Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

  Active had known Dennis Johnson since they had both turned out for Youth Hockey at the outdoor rink at Muldoon Elementary School at age ten. He had been the only Eskimo on the team, Dennis the only black.

  Actually, as he had discovered the first time he went to Dennis’s house, his new friend was only semi-black, the son of a black father and a white mother. And Dennis, like his father, had married a white woman.

  Active had concluded, after some reflection and without ever mentioning it to Dennis, that the men of the Johnson clan must have decided to solve the race problem by turning the bloodline white. Dennis’s own little girl had a light olive complexion and wavy hair that could easily pass for Mediterranean.

  The dispatcher came back on the line. “He’s out on patrol. You want me to patch you through?”

  “No, just put me on his voicemail, will you?” There was a click and he listened to Dennis’s voice ask him to leave a message or press zero to talk to a dispatcher right away.

  “Hey, Slick,” he said after the beep. “How’d you like to track down a beauty queen? Look for a package in the mail.” That should get Dennis interested enough to at least scan the pictures and the report when they reached Anchorage.

  He hung up, typed up what he knew of Grace Palmer, and sent it to the office laser printer. He put three of the most recent pictures of the girl into a manila envelope, added the report, then sealed the package and addressed it to Dennis.

  He stacked the annuals on a table by the door, figuring he could take them to the high school the next time he left the office. But what about the rest of Jason Palmer’s pictures? Palmer hadn’t said anything about returning them. Active tossed them into a desk drawer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At noon, right on time, Lucy Generous looked up from her console to see Nathan come out of the stairwell and walk toward her dispatch station with that smile on his lips.

  “What’s for lunch?”

  “Tuna sandwiches, just like your naluaqmiut mother in Anchorage used to make,” she said with a smile of her own. “I won’t tell Martha if you won’t.”

  Nathan, she knew, was well aware of what they were having for lunch. She had been making the sandwiches that morning when he stopped to pick her up for work. He had watched as she sealed them in zip-locks and dropped them into a shopping bag with two Diet Pepsis and a big package of tortilla chips. It was a running joke between them, how Martha was trying to lure Nathan into the Chukchi lifestyle while Nathan clung stubbornly to his Anchorage habits, including the tuna sandwiches—with mayonnaise and a touch of mustard—they had for lunch at least once a week.

  As she pulled off her headset and lifted her coat from the back of her chair, she wondered if Nathan knew how serious this particular joke was. Every time she made him a tuna sandwich, she wasn’t just giving him food he liked—she was doing something for him that Martha wouldn’t do.

  She came out of the dispatcher’s booth and they left the Public Safety Building together. She wanted to take Nathan’s arm, but she knew he didn’t like that when he was in uniform. So she put her hands in the pockets of her coat until they reached his Suburban.

  She waited by the big side mirror while Nathan pulled out his keys and opened the passenger door. As usual, he had locked up the Trooper rig like a bank vault, even though it was within easy view of herself and several other public safety employees who worked on the ground floor.

  “Someday I’m going to catch you leaving something to chance.”

  Nathan looked at her and put on his most serious expression. “I could arrange that. What day would you like it to be?”

  She laughed, climbed in and reached across to unlock his door, thinking how much she loved their lunches. Especially on days like today, when they weren’t going to a restaurant, but would park on Beach Street in the spring sun and look out over Chukchi Bay as they ate their sandwiches and listened to the radio. At times like these, she could imagine that whatever it was they had would go on forever.

  Nathan climbed in, started the engine and pulled away from the Public Safety Building. He turned on the radio so they could catch Mukluk Messenger, the most popular program on KCHK.

  For the past few days, much of Chukchi had been avidly following a saga of love and betrayal threaded among the messages about grocery shipments, public hearings, church meetings, and flight schedules for the swarm of Bush planes that linked Chukchi to the surrounding villages.

  It seemed that one Harvey Salmon had left Chukchi and traveled up the Isignaq River by snowmachine for a spring ptarmigan hunt. But when the hunt was over, the ice of the river and of Chukchi Bay were too soft for a safe return.

  So Harvey had informed Margaret Salmon over Mukluk Messenger that he would leave the snowmachine with his cousin Charlie in Ebrulik for the summer and return to Chukchi by air charter the next day.

  But Harvey had slept in and missed his plane, according to his message on the second day, and would have to stay in Ebrulik another night or two until the next plane arrived.

  That had provoked a message from Margaret Salmon, inquiring in the most insinuating of terms why Harvey would be so tired as to oversleep, reminding him the same thing had happened the preceding spring, and ordering him not to miss the next plane. A second message from Margaret had suggested that someone identified only as “Shirley in Ebrulik” go to church and talk with God about what she had been doing in her “spare time.”

  But Harvey had indeed missed the next plane, this time explaining by message that he had to help his cousin work on a four-wheeler.

  Now, five days into the saga, came the latest message from Margaret: “To Harvey at Ebrulik: Coming down with Cowboy Decker this afternoon. You better be at the airport and Shirley hadn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be Harvey,” Nathan said as he stopped at a little pullout on Beach Street. The ice in front was so bright, it made her squint.

  “Or Shirley.” She opened the shopping bag and handed him a sandwich, then a Diet Pepsi. “That Margaret is real fat and she’s real mean. Before you came, she went to jail once for setting Harvey’s hair on fire with a Bic lighter.”

  “Did you see this with your own eyes?”

  She slugged him lightly in the side. “You always say that. Of course I didn’t see it myself. But everybody knows it’s true.”

  Nathan chuckled and shook his head, then took his sandwich out of the zip-lock and bit into it. A thoughtful look came over his face while she opened the tortilla chips and put the bag on the seat between them. “Did you ever know Grace Palmer?”

  “Grace Palmer?” She reached to switch off the radio, then changed her mind and pulled her hand back, hoping she didn’t look or sound as alarmed as she felt. “What about her? Did she come back?”

  Nathan gave her an odd look. “No, but her father asked if I … if the Troopers could find her. Her mother has cancer.”

  “Oh, yes, I heard that.” She was embarrassed by the relief she felt. She hoped he didn’t pick that up in her voice, either. “That poor family, so many troubles.”

  “I gather. So, did you ever know her?”

  “Gracie? Not really. She was a lot older than me, you know. She left high school before I went in. I just remember she was really pretty and the older girls all hated her. They called her bossy.”

  “Bossy?”

  “You know.” She tilted her nose into the air and tapped her chin from below with two fingers. “Always had to have her own way. Stuck-up.”

  “Stuck-up, huh?” Nathan sounded amused.

  “Yep, stuck-up.” She nodded, then stuck her nose into the air again and pushed out her lower lip and giggled. “Bossy.”

  “Well, did Miss Bossy Stuck-Up have a boyfriend who might know what happened to her?”

  She twisted in the seat to face him. “I don’t think so. I heard Jason Palmer never let his girls date much.”

  She reached across the seat and punched his shoulder. “Aren’t you glad some fathers aren’t like that
?”

  “I should say!” He smiled, glanced around, and gave her a fast kiss on the lips. They both chuckled, and bit into their sandwiches.

  She was feeling good, now, feeling like the situation was under control. She was about to open her Diet Pepsi when the stupid question she had been trying to choke back came blurting out.

  “What if you met her before me?”

  “What?” He said it with a guilty little start, she thought. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s so pretty. Smart, too. What if you met her first?”

  “You’re pretty and smart.” He lowered his voice in mock secrecy, as if someone might be listening outside the door. “Good in bed, too.”

  She knew he was trying to tease her out of it. Which was exactly what he should be doing, because she was being silly. Unless he was really doing it because he was guilty. She smiled a little.

  “So nothing would happen if I met her first.”

  She smiled again, took a sip of Diet Pepsi, and looked out the passenger window, away from Nathan.

  “Anyway, she’s probably not pretty or smart now, not after all that time on Four Street,” he said from over her shoulder. “And I doubt she could make a tuna sandwich like you.”

  She could feel herself getting furious, so she kept looking out the window to keep Nathan from seeing. The knot of unease that lay like a stone in her stomach lately felt heavier now, tighter and harder to keep down. Now the sun on the ice seemed cold and harsh, a blue flame that burned the eye without warming the heart.

  It was all the questions she couldn’t ask him that were balled up into that knot in her stomach. Questions like, I know you’re a lot smarter than me, but how much does that matter to you? Like, if you get a job in Anchorage, am I coming, too? Or am I just a way to pass the time while you’re in Chukchi?

  It scared her to think about it, but their relationship had reached the point where all these questions could be answered only one way. That would be if Nathan asked a question of his own: Will you marry me?

  But she knew that wasn’t about to happen, no matter how many times she wrote “Mrs. Lucy Active” on napkins and the backs of envelopes, then felt stupid and ripped them up before anyone saw.

  “You’re too handsome,” she said finally. She knew it was unsatisfactory, but everything else that was trying to bubble out of her at that moment was even worse.

  Dimly, in the passenger window, she saw Nathan’s reflection throw up its hands and look out the driver’s window. Then it turned toward her and switched off the radio and spoke. “I’m sorry,” it said. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing.” She knew she was being ridiculous, so she turned and looked at him with what she hoped was a neutral expression. “I guess I’m not feeling too good, is all. Can you take me home? I think I’ll call in sick for the afternoon.”

  When Nathan tried to ask her why, she just repeated it and he didn’t say anything after that. He drove her to the little cabin she shared with her grandmother, Pauline Generous, when she wasn’t staying at his place.

  He started to get out to walk her to the door, but she said “Don’t!” and jumped out and hurried into the cabin before he could say anything else.

  It was quiet and dark inside. Her grandmother must be at the Senior Center with the other aanas, probably playing snerts and gossiping. She went into the cabin’s one tiny bedroom, threw herself onto her bed, and, finally, let out the sobs.

  As Nathan Active watched Lucy vanish into her grandmother’s cabin, he marveled again at the intuition or ESP or whatever it was she used to read his mind before he knew what was in it himself. The moment Lucy had asked, “What if you met her first?” he had realized the truth and begun to dissemble.

  And now he was ashamed. He should have been honest with her: All right, Grace Palmer is, or was, very attractive and of course I would have been interested if I didn’t know you. But I do know you so it doesn’t matter. Besides which, I’m not going to meet her. And if I did, she probably doesn’t look like that now …

  He shook his head. No, this was one of those conversations that could take any one of a thousand paths but would always end up in the same place. Lucy would be hurt and angry and he would realize once more how little he understood women. Or any other variety of human being, for that matter. He switched KCHK back on and pulled away from Pauline Generous’s cabin.

  “I gave you the account number yesterday!” Evelyn O’Brien was snarling into the phone as Active, still preoccupied with the Lucy situation, opened the door to the Trooper offices. “Now where’s our damned toner?”

  She looked up, caught his eye, covered the mouthpiece with her hand, and glared at him. “Fucking Anchorage, a lot those idiots care if our copier runs out of toner.”

  He didn’t know if this meant the problem was his fault, perhaps because he was from Anchorage, or if he was just supposed to sympathize. After some thought, he shrugged ambiguously, then shook his head with what he hoped was an expression of collegial dismay at the incompetence of whichever idiot in Anchorage had lost the toner shipment.

  The secretary shook her head, too, and seemed satisfied. “Oh, yeah. The boss wants to see you.”

  She jerked her head toward Captain Patrick Carnaby’s office, then uncovered the mouthpiece again. “Two weeks? What am I supposed to make copies with for two weeks?”

  Active stepped into the detachment commander’s office and closed the door just as O’Brien was demanding to talk to the Anchorage idiot’s supervisor.

  “I see Evelyn’s on the rampage again.” Active dropped into one of the two green plastic chairs in front of Carnaby’s desk.

  Carnaby looked up from a stack of spreadsheets on his blotter and glanced out at the secretary. “Yeah, she needs to vent once in a while or she starts to take it out on us. This toner thing was a godsend.”

  Active had never thought of it before, but Carnaby was right about how to manage their combustible but highly competent secretary. Yet another example, he supposed, of the combination of insight, intuition, and intellect for which Carnaby had become known as the Super Trooper.

  That, and the fact that he looked like a Super Trooper: six-two, square-featured and devoid of fat, his hair and mustache just starting to fleck with gray.

  “Yep, better Anchorage should taste Evelyn’s wrath than us,” Active agreed. “She said you wanted to see me?”

  “Oh, yeah. Got some good news for you here.” Carnaby thumped the spreadsheets in front of him and began thumbing through the stack. “This is the quarterly budget revision. They can’t seem to get us our toner and they cut ten thousand bucks out of our undercover operations against the bootleggers, but they can buy us new computers. Let’s see, here we are.”

  Active studied the sheet Carnaby pushed across the desk and whistled. “We’re dumping the Macintosh and getting Windows? I thought that was some kind of religious issue with our computer guys.”

  “I think it has something to do with the fact that our new public safety director likes Windows. He apparently doesn’t think the Apple Macintosh is manly enough for people who carry guns and arrest crooks.”

  Active, who felt the same way, chuckled.

  “And he got hold of some study saying the Apple company is turning into a music service and we’ll be stranded on Macintosh Island if we don’t switch,” Carnaby said. “So I believe a vision of a burning resume appeared unto our systems people and they had a conversion experience. Now they’re all Windows believers. Who cares, as long as the darn things can do email and run these spreadsheets?”

  Carnaby took the page back and pointed to a line about halfway down. “Anyway, that’s you.”

  “Me?” Active looked and saw that the line said “Windows Training (P.I.T. Anchorage)—$1,000.”

  Carnaby nodded.

  “I don’t need any Windows class. I have a Windows machine at home.” Active looked again at the line. “What’s ‘P.I.T.’ anyway?”

  “The latest thing. ‘Peer Inst
ruction Training.’ “

  Active struggled to parse the chain of nouns, then gave up. “OK, so what does it mean?”

  “It means they’re too cheap to send all of us down to Anchorage for training, or even bring people up here to train us.” Carnaby shook his head, presumably at the dim-witted parsimony of the department’s budgeteers. “So we’re supposed to send one person down there to learn how to teach the rest of us. That’s why they’re giving us the thousand dollars—a round-trip ticket to Anchorage, plus room and board for one person.”

  “I’ll be trained to instruct my peers, is that it?”

  “You got it.”

  “But why me?”

  “Two reasons. One, you minored in computer science, according to your file. So you’re the logical one to come back and teach the rest of us.” Carnaby stopped, as if awaiting Active’s reaction.

  “And the second reason?”

  “Well, that’s kind of where the silver lining comes in.” Carnaby dropped his eyes to the spreadsheet and looked embarrassed.

  “What silver lining?”

  “Seeing as how you’re from down there, I figured you might stay with your folks and save us a little expense money. A hundred here, five hundred there, we might be able to scrape up enough for a little undercover operation one of these days.”

  “What? Why should I …”

  Carnaby held up his hand, dug through some mail in his in-basket and pulled out an Alaska Airlines envelope. “And, I’ve got some frequent-flyer coupons here. You can travel free, on me.”

  He rocked back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and raised his eyebrows in the white expression of inquiry.

  Active was trapped and he knew it. The City of Chukchi had banned liquor a couple of years earlier, producing an immediate reduction in murder, wife-beating, child abuse, and other indicators of social malaise.

  But the improvement had proven temporary. Chukchi’s little cadre of marijuana dealers had quickly branched into liquor, the most lucrative and dangerous drug of all, and now crime rates were creeping back toward their old levels. It was up to the Troopers, allied with Chukchi’s city police, to enforce the increasingly leaky alcohol ban.