Sisters of the Midnight Sun

Chapter 1

Chapter: "Chapter 1"

The courtroom is packed. Rebecca Wright pushes through the heavy gray doors, dragging a suitcase, straight from the airport. Her office manager called her in South Carolina, cutting short her first vacation in three years. The news: Amos Lane is held on misdemeanors, but authorities think he killed the Ipalook sisters. Both strangled, one raped.

She stashes her suitcase and heads up the aisle. The courtroom is usually empty on a Friday, but today it's full. Public safety officers fill the back pews. The Ipalook family takes up two middle pews, looking stricken. Bored spectators crowd in. Rebecca spots Ed Ellingsworth, the lead detective, and a young reporter beside him who always misspells the DA's name as "Slusher."

Her client sits alone at the defense table in handcuffs, orange jumpsuit, long black hair, muscular shoulders. He needs company. She sits beside him. He eyes her like she's just another part of the system that keeps him locked up.

The charges are flimsy. Harold Killbear made a citizen's arrest, claiming Lane assaulted him, but no officer saw anything. Lane whispers he stopped Killbear from beating his girlfriend, and he has witnesses. Rebecca remembers Killbear's DUI case from weeks ago and wonders if it vanished in exchange for this complaint. Then there's Johnny Aveoganna, an ivory carver, accusing Lane of stealing ivory. Rebecca knows Johnny—friendly, generous, heavy-drinking, gives carvings to friends. If the ivory is signed and in Lane's possession, Johnny might call it a gift. But its value could bump the charge to a felony if the State wants to hold Lane badly enough.

There's also a petition for probation revocation. Lane says it's from a fight write-up he caught before getting out—the guy lied, and he copped a plea to get into alcohol treatment. Rebecca's head aches. His story could be true, or his record could show a dangerous drunk. But what strikes her most: nowhere in the papers is there any mention of the two dead sisters. She flew 3,800 miles for this, and no one has produced any evidence against him.

Lane is from Point Hope, a remote village on the western rim, isolated for centuries. Her goal is to get him out of jail. The State is holding him on small charges while they gather evidence. If she can get bail set low, the murder case shifts footing. She asks if he has any sexual assaults on his record. He looks at her full-on. "Yes," he says. "That's what I just got out for." The conviction was serious, a long sentence. But he was released to alcohol rehab, and they let him out on a weekend pass. The light dawns. Public Safety latched onto him because he has a rape conviction and happened to be in town. That's their evidence. Outrageous.

Rebecca thinks about the system here. The law is Anglo, the place is Native, and the two don't fit. Natives have their own justice based on accountability and community knowledge. Written law doesn't work well where family values come first, where the midnight sun blurs days, where witnesses tell you what you want to hear to be polite. The attorneys who run things sit five hundred miles away in Fairbanks and Anchorage. It's up to her to keep this case on track.

Lane mentions his counselor is in the courtroom. Rebecca finds Pete Petersen, director of the rehab facility SATS. Petersen is upset. Amos has worked hard in treatment, on alcohol dependency and serious grief issues. When Rebecca asks what kind, Petersen studies her. When Amos was fourteen, his mother was dragged into a house by three men. They raped and tortured her until she died.

A chill falls over Rebecca. She looks around at the women in the courtroom. We are all prey, she thinks. But there's no time for that. She asks Petersen if he can tell the magistrate Lane is in compliance with the program. He can, and he's angry the State is poking into treatment, protected by federal confidentiality laws—though Rebecca knows federal law often doesn't reach the Arctic.

Back at the table, she presses Lane: will he go back to treatment? She doesn't think she can get him out any other way. He doesn't answer right away. She notices his black hair has a reddish cast, a reminder that whale hunters from Nantucket once left offspring here. He says he'd rather be with relatives, but they got threats and couldn't come. Maybe true, maybe a cover. Unhappily, he nods to treatment.

The trooper commands all rise. The magistrate enters—Rebecca's former colleague in children's cases, a part-time dog musher. She asks that Lane's cuffs be removed. The DA, Slusser, objects, stammering, acting on instructions from Fairbanks. But Rebecca insists these are only misdemeanors, and the magistrate directs the trooper to remove the cuffs.

The arraignment proceeds. Lane asks for a public defender. The magistrate finds him indigent and appoints the Public Defender Agency. Rebecca waives formal reading, enters not guilty pleas. Then comes bail.

The DA calls Public Safety Officer Marten to the stand. The courtroom buzzes. Marten testifies that Lane was convicted of sexual assault in 1983 in Kotzebue and has been in almost continuous custody until his release to treatment three weeks ago. Marten explains: Lane escaped from Fairbanks Correctional in 1985, triggering a manhunt on the tundra near Point Hope. He was found almost dead of exposure, with large portions of his feet frozen. About half of his left foot had to be amputated.

The courtroom buzzes again. Rebecca resists looking at Lane's feet. His face is cold as seawater. She imagines the awful fate of running across the tundra, knowing the risk, and running anyway. He lasted longer than anyone else would have, just not long enough to get home.

The DA asks about other charges. Marten mentions a misdemeanor assault on another inmate, then pulls folded papers from his pocket. Rebecca objects to any reference to in-house administrative proceedings. The magistrate asks if she wants a continuance, but that means more jail time. "No, Your Honor, we're asking for due process." The magistrate frowns. She offers to file a motion. She feels Lane's eyes on her and hopes he doesn't ask what proceedings she has in mind, because she has no idea.

The magistrate allows the DA to question on the material but won't consider it for bail. The DA says no further questions. Rebecca declines to question too, to avoid emphasis. The potential jurors already have "prior sexual assault" and "frozen feet" burned into their brains.

The State asks for bail at $10,000 cash only, calling Lane a danger and a flight risk. Ten thousand cash on misdemeanors.

Rebecca calls Pete Petersen. He shambles to the box, looking like an aging hippie. She struggles with double-edged swords. If she generates sympathy through Lane's grief, the magistrate might think trauma turned him into a killer. If she explains Public Safety has no evidence, the magistrate might think the prior record looks bad too. Petersen confirms he's Lane's counselor, that they've been treating alcohol dependency and grief syndrome. Yes, Lane recently relapsed, but relapse is typical in recovery. He went straight into detox and lost all privileges. Petersen considers Lane in substantial compliance and will accept him back today.

The DA asks about passes. Yes, the program grants day and weekend passes. Is there supervision? Not exactly. Patients don't get passes until they're ready to demonstrate responsibility. Well answered, Rebecca thinks, but the magistrate will worry.

The magistrate asks what the defense proposes. Rebecca asks that Lane return to treatment, that the revocation petition be dismissed, and that early trial dates be set. The courtroom falls silent. The magistrate says, "Brief recess," and disappears.

"Thank you, Counselor," Lane whispers. He's doodled a huge firebird on the edge of a complaint and written "God is love." Rebecca tells him it's too early for thanks. The DA passes her a note: "Sorry about this. E.E. wants this guy." E.E. is Ed Ellingsworth. She smiles ruefully and hands it back. Lane demands to know what it said. She explains the DA is sorry about the administrative stuff, that Fairbanks runs the show. Lane mumbles, "They shouldn't do it if it's not right." She lets it pass.

Then Lane asks, "Are you a good attorney? How come you're just a public defender?" She sighs but reminds herself the question is fair. Some people think public defenders aren't real attorneys. She remembers the old joke: "Please don't tell my mother I'm a public defender. She thinks I play piano in a whorehouse." She tells him, "Ask around, Amos. Ask Frank Peter, or Wesley Ahvakana." They're not in jail, thanks to her.

The magistrate returns, his hair neatly combed. He gives his decision. The court does not believe the State has shown Lane is necessarily a risk. The sexual assault conviction is old, and Lane has served his time. His counselor says he's in compliance, so the court dismisses the probation revocation petition. The present charges could be characterized as thin. He raises his eyes and looks at Rebecca. He says he knows everyone is there because of that other case, a very serious case. Their presence is appreciated. Too many

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

An epigraph from Emma Sikkikoq Mills frames this Arctic world: men are the "keepers of the tradition," and therefore considered most important. The women let them think so, but the women know that without their hard work feeding the family and planning for the future, the people wouldn't survive.

The Alaska Court System shares a building with the Bank of Alaska in Utqiagvik. The district court occupies the lower floor; the superior court sits on the mezzanine; the public defender's office, where the narrator works, is on the third floor. Public Safety Officer Marten is already there when she returns, slumped beside the front desk, nearly asleep. He has never come to the public defender's office before. But then, two well-known sisters have never been murdered in Utqiagvik before.

Liz Kanayurak is at her desk too, in her perpetual jeans and sweatshirt. Liz is Inupiaq, quick and bright, and knows everybody in town. The office is the only legal office in town with a Native person on staff, a huge advantage—clients hear her Native voice rather than a tanik bureaucrat, and a little trust is kindled. "Hey, Rebecca, some vacation," she says, raising an eyebrow, meaning she has something on her mind she won't say in front of Officer Marten.

Marten asks the narrator to come to Public Safety. She figures it must be about her new client, Amos Lane. Before leaving, she asks Liz for news about the Ipalooks. Liz has none. The narrator also asks about Randy, a local teen she and Liz have been trying to keep on informal suicide watch: his mother is dying of cancer at the Public Health hospital, his father stays in the village of Anaktuvuk Pass, leaving Randy to cope alone. He's a talented basketball player, a skilled mechanic working too many hours to buy his mom gifts, and so at risk. All Alaska Native teens in bush communities seem at risk this year.

Liz tells her they're throwing a birthday party for her Saturday night in the garage, with booze ordered from Fairbanks. The narrator starts to protest, given the double homicide, but Liz insists, with a funny shy look. "There's something you don't know," she says, and then declares: "Eskimo parties are the best parties in the world." Relieved, the narrator laughs. Liz has used her humor to get her way again. The narrator agrees to come.

In her office, morning glories thrive in an indoor window box, climbing twine in the endless Arctic summer sun. She checks on her associate Carol, fresh out of law school, who made no secret of coming to Utqiagvik only because it was the only position she could find. Carol mentions a message: a Native kid named Randy came by, seemed upset, wanted to see the narrator, but said not to call—he'd come back. The narrator knows Randy wouldn't show up unless his problem was urgent, a matter of life and death. Carol didn't seem to grasp that all messages in a law office matter, that lives can turn on dates and times. The narrator hopes Carol didn't make Randy feel unwelcome; he might never come back, and then they'd have to go out and look for him.

The North Slope Borough Public Safety building and jail is a blue-tiled cube across gravel from the courthouse. The narrator gulps the clean Arctic air, glad to walk on gravel—there is no pavement in Utqiagvik because winter destroys it. Inside, she passes walrus and caribou heads and anti-drug and anti-shoplifting posters. Marten's door is shut. No answer. Odd, since he asked her to rush over. She sits on a bench and picks up a brochure titled Subsistence, which explains that the word stands for a proud Native heritage codified into law, that Inupiat people harvest food from marine and land mammals, fish, migratory birds, and the tundra, and that only Native peoples may harvest certain marine mammals and the polar bear.

Marten arrives looking like the living dead. He closes the door, offers no small talk, and begins with an odd preamble: they've worked together fairly, she's been honest, he thinks she's good people. "We've got a problem on our hands with this Ipalook case," he says. Calls are coming from the mayor, the governor's office, the media. They've interviewed dozens of people trying to piece together a time frame, but it was a weekend in the midnight sun, lots of people were drinking, and nobody gives the same time for the same thing.

The key witness problem: Bernice Ipalook's neighbor, Wiley Ungarook, remembers her coming over to borrow a cigarette—she ended up taking half a pack, and he was pissed. But Ungarook started drinking Friday afternoon and can't be sure when she came. If she came late Sunday, then Bernice was still alive after Amos Lane checked back into SATS, and Lane couldn't have killed the sisters. That points to the boyfriend, John Adams, who fought with Bernice that weekend—she threw her ring in his face, and he told the bus driver about it on his way home. He took the last bus Saturday night around eleven, leaving plenty of time for Lane to show up after Adams left. But if someone told Adams that Lane was there after he left—even just watching TV or playing cards—Adams could have walked back to the girls' house later, mad.

"If we had one good, sober witness who could testify that the girls were alive Sunday night, your client would be in the clear," Marten says. Marten asks for the narrator's help: they know Amos Lane was on a weekend pass from treatment; they need to know who he spent time with. If she gives them names "just between you and me," and they check out, they could quit focusing on him and move to other suspects. The narrator says Lane mentioned relatives at arraignment who didn't show up because they'd received death threats, but he gave no names, and she doesn't know if she'd call them alibi witnesses. She can't advise her client to give names; if the witnesses' stories don't check out, he'd be in worse shape, possibly indicted for two murders.

Marten presses. He claims Lane hates Public Safety, and they know reasons she doesn't. "Rumors. Village rumors, is all," he says. But some rumors turn out to be true, and they have to check them all. There are other women missing on the tundra. The narrator knows from social workers that too many Native women go missing each year, and too few cases are investigated. Marten implies Lane's name was linked with some of them. A chill creeps up the narrator's spine as she recalls what Lane's grief and alcohol counselor told her at arraignment about the horrific rape and murder of Amos's mother.

Marten asks again for the witnesses, promising the client will never know. The narrator repeats: she doesn't know any names, and if she did, she wouldn't tell him—that's protected client information.

A noise behind her. Detective Ed Ellingsworth has joined them. He takes two folding chairs, draping his long legs over one, and drawls, "Now, Miss Becky, don't get in a spin." She dislikes him calling her Miss Becky, and he knows it. She can hardly stand to be in the same room with him—she disliked his oily imitation cuteness from the start, and actively disliked him after learning about the Russian girls he invited to visit as possible brides, though he had a wife in the Lower 48. She tells him if he has a bona fide offer, make it, and she'll take it to her client, but don't expect anything on the side. "If it turns out Amos had mud on his boots or a wart in the wrong place, you know the grand jury will indict him."

Ellingsworth reaches across and opens Marten's top drawer. A glowing red eye: a running tape recorder. They tried to record her giving confidential client information, in violation of Alaska law. If she'd given them anything, they could blackmail her into other kinds of cooperation; if it became known she'd given confidential information, the Alaska Bar Association would sanction her severely. Ellingsworth shuts off the machine with a bony forefinger. "Sorry, little lady. This case is driving us nuts. If you can help us here, we'll dismiss all them cases and he'll walk today." The narrator tells him he has no power to promise anything—only the DA does—and they're offering to dismiss two misdemeanors so they can indict Lane on a double homicide. "If he's innocent, he's got nothing to worry about," Ellingsworth says.

"You mean like Theo Johnson had nothing to worry about?" she says, and wishes she hadn't. Theo Johnson is the reason her dislike of Ellingsworth escalated into hostility: a young kid who got drunk and barricaded himself and his girlfriend into their cabin. Instead of letting him sleep it off, Ellingsworth brought in a SWAT team and set up a siege. When officers fired on the shack, Theo fired back; an officer got hit. At sentencing, Ellingsworth brought officers and their families from all over the Slope to pressure the court. Theo received twenty years and was shipped to a for-profit prison in Arizona, far from his Native home. "Theo Johnson was a cop-shooting son of a bitch who got what he deserved," Ellingsworth says. "

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The narrator wakes glad to be back in her little house on the tundra, a home she was lucky to find because housing in Utqiagvik is nearly impossible to get. Elders limit new construction to avoid the boom-and-bust oil-pipeline syndrome that hit Anchorage, and desperate people have resorted to renting walk-in closets or living in their offices. She rented half a duplex sight unseen, only to be evicted when she showed up with her Labrador retriever, mixed terrier, and two cats. That same day the Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corporation listed a small maroon bungalow on the edge of town, built on stilts because of permafrost, and she gratefully pays the exorbitant rent. The family on the corner is well known because the patriarch, Clair Okpeaha, witnessed the plane crash that killed Will Rogers and Wiley Post in 1935 and ran about thirteen miles to bring the news to Utqiagvik. His son Clair Jr. sometimes shares a duck or hare from his hunt, and she is ashamed to tell him she doesn't know how to cook game and usually gives it to Liz.

Inside, her natural gas heater sits on a raised tiled platform, set to sixty-eight degrees, guttering peacefully year-round. In winter storms snow blows through cracks in the walls, but the heat never fails. A water reservoir is filled by truck each week; because the water isn't drinkable, a Sears countertop distiller provides drinking water. The curtained bathroom alcove holds a honey bucket toilet with disposable plastic bags picked up by city employees every three days. The shower drain is an open hole in the floor through which water runs out onto the tundra. Upstairs she has a futon mattress with an electric blanket, a chest of drawers, and an Exercycle. Above the tundra in front of the house, snowy owls glide and soar in their endless search for lemmings. The first time she sees one she thinks she is hallucinating: wings of snow against the Arctic blue, so beautiful the ancients called the area "place where the snowy owls gather."

The Ipalook crime scene

Ordinarily she sleeps most of Saturday and works Sunday, but this Saturday she goes in to catch up on the backlog. Not long after she arrives, the DA calls. Joe is going to look at the Ipalook crime scene, over on the bluffs behind Arctic Pizza, and asks if she wants to come. She says yes. Rules of discovery entitle defense attorneys to information about their cases, but no one has been charged yet in the Ipalook case; Joe is assuming Amos Lane will be charged and she will be appointed to represent him, so he is cutting a corner and saving time by giving her information as it develops.

The office is only a few blocks from the crime scene, so she walks in the breezes off the Arctic Ocean. She dislikes going to crime scenes, but cases rest on facts, and facts rest on crime scenes: only by being in the actual place can she understand how many seconds it would take a perpetrator to reach the front door from the bedroom, how far voices carry, how weather could have modified outside evidence, and whether a witness could possibly have seen what they told police they saw.

At the scene, Joe waves to her from his faded blue International Harvester Travelall. He has the notebook the Anchorage forensic team made up. He lifts the yellow crime scene tape for her, and they cross the dried mud of the yard, stepping over a pile of rotting canvas squares and skirting an abandoned sink. The house is a large weathered shipping container with plywood add-ons whose laminations are beginning to buckle. Joe unlocks Public Safety's padlock, and the door yawns inward. Homes of affluent Inupiat are similar to affluent white homes, she reflects, but poor Native homes differ from poor white homes: white homes smell of kids, dogs, potato chips, Campbell's soup, and cleaning products, while Inupiat homes smell of seal oil used for cooking, gun oil from hunting weapons, and damp parka fur. In the very poor homes, with everyone living in one room and no closets, most possessions hang on the walls: pots, clothes, guns, graduation pictures, bags of food. The honey bucket is partitioned in a corner behind only a curtain but never gives off an odor because the air is so cold, and people go to the rec center for showers.

Joe pauses inside the kunnychuck, the protective Arctic entryway, a lean-to where jackets and dog harnesses dangle on pegs. "This is where the first body was found," he says, and moves inside where a crack in the seaming gives light. He opens the notebook and reads: in the Arctic entry, Victim A was lying on her left side, head turned south and feet north, with her back propping open the living room door, lying on top of her parka with one arm still inside it. A bottle of Crown Russe vodka sits in the sleeve. She wears no pants; a white panty is around one ankle, her t-shirt pushed up with the left breast exposed. A white substance on her lips could be dried semen, and a sample has been submitted for testing. A black Reebok high-top tennis shoe lies by her right foot, with a matching shoe in the living room. Behind the kunnychuck door is a pile of human feces. The forensic team has removed everything from the floor and swept it bare. She strains her eyes for bloodstains or marks, knowing that if the case involves forensic evidence like blood spatter and the defense can show they were deprived of the opportunity to test with their own experts, an entire case can sometimes be dismissed.

She remains in the entryway while Joe moves deeper into the house, wondering about the woman whose final resting place this was. She knows many members of the family but cannot recall meeting Wanda or Bernice. Any woman could end up a victim like this. She says a prayer for the peace of the sister's soul and for her sister's, and adds one for Amos's mother, who died as they did. She thinks that all of us who are prey are sisters. Then she retreats back into the emotional compartment that makes her job possible. There do not seem to be any bloodstains, perhaps because the victim died from strangulation.

In the main room, a contractor's droplight dangles from an extension cord on a hook in the middle of the ceiling, and Joe switches it on. The small living area holds a mattress in front of a television set, with beer cans and overflowing ashtrays everywhere. Joe takes down the light and moves it around, and as it highlights different areas she feels as if she is seeing underwater camera shots from the Titanic. The light reveals elaborate hand-carved details on the wooden cabinets around the dry sink; someone once tried to make this place a pleasant home. Joe puts the light back on its hook, takes up the notebook again, and reads: Victim B was lying flat on her back on a mattress in the living room, head toward the north, wearing a yellow t-shirt and no pants. A pink hair dryer lies under her shoulder, its cord wrapped around her neck. A pair of blue jeans lies on top of her lower torso, and there is a small amount of blood by her head on the west side.

Listening, she tiptoes around with no idea what she is looking for, trying not to trip on anything fragile. She notices a patch of mattress has been removed. She peers through the curtains in the honey bucket corner, but the bucket has been taken away. She looks at a picture on the wall: a stern-faced man in a white anorak holding a harpoon, standing astride the tail of a beached whale. In the kitchen area, a plate of congealed spaghetti sits on the counter, a rumpled empty bag of cookies nearby with crumbs scattered around it, and a heavy white coffee mug lies on its side near a spreading brown stain. On the stovetop, a skillet looks like it has not been washed since last year, just reheated and reused.

The button in the stove grease

Something beside the skillet catches her eye: an odd shape sticking out between the skillet and the burner that she cannot immediately recognize. She figures it is probably nothing important, but on instinct she does not want to draw Joe's attention to it. He might be a nice guy and a respected colleague, but he is, after all, a prosecutor. She does not claim to be a trained observer, but one skill she has is sensitivity to what is out of place, proven years earlier when she accompanied her sister, a biologist, on a saltwater-creature census in a Florida estuary and was usually first to spot where the sea bottom had been disturbed. But the real reason this object catches her attention is that she spent nine years as a homemaker and knows that nobody, not even drunks, either Native or Anglo, would cook with something sticking out of a burner, something flammable right in the area of the fire ring. The boys from Anchorage in their lintless white jumpsuits, the professionals, have processed the whole place, picked up hairs with tweezers, vacuumed for fibers, photographed every stain and crack, but they miss stuff all the time.

At that moment the police radio crackles in Joe's vehicle out in the yard. "Right back," he says, and goes out to check it. She takes down the droplight and holds it over the stove. The object is a ripped and frayed piece of plaid cloth with a button sewn onto it, an

Chapter 4

Rebecca is in no mood for a party, but she cannot disappoint Liz, who rarely disappoints her. The endless summer sunlight grates on her nerves; she longs for the cozy darkness of polar night, when the village pulls together and everyone helps everyone else. Still, she puts on her best jeans and a low-cut scarlet sweater, calls a Tuttu Taxi, and heads to Liz's house. The Korean driver smirks and mentions there is a party going on, music too loud, cops likely to come. Utqiagvik's cab drivers are a cosmopolitan bunch, some of them fugitives, others just chasing good pay at the end of the earth, and riding with them is never dull.

At Liz's place, the garage is dark as a bar, filled with balloons and streamers, dancing bodies, and Bob Seger's "Night Moves." Liz yells that she has arrived, and Rebecca forces surprise and delight. The Inupiat hug a lot, and somebody thrusts a cold, damp bottle of champagne into her hand. Lucy Renfro sent it, grateful that Rebecca got her little brother Jimbo Matumeak off an assault case years ago. Seismic Isaac Tuckfield, the local DJ with the rumbly voice, has brought his equipment for free, turning down a paid gig. Rebecca's backstory with Seismic's family involves allowing his cousin in prison to make collect calls to the office, and relatives now show up on holidays to wait for those calls. Someone puts white carnations in her hand, flowers flown in specially from Anchorage, and she cannot hold back her tears. Former client Eluktoona "Tuna" Brower leads her through a dramatic dance to "When a Man Loves a Woman," twirling and dipping her while she clutches carnations and an empty champagne glass. He whispers that everybody wants her to have a good time and stop working so hard.

She opens presents in the comfortable darkness, crying again at an exquisite ivory carving. Liz keeps the party moving: more dancing, more champagne, more gifts. For the first time in a long while, Rebecca loses track of time. Then she notices a Native man leaning against the wall, tall and lean, long black hair, a twisted bandanna around his forehead. He looks thirtysomething. She is fortysomething. She asks Liz who he is. Michael Nusunginya, Liz says. Rebecca declares she wants him for her birthday. Liz tells her she is drunk and steers her to the bathroom.

The bathroom door is locked, and when Liz knocks, they are admitted into a cloud of marijuana smoke as the occupants flee past. Rebecca whines that she would never narc on anybody; Liz points out that people at the courthouse are scary to them. Behind the curtained honey bucket, Liz warns Rebecca to be more careful. Some of those girls might be using hard stuff, and Liz gave everyone a lecture before she arrived. A warning bell goes off in Rebecca's head, but the champagne fumes deflect it.

Liz tells her about Michael. Around thirty-five, not too young, but too experienced, maybe a kid around town. His sister is on the city council, a brother works for Bowhead Transport. Liz teases her about being a white eye with degrees who needs the whole village to train her for the job. Eskimos, she hints, are not just good at parties. Rebecca, drunk, pushes for more, but Liz grows serious. She worries about Rebecca. There is so much she has never been a part of or understood. Amos Lane, for example. Rebecca should not be representing him. Inupiaq law has been around for thousands of years, and some people should not be represented. They should be cast out.

Rebecca thinks about casting out, about the killing cold of the ocean glittering in the midnight sun, and about due process. Even guilty people deserve to be heard. Poor Theo Johnson was persecuted by Ellingsworth for defending himself against a SWAT team. Maybe a group of elders would have done better by him, lectured him, put him on an island with no booze. But Amos Lane might be innocent, she blurts out. Liz meets her eyes in the mirror and says something in Inupiaq. She does not explain. She just opens the door and waits.

Back in the musical garage, Rebecca stands in the shadows near Seismic's blinking black boxes, watching Michael. He looks like a hunter ready to step out of cover, like the men in the historic photos at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory who went out on the Arctic Ocean in fragile skin boats with fierce joy in their eyes. With champagne courage, she walks over and introduces herself. He startles slightly, like an animal in a cage, then wishes her a happy birthday. She knows his name. He laughs. His cousin Liz warned her about him, Rebecca says. Maybe I should warn you about her, he replies. Forgetting that women from South Carolina never ask men to dance, she asks him to dance. It is her birthday.

They dance to "Wonderful Tonight." He does not say a word. His arms feel hard. She likes his long black hair. They sit together and share another bottle of champagne. He is a heavy equipment operator for the city, lives with his sister and nieces and nephews, was born in Utqiagvik, lived in Fairbanks and Anchorage, and came back. Everybody that is born here comes back eventually, he says. He knows she has been here four years. He asks if she is divorced. Widowed, she says. He asks what happened.

She does not want to be a crying drunk and spoil her own party, but the memories flood back through the champagne gates. Kent's death. A car wreck. The sound of the police radio in the driveway. The trooper's odd word: expired. The warming tray of fried chicken and biscuits and gravy that she could not bear to touch. The closet she could not open. Her mother picked out his burial clothes. Her six-year-old son, whose only frame of reference for death was Bonanza, asked if she was now the "Widder Wright." Yes, she was the Widder Wright, and had been for years, but with two small children there was not much time to grieve.

Michael gets up. She thinks he does not want to sit by some weeping tanik. But he whispers to Seismic, and when Creedence ends, Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" envelops them. Michael takes her hand and holds her in his strong arms while she gets his shirt shoulder wet. Nobody stares. Nobody points. People in Utqiagvik are not surprised by grief, and tears are okay, even at a party.

They sample the buffet, piling plates with deviled eggs, cheese ball, cashews, olives, and homemade chocolate chip cookies. He asks her to dance again to "Save the Last Dance for Me," but she cannot move as well as she did earlier. Liz interrupts with another gift: a secret friend is giving her a limo ride home. Rebecca and Michael. Liz loads carnations and one more bottle of champagne into Rebecca's arms, and the presents onto Michael. Everybody cheers and leers as they make their way to the limo, dazzling white in the evening sunlight. Rebecca thinks about half the jury pool watching. She wishes fervently for darkness.

Debra, the blond owner and driver, congratulates them and drives away. Michael redirects her: to the freshwater lake. Nobody said they had to go straight home. He opens the bottle, holds it for her. The edge of consciousness where she lingers is pleasant. Through the tinted windows, the tundra looks like Eden. Rebecca calls out to Debra about her ranch, her "Barrow bucks." Debra is about five-eighths enough.

They emerge through sudden fog beside the lake south of town. Michael helps her out and holds her elbow like she is a teenager wobbling to prom. The tundra is not flat: small depressions and frost heaves in endlessly interlocking whorls, a bonsai garden that is the devil to walk in. Rebecca kneels and touches a stalk of hairy gray fuzz holding up purple flowers, inhaling its sugary scent. Woolly lousewort, she remembers from a guidebook. Surely beauty's brave standard-bearer in the Arctic slush deserves a more elegant name. She stands and gazes south, where there is not a single road between her and Fairbanks, five hundred miles away. She shivers, strangely thrilled.

Michael points. Nigliq. Geese settling on the far side of the lake. They are beautiful, she says. They are delicious, he says. She asks how they keep from getting eaten by wolves on the ground. They fly. But the babies in the nests, she insists. There is no shelter. Lots of babies, he says. Some of them survive.

Debra turns the coach back toward town. Thirteen miles of road ring Utqiagvik, and they have reached the limit of one of them. Debra knows where Michael lives and drives there without asking. He gives Rebecca a brief kiss and says he will call her.

Alone in the back of the limo, she wonders like any schoolgirl whether he will. He does not have her number, she almost blurts out. He could ask Liz. Why would he call? She remembers the beautiful young girl in the bathroom, waist-length black hair, and thinks he will probably call her instead. Even if he does call, when he shows up in the daylight, she will not look like she did in the dark, musical garage with a glass of champagne in her hand. She must not expect him to call. Better to just get back to work whenever the hangover is over.