“It’s a deal,” Jacqueline says, still gripping the hilt.
CHAPTER 5
Despite a cool early morning, that day—the day of the murder—was one of the hottest in Tanacross that Elisabeth could remember. The sun glared down with an almost violent intensity, its light not beams but spears, its shining not warmth but a suffocating pall. Elisabeth’s clothes clung to her arms and legs like sodden bandages.
Margaret spent the afternoon swimming with Clara Nez and her mother, Marjorie. The Athabaskans never swam in the Tanana River itself—its currents were much too swift—but, on the handful of days each year when it wasn’t too cold for a swim, Glaman Pond was suitable enough. Even so, swimming was hardly a popular pastime. The Athabaskans were not strong swimmers. Why would they be? During most months, the only flowing water in Tanacross lay buried beneath the ice of the river, as swimmable as a channel of lava rushing through a mountain.
Around dinnertime, with the canister of oil in hand, Elisabeth set off for Mack’s house, all the while peering up the lane toward the landing strip. Alfred had spent all day working on his plane. He had wheeled it into the middle of the runway, and now the plane was facing northwest, opposite Elisabeth. With its single back wheel so much smaller than the two in front, the plane angled up as though it was always in the motion of taking off.
But it didn’t look like the plane would be flying anytime soon. Straddling the engine, Alfred was furiously yanking at something Elisabeth couldn’t see. Teddy Granger stood nearby, dressed in a blue jumpsuit and idly puffing a cigarette. At his feet, the ground was littered with pieces of machinery—pistons and coils, shafts and shielding, smaller bits and bolts that glinted in the sunlight like a pocketful of spilled coins.
“Quite an operation over there,” Elisabeth told Mack a minute later. She was standing beside his front stoop. Mack was seated on the top step with his back leaned against the door. The canister of oil dangled from one of his hands.
“No fooling,” he said. They watched Alfred and Teddy for a little while longer. Then Mack sucked at his teeth. “It’s kind of surprising. I guess he was saving up all his energy.”
Elisabeth thought about that. “How do you mean?”
“Just about this afternoon. For hours he didn’t do but nothing. He just paced around the GD thing.” Mack’s face went long and he stomped his boots on the stairs, pantomiming the motion of slow, laborious steps. “Just walked and walked around it, one hand scratching at his chin like a professor studying a chalkboard.” Mack smiled widely at Elisabeth, as though that analogy would have particular significance to her.
“I see,” she said, smiling a little. “Well, maybe he wasn’t sure about what all needed to be fixed. He told us this morning that something was wrong with the wings, but I guess he found other parts that needed fixing, too.”
“I guess so,” Mack said. He thought for a moment, and then he frowned. “Least he’s out of your house for now. Better here than there, I suppose.”
“Are we really going to talk about that again? You’re going to give me the older-brother treatment?”
“Older brother?” Mack said, looking up at her. “Else, I don’t look a day over eighteen.”
Elisabeth smirked, and they turned their heads to watch Alfred again. Now he was leaning to the side, his right hand darting out as he talked with Teddy. A moment later Teddy was strolling over to the house. The hook of a candy cane was sticking out of his mouth—a trademark of his. No matter the time of year, Teddy was almost always sucking on a candy cane. He ate them slowly, never snapping them between his teeth, each cane melting into a stubby U with ends as sharp as needles. Every few months, Teddy had Mr. Glaser bring him whole boxes of them. Like all of the Athabaskans in Tanacross, Teddy was mostly self-sufficient—he hunted, he trapped, he traded—but he also earned some extra spending money from working in a gold mine up in Chicken.
“Hot as the dark dickens out here,” Teddy said, walking up to the stoop. Sweat glistened on his forehead.
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Mack said. He glanced at his kennels. “I think my dogs are about to catch fire.”
“Burning fur—I wondered what that smell was,” Teddy said, and a smile crept onto his face. He turned to Elisabeth and winked. “I assumed it was only Mack’s cooking.”
Elisabeth laughed. Mack cocked his head.
“And how are you, Mrs. Pfautz?” Teddy asked.
“I’m doing fine. Thank you.”
“I hope the old bugger’s not giving you and Margaret too much trouble.”
“None at all,” Elisabeth said, but she couldn’t stop herself from glancing down at her feet. “And how’s he treating you? You guys sure have some setup over there.”
Mack huffed. “Is he fixing the thing or tearing it apart?”
“A little bit of both, I think,” Teddy said. He shifted the candy cane from one side of his mouth to the other. He was almost through with it; the cane had been whittled down to a shape as spindly as a wishbone. “Honestly,” Teddy said, “I’m really not sure what he’s doing. He’ll work with one thing, put it back together, and then he’ll take it apart again fifteen minutes later. He’s messing with the crankshaft for the fourth or fifth time today. Speaking of which”—he turned to Mack—“do you have a set of Robertson bits? He sent me to fetch.”
“Maybe,” Mack said. Holding both knees, he pushed himself to his feet and headed inside.
Teddy and Elisabeth were quiet for a while. Then, sighing, Teddy wiped one hand across the back of his neck.
“Hot as the dickens,” he repeated, staring up at the sun.
Elisabeth folded her arms. “So if he’s going around in circles, what all are you doing?” She glanced at Alfred. “It’d be a shame if he’s making you just stand around, wasting your time.” Elisabeth frowned. “Wasting your talents,” she added.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Teddy said. “I don’t have a whole lot to do this week, and it beats sitting around and reading funny books all day.”
“I know how that is,” Elisabeth said, but she didn’t. There was always something for her to do, and she was old enough now that the idleness of younger people seemed foreign and baffling to her. She watched Teddy draw the last of the cane into his mouth. His lips puckered and pulled at it, tossing the candy from one cheek to the other like a bite of food too hot to chew. Not five seconds later, Teddy pulled another candy cane from the pocket of his shirt. Then Mack opened the door and stepped outside.
“You’re lucky I found it,” he said. He was carrying a small tackle box in one hand, a thing that reminded Elisabeth of a lunch box.
“Thank you much,” Teddy said, reaching out and taking the box. He cradled it beneath one arm and, with both hands working, started to peel the wrapper off the new candy cane. “You all take care,” he said, turning back to the landing strip.
“Don’t let him boss you too much,” Elisabeth said.
But Teddy didn’t seem to hear her. He was concentrating on the candy cane, and a moment later he had it freed. He tossed the plastic wrapper away, and it caught in the breeze and fluttered through the air like a sheath of snakeskin.
“He’s a big dang kid, that one,” Mack said, taking a seat on the top step again.
“Aren’t we all?”
“I thought I was your big brother,” Mack said. “Now I’m a kid? You’ve got to get your story straight, Else.”
“All right,” Elisabeth said. “You’re just you. How about that?”
Mack grimaced. “Eh, I don’t know if I want to be me either. Being me ain’t all that great most of the time.”
“I know how that is,” Elisabeth said again, automatically, just making conversation, but this time, she realized that she was telling the truth.
Mack knew it, too. He looked up at her for a long moment, and then he reached out for her. He gripped her arm, and at f
irst Elisabeth thought that he was going to pull himself up, that he needed an anchor, but instead he simply held her. Then his hand dropped away, and Mack watched the landing strip once more.
“I’ve got to get Margaret to bed,” Elisabeth said.
“Yeah,” Mack told her. “It’s about that time, isn’t it?”
“I hope you can get some sleep, too.”
“I hope I can. I could use it. And I’ll tell you what.” He looked up at her again, and now he smiled, back to his old self, or some approximation of it. “I’ll go on being me if you go on being you. Because I like you being you, Else. I wouldn’t have it any other way. So how’s that for a deal? Does that sound fair?”
“That sounds fair enough to me,” Elisabeth said. “You’ve got a deal.”
“Good,” Mack said, and he nodded firmly. “That’s all I could ever want.”
* * *
—
That night, Elisabeth dreamed that she was wandering through the house—the house here in Tanacross. Up and down its drafty hallways, in and out of the bedrooms, through the kitchen and back again. The layout of the house was the same as it normally was, but it also felt more expansive, and more warped. The hallways seemed to bend. The floorboards were scalloped. The bedrooms buckled at their corners, rooms that stretched so tight they were nearly circles. Still, it was certainly their house. Their pictures hung on the walls. Their books lined the shelves. The hallway was clad in their floral-print wallpaper, and their ironing board lolled open beside the stove in the kitchen.
Elisabeth walked and walked, pacing around with the dubious interest of someone touring a home on the market. The house was peaceful, noiseless, deserted. Then, passing through the living room and into the dining room for the umpteenth time, Elisabeth saw that she wasn’t alone. Jacqueline was sitting at the table with a map sprawled out in front of her.
“Where have you been?” Jacqueline said. “I’ve been waiting for you all this time.”
Elisabeth was dumbstruck.
“Well, come on,” Jacqueline said. “Let’s get started.”
She ran her hands across the map, pressing it flatter as Elisabeth approached the table. Although Jacqueline was still a little girl, Elisabeth was the same age that she was now, old enough to be Jacqueline’s mother—to be their mother, had their mother made it that long. She stopped in front of the table and looked down at the map. It was a map of the world, and it spread across the length of the table. The wiggling borders of countries were marked in thin black lines, but the map was completely unlabeled. It was a teacher’s map.
“All right,” Jacqueline said, “show me where Korea is,” and even though Elisabeth could feel how strange it was to be instructed by a little girl—her sister, no less—she couldn’t help but point to Korea.
“Good,” Jacqueline said. “Now show me”—her voice hung in the air, trailing along as she considered Elisabeth’s next task—“show me Germany.”
Elisabeth pointed to Germany.
“Now show me where Papa was born. Do you remember?”
After a second, Elisabeth pointed to the spot where Hamburg was, way down near the bottom of the Jutland Peninsula.
“Close enough,” Jacqueline said.
Turkey, Ireland, French Indochina, Brazil; they went on and on. Finally, Jacqueline started asking about states. North Dakota. Arkansas. Oregon. But when Elisabeth was instructed to point at Pennsylvania, Jacqueline just shook her head.
“Try again,” she said. “Pennsylvania. Come on. Where’s Pennsylvania?”
Elisabeth pointed again. Jacqueline only sighed. “One more time,” she said.
But before Elisabeth had a chance to try again, someone knocked on the front door. Both of them turned their heads.
“Too late,” Jacqueline said, and then she frowned. The knocking continued, louder now, and scattered. It sounded as if a hundred different people were knocking on a hundred different spots in the house: the roof; the windows; even beneath their feet, noises that resonated up from the root cellar. Each of the knocks rapped quickly three times, then paused, then rapped again. Too frightened to think straight, Elisabeth kept pointing to Pennsylvania. Her finger tapped the paper of the map so hard that it left an indentation.
“No,” Jacqueline said, shaking her head. “That’s not it,” and then her shaking grew more violent. Her entire body oscillated until she was only a blur, streaks of foggy motion like the image of a person who moves while being photographed. Horrified, Elisabeth took a step back. Then she opened her eyes.
“Mama, Mama,” Margaret was saying, but at first, still half-asleep, Elisabeth mistook her for Jacqueline.
“What’s happening?” she said, and she meant that question for her sister, though it was Margaret who answered it.
“Mr. Granger is here,” she said.
Margaret. Her daughter. In Alaska. Elisabeth sat up, and her stupor began to fade. “What?”
“Mr. Granger,” Margaret repeated, stepping away from the bed. “He’s in the kitchen. Him and Mr. Nilak. They told me to wake you up.” She was silent for a second. Then, quizzically, “Why didn’t you answer the door?”
CHAPTER 6
What had happened, Teddy told her, was this: About an hour earlier, Alfred had bludgeoned Mack with a hook wrench, and now Mack was dead.
“If he put up a fight,” Teddy said, his voice catching in his throat, “it sure didn’t last long. Alfred doesn’t have a mark on him. Not one mark. And it was savage, Else. Absolutely savage. I’m telling you. I saw Mack, and this was”—his eyes glazed over—“this was really something else.”
“He just about bashed his goddamn head off,” Daniel Nilak said, taking one step toward the table. Daniel was one of Mack’s many nephews. Heavyset and seventeen years old, he had never been particularly friendly with them, and now a tenor of rage boomed in his voice. “His goddamn brains are all over the landing strip. Why did—”
“Cool it,” Teddy said, lifting one hand.
“What was that Kraut doing here?” Daniel said.
“I said cool off,” Teddy told him, and he turned in his seat, raising his palm and pushing air at Daniel. “Let’s all just calm down.”
Seated at the kitchen table across from Teddy, Elisabeth watched and listened in silence. It was just after one o’clock in the morning, and the skin around her eyes felt puffy from sleep. Sitting there, taking it all in, she felt as though she was still partly dreaming. She thought of the warping hallways, the contorted rooms, the recessed floorboards. The kitchen table looked huge and surreal, and Teddy seemed to be sitting very far away.
You’re in shock, she told herself, but she didn’t know if that was true. Maybe she was calm because of just the opposite; maybe she had expected this from Alfred all along. And what if she had? Way down deep, was the calm she felt something like relief? It could have been us, she thought more than once. It could have happened to us, and she was thankful that it hadn’t, but giving thanks had never felt so shameful.
Because, Mack. Dear God, it had happened to Mack, and that was hardly any better than it happening to them. Mack was dead, and the horror of how it had happened was so extreme that Elisabeth couldn’t even cry. She just sat there, blinking and breathing and a little bit dizzy.
“But why did he do it?” she finally said. “What did Alfred say?”
“He said they got into an argument.”
“Over what?”
“Cards,” Teddy said. “A hand of rummy. I left Alfred around seven o’clock, and at some point after that Mack started helping him in my stead. Then they started playing cards, and then it happened. Buddy Luke heard the commotion when he was going to the toilet out back behind his place, and so he went running. But by then it was over.” Teddy closed his eyes, rubbing at his forehead. “Thing is, I just don’t get it. I’ve known Mack all my life, and he wasn’t the gambling k
ind.”
“And he wasn’t the cheating kind,” Daniel added gruffly, crossing his arms.
“No, he wasn’t,” Teddy said. “I don’t understand it.”
A log shifted in the fire of the stove, hissing and popping as it fell.
“And what happens now?” Elisabeth said.
“Buddy Luke’s already radioed Fairbanks. They’re flying in some folks from the city to take him away.”
“And where is Alfred?”
“Buddy and Henry Isaac have him up in the big cache on the south side. Henry’s keeping an eye on him.” Teddy sighed, scooting forward an inch or two. “In the time he was here, did he ever say anything about Mack? Did he talk about him at all?”
“No,” Elisabeth said, “not that I can remember. Honestly, he didn’t really talk to us much. The first day he just slept, and then all yesterday he was working on the plane.” She leaned back in her seat. “I don’t know what to say,” she told him, which was true.
They were silent. Then Teddy cleared his throat, reaching up and running his fingers across the top button of his shirt. It was mother-of-pearl, nicer than the other buttons, and even in the dimness of the kitchen it gleamed like a tiny moon.
“There is one other thing,” he said. “Another reason why we came here to tell you this.”
Elisabeth lowered her chin. “What is it?”
“Well, it’s just that”—Teddy shifted in his seat—“well, he asked about you.”
“He asked about me?”
“He wants to talk to you. He really wants to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy said, “but he wouldn’t quit about it. He went on and on asking for you. Screaming for you. Over and over. Outside of the basics, it was just about the only thing he said to us.” Teddy swept one hand through his hair and, briefly, his bangs stood up in a swooping wave. “He tried to get over here.”
How Quickly She Disappears Page 5