Hold the Dark: A Novel (18 page)

“If the people of this village came across Medora, hiding out there, like you say, they wouldn’t turn her in,” Marium said. “Even as what she’s become, she’s still one of their own. All the blood here is bonded.”

“What has she become?” Core said.

“I should be asking you that.”

Core looked away again and reached for the chocolate in his coat.

“What has that woman become, Mr. Core?”

We are the most unnatural of all
, he thought.

“A child is the mother’s,” he said. “Not the father’s and not anybody else’s. Always the mother’s in a way we’ll never understand. It’s the same wherever you look out there, in nature. She was trying to fix something. Something was broken and she thought she was fixing it. Or saving him from something. Trying to, anyway. I don’t know.”

“Who destroys something to fix it? Tell me who does that please.”

“It happens in medicine,” Core said. “Chemotherapy does just that.”

“Are we talking about medicine or people here?”

“What Medora did is the same as chemotherapy. Kill the boy in order to save him.”

“Save him from what?”

“I don’t know that,” Core told him. “Don’t you think I’d say it if I knew? I’m trying to know.” He lit another cigarette, studied Marium’s lighter, a Zippo made of mock snakeskin. “Saving him from Slone, maybe. From becoming what his father is. I don’t know.”

“Well, I’ll agree with you on one thing, Mr. Core. What happened here is a cancer of some kind. And believe me, when this is all done, I’m going on vacation, taking my wife to the Caribbean or someplace, nothing but green water and hot sand.”

“The Caribbean?”

“Hell yes the Caribbean. But right now we’re in this snow, Mr. Core. So I need you to replay your conversation with Medora Slone. Start from the start and tell me everything she said to you.”

A young girl trudged before them in snow past her knees with a .22 rifle strapped slant across her caribou coat, face and hair lost in a hood and ruff, an unleashed husky before her exploding a path in great clouds of powder. Core knew she was a girl by her gait. How could it feel to be from this place, to have your every molecule formed by its rhythms? Medora Slone had told him that Keelut wasn’t of the earth, and he’d puzzled over those words since then.

But no place is of the earth—every place is of itself, knows only itself. The Caribbean? A child there is as peculiar, as particular as this child before him trudging through snow. Medora Slone, he recalled, had told him that she looked at magazine pictures of green water and island sand and wondered about those places, about their reality—their reality that seemed to her like mystery. She told him this right there on the road in front of him, between those rows of cabins, when she showed him where the wolves had invaded this village. She told him that the only warmth and water she had now was the hot spring hidden in the crags past the valley. Her special place, she said. And again he thought of her in the tub that night as she scoured her skin with a brush, as she tried to get clean and could not. He felt his own clean-shaven body against his clothing.

“She said something to me,” Core told Marium. “The night I got here. She mentioned a hot spring to me. And I think I saw what she was talking about, that morning when I looked for the wolves. I saw a spring out there.”

“Why a hot spring? I’m not following.”

“If she’s out there,” Core said, “she’d need water. She’d need to get warm. Maybe she couldn’t build a fire, couldn’t risk being seen from the air, I don’t know.”

“Okay. Lots of hidden springs out there, Mr. Core. Where is this one you saw?”

“About a three-hour walk northeast from here.”

“What else?”

“She called it her special place,” Core said. “That’s all. I don’t know what else.”

“Her special place. A hot spring.” He flattened the topo map on the seat between them. “Show me,” he said. “We’re here,” and he uncapped a red pen with his teeth, marked a crooked
X
on Keelut.

“It would be here then,” Core said, pointing. “Although I can’t make sense of this map. How old is this thing?”

“That’s okay,” Marium said, refolding the map. “You don’t have to make sense of it. You can show me yourself at sunup.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re gonna show me where this spring is, Mr. Core. We’ll fly over at sunup. We can’t take off now. It’ll be dark in two hours, and we’re still an hour drive from town.”

“It was just something she mentioned to me. I’m not saying she’s there. How would I know?”

“If I had better leads than that, I’d follow them, believe me. But I don’t. So you’re gonna show me.”

“Shouldn’t you take men with you?” Core asked. “Other cops, I mean? I can’t help you out there.”

“How many men you think fit in a Cessna? You and me will go, you’ll show me this spring, and if we find anything, we’ll come back for more men. You can stay at our place tonight.”

“I have a motel,” Core said.

“Stay with us, I insist,” he said, smiling. “We have a spare room. And you’ll like my wife. We’ll have a home-cooked meal.”

“Because you’d rather keep an eye on me, you mean.”

“You’re free to leave, Mr. Core, you probably know that. But you haven’t left yet, you’re still right here talking to me. You can be a witness, whatever you want to call it, but you’re gonna show me this spring.”

Through the windshield, through blurs of blown snow, they watched the young girl and husky get swallowed by hulking cones of covered spruce. Marium swigged from whiskey again and passed the bottle to Core.

* * *

In his double-bay garage, at six a.m., the sun still loath to bring its light, Shan Martin dialed Marium’s office—he had the number memorized—and tried to get him on the phone. “You tell Marium to call me, tell him I have information about Vernon Slone. I saw which way he’s going and I believe that reward money is mine. You tell Marium to call me.”

He returned the phone above the workbench to a cradle blackened by years of oil and grease. On the radio a weather report complaining of more storms, snow from the north. He flattened a cigarette filter into a can and moved a truck’s carburetor aside. On a square of aluminum he crushed a pain pill with a hammer, then with a putty knife scraped the residue from the head and chopped, plowed the powder into a line. With a rolled one-dollar bill he snorted half into one nostril and half into the other.

When Shan turned, he saw him there by the door in a wolf mask, the pistol-grip shotgun at his side like a cane. The sight of Slone in his garage made it suddenly hard to breathe.

“Jesus, Vernon? What are you doing? The hell you wearing, man? I thought you left.” His peculiar new voice was a choked wobble.

Slone stepped toward him slowly. Shan inched back against the workbench.

“Is this Halloween, man? The fuck you wearing?”

Slone’s boots made not a sound on the concrete floor.

“I thought you left. You come back for some pills? That wound must be killing you. I can get you more.”

Just the breathing inside the mask.

“You all right, man? I was just talking to Darcy on the phone, she wants more money from me, you know women, it’s always that way with them.”

Slone stepped nearer still and Shan looked to the gun. “The hell you doing, Vernon?” Slone raised it to pump the first slug into the chamber—a sound metallic and final in the cuboid cold of the garage.

Cornered where the workbench met the cinder-block wall, his face a welter of anguish, Shan pitched wrenches and screwdrivers that bounced from the padding of Slone’s coat and clanged to the floor. He shrank more into the corner, his face now coiled in a noiseless sob. When Slone reached him, he pressed the barrel up hard beneath Shan’s sternum. In the muzzle of the mask a hollow wet breathing, those familiar eyes embedded above a lupine snarl.

Sniveled pleas, an appeal to their past. Excuses—what the divorce had done to him, his abysmal debt. An apology for this betrayal, a prayer with tears. The radio sound behind them, the weather report foretelling of this winter’s reign.

The blast ripped up through Shan Martin’s chest and out his throat and face in a vermillion flare, thrust him back into the cinder block before he slumped dead to Slone’s feet, his face leaking teeth and pieces from where his mouth had been. Slone lifted a garage door, backed up his truck to the new snow machine strapped to a trailer, then attached the trailer to the truck’s hitch . . . on the radio behind him the weatherman trying to explain arctic air, still in calm drone about what was coming.

A
snowplow scraped against asphalt at eight in the morning, shook the house when it hit the curb. Core woke to its headlamps and racket—woke in the spare bedroom in Marium’s home, the room that in eight months would belong to Marium’s child. Nothing in this room now but a single bed and an ironing board, the iron unplugged on a green carpet. No dresser, not a chair. Walls bare, a washed-out cream. Before sleep he’d felt that familiar sense of being afield in an unfamiliar bed, a welcome trespass among the scent of strange laundry soap. Lying wrapped in the dark and straining to hear the sounds of the house and not to make a sound himself.

The night before, Marium’s wife, Susan, had cooked a meal of burbot and rice in a kitchen with appliances much older than her. All evening at the table she observed Core with barely veiled suspicion. He tried to diffuse such discomfort with talk of children.

“What’s it like to have a daughter?” Susan said.

“It’s good, though I’m not the best man to ask about kids. I haven’t been the father I planned on being.”

“I hear no one is,” she said.

“I was away a lot, more than I wanted to be.”
And I’m still away now
, he thought.

“You were away to work, I’m guessing,” Marium said. “To make money. That was for her.”

“There are ways to make money that don’t involve being apart from your family. I was younger than you by a bit. What are you, forty-three? You’re wanting a boy, I’d bet.”

“Sure I do.” He looked to Susan. “But a girl is good too. And I’m forty-eight. A fogey like me having my first kid.”

“Fogey?” Core said. “I’ll trade with you.”

Now in the dark of the morning Marium knocked twice on the door to the spare bedroom. Core was already dressed, trying to unearth his toothbrush from the bottom of a duffel bag.

“Sunup is ten-fourteen,” Marium said. “We gotta get to the plane. You’re right that Slone is still here. We got a call in last night from a mining camp north of here. Slone was there yesterday and there’s a dead man to prove it. Plus a call in early this morning from one of Slone’s old buddies. We gotta get to the plane.”

“Shouldn’t you go talk to those people? I can wait here.”

“There aren’t any clear roads to that mining camp now, but I got a guy going to interview Slone’s buddy. We’re going to find that hot spring behind Keelut, Mr. Core.”

As they drove through town, Core saw shops alight in dull fluorescence, their storefront windows thick with frost, slow shapes inside like fishes beneath lake ice. Bags of sand and salt stacked on a pallet in front of the hardware store. Someone had long forgotten to take down a wind chime and it hung now before the grocer’s like a birdcage of ice. Stray citizens passed on a sanded sidewalk, sacks of larder slung across their shoulders. The hands of the clock tower frozen to the wrong time. The temperature was twenty below. Marium rushed into a diner and returned with egg sandwiches and coffee.

“We won’t have more than two hours’ air time after sunup,” he said. “You get caught in a blizzard this time of year and you lose the horizon. Then you hit a mountain or the ground and never even know it. You know what day it is?”

“Friday,” Core told him.

“It’s the winter solstice. Longest night of the year.”

“All the nights here feel pretty long to me,” Core said.

“Tonight is eighteen hours and thirty-three minutes of darkness.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means we have to get back before that dark begins to fall. Slone’s buddy left a message at the station at six this morning, and if he’s right that he just saw Slone heading somewhere, that means Slone’s got a four-hour lead time on us.”

“Do you think this friend is right about seeing Slone? I doubt the man would let himself be seen.”

“Shan Martin is a thief and I never met a thief that wasn’t a liar too, so I don’t know. But if Slone came out of the bush then he must have needed something. Food or ammo, or maybe he’s hurt. The woman at the mining camp told us she shot the shit out of his truck.”

“Call him, then, this Shan Martin,” Core said.

“I tried, he’s not picking up. I got a guy going there.”

The sun broke then over the range, orange-pink and frigid-looking.

“What’s the weather say?” Core asked.

“Says clear for now. But this place doesn’t play by weather rules. Denali makes its own weather.”

“Mount McKinley, you’re talking about?”

“Denali, please, Mr. Core. You forty-eighters should quit calling it McKinley. Denali is the weathermaker. I’ve seen six feet of snow fall from a sky that two hours before was all baby blue with a smiley-face sun. There’re more lost planes in this state than there’re lost kittens in a city.”

When they approached the lake, the sky was beginning to bruise in maroon and blue, a dim amber east through trees. At the shoreline the ski plane was dressed in insulated covers on its engine, tail, and wings—a lava-colored Cessna incongruous against this vast white. Core helped Marium unfasten the covers, then with brooms they swept snow from the flanks of the plane, the air so stinging he wondered how machinery could be coaxed into motion. How metal didn’t fracture, crack from so much cold.

Core took the caribou one-piece suit from his duffel bag and began dressing at the door of the plane.

“Fancy outfit you got there,” Marium said, still sweeping snow from the wing. “Where does a guy get one of those?”

“This belongs to Vernon Slone,” Core told him. “The boots too.”

Marium stopped sweeping then. He watched Core button the suit. He looked either appalled or superstitious but said nothing.