Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  And Auntie Vi, the independent businesswoman, the entrepreneur, the capitalist, the hard-eyed realist who knew stability, accountability, and transparency were essential to increase business to, from, and within the Park, and who knew they would come only with a steady hand on the Park’s tiller, and so much the better if it was the hand of her choice.

  All four pairs of eyes bored into her back as she mounted her snow machine, called to Mutt, and left.

  She didn’t go as advertised, though, instead cutting through the village and following the track about a quarter of a mile downriver. She pulled up in front of a two-story house with blue vinyl siding, black shingles, and a deck the width of the house that faced the river. Safely above its frozen surface, a handsome drift netter called the Audra Sue sat in dry dock.

  There were four snow machines in the shed at the side of the house, along with some other interesting items. Kate climbed the stairs to the deck and banged on the door. She had to repeat the action a second and a third time before Matt Grosdidier, his shiner somewhat less spectacular now, poked his head outside. “Kate?” he said, sounding dazed. “What the hell time is it?”

  “Late enough to come calling,” she said, shouldering her way inside. “Get your brothers up.” He stared at her, his hair flattened on one side and a pillow crease on his cheek. “Go on,” she said, “go get them. This won’t take long.”

  She gave him a hard look that propelled him upstairs, and a moment later she heard him thumping doors and calling his brothers’ names. In the meantime, she looked around her at the chaos that was the Grosdidier en famille. Their front room looked like a larger version of Johnny’s room. She shuddered.

  In short order they were assembled before her, wary at this home invasion and assuming an early morning grouchiness to cover it up.

  Without preamble she said, “Whose idea was it to go after the Johansens?”

  Luke, Peter, and Mark looked at Matt, who grinned. “Don’t know what you’re talking about, Kate.”

  “I’m not looking to jam you up here,” she said. “I’m just looking to fit in another piece of the puzzle. You four are looking like ten rounds with Muhammad Ali. The Johansens are looking like fifteen with Mike Tyson. Seems reasonable to suppose the two groups might have encountered each other recently.”

  Luke, Peter, and Mark looked at Matt again. It wasn’t that they couldn’t all speak, it was just that Matt was oldest. It was habit, mostly. He’d been the only one of legal age when their father’s boat had gone down off Gore Point with their mother on board, and he’d raised the other three, seeing them safely through puberty and high school, working as a deckhand until he’d saved enough money to buy a boat so he could work his father’s drift permit with his brothers as deckhands.

  She looked them over dispassionately. They were an attractive bunch, medium height inherited from their French father, black hair inherited from their Aleut mom, ruddy outdoor skin and dark, merry eyes. They were loud and boisterous and good-humored, and they fought each other with enthusiasm, until one was attacked by some clueless other, and then the four of them united to annihilate him with even more enthusiasm. They were fair about it, they cheerfully patched up whoever they beat the snot out of, but Jim Chopin had been known to observe that these occasional contretemps appeared to be more a matter of drumming up EMT business than of wreaking vengeance.

  They seemed to have adopted the Park as a fifth sibling since they’d all four graduated from the EMT class, however. Kate, looking past Matt, saw a framed copy of the Hippocratic oath hanging crookedly on the wall, surrounded by a bunch of family pictures. She sighed. “Did you bait them out? I saw the sled with the supplies packed into it in the garage. I also noticed that all the boxes were empty.”

  “You’re a snoop, Kate Shugak,” Matt said without heat.

  “Yes, I am, Matt Grosdidier,” Kate said. “Did one of you bait them out and the rest of you jump them when they bit?”

  He looked at his brothers. “If we did, so what? Boys needed a whupping.” He looked back at her. “And at the time it didn’t look like anyone else was going to give them one.”

  Kate ignored the unspoken implication. “So you stepped up.”

  He shrugged. “Even if we did, and I’m not saying that, it didn’t do a whole lot of good, now, did it? They jumped that guy from Anchorage.”

  “So it doesn’t count if it didn’t work?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Will you tell me one thing?” she said. “Was it your idea?”

  His eyes shifted. “I don’t know what you mean, Kate.”

  “The Johansen brothers emphatically, categorically, and comprehensively deny killing Talia Macleod,” Jim said that evening.

  “Of course they do,” Kate said.

  “They say they didn’t kill Mac Devlin, either.”

  “Of course they do,” Kate said again. She was stretched out on the couch with a copy of Christopher Hitchens’s latest polemic against all gods, all faiths, and all those who sailed in them. Since she agreed with every word he said, naturally she considered it a work of genius, and she wanted to get back to it. Besides, she had a feeling that this conversation was going to do nothing but go around and around, like a snake chasing its own tail and eventually eating itself. Serene in her ignorance of Jim thinking the same thing about a previous conversation, she said with as much disinterest as she could infuse into the words, “What else would you expect them to say?”

  He hung coat and cap and toed off his Sorels. “Nothing,” he said, staring at his feet with dissatisfaction.

  “They cop to the river attacks?”

  “Yes.”

  “The last guy, whatshisname, too?”

  “Gene Daly. Yeah, him, too. All of them, no problem there.” Mutt extricated herself from the quilt in front of the fire and bounded over for reassurance that she still occupied the first and largest place in his heart.

  “I can imagine,” Kate said, very dry. All Jim would have had to do was tell the Johansen brothers they were going down for murder one and they would have confessed to anything else going on anywhere else in order to get out from under. “Ick do most of the talking?”

  “Ick did all of the talking. Doesn’t he always?” Jim gave Mutt a final scratch between the ears and stood up. “Kid home?”

  “Studying in his room.”

  “Am I cooking tonight?”

  She went back to her book. The Old Testament was a scary place, although the New Testament might be even scarier. “Did you know that hell and damnation aren’t mentioned by any of the Old Testament prophets?”

  “Really?”

  “Nope. Oh, they’d sell their daughters to angry mobs in exchange for their own safety and they’d slaughter opposing tribes by the thousand, but after that they were pretty much done. It’s only Jesus who preaches hell and damnation in the afterlife if you don’t believe in him.”

  By this time Jim had deduced that if he wanted to eat, he was, in fact, cooking dinner that evening. Unperturbed, he went to the kitchen and as he expected, found a package of caribou steaks thawing in the sink and bread rising in a bowl. He opened the refrigerator and with great contentment found a six-pack of Alaskan Amber. Kate wouldn’t bring home beer for just anyone. He uncapped a bottle and took a long swallow. “I made a bunch of calls the last couple of days. It turns out, our Talia got around.”

  Kate peered at him over the top of her book. “Do tell.”

  He nodded, put down the beer, and started chopping onions. “We all know there were enough Park rats around who wanted to take her down because of the mine,” he said, pouring olive oil into a cast-iron frying pan and turning the heat on beneath it. “And let’s face it, you didn’t help.”

  That brought her upright, book discarded. “I beg your pardon?”

  He shrugged. “You straddled the fence on the mine at the last NNA board meeting. Because you didn’t vote to throw the bastards out, some people could get the impression that Talia wa
s a serious threat to the Park and to their way of life.” He looked up and met her eyes. “You could have helped make her a target, Kate.”

  She didn’t go immediately on offense, which surprised and relieved him. He needed her as a sounding board and it wouldn’t help the discussion along if she got too mad to listen.

  She sat in frowning silence for a moment. He tilted the cutting board over the frying pan and used the knife to push the onions into the oil. They sizzled. He stirred them with a wooden spoon.

  “Okay, say that’s true,” she said. “Let’s leave that for the moment, and you tell me about these calls you made.”

  He flattened some cloves of garlic, peeled them, and minced them. “Talia was a busy girl.”

  “Busy how?” Kate said, alert to the change in his tone.

  “Busy between the sheets.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  He looked at her, a steady, unflinching gaze.

  She could feel the color rising into her cheeks. She looked down, picking up her book and smoothing the cover unnecessarily, mumbling something that might have been “Sorry.”

  The onions were beginning to brown and he added the garlic, stirring it in and leaving it over the heat just long enough to perfume the oil. “Understand that all I’ve been doing is gathering information,” he said, using a slotted spoon to move them to a saucer. “Can’t dignify much of it as more than gossip.” There might have been an added bite to that last sentence. Mutt, having resumed her position in front of the fire, flicked her ears.

  Kate’s lips pressed together, but she didn’t say anything.

  “The word is she was sleeping with both the mayor of Cordova and the manager of the Costco store in Ahtna. Plus I think she gave Gallagher a tumble, too.”

  “The mayor of Cordova is married,” Kate said, making an effort to keep her voice neutral.

  “Yeah,” Jim said, “I don’t think that mattered much to Talia.” He took a deep breath and said, “She hit on me, too. When I was in Cordova, putting Margaret Kvasnikof and Hally Smith on the plane for Hiland Mountain.”

  “Oh,” Kate said inadequately.

  The hard part out of the way, he took another deep breath and let it out. “I also got Brendan to find out who was her attorney. I called him, and after he swore me to secrecy he told me that she had a chunk of nonvoting stock in Global Harvest.”

  “Part of the paycheck,” Kate said. She felt a little light-headed, and forced herself to focus.

  “Yeah, but. There’s a weirdness.”

  “Which is?”

  “These particular shares are held by a limited group of Global Harvest stockholders. They own their shares for the period of their lifetimes in joint rights of survivorship, accruing all dividends generated by those shares to themselves. But they can’t sell them or trade them or leave them to anyone else. Once they die, the shares revert to the other partners.”

  Kate digested this in silence for a moment. “So her relatives don’t inherit, beyond what she’d already earned?”

  “Nope.”

  “Which puts any of them out of the running.”

  “Normally I’d say not unless they knew, but it turns out they did know. Part of the deal that employees at that level make when they sign on with Global Harvest is they also have to sign an affidavit saying they so informed their nearest and dearest, with registered copies going out to and signed for by all of same.”

  Kate said admiringly, “So Global Harvest pays you well—”

  Jim put his head back and gave forth with a long, loud wolf whistle.

  “—okay, extremely well, so long as you’re alive, but they don’t have to worry about the shareholders getting uppity and voting the board out of office during that time, and they don’t have to worry about who the stock goes to once you’re dead, averting an unfriendly takeover. All the shareholders get is the money, no voice.”

  “You got it.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Brendan says it’s a contract, and everyone who signed off on it was of legal age. He says if you had a cranky enough heir it could be tested in court, but . . .”

  “Man. I wonder how the shareholders of the Niniltna Native Association would like that. All the money and no voice.”

  “Everyone in this particular group of shareholders is also doing a job of work for the company,” Jim said. “Talia was drawing a hefty salary. The shares were just a bonus.”

  Kate detected a possible hitch. “Do they keep the stock even if they quit the company?”

  “They keep it and any dividends the stock pays until they die,” Jim said, “whether they’re working for Global Harvest or not. The stock reverts to the company. The earnings to date then go to their heirs.”

  Kate stood up, her book sliding to the floor. Her eyes were bright and she had the beginnings of a smile on her face. “It’s a tontine.”

  Jim dredged the steaks in flour and salt and pepper and put them in the frying pan. The smell was instant and intoxicating and his mouth watered. He wrested his attention back from his appetite. “It’s a what?”

  “I read about it in a novel once.” Kate got up and walked over to the kitchen, her nose almost twitching with interest. He hid a grin. Kate the detective in action. It was always fun to watch. Not to mention which, anything that diverted her from his little bombshell was bound to be a good thing.

  “A tontine is a kind of contest,” she said, “where a bunch of people pay into a kitty and whoever lives longest gets the dough.”

  “Whoa,” he said, browning the steaks for a couple of minutes on either side.

  “Yeah,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. “Did you get the names of the other shareholders?”

  “Why,” he said, dragging the word out, “I just might have done that little thing.”

  He moved the steaks from pan to warming plate with care and deliberation.

  “So?” she said. “Anybody we know on it?”

  “One name kinda jumped out at me,” he said. He poured a cup of chicken broth into the pan. “Is that leftover bottle of white wine still knocking around anywhere?”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Like I keep telling you, I was at the Roadhouse that night with my wife,” Harvey Meganack said. “You can check. Must have been a hundred other people there. After that, we came right home. Didn’t we, honey?”

  The four of them were sitting in Harvey’s front room, in the largest and newest house in Niniltna, the first one you saw when you drove in from Ahtna. The frozen surface of the Kanuyaq River was just on the other side of the dock that began down the stairs from the house and extended twenty-five feet out from the bank. It looked nowhere near as well used as the Grosdidiers’ dock did, although the Laurel M. was in dry dock next to it, looking very fine in new white paint with blue trim.

  Inside, everything was equally brand spanking new, and it all matched. The bright floral couch matched the bright floral love seat and the bright floral easy chair. The faux mahogany coffee table with the identically turned spiral legs matched the three end tables. Four matching brass lamps with white pleated shades and swing arms stood on either side of the couch and at exactly the same distance from the right arm of both the love seat and the easy chair, and everything in the room was placed at precise angles and a precise distance from everything else on the twelve-foot-square area rug, with colors that picked up the flowers on the couch, love seat, and easy chair.

  Kate thought about the chaos of her own front room, the lone couch, the aunties’ quilt crumpled on the floor before the fireplace, the mismatched bookshelves that lined one wall, the throw pillows of various sizes and ages and colors and patterns that lay where they fell, until someone came along and pulled them into a pile large enough to flop down on. Mutt didn’t shed a lot, but there was definite evidence of dog everywhere.

  She wondered if she were suffering from house envy. She looked around the room again, and then back at Harvey, sitting on the extreme edge of the
floral couch, sweating bullets. Next to him sat Iris, a pillar of rectitude, presently inflamed by Kate and Jim’s presence in her hitherto pristine and perfect home.

  Nope.

  Everyone looked at her and she realized she’d said it out loud. She looked at Iris. “You sure you want to back him up on this, Iris?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? It’s the truth.” She looked at Kate, not bothering to hide her resentment. She had wanted Harvey to be chair of the Niniltna Native Association board, primarily so she could be the wife of the chair of the board. If there could be said to be even one Park rat with a social agenda, that rat would be Iris Meganack. Kate realized for the first time that it was far more likely Iris who had spread the stories of Kate’s first board meeting, not Harvey. Iris, motivated by malice and envy, would have no internal editor. Harvey, motivated by greed and ambition, would not want to be shoved out of the loop and therefore might think twice about pissing off the however temporary current board chair.

  The door opened and Laurel Meganack walked in. Her eye lit upon Jim first and a smile spread across her face. “Jim, hey. What’re you doing here?” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Asking Dad for my hand in marriage?”

  She saw Kate. Her smile faded. “Oh. Hey, Kate.”

  “Hey, Laurel.”

  Laurel looked from Kate to Jim and to her parents as realization dawned. “Dad. What’s going on here?”

  “None of your business, Laurel,” her mother said sharply. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to pick up some more of my stuff,” Laurel said, still looking at Harvey. “Dad, is everything all right?”

  “Of course everything’s all right,” Iris said. “Go get your stuff.”

  “Go ahead, honey,” Harvey said, passing his sleeve across his forehead and managing a smile. “Everything’s fine.”

  Laurel looked at Kate, no trace of smile present now, and her thoughts were transparent. If you think you’re going to hurt my dad, think again. It made Kate think better of both of them.

  Laurel left the room. Kate waited until she heard a door open and close, and said in a lowered voice, “You see how it looks, Harvey. Talia Macleod has stock in Global Harvest that reverts to the chunk of stock held by the other shareholders in her particular group. It bumps up everyone’s portion, increases everyone’s income. You’re one of the shareholders, so far as we know the only one who is also a Park rat. So you have motive.”