by Неизвестный
A finger tapped her shoulder and she jumped. Before she could turn, she felt his head next to hers and puffs of breath against her ear as he spoke.
“Sorry about your mom.” He put his hand on her arm. “Let’s scout around, maybe the police missed something.” He paused, then added. “You’ll be warmer if you’re moving.”
This jerk wanted to play detective. What was Evie—a freak show?
“Come on.” He pulled at her sleeve, urging her toward the far end of the bridge.
She gave in and followed him across the gray boards of the bridge and up the trail a few yards to a cut-off that led down to the beach. It was steep and slick with mud; Kris climbed down backwards, holding onto roots and rocks until the trail leveled out again. He beat through the brush and reached the stream below the police tape. She followed without enthusiasm.
“The police have mucked this place up,” he said when she came alongside him. The surrounding banks had been churned by heavy boots and rocks in the stream bed had been overturned and pushed aside. “I wonder how well they went over the area before they moved the body out.” He ducked under the tape and lifted it for her. On the other side were parallel lines of white twine spaced every couple of feet running up either side of the stream.
“For their search,” he said, pulling one; a bush up the hill jerked. “It was dark, they were cold and wet.” He looked at her. “Mind if I take a look?”
Kris shrugged.
He crouched and, keeping low, began slowly moving upstream examining the bank. Kris lit a cigarette and watched him indifferently until he disappeared around the bend. She squatted on a rock, tucking her poncho under herself to keep dry and stared at a pool of quieter water ringed by muddy footprints on the other side of the creek.
For no reason, Kris suddenly remembered a snowmobile trip out at Two Rivers that her school had organized when she was fourteen. Evie had promised her the money to go, but when Kris shook her awake that morning the money was gone. This time, Evie hadn’t drunk it, but had spent it on a pair of mittens she’d found in the surplus store. “It gets real cold when you get going fast and the ones you got are too thin.” Kris pounded the bed and yelled. What good were mittens if she couldn’t go? In the end, she managed to hustle the money before the bus left; but, furious at her mother, she’d flung the mittens into the street and the cold and wind had frostbit the thumb that worked the throttle.
Why did her mother still anger her? Nine years and Evie still wasn’t out of her head. Tomorrow, she could be on a plane back to L.A. and out of this mess. Let Evie fade out of her mind like mud settling to the bottom of a puddle. But something unseen stopped her and fastened her to that rock. She bent over her lap, squeezing her eyes shut, hugging herself under the poncho, and curling her numb toes in the wet sneakers. Why wouldn’t Evie let her go?
“Hey, look what I found.” The stream was quieter in front of Kris where it had leveled, but she barely heard the shout above the noise. She edged upstream, trying to keep her feet out of the water. When she turned the corner and he came into sight, he was standing on the opposite bank pointing at something in the mud.
“Can you see this?” he yelled.
“No,” she answered, not looking hard.
“It’s a footprint. But the sole is wrong. It’s a crepe sole, the kind on a cheap work boot.” He looked at her as if she’d understand the significance of this. When it appeared she hadn’t, he waded over to her side, splashing through water up to his knees. “Damn that’s cold,” he said. “Look. All the other footprints are either lug soles or Xtratufs. See here?” He pointed at several tracks in the mud. “Lug. Like the Vibram soles on hiking boots. These have to be police prints. But the crepe print belongs to someone else. A cop isn’t going to wear boots from Wal-Mart.”
Kris tossed her cigarette in the stream; he watched it swirl away.
“Well, it’s something. I wonder if the police saw it.” He waded back across, climbed the bank, and, dropping to his hands and knees, crawled into the undergrowth. Kris went back the way they’d come, crossing the bridge and hiking up the path toward the road, until she could see him moving up the slope through the bushes. Her clothes were damp; the bandanna around her neck was soaked and she began to shiver as she stood watching him.
“Hey, come down and look at this.”
She was starting to feel like a dog; next he’d have her fetching sticks. Kris waded into the scrub, pushing the wet stalks and leafless branches out of her way. Bushes with thorns pricked at her poncho and she gently pulled it free so it wouldn’t tear. He was holding back a couple of thick, heavy bushes with one arm and pointing under them with the hand of the other. Under the bush, brown leaves lay flat and matted against the earth—except for a small cluster half the size of her palm that had been twisted and torn.
“Looks like someone putting out a cigarette with his toe,” he said. “Somebody’s been walking through here,” he said. “Too many stems have been broken. Look.” He pointed at a stem broken off at knee height. He dropped back on all fours, letting the bushes fall onto his back, and crawled another foot up the slope, shoving bushes out of his way.
“Here’s another bunch of twisted leaves.” He pointed at it. “This one’s bigger, there’re two twists.” Kris pushed aside the bush and saw two soggy clumps of twisted leaves next to each other. He picked up a leaf and carefully flattened it on his thigh. “This looks normal, don’t you think?” He handed it to Kris. It looked normal. Working methodically, he smoothed each leaf. “Nothing weird here. Though the leaves in this clump have holes in them.” He held them up; Kris didn’t touch them. So leaves have holes.
Crawling another foot up the slope, he found another clump of twisted leaves; it was a single clump like the first. He smoothed out these leaves as well; nothing unusual. The bushes thinned, but he stayed on his hands and knees until he got to the trail. He didn’t find anything else.
“What do you think?” he asked. His hair was snarled with dirt and bits of twigs, and his pants were wet, the knees baggy with mud. “This has got to be the way they walked down to the stream, all those broken twigs. Though it’s funny there weren’t more footprints—just that crepe sole.”
He looked at his watch. “Damn,” he said. “It’s past one; I’ve got to get back to work.”
When they got back up on the road, he glanced around; there was only one car parked there, a blue Subaru wagon.
“How’d you get down?” he asked.
“Thumbed.”
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride back.” He moved a pile of books, tools, paper, and other trash out of the passenger seat and foot well, dumped it in back, and motioned Kris in.
“Justin Palmer,” he said after he’d gotten the car started.
“Kris.”
He reached out his hand; it was muddy and she wiped her hand clean after shaking it.
“Sorry. Are you local?”
“L.A.”
“You got up here fast,” he said. “Where’re you staying?”
“The hostel.”
“If you want a mellower place without so many rules, you can crash on my couch.”
“I’m OK.”
“You’re welcome to the car too, if you want. It’s never locked; the keys are there.” He tapped the ashtray. “Just let me know when you’re taking off with it, so I don’t run around trying to remember where I parked.”
“Things aren’t locked in Juneau?” Kris let his offer ride. She might need a car, maybe an apartment if she stayed much longer; she hadn’t arrived with much and only had rent money left in her account back home. But she was wary; she knew what the deal would be.
“You lock your car here and eventually you’ll kill your battery,” he said. “It rains so much you’ve got to drive with your lights on during the day. Sooner or later, you’ll forget to turn them off when you park. If you leave your doors open, someone walking by will do it for you.” He downshifted and accelerated up a hill.
�
�What did you think about those twisted leaves?” he asked.
Kris hadn’t thought anything about them.
“Leaves don’t twist themselves,” he said. “And they were spaced about a footstep apart.” Kris stared out the side window, letting him talk to himself. “Sure looked like someone putting out a cigarette. You want to swing by the police station and tell them about it?” He turned to her. “Have you talked to the police yet?”
“They won’t do anything,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The police have only been trouble for Evie; they’re not going to go out of their way to help her now.” Kris could tell by the way Justin kept quiet that he didn’t believe her; for white boys, cops were the good guys.
“Evie’s your mother?” he asked.
“Uh huh.”
“So you don’t want to tell the cops?” he asked.
Not about leaves.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
The car bounced, something in back rattled, and suddenly the anger that had been simmering half hidden inside her broke open. “I’m going to find the asshole that killed her,” she said, unable to control the heat in her voice. Kris caught herself and forced her mouth closed. This guy, who’d probably never gone to bed hungry, didn’t need to know that her mother had been stepped on by everybody who’d come through her life: The police who’d hauled her off for vagrancy when she had no place to go; men who’d promised love but just screwed and beat her; landlords who’d tossed her out of rooms that stank of piss; and social workers who’d nit-picked her with a million chicken-shit rules. Kris never let anyone jerk her around and nine years since she’d last seen Evie it still pissed her off remembering her mother just shrugging when someone dumped on her.
“I’m going to find him,” she said again, knowing suddenly that she wouldn’t let go.
“Do you think you can?” Justin asked.
Kris hardened, waiting for his laugh.
It didn’t come, but she didn’t answer him and let the silence grow. They came around a curve, passed a huge satellite dish pointed low in the sky, and a few hundred yards later they drove by a tank farm spread out over a barren flat of gravel that stuck into Gastineau Channel.
“Tailings from the old AJ mine,” Justin said, as they sped by. “Someday, in the middle of the next century, maybe something might grow there.”
They came into town and passed under cables that disappeared up a mountainside and into the clouds.
“It’s a tram that goes halfway up Mount Roberts. Another gift to the tourists. It’s kind of like slow-motion rape around here, every year another mountain, another beach gets sold to the tour companies. We had a million people come through here last summer. Only thirty thousand live here full time—you could hardly walk the streets downtown and it’s like Iraq with all the planes and helicopters flying around.”
“You were in Iraq?” Kris asked, letting sarcasm creep into her tone; she’d had too many self-stuffed blow-hards unload on her to have any patience with them.
“Like Apocalypse Now, then. It’s like that from May to September. The city will sell whatever it can to make a buck.”
“Where are you going?” he asked a second later, turning right on a wide road that topped out on a ridge six or seven blocks up.
“Third Street,” she said.
“What’s there?”
“The old man who found her.”
Justin shifted down as the road began to rise. Without looking at her, he asked, “Mind if I join you?”
“I thought you had to go back to work.” He’d just be in the way.
Justin paused. “I’ll call in sick,” he said. “I’m late already and I’m a mess. By the time I got cleaned up it would be quitting time.”
Kris looked at the passing buildings, considering. She was going to need the car. “Get cleaned up first, then.”
“OK. That’s Third there.” He pointed to the right.
“And be cool; something’s off,” Kris said.
“What?”
“He knew my mother. He found her body. He told the cops she didn’t have any relatives.”
“Maybe he didn’t know about you.”
“Maybe.” Probably. Kris couldn’t see Evie telling anyone about her.
“So, what are you thinking?” Justin asked.
Kris didn’t answer.
__________
“I know this house.” Justin was behind her, climbing the stairs, ringing its metal grates with each step. “It belongs to a friend of mine. It’s tiny. She had to move into a bigger place when she got married. She just rents it now. There’re the ashes of an Australian buried under a tree up here. He fell off a cliff on Mt. Jumbo.”
They stepped off the stairs and onto a board walk leading to the house. “I think this is the tree.” Justin touched a leafless twig on a tree about four feet high. “It doesn’t look very healthy.” Kris walked past it to the door of the entryway, pushed it open and stepped through. She knocked on the inner door. Finally silent, Justin came in behind her as it opened.
Ben Stewart was a small man, stooped. His head, bowed toward the floor when the door opened, was hairless with ears that wagged out from his skull. When he straightened and looked at her, his eyes, at first welcoming, slackened and dulled. He stared silently at Kris until Justin shuffled his feet and Stewart, glancing at him, turned and walked back into the house.
Uninvited, they hesitated before following him in. Stewart walked behind a wooden chair angled to look through a rain-splattered window at the town below and the mountains that rose out of the far side of the channel. Resting his hands on its back, he watched them come in. The room was unfurnished but for the single chair and a small table under a wall cabinet by the front door. Against the back wall; a steep staircase led to a loft that was too low to stand in and behind Stewart, a wood stove stood on a platform of bricks, bathing the room with warmth. On the other side of the stove was a narrow kitchen. The kitchen sink, under a window in the opposite wall, wasn’t five big steps from the front door.
Kris stood awkwardly, wondering why Stewart had retreated behind his chair.
“I’m Kris Gabriel,” she said, finally. “Evie’s daughter.”
“I know.” He was wary, like a kid on the wrong gang’s turf.
“Can I bring those chairs over?” Justin interrupted, pointing to chairs stacked in a corner that Kris hadn’t seen.
Stewart looked startled, shifted his eyes from Kris to Justin, and then nodded.
Justin set them in a semi-circle in front of the window, offering the middle one to Kris. Stewart sat; his hands resting in his lap. They were crooked and gnarled, too big for his body, which was short and bent with the tightness of old muscles. He took a breath, his eyes, blue and nested in wrinkles, were clear.
“She thought you were dead,” he said.
“Who?” Kris asked.
“Your mother. One morning she told me she woke up and you were gone.”
“Woke up on the floor.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Stewart said, ignoring Kris’s sourness. “Where did you go?”
“L.A. I hid in trucks until I got into B.C. Then hitched down the coast.” She didn’t say more, telling your stories was like handing someone rocks; someday they’d be thrown back at you.
“In the winter, wasn’t it? How old were you then?” His voice was scratchy, like a woolen blanket.
“Fifteen.”
Stewart studied her. Kris tensed, expecting a dismissive shrug, but didn’t yield to his gaze.
“Not many people could’ve done that,” he said. “How–” he started, but Kris tipped her head toward Justin and Stewart changed direction. “The police gave you my name?”
“Yeah. You knew her, didn’t you?” Stewart didn’t fit. He was too quiet, too comfortable with himself; he didn’t have the water-in-hot-oil frenzy of the people Evie hung around.
Stewart shifted his gaze out the window, turnin
g his shoulders as if his neck were stiff. Drops of water beaded on the glass, swelling until they burst and slid down the pane in crooked streams. While she waited for his answer, Kris leaned forward and pressed her finger against the glass, feeling the outside cold pushing in. “I met her five or six years ago,” he said, turning back to her. “We became friends.” He hesitated, his words didn’t come quickly, as if he hadn’t had much practice with them. “I ran a few trap lines up the Alatna River. I’d bring the skins in before breakup, combed and stretched, to my buyer. I met her in town one spring.”
“Where’s the Alatna?” Justin asked.
Kris glanced at him, irritated; she didn’t want him taking over.
“It rises in the Brooks Range and empties into the Koyukuk at Allakaket, about a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Fairbanks,” Stewart answered.
“I should introduce myself.” Justin stuck out his hand, leaning in front of Kris. “Justin Palmer.”
“Proud to know you,” Stewart took Justin’s hand, shifting slightly in his chair, to look more fully at him.
“How did you know who she was?” Justin indicated Kris.
“She looks like her mother.”
“I do not,” Kris said. She didn’t look anything like her.
“What happened to your neck?” he asked.
Kris touched the bandanna. “I was attacked.”
“You were what?” Justin examined her neck.
Kris untied the bandanna and pulled it off. When she’d looked in the mirror that morning, the marks had purpled and were rimmed by a pus-yellow color.
