“Remember, son,” his father had told him the first time the two of them had gone camping, “all of this”—he swept his arm around to encompass the trees, the mountains, the stream by which they’d pitched their tent—“all of this doesn’t care about you at all. If you do something stupid, this will kill you if it can.”
He felt the cold creeping into his bones. I hope this girl I’ve come to find isn’t out here somewhere, he thought. I hope she hasn’t done something stupid and been killed by the land. That would be bad for me, and very bad for her.
He climbed back into the pickup, started it, and drove on. The road brought him out on the side of the runway. Kane drove across it, then took the road he’d traveled a couple of days before. He pulled in to the community building, shut off his lights, and killed the engine. He was about to get out when he noticed the manila envelope the Asians had given him.
He opened the envelope and spilled its contents onto the seat. It held three bundles of used $100 bills and a prepaid cell phone with an Anchorage number programmed into it. The phone showed a text message, so Kane punched it up.
“call when U R dun,” the message said.
Kane dialed the Anchorage number. After a couple of rings, it answered. But in place of a voice or a recording, there was only silence. Kane was silent on his end, too. Finally, someone or something on the other end broke the connection. Kane shut the cell phone off and zipped it into an inside pocket of his coat.
The envelope also contained three eight-by-ten photographs: two of men, the third of a young, pretty woman with long, straight, blond hair.
Kane fanned one of the bundles of bills. Probably $5,000 a bundle, he thought. Then he sat thinking for a long time before the cold drove him out of the pickup and into the building.
6
The heart knoweth his own bitterness.
PROVERBS 14:10
KANE FOUND THOMAS WRIGHT IN THE OFFICE TRAILER, sitting behind a desk, talking on a cell phone. He took the seat Wright waved him to and waited.
“Sorry about that,” Wright said when his conversation was over. “Business.”
“That’s okay,” Kane said. “I’m surprised cell phones work out here.”
“There’s a string of towers along the highway system, if you can call the handful of highways we’ve got here a system,” Wright said. “They actually make more sense than regular phones. No wires to maintain.”
“I suppose that’s right,” Kane said. “Anyway, I’m here to get to work, Elder Thomas Wright.”
“Please,” the other man said, “call me Tom.” He grinned. “Just don’t call my father Mo.”
“I won’t be doing that anytime soon,” Kane said.
“So, tell me about ‘Nik,’ ” Wright said. “Is it short for Nicholas?”
This was a question Kane hated answering, but he couldn’t see a polite way out of it.
“No, it’s short for Nikiski,” Kane said. “The place down on the Kenai Peninsula? When my father first came to Alaska, as a soldier in World War II, he saw the area and vowed he’d come back after the war and homestead there. But then he met my mom, and they got married and started having kids. They needed money and schools and medical care, so a homestead wouldn’t work. Anchorage was as far as they got. My father went to work doing whatever he could. By the time I came along, he knew he’d never achieve his dream, so he named me to remind him of it. Fortunately, even he never called me anything but Nik.”
“Nikiski Kane,” Wright said. “Your father sounds like something of a romantic.”
“I suppose he was,” Kane said. “And then there’s the fact he was dead drunk the day I was born. But that’s another story.”
The two men sat silently for a moment.
“Fathers aren’t always what we’d wish them to be,” Wright said.
“Too true,” Kane said. “Anyway, have you told the other members of the community what I’m up to?”
“Yes,” Wright said, “at last night’s gathering. If you are here, I’d like to introduce you formally at tonight’s gathering. But the members of the community already know to expect you to ask questions, and I asked them to answer as openly as possible.”
“You don’t expect members of your community to withhold information, do you?” Kane asked.
Wright gave him a wistful smile.
“Religion is important to most members of this community,” he said, “but it is a community of human beings. Not saints.”
“Or Angels?” Kane asked.
Wright’s smile faded.
“I know others call us that,” he said, “but it’s not a name we picked for ourselves. ‘Pride, and arrogancy . . . do I hate.’ ”
Kane cocked an eyebrow.
“Proverbs,” Wright said, “slightly edited.”
“It’s possible that your neighbors aren’t being complimentary,” Kane said. “There must be friction between a community like this and, say, the people around Devil’s Toe who are engaged in more worldly pursuits.”
“There is,” Wright agreed. “But is that of concern to you?”
“Until I find out more, everything is of concern to me,” Kane said. “You don’t suppose this friction might be connected to Faith’s disappearance, do you?”
Wright was silent for a moment.
“You mean, someone took out their animosity toward us on Faith? If that were the case, wouldn’t whoever did it want us to know?”
Kane looked at Wright, who looked back with an unruffled expression. I wouldn’t want to play cards with this guy, Kane thought. He’s smart, and he has a good poker face.
“They might,” Kane said. “They might not. One thing I learned in law enforcement is that people don’t follow patterns. Each one makes his own. Or her own.
“Anyway, I should get started.” He took out a notebook and a pen. “Let’s start with a physical description. Height, weight, eye color. All that.”
Wright nodded.
“Faith is five-foot-six, about one hundred twenty pounds. Shoulder-length blond hair, blue eyes.”
“Any scars, distinguishing marks?”
“She has a small scar at the corner of her left eye, where a dog cut her with a claw when she was a baby.”
“That it? What was she wearing the last time you saw her?”
Wright shook his head.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t notice those things. Perhaps one of her friends can tell you.”
“A girl, you mean?” Kane asked. “Or is Faith the sort of girl the boys notice?”
Wright squirmed in his chair.
“I don’t think these are the sort of questions you can expect a father to answer. But Faith wasn’t seeing anyone here in Rejoice, and I don’t believe she was attending any of the social events at the high school.”
Kane had daughters of his own, so he understood Wright’s reluctance to discuss anything bordering on sex. Every father wanted his daughter to remain the little girl who thought kissing was icky. And when she decided it wasn’t, he didn’t want to hear about it. It must have been tough for Wright, he thought, to have a daughter go through her teen years with no woman in the house.
“Okay,” Kane said. “When did you see Faith last?”
Wright’s story was straightforward. It had been the previous Friday. They’d attended the morning gathering together and eaten breakfast in the cafeteria. Faith had her nose buried in her history book most of the time; she said she had a test that day. She’d seemed normal.
“What’s normal?” Kane asked.
“Friendly, but reserved,” Wright said. “A little formal.”
“A little formal? Even with her father?”
“Yes, even with her father. Maybe especially with her father. Her mother did most of the child-rearing and kept our family together. When she died, Faith and I grew apart.”
Kane understood this, too. Even not counting the time he’d been in prison, Laurie had raised their kids almost on her own. Kane was out chasing bad guys and, truth be told, hanging out with other cops, who were the only people he’d ever felt entirely comfortable with. He’d brought home a paycheck and doled out punishment when called upon, but otherwise the fact that the Kane children were functioning adults had been Laurie’s doing. If she’d died when the kids were young, God alone knew what would have happened.
“Faith said she had a couple of after-school activities, as she seemed to every day,” Wright said, “but would be back before dinner. Then she got into her car and left.”
“She had her own car?” Kane asked.
“None of us has his own car, but some of us have use of one. When Faith chose to attend the regional high school, the elders decided to grant her use of an old Jeep.”
“Where’s the Jeep now?”
“It’s plugged in outside the cafeteria building. It was sitting in the parking lot of the high school, and we decided to bring it back before it froze up completely.”
“Did anybody search it?”
“I looked around in it but didn’t find anything.”
“How about Faith’s room?”
“I didn’t find anything there, either.” Wright gave Kane an embarrassed smile. “I probably didn’t do the best job of searching anything. It seemed like an invasion of Faith’s privacy to me.”
“It is,” Kane said, “but invading people’s privacy is a big part of this job. I’ll probably do a lot of it here. That might make some problems for you.”
“We’ll deal with those as they come along,” Wright said. “What will you do first?”
“Search Faith’s car and room,” Kane said. “But before that I’ll need the names of the people who knew Faith best and where to find them. Including your father.”
“Faith and my father weren’t really close, at least not in the past few years,” Wright said, picking up a pen and writing.
“Why not?” Kane asked.
“I’m not sure,” Wright said, handing him the piece of paper. “I think he thought Faith wasn’t truly religious enough. And when she left Rejoice to go to high school, well . . .”
“Was that unusual?”
“As far as I know, Faith is the first child from Rejoice to do so.”
Wright handed Kane the keys to both the Jeep and the log cabin he shared with Faith.
“You lock things up here?” Kane asked.
“ ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ ” Wright said.
Kane got to his feet.
“I’ll be around here all day,” he said. “Maybe more than one day. So if you’ve got a spare bed, that would be good. And somebody might tell whoever runs the cafeteria to feed me, too.”
He turned to go.
“One more thing,” he said, taking the pictures out of the manila envelope. “Do you know these people?”
Wright looked at the picture on top, which showed a man in his late twenties with long, unwashed black hair and an earring. The photo did not seem to have been posed; the man was captured in profile, apparently talking with someone off camera.
“I think this is the fellow they call Big John, although the picture has to have been taken thirty years ago,” Wright said, holding it up. “At least that’s what he calls himself. If he has a real name, I’ve never heard it. He owns the Devil’s Toe Roadhouse and some other local, um, businesses. He doesn’t run them anymore, though, or so people say. That work’s done now by his son, who answers to Little John. There is another son, too, younger, named Johnny Starship. Named for his mother, they say. It’s an improbable name, isn’t it? Starship? Anyway, I don’t think she ever married his father.”
He stopped and shook his head.
“Listen to me, gossiping. ‘Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak.’ ”
“That’s from the New Testament, isn’t it?” Kane asked.
“Some of us read the New Testament, too,” Wright said with a smile.
He set that picture down and looked at the second one, a man with shoulder-length brown hair and a bushy brown beard. Like the first one, this looked unposed; the man had been captured glaring at someone to his right. Wright was silent for a moment.
“This is an old picture of my father, one I’ve never seen before. It was probably taken not long after Rejoice was founded.”
He gave Kane a questioning look, then picked up the third photograph. The blood seemed to drain from his face.
“Where did you get this?” he asked Kane.
“Someone had the pictures delivered to me. I’m not sure why.”
“That seems strange.”
“It does, doesn’t it. Do you know her?”
“I do, although I’ve never seen this particular picture. It’s my mother, Margaret Anderson Wright.”
He looked at the photograph some more. This one had the appearance of being posed. The woman was looking at the camera, joy in her eyes, her lips slightly parted and smiling.
“I just don’t understand why someone would give you her picture,” he said. “She’s been gone for so long.”
“Neither do I,” Kane said. “What can you tell me about her?”
Thomas Wright was silent for a long time.
“I’m not certain this is a subject I want to discuss,” he said at last.
“Tom,” Kane said, “if you expect me to work for you, you’re going to have to answer my questions. No matter how odd they might seem. Or invasive. Detection isn’t the straightforward, scientific process they make it seem on TV. It’s a lot of fits and starts and detours and dead ends. So you’ll have to humor me.”
Thomas Wright sat silently for a while longer. Then he sighed and shrugged.
“It’s not something we talk about much. And I was so young when it happened, I have no firsthand knowledge. All I know is that she left not long after my birth and was never heard from again. She just wasn’t cut out for the pioneer life, I guess.”
“Surely you know something. Take this picture. Was this taken before you were born or after? She looks pretty young here.”
“I wouldn’t know when the photograph was taken. My impression is that my mother was quite a bit younger than my father. As were most of those who came here to found Rejoice.”
“That’s it? Aren’t you curious?”
“Of course I’m curious, but my father won’t discuss it in any detail. I have asked others from time to time, but they were very circumspect. Today, with deaths and departures, I don’t think there is anyone left in Rejoice who would remember her.”