Maisie apparently had been out for a walk alone. She was just entering the hotel when Bouvier dropped me, and she waited to hold the door for me. “Hi, Matteesie,” she said quietly. I replied, “Hi,” and while I got my parka off reflected on how hi had so quickly replaced all other forms of greeting in the Arctic. For natives it was the very easiest English word of all time. You could be bilingual with only one word, two letters. Hi! Also, there were inflections. Thomassie Nuniviak’s little boy Ernie in Inuvik was twenty-three months old and so far had never felt the need to learn another word. Once I saw Ernie haul a stool over so he could stand behind his father, who was cutting caribou steaks for dinner. Thomassie had shot the caribou the day before. Ernie, watching his Dad’s hand on the knife, kept saying, “Hi? Hi? Hi?” meaning “Will you cut me a little piece please, Dad?” Which Thomassie did, from the tenderloin; he gave me a piece of the raw caribou, too.
Anyway, Maisie and I leaned against the wall a few inches from each other while removing our boots under the sign that read, “Leave boots here, this means you!” She lined hers up neatly, heels to the wall, and when I put mine alongside hers the bulk made my mukluks seem much bigger, but they weren’t. Their toes and the toes of Maisie’s classy leather snowboots lined up precisely the same distance from the wall. I’m a size eight.
She slipped into sealskin slippers. I kept my felt boot-liners on. Up the stairs and a few steps to the left she opened the door into the small apartment that she and her mother shared. It was at the opposite end of the corridor from my room and directly above the dining room.
The end of the room nearest the door was carpeted and furnished with a chesterfield, lounge chairs, end tables, floor lamps. They were grouped around a low square table that I judged to be walnut, and also judged to be a sawed-off onetime dining table from some period in Margaret’s life. The top was scarred. The corners might once have been square, but had been rounded off. The legs swelled from ankle-size near the floor to rounded calf-size just under the edge of the table’s top. Plain and yet somehow a beauty.
Margaret said, “You never seen a table before? Not for sale. Have a seat.”
My opening guess that the table once had been a dining table was fairly accurate. That’s not what we were here to talk about, but that’s what we did proceed to talk about. I knew then that I should have arranged this meeting for the detachment instead of in these home surroundings. This was too bloody cozy altogether. Still . . . she told about the table.
It was the table from her first dining room suite in Lexington, Kentucky, she said. “It was full-size then and with six nice chairs and a husband to go with it, some of which, the chairs not the husband, I still have downstairs.” Margaret liked talking. When she started moving from one city to another, she said, naming the places, well, the table had been cut down to its present height. That was when Maisie was just a child.
It was when Margaret was pointing to a small gouge near one corner and recounting the story of Maisie, just a toddler, falling into it and driving one of her baby teeth right back into her head, that I seized a small break and said, “I think we better get to the point.”
“Ah, hell,” Margaret said. “Just when I was getting into my life story. Oh, well . . . we’ll get back to that sometime when Maisie isn’t around to listen to the bedsprings jangling.”
“Mo-ther!” Maisie said.
But Mother suddenly had her edge back. “Well, you don’t think you’re the only female who from time to time likes to see what a guy is really like, do you? What there is under that bulge in his jeans?”
Maisie looked pained. I thought it might be a hard life for a striking-looking but not especially self-assured tomboy-type young woman to have a mother who had sashayed her own way through forests of panting males, taking and rejecting, and learning a good deal from both.
“Just tell it the way you told me,” Margaret instructed. “I mean, the way you just told me, not the version you told me first.”
“Okay,” Maisie said, glaring. “If you’ll shut up.”
Margaret held her lips together with a thumb and forefinger.
“All right!” Maisie said, looking directly at me briefly and then dropping her eyes in some confusion. “I liked Dennissie. From when I got here six months ago with what my mother calls a degree in Calgary Stampeder football players, which isn’t fair, I only knew one and didn’t sleep with him, I worked in the kitchen, first with a real crumbum who eventually took off, and then with Dennissie. The first guy was white and a pain in the ass—which he liked to put his hands on when I wasn’t looking—and liked to say ‘fuck’ a lot, you know the type, stuck in some time warp, and Dennissie was the exact opposite.” She smiled at some memory.
“In what way opposite?” I asked.
“He was fun to work with, always nice to Thelma, his granny, and he was really witty.” She glanced at her mother. “Like when Steve Barker used to come in here for coffee almost every afternoon, and look like he was dying to get Mother to bed, she would butter him up, and Dennissie would mimic them both, with a little bit of Sadie thrown in, Sadie on the phone hunting for Steve . . . We’d be laughing out there in the kitchen fit to kill, even Thelma laughing at the same time she’d be whispering, ‘Dennissie, stop! Stop!’”
“Besides that, he was good-looking,” Margaret supplied.
I thought of the body and the foulness in his bedroom at the end.
“Yeah, he was good-looking. And I won’t deny that him being an Inuk made him . . . well, more good-looking, to me, different? Don’t laugh.”
Nobody was laughing. We were all just sitting. Monday night at home in Sanirarsipaaq.
“I mean so different from guys I’d known that he was like from another planet! Honest to god, until he started talking about maybe I should come home with him some night and listen to his music he’d never made a pass at me, even verbally . . .”
“All that fun they had in the kitchen is really an early part of making a pass, but she didn’t know it at the time,” Margaret explained in an aside to me, as if I didn’t know.
Maisie ignored that. “So one night I thought, what the hell, he wants me so much, I’ll go with him. But when we got there I was so nervous. I didn’t really major in football players or any other kind of men, but I guess he didn’t know that. We tiptoed past Thelma asleep on the couch, just like Dennissie said she would be, and up the stairs to his room, and at the top he put his arm around me like this”—she made a motion with her arm which ended with her hand clasping her breast—“and suddenly I, uh, lost interest! I just thought of Thelma waking up and finding me there and what she’d think . . . I didn’t say anything, I just ran back downstairs and went in and shook Thelma.
“Dennissie came down right behind me and stood in the doorway looking I don’t know what, amazed, I guess. But laughing, too. I’m saying, ‘Thelma, it’s me, Maisie! Just dropped in to say hello!’
“She woke up a little, but not very much, the poor dear. Then I left. Dennissie didn’t try to stop me. The next morning when I reminded Thelma about me dropping in and trying to wake her up she said she thought it had been a dream.”
It was a funny story, in a way.
“Did you go back with him some other night?”
Maisie started to cry, sobbing, “No, I wish I had.”
Margaret was looking at me. I was looking at Maisie. Maisie was looking down at her lap, making weeping noises.
“She’s been crying in her sleep,” Margaret said, eyes brimming with tears of her own.
“So have you, the last couple of days,” Maisie sobbed. After a minute or two, she calmed down. Margaret got up and put a kettle on and made coffee in the kind of pot where you push a perforated close-fitting round of metal down through the coffee grounds. It sure as hell beat the coffee from the instant jar downstairs. For a while then we just sat. I believed Maisie’s story, as far as it went. It was too natural to be untrue, for that one visit anyway. It didn’t even conflict with the idea of Dennissie as a ladies’ man.
“You said you didn’t go back another night,” I said.
I was looking straight into those blue, blue eyes, and thinking about the latent footprints Pelly had mentioned, ones he’d thought might be a woman’s, made while the floor was still clean.
The silence was not long at all, a second or two.
“No, I didn’t,” she said, and I was sure she was lying. I waited, giving her a chance to amend, or whatever. No amendment. Until I had more from Pelly, I decided to leave it at that, for now. I looked at Margaret, who showed no sign. So I switched.
I said to Maisie, “Did Dennissie talk much about other people he dealt with, like Davidee, Hard Hat, and so on?”
Immediately, her eyes were on mine. “Sometimes, but not in detail. He and Hard Hat had something going on, some business thing, I don’t know what. After Davidee started showing up with Dennissie, usually at night, I met him and thought he was a creep, one of those good-looking guys who could turn it on like a tap. It seemed to me that Davidee arriving sort of pushed Hard Hat into the background. I asked Dennissie about that once and he just clammed up. But one other time when I saw them together they were arguing, I thought about money. I knew Dennissie well enough that I asked. He looked worried but said no, that it was something about a date that Davidee wanted him to arrange.”
A shot in the dark. Sometimes shots in the dark hit something: “With you?”
“Not me! God, no. Davidee never looked at me twice. He likes people he could dominate, which ain’t me.”
“About one of Dennis’s girlfriends, then?”
“Well,” she said slowly, “there was one girl that Davidee was really gone on, Dennissie said . . . oh, hell, I got no right. . .”
“If it would help solve the murders, you got a right.”
She thought about that. “This was a girl that Dennissie I think took home with him more than anybody else. He never told me in so many words but I got the idea she was somebody special to him and that right after Davidee met her he was always pestering Dennissie to set her up for him. Maybe that’s what they were arguing about.”
“Who?”
Reluctantly, she said, “Leah Takolik.”
That was one of the names on Annie’s list. I thought of the one small bloody footprint that Pelly had pointed out. I had sort of lost track of Hard Hat in this part of the conversation, but I didn’t want to interrupt what Maisie was saying. Forget Hard Hat for now. Suppose Davidee had something on Dennis, and used it in a way somehow connected to Leah. How do Dennis and Thelma get killed out of all that?
Anyway, no harm in trying it on.
“Did Dennis ever make deals with other guys, like to double-date and go to his place?”
“Not that I ever heard about. I can’t imagine it, I mean Dennissie just had this one small room. Two people could probably keep fairly quiet so as not to rouse poor Thelma, but not four!” Then she thought of something; her expression slowly changed. “Well, maybe something like it, I don’t know.”
“What made you change so fast from absolutely no to maybe?”
“One night when we were going snowmobiling Dennissie was so mad after talking to Davidee that he kicked his own snowmobile and hurt his foot. That was the night he told me that Davidee really had the hots for Leah. But that was all he said.”
“The hots,” Margaret mused, pouring coffee. “I rather like that.”
So Dennis would kick his snowmobile angrily over something Davidee said or did. But really stand up to him?
I let that sit there. “When you went home with Dennis that one time, did he open his door with a key?” I stressed the word one, and watched. I’m sure she got it, but she didn’t react.
“No. I don’t think they ever locked the door. Thelma told me that once. Said, ‘What have we got that anyone would want to steal?’”
“Do you know Leah fairly well?”
“Pretty well. I like her. When these kids up here get together sometimes, the girls, they giggle a lot. Always remind me of that song, whatever it’s from, ‘three little girls from school are we, fresh from the ladies’ seminary,’ or however it goes, and they talk about this boy or that and how they are in sex. But Leah isn’t a giggler. Gives me the idea she doesn’t do something without thinking, including sex. Of course, sex up here is treated as a really natural thing to do, no stigma for sleeping around, and so on, right?”
Drily I said, “I think we know what you’re talking about.”
“Speak for yourself,” Margaret said.
“I know that Leah liked Dennissie a lot,” Maisie went on. “I don’t think she had other guys, too, like a lot of girls do. It wasn’t like what anybody in the south would call having a steady, just that not many guys have the kind of setup that Dennissie had, fairly private, with Thelma sleeping like the dead the way she did . . . Aw, hell.”
She stopped and shook her head. Tears began to well up again. “Matteesie,” Margaret said. “I think that’s it, eh?”
I was ready. “Okay.” The Leah-Dennis thing was interesting, with a little Davidee a question mark on the side. I thought I had opened a door, just a crack, but couldn’t guess where it might lead. Why didn’t I press harder when I thought Maisie was lying? That was instinct. All I could have done was hammer away. I had a feeling that the next time I brought it up, I would know more. Maybe from Annie. Maybe from Pelly. Maybe from Maisie herself.
The next morning, Tuesday, I beat Bouvier to the detachment. On the way I could see and hear the settlement coming to life, the yells of the sliders, girls in brighter, maybe Easter-bought, anoraks and pants. I remember once reading a piece in which a writer said he wished he had four lives. I forget what they were, but the idea surfaces in me once in a while, at times when one life, in the Arctic, would do me fine. Maybe as a hunter, with a son or two I could teach.
I shook myself back into the present. I was sure Bouvier hadn’t made significant yards with the three native girls he’d questioned Saturday. When I talked to them again myself, maybe I’d get more, would expand upon Maisie’s account. I went to the window and could see Jonassie walking down to the shore, appearing to be deep in thought. When he turned back he walked slowly, head down, toward Debbie’s father and mother at the side of their house. The man, watching Jonassie approach, wiped his skinning knife on his pants. His wife put down the sharp ulu with which she’d been cleaning another skin. Jonassie seemed to speak first, then he and the woman both talked to the man, who stared down, apparently saying nothing. What was that about?
And how was it that Debbie’s father and mother were working on seals? They must have come from a friend, someone who had hunted well . . . or from Davidee? Of course, I hadn’t been around from Saturday morning to Monday night. Davidee and his playmates could have bagged a seal or two, then zoomed off again. The three-wheeled Honda was still in place, but no snowmobiles.
Perhaps this was my chance to talk to Debbie. She’d been on my mind off and on since Barker said she had not been home when her parents backed up Hard Hat’s alibi on the night of the murders. I left a note telling Bouvier where I was going, and walked up the hill. Jonassie, leaving, called a greeting but kept going, not looking back. I waved at the other two. The woman waved back, not the man.
I knocked on the door. Debbie opened it a crack, then wider, and beckoned me in while putting one finger to her lips and nodding toward a store-bought wooden cradle where young Julie was sleeping. Inside, once the door was closed, I said quietly, “I want to ask you a few things about when Davidee starting sneaking back into town . . . what, a week or two ago?”
She smiled, a very small smile. “Try three.”
“You mean as soon as he got to Cambridge and got parole permission to go as far as No Name Lake, he started coming here?”
She nodded, not smiling at all. “I heard that but didn’t see.”
“He didn’t stay here, then?”
She shook her head. “Too close to the RCMP. No, he’d stay with Hard Hat, probably. Has a little place of his own.” She shrugged. “Now, of course, no need to hide, so he’s back in his old room here.”
“You talk to him much?”
“Not at all . . . So what else do you want to know? Early this morning he took off hunting. Tommy and Paulessie had been out sealing with him late Saturday. Maybe they went along with him today. I just heard the two snowmobiles taking off.”
There was nothing basically suspicious about that kind of hunt at this time of year. With the weather moderating sometimes young men got restless and took their guns and snowmobiles and went out to bring home meat.
When that Friday storm hit they must have been holed up somewhere warm, like an igloo or a tent. Maybe they had come back Saturday in better weather; maybe they had sighted caribou and come to get provisions and go out again. Farther south, the caribou herds would be moving past the tree line into the open tundra to where the females had their favorite calving places. Here, hundreds of miles north of the treeline, the caribou had the same habits of calving in one secluded area. If hunters saw a herd, they went for them.
Meanwhile, Debbie. Her parents? I thought their wariness of me earlier would almost guarantee that they wouldn’t come in. I thought of Davidee being back in this house. No matter what the courts allowed in their dumb idea of justice, honest to god, what could have been in their minds, a family reconciliation? Bullshit. But where could she go? From what Byron had told me, he and Debbie wanted a place of their own but did not have it yet. So she was here out of necessity. Necessity is something that my people have lived with for centuries, sometimes in worse circumstances than these, but it shouldn’t be imposed on them by some dunces living in suburbs of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where Davidee had been in the pen.
I plunged. “The night of the murders, when Hard Hat was here, according to your parents, Barker told me that you weren’t. And that you weren’t around the next morning, either, when he questioned your parents to check on Hard Hat’s story.”
She watched me, listened, but said nothing. I picked my way with a certain amount of care.
“If you were here both times and backed up your parents on Hard Hat being here all evening on the night that the murders happened, I would have been inclined to believe you.”
She watched my eyes, her own very big behind the round spectacles.
“Was Hard Hat really here that night?”
Her gaze didn’t waver, but she said nothing.
“Put it a different way—you don’t know whether Hard Hat was here or not?”
“That’s not exactly right,” she said with a little smile, but didn’t go on, although various emotions crossed her face. She dipped water from a pail into a kettle and put it on the stove. She got out a small teapot. I was not jumping from one foot to the other waiting for the answer. I could guess how she was considering what I had asked. When a lawyer or a policeman or a judge is asking questions, there is a tendency among our people to figure out what answer the questioner would like to hear, and provide it. That way, you’re less likely to get bullied. Conflicting sworn evidence is a constant bugbear in even minor cases in the north.
So as her silence dragged on, I let it. I was a native, too, sitting at a seal hole. Make the slightest false move, and no seal, or in my case no answer. I had all day. Davidee was one thing; I couldn’t see her wanting to protect Davidee. Her parents’ story giving Hard Hat an alibi was another thing altogether. She wouldn’t want to hurt her parents by contradicting their accounts, if she could avoid it.
She was silent, moving around, gazing at her child. I thought she was getting ready to answer. Then someone passed by the window, heading for the door. She said hurriedly, “Not now. Not here. Tonight at the detachment,” and the door opened behind me and Byron Anolak limped in.
“Hey, inspector,” he said.
Damn the interruption!
Which might have been why I needled, “I thought maybe you’d be out hunting with Davidee.” I said it to get a rise out of him, but I was astonished at the black fury that suffused his face.
He took a deep breath, two, three. His angry color receded a little. Only a little. “My girl and our daughter live in this house where Davidee now lives too, thanks to a justice system that doesn’t know its ass from a seal hole! I don’t hang out with those guys and you goddamn well know that! I don’t hang out with Davidee ever. But I don’t disturb the peace if I can help it.”
“Okay,” I said. I really liked that line “doesn’t know its ass from a seal hole,” and would make sure that the judge in question got that message. “However, do you know where they might have gone to hunt?”
Rather curtly he replied, “I could guess. Lewissie Ullayoroluk went south a day or two ago, down around No Name Lake, and got caribou.”
At that moment the little girl’s eyes opened and she smiled at Debbie and Byron, standing together, looking down at her. Debbie picked her up. I was thinking, with all that bloody happens around this place, and keeps on happening, the child woke up smiling. Byron reached for his daughter and sang a few lines of a song that I knew and apparently she did, too, for she laughed. I looked at Debbie. The question I’d asked still hadn’t been answered.
“I’ll see you later,” she said. She spoke swiftly to Byron about him taking over the baby around nine or a little later. He nodded. She turned back to me. “Okay, after dark be in the detachment with no lights on. I’ll knock.”
Byron glanced at me and then at Debbie, laughing. “Say, ‘yes boss’ to the lady, Matteesie!”
“Yes, boss, lady,” I said.
Exit, all laughing, including the baby. Outside, the parents, back working on the seals, were being studied soberly by two or three bundled-up children too young for school. The man stared at me sadly and then at the house and then looked back down to continue skinning the seal.
As I walked to the detachment I was thinking that, beyond tonight, when Debbie might tell me something, I needed a plan. If by then Davidee and those with him were still out on the tundra, what better place could there be to face them? Checking out Byron’s No Name Lake guess would be a logical start. Maybe I could track them by snowmobile, but—the big but—following snowmobile tracks on the tundra is very low on any list of surefire projects. What I needed was a backup from the air.
I thought about that. It was routine for the force to pay for a charter to do a search, especially in a murder case. But I didn’t want some pilot I’d have to explain things to—not only who we were looking for, but how long the charter might take, hours or days. Antler Aviation, flying out of Inuvik, came to mind. I knew their pilots. But right on the heels of that idea came another that for a lot of reasons was more personal and therefore suited me better.
While I was reading the note Bouvier had left on the counter, saying that he’d decided to go out to check garbage cans again for remnants of burned boots or clothing (my “new hobby,” he wrote), I picked up the phone and called Komatik Air in Inuvik. Thomassie Nuniviak, who owned Komatik’s three-aircraft outfit, had been my friend since we were both only seven or eight years old, shipped into Inuvik with a lot of other scared kids, away from our families for the first time to go to school.
As the phone at Komatik Air rang and rang, I remembered our first textbooks, ridiculously enough the standard Dick and Jane and Spot stuff—stories set in southern white family situations as alien and unknown to us as if they’d been set on the moon. But at the time that was how the government insisted every native kid learn to read, write, and talk in English.
They were regretting that now, with individuals in every native organization recalling publicly for the first time how they were mistreated. Some had been whipped if they were caught speaking Inuktitut. It was the old, old story, not exclusive to Canada, of the white establishment senselessly and systematically trying to wipe out ancient native cultures in favor of . . . what? The bullshit that whites know it all. The hatred and distrust bred in those days would not go away, and knocked hell out of the more understanding initiatives that slowly followed, the government was forced into reluctant reform only when the natives grew, matured, and fought back, as they learned that fighting back sure as hell beat turning the other cheek.
Finally, it must have been on the twentieth ring, Thomassie answered. “Matteesie! Are you in town? Come on over. God, I’m sorry about your mother. Live that long and then die for being in the way of that shit, whoever did it!”
He had come home with me to Holman one springtime after school finished, when his parents hadn’t come in yet from the winter hunt—either stranded or just late, I forget—so he knew, had known, my mother. Once he had tried to smoke her pipe and had gone so pale that she said, “Oh, Thomassie, I didn’t know you were part white man!”
I told him where I was, not in Inuvik but Sanirarsipaaq, and that I needed somebody to do some flying. The sooner the better.
“It’s about the murders?”
I said it was.
“Well, look, I got both the Beaver and the Cessna right here. You got a preference?”
“No, whatever you say. Any chance you could fly it yourself?”
He laughed. I could imagine him in that little office he had in an old 512 on the banks of the Mackenzie, electric kettle and tea bags and powdered milk at his elbow, two of his three somewhat timeworn aircraft sitting on the river ice out front. Last time I’d seen him his Cessna had been missing, flown by some fugitives who’d hidden it south of Fort Norman where I’d found it safe and sound.
“Sure I’m gonna fly you myself! You think I’d let anybody else fly you?” He thought aloud about the time element. “It’s a little late for me to get there today but I could get part way. Can’t fly at night into that landing strip you got there with forty-watt bulbs along the runway, but I should make Cam Bay and call you from there and maybe come on at first light in the morning.”
After I hung up I thought that if Davidee did return on his own today and I didn’t need an aircraft, I could cancel. But I had a strong feeling that Davidee was not planning a quick return. If I was right I had saved a day or two by laying on an aircraft now.
Bouvier had rushed in during the Thomassie call and headed straight for the bathroom, his business there broadcast by a sound like that of a hose filling a pail. He emerged grinning and drying his hands on a well-worn towel. Before I could ask him to fill me in on the days I’d been away, Bouvier, looking a little embarrassed, beat me to it, laughing, comically trying to both talk and light his cigar.
“Really weird thing happened Sunday. I had my Easter dinner at the hotel, a big spread, soup, fish, chicken, pie, you name it, and came back here to write a letter home but first I really had to go to the can. When I came out pulling my pants back up, not so easy in that bathroom, it’s so damn small, I just happened to look out. What do I see but Davidee walking downhill across the open space, as if he’s heading for the rec hall.
“It was still broad daylight, of course, and around Easter Sunday dinnertime, hardly anybody else around. Then I see Byron, going in the same direction as Davidee, but by a different route, like shadowing him, always keeping a building between him and Davidee.”
I was thinking about Byron’s angry flush and denial just a few minutes ago when I’d needled him about thinking he might be out hunting with Davidee.
“While I’m watching, just pulling my braces up over my shoulders, and Davidee is going by in front of the detachment, Byron takes a step from where he’d been shielded—right behind the corner of our building here—and, Jesus, he brings up a twenty-two Magnum he’s been carrying sort of shielded by his right leg. He sights right on Davidee, had his finger on the trigger, couldn’t have missed, clear shot, twenty-five yards or so, and holds it for maybe a second or two, and then drops the gun and turns. It all happened so fast. I grabbed my parka and when I got outside I could see Byron heading back toward his house pretty fast for a guy with a bum leg, and I yelled at him, ‘Hey, stop right there!’”
“So he went faster,” I suggested.
“Yeah! He looked back to see who had yelled at him . . . and then he broke into a kind of run. I went after him up past where Annie lives, until we got to his family’s house, and he went in and as soon as I got there, so did I.
“The people there, parents and a bunch of kids, Byron’s the oldest but I don’t know how many brothers and sisters he’s got, were eating their Easter dinner, for Christ’s sake . . . uh, no pun intended . . . and there was an empty chair with that twenty-two Magnum leaning against it.
“I said who I was, policee Alphonse Bouvier, in case they didn’t know, and that I was sorry to interrupt their Easter dinner, but that I had been following Byron who had pointed that gun . . . I pointed to the gun . . . at Davidee, and he’d come into this house. The man at the head of the table, I guess the father, nodded. He’s about your size, Matteesie . . .”
“A veritable giant,” I said.
“Yeah!” He laughed. “And he was chewing away at the wing from the big roast goose on the platter in front of him and gave me a little grin. ‘Ayah,’ he said. ‘We see that man.’ He didn’t say Byron’s name.
“‘I wish to speak to him,’ I said.
“‘He not here.’ The man’s grin got a little wider. ‘You come in front, he go out back.’
“Everybody around the table was grinning. It was a really strange feeling. Then it suddenly struck me like one of those old rerun comedies on the TV, one guy running in the front and another out the back. When I grinned, they started to laugh. And I suddenly relaxed, thinking, what the hell, he didn’t fire the gun, there’s no law against carrying one, and I knew Byron, of course, thin, wiry-looking, no mustache, ponytail, no chance of me mistaking his limp, I’d find him all right and ask what it had all been about.
“At that point the older woman, I guess Byron’s mother—who has a really nice face, smiles a lot, hair parted in the middle, I found later her name is Mabel—got up and brought another plate and nodded to Byron’s empty chair. The dad moved the gun and I sat down, seemed the thing to do. Now, I guess it wouldn’t happen this way in a big-city murder investigation—but then she brings in another roasted goose, and the man cut some meat from it and I had some, would have been rude not to. And I drank some tea and we talked about one thing and another, and I didn’t push, and when we’re sitting there, eating goose, I did find out what happened. They’d been just starting their dinner, talking and laughing, when Davidee barged in without knocking and demanded money from Byron. Said it had been owed to Dennissie and now was owed to him. Also made some dirty crack about Byron and Debbie’s little girl. That’s when Byron grabbed the gun and Davidee ran out of there with Byron after him. What I’d seen must have happened right after that. When I got back I wrote a report and looked up Byron in the files. Never in trouble. So I just thought, well, I’ve made a report, entered it in both Byron’s file and Davidee’s, and that I’d tell you all about it when you get back, in case anything did come of it. But nothing did that we know of.”
“No more at all?” I asked.
“No more than Byron getting mad when Davidee walked in and started jawing about Byron owing him some money, and bad-mouthing Debbie and the little girl. Maybe that’s it, entirely.”
He then told me that by now he’d checked just about every garbage barrel in town, some twice, and found nothing.
I told him about my plan to hunt for Davidee and company the next morning, probably going out very early by snowmobile and then, if everything worked, to rendezvous around No Name Lake with Thomassie Nuniviak of Komatik Air. I also told him about the meeting scheduled with Debbie later tonight.
I went to the rec hall after dinner. The usual people were there, plus Jonassie. I’d never seen him in there before. He was leaving when I arrived. I thought of what I’d seen from my window, his conversation with Debbie and Davidee’s parents and planned to ask him about this when I had a chance to do so privately. The little guy, Andy Arqviq, practically adopted me and told me how he wanted to be a carver, and Jonassie had helped him a lot. Lewissie came over and talked. There was another hockey game on TV, Los Angeles and Calgary again. It was still on when I left and told a little white lie, as the saying goes, that I was going back to the hotel to get some sleep.
When I came out, the last light after sunset gleamed from the northwest through a slit like a narrowed eye between black and stormy clouds both above and below. The clouds looked heavy with snow. I went into the detachment and turned the lights out and waited. After a while I could see Debbie strolling along and heard her steps crunching on the snow and then her knock on the door.
There was still a little light from outside by which I could see her find a chair near the counter and drop into it. I heard her sigh. For a while we were silent, glancing back and forth at one another, staring out at the few passersby on their ways to or from the rec hall. I was waiting for her to talk.
The eye of the dark cloud bank suddenly closed and left us in deep dusk. The sound of far-off wolves blew in on the cold and cutting west wind.
When she spoke it was as if she’d made up her mind to tackle a hard task and wanted to get it over with. Her words tumbled out. “It’s about Davidee and Hard Hat,” she said. Her brother’s name came out like a swear word. “I just want you to know something. On the night that Dennissie and Thelma were killed and your mother was hurt so badly, I was home only in the early part . . .”
She paused, swallowing hard. This was the crunch, one way or the other. Either she backed up Hard Hat’s alibi or she didn’t.
She didn’t; she even dropped a bombshell of another kind.
“Hard Hat was there for a while, but I don’t know how long. So was Davidee.”
“Davidee!”
We had done what we could earlier, asking around about whether Davidee had been seen in Sanirarsipaaq that night, but had drawn a blank. In all Hard Hat’s efforts to distance himself, he sure hadn’t mentioned seeing Davidee that night. But then not everyone was like Debbie, obviously ready to talk.
“He’d sneaked into town, down the back streets, parked his snowmobile over by the school. When he and Hard Hat got to our place I took the baby and went to Byron’s parents’ place. We were there until nearly eleven, and then Byron came back with me, carrying our baby, who’d woken up on the way, and we put her to bed. Neither Hard Hat nor Davidee were there then, and my mother said they’d gone out around ten, didn’t know where, except she’d heard them talking and heard Dennissie’s name mentioned.”
I felt silly asking, but wanted to be certain. “You’re absolutely sure of the times?”
Obviously she understood what I was getting at. She went through it again, being specific about times. “As I said, we got back around eleven and they’d been gone a while by then, and hadn’t come back. It’s a time, booze night, when Byron and I like to be together and let other people live it up. The hockey was over and my mother was watching something else and my father was asleep in his big chair. So we went upstairs and played with the baby until she went to sleep again and after that we were in my bedroom until Byron left around twelve. Another night he might have slept over, but not with Davidee in the house. He hates Davidee.”
“All that time your parents were in the kitchen?”
“All that time. At the kitchen table where they always are. Nobody else came in or out. We would know, you can hear what goes on all through that house. I fell asleep as soon as Byron left. So if anybody came back after that, they were very quiet.”
I thought about that. “Even if one or both of them had come back, it could have been after the murders,” I said.
She nodded silently.
“So,” I said, “the next day when Barker came around to check Hard Hat’s alibi that he was here all evening before going to the rec hall late, you weren’t home then either?”
“I was in the bedroom with the baby. I could hear the corporal in the kitchen asking questions and my father not mentioning Davidee at all but saying that Hard Hat had been here all the time until he went to the rec hall about midnight, which of course was a lie.”
“And your mother?”
“I heard the corporal ask her the same question. I thought she didn’t answer or I didn’t hear it. I asked her later and she told me, ashamed, that she had nodded her head.”
A sudden gust of snow came in on the wind, rattled the windows, slackened off, and came again as steady blowing snow, swirling across the open space. Far off upwind the wolves were howling, and dogs in the settlement were answering, as they sometimes do.
I mentioned the possibility Bouvier had referred to the first time we talked at length: the chance that whoever committed the murders could have gone somewhere long enough to change his clothes and then gone to the rec hall, fast enough to ensure an alibi. Maybe Debbie had thought of that herself. She made a hard line of her lips and met my eyes.
“I can only tell you what I know, that neither of them were there when we got there, nor when Byron left at nearly midnight.”
I belabored the obvious, but I wanted to nail it down. Maybe there was more there that needed shaking out. “So your parents lied.”
Her words poured out in a hard and angry jumble. “If he was yours and he had already disgraced the family and done things to us and others for years so that we knew what he was capable of, and he said that he would kill you if you did not say what he told you to say, that Hard Hat was there most of the evening, and not to mention Davidee being around at all, would you lie?”
“Maybe I would,” I admitted, putting myself in their place, old and defeated and fearful.
“Well, I wouldn’t!” she said. “But our parents would and did, because he said that he would kill them both if they said anything else.”
“But do you really know that he said that? I mean threatened to kill them if they didn’t say what he told them to say?”
Her voice was shaking. “Yes, I do know.”
“How?”
“My mother told me. Please be careful. Lie about where you heard this. I don’t want Davidee to think it was my parents who told you. Even more, I don’t want him to know it was me. If he knew that, he could do anything! He could hurt my baby! If he was going to be caught anyway he wouldn’t care anymore what he did . . .”
The last few words were almost inaudible. She wept for a minute or two. I thought of putting my arm around her shoulders, but didn’t. Eventually she went on, much quieter. “Our father, it has been worst for him, years when he didn’t know what he would do next about Davidee! Other men, friends he had hunted with long ago and grown up with, pitied him! Used to say, ‘Poor Ipeelee.’ With pity, among men, there is always a contempt as well. He . . .”
Her tone had changed. The heat was gone. Now she was speaking matter-of-factly. She could have been reading a story from a newspaper, a segment of one of those sociological roundups about family problems. “Exclusive! Our Family Problems reporter interviews parents whose offspring have threatened to kill them . . .”
“My father, Ipeelee, is treated as a nothing in all of Sanirarsipaaq when all he did was take in a boy who needed a home, as many of our people do. But he couldn’t handle what the boy had brought along with him, the fears and lying and violence against girls who wouldn’t do what he told them to do. You’ve seen my father, a man with no manhood left to him. I know he thinks of suicide. It was known from the time of Davidee’s trial that when I was a little girl and Davidee was screwing me that my father did nothing to stop it. He said in court he did not know, and it was true that always Davidee and I were alone in the house when these things happened. But I had told them and they did nothing. It went on. In a little house those things are known.
“You can look at my mother now and believe what I tell you. She told me that if she had it to do over and knew what was going to happen she would have killed him when he first came to us when he was eight and I had just been born. She told me that.”
I thought of what the judge had told me about Davidee being adopted after being sexually abused. Sexual abuse has some terrible by-products, one being the repetition of the original abuse. The way Davidee could exercise power over others, lead them to follow him, could be another element of his old nightmare.
Debbie might have guessed my thinking, or maybe not. Maybe she had lived with it so long that the very thought was a commonplace. She went on, as calmly as before: “When I heard my father lie to the corporal about Hard Hat being there until late that night, as soon as the corporal left and my father had gone out I asked my mother what had really happened. She said Davidee had promised to kill them both if they did not tell the corporal that Hard Hat had been at our house all evening.” She gulped in a deep breath. “Even now I am afraid of what I have said to you. There are terrible things Davidee could do.”
“But it has to end,” I said.
“Yes, it has to end,” she said, turning away, getting to her feet, saying no more. When she was walking unsteadily up the hill to her home, I added it up. Davidee had been in Sanirarsipaaq at least early that night. He could have been involved in the murders himself. He had told his parents to lie or he would kill them. His parents had duly lied.
But I had to have more, and somewhere there must be more. I thought of Hard Hat telling me and then Bouvier that he wasn’t really involved with Davidee anymore, but that change, if it was real, could have come after the fact. Nothing, so far, firmly connected either of them to the murders—unless the bloody footprints that Pelly had taken to forensics would do that. Bouvier’s search of the settlement for discarded boots and clothing, turning out old oil drums and going through the half-burned contents, had so far turned up nothing of value. It didn’t seem reasonable that Davidee and Hard Hat would overlook getting rid of anything incriminating.
Unless Davidee had taken it with him now out on the tundra where it might be found in ten years, or a century, or never. All the more reason for me to find Davidee wherever he was, or had been.
I wandered back over to the rec hall, getting there at the same time as Byron, whom Debbie had just relieved from looking after Julie. We stopped in the lobby before going in to where the crowd was.
“Byron,” I said. “I’m told that you went after Davidee with a gun on Sunday after he interrupted your Easter dinner. Were you really thinking you might shoot him?”
He let out a long breath, dropping his eyes and muttering, “I guess I was, but I didn’t.” Then he raised his eyes defiantly to mine. “But if he ever did anything to hurt Julie or Debbie I would kill him! I’d shoot him down like a dog! So if that ever happens, you’ll know where to look.”