“Sorry,” Elaine said shyly. “He's never seen anyone with that color hair before.” She unwound her scarf and unzipped her coat, then did the same for the baby.
“Elaine, this is Wass,” Charles said. “He lived here a long time ago.”
Daniel stood at the introduction, and when he did, the baby reached for him. He grinned, catching the boy as he twisted out of his mother's arms. “And who's this?”
“My son,” Elaine said. “His name's Cane.”
* * *
Elaine lived in the same house as her parents, along with her two older children and her husband. So did her sister Aurora, who was seventeen years old and heavily pregnant. There was a brother, too, in his late twenties; Laura could see him in the only bedroom in the house, feverishly playing Nintendo.
On the kitchen table was a hunk of frozen meat in a bowl - if Laura had to guess, she would have said it was intimately related to the moose parts in the arctic entry. There was a stove but no sink. Instead, a fifty-five-gallon drum in the corner of the kitchen area was filled with water. Dusty ice-fishing lures and antique hand-carved
kayak paddles were suspended from the ceiling; five-gallon buckets filled with lard and dried fish were stacked beside the threadbare
couch. The walls were covered with religious paraphernalia: programs from church services, plaques of Jesus and Mary, calendars printed with the feast days of saints. Anywhere there was a spare square of paneling, a photograph had been tacked: recent pictures of the baby, old school portraits of Elaine and Aurora and their brother, the boy Daniel had been accused of murdering.
There was a curious irony to being left behind here, even if the very thought of it made Laura break into a sweat. She kept remembering what Daniel had said about the Alaskan bush: It was a place where people tended to disappear. What did that bode for Trixie, or for Daniel? And what might it mean for Laura herself?
In Maine, when Lauras life had been jolted off course, it had been terrifying and unfamiliar. Here, though, she had no standard for comparison - and not knowing what came next was the norm. She didn't know why no one would look her in the eye, why the boy playing video games hadn't come out to introduce himself, why they even had state-of-the-art video equipment when the house itself was little more than a shed, why a family that at one point had believed you'd killed their son would welcome you into their home. The world had been turned inside out, and she was navigating by the feel of its seams.
Daniel was speaking quietly to Charles, telling him about Trixie. “Excuse me,” Laura said, leaning toward Minnie. “Could I use your restroom?”
Minnie pointed down the hall. At its end was a flattened cardboard refrigerator box, erected like a screen. “Laura,” Daniel said, getting to his feet.
“I'm fine!” she said, because she thought if she could make Daniel believe it, then maybe he'd convince her of it as well. She slipped behind the screen, and her jaw dropped. There was no bathroom; there wasn't even a toilet. Only a white bucketlike the ones
in the living room that stored dried fishwith a toilet seat balanced on top of it.
She peeled off her ski pants and squatted, holding her breath the whole time, praying nobody was listening. When Laura and Daniel had moved in together, there had still been a certain shyness between them. After all, she was pregnant, and that had speeded along a relationship that might have otherwise taken years to reach that level of commitment. Laura could remember Daniel separating his laundry from hers for the first few months, for example. And she had studiously avoided going to the bathroom if Daniel happened to be in there taking a shower.
She couldn't recall when, exactly, all their shirts and jeans and underwear had mixed in the washer together. Or when she'd been able to pee while he was two feet away from her, brushing his teeth. It was simply what happened when the histories of two people dovetailed into one.
Laura straightened her clothes - washing her hands wasn't even an option - and stepped out from behind the partition. Daniel was waiting for her in the narrow hallway. “I should have warned you about the honey bucket.”
She thought of how Daniel couldn't bear to run the dishwasher if it wasn't overflowing, how his showers lasted less than five minutes. She'd always considered it thrifty; now she saw that when you grew up with water as a luxury and plumbing a distant wish, it might simply be a habit too deeply rooted to break.
“I need to get going,” Daniel said.
Laura nodded. She wanted to smile at him, but she couldn't find it in herself. So much could happen between now and the next time she saw him. She wrapped her arms around Daniel and buried her face against his chest.
He led her into the kitchen, where he shook Charles's hand and spoke in Yup'ik: “Quyana. Piurra.”
When Daniel walked into the arctic entry, Laura followed. She stood at the front door, watching him start the snow machine and climb aboard. He lifted one hand, a farewell, and mouthed words he knew she would not hear over the roar of the engine. I love you.
“I love you, too,” Laura murmured, but by then, all that remained of Daniel was what he'd left behind: a trail of exhaust, hatched tracks in the snow, and a truth neither of them had spoken for some time.
* * *
Bartholemew stared at the sheet of results that Skipper Johanssen had given him. “How sure are you?” he asked. Skipper shrugged. “As sure as this particular typing can be. Onehundredth of one percent of the world's population has the same mito DNA profile as your suspect. You're talking about six hundred thousand people, any of whom could have been at the scene of the crime.”
“But that also suggests that ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the population wasn't there.”
“Correct. At least not based on that piece of hair you found on the victim.”
Bartholemew stared at her. “And Trixie Stone doesn't fall into that ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent?”
“Nope.”
“So I can't exclude Trixie Stone.”
“Not mitochondrially speaking.”
The odds were looking better, when you glanced at them from this angle, Bartholemew thought. “Even though Max said . . .”
“No insult to Max, but no court is going to put stock in an analysis done by the human eye, as compared to a validated scientific test like mine.” Skipper smiled at him. “I think,” she said, “you've got yourself a suspect.”
* * *
The Johnsons were addicted to the Game Show Network. They especially liked Richard Dawson, who kissed anything on two legs while hosting Family Feud. “One day,” Minnie kept saying, elbowing her husband, “I'm gonna run away with Richard.”
“He'll run, all right, when he sees you coming after him.” Charles laughed.
They had a satellite dish, a flat-screen TV, a PlayStation and a GameCube, as well as a DVD/VCR player and a stereo system that would have put Laura's own to shame. Roland, the antisocial brother, had bought all the equipment with his check this year from the Alaska Permanent Fund - the dividends on oil that every Alaskan was paid by the government since 1984. The Johnsons had lived the entire year on the $1,100 of Charles's check alone, supplemented by hunting expeditions for caribou and dried salmon caught during the summer at fish camp. Roland had told her that Akiak residents could even get wireless Internet for free - they qualified for government-funded technology because they were both rural and native - but that no one could afford it. A person had to have a computer first, which would cost nearly a whole year's Permanent Fund check.
When Laura had had her fill of Richard Dawson, she put on her coat and walked outside. On a telephone pole, someone had nailed a basketball hoop; the ball itself was half buried in a hummock of snow. She pulled it free and bounced it, amazed at how the sound echoed. Here there were no lawn mowers or blaring radios or rap music. No slamming of SUV doors, no clatter of kids spilling out of a school bus, no hum from a nearby highway. It was the sort of place where you could hear the tumblers of your mind falling into place as you pieced thought together, as you tried to match it to action.