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· September 4 ·
CHUKCHI
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“YOU NEED SOME TEA, ah?” Millie Tulimaq said in her high, crackly voice. It was a statement, not a question.
Active settled himself at the old woman’s yellow kitchen table in the little cabin a block from the Catholic church.
Two hind-quarters of caribou lay on a couple of big sheets of cardboard on the floor. The meat was partly carved into steaks and strips in a pile surmounted by an ulu. Minnie, it appeared, followed the old Inupiat custom of conducting the important business of the house on the floor—cutting meat and fish, sewing furs, perhaps even playing the rambunctious multi-handed variant of solitaire known as snerts.
Millie shuffled to the stove, lifted a singing kettle, and poured him a cup of tea.
“Thank you, Ms. Tulimaq.”
She reminded him of the healer Nelda Qivits. So much so that he expected the bitter tang of sourdock as he lifted the tea to his lips. But, no, it was much milder. A raspberry taste that was only a little bitter.
Millie set out a dented aluminum camp saucer stacked with Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, along with a knife and a jar of peanut butter. He hadn’t had breakfast yet, and his mouth watered at the thought of Sailor Boy. He spread peanut butter on one of the pancake-sized crackers, took a big bite, and let his eyes close in bliss. There was nothing better than pilot bread with peanut butter. Nothing.
“You like your Eskimo food, ah, naluaqmiiyaaq?” Millie said with a grin.
“Of course if it’s Sailor Boy.”
“You gonna be a real Eskimo yet, you stay around here.”
Active grinned at her teasing. He’d been in Chukchi long enough to marry and have a child. But the old-timers still ribbed him without mercy about being a naluaqmiiyaaq—almost white—because of his upbringing in Anchorage by white adoptive parents.
“Pretty soon, ah?” he said.
Millie chuckled and lowered herself into a chair. Her dark eyes gleamed from a brown face, now somber, framed by silver braids. “You come to talk about my Kimmy, ah? She’s in some kinda trouble?”
“I just have a few questions.”
She blinked, and her expression softened in patient anticipation, tinctured perhaps with caution.
“You live by yourself?”
The old woman nodded. “Long time now, almost thirty years, since my husband pass.”
“Your granddaughter says you’re a strong woman.”
“I try stay busy, go to bingo, sing with my church ladies, do my beading, cook for the elders at the Senior Center.”
Active took a bite of Sailor Boy and peanut butter. “And watch some TV?”
A broad smile crinkled her face. “I like that ‘Bachelorette’ show, all right. I never miss that one, them little girls are so pretty. I watch the news sometimes, but too much politics, same thing all the time, I fall asleep.”
“Does Kim come by to check on you?”
“Ah, she don’t come so much no more. Don’t want to listen to her aana, I guess.” She shook her head.
“Do you remember when was the last time she came by?”
She shook her head again. “Some time before breakup, I think. Seem like she was on her snowgo.”
“Was she much trouble when she was a kid?”
“Not all the time. She keep to herself a lot, never talk much. I worry she’ll keep everything inside after her mom die, then her dad and stepmom get kill.”
“Killed? I thought they died in a fire.”
“Ee, the house burn all right. But they’re already dead when it happen and then someone start the fire, that’s what they say. Arii, on their first day married, too.”
“Was anybody ever arrested?”
Millie folded her hands on the table. “No, they never catch ’em.”
“Did Kim get hurt?”
“They find her outside in the shed, hiding from the people did that. She almost die from cold by then. My poor Kimmy, so skinny and all close up inside when she come stay with me. I try take care of her best I can. Even now she’s a woman she still can’t talk about what happened, just go up to her camp, hunt, fish, pick berries. Then when she come back she’ll say, ‘I’m okay, aana. Don’t worry.’ But I know she has pain. I always pray for her, all right.”
Active eyed the crucifix above the sink. He had passed another in the main room when he came in.
Millie massaged the fingers of one hand with the other. “Is she in trouble?”
“I’m just following up as part of an investigation. We don’t know that she did anything.”
Millie’s face went bland and unreadable, as happened with elders when they didn’t quite believe you but were too polite to say it. She folded her hands again on the table. He thanked her and eased out, feeling the dark eyes on his back as he closed the door.
Back in the Tahoe, he started for the beach and called his old Trooper boss, Pat Carnaby.
“Need more advice, Nathan?”
“No, just a little information if you can dig it up.”
“Same case?”
“Yep.” Active heard a munching sound through the phone and a slurp. He must have caught Carnaby in the middle of lunch. If he knew Carnaby, it was a double bacon cheeseburger and a Coke, not Diet. Exercise program or not, some habits evidently could not be broken.
Carnaby smacked and swallowed. “You know me. If I can’t find it, it can’t be found. Whattaya got?”
“House fire in Nuliakuk maybe fifteen years ago. Two fatalities, a male and a female. Possible double homicide or murder-suicide, and possibly arson. Apparently went cold and never got solved.”
“That would have been a little before my time, but...yeah, I remember hearing about it. That kind of thing doesn’t happen much around here.”
“There was a child that survived. Teen-age girl, found outside with severe hypothermia.”
“What does a fifteen-year-old cold case have to do with a murder that happened a few months ago?”
“The survivor’s a person of interest in the Tent City murder. Kim Tulimaq.”
“Huh,” Carnaby said. “I’ll get on it. I think I remember the guy that had the case. He’s retired now but if I have it right, he’s down in Klawock.”
“All help greatly appreciated.”
“Give me a couple of days maybe. Sure you don’t need any more advice on that other thing?”
“I’m sure.”
“Because you’re handling it.”
“Absolutely. And you’re handling that cheeseburger and Coke.”
“Gimme a break. It’s a veggie burger. And green tea.”
“Of course it is. Thanks again.”
At the beach, Active found Kavik beside a ten-foot mound of bulging yellow trash bags a few yards from the ashes of the previous night’s bonfire. A hundred bags, plus or minus, Active calculated.
A red-and-gray garbage truck was parked close by. Some of the bags had already been loaded. The driver, a sixtyish Inupiaq wearing a red cap and a frown, jumped down from the truck and walked toward Active and Kavik.
“Unbelievable,” Kavik said.
“That our citizens found this much litter on our beach?” Active asked with a grin.
“No, that we have to go through it.”
Another police Tahoe pulled up with Alan Long and an officer named Jenkins in the front seat.
The Public Works driver came up, and he didn’t look pleased. “If yesterday wasn’t the Labor Day holiday this would all be gone already,” he said. “We gotta get this junk loaded and dumped at the landfill by four or I gotta ask for overtime again. Arii, the boss don’t like that.”
Active checked the ID tag on his zipper pull. “Mr. Oktollik, is it?”
The driver raised his eyebrows and they exchanged a single-pump handshake. He eased around Active to put the west wind off the bay at his back, then hunched his shoulders and pulled down a Native Pride ball cap as the wind stiffened a little more.
“We’ll get it done as fast as we can,” Active said. He turned up the collar of his jacket and huddled into it. “You might be able to help us. We’re looking for a suitcase about yea big.” Active stretched out his hands about three feet apart.
“A green hard-shell with a little purple Teddy bear tied on the handle. You seen anything like that?”
“Naw. Trash is trash, ah? It might be with the stuff that was too big to bag. It’s in those piles over there.”
Oktollik pointed to two other mounds a few yards off. Active saw several car tires and the propeller blade Nita had mentioned.
“Good. We’ll start with those.”
He waved the other officers over. They pulled on leather work gloves and started tugging one pile apart while Active and Kavik worked on the other.
Kavik grunted and flung aside a dented and rusted oven door.
“So you and Lily ...” Active said.
“What?”
Active yanked at a tire. It slid down the pile and hit the gravel with a thud. “You’re broadening your horizons, huh?”
“Meaning?”
“They say a seasoned woman can teach a young man a thing or two.”
“I already know a thing or two, thank you very much.”
“Is that right?”
Active tugged at a twin-size box spring. Kavik grabbed the opposite side and they extracted it from the pile.
“It’s more like we’re learning from each other,” Kavik went on. “There’s a mutual respect, not just an attraction.” He clapped his hands to knock off the accumulated dust and dirt. “She’s an amazing woman.”
Active was taken aback for a moment. He had expected some standard male banter about the new girlfriend, but this tone, this was new for Kavik.
“Wow. Sounds serious.”
“Could be. Don’t know yet.”
“I kind of get the impression you’re keeping it on the down low?”
“Not me. Her. She’s nervous about the age difference. You know how women hate being judged, especially by other women.”
“Tell me about it. But she does seem like a great lady. And she was a local girl at one time?” Active tossed aside a broken snowgo ski.
“Yeah. Her mom took her and her sisters Outside when she was little. She grew up in Oregon and stayed there.”
“And she decided to come back because ...”
“Her mom died last year. Her sisters had married and moved away. The way she explained it, she wanted to reconnect with her culture, make peace with her past.”
“Peace with her past. What’s that about?”
“Not sure yet,” Kavik said. “I figure, give her the space and time, and she’ll tell me when she thinks I’m ready to hear it.”
“Sounds right to me.” Active spotted a rounded green corner of something hard and shiny behind a three-legged chair.
“Bingo!” he said.
Kavik muscled the suitcase out onto the beach gravel. Its side was dented, but Active was sure it was the suitcase from the photos on Kim Tulimaq’s wall. A misshapen blob of plush hung from the handle. He made out the ears and snout of a stuffed Teddy bear. The legs and belly were squashed, and the color had faded to a pale lavender after months of immersion in Chukchi Bay or exposure on the beach.
Active dismissed Long and his partner, then laid the suitcase on the ground. Kavik went back to Active’s Tahoe for a camera.
Active inspected the suitcase inch by inch while Kavik shot photos. It still had its wheels and the telescoping handle was still intact, although it couldn’t be pulled out all the way. Active scraped green slime from the case’s side with his thumbnail, producing a small square of the original neon green.
The zipper had partially separated, and it was easy to pry the case open the rest of the way. The inside held a few handfuls of sand and slimy seaweed. The bottom and the empty fabric pockets were soiled with black and rust-colored streaks. Dirt, grease, blood, sea salt, who knew?
“No ID,” Active told Kavik as he slipped the suitcase into a trash bag and carried it to the Tahoe. “But the color and size match the one Shalene had. And there’s that Teddy bear on the handle.”
“Maybe Kalani can figure it out.”
Active slid in behind the wheel. “Let’s hope.”
“It could have been on the beach long before Shalene was killed,” Kavik said as he climbed into the passenger side.
“Or dumped in the bay long after,” Active said.