Village of the Ghost Bears (11 page)

He shrugged helplessly and squinted a no. “We’re just getting started, but. . . .” He paused, momentarily frozen by the desperation in her eyes. “But we’re wondering if Jae Hyo Lee could have done it. We understand he blamed Jim for—”

“Not any more. He tell Ruthie he found out it was somebody else.”

“But he might lie if he was planning to do this.”

Jenny Silver became still, then lurched back as if he had shoved her. He put out a hand and caught her shoulder. “You think he would—you never tell this to Ruthie, did you?”

“I’m sorry. I—”

“I have to go in there.” She pulled her shoulder free and turned toward the house.

“Jenny, wait, I—there’s one more thing.”

She faced him again. “Ah-hah?”

“Did Jim go to the Rec Center a lot?”

“He never go. Only that one night.”

“Did he say why?”

She squinted. “Just that he have to talk to somebody up there.”

“He didn’t say who? Or why?”

Another squint. “He’ll never say much about anything he’s working on, until it’s finished.”

She turned and hurried through the door of her mother’s house.

Active started past the school toward the water, turning his face a little to the side to keep the weather from blowing into his hood.

At the beach, he swung left and headed for the blue dory, just visible through the mist, perhaps three hundred yards away. He descended the gravel slope to the packed sand near the water, where the walking was better, and trudged along, seagulls over the tide line shrieking at the intrusion, little breakers washing onto the beach with a sound like a long sigh of exhaustion.

Thanks to the ebbing of the tide, the dory was now just above the water line, the waves no longer coming over the transom. First he studied the tracks leading from the dory to the upper beach. Rain and wind had done their work, leaving only faint depressions in the sand that offered no clue as to what kind of footgear had made them.

Then he turned to the dory itself. An empty green jerry jug floated on the water that had washed into the boat earlier, as did a red-and-white Monarch vodka bottle, which he pocketed, and a red steel gas tank, still connected to the Johnson outboard by a black rubber hose with a squeeze-bulb primer in the middle. “R. Miller—Chukchi” was hand-lettered in black paint on the tank and on the jerry jug. A spare propeller lay mostly buried in the sand flushed in by the surf. A red plastic toolbox was buried up to its lid, also labeled “R. Miller.” He dug it out and, inside, found two screwdrivers, four small wrenches, vise grips, and a pair of spark plugs.

The upper half of a gallon plastic jug, the mouth still capped, was tied to a gunwale. It was the Chukchi version of a bailer, used to clear the boat of water that came in via rain, spray, or the odd wave while under way. He used it to attack the sand in the bottom of the boat but quickly discovered the plastic was too soft. He dropped the bailer and combed through the sand with his fingers, but came up with nothing else.

He stepped out of the dory and looked up the beach toward the village. It would be a couple of hours till Cowboy showed up, maybe more. What to do? Every village had at least one small store. He’d find it, buy something to eat, maybe a sudoku book too, and figure out a place to wait.

He remembered from his telephone conversations with the Village Public Safety Officer that the man worked out of the same building that housed the health clinic and the city clerk’s office. He could hole up there. Wherever he was in Cape Goodwin, he’d certainly hear when Cowboy Decker buzzed the village in his Super Cub.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“THINK THEY WERE TELLING the truth?” Carnaby asked. They were gathered in the Trooper captain’s office for what threatened to become a standing afternoon meeting on the lack of progress on the Rec Center fire.

Active nodded. “Struck me that way. I don’t think they’ve seen or heard from Jae since he called Ruthie before he got out.”

“And he told Ruthie he’d changed his mind about Jim Silver turning him in? What do you make of that?”

Long broke in. “Like the grandmother said, of course he’s going to tell them that if he’s planning this thing. Otherwise they’re gonna know he did it.”

“And Jim didn’t tell Jenny anything except he was going to the Rec Center to see somebody?” Carnaby asked. “Nothing about Jae Hyo Lee?”

Active shook his head.

Carnaby swiveled his chair to gaze out a window. Across the lagoon and the rolling folds of tundra, a wet, gray night was gathering in the east. “So where the hell is Jae Hyo Lee?” He swiveled back and looked at Alan Long. “Alan? You’re the only one here who’s ever met him.”

Long shrugged. “Like I said, he’s really good out in the country. He could be anywhere by now if he has a boat and travels at night.”

“That reminds me.” Active looked at Long. “I found your stolen dory. It’s swamped a few hundred yards down the beach from Cape Goodwin.”

“No joke? The village, or the Cape itself?”

“The village. Looks like the guy parked it there and hiked into town. I couldn’t find out who he was, but I found this sloshing around inside it.” He pulled the vodka bottle from his anorak and held it up.

Long looked disgusted. “You know, it’s hard enough getting a boat up that coast and around the Cape even if you’re sober and it’s daylight. And some drunk does it by night. I’ll let Roland know he’ll have to go up there and get it.”

“All right,” Carnaby said. “What else we got?” He studied a sheaf of notes on his blotter. “Let’s see, Dickie Nelson knocked on doors around the Rec Center. None of the neighbors saw anything till they heard the sirens and looked out their windows.”

The other two nodded.

“And how was your day, Alan?”

“Not a lot better,” Long said. “I confirmed that none of our officers have heard anything about Jae being in town, and I checked with the ER at the hospital. No burn cases the night or morning of the fire. But we think we’ve got an I.D. on the owner of the last four-wheeler. The Honda dealer says he sold it to a guy named—” Long paused and flipped through a notebook. “—Tom Gage?”

Carnaby and Active looked at each other and shook their heads.

Long studied the notebook. “I didn’t know him either, but the name sounds kinda familiar. The dealer says Gage teaches aviation technology at the Tech Center. Or did teach it. White guy.”

“Any family?” Carnaby asked.

Long grimaced. “I went to his house back on the lagoon. Nobody home, small place, all right, looks like maybe he’s the only one that lives there. The Honda guy thinks he remembers Gage was in the middle of getting divorced when he bought the four-wheeler about a year ago, and the ex-wife-to-be had already gone back Outside.”

“Any sign of a girlfriend?” Active asked.

“I don’t know,” Long said. “Place didn’t look very feminine from what I could see through the window. No vehicles around except for a pickup on jacks with the rear wheels off and the brakes pulled apart.”

“Should we let the ex-wife know?” Active asked. “The Tech Center would probably have her on file as the next of kin.”

Carnaby thought for a moment. “Let it ride for now. Put a message on Kay-Chuck for Gage to contact us. If we don’t hear from him in a day or two, then we can let his family know he probably died in the fire.”

“All right,” Long said, writing in his notebook.

“Where do we go from here?” Carnaby asked.

Active chewed his lip for a moment. “If Jae did start this fire, seems like he would have to have been planning it for a while. Maybe he talked to somebody about it. He was shooting off his mouth before he went away, right, Alan?”

Long raised his eyebrows yes.

“So, we should talk to the prison in Oregon,” Active said. “Find out about his mail and visitors and phone calls, huh? See if the prison will interview his cellmate for us? You ask the prison about that, Alan?”

Long looked chagrined. “I’ve been busy. I was in a hurry.”

Carnaby sighed. “Take care of it, will you, Nathan?”

Active looked at his watch. It was almost five-thirty and in Oregon it was an hour later. “Sure, first thing tomorrow.”

“What else we got on our list?”

Active spoke. “Jae blamed Chief Silver for getting him busted, but Jim told Alan he didn’t do it. And Jae ended up telling his girlfriend the same thing. What if he was leveling with Ruthie? What if the chief wasn’t the target at all?”

Carnaby frowned skeptically. “And Jim just had the bad luck to be in the Rec Center the night Jae made his move on the real snitch?”

“Everybody there had the same bad luck, except the snitch,” Active said.

“Good point,” Carnaby said. “All right, Alan, you get on that. See if the Feds will tell us who their source was when they busted Jae.”

Long pulled himself up and looked a little more official. “Absolutely, Captain. First thing tomorrow.”

After taking his leave, Active drove the Suburban to his birth mother’s house.

When he was born, Martha Active had been only fifteen, interested mainly in partying and sleeping around. So she had turned him over to two of her teachers at Chukchi High. Officially, his adoption by Ed and Carmen Wilhite had been
naluaqmiut
-style, complete with lawyers, court proceedings, and documents on long paper. In practice, it had operated more like a village adoption, even after the Wilhites moved to Anchorage. They let him keep his mother’s last name, and he saw her from time to time when she came to the city. She sent him Christmas and birthday presents, and Carmen made him send her thank-you notes.

In time, Martha had tired of strange beds and stranger men. She had gotten her GED, then a job as a teacher’s aide at Chukchi High. The Wilhites had taken him to Chukchi for a visit about then, but for the entire visit he had refused to speak to the woman who had sent him away.

Martha had finally married, about the time he was old enough for Little League. The groom was one Leroy Johnson, an electronics technician at the nearby Air Force radar site that had peered across the Chukchi Sea for Russian bombers and missiles until the Cold War ended. Two years after the wedding, the Wilhites had reported to a sullen Nathan that he had a half-brother in Chukchi, but he hadn’t set foot in the village again until the Troopers, with the ancient and faceless perversity of bureaucracies everywhere, posted him to Chukchi for his first assignment.

And now Martha and Leroy were solidly ensconced in Chukchi’s version of married, middle-class comfort. He delivered stove oil for the local Chevron dealer and hunted and fished more than a lot of Inupiat, while she headed the teacher-aide program at Chukchi High. They lived in a modern house on a quiet back street. Leroy bought each of them a new snowmachine every year, plus a new Ford Ranger every other year, and maintained a shifting population of boats and four-wheelers.

Active parked the Suburban in front of the house, went past a pair of four-wheelers into the
kunnichuk
, knocked on the inner door, and braced himself for the discussion that lay ahead.

Martha, he knew, held the view that only one final detail needed nailing down to make her life perfect: persuading her older son to give up his ambition of a transfer to Anchorage and settle down in Chukchi with a suitable wife, one who was smart, educated, and not too much of a village girl, but nonetheless willing to make a home, a life, and a family right here on the shores of the Chukchi Sea.

And now—the inner door swung open to reveal Sonny Johnson, gym bag in hand and dressed for the rain that seemed to be increasing as the wind diminished. He slipped off the earphones of an iPod and said, “Yo, Nathan! Whaddup?”

Sonny, like every teenage male Active had encountered in the past few years, was into hip-hop music. “Not much, man, whaddup with you?” Active responded.

Active could tell from his half-brother’s look that it hadn’t come out quite right, and he vowed never to try to talk like a teenager again. Better to slide into the irrelevance of adulthood in dignified silence.

Sonny, however, was an exceptionally polite teenager and ignored Active’s gaffe after that one brief flash of scorn. “Not much, dog, not much. I’m on my way to the gym. City League basketball starts tonight.”

Then the boy’s face clouded and he forgot his hip-hop for a moment. “That’s terrible about Augie and everybody at the Rec Center, ah? You guys find out who did it?”

Active shook his head. “We’re not completely sure anybody did it. The fire may have been accidental.”

“I hope so,” Sonny said. “Augie was our coach in basketball camp this summer. He was sure good at it. I’d hate to think anybody around here would do something like that.”

“Me too,” Active said. “I’ve got to talk to Martha, then maybe I’ll come up and watch the game. Who you playing?”

“Nuliakuk,” Sonny answered with a feral expression.

“You’ll crush ’em,” Active said.

“Word to that,” Sonny said with a grin. “They’re just a bunch of village boys.”

As the teenager slipped around him and left the
kunnichuk,
Active pondered the phrase:
Word to that
. It signified emphatic agreement, clearly, but how could a simple, everyday noun like “word” have taken on such a load of meaning? Active shook his head and pushed open the inner door to the house.

“Hi, Sweetie!” Martha said, hurrying to him for a hug. “Good to see you!”

As usual after not seeing her for a few days, he was struck by her youthfulness. She was in her mid-forties, but she carried it well. No middle-age fat, black hair still glossy except for the first hint of gull-wings at the temples, smooth-faced except for the laugh lines around her mouth and sparkling black eyes.

“Hello,
aaka
, it’s good to see you.”

She frowned. “Isn’t it terrible about the Rec Center? You figure out who did it?”

He gave her the same non-answer he had given Sonny, then changed the subject. “What’s that I smell?”

She led him into the kitchen and lifted the lid from a pot on the stove. “Moose stew. Didn’t I tell you Leroy got one?”

Active tried to remember. “Probably.”

“Oh, it was lotta trouble. It ran into a lake after he shot it. He and Sonny had a terrible time getting it out. Leroy will tell you all about it when he gets back from caribou hunting.”

“I can’t wait.”

Martha shook her head. “Same old smart-mouth, ah?” She filled two bowls from the stewpot and set them on the table, along with a box of the CD-size saltines known as pilot bread. “How you going to be a real Eskimo if you don’t hunt?”

Active realized the moment had come, but he didn’t quite have the nerve to seize it. Instead, he filled his mouth with stew and pilot bread, eyes on the bowl.

Martha, of course, spotted the stall instantly. “What? You can’t look at me?”

He chewed slowly, stretching it out.

“Whatever you don’t want to tell your mother, that’s what she needs to hear.”

He met her eyes, finally. “I got my transfer. I’ll be moving to Anchorage around Christmas, probably.”

Martha’s spoon halted halfway to her mouth and hovered there. “No,” she said.

“What?”

“No. You can’t go.”

Active had never seen her look so upset. “But I. . . .” He filled his mouth with stew to gain time. What to do next?

She put down her spoon and stared at a spot in a far corner of the room. “But what about Gracie and Nita and . . . and everything?”

“And everything,” Active understood, meant “and what about me?”

“I don’t know yet about Grace and Nita. Grace is a little scared about it, but I need to get her out of here.”

“Maybe if you just got her out of that house.”

“Maybe. But I don’t want to stay in Chukchi all my life. Look at it.”

She was silent, eyes liquid and dark. “It’s not so bad if you’re used to it,” she said eventually. “I thought you were getting to like it.”

He shrugged. “A little bit, maybe. Sometimes. But I have to make my way in the Troopers.”

“You want to get away from me, ah?”

“Of course not. I’ll come back for—”

“Because I gave you away, ah?”

“
Aaka
, please. Don’t say that again. You know I—”

“Well, it seemed like the right thing at the time. I couldn’t take care of any baby. I was too young and
kinnaq
, like any girl that’s fifteen.”

“I know,
Aaka
, and—”

“And weren’t Ed and Carmen

“And weren’t Ed and Carmen good to you?”

“Of course they were.” This was like a catechism now, a ritual exchange they had to reprise every few months. His role was to give the right answers and hold his resentment in check, so he no longer added “but not like real parents” to the obligatory praise of the Wilhites’ child-rearing abilities.

“Well, then, why?”

“
Aaka
, Anchorage is my home. It’s where I grew up.” He braced himself, belatedly realizing how Martha was likely to take this.

She blinked rapidly for a few seconds, then took a spoonful of the moose stew. “You can’t go away again,” she said. “It’s bad when I let them take you when you’re baby, it’s bad when you come visit me when you’re little boy, and . . . no, you can’t go again.”

“You can come down and visit us.”

“No.”

“I’ll come up and visit you, then.”

“You can’t go.”

They both fell silent. Martha dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. After a time, she blew her nose into the napkin and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans.

“Gracie doesn’t have any women still alive in her family, ah?”

“Not that I know of.” Where was this going?

“Maybe when you guys have baby, she’ll need me to come down, help her out, ah?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said, trying not to think of how many bridges he and Grace would have to cross to reach that point. Then he saw the effect of his words on his mother. “But, when the time comes, I’m sure Grace would like that.”