a Night Too Dark (2010) (14 page)

Haynes polished off the last cookie, licked her forefinger, and used it to pick the plate clean of crumbs. “I know.”
“What would you rather be mining, and why aren’t you?” Kate had no time at all for anyone who worked at a job they didn’t like.
Haynes looked up at that. “Oh, I love my job. Especially the travel. I get to go all over the world, places I’d never get to on my own. Russia, China, Peru, Madagascar. A couple of times we were the first Americans the people we met had ever seen.”
Kate had heard avowals with more conviction, but then Haynes wouldn’t be the first person talking herself into believing that she didn’t hate her job. Hard to bite the hand that feeds you, and Global Harvest fed very well indeed.
Haynes brushed her hands, gulped down the rest of her drink, and sat up straight in her chair, folding her hands on the table in front of her. “The cookies were great, thanks.”
Kate made a deprecating noise, and waited.
“Vern gave most of the nonessential personnel the day off and brought us into town on George’s Otter. He wanted me to drop by and, well, touch base, so to speak, with the chair of the board of the Niniltna Native Association. Which would be you.”
She smiled. Kate smiled back. Both smiles lacked conviction.
“I didn’t want to come,” Haynes said, “it being a holiday and all.”
And being uninvited and all, Kate thought.
“But Vern insisted. He—We want to assure you that you’re welcome out at the mine at any time, that there is no question you have that we won’t answer. We know there are plenty of people in the Park who aren’t necessarily overjoyed about the mine going in here. Vern wants you to know that we’re prepared to be completely transparent about the operation.”
She picked up her glass, forgetting that she’d already drained it, and sucked at the one or two remaining drops. She declined Kate’s honor-bound offer of another. “Vern wants you to know that you’re our first call when something happens at the site.”
“You can tell Vern I appreciate that,” Kate said.
Conversation wandered around a little after that, from the computer installation just begun at the school to the ongoing talks with three different communications companies vying with one another to provide cell phone access to the Park. At one point, Haynes said, “Sergeant Chopin told us that the body in the woods was confirmed as Dewayne Gammons.”
Whatever misgivings Kate had had over the gentleman who had walked into the Park to make of himself a bear’s breakfast, they had waned over the intervening month, to the point that it took her a moment to place the name. “Oh yeah,” she said, “the blood matched the employee record. What with the note and his girlfriend and his coworkers saying he was depressed, the coroner came back with suicide.”
“He had a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, maybe not girlfriend,” Kate said, “but I got the feeling it might have been if he hadn’t gone into the woods. But I suppose if he’d had any real feeling for her he wouldn’t have gone into the woods in the first place.” She shook her head. “I don’t know, I guess it’s one of the more environmentally friendly ways to off yourself.”
“Was the, what, the un-girlfriend very upset?”
Kate looked at her. “You know, for a workforce of only a hundred you people sure don’t talk to each other a lot.”
Haynes looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t even know who Gammons was when Sergeant Chopin asked you about him.” Haynes looked blank, and Kate reminded her. “At the café the day his body was found.”
Haynes shifted in her seat and looked defensive. “The work’s pretty intense, especially when they’re pulling five core samples out of the ground every day. Rick Allen was the only worker who wasn’t staff who I had a lot to do with.”
“He ‘was’? What, you lose another employee?”
Haynes grimaced. “We lose some with every paycheck. Attrition is always a problem on a job like this. Working out in the middle of nowhere isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It’ll get better when we go into production and the camp gets bigger, more amenities, a movie theater, a swimming pool.”
Kate remembered Lyda saying more or less the same thing. “Did the mine notify Gammons’s next of kin?”
“He didn’t have any,” Haynes said.
Kate stared at her. “None?”
“He didn’t put an emergency contact on his employee form.” Kate already knew that from Lyda Blue. “Lyda called his high school and the principal barely remembered him, much less his parents. She called his voc ed school and they barely remembered Gammons, either. Vern and I talked it over and decided we’d done as much as we could. Maybe someone will come looking.”
Kate wondered what it would be like to have no one looking for you if you disappeared. “How’s Lyda doing?”
Haynes looked surprised. “Fine. One of the best exec assistants I’ve ever worked with, smart, takes the initiative, never makes the same mistake twice. Why?” Then in sudden realization, “Lyda was Gammons’s girlfriend?”
Kate raised a hand. “Not quite girlfriend, but she was upset at his death. And don’t hassle her about it.”
“Of course not,” Haynes said. “I’m just surprised. I didn’t realize they were close.”
No reason you should, Kate thought, you don’t appear to have known Gammons even existed.
Out on the deck Mutt stretched out and gave a voluptuous groan.
“Who’s your second call?” Kate said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You say we’re Suulutaq’s first call. I was just wondering who your second call was. The boss in Anchorage, maybe?”
Haynes, thrown off her game, said, “Well, I . . . well, of course, we—”
She was spared further inarticulation by the arrival of a vehicle in the clearing. Kate stood up to look out the window. “Ah. Here’s another one of your First Callers.”
She went outside, trailed by a still stuttering Haynes, as the powder blue Ford Explorer, driven with dash and style, slid to a halt not quite eighteen inches away from the foot of the stairs. A diminutive octogenarian hopped out with a spryness that belied her years. “Katya!”
“Hi, Auntie Vi,” Kate said.
Mutt, through long experience wary of whatever mood Auntie Vi might be in, remained at Kate’s side.
Shorter than Kate and thicker through the middle, Auntie Vi had bright button eyes of a piercing brown, a tousled bob of hair in which not a strand of gray dared show its face, and skin the color and smoothness of a walnut shell. “Ha, Katya,” she said again, moderating her tone as Haynes moved into her sights and she realized they had an audience. She bent an accusing stare on Kate, aggravated at this thwarting of her natural inclination.
“Hello again, Vi,” Haynes said. To Kate she said, “Vern and I are both spending the night in town.”
Kate wondered if they’d taken adjoining rooms.
Her thought was immediately confounded when Haynes added, “Vern’s wife flew in for the weekend.”
Kate raised her eyebrows. “Really? Nice for them both.”
“Yes.” But Haynes’s jawline looked taut. She was able to hold Kate’s gaze for only a few seconds before she said in a false, bright tone, “Is that what you call a cache? I’ve never seen a real one before.” She walked to the edge of the clearing to examine the little house on peeled-log stilts with a wholly unmerited attention to detail.
Auntie Vi took the opportunity to say in a tone that approximated a hiss, “Board meeting next week. You be there?”
Kate repressed the shudder along her flesh. “Actually, it’s not until week after next, but yes, I’ll be there, Auntie.”
Auntie Vi looked hard at Kate. “Why not you down Alaganik way with Old Sam?”
“I decided to spend a summer at home for a change.”
Auntie Vi dismissed this with a wave of her hand. “But you be in town for board meeting.”
“Yes, Auntie,” Kate said. “I. Will. Be. There.”
“Demetri say he might maybe be up to lodge. So maybe he not there either.”
“Yes, Auntie,” Kate said. “That’s why we made the board larger, so we’d still have a quorum when some of the board members are absent.”
Auntie Vi snorted. It was a trademark expression, and one eloquent of feeling. “You make. Not we.”
This was not true. In January on Kate’s recommendation the Association shareholders had voted to expand the board from five members to nine. Afterward, Annie Mike orchestrated a one-time-only write-in campaign to fill the four new seats. They were announced at the April board meeting and in letters that went out to every shareholder. When Kate looked at the names, she almost wished the
amendment to the bylaws had failed. Her only consolation was that Auntie Vi didn’t like them any better than Kate did. Only one of the four, Herbie Topkok, lived in the Park. Einar Carlson was from Cordova, Ulanie Anahonak from Tok, and Marlene Colberg from Kanuyaq Center.
“We had to open it up to people who didn’t live in the Park, Auntie,” Kate said. “We’d never have been able to fill nine seats otherwise. And they are shareholders.” She looked at Auntie Vi and her smile was ever so sweet. “You could have run for a seat on the board yourself, Auntie.”
Auntie Vi snorted again, and threw in another glare for good measure. They both knew that Auntie Vi was a behind-the-scenes kind of gal. She wanted to pull strings, all right, but only in the background, where no one could see.
Kate had a feeling that the board meeting was only a red herring. Auntie Vi proved her right when she looked over her shoulder at Haynes, who was still rapt in contemplation of the cache, and said, in a lower voice, “You let those kids go to work at mine!”
“Yes,” Kate said. Mutt looked up, the wag of her tail slowing. “Yes, I did. You could even say I encouraged them. They wanted to work, which I consider a minor miracle in sixteen-year-olds, and this was hands down the best opportunity going. You got a problem with that?”
It came out a little more in-your-face than Kate had meant, and it only fanned the flames. Auntie Vi forgot their audience, opened her mouth, and prepared to wax even more eloquent.
“Auntie,” Kate said. Something in her tone of voice arrested Auntie Vi in mid-peroration. “The Suulutaq Mine might be this generation’s Prudhoe Bay. Who am I to say they can’t have their paycheck?”
Auntie Vi stared at her, mouth still open.
“Besides,” Kate said, unable to stop herself, “look who’s talking. You sold out at the first offer.”
Fortunately or unfortunately, at that moment Old Sam chugged into the clearing in his International pickup, a vehicle that wasn’t as old as he was only because he had been born before they started building them. He climbed out of the cab on his spider legs and stood surveying the tableau with a sardonic expression on his face. “Vi,” he said.
Auntie Vi’s mouth closed with a snap, and her hand, half raised to do who knew what, fell again to her side.
Old Sam smiled at Kate. “Hey, girl.”
“Uncle, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in Alaganik? Who’s got the
Freya
?”
“Got some king salmon for you, girl,” he said.
“Kings?” Kate said. “Where’d you get—”
She quit before she got them all into trouble. Due to three years’ worth of low returns, king season wasn’t open anywhere on the Kanuyaq, or in Alaganik Bay, either, not even for subsistence fishers.
The other shoe dropped and she glared at him. It was so typical of Old Sam to apologize for the whole body-as-bear-bait affair with salmon that were illegally caught. She had thought that business concluded with his hiring of Petey Jeppsen and Phyllis Lestinkof. Her mistake.
Old Sam followed her train of thought without difficulty, and gave her his patently could-give-a-shit grin. Where was Mary Balashoff when Kate really needed her? “Where’s Mary?” Kate said.
Mary Balashoff was Old Sam’s longtime squeeze. She had a set net site on Alaganik Bay and the two were inseparable on off periods during the summer.
“She’s minding my girl,” Old Sam said. “Since my regular deckhand saw fit to run out on me this summer.”
This was unanswerable, so Kate said, “Petey working out?”
“He’s almost worth cutting up for bait.”
From Old Sam this was a compliment.
“And Phyllis?”
“Some of what she cooks is almost fit to eat.”
All well, then.
“You want the kings or don’t you?” Old Sam said.
Kate looked at Auntie Vi. With unspoken agreement neither looked at Holly Haynes, the Outsider who stood there, clueless, and who should for all their sakes depart as unenlightened as she had arrived. “Let’s see ’em.”
Old Sam pulled down the tailgate of the International to reveal a wet-lock box. With some ceremony, he opened it.
Inside were half a dozen kings, which Kate eyeballed at about thirty pounds each. They’d been blooded and gutted, and from where she was standing Kate could see the thick line of fat between skin and meat.
Drool pooled in her mouth. These kings had never seen fresh water. She looked at Old Sam, who looked back at her, radiating all the innocence of the devil himself. “What do you want to do with them, girl?”
“We’re going to eat one right now,” Kate said. “I’ll smoke and can the rest.”
“I guess I’d better be going,” Holly Haynes said, without moving.
“You’re welcome to stay,” Kate lied.
Auntie Vi, constrained by Bush hospitality, said with a false heartiness anyone but a moron would have recognized, “Stay, stay! You got to eat!”
Haynes, alas, hesitated, and then, eying the salmon, capitulated. Her capitulation could also, Kate realized after the fact, have something to do with Haynes not wanting to go back to Niniltna and the B and B where Mr. and Mrs. Truax were enjoying a rare moment of connubial bliss.
Kate set up a stained sheet of plywood on two sawhorses and got out the filet knives and the garden hose. Auntie Vi filled a couple of five-gallon plastic buckets with water and stirred in quantities of salt.
Old Sam headed and fileted the kings with deft, sure motions, and all the filets but one went into the brine. The heads went into the freezer for fish head soup in the winter.
Old Sam had brought the eggs from the females along in a plastic bag, and Auntie Vi pulled out one of the sacs, tore off some of the eggs, and popped them in her mouth. She closed her eyes and chewed, humming her approval. She opened her eyes again and saw Haynes looking appalled. “You try? You like!”
Haynes stuttered a refusal, trying to be polite about it and failing, and Kate laughed.
Auntie Vi laughed, too. It transformed her face, and Kate saw Haynes looking at her, marveling. It was good to be reminded that as cranky as Auntie Vi was determined to appear, said crankiness was a tool used to intimidate, and not or at least not always her prime characteristic.
Kate lit the charcoal in the cement block grill between the house and the garage. She brought out wasabi, soy sauce, and ginger paste, mixed them into a sauce and brushed it on the salmon filet. When the grill was hotter than hot she laid the filet skin side down on a sheet of foil across the coals. The smell of roasting king salmon was immediate and irresistible. They crowded around the grill like seagulls ready to fight over their next meal. Mutt even started barking again.