Stone Cross

by Marc Cameron

  Birdie took another drink of water and closed her eyes. The potluck had gone by much more quickly than she had hoped. This Deputy Cutter fellow was interesting. She’d hoped to find out what he planned to do about the murder if the Troopers couldn’t make it in for a few days—as she suspected was going to happen.

  They were marooned a lot this time of year, before it decided to be winter.

  Her high school basketball team made up a chant about it when they got stuck in Shungnak up on the Kobuk River for three days one winter. They made up a chant about it that got them all detention. Bad ice, no dice. Bad sky, can’t fly. Planes stuck . . . you’re shit outta luck.

  She wanted desperately to tell Cutter more about Sascha Green, but even giving voice to the name made her physically ill. Kidnapping was right up his alley. He’d kidnapped her, all right. He would have killed her too if she hadn’t stabbed him in the neck with a kitchen knife.

  Suddenly hungry, she got the leftover agutaq out of the fridge. It took some searching to find a clean spoon. Jolene hadn’t done the dishes in two days, but that was not the hill Birdie wanted to die on at the moment. She rinsed a teaspoon from the sink and took a bite of the frothy pink stuff. The sugar came from the AC store, but Birdie had caught the caribou, picked the berries, and netted the whitefish. She rolled the berries around with her tongue, popping them as the fat and sugar melted in her mouth. Her belly warmed immediately. Energy rushed to her muscles. A single bite made her full, but she ate another spoonful before going to bed. She’d sleep better. As good as she ever did anyway.

  The agutaq went back in the fridge by the seal oil. The glass and spoon went into the sink, along with the other dishes that would have to be done tomorrow.

  Jolene’s bedroom door was open—an unpopular rule that Birdie strictly enforced. She’d already showered, and was now dressed in running shorts and a loose T-shirt, sitting on her bed with her knees drawn up to her chest. A Paris Saint-Germain poster was tacked to the wall behind her, along with several ribbons from soccer camps she’d attended in Anchorage. She looked up, actually said hello, and then went back to whoever she was texting.

  Birdie paused at the door—hovering, Jolene called it. How could something so beautiful come from such an ugly encounter?

  Jolene glanced up. “Good potluck, Mom.”

  Flustered at the civil tone from her normally icy offspring, Birdie struggled to think of something worthwhile to say.

  “It was.” She wracked her brain and came up empty. “I’m going to have a shower.”

  “’Kay.”

  Jolene returned to her text.

  Unwilling to squander the moment, Birdie banged her head nonchalantly against the door frame. “You and that lady marshal seemed to be having a nice conversation.”

  “You mean Lola?” Jolene said, looking down to pick a piece of lint off her toe. “She’s badass.”

  Birdie felt the agutaq churn in her belly.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yep.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “Some.”

  “She seems like a tough one.”

  “She is.” Jolene looked up again, but only with her eyes. “Have a good shower, Mom.”

  The moment was over before it started, but Birdie was around fifteen-year-olds every day, enough to know her daughter wasn’t an anomaly. Teenagers were snarky. That was the way of things. Birdie had been a handful when she was that age—until that day with Sascha Green. After that, she’d become a real problem.

  She said good night to Jolene and got a nod back. Status quo.

  Birdie shut the door to her own bedroom—no rules there—and stepped on the toe of each of her socks to pull them off, kicking them into the hamper in the corner. Her khaki slacks were clean enough to get another day’s wear—a miracle considering the mud outside—so she hung them over the back of a wooden chair beside her bed. It was all relative anyway. If everyone was muddy, then the acceptable level of mud went up. It was like being drunk. Birdie had spent her freshman year of college slightly less intoxicated than her friends, so no one had noticed.

  Her shoulder ached more than usual today and she winced when she pulled the polo shirt over her head. It always hurt when she lifted her arm that way, especially when a big storm was blowing in off the Bering. Her hand hurt too, worse than her shoulder. She had scars there, deep ones, and another behind her ear in her hairline. The worst one—the worst physical scar anyway—ran from her left buttock to the side of her knee. That one had nearly killed her. It had earned her a flight to the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, eleven days in the hospital, forty-two stitches, and gallons of antibiotics.

  Sascha had done a number on her. He’d hurt her, bad, and in countless ways, but he hadn’t been the one to take her virginity. Sadly, that job had been done the month before she turned thirteen. She’d always looked older than she was and told herself that the boy was just a high school jock taking things too far. He had not hurt her, or at least he wasn’t cruel about it when he did. She still saw him almost every day around the village. He’d grown up to be the local agent for one of the bush airlines. Later, she’d come to realize that he had some level of fetal alcohol syndrome. It didn’t excuse what he’d done. She was twelve and he was sixteen, but his mental state made it easier for her not to fixate. Now, if he came near Jolene, Birdie would lure him out to the tundra and gut him on the ice. That went without saying. But he hadn’t. And she didn’t hate him. Much.

  Though her virginity was no longer up for grabs, Sascha had still managed to rob her of health and youth. She reserved the bulk of her hate for him. He’d separated her collarbone during the attack and almost sixteen years later it still crunched and popped if she moved her arm just so. One of her shoulders was all wonky, sloping downward a hair lower than normal and making it impossible to keep bra straps and swimsuits in place. The unevenness was an unforeseen consequence that, while not horrible in and of itself, reminded her daily of the violence of the event.

  She thought about it each day, some days more than others. Some days, it was all she could think about.

  CHAPTER 31

  Word had gotten around about the new batch of home brew before fifteen-year-old Birdie even left school that day. Her parents never hurt her when they got drunk, but they screamed way too much for people who loved each other like they did. She decided it would be more peaceful to watch television at her uncle’s house after she fed her dad’s sled dogs, instead of going home and listening to a screaming match. Her uncle had satellite TV, with one of those little dishes that he had to point almost straight down at the ground to get a signal this far north. Her auntie had passed on, and her uncle worked late cleaning the city offices, so Birdie had the house to herself—with no yelling.

  Sascha must have seen her go in. He came to the back door and knocked softly, like a friend would knock, not like a monster at all. Birdie remembered clearly the conversation Alex Trebek was having with a contestant from Cedar Rapids when she got up off the couch to answer. She opened the door, thinking it might be Patricia Chiklak coming over to watch Jeopardy! with her. Sascha didn’t say a word. He didn’t make a sound. Instead, he just stood there, looking at her and breathing fast, like some weirdo. She tried to slam the door, but that broke the spell and he bounded inside the house. He caught her immediately and slammed his fist into her belly before she could scream. Then he turned calmly to shut and lock the door, like he had it all planned out. Birdie could do nothing but sink to her knees, trying in vain to get a breath of air.

  No sooner had the dead bolt clicked home than he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her toward the living room. She twisted and kicked, but the linoleum floor was too slick to get any footing. Screaming when her lungs started working, she clawed at his hands, but nothing would scare him off. At fifteen Birdie weighed less than a hundred pounds. He was twenty-six, strong, determined, and crazy drunk on home brew. For whatever reason, he was incredibly angry, hitting her
as much as he groped her breasts, as if Birdie was the cause of everything bad that had ever happened in his life.

  The troopers came to the school to talk about this stuff all the time. She remembered they’d told all the kids in her class to fight back, to scream and yell and bite, to do anything to get away. She had done all that, but it didn’t matter. Alex Trebek kept talking, her uncle stayed at the school. Nobody heard. Sascha was just too big and too drunk. Much of it was a blur, like a bad car wreck that went on and on and on. She remembered pulling away, him grabbing her again and dragging her toward the couch. How that patch of hair had just pulled out of her scalp in one big clump and how he’d stood there holding it in his fist and laughing hysterically. She’d tried to run, making it to the kitchen before he caught her. She was all screamed out by then, unable to utter anything but whimpering baby sounds, barely able to breathe. This only made him madder. Her uncle’s house was small and she landed hard against the edge of the Formica table when he threw her. It was the table where her uncle played dominoes with her parents, and told stories, and ate dried fish dipped in seal oil. That’s when her collarbone snapped. Sascha loomed over her, grinding her face against a piece of bloody cardboard where her uncle had been cleaning ducks that morning before work. The carcasses were still on the table in a metal bowl and she’d pulled the whole thing off when Sascha dragged her to the floor. She remembered the searing pain, being covered in blood and meat slime, the smell of the butchered ducks on the slick floor beside her. Sascha hit her again with his fist, eyes red, black hair pasted to his forehead with sweat. Pinned against the floor, she couldn’t go anywhere. He’d connected with the side of her head that time, and everything went black. It wasn’t like the movies though. She was only out for a minute, long enough for him to tear away her shorts and do what he needed to do to feel like he dominated her—and to make Jolene. He was still laughing when she regained consciousness, making fun of her because she wasn’t a virgin. He said that the troopers wouldn’t even get him in trouble because it wasn’t rape if the girl was a slut already.

  She’d found her voice at that, and screamed up at him, trying to scramble backwards like a crab. His hand shot to her mouth, plugging the scream. Pressing down with the weight of his body, he subdued her against the linoleum floor while the fingers of his free hand wrapped around her throat. All the while he laughed, grunting, chuckling, against her half-naked bucks and squirms. He was bigger. He was stronger. He could do whatever he wanted.

  A cold realization gushed like ice water through her limbs.

  He had won. There was nothing left to do but kill her.

  The knife her uncle had used to butcher the ducks that morning had fallen on the floor during the struggle and now lay on the floor next to the carcasses. It was a small thing, serrated, like something you’d have next to your plate if you were eating a moose roast—not something you’d use to fend off a rapist. But it was all Birdie had.

  Her fingers brushed the blade as she flailed. Somehow, through the fog of panic and fear, she realized what it was. Grabbing blindly, she screamed again, driving the little blade over and over again into Sascha’s neck and face. He must have thought she’d merely hit him at first, but his eyes went wide when he brought his hand back and saw the blood. She managed to stab him two more times in the neck and shoulder before he wrested the knife away. He’d tried to stab her too, but blood was slick and they were covered in it, making her impossible to hold now. He lashed out as she squirmed away, slicing her deep across the thigh before collapsing on the floor.

  Birdie didn’t remember much after that, she’d lost a great deal of blood too, but she remembered the pain, and Sascha’s face, swathed in gore, as he lay there on her uncle’s floor with the knife clenched in his fist, beside a pile of butchered ducks.

  Now, sixteen years later, Birdie sat on the edge of her bed and ran her fingers over her uneven collarbone, touched the scars on her hand and thigh. Her friend had come over to watch Jeopardy! like they’d planned, and found them both on the floor unconscious. Sascha had lived somehow, despite his wounds. He was, Birdie suspected, too evil to die without the chance to observe the hell he’d put her through. She was surprised she’d been able to say his name to Cutter, though he was an obvious suspect. It was something she rarely spoke out loud, certainly not to Jolene.

  Birdie’s friends who were divorced, the smart ones anyway, took great pains to say good things about the fathers of their children. But Sascha wasn’t Jolene’s father. He wasn’t her dad. He was the rapist who got Birdie pregnant. There was not one thing good to say about him, but she didn’t speak ill of him either. That kind of talk would only bring down Jolene’s self-esteem—and that was low enough already. Kids with low self-esteem ran the risk of following Sylvia Red Fox’s path, dying alone on the loading dock with a packing strap around her neck.

  Birdie shuddered, then fell against her pillow. No sleep tonight. She stared up at the light fixture on the ceiling. It was cracked, and filled with dust and the bodies of a dozen dead bugs. There was one way this might all work out. Deputy Cutter might very well have come along at just the right time. She felt bad for Rolf Hagen, but in some perverse way, she hoped Sascha had been the one to murder him and kidnap Sarah Mead. Prison had done nothing but give him time to feed that fantasy that he owned her. That was why he was hanging around now. It had to be. He’d go crazy jealous if he knew that Birdie and Arliss were friends. Birdie smiled, feeling relaxed for the first time in days. Sascha would fight if confronted. He was too vain not to, too impulsive. And when he fought, she had no doubt that Cutter would end him.

  CHAPTER 32

  Cutter and Lola walked through the doors of the school at a quarter past midnight, wet and chilled. Donna Taylor, Abe Richards, and Daisy Aguthluk looked to be tucked in for the night. James Johnny had yet to return to Stone Cross from his hunting trip. Temperatures were dropping, but according to Lieutenant Warr, the fog remained too thick for air travel. He was still at the office, spending the night there, he said, readying what few pieces he had so he could move them around the chess board the moment the fog lifted but before the front blew in off the Bering Sea. Troopers with the Alaska Bureau of Investigations in Anchorage were working up packages on the names Birdie had given Cutter. Full backgrounds would be available anytime. He’d call back when they were.

  Judge Markham’s room was dark when they passed; the small piece of tape Cutter had left on the lower edge of the door was still there. No one had been in or out.

  “Does this place seem haunted to you?” Lola said, glancing up and down the dark hall while Cutter used the key Birdie had given him to unlock the library. Lola didn’t exactly appear to be scared, just interested, like someone noting the color of the carpet. “Because I heard it’s haunted. A young girl who died here years ago is supposed to appear once in a while. You know, she just stands there and watches you . . .”

  “As long as she doesn’t have long toenails,” Cutter said.

  Lola frowned. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Cutter said, easing open the door. “Just a story Birdie told me.”

  Everyone else in the school was likely asleep, so he took care to be quiet, though all the other doors in the hall were shut and there was probably no need.

  Lola shrugged since he didn’t engage with her ghost stories, and disappeared into the small book room off the library where she’d stowed her bags. Cutter laid out his air mattress and sleeping bag near the back wall between the stacks. The shelves were close enough that he could reach across with outstretched hands and touch books with the fingers of each hand. It wasn’t long before he had a reasonably comfortable nest beside a dusty Time Life set about seafarers. He fought the temptation to pull a volume and read, knowing he needed sleep more than a primer on windjammers or steamships. His brother, Ethan, would have gotten a kick out of this.

  On his knees, Cutter took off his Colt and set it on the right side of his mattress next to a small Streamlight, both
within easy reach from his sleeping bag. The Glock 27 would stay in the holster on the belt of the Fjällräven pants, which would eventually go beside the rolled fleece jacket he’d use for a pillow. It was like camping in a fort made of books. Flanked by shelves, he’d put the foot of his sleeping bag toward the library door. On the far side of the stack with the Time Life books to his right, a row of windows ran the length of the wall. He walked around the shelving and raised the mini-blinds a few inches, cranking the brass handle a couple of turns. The open window gave some ventilation, but there was more to it than that. Contrary to his present demeanor, Arliss had been timid as a boy, scared of the dark, nervous and jittery about what evil might be lurking outside. Grumpy hadn’t made light of the fears, but challenged young Arliss to sleep with the window open every night—to make anything out there more afraid of him than he was of it. Doors were one thing, Grumpy explained, but windows were only suggestions of security. They kept drunks from wandering in and provided an early warning if a bad guy did want to intrude, but, when you got right down to it, a thin piece of glass provided little more protection than a blanket fort. True security, Grumpy explained, lay with the individual. Ironically, the hard truth of his grandfather’s words made Arliss feel safer. Rain or shine, he’d slept with the window open since he was eight.

  Window cracked, he’d just sat back on his bedroll to untie his boots when Lola called from around the chest-high shelves.