Stone Cross (Arliss Cutter #2) - Marc Cameron Page 0,24
awfully young to be the principal of Stone Cross K–12, or any school for that matter. The two men and four of the five women who sat with her at the folding table in the gym were village elders, none of them under sixty years old. Ethyl Kipnuk sat to Birdie’s right with her head bowed in prayer. She was in her early fifties.
All eight rows of bleachers were filled, from the edge of the basketball court to the cinderblock wall. Stenciled lettering said the Stone Cross girls’ basketball team had been regional champions four years running—two of those years with Birdie’s daughter, Jolene, playing forward. Birdie peeked through a half-open eye, scanning the crowd for the fifteen-year-old, who had apparently defied her mom and skipped out on the meeting.
Birdie pressed back the urge to panic. She’d seen Sascha that morning, walking through the snow in the dark. He’d been out of state for a while after he got out of prison. She didn’t know where he’d gone, but that didn’t matter as long he wasn’t here. But now he was back. The court said he could come through town to visit family, but Birdie knew full well he came just to torment her—and see Jolene. So far, he’d never been stupid enough to come to the school. One of these days she was going to have to shoot him, but until then, she wanted to keep Jolene under her wing.
Like the other women at the table, Birdie wore a traditional parka-like blouse of thin cotton called a kuspuk that hung to mid-thigh. Birdie’s was light blue with darker blue forget-me-nots, worn over a pair of not so traditional khaki slacks. Many of the others in the gym, both women and men, had on sweat pants. The loose kuspuk hid Birdie’s slender figure—a change from the norm of many Alaska Natives, male and female alike, ever since sugary pop and starchy foods had found their way into the bush diet of meat and fat. Birdie stuck to traditional foods—salmon, whitefish, caribou, moose, beaver tail, and wild berries. She had a teenage daughter to think about. It was hard enough raising a kid in the village without worrying about the problems brought on by a steady diet of cookies and cola. And anyway, a gallon of milk was fifteen bucks. The good candy bars were three dollars each. It didn’t take long to eat up a teacher’s salary if you didn’t supplement it with hunting and fishing.
Birdie kept her head bowed, but opened her eyes a little wider. Where was that kid?
As a rule, children ran wild in the village, considering all adults to be their aunties or uncles. Rubber boots, a T-shirt, maybe a hoodie when it got super cold, a basketball to play with—or a rusted bicycle if they were lucky—kids played outside in everything but a blizzard. Chronic coughs, snotty noses, runaway eczema, it didn’t matter. Tundra tough, they called it.
She didn’t want that for her daughter. She wanted her here, where it was safe. Birdie knew all too well that fifteen was plenty old enough to get herself into life-altering trouble. Jolene had come home from her basketball game with two new hickeys on her throat. You had to stand still for someone to give you a hickey, and if a girl stood still long enough around some of these boys . . . Birdie didn’t want to think about that. The love bites weren’t the worst of it. Just last week, Sylvia Red Fox had looped the fiberglass band from a pallet of canned peaches around her neck, then put the other end over a door handle on the loading dock and sat down on the cold concrete to hang herself. Sylvia Red Fox had been fifteen. She’d seemed like such a happy girl, with a hickey or two on her neck—just like Jolene, who was not where she was supposed to be right now.
Flutters of panic began to push their way into Birdie’s chest. Birdie raised her head now, joining the clandestine group of others in the gym who had their eyes open during the prayer, checking Facebook or sending texts. At last, Birdie located her daughter, sitting on the top row, her back to the mural of the school mascot, a howling timber wolf. She too surfed on her phone when she should have been praying. The schizophrenic emotions of wanting to bite her toes off or give her a hug ebbed and flowed