It didn’t take much thought, what I did next. There was no doubt that Davidee was hurt, maybe badly, depending on the damage the knife had done internally. I did not envy the woman at the nursing station. Normally her cases would be cuts and bruises from boozy fights or accidents, people with acute appendix pains or blinding headaches, people in off the tundra with frozen limbs, pregnant young girls or women who had ignored her urging to fly out to Inuvik or Yellowknife where their confinements could be monitored. Or who had not come to her at all.
At that moment I saw Bouvier cruising up to the rec hall in the van, staring in astonishment at the milling crowd, his hunt for Andy obviously in vain. I ran to the driver’s side door as he wound down the window. “What the hell happened?” he asked.
I told him. The short form, mainly Davidee, the shaman’s knife, Byron, and that I was not sure how serious the wound might be.
“You go to the nursing station,” I said.
“That where Byron took him?”
“That’s what I figure.”
“Is Davidee likely to cause a lot of trouble there?”
“Don’t think so.” A full stab in the back with what Jonassie had told me was a five-and-a-half-inch blade . . . depended what it hit.
“We’ll have to pick up Byron but there’s no hurry about that part.” Pause. What else? A statement. “You haven’t found Andy.”
“Right.”
I could see Erika Hall running toward us, her eyes wide with shock and excitement at what she had witnessed, and perhaps, to be charitable, only secondarily concerned with how it would look in print.
“You go with Bouvier,” I told her.
She ran to the other door and they drove off, Bouvier honking his horn to make a way through people heading in the same direction. Some were hurrying but most, visible in the glow of the few lights holding back the cloud-blackened Arctic night, moved slowly, like a crowd leaving somewhere after a game, the excitement to be reflected upon, regretted or savored, but the result unchangeable. Heading for the nursing station . . . what else was there for them to do? This was not a place where you could go home and listen to the radio to find out what happened.
As I stood watching for a few seconds, among the walkers I could see Margaret and Maisie close together. Sarah and Agnes were with a larger group, Lewissie and his wife Jane nowhere to be seen, Jonassie the same. Leah and her mother were among those still milling around the entrance to the rec hall.
I moved out of the light from the entrance and soon found myself alone, all the signs of excitement behind me. Rather than risk being seen going directly toward the shore, I walked quickly to the right and down the slope where there was no road, through the ankle-deep snow. Passing behind the hotel, I wished I had brought a flashlight, but maybe it was just as well—the light would have been seen, someone might have followed. I wanted Andy to myself.
The dark line of overturned boats showed plainly against the snow. I stopped at the end one. I thought I could see recent footprints in today’s noon snow. I leaned over almost double to peer in, but could see nothing.
“Andy,” I said.
No answer.
“It’s Matteesie,” I said.
Still no answer, no stirring from under the boat.
“Davidee has been stabbed with the shaman’s knife,” I said. “It happened at the dance. He’s badly hurt.”
His unbelieving voice came from only feet away. I still couldn’t see him. He was hiding as deeply in the shelter of the boat as he could get. “You’re just trying to get me to come out.”
I could hear his teeth chattering.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
He crawled out on his hands and knees.
“We have to talk,” I said. “We’ll go to the detachment. You’re safe now. I promise.”
He stood up, his tiny body shivering uncontrollably. I realized he still didn’t know what had happened, how Davidee probably was no longer a threat to him. We walked out of there behind the hotel, behind the rec hall, past the door to the rink where the ice-scrapings were piled all winter. He stayed close to me as if trying to make one shadow out of two. We walked up the slope between the rec hall and the detachment and crossed a few yards of open space before I unlocked the door and turned on the light.
He was the one who locked the door behind us. Then he went to the window facing the house where I’d first laid eyes on Davidee and Debbie and their family. The house was dark. He was still there staring out while I made tea and hunted through the scanty rations in the refrigerator, finding bread and margarine and a can of soup. I put the soup into a bowl and into Bouvier’s microwave to heat, cleared a place on Barker’s desk, laid out bread, margarine, Bouvier’s jar of peanut butter, a half package of cheese slices.
At the same time, speaking largely to his back, except once in a while when he turned to glance at me, I told him what had happened: the fight, the appearance of the shaman’s knife, the stabbing by Byron.
“Byron?” he asked incredulously, coming to sit down. “Shee-it!”
He wolfed the bread and cheese, gulped the soup. Sitting across the desk from him, I phoned the nursing station. Busy signal. I put down the phone, waited, tried again. Still busy.
Then I turned on the office tape recorder and said to Andy, “Now you’re safe. You accept that?”
He nodded.
“So I want the whole story. No more running away, right?”
He nodded again.
“How come your Nikes had blood on the soles?”
He gulped, but after a few seconds answered in a mixture of dialect and English, faltering, “I have to start farther back.”
“We’ve got lots of time. Now’s the time to tell it.”
He let out a long breath, paused, then met my eyes. “Well, one time when Jonassie was away buying stone, but I didn’t know that, I went to his house. I did that because sometimes Jonassie has been kind to me when other people weren’t. I knocked on the back door. There was no answer. I tried the knob. It was open, so I went in.”
I had to keep remembering he was only fifteen. I wanted to ease him along, let him set his own course, interrupting only when I had to, in short, soft rather than hard questioning—as long as that worked.
“Then what?”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, but in a few seconds went on.
“Well, I was inside so I looked around. Sometimes when we talked he told me about the old days when it was like one for all and all for one, and if a person came to the door or came to a snow house out on the tundra and had no food to eat or skins to sleep on or boots that were not worn out, it would not be that he was coming to beg [tuksiaqtuaq], but he would be treated for a time at least as one of the family to be fed and looked after as long as he behaved himself. I was hungry so I found some caribou dry-meat that I knew he dried himself and while I was chewing that I went around the place looking at his stuff. Just looking. I thought he might come in any time, but didn’t think he’d be sore at me as long as I didn’t do anything bad.”
“What kind of stuff were you looking at?”
“Well, masks, and a lot of carvings, mostly finished. He introduced me once to a black-haired woman from Winnipeg Art Gallery he said comes nearly every year and buys carvings. Many of the carvings were large and would sell for a lot of money, I think, but I just cruised around in there and began to think I might take a small one if I could find one, and maybe he wouldn’t notice.”
“So that’s when you found the shaman’s knife?”
An instant glance of surprise that I knew, then a nod. “I saw it tucked away at the back of a shelf. The handle was black stone, carved to the head of a bird, I didn’t know what bird, something like a hawk [qilriq] or an eagle [tingmiaqpak] that I have seen in many drawings. I thought that this knife would be easy to sell, and probably Jonassie would never miss it, or I would tell him I had taken it. So I took it. Only later did find that the bird was a gyrfalcon [kidjgavik].
“I knew that in the spirit world the gyrfalcon is one of the spirits of death. This is all not long ago, maybe a month.”
“So for a while you had the shaman’s knife. How did Davidee get it? Did you sell it to him or he took it from you or what?”
Andy sighed. I could tell this was a bad memory. “One night at the rec hall before he was even supposed to be back here, he was after me for twenty dollars I had borrowed from Dennissie and was supposed to pay him back twenty-five in a week. Dennissie asked me for it and I said I didn’t have any money, so a few days later he sent Davidee to collect. I still had no money but Davidee scared me and I showed him the knife and said that it was worth fifty dollars.”
At that he looked exactly like anyone who didn’t like remembering a bad deal, his eyes showing the kind of deep regret well known among some used-car buyers.
“I was surprised—he took it from me and gave me twenty-five dollars change! He seemed very excited about the knife, as if he had seen it before, or knew about it, and right away I knew I had not asked enough, but then it was too late. I know it was wrong, but I thought that when I had fifty dollars again I would give it to Jonassie and tell him what happened, but I have never had fifty dollars since.”
I had to push a little, needed to know the rest as fast as possible and get to the nursing station. “Did you ever see Davidee with the knife, or did anybody else know about it?”
“Not that I know. The next time I heard about the knife was on the night of the murders. I was in the rec hall and Davidee wasn’t but some of the others were laughing about something that had happened the night before.”
I thought he might be straying. I didn’t have time for digressions. “Something connected to Davidee? What?”
Then what Andy said turned out to be precisely the other side of what Leah had told me about earlier.
“Why they were laughing was that some of them had heard Davidee trying to get Dennis to set up Leah at his house. It was known that Dennis and Leah had gone there before fairly often. The difference this time was that Davidee had offered Dennis fifty dollars to get Leah there the following night and leave the front door open so that when Leah and Dennis were uh . . .”—he looked ashamed—“finished, Davidee would get a turn at her.
“I didn’t laugh when I heard that. Leah is one of the people who is good to me. If I think of an angel, I think of Leah. But what the guys were laughing at was two things. Dennis had told Davidee that he already had spoken to Leah and she couldn’t come that particular night. But someone had seen Dennis and Leah together that night, going to his house. Because nobody likes Davidee, when he came to the rec hall they laughed at him and told him that he had been made a fool of. I was there to hear all this. Davidee had been drinking but didn’t seem real drunk. When everybody was laughing he just listened, looking mad as hell, and then walked out, fast, without a word.”
“Did you talk to him then at all, where he was going, or anything?”
He pressed his lips close together, a hard straight line. “Not then. But the next time I saw him it was just about twelve, maybe a few minutes earlier, the rec hall was supposed to be closed but on booze nights rules were broken. The thing I noticed was that he wasn’t wearing the same clothes he’d had on earlier. Probably his other ones had blood on them . . .”
“How would you know that?”
“I didn’t, right then. I figured it out later. Anyway, he pulled me off to the side and said he’d been in a fight with Dennissie and it had got rough and now he found that he had lost the knife. He told me to go to the house right away and find the knife and bring it to him and he’d give me fifty dollars. He said it would probably be in the living room, maybe in or around the chesterfield. He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me up tight against him and said, ‘I’ll kill you if you ever say a word about any of this.’”
I could imagine it.
“So you went to the house.”
“I didn’t know anything about the murders then, not a thing. At the house, that’s when I found out. I get up there. The police had just arrived. People were gathering. The old lady I later learned was your mother, Matteesie, had been taken next door to Annie’s house, and . . .”
I was feeling more than a little sick by then, about murder, my mother, everything I knew about that night—including some sloppy police work. I didn’t want to believe what I now was imagining.
“You mean you went into the house then, nobody stopped you?”
“There was a lot of confusion. I almost got sick from the amount of blood I could see even from the door. I didn’t know what had happened but the blood made me think what would happen if I came back to Davidee without the knife. The house was pretty dark inside, bad lights. I heard Barker saying to Bouvier, ‘What the hell do you mean, you didn’t bring flashlights?’ Anyway, I am small, and when Barker went upstairs and Bouvier went next door to talk to your mother, I slipped in. Some of the blood was dry, but I almost fell stepping into a sort of pool of it. I could see that Thelma was on the couch. I couldn’t see well enough to know that she was even hurt. I said, ‘Don’t yell, Thelma, it’s just me, Andy,’ and meanwhile I’m trying to see what’s on the floor and I do see a gleam of light and it is the knife. I pick it up and get out just as Barker was coming downstairs.”
“Jesus,” I said. The only thing I could think of.
“Someone outside must have seen me, I don’t know, but after all I just lived two doors away, they were used to me.”
Well, I thought, we’re getting there, slow but sure.
“So now you had the knife,” I prompted.
“There was blood on it. I ran a little and cleaned it off on some snow and took it back down to the rec hall, where Davidee was pacing around waiting for me, not talking to anybody. When he saw me I went to the toilet and got into one of the stalls. I had been in a stall with him before doing drug deals. He followed me in and I gave him the knife and he gave me a fifty-dollar bill. I told him about cleaning the blood off the knife and he said, ‘Oh, I hit Dennissie and he got a nosebleed.’ Then he took some more money from his pocket, mostly twenties and tens, a little with blood on it, not even all dried, and gave it to me and said, ‘Is your man out there?’ I knew he meant a dealer, a guy who came in once in a while but wasn’t known to the police. I said I thought he was still there.
“‘Cocaine,’ he said. ‘Get back here fast.’ Then he went out, but instead of leaving fast I stood there almost crazy, wondering what the hell I’d got into.”
“How long before you went out, then?”
“Just a minute or two. I looked at the fifty he’d given me and one side had some blood on it. I didn’t want any money with blood on it so in the money he’d given me I found two twenties and a ten for myself that were clean. Then I put the fifty he’d given me with seventy more, with only the clean side of the fifty Davidee had given me showing, and I went and I found the dealer and I bought a cocaine packet for a hundred and twenty and took it back in to the can with Davidee right behind me. He took it right away, sniffing it off the side of his hand, and then he practically ran out of there.
“Left the rec hall, too, you mean?”
“I heard his snowmobile go. I was back out with the others for a while before the police came and lined everybody up and checked for bloodstains. If they had been able to check the dealer’s pocket they would have found some, I’d given all the bloodstained stuff to him.”
“But he’d already left when the police arrived? He wasn’t in the pictures Bouvier took.”
“He’d gone by then. I looked for him the next day but he’d flown out on the first morning flight. Guys like that know when to disappear. I was wishing by then I could have gone with him. Then when one of the cashiers at the Co-op found she had a fifty with blood on it, and Nelson was in an uproar, I knew the dealer must have bought something there on his way out of town.”
He stopped talking for nearly a minute, dropped his head, stared at the floor. The fear hadn’t left him. “I haven’t felt safe since that night,” he said. “Every time I saw Davidee again it all came back that if I talk, I’m dead.” Apprehensively, he asked, “How bad is he hurt?”
I explained as much as I knew: that he’d been stabbed and practically collapsed across the seat of his snowmobile.
“That knife would go through me and come out the other side,” Andy said, and shuddered. “I knew all along he’d have it hidden somewhere, either carrying it hidden, or hiding it where it wouldn’t be found in a search. I don’t know where. I hope he’s dead, I’ll sleep better.
“Oh”—this was an afterthought—“two days after the murders, that Sunday, he showed up with a note. I don’t know where he’d been. He told me to pin it up on the notice board at the rec hall when nobody was around. I read it fast, something about the shaman causing the murders. I knew that was crazy, but he’d told me to pin it up and I did.
“That’s all I know,” he said. He looked deathly tired.
I had no more questions. I had what I wanted.
I wrote out quickly the main elements of his story. With Leah’s account, backing up the presence of her footprints in the house, and Maisie’s story about being there when she heard Leah and Dennissie upstairs, it should be all the evidence I’d ever need.
I read it to him.
He nodded. “Okay, sign it,” I said, and he did.
This document, labeled exhibit something or other, I forget exactly, and backed up by the tape, later appeared in my overall report in a section headed: “Andy Arqviq’s Story.”
I asked if he wanted to come with me to the nursing station. He said no, he would go home now.
“No,” I said. “You’ll stay here. I don’t want to lose you again. I’m going to lock you in. There’s the cot over there. Don’t answer the phone or the door. I’ll be back when I can and we’ll go back to Barker’s house for the night. But right now, can you sleep?”
“I think so,” he said, and, looking like a small ghost, fell asleep in his chair. I lifted him onto the cot. I’ve lifted much younger kids who weighed more. I unzipped one of the detachment’s sleeping bags and laid it over him like a blanket. He didn’t move.
I thought about maybe disturbing him if I used the phone, but then decided no way and dialed Maxine at her townhouse in Inuvik. I was thinking of her moving to answer it from wherever she was: reaching from bed or from her hassock in front of the TV, or more likely just reaching out a wet arm from the bath. This was her bath time, I’d learned from sometimes letting the phone ring ten times before I’d just about give up and then she’d answer. For her forty-fifth birthday I’d given her an extension phone with a thirty-foot cord that she could carry with her into the bath.
“Maxine here.”
“This is the RCMP on our new view-a-phone. You don’t look very decent to me.”
Her chuckle always made me feel good. “For you I don’t have to be decent.”
“I’ve got news. You got a pencil and paper there in the bath?”
After a few seconds, she said, “Fire away.”
“I think I’m just about finished here,” I said. “But Erika Hall is beavering around and I thought I should tell you. You remember Davidee Ayulaq from here? That rape case?”
She did.
“Tonight at a dance he got stabbed and he’ll be charged tomorrow, two murders, one manslaughter. I’m just going to the nursing station now to find out what shape he’s in. Can’t give you the name of the guy who stabbed him until we decide what to do about it, but the main thing is that to all intents and purposes the case is closed except for the wrap-up.”
“Can I quote you as saying that?”
I thought about it. “Yes. I’ve gotta go now. What do you pay your stringers?”
She laughed. “For you, guess.”
“If you call me tomorrow I should have it all.”
Trying to recall the time I spent getting to the nursing station after I had locked the detachment door, I am reminded of . . . what is it? Anyway, a line: Where did you go? Out. What did you do? Nothing.
The nursing station was only four or five hundred yards away. I walked all over Sanirarsipaaq to get there. I had a strange reluctance to go and actually find out what was happening with Davidee.
On that near-midnight walk I thought of how Leah’s story fitted so closely into Andy’s: she running out as soon as the fight between Davidee and Dennissie started; Andy’s background story about Davidee trying to pay Dennissie to set her up for him in what would have been another rape; the blood on Andy’s shoes as he earned his fee for recovering for Davidee the knife he had stolen in the first place; the blood on some of the money, including the fifty that Davidee had used to pay Andy, and that Andy had used for the cocaine, the fifty that had turned up at the Co-op. Davidee must have started taking Dennissie’s money and then taken only part of it, for whatever reason.
What else? More thoughts: The fee hall guys who’d been laughing at Davidee, maybe starting his murderous rage. Andy could identify them as backup witnesses to what Davidee had in mind for Leah that night. Then there was Andy himself as an example of what could happen to an orphan kid left to do what he thought he had to, to stay alive. The drug dealing in the can at the rec hall could be an investigation of its own, leading to a later arrest. Maybe. You can never be sure.
But what I really wrestled with was Davidee. The fury that I’d had originally, personally wanting to get whoever ran down my mother and eventually caused her death, had been largely forgotten in the nuts and bolts of trying to put the case together. Now my anger was back, full strength. Three people had died because of him. Leah mourned Dennissie, many friends and relatives mourned him and Thelma, and I mourned my mother and always would.
“I was wondering if you were coming.” Bouvier said, outside the nursing station. “It’s been a madhouse around here.”
“What kind of shape’s he in?”
“Alive, so far.”
I walked up the wheelchair ramp and inside. Davidee was lying face down on a stretcher with the gyrfalcon handle of the shaman’s knife still sticking out of his back through his layers of clothing. His anorak’s sleeves had been cut off and there were two intravenous needles in him, traces of red foam on his lips.
“Hi, Matteesie,” the nurse said, looking up. She was just standing by, as if to watch and do anything that suddenly needed doing. I could see the sweat on her uniform under her arms and bloodstains down the front. A little blood showed around the hilt of the knife where it stuck through Davidee’s clothing. His father and mother sat in one corner of the room. Not Debbie. I had an idea that she’d have been torn, in a way, about leaving her parents on their own, but more concerned about what was happening to Byron. Erika was taking notes, sitting unobtrusively against one wall.
Bouvier entered behind me. “What about Byron?” I asked.
“Lewissie picked him up. He found Byron just walking with his father. His father was right there, you know, when it happened, He walked up here and went straight to Byron, who was still sitting outside on the snowmobile when I got here, his head down, I’d guess in shock. Tell the truth I didn’t notice when he and his dad left, but then asked Lewissie to watch for him, we probably had to charge him. He and his father had just gone for a walk, and to talk. They were walking back along the road from the airstrip when Lewissie found them and sent a message with Paulessie to say he’d go home with them. They’re at Byron’s home. Debbie and Julie are there, too.”
“Never handled anything like this before,” the nurse said to me. “Hope I never do again.” Her fair hair was mixed with gray. She was stocky and strong-looking. A badge clipped to the front of her white uniform read: Elizabeth Homfray-Davies, Registered Nurse.
“Have you kept notes?” I asked.
She tapped a pad beside her.
“Could I read them?”
“Maybe I’d better read them to you,” she said. “Or you ask what you want to know. Funny, this is something we’re taught to do, have notes we can consult if we have to give evidence in court, but it’s the first time it’s ever been necessary for me. Yet, anyway.”
She had an English accent. I’d been going to talk to her about the night my mother was hurt, but never got around to it. If this case got to court, which it almost certainly would when Byron was tried, she would have to give details of her training, experience, any degrees she held, where she had served, and so on. I’d been through that with doctors testifying, never with a nurse.
“Okay, will you read what you’ve got?”
“It’s pretty formal,” she said. “I thought I’d better make it that way, like we’re told to do.”
I can stand formality better than I can sloppiness. “Formal’s fine,” I said. “I’ll take notes. Now, tell me off the top.”
She began in her precise English voice, sometimes consulting her notes. “Yes, well, here it is, then. I had a phone call about eleven o’clock from Lewissie Ullayoroluk. All he said was that an emergency was coming in right away. I’m all alone here, my backup is in Florida, so I couldn’t go to the dance and was in bed here reading. I was just into my clothes when I heard a snowmobile coming and went out and saw Byron driving the snowmobile and Davidee lying across the seat on his abdomen . . .”
“Nobody else with them?” Dumb question, I knew immediately, unless some Olympic sprinter was around who I didn’t know about.
“Nobody else right then,” she said, “but soon, I assure you! People by the dozens began arriving, the younger ones running. I had to tell them for God’s sake to get out of the way and let me do what I could, but there was still a crowd around me when I was trying to see what we had here.”
“Did he say anything?”
She shook her head decisively. “Never, so far. He was breathing, but only just. Of course I could see why, that knife.” She jerked her head at the knife sticking out of his back. “I got help from some of the young men, Tommy was one of them, to help me with a stretcher, and we wheeled him up the ramp and in here just the way he is now, knife and all. He’s hardly changed since he got here. You can see yourself, blue around his mouth, frothy blood drooling out from his nose and mouth.”
“Any sign of consciousness at all since?”
“Not a stir out of him.”
“So what happened after you got him inside? Now I guess I need any technical stuff.”
“I examined him. His pupils were dilated. There was very little reaction to my light testing, no response to verbal command. I tried mild pain stimuli, jabbing a small needle shallowly into his hand. He didn’t react. When I checked him with a stethoscope his heart rate was very faint and rapid, so much so that I could not count it. Also, the air entry into his lungs was very poor, very shallow, probably meaning badly damaged lungs. The knife is in the middle of his back just below the shoulder blades, I think that’s where, just a little to the right side from the midline, anyway, wouldn’t be able to be certain without undressing him.”
“Did you try for any advice, like call a hospital or doctor?”
“I tried to get a call through to the doctor on call in Churchill, but couldn’t get her, left a call, she was on the line to some other nursing station, so I went ahead doing what I had been doing. While Tommy kept trying Churchill for me, I cleared his airway, put an airway in, and sent a message out to get two of my local health-aides in to help.
“They were on their way anyway, they were at the party and saw some of this happening.” She waved a hand at Jane Ullayoroluk and an Inuit women I knew by sight. “They’ve been a big help. Then I tried to start intravenous infusion. That was very difficult but on the third try I got a very small needle in. When the doctor in Churchill called me back her advice was don’t remove the knife but try to start two intravenous infusion lines running at the maximum and to keep the airway open. She said she would call for a medivac flight right away.”
I sighed. Medivac several days ago for my mother, and now medivac for the guy who knocked her down.
“But you got the intravenous going all right.”
A brisk nod. “It took me quite a while. I haven’t got the time exactly when I did start it.”
“Is it making any difference?”
“It has to, but there’s been no noticeable effect. I can still hardly get any pulse or blood pressure, can hardly observe any breathing, pupils still dilated, no reaction to light, in fact I’ve thought he was gone two or three times, but he seemed to stabilize just before you came in. He might just make it. So that’s where we are now.”
I sat down at her desk and from my notes wrote in longhand a summary of what she’d said. When I read it to her, she said, “Yes, that’s about right,” and signed it. This statement later appeared in my final report under the heading of, “Nurse Homfray-Davies’s Account.”
Bouvier claims, and he might be right, I was not functioning all that well by then, that when I was folding up her statement and sticking it in my pocket, I looked at her and said quietly, “Thank you. You’re a bloody star!”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Keeping this guy alive so we can try him for murdering Dennis Raakwap and Thelma Pukwap and causing the death of my mother,” I said, having trouble with the last few words.
And then I said something that Bouvier insisted on laughing about later. He even phoned Maxine to tell her, figuring she would appreciate it.
“You’re standing there, Matteesie,” he said. “The guy is almost dead. About one breath away from eternity, wherever that is. And you’re standing over him telling the nurse, ‘It would have been a bloody miscarriage of justice if he checked out unconscious and never had to sit in court and listen to what an asshole he really was.’”
Soon after that, Davidee died. Slipped away, with no sound, more like a cessation of sounds. The nurse swiftly checked and looked to me, shaking her head. “Gone,” she said.
I stood looking down at him for a moment and then for some instinctive reason I went over to his ravaged-looking mother and father. She was motionless, expressionless, staring nowhere, as if in a trance. I put my hand on Ipeelee’s shoulder. He looked up at me and slowly, faintly, smiled. Either the shaman trying to help him, or maybe the shaman’s knife right there, sticking out of Davidee, had made a difference.
Then I went over to Erika, standing against one wall taking notes. “Phone me in the morning,” I said. “I’ll answer any questions you’ve got, on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Find out where Barker is staying in Honolulu and fax him a copy of your story. Put a note on it saying it’s with Matteesie’s compliments.”
“You’re a bastard,” she said. “It’s a deal.”
I drove to the detachment with Bouvier. While we carried Andy to the van and later into Barker’s house, he mumbled sleepily and then was gone again. We laid him on a bed and took off his lousy cheap boots.
“Byron?” Bouvier asked.
It had to be done. “You stay here,” I said. “I’m going over there now.”
The whole family had gathered, brothers, sisters, parents, Byron, Debbie, Julie. Plus Lewissie. I stood just inside the door.
“I have to charge you,” I said to Byron. “I’ll let you know in the morning what happens next. Get a good lawyer.”
Debbie cried. “You know what Davidee said to Byron in the rec hall, that he was going to kill Julie!”
I had wondered. Now I knew. But I only said, tiredly, “Be sure Byron’s lawyer gets that. It’ll help Byron in court.”
I don’t know when I got back to the hotel. Margaret let me in and hugged me. I hugged her back. Maisie hugged me, too, just about cracking my ribs, crying a little, either over her narrow escape from being more involved, or from a lingering wish that she had stayed around to throw another male creep out of a second-story window.
Thomassie was sitting in our room, smoking his pipe. He’d heard all about the action by now but had missed being an eyewitness—he hated rock music, and had left when it began. He had done rather well with the rest of my rum, but had saved one drink for me. I told him that, with Davidee dead and everything else done that could be done, I wanted him to fly me and Byron and maybe somebody else to Inuvik in the morning, once I had a chance to think things over and talk charges with Yellowknife. There are holding cells in Inuvik.
“What other passenger besides Byron?” Thomassie asked.
“Andy. I’ll ask him, anyway. Just want him to see somewhere that isn’t Sanirarsipaaq. Broaden his horizons. He can use that.”
Actually, Andy and Maxine got along fine. He made her laugh a lot when he was mimicking me marching around his town looking important. But soon he got homesick for Sanirarsipaaq. He just wanted to know what was going on there. He didn’t want to be away when he had a chance, maybe his first, to be the center of attention. It was probably the right thing for him. Annie took him in. I might do more about him sometime. But so far I’m not sure exactly what.