Restless in the Grave Read online

  January 12. An anonymous caller objected to cross-country skiers wearing parasails as they came down the bunny hill.

  Well he might, as a launch from the ski hill had a trajectory that could put a parasailing skier on course with the windows of several homes of Niniltna’s most illustrious citizens, among them Demetri Totemoff and Edna Shugak. The aforesaid Harvey Meganack, in pursuit of his eternal quest to make his fortune, had cleared a path through a stand of spruce on a slope off the foot of the town’s airstrip, installed a rope tow, and built a shed from which Harvey’s cousin, that unrecovering alcoholic and heretofore unemployable Elias Halversen rented out sleds, skis, and snowboards. Harvey’s plan had been to entice some of those Suulutaq McMiners into paying for a little harmless fun during their off time, totally ignoring the fact that said miners were mostly young men in their twenties and that when they got off their twelve-hour shifts all they wanted to do was score transportation to the Roadhouse, the only purveyor of alcohol within a hundred miles.

  Well. The only legal purveyor.

  January 13. An anonymous caller reported two individuals were selling pints of Windsor Canadian in front of Bingley’s.

  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who the two individuals were, but as usual Howie and Willard had been long gone by the time Jim got there.

  This was the last item, and she saved and sent with a flourish.

  Jim was still standing in front of her desk, and something in the quality of his silence brought Maggie’s head up. His eyes had narrowed and his mouth was a hard line. After a moment he said, “Where are you?”

  He glanced through the window. “Cross the strip and follow the road down the hill. The post is the third building on the left after the school.”

  He hung up and went into his office, and she went back to work wondering what all that was about.

  Ten minutes later, the door to the post opened, and Maggie looked up. In purely instinctive feminine reaction, she sat bolt upright in her chair, sucked in her gut, raised her chin to smooth out an incipient wattle, and resisted the temptation to raise a hand to check her hair. “May I help you?” she said, and was proud her voice didn’t squeak.

  “I’m here to see Sergeant Chopin,” the Alaska state trooper, also a sergeant, said in a pleasant baritone, pulling the ball cap from his head. His name tag read L. CAMPBELL. “He’s expecting me.”

  “Certainly,” Maggie said. Jim’s door was closed, which was unusual. The only time Jim’s door was closed was when both he and Kate Shugak were on the other side of it. It took Maggie a moment to find the intercom button on her phone. “Sergeant Chopin? A Sergeant Campbell to see you.”

  “Send him in.”

  She released the button and nodded at Jim’s door.

  “Thanks.” He looked at her name tag. “Maggie.” Sergeant Campbell’s smile made her heart skip a beat. Tall but not too tall, thick dark red hair that just begged to be rumpled by a caressing hand, eyes the color of the sea at sunset, strong, square shoulders, narrow hips, and long, muscular legs. There just wasn’t anything not to like. When he turned to knock on Jim’s door, she couldn’t help noticing that the view going away was equally entrancing. His uniform was neither off the rack nor made of a material even remotely synthetic. It fit like it, too.

  A laconic “Yeah” sounded from behind the door.

  Campbell opened the door. “Jim,” he said.

  “Liam,” Jim said, and the door closed behind them.

  “Wow,” Maggie said softly. She had worked every day of the last three years with a man who was, to put it mildly, easy on the eyes. She would have thought she’d become inured to it.

  She’d always wondered if recruiters for the Alaska State Troopers selected for height. Now she wondered if they selected for looks, too.

  * * *

  On the other side of the door, the two men in the almost identical uniforms exchanged a long, expressionless stare. Finally Jim said in a voice entirely without inflection, “Liam,” and nodded at a chair. “Have a seat.”

  “Thanks, Jim.” Campbell unzipped the heavy blue jacket and sat down.

  There was silence. “How long you been here?” Campbell finally said.

  “Going on three years,” Jim said.

  “Little different from Wasilla.”

  “That it is,” Jim said. “Not busting near as many meth labs and marijuana grows in the Park. Thank god.”

  Campbell nodded. “You looking to retire out of here?”

  He was referring to the Alaska State Troopers’ seven-step duty posts. The more rural the post, the higher the pay. The higher the pay when a trooper retired, the bigger the pension. “Not planning on retiring anytime soon,” Jim said, and wondered if that were true.

  “You just like the village life, then.”

  A faint shrug. “This village, yeah.”

  Campbell raised an eyebrow. “Hear tell there might be another reason.”

  “There might.” Jim did not elaborate.

  “Never took you for a one-woman man.”

  Jim shrugged and returned no answer.

  Another silence. Campbell started to fidget in his chair, and thought better of it. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you.”

  “Any reason I should?”

  Campbell looked past Jim, at the impenetrable cluster of spruce trees crowding in at the window. “It’s not like I don’t know I screwed up.”

  “Five people dying because you were asleep at the switch constitutes a little more than screwing up in my book,” Jim said.

  “That was six, almost seven years ago now,” Campbell said, his voice level. “Maybe time to let that go.”

  “Like you have?”

  Campbell met Jim’s eyes squarely. “Not an option for me.”

  A third silence. Jim took a long breath, held it for a few moments, and then let it out slowly. “What the hell happened?”

  Liam told him. He spoke simply, in words devoid of emotion, but the obvious determination to remain matter-of-fact told its own tale. “There’s no excuse, Jim,” he said. “I just wasn’t paying attention. I fucked up, and five people died.”

  “You’re right, you did,” Jim said. A pause. He sighed. “But so did they. They drove down an unmaintained road in February, out of cell range, with no arctic gear, and didn’t tell anyone where they were going.” His mouth twisted. “A friend of mine calls it suicide by Alaska. Usually it’s Outsiders with no clue. But sometimes…”

  Campbell was silent.

  “I should have asked before,” Jim said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You tried,” Campbell said. “I wasn’t real … receptive.”

  They were men. That was as sentimental as it was going to get.

  Jim leaned back in his chair and crossed his feet on his desk. “Newenham. Lot of big cases, all closed pretty decisively, and all of them on film at ten, too. Been an interesting post for you.”

  Campbell’s expression lightened at the relaxation of tension in the room. “You could say that.”

  “And I see you’re already back up to sergeant.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fast tracker.” Jim smiled for the first time. “Good work on Gheen.”

  Campbell shrugged. “He finally kidnapped the wrong woman. She escaped and led him right to us.” A shadow passed across his face. “And getting him didn’t come for free.”

  “Heard that, too. Still.”

  Liam nodded. “Still.”

  “Heard you didn’t even have to go to trial.”

  Liam shook his head. “Oh, he wanted to tell us all about it. Whether we wanted to hear it or not.”

  Jim smiled. “A full confession, plus enough probative evidence to slam-dunk a jury full of card-carrying ACLU members, might make some practicing law enforcement professionals think they’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “When the perp, tail wagging, led them to the grave of his tenth vic, where was found not only her skeleton but also the skeleton o
f her unborn child, some practicing law enforcement professionals might think otherwise. I’m just glad it didn’t come to that.”

  Their eyes met in perfect understanding. By profession, their noses rubbed in the worst of human behavior every day of their working lives, they were de facto unshockable. People behaved badly. It’s why there were cops. But Jim and Liam wouldn’t have been human if the criminal, conscienceless inventiveness of certain deeply bent individuals had not, in fact, deeply shocked them on occasion.

  Campbell settled back into his chair. “I’ve got a problem.”

  “Figured. A big one, too.” He saw Campbell’s look and shrugged. “Had to be something big to get you on a plane all the way out here.” Jim laced his fingers behind his head. “I grant you full and free access to the wisdom of your elder and better.”

  Campbell didn’t smile. “I caught a murder.” He paused. “I think.”

  “Interesting,” Jim said.

  Campbell’s laugh was explosive. “That’s one word for it. I could use some help on it.”

  “I thought you had help. Didn’t Barton send Prince down there?”

  Campbell’s brows came together. “He did.”

  “And she can’t help you?”

  “No,” Campbell said.

  “Why not?”

  Campbell’s lips tightened. “Because she ran off with my father.”

  When Jim stopped laughing, he saw that Campbell was regarding him with a marginally lighter countenance. “Yeah, very funny.”

  “Clearly, it is,” Jim said, wiping an eye. “USAF Colonel Charles Campbell, trooper thief. Who’d a thunk it.”

  “Anybody who knew him for more than five minutes,” Campbell said.

  “Wouldn’t have thought it of Prince, though.”

  “No,” Campbell said glumly, “but all bets are off when it comes to my father and women. But about this case.”

  Jim frowned. There was something else, other than perfidious fathers absconding with faithless sidekicks. “What about it?”

  “If I were investigating this officially,” Campbell said, his voice bleak, “my prime suspect would be my wife.”

  Four

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 15

  Niniltna

  At the very same moment Sergeant Liam Campbell was unburdening his heart to Sergeant Jim Chopin, Niniltna Native Association board of directors chair Kate Shugak was back in the Niniltna School gymnasium for the second day in a row. As usual, a longing eye was canvassing the room for the nearest exit. While yesterday’s potlatch for Old Sam had inspired its share of grief and tears, she infinitely preferred it to presiding over the annual shareholders meeting.

  Although it was going unusually well, the customary infighting, backbiting, and power-jockeying were in suprising abeyance. In part this was due to their current chair’s leadership abilities. Kate marched them through old business like Alexander went through Asia, doubling the budget for the Niniltna Public Health Clinic against easily suppressed opposition from Ulanie Anahonak and her anti-everything clique, refining two clauses in the NNA contract with Aurora Communications, Inc., the document governing the construction of cell towers down the three-hundred-mile length of the Kanuyaq River, and reporting on ongoing talks between the Association, the State of Alaska, and the federal government on just who could fish where, when, and take how much out of the three-hundred-mile length of the Kanuyaq River.

  New business didn’t take much longer, being chiefly concerned with the return of the Sainted Mary to the tribe. Kate reported on as much of the history of its one-hundred-year perambulation and subsequent restoration as she thought it was good for the shareholders to know, and gave all the credit to Old Sam. Tradition held that the Sainted Mary reside with the current chief, but there wasn’t a current chief, that position having been gradually superseded over the last thirty years by the chair of the NNA board, and the shareholders agreed that the safest place for the Sainted Mary at present was locked up in the NNA’s headquarters here in Niniltna. Kate proposed and Herbie Topkok seconded that a committee be formed to work out more permanent accommodations for the Sainted Mary’s future, and five people, including two aunties, promptly volunteered to serve.

  “Is there any more new business?” Kate said.

  There wasn’t. Really, one of the least confrontational shareholders meetings in the history of the Niniltna Native Asscociation.

  Or, she thought, everyone was just in a hurry to get to the main event, which was the election of a new board of directors, and a new chairman of that board.

  She was in something of a hurry to get there herself.

  “Very well,” Kate said. “There being no new business, I move that we open the floor to nominations for the board seat left vacant by the death of board member Samuel Leviticus Dementieff.”

  The move was seconded, and Auntie Vi raised her hand.

  “The chair recognizes Viola Moonin.”

  “I nominate Axenia Shugak Mathisen for Old Sam’s seat,” Auntie Vi said, and the glower she directed at the assemblage dared anyone else to put up a rival candidate.

  Some of the shareholders would go up against Kate any day all day long, but Auntie Vi was another kettle of fish entirely. Harvey Meganack, of all people, seconded the nomination.

  “Axenia Shugak Mathisen has been nominated to serve on the board of directors,” Kate said. “Ms. Mathisen?”

  Halfway down the center aisle formed by two rectangles of gray metal folding chairs, Axenia rose to her feet, dark brown eyes calm, black hair cut in a tidy pageboy with artfully feathered bangs. “Madam Chair?”

  “You have been nominated to a seat on the board of directors. Do you accept the nomination?”

  “Madam Chair, I do.”

  “Very well.” Kate surveyed the two hundred shareholders. “Are there any other nominations?”

  Auntie Vi maintained her glower. Prudently, there were none.

  “Very well,” Kate said. “Is there any discussion on the nomination of Axenia Shugak Mathisen to the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association?”

  Iris Meganack raised her hand. “Axenia lives in Anchorage. I thought all board members had to live in the Park.”

  Kate looked at Annie. “The chair recognizes Annie Mike.”

  Unflustered, Annie looked at Iris. “Residency is unrestricted, according to our bylaws. The founders”—by which she meant Ekaterina, Kate’s grandmother, who had been most responsible for the final form of the bylaws governing the Association—“were mindful of the fact that the Association was and would be for the foreseeable future very small in number of members. They knew it would have been a mistake for the founders to exclude any shareholder on the basis of residence.”

  “Yes,” Iris said, “but have we ever had a board member who didn’t live in the Park before?”

  “No,” Annie said. “Again, this is a matter of tradition only, not of bylaw.”

  The shareholders took a moment to digest this. Kate looked at Axenia, who had remained on her feet for the discussion. She was dressed in worn jeans, a faded plaid shirt, and waffle stompers that looked older than she was. She had brought both of her children with her, and they were playing quietly with the rest of the kids in back of the rows of folding chairs. She’d been front and center at the potlatch yesterday, circulating through the crowd to speak at least a few words to every single person there, and taking her turn at the microphone to tell an unexceptional story about Old Sam and the time he’d built a bed for her Barbie doll. She’d been a wild child in her youth, before Kate conspired against their grandmother to get her cousin out of the Park. Her Park rat dress and quiet, assured demeanor, not to mention her well-behaved children, had gone a long way toward erasing the Park’s memory of that wayward teenager.

  Someone else raised their hand. “The chair recognizes Debbie Ollestad.”

  Debbie raised herself ponderously to her feet, wincing when her weight came down on that bunion on her left big toe. “Axenia’s hu
sband is an attorney for the Suulutaq Mine.” A murmur went around the room. “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?”

  Annie Mike raised her hand. “Madam Chair, if I may. The bylaws do not define conflict of interest, per se. They do require all board members to conduct themselves in a manner that is transparent, at all times putting the interests of the Association before their own.” Annie paused briefly, and when she continued, the more observant noticed the steel entering into her voice. “If a board member is at any time observed by any shareholder in violation of these precepts, the bylaws provide a mechanism for bringing the matter before the shareholders.” Annie paused again. “At which time the shareholders will be asked to decide if they wish to retain the services of said board member.”

  Her tone was so dry this time that a ripple of laughter ran around the room, and Debbie nodded and resumed her seat in obvious relief.

  “Is there any further discussion?” Kate asked, bending an intimidating eye on the assemblage. There was not, and Axenia Shugak Mathisen was elected to the Niniltna Native Association board of directors by a voice vote. Amid applause, she walked to the stage, climbed the stairs, and took the empty chair next to Auntie Joy.

  Which brought them to the last item on the agenda. Kate took a deep breath and did her best not to look overjoyed. “As you all know, two years ago I was named NNA chair, to serve out Billy Mike’s term. It’s up. I’m out.”

  This time the laugh was louder and lasted longer. Behind her, Kate could hear the enthusiastic thump of Mutt’s tail on the wooden floor of the stage.

  Try as she would to maintain the dignity of her office, Kate couldn’t stop the grin from spreading across her face. “Therefore, today we elect a new chair. I declare the floor open to nominations, and as my penultimate act I’m going to co-opt the first one. I nominate Annie Mike.”

  “I second,” Auntie Vi said promptly.

  Kate had spent the last two months speaking in person to each and every one of the 276 shareholders to ensure that there would be no other nominations and no discussion. In addition, she had put the aunties into the field, a five-pronged attack that had not failed of effect. Ulanie Anahonak looked angry, but she could take the temperature of a room as well as any other politician, and Annie Mike was elected to the board without a single dissenting vote. Indeed, the shout of acclamation was almost as loud as the shout that greeted Lars Ahkiok’s winning basket in last year’s annual grudge match between the Kanuyaq Kings and the Seldovia Sea Otters.