Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

It had been a bitter cold ride in and she could use a warm-up, so she followed him down the passageway to the kitchen and sat down at the table opposite him.

"So what's your name?" he said, getting a plate of French toast and bacon from the oven.

"Kate," she said. "Kate Shugak."

His fork stopped halfway to his mouth. "Kate Shugak," he said.

"Yeah. Where you from?"

He shrugged, and the fork continued its upward motion. "Outside." He grinned again, although this time it seemed to lack its previous warmth. "I understand that's what I'm supposed to say."

She registered a slight tingling of her Spidey sense. She shrugged, watching his face. "It's what you can say."

He cocked his head a little. "Meaning if I do, I must be hiding something?"

She surprised both of them by laughing, a rough husk of amusement that by the appreciative gleam in his eye he found as attractive as the rest of her. "If you aren't, you'd be the only cheechako in the Park who isn't." She added, "And maybe the only one in Alaska." She looked at him, her face a genial mask. "How long you been here?"

"Couple months now."

"You like it?"

He mopped up the last of the syrup with the last piece of French toast and pointed it at her. "I'll tell you, Kate," he said, "I fucking love it. I've never seen a place with more opportunities to make a buck. Like I'm headed out on a snow machine trip today, up and down the river with my boss going to the villages to talk to the people about the mine, and I get overtime for that. Man." He laughed. "I like it all right. I got a warm place to sleep, plenty to eat, and"-he winked at her-"I'm making new friends every day. A man can get ahead here. Yeah," he said, regarding his forkful of food with a satisfaction that verged on complacency, "I fucking love it here. I'm going to stay forever."

Or at least long enough to make enough money so he could spend the rest of his life deep-sea fishing in Manzanillo, Kate thought. "You're what we call a boomer," she said.

He looked quizzical. "Baby boomer, you mean?"

"No. Just a boomer. Somebody who comes to Alaska to make good, and who does very well."

His smile hardened momentarily, only to return at double wattage. "Nothing wrong with a man making a good living."

"Nothing at all," she said cordially.

She agreed with him too easily and he didn't trust her response, which proved he wasn't entirely stupid. Still, he was incapable of stopping his eyes from drifting down over her. They lingered on her chest for a moment, and then jerked back up, to the thin, white scar that bisected her throat. He looked at her face, and back at the scar. He opened his mouth to say something else when Auntie Vi slammed in the kitchen door. She saw Kate and stopped in her tracks. "Katya."

"Auntie." Kate rose. "Something we need to talk about, Auntie. Auntie Vi snorted. "You talk. I work." She filled the thermos she carried full of hot coffee.

"Great breakfast, Vi," Gallagher said heartily. "I don't know when I've eaten a better one."

Auntie Vi looked at him and snorted again. "You pay for what you get here." She slammed out again. Kate didn't move fast enough and almost got her nose caught in the door. She heard Gallagher chuckle behind her.

Kate found Auntie Vi mending gear in the net loft, a room over her garage that was insulated and Sheetrocked but unpainted. Heat came from a small Toyo stove, and the radio was on and currently tuned in to Park Air. Bobby's voice was transmuted by digital wizardry from its usual sonic boom to a more intimate and somehow sexier rumble, a velvet rasp of sound that made you listen whether you wanted to or not. NPR had missed out when they hadn't recruited Bobby Clark to replace Bob Edwards on Morning Edition. Of course, Bobby could be just a trifle more incendiary than Bob. "Okay, all you tree-hugging, bunny-loving, granola-eating, Birkenstock-wearing Naderites, this one's for you," he said, "the only song worth a greenie shit," followed by the seductive opening licks of Three Dog Night's "Out in the Country." Bobby, Kate thought, was the living embodiment of Emerson's dictum that a foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds.

Drift nets were heaped in orderly piles all over the floor, the one currently undergoing repair draped over a couple of sawhorses. Auntie Vi sat on a straight-backed wooden chair, head bent over hands wielding a hand-carved bone needle with unerring dexterity, translucent green monofilament almost magically assembling itself into a curtain of mesh whose individual cells were the exact size to snare a red salmon right behind the gills. "I'm busy," she said without looking up. "What you want?"

Okay, no point in not being equally blunt. "Howie Katelnikof told Jim Chopin that you and the other aunties hired someone to kill Louis Deem."

Auntie Vi didn't answer. The silence stretched out. Kate looked hard at the top of Auntie Vi's unresponsive head. "Auntie, did you hear me?"

"Nothing wrong with my ears."

Kate began to feel a slow burn. "Anything you'd like to say about it?" Mutt, standing next to her, moved a pace forward, putting a firm shoulder in between the two women.

"What to say?"

"Oh, I don't know," Kate said. "How about, Howie's full of shit? How about, Howie's trying to buy his way out of getting caught with a commercial load of caribou taken out of season? How about, Howie's a little weasel who'd sell out his own mother to stay out of jail? I'm wide open for suggestions here."

"Howie got no mother."

Kate looked at Auntie Vi's bent head with a dawning horror. "Jesus Christ, Auntie. Is it true?"

"Howie say who we suppose to hired?"

There was a short, charged silence. "No," Kate said. "Not yet."

Auntie Vi finished mending one hole and put down the needle to shake the cramp out of her fingers. "Tell something to me, Katya." She looked up for the first time, and Kate almost fell back a step from the anger she saw there.

"What you do, Katya? Tell me what you do. Louis Deem monster. Monster," she said again, with emphasis, making it clear. "Liar. Thief. Murderer. Murder three wives. Three. Jessie. Ruthie. Mary. All dead, by his hand. Everybody know this, Katya. And nobody do nothing."

"Not nothing, Auntie," Kate said. "Not nothing. He was brought to trial twice."

Auntie Vi dismissed this with a contemptuous wave of her hand.

Her button black eyes burned and her face was flushed. "What that matter? They let him go. You always let him go, Katya." She looked straight at Kate. "You always let him go." "Auntie, I-"

"Then he hurt those two girls. Those two babies. That one she comes to me crying her eyes out. She beg me for help. What do we do, Katya? You tell me. What do we do?"

Kate tried to say something and failed.

"What you do, Katya?" Auntie Vi said, and the resentment in her voice was as unmistakable as it was flaying. "What do you do?"

She took up the needle again and reached for the next hole in the gear.

Kate stood there, shocked, speechless.

"Working here," Auntie Vi said. "You bother me. Go."

Kate went.

Outside, she was just in time to see Gallagher and Macleod loading up their snow machines.

Macleod looked up and gave her a warm smile. "Kate," she said.

Kate made a heroic effort and managed a civil reply. "I hear you're making a trip downriver."

Macleod nodded. "Down first, one day in each village, back and overnight here, and then up to Ahtna, same."

"Spreading the gospel according to Global Harvest Resources Inc.," Kate said.

Macleod shrugged, unfazed by Kate's less than enthusiastic tone. "I told Global Harvest that if they wanted a successful operation they'd better get to know the neighbors."

"The 'Burbs know you're coming?"

"Oh yeah," Macleod said. "We've got town meetings set up everywhere we're stopping, and someplace warm to lay our heads every night. People have been pretty welcoming."