“Trixie knew she could have come to us if she was feeling ostracized,” the principal said, and then he stopped in front of a drab olive locker. “This is the one.”
Bartholemew lifted the bolt cutters he'd brought from the fire department and snipped the combination lock. He opened the metal latch, only to have dozens of condoms spring out of the locker like a nest of snakes. Bartholemew picked up one string of Trojans. “Good thing she wasn't being ostracized,” he said. The principal murmured something and disappeared down the hallway, leaving Bartholemew alone. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and pulled a paper bag out of his coat pocket. Then he brushed the remaining condoms from the innards of the locker and stepped closer to investigate.
There was an algebra textbook. A dog-eared copy of Romeo and Juliet. Forty-six cents in assorted change. A ruler. A broken binder clip. Mounted on the swinging door underneath a sticker that said HOOBASTANK was a tiny compact mirror with a flower painted in the corner. It had been smashed hard enough to crack, and the bottom left corner was missing.
Bartholemew found himself looking at it and wondering what Trixie Stone had seen in there. Did she picture the girl she'd been at the beginning of ninth grade - a kid, really, checking out what was going on in the hall behind her and wishing she could be a part of it? Or did she see the shell she'd become - one of the dozens of faceless
adolescents in Bethel High who made it through the day by praying, one step at a time, they wouldn't attract anyone's notice?
Bartholemew peered into Trixie's locker again. It was like a still life, without the life.
There was no gauze or box of Band-Aids. There was no shirt crumpled into the corner, stained with Trixie's blood. Bartholemew was about to give up when he noticed the edge of a photo, jammed down into the joint between the back metal wall and the floor of the locker. Pulling a pair of tweezers out of his pocket. Bartholemew managed to inch it free.
It was a picture of two vampires, their mouths dripping with blood, Bartholemew did a double take, then looked again and realized the girls were holding a half-eaten bucket of cherries. Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein was on the left. Her mouth was a bright crimson, her teeth stained, too. The other girl must have been Trixie Stone, although he would have been hard-pressed to make an identification. In the photo, she was laughing so hard her eyes had narrowed to slits. Her hair was nearly the same color as the fruit and fell all the way down her back.
Until he saw that, he'd forgotten. When Bartholemew had first met Trixie Stone, her hair had reached down to her waist. The second time they'd met, those locks had been brutally shorn. He remembered Janice the rape advocate telling him that it was a positive step, a donation Trixie had made to a charity that made wigs for cancer patients.
A charity that would have taken, recorded, and labeled Trixie Stone's hair.
* * *
Daniel and Laura sat in an airport bar, waiting. A snowstorm in Anchorage had delayed the connecting flight out of Seattle, and so far three hours had passed, three hours that Trixie was getting farther away from them.
Laura had tossed back three drinks already. Daniel wasn't sure if it was because of her fear of heights and flying in general, or her worry about Trixie, or a combination of both. There was, of course,
the chance that they had been wrong - that Trixie was heading south to Mexico, or sleeping in a train station in Pennsylvania. But then again, Trixie wouldn't be the first kid in trouble to turn to Alaska. So many folks on the run from the law wound up there - the last great frontier - that states had long ago given up spending the money to come pick them up. Instead, the Alaska state troopers hunted down fugitives from justice. Daniel could remember reading newspaper stories about people who were dragged out of cabins in the bush and extradited on charges of rape or kidnapping or murder. He wondered if Trixie's picture was being e-mailed to sergeants around Alaska, if they'd already started to search.
There was a difference, though, between searching and hunting, one he'd learned with Cane and his grandfather. You have to clear your mind of the thoughts of the animal, the old man used to say, or he'll see you coming. Daniel would focus, wishing he was less white and more like Cane - who, if you told him, “Don't think of a purple elephant,” could truly not think of a purple elephant. The difference here was that if Daniel wanted to find Trixie, he couldn't afford to stop thinking about her. That way, she'd know that he was looking.
Daniel moved a martini glass that had been on the bar when they first sat down - someone's leftovers. You didn't have to clean up after yourself; there was always waitstaff to do it for you. That was one difference between Eskimo culture and white culture he'd never
quite understood - people in the lower forty-eight had no responsibility to anyone else. You looked out for number one; you fended for yourself. If you interfered in someone else's business
- even with the best of intentions - you might suddenly be held accountable for whatever went wrong. The good Samaritan who pulled a man from a burning car could be sued for injuries caused during the process.
On the other hand, the Yupiit knew that everyone was connectedman and beast, stranger and stranger, husband and wife, father and child. Cut yourself, and someone else bled. Rescue another, and you might save yourself.
Daniel shuddered as more memories passed through him. There were disjointed images, like the Kilbuck Mountains in the distance flattened by an air inversion in the utter cold. There were unfamiliar sounds, like the plaintive aria of sled dogs waiting for their dinner. And there were distinctive smells, like the oily ribbon of drying salmon that blew in from fish camp. He felt as if he were picking up the thread of a life he had forgotten weaving and being expected to continue the pattern.
And yet, in the airport were a thousand reminders of how he'd been living for the past two decades. Travelers belched out of jetways, dragging wheeled carry-ons and hauling wrapped presents in oversized department store bags. The smell of strong coffee drifted from the Starbucks stand across the way. Carols played in an endless loop on the speaker system, interrupted by the occasional call for a porter with a wheelchair.
When Laura spoke, he nearly jumped out of his seat. “What do you think will happen?”
Daniel glanced at her. “I don't know.” He grimaced, thinking of all that could go wrong from this point on for Trixie: frostbite, fever, animals she could not fight, losing her way. Losing herself. “I just wish she'd come to me instead of running off.” Laura looked down at the table. “Maybe she was afraid you'd think the worst.”
Was he that transparent? Although Daniel had told himself Trixie hadn't killed Jason, although he'd say this till he went hoarse, there was a seed of doubt that had started to blossom, and it was choking his optimism. The Trixie he knew could not have killed Jason; but then, it had already been proved that there was a great deal about Trixie he didn't know.
Here, though, was the remarkable thing: It didn't matter. Trixie could have told him that she killed Jason with her bare hands, and
he would have understood. Who knew better than Daniel that everyone had a beast inside, that sometimes it came out of hiding?
What he wished he had been able to tell Trixie was that she wasn't alone. Over the past two weeks, this metamorphosis had been happening to him, too. Daniel had kidnapped Jason; he'd beaten the boy. He'd lied to the police. And now he was headed to Alaska the place he hated more than anywhere else on earth. Daniel Stone was falling away, one civilized scale at a time, and before long he'd be an animal again - just like the Yupiit believed. Daniel would find Trixie, even if it meant he had to walk across every mile of Alaska to do it. He'd find her, even if he had to slip into his old skin - lying, stealing, hurting anyone who stood in his way. He'd find Trixie, and he'd convince her that nothing she could do or say would make him love her any less. He just hoped when she saw what he'd become for her, she'd feel the same way.