Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

He went in the cabin first and surprised Ms. Petroff in the act of lighting the gas lantern. “Oh!” she said, and knocked the lantern off the table. Liam caught it before it hit the floor. Ms. Petroff made an abortive attempt to reach the door, and only subsided when she saw Wy standing there.

“Sit down, Ms. Petroff,” Liam said, taking her firmly by one arm and guiding her to a chair at the table. Wy came in and closed the door behind her, and Liam finished lighting the lamp. He turned it up all the way, filling the little room with a warm radiance. He hung it from the hook and they both turned to look at the girl.

She was sitting with her elbows on the table and her face in her hands. The scarf was looped around her neck. “You lied to me, Ms. Petroff,” Liam said, his voice implacable. “I asked you where Erik Berglund’s cabin was and you said you didn’t know.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, and dropped her hands, revealing a tear-stained face. She sat back and folded her hands in her lap. “Yes, sir, I did.”

“Why?”

She swallowed. “I didn’t want you to know I knew.”

“Because I’d have questions you don’t want to answer.”

She closed her eyes. “Yes, sir.”

“Did you have a relationship with Erik Berglund, Ms. Petroff?”

She bit her lip and another tear slid down her cheek. “Yes.”

“Where were you between Monday night at ten and two a.m. Tuesday morning?”

Her eyes flew open. “What?”

“Where were you between—”

“Stop!” she shouted. It was the first loss of self-possession Liam had observed in her. “Just stop. I didn’t kill Erik. I was nowhere near his dig that night or even that day. My aunt and uncle had a family picnic on the beach and we were out there until after sunset.” She let out a long, shuddering sigh. “Yes, I had a relationship with Erik, but it’s not what you think.”

“What was it, then?”

“He—” She twisted her hands together. “He was my father.”

They stared at her, speechless.

She’d taken an online genealogy course because she’d thought it would be fun if she constructed a family tree for her parents’ anniversary. When the instructor suggested all the students take a DNA test from 23andMe, she didn’t hesitate. When the results came back, she didn’t believe them, and submitted a second sample, which came back the same.

Alexei Petroff wasn’t her father.

What felt even weirder was that she was half white. She had been raised as a full-blooded Sugpiaq. It was how she was down in the tribal register.

She had confronted her mother, who had confirmed this unwelcome news but wouldn’t tell Sally who her birth father was. Alexei, her mother said, didn’t know.

Liam thought of the barely repressed rage he’d observed in Alexei and wondered if that was true. Sally Petroff unconsciously confirmed that feeling when she said, “I don’t know if she’s right about that. Dad always treated me a little differently than my brothers. I thought it was because I was a girl and they were boys. Dad’s a really traditional guy and he’s all about the men doing the providing and the women catering to them. He was mad at me when I decided to go away to school.”

Pissed at losing all that unpaid domestic help, Wy thought, and was immediately ashamed of herself. A traditional lifestyle was why Alaska Natives had survived millennia in some of the most difficult natural conditions on earth, and there was no call to disrespect the people who still lived by those precepts. Their traditions were responsible for the existence of the Yupiq part of her DNA. She had been raised by white adoptive parents and she had never lived a traditional lifestyle, and while she might have written off her relatives in Ik’iki’ka she knew what she owed the people who came before them.

Besides, Alexei might have been angry but he hadn’t forbidden his daughter to leave the village. He could have, and he could have made it stick, too.

“There’s an online database that collates DNA samples. Even if the DNA of the person you’re looking for isn’t in it, sometimes you can trace them through the DNA of a relative of theirs whose is.”

Erik had a second cousin in the database, and the connection was made.

“It took me a long time to find him. He was in eastern Africa, working for UNESCO. I wrote to him. The next thing I knew he was here, in Blewestown.”

“This was in June?”

She nodded. “He wrote to me that he was here. I told my mother. She was really angry, and she told me if I told Dad that she would never forgive me.” She wiped her face dry with her hands and met Liam’s eyes. “Erik told me Mom never told him about me. He never even knew I existed, that he had a child. He told me he came back to the Bay to meet me, for us to get to know each other. I didn’t transfer down here until a month ago, like I told you, but he would drive to Anchorage once a week and we would meet for a meal or a walk. When I moved back to the Bay, we would meet here and talk. That’s all. That’s really all.”

“That scarf.”

She touched it. “Erik brought it back from Africa for me.” Her lip trembled. It would be the only thing she ever received from the hands of her birth father. “I forgot it the last time I was here.”

“Do you think your mother told Alexei that Erik was your father?”

“She would never.”

“Do you think Erik told Alexei he was your father?”

“No!” This time she was shouting. “No, he didn’t. He promised, and I believed him. Nobody told Dad anything, not Mom, not Erik, not me.” She sniffled, and Wy looked around for Kleenex and settled for a paper towel. Sally mopped her eyes and blew her nose and crumpled the towel between her hands. “We talked about it. Erik didn’t want to meet in secret.” Her lips trembled into a smile. “He was proud of me. Proud that he had a daughter. I think I—” Her voice broke. “I think I could have loved him. If we’d had time, maybe we could have made Dad understand.”

And now all she had left was a scarf and a dead hero to worship. No substitute for a living, breathing father, even if Sally’s mother had treated him as nothing more than a sperm donor. “When was the last time you saw Erik?”

“Sunday. I came up in the morning with doughnuts and coffee. He wanted me to come down to the dig. He said he’d used the dig as an excuse, something he could pretend to work at so he could stay here and see me. He said that he’d found something unexpected, something that would refute prior studies and add to the history of the Sugpiaq in the Bay.”

“Did he tell you anything about his personal finances?” Liam held up a hand. “I’m not accusing you of anything, Ms. Petroff. I’m just trying to find a paper trail to inform my investigation, so I can find out who killed him.” He gestured at the table. “So far as I can tell he didn’t even have a checkbook.”

She sat down again and took a deep breath. “He didn’t have many possessions. He said when you spent time in places like east Africa, you understood how much we have that we don’t need. Clothes and food and shelter were necessities.” She glanced at the bookshelf and smiled a little. “He said books were a luxury he couldn’t do without. He said once he spent more money on books than everything else combined.”

“How did he pay for them?”

“When he was working for UNESCO, he said they paid him by wire deposit into his bank. He charged everything to his Visa card or paid with cash out of an ATM, and paid his bills with automated payment processing through his checking account.” She smiled faintly. “No stamps, he said.” Her hand caressed the scarf again, gently, reverently. “I barely got to know him. Just a few months, and now he’s gone.” Her voice broke.