Bad Blood (5 page)

Kate laughed and pulled her ear. “What kept you?”

It was with a strong sense of virtue attained that she passed the hammock with no more than a longing look and entered the brush at the side of the clearing.

The granite uplift beneath Kate’s homestead was the continuation of a long ridge that extended east and south from the Quilak Mountains, worn down in places by glaciers, recurring in humps and bumps here and there so that from the air it looked like Smaug had been buried on Kate’s homestead beneath a barely decent layer of earth. Over the millennia, Zoya Creek had cut a deep channel through and between the granite. Around the creek, the land fell gradually from the northeast to the southeast, where it met the Park road.

Everything that grew in the Park grew on the homestead. While the black spruce and the white spruce had been thinned by two-thirds, the good news was that now light could get down to the quaking aspen and the paper birch. They had responded by leaps and bounds, forming large groves that turned a glorious gold in the fall. So prolific and determined were they that Kate had formed the habit of going out with a hatchet to hack them back enough so that the new spruce seedlings would have a chance. In another hundred years, the spruce would have reestablished themselves and the aspen and birch would die back to their previous levels, but Kate wasn’t sorry she’d been here to see the transformation. Captain Cook had seen it, too, when he had sailed up Cook Inlet that May 230 or so years before. She’d read it in his log, an old leatherbound three-book edition of which she had inherited from Old Sam, along with all the rest of his books. Reading matter even more hammock-worthy than Reginald Hill, heresy though that might be.

The trail was one hacked out of the brush by Stephan long ago, but in spite of its years of establishment, Kate felt like she ought to take a whip and a chair with her every time she traveled it. The undergrowth felt like a tiger waiting to spring, and she knew if she didn’t maintain it that the forest would gobble it up between one year and the next. It was just wide enough for the four-wheeler, and it meandered, never taking a straight line when it could possibly avoid it, following the path of least resistance, around high knobs topped with erratics, gigantic boulders shrugged off by a passing glacier millennia before, and through sunken bogs lush with lowbush cranberry where ptarmigan hens and their chicks skittered frantically from in front of the ATV’s wheels. Ranger Dan swore there was kinnikinnick tucked into the corner of one bald rocky top, although he didn’t know what the hell it was doing below a thousand feet, and other gardeners pro and am had found every species of moss, fern, berry, and wildflower on the Park plant list within the borders of Kate’s realm.

She had helped the plant life along, every fall beginning when she was a child planting half a dozen raspberry bushes somewhere along the trail, on the theory that if there were hundreds, the moose had to miss at least a few of them. She planted other things, too, salting the landscape with blueberry and salmonberry and Siberian larch and mountain ash, even honeysuckle and lilac. In a few south-facing hollows she tucked bulbs for tulips and daffodils, and sometimes they even survived the depredations of winter and fauna to bloom brightly in the spring. Half the time she forgot where she’d put them and in late spring it was always a glorious surprise to stumble across a bright patch of sunshine yellow or lipstick red.

Ahead she saw a broad brown back vanish into the brush, followed by two smaller ones. The cow moose had probably found that stand of diamond willow that edged the lower cranberry bog and staked it out for herself and her two calves. Kate welcomed the company, and hoped that at least one of the calves was a male. The cow hadn’t moved like she was in a hurry, which told Kate that the local two-year-old grizzly, recently booted out by his mother in favor of her new twins, had abandoned his pursuit of the calves and moved down to the river, where the salmon were now migrating upstream in enough abundance that he didn’t have to work too hard to fill his belly. In the distance, a goshawk plummeted down to disappear behind the trees, to reappear moments later with something mammalian wriggling uselessly in its talons. Closer inspection proved it to be an arctic hare, fat and brown and now lunchmeat for the baby goshawks back home. “Good on you,” Kate told the goshawk. The hares were currently in their high cycle and had proved every bit as devastating to the shrubs and trees as had the spruce bark beetle. On the upside, Kate had seen seven different lynxes on her homestead alone that winter. She had a fondness for the cats with the tufted ears and the enormous paws, and for that alone she found she could forgive the hares much.

At her most recent windfall site, she fired up the boom box. Wearing earphones in the woods was way too risky, even with Mutt as an early warning system, and bears tended not to like loud noises, unless they were making them. By noon, with the aid of Adele, Brad Paisley, Cee Lo Green, Jimmy Buffett, the Steve Miller Band, and Dion, among others, she had sliced five felled, limbed, debarked spruce trees into neat three-foot rounds and made the trip to the woodpile in the clearing a dozen times with a loaded trailer, stacking the rounds next to the woodpile. The house had a Monitor, by now the Alaska state stove, that burned furnace oil very efficiently to heat the entire house, both floors. But she’d always liked a wood fire, the look of the bright, leaping flames, the sound of knots cracking and sap popping, the faint smell of woodsmoke it left on her clothes and in her hair. And a job done well was always satisfying in and of itself.

Sweaty, filthy, covered with scratches and needles and sap, she decided getting out the splitter could wait for another day. She washed down the ATV and the trailer and put them back into the garage, and as she came outside again, she saw that she had company.

A middle-aged couple stood at the edge of the clearing, holding an unfolded map between them as they gawked around with their eyes squinted against the sun, surrounded by a general air of bewilderment.

“Oh hell,” Kate said, “not again.” She walked forward, stripping off her gloves. “May I help you?”

They turned their heads. The woman took a step back, and it looked as if her man refrained from doing so only by exercising a strong effort of will. They were middle-aged, overweight, and blatantly Outsiders, with that unmistakably eager air of venturing into a wild frontier known to them previously only through the Discovery Channel.

“May I help you?” Kate said again.

This time her words penetrated, and they both visibly relaxed. “Oh, you speak English,” the man said, sounding relieved.

“You’re lost, I take it,” Kate said, and tried hard not to make it sound like an accusation.

“We’re looking for the gold mine,” the woman said.

Which one?
Kate almost said, and stopped herself in time. “You turned too soon,” she said. “Get back on the road and keep going about fifty miles until you come to a village.”

The man nodded. “Ninilchik.”

“Niniltna,” Kate said. “The mine is on the other side of the village.”

“Is the road not paved the whole way?” the woman asked, looking over Kate’s shoulder at the house, and then looking back at Kate like she couldn’t see Kate in it. That was okay. Sometimes Kate couldn’t see herself in it, either.

“Yes, it’s unpaved all the way,” Kate said, and stepped forward, spreading her hands a little, just enough to give the impression she was shooing them back up the trail.

“Oh, Paul,” said the woman, not budging. “My back’s killing me.”

“We’re already halfway there, Alice,” Paul said, still trying to locate them on the map. “We might as well keep going.” He looked back at Kate. “Is there an RV park in this Nenana, do you know?”

Mutt reappeared at that moment, translating from dark green brush to iron gray wolf in a single step. She gave herself a vigorous shake and trotted forward, very businesslike. Alice squeaked. Mutt looked up at Kate and gave an inquiring yip.

Alice answered with another squeak and plucked imploringly at Paul’s sleeve.

“In a minute, Alice,” he said testily, and then looked up. “Oh. Ah. Jesus.” He cleared his throat, and Kate had to give him points for standing his ground. “Is that a wolf?”

“Only half,” Kate said, dropping a casual hand to scratch behind Mutt’s ears. Mutt let her jaw fall open and her tongue loll out past canines Dracula would have envied.

“How many does that make,” Kate said to Mutt as they watched Alice and Paul scuttle up the trail to the road. “Four? Five?”

“Wuff,” Mutt said with a hearty sneeze.

“You’re right, might be six.”

The world’s second-largest gold mine, which might yet turn out to be the world’s largest gold mine, had been discovered in the southeast corner of the Park two years before. The first to appear on scene after the geologists were the resource corporations. After them came the journalists, followed by people looking for jobs, and then, inevitably, came the tourists. Had the Park been a normal remote Alaskan location, access would have been limited to airplane. But no, the Park had a road, and said road was pleased to deliver random tourists to the Park’s doorstep, for which Kate’s homestead was sometimes mistaken.

She had a momentary vision of herself at the controls of a Caterpillar D9 tractor, big shiny blade pushing up a mound of earth taller than herself to block the trail into her homestead.

Lunch was a thick slice of last night’s moose meat loaf and a big red apple, astonishingly juicy and crisp, always a rarity in produce shipped to Alaska. With some of Corinna Chapman’s lemon cordial, she made a pitcher of sweet, tart lemonade and took it and
The Stranger House
out to the hammock. It was warm from the sun, and molded around her body as if it had been made for that purpose. A light breeze kept off the bugs.

One of Jim’s better ideas, she thought, the hammock swinging gently from side to side, and that was the last she knew until her cell phone dinged against her hip and she came to with the open book across her face. It startled her enough that she nearly dumped herself out of the hammock. She moved the book out of the way and fished out her phone and looked at the screen.

You home?

She texted back.

Yes. Where are you?

Reply:

Kushtaka.

Her:

What’s going on?

Him:

Maybe an accident.

Her:

Maybe?

Jim didn’t reply immediately.

Maybe not?

Maddeningly, no response again. She wondered if his phone had dropped its connection. While the cell phone towers had gone up with an almost miraculous rapidity over the last year, the system still had a few kinks, and their putative range held more than a few dead spots. Not that Jim would know, since the Park rats had taken to dialing 911 with a heady, entitled abandon for everything from noisy neighbors (the Bingleys had fallen out of love again) to bloody riot (Suulutaq miners whooping it up at Bernie’s Roadhouse). Previously, Kate would have been called out to quell the former and Bernie would have quelled the latter with the baseball bat behind the bar, but having an Alaska state trooper on your speed dial seemed to bring out the previously unsuspected needy in the most self-sufficient Park rat. Very odd.

Kate rolled out of the hammock, collected book and glass, and headed back to the house. It was four o’clock. She hadn’t checked the mail in a week, or maybe two, and she ought to be able to make it into town just before the post office closed so she could pick up any packages without standing in line. “Want to go to town?” she said.

Mutt was out the door and across the deck and down the steps and dancing impatiently next to the battered red pickup before Kate could grab her wallet.

Five

WEDNESDAY, JULY 11

Kushtaka

The sound of the engine on the skiff carrying Tyler Mack away from his native side of the river had barely faded out of earshot when they gathered at the chief’s house in Kushtaka. His wife and daughter were sent next door. This was talk for men.

Pat Mack described what he had seen. The object was produced and passed hand to hand. Returned to him, he set it on the floor, in the middle of the circle of men.

There was a long, deliberative silence, broken first by Pat Mack. “He was my great-nephew.”

Dale Mack looked up. “He was my nephew, too.”

“He was ours,” said the eldest, and the others were silenced.

“Who did this thing?” the eldest said.

“I don’t know,” Pat said. He said it without hesitation and with perfect truth. He didn’t know whom he’d seen at Kuskulana landing when he arrived at the fish wheel. He couldn’t be sure it was Roger’s son, and when he’d seen him, it had been hours after Tyler was killed. He would not accuse unless he was sure. A name would be spark to Kushtaka timber and the resulting blaze could burn down both villages.

Others with less cause were less hesitant. “I can make a pretty good guess,” one of the younger men said, his eyes hot. “Someone from across the river.”

“Ya think?” Rick Estes said. He was the youngest man there, and he bit back what else he might have said when the eldest raised his hand for silence.

“Talk to his friend,” the eldest said.

“Boris?” Rick said, looking at Dale, who nodded.

“See what he says,” the eldest said.

Dale Mack’s face was red, and it was obvious he was laboring under a great need to speak his mind. “Uncle, there is no need. We know who did this.”

“Speak to his friend,” the eldest said. His voice quavered, but there was no gainsaying that tone, not if you’d been born and raised in Kushtaka, and not if you wanted to go on living there. “We must know more before we act.”

*   *   *

When the others left, Rick Estes stayed behind. “What do we do?”

Dale Mack’s jaw was tight. “Talk to Boris. See what he says. Ask him who Tyler had pissed off recently.”