Village of the Ghost Bears (15 page)

“What if we call Ronnie Barnes first, go over it with him one more time?” Active suggested. “See if there’s something we should be doing that we’re not.”

“Can’t hurt,” Carnaby said. He looked at his watch. “Ah, it’s too late now. We gotta get over to that thing at the school. Let’s keep our eyes open, see if we can pick up anything, then get a good night’s sleep and hit it again tomorrow, eh?”

They climbed into the Suburban. Active steered it out of Gage’s nearly abandoned subdivision, then along Church Street to Second Avenue and up Second to Chukchi High on its forest of pilings at the north end of the spit. The school’s gymnasium had been deemed the only place in town large enough for the crowd likely to be drawn to the memorial service for the Rec Center fire victims. When the three of them walked in, the gym was already packed and as steamy as a sauna from body heat.

They stood at the back and peered over heads and shoulders as best they could. There had to be six or seven hundred people in the bleachers and on the gym floor. Long gave a little cough of disgust and nudged Active. “Fat chance of spotting anything in this mob, huh?”

Active and Carnaby grunted in assent. It was impossible to see anything except the people onstage.

Carnaby sighed. “Alan, let’s you and me circulate through the crowd. Nathan, how about you hang around here, see who comes and goes?”

Active lifted his eyebrows and watched as the other two disappeared into the crowd. Then he studied the group on the stage at the end of the gym. He spotted Chukchi’s mayor and a middle-aged Inupiat he recognized as Hubert Skin, pastor of the Friends Church, the biggest denomination in town. Behind them stood a choir of women in blue robes, hymnals in hand. One of them was Lena Sundown.

The proceedings began with a prayer from the Reverend Skin, who expressed confidence that God would speedily receive into heaven the souls of the victims of the fire, regardless of past sinfulness or church membership, as the suddenness with which death had overtaken them had deprived them of any chance to repent or accept the Lord as their savior.

Then Skin led the choir in “I’ll Fly Away” and “Amazing Grace.” After that, he got to the real point of the event—inviting anyone so inclined to come up and offer a testimonial on behalf of a loved one who had died in the fire.

He lowered the microphone to the floor in front of the stage, and people began lining up. Lena Sundown left the choir and came down in her robe to speak first. She told the story about Augie shooting hoops in her living room and triggering the furnace, drawing a scattering of chuckles and “amens” from the crowd. A man in Carhartts and Sorels stepped up next. “I’m Benjamin Benson,” he said. “Lula Benson was my wife thirty-nine years before this fire. We had good times, and we had bad times, but she loved me, and I loved her. Now I know she’s with the Lord, but I miss her anyway and I hope she’s hearing me tonight. That’s all I have to say. Thank you very much.”

And so it went for an hour, then two. Active hovered near the entrance as instructed, scanning the late arrivals, observing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, and wishing he was home with Grace and Nita, anywhere but here.

Finally, the last person in line, an
aana
in a calico
atikluk,
took the microphone and spoke in Inupiaq for a long time, her old, whispery voice barely audible over the bustle of the crowd and an occasional wail from a baby nestled in the back of its mother’s parka. Active caught the word “Rachel” and concluded that the
aana
was part of the Akootchuk family. The crowd grew quieter as she went on. Men cleared their throats, and women pulled out tissues and dabbed at their eyes and blew their noses.

The
aana
stopped and shuffled away from the microphone, and the crowd fell silent for a few moments. Then, somewhere on the floor, a woman began to sob.

Skin looked around the room and, when no one else moved toward the microphone, pulled it back onstage. He glanced at the mayor, who nodded and came forward.

The mayor of Chukchi was a forty-something Inupiaq named Everett Williams. He had dark skin and curly hair and was said to be descended from an African-American crewman on a long-ago whaling ship. He was so popular that he was mayor not only of the city of Chukchi, but of the new regional government known as the Aurora Borough as well.

Williams was also, as he reminded the crowd, the uncle of Cammie Frankson, the Rec Center clerk who had died in the fire, apparently after trying to save the men trapped in the locker room. “A lot of our family’s hopes died with Cammie that night,” Williams said. Then he spoke for a few seconds in Inupiaq. Active caught enough to know that he was repeating his remarks in the only language many of the elders in the room could understand.

“Cammie was a good girl. She didn’t drink or run around, she helped her mom with the other kids at home, she had her job at the Rec Center, and she was going to college,” Williams continued, translating into Inupiaq as he went.

“We’re all shocked by what happened because we never had something like this in Chukchi before. But we who are left behind here, we have to go on and make the best of life that we can, because we never know when our day will come, like Cammie didn’t know—” Williams coughed, pulled out a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and went on. “—didn’t know when she went to work the other day that she wouldn’t be going home again. We are all facing in that direction, and that same day is ahead of every one of us.”

The big room was silent again. Williams stepped away from the microphone and Skin came up to it, presumably to end the service with a prayer.

But a man’s voice called out from the steaming anonymity of the gym floor: “I see the cops are in here tonight, sneaking around among us. How about they get up there and tell us why they haven’t caught anybody yet?”

A wordless rumble of assent rose from the crowd like river ice going out.

“Well, that’s not the purpose of this gathering,” Skin said. “We’re here—”

“Yeah, get ’em up here!” a different male voice called out. The rumble grew louder.

“They should talk to us!” a woman yelled.

Skin looked uncertainly at Williams, who returned to the microphone, looking as uneasy as Skin while the calls from the floor continued to build.

“Well, maybe Captain Carnaby of the Alaska State Troopers could come up here and say a few words,” Williams said. “I see him right over there.” He pointed to where, even from the back, Active could see Carnaby towering over the crowd.

Carnaby made his way to the stage and came to the microphone, looking off-balance and unprepared. He recapped what little had already been made public about the fire and extended his condolences to the families of the victims. “We have the Trooper arson specialist from Fairbanks working on it, and we’re following up all the leads that come in, and if it turns out this was arson, you can be sure we’ll find and arrest the person responsible.”

“You’re getting nowhere,” a man shouted from the floor.

“You should bring in the FBI,” a woman joined in. “If it was a bunch of white people at Anchorage that burned up, the FBI would be taking the case, all right.”

The mayor raised his hands, and the rumble subsided slightly. Williams leaned toward the microphone. “The Troopers and our city police are doing all they can,” he said. “We all know that. I see Alan Long out in the crowd from our city force, and there in the back is Trooper Nathan Active. They’re Inupiat, like most of us. And many of the victims in the Rec Center fire were white. We all know that. So instead of dividing ourselves up tonight, let’s try and come together until Chukchi is through this and life can start to get back to normal again. Captain Carnaby, did you have anything more to say?”

The rumble grew again, with individual voices rising above the din now and again to complain about the lack of progress on the case and the stupidity and indolence of the investigators. Carnaby stood silently at parade rest, shoulders squared, hands locked behind him, a neutral expression on his face, eyes on the crowd, waiting. After a minute, perhaps realizing he looked too military for the situation, he took off his hat, shifted his weight to one hip, tilted his head to the side, and softened his expression. Finally the crowd quieted again.

“Let me just repeat that we do have some good, solid leads,” Carnaby said. “Of course I can’t go into detail about them, but I’m confident we’ll get to the bottom of this soon, especially if you can help us. If you have information that might help, please let us know about it. Anything at all, like if you saw someone hanging around the Rec Center about the time of the fire, or if someone said something funny, or if someone is acting funny since the fire.”

The crowd rumbled again, but the tone was different, more thoughtful now.

“You can call our anonymous tip line if you don’t want your name known,” Carnaby went on.

Williams stepped up to the microphone. “And I’m sure most of you have heard the Lions Club and the Fire Department have a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for the fire,” he said.

Now the rumble was just a murmur as heads nodded in the crowd.

Carnaby gave the tip line number twice, then moved back from the microphone with a look of relief.

Active feared the mayor would call him up next, or perhaps Alan Long as acting police chief. But Williams evidently figured enough had been said, because he asked Skin to give a closing prayer.

Active wanted to slip away while everyone’s heads were bowed, but decided he should stay on post as people left the gym. Who could say when the thought of five thousand dollars for a boat or snowmachine might undermine family or romantic loyalties long enough for someone to whisper in the ear of law enforcement?

CHAPTER TEN

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Active braked to a halt at the little cabin on Second Street where Nelda Qivits lived and checked his coat to be sure the foil packet was still there.

Satisfied, he climbed out of the Suburban and walked to the door. Like the rest of the place, the door might once have been brown, but was now pretty well paint-free. But a lot of old buildings in Chukchi were paint-free, and it didn’t seem to hurt them much. Being deep-frozen eight or nine months a year probably offered as much protection from the west wind and driving snow as anything the petrochemical industry could come up with.

He let himself into Nelda’s
kunnichuk
and knocked on the door to the cabin proper.

“Who’s that?” Nelda croaked from inside.

Active heard a TV in the background. Nelda was probably in her easy chair, as usual. He nudged the inner door open. “It’s me, Nathan.”

“
Naluaqmiiyaaq!
Good to see you!” She fumbled in the folds of her dress, came up with a remote, and clicked off an ancient
Dukes of Hazzard
rerun on the state’s bush television channel.

“Good to see you too,
atchak.
Look what I brought you.”

Her eyes lit up at the sight of the packet. “You found
iq’mik
again? Where you get it this time?”

“One of our Troopers went to Bethel a few days ago. I asked him to look in the store there.”

“Arigaa!
Long time since I had
iq’mik
, all right.” She struggled up from the chair, Active checking the impulse to extend an arm. He knew from long experience that she would reject, with profanity, any such foolhardy offer.

“I’ll make us some sourdock tea,” she said, hobbling toward the kitchen. “And I gotta get some water for my
iq’mik
.”

Iq’mik
was a noxious chew made by mixing cigarette tobacco with the ashes of burnt tree fungus. It was acutely unhealthful and apparently about as addictive as heroin. Though nearly unheard-of around Chukchi, it was wildly popular in the Bethel area, where, Active knew, a much younger Nelda Qivits had spent several years as a cook in a government hospital. He felt only mildly guilty for feeding her habit. For one thing, he could only get it a couple of times a year. How much of an addiction could that cause? For another, Nelda was well past eighty, as best he could determine. If
iq’mik
hadn’t done her in yet, what were the chances it would carry her off to the Inupiat hereafter before some more natural process did so?

In any event, she was a doctor of sorts—a tribal doctor, actually—and she deserved to be paid. Sometimes he left money, which she seemed to resent. When he happened to come into possession of fish or game, he’d leave some of that, which she liked a great deal. But nothing made her happier than an ounce or two of
iq’mik
. Who was he to deny an old lady her pleasures?

He followed her into the kitchen, where she was dipping a spoon into a bowl of water and dribbling a few drops at a time into the
iq’mik
. She stirred the stuff around in the foil, rolled a pinch between thumb and forefinger in appraisal for a few seconds, then tucked it into her cheek with an expression of anticipatory bliss. “
Arigaa
,” she said again. “You want some?”

“No, thanks,” he said. “I, ah—”

“You think you’ll puke it up like before, ah?” She chuckled and dropped some sourdock root into a teakettle, lowered it into the sink, and turned on the faucet.

“I wouldn’t want to mess up your couch again, no. I should probably stick to the sourdock.” He nodded toward the kettle.

“
Naluaqmiiyaaq.
” She turned off the faucet and set the kettle on a burner.

They made small talk for a few minutes, primarily about the delayed onset of winter and the likelihood that it was caused by, in Nelda’s phrasing, “that global warning, what them
naluaqmiuts
call it.”

Finally the sourdock tea was ready. Nelda poured out two cups, and Active took a swallow from his. It was vile and bitter, though nothing compared to
iq’mik
. Nelda claimed sourdock could cure nearly anything. Active didn’t know if it could or not. It was true that he never seemed to get sick now that he drank it regularly.

Nelda, meanwhile, was gulping hers with gusto as she made her way back to the easy chair. He wondered how she was getting the sourdock past the
iq’mik
in her cheek. Chewers like Nelda must have solved the problem long ago, he concluded.

He perched on the couch, near the stain from his experiment with
iq’mik
, and sipped a little more sourdock as Nelda’s eyes played over him. He had learned there was no use saying anything before Nelda finished her intake exam. It seemed to be her equivalent of a
naluaqmiu
doctor checking your temperature and blood pressure, even if you came in for a sprained ankle.

Finally her eyes settled on his. “Grace tell me you want to take her and Nita to Anchorage.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “The Troopers want to send me there.”

“What I heard, you’re the one want it.”

He lifted his eyebrows again, trying to decide if he’d been caught in a lie. “I’d be getting a promotion in the Troopers.”

“You’re still too much
naluaqmiiyaaq
for Chukchi, ah?” She sighed and smiled in a familiar way. He had come to recognize this smile as indicating that Nelda Qivits, with the perspective of eighty-something years of life, was resigning herself to the fact that human nature was not to be changed, only abided.

“How do you think they’ll do down there?” he asked. Grace and Nita both visited Nelda for the Inupiat version of counseling, and she possessed insights into their souls that astonished him. Better yet, unlike a white counselor, she would discuss these insights with him.

“That little Nita, she’ll probably be okay anywhere if Grace is around, and you.”

He lifted his eyebrows again. “And Grace?”

Nelda thought it over for a while. Then she said, “No
quiyuk
yet?”

He shook his head. “Not exactly.”

Nelda’s wise old eyes burned into him. “Ah?”

His face turned hot, and he was sure he was blushing. “She, ah, she used her hands on me at One-Way Lake.”

“First time?”

He raised his eyebrows yes. “I think it was because she wasn’t in her father’s house.”

“She let you do anything for her?”

He squinted no. “She still freezes up when I touch her . . . her, anywhere below the neck.”

“
Arii
, that Gracie.” There was another long silence. Nelda looked into her sourdock, took a swallow, then did something with her mouth that puzzled Active until he realized she was shifting the
iq’mik
from one cheek to the other. “You know why she still want to live in that house, after what happen?”

He wrinkled his nose in negation and dismay. It was a painful subject. “I’ve never understood it. And she’s never explained it to me.”

“That’s because she never understand it herself.”

He waited out another long silence, knowing they were inevitable in any conversation with an elderly Inupiaq. At last he could stand it no longer. “And you do?”

She lifted her eyebrows yes. “That house, it’s kind of like her daddy to her. Long as she’s there, it’s like he’s still around.”

“But why would she want that, after what he—after she. . . .”

“Ah-hah,” Nelda said. “After he do what he do to her when she’s little girl, then she go on Four Street in Anchorage all that time what they call her Amazing Grace, then she come back and try kill him, but her mother do it first?”

Nelda phrased it as a question, though she knew Grace Palmer’s history as well as he did. As usual, the old lady didn’t flinch from looking at things straight on. The question she was really asking was, “This is what you can’t bring yourself to say?”

He nodded, feeling numb.

“Ah-hah,” Nelda said again. “A girl need her daddy. Down deep inside, she know he should take care of her. That’s his job, and that’s what she need, no matter what. If he don’t, she’ll think it’s something wrong with her; maybe she’ll never get over it. Boyfriend rape her, uncle rape her, probably she’ll be okay someday maybe. But if it’s her father, maybe not.”

She peered intently at him with a questioning look: did he understand?

“But I don’t—”

She held up a finger to stop him.

“If she’s got his house, if she’s safe and warm, maybe if you’re there too, then in her mind it’s kinda like she can make her daddy do right after all this time. She’s making him take care of her like he should, even if he never do that when she’s little girl.”

She sipped the sourdock, gazing at him over the rim of the cup.

He gazed back in his usual amazement at the things she came up with. What Nelda said sounded right. He seemed to remember reading somewhere that the human psyche could rebuild itself after most forms of emotional trauma. But father–daughter incest was the hardest. “I have to get her out of there.”

Nelda shrugged. “If she get ready to leave on her own, that’ll be good. It’ll mean she got better from what her father did.”

“And if she’s not ready?”

“If you make her leave, maybe it’s good for her, she’ll get over him faster. But maybe not too. She might leave Anchorage, come back up here to that house. Or maybe she’ll go back on Four Street again. It’s full of girls like her, what I hear.”

He took a swallow of sourdock, wishing real life were more like police work. In police work, you investigated a case and closed it. Or, if you couldn’t close it, it cooled off and you forgot about it eventually. But in life, no issue could ever be completely closed, or completely forgotten. One way or another, it would come up again and again.

“You go to that meeting at the school last night?” Nelda asked.

“Mm-mm. It was really crowded in the gym.”

“Ah-hah. I listen on Kay-Chuck, all right. So sad about all them people burn up, ah?”

He lifted his eyebrows.

Nelda was silent for a long time, sipping sourdock and staring into the blank face of the television. “You never catch ’im, things will be bad around Chukchi for long time. Maybe never get better again.”

It was said in a way that didn’t require a response. He sighed, set his cup on the floor, and stood up.

“Who you fellas think it was?”

“You know I can’t talk about that. It’s Trooper business.”

“Ah-hah. But you’ll catch ’im soon, whoever start that fire?”

“We’re doing everything we can,” he said, embarrassed by the fatuity of the officialese. He took his leave from the old lady. As he closed the outer door of the
kunnichuk,
he heard the television click back on, this time to what sounded like an iPod commercial. What could Nelda Qivits possibly imagine an iPod to be?

It was almost nine by the time he got to work, shucked his coat, checked his e-mail and voice mail, and—Diet Pepsi in hand—joined Carnaby and Long in the captain’s office.

“That deal at the high school was brutal,” a red-eyed and slightly groggy-looking Carnaby was saying as Active slid into a chair. “I felt like a deer in the headlights.”

“No joke,” Long put in. “I’m just glad the mayor didn’t call me up there. As it was, I couldn’t get to sleep until three or four.”

“I guess people need to vent,” Active said. “Did you notice anything from the stage?”

“Nothing but grief,” Carnaby said. “More grief than I, I. . . .” Carnaby shook his head and gulped his coffee until the cup was half-empty. “Times like this, I remember why I got into the business, and I wish I hadn’t.”

Long just lifted his eyebrows.

Active nodded as if he felt the same way. He didn’t, not yet, but the Rec Center fire was a start.

“How about you guys?” Carnaby asked. “Spot anything from the floor, Alan? Or by the door, Nathan?”

Neither of them spoke.

“Nothing?” Carnaby said. “All right, then, who’s gonna do this?”

It took a moment for Active to remember their reason for gathering was to call Ronnie Barnes and go over the evidence from the fire scene again.

“I brought Barnes’s card.” Active patted his shirt pocket. “I guess I could.”

“Feels kind of pathetic,” Long said. “Like we’re panhandling for a break in the case.”

Carnaby frowned. “Alan, the first thing that pops into your head shouldn’t necessarily be the first thing that pops out of your mouth.”

“Sorry, Captain.” Long hid his face by taking a slow pull at his coffee cup.

“Especially when everybody else is thinking the same thing,” Active said.

Carnaby’s frown deepened, and he glared at each of them in turn. “I don’t know which one of you two is worse.” He sighed. “Both, I guess.”

He looked at Active again. “All right, Nathan. You call him. Alan and I will just listen unless we think of something to say.” He turned his glare on Long. “Something helpful and intelligent, right, Alan?”

Long lifted his eyebrows.

Active pulled out Barnes’s card and had laid it on the desk when Evelyn O’Brien rapped on the captain’s door and stuck her head in. The three of them relaxed slightly at the reprieve.

“Call for Nathan.”

“Take a number,” Carnaby said. “He can call them back.”

“It’s the crime lab in Anchorage,” O’Brien said. “They’ve got an I.D. on the body we sent down there.”

The three men looked at each other. “What body?” Carnaby said.

Several seconds of silence passed before it dawned on Active. “Maybe it’s No-Way. I completely forgot about him.”

“No-Way?” Carnaby asked. “Oh, the guy from One-Way Lake. Really?”

Active counted backward in his head. “But we only sent him down there, what, two days ago? The crime lab couldn’t have worked him already, could they? ”

“Nah,” Carnaby said. “It normally takes them at least a week to get around to one of our bodies. Look, you better go straighten them out. They must have switched the toe tags or something.”

Active trudged across the reception area to his own office, picked up the phone, and punched the line that was blinking. “Active here,” he said.

“John Park,” said a faintly Asian voice. “From the state crime lab?”