Blood Will Tell (23 page)

She shook her head. "No. That would be too small."

His hand dropped to a third drawer and pulled it open, revealing a stack of maps two and three feet square. He thumbed through them, muttering to himself over keys and legends until he found what he wanted. In the end he produced three for her, spreading them out on a vacant table. "This one is topographical, this one political, this one meteorological, so you can see for yourself how much it rains down there." Kate pawed through them. "Which one shows the national parks and forests and wildlife refuges and like that?"

He turned on his heel and went back to the cabinets, returning almost immediately with a fourth map. "That do for you?"

"Perfect," Kate said, sliding into a chair. "Which one shows what minerals are found where?"

He trotted back to the cabinets, reappearing with a fifth map, which he lay down on top of the other four. "Anything else?" he inquired hospitably.

She patted her jacket pockets. "Yeah, actually. I don't have a pen." He produced one. "Or any paper, either, for that matter. I'm sorry, I didn't know I was coming here, I wasn't prepared." Before the words were all the way out of her mouth he had walked to the copy machine standing in back of his desk and yanked a handful of paper out of the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven tray.

"Anything else?"

She eyed the sheaf of paper. "You think you could send out for pizza?"

"No anchovies, extra cheese?" he said promptly, and they both laughed.

The old man with the newspaper harrumphed and glared. Dan returned to his desk to help the next person through the door and Kate bent over the two maps highlighting mineral deposits and national parks and preserves.

Fifteen minutes later she looked up. Dan was there instantly. "What?

Need something else?"

"I think so. Do you have anything on Katalla?"

He pulled in his chin. "Do we have anything on Katalla. Hey, Bruce."

This to a slender man with glasses and dark hair just emerging from a back office. "She wants to know if we have anything on Katalla."

Dan was a bit of a flirt. Bruce was shyer and more dignified but no less charming and just as capable. "I believe we may be able to find something."

Five minutes later she was surrounded by books, texts on Alaskan history, studies and surveys of Alaska's natural resources, and relevant copies of the Alaska Geographic Magazine, which seemed to have an issue for every separate town, mountain range, island chain and state and national park in the state. When Dan and Bruce had satisfied themselves that they weren't going to turn her away ignorant, they left her alone.

Beauty and brains both, she thought with pleasure, and started opening books and consulting indexes.

There was no dearth of information on the subject. Katalla Bay was the next major coastal notch over from the Kanuyaq River delta, and had been the site of Alaska's first commercial oil development. Between 1902 and

1931 thirty-six wells had been drilled into paydirt between a thousand and two thousand feet deep. Only eighteen of the thirty-six were producers, producing, over a thirty-one-year period, all of 154,000 barrels of oil.

Prudhoe Bay it wasn't. It wasn't even Swanson River.

In 1933 the field ceased production when the topping plant the wells supplied burned down and the Chilkat Oil Company abandoned the operation.

What Kate found much more interesting was Katalla's location. North of Katalla were the Ragged Mountains, and east of the Ragged Mountains was Iqaluk, a coastal rain forest the size of Rhode Island, covered with lush stands of Western hemlock and Sitka spruce, all of it drained by the navigable Katalla River.

She looked up. Dan beat Bruce to her side by a hair. "Need something else?"

"Do you have a copy of ANCSA? The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act?"

He pulled his chin in. "Do we have a copy of ANCSA." He looked at Bruce, Abbott to his Costello. "She wants to know if we have a copy of ANCSA."

Bruce smiled his shy smile. "I believe we may be able to find something."

Three minutes later she had a copy of ANCSA in her hands, as well as two interpretations exploring the legal ramifications thereof and a critical political analysis by a former state senator who had failed of reelection and therefore had nothing to lose by telling the truth. She located the relevant passages, took a few notes, and raised her head once more. It was a photo finish, but Bruce beat Dan by a nose. "Do you have anything on the differences in land use in national parks and national forests?" Almost before the last word was out of her mouth Bruce was moving in one direction and Dan in another. Sixty seconds later she had more books piled in front of her.

It took the better part of two hours to find everything she needed. She finished taking notes, tidied her notes into a pile and folded her hands on top of the pile, staring into space for a full fifteen minutes without blinking. She came to several conclusions, shoved them all resolutely to the back of her mind, and started returning the books to the shelves, pursued up and down the aisles alternately by Dan and Bruce protesting that it wasn't necessary. "It's okay," she told them, "I'm Dewey Decimal literate, I won't put them back in the wrong place."

They had to abandon her due to press of business. As Kate departed Bruce was looking up the 1920 Mineral Leasing Act for a purposeful Anchorage Daily News reporter with the word "MISSION" stamped on his forehead and Dan was hunting out Vitus Bering's biography for a woman leaning heavily on a cane who looked old enough to have personally witnessed the wreck of the St. Peter in the Commander Islands.

The building might have been designed by a mental midget, but the staff inside was first class all the way.

The sun was getting low in the sky when she went through the doors.

Worried that she would be late picking up Jack and Johnny she said,

"Come on" to Mutt and hurried into a trot, the crisp, clear air biting into her cheeks, Mutt's toenails again tickety-tacking on the pavement behind her. She looked to the south as she went, toward Turnagain Arm--where another explorer, Captain Cook, had been turned away again in his search for a northwest passage --and looked in vain for signs of snow. There were none. The chill air filtered through her clothes and made her shiver. It would have to warm up to snow. She tucked her chin into her windbreaker and went down the stairs behind a man with a maroon leather portfolio in his hand and a preoccupied look on his face, who told both petitioners to fuck off without any real heat and climbed into an old Ford beater that didn't match the portfolio and drove off. She was followed by a harried woman with a mountain of books and not enough hands left over for four energetic children, who never even saw the petitioners over the books, and walked to the longest station wagon Kate had ever seen. She got the doors open and the books in and started corralling the children, who as soon as she put them in one door would spill out another. It looked like a Keystone Kops movie, or the clown car at the circus, and Kate was sorry when Mom got all the kids into their safety seats and drove off. Smiling, she called to Mutt, who was sniffing interestedly around the sculpture in the library park that had always reminded Kate of a stainless steel Dutch girl cap. They got in the Blazer and drove out of the parking lot to turn left on Thirty-Sixth and right on A. The lights were right at Benson and Northern Lights and Fireweed and she was already making good time as she came down the hill toward Chester Creek before it climbed back up to Ninth Avenue. The street sign said the speed limit was thirty-five, and she glanced down at the speedometer and saw that she was going fifty, with traffic passing her on both sides. The last thing she wanted was an appearance in court before a judge who might remember her all too well from the old life, and she braked.

The front right tire fell off.

Kate had just enough time to see it bounce into the next lane of traffic before the Blazer dropped to one knee and began to scream with the pain of metal on pavement. She took her foot off the brake, too late. The Blazer swerved to the left, rolled over on its right side and from there to the roof. There was a thud and a startled yelp as Mutt's body hit the inside of the roof, and more thumps as everything Jack had tossed in the back of the Blazer over the last ten years hit the roof, too. The Blazer stopped rolling but kept sliding. The howl of metal in agony deafened Kate to all else until the Blazer slammed into the sidewalk and fence on the left of the road, the seatbelt harness jarring the breath out of her. The windshield bulged and shattered, spraying the interior with glass. Safety glass, Kate noticed with gratitude in some detached part of her mind.

She hung upside down in the seatbelt, her hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two, feeling cool air on her face through the broken windshield. Her breath came back to her in a great whoosh of an inhale, and she gulped air in great lungfuls. Slowly she became aware of screeching brakes and slamming doors and rapid footsteps. "Ma'am?" a voice said. "Ma'am, are you all right?"

In slow motion, as if she were moving beneath the pressure of ten fathoms of water, she turned her head and looked through the driver's side window, by a miracle still intact. An anxious face peered in at her. He was young and black and dread locked and he was bent over the better to look at her so that his hair hung below his eyes like the strands of a plump black jellyfish. It bobbed gently with the movements of his head, like tentacles stirred by the movement of the sea. Kate admired the effect with a kind of dreamy detachment.

"Ma'am?" he said again, even more anxiously this time. "Are you okay? My name is Martin, what's yours? Ma'am?" He rattled the door. It was stuck.

His face disappeared and she heard his voice say, "She's in shock. I can't get the door open, let's try to get her out through the window.

Anybody got a blanket? And somebody better call the cops!"

Jack got there the same time the blue-and-white did and had to wait his turn, pacing back and forth on the periphery like an angry bear. Once she had assured herself that but for some bumps and bruises Mutt was all right, Kate answered all the questions they put to her and submitted to the mild indignity of a breathalyzer test. The back of her neck was sore from where she had fallen on it when she released the seat belt to crawl through the broken windshield, but other than that she was fine. Better than fine, she thought from the seat of the police car, looking through the open door at the driver of the second blue-and-white as he directed traffic around the wreck. She said suddenly, interrupting the police officer questioning her in mid-sentence, "Did the loose tire hit anybody? Did any other cars crash? Was anybody hurt?"

"No," he said patiently, and she wondered if she'd already asked that question. "Now if we could get back to the accident, Ms. Shugak--" "I told you," she said, suddenly weary. "The tire fell off."

He looked skeptical but not offensively so. "Ma'am, tires don't just fall off."

I couldn't agree more, she thought. Mutt sat on the pavement next to the blue-and-white, her shoulder pressed hard against Kate's knee.

Jack stopped pacing and came forward to stand next to Kate. "Craig, for cris sake Let me take her home. We'll come down to the station tomorrow for the report."

The police officer, whose eyes were too old for his fresh young face, sighed and closed his notebook. "Okay, Jack. She staying with you?" Jack nodded, and the cop waved them away and went to direct the wrecker. Jack led Kate and Mutt to an anonymous beige four-door sedan and held the door. "Loaner from the department," he said tersely. Mutt hopped in the back and Kate, whose knees were beginning to shake, subsided gratefully into the passenger seat. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Jack walked around and got in. The door slammed. There was a moment of silence that was not in the least sympathetic. "What happened?" Jack said.

Without opening her eyes she said, "Someone loosened the lug nuts on the wheel. Couldn't have been anything else." She roused herself enough to add, "Better have the wrecker check the other tires."

Without another word he got out and went to talk to the wrecker driver.

The driver, a laconic, gangly teenager in jeans with the knees ripped out and safety pins around the rim of one ear, walked around the Blazer with Jack and the cop who had taken Kate's statement. After a moment, he went back to the wreck and returned with a lug wrench, and Jack and the cop held the tires while he tightened the nuts on the three remaining tires. Subtle, insidious little tremors began to chase each other up and down Kate's spine. Sensing something was wrong, Mutt thrust an anxious muzzle over the back of the seat and pressed a cold nose to Kate's cheek. "It's all right, girl," Kate said, with an effort raising one hand to stroke Mutt's head. "It's all right. We're okay now."

Jack climbed back in the sedan, jaw champing at an invisible bit. "The nuts on the left front tire were loose, too."

"Always good to make sure," Kate murmured a little giddily. "The laborer is worthy of his hire."

"I don't consider this to be as amusing as you obviously do," Jack snapped. "Where'd you go today?"

She blinked through the windshield, watching without much interest as the punk rock wrecker attached the line of the come-along to the up side of the Blazer. "Where did I go today?" she said absently. "Out. What did I do? Nothing." She almost giggled, almost, but not quite.

"Knock it off, Kate." Jack's voice was hard and yanked her out of her abstraction. Still leaning against the headrest, she turned to look at him. His eyes were narrow and his mouth thin-lipped, and the visible evidence of his anger sobered her. "Sorry," she said, and a wave of fatigue swamped her, half-sinking her where she sat. "Sorry, Jack."

"Where did you go today?" he repeated.

She gathered up what few wits she had left, retrieved her memories of the day from wherever they had been scattered, and recounted her activities.

"Library?" he said. "What were you doing at the library?" "Looking something up," she said, remembering, and unable or unwilling to elaborate, maybe a little of both. She sighed and closed her eyes.