Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

The snow machine nosed down the narrow track, which went in about a mile before ending in a large clearing. There was a small, neat house, a cache on stilts, and a couple of outbuildings. Next to one of these was a D6 Caterpillar tractor, yellow body and ten-foot steel blade. Kate recognized it immediately, as some years back she'd had occasion to employ it as a means of resolving a chronic property dispute between the Jeppsens and the Kreugers. It would have wrung Mac's heart to see it sitting out in the weather. He'd always taken good care of his equipment. It was one of his few discernible virtues.

She pulled up to the house and killed the engine. Mutt hopped down and Kate dismounted as the door opened. A man stood in the doorway squinting out at the morning light, tall, balding, suspenders holding up his Carhartts, T-shirt stained with coffee and what looked like egg, worn leather mocs on his feet.

"Mr. Sheldon?" Kate said, without moving, because he was also holding a bolt-action.30-06. He wasn't aiming it anywhere in particular and she wasn't going to give him cause to do so. She hoped.

"Yeah?"

"I'm Kate Shugak, Mr. Sheldon. I'm a Park rat like yourself, live about thirty miles the other direction, off the road to Ahtna."

"I've heard of you." The rifle remained held loosely in front of him. "What do you want?"

"I need to talk to you. Okay if I come in?"

He seemed about to refuse, and then Mutt trotted up and looked at him with wide eyes and alert ears. "Nice-looking dog. Got some wolf in her."

"Some. May I please come in and talk to you, Mr. Sheldon?"

He shrugged and stepped back. "Sure, I guess. If you want."

She waited until he set the rifle in a corner before stepping into the kitchen, where unwashed dishes were piled high in the sink and more were spread on table and countertop, along with silverware, cutlery, and pots and pans. There was the sour smell of moldering food in the air, probably emanating from the gnawed-looking haunch of caribou sitting on the table, and dirt crunched underfoot.

"Sorry about the mess," Sheldon said. "My wife's away."

There was a propane cooker and a woodstove with a kettle on top. He moved the kettle to the cooker and turned the burner underneath on high, produced a jar of Sanka and another of creamer and a bowl of sugar crusted around the rim from countless wet spoons dipping into it. The kettle boiled almost immediately and Sheldon used his arm in a sweeping movement to shove everything on the table to one side and set out heavy white mugs and Fig Newtons in a tattered plastic sleeve. Kate doctored her coffee, sipped it, and took a bite of a cookie. She fed the rest to a bright-eyed Mutt sitting alertly at her side.

Hospitality satisfied, Sheldon said, "What's this about?" His face looked hollowed out, his eyes bruised. His thinning hair looked as if it hadn't been combed in a week or washed in a month. He hadn't shaved in a while, either, and his fingernails were grimed with dirt. He spoke in a monotone, without life or hope.

"I think you know, sir."

"Do I?"

Kate made her voice as gentle as possible. "I understand your son was killed this fall."

His head snapped up and he stared at her. His eyes reddened and filled with tears. "Shit," he said, rubbing them with the back of his hand. "Shit. You'd think after all this time…" He dropped his hand and glared at her. "What's that got to do with you?"

"I understand it was an accident," Kate said. "The Cat turned over on him."

"Accident my ass," Sheldon said, firing up, "that fucker Devlin sold me that Cat when he knew the track was about to fall apart. My boy took it out to work on the creek out back, been showing some color. He thought he might pick up a few nuggets, maybe pay for his tuition, price of gold what it is…" His voice trailed away as the energy drained out of him again. "Killed him, that piece of shit Cat did." He looked at Kate again but the glare was gone. "Devlin sold me a defective piece of equipment. Should have known when he let it go so cheap. Should have looked it over more careful." His head drooped. "Should never have let Roger drive it."

"Is that why you killed him, Mr. Sheldon? Is that why you shot Mac Devlin in the back?"

His head came up again and they stared at each other, the silence stretching out between them, pulling tighter and tighter, until he seemed to realize that he'd left his answer too long.

"You were hunting caribou up back of Suulutaq with Howie Katelnikof and Martin Shugak," Kate said. "Mac went out to the Global Harvest trailer, probably to steal what he could and trash the rest. You saw him on your way out. Followed him. Shot him in the back as he was going inside. That the way it happened?"

He was still staring at her. "Was Roger your only son, Mr. Sheldon?"

He blinked, and looked down at the table, his eye lighting on something. He stretched out a hand possessed of a fine trembling and pulled it out of the mess. "Yes," he said, looking at it. "He was our only child."

He handed it to her. It was a photograph of three people, a man barely recognizable as the one sitting in front of her now, not much younger but healthy and happy. The woman was attractively plump, and they were both looking adoringly at the third person in the photo, a gangly young man with a large Adam's apple and silverrimmed glasses perched on a hawk beak of a nose identical to the one on the face before her.

"I'm very sorry," she said, handing the photograph back.

"Me, too," he said.

"You didn't go out there meaning to kill Mac Devlin, did you, Mr. Sheldon?"

"I didn't even know he was going to be there." Sheldon spoke in a dreary tone. "Martin told me they could use an extra hand with the caribou, and I'm a good butcher. They were going to pay me in meat, so I said I would. He told me to come out a day after them, so they'd have some shot and gutted and ready for me to work on. So I did." He turned blind eyes toward the window, the only source of light in the room. "It was like you said. I saw that bastard Devlin at the trailer." He shrugged. "I had my rifle with me." He picked up the photograph again. "Seemed the right thing to do at the time."

She sat in silence with him for some minutes, before getting to her feet. "I'll have to take your rifle in, Mr. Sheldon," she said. "Give it to the trooper in Niniltna. I expect he'll be out here in the next day or so."

He nodded. "Good. Give me a chance to clean up the place." He looked around. "Although I don't know what for. Nobody going to be living here now."

It about killed her to drive off and leave him there, alone with his ghosts.

It snowed for Christmas, dry, fluffy flakes that piled up fast, twenty-eight inches in eighteen hours. Christmas Day dawned clear and cold, a beautiful morning. "Let's ski over to Mandy's after dinner," Kate said.

"Deal," Johnny said.

They even had a tree, small enough for one string of lights and a few bright ornaments, and topped with a tiny Eskimo doll in an exquisitely hand-worked sealskin kuspuk and mukluks that Annie Mike had given all the board members for Christmas. They'd agreed on the rules beforehand. There would be no singing of carols, no recitation of the Christmas story, and each of them was allowed to give the other only one gift. Kate gave Johnny a leather-bound atlas of Middle-earth, elaborately illustrated and annotated, and Jim the four-book memoir by Gerald Durrell about growing up on Corfu between the World Wars, first editions Rachel had found for her on the Internet. Johnny gave Jim a Leatherman, the new Skeletool model. He gave Kate one, too. Jim gave Johnny a small telescope, an Astro-Venture 90mm, with its own spotting scope. "Your math better be up to this," he told him, "because mine isn't."