Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  His rescuer looked anything but pleased at the accolade. Indeed, he was trying to worm through the crowd, on a heading for the door. Jim took three steps and grabbed him by his collar. “Hold on, there, Martin. Been looking for you. Need a word.”

  Jim frog-marched Martin to the bar, sat him on a stool, and said to Kate, “Watch him for me?”

  Kate said to Mutt, “Watch him for me?”

  Mutt looked at Martin and gave a single, authoritative bark that established a perimeter of not more than a foot in every direction that was perfectly understood by everyone concerned.

  Kate followed Jim back to the victim, who was struggling to remember something, anything else. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, I just don’t remember. Wait, maybe, there might have been another snow machine?” He closed his eyes and shook his head, and then stopped, grimacing, as if trying to think hurt his head. “I don’t know.”

  “If you remember something else, be sure to contact me,” Jim said, and stood, nodding at the Grosdidiers, who escorted their patient out in an EMT guard of honor. There was nothing the four Grosdidiers loved more than having a patient to minister to. They’d fixed up what was essentially a two-bed ward in their house, and Daly would be well looked after until George took him to Ahtna the following day.

  Jim turned to Kate. “Well, you can stop worrying. It would appear the Johansens are alive and well and still in business.”

  “Not for much longer,” Kate said. “Mutt!”

  Mutt gave Martin a threatening glare, just to keep in practice, and shot after Kate as she headed for the door. They were both showing a considerable amount of teeth.

  “Kate,” Jim said.

  “Later,” she said. The door to the Roadhouse opened and Harvey Meganack stepped inside. He saw what was coming his way and he stepped back hastily, overbalanced on the top step, and stumbled backward. Kate and Mutt didn’t so much as break stride, brushing by him as his arms windmilled and he tap-danced backward down the stairs.

  “Kate!”

  This time she didn’t bother answering.

  CHAPTER 22

  She loaded a fifty-gallon drum onto the trailer of her snow machine, lashing it down. It held gas for the snow machine, not stove oil, but the Johansen brothers wouldn’t know that and they probably wouldn’t care anyway. Around the drum on the sled, she packed food, stove, and tent.

  As angry as she was, she was glad to have a focus, a goal with a tangible end in sight. Someone was hijacking innocent Park rats and hapless Park visitors on the Kanuyaq River. She was going to find them and stop them, and—she patted the rifle—if she had to hurt someone in the process, fine by her. She might even be looking forward to it.

  She kept her thoughts firmly focused on her preparations, but somewhere, tucked in a corner of her mind, she knew what was really pushing her down the river.

  Life had taken some strange turns of late, and all of those turns had left her on an unfamiliar path, each with a destination shrouded in darkness and uncertainty. Kate didn’t care for uncertainty. If it came to that, she wasn’t big with the darkness, either.

  If that little weasel, Howie Katelnikof, were to be believed, the aunties had conspired to have Louis Deem murdered. The aunties, of all people, the fixed foot around which the rest of the Park revolved. The aunties were the first and last stop when you needed a job, a bed, a meal, or just some ordinary, everyday comfort, ladled out with cocoa and fry bread and an attentive and sympathetic ear.

  She’d always known the aunties were judge and jury. She just hadn’t known that they saw themselves as executioner, too.

  The aunties. Conspiracy to commit murder. She couldn’t believe it, and her mind refused to deal with the thought of them being tried and jailed for it.

  Or of a Park without aunties in it.

  The snow machine was fueled, oil checked, the rifle loaded and snug in its scabbard.

  Then there was her seat on the Association board, definitely not a consummation devoutly to be wished, if she wanted to keep quoting poetry to herself, which she could if she wanted to. Not only a seat, she was chair of the board. How the hell had that happened? There followed of course her less than stellar debut at her first board meeting, as she fumbled and farted her way through an unfamiliar agenda she hadn’t written, and responded—or not—to topics about which she knew little or—be honest, now—nothing.

  Kate had always regarded herself as a responsible shareholder. Well, she would have if she’d thought about it. She voted in all the elections, and where she felt it was necessary she spoke her mind at those—be honest again, admittedly few—shareholder meetings she’d managed to attend, work permitting. Her work took her all over the state, from Prudhoe Bay to Dutch Harbor, often at a moment’s notice. The number of meetings she’d missed far outweighed the number of meetings she’d attended.

  If she were being brutally honest, her shares in the Niniltna Native Association didn’t mean tribal pride or self-determination or land ownership. No, what the Niniltna Native Association meant most to her was the quarterly dividend that landed in her mailbox four times a year. That dividend meant food, fuel, new jeans when the knees on the old ones ripped out, money for taxes and vehicle registration and insurance. She owned her house and her land outright, but all those things cost money to support and maintain. Her job paid well, sometimes very well indeed, but she only had on average half a dozen jobs a year, and the amount of the Association quarterly dividend was often an essential cushion between paychecks.

  She went back inside and donned long johns, cotton, wool, and felt socks, down bibs, down jacket, parka, and Sorels.

  Speaking of money, now she had Johnny to provide for.

  Look out for Johnny for me, okay? It was very nearly the last thing Jack had said to her. Johnny was all she had left to her of Jack Morgan. And hell—tell the truth again—she loved the boy for himself, and she wanted the best for him. He had to have an education. Since he’d been with her, her quarterly dividends had been going directly into his college fund.

  Johnny was another black hole, sucking in every worry and fear she had. Adolescence was the worst time in anyone’s life, when the body betrayed the comparatively stable twelve previous years and erupted suddenly in every direction, things popping out, things dropping down, voices changing, hair changing, hormones launching an all-out attack, no mercy, no quarter, no prisoners. It was quite literally an outrage, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and it went on for years, during which life existed at either the zenith or the nadir, occupying no middle ground and offering no peace. It was exhausting just to think about it. All too well did Kate remember being at the mercy of a body that would not leave her alone. It was good that she and Ekaterina had come to an understanding about Kate living on her own at the homestead, because otherwise they might have killed each other.

  So far, Johnny seemed reasonably sane, although there had been something worrying at him lately, leading to long, abstracted silences. She made every effort to give him as much space and privacy as he needed, in hopes that he would voluntarily tell her what it was. In the meantime, she stewed over the cause. Vanessa, maybe? Girlfriends were tough.

  Not as tough as boyfriends, though. Not near as.

  In the pantry she loaded the pockets of her parka with dried dates, dried apricots, tamari almonds, and roasted pecans. She didn’t know how long this was going to take and she might need fuel herself before she found them.

  She went back outside and rechecked the lines on the drum, Mutt trotting behind her, ears pricked, tail wagging, as always ready to go anywhere, anytime. A scattered overcast allowed some stars to peer down at her. Her breath was a white cloud in the cold air.

  “I did turn off the stove,” she said.

  Mutt looked up at her, tail slowing.

  “I did,” Kate said. “I did turn off that goddamn stove.”

  Jim had started coming for her, and she had known what was going to happen, every cell in her body sounding the alarm.


  Not just the alarm. If she had really fought him, he would have stopped. If she had said no and meant it, he would have stopped. If she had raised so much as a wooden spoon in his direction, he would have stopped in his tracks. No, it wasn’t only alarm she had been feeling, as events upstairs had demonstrated very shortly thereafter. Damn him, anyway.

  “I just didn’t see it lasting this long,” she said to Mutt.

  Mutt, realizing that departure had been delayed indefinitely, sat down with a martyred air.

  Kate sat down on the seat of the snow machine. “He was supposed to be long gone by now, history, conspicuous by his absence. But he’s still here.”

  Mutt gave her a bored look. Obviously.

  “Why? Is it just the sex?”

  Which was a considerable factor, given the intensity of their latest encounter, and which led to a whole other worry. Passion, according to conventional wisdom and Cosmopolitan, was supposed to wane as the relationship aged. They had gone at each other like minks that first year, but while subsequently the frequency had decreased, the intensity had remained, whether Jim took her by storm at night or she launched a surprise seduction before he had his eyes open in the morning.

  “You know what the problem is?” she said to Mutt. “I like him. I really like him. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s good at his job.” She thought for a moment and added, a little doubtfully, “Everybody tells me he’s gorgeous. I guess he is. But you know eye candy’s never been enough for me.” She thought of Jack, whose blunt, irregular features had looked like something chipped off the cornice at Notre Dame, and smiled a little. No, she could accuse herself of many things, but falling for a pretty face wasn’t one of them.

  Mutt, impatient, thumped Kate’s leg with her head.

  “You’re right,” Kate said, and welcomed the rush of anticipation that washed out all misgivings and indecision. Action was what was needed to shake the cobwebs out, hard, fast action, a fight for the right, without question or pause. “Let’s get a move on, girlfriend.”

  She mounted the snowgo, pressed the starter, waited for Mutt to jump up on the seat behind, and lit out of the clearing as if Raven himself was on her tail.

  It took three days to smoke them out.

  On the way through town she stopped for a late-night coffee at the Riverside Café in Niniltna, telling Laurel Meganack where she was going and what she was doing in a full, carrying voice, her words falling on a dozen pairs of eager and, she hoped, fertile ears.

  Her next stop was the store, where Cindy was just closing. She bought a package of Oreos and told her all about it, too.

  At the Roadhouse, Jim had left, and Kate marched back up to the bar and ordered the usual. Conversation ensued, in the course of which Kate let it be known, again in a carrying voice, that she was delivering fuel over the next week to some of the shut-ins along the river. Bernie continued noncommittal and subdued. In the corner, the aunties sewed industriously without looking her way. Old Sam, attention fixed on the slamming and dunking going on on the big screen overhead, nevertheless spared her a sharp glance. His shrewd eye lingered as the door closed behind her, before looking over at the aunties’ table. None of them would meet his eye, either. He nodded as if their inaction had confirmed a profoundly unpleasant inner thought, and returned his attention to the screen.

  That first night she camped on the bank of the river a mile north of Double Eagle, almost exactly at the spot where the attack on the Kaltaks had taken place. She and Mutt passed an unfortunately peaceful evening in the tent, a wood fire a safe distance in front of the flap built high enough to illuminate the loaded sled, the barrel casting a long and come-hither shadow.

  The next day they trolled the river with the drum as bait, up and down the frozen expanse between Tikani and Red Run, stopping at every cabin and village on the way south. Some of them were surprised to see her again this soon, but they all made her welcome.

  That night they camped in a willow thicket at the mouth of the Gruening River. The next morning Kate watched the light come up on the tent wall, thinking. Mutt, a warm, solid presence next to her, stretched, groaned, and pressed a cold nose to Kate’s cheek, indicating a pressing need to be on the other side of the tent flap.

  Oatmeal with raisins and a couple of too-slow parky squirrels for breakfast, and they broke camp and repeated the previous day’s route, north again to Niniltna and on to Tikani and almost to Louis Deem’s homestead, where she could have stopped in to check on Willard, but she didn’t.

  Another disappointingly unmolested day with minimal traffic on the frozen length of the Kanuyaq. “Okay,” Kate said at dusk. “Inland it is.”

  Mutt agreed, and they moved off the river.

  Kate had spent the hours before dawn that morning running down the various options, snug and warm in a down sleeping bag rated to forty below placed on top of a thick foam pad, watching the vapor of her breath form a layer of frost on the inside of the tent. She’d slept deep and dreamlessly the night before. The best soporific was always a cold nose. The memory of last night’s meal, moose steak, biscuits and gravy, followed by stewed rhubarb, lingered pleasantly on palate and belly, and a delicate odor of wood smoke told her that the campfire she had banked the night before was ready to be blown into flame at a moment’s notice. There was nothing quite as life-affirming as a successful winter’s camping trip. If she hadn’t been on a mission, she would have been enjoying herself.

  If, as she suspected, the Johansens had been, ah, temporarily discouraged from further attacks, her last trip to Tikani had confirmed that they had not gone home to lick their wounds. But, like Jim, neither did she believe that they would have left the Park. There was no need. To the uninitiated, the Park might appear to be twenty million acres of frozen wasteland, devoid of sustenance or shelter, but those who lived there knew better.

  No. She had known however bloody and bowed the Johansen brothers might have been, they were still in the Park, providing they were still alive. The attack on Daly proved that they were both. And she finally had a pretty good idea where they’d gone to ground. She couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to figure it out.

  Ranger Dan’s Park headquarters were on what the Park rats called the Step, a long bluff about four thousand feet high that meandered south along the western edge of the Quilak Mountains. Where the bluff finally disappeared, the foothills got higher and more rugged and far less passable, even to snow machines. But there were ways in, especially if you’d been raised by a crotchety Alaskan old fart who’d spent Prohibition on the back of first a dogsled and later one of the first snow machines imported into the Park, finding a route through the Quilak Mountains into Canada for the purposes of stocking the liquor cabinet. From a few remarks the aunties had let drop over the years, Kate believed that Abel might well have been the Park’s first bootlegger.

  South of where the Step ended and deep into the foothills but not quite into the Quilaks themselves, hidden in a narrow canyon with an entrance at right angles to itself that from a distance gave the illusion of an impenetrable wall, a geothermal spring bubbled up out of the ground. The water was a pleasant ninety degrees and never froze, not even in winter. Its flow formed a chain of small ponds, one emptying into another down the little canyon, the last pond draining into some invisible underground fissure, not to surface again, or not in the Park.

  Very few people knew about these hot springs, and even the ones who did didn’t get there often because it was so far from anywhere and it was so difficult to find. Poking around the Quilaks in winter was not a formula for longevity.

  At the head of the canyon, next to the first pool, someone had knocked together a cabin from rough-cut logs. It had been pretty tumbledown the last time Kate had seen it, but if the roof hadn’t fallen in, it would provide adequate shelter, and the springs would be good for any aches and pains the Johansens might or might not be suffering. If they had enough food, they could hole up there indefinitely.

  It was a
long, cold drive into the foothills, and she lost her way twice and had to retrace their steps, first out of a box canyon that dead-ended on the west-facing and nearly vertical slope of one of the Quilaks, and second off of a narrow, twisting creek whose ice boomed ominously beneath the tread of her snow machine every five feet. Mutt got off and trotted a good ten feet away after the second boom. “Et tu, Mutt?” Kate said, and Mutt gave her a look that said plainly, You’ll be happy when you go in that I’m right here, ready to pull you out.

  Kate didn’t go in, though, and once on the bank again, Mutt remounted without any further backseat commentary and they were off again.

  It had been a long time since she’d been to the springs, and snow and ice were adept at disguising even the most distinctive landmark. The wind had swept the snow smooth of tracks, and Kate was working on by guess or by god when she stumbled onto the correct trail pretty much by accident. It was well past dark by then, and Kate stopped before she went around the last dogleg into the canyon itself.

  She looked up at the sky. No stars. She pulled back the hood of her parka and tested the air on her face. Her weather sense, while by no means infallible, was usually pretty good. It didn’t feel like it was going to snow, not quite yet. She refueled the snow machine by means of a hand pump, estimated the contents of the barrel, and recalculated a point of no return, when she would have to start heading for Niniltna so she could get there without running out of gas. She was cutting it close, she decided, but not by too much, and bagged and stowed the pump.

  She pointed the snow machine toward the canyon’s entrance and unhitched the sled. She didn’t expect to be chased out of the canyon—in fact, she was determined not to be—but there was no sense in not being careful. In that same spirit, she tarped both sled and machine, lashing the tarps down loosely, using running loops that would give with a yank if she had to leave in a hurry. Just because it didn’t feel like snow didn’t mean it wouldn’t.