The Tenth Circle

The Tenth Circle

“To identify the remains?”

“Exactly,” Skipper said. “Traditional efforts didn't work . . . they couldn't find intact teeth, or bones that weren't crushed, or even anything to X-ray. But mtDNA can be used to profile samples that have been burned, pulverized, you name it. All scientists need is a saliva sample from a family member of the deceased in order to make a comparison.”

She picked up the hair sample that Max had scrutinized under a microscope the previous day. "The reason we can test this for DNA without a root attached is that a cell isn't made up of just a nucleus. There are many more parts - including the mitochondria, which are

basically the powerhouses that keep the cell functional. There are hundreds of mitochondria in a cell, as compared to a single nucleus. And each mitochondrion contains several copies of the mtDNA we're interested in."

“If there's so much more mtDNA than nuclear DNA, why isn't it used all the time for criminal profiling?” Bartholemew asked.

“Well, there's a catch. Typically, when you get a nuclear DNA profile, the chances of finding another person with that profile are one in six billion. Mitochondrial DNA stats are far less discriminating, because unlike nuclear DNA, you inherit mtDNA only from your mom. That means that you and your brothers and sisters all have the same mtDNA she does ... and that her mom and siblings do, and so on. It's actually fascinating - a female egg cell possesses tons of mitochondria, as compared to the sperm cell. At fertilization, not only are the few sperm mitochondria totally outnumbered, they're actually destroyed.” Skipper smiled brightly.

“Natural selection at its finest.”

“It's a pity you have to keep us around for that whole fertilization thing in the first place,” Bartholemew said dryly.

“Ah, but you should see what's going on next door to me in the cloning lab,” Skipper replied. “Anyway, my point is that mtDNA isn't helpful if you're choosing between two biological siblings to pinpoint a suspect, but it's a nice tool if you're looking to exclude someone nonrelated from an investigation. Statistically, if you test fifteen spots on the DNA strand, there are more than an octillion nuclear DNA profiles, which is awfully nice when you're in front of a jury and trying to pin down a particular individual. But with mtDNA, there are only forty-eight hundred sequences logged to date . . . and another six thousand reported in scientific literature. With mtDNA, you might wind up with a relative frequency of point one four or something like that . . . basically, a subject will share a profile with four percent of the world's population. It's not specific enough to nail a perp without reasonable doubt in front of a jury, but it would allow you to rule someone out as a suspect because he or she doesn't have that particular profile.”

“So if the mtDNA profile of the hair found on the victim's body doesn't match the one for Trixie Stone's hair,” Bartholemew said,

“then I can't link her to the murder.”

“Correct.”

“And if it does match?”

Skipper glanced up. “Then you've got reasonable cause to arrest her.”

* * *

The sun skipped the Alaskan tundra. At least, that's how it seemed to Laura, or why else would it be pitch-dark at nine in the morning? She anxiously waited for the flight attendant to open the hatch of the plane, now that they had landed in Bethel. It was bad enough that she had a fear of heights and hated flying, but this was only half a plane, really - the front end was devoted to cargo.

“How are you doing?” Daniel asked.

“Fantastic,” Laura said, trying to lighten her voice. “It could have been a Cessna, right?”

Daniel turned just as they were about to exit the plane and pulled up the hood of her jacket. He tugged on the strings and tied them under her chin, just like he used to do when Trixie was tiny and headed out to play in the snow. “It's colder than you think,” he said, and he stepped onto the rollaway staircase that led to the runway.

It was an understatement. The wind was a knife that cut her to ribbons; the act of breathing felt like swallowing glass. Laura followed Daniel across the runway, hurrying into a small, squat building.

The airport consisted of chairs arranged in narrow rows and a single ticket counter. It wasn't manned, because the lone employee had moved to the metal detector, to screen passengers on the outbound flight. Laura watched two native girls hugging an older woman, all three of them crying as they inched toward the gate. There were signs in both English and Yup'ik. “Does that mean bathroom?” Laura asked, pointing to a doorway with the word ANARVIK overhead.

“Well, there's no Yup'ik word for bathroom,” Daniel said, smiling a little. “That actually translates to 'the place to shit.' ”

The single door split off to the right and the left. The men's and women's rooms were not marked, but she could glimpse a urinal in one direction, so she walked the opposite way. The sinks were operated by push pedals; she pumped one to start the flow of water and then splashed some on her face. She looked at herself in the mirror.

If someone else walks into the bathroom, she thought, I will stop being a coward.

If the family outside has made it through security, to the gate.

If Daniel is facing forward, when I come out.

She used to play this game with herself all the time. If the light changed before she counted to ten, then she would go to Seth's after class. If Daniel picked up before the third ring, she would stay an extra five minutes.

She'd take these random occurrences and elevate them to oracles; she'd pretend that they were enough to justify her actions.

Or lack therof.

Wiping her hands on her jacket, she stepped outside to find the family still crying near the metal detector and Daniel facing out the window.

Laura sighed with relief and walked toward him.

* * *

Trixie was shivering so hard that she kept shaking off the quilt of dead grass Willie had used to cover them for warmth. It wasn't like a blanket you could just pull over yourself; you had to burrow down and think warm thoughts and hope for the best. Her feet still ached and her hair was frozen against her head. She was consciously awake - somehow she thought that sleeping was too close to the line

of being blue and stiff and dead, and that you might pass from one side to the other without any fanfare.

Willie's breath came out in little white clouds that floated in the

air like Chinese lanterns on a string. His eyes were closed, which meant Trixie could stare at him as much as she wanted. She wondered what it was like to grow up here, to have a snowstorm hit like this and to know how to save yourself, instead of needing someone to do it for you. She wondered if her father knew this sort of stuff too, if elemental knowledge about living and dying might be underneath all the other, ordinary things he knew, like how to draw a devil and change a fuse and not burn pancakes.

“Are you awake?” she murmured.

Willie didn't open his eyes, but he nodded the tiniest bit, and a stream of white flowed out of his nostrils.

There was a warm zone connecting them. They were lying two feet apart, with grass heaped in the space between their bodies, but every time Trixie turned his way she could feel heat conducting through the dried straw, pulsing like light from a star. When she thought he might not notice, she inched infinitesimally closer.

“Do you know anyone who ever died out here?” Trixie asked.

“Yeah,” Willie said. “That's why you don't make a cave in a snowbank. If you die, no one can ever find you, and then your spirit won't ever rest.”

Trixie felt her eyes get damp, and that was awful, because almost immediately her lashes sealed shut again. She thought of the ladders she'd cut on her arms, the way she'd wanted to feel real pain instead of the hurt gnawed on her heart. Well, she'd gotten what she wanted, hadn't she? Her toes burned like fire; her fingers had swollen like sausages and ached. The thought of that delicate razor blade being drawn across her skin seemed, by comparison, ridiculous, a drama for someone who didn't really know what tragedy was.

Maybe it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.

Trixie wiped her nose and pressed her fingertips against her eyelashes to dissolve the ice. “I don't want to freeze to death,” she whispered.

Willie swallowed. “Well. . . there is one way to get warmer.”

“How?”

“Take off our clothes.”

“Yeah, right,” Trixie scoffed.

“I'm not bullshitting you.” Willie glanced away. "We both get.

. . you know . . . and then huddle together."

Trixie stared at him. She didn't want to be pressed up against him; she kept thinking of what had happened the last time she was this close to a boy.

“It's just what you do,” Willie said. “It's not like it means anything. My dad's stripped down naked with other guys, when they get stuck overnight.”

Trixie pictured her father doing this . . . but stopped abruptly when she got to the part where she had to imagine him without clothes.

“Last time it happened, my dad had to cuddle up to old Ellis Puuqatak the whole night. He swore he'd never leave home again without a sleeping bag.”

Trixie watched Willie's words crystallize in the cold, each as differentiated as a snowflake, and she knew he was telling her the truth. “You have to close your eyes first,” she said, hesitant. She shucked off her jeans, anorak, and sweater. She left on her bra and panties, because she had to.

“Now you,” Trixie said, and she looked away as he pulled off his coat and his shirt. She peeked, though. His back was the color of the outside of an almond, and his shoulder blades flexed like pistons. He took off his jeans, hopping around and making little sounds, like a person at the town pool who makes a big deal when he finally manages to get into the cold water.

Willie spread some grass on the ground, then lay down and motioned for Trixie to do the same. He drew their jackets over them, like a blanket, and then covered these with more grass. Trixie squeezed her eyes shut. She could feel the rustle of the straw as he moved closer and the itch of the grass on her bare skin as it caught between them. Willie's hand touched her back, and she stiffened as he came up behind her, curling his knees into the hollow bowl made by the bend of her own. She took deep breaths. She tried not to remember the last boy she'd touched, the last boy who'd touched her.

The inferno began where his fingers rested on her shoulder and spread to every spot where their skin was touching. Pressed up against Willie, Trixie didn't find herself thinking about Jason, or the night of the rape. She didn't feel threatened or even frightened. She simply felt, for the first time in hours, warm.

“Did you ever know someone who died?” she asked. “Someone our age?”

It took Willie a moment, but he answered. “Yes.” The bitter wind beat against their tarp and made its loose tongue rattle like a gossip's. Trixie unclenched her fists. “Me too,” she said.

* * *

Bethel was technically a city, but not by any normal standards. The population was less than six thousand, although it was the closest hub for fifty-three native villages along the river. Daniel turned to Laura. “We can get a taxi,” he said.

“There are taxis here?”

“Most people don't have cars. If you've got a boat and a snow-go, you're pretty much set.”

The cab driver was a tiny Asian woman with a massive bun perched on her head like an avalanche waiting to happen. She wore fake Gucci sunglasses, although it was still dark outside, and was listening to Patsy Cline on the radio. “Where you go?” Daniel hesitated. “Just drive,” he said. “I'll tell you when to stop.”

The sun had finally broken over the horizon like the yolk of an egg. Daniel stared out the window at the landscape: pancake flat, windswept, opaque with ice. The rutted roads had houses pitted along them, ranging from tiny shacks to modest 1970s split-levels. On the side of one road sat a couch with the cushions missing and its overstuffed arms dusted with frost. They drove past the neighborhoods of Lousetown and Alligator Acres, the Alaska Commercial Company store, the medical center where Yup'ik Eskimos received free treatment. They passed White Alice, a huge curved structure that resembled a drive-in movie screen but that actually was a radar system built during the Cold War. Daniel had broken into it a hundred times as a kid - climbed up through the pitch-black center to sit on top and get drunk on Windsor Whiskey.

“Okay,” he told the cab driver. “You can stop here.” The Long House Inn was covered with ravens. There were at least a dozen on the roof, and another group battled around the remains of a torn Hefty bag in the Dumpster off to the side. Daniel paid the driver and stared at the renovated building. When he'd left, it was on the verge of being condemned.

There were three snow machines parked out front, something Daniel filed away in the recesses of his mind. He'd need one, after he figured out what direction to head to find Trixie. He could hotwire one of these, if he still remembered how, or take the honorable route and charge one to his MasterCard. They were sold in the Alaska Commercial store, at the end of the dairy aisle, past the $6.99 gallons of milk.

“Did you know a group of ravens is called an unkindness?” Laura said, coming to stand beside him.

He looked at her. For some reason, the space between them seemed smaller in Alaska. Or maybe you just had to get far enough away from the scene of a crime to start to forget the details.

“Did you know,” he replied, “that ravens like Thai food better than anything else?”

Laura's eyes lit up. “You win.”

A banner had been strung across the doorway: K300 HEADQUARTERS. Daniel walked inside, stamping his boots to get the snow off. He'd been a kid when this dogsled race was just getting organized, when locals like Rick Swenson and Jerry Austin and Myron Angstman had won the pot of a few thousand dollars. Now the winnings were

$20,000, and the mushers who came were stars with corporate backing for their dog kennels - Jeff King and Martin Buser and DeeDee Jonrowe.

The room was crowded. A knot of native kids sat on the floor, drinking cans of Coke and passing around a comic book. Two women answered phones, another was carefully printing the latest splits on a white board. There were Yup'ik mothers carrying moonfaced babies, elderly men reading the scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, schoolgirls with blue-black braids giggling behind their hands as they helped themselves to the potluck stews and cobblers. Everyone moved pendulously in layers of winter clothing, astronauts navigating the surface of a distant planet.

Which, Daniel thought, this might as well be.

He walked up to the desk where the women were answering phones.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I'm trying to find a teenage girl. ..” One woman held up a finger: Just a moment.

He unzipped his jacket. Before they'd left, he'd packed a duffel full of winter gear; he and Laura were pretty much wearing everything they'd brought all at once. It was cold in Maine, but nothing compared to what it would be like in the Eskimo villages. The woman hung up. “Hi. Can I . . .” She broke off as the phone rang again.

Frustrated, Daniel turned away. Impatience was a trait you developed in the lower forty-eight, an attribute that a child who grew up here didn't possess. Time wasn't the same on the tundra; it stretched to elastic lengths and snapped back fast when you weren't looking. The only things that really operated on a schedule were school and church, and most Yupiit were late to those anyway.

Daniel noticed an old man sitting on a chair, staring. He was Yup'ik, with the weathered skin of a person who'd spent his life outside. He wore green flannel pants and a fur parka.

“Aliurturua,” the man whispered. I'm seeing a ghost.

“Not a ghost.” Daniel took a step toward him. “Cama-i.” The man's face wrinkled, and he reached for Daniel's hand.

“Alangruksaaqamken.” You amazed me, showing up unexpectedly. Daniel had not spoken Yup'ik in fifteen years, but the syllables flowed through him like a river. Nelson Charles had, in fact, taught him his very first Yup'ik words: iqalluk . . . fish, angsaq . . . boat, and terren purruaq . . . you suck the meat off an asshole, which is what Nelson told him to say to kids who made fun of him for being kass 'aq. Daniel reached for Laura, who was watching the exchange with amazement. “Una arnaq nulirqaqa,” he said. This is my wife.

“That kind's pretty,” Nelson said in English. He shook her hand but didn't look her in the eye.

Daniel turned to Laura. "Nelson used to be a substitute teacher.

When the native kids got to go on field trips to Anchorage that were subsidized by the government, I wasn't allowed to go because I was white. So Nelson would take me on my own little field trip to check out fishnets and animal traps."

“Don't teach these days,” Nelson said. “Now I'm the race marshal.”

That would mean, Daniel realized, that Nelson had been here since the start of the K300. “Listen,” he said, and he found himself slipping back into Yup'ik because the words, thorny on his tongue and in his throat, didn't hurt quite as much as they did in English. “Paniika tamaumauq.”

My daughter is lost.

He didn't have to explain to Nelson why he thought that his child, who lived a whole country away, might have wound up in Alaska when she went missing. The Yupiit understood that the person you were when you went to sleep at night might not necessarily

be the person you were when you woke up. You could have become a seal or a bear. You might have crossed into the land of the dead. You might have casually spoken a wish aloud in your dreams and then found yourself living in the middle of it.

“She's fourteen,” Daniel said, and he tried to describe Trixie, but he didn't know what to say. How could her height or weight or the color of her hair convey that when she laughed, her eyes narrowed shut? That she had to have the peanut butter on the top side of the sandwich and the jelly on the bottom? That she sometimes got up and wrote poetry in the middle of the night because she'd dreamed it?

The woman who had been on the phone stepped out from behind the table. “Sorry about that . . . the calls have been crazy. Anyway, the only kids coming through here I didn't know are the Jesuit Volunteers. One girl flew in late, because of the snowstorm, but by now, they're all up at Tuluksak, manning the checkpoint.”

“What did she look like?” Laura asked. “The girl who was late?”

“Skinny little thing. Black hair.”

Laura turned to Daniel. “It's not her.”

“This girl didn't have a warm coat,” the woman said. “I thought that was pretty crazy for a kid who knew she was coming to Alaska. She didn't even have a hat.”

Daniel remembered Trixie sitting in the passenger seat of his truck in the middle of the winter as they drove up to the high school entrance. It's freezing out, he'd said, and he handed her a hunter-orange wool stocking cap he'd used when he was out cutting wood. Wear this. And her response: Dad, do you want people to think I'm a total freak?

There had been times, when he lived in Akiak, that he would know things before they happened. Sometimes it was as simple as thinking of a red fox and then looking up and seeing one. Sometimes it was more profound: sensing a fight building up behind him, so that he could turn in time to throw the first punch. Once it had

even wakened him out of his sleep: the sound of a gunshot and the echo of basketballs thudding when the bullet upset the cart they were stored on.

His mother had called it coincidence, but the Yupiit wouldn't. People's lives were as tightly woven as a piece of lace, and pulling on one string might furrow another. And although he'd dismissed it when he was a teenager in Akiak, he recognized now the tightening of the skin at his temples, the way light moved too fast in front of his eyes a moment before he pictured his daughter, not wearing a hat, or anything else for that matter, shivering in what seemed to be a haystack.

Daniel felt his heart jump. “I have to get to Tuluksak.”

“Ikayumaamken,” Nelson said. Let me help you. The last time he'd been here, Daniel hadn't wanted anyone's help. The last time he'd been here, he'd actively pushed it away. Now he turned to Nelson. “Can I borrow your snow machine?” he asked.

* * *

The checkpoint in Tuluksak was at the school, close enough to the river for mushers to settle their dogs in straw on the banks and then walk up to the building for hot food. All mushers racing the K300 passed through Tuluksak twice - once on the way up to Aniak and once on the way back. There was a mandatory four-hour rest and vet check during one of those stops. When Trixie and Willie arrived, a team of dogs was idling without its musher down at the bank of the river, being watched over by a kid with a clipboard who asked if they'd run into anyone else on the trail. All but one of the mushers had passed through Tuluksak, detained, presumably, by the storm. No one had heard from him since he'd checked in at Akiak.

Trixie hadn't really spoken much to Willie this morning. She had awakened with a start a little after six A.M., noticing first that it wasn't snowing and second that she wasn't cold. Willie's arm was draped over her, and his breath fell onto the nape of her neck. Most humiliating, though, was the hard thing Trixie could feel pressing up

against her thigh. She had inched away from Willie, her face burning, and focused on getting herself fully dressed before he woke up and realized he had a boner.

Willie parked outside the school and climbed off the snow machine. “Aren't you coming in?” Trixie asked, but he was already tinkering with the engine, not seeming the least bit inclined to finesse an introduction for her. “Whatever,” she muttered under her breath, and she walked into the building.

Directly in front of her was a trophy case that held a wooden mask decorated with feathers and fur and a loving cup with a basketball etched onto it. A tall boy with a long, horsey face was standing next to it. “You're not Andi,” he said, surprised. The Jesuit Volunteers who were in charge of the checkpoint at Tuluksak were a group of college-age kids who did Peace Corpsstyle service work at the native clinic in Bethel. Trixie had thought Jesuits were priestsand these kids clearly weren't. She asked Willie why they were called that, and he just shrugged.

“I don't know about Andi,” Trixie said. “I was just told to come here/She held her breath, waiting for this boy to point a finger at her and scream Imposter! but before he could, Willie walked inside, stamping off his boots. ”Hey, Willie, what's up," the tall boy said. Willie nodded and walked into one of the classrooms, heading toward a table set up with Crock Pots and Tupperware. He helped himself to a bowl of something and disappeared through another doorway.

“Well, I'm Carl,” the boy said. He held out his hand.

“Trixie.”

“You ever done this before?”

“Oh, sure,” Trixie lied. “Tons of times.”

“Great.” He led her into the classroom. "Things are a little crazy right now, because we've got a team that just came in, but here's a five-second orientation: First and most important, that's where the

food is.“ He pointed. ”The locals bring stuff all day long, and if you haven't had any, I recommend the beaver soup. On the other side of the door where you came in is another classroom; that's where the mushers sleep when they come in for their layover. They basically grab a mat and tell you when they want to be woken up. We rotate shifts - every half hour someone's got to sit out on the river, which is cruel and unusual punishment in this kind of weather. If you're the one on duty when a musher comes in, make sure you tell him his time and call it into headquarters, then show him which plywood corral has his gear in it. Right now everyone's a little freaked out because one team hasn't made it in since the storm."

Trixie listened to Carl, nodding at the right places, but he might as well have been speaking Swahili. Maybe if she watched someone else doing what she was supposed to do, she could copy when it came her turn.

“And just so you know,” Carl said. “Mushers are allowed to drop dogs here.”

Why? Trixie wondered. To see if they land on their feet?

A cell phone rang, and someone called out Carl's name. Left alone, Trixie wandered around, hoping to avoid Willie, who was doing such an effortless job of avoiding her. It seemed that the entire school consisted of two classrooms, and Trixie thought of Bethel High's complex layout, a map she had memorized all summer before starting ninth grade.

“You made it.”

Trixie turned to find the vet who'd been on the bush plane with her from Anchorage. “Go figure.”

“Well, I guess I'll see you outside. I hear there's a nasty case of frostbite out there with my name on it.” He zipped up his coat and waved as he walked out the door.

Trixie was starving, but not enough to want to eat something that might have beaver in it. She gravitated toward the oil stove at

the corner of the room and held her hands out in front of it. It was no

warmer than Willie's skin had been.

“You all set?”

As if her thoughts had conjured him, Willie was suddenly standing next to her. “For what?”

“This.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Piece of cake.” He smirked and started to walk away. “Hey. Where are you going?”

“Home. This is my village.”

Until that moment, it hadn't occurred to Trixie that she was going to be by herself again. As a teenager, she was always part of a greater whole - a family, a class, a peer group - and there was always someone sticking a nose in her business. How many times had she stormed off after a fight with her mother, yelling that she just wanted to be left alone?

Be careful what you wish for, Trixie thought. After a single day spent on her own, here she was getting all upset about losing the company of a total stranger.

She tried to wipe all the emotion off her face, so that it reflected back at Willie the same indifference he was showing her. Then she remembered she was still wearing a coat that belonged to someone he knew, and she struggled to unfasten it.

Willie pushed her hands away from the zipper. “Keep it,” he said. “I'll come back for it later.”

She followed him out of the school building, feeling the cold rake the hair from her scalp. Willie headed toward a cluster of small houses that seemed two-dimensional, sketched in shades of smoky brown and gray. His hands were dug deep into his pockets, and he spun around so that he wouldn't have to bear the bite of the wind. “Willie,” Trixie called out, and although he didn't look up, he stopped walking. “Thanks.”

He ducked his head deeper, an acknowledgment, then kept moving backward toward the village. It was exactly how Trixie felt: If she was getting anywhere on this journey, it was still the wrong way. She watched Willie, pretending she could see him even when she couldn't, until she was distracted by the sound of barking near the river.

The JV they'd seen when they pulled up in their snow-go was still on the ice, watching over the same dog team, which panted in small frosty bites of punctuation. He grinned when he saw Trixie and passed her the clipboard. “Are you my relief? It's brutal out here. Hey, listen, Finn Hanlon's up taking a leak while the vet finishes checking out the team.”

“What do I have to do?” Trixie said, but the boy was already halfway up the hill, making a beeline for the warmth of the school. Trixie looked around, nervous. The vet was too busy to pay attention to her, but there were a few native kids kicking a Sprite can, and their parents, who hopped from foot to foot to ward off the cold and talked about who would win the race this year.

The lead dog looked tired. Trixie couldn't blame the poor thing; she'd traveled the same route on the back of a snow machine and it

had nearly killed her; what would it be like to do that barefoot and naked? Taking a glance at the vet - he could keep an eye out, just in case that last musher came in, couldn't he? - she walked away from the team to a set of plywood lockers. Rummaging inside one, she grabbed a handful of kibble and walked back to the husky. She held out her palm, and the dog's tongue, rough and warm, rasped against her skin to devour the treat.

“Jesus,” a voice yelled. “You trying to get me disqualified?” Staring down at her was a musher wearing a bib with the number 12 on it. She glanced at her clipboard: FINN HANLON.

“You're feeding my dogs!”

“S-sorry,” Trixie stammered. “I thought . . .” Ignoring her, Hanlon turned to the vet. “What's the verdict?”

“He's going to be fine, but not if you race him.” The vet stood up, wiped his hands on his coat.

The musher knelt beside the dog and rubbed him between the ears, then unhooked his traces. “I'm dropping him,” he said, handing the neck line to Trixie. She held it and watched Hanlon reconfigure the tug line of the dog that had been Juno's partner, so that the sled would pull straight. “Sign me out,” he ordered, and he stepped on the runners of his sled, holding on to the handle bow. “All right,” he called, and the team loped north along the river, gaining speed, as the spectators on the bank cheered. The vet packed up his bag. “Let's get Juno comfortable,” he said, and Trixie nodded, holding the neck line like a leash as she started to walk the dog toward the school building.

“Very funny,” the vet said.

She turned around to find him in front of a stake hammered into the grass along the edge of the river. “But it's so cold out here ...”

“You noticed? Tie him up, and I'll get the straw.” Trixie clipped the dog's neck line onto the stake. The vet returned, carrying a slice of hay in his arms. “You'd be surprised how cozy this is,” he said, and Trixie thought of the night she'd spent with Willie.

A current suddenly energized the small tangle of spectators, and they began to point to the spot on the horizon where the river became a vanishing point. Trixie gripped the clipboard with her mittened hands and looked at the pinprick in the distance.

“It's Edmonds!” a Yup'ik boy cried. “He made it!” The vet stood up. “I'll go tell Carl,” he said, and he left Trixie to fend for herself.

The musher was wearing a white parka that came down to his knees and the number 06 on his bib. “Whoa,” he called out, and his malamutes slowed to a stop, panting. The swing dog - the one closest to the sled - curled up like a fiddlehead on the ice and closed her eyes.

The children spilled over the riverbank, tugging at the musher's coat. “Alex Edmonds! Alex Edmonds!” they shouted. “Do you remember me from last year?”

Edmonds brushed them off. “I have to scratch,” he said to Trixie. “Um. Okay,” she answered, and she wondered why he thought he had to make an itch common knowledge. But Edmonds took the clipboard out of her hands and drew a line through his name. He handed it back and pulled the sleeping bag off the basket of the sled, revealing an old Yup'ik man who reeked of alcohol and who was shaking even as he snored. “I found him on the trail. He must have passed out during the storm. I gave him mouth to mouth last night to get him breathing again, but the weather was too bad to get him back to the medical center in Bethel. This was the closest checkpoint ... can someone help me get him inside?” Before Trixie could run up to the school, she saw Carl and the other volunteers hurrying down to the river. “Holy cow,” Carl said, staring at the drunk. “You probably saved his life.”

“Whatever that's worth,” Edmonds replied. Trixie watched the other volunteers drag the old man out of the dogsled and carry him up to the school. The bystanders whispered and clucked to each other, snippets of conversation in Yup'ik and English that Trixie caught: Edmonds used to be an EMT... Kingurauten Joseph ought to pay for this. . . damn shame. One Yup'ik woman with owl eyeglasses and a tiny bow of a mouth came up to Trixie. She leaned over the clipboard and pointed to the line splitting Edmonds's name. “I had ten bucks riding on him to win,” she complained. With all the dog teams accounted for, the onlookers dispersed, heading into the village where Willie had gone. Trixie wondered if he was related to any of those little kids who'd been cheering for Edmonds. She wondered what he'd done when he got home. Drunk orange juice out of the container, like she might have? Taken a shower? Lay down on his bed, thinking of her?

Just as suddenly as all the activity had arrived, there was nobody on the bank of the river. Trixie looked north, but she couldn't see Finn Hanlon and his team anymore. She looked south, but she couldn't tell where she and Willie had come from. The sun had

climbed almost directly overhead, washing out the ice so that it made her eyes burn even to pick out the trail from the field of white.

Trixie sank down beside Juno on the straw and scratched the dog's head with her glove. The husky stared up at her with one brown eye and one blue, and when he panted, it looked like he was smiling. Trixie imagined what it was like to be a sled dog, to have to pull your weight or realize you'd be left behind. She pictured how it would feel to trust your instincts in a strange land, to know the difference between where you had been and where you were going.

* * *

When the river froze in the winter, it got its own highway number, and at any given time you would see rusted trucks and dogsled teams driving over the ice in no particular direction or parallel course. Like most Yup'ik Eskimos, Nelson didn't believe in a helmet or goggles; to brace himself against the wind on the old man's snow machine, Daniel had to crouch down close to the windshield. Laura sat behind him, her face buried against the back of his coat.

In the middle of the river was a stationary white truck. As Daniel slowed the snow-go, he could feel Laura relax - she was freezing, even if she wasn't complaining. “This must be a checkpoint,” he said, and he got off the machine with his thighs still thrumming from the power of the engine.

A dreadlocked white woman unrolled the driver's side window.

“Kingurauten Joseph, for the love of God, go pass out in someone else's backyard.”

Kingurauten was Yup'ik for too late. Daniel pulled down the neck warmer that covered his nose and mouth. “I think you've got me confused with someone else,” he began, and then realized that he knew the woman in the truck. “Daisy?” he said hesitantly. Crazy Daisy, that was what they'd called her when she used to run the mail out to the native villages by dogsled back when Daniel was a kid. She frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

“Daniel Stone,” he said. “Annette Stone's son.”

“That wasn't the name of Annette's kid. He was”

“Wassilie,” Daniel finished.

Daisy scratched her scalp. "Didn't you bug out of here because

. . ."

“Nah,” Daniel lied. “I just left for college.” It was common knowledge that Crazy Daisy had gotten that way by running with Timothy Leary's crowd in the sixties, and that she'd pretty much fried the functioning parts of her brain. “Did you happen to see a snow-go pass by here with a kass'aq girl and a Yup'ik boy?”

“This morning?”

“Yeah.”

Daisy shook her head. “Nope. Sorry.” She jerked her thumb toward the back of the truck. “You want to come in and warm up? I got coffee and Snickers bars.”

“Can't,” Daniel said, lost in thought. If Trixie hadn't come past Akiak, then how had he missed her on the trail?

“Maybe later,” Daisy yelled, as he turned the ignition on the snow machine again. “I'd love to catch up.” Daniel pretended not to hear her. But as he circled around the truck, Daisy started waving like a madwoman, trying to get his attention. “No one's passed by this morning,” she said, “but a girl and boy came through last night, before the storm hit.” Daniel didn't answer, just gunned the engine and drove up the riverbank into Akiak, the town he'd run away from fifteen years earlier. The Washeteria - the place they'd gone with their laundry and for showers - was now a convenience store and video rental shop. The school was still a squat, serviceable gray building; the house beside it where he'd grown up had two dogs staked out front. Daniel wondered who lived there now, if it was still the schoolteacher, if she

had children. If basketballs still sometimes started to bounce in the

gymnasium without being set in motion, if the last one to lock up the school building ever saw the old principal who'd killed himself, still hanging from the crossbeam in the only classroom. He stopped in front of the house next door to the school, a shack with a slight pedigree. A snow-go sat in front of the building, and an aluminum boat peeked out from beneath a blue tarp. Paper snowflakes had been taped to the windows, as well as a red metallic crucifix. “Why are we stopping?” Laura asked. “What about Trixie?”

He got off the snow machine and turned to her. “You're not coming with me.”

She wasn't used to this kind of cold, and he couldn't slow down for her and risk losing Trixie for good. And a part of him wanted to be alone when he found Trixie. There was so much he needed to explain.

Laura stared at him, struck dumb. Her eyebrows had frosted over, her eyelashes were matted together with ice, and when she finally spoke, her sentence rose like a white banner between them.

“Please don't do this,” she said, starting to cry. “Take me with you.”

Daniel pulled her into his arms, assuming that Laura thought this was a punishment, retribution for leaving him behind when she had her affair. It made her seem vulnerable; it made him remember how easy it was for them to still hurt each other. “If we had to walk through hell to find Trixie, I'd follow you. But this is a different kind of hell, and I'm the one who knows where he's going. I'm asking you .. . I'm begging you to trust me.” Laura opened her mouth, and what might have been a reply came out only as a smoke ring full of what she could not say. Trust was exactly what they no longer had between them. “I can go faster if I don't have to worry about you,” he said.

Daniel saw true fear in her eyes. “You'll come back?” she asked.

“We both will.”

Laura glanced around at the rutted street with snow-go tracks, at the public water receptacles at the base of the street. The community was silent, windswept, frigid. It looked, Daniel knew, like a dead end.

“Come with me.” He led Laura up the set of wooden stairs and opened the door without knocking, entering a little antechamber. There were plastic bags stuck on nails in the frame overhead, and stacks of newspaper. A pair of boots toppled to the right, and a tanned hide was stretched on the back wall, beside the door that led into the house. Lying on the linoleum was a severed moose hoof and a half rack of frozen ribs.

Laura stepped hesitantly over them. “Is this ... is this where you used to live?”

The interior door opened, revealing a Yup'ik woman about sixty years old, holding an infant in her arms. She took one look at Daniel and backed away, her eyes bright with tears.

“Not me,” Daniel said. “Cane.”

Charles and Minnie Johnson, the parents of Daniel's one and only childhood friend, treated him with the same sort of deference they might have given any other ghost who sat down at their kitchen table to share a cup of coffee. Charles's skin was as dark and lined as a cinnamon stick; he wore creased jeans and a red western shirt and called Daniel Wass. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, as if life were something poured into a body, a vessel that could hold only so much before memories floated across the windows of consciousness.

“It's been a long time,” Charles said.

“Yes.”

“You've been living Outside?”

“With my family.”

There was a long silence. “We wondered when you'd come home,” Minnie said.

The Yupiit did not speak of the dead, and because of that, neither would Daniel. But he had less practice with silence. In a Yup'ik household, ten minutes might pass between a question and the answer. Sometimes you didn't even have to reply out loud; it was enough to be thinking your response.

They sat around the kitchen table in the quiet, until a young woman walked through the front door. She was clearly Minnie's daughter - they had the same wide smile and smooth hickory skin but Daniel remembered her only as a young girl who liked to storyknife - using a butter knife in the soft mud to illustrate the tales she'd tell. Now, though, she held in her arms her own fat, squirming baby, who took one look at Laura and pointed at her and laughed.

“Sorry,” Elaine said shyly. “He's never seen anyone with that color hair before.” She unwound her scarf and unzipped her coat, then did the same for the baby.

“Elaine, this is Wass,” Charles said. “He lived here a long time ago.”

Daniel stood at the introduction, and when he did, the baby reached for him. He grinned, catching the boy as he twisted out of his mother's arms. “And who's this?”

“My son,” Elaine said. “His name's Cane.”

* * *

Elaine lived in the same house as her parents, along with her two older children and her husband. So did her sister Aurora, who was seventeen years old and heavily pregnant. There was a brother, too, in his late twenties; Laura could see him in the only bedroom in the house, feverishly playing Nintendo.

On the kitchen table was a hunk of frozen meat in a bowl - if Laura had to guess, she would have said it was intimately related to the moose parts in the arctic entry. There was a stove but no sink. Instead, a fifty-five-gallon drum in the corner of the kitchen area was filled with water. Dusty ice-fishing lures and antique hand-carved

kayak paddles were suspended from the ceiling; five-gallon buckets filled with lard and dried fish were stacked beside the threadbare

couch. The walls were covered with religious paraphernalia: programs from church services, plaques of Jesus and Mary, calendars printed with the feast days of saints. Anywhere there was a spare square of paneling, a photograph had been tacked: recent pictures of the baby, old school portraits of Elaine and Aurora and their brother, the boy Daniel had been accused of murdering.

There was a curious irony to being left behind here, even if the very thought of it made Laura break into a sweat. She kept remembering what Daniel had said about the Alaskan bush: It was a place where people tended to disappear. What did that bode for Trixie, or for Daniel? And what might it mean for Laura herself?

In Maine, when Lauras life had been jolted off course, it had been terrifying and unfamiliar. Here, though, she had no standard for comparison - and not knowing what came next was the norm. She didn't know why no one would look her in the eye, why the boy playing video games hadn't come out to introduce himself, why they even had state-of-the-art video equipment when the house itself was little more than a shed, why a family that at one point had believed you'd killed their son would welcome you into their home. The world had been turned inside out, and she was navigating by the feel of its seams.

Daniel was speaking quietly to Charles, telling him about Trixie. “Excuse me,” Laura said, leaning toward Minnie. “Could I use your restroom?”

Minnie pointed down the hall. At its end was a flattened cardboard refrigerator box, erected like a screen. “Laura,” Daniel said, getting to his feet.

“I'm fine!” she said, because she thought if she could make Daniel believe it, then maybe he'd convince her of it as well. She slipped behind the screen, and her jaw dropped. There was no bathroom; there wasn't even a toilet. Only a white bucketlike the ones

in the living room that stored dried fishwith a toilet seat balanced on top of it.

She peeled off her ski pants and squatted, holding her breath the whole time, praying nobody was listening. When Laura and Daniel had moved in together, there had still been a certain shyness between them. After all, she was pregnant, and that had speeded along a relationship that might have otherwise taken years to reach that level of commitment. Laura could remember Daniel separating his laundry from hers for the first few months, for example. And she had studiously avoided going to the bathroom if Daniel happened to be in there taking a shower.

She couldn't recall when, exactly, all their shirts and jeans and underwear had mixed in the washer together. Or when she'd been able to pee while he was two feet away from her, brushing his teeth. It was simply what happened when the histories of two people dovetailed into one.

Laura straightened her clothes - washing her hands wasn't even an option - and stepped out from behind the partition. Daniel was waiting for her in the narrow hallway. “I should have warned you about the honey bucket.”

She thought of how Daniel couldn't bear to run the dishwasher if it wasn't overflowing, how his showers lasted less than five minutes. She'd always considered it thrifty; now she saw that when you grew up with water as a luxury and plumbing a distant wish, it might simply be a habit too deeply rooted to break.

“I need to get going,” Daniel said.

Laura nodded. She wanted to smile at him, but she couldn't find it in herself. So much could happen between now and the next time she saw him. She wrapped her arms around Daniel and buried her face against his chest.

He led her into the kitchen, where he shook Charles's hand and spoke in Yup'ik: “Quyana. Piurra.”

When Daniel walked into the arctic entry, Laura followed. She stood at the front door, watching him start the snow machine and climb aboard. He lifted one hand, a farewell, and mouthed words he knew she would not hear over the roar of the engine. I love you.

“I love you, too,” Laura murmured, but by then, all that remained of Daniel was what he'd left behind: a trail of exhaust, hatched tracks in the snow, and a truth neither of them had spoken for some time.

* * *

Bartholemew stared at the sheet of results that Skipper Johanssen had given him. “How sure are you?” he asked. Skipper shrugged. “As sure as this particular typing can be. Onehundredth of one percent of the world's population has the same mito DNA profile as your suspect. You're talking about six hundred thousand people, any of whom could have been at the scene of the crime.”

“But that also suggests that ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of the population wasn't there.”

“Correct. At least not based on that piece of hair you found on the victim.”

Bartholemew stared at her. “And Trixie Stone doesn't fall into that ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent?”

“Nope.”

“So I can't exclude Trixie Stone.”

“Not mitochondrially speaking.”

The odds were looking better, when you glanced at them from this angle, Bartholemew thought. “Even though Max said . . .”

“No insult to Max, but no court is going to put stock in an analysis done by the human eye, as compared to a validated scientific test like mine.” Skipper smiled at him. “I think,” she said, “you've got yourself a suspect.”

* * *

The Johnsons were addicted to the Game Show Network. They especially liked Richard Dawson, who kissed anything on two legs while hosting Family Feud. “One day,” Minnie kept saying, elbowing her husband, “I'm gonna run away with Richard.”

“He'll run, all right, when he sees you coming after him.” Charles laughed.

They had a satellite dish, a flat-screen TV, a PlayStation and a GameCube, as well as a DVD/VCR player and a stereo system that would have put Laura's own to shame. Roland, the antisocial brother, had bought all the equipment with his check this year from the Alaska Permanent Fund - the dividends on oil that every Alaskan was paid by the government since 1984. The Johnsons had lived the entire year on the $1,100 of Charles's check alone, supplemented by hunting expeditions for caribou and dried salmon caught during the summer at fish camp. Roland had told her that Akiak residents could even get wireless Internet for free - they qualified for government-funded technology because they were both rural and native - but that no one could afford it. A person had to have a computer first, which would cost nearly a whole year's Permanent Fund check.

When Laura had had her fill of Richard Dawson, she put on her coat and walked outside. On a telephone pole, someone had nailed a basketball hoop; the ball itself was half buried in a hummock of snow. She pulled it free and bounced it, amazed at how the sound echoed. Here there were no lawn mowers or blaring radios or rap music. No slamming of SUV doors, no clatter of kids spilling out of a school bus, no hum from a nearby highway. It was the sort of place where you could hear the tumblers of your mind falling into place as you pieced thought together, as you tried to match it to action.

Although Laura knew without a doubt that Trixie had not murdered Jason, she didn't understand what had made her daughter run away. Was Trixie just scared? Or did she know more about what had happened that night than she'd let on?

Laura wondered if it was possible to run away forever. Daniel had certainly managed to do it. She knew that his childhood had been foreign, but she never could have envisioned something as stark as this. If she'd believed that there was a vast dichotomy between the man she'd met in college and the one she lived with now . . . well, there was an even greater gap between who Daniel had been when she met him and where he had started. It made Laura wonder where all of Daniel's jettisoned personalities had gone. It made her wonder if you could know a person only at a single moment in time, because a year from now or a day from now, he might be different. It made her wonder if everyone reinvented himself or herself, if that was as natural as other animals shedding skin. If she was going to be honest now - and wasn't it time for that, already? - Laura would have to admit that Trixie had changed, too. She had wanted to believe that behind that closed bedroom door, her daughter was still playing God with the denizens of her dollhouse; but in fact Trixie had been keeping secrets, and pushing boundaries, and turning into someone Laura didn't recognize.

On the other hand, Daniel had been keeping a vigil for Trixie's metamorphosis. He'd been so nervous about the thought of their daughter getting older, taking on the world, being flattened by it. As it turned out, though, Trixie had grown up during the one instant Daniel had turned away, momentarily distracted by his wife's betrayal.

It wasn't what you didn't know about the people you loved that would shock you; it was what you didn't want to admit about yourself.

When the door opened, Laura jumped, her thoughts scattering like a flock of crows. Charles stood on the steps, smoking a pipe.

“You know what it means if you go outside and there are no Yupiit around?”

“No.”

“That it's too damn cold to be standing here.” He took the basketball from Laura's hands and sank a neat basket; together they watched it roll into a neighbor's yard.

Laura dug her hands into her pockets. “It's so quiet,” she said. How ironic, she thought, to make conversation about the lack of it.

Charles nodded. “Every now and again someone will move to Bethel, and then come back because it's too loud. Down there, there's too much going on.”

It was hard to imagine this: Bethel was the last place Laura would ever have considered a metropolis. “New York City would probably make their heads explode.”