The Shaman's Knife (22 page)

“So he went faster,” I suggested.

“Yeah! He looked back to see who had yelled at him . . . and
then
he broke into a kind of run. I went after him up past where Annie lives, until we got to his family's house, and he went in and as soon as I got there, so did I.

“The people there, parents and a bunch of kids, Byron's the oldest but I don't know how many brothers and sisters he's got, were eating their Easter dinner, for Christ's sake . . . uh, no pun intended . . . and there was an empty chair with that twenty-two Magnum leaning against it.

“I said who I was, policee Alphonse Bouvier, in case they didn't know, and that I was sorry to interrupt their Easter dinner, but that I had been following Byron who had pointed that gun . . . I pointed to the gun . . . at Davidee, and he'd come into this house. The man at the head of the table, I guess the father, nodded. He's about your size, Matteesie . . .”

“A veritable giant,” I said.

“Yeah!” He laughed. “And he was chewing away at the wing from the big roast goose on the platter in front of him and gave me a little grin. ‘Ayah,' he said. ‘We see that man.' He didn't say Byron's name.

“‘I wish to speak to him,' I said.

“‘He not here.' The man's grin got a little wider. ‘You come in front, he go out back.'

“Everybody around the table was grinning. It was a really strange feeling. Then it suddenly struck me like one of those old rerun comedies on the TV, one guy running in the front and another out the back. When I grinned, they started to laugh. And I suddenly relaxed, thinking, what the hell, he didn't fire the gun, there's no law against carrying one, and I knew Byron, of course, thin, wiry-looking, no mustache, ponytail, no chance of me mistaking his limp, I'd find him all right and ask what it had all been about.

“At that point the older woman, I guess Byron's mother—who has a really nice face, smiles a lot, hair parted in the middle, I found later her name is Mabel—got up and brought another plate and nodded to Byron's empty chair. The dad moved the gun and I sat down, seemed the thing to do. Now, I guess it wouldn't happen this way in a big-city murder investigation—but then she brings in another roasted goose, and the man cut some meat from it and I had some, would have been rude not to. And I drank some tea and we talked about one thing and another, and I didn't push, and when we're sitting there, eating goose, I did find out what happened. They'd been just starting their dinner, talking and laughing, when Davidee barged in without knocking and demanded money from Byron. Said it had been owed to Dennissie and now was owed to him. Also made some dirty crack about Byron and Debbie's little girl. That's when Byron grabbed the gun and Davidee ran out of there with Byron after him. What I'd seen must have happened right after that. When I got back I wrote a report and looked up Byron in the files. Never in trouble. So I just thought, well, I've made a report, entered it in both Byron's file and Davidee's, and that I'd tell you all about it when you get back, in case anything did come of it. But nothing did that we know of.”

“No more at all?” I asked.

“No more than Byron getting mad when Davidee walked in and started jawing about Byron owing him some money, and bad-mouthing Debbie and the little girl. Maybe that's it, entirely.”

He then told me that by now he'd checked just about every garbage barrel in town, some twice, and found nothing.

I told him about my plan to hunt for Davidee and company the next morning, probably going out very early by snowmobile and then, if everything worked, to rendezvous around No Name Lake with Thomassie Nuniviak of Komatik Air. I also told him about the meeting scheduled with Debbie later tonight.

I went to the rec hall after dinner. The usual people were there, plus Jonassie. I'd never seen him in there before. He was leaving when I arrived. I thought of what I'd seen from my window, his conversation with Debbie and Davidee's parents and planned to ask him about this when I had a chance to do so privately. The little guy, Andy Arqviq, practically adopted me and told me how he wanted to be a carver, and Jonassie had helped him a lot. Lewissie came over and talked. There was another hockey game on TV, Los Angeles and Calgary again. It was still on when I left and told a little white lie, as the saying goes, that I was going back to the hotel to get some sleep.

When I came out, the last light after sunset gleamed from the northwest through a slit like a narrowed eye between black and stormy clouds both above and below. The clouds looked heavy with snow. I went into the detachment and turned the lights out and waited. After a while I could see Debbie strolling along and heard her steps crunching on the snow and then her knock on the door.

There was still a little light from outside by which I could see her find a chair near the counter and drop into it. I heard her sigh. For a while we were silent, glancing back and forth at one another, staring out at the few passersby on their ways to or from the rec hall. I was waiting for her to talk.

The eye of the dark cloud bank suddenly closed and left us in deep dusk. The sound of far-off wolves blew in on the cold and cutting west wind.

When she spoke it was as if she'd made up her mind to tackle a hard task and wanted to get it over with. Her words tumbled out. “It's about Davidee and Hard Hat,” she said. Her brother's name came out like a swear word. “I just want you to know something. On the night that Dennissie and Thelma were killed and your mother was hurt so badly, I was home only in the early part . . .”

She paused, swallowing hard. This was the crunch, one way or the other. Either she backed up Hard Hat's alibi or she didn't.

She didn't; she even dropped a bombshell of another kind.

“Hard Hat was there for a while, but I don't know how long. So was Davidee.”

“Davidee!”

We had done what we could earlier, asking around about whether Davidee had been seen in Sanirarsipaaq that night, but had drawn a blank. In all Hard Hat's efforts to distance himself, he sure hadn't mentioned seeing Davidee that night. But then not everyone was like Debbie, obviously ready to talk.

“He'd sneaked into town, down the back streets, parked his snowmobile over by the school. When he and Hard Hat got to our place I took the baby and went to Byron's parents' place. We were there until nearly eleven, and then Byron came back with me, carrying our baby, who'd woken up on the way, and we put her to bed. Neither Hard Hat nor Davidee were there then, and my mother said they'd gone out around ten, didn't know where, except she'd heard them talking and heard Dennissie's name mentioned.”

I felt silly asking, but wanted to be certain. “You're absolutely sure of the times?”

Obviously she understood what I was getting at. She went through it again, being specific about times. “As I said, we got back around eleven and they'd been gone a while by then, and hadn't come back. It's a time, booze night, when Byron and I like to be together and let other people live it up. The hockey was over and my mother was watching something else and my father was asleep in his big chair. So we went upstairs and played with the baby until she went to sleep again and after that we were in my bedroom until Byron left around twelve. Another night he might have slept over, but not with Davidee in the house. He hates Davidee.”

“All that time your parents were in the kitchen?”

“All that time. At the kitchen table where they always are. Nobody else came in or out. We would know, you can hear what goes on all through that house. I fell asleep as soon as Byron left. So if anybody came back after that, they were very quiet.”

I thought about that. “Even if one or both of them had come back, it could have been after the murders,” I said.

She nodded silently.

“So,” I said, “the next day when Barker came around to check Hard Hat's alibi that he was here all evening before going to the rec hall late, you weren't home then either?”

“I was in the bedroom with the baby. I could hear the corporal in the kitchen asking questions and my father not mentioning Davidee at all but saying that Hard Hat had been here all the time until he went to the rec hall about midnight, which of course was a lie.”

“And your mother?”

“I heard the corporal ask her the same question. I thought she didn't answer or I didn't hear it. I asked her later and she told me, ashamed, that she had nodded her head.”

A sudden gust of snow came in on the wind, rattled the windows, slackened off, and came again as steady blowing snow, swirling across the open space. Far off upwind the wolves were howling, and dogs in the settlement were answering, as they sometimes do.

I mentioned the possibility Bouvier had referred to the first time we talked at length: the chance that whoever committed the murders could have gone somewhere long enough to change his clothes and
then
gone to the rec hall, fast enough to ensure an alibi. Maybe Debbie had thought of that herself. She made a hard line of her lips and met my eyes.

“I can only tell you what I know, that neither of them were there when we got there, nor when Byron left at nearly midnight.”

I belabored the obvious, but I wanted to nail it down. Maybe there was more there that needed shaking out. “So your parents lied.”

Her words poured out in a hard and angry jumble. “If he was yours and he had already disgraced the family and done things to us and others for years so that we knew what he was capable of, and he said that he would kill you if you did not say what he told you to say, that Hard Hat was there most of the evening, and not to mention Davidee being around at all, would you lie?”

“Maybe I would,” I admitted, putting myself in their place, old and defeated and fearful.

“Well, I wouldn't!” she said. “But our parents would and did, because he said that he would kill them both if they said anything else.”

“But do you really know that he said that? I mean threatened to kill them if they didn't say what he told them to say?”

Her voice was shaking. “Yes, I do know.”

“How?”

“My mother told me. Please be careful. Lie about where you heard this. I don't want Davidee to think it was my parents who told you. Even more, I don't want him to know it was me. If he knew that, he could do anything! He could hurt my baby! If he was going to be caught anyway he wouldn't care anymore what he did . . .”

The last few words were almost inaudible. She wept for a minute or two. I thought of putting my arm around her shoulders, but didn't. Eventually she went on, much quieter. “Our father, it has been worst for him, years when he didn't know what he would do next about Davidee! Other men, friends he had hunted with long ago and grown up with, pitied him! Used to say, ‘Poor Ipeelee.' With pity, among men, there is always a contempt as well. He . . .”

Her tone had changed. The heat was gone. Now she was speaking matter-of-factly. She could have been reading a story from a newspaper, a segment of one of those sociological roundups about family problems. “Exclusive! Our Family Problems reporter interviews parents whose offspring have threatened to kill them . . .”

“My father, Ipeelee, is treated as a nothing in all of Sanirarsipaaq when all he did was take in a boy who needed a home, as many of our people do. But he couldn't handle what the boy had brought along with him, the fears and lying and violence against girls who wouldn't do what he told them to do. You've seen my father, a man with no manhood left to him. I know he thinks of suicide. It was known from the time of Davidee's trial that when I was a little girl and Davidee was screwing me that my father did nothing to stop it. He said in court he did not know, and it was true that always Davidee and I were alone in the house when these things happened. But I had told them and they did nothing. It went on. In a little house those things are known.

“You can look at my mother now and believe what I tell you. She told me that if she had it to do over and knew what was going to happen she would have killed him when he first came to us when he was eight and I had just been born. She told me that.”

I thought of what the judge had told me about Davidee being adopted after being sexually abused. Sexual abuse has some terrible by-products, one being the repetition of the original abuse. The way Davidee could exercise power over others, lead them to follow him, could be another element of his old nightmare.

Debbie might have guessed my thinking, or maybe not. Maybe she had lived with it so long that the very thought was a commonplace. She went on, as calmly as before: “When I heard my father lie to the corporal about Hard Hat being there until late that night, as soon as the corporal left and my father had gone out I asked my mother what had really happened. She said Davidee had promised to kill them both if they did not tell the corporal that Hard Hat had been at our house all evening.” She gulped in a deep breath. “Even now I am afraid of what I have said to you. There are terrible things Davidee could do.”

“But it has to end,” I said.

“Yes, it has to end,” she said, turning away, getting to her feet, saying no more. When she was walking unsteadily up the hill to her home, I added it up. Davidee had been in Sanirarsipaaq at least early that night. He could have been involved in the murders himself. He had told his parents to lie or he would kill them. His parents had duly lied.

But I had to have more, and somewhere there must be more. I thought of Hard Hat telling me and then Bouvier that he wasn't really involved with Davidee anymore, but that change, if it was real, could have come after the fact. Nothing, so far, firmly connected either of them to the murders—unless the bloody footprints that Pelly had taken to forensics would do that. Bouvier's search of the settlement for discarded boots and clothing, turning out old oil drums and going through the half-burned contents, had so far turned up nothing of value. It didn't seem reasonable that Davidee and Hard Hat would overlook getting rid of anything incriminating.