THE RIDE TO EMILY Hoffman's mother's house was uneventful, except for when the girl shouted, "Stop, Nathan!" as they passed the Lions Club.
He slammed on the brakes and Emily jumped out. She lurched over to the club, leaned against the orange T-lll wall, and vomited. A clear liquid that could have been this morning's beer came up, followed by what looked like the remains of last night's pizza. He thought about going over to offer aid, but decided he could in good conscience stay in the Suburban as long as Emily remained standing. So he watched from a safe distance as her stomach emptied and she progressed to dry heaves.
Finally they stopped too, and she tottered back to the Suburban and climbed in. She leaned her head against the padded dashboard and sighed.
"Maybe George's baby doesn't like beer for breakfast," he said.
"Fuck you, Nathan." She wiped her mouth and nose on her parka sleeve, leaving a glistening stripe of pizza fragments and mucus on the green nylon.
"There's some Kleenex in the glove compartment." He put the Suburban in gear and pulled away, following her somewhat belligerent directions to her mother's place.
"Good," Emily said as they stopped in front. "Mom's four-wheeler's not here. She's still at the store, I guess."
Emily's mother—he didn't ask if there was a father in the picture—lived in what people in Chukchi called a BIA house: twenty-four feet wide by thirty-six feet long, plywood sides, aluminum roof, and a little kunnichuk in front. They were sprinkled all over town, the fruit of some forgotten program from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
This one was run-down, but not as badly as some Active had seen. The paint was an ambiguous gray that might once have been red, and one corner of the kunnichuk sagged slightly where a supporting post was sinking into the tundra. But all the windows had glass and the place was free of the scorch marks that would indicate it had ever caught fire, the fate that seemed to befall most BIA houses sooner or later.
They climbed out of the Suburban and Emily led him into the house. It was much nicer inside than out, reasonably clean, done in bright colors, with framed Bible scenes hung on the walls.
Emily took him to a door near the back. A sign on it said Emily's, without explaining Emily's what. She let him in and he looked around.
It was a teenage girl's room, with posters of rock stars on the walls, and one dresser top entirely covered by makeup and the tools for applying it.
The bedspread was fringed and covered with a pattern of big bright flowers. It was a single bed, and Active wondered how Emily and George had managed to share it and get any sleep, assuming they wanted to. He also wondered why the mother consented to the sleepovers, but decided it was, like the whereabouts of Emily's father, a subject best left unexplored.
He looked around the rest of the room. The top of a chest of drawers beside the bed was filled with pictures in departmentstore frames. Many were of Emily with various combinations of girlfriends—at school, in an aluminum riverboat pulled up on a gravel bar on a sunny summer day, at slumber parties. But several showed George Clinton, alone or with Emily.
In one corner, a pyramid of stuffed animals rose nearly to waist level.
In another corner he saw a duffel bag and a backpack. Both were open, the contents spilling out onto the floor. Active pointed at the mess. "Is that George's stuff?"
At Emily's nod, he knelt, picked up a wrinkled pair of Levi's, and went through the pockets. Nothing. Next, a red plaid wool shirt. Nothing there either.
As he worked through George Clinton's possessions, he was vaguely aware of Emily moving around the room, then he heard the bedsprings squeak.
When he finished the search, he turned and saw that she was sitting on a corner of the bed watching him. She held George's red plaid shirt against her chest.
"The schematic's not here," he said, studying the girl. He decided to try a long shot. "Did he say anything about showing it to Aaron Stone?"
"He never say, but he might do it." Emily sniffed the shirt, then lay back on the bed and hugged it. "They were kind of friends. Aaron was teaching George how to work on the machines. George wanted to get mechanic's job, make more money now that we were getting married and having baby."
Emily took a picture of George, grinning in sunglasses from the saddle of a snowmachine, off the chest beside the bed and studied it, resting the frame on the little potbelly caused by her pregnancy. "Why he leave me, Nathan?"
"Maybe he didn't do it on purpose. Maybe it was some kind of accident."
She brightened, but then the smile faded. "Nah, it don't seem like accident to me, out on the tundra by himself in the middle of the night like that." She closed her eyes and now hugged both the shirt and the picture.
"You never can tell." A yellow blanket was folded at the foot of the bed. He pulled it up over her. "Sometimes it happens when people carry guns while they're drinking."
"I guess," Emily said drowsily, snuggling under the blanket. "I don't want my mom to see me like this," she said. But her breathing soon slowed and he realized she was asleep.
Active tiptoed out and closed the door with the Emily's sign on it. As he came out of the kunnichuk, an Inupiat woman pulled up on a Honda four-wheeler towing a little trailer filled with groceries in boxes. She killed the engine, glanced at the Suburban, studied him in his uniform, and said sharply, "Is it something with Emily?"
"She's fine," he said. "She's in her bedroom asleep. I brought her home."
"You get her away from that nalauqmiut painter? That's good. Will she stay now?"
"I don't know," he said. The woman lifted one of the boxes from the four-wheeler trailer and hurried past him into the house.
He climbed into the Suburban, picturing Aaron Stone's cabin in his mind. Could the schematic be there? He doubted it. He had searched it carefully. On Stone's body or his snowmachine? He doubted that too. He had gone through the Yamaha and Stone's clothing before shipping the corpse off to Anchorage for autopsy.
He started the engine and drove to Clara Stone's house. She was just coming out when he pulled up. She wore a flowered parka with a wolf ruff and a handsome pair of caribou mukluks that Active supposed were the product of Aaron Stone's hunting prowess.
He rolled down his window. "Good morning. Can I give you a lift?"
She walked across the gravel street to talk to him. "I'm going to Arctic Mercantile," she said.
"Well, get in and I'll take you. I wanted to ask you something else for my report anyway."
She came around the nose of the Suburban and climbed into the passenger seat.
"How you doing?"
"Not too bad," she said. "Little better since my daughter come down from Nuliakuk with her kids."
"Yeah, I remember you said she was coming."
They bounced along Beach Street until Active broke the silence. "Can you talk about it a little bit if I ask some questions?"
"I guess," she said. "What is it?"
"I was just wondering if Aaron said anything about having a picture or a drawing when he called you from the Gray Wolf." He turned the Suburban east on Lake Street, towards the lagoon and Arctic Mercantile.
"No, he just say he's going caribou hunting, so he'll send his paycheck, some other stuff, home by mail, same as always. He don't like to bring it on his snowgo, might get lost or wet or something."
"Was there anything unusual with his paycheck when it came?"
Her eyes widened and she clapped a hand over her mouth. "You know, I never check the mail since last week. I'm too upset to remember, I guess. We could go get it now."
Active made two more right turns to get them back to Beach Street, then a left to take them to the old wooden post office overlooking Chukchi Bay. Clara went in and he watched through the big front window as she opened a mailbox, pulled out an armload of mail, and returned to the Suburban.
She flipped through the stack to a thick manila envelope hand addressed to her at Box 114 from"Aaron, Gray Wolf."
"That's funny," she said. "Usually he put his check in regular envelope. Wonder what's in here." She put a finger under the flap, ripped it along the top, and pulled out the contents. There was a small window envelope that apparently contained a paycheck and a big sheet of paper that had been folded to fit in the manila envelope. Clipped to it was a sheet of typing paper with a handwritten note.
Clara read the note, then handed it, still clipped to the big paper, to Active.
"My Sweetie," Active read. "Please keep this for me till I'm home with you again. Might be very important!—Your loving Aaron."
He unfolded the sheet enough to see a complicated technical drawing, then refolded it and looked at the woman. "Can I have this?"
"Maybe I could just keep his note?" Tears glistened on her round brown cheeks.
He handed her the note. She read it again, put it back in the manila envelope, folded that in quarters, and put it into her purse. "What he send?"
"I'm not sure," Active said. "But I think it might help us stop the fish kills on the Nuliakuk."
"Yeah, I know Aaron worry about that." Clara took a tissue from her purse and wiped her eyes and cheeks. "He say if the river's going bad, it will poison the water at Nuliakuk village, hurt our daughter and her family. He sure love those grandkids." She blew her nose and looked straight ahead.
"You want me to take you back home?"
"No, it's OK. You can take me to Arctic Mercantile. I need chocolate chips to make cookies for those grandkids."
Active dropped her at the big store by the lagoon, then went to his office in the public safety building, closed the door with the briefest of nods to Evelyn O'Brien, and spread the schematic out on his desk.
It was about eleven by seventeen inches. The label at the top identified it only as Sewer System. Most of the sheet was filled with a tangle of lines and boxes that could have been pumps and pipes.
One of the lines—the biggest one—led out of the tangle toward a stippled area in the lower right corner of the page. But parallel jagged marks slashed through it about halfway there.
If he remembered correctly the little he had learned about mechanical drawing, those jagged marks represented a break in the diagram, meaning the stippled area was farther from the tangle of machinery than the drawing suggested.
Not that it mattered much. No scale or compass rose was printed on the drawing, so it wouldn't have been possible to figure the distance or direction to the leach field anyway, if that was what the stippled area represented.
Active studied the drawing more closely. It wasn't dated either, nor did it bear any clue to the identity of the company that had prepared it.
Perhaps the drawing showed a leach field, perhaps not. One thing was certain, though: It was as much a puzzle as a drawing, and he couldn't decipher it.
But he knew someone who could, someone who knew a lot about the Gray Wolf and sewer systems and dead fish on the Nuliakuk. Someone whose amazing blue eyes were probably at this very moment training the crosshairs of a hunting rifle on the kill spot at the base of a caribou's neck.
He dialed Lienhofer Aviation and was gratified to hear the smoky scrape of Cowboy Decker's voice on the other end of the line.
"Your Super Cub running? I need to go to Jade Portage right now."
"Right now? It's almost lunchtime."
Active looked at his watch and was shocked to see that Decker was correct. Where had the morning gone? "I'll get some hamburgers at the Korean's and we can eat on the way."
"Make it two double cheeses with fries and you're in business," Decker said. "I'll go gas 'er up."
Active made two copies of the schematic and locked the original in his desk. Twenty-eight minutes later, he pulled the Suburban up beside the red-and-white Super Cub. Cowboy squatted at the tail of the plane, smoking a cigarette and doing something underneath of the tail. A roll of gray tape rested on top of the tail.
Active grabbed the paper bag, translucent with grease, from the seat beside him, walked over, and dropped it onto the front seat of the Super Cub. Then he squatted beside the pilot. "Something wrong?"
"Ah, I put a little rip in the fabric when we landed at Stone's camp the other day," Cowboy said. "Tail must have caught some brush. But I can't fix it today. Damned duct tape won't stick in the cold."
He stood up, a strip of the insufficiently sticky tape clinging to the fingers of his right hand. He flipped his hand up and down until the tape spun off into the snow.
"Don't worry," he said at Active's look of alarm. "We flew around with it like this half that day when we were looking for Aaron. Takes more than a little rip in the tail to bring down a Super Cub."
Active shrugged, climbed in, put the food bag between his feet, and waited as Decker went through the preflight ritual. He pulled off the engine cover, took out the preheater, snuffed the heater out, and stowed both in the little cargo bay behind Active's seat. Then he checked the oil, climbed in, and started the engine.
He taxied out to the runway and shoved the throttle forward. The engine roared and then they were in the sky again.