Village of the Ghost Bears (18 page)

It was not until he spotted Grace’s four-wheeler in front of the house that he realized it was lunchtime and then some, and they were supposed to be having it together at home that day.

He found Grace at the kitchen table, holding a half-eaten tomato-and-cheese sandwich and frowning in concentration at her laptop. A Microsoft Word document was open on the screen. She closed it as he came in.

“That your journal?”

The journal had been Nelda’s idea. Even with the old tribal doctor, Grace had trouble talking about Jason Palmer and the circumstances of his death. So, Nelda had said, “You could write it, ah?” Nowadays, that meant on a computer, not in a spiral notebook. Grace took the laptop to her sessions with Nelda, but never showed Active the entries.

She nodded. “I’m sorry. I—it’s the Anchorage thing, you know.”

“It’s all right. I don’t need to read it. You’ll tell me what you want me to know.”

“And that’s really okay?”

He was seated beside her now, in front of the tuna sandwich and iced tea she’d set out for him. He nodded and leaned in for a kiss. “You talk to Nita? How’s she doing with it?”

Before she could answer, the door of the
kunnichuk
slammed, then the inner door creaked open and banged shut.

“Uncle Nathan! Are we moving to Anchorage?”

Active turned and opened his arms. Nita raced down the hallway, shrugged off her backpack, and dived into them, then took her usual seat on his left knee.

“Probably maybe,” he said. “Whattaya think?”

“You and Mom will both be there, right?”

Active lifted his eyebrows yes.

“Of course,” Grace said.

“
Arigaa.
But nobody else from Chukchi?”

“Sometimes Chukchi people might visit us when they come down,” Grace said.

Nita wrinkled her nose in rejection and dismay, then looked at Grace. “I don’t like them. Sometimes they always tease me a lot. They say mean things about you and my Aunt Ida, how she kill Uncle Jason.”

Grace’s face took on the stricken expression that appeared whenever this subject came up. “But you don’t believe them, right? You remember what I told you about what really happened?”

Nita raised her eyebrows. “He was showing her how to clean the gun, and he dropped it, and it went off and shot him, right?”

Grace relaxed slightly and nodded. “Well, if you don’t want to see any Chukchi people, we won’t.”

“Nobody will know us down there?”

“Nobody except Nathan’s
naluaqmiut
mom and dad. You like them, ah?”

Nita beamed. “Remember when we went to Chuck E. Cheese? Can we go there again?”

“Every Saturday,” Active said. “We’ll all go together.”

Grace rolled her eyes at this but smiled. “You hungry, sweetheart?”

Nita glanced at the third place set at the table, and her eyes lit up. “Macaroni and cheese!”

“Yes-a-roni,” Grace said. Nita giggled as she shoved in the first bite.

Over Nita’s head, Grace grimaced in mock embarrassment. The stuff was Nita’s favorite dish, one she’d eat three times a day if Grace would allow it. In fact, it was Grace’s favorite too, though she wouldn’t have admitted it to most people. “Comfort food for the soul,” she called it.

Active smiled and applied himself to the tuna sandwich. He still had a third of it left when Nita swallowed the final spoonful of her macaroni and cheese and downed the last of her apple juice.

She jumped out of her chair and raced for the stairs. “I’m going to play Nancy Drew till it’s time to go back.”

“Yeah, okay, fifteen minutes, then it’s off the computer and out the door, young lady!” Grace yelled as the girl clumped up to her room.

“Full speed as usual,” Active said.

“Absolutaroni.”

He smiled.

Grace was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Nita’s all right with the Anchorage thing, obviously. I guess I’m seriously outnumbered.”

“Two to one, looks like.” He paused, thinking about how to get into it.

She turned her amazing quicksilver eyes full on him. “What?”

“I talked to Nelda.”

“About the Anchorage thing?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“And?”

“She seems to think that, at some level, this house represents your father to you,” Active said. “When you’re here, running this place, you feel like you’re in control, you’re getting love and comfort from him the way you never did when he was alive.”

“We’ve talked about that,” Grace said. “Makes sense at an intellectual level, I know, but I can’t say that I actually feel it. It’s just an idea to me.”

“She said if I make you leave this house, it might be good for you. It might help you finally make that break with . . . with everything here.”

“But it might not?”

“If it’s too soon, you might leave me and come back to the house. Or even go back to Four Street.”

Grace fidgeted, picking at the latch on the front of the laptop. “I think about that sometimes.”

“Going back to Four Street?”

She nodded, more to herself than to him. “It’s comfortable there, in a way. You don’t have to try to do or be anything. Nobody expects anything. They don’t judge you. They just want to drink with you.”

She saw the look on his face and said hurriedly, “Not that I ever would, of course. With you and Nita in my life, I never would, not now.”

She paused, lost in thought again, her fingers busy with the latch.

“I’ll go if you make me,” she said at length.

“But if I have to make you, will it really—how will you—”

“I think that would be the way to do it, is all.” She was smiling, tears glistening at the corners of her quicksilver eyes.

When she spoke again, her tone was reflective, inward. “You know, I think I might be able to have sex in Anchorage. Maybe Nelda’s right. If I get out of here, maybe I’ll have a shot at being normal.”

“That’s how I interpret that lovely experience at One-Way Lake.”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I think I could have done it that night I tried to seduce you in Dutch Harbor, but I was your murder suspect at the time, and you turned me down. Remember that?”

“Don’t remind me.”

“Maybe you’ll get a second chance if I’m not in Chukchi.”

“We could all use a second chance.”

She raised her eyebrows in assent, then looked around the kitchen and down the hall. “Maybe I should burn it.”

“Burn what?”

She shrugged.

“You mean this place? You want to burn your own house?”

“Sure. To complete my recovery.”

“But . . . it’s probably against the law.”

“Why? I own it outright. There’s no mortgage. I could cancel the insurance first. Maybe it’s the only way I’ll ever be free of it all. Burn it, like he did my sister.”

“It might endanger the neighbors.” He pointed out the kitchen window at the house next door. It was rented by a couple who taught at the elementary school. “Like the Olsons there.”

She shrugged again. “Maybe I’ll talk to the fire department. They could set it on fire and put it out for practice. This is a pretty big lot and they could do it in the winter, when everything’s covered with snow. That should be safe for the neighbors, eh?”

He was still groping for a response when she spoke again. “Speaking of fires, you guys getting anywhere on the Rec Center case?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, almost shouting from relief at the change of subject. “I’m going to Barrow. We actually have a lead.”

Her eyes widened in interest, and he sketched the latest developments for her, the prospects seeming dimmer the farther he went. A village drunk from Cape Goodwin in the Barrow jail for bootlegging—that was their best lead, with second place going to a caribou hunter in camp on the Katonak River. “Pretty depressing, huh?” he said at the end.

She pondered for a few moments, shrugged, and smiled in sympathy. “Finish your lunch. You won’t solve anything on an empty stomach. I’m going to go up and kick Nita off the computer and pack you a bag for Barrow.”

She headed for the stairs, and he downed the rest of tuna sandwich without tasting it. She had just proposed setting her own house on fire. Was that her way of telling him that she—no, of course not. She had been in the sleeping bag with him at One-Way Lake when the Rec Center went up in flames. She couldn’t have been involved. Her father’s house was the only thing she wanted to burn down.

At first thought, it seemed bizarre and crazy, pure pathology. But maybe the idea made sense. Maybe it would be therapeutic. Grace’s knack for getting straight to the heart of a thing was a little spooky sometimes. Maybe he’d see what Nelda thought when he got back.

Grace came downstairs with Nita, handed him a bag, and kissed him good-bye. “Maybe I’ll book us a house-hunting trip to Anchorage for when you get back from Barrow.”

“I might be back tonight,” he said when he found his voice. “Or tomorrow at the latest.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m probably going to have to make a trip up to the Gray Wolf tomorrow. Can Nita stay with your mom?”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine—just check with her.”

Nita asked him for a ride, so they walked out to the Suburban together and she chattered about Chuck E. Cheese and the other delights of Anchorage as he drove her back to Chukchi Middle School and marveled at the speed with which Grace Palmer was capable of moving.

His amazement still hadn’t fully subsided an hour and a half later when he climbed into Cowboy Decker’s Cessna 185 with Alan Long and they lifted off into the clear, windy sky of an Arctic early afternoon. Cowboy pointed the plane northeast, toward the great stone spine of the Brooks Range. They climbed steadily as they passed the Sulana Hills across the bay from Chukchi and then the Katonak Flats. The departed storm had dusted the hilltops and upper ridges white, though the lower elevations still wore the dead, flat brown of late fall. The tundra ponds on the Flats were glazed over now, and pan ice was running in the Katonak River.

To their left, over the coastal hills marking the western edge of the Flats, Cape Goodwin was just visible as a row of tiny, fragile boxes on the rim of the Chukchi Sea. Farther out, a white line stretched along the horizon where the ice pack rode down from the north on the same wind that rocked the Cessna from time to time.

Cowboy leveled the plane and clicked on the intercom. “So, why are we going to Barrow?”

“Trooper business, Cowboy.” Active glanced into the rear seat to make sure Alan Long wouldn’t tell the pilot more than he needed to know. Long was asleep, head resting against one of the Cessna’s Plexiglas windows, mouth slightly open. It made his chipmunk face even more childlike.

“Who we bringing back?” Cowboy asked. “You have to tell me at least that much, right?”

Active thought it over and decided Cowboy had a point. “Pingo Kivalina. We hope.”

“Kivalina, huh? From Cape Goodwin, right?”

“Uh-huh. You know the guy?”

Cowboy was silent, adjusting the controls. The Cessna’s nose dropped slightly and the pilot nodded in satisfaction. “Don’t think I know Pingo, but the Kivalinas that I do know . . . well, they’re different. But so is everybody in Cape Goodwin. What did this one do?”

“Like I said, it’s Trooper business.”

“He your guy on the Rec Center fire?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Why else would the Troopers pay for a charter to Barrow? And what else are you guys working on these days?”

Active said nothing, and Cowboy didn’t ask any more questions. He was silent until they crossed the crest of the Brooks Range and the North Slope unfolded before them. Here in the uplands, the country was already asleep for winter, the terrain a titanium white, the lakes frozen over. Most of the streams were iced in, too, except for the occasional waterfall or stretch of rapids.

“Hungry country,” Active said.

Cowboy grunted through the intercom. “I’ll say. Hardly any place to land up here till the ice on the lakes gets thick enough.”

Active peered down at the terrain. Not trackless, exactly, with all the streams cutting through it, but it might as well have been. The peaks, ridges, and rivers formed an endlessly iterated pattern of arteries and capillaries, meaningless to his untrained eye. “So what would you do if this thing quit on us right now?”

Cowboy glanced at his instruments, then at the map on his knee. “Right now? We’d probably luck out. There’s an old oil company strip called Driftwood about three or four miles behind us on the Utukok River. We might be able to glide that far. Otherwise, you got your choice: set her down on the tundra and nose over, or take your chances on a lake and cross your fingers about the ice.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Let’s talk about something else,” Cowboy said. “That’s the Utukok over there.” He pointed under the left wing. “It runs north into the Arctic Ocean, and so do all the rivers west of it—the Kokolik, the Kukpowruk. But that one up ahead there, that’s the Colville. It runs a couple hundred miles east before it turns north and goes down into the Beaufort Sea.”

Cowboy dropped the right wing slightly and pointed at a brush-lined furrow threading a snowy valley below them.

Active grunted in acknowledgment but said nothing, letting Cowboy have his change of subject.

“You know about the redwoods, right?” Cowboy asked.

Now Active was slightly interested. “Redwoods?”

“Yup. There’s a place on the Colville where redwoods are coming right out of the bank and falling into the river.”

“Fossils, you mean.”

“No, redwoods. As in wood. They been frozen all this time, and they never fossilized. Or rotted.”

Active thought this over. It might be true. The Alaskan Arctic had had a much balmier climate in the dinosaur era. Redwoods could have grown here, and they could have been frozen when the climate changed.

On the other hand, Cowboy Decker’s critical thinking skills weren’t exactly robust. “Did you see this with your own eyes?”

“Absolutely,” Cowboy said. “Few years ago, I was flying support for a bunch of paleontologists who were in there studying those redwoods. I brought back a chunk and made it into a lamp.”

Active turned to stare at the pilot. “Did the paleontologists know this?”