Bad Blood (6 page)

Patrick Estes, Rick for short, was in his early twenties, with black hair and eyes and smooth brown skin tanned a permanent chestnut from spending all his time on the water. His hands were strong from working the fish wheel and the drift net from the front of his bowpicker in Alaganik Bay. He didn’t talk much, or smile, but he was the best of his small generation: a hunter, a trapper, and a fisherman in the traditional mold that went all the way back to Tobold Mack.

Dale Mack thought again how much he would have loved to have Rick Estes as his son, and how perverse a world it was that put a Tyler Mack ahead of a Rick Estes by blood and tribal precedence and tradition. “That way,” he said deliberately, “we can tell the eldest that we did what he said.”

Their eyes met, and Dale Mack saw understanding dawn in Rick’s eyes.

The door opened, and his wife and daughter came inside, followed by a third figure, short and plump, with a round, foolish face beneath a fringe of graying hair she was continually shaking out of bright, inquisitive eyes. His wife, even more monosyllabic than Rick Estes, went immediately to the stove to check the fish head stew.

“Big powwow all done?” Auntie Nan said.

Auntie Nan, his wife’s cousin somewhere on her mother’s side, had moved in with the Macks when her husband died. That was eighteen years ago, just before Jennifer had been born. After a prolonged and difficult labor that had proved to be her last and only, his wife welcomed the extra pair of hands. Her husband had not welcomed the extra mouth to feed but never had the courage to ask Auntie Nan to move on, and eventually she had become a fixture in their home.

Auntie Nan, dim though she might be, had an instinctive sense of self-preservation and scurried to the counter without waiting for an answer, there to throw flour and sugar and milk and yeast into a bowl with so much energy that much of it spilled on the counter and more of it onto the floor. She uttered a distressed sound and snatched up a broom and dustpan to sweep it up, leaving a large smear of white behind. His wife’s shoulders raised and fell in a sigh she would never allow to become audible in front of her husband, and she cleaned up the smear with a damp sponge.

Dale Mack watched as Rick’s eyes were drawn irresistibly to Jennifer’s face and stayed there.

“Hi, Jennifer.”

The older man stopped himself from cringing, barely, at the open note of adoration in the younger man’s voice. Servility would never get Rick Estes anywhere with Dale Mack’s daughter.

“Hey, Rick.” Her smile was perfunctory, and she was looking at her father. “What was all that about?”

“None of your business,” Dale Mack said, wishing, not for the first time, that his daughter looked upon Rick Estes with half as much interest as Rick Estes looked upon her. A great deal of trouble would have been saved thereby, beginning with her, him, and the entire village of Kushtaka.

It would have helped, too, if she hadn’t been so goddamned beautiful. Sometimes he felt his own eyes straying to that cape of shining black hair, the proportionately long legs, the hourglass figure, the clear olive skin, partly in a kind of dumb admiration but mostly in bewilderment that a child so striking had sprung from his own loins. When she hit fourteen, the boys had shown up in what seemed to Dale Mack like herds. He didn’t begin to know how to handle it, other than with rough oaths and dire threats and sometimes simply forbidding Jennifer to leave the house. An edict she managed to flout with contemptuous ease whenever she wanted to.

“Is it true?” Jennifer said, her glowing presence a living flame in the dark environs of the little cabin. “Is Tyler Mack dead?”

Dale Mack hesitated. This wasn’t the kind of thing one spoke of with women. “Yes,” he said at last.

“And that he was murdered?”

Her father’s mouth tightened. “Yes,” he said.

She ignored the accompanying glare. “Do they know who did it?”

If he’d been less concerned with his own affairs and the affairs of the village of Kushtaka, he would have heard the undertone of anxiety warning of problems closer to home.

But he’d already caught seventeen different kinds of grief from the village elders for teaching Jennifer to work the fish wheel. Especially from the women, whom one would have thought might have been on Jennifer’s side. From there, things seemed to progress exponentially, until somehow he was taking her with him when he was running his traplines. She learned, quickly, just by watching, how to set traps, how to skin and tan hides.

Her mother had tried to teach her how to smoke fish, but here, too, Jennifer nagged Dale until he took her out on the Sound and taught her how to gillnet. The whole village heard what the elders had thought about that. Girls didn’t fish, either. At least Kushtaka girls didn’t.

Resentful of the criticism, despairing because he had no son, he bought her a rifle and taught her to shoot. It didn’t help that she turned out to be the best shot in the village, taking down a bull moose the previous fall so big, it had taken two days to pack out. There was plenty of grumbling over this blatant flouting of tradition, too, but Dale hadn’t seen any of the elders turning up their noses at Jennifer’s mom’s moose stew at the Christmas party at the gym.

She’d always been smart, and quick to learn. She should have been a boy.

Jennifer, of course, had ignored the whispers behind her back and the scolding to her face with equal disregard. Perhaps that kind and quality of beauty bred its own indifference to authority.

Suddenly, Dale Mack was afraid for his daughter, afraid for his family, for his village, a nameless, inchoate fear that threatened to well up and choke him where he sat.

He looked at Rick. “Want to stay for supper, Rick?”

The younger man brightened. “Sure.”

And Dale Mack cravenly ignored the dark fury in the glance directed his way by his only child, and said, “Set an extra place, Jennifer.”

Six

WEDNESDAY, JULY 11

Niniltna

The cell tower on the hill in back of the school was the first thing to be seen driving into Niniltna, a village built along one street that paralleled the river. Houses varied in construction from one-year-old split-level ranch homes to hundred-year-old log cabins, with a few tar paper shacks thrown in just to keep the place humble. The school’s gymnasium was the largest building in town and where every event of any significance was held, from the Kanuyaq Kings basketball team’s annual grudge match with the Cordova Wolverines to Niniltna Native Association annual board meetings to potlatches for any event, birth, death, wedding, or old-fashioned ego trip for the host.
See how rich I am? See what good food I serve? See how many rifles and blankets I can give away? You should vote for me next time, for NNA board or CEO or state senator.

There was a single grocery store, a restaurant, and a fuel dealer with a lone gas pump out front, $7.40 a gallon today, Kate saw. Which was why everyone who could afford to bought their gas in fifty-five-gallon drums trucked in from Ahtna, or in bulk delivered to personal fuel tanks by the tanker truck that made the trip into the Park once a month during the summer. Which wasn’t much cheaper, but every little bit helped, especially before the fish started running.

The Kanuyaq River at Niniltna was deep enough along its eastern edge to bring smaller fishing boats in to the many docks attached to the houses built along the bank. The southern side of the river was less populated, mostly by log cabins that predated the Park, every second one of which was abandoned, tumbledown, and covered with moss.

Kate stopped at the Riverside Cafe for one of Laurel’s Americanos, heavy on the half-and-half, and spent a few moments catching up on the local gossip. Kushtaka did not figure in it, so the news had not percolated this far north. Cindy and Ben Bingley did. “Is the store closed?” Kate said, thinking of the shopping list she had in the pocket of her jeans.

A Meganack, the apple hadn’t fallen that far from the familial tree in that Laurel owned and operated the Riverside Cafe, one of Niniltna’s newer and healthier commercial concerns. The mine had helped, of course, since the café was the only place a Suulutaq miner could buy a burger and at the same time eye up the local talent, of which Laurel was certainly a member. In her twenties, long dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail, big dark eyes framed with thick lashes, an hourglass figure showcased in tight jeans and tighter T-shirts, even if Laurel had been the worst cook between Niniltna and Anchorage, she could still have packed them in just by bending over the counter to refill mugs. She knew she wasn’t only selling espresso.

Laurel stripped a piece of beef jerky out of cellophane and offered it to Mutt, who took it delicately between her front teeth and then suffered her head to be scratched with a kind of weary stoicism. Mutt wasn’t a misogynist, precisely, but with a few rare exceptions, Kate fortunately among them, she did vastly prefer men to women. “No,” Laurel said, answering Kate’s question, “Annie took care of it.”

“What’d she do?”

Laurel smiled. “She sent Auntie Vi over to the Bingleys.”

Kate laughed. “Auntie Vi drop-kick Cindy back to the store?”

“No,” Laurel said. “She demanded the keys. Said if Cindy and Ben couldn’t get enough of their shit together to sell milk to the Park rats, she’d do it for them.”

Kate’s eyebrows went up. “Auntie Vi’s running the store?”

“She is,” Laurel said gravely, but with a twinkle in her eye, “and it’s my understanding that about five minutes after she did, Howie and Willard had to find somewhere else to conduct business.”

Kate made an effort to keep her grin tacked in place, but on her way up to the post office she did wonder where Howie and Willard had moved their operation. Bootlegging was one industry that never went out of business in the Park.

The old-fashioned brass bell above the door jingled when she pushed it open. The Niniltna post office had been built on the side of the airstrip, the easier to transfer mailbags and packages from the plane they rode in on. Inside there was a Dutch door opposite, top half open, next to a wall of post office boxes. One corner held a shelf with a selection of USPS shipping boxes, Bubble Wrap, and strapping tape; another, a tall brass étagère with glass shelves. The étagère held a selection of Bonnie Jeppsen’s beadwork—headbands, eyeglass holders, earrings, bracelets, and bookmarks—all tastefully displayed with discreet price tags attached. “What’s this?” Kate said, examining one such object. “It looks like a rock. With beads on it.”

The postmistress was a large, zaftig woman with long, grayish blond hair and a floating, floral style of dress. “They are rocks, Kate. With beads on them.”

Kate picked one up, fascinated by the incorporation of tiny snail, mussel, and clam shells among the green and gray and brown beads. “Did you glue them on?”

“No, I sewed them on.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope,” Bonnie said. “Needle and thread. A skinny needle and a special kind of thread.”

“Wow. Must have taken a while.”

“I went to Anchorage and took a couple of classes.”

Kate put the rock down and turned. Bonnie was in her fifties, with an air of incorporeality that might have been studied or might have been natural, Kate could never tell. It was relatively new, dating from her leaving her sister Cheryl and Cheryl’s abusive husband and the rest of the born-again Jeppsens up on their homestead and moving into town. That was, what, five years ago now? At any rate, Bonnie had switched allegiance to Wicca and was now into homeopathy, healing crystals, herbal tinctures, and for all Kate knew, dancing naked under a solstice moon.

“Gorgeous,” she said, putting the rock back on the shelf without looking at the tag on the bottom. However tempted, she would rather wash dishes for three days in a row than try to dust that rock after it had been sitting on a shelf in her house for more than a week.

She felt to see if the ivory otter was still in her left-hand pocket. It was, as it had been for the last six years, and it would never need dusting so long as she carried it around with her.

“Want your mail?” Cheryl said.

Kate took a step toward her mailbox and Bonnie said, “Don’t bother, I’ve got it in overflow.” She disappeared and reappeared with a plastic bin filled to the brim with envelopes white and manila, magazines, catalogs, half a dozen book-shaped packages from Amazon, and a glossy color brochure. The brochure’s logo was a circular figure of a woman with long swirling dark hair cradling Planet Earth in her arms.

“Gaea still in business, I see,” Kate said.

“That one’s four weeks old,” Bonnie said. “You might like to check your mail more than once a month.”

“Has it been a month?” Kate said, trying not to sound guilty. “I thought it was only a couple of weeks.”

Bonnie gave her a stern look. “What if there’s an overdue bill somewhere in there?”

Kate didn’t have that many bills, but she took Bonnie’s point and hauled the bin out to her pickup and spent half an hour sorting the wheat from the chaff. Direct mail advertising and catalogs were fast-forwarded to the trash. Neither was she interested in solicitations from the AARP, the NRA, the AFL–CIO, the United Fund, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Libertarian Party, the Secessionist Party, or the Tea Party. Likewise, she tossed missives from Doctors Without Borders and Heifer International, both of which organizations she sent a check to every Christmas already. Why was it that the instant you sent someone a check, no matter how worthy the organization, the first thing they did was ask you for more? Irritating, and a waste of the money she had just sent them.

There were, miraculously, some items meriting a forty-six-cent stamp. She smiled over a postcard from Andy Pence, which read, “You don’t call, you don’t write, you couldn’t stop off in Dutch on your way to Adak?” She wondered how he had found out about her overnighter to Adak in January, though not for long. Fishermen were worse gossips than any auntie she had ever met.

There was a rare letter from Stephanie Chevak in Bering. Stephanie was, what, fifteen now? But she wrote with all the formality of a Victorian great-aunt. She was well and in good health, as Kate knew she would be graduating early from high school and she was already preparing to submit college applications. Would Kate be willing to write her a letter of recommendation?