THE PALMER HOUSE ON Beach Street was silent when Active let himself in for the second time that day. No TV, no radio, no kitchen sounds. It was a little after seven. He tried to remember if this was one of Nita’s basketball nights and finally decided it was.
He tiptoed up the stairs. The door was open to Grace’s childhood bedroom, and it was empty now. Active relaxed a little. She must be doing better, he thought.
Then he saw light under the door of her parents’ old bedroom and heard muffled TV sounds coming from inside. He relaxed some more. She was herself, or as close as she got, when she slept in her father’s bed. She had taken to sleeping there after his murder, seeming to regard the bed as conquered territory.
He knocked and poked his head in.
She was watching a home-remodeling show on cable, the volume lowered to near-inaudibility. He couldn’t re -member the name of the show, but it involved people redoing rooms in each others’ houses with camera crews recording it all. And it was, as far as he could determine, irresistible to any female who tuned in to it. His mother was also addicted.
“Hi,” he said as she muted the TV. “How you feeling?”
“Better,” she said. “Did you find out who he was?”
He sat on the bed. She was rubbing on lip balm.
“The arsonist? No, and we’re still not sure it was arson in the first place.”
She shook her head with a sympathetic smile. “Bad day, huh?”
Active let out a long breath and rubbed his eyes, noticing now how tired he was. “Alan Long thinks maybe it was a Korean if it was arson. You ever know a guy named Jae Hyo Lee?”
She thought for a moment, then replied, “Don’t think so. They tend to keep to themselves, you know.”
“So I hear.”
“Why does Alan think he did it?”
Active laid out what they had learned that day, and waited for her take on it.
“Wouldn’t somebody have seen him around if he was back in town?” she asked.
“You’d think, and we’ll probably do some more checking. But I don’t know. Maybe he was just here long enough to set the fire. Alan Long’s hot on him, and I guess I’m starting to come around myself. Oh, and by the way—”
“This is all secret Trooper stuff, and we never had this conversation, ah?” She was smiling.
He smiled back and lifted his eyebrows in affirmation.
“So Carnaby wants you to go up to Cape Goodwin tomorrow?”
“Uh-huh. Know anybody up there?”
“Not really. Everybody says people from Cape Goodwin are a little different.”
“I’ve heard that too,” he said. He was silent, thinking of how to break the news about Anchorage.
“How about No-Way?” she said before he could speak. “Did you find out who he was?”
“Well, no. Cowboy’s not going up to get him till tomorrow, then we have to send him to the crime lab in Anchorage. It’ll be a few days before we know anything.”
“Anybody reported missing from the villages upriver?”
“Nope.”
“Mmm-mm.”
He shifted his position to look at her more directly, studying her quicksilver eyes for a moment. “Carnaby talked to me about something else just now too.”
She looked up at him, her face tightening. “You got the transfer.”
“Apparently.”
“When?”
“By Christmas, probably.”
Her gaze shifted to the remodeling show, still muted. “I don’t know how I’d do in Anchorage. Too many memories.”
“How are you doing here?”
She didn’t answer, but her face got a little tighter.
“You need to get out of this house. This room.”
“I know. But not yet. Don’t crowd me.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“I don’t know what you see in me.”
He was silent for a long time, trying to explain it to himself so he could explain it to her. Finally, he said, “I’m not so lonely now.”
“Oh, baby, neither am I. Come here.” She opened her arms, and he leaned in for a hug that became a kiss, then a hug again. She un-muted the remodeling show. “Let’s finish this, then I’ll go down and make us something to eat. How does that sound?”
“It sounds fine.” He shifted around to face the TV, counting the remodeling show a small price to pay for her company.
THE NEXT morning, Active was not surprised to learn that getting to Cape Goodwin to see Ruthie Silver would not be easy. Chukchi had two small airlines that ran commuter flights to the outlying villages. Neither, he discovered, could get into Cape Goodwin just then. The ticket agent at one said that half the Cape Goodwin runway had been eaten away by a fall storm two weeks earlier, and what was left of it was too short and rough for a standard nose-gear airplane. Until the runway was fixed, you needed an old-fashioned taildragger, a Super Cub or maybe a Cessna 185, to get into Cape Goodwin. Unless you wanted to take a floatplane and land in the lagoon behind the village. “Cowboy Decker goes up there in the Lienhofer Super Cub,” the agent concluded.
Active sighed and hung up, resigning himself to another run-in with Delilah. Maybe her disposition would be better today.
It wasn’t.
“First you want Cowboy to go up to One-Way Lake and fly out a dead man,” she said from behind the Lienhofer counter, “and now you want him to go up to Cape Goodwin instead? The fuck for? Somebody dead up there too?”
Active shook his head. “There’s been a change of plans. It’s Trooper business. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Doesn’t matter anyway. Cowboy already left for One-Way.”
“Already?” Active looked at his watch. “It’s not even nine o’clock yet.”
Delilah shrugged. “I guess he’s not running on village time today. Anyway, he probably won’t be back till around noon, or a little after.”
“That long, just to One-Way Lake and back?”
“Don’t forget, he’s got to tie a dead man on a float. And didn’t you ask him to look for a boat or something?”
“Oh, yeah.” Active drummed his fingers on the counter until Delilah shot him one of her glances. Something was tugging at his memory. “So, is there any other way to get up to Cape Goodwin?”
The phone rang, and she booked a charter to Ebrulik before answering him. “There is no other way to get to Cape Goodwin that I know of,” she said after she hung up. “And I am kind of busy right now?”
“Wait a minute,” Active said. “What about Doug McAllister? Didn’t Cowboy say he’s got a Cessna 185?”
Delilah shrugged. “It’s Dood, not Doug, and yes, he has a 185. But I don’t think he wants any charters today. He gassed up at our pumps a few minutes ago and said he was gonna be hauling supplies out to his hunting camp on the Upper Katonak. See?”
She pointed at a line of planes tied down between the Lienhofer hangar and the runway.
Active saw a squat, potbellied man loading boxes from a pickup into the back of a shiny blue-and-white taildragger with a cargo pod under the belly. It was noticeably larger than a Super Cub.
“Maybe he could drop me on the way,” Active said.
“I doubt it,” Delilah said.
“Well, if I can talk him into
“Well, if I can talk him into it, will you send Cowboy to pick me up when he gets back from One-Way?”
Delilah glared at him for a moment, then walked to the flight board on the wall at the end of the counter and made a note with a black marker. “I see you leave with McAllister, I’ll book it,” she said. “Will that be all, officer?”
The phone rang again, and he turned to leave, but stopped when she said, “Hold on, he’s right here.” She waved the phone at him. “It’s for you, and don’t tie up my line, all right?”
“You want to look for a stolen boat as you head up the coast?” said the voice of Alan Long.
“What boat?”
“Somebody stole a boat off the beach two nights ago.”
“The same night as the Rec Center fire?”
“Yep.”
“And it just got reported now?”
“No, it was reported yesterday, but everybody was too busy to pay attention. The report just hit my desk this morning, and I’m thinking maybe Jae took it to make his getaway.”
“But if Jae came in by boat, why would he need to steal one to get out?”
Long was silent for a moment. “Good point.”
Active sighed. “All right, what’s it look like? I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Blue wooden dory, eighteen-footer, white Johnson outboard on the back. Owner’s a guy named Roland Miller. Went out yesterday to load up for a caribou hunt, and it was gone.”
Active left the office still writing the description in his notebook and headed for the blue-and-white Cessna. McAllister turned to watch as he walked up. “Help you?” the guide said.
Active introduced himself. “I need to get up to Cape Goodwin. Delilah says you’re heading up to your camp, and I thought you might be able to drop me off.”
Up close, McAllister didn’t seem so much short and potbellied as tough and compact. He smelled tough too, like gas, sweat, wood smoke, and something else—animal blood, maybe? Camouflage anorak, rust-colored Carhartt jeans, hip waders folded down to the knee, the hilt of a hunting knife sticking out of a sheath on his belt. Dark, fleshy, leathery face, maybe a quarter Inupiaq, maybe half, careful eyes in what looked like a permanent squint, no sunglasses.
“Sorry. I’ve about got a load here, all right.” McAllister gestured at the groceries in the pickup and the plane.
“Relax. I’m not doing any Fish and Game enforcement today.”
McAllister shrugged. “I’m not doing any violations today. Or any other day.”
Besides groceries, the pickup held four jerry jugs of gas, Active saw, and what looked to be a case of wine labeled “Solare.” Active had never heard of Solare, but he guessed it was expensive. It was well known that sportsmen willing to pay fifteen or twenty thousand dollars for the Arctic Quadruple—moose, caribou, grizzly, and Dall sheep—liked their comforts, even in the wilderness. For the most part, Chukchi law enforcement looked the other way and let the local guides fly in their clients’ liquor unmolested, as long as none of it hit the black market in Chukchi or the surrounding villages.
McAllister finished loading the groceries and heaved two of the jerry jugs into the back of the plane.
Active leaned on a fender of the pickup and dangled a hand over the Solare. “And the city cops are in charge of enforcing the liquor ban. But this probably isn’t wine anyway, right? Probably just an old case you’re using to haul groceries, right?”
McAllister muttered something Active didn’t catch, lifted the case out of the pickup, and held it against his chest. He looked at Active with a little smile. “This case?” he said, and then he dropped it.
Active jumped sideways to save his feet. There was a crash of breaking glass, then a clear, red liquid began trickling out. The tang of wine reached Active’s nose.
“Whoops,” McAllister said, still wearing the little smile.
“That was no accident.”
“That uniform doesn’t mean you can fuck with people, naluaqmiiyaaq.”
“I could bust you for the wine.”
McAllister shook his head with a disgusted look. “I didn’t know it was wine. The client said it was camera gear.”
“I could bust your client. How would that be for—”
“Client’s not here yet. And he won’t be if I tell him there’s a Trooper hanging around with a hard-on.”
Active rubbed his forehead. “All right, I was out of line. Sorry.”
McAllister hefted the last two jerry jugs into the plane. “Somebody dead up there?”
Active shook his head. “Nobody dead, but that’s all I can tell you. It’s Trooper business.”
McAllister muttered under his breath again, then looked at Active, head tilted. “Wait a minute. From what I hear on Kay-Chuck, all you Troopers must be working on that Rec Center fire. Somebody up there set it?”
“I told you, it’s Trooper business.”
“All right, I’ll take you if that’s what it’s about. And if you’ll stay out of my face.”
Active was tempted to ask why McAllister wasn’t worried about overloading the plane any more, but decided he needed the ride more than the information. “No problem.”
“Is anybody going to be shooting at us when we land?”
Active stared at McAllister, who appeared to be serious about the question. “What for?”
“They don’t like strangers in Cape Goodwin. I’ve had my tires cut when I left my plane on the runway overnight, and I wasn’t bringing in a Trooper to arrest anybody. They see your uniform, they might shoot, all right.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Active said.
“In Cape Goodwin, you gotta worry about everything,” McAllister said. “I land; you jump out; I take off. That’s that.”
“I’m not going to arrest anybody,” Active said. “I just need to talk to them. And they don’t know I’m coming.”
“Okay,” McAllister said. “But I’m not shutting my engine down. And how you getting out of there? I’m sure not coming back for you.”
“Cowboy Decker will pick me up in his Super Cub this afternoon.”
“Well, you better be out at the lagoon waiting for him. If he has to go into the village looking for you, he’s liable to have holes in his floats when he comes back.”
Active watched as the guide shoveled the remains of the Solare back into the bed of the pickup. Then they climbed in and buckled their seat belts. The Cessna 185 was luxurious compared to Cowboy’s Super Cub. Its skin was metal, not fabric, and it seated four, not two, with room at the back for the groceries and extra gas McAllister had loaded in.
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.”