by Ed Ifkovic
Noah looked embarrassed. “Grandmother believes that goodness heals.”
“And so you do,” Lucy admonished, sharply.
“I…” I began, but Lucy shook her head. Her expression told me to be quiet.
Rocking in her chair, Lucy talked. “Back in the old days a young man was careless with himself and others of the village, no respects for nothing. He don’t listens to the elders. In those days there was shamans who cast spells, talked to spirits, talked of the future, talked to the dead. The young man, foul-mouthed, one day he kills a caribou for sport. He is showing off for his buddies. He shoot the animal on the edge of town at twilight, and he, lazy, lazy, cruel, he leave it there. The wolves ravage it, the bones they clanged and knocked and the wind blew them across the land, down into the village. No one thanked that animal for giving its life—for food, for clothing.” She stopped and looked into my face. “You understands? The need to thank?”
I nodded. “I’ve heard…”
But her words rolled over mine. “And all winter the peoples in the village they suffers, and the wind never stops and the snow is hard. Fires go out, bears walk on the trails, wolves howl, little children die. In the spring everyone wait for thaw, breaking up, and the swimming salmon. They wait. Nothing happens. The Yukon stays frozen, buckled. March, April, May, even June.” She turned to Clint. “Youse remember the ice in the summer?” She shivered.
Clint leaned in. “A bad summer. You can’t forget…”
“People are skeletons. It’s a village that’s icebound. The elders saw the lazy young man—he wanders the tundra, crazy, skinny, hungry. And someone remembers the caribou bones strewn here and there. So the elders talk to the young man and tell him—go into the wilderness, you go alone without a parka or mukluks, without a stick, and you finds the caribou king and beg forgiveness. Crazy, he did, he got to, and he finds a caribou bone, and carves an amulet to wear around his neck. At night, sleeping on the snow, the caribou come to him and thank him for the amulet, and the boy, waking, is saved.”
She winked at Noah, flashed that toothless smile. “The happy ending, yes, my boy?”
He grinned back. “Grandmother, all the endings of your stories are happy.”
She waved a hand at him. “He bring justice back to the village. And the boy, shirtless in the cold, his feet bare, comes home, and as he is walking the temperature rises, red poppies bloom in the snow, and the Yukon is no longer icebound. And the caribou come back, led by a blessed raven, and the fox and the rabbit and the otter and the seal. Then everyone understood that, yes, a wrong had been righted.”
She nodded at me.
“But Fairbanks is not a Qwich’in village, Grandmother,” Noah said quietly.
“All Alaska is our village. There is a lazy evil boy out there. The white elders think it’s you. They must be shown the truth.” Turning to me, a twinkle in her eye, she whispered, “Your job, old woman.”
But Noah leaned into me, whispering, “No, our job, Edna. The two of us. For Sonia. For Jack and Sam.”
“The two of us,” I echoed.
Clint left us, headed back to his log cabin. “Got me a touch of the sniffles.”
I lingered with Noah. He wanted to drive, so I climbed into his battered clunker, a decades-old Ford with ripped seats and cruel springs, with a grinding sound whenever he made a left turn. He grinned. “I’ll do my best just to make right turns only.”
A chilly, gray afternoon, but the air was clear, windless. The heater blasted. He drove and drove, out past the gold dredge, onto the university grounds, then to Ladd Air Force Base, and dreamy from the puffy heat, we talked. He asked about the funeral, about Hank and Irina, about Paul. “I sent flowers. I don’t know why. It seemed wrong for me to do it. I don’t know why.”
“I know.”
He looked at me. “Does Hank still hate me?”
“No, Noah, he’s filled with grief.”
I noticed his hands tighten on the steering wheel. “I’ll never understand what happened. You know, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the years I lived in the Lower Forty-eight. I mean, my years in prep school, at the University in Washington.
“Why now?”
“Well, I never really thought about difference—skin color, race. Not until I went down there. Hank’s family sheltered me. Sure, prep school in Massachusetts was a safe haven. I made friends right away. I was an Alaskan and damned proud of it. Back home, the few redneck slights bounced off me. I was a kid. Some drunk oil bum spitting at me in Nome. Hank and Irina have always been courageous folks. Those were the days of heavy-duty discrimination, though it’s outlawed now. Natives couldn’t go into some stores, hotels, even bars. Keep out. One sign actually said: ‘Indians and dogs not served.’ I used to have that sign—I stole it with some friends of mine, hanging it on my bedroom door. But, you know, educated people—the Hanks and Sonias and Pauls—made no distinction.”
“Your heart was in Alaska.”
“I couldn’t wait to get back to Alaska. This was my home. I ran back to Hank and Irina, almost out of breath. And they welcomed me.”
“And they will again.”
He snapped at me. “I don’t know if I want to go back there.”
“Don’t become hard, Noah.” I touched him on the sleeve.
He shrugged. “Too late.”
“I don’t believe that.”
He pulled into a parking space alongside a landing on the Chena River. “Let’s walk a bit, Edna.” Outside he said, “Cover your face.”
The air felt good after the warmth of the car. Twilight now, the early setting of the sun. A blue-gray light in the air, the wispy pastel strands of aurora borealis hazy in the distance. Walls of packed snow, turquoise-blue. We strolled along the banks of the dead winter river.
“In your note you mentioned dreaming of ravens.”
Noah laughed. “A good omen, Edna. The black raven, chulyin, created the world, dug rivers with his feet, survived, tricky, but with a spiritual power. I value that dream.”
“Tell that to Edgar Allan Poe.”
Noah got serious. “The police stopped in to see me again. Rawlins and his deputy. Some commissioner. A bigwig I didn’t know who reminded me that Hank and his family are powerful—that this murder has to be solved. More questions. Even less friendly than before. It was like they were ready for a confession from me. The man kept saying that lots of folks saw me on the street outside the Nordale that night, looking suspicious, waiting, in my famous parka…”
“But we’ve been through this.”
“What else do they have? I fully expect to be arrested for murder.”
“Why haven’t they arrested you?”
“I asked them.”
“And?”
“Well, the witness didn’t see my face—just the red parka and cane.” Noah smiled. “The chief said they’re gathering evidence.”
Startled, I looked into his face. “Like what?”
He shook his head. “I guess I’ll find that out when they come for me.”
“What will you do?”
“What do you mean?” He stopped walking and stared off at rosy-tipped Denali, disappearing into the darkness.
“I don’t know what I mean.”
“Edna, I’m a lawyer. An American lawyer. I’ve been trained in American jurisprudence. I value the law. To me it’s not white man’s law—but law. Law is imperfect, but the concept of law is sacred to me. I have to trust…”
“Well, I have less faith in our system than you do, obviously.”
He was staring at the darkening hills to the north. “I spend my life defending Indians. I tell them to trust the law.”
“Who killed Sonia?” I blurted out. “You must have thought a lot about it.”
“That’s all I think about.”
“This is scary. Three murders.�
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“And the killer probably feels safe now.”
“These murders are connected.”
“I agree. Someone killed Jack…”
I interrupted. “Then Sam—to cover up. Because Sam knew the killer.”
“And then Sonia—because she learned who killed the men.”
“But who?”
He checked off reasons with his fingers. “My conclusions are obvious. Someone from the old days. It was someone who wouldn’t be out of place in the Nordale Hotel. Someone who knew I stopped in most nights, lingered in the lounge. Someone who knows the hotel, especially the little-used back entrance, the dark parking lot in back, stairwells, the hallways, even the shifts of the housekeepers. The easy-to-open locks. How else to pull off such a murder…and to implicate me?”
“Why you, Noah?”
“Because of Sonia?”
“Maybe.”
“Your connection to Sam?”
“Few knew that.”
“Someone who had to get rid of Jack first.”
“Jack knew something.”
“But what? An old drunk.”
“And Sam knew it, too.”
“Sonia’s death was necessity. She learned something. She had to be stopped—and quickly.”
“The first two were—vengeful.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “The men were easy targets. Outside a bar. Late. Drunk. But Sonia’s was carefully planned.” He was nodding at me. “Someone intended to implicate you. The parka was chosen because everyone recognizes you in it. Someone slapped on that trim. Maybe not even Athabascan. The red color was what was important. And that cane. The killer wanted to be seen by that tourist.”
“Not hard to locate a red parka in Fairbanks.”
“But someone who also knew my plans. Someone who knew I was at the high school till around nine. My obligation.”
“And someone who knew what Sonia’s plans were that day—her flying alone to Tanacross, gone for the day. Someone who must have talked to her and knew she planned on meeting you that night, knew how to orchestrate a change at reception. Someone she felt comfortable talking to.”
“A spy at The Gold, maybe. Tessa mentioned her spies.”
“Someone phoning Preston? News for Tessa?”
I shivered from the cold. “And, most importantly, someone who knew what she wanted to tell me that night. Obviously, someone who knew her secret.”
“True. If only we knew who’d she’d talked to that last morning, we’d know who did it. Who was in The Gold offices early that morning? Anyone? Or the night before? Did she stop there first? Who did she talk to?”
“That’s the problem. Sonia talked too much—but never enough. Maybe she blabbed to someone at breakfast, at the airport, anywhere, hinting at solving the two murders, mentioning meeting me that night, and someone overheard her.”
Noah nodded. “Everyone in Fairbanks listens in on others’ lives. That’s what we do here.”
“Your winters are too long and dark.”
“Edna, I want to fly up to Fort Yukon in a few days. I need to see my grandfather. If they let me leave Fairbanks. Away from here. I need to breathe again. Come with me.” He reached out to touch my wrist.
That surprised me. “God, no. It’s winter. I was in Kotzebue two years ago, Eskimo land, and it was forty below. I still feel numb when I think of it.”
He tapped my wrist. “Come with me.”
I shook my head. “God, no.”
He smiled and faced me. “You’re…you’re cold, Edna, I can see. Back to the car. C’mon. I need to get you back to the hotel and a pot of hot tea.”
At the entrance of the Nordale I asked him, “Are you all right?”
“At first I couldn’t sleep at night, rolling and tossing, agitated as hell. But last night I slept like a baby.”
That surprised me. “How?”
He grinned. “I finally remembered something. Surefire medicine. I rummaged in an old bureau and found a tattered blanket my grandfather gave me when I was home in Fort Yukon one winter and caught sick. He wrapped me in the smelly old blanket. It’s moldy and musty and smells of rotten apples and seal oil. But last night I covered myself with it, and I slept.”
“It has magical powers,” I said, smiling.
“Of course it does.”
“It’s a blanket, Noah.”
“No, Edna, you don’t understand. It’s my grandfather’s breath.”
Chapter Eighteen
Late afternoon, an empty hour, I sat by myself at a window table in the Gold Nugget. I’d ordered a powdered doughnut and hot coffee but touched neither. With lazy, half-closed eyes, I gazed out the grimy plate-glass window across Second Avenue at the frozen cars and the occasional scurrying pedestrian, and considered the Nordale Hotel with its drab beige exterior, built on a block overwhelmed by airline offices, their clunky signs cluttering the façades: Wien, Alaskan, Pan Am, Pacific. Northern Lights Airways. Tessa Strange’s company. Jeremy Nunne strolling in, a newspaper tucked under his arm. One after the other. What a strange land, this Alaska. Folks spent their time trying to get off the ground.
Hank Petrievich, hatless, walked by, gazed at something in the window of the Co-Op Drug Store, looked at his watch, and headed to The Gold offices. When I left the café, I decided to drop in to talk to him.
He seemed surprised to see me. I pointed to his clothing. “A new look?”
A checkered wool shirt, open at the neck. I couldn’t remember him in anything but a pressed dress shirt and bolo tie, the kind a sensible western businessman might wear, with cuff links made of whalebone, the man of affairs in the rough-and-tumble town. Now Hank looked like a man who no longer knew how to wear clothes. His shirt was wrinkled, too resolutely casual, and too—I winced—dude ranch.
I slipped into a chair across from him. For a moment he gazed out the window. “Nobody’s in town.” The title of one of my books, I realized, but I doubted he knew that. “I’m expecting Paul.” Another glance out the window. “He avoids me. He spends so little time at home now that I gotta make an appointment to see him.” His words clipped, low.
“You seem angry, Hank.”
His tone was biting. “You’re our guest in Fairbanks, Edna. Our friend.”
“I am that.” I watched him. The corners of his mouth crinkled, tightened, and he sucked in his breath.
“I wonder about that.”
“What’s going on, Hank? I can’t believe you’re mad at me. Are you?”
A long silence. “I sure am.”
“Tell me.”
“Noah West.” Two words, weighty, explosive, an epitaph.
I nodded knowingly. “I spent all of yesterday with him.”
“I know.”
“So that’s it. The mukluk telegraph. I’m not allowed to do so?” I bit my lower lip. “There was a time when you spent days with him.”
“That was before he murdered my daughter.”
“For God’s sake, Hank, a little over the top, no? What has happened to innocent until proven guilty? You, of all people. A newsman, First Amendment rights, all that Constitution language…”
His eyes closed a second, then popped open. “I know, I know, I’m being unfair. I don’t know what I mean anymore.”
“Yes, you are.”
“I don’t care.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I know I’m being irrational. I know Noah was set up. A whole part of me believes that. Well, a good part of the time. But then, waking up from a nightmare, sweating, frightened, I think—maybe not.” A deep sigh. “How do I know? I keep playing that scene at the hotel in my head—him striking her over the head over and over. In a fit of passion, jealousy. Old lovers—a quarrel that got out of hand. I don’t know.”
“This was no spat between lovers th
at got suddenly nasty. You know that.”
He nodded furiously. “I know, I know.” He looked me in the eye. He scratched his face, and I noted his nails were bitten to the quick: a thin line of dried blood. “Then I’ve horribly wronged someone I love, and I can’t go back.”
“Hank, you’re better than this.”
He looked at me and his eyes got watery. “Am I? I used to think I was, lofty and smug and liberal and tolerant…”
“You’re still that man.”
“I never was that man, maybe.”
“Noah has done everything you’ve ever wanted or expected from him.”
“True,” he admitted. “Except…”
“Except what?”
“Marry my daughter. I wanted that.”
“And now he’s a leper.”
He shook his head. “I’m discovering whole parts of myself that are ugly.” Abruptly, he shifted the subject. “What did the two of you talk about yesterday? And Clint, my old buddy. Another one. You were at Mimi’s, you went to the Brotherhood Hall, you and Noah walked along the Chena at twilight…”
I smiled. “Spies?”
“You don’t build a great newspaper in Fairbanks without a network.”
“It’s not important what we talked about, Hank. And it’s private.”
A flash of anger. “Yes, it is. Did you talk about Sonia?”
“Of course.” A pause. “Noah mentioned sending flowers.”
I actually saw his face flush. “That was childish of me, throwing out those flowers.”
“Yes, it was.”
“What else?”
“Hank, please. I can’t do this.”
He slammed his fist down on the table. “It’s important.”
“I will tell you one thing. Noah and I believe the murderer is someone who knew Sonia’s plans intimately, someone who had already killed Jack Mabie and Sam Pilot.”
He got quiet. “I’ve thought the same thing.”
“Any word from the police? Anything?”
He glanced over his shoulder, back to the small cubicle that had been Sonia’s office. “The police spent another morning in Sonia’s office, going through her papers, examining all her files, something I protested—to no avail.”