Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 01 - Lost Angel

by Mike Doogan

  After a year, the town was confident in Faith’s ability to mix in the outside world without harm to herself or to them. Once that threat was removed, and the novelty of having a Rejoice teenager in the regional school wore off, the town paid less attention to her comings and goings. So what Faith’s extracurricular activities were this school year, no one could say exactly.

  The only off note in this chorus came from a couple of twenty-something men Kane talked with, cornering them one by one in the cafeteria when they came in from some outdoor labor for a warm-up. They made a point of saying that Faith seemed to spend a lot of time with Johnny Starship—“Can you believe that name? What a wuss,” one of them said—who they figured was just biding his time before taking over the family business of doing the devil’s work. Careful questioning by Kane revealed that each of the young men had harbored hopes of winning Faith for himself and, although she had disabused them of this notion in the nicest possible way, were still hurt by the rejection. Feeling that there was nothing wrong with himself, each chose to explain it by believing that she was interested in some other male.

  The nonsmitten adults had another view. If Faith was spending time with Johnny Starship, it was during the day and in school, where, despite what you sometimes heard about American public schools, they didn’t believe anything seriously sinful could be going on. Besides, the contact didn’t seem to be hurting her and could only help him. Everyone agreed that Elder Moses Wright couldn’t have been happy about his granddaughter spending time with the spawn of his sworn enemy, but it is, they pointed out, a Christian’s duty to proclaim the Good News. Doesn’t the Bible say: “Sing unto the Lord, bless His name; show forth His salvation from day to day”?

  Kane was sitting in his small interview room turning all this over in his mind when Thomas Wright found him.

  “I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said, “but it is time for the evening gathering.”

  Kane got to his feet, and the two men walked out into the community hall.

  “Have you learned anything?” Thomas Wright asked as they moved through the thickening crowd toward the front of the room.

  “Only that your daughter was well liked and respected,” Kane said, “although what I heard did raise a few questions I’d like to ask you.”

  “After the meeting,” Thomas Wright said. “If you’ll stand here.”

  Kane found himself in the front rank of a crowd facing the front of the room. After a couple of minutes, during which more people straggled in, Thomas Wright stepped out and turned to face the crowd.

  “We are at the end of another day of working in the vineyards of the Lord,” he said, raising his voice to be heard in the back.

  “Praise God,” the crowd answered

  “Let us hear the Lord’s words,” Thomas Wright said, and his father, Bible under his arm, stepped out.

  “My text today,” he said, opening the Bible, “is from the Gospel of Saint Mark, chapter four, verse eleven.”

  “Speak to us of God’s word,” the crowd replied.

  The old man looked straight at Kane, then dropped his eyes to read: “ ‘And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the kingdom of God: but to them that are without, all things are done in parables.’ ”

  The old man closed his Bible, fastened his gaze on Kane again, and expanded on his theme: the superiority of those who believed over those who didn’t, Rejoice over the outside world, and self-reliance over depending on outsiders. Kane locked his gaze with the preacher’s and stood there, a slight smile on his lips.

  There was no telling how long that might have gone on if the crowd hadn’t started fidgeting. Moses Wright, in tune with his audience like any showman, sensed its unease, wrapped up his homily and, with one last look at Kane, stepped back into the crowd.

  His son took his place. He looked unhappy.

  “Once again, it is good to hear one of the possible interpretations of God’s words,” he said, bringing a titter from his audience and a scowl from his father. “Now, who has matters to be brought before the meeting?”

  What followed was a mishmash of progress reports, complaints, and news, delivered by people in the crowd, some of whom stepped forward in the same manner the Wrights had, others who stood where they were and spoke. The community gave a prayer of thanks that two of its members serving in Iraq remained unharmed and a third was recovering from her wounds in Germany. It said another prayer for the safety and success of the basketball teams on their way to Anchorage. The rest of the proceeding seemed to Kane to be wholly secular: production reports, plumbing problems, plans for the spring and summer. There was some discussion of the wisdom of opening an espresso stand in Devil’s Toe, those for it stressing the profits to be made, and those against it voicing the community’s aversion to nonbiblical stimulants. No vote was taken.

  When everyone had had a chance to speak, Thomas Wright stepped up again and gestured to Kane to join him. Kane walked up and turned to face the crowd. Seeing so many people in one place, all looking at him, made Kane nervous, but he fought to keep an easy smile on his face.

  “As you know,” Thomas Wright told the crowd, “a member of our community, my daughter, is missing. The Council of Elders has decided that her disappearance merits investigation that is beyond the abilities of anyone here. So we have employed Nik Kane here to look into it. I know he has talked with some of you already, and may want to talk with others. I urge you to cooperate with him, to answer his questions fully and truthfully, and to aid his efforts in any way you can. For now, though, I would simply like you to bid him welcome.”

  “Welcome, Nik Kane,” most of the crowd said. Moses Wright and a few others kept their lips pressed firmly together.

  “Let us go now, walking in the light of the Lord, until we meet again in the morning,” Thomas Wright said.

  The crowd broke up, several members making a point of going to shake Kane’s hand.

  “Elder Moses Wright seems to have forgotten his duty to strangers,” one middle-aged woman said. “The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him.’ ”

  “And elsewhere,” her companion, another middle-aged woman, said, “ ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ ”

  Kane laughed.

  “I appreciate the welcome,” he said, “although I don’t pretend to be an angel.”

  “Neither do we,” one of the women said, “but others still call us that.”

  Kane was swept along into the dining room, where he ate spaghetti and meatballs at a long table filled with Rejoice residents of all ages and occupations. They asked him so many questions about life in Anchorage that an elder had to intervene, laughing. “Please, give Mr. Kane a chance to eat. We wouldn’t want him to go hungry to answer our questions.”

  Kane found his dinner companions to be an odd mixture of innocence and sophistication, able to talk knowledgeably about national politics and economics, but completely unaware of things like property taxes or the price of a loaf of bread. They got their information, he learned, mostly from the radio, which meant mostly from talk radio and, thus, mostly from the rantings of right-wing white men. So they thought the larger world was much more dangerous and threatening than it was, much more sinful, much more strident and partisan, much less friendly and compassionate. Most of those who had more recent experience of the outside world had come to Rejoice to escape it, their own fears and disappointments reinforcing that view. Kane’s suggestions that this might not be a full picture of the outside world were met with skepticism, so he gave that up and used the time to try to learn more about Rejoice.

  What he found out was that the community was hardly monolithic. Most of those at his table were unreservedly Christian in their beliefs and fundamentalist in their practice, but some were less so. That the two groups had worked out a satisfactory relationship was clear, and it appeared to Kane that a person could live quite happily in the town by respecting the f
orms, if not embracing the content, of Christian fundamentalism. Among the strictly religious, there was a wide variety of opinion on both religious form and content. Some sided with Moses Wright’s stubborn adherence to a literal interpretation of the Bible, while others upheld the principle that each person was his own interpreter of the Holy Writ.

  “How do you manage to live together with so many differences?” Kane asked as he rose at a sign from Thomas Wright.

  “Why, where else would we live?” one of the Bible-quoting ladies asked, in a tone that made it clear that she thought no sane person would want to live anywhere but Rejoice.

  Kane followed Thomas Wright back to the small room he’d used to interview the teens, and both men sat.

  “You said you had some questions?” Wright said.

  “A few,” Kane said. “Do you know what Faith’s extracurricular activities are this year?”

  Wright thought for a moment.

  “I don’t really. I assume she is pursuing the same sort of things she did last year, but I don’t know for certain.”

  Kane made a note.

  “Okay, how about her relationship with a boy everyone calls Johnny Starship? What do you know about that?”

  “I’ve heard the rumors that they are involved, uh, romantically, but don’t believe them. Faith came to me and told me about the boy long before the gossip started. She said that he was a nice boy, but troubled about what his father and brother did for a living, and that she was trying to help him through that and, perhaps, into a more Christian life.

  “I asked her if she was interested in him romantically, and she laughed and said, ‘Oh, Papa, I couldn’t be. We’re the same age in years, but he is so much younger in every other way.’ ”

  “So,” Kane said after finishing his note-taking, “he was just a potential convert to her?”

  Thomas Wright smiled.

  “Every Christian has a duty to spread the Gospel, but we don’t try to trick or seduce or dragoon people into our beliefs. At least, most of us don’t. I’m certain that Faith’s motives were first and foremost to help a fellow human being, and if through that help he came closer to God, so much the better.”

  “Does that attitude have something to do with why there’s no Bible in her room?”

  Wright looked confused.

  “No Bible? Faith always has her Bible near to hand. It’s the one I gave her when she turned seven and was old enough to begin to understand God’s word.”

  “Describe it for me.”

  “Oh, it’s hardback-book-sized, with a padded cover done up in brown leather with gold, stamped lettering. It was actually quite expensive. I expected it to last her a lifetime.”

  “And your own Bible?” Kane asked. “I didn’t find it in your home, and I don’t see it here.”

  Thomas Wright’s ears turned red. He squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. Kane began calculating his chances of taking Wright down if it came to that.

  “You said you wanted to search Faith’s room, not my entire home,” Wright barked.

  “Calm down,” Kane said. “You’ve hired me to do a difficult job, and to do it I need to know as much as I can find out about your daughter and the world she lives in. That definitely includes the house in which she lives.”

  Wright sat still and silent. Kane could see him try to will the tension from his body. He took a couple of deep breaths, unballed his fists, and let his shoulders sag.

  “ ‘He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly,’ ” he said, as if to himself, then sighed. “I apologize for my reaction. I suppose you have a job to do, and as I am the one who asked you to do it, I shouldn’t complain if your methods cause me some discomfort. But do you really need to know about the state of my soul?”

  “I don’t know what I really need to know,” Kane said. “I just pick up information wherever I can find it, and hope that, somehow, it arranges itself into a story that I can understand.”

  “That doesn’t sound very scientific,” Wright said.

  Kane grinned.

  “It’s not. It’s more like hoping for revelation than waiting for the results of an experiment.”

  Wright smiled back at the detective.

  “How can I refuse a man striving for revelation? I don’t have a Bible in my home. When my wife died, I put mine away in a drawer in my office. I have not yet figured out how to reconcile her death with faith in God. I understand all the arguments intellectually, but I don’t feel confident of them and, until I do, I guess I am estranged from God.”

  “Doesn’t that cause you problems here? Being in charge of a Christian community without sharing the faith?”

  “It does,” Wright said, smiling again, “but it also causes many people to pray for me. That can’t be all bad.”

  Kane asked Wright a few more questions, then put his notebook away.

  “I’m going to do some detecting outside Rejoice tomorrow,” he said, “and one of the things I need is your written permission to search Faith’s locker at the school. I’ll take the trooper along to make it official, but when you’re dealing with the public education system, it’s better to be prepared for anything.”

  The two men walked over to the office trailer, where Kane dictated a permission form. Wright typed it into a computer, printed it out, and signed it. Then he reached into a desk drawer and came out with a key attached to a piece of wood by a thin chain. He tossed it to the detective.

  “We’re putting you into a cabin of your own, so you can play the violin or use cocaine or whatever it is detectives do these days,” he said. “I could show you where it is, but I’m late for a building committee meeting. We’ve decided it’s time for a proper church, and you wouldn’t believe the details involved in that. But there’s a map in the community hall, so I can show you where it is.”

  The two men walked back to the community hall and stood in front of a big, hand-drawn map.

  “This is the way we keep track of everyone, and know which homes are available for new arrivals,” Wright said. He pointed to a large rectangle. “We are here.” He pointed to a smaller one nearby. “That is my home.” He pointed to a rectangle next to a much bigger one labeled “Airport.” “My father lives here.”

  “He lives far away from everyone else,” Kane said.

  “His home is on the edge closest to Devil’s Toe, right on the road that leads to the highway,” Thomas Wright said. He smiled. “My father says he lives there because he is Rejoice’s bulwark against the evils of the secular world. Others say he lives there so he can keep an eye on everyone else’s comings and goings.

  “You will be here,” he said, pointing to a rectangle on the other side of the town, not far from the greenhouses. As he traced the route to it, Ruth Hunt came into the room.

  “I wondered who still had the lights on,” she said with a smile. “Are you lost?”

  “No,” Wright said, “I’m trying to show Mr. Kane how to get to the cabin he will be using. I’m late for a meeting, so I can’t take him there.”

  “You’re always late for a meeting, Elder Thomas Wright,” the woman said, walking over and standing next to the detective. She smelled of cooking and clean skin. “Where is it?”

  Wright pointed to the little rectangle that represented Kane’s quarters.

  “That’s not far from me,” the woman said. “I’ll be happy to show Mr. Kane the way and see him settled.”

  “Thank you very much, Ruth,” Wright said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He picked up a marking pen, wrote Kane’s name next to the rectangle, and headed off to his meeting.

  “Not much chance of privacy here,” the detective said, pointing to the names written next to other rectangles on the map.

  “If you live here for a couple of weeks, you don’t need this map,” the woman said, “but it comes in handy for newcomers.”

  Kane retrieved his coat from his interview room and followed the woman out into the cold.

  “Just follow me,” she said, getti
ng into a Jeep very like the one Faith had been driving.

  Kane unplugged his pickup and followed the Jeep’s taillights through the darkness, thinking about one of the last exchanges he’d had with Thomas Wright during their interview.

  “Do you remember anything that might have happened to Faith right after her mother died?” he’d asked. “Anything that might have changed the way she acted?”

  Wright had shaken his head.

  “I don’t. Faith never said anything to me, and frankly, those days aren’t very clear in my mind. It was like I was living in some sort of fog. You may not know what it’s like to lose someone close to you, someone you love, but it’s like a blow that dazes you. It took me a long time to recover. If, in fact, I have recovered yet.”

  I do know what it’s like to lose someone close, the detective thought. Laurie’s not dead, it’s true, but she’s gone and she’s not coming back. And that’s every bit as inexplicable to me as why Thomas Wright’s wife died of cancer. And every bit as final. And I don’t have a faith to fall back on or a community to support me.

  Whoa, he thought. That sounds a lot like whining. Better to think about what’s happened to Faith and get on with it.

  He pulled in behind the Jeep at a small cabin, got out, and unlocked the door with the key Thomas Wright had given him. Ruth Hunt walked to a box on the back wall, opened it, and thumbed a set of switches. Then she walked back and switched on a lamp, then another.

  The cabin was one room: sink and sideboard at the front, wood stove and a couple of chairs in the middle, bed at the back. A long, doorless closet ran along the foot of the bed. There was a window over the sink and another in one of the long walls near the wood stove. Off the living area was a door that Kane figured led to a bathroom. A trickle of water flowed from the sink’s faucet.