Blood Will Tell (29 page)

Behind him Kate opened the urn. They scattered Ekaterina'sashes all the way down the creek to its confluence with the Kanuyaq River, and down the Kanuyaq River to Niniltna and downriver to Prince William Sound. The urn empty, Kate let it fall, too.

The potlatch was held in the school gymnasium and included everyone in the Park; Bobby and Dinah, Mandy and Chick, Auntie Joy, Auntie Viola, Martin, Axenia, Dan O'Brian, George Perry, rangers, homesteaders, miners, loggers, Park rats, Aleuts. There were Eyaks from Cordova, Athabaskans from the Interior, Tlingits and Haidas and Tsimshians from Southeast, Yupiks and Inupiats from the north and west, all mourning their loss together. There was blood stew and maqtaq, macaroni and cheese, seal blubber and moose steak, pilot bread and peanut butter, Eskimo ice cream and alodiks. Kate gave away her grandmother's possessions, a mass of gifts and memorabilia that included baleen and walrus tusks, harpoons and Attu baskets, dance masks and stone lamps, countless carvings of wood and bone and ivory and soapstone, and skins of bear and seal and moose and caribou and wolf and fox.

The Association banner she gave to Billy Mike, who had been elected the new chairman of the Niniltna board.

Smiling, Billy promised Kate to remember what it stood for.

Smiling, she promised to remind him when he forgot.

Ekaterina's house by the Niniltna River she gave to Martha Barnes and her children.

A fat photo album, filled with the pictures of relatives and friends with which emaa had papered her kitchen wall, she kept for herself.

"What happened with Jane? What did the judge decide?"

A pleased chuckle rumbled up from the chest beneath her cheek. "The damndest thing. She dropped the case."

Kate infused her voice with surprise. "You're kidding."

"No, really, she flat dropped it." He grinned against her hair. The judge was so pissed off at her for wasting the court's time on a case that should have been settled before it ever got in front of him that he made Jane pay all the court costs."

"No."

"Yes."

"Outstanding." "We thought so."

Jack sounded very smug, but Kate didn't grudge it. She could not resist asking. "Why? Why'd she'd drop the case, I mean."

"Officially, I know nothing."

"Of course not."

"But her lawyer let it drop to my lawyer that Jane bounced a check off her. Her lawyer, not mine."

Kate turned her face to hide a smile in the front of his shirt.

"Really?"

"Really. So her lawyer fired her, and if she was bouncing checks off her lawyer she may have been bouncing checks all over town, and if she was bouncing checks all over town she probably couldn't get another lawyer."

"So Johnny's yours?"

"Mine. The judge made her say so, in court and in writing."

"Johnny happy?" He thought. "More relieved than anything, I think."

"Nobody likes being the bone the dogs are fighting over."

He winced at the analogy, which was too close to the truth for comfort.

"I guess not."

She raised her head and kissed him. "Congratulations, Dad."

"Thank you." He returned the kiss with interest, and shifted so she could snuggle comfortably back into his embrace. "Now," he asked the air over her head, "you want to tell me how you did it?"

She went very still. "What makes you think I had anything to do with it?"

"Simple. I know you. How'd you do it?"

Kate weighed the chance of maintaining her innocence against the tone of good-humored but relentless inquiry in his voice. It didn't look good.

"I broke into her house and stole her cash card, her PIN number and her account password," she said baldly. "I put about five thousand dollars' worth of stuff on her credit cards, I ordered a cashier's check for another five thousand dollars, and I took three hundred bucks cash a day out of her bank account. I figured if she was broke, she couldn't pay her lawyer, and I don't know any lawyers who work for free, do you?"

He'd suspected something of the sort but the breadth and thoroughness of the attack was a little staggering, all the same. "No," he said weakly,

"I don't."

You shouldn't have asked if you weren't prepared to hear the answer, Kate thought.

He didn't ask her where she had gone the morning after the attack on his townhouse, and prudently, Kate didn't volunteer. From time to time she still wondered about that copy machine and all those reams of paper in Jane's spare bedroom. Federal contract bids passed through Jane's hands continuously, blind bids that certain contractors would pay well to get an advance look at so as to alter their own accordingly. Reports of those kinds of shenanigans were in the papers every day. Must be a hell of a temptation to Jane. K-Y jelly didn't come cheap. And then there were all those expensive suits in the closet, and that very nice bank balance. Well, there had been.

But, Kate had decided, along with everything else, Johnny didn't need to see his mother go to jail for bribery. Not yet, anyway. When he was older, maybe. If in future Jane started harassing Jack and Johnny again, Kate would have to rethink her decision. For now, she let it lie. "Did you arrest the brunette?" she said, without much interest. "What is her name, anyway?"

"Myra. Myra Randall Wisdon Hunt Banner King. Randall was her maiden name. Wisdon was her first husband, storekeeper in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Hunt was a banker in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Banner was a wildcatter out of Lubbock, Texas. While he was out drilling dusters, she ran off with King, all the way to Alaska."

"Goodness me."

"Yeah, she'd been working her way up the food chain for a quite a while."

"Any of her husbands survive her besides King?" "What a suspicious broad you are," he said comfortably. "Yes. They all did. The stakes were never high enough for murder before King."

"Will King testify that he heard her say she admitted to killing Enakenty?" "So far, he says yes. We'll see what he says when we get to trial. Right now he's mad. Later on he'll see how foolish he looks, and realize how little he's going to enjoy sitting up in court and testifying to it."

"You're such a cynic."

"Trust but verify," he replied. "Morgan's Fifth Law." "I thought it was the Sixth."

"Whatever. At any rate, we've got her cold on attempted murder on you, so she'll be spending some time as a guest of the state."

"She going to roll on Dischner?"

"Already has. The problem is we only have her word to go on, and it ain't gonna be worth much in court against Dischner."

"I don't doubt Dischner will be indicted," Kate said. "Tried is another story."

"The loose lug nuts," Jack said, "the trashed house, the drive-by, all those have the earmarks of a summa cum laude graduate of the Dischner School of Not Guilty by Reason of an Expensive Lawyer."

"No argument here."

"He has defended some lowlifes some say even mob connected lowlifes At least his firm has. He must have contracted out for the job."

"No argument here, either."

"But we'll probably never know who to. He's too smart for that." Jack sighed. "He'll walk again, won't he, that son-of-a-bitch." The words were spoken with only a trace of bitterness. They might fail of indicting Eddie P. this time, but there'd be another chance before long, and Jack wasn't going anywhere. "What about the UCo contracts? Can the new board prove kickbacks?"

"They've got about ten different accountants and lawyers looking into it now. I put them on to Gamble, to see if they can scare up some racketeering charges. You might get Dischner yet."

"Maybe." Jack sounded about as convinced of that as Kate felt. "What happens with Iqaluk now?"

"It looks like it's going federal."

"Which way?" "That," Kate said, "is in the laps of the gods. Billy Mike promised me that he and the board will lobby that it be made a national park. The Raven board says they will, too."

"You don't sound too sure."

"I'm not. King swore he'd bag the operation but the word will get out, it's inevitable, and as soon as people know there's oil there there'll be another fight between the greenies and the oil producers and the state and the Natives, just like ANWR all over again." The prospect was not a pleasing one. Still, Ekaterina had never shirked her duty, and Kate would not shirk hers.

My life is changing, she thought.

The prospect did not fill her with anticipation.

"Will you be in the fight?"

She pondered his question, and the memory of that podium flashed through her mind, on stage in front of a room full of a crowd of cheering people. It was quickly succeeded by a vision of Iqaluk, glacier and stream, mountain and river, lakes and shore. The air was still clear, the water still ran clean. It had to stay that way. It had to. "I think I might have to be," she said slowly. "Dan O'Brian said he would help.

Give me pointers on dealing with the bureaucrats, like that."

"He want Iqaluk for the Park?"

She laughed a little. "If Dan O'Brian had his druthers the whole state would be a federal park."

"It'll be a long fight, Kate."

"Years," she agreed. "A lifetime, even. But for now, while it's in limbo, Iqaluk is safe."

They watched the moon emerge from behind Angqaq, bathing the mountains and valley in pale light. It was cold, and getting colder, and he shivered inside his jacket. "About time to go in?"

"In a while."

"You seem--" He hesitated.

"What?"

"I don't know. Awfully calm?"

She sat up and looked at him. "Would you feel better if I gnashed my teeth and tore my skin and ripped my hair out at the roots?"

"No, that's okay, but thanks for thinking of me."

"It doesn't work like that, Jack."

"I guess I don't get just how it does work," he said apologetically. She was silent, trying to think how to say it. It was some thing she felt so deeply it was hard to explain with mere words. "I can't be sad, Jack.

She's with me, right here, right now. Here--" she touched her temple

"--in my head, and here--" she touched her breast "--in my heart, and here--" she touched her stomach "--in my gut. Emaa lives on inside me, and in every other person she ever touched. While we live, she lives.

"She's in every rock and tree in the Park. She's in the water we drink.

She's in the air we breathe.

"She'll be in every flake of snow that falls, all the winter long.

"She'll come up the river with the first salmon in the spring.

"She'll be on board every seiner that puts out to sea in the summer.

"She'll be on the foothills with the berry pickers in the fall.

"She'll always be here, Jack. I can't be sad she's gone, when she never left in the first place."

He could not speak, could only wrap his arms around her and hold on for as long as he could, for as long as she would let him.

After a while she pulled back and smiled at him, touching his cheek in a brief caress. "Go in now, okay? I want to sit out here alone for a while."

He went, the door to the cabin shutting softly behind him. Mutt stayed with Kate, her shoulder warm and solid against Kate's knee.

From the seat on the rock by the creek, they watched the moon make its dignified progress across the sky, trailing a veil of quicksilver, star-studded light behind it that turned the mountains into monuments of marble, and the long valley into a gleaming shell of mother-of-pearl. what's that you do with the leaky eye? says the Woman Who Keeps the Tides. It is time, you said so yourself.

I know, says Calm Water's Daughter, but it is so hard on the left behinds. I can't help feeling sorry for them.

Maybe if we, says The Woman Who Keeps the Tides.

No, says Calm Water's Daughter.

What's the point of being us if we can't help? says The Woman Who Keeps the Tides.

Look at the larger picture, says Calm Water's Daughter. Are we myth or marketing? Were we born or made?

Sometimes I just don't understand you, says The Woman Who Keeps the Tides.

Hello, says a new voice.

Oh, it's you, says The Woman Who Keeps the Tides. You're late.

I'm sorry. There seemed to be some problem with my credentials.

Well, really, says The Woman Who Keeps the Tides. They let the scaff and raff from the Mediterranean run wild all over the place. We'll just see about that.

How are you? says Calm Water's Daughter.

I feel a little, I don't know, dizzy?

Don't worry, says Calm Water's Daughter. That first step is the hardest one, Everybody Talks to Her.

Call me emaa, She says. That's all \ '

Dana Stabenow is the author of the Kate Shugak mystery series---A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, Dead in the Water, A Cold-Blooded Business, Play with Fire, and Blood Will Tell--each of which brings to life a different aspect of the Alaskan experience. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.