Village of the Ghost Bears (10 page)

McAllister handed Active a headset, and he listened as the guide talked to the FAA station across the field. Then they took off into the west wind beneath an unfriendly gray sky that seemed to promise more rain or perhaps snow. Maybe the weird, warm fall was finally breaking.

McAllister climbed out over Chukchi Bay, then swung right until the nose pointed due north, across the Sulana Hills toward the Katonak Flats. Cape Goodwin was to the northwest, directly up the coast from the far shore of Chukchi Bay. Active studied the shoreline curving into blue-gray haze off their left wing. No sign of coastal fog, so why was the pilot heading north instead of taking the direct route to Cape Goodwin?

He was about to ask when McAllister came on the intercom in a spray of static. “I gotta go by the Flats and check on my Super Cub.”

“I heard you went down,” Active said.

“Mm-mmm.”

“What happened?”

From the corner of his eye, Active saw the pilot shrug. “Engine quit. Happens sometimes.”

Active turned to study McAllister. Most bush pilots never passed up the chance to tell a flying yarn, but maybe McAllister was different. Active thought about the case of Solare the guide had wasted and decided he was definitely different.

Soon they were circling McAllister’s Super Cub, which was blue and white like his Cessna. The little plane was stranded in a patch of brush, one float showing a long gash down the side. The struts between that float and the fuselage had crumpled too, leaving the plane tilted about thirty degrees, the left wingtip nearly touching the tundra. Over the intercom, Active heard the pilot muttering to himself again.

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you.”

McAllister looked at him, as if in surprise, before speaking. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s been fucking with it. You gotta watch ’em.”

The plane was at least a quarter mile from the nearest water, a long and relatively straight stretch of one of the sloughs that meandered through the pothole lakes on the Katonak Flats.

“How will you get it out?” Active asked. “Helicopter?”

McAllister snorted over the intercom. “Right, me and my million dollars. Nah, I’ll wait till freezeup and take it out on skis.”

Active studied the terrain around the Super Cub. It was rough and covered with brush, fall-dappled in red and gold. “You really think the Flats will get enough snow to smooth all that out?”

McAllister said, “I’ll cut enough of a trail through the brush that I can winch it out to the slough, then take off from there. All I need is a few days of hard freeze, and it looks like we’re about to get it.”

McAllister rolled out of his circle and pointed the nose west, straight at a low range of coastal hills, the slopes splashed with autumn reds and yellows, the ridgetops mostly barren gray rock dusted with snow.

“Too bad about Jim Silver, ah?” McAllister said over the intercom. “He was a pretty good guy, all right. For a
naluaqmiu
, anyway.”

“You know him at all?”

“Couple times he busted people that were robbing from my planes when they were parked on the ice in front of town there.” McAllister grunted. “The other cops we used to have wouldn’t bother with that kind of stuff, but he got me back a rifle and a couple of those Woods sleeping bags them kids took. I took him up on the Isignaq, got him a spring bear after that. He was pretty skookum out in the country, all right.”

“You didn’t charge him for the hunt?”

McAllister grunted again.

Active took that for a no, and decided after a moment that it probably hadn’t been unethical for Silver to take the free trip. Not that it mattered now.

“It’s tough he had to die like that,” McAllister said. “Him and those other people. You got any ideas yet who did it?”

“It’s Trooper business.”

McAllister grunted again. “You I.D. them all yet?”

Active studied the guide and thought it over. On the one hand, it was Trooper business. On the other hand, some of the victims’ names had already been aired on Kay-Chuck, and the village gossip circuit would swiftly broadcast the rest. McAllister undoubtedly knew just about everyone in the village. Not only that, but also their family histories, who they were sleeping or feuding or drinking or hunting with. Everything.

Active reeled off the list of the victims who had been identified so far. “Know why anybody would want to burn any of them up?”

McAllister frowned and thought it over. Finally, he shook his head. “Unless somebody was after Chief Silver maybe?”

Active thought some more and decided McAllister was likely to know as much about Silver and his family as Alan Long did. “You know a guy named Jae Hyo Lee?”

McAllister grunted. “That Korean that took up with Silver’s daughter. Didn’t he blame Chief Silver for that gallbladder deal in Cape Goodwin?”

“Uh-huh. You know if he’s back in the country?”

“I thought he was still in prison.”

“He’s out,” Active said. “As of about three weeks ago.”

“You think he came back and started the Rec Center fire?”

Active said nothing. McAllister turned to stare at him, then directed his gaze back to the horizon.

A few minutes later, they crested the coastal range and saw a belt of stratus along the shore and, beyond that, the ocean, a limitless expanse of white-streaked steel. At its far edge, the lemon glare known as iceblink signaled pack ice over the horizon, gliding down from the north with the approach of winter.

The coast here consisted of a chain of long, low barrier islands separated from the mainland by shallow, brackish lagoons. The village of Cape Goodwin lay on one such island, a few miles north of the protruding headland for which it was named. Under the stratus, a quartering surf curled into pearly breakers before splashing onto the gravel beach.

“There it is,” McAllister said. “It’s famous for—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Active said. “Twins, polar bears, and schizophrenia.”

Active studied the village as they crossed Goodwin Lagoon. A line of wooden houses straggled along the shore, dominated at one end by a cluster of fuel-storage tanks and at the other by the school, which, as in most villages, towered above everything else. The runway started just beyond the fuel tanks, and the village cemetery lay between it and the lagoon.

McAllister crossed the beach a quarter-mile from the village and rolled right to line up with the runway.

“Wait a minute,” Active said suddenly. “Let’s take a look at that boat.”

McAllister dropped a wing and rolled into a circle around the blue dory with the white outboard beached a few hundred yards down the shore from the village. “Hey,” the pilot said, “that’s Roland Miller’s boat. What’s he doing up here?” He glanced at Active. “Looks like it’s swamping.”

McAllister was right. The surf was coming over the transom, and the dory was half-full of water and sand. “Wonder why he left it there,” the guide said. “Normally they pull into the lagoon and land on the back side of the island.”

Active looked up the beach toward the village. A dozen or so boats were beached or riding at anchor in the sheltered waters of the lagoon. A man was loading supplies into one from a small trailer attached to a four-wheeler, and another boat was making its way across the lagoon toward the mouth of the Goodwin River. A few yards in from the lagoon, the frames of several of the whale boats known as
umiaqs
rested upside-down on driftwood platforms.

Active refocused on the blue dory. “Let’s make a couple more circles. Maybe it capsized and washed ashore.”

“I don’t think so,” McAllister said. “See those?”

He pointed. A faint string of tracks dimpled the silken sand near the water before fading out in the loose gravel higher up the beach. “Probably just quit on him,” McAllister said.

“Yeah, probably,” Active said.

McAllister shot him a glance. “The Troopers interested in abandoned boats these days?”

“Only if somebody gets hurt.”

McAllister glanced at him again,

McAllister glanced at him again, then shrugged and pointed the Cessna at the runway once more. Like every bush pilot Active had ever ridden with, McAllister made a low pass to check the airstrip before landing.

“Shit,” he muttered over the intercom.

“What?” Active said.

McAllister pointed down. “Look at that. This is bad.”

Active stared out at what was left of the Cape Goodwin airport. The system of lagoons and barrier islands was great country for nomadic hunters who subsisted on seals, whales, and seabirds, but it was implacably hostile to any effort to raise a permanent settlement. Unlike the somewhat sheltered recess of Chukchi Bay, the coast here was defenseless against the late summer storms that boiled up from the Bering Sea to the southwest. The one that had hit the village a few weeks earlier had chewed a huge chunk out of the island at the north end of the runway. The surviving section of the strip was appallingly short and appeared to be covered with some kind of steel matting that undulated with the natural contours of the beach and hung, twisted, over the gap left by the storm. Getting down would be like landing on an aircraft carrier, but without the tailhook.

“We don’t have to do this,” Active said as the Cessna shot past the end of the strip and McAllister rolled into a turn over the lagoon.

“Shit,” the pilot said. “I don’t have time to take you back to Chukchi. And I ain’t taking you to camp.”

“What about landing on the beach? I can walk in.”

“Too soft,” McAllister said. “We’d nose over. That’s why they have the matting. Brace yourself.”

McAllister made a circle and came up the beach again, low and slow. He chopped the engine over the fuel tanks, banged the plane onto the runway, and rode it like a bronco as it bucked over the heaves in the steel matting. Active found himself jamming his feet against the floorboards in an unconscious effort to help with the brakes as the Cessna rolled and pitched toward the newly carved dropoff into the Chukchi Sea. Active had his seat belt off and his mind on swimming when McAllister finally got them stopped a few yards from the water.

Both were silent for a time.

“Shit,” McAllister said finally. He revved the engine and pivoted the plane on its left main gear to point back up the runway.

“Can you get off again?”

McAllister chewed his lip, peered through the windshield at the strip, said something under his breath, then spoke up: “Without your weight, yeah. I think.”

He taxied slowly past the cemetery, marked by a man-high arch formed of two bowhead jawbones, to the start of the runway. “Here ya go,” he said, not killing the engine. “Have a nice visit.”

Active grabbed his pack, popped the door open, and was about to step into the propwash when he realized he didn’t know which of the rundown houses in the little village was occupied by Ruthie or by her grandmother. Or, for that matter, by Jim Silver’s widow, Jenny, who supposedly had flown home to Cape Goodwin the morning after the Rec Center fire.

He closed the door again. “Know where I can find Ruthie Silver?”

McAllister studied him a moment. “Why d’you want her?”

“Troo—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, Trooper business,” McAllister said. “I think she stays with her grandmother down by the school.” He pointed along the gravel street that rambled through the center of the village, generally paralleling the beach. “That way.”

CHAPTER SIX

MCALLISTER’S ENGINE ROARED, AND the plane quivered in place as the pilot held it with the brakes and let the RPMs build. Then he let go, and Active watched the plane bounce down the matting and stagger into the air just before the dropoff into the sea.

Feeling suddenly grateful that Cowboy Decker would be picking him up in a floatplane from the lagoon, Active turned and started down the street, the knee-length breakup boots that were part of his uniform from spring to freezeup sinking into the beach gravel.

From ground level, Cape Goodwin looked deserted. No four-wheelers moving, nobody walking. Just the wind off the ocean, a fine rain stinging his face, and a skein of seagulls riding the updrafts along the tideline. No sign of polar bears, but then, none was to be expected until the sea ice closed in for the winter and brought the animals ashore.

Well, the kids would already be in class; most of the men were probably upriver hunting, like the Village Public Safety Officer; and it was early enough in the day that everyone else, operating on village time, was probably still in bed.

He made his way to the school and saw several houses that could be Ruthie’s grandmother’s place, but none that seemed likelier than another. From the corner of his eye, he sensed a flicker of motion at a window as he passed a cabin that looked to have been built of driftwood logs. He turned to catch a glimpse of a heavy-jawed oval face, but it vanished before he could raise a hand to wave or turn toward the door to knock.

He was about to go into the school and ask for directions when he heard the stutter of a four-wheeler near the shore of the lagoon. He watched as the driver rode it up the slope to the street and parked beside a house. The man pocketed the key and started back the way he had come, avoiding eye contact all the while.

He could hardly have missed an Alaska State Trooper in uniform on the village’s only street. “Excuse me,” Active shouted.

The man accelerated his pace toward the lagoon, Active now recognizing him from his clothing as the man who had been loading his boat as they circled to land. Active trotted down the slope to where the man was untying the boat, another of the homemade plywood dories favored in the coastal villages. This one wasn’t painted, just covered with a clear varnish that glistened in the rain.

“Excuse me,” he said again. “I’m Trooper Nathan Active.”

The man cut him a sideways glance and tossed the rope into the boat without a word.

“Can you tell me where Ruthie Silver lives?”

The man was short and mahogany-faced with close-cropped white hair and dark glasses. He wore a raincoat, hip waders, and a baseball cap with “Native Pride” stitched on the crown. He gripped the prow of the boat and heaved, grunting loudly. It didn’t budge. Evidently the tide, such as it was at this latitude, had ebbed since he had beached the boat.

Active seized a gunwale and heaved too. The dory scraped backward and then was afloat. Active grabbed the prow to keep it from drifting away. The man climbed in.

“Ruthie Silver?” Active asked again, without much hope.

“Got a whalebone in front, all right,” the man said, pointing toward the school.

Active thought he remembered a bowhead vertebra beside the door of one of the houses near the school.

“Thanks,” Active said. He decided to press his luck. “There’s a blue dory swamped on the beach down there.” He pointed south. “You know whose it is?”

The man was at the back of the boat now, squeezing a rubber bulb in the fuel line to prime the engine. “Not me,” he said and yanked the starter cord. The outboard sputtered to life, and he backed the dory away from the beach, then threw the engine into forward and started across the lagoon to the mainland.

Active trudged through the gravel to the cluster of houses near the school and found the one with a whale vertebra out front. It looked like a huge, three-bladed outboard propeller carved from porous, cream-colored pumice.

He stepped through the
kunnichuk
to the inner door, knocked, waited, and knocked again, trying to imagine living on village time. Up till two or three in the morning, sleeping till noon. There were days when it sounded pretty nice. In the Arctic, it was dark all winter and light all summer. The diurnal cycle was pretty much an abstraction, another
naluaqmiut
invention of marginal utility.

Finally the door opened to reveal a gray-haired Inupiat woman wearing a tired, kindly face and the lightweight, flower-patterned, all-purpose parka known as an
atikluk
. She took in his uniform in silence.

A tiny white dog burst yapping into the room from somewhere in the back of the house and headed for Active’s ankles. The woman bent and scooped him up. “You, Jackie, you shut up now!” She cradled the animal to her chest until he calmed down. At last, he was only a silent bundle of white fur with two glaring, black BB eyes.

“
Arii
, this little can’t-grow,” the woman said. “He think he’s great big husky, all right.”

“I’m Trooper Nathan Active,” he said. “I’m looking for Ruthie Silver.”

“I’m Blanche Ahvakana,” she said. “That Ruthie, she’s still asleep I think. You don’t need to bother her. She’s too sad, all right.”

“It’s about her father.”

Her eyes narrowed as she studied his. “You find out who burn him up yet?”

“Maybe Ruthie could help us.”

The woman considered this for a moment, then lifted her eyebrows. “I’ll get her. You could come in.”

Active shut the door behind him as the woman shuffled through a doorway to the rear of the house. He was in a combination kitchen, living room, and dining room: gouged wooden dining table with mismatched chairs; an oil stove for heat and cooking; a sofa and easy chair, both old and brown; a big gray plastic trash can in a corner that probably held drinking water; clothes drying on a wooden rack behind the stove; a pair of jeans and a sewing kit on the table; a radio on a counter tuned to Kay-Chuck; a wall covered with family snapshots and a tapestry of the Last Supper.

The four quarters of a dressed-out caribou hung from eyebolts screwed into the ceiling joists. They were dripping blood onto a green tarp, but not much. The animal must have been cooled out before it was brought in for Blanche Ahvakana to cut up. A second caribou was in the process of dissection on another tarp on the floor. It had been gutted and the legs severed at the knees, but the skin was still on, except for a flap peeled back from the right foreleg. An
ulu
, the traditional pie-slice-shaped Inupiat woman’s knife, lay in the chest cavity.

He took a seat on the sofa. The door from the rear of the house opened and Active rose as Blanche Ahvakana led a sleepy-eyed young woman into the room. “This Ruthie,” she said. The older woman went to the stove and moved a teakettle onto a burner.

Ruthie Silver looked to be about twenty-five. Short black hair, freckles on her nose and cheekbones, a chin like her father’s, a squarish, pleasant face that looked as if it might have been merry before life got so complicated. She wore black sweatpants and the heavy-ribbed white top from a set of thermal underwear. Her pajamas, Active surmised.

“I’m Trooper Nathan Active,” he said.

“I know,” Ruthie said. “My
aana
told me. Did you find out who, who. . . .” Her grandmother passed her a handkerchief, and she wiped her eyes, then her nose.

Active shook his head. “Not yet.”

She dropped into the armchair, and he settled onto the sofa again.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “We thought you might be able to help us.”

“My dad and me, we were so mad at each other. We, we—”

“Too much alike,” Blanche growled from the stove. “Stubborn.”

“We didn’t get to say good-bye,” Ruthie said. Then, after a long pause: “You worked with him, ah?”

Active nodded. “He was a good man and a good policeman.”

“He ever talk about me?”

“Sure,” Active said. “He talked about how much he loved you and missed you, and he said he hoped that one day you two would get over your fight and be . . . like you were before.”

“Dad said that?” Ruthie sounded disbelieving, but not suspicious. More like a dream was coming true.

“Lots of times,” Active lied again, with not a murmur of protest from his conscience. In reality, Silver had never mentioned this daughter who had run off with an unsuitable suitor, but why not give her the comfort she needed? Besides making her feel better, it might increase the chances that she’d talk. “He said maybe he was too hard on Jae; maybe he could help Jae get on his feet after he was released.”

“Really?” Ruthie sobbed and snuffled and used the handkerchief. “I sure miss him.”

Active thought of asking which one, but decided against it. He cleared his throat and dived in. “We were wondering if your dad worked out at the Rec Center a lot.”

Ruthie thought it over, then squinted a no. “Not when I’m living there. I don’t think he ever went.”

“Do you have any idea why he would have gone the night it burned?”

She squinted again. “I hadn’t talked to him since last week.”

“How about Jae? Have you heard from him since he got out of prison? Is he back in Cape Goodwin yet?”

Ruthie’s face froze for a moment, then collapsed into tears again.

“She never hear nothing,” Blanche said, handing each of them a cup of tea. She knelt by the caribou on the floor and resumed separating the hide from the flesh with the
ulu
.

“He called me a few days before he was getting out,” Ruthie said from behind the handkerchief. “He said he’d be here in a couple weeks, but he never did come, and he hasn’t called, and now I don’t know what happened to him. That’s why I called Dad last week, to see if he would check on Jae, but he just hung up on me. Can you find Jae?”

Active considered. She was almost certainly too distraught to lie. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to push a little. “We heard Jae thought your father was the one who reported him and got him arrested?”

Ruthie lifted her eyebrows. “He’s almost as bad as Dad when he gets an idea in his head. I tried to tell him Dad didn’t do it, but at first he wouldn’t listen. Then, couple months ago when he called from prison, he said it’s all right, now he knows who turned him in, and it wasn’t Dad.”

“He changed his mind?”

Ruthie raised her eyebrows again.

“Did he say why? Or who it was?”

“No, he just say he found out the truth, and he’s sorry he thought it was Dad.”

Active was silent for a long moment. How much pain could he inflict? “Did you believe him?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Before he changed his mind, was he angry enough to want to hurt your father?”

Ruthie’s face froze again as she realized what this visit was about. She set her teacup on the floor with a loud rattle and some spillage. “You think Jae started that terrible fire?”

“We have to check all the possibilities.”

“No, he. . . .” Active watched as Ruthie searched for solid ground and couldn’t find a spot to put her foot. “But he said. . . .” She looked at her grandmother. “
Aana?
”

Blanche put down her
ulu
and looked at her granddaughter as if they were now separated by a huge polynya. “He’s one of them Koreans,” she said finally. “You know how they are. If he was going to do this thing, he wouldn’t want you to know.”

“Don’t tell Mom it was Jae,” Ruthie said. Then she buried her face in the handkerchief again.

Blanche came over and put an arm around Ruthie’s shoulders. “She’ll have to know sometime.” Then she turned to Active. “My daughter Jenny, that’s Ruthie’s mom, come up here yesterday. She’s at church right now.”

Active set his teacup on the floor and stood. “There’s one more thing. Somebody stole a boat from Roland Miller and drove it up here two nights ago, when we had the fire in Chukchi. It’s swamped on the beach down that way.” He pointed south. “Have you heard who brought it up?”

Blanche wrinkled her nose no. “We never hear nothing about that,” she said.

Was it possible that somebody could bring a boat to a hamlet like Cape Goodwin and not be noticed? People were nosy and gossipy everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the tiny Inupiat villages of the northwest coast.

The boat thief would have arrived at night, admittedly, and the boat had been beached out of sight and sound of the houses. Perhaps he could have walked into the village without being noticed, but then what?

“Any strangers show up in the village yesterday?”

Blanche squinted no again.

Active thought it over and suddenly felt stupid. The thief had to be somebody
from
Cape Goodwin. He’d simply landed, walked home, and gone to bed. This was starting to sound like a drunk story. Maybe the theft was more like an involuntary loan. The guy would probably sober up, dig the boat out of the sand, take it back to Chukchi, and have a good laugh about it with Roland Miller.

He looked at the two women, both watching him, waiting for him to go. “Anybody come home from Chukchi yesterday, maybe they’ve been drinking a little?”

Another pair of squints.

He left his card, asked them to get in touch if they heard from Jae, and took his leave.

Outside Blanche Ahvakana’s house, he put his baseball cap back on and pulled up the hood of his anorak against the rain and wind, both of which seemed to have picked up while he was inside.

“Nathan? You’re up here? Did they find out about, about . . . ?”

He turned and found himself facing Jenny Silver, who looked like an older and more Inupiat version of her daughter.

“Jenny, I’m so sorry about Jim. I—”

She moved toward him a little and, without thinking, he opened his arms. She stepped into them, and they huddled for a moment against the weather, like mother and son or sister and brother. “
Arii,
how am I going to live without him? We’re married twenty-eight years next month. He was taking me to Hawaii.”

“Is there anything I can do?” he murmured after a few seconds.

“You could catch whoever did it.”

“We’re trying.” He patted her back and relaxed his embrace.

She took the hint and stepped back, though she retained a grip on his elbow, as if unwilling to be without human contact for the moment. She peered into his eyes with a directness uncommon for any Inupiaq, particularly a woman. “You find out anything yet?”