a Night Too Dark (2010) Read Free

less than human had he not yielded to curiosity and read it.
The note had been written in black ink with a broad nib, printed on a blank eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet of paper in large block letters, neat, upright, legible. The content was direct and to the point.
    I am returning my body to nature.
I do this of my own free will.
Please do not look for me.
    “Oh my god,” Father Smith said, with a dismaying lack of reverence. “Hello? Hello! Hello, out there!” He cupped his hands and shouted. “Come back! Come on, nothing’s so bad that you have to do something like this! God loves you! You can come home with me, have a meal, be with my family! Hello? Hello!”
He called and shouted for a good quarter of an hour, but only the birds replied.
    Two
    He had to go up to the mine,” Maggie said.
Kate went on alert. “Why, what’s going on out there?”
Maggie shook her head. “Not the Suulutaq, the Kanuyaq.”
The Kanuyaq was a dilapidated collection of buildings clustered together on the end of a mountainous pile of gravel tailings four miles up the road from Niniltna, the remains of a copper mine whose owners had closed up shop back in 1936. It had long since been stripped of anything salvageable, right down to the railroad ties under the tracks pulled up after the last train out. As any Park rat could tell you, railroad ties were useful items for house foundations, raised-bed gardens, and wooden bridges in need of resurfacing.
The Suulutaq Mine, on the other hand, was a gold mine, fifty miles south-southwest of town, inaccessible by road—so far—and a going concern. Two years before, Global Harvest Resources Inc. had discovered forty-two million ounces of gold, as well as commercial quantities of copper and molybdenum, on state leases in the middle of the Iqaluk Wildlife Refuge. They had, last time Kate checked, a hundred people on site, primarily engaged in drilling core samples in a continuing attempt to define the boundaries of adeposit that had thus far refused all limitation. They were also assembling the studies and documentation for their environmental impact statement. When the EIS was completed, accepted by the powers that be, and ratified by all the relevant state and federal agencies, as Kate had no doubt it would be, Global would go into production and their on-site population would rise to an estimated two thousand.
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter the Park,” some wag had written on the Roadhouse wall in big black Marks-A-Lot letters. “Global cometh.”
Not without effort, Kate put the thought aside. It would be years before a producing mine came to pass, years of attorneys representing Global and the Sierra Club and fishermen’s associations and miners’ guilds and the state government arguing their clients’ causes in one court after another. Sufficient unto the day would be the evil thereof. In the meantime, she was in search of her errant trooper. “Okay,” she said, “what’s going on up at the Kanuyaq, then?”
“Wasillie Kvasnikof called in a report that some of the off-shift Suulutaq guys were partying up there and wrecking stuff.” Maggie was pulling off her dress jacket as she spoke. “It’s still private property, you know.”
“I never said it wasn’t,” Kate said. “What’s with the fancy dress?”
Maggie’s mouth turned down at the corners, and she tossed the blue jacket with the Alaska State Trooper insignia on a chair. Hurled it, more like. Mutt, standing on Kate’s right, cocked an apprehensive ear. “Since Jim is on call, I had to drive the Blazer in the parade.”
Translated, this meant Sergeant Jim Chopin had taken the first opportunity that came his way to dump leading the parade off on Maggie Montgomery, his clerk, dispatcher, and warden. “If you were in the Blazer, what’s he driving?”
“He went up with whoever it was that came whining into the office,” Maggie said. She wasn’t in a good mood. “You should see thecall sheet since they went