Kate only too painfully of the interview with Al Sheldon.

  Yes, he’d been at the post office that morning. Along with everyone else waiting for their mail he’d heard that Louis Deem was going to go free.

  He’d sat in his pickup down the street from the trooper post, and when Louis Deem walked out and started up the road to the Step on foot, Nick had taken his shotgun and followed.

  “I stayed far enough behind so he wouldn’t hear me,” Nick said. “When we were a couple of miles out of town, I caught up with him. And I shot him.”

  He didn’t look at either of them as he sat there, big, gnarled hands hanging between his knees. He got up and followed Jim obediently out to Nick’s truck and watched silently as Jim took his shotgun from the rack in the back window.

  Later, at the post, he repeated his words and signed the statement and shuffled into the cell vacated when Greenbaugh was moved to Anchorage. He lay down on the bunk, clasped his hands on his chest, and closed his eyes. He looked ready to be placed in a coffin.

  Kate and Jim gaped at him for some moments before Jim recalled himself and closed and locked the door. Back in his office he repeated Kate’s totally inadequate words with force and feeling. “Jesus Christ. I feel like I ought to be fired. Hell, I feel like I ought to resign in protest of my own total and complete incompetence and malfeasance and just all around general stupidity.”

  He dropped his head into his hands. His voice sounded tinny and far away. “This is what comes of crossing the line, Kate. You think the right reason trumps doing the wrong thing, and then you never get to the truth, when the truth is mostly a good thing and almost always the best thing to get to.”

  “I can’t believe I missed it,” Kate said, still dazed.

  “I will never do something like that again.” Jim said it like he was taking a vow. “I don’t care what the provocation is. I don’t care if the perp is Satan himself. Never ever again.”

  “He was sitting right there in the courtroom when the verdict came down,” Kate said.

  “I was so sure I knew how Louis Deem died. I was so sure I knew who did it, and why, and I worked so hard to prove otherwise that I couldn’t even see who had the biggest motive of all.”

  “We all saw how angry Nick was,” Kate said. “It’s Morgan’s First Law. ‘The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the mostest.’ And I was so blinded by my hatred of Louis Deem that I
didn’t even think of it.”

  They sat in silence, trying to move beyond stunned disbelief to acceptance.

  Kate looked up and said, “We have to tell Bernie.”

  He felt his expression change.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “You’re right. We have to tell Bernie, and the aunties. And Howie, the little weasel.”

  Later that night he lay in bed next to Kate and wondered why he hadn’t told her about Willard right then and there. It had been the perfect moment.

  There were lots of reasons.

  It would hurt her.

  It would hurt the aunties, because she would surely tell them.

  It would hurt Willard, who would very likely wind up in long-term, court-mandated psychiatric care somewhere that wasn’t the Park and might not even be Alaska, which would very probably kill him. He was cared for where he was, more or less, and absent the fell influence of Louis Deem, was unlikely to be incited to burglary and murder a second time. His trigger was dead and buried.

  And telling wouldn’t change anything. Enid and Fitz would still be dead.

  All telling Kate about Willard would do was make him feel better. Carrying around a secret this big was a blight and a burden. It weighed on him, preyed on his mind, made him feel guilty, which made him feel cranky and snappish. Confession was good for the soul, and all that crap.

  Still, he was a big, strong man. He’d taken an oath to serve and to protect.

  But what it all came down to, really, was that telling Kate about Willard would hurt her.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to sleep with Talia Macleod. Attractive and willing and every bit the dog he was, how could he resist her? More to the point, why on earth would he? No doubt that it would have been a very enjoyable evening. Who would it have hurt? Not Talia. Not Jim. Not Park society, or he’d have been stoned to death by now.

  Hard questions. Easy answer, though.

  Kate. He hadn’t slept with Talia because Kate would have been hurt.

  Funny how more and more often the focus of serving and protecting, for him, came down to serving and protecting Kate Shugak.