Stone Cross (Arliss Cutter #2) - Marc Cameron Page 0,86

choice of girlfriends, lived on the road out toward the airport. Lola would go there next to see if he’d returned from hunting. Or link up with Cutter if he’d come up with anything good on the shop teacher.

The slurp of her muddy boots brought another eruption of yelps and barks from the dogs—the rural equivalent of a knock at the apartment door. It didn’t matter. By now, Taylor must have thought she had a moose or a bear stomping around outside. The wind had picked up enough to rustle the smallest willows, sending a fresh chill down Lola’s spine. Her Maori relatives on Rarotonga told stories of spirits, restless warriors who marched in the mountains and fog at night. As a little girl, she’d giggled when her grandfather told her about a ghost pig that haunted the area near Black Rock—until it was time for bed. For some reason, ghost pigs weren’t so funny when the lights were off. She wondered if Yup’ik people believed in ghosts. It was hard not to on nights like this, with fog and darkness so thick it felt like you had to swim through it.

Lola broke out her flashlight as soon as she made it beyond the willows, well away from the boisterous dog yard and Donna Taylor’s cabin. The beam was incredibly bright, six hundred lumens or something, but it did little good to light her way now, reflecting back to her like a broken light saber in the white vapor. But it made her feel better, and with any luck, it would help her catch the approach of any rabid foxes. Her hand dropped to the butt of her pistol and she picked up her pace, nearly losing a boot to the sucking mud.

Rabid foxes . . . The Action Service indeed.

CHAPTER 30

Birdie Pingayak slid the yellow margarine tub containing left- over agutaq onto the top shelf of her refrigerator, between a mayonnaise jar half full of seal oil and a clear baggie of smoked salmon strips that she intended to eat for lunch the next day. She’d been too twisted up inside to eat much of anything at the potluck, especially after she’d seen Jolene talking to the lady deputy. Lola Teariki had actually made her daughter laugh. What was up with that? Birdie got herself a glass of water from the tap—which, miraculously, was working today. She thought about boiling it, but decided her stomach bugs were accustomed to their little friends in the village water by now. She leaned against the counter, arching her back, catlike, while she looked around her living room. It was a good house, fairly new. Like most houses in the village, it had a crapload of framed photos covering the walls.

Jolene was six years old before she’d asked why there were no photos of her father. Tony’s mom had pictures of her dad and her dad was dead. Robert’s dad caught a lot of caribou. Melissa’s mom hated her dad. Did her mom hate her dad too? Was her dad dead? Was her dad off hunting caribou? Did she even have a dad?

There was no good answer. Birdie wasn’t about to let Jolene’s DNA donor near her, let alone put his photo on the wall of her house. He was dead, to her at least. If he was ever foolish enough to come to the door, he’d be dead to everyone.

Before Birdie’s time, the principal at Stone Cross school lived in the big three-bedroom unit at the south end of district housing. That boss’s proximity to everyone else had cramped teacher parties, which these guys badly needed because they were away from all their families and friends. It wasn’t exactly a downside as far as the district head-shed was concerned. Birdie grew up in Stone Cross, so she already had a house when she was hired as a teacher. It was a nice place, warm, sealed against western Alaska’s notorious weather with Tyvek wrap, but it was small. Then this place had become available, with cold-resistant siding that was a pretty robin’s-egg blue instead of the wind-scoured plywood like so many of the other houses in Stone Cross. One of the elders on the village council had it built after making a ton of money off the contract to upgrade the road leading out to the airport. He’d died shortly after and Birdie was able to scoop it up.

It was less than ten years old, with the cluttered look of a grandma’s house