A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  Maggie nodded. “I’ll tell Jim what’s up when he gets back.”

  The Grosdidier driveway was full so Kate had to park on the road. Smith waited in the pickup. Mutt followed Kate.

  It was a two-story, two-bathroom, four-bedroom house, typical of the post–log cabin construction boom in the Park in the mid-seventies. It was always cheaper to go up, requiring a smaller foundation in construction and less in the way of heat in operation. A detached garage the size of a small hangar stood to the left. Both buildings fronted the river. An aging but sturdy dock was built on the bank, to which was moored a thirty-six-foot drifter named Audra Sue, resplendent in a brand-new coat of white paint. Kate paused with her hand on the door for a closer look. Yes, the brand-new red trim line began at the bow with a square cross. She had to smile.

  She pushed open the door and stepped into a small room crowded with mismatched chairs that had all seen better days. A large empty wooden spool sat in the middle of the room, laden with magazines ranging from Guns & Ammo to Cosmopolitan. The Redbook issue facing Kate’s direction had a picture of the original Charlie’s Angels on it.

  Kate had barely enough time to see that several of the chairs were occupied before a small form impacted her legs with such force she almost went over backward. “Kate! Kate! Kate!”

  “Katya!” She scooped up the four-year-old and tossed her in the air.

  Katya laughed her delightful chuckling laugh. “Do it again!”

  Kate did it again and then set her down with a grunt. “You’re getting too big for shot put, girlfriend.”

  Katya was promptly attacked by Mutt, who used her nose to roll Katya around the room. Katya giggled some more, and squealed when her South Park T-shirt rode up and Mutt’s wet nose pressed against her bare back.

  Kate smiled at Dinah. “Hey. The brat okay?”

  Dinah, a wispy, blue-eyed blonde, Bobby Clark’s wife, Katya’s mother, and a practicing videographer, looked up from Time magazine’s special report edition on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to smile and shake her head. “She needed her polio booster.”

  “Where’s Bobby?”

  “On the air.”

  “Oh yeah? What frequency?”

  Dinah shrugged. “You know it changes every day.”

  “I know.”

  Eknaty Kvasnikof was there, elbow resting on the arm of his chair, holding a hand wrapped in a bloody piece of cloth straight up. He nodded. “Kate.”

  “Natty.” She nodded at his hand and raised her eyebrows.

  He grimaced. “Working on the engine. Trying to work a bolt loose.” He shook his head.

  He looked tired, and there was an anxious crease in his forehead. A recent graduate of Niniltna High, Eknaty was skippering the family drifter for the first time this summer. He was the oldest, there were five younger sisters and brothers back home, and a father with lung cancer.

  Kate thought for a moment, while Mutt stepped up and pushed her nose beneath Natty’s hand. He rubbed her ears, a faint smile lightening his features.

  “Would Willard be any use to you, Natty?” Kate said.

  Natty looked up. “Jesus, Kate.” It was all he said, but it was heartfelt.

  She nodded. “He’s up the post. Tell Maggie I said to release him into your custody. You have to keep him working, you understand? You can’t let him stray off on his own, you’ve got to keep tabs on him.”

  Natty looked uncertain. “What about when the job’s done?”

  “We’ll worry about that then. Shouldn’t be a problem so long as you keep him in cookies and candy bars. Keep him busy and out of trouble, and he’ll keep your engine purring like a cat on overtime.” Her hand rested on his shoulder for a brief moment. She turned to the woman sitting a few chairs down. “Ulanie.”

  Ulanie Anahonak was a thin, tense woman with scant dark hair, a sallow complexion, and a gaze so intense Kate had often wondered if she were myopic. “Kate,” she said, and turned back to leafing through an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal with Nancy Reagan on the cover.

  The door to the clinic opened and Matt Grosdidier’s voice was heard. “If you’d come here right away, Phyllis, right when you knew—”

  “I told you, I didn’t—” The woman’s tearful voice came to an abrupt halt when Phyllis Lestinkof turned her head and met Ulanie Anahonak’s eyes.

  There was a brief silence that felt somehow uncomfortable, although Kate did not know why. “Hey, Phyllis,” Kate said.

  Phyllis looked away from Ulanie, it seemed with something of an effort. Her smile was strained. “Hey, Kate.” A plump young woman with a round, brown face and hair in a pixie cut that made her look like a post–Frank Sinatra Mia Farrow, if Mia had been Aleut, Phyllis was, for a miracle, sober. She didn’t look happy, although Kate hoped it wasn’t because of lack of alcohol.

  Phyllis glanced at Matt and flushed. She took a deep, albeit shaky breath and summoned up a smile, looking straight at Kate and only at Kate. “Nice to see you,” she said, “gotta go, Auntie’s waiting on me.”

  The door closed softly behind her on its hydraulic hinge.

  “Kate,” Matt said. “What’s up?”

  He met her eyes with apparent frankness, but she noticed he was showing a little color, too. She refrained from casting a meaningful look at the door that had closed behind Phyllis Lestinkof and said instead, “Got somebody lost in the woods up near the Smith place. I want a Grosdidier to go with when we go looking for him, in case he’s hurt when we find him.”

  Matt blinked at her, tilted his head back, and raised his voice, already a fine, stentorian baritone. “Mark, Luke, Pete! Get the lead out, let’s clear the waiting room.”

  Thirty minutes later Eknaty had stitches and a bandage and Katya a red spot on her upper arm and a cherry lollipop. Ulanie had departed on Phyllis’s heels without treatment or explanation. The four Grosdidier brothers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Peter, took no notice, they were too busy hoping out loud that they’d find the driver of the truck alive. Barely alive, preferably, with multiple open wounds. Broken bones would be a bonus, an open fracture best of all, multiple open fractures nirvana. They checked the massive aluminum tool chest bolted in the back of their fire-engine-yellow (custom painted) Chevy Silverado, in which was stowed a vast array of medical paraphernalia that for all anyone in the Park knew included a cure for cancer. For sure no Grosdidier had ever dived inside it and come up at a loss for what was needed at the scene. The Niniltna Native Association had paid for most of it. Kate had a sneaking suspicion that the NNA had paid for the Silverado, too, but she’d never had the heart to go back and look at the records to be sure.

  “All present and accounted for!” Mark said.

  “Lock and load!” Luke said.

  “Let’s roll!” Peter said.

  Matt said, “Okay, boys, let’s saddle up.” The four of them piled into the two bench seats of the extended cab, Matt as usual at the wheel, and if they could have peeled out they would have. As it was, gravel sprayed the wall of the garage and everything hanging on it received yet another layer of chips and dings. They stayed on Kate’s bumper all the way up to the Step, where the two-car convoy parked in front of the group of prefabricated buildings that made up Park headquarters. Tucked against a Quilak foothill, the Canadian border at their back and the Park rolling out before them in all its glory, the view was superb out of any window. The Step, a wide, level ridge running north-south, had enough room for a dirt strip big enough for a Cessna 180 to get out with a full load of confiscated bear bladders, moose racks, walrus tusks, and fur pelts illegally harvested from wolves, wolverines, beaver, mink, and marten.

  Dan was in his office.

  He was not alone. Standing, or rather slumping across the desk from him, was a sad sack of a guy, midforties, brown hair and eyes, medium height, medium build, with a chin and a waist that both showed distinct signs of regular meals. His chin also bore trace evidence of having tried to grow a beard but it just wasn’t in the cards. His Carhartt
overalls were worn at the elbows and knees and looked as if they had begun life on a far smaller man. His boots were used, the toe of the right boot having been punctured with what might have been the claw of a hammer, or maybe a hatchet. He carried thread-bare musher gloves leaking down feathers that when donned would reach to his elbows and a flapped cap with the right earflap missing.

  He was arguing with the chief ranger. Any Park rat could have told him that was a lost cause. “You want to hike up to Bright Lake?” Dan said. “At this time of year? With the snow still twelve feet deep in some places? Why?”

  “I like the name,” the guy said.

  Dan was rendered momentarily speechless.

  “It doesn’t matter where I want to go,” the guy said. “You told me to come back when I got geared up. Well, here I am, all geared up.”

  Dan surveyed said gear, which looked like it had been excavated from the nearest trash pile, and didn’t bother to hide his contempt. “Mr. Davis, you said you wanted to spend a month covering a hundred miles in the Park. I’m telling you that, uh, gear you’ve managed to scare up from god knows where won’t last you fifty feet.”

  “You saw my tent,” the guy said, “it’s a good one.”

  “It was a good one,” Dan said.

  “And I’ve got an emergency locator transmitter.” This last was said with a good deal of pride.

  “Yeah,” Dan said, “well, I’m not signing any permit for you just so I can come haul your ass out when you stumble into trouble, which sure as shit you will, and set off your ELT, which also sure as shit you will. Now get out of my goddamn office, and don’t come back until you’ve got a fucking clue as to what you’re doing!”

  Kate thought of Maggie. Happy Memorial Day, everybody.

  Davis, red-faced and sullen, clumped past Kate and the Grosdidiers without speaking. His boots weren’t laced and they must have been too big because one of them almost slipped off his foot. He tripped on the threshold and the Grosdidiers might have had their first Kate-related case of the day then and there if Pete and Matt hadn’t caught him and set him upright again. He yanked his arms free of their grasp and clumped off without a word of thanks.

  Dan looked around and acquired Kate as a target. “And what the hell do you want?”

  A little over medium height, thickset without being fat, red hair cut in a buzz, and bright blue eyes glowering from beneath a shelf of a brow, the chief ranger of the Park was not to be trifled with in this mood. She told him what the hell she wanted without excess verbiage. The Grosdidier boys kept their mouths shut. It seemed safest.

  “Fuck me,” Dan said, his mouth a tight line. “Not another one.”

  “Another one?” Kate said. She didn’t want to set him off again but this sounded interesting. And possibly relevant.

  “Happens all over the national parks, people thinking they can walk in and just disappear. They’re right, mostly, but what they don’t figure is that we have to go look for them anyway. Clueless assholes.” The last two words were almost a shout and appeared to be directed at the now empty door. He got to his feet. “Show me on the map.”

  A map of the Park covered most of one wall of Dan’s office, color-coded for ownership—federal, state, Native corporation, urban, private. The yellow dots signifying land privately owned were barely visible in the sea of green that represented federal parks and wildlife refuges. Smith found the Step road, traced it down to the turn-off, and stopped about half an inch in.

  Dan’s sigh was heartfelt. “Great,” he said, “just dandy.” He tapped a red pin. “Eddie saw a grizzly male thereabouts a couple of days ago. Big one, he said, he figures record size, gorgeous golden brown hide.”

  “Thought Park rangers weren’t supposed to think about Park bears in terms like ‘record size’ and ‘gorgeous hide,’ ” Kate said.

  Dan snorted. “Yeah. Like monks don’t think about sex.” He strapped a .357 to his waist and reached for the .30-06 in the gun rack next to the door. “Let’s go.”

  The convoy of trucks rumbled down the hill and pulled up in back of the abandoned pickup an hour and a half later, good time due to the still semifrozen state of the road.

  Kate found the registration in the glove compartment. “Dewayne

  A. Gammons,” she said.

  “ ‘Dewayne’?” Mark said.

  “ ‘Gammons’?” Luke said.

  “What’s the A stand for?” Peter said. “Aloysius?”

  The Grosdidiers snickered en masse.

  The glove compartment yielded further the vehicle handbook, a square of foil that proved to be a Trojan condom with a three-year-old sell-by date, and a box of cinnamon Tic Tacs with two left. A more extensive search beneath and behind the bucket seats turned up an empty pint of Windsor Canadian, a lug wrench, an oil filter still in its box, an air filter ditto, a book of matches from the Ahtna Lodge, a Suulutaq Mine flyer extolling Global Harvest’s environmentally friendly policy that looked as if it had been used to swab oil from a dipstick, and a single round of ammunition.

  The cartridge was maybe an inch long. Kate wasn’t a gun nut, with two weapons to her name, the 12-gauge shotgun in the rack next to the door back home and the .30-06 in the gun rack in the cab of her truck. This was a much smaller cartridge for a much smaller weapon. She handed it to Matt, who flattened his hand and cradled it in his palm. The Grosdidiers crowded around.

  “CCI,” Mark said.

  “Twenty-two,” Luke said.

  “CB Long,” Peter said.

  They looked up at Kate and said in a chorus, “Girly gun.”

  “Or a kid’s,” Matt said, handing back the round. “Rifle or revolver, not designed for auto or semiauto. Range maybe a mile with a tail wind. Not a lot of oomph, not very loud, used mostly for plinking and taking out your local feral squirrel. Six, six-fifty a box, a hundred rounds per.”

  “And, you’ll notice, not fired,” Dan said. “Probably dropped it when he was trying to load the gun so he could shoot himself. Really sucks how that didn’t work out. Can we go find this jackoff now or what?”

  He looked at Kate. She wasn’t listening to him, her head cocked, concentrating. “Did you hear that?” she said.

  His head whipped around and he looked hard at the dense wall of brush lining the side of the trail. One hand unsnapped his holster, the other half-raised his rifle. “What?”

  They all listened then. An eagle called in the distance, a full, piercing cry, answered by a raven’s malicious croak nearer by.

  “Nope,” Matt said, “didn’t hear anything.” He didn’t make fun of Dan’s nervousness. None of them did. No Park rat with the most minimal sense of self-preservation would dream of making fun of anyone on the alert for hungry bears in the spring.

  “I don’t know,” Kate said, “I thought I heard a shot.” She looked at Mutt, who had those parabolic antennas that passed for her ears up and scanning for intelligent life in the universe. Alert but not alarmed. Of course a gunshot in the Park was like the smell of dope at a Jimmy Buffett concert, familiar and expected. “Probably my imagination.”

  She bagged and tagged the bullet, more because she knew what Jim would say if she didn’t than from any real conviction that the unspent round was evidence of anything other than a strong tendency toward melodrama. Odds were that somewhere between the truck and wherever he was now, Mr. Gammons had rediscovered the will to live. There was a story she remembered reading about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge who had survived, every one of whom reported having changed their minds on the way down.

  On the other hand, it was spring, the moose were in calf and the bears were up and hungry. There were plenty of ways to die in the Park without shooting yourself. “Okay,” she said, “which way, do you think?”

  They surveyed the thick, impenetrable brush with less than enthusiasm, even the Grosdidiers. Bushwhacking was not a fun way to spend an afternoon. “Let’s spread up and down the road,” Kate said, “look for where he went in.”

  Lu
ke found crushed fireweed and a bent alder branch about ten feet from the pickup’s front bumper. Mutt took point, nose sensing something the rest of them would never be able to smell. Kate, holding her .30-06 at the ready in front of her, went in next, followed by Dan and the brothers. Smith, with the smug air of one who had done his duty by God and country, had left them to finish his interrupted walk home.

  It was a still day, and clear, the sun well into its daily twenty-hour journey around the summer horizon. The spruce were thick here, but they were dying from the spruce bark beetle infestation, too, which meant a lot of them had fallen over, or tried to. It didn’t make the going any easier, and the third time they’d had to get down on their hands and knees to crawl beneath a horizontal trunk there was increasing skepticism displayed concerning Mutt’s trailing abilities.

  “Just don’t let her hear you say that,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, but who works this hard to off themselves?” Luke said.

  “Yeah, what’s wrong with a nice little bullet to the head?” Mark said.

  “Yeah, and you realize we’re going to have to pack this fucker out when we find him,” Peter said.

  “Maybe he’ll be able to walk,” Matt said, without much conviction.

  “Could be worse,” Kate said. “At least it’s too early for mosquitoes.”

  But they were all thinking about that gunshot Kate thought she’d heard.

  The going was rough and got rougher. They stumbled through patches of ice and snow that the shade from the forest had hidden from the sun. The rest of the time the surface beneath their feet ranged from bare, frozen ground to wet moss. Everyone’s jeans were soaked to the knees, and Matt, who had a particularly fine head of hair, had lost some of it to clawing spruce limbs. More comments were made, most of them profane.

  Kate, the smallest of them and therefore the quickest through the underbrush, said, “Jeez, what a bunch of whiners. You’d think you guys had never been hunting in your lives.”