Authors: Dana Stabenow
"Elaine."
"Elaine?" The doctor leaned over and looked into her face, one hand on her wrist, counting her pulse. "Elaine? Can you hear me?"
Her eyelids fluttered. "Elaine? Elaine, this is Dr. Westfall. Open your eyes." Still holding her wrist, he moved her arm across her breast, counting respirations.
The tension in the group eased when they heard the small groan and saw the woman's eyes open. One hand came up and the doctor caught it before it could feel her head. "Elaine?" He smiled down at her. "I'm Dr.
Westfall. That's right, you've hurt your head. Don't move." He held up one hand in front of her face, two fingers raised. "How many fingers do you see?" She muttered something and he said insistently, "How many fingers do you see, Elaine?"
"Two."
"Good. How many this time? Elaine?"
"Three."
"Good." He held both her hands. "Will you squeeze my hands, please?"
She blinked, and spoke again, her voice rising. "Where's Steve?
Where's my husband?"
"He's right here, Elaine." "I'm right here, honey," Steve said, crowding up behind the doctor, relief flooding his voice. "I'm right here, and I'm okay."
"Steve." She tried to reach for him and Dr. West fall said firmly, "In a minute, Elaine. First squeeze my hands. Squeeze. That's good."
He moved the palms of his hands to the soles of her feet. "Press your feet down for me. Press harder. Good girl." He got a penlight out of his bag and shone it in her eyes, one at a time. "Good." He put the penlight back in his bag. "I think you're going to be fine, Elaine.
You took a bump on the side of your head, but your pupils aren't dilated and they're responding so it doesn't look like there's anything wrong internally. I'd recommend an X ray to be sure, maybe a night in the hospital for observation."
He turned to Steve. "How about you?"
Steve, oblivious to the blood running down the side of his face, said,
"Huh?"
It was just a scratch from a piece of the shattered window and the doctor cleaned it up and sat back. "They could both use something hot to drink."
The driver of the Volkswagen bus said, "Hot tea, maybe? With honey?"
"Perfect."
In back of the crowd someone cleared his throat. They turned as one and beheld First Sergeant James M. Chopin, trooper in residence at Tok and the pride of the Alaska Department of Public Safety.
He'd been busy, Kate realized, looking beyond him. There were flares burning brightly at both ends of the curve. The cruiser was up out of the ditch and parked by the side of the road. There was a clipboard beneath his arm with a drawing of the accident and the relative positions of the vehicles already sketched on an accident report.
"What are you doing here?" Kate demanded, but so only he could hear her.
"I thought they didn't let you out without your helicopter."
He touched one finger to the brim of his hat in reply, calm, dignified, even stately. "Kate. Ladies and gentlemen, if you'll identify your vehicles for me, I'll need to see your licenses and registrations.
You can get them after you move your vehicles to the side of the road."
"It was his fault!" a big, beefy man in an Alyeska cap growled. "He was passing on a curve." He was the driver of the Ranchero with the vet plates, and he was pointing at the driver of the Toyota truck from Tennessee, who gulped and looked young and scared. His companion was edging to one side, looking as if he wished he'd hit his dad up for that plane ticket to the cannery job with Peter Pan Seafoods in Dillingham after all.
Now that there was time, now that nobody had died, they got mad, and there was a concerted move toward the driver of the Toyota truck from Tennessee, with son of a bitch the nicest epithet hurled at him and shooting the least painful method of execution suggested. Chopper Jim quelled the incipient riot without effort and went about the business of taking statements, patient, imperturbable, his absolute calm infectious, his innate authority unquestioned. From the front seat of the Isuzu, Kate watched him move from one group of people to the next, doing more listening than talking, taking notes, letting each of the drivers walk him through their version of the accident.
She dug out a piece of beef jerky from the glove compartment and split it with Mutt. Gnawing on her share, she watched Chopper Jim do the trooper thing and thought of the first time she'd ever seen an Alaska state trooper in action. Back before the Dam pact when there were still two bars in Niniltna, a gold miner had made the mistake of pulling a knife on one of the Moonin boys in front of three of his brothers. The miner had died shortly thereafter. The death had been messy and public and the miner was white so somebody radioed for the trooper from Tok.
Back then the trooper had made his rounds in a Piper Cub and a group of curious kids, Kate among them, had been waiting at the airstrip when he landed.
The Cub rolled out to a stop. The door opened and a man climbed out.
He was too tall to stand up straight beneath the wing, Kate remembered; he had to stoop a little until he cleared it. Before the days of EEO, there had been a height requirement for the Alaska State Troopers and this officer exceeded it handily. Or so it seemed to the little eight year-old girl goggling from the end of the runway, and a little nearer to the end of it than she had been before the door to the plane opened.
He was immaculately dressed in blue and gold, the colors of the state flag, the colors of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, now that she thought of it. His pistol rode obviously on his hip, but the closest it ever got to being drawn was the casual hitching motion he made with his belt, a habitual, even professional gesture echoed by every state trooper Kate ever saw walk into in a dicey situation, and one that never failed in its effect. In motion, he walked slow, he talked slower, and he never, ever raised his voice, not even when Henry Moonin threatened to open him up the way he had the miner.
Kate had been spending the weekend with Ekaterina and she had seen her cousin knifed in front of the bar, and the fight and all the blood that followed had shaken her badly. She never remembered that trooper's name but she knew, with a bone deep, unshakable conviction that never left her, that he had brought all the might and authority of the law with him to Niniltna, Alaska, and the ground had felt that much steadier beneath her feet.
It was years since she'd thought of that day. For the first time, she realized it wasn't only the ex-cop from Cook County who had influenced her to take up a career in law enforcement.
The Ranchero had a come-along and they had the Bronco right side up in ten minutes. The passenger door window was broken and the door wouldn't open. It started; it even went into drive, but the doctor ruled out Steve behind the wheel this soon, so the woman in the Volkswagen volunteered to drive him and Elaine to the clinic in Glennallen. The driver of the Alaska Ranchero flatly refused to pull the Toyota truck from Tennessee out of the willow thicket. Jim insisted. The Ranchero driver growled and gave in. It ran, too. It also didn't have a scratch on it. The rest of the vehicles had dinged front and back ends and a couple of the doors were hard to open and close, but on the whole were serviceable.
Jim ticketed the driver of the Toyota truck from Tennessee for speeding, reckless driving and driving uninsured. He warned him to stop at the trooper's office in Glennallen, speculated out loud on the possibility of charging him with attempted vehicular homicide if he did not, and dwelled for a few graphic moments on the delights awaiting young and nubile hard-timers at the Spring Creek Correctional Facility in Seward.
This sounded like a fine idea to everyone else and they said so. The drivers of the three RVs from Alabama were especially vociferous in their support, until Jim ticketed them for not pulling off the road when they had five vehicles behind them. They were even less happy when he held them up long enough for everyone else to take to the road in front of them. Of course, he'd cited everyone else for tailgating, so it was with a united air of general disenchantment that the convoy finally hit the road.
"Attempted vehicular homicide'?" she said when Jim came up to her.
He grinned.
"What are you doing on the road? And behind the wheel of a car, no less?" Kate added.
"You make it sound like a penance."
"For you it is."
He resettled the hat on his head. "I flew into Glennallen and borrowed one of their cruisers. Jack called; I knew you were on your way down, and I wanted to talk to you."
"Why didn't you just wait at the junction?"
"And miss this opportunity to help balance the state budget?"
Chopper Jim loved writing tickets, and there wasn't much opportunity for that a thousand feet up, his usual milieu. "What's going on?"
The rain was coming down harder now. "Let's get in the cruiser."
"Okay." She climbed in next to him.
He moved the shotgun out of her way and then had to get out and open the back door for Mutt when she gave an imperious yip outside the driver's window. He got back in again and shut the door. He sniffed.
"What is that smell?"
Kate looked innocent.
"Is that roses?"
Mutt looked coy.
"Don't ask," Kate said.
Jim shook his head. He didn't say, "Women!" but only because he knew it'd probably get him killed. "Jack marched into Frances Sleighter's office at 8:01 A.M. today." Kate paused in the act of slicking rain off her braid. A smile spread slowly across her face. "Oh he did, did he?"
"He told me to tell you he intimidated her with his male superiority. I told him even I wasn't dumb enough to say that to Kate Shugak. So then he told me to tell you he showed her his ID and said he was investigating a murder."
"Since when are you calling it murder?"
"We aren't."
"Oh. And?"
"And she caved and let him see Seabolt's file."
"Hmm." Even an entrenched bureaucrat could be cowed by a threatened charge of obstructing justice, it seemed. Good old Jack. Morgan's Second Law was
"Evidence first, admissibility second, and don't be too lavish with the truth when you're interviewing potential witnesses, either." Jack Morgan always took ruthless advantage of the fact that the D. A."s investigators were not cops. He could always, and always did, bat his eyes and say innocently, "What do I know? I just work the cases APD is too understaffed to handle, clean up the messes they leave behind." It endeared him neither to the D.A. nor to the cops but it got the job done. Morgan's First Law was
"The nearest and the dearest got the motive with the most est but that was a different case and another story. "What was in the file?" Kate said.
"To begin with, there was one almighty stink in Chistona over Seabolt's teaching practices."
"Ah. Specifically?"
"Specifically, he was teaching the theory of evolution."
She'd heard that before, but this time Kate also heard an audible click, as if the last tumbler had fallen into place and the safe door was about to swing wide. "As in we come from monkeys?"
"Yup."
"As in the earth is about four million four hundred and ninety-five thousand years older than his father preaches?"
"Yup."
"I bet his father loved that. How do we know all this?" "Jack says the first half of Seabolt's file is filled with letters of testimonial from Simon Seabolt and all of his parishioners, recommending him for the position of teacher at Chistona, pointing out his family ties in the community, citing chapter and verse from his last employment in Oklahoma."
"When did the tone of the file change?"
"Seabolt taught at Chistona for two years. The school district got the first letter of complaint just before school let out the first year, May something, 1992."
"What'd it say?"
"It wasn't a letter of complaint, really. It was very polite, and very politely pointed out that since Chistona Public School was a public school and supported by taxpayer dollars, that all of the relevant theories of the creation of the universe should be taught there, and not just the one that held current political favor in Washington, D. C."
"The significant word in that sentence being '."
"Uh-huh. She wanted the district to understand that she wasn't protesting the teaching of the theory of evolution, and Jack says she underlined the word theory. She was merely pointing out that it was only a theory, and that other theories should be given equal time."
He flipped the page in his notebook. "That was it for that year.
School lets out, summer vacation, school starts again. October 10, another letter from Mrs. Gillespie."
"Gillespie?"
"Yeah," he frowned at his notes, "Mrs. Sally Gillespie." He looked over at her. "Why?"
"We've met."
"She the one who stiffed you when you were asking questions?"
"One of them. Go on, what else?"
He looked back down at his notes. "Now she's complaining about a time line Seabolt is having his students draw, one that runs from prehistory to the present." His eyes narrowed, trying to make out a word. "Jack said something about the Pest--the Pless--"
"The Pleistocene."
"Right, the Pleistocene. And something about Babe the Blue Ox?"
"Blue Babe, the steppe bison on display in the UAF museum."
"Um," he said dubiously, regarding his notes. "Maybe that was it.
Again, Mrs. Gillespie was very polite. Again, she suggested equal time for alternative points of view. But this time, she wasn't alone." Kate smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "The rest of the Chistona Little Chapel weighs in."
"In spades. Jack and I looked on the calendar. There were twenty-one letters, all saying the same thing as Mrs. Gillespie, and all dated on the same Monday or the day after."
"Following the Sunday sermon."
"I don't care what people say about you, Shugak, you are smarter than the average bear."
"You're too kind. What else did Jack say?" "He said there were a few letters supporting Daniel Seabolt, too. One of them came from a Philippa Cotton. She was a member of the school board, and she was a lot less polite. She said she didn't believe that God had brought down the Holocaust on the Jews because the Jews were responsible for killing Christ, and she didn't want her children being taught that in a school supported by her tax dollars."
Kate swiveled to stare at him incredulously, and he said, "Uh-huh. Ms.
Cotton further stated that if the school district continued to allow 'those churchy people," quote end quote, to run the Chistona school that she was going to yank her kids out and, furthermore, she'd call the Anchorage Daily News and tell them why."
"Oho."
"Uh-huh. There were a couple of other letters, one from a Gabrielle Jordan, one from a Smitty Taylor, who said pretty much the same thing."
Jim refolded his notebook and stowed it away.
Kate sat still, thinking. "Pastor Seabolt must have brought in a ringer." "Yeah," he said, "that's what we figured."
"One of the elders of the church, maybe."
"Or a guest speaker, air-freighted in from Glenn alien or Anchorage."
"Did Jack ask Ms. Sleighter if she knew about the ringer?"
He shook his head. Mutt stuck her muzzle over the back of the seat and he reached up to scratch her behind the ears. Her eyes half-closed; if she'd been a cat she would have been purring. Disgusting. "We only figured it out on the phone. He was going to go back to see her this afternoon. He's going to call me in Glennallen tonight. But we figure she had to know."
"Just won't say until forced to it."
"The Cover-Your-Ass Principle of good government," Jim agreed cheerfully. "You learn it your first year of public service or you're out on said ass the second. If there's trouble, you run. There was a lot of trouble at Chistona Public School last year. From what Jack said, Sleighter must be getting close to retirement." He grinned. "And I'm here to tell you, a retirement pension from the state of Alaska is a pension you can live on. You don't jeopardize one of those with the truth, especially if the truth makes you look bad."
Kate sat in silence for a moment longer. "I'd like to talk to one of those letter-writers. Not one of the churchy people. One of the disloyal opposition."
He raised his eyebrows in well-simulated surprise. "Would you indeed?
Philippa Cotton, perhaps?" She eyed him suspiciously. "Perhaps." He started the engine and pulled the cruiser level with her truck. "Zen vollow me to zee casbah, pretty lady. She's living in Glennallen now, and I just happen to know where." "It was one hell of a mess," Philippa said. She was a bouncy, apple-cheeked woman with short, shiny brown hair. Her brown eyes had laugh lines around them and a merry grin to match, neither in evidence at the moment. "They had the school district superintendent down from Fairbanks, the president of the State Board of Education, a lawyer from the ACLU, hell, there was even a guy here from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith in Seattle. Oh my yes, we had a fine time there for a while. The ACLU guy told us that giving equal time to the creation theory was unconstitutional. Some school in Louisiana tried it and the parents sued and in, oh, in 1986 I think he said, the courts ruled that teaching creationism in the public schools promoted a certain religious belief in which all the students might not share and therefore violated the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion." She paused. "He said the case went all the way to the Supreme Court."
"The Supreme Court of Louisiana?"
She shook her head. "The Supreme Court of the United States of America."
"In Washington, D. C.?"
Philippa gave a single, firm nod. "The same."
"Were Pastor Seabolt and the rest of them made aware of this?"
"Of course."
"And they still brought in a ringer."
"Yes, one of the church elders, a guy by the name of Bill Prue. He didn't have a teaching certificate, but the district superintendent said he could come in anyway."
"Frances Sleighter?"
The nod again. "She came down in January, I think it was, on an inspection tour or something, and gave this speech about the Molly Hootch law, and how the most important thing about it was that it won for the people in the Alaskan villages who chose to have high schools built in their communities the right to have a say in what their children were taught."
Kate sat up straight in her chair. "The intent of the Molly Hootch law was not to promote the teaching of any community's pet religious theories."
"No? Doesn't matter. Ms. Sleighter said she was happy to see the community of Chistona taking such an interest in the curriculum. She said she wished more citizens got involved in their children's education." Phil's words were bitten off and bitter.
"She didn't say anything about obeying the Constitution of the United States of America. She didn't say anything about the oath teachers have to sign, swearing they will uphold both the constitution of the state of Alaska and the Constitution of the United States of America."
"Then what happened?"
"Then she left. And the very next week, the Chistona Little Chapel wasn't letting the grass grow under its feet, Bill Prue came in and told my daughter and her ten classmates that it didn't do to take everything scientists said too literally or too seriously."
Kate and Jim laughed.
Phil wasn't laughing. "Then he moved from science on over into history, biblical history, and explained that the Old Testament was one long account of how God kept smiting the Jews for their collective sin of egregious pride. The gist of it was He visited Hitler on them because they were too proud."
Kate closed her eyes and shook her head.
"Yeah. So, you'd think Pastor Seabolt and the rest of them would be satisfied. They got their licks in, the kids had been exposed to an alternative look at the beginning, middle and ending of the world. But noooooooo. Then they had to start banning books."
"Which ones?"
Phil fortified herself with coffee. "First it was only books out of the library, books we could have at home if we wanted to let the kids read them. When we didn't make too big a fuss over that, they started in on the textbooks." She saw their expressions and nodded again, that single, decisive gesture that seemed to be characteristic of her. "They went after the science books first, the ones with the E word in them.
Evolution," she added, in case they didn't know.
They did, and they didn't like it. "Then what?" Jim said.
"The history books were next. Seabolt and company didn't care for the chapter on ancient history, or the one on World War II." She gave a thin smile. "And then one of the kids brought home a poem. I will never forget the title of it as long as I live. "Church Going," by Philip Larkin."
"What's it about?" Jim said.
"A guy who goes to church and finds nobody home," Kate said. "What happened next?"
"As if that wasn't bad enough," Phil said grimly, "next the teacher plays them a song, another title I will never forget, "Something to Believe In," by a rock group named Poison."
"What's it about?" Jim said. "Or do I have to ask?"
"Pretty much the same thing," Kate said, "and no, you didn't." "Smart ass," Jim said, but so only she could hear him.
"What happened?" Kate asked Phil.
Phil's usually merry mouth was stretched into a tense line. The time had obviously been a bad one and she wasn't enjoying reliving it. "The English teacher, she quit the following spring, before they could fire her, you know what she told me? She told me if she'd wanted to participate in a religious war she'd have moved to Jerusalem where she'd heard tell there was one already in progress. All she wanted was to try to draw some parallels, make the kids realize poetry could be as everyday as rock and roll. I mean, it's hard enough trying to get a generation raised on MTV to pay attention in class--I hate satellite dishes--but when you're trying to get adolescents with five-second attention spans to read literature and understand it ... " She shook her head and drank coffee.
"So, she sent them home with an assignment to compare and contrast the poem with the song lyrics. One of Seabolt's congregation got hold of the textbook with the poem in it, and so then they started purging the English books."
"Purging?" " Jim said.
"Purging," Phil said with that single nod of her head. "I don't know what else you'd call reading through them and blacking out with Marksalots whatever you found objectionable."