her shoulder slightly to Bernie. He drifted down to the other end of the
bar. She drank. "What kind of business?"
"Import-export," he said. "And you?"
"Oh, I homestead about twenty-five miles from here., I'm Kate Shugak, by
the way. And you?"
He took her hand. "Johnny Wu. Live here year round,; do you? How long?"
"I was born here."
"Really. That's interesting."
"How about you? How long have you lived in Hawaii?" "Maybe you can help
me," he replied, either not hearing or ignoring her question. "I'm
looking for someone."
"Well, I know pretty much everyone in the Park. Who do you want?"
"It's a woman, name of Lisa Getty."
Kate felt a frisson of awareness run up her spine. "Lisa Getty?"
"Yes. A ... mutual friend gave me her name, said she was the best guide
in the Park."
"Lisa Getty is dead," Kate said bluntly. The smile was wiped from his
face, and she congratulated herself inwardly that her cop's eye was
still in. "Didn't you hear about the massacre?"
"Massacre? What massacre?"
"A week, week and a half ago. Some Park rat went nuts with a 30.06. Lisa
Getty was one of the victims."
"Jesus," Wu said.
"Sorry to have to be the one to tell you," she said. "You know Lisa
yourself?"
"No," he muttered, his face pale, grabbing his beer. "I never met her
personally." He tilted the bottle up and gulped thirstily.
"I do some guiding myself, in season," Kate offered. "Maybe we could
work something out. You didn't say what you were after-bear? Did Lisa
organize you a permit?"
He smiled, a sick smile, and set the empty bottle down. "Thanks anyway.
This whole thing is pretty pretty shocking. I think I'll-" He got off
his bar stool without finishing his sentence and picked up his bag.
"You need a place to stay?"
He shook his head and went to the door. Kate watched him go, a
thoughtful expression on her face, and turned back to the bar to find
Bernie watching her. "What?" she said.
"Nothing." "You hear all that?" "Most of it."
"Seen him around before?"
Bernie was silent for a moment. Finally he said, "Not him, no."
She paused in the act of raising her glass and stared at him over the
rim. His expression was bland. "Right," she said finally and drank. "See
you."
"I wonder where you're going."
Her eyes narrowed. "No, you don't."
She stood up just as the door to the back room opened and, to Kate's
dumb amazement, a group of belly dancers came out. One of them was in
full regalia, all diaphanous
gauze and jingling gold coins, laughing eyes above a sheer veil. A
second dancer in bikini bra and jeans struck a tambourine, a third in
shorts and a tank top blew on a flute, and a collective whoop went up
around the house.
Kate looked at Bernie, open-mouthed. He grinned at her expression and
gave a deprecating shrug. The dancers began to shimmy, and the
congregation deserted their pastor and the mushers their map to join the
climbers and the other miscellaneous drinkers in a shouting circle that
beat time with their hands. Only the quiltters stayed where they were,
plying needles and tongues with equal intensity. Kate shook her head in
disbelief and made for the door, passing near the quiltters on her way out.
"So did she divorce him?"
her."
"They do say ..." "What?"
"What do they say?" "What, Darlene?"
"Well," Darlene said, leaning forward and dropping her voice, "you know
they found him floating at the bottom of the ramp ...
"Yes, yes?"
"Someone said they saw her down there, too, that morning."
"No!" The door closed behind Kate. Blinking as her eyes
adjusted from the gloom of the bar to the bright light of the afternoon,
she saw Leonard and Amos sitting together at the top of the stairs,
playing scissors-paper-stone. As she watched, Leonard lost and took a
wallop on his upper arm
from Amos's clenched fist. Kate took careful aim with one booted foot
and kicked them both down the stairs.
She climbed on the Super Jag as they were picking themselves up out of
the snow, motioned Mutt up behind her, and left.
Lisa Getty's bowpicker was racked up above the high tide mark, side by
side with thirty others, all waiting for the ice to go out of the river
before their hulls could hit water.
It was a thirty-two foot bowpicker with a bare, stainless-steel reel in
the bow and a square, squatty cabin that filled up the stern. Between
them was the hold, covered over in wooden deck planking. In appearance
it had much in common with the Getty's homestead, as it was messy but in
good repair, and clean if not neat. There were old tracks of a very
small boot in the thin layer of crusting snow on deck. Kate climbed
aboard and began to pull up the deck planks-long, onebytwelvebytwelves
laid side by side across the inner lip of the holding tank. Mutt wagged
her tail encouragingly from her comfortable seat on the mat in front of
the cabin door.
It was noon, and the sun was shining, and Kate was sweating before she
had enough planks up to climb down into the hold.
She surfaced some twenty minutes later, puzzled. The hold was empty,
without a net, corkline, leadline or buoy to be found. She'd even pried
up the floorboards and checked the bilge. Bone dry from a winter in dry
dock, it, too, was empty, from stem to stern.
She replaced the floorboards and straightened, groaning a little when
her back creaked in protest. "It has to be here if it's anywhere," she
told Mutt.
"Woof," Mutt agreed without moving.
"You're a big help." Putting both hands flat on the lip of the hatch,
Kate lifted herself up and over into a sitting position at the hatch's
edge. Her legs dangling in the hold, she turned her face up into the
sun, closed
her eyes and thought out loud. "When we were kids, Lisa never left all
her stuff in one place. She had toys stashed in hidey-holes all over-in
the tent we pitched up the hill in back of her parents' house, in the
tree house we built in the cottonwood in Big Monkey-Land down on Humpy
Creek, on her dad's boat, in her uncle's cache, in her locker at school,
hell, in her desk at school. She spread things around; she always did.
If she was growing dope at home, ten to one she was selling what she
poached out of somewhere else. Besides, at home there was Lottie, who I
know for a fact disapproves of flying and shooting the same day, never
mind shooting at something on the endangered species list. She'd
probably have turned Lisa in herself, if she'd caught her at it." Kate
paused. "If she'd caught her at it." She looked down at Mutt, who stared
solemnly back. "Anyway, the boat was in town and closer to hand. Closer
to the airstrip, for that matter, and to planes headed out of the Park."
Mutt rested her chin on her forepaws and prepared to be patient.
Somewhere down the
beach a couple of sea gulls raised their voices in
raucous dispute, a crow cawed mockingly from overhead, a slight breeze
rustled through the alders crowded against the high water mark. That
same breeze lifted the wisps of hair escaping from Kate's single braid.
A hammer beat rhythmically against a metal surface, paused, resumed. The
ice in the river shifted and cracked over the gray, thickly silted water
beneath. As the brims of ice-cap glaciers dissolved in the warmer
temperatures of the ever-increasing daylight, as the winter's snowpack
melted, the runoff filled the streams and creeks and poured into
tributaries and from them into the Kanuyaq. Daily, the volume and speed
of the river increased, and would soon peel the caked, cracked rind of
winter from the river's surface, sweeping it downstream, into Prince
William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska and out to
sea, leaving behind a new, swelling, rushing skin of pearlescent gray, a
living, gleaming, 250-mile ribbon adorning the awakening landscape of
the Park, fecund with the promise of spring and the first run of salmon.
There is nothing tentative or uncertain about the coming of spring in
the Arctic; it does not creep in unannounced. It marches in at the head
of an invading army, all flags flying, brass brand playing, soldiers at
present arms and knee-deep in ticker tape and cheers. Suddenly and with
all her heart Kate longed to be home, back at the homestead, to
participate in the rambunctious toss and jostle as breakup elbowed its
way into the Park. The trunks of the birches were dark with the
subdermal flow of sap; the scab of ice on Silver Creek at the foot of
the ravine in back of her cabin was breaking off in larger and larger
chunks; the Quilak Mountains were shrugging out of their winter coats
and striding bare-breasted into spring. Away from it for twenty-four
hours, she missed home with an aching intensity that brought a rueful smile
of self-acknowledgment.
"Maybe Jack's right and I am just a hermit at heart," she told Mutt. She
should have gotten on with her search.
Instead she stretched out on the deck, burrowed her head into Mutt's
furry side and let the sun pour down over her.
A half hour later a sudden chill woke her from a light doze. She
shivered and sat up, blinking. A tumble of cumulus clouds elbowed its
way up out of the southeast horizon, jostling for position between Kate
and the sun. "See that," she said, slapping Mutt affectionately on the
flank, "a cloud comes over the sunlit arch, a wind comes off a frozen
peak and you're all at once back in the middle of March. The poet was
right."
She rose to her feet and stretched her arms over her head, yawning. "I
suppose I should check the cabin, although I can't imagine Lisa'd be
dumb enough to leave anything right where some drunked-up teenager
vandalizing dry-docked boats on a dare could stumble across it. But if
Wu's in the Park, the stuff's got to be somewhere."
Still half-asleep, she grappled with the hasp, upon which Lisa had not
bothered herself to install a pad lock. Sliding the little door to one
side, she took a step forward, tripped over an unstowed boat hook and
fell headlong through the cabin door.
Which was a very good thing, since the shooter hunkered down in the
clump of alders at the head of the beach chose that very moment to
squeeze off a shot in her direction.
The sharp report echoed across the expanse of sand and gravel and ice.
Something nudged the side of Kate's head, and something warm began to
flow down over the right side of her face and drip off her chin. She
fell hard and loose, hitting her shoulder against the edge of the bunk
built into the back of the cabin. Her head started to hurt. She raised a
hand and touched it, and saw that the liquid was blood. All the strength
seemed to go out of her limbs and a smothering wave of darkness rose up
and overwhelmed her.
When she woke, her eyelids seemed stuck together. It took her a moment
to get them open. Her cheek was pressed against a hard surface and
seemed also to be stuck there. Someone was rubbing a rough, wet
washcloth over her face. A dog whined, and she stirred. She knew that
whine, and memory returned in a sudden rush. "Mutt?" Her hands fumbled
around for purchase and she pushed up. The skin of her cheek pulled off
the floor with a sticky sound.
At her side, Mutt whined anxiously. She licked Kate again.
Her head was pounding. Kate raised a shaky hand and investigated. Where
the bullet had plowed across her temple there was a shallow wound a
half-inch wide and two inches long. Blood must have drained from it into
her eyes and down the right side of her face and into the collar of her
shirt. The smell of blood was everywhere, but the area around the wound
seemed cleaner than the rest of her. Mutt whined again, her muzzle
thrust directly in Kate's face, her yellow eyes round and anxious, and
licked her cheek yet again.
"okay," Kate muttered, holding her off, "head wounds always bleed like
hell. Get fixed up in a minute. okay, girl, take it easy." With hands
seemingly too swollen to perform even the most simple task, she fumbled
around in her pockets for a kerchief. It took what felt like forever to
find one, and when she did, it took another forever to fold it and bind
it around her forehead. Reaching up over the edge of the tiny sink,
praying that the water tank wasn't empty, she was rewarded by a thin
stream of cool water. She splashed some on her face, a scant handful at
a time. Blinking her eyes clear, she inched over to the door and peered
up over the sill.
Outside, the sky had cleared again, and the sun seemed to have dropped
like a golden stone into a pale blue pond, cumulus ripples spreading out
to the very edge of the horizon. Kate blinked again and realized it was
coming up on sunset. She must have been out for hours. She could see
nothing out of the ordinary, hear nothing out of the ordinary. No one
had come running, so the hammerer had not heard the shot and was long
since gone. From the town up the bank and beyond the trees smoke rose
from chimneys in peaceful white wisps. Even the gulls were silent.
Leaning back, Kate looked around the cabin and found a knit watch cap of
navy blue. With the cap over the end of the boat hook that had tripped
her up, she poked them both out the door of the bowpicker's cabin, very
slowly. Mutt, still on her feet with her eyes fixed unwaveringly on
Kate's face, didn't move.
The cap crept up over the sill, the level of the deck, the railing.
Nothing. No sound, no movement, nobody shooting.
Kate swung the boat hook back and, swinging it with both hands, threw
the cap across the deck into the bow. Still nothing.
The boat hook fell clattering to the deck. Whoever the shooter had been,
they were gone now. Kate lay where she was and shook for a while. She
felt she'd earned it.
After a moment she remembered there was something she was supposed to
do. Groaning, she pulled herself up by the edge of the bun
k, raising
herself to her feet to begin the search. Hampered by the dimming light,
her pounding head, and having to do most of it by touch, nevertheless it
didn't take long to find what she was looking for. In the locker mounted
on the bulkhead above the bunk, hidden behind the canned goods, she
found a creased paper bag with the top folded down. Inside were half a
dozen greenish-yellow, wizened-up little bags of what seemed to be dried
meat. She put the bag to one side to rummage further. Not for a moment
did she believe she had found all there was to find, and proved herself
right almost immediately.
She pulled back the mattress and knocked against the sheet of plywood