The Shaman's Knife (18 page)

How could anyone prepare her? Certainly I couldn't logically tell her what I was thinking, straight out. Still, if Maisie had been one of Dennis's regular playmates, I wanted her reaction to my new information directly from her, not after she and her mother had had time to cook up ways of dealing with it. At the same time, Margaret had been my first real source about the girl side of Dennis's life. She either had taken Maisie's story as gospel or had laundered it for my consumption. Either way, trying to protect her daughter was natural. I didn't want to repay her with a slap in the face. But was there any other way?

People began to straggle in for the noon meal. I had mine, caribou steak rare. The dining room was in the tail end of the lunchtime routine when Margaret came in. She winked as she went by my table. I sensed that she hadn't been listening to the radio. Maybe she had slept in, hadn't heard about my mother yet. Like many another person preoccupied by personal shock, I had tended to feel that the whole world knew of it.

Some diners staying at the hotel were signing their tabs. A group at one table, however, was paying cash—the standard fifteen dollars per noon meal. Margaret had to make some change, and went back to her desk to do so. I followed and watched her open a metal cashbox she'd pulled from under the counter.

“How often do you send money out to the bank?” I asked.

“First flight Saturday. Why?” She smiled. “Planning a holdup?”

“Meaning you've still got everything you've taken in since the murders?”

“Right.” She looked puzzled. “Could I have a look?”

She laughed. “You an income-tax guy on the side?”

But she handed over the cashbox and watched me silently as I looked carefully at every bill, both sides. Besides a few checks and credit-card slips, the cash was in hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens and fives. Some bills were old and worn.

None had anything that looked like a bloodstain.

“What are you looking for?”

“Blood.”

Her eyes went wide.

I told her that, according to the forensics guy, some money had been taken from Dennis's pocket at the time of the murder or soon after. For some reason whoever it was hadn't taken it all. Maybe pulled some out and saw a lot of blood.

“You mean, there was blood in Dennissie's money pocket?”

“Slathered with it.”

“Jesus!” She looked at the money as if it might reach out and bite her, then locked the cashbox and leaned to put it back on its shelf under the counter.

“So don't faint if you see money with blood on it,” I said. “Just call me, if I'm here, or Bouvier.”

“I'm not the fainting kind.” The guy waiting for his change came by and she handed it to him abstractedly. Others behind me were pulling on their boots and leaving.

“What do you mean
if
you're here?” Margaret asked. “You leaving? You got it all solved?”

By then we were alone again. I told her about my mother.

“Oh, hell!” she wailed. “Oh, Matteesie, I'm so sorry . . . I slept in, just got up, didn't hear anything!” There were tears in her eyes. That talk we'd had about life as she knew it in Sanirarsipaaq had made us . . . well, not instant close friends, but friendly. She kept shaking her head, her eyes brimming.

My own numbness hadn't quite worn off. Maybe that was just as well. There is a kind of clarity of purpose in being numb, getting bothersome things over with.

“I have to go to Yellowknife first thing tomorrow. When I get back I'll have to talk to Maisie.”

At first, Margaret thought I meant about my mother's death. “Oh, she'll be phoning, I'll tell her,” she said. Then something in my face made her doubt her first reaction. “Talk to her about Dennissie?” she asked incredulously.

I nodded.

She said, “But you know what I told you. That he tried but she didn't fall for it.”

I don't generally feel miserable about doing my job.

“It's necessary,” I said.

“How
can
it be?”

I told her straight, except I didn't mention Annie. “Girls were seen going in with Dennis from time to time. Maisie was one of them. Maybe it was only the once, who knows, but going in at all, she'll have something to say about it. I've got four names in all to question.”

“Who are the others?” “Sarah, Agnes, and Leah.”

She nodded without speaking, her eyes thoughtful and . . . what? Angry? If so, at whom? I don't know why I was feeling defensive, but I was. Certainly not because Maisie was white, the others native. With me being native too it might easily have been the reverse, even had been from time to time, giving natives any break they had coming.

I didn't mention the other thing I was thinking about, Maisie's physique and the Calgary case.

“Well,” Margaret said, in a train of thought that hadn't occurred to me, “if the others know that Maisie
was
in there, for whatever reason, and you question them and not her, they're going to think she was the one who told you. Those kids aren't gentle when they think they've been double-crossed. Oh, God!”

For a minute she seemed to have forgotten I was there. I guessed she might be thinking about Maisie and the football player, and the complications therein.

“I'm coming back here at the latest Monday on the regular late flight,” I said. “I'd like to see Maisie as soon as I get back—say late Monday here in the hotel? Do you want to be there when I talk to her?”

She let out a long sigh. “Okay.” Whatever she might have added, she didn't. Then she did add something. “That sonofabitch!”

I couldn't be sure which sonofabitch she was referring to.

“Who do you mean?”

“The guy who did it.” I thought of the common assumption that whatever had happened had to have been done by a man, and I thought of the size and strength of Maisie, and of how surprised the Calgary football player must have felt flying out of a second-story window.

“God, Matteessie,” Margaret said, her eyes again full of tears. I didn't think they were for my mother, this time.

I walked back to the detachment again, looking for ways to fill the day. Pelly had had time to reach at least some preliminary conclusions about all that blood-tracked stuff he'd taken out for close inspection, but hadn't called. I called him and found him in. He knew about my mother's death and spoke of it subdued and sorry, then said, “I've been feeling guilty about not getting back to you sooner, but it's sort of complicated.”

“In what way?”

“Well, there are really two categories of prints, the stuff with blood on it and something else, sort of latent prints, no sign of blood, undoubtedly made before the murders—but maybe important. The way I figure it, a lot of the floor that didn't have blood on it was pretty clean, as if it had been scrubbed before the murders took place. I'd imagine old Thelma was a pretty good housekeeper, and anyway I'm making that guess. So anybody coming in let's say just before the murders with shoes wet from the snow, the track would dry into a very faint mark. I'm going to say ‘very faint' a lot. There's a couple of different sets, one just maybe one size bigger than the other but I'd say both were made from women's shoes or boots, a little smaller and narrower than what we take to be a man's prints, the main ones, but not as small as the real small bloody ones, get me?”

“Go on.”

“As I say, there were two types of them, hardly visible, trademarks, but we can get a fair outline. One set, the smaller ones, show up on the stairs as well as, almost invisibly, I can't even be sure yet, in Dennis's room. Could have been done anytime before the murders, that set, but not after or they would have been in blood instead of faint, faint watermarks. Know anybody who was in the house before the murders and might have made those prints?”

“Nobody,” I said. “I mean nobody we've found, but we'll go at that.”

I hung up thinking, maybe Maisie for one set and some other girl or woman—Sarah, Agnes, Leah, or someone we don't even know about, for the other?

A little later that afternoon I was drawn to see the shaman again for reasons that at first I didn't try to figure out. I walked up there with my parka hood pulled over my head, slipping and sliding where the sleet had turned to ice. I found him sitting alone at his kitchen table, listening to his radio. “My brother is out visiting his flock,” he said drily. He made tea. After some silence I asked him about the state of shamanism, whether people still consulted him when they were in trouble, whether young people were interested or was it just the old.

There was a long pause before he answered. “Attitudes of young people, not only about shamanism, depend a lot on what they have heard. To some of the young, everything about our old beliefs is a joke. To others, it is not. The jokers like the story, a true one, about an old shaman at Spence Bay. If you know Spence Bay you will remember that on one side of the harbor there is an overhanging cliff. That's where this old shaman lives. Some time ago his wife developed tuberculosis and in the end became so sick that an aircraft was sent in to take her to hospital, where she died and was cremated. But the old shaman did not accept that she had died. When he heard an aircraft coming in he would don his mask and go to the edge of the cliff dancing and shaking his leg rattles, thinking that because an aircraft had taken his wife away, he could make one bring her back.”

He stopped for a while, then added, “This was the joke, people laughing at an old man trying to cast a spell that would bring his wife back to him.”

I knew the cliff. I could imagine the rest. Young people who watched all kinds of amazing things happen on television, and saw them as real, were cautioned in church against the kind of superstition the shaman's antics would suggest to them. On television, if the shaman did bring his wife back, it might be merely another happy ending to some sitcom, but in real life in their own familiar community they would see such an attempt as a joke.

“Really both a joke and a tragedy,” I said.

He nodded his huge head and poured me more tea. “But that is not the worst. Some of the young do accept shamanism, but not for the good. In movies and television they see or hear about Satanism, black practices, devil worship. To some of the young the stories told by the elders are not unlike some of the concepts of Satanism. There have been instances of young people blending the two, shamanism and Satanism. Some person attracted by Satanism announces that he is a shaman . . . That can be very bad, and has happened.”

“Like the murders at the Belcher Islands long ago,” I said, thinking of the discussion Erika Hall and I had had when the rumor first surfaced that shamanism had something to do with the murders here.

Jonassie simply nodded. “I told you Davidee tried to become a shaman once.”

We sat in silence for a while again. Then I had a thought.

“Have you found out any more about the missing knife?”

He looked at me sharply. “No,” he said.

When I came out the storm was almost imperceptibly abating. The sun showed fitfully through the scudding clouds. I was getting through the day.

Around eight I followed the dinner crowd to the rec hall. The hockey playoff was on TV, two of the three pool tables were busy, coffee and soft-drink machines thunked and clattered from time to time. Near the door a noticeboard was jammed with notes. I read about jobs wanted, workers wanted, free French lessons available, gun for sale, dogs for sale, camera for sale, wedding dress for sale (unused). Below that a joker had written, “Condoms for sale (unused).” Beside the noticeboard was a large and well-made poster headed:

!!!!!!! NEXT FRIDAY, DON'T MISS !!!!!!!
SANIRARSIPAAQ'S WELCOME TO SPRING!
DRUM DANCING, THROAT SINGING,
KNUCKLE HOPPING
MODERN DANCING TO COUNTRY AND
ROCK 'N' ROLL TAPES

The rec hall was where the settlement's young, especially the males, gathered every night. Tonight most clustered around the television. Hockey playoffs were on every night at this time of year. Mixed with the cheers and groans from that corner of the room was a constant roar—from the Winnipeg Arena a couple of thousand miles to the south, where the Winnipeg Jets were playing on home ice.

Byron Anolak was playing snooker against a tiny Inuk, no more than five feet tall, one of the government people staying at the hotel. Whether Byron had been nervous all along or just got nervous when he saw me enter, he began to blow easy shots, lost badly, and moved over to a stool against the wall to watch his opponent massacre somebody else. I carried a stool over and sat down beside him. He looked as if he'd prefer I hadn't, but eventually asked in Inuktitut how we were making out in the case.

I didn't answer directly. “I still haven't caught up with the people who know the answers. Including Davidee.”

“You probably won't see him for a few days anyway. You know he's out hunting. He left right after the radio report about your mother dying. He'd figure that meant you'd be getting a lot tougher. He's good at disappearing when he knows he might be in trouble.”

“Was the hunt trip that sudden a decision?”

He shrugged. “I don't know. He and his pals don't tell me.”

After a pause I said, “That's a nice little daughter you have.” His face lit up. “Debbie, she's a good mother. When we get a place of our own it'll be better.”

I liked him. He seemed to be a straight arrow. “Erika Hall was telling me you did journalism and were stringing for
News/North
. Any chance of getting on staff there or at the CBC?”

There was sudden hope in his eyes, but then he shrugged. “I've tried. Tell the truth, I haven't tried as much since Julie was born. I wouldn't want to leave her and Debbie behind.” He thought about that. “Wouldn't like to leave here for other reasons, too, my family.” He dropped his eyes and stared for a while at the floor. “I've got a real close family, but once Debbie and I get straightened around, maybe get married, I really do feel I've got the stuff, especially with things changing so fast in the north . . .” He let that trail off.