by Неизвестный
“Tomorrow’s Sunday.”
“You going to church?”
“No. I just thought…well, what’re we going to do if we find him?”
“I don’t know. See what happens.”
“Do you think he murdered her?”
“How should I know?”
His eyes shifted back to the screen. “What about Ben?”
“I don’t know. He was acting pretty weird today. He doesn’t want to find out who killed her.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated. “He thinks it would be better just to leave her alone. You know, not dig up her past.”
“What does he care?” Justin asked. The kettle whistled.
Good question. What did Ben care? Kris watched Justin search his cabinets for tea. “I don’t know why. But he got real quiet after I told him I was going to find out who did it. He hardly said anything all the way back to town.”
Justin grunted.
“Yeah, and that cop told me that he was down the trail twice as long as he said he was.”
“Really?” He handed her a mug with a picture of a skunk cabbage on it.
Kris pulled her feet out of Ben’s shoepacks and tucked her legs underneath herself. “I don’t think he did it, though.”
“How come?”
“I just don’t. Is there anything else on TV? I’ve got a couple hours to kill before that dinner.”
__________
Lambale was late. Kris stood on the sidewalk in front of the door to the parking garage trying to sink deeper into Ben’s parka. Patches of dirty ice stuck to the sidewalks. Yellow light from the street lamps seeped into the night, hiding the stars overhead. Skinny, leafless trees grew out of square holes in the sidewalk in front of her. Off to her left were the black waters of Gastineau Channel and behind her, an occasional car turned out of the parking garage and drove past, heading out of town.
The cold cut in around the edges of the parka. Ten years ago, it would have been sweater weather, but L.A. had thinned her blood—and that was OK, this place wasn’t home anymore.
She raised her eyes and saw Lambale come out of the alley by the Sealaska Building. About time. He had a briefcase in one hand and a couple of plastic bags that swayed with each step in the other. It was Saturday; he didn’t have his fancy coat on, but he was still dressed like he thought he was important. His gloves were leather. Kris looked away.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said when he walked up. “I forgot I had to pick up my wife’s shoes.” He shook the plastic bags. “She lost a heel and she also wanted me to pick up some fresh basil and a red onion at Rainbow.” He looked into her hood, trying to see her face in its shadows. “Come on,” he said, opening the door to the garage and ushering her through. “This will be fun!” Lambale followed her into the small room, reached around her, and pushed the button for the elevator; it opened right away.
This will be fun! Christ, why is she putting up with this? Kris stared at the stainless steel door, trying to ignore the weight of Lambale’s presence behind her. The elevator bleated at every floor it passed, and Kris wondered irritably why they couldn’t have given it a more reasonable sound. At “C” level it opened. Gently touching her elbow, Lambale directed her toward a Mercedes, black, unblemished, and reflecting the overhead lights. They got in without speaking and he let the car coast down the ramp, turned left, passed the spindly trees, and got on the expressway heading out of town, the same road she and Ben had taken that morning. Kris let the silence hang.
“I’m sorry about your mother, Kris,” he said. “What a tragic thing to have happen.” On the edge of her vision, she saw his pale face turn toward her and then back to the road. Warm air blew against her legs and began filling the compartment. Kris unzipped the parka and pulled her arms out of the sleeves, leaving the coat bunched up around her. A faint smell of vinyl came out of the vents.
“I met her at the shelter,” he continued when she didn’t answer. “She was in twice last summer. Unfortunately, things weren’t going well for her.” He glanced sideways at her again. “I tried to help her some.”
He paused, waiting for her. The car was quiet; Kris couldn’t even hear its tires running on the road. The broken white lines sped toward them and vanished under the car. What did he want from her? Was she another trophy, another hard luck case he could rescue and add to his collection of good deeds? You are a good man, Mr. Lambale. She could hear them cooing, the women with tasteful pearl earrings and hundred dollar bras supporting shapeless puddles of flesh, while writing checks for his next project. Looking out the side window, away from him, she saw the lights of the city bus flashing through the trees as it wound around the curves on Glacier Avenue. The shelter was around here, somewhere.
Kris roused herself. So, did she play the game too? Or just ignore him, hoping he’d lay off? She laid the flat of her hand on the upholstery. Leather.
“Thanks,” she murmured and felt him swell.
“How long will you be in Juneau?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Then took a breath. “I should be back in L.A. on Monday. For work.” she added, pushing it out.
“So soon? What do you do?”
She told him and he oohed as if it were brain surgery. It wasn’t shit, she knew, dispatching trucks. Kris forced her thumb into the padded armrest on the door until she felt the steel beneath it and kept her mouth shut. A minute later, it was clear what he really thought when he asked her how much longer she’d be a dispatcher and whether she ever thought about going back to school and getting her diploma or GED. Then he started explaining the world to her, that she’d make more with a high school education, that she could work at a bank, he’d help her get a job, how she’d move up, she’d be an account rep in a couple years, then floor manager, who knows, maybe president someday.
Right. Like Ken and Barbie Land. Where men say yes dear, kiss their wives on the cheek, and don’t fuck them till they bleed.
“I knew a bank manager in Fairbanks,” she said, lying—he’d been a schoolteacher. “Once when DFYS took me away from Evie when she was drinking bad they put me in his home. He and his wife were making money off the foster kids they kept. They didn’t give us squat; they kicked us out in the morning, even in the winter, and wouldn’t let us back in until night, after they ate—they fed us different food. He was screwing one of the boys. Everyone knew it, but DFYS only busted him when the kid got hurt so bad they had to take him to the hospital.”
The car was quiet, then Lambale said, “That sounds horrible.”
Anger at his innocence flashed in her. “There was blood streaming out his ass,” she pressed, not letting Lambale push it away. “Blood all over the man’s pants. His wife was screaming that they’d take us away from them, half the kids were crying, and I had to break into the main part of the house to call the cops.” It’s not the Cosby Show, Mr. Lambale, Kris finished to herself, rubbing the dent in the armrest with her thumb, feeling it slowly refill.
“What happened to you after that?” he asked.
Kris shrugged and they drove on in silence. After another five or ten minutes, the divided highway ended and the evening traffic squeezed into a two-lane road. When they curved around the head of a little bay crammed with boats, Lambale tried to recover the conversation.
“Do you have many friends left in Fairbanks?”
Kris had never considered it; there weren’t many people she wanted to see. “They’re probably all dead now,” she said, knowing it wasn’t that bad. Some would be dead, some in jail, some still on the street, and a few would be working in minimum-wage jobs like hers. Annie, she remembered unexpectedly. She’d been cool in a stuffy kind of way, working with the kids at the shelter, playing board games with them and trying to get them to brush their teeth. She’d be doing all right.
“Honestly?” Lambale broke into her thoughts.
“Yeah. In Fairbanks, it doesn’t take a knife or a hit with bubbles in it to kill you. At twenty below, passing out in
the snow works good enough,” Kris said as if these were things anybody would know.
“I’m sorry, Kris,” Lambale said almost under his breath.
Kris looked at a big boat, lights blazing in the darkness, and a line of cars slowly feeding into an opening in its hull.
“The state ferry,” Lambale said, following her gaze. “You know you can’t drive out of here? We’re surrounded by glaciers, mountains, and the sea. Boats and planes are the only way in or out.”
“The rain, the darkness, and nowhere to go,” Kris said. “Why would anybody live here?”
Lambale laughed, but she was serious.
“So Loren, if the family homestead is in Fairbanks, why didn’t you move back there once you’d received your MBA?”
Kris couldn’t remember her name, but the woman who’d asked the question, sitting comfortably relaxed across the dinner table from her, was, Lambale had told her, on AWARE’s board. Her blouse was whiter than any shirt Kris had ever owned, even one fresh from its wrapper. Her eyes were blue and her graying hair was gathered in a simple ponytail. Whenever she spoke, she would try to make eye contact with Kris to include her in the conversation. She glanced at Kris again, but Kris let her eyes drift over the woman’s shoulder to a distant light blinking on and off with irritating regularity in the blackness on the other side of the sliding glass doors. The ocean was that way. Little waves had lapped on the gravel beach when Lambale gave her a tour before dinner. The Lambales’s house was on the shore, at the foot of a covered staircase almost as long as Ben’s, but leading steeply down from the road instead of up from it. It was the road Kris had seen when she flew in; the one that cut through the trees on the slope above the line of houses pressed against the sea by the mountains.
“We made a deal,” Lambale said, glancing at his wife at the other end of a table. Kris shifted to the side as an arm reached past her and placed a cup of coffee on a saucer in front of her. It had a silver rim. “Alvilde agreed to come to Alaska only if we lived in a town which had a tanning salon and where it was above zero at least fifty weeks out of the year.”
Alvilde looked critically around the table as the last of the cups, their contents hot and faintly misting, were placed, neatly centered, in front of each person. She made a small movement to the woman doing the serving, and Kris’s napkin, which lay in a crumpled wad by her cup, disappeared and a clean one, precisely folded, appeared in its place.
“Lucky you didn’t end up in Ketchikan,” the woman in the white blouse said.
“She thought she had me. She was certain no part of Alaska had even six months—“
“Bet Loren didn’t tell you about the Taku winds,” interrupted the AWARE woman’s husband, who was sitting next to Kris.
“Actually, it was the art community that attracted us to Juneau,” Alvilde said mildly, her English lightly accented. They talked about her art gallery; the governor had come to its most recent opening. Kris let them talk around her. She couldn’t understand how Alvilde got so clean; her skin was translucent, like it had been waxed. She had smiled when Lambale had ushered Kris into the house and had made an appreciative comment about Kris’s shirt with the “CA-4-ME” logo on the breast pocket.
Delicately and precisely, Alvilde stirred sugar into her coffee and passed the bowl. The conversation had circled around to the dedication of the new wing again. Lambale was telling another story—how the architect had mismeasured the door frames and all the premade doors had to be cut down. Alvilde listened attentively, although Kris was certain she’d heard the story before. Alvilde seemed proud of her husband’s project, sharing his enthusiasm in a reserved, understated way.
“We almost missed you,” said the AWARE woman.
“I wouldn’t have missed the dedication for the world,” Alvilde said. “But when I tripped and broke my heel, I had to run back here to find another coat and pair of shoes.”
“Your outfit was beautiful.”
“Beltrami,” Lambale said. “Apparently Italians don’t design shoes to Alaskan specifications.
The sugar bowl reached Kris. She stirred a spoonful into her coffee using the silver spoon from the sugar bowl and then stuck it, still moist, back into the white crystals.
Before dinner, Lambale had taken her into his study and shown her the drawings for the newly finished wing at AWARE. None of the other guests followed them in and Kris figured that she was new prey; everyone else had seen and heard enough. Lambale pointed out a picture on his desk that showed him giving the governor a copy of the report of the Governor’s Task Force on Domestic Violence. It had been very controversial, Lambale told her. “I didn’t pull any punches,” he said, as if he’d been the only person on the task force. While he talked, Lambale hovered over her, occasionally touching her arm. Was he coming on to her? Exasperated, Kris stepped away. He laid a hand on her shoulder as he pointed out another one of his prizes. Kris twisted, the hand fell. What a fool. Kris moved toward the door, she’d seen enough.
“Would you like another cup, Kris?” Lambale was mother-henning her again. The serving woman, reflected in the glass doors, hovered behind her with the coffeepot.
“No.”
“Sure?”
Leave me alone.
Alvilde shook her hand. “It was very nice to meet you, Kris. Please come again,” she said. Her eyes, a faded blue, were amused.
Lambale squeezed her arm and told her he’d call her soon and apologized again for not driving her back—but since Jane and Dave lived in town, it made more sense for her to go back with them. She followed the AWARE woman and her husband up the stairs and sat in the back seat, resolutely answering questions, wondering silently what it was that Lambale wanted from her.
Sunday, November 15
It was around noon, but the town was empty. There was a high overcast, the color of old milk, and the sunlight draining through it was pallid and lifeless. The car was cold and Justin had done a lousy job scraping the frost off the windshield.
“How was dinner?”
“What a bore.”
“You got to slam the door harder.”
Kris opened and swung it closed again. The window glass shook.
“Was the food good?”
“They had a cook, she stayed by herself in the kitchen while we ate. It was weird.”
The Subaru stalled and Justin let it cruise down Main Street before popping the clutch. It jerked and the engine caught.
“You got a bad muffler, too.” Kris heard the muted puttering of the exhaust.
“Yeah, they don’t last around here, too much salt in the air. So what’d you talk about?” The light at the bottom of the hill turned red. Justin slowed but turned right without stopping. The view down the channel opened up between the buildings; flashes of white flecked the choppy gray water.
“He was hitting on me.”
“Lambale?” Justin turned his head surprised. “With his wife there?”
“In his study, we were alone. He kept trying to touch me.”
“Sure he wasn’t just trying to be friendly?”
“Give me a break.”
“Where did he touch you?”
“He was touching me, OK? He’s not going to grab a tit first thing.”
“Just because he touches you doesn’t—“
“You don’t think I can’t tell when someone is trying to get something off me?” she said.
“Why are you getting so steamed?” Justin turned and looked at her.
“Why am I being interrogated?”
“Maybe he was feeling sorry for you,” Justin said. “Maybe he wanted to give you some support.”
“Why would he feel sorry for me?” Kris turned in her seat and faced him, pissed that he questioned everything she said.
“Maybe, just maybe, because your mother was murdered Tuesday,” Justin said.
“Why the hell would he care?”
“Just because. Why would he want to hit on you?”
“What kind of bullshit quest
ion is that? You guys are slaves to your pricks. Everything you do, you do to keep them happy.”
Justin laughed. “That clears up a lot of my confusion about God, Ben and Jerry’s, and the World Series.” A bright yellow McDonald’s cup skittered in the wind across the pavement, bounced off the curb, and rolled back into the street. Justin swerved and flattened it. “You don’t think he’s getting any off his wife?”
“It’d be like fucking an ice cube,” Kris said, calming down and settling back in her seat.
“Crevasse.”
“What’s that?”
“Big crack in a glacier.”
“Yeah.” She laughed, feeling some tension drain away. Kris toyed with the zipper on her parka, remembering how exposed she’d felt following the AWARE woman up the stairs in Ben’s big shoepacks. Behind the closed door of the house, she imagined Alvilde saying to Lambale, “Did you see that child’s shirt, dear? I’m quite certain Nordstrom’s doesn’t carry it.” Kris wrenched the zipper.
“Pick your nose and she’d fry you. Everything was silver and china; Normal beer wasn’t good enough for her.”
“You had to drink Amber? What’d you think?”
“No, something Danish. She’s Danish. She’s got an accent and their kids are named Hansel and Gretel.”
“Really?”
“Something like that.” The kids hadn’t been there. Both were Outside at boarding schools. Alvilde had told them that her daughter’s photographs were almost good enough to hang in the gallery.
Justin nodded and Kris fell silent letting the hum of the tires on the pavement fill the car as it sped along the expressway. The road ran north between Gastineau Channel on the left and mountain ridges coming down perpendicular to the water on the right. It cut across the mouths of the valleys that lay between the ridges. Kris looked into the valley they were crossing now. It looked industrial. Big heaps of mud and gravel had been bulldozed out of the valley floor. Tucked far up the valley, was the crystal blue of a glacier.
Justin drove on another few miles and then turned right. Spread before them above the trees, only a few miles away, was a glacier. It stretched, a mile wide, across the end of the valley and rose massively, twisting and curving back up between the mountains to the distant ice field. The rains of the last few days had washed its lower reaches and the ice showing in its cracks and folds was a blue so deep and rich that it glowed in the dull daylight.
