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Back onboard Dreamspeaker, Dan went up to the wheelhouse and called Markleson.
“You find Jimmy yet?”
“No,” Markleson answered. “It’s like he disappeared into a black hole. You?”
“Nothing. I showed his picture to the people that run that marina over in Kwatsi Bay but they haven’t seen him. I did hear an interesting story though. It’s about two other guys who have maybe disappeared around here in last the week or so.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Except for Jimmy we haven’t had a missing person report up here for almost a year, and as I recall that one turned out to be some guy who went off for a wild weekend with his new lady friend without remembering to tell his wife.”
Dan took the phone out onto the side deck where he could watch a pod of dolphins play around the boat.
“Well ‘report’ may be the operative word here,” he said. “The way I heard it, both men went missing from Tsa’wit, over there in Banks Inlet, and the folks in the village don’t have too much faith in our abilities so they never called it in.”
There was silence while Markleson absorbed what Dan had said and then he asked, “You think it’s true?”
“Damned if I know. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing someone would make up. The guy that told me certainly thinks it’s true and I tend to trust his judgement.”
“Shit. So now we’ve got one guy in the water, probably drowned, Pete’s son missing, and maybe a couple of guys from Banks as well? What the hell is going on?”
“Good question—and there’s more. The guy that told me said both of the missing men were headed out to work at one of the fish farms. That’s where Jimmy was supposed to be heading too, right?”
“Yeah.” Markleson’s speech had slowed down, softened. Dan could picture him sitting at his desk, papers scattered over every available surface, half-empty cups of cold coffee pushed to one side, a pipe and tobacco pouch within easy reach as he leaned back in his chair and stared out the window.
“And that guy the coastguard is looking for—what the hell was his name?“ There was the sound of papers being shuffled. “Colin Farnsworth, that’s it. He fell off one of those fish farms too.”
“That’s what the coast guard people told me,” Dan answered. “At least they said he fell off a barge that was delivering fish food to a farm.”
Silence fell again as both men thought about what they had learned. Claire’s voice, calling from the galley, snapped Dan back to the present.
“That Claire?” Markleson had overheard her call. “Say hello from me. I’ll phone you when I’ve got a better handle on all this.”
***
THEY ATE DINNER OUT on deck again. They had collected some mussels on the way back from Kwatsi Bay and Claire steamed them in a little white wine and added some stalks of sea asparagus on the side. As Dan nibbled on one of the crunchy green stems, he thought about the man who had first introduced him to the plant he now ate as often as he could find it. At the time, Walker had been berating him for his habit of eating canned and frozen food when, as Walker had put it, there was a ‘restaurant’ of fresh, free food out there for the taking.
“You think we could find Walker?” he asked.
“Walker?” Claire looked up from dunking a piece of bread in the mussel juice. “Not unless we get really lucky. We’ve never known where he lives even when we were further up the coast and I can’t imagine it would be any easier here. Why?”
Dan repeated what Roger had said to him.
“If anyone knows exactly what happened, it would be Walker,” he said as he finished the story.
“Why don’t you just go to Tsa’wit and ask them?” Claire asked.
“That’s not as easy as it sounds,” Dan answered. “The band council over there has declared their village off-limits to visitors unless they apply for and receive permission, and that’s a long process. Everything gets taken in there by boat, so getting an application and sending it in can take weeks—and that’s only if they want to deal with it at all.”
“Are you serious?” Claire was staring at him, her meal forgotten in front of her. “That’s crazy. Surely it doesn’t apply to the police.”
“We could ignore it—and I’m sure we would if we knew there had been a murder, but for something like this . . . it would just cause trouble, and they probably wouldn’t tell us anything anyway.”
“But why? These are their people that have gone missing. Why wouldn’t they ask for help?”
“They don’t trust us, and I can’t say I blame them. They’ve never signed a treaty, and they say they’ve never ceded their land so that makes them a sovereign nation. They look after themselves.”
Claire stared at him in amazement. “I had no idea. Surely you don’t agree with them?”
Dan’s mouth twisted into a lop-sided smile and he turned and looked out across the bay. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I guess I never really thought about it before, but there was a guy that spoke at the meeting last week—he was from the Aboriginal Justice program—and he said some things that got me thinking. Gave us some hard numbers.”
He turned back to Claire, his voice tight with the same emotion he had felt when he first heard the speech.
“Did you know that our jails are filled with aboriginal people? Hell, I should know. I arrested a lot of them when I was down in the city—but I arrested a lot of white people too, and it wasn’t until that guy started talking that I thought about how many of the Native folks I arrested were convicted and how many of the white guys got off.” He shook his head. “I should have seen it a long time ago.”
“Well there has to be a reason,” Claire said. “Maybe Native people don’t have the money to hire a decent lawyer, or maybe they can’t get a job and they have to steal to eat . . .”
She was staring at him, her expression puzzled, and Dan knew his sudden change of mood had confused her. He wasn’t surprised. His reaction to the talk had confused him too, although he doubted he would have felt nearly so strongly about it if it hadn’t been for all the time he had spent with Walker. And with Joel, he reminded himself as he thought of the gentle Haida man he had met the previous year.
“No.” He shook his head. “That’s not it. Those things happen to white people too. Remember Joel? Do you think the police in Prince Rupert would have been so quick to pull in a white guy for questioning just because he was out in a canoe? They didn’t check out anyone else and there were all kinds of people with canoes and kayaks in Kitsault and Prince Rupert. Joel was a suspect because he was Native.”
His voice dropped until it was barely a whisper. “And the truth is, I would have done the same—at least I would have before I heard that talk. It’s not fair, and it’s not right.”
“But the police thought all those people might have been killed with a paddle! Claire’s hands were spread out in front of her, drawing the shape in the air as if to conjure up the real thing. “And Joel had a paddle.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Dan answered. “Think about it. All they had was the possibility the weapon had been made out of a certain kind of wood and shaped somehow. It could have been an oar, a chair, a railing. Hell, it could have been a walking stick. Even that yew-wood cutting board I’ve got in the galley. Nothing pointed directly to a paddle, yet they went straight to Joel.”
He shook his head. How come it was so clear to him now? He hadn’t even thought about it last year when he’d been actually working on the case.
“But it doesn’t make sense!” Claire was leaning forward, pleading with him. “Why would we put anyone in jail if they weren’t guilty of a crime?”
“Ah, but they are guilty of a crime. The government makes the laws and they can make a crime out of anything they like. Being indigent. Being drunk. Taking drugs. Stealing a pack of cigarettes. It’s not the crime that matters—or even being found guilty, although that’s certainly a part of it. It’s the sentencing. If you’re white, you get off. If you’re Native, you don’t.”
Her heard Claire’s gasp of protest, but ignored it.
“Hell, indigenous people are only four percent of our population, yet they make up almost a quarter of our jail inmates. That’s higher than the numbers for black people in South Africa during apartheid. We’re using the jails like we did the residential schools: trying to solve the “Indian problem.”
He stood up, walked over to the railing and stood gazing out unseeingly over the bay. He felt both angry and helpless, with the weight of a guilt built by generations pressing down on him. His job brought him into contact with Native people almost every day. How could he hope to reconcile what he had learned with what was expected of him?
He didn’t know how long he stood there, and he wasn’t aware that Claire had moved until the touch of her hand on his arm pulled him back to the present. He looked down at her, grateful for her concern and for the sense of connection it gave him.
“So what are you going to do?” Her voice was quiet.
“I don’t know.” He smiled down at her. “I’ll think of something.” He could see she was worried and he kicked himself for dumping all his worries on her. None of this was her problem.
“Come on,” he said, slipping his arm around her shoulders and pulling her close. “I think we’ve let dinner get cold, but the wine won’t have suffered.”
He led her back to the table and refilled their glasses. “Here’s to us,” he said as he toasted her. “And to sandy beaches.”
As he heard her quiet laughter he felt the tension relax its grip on his body. In its place a surge of warmth spread through his blood and he offered up a silent prayer of gratitude for having this woman in his life.
They sat and sipped their wine as dusk settled on the bay, first cloaking the trees and then sliding its dark veil over the water. The chatter of birds slowly stilled and soon the only sound they could hear was their own breathing and the occasional chuckle of water against the hull.
“We could take the dinghy out again tomorrow and go look for Walker.” Claire’s voice drifted out through the darkness.
Dan smiled and reached for her hand.