Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Have you asked them? The Sugpiaq?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to have some concrete evidence before I do.”

  The guy was so excited that it was hard not to like him. “Where is your evidence?”

  Berglund grinned. “Trooper,” he said without heat.

  Liam grinned back. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Too much to eat not to have,” Erik said. “There was a monograph written by Hilary Houten—the old fart you saw yelling at me at the brewpub, he’s not a fan—anyway, Houten wrote a paper thirty-odd years ago that claims the lack of artifacts proves that no one settled here, or at least on this side of the Bay. Well, maybe they didn’t settle here, but they sure as hell used it.” He stood in front of one of the tables, where many unidentifiable objects were neatly laid out and labeled. At least half the names on the labels were followed by question marks. “This is for sure a harpoon head—see the barbs? No flies on the old folks when it came to building something that would hang on to what they stuck it into.”

  “Arrowheads?” Liam said, pointing.

  “A bunch of them. If I can get them dated I might be able to work up a decent timeline, but you can see the evolution of the technology, stone to iron to stainless steel.” He grinned. “I admit the metal ones don’t exactly help prove my thesis, but it does show that the locals have been using this cave for a long time. These are axe heads.”

  “What’s that groove?”

  “Where they tied it on to a handle. See where the twine or rope or whatever crossed over?” Erik was practically glowing with excitement and appeared delighted to share his expertise, and Liam warmed to him. People who liked their jobs were the luckiest people in the world, and by far the most fun to talk to. “Those shaved areas are where they shaped the striking edge with another tool.”

  Even Liam could recognize a fish hook when he saw one, but Erik had discovered one carved from wood that was as big as his hand, flat with wicked-looking barbs.

  “For halibut,” Erik said. “You’ll see stainless steel hooks almost exactly like that on a halibut boat today.”

  “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

  “Exactly.” Pleased, Erik nodded his head. “This is that snare I told you about.”

  To Liam it looked like a jumble of old bones, although he could see in places where they had been shaped by human hands. For what purpose, he had no clue.

  He turned to look at the Bay. The rock outcropping extended out at least a hundred feet and was almost exactly perpendicular to the bluff that edged the beach. Nothing but sand on either side. Good bottom for landing a boat. The location was halfway between the head and the mouth of the Bay, so reasonably accessible to anyone living on the other side, especially experienced seamen like the Aleuts. He looked at Erik. “How did you find this cave?”

  The archeologist’s smile faded, but he said readily, “A friend and I were beachcombing around here when I was a kid. I remembered the outcropping, and since it’s such an anomaly on this side of the Bay, I thought I’d take a look.”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “No kidding.” Erik’s voice was flat. He dropped one of the snare parts and shoved his hands in his pockets. “It would be something.”

  He spoke in such a low voice that Liam was not sure he was meant to hear. “What would be?” he said.

  “If I pull this off. If I find proof. It would be something to give. Something to leave behind. Do you have kids, Liam?”

  “Two,” Liam said. Charlie might have died but he was never gone to Liam. “You?”

  “I’m told it makes you think differently about things.”

  “It does.” Liam pointed. “Is that a rock hammer?”

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Shawshank.”

  Erik laughed. “Good movie.”

  “Any movie with Morgan Freeman in it is a good movie. I would have thought the last thing an archeologist would need is a hammer. You’re all about the not breaking of stuff.”

  “It’s not mine. I found it here.” He gestured. “With the rest of the artifacts.”

  Liam picked up the hammer. The head was rusty and the paint had faded from the handle.

  “Erik!”

  They both looked up as if trying to see through the top of the tent.

  “Erik? You down there?”

  “Hey, Gabe!”

  “You got company, I see. You mind more?”

  Erik laughed. “Not that kind of company, Gabe. Come on down.”

  A cascade of small stones preceded the visitor, who maintained a lot more control over his descent than Liam had. Probably only because he’d had more experience.

  “Who’s Gabe?”

  “He’s just my neighbor up the hill.” Liam was pretty sure he was holding back a smile.

  Liam remembered the big roof and the stone chimney. “Ah. Your landlord?”

  “Sort of, but not really.”

  “Cryptic.”

  “I try.”

  A pair of long jeans-clad legs appeared beneath the top of the tent and both men turned to watch as the owner of the voice galloped down the incline and jumped the last four feet of the trail to land neatly on the beach, the impact scattering gravel and sinking him ankle deep in the sand. He punched the air. “And the crowd goes wiiiiiiiild!”

  Erik laughed and the third man turned and grinned at them. “Hey, Erik!”

  “Hey, Gabe! What brings you down the hill?”

  “And a slalom of a hill it is, too. Who’s your friend?” He squinted into the sun.

  “Liam. New to town. I met at him Jeff’s this morning when I went in for a growler. I told him about the dig and he came out for a look.”

  Gabe walked forward to get under the tent and out of the sun. “Nice to meet you, Liam.” He stuck out a hand.

  “And you, Gabe.”

  He tried to let go of the handshake but Gabe held on. “Wait a minute. I know you.”

  “We have met.” Liam had recognized him immediately but he had not expected to be recognized in turn.

  “I’ll say. In Newenham. Sergeant Liam Campbell.”

  “That would be me.”

  “You still a trooper?”

  “Yep. You still a movie star?”

  “Yep.”

  They both laughed, and Gabe McGuire, Oscar-winning action film star, breaker of a billion hearts and a bona fide box office bonanza, turned to Erik and said, “We met in Newenham, what, two years ago now.”

  “Almost. Still have that FBO in Chinook?” Liam said.

  A shadow crossed McGuire’s face. “Sold it. The lodge, too.”

  The FBO at least had some Erland Bannister DNA so Liam could understand it, but still. “Damn. Sweet properties, both of them.”

  Gabe smiled. Usually you couldn’t see him acting, but today wasn’t his best effort. “Too much baggage.” He spread his hands. “And hey, I’m a Bay boy, now.”

  Erik snorted, and Gabe laughed. “Reason I came down is, I’m throwing a little watch party this evening. I’m inviting all the neighbors. Booze and I’ve got hot dogs and hamburgers for the grill, and six different kinds of ice cream for after.”

  Erik laid his hand on his heart and let it thump a few times. “You had me at booze, but Dom, too?” Gabe rolled his eyes and Erik snorted again. “Like you wouldn’t tap that.”

  “Seriously, dude? That woman comes with her own freight train of baggage.” He turned to Liam. “You’re invited, too.”

  “Thanks, but—” He looked at his phone. “I’ve got just about enough time to get from here to the airport to pick my wife up when she lands.”

  “The hot pilot, right?” Liam raised an eyebrow and McGuire grinned. “I’m not blind. Bring her along.”

  “I’ll ask her,” Liam said, knowing he would do no such thing. He hadn’t seen Wy for a week and what he had in mind for the evening didn’t include an audience.

  Gabe read his expression. “Yeah, never mind. Rain check.”

&nb
sp; “Works.” He looked at Erik. “Thanks for the tour.”

  “Anytime.”

  “I’ll follow you up,” McGuire said.

  The way up was arduous but less death-defying. They stood at the top for a moment to catch their breath. “You get this view from the house?” Liam said.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Liam looked towards it but the trees were impenetrable. “How long have you been here?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “Buy or build?”

  “Bought. Some dot-com gazillionaire built it, spent about twelve days in it, and decided it was too far from the nearest server farm.” Liam laughed and Gabe smiled. “Seen anything of that FBI agent or that reporter?”

  “Mason and Dunaway? Dunaway’s always in and out on stories. I’ve talked on the phone to Mason a time or two.” Liam looked at him. “Did I remember to thank you for giving Kate Shugak a ride back from Adak that time? I still owe you for that.”

  Gabe shrugged. “I can always use more hours in the G-2.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away. “I was real sorry to hear.”

  “Hear what?”

  Still not looking at Liam, Gabe said, “That she died.”

  “Who died?”

  McGuire did look at him this time, clearly annoyed. “Kate Shugak.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t know? I thought Alaska was the original seventh grade classroom, everybody knows everything about everybody else.”

  “Kate’s not dead, Gabe.”

  “She got shot. I heard. Her and that monster dog of hers, too.”

  “True,” Liam said, “but she didn’t die. Monster dog, either.”

  McGuire stared at him. “Kate Shugak’s alive?”

  Liam got the feeling McGuire was tap dancing but he couldn’t figure out what around.

  “I was told she was dead,” McGuire said slowly.

  “Who told you that?” McGuire didn’t answer, and the answer dawned. “Erland Bannister? Your business partner in Newenham?” McGuire looked away and Liam said, “Yeah, well, he actually is dead. And never a man whose word you could trust when he was alive, by the way.” Liam checked his phone again. “I gotta book.”

  The one-lane dirt road was just as awful going out as coming in and he achieved the paved surface of East Bay Road again with the feeling of having dodged an enormous repair bill. McGuire could afford to turn that poor excuse for a road into the Champs-Elysées, so why put up with what was basically a hog wallow?

  A second later he answered his own question. Why would Gabe McGuire of all people want to make it easy for anyone to come visit?

  Mystery solved, he headed back into town with a heart that lightened with every mile. He was already smiling when he turned left on Airport Road, and he was positively grinning when he entered the code to get through the gate onto the field. He drove to Wy’s tie-down and got out. The sun was warm on the back of his neck and he stood there for a moment, enjoying the place, the day, the anticipation of greeting his wife in his best Duke of Marlborough imitation.

  Perhaps just to remind him that all joy is conditional and fleeting, his brain brought up the images of Jenny and Charlie, his first wife and their son, both killed by the same drunk driver. That event had begun a downward spiral that had nearly destroyed him mentally and emotionally, and very nearly professionally as well. That spiral had culminated in his being assigned to the post in Newenham, a location so remote and a town so lacking in all the mod cons they couldn’t even keep a city cop on the payroll, never mind a trooper.

  But there he had found Wy again. He looked at the image of Jenny’s face in his mind’s eye and saw her smile at him. They had been such good friends, and generous woman that she was she would never have wanted him to live out his life in loneliness and misery. She would have been happy he had found Wy again, and again, he hoped with all his heart that she had never suspected the affair. Jenny had been and always would be the best person he had ever met in his life, and this far on the other side of his loss he knew he was all the better for having had her in it.

  It was harder to look at Charlie, even in his own imagination, to see again that soft, tiny bundle of gurgling charm blowing bubbles at him, those tiny fingers grasping his own. Sometimes Liam’s arms actually ached to hold his son again. His heart did ache at the loss and always would.

  He heard the distant drone of an airplane and looked up, squinting into the sun.

  Five

  Monday, September 2, Labor Day

  STRETCHING ALMOST TWO HUNDRED MILES from the city of Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska, the vast estuary called Cook Inlet was host to tides second only to those off the Newfoundland Banks, as well as some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Wy crossed the southernmost tip of Kalgin Island and continued on a southeasterly heading, to cross the coast of the Kenai Peninsula at Tikahtnu, a town of a thousand people perched on a bluff divided by a river and its tributarial creek.

  That bluff began in Turnagain Arm in the north and continued west and around and all the way down the west side of the Kenai Peninsula and up to the head of Chungasqak Bay which, as she rounded Cook’s Point, unfolded before her in all its forty miles of glory. She studied up on it in advance but nothing could have prepared her for the disparities between the north and south shores. The north shore was almost agricultural-looking, a broad bench of mostly flat land between a short bluff at water’s edge and a much taller bluff farther inland. The south shore looked like Norway, where a range of sharply pointed, white-capped mountains slid precipitously into slivered eighty-fathom fjords. The fjords alternated with five massive piedmont glaciers, themselves depending from a seven-hundred-square-mile ice field only the mountains held in check. Between the fjords were small, rocky inlets and bays and coves and lagoons, along with the occasional spit, tongues made of millennia of glacial silt washing down Cook Inlet. The largest spit thrust out four miles perpendicularly from the north shore. A handful of islands lined up in front of two of the larger fjords on the south side, with a few more so small they could more properly be called rocks scattered by an indiscriminate hand.

  Liam’s first reaction to being offered the job of the new trooper post in Blewestown had been to dive into the crime statistics in the area. Wy had hit Naske and Slotnick’s Alaska: A History of the 49th State, the Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer, Merle Colby’s A Guide to Alaska: Last American Frontier, one of the state guides published by the Federal Writers Project back in the day, and of course her personal copy of AOPA’s Airport Directory. She glanced at the clock on the dash, and on impulse turned right to follow the spit across the Bay for an aerial tour of the south side. The longer this big high hung in over Southcentral, the bigger the first fall storm would be that was certainly building up behind it in the Gulf of Alaska. If you don’t like the weather in Alaska, wait ten minutes.

  She’d been making a slow descent since Tikahtnu and now she leveled out at a thousand feet, maintaining a course that held just offshore, watching and listening for traffic. There were half a dozen airstrips in the various villages and towns on the south side of the Bay, and where there weren’t airstrips at low tide they used the beaches. She checked the tide app on her phone. Low tide was just an hour away. She grew the extra pair of eyes that all good pilots held in reserve for situations like these and proceeded with enough caution to avoid a mid-air collision but with enough attention to appreciate the view. Over the headset she heard pilot chatter from three different aircraft; from Chuwawet (taking off), Beaty’s Hot Springs (landing), and Jefferson Cove (humpback cow and calf alert). The Chuwawet pilot announced his ETA for Blewestown, which prompted a brief but incendiary blast from someone on the ground in Engaqutaq who apparently had passengers and freight waiting for transport to Blewestown. No reply from the pilot, although the resulting silence on the channel was electric with expectation, everyone muting their mics in the hope of hearing the Engaqutaq ground crew tear the pilot who had changed the schedule mid-flight a
new one.

  Wy grinned and drifted west, the throttle up just enough to keep her from falling out of the sky, giving her time to peer up every nick and notch big enough to admit a tide. The mountain peaks held up almost to the very end of the peninsula but there was no level ground to be seen afterward, just multiple rough granite slabs off the vertical by only a few degrees. Two different collections of islands, one close in about five miles offshore and another about ten miles further south and sixty degrees more to the west, looked just as horizontally challenged. There wasn’t a cove big enough to spread a beach towel on or a place flat enough to land even a Super Cub. Maybe there was somewhere to land on floats but she wasn’t on floats today. She circled and headed back up the south coast of Chungasqak Bay.

  The nineteen-hundred-foot airstrip at Blueberry Bay was built on a gravel spit that separated a lagoon from the Bay, attended by a few dozen houses and cabins scattered between the water’s edge and halfway up the nearly vertical hillside the airstrip dead-ended in. Not a strip she would take for granted, not without multiple touch-and-goes for practice first. The community consisted of 103 people and was according to the last census a hundred percent Sugpiaq, although it had originally been a Russian fort under Alexander Baranov’s tenure as Catherine the Great’s Alaska exploiter-in-chief. Recently the citizens of Blueberry Bay had unilaterally reclaimed the settlement’s original Sugpiaq name of Chuwawet, and were now in the process of convincing the US Postal Service they had the right to call themselves what they wanted to and still have their mail delivered.

  Deeper into Blueberry Bay, Engaqutaq had a two-thousand-foot airstrip on a hill the top of which had been sliced off specifically for the purpose. Black spruce clustering menacingly on three edges as if just waiting for the starter’s pistol to sound before they reclaimed their territory from its two hundred residents. The edge closest to the water was lined with—she dropped down for a look, and then circled back for another look. Yes, those were headstones. Engaqutaq had a cemetery off the edge of its airstrip.

  Most of the houses in Engaqutaq paralleled the strip, the way Alaska villages had been built in the old, more sensible days, when all you had to do was hop out of your plane and walk across the strip to get to your front door. After statehood the FAA had brought in a bunch of federal money and most of the airstrips had been relocated to five or ten miles out of town, among other things introducing allegedly better aids to navigation, along with the unintended consequence of wheeled vehicles, not to mention driver’s licenses, to the Alaskan Bush. Engaqutaq had originally been a US military fort of much more recent origin than neighboring Chuwawet’s Russian fort, rapidly succeeded by a herring cannery and then, when the herring were fished out, a salmon cannery, astonishingly still in operation. Wy had thought that all salmon were fresh frozen nowadays.