Hold the Dark: A Novel (9 page)

Slone watched her face, the pencil-thin and chapped pale lips folded in on themselves.

“We heard them howling. Howling beyond the valley that night. We hurried and melted ice for my father as he told us. He stayed with this woman. He stayed until morning, giving her the water. He told us the water would save her. If she kept drinking it would save her. But she slept finally at the dawn and didn’t wake. She never woke. My father stacked her on the dogsled with the other dead and brought them to the igloos behind the hill.”

Slone, still intent on the old woman’s face, passed the blade slowly back and forth in callused hands.

“The next morning my father and others found what happened in the snow igloos. The wolves got in, they tore apart the bodies of the dead in the night. They feasted in gore on those many corpses, a hundred bodies. Their frozen blood and bones were all over the hillside, strewn. Scattered everywhere. Not a single body was spared by the animals. From the tracks my father saw the size of this pack. Over twenty wolves had come, had feasted that night. It seemed a fate worse than the influenza. Everybody then gathered the bones, all the bones they could find, gathered them in baskets for proper burial when breakup came. But there is no proper burial after such a thing.”

She took up the doll again and caressed its head as if it had life.

“That is the history here, our history, Vernon Slone. You cannot blame an old woman for that.”

Minutes later, his wrist and hand gluey with the old woman’s blood, Slone walked back into the brimming day. He stood breathing in the cold. If the villagers knew he was back they did not come from their cabins, neither to welcome nor damn him. Across the road he saw curtains part and close. He returned to his truck and looked over his home a final time.

Then he was gone from that place, fled down icy passageways that could not be called roads—paths through a wilderness forged long before his birth.

A
t this December dawn behind the town morgue Donald Marium saw ice crystals shine atop the newest snowfall, drifts rolling to a dun-hued horizon. He took in the men’s faces as they gazed upon the killed—shot dead, they lay frozen and twisted by the wheel of their truck. Snow had been dusted from their corpses to reveal splashes, rivulets of glassy blood. Across the open compass behind town, north toward the range, he saw snow-burdened trees bowed like penitents. The morning seemed made of muslin, the sun less than a smudge. The wind came in soughs and shook free a pine scent from trees, then sent snow aloft as mist.

Every one of these cops had seen deer and caribou and wolves like this, marten and muskrat, Dall sheep turned from white to red. A few had witnessed men dead of cold and wet in swollen rivers, or of long plunges from headwalls. Some had tried to rescue children yanked underwater, lost beneath capsized canoes, yoked to the bottom. But Marium understood that most here had never witnessed fellow men like this. He himself had seen such a mess only once before, and not in this town.

He spoke to the cop standing behind him. “What’s in the building?”

“Another one dead. Frank the coroner, we think.”

“You think?”

“Shit, Don, we can’t get near enough him to see. He’s in a whole lake of blood, in his office.”

“Dead how?”

“Dead all the way through, it looks to me.”

“You find the casings here?” he asked.

“The what?”

“Shell casings. How do you think these men were killed? With some tickling? Dig up that spot for the casings, please.”

“How do you know it’s this spot?”

“Those wounds are nearly point-blank. You see the faint star pattern of that wound? On that man’s face there? You’re standing on the shell casings.”

“Something from here did this?”

“I’d say a someone did it. Dig up the casings, please.”

“Feels like a something to me. First that village kid, and now this. What a goddamn shitty way to end the year. That kid’s gone, you know.”

“Gone how?”

“His body, it’s gone. They took the kid’s body. You ever see anything like this?”

“Not quite like this, no. Please find the casings.”

Marium stood smoking a cigarette in the cold as men continued this work. The ambulance sat silent and without use, its lights pointlessly in twirl. His dreams in the night had offered him no sign of what this day held.

The morgue’s waxed hallways squeaked beneath a racket of wet boots. A half-moon of cops stood at the cusp of the coroner’s blood. He lay facedown and Marium could see the stab wound was in the side of his head, through the ear and out the other side.

“You boys waiting for Frank to sit up and tell you who did it? Mop right up to him, please, and look for boot marks as you go.”

“What about forensics, Don?”

“About what?”

“The guys from the city.”

“You photograph this room?”

“Took a hundred shots.”

“Then you and a mop are as forensic as it’ll get right now. Look for a goddamn boot mark, please, and stop if you see it.”

“I thought the city guys were coming. Or troopers, something. How in the hell we supposed to handle this?”

Marium smiled at him. “Troopers. That’s a good one. I didn’t realize troopers even knew we were here, this town. Let’s think of this as our own mess for now. Stop touching things, please.”

His salmon-and-eggs breakfast sat half eaten on his kitchen table. He thought of coffee, Susan, his wife, in her bathrobe and nothing underneath, toenails the pink he liked. Twelve years younger, redheaded and lithe, she was a former dancer of ballet. Her breath stayed sweet even at waking. She was his promise of thaw in this place. She wanted children and kept Marium engaged in the task, early-hours coupling with an erotic unclean scent on her. He was prepared for kids, willing now at forty-eight.

At the rear of the hall he stepped into the break room. He could smell the cigarette smoke stuck on curtains and patted a jacket pocket for his own pack. He saw dents in the sofa cushions where heavy men had sat. Other rooms, offices down a second hallway, and the metallic coldroom at the end. He’d been to this morgue dozens of times over the years—to sign papers for old people dead from sickness, or young people dead from being dumb—but he’d never entered this coldroom. Never wanted to.

He grabbed the handle with a latex glove, pulled to open the door, then entered in the kind of caution born of superstition. The extended corpse drawer was empty, the sheet thrown aside. On the floor beneath it lay a toe tag in blue ink. He crouched to get it and read the name, read the numbers telling all of Bailey Slone.

Looks like your daddy’s home, boy.

* * *

Cheeon answered the knock, opened his front door and kept it open, a cigarette glowing to its stub, the heat from a cast-iron stove pushing at the cold. Marium’s coat was unzipped to show no weapon in his underarm holster. When he saw Cheeon’s cigarette he retrieved one of his own from a coat pocket. The men leaned against the doorframe smoking, looking fifty yards out in front of Cheeon’s two-level cabin where police vehicles sat arranged on the snow front to back, four of them. The men behind wore flak jackets and helmets, their rifles lowered, some sipping from cups of coffee hastily got.

“Was wondering when you’d show up here.”

“I told them I’d try talking to you, Cheeon. See if I could get you to come without any goddamn mess here. I’m not claiming to be a friend. I wouldn’t claim that.”

“If you say.”

“But we’ve talked over the years, when you were in town. Had coffee a few times, if memory serves. We’ve been friendly, anyway. Our fathers knew each other, I think. Your wife and girl were friendly with me. With Susan too, my wife. Would you agree with that?”

“If you say.”

“And that has to mean something.”

Cheeon spat, half in the snow, half on his boot.

“If you say. But I don’t think it means what you want it to mean right now, guy. Not even close.”

A scud of wind lifted loose snow from roofs and moved across open space in a white swirl. The late morning sun was just a peach smear.

“I’m from this place just like you.”

“You ain’t from this village.”

“No, not from here, but not that far from here.”

“You come to tell me your life story, guy?”

“We’ve got two cops killed out back of the morgue in town, Cheeon. Also the coroner inside with a knife wound through his head. And then there’s a missing dead boy. That’s what we’ve got here, Cheeon.”

He nodded and smoked but did not look at Marium.

“You list those dead in order of importance? Because a couple of dead cops is cause for a party around here.”

“No, I did not. I’m not saying that dead cops are something special, more special than anyone else dead. Dead all around is not a good thing, you ask me.”

“I can think of some sons of bitches that might do the world a bunch of good dead.”

“That’s fine. I ain’t disagreeing. I just don’t want anyone else dying here today if we could help it, please.”

“Looks like you came expecting it, though. All these cops out here.”

“Like I said, I told them I’d try talking to you first. See if we could prevent a mess here.”

“Come quietly, you mean. That’s the cop phrase, right? Come quietly.”

More silence while they smoked.

“Cheeon, most of these cops out here aren’t our redneck guys from town. They’re Feds, city boys, and they’ve got a fair amount of firepower they’re ready to use today.”

“I’ve got a fair amount of my own I’m ready to use.”

“I know it. That’s why we’re talking here, Cheeon. Your father was busted a few times for illegal firearms. You know what they say about that apple not falling far.”

“Nope. I don’t know nothing about that apple. But it’d be real smart of you, guy, not to mention my father again.”

“Okay. I won’t. It was either you or Slone who killed those men and took that child. Maybe it was the both of you. I know you boys have been tight since way back.”

“Vernon’s gone to the desert. There’s a war there. You got a radio?”

“Vernon Slone is home. You know that. And you helped him. I was just at his cabin. Looks like I missed him by five or six hours.”

“If you say.”

“Listen, Cheeon. Whatever happened, we’ve got to get it figured. The cops were shot with a .45 Springfield. You’ve got one of those registered.”

“I’ve got others not registered.”

“I figured that. Frank, the coroner, was retiring this year, moving to San Diego, I believe. Hell, he wasn’t even a real coroner. Just a doctor who did the job for us because no one else could do it.”

“San Diego, huh? Never heard of it.”

“He was stabbed straight through his head. Clear through, from one side to the other. Who’d do a thing like that?”

“You tell me.”

“You can probably guess he had some family who won’t be the same.”

Cheeon nodded more, smoked more, nearly smiled. His fingernails were piss-tinted from tobacco.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a bunch of that going around here lately.”

“Where is Vernon Slone, Cheeon?”

Cheeon turned to him, smoke funneling from his nostrils. His face—a crimped brow, the start of a smirk—said,
You’re dumber than you look if you think I’ll tell you that
.

“Yeah, okay,” Marium said. “Maybe you’ll tell me where that boy’s body is, then. It’s state evidence.”

“It’s what?”

“Evidence.”

“That boy’s body is nothing to you and your like. It’s not of this earth anymore. Put that boy out of your mind or he just might haunt you, guy.”

“Where’s Medora Slone?”

“She’ll be found. Not by you or them, though.”

“What happened to her? How does that happen to a woman?”

“How in the goddamn hell should I know? I ain’t a woman.”

A span of silence now. Cheeon pressed out the filter into ice with a boot toe, then lit another.

“What’s the temp today?” he asked. “Feels like a February cold is coming on and it ain’t even January yet.”

Marium pointed. “Thermometer says zero right there.”

Cheeon looked at the thermometer screwed into the outside sill of the kitchen window.

“That’s broken. It’s been stuck on zero all year, even last summer.” He stopped to pull in the smoke. “Maybe it’s not broken. I don’t know.”

“Is that why those cops were shot?” Marium said. “So no one but Slone would find Medora? So no one would interfere in his business? His revenge, whatever he wants. And Frank because the big galoot just got in the way?”

“What do I look like, like I enjoy all these fucking questions from you, guy?”

“I know your little girl was taken from here by a wolf. I know you don’t have a body to bury and that there’s nothing on earth worse than that.”

“You know that, huh? A lot of help you were for a guy who knows that. You come an hour across the goddamn snow for my sorry ass but you wouldn’t come for some kids dead in the hills.”

“We came.”

“You came and you left and you didn’t come back. Worthless as shit, you city boys. Though even shit can fertilize, right? What can you do?”

“We ain’t city boys, Cheeon, you know that.”

“You sure as hell are. I’ve been going there my whole life, I know what the goddamn city is.”

“We’re an hour closer to Anchorage than you. That don’t make us the city. Five thousand people is hardly a city, I’d say.”

Cheeon bent with laughter, coughed on his smoke. Laughed more, his teeth as stained as his fingers.

“You come here today to argue with me about the definition of a city, guy? You must have goddamn nothing else in the whole world to do.”

“I’m not arguing, Cheeon. No one’s arguing. I’m just talking. And I’m saying: we’re not that different from all of you here.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. That’s one of the places you’re wrong. You went to college and you’re dumber than dog shit.”

“Okay, then. I’m wrong and dumb, I don’t deny that. I’m just saying. We’re not all bad. We helped get the plumbing set up in this village five or six years back. Helped put this place on the grid.”

“And now you want a goddamn trophy for letting these people take a shit in their own house. Ain’t you something.”