The Darkening Archipelago

by Stephen Legault

  “Then clean up your mess.”

  Darren sighed. “And what about you? When will you be leaving Jeopardy Rock?”

  “Like I said, while you’re tying up one loose end here, I’ll be taking care of another in Lostcoast. I’ll get away around ten. So don’t show your face in Tribune Channel before then.”

  “And what about the minister? They’re saying he’s coming to Port Lostcoast.”

  “We can’t take a chance that he connects the dots until after the announcement. My business in Lostcoast will look like an accident. You’re just going to have to stay out of sight for a few days. Tell the wife you’re taking Cole fishing.”

  Darren blew hard through his lips, his cheeks puffing out like a blowfish. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t take care of this, Darren, and you’ll never see your kids again. You know that.”

  “I know it.”

  “Then finish what you started.”

  “Okay, I will.” Darren hung up the phone. He sat at the kitchen table in the dark. Dr. Thurlow’s words made sense. He had to make sure Cole didn’t get in the way. But kill him? It had made him sick when Archie had died. When he had killed him. Darren First Moon put his head in his hands as he thought about it. The feeling of the gaff in his hand as it pierced the soft spot above the temple. The blood. He had barely been able to hold himself together when they had found it on the Inlet Dancer in Alert Bay. He had vomited off the deck when no one was looking.

  And now Cole. Darren First Moon was smart enough to know that Darvin Thurlow was playing him. He just couldn’t think of any way out now. He couldn’t think of any way to climb out of the grave he had dug for himself. Would he lose his kids? He had heard terrible stories of what white families did to First Nations children when they were taken from their parents. No doubt that with Darren gone, his children would be taken away. Betty was a good mom, he thought, but she wouldn’t be able to raise the kids on her own. She liked to drink a little too much. Like his own parents. And both of her folks were gone. The community wasn’t what it once was, he reasoned. The government would take his children and they would end up much the way he had. On his own, on the street, angry, violent. He didn’t want that to happen.

  Then Darren First Moon had an idea.

  He sat in the dark for half an hour considering it.

  And then the phone rang. He jumped up to get it.

  “Hello?”

  “Darren, it’s Nancy. I’m so sorry to call so late —”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s midnight. Listen, Cole hasn’t come home yet.”

  “You think he’s getting into trouble?”

  “Likely. When I saw him tonight he was pretty pissed about, well, about something.”

  “He’s likely gone to The Strait. If he ran into Dan Campbell, that could be bad news.”

  “Can you go and look in on him?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks, Darren.”

  Darren hung up the phone. He hit the front door at a run and made for the docks. He had to stop by his boat before looking for Cole. Suddenly, keeping Cole Blackwater alive was very important to his future.

  28

  “Daddy, who’s that?”

  Cole Blackwater pushed his eyes open.

  “He looks awful.”

  Mouths of babes, Cole thought.

  “That’s a friend of Daddy’s, sport. Go play outside, okay? And take your sister.”

  Cole heard the laughter of two children, the slamming of a door. Felt the cool air waft over him from the draught.

  “How you doing, bruiser?”

  Cole opened his eyes and strained to focus on the face of Darren First Moon.

  “We at your place?” Cole asked.

  “Yup. Those are my rugrats.”

  Cole pushed himself up and took inventory. He looked around the tiny living room. The floor was bare plywood. An assortment of ratty-looking chairs were scattered around the room. He was lying on a sagging couch covered in a moth-eaten wool blanket.

  He felt for breaks. He could move his arms and legs, though his left arm hurt when he extended it. He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and saw that it was purple from the midpoint of his forearm up to his triceps. He flexed it again. Not broken, but darn near.

  “Got a mirror?” he asked.

  “Bathroom.”

  Cole stood, his body feeling as if he’d been stuffed in an industrial dryer set on tumble. He worked to straighten his back and felt his stomach heave. Long night. Long, dark tea time of the soul. He shuffled to the bathroom and flicked on the lights. A dim glow came from a bare, overhead bulb. The bathroom was clean but run down. The tiles on the floor were cracked. The shower curtain hung by a long stick rather than a rod. He looked at himself in the foggy mirror.

  “Good fucking grief,” he said, and then wondered if Darren’s kids were within earshot.

  “Looking pretty handsome this morning, bud,” came Darren First Moon’s voice from the other room.

  His left cheek, where the scar from a previous brawl was just starting to fade, was taped shut with six strips of first-aid tape. Under the tape was a gash nearly two inches long, running from the top of his cheek down to the edge of his mouth. He pressed it gently and felt the bone beneath it ache. Lucky not to have cracked anything. Some x-rays wouldn’t hurt. But his head felt okay, with the exception of the hangover, which was monumental.

  He had several other bruises on his face, but they all paled in comparison to the gash on his left cheek. He pushed his hair up and saw that his forehead wore a long, jagged cut that had been patched with bandages and gauze. The head-butt, he recalled. He looked down at his hands. His knuckles were red and raw. He felt his left side. “I think I cracked some ribs,” he said aloud.

  “Those guys were going to kill you,” said Darren from the other room. Cole could hear toast pop.

  “Only if I didn’t kill them first,” mumbled Cole.

  “What was that?” Darren stuck his head into the washroom.

  “I said I guess I have you to thank.”

  “No thanks to me. Thank Nancy. She called me when you didn’t come home right away. Guessed that you’d gone looking for trouble. I talked to a few folks in The Strait and they said they had seen Dan Campbell waiting outside the bar with his buddies. As I understand it, you took the back door. That likely saved your skin, such as it is.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing you showed up when you did.”

  Darren shrugged. “Nothing to it.”

  “You’re going to have to watch your back now.”

  “I don’t think so. I think Dan Campbell is through here.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “He went too far.”

  Cole pressed on his cheek again.

  “You want some toast before we go?”

  “Go?”

  “Jeopardy Rock. Remember?”

  “Good Christ,” said Cole, and Darren laughed. Cole grinned.

  “Do I have time to go back to the bluff house and change? Make sure Grace and Nancy know I’m okay?”

  “Not if we’re going to get there and back today,” said Darren, feeling some impatience. “We’re not taking the Inlet Dancer. My little boat has got some guts, but not much.”

  “Can I call?”

  “Phone’s on the table there. I put some of my warm clothes out for you.”

  “Thanks.” Cole found the phone among a clutch of dirty plates and coffee cups on the dining table in the kitchen.

  “Nancy, it’s me,” he said when got through to the bluff house.

  “Cole —!”

  “I’m okay. Got jumped coming home from the bar. Dan Campbell. Listen, I think he’s dangerous. Likely our man. Can you call Constable Johns and let them know?”

  “I will, of course. How bad, Cole?”

  “Superficial,” he said. “Nothing new. I gave worse than I got,” he bragged again.

  He heard Nancy take a br
eath. “The RCMP are already heading this way today, remember?”

  “I remember. Tell them to get a move on, would you? And you guys stay put today. Is Jacob back?”

  “No, I haven’t heard if he’ll be around today.”

  “I’m worried is all.”

  “How does Dan tie in with Stoboltz? You think they asked him to take Archie out?”

  “I have no idea. The RCMP will have to get that piece of the puzzle. But you stay clear of him. I mean it.”

  “We’ll be fine. Look, Cole —”

  “Nancy, I don’t want to talk about it now. Darren says if we’re going to get to Jeopardy Rock and back today, we’d better get going. You need to get ready to file a story on this.”

  “You still want me to write it?”

  “Of course. And make sure you talk with Bright about the connection between the leaked memos and the First Nations Opportunity Fund.”

  “Who else should I talk to?”

  “Don’t tip the minister’s office off. God, I wish we knew who the deep throat was. Maybe you could track him down. Otherwise, I think the best we can do is interview some of the enviros working on the salmon file.”

  “What about Greg?”

  “You do that and he’ll call the event off. He’s in with Lance Grey and Stoboltz.”

  “So what if they call the event off? Isn’t that what we want?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what we want. Can you put Grace on?”

  “Sure, Cole,” she said, and then added, “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  Grace picked up the phone. “Cole, are you all right?”

  “Never better,” he laughed. “Listen,” he said, “you need to call Carrie Bright. Tell her everything we know about the funny business linking Stoboltz, the sea lice engineering, and the First Nations Opportunity Fund. Get her to come to Port Lost-coast for the announcement.”

  “And do what?”

  “Upend the apple cart. I don’t know. We’ll think of something today.”

  “Okay, Cole….” Grace sounded skeptical.

  “Look,” he said, “the way I see it, Lance Grey knows we’re onto this whole thing. He knows we have a bunch of the pieces. He knew Archie did. But the minister has said, ‘Let’s go to that nice little port town, you know, out in the islands, to make this announcement.’” Cole mimicked the minister’s voice. “And Lance hasn’t been able to come up with a good enough excuse not to, so he’s going to string this along as best he can and hope like hell he can protect his own ass.” Cole was in his bull-in-a-china-shop mode.

  “What if the minister is in on this, too?”

  “I can’t see it.”

  “Okay, I’ll call Carrie and set this up.”

  “And Grace, I told Nancy to go ahead and file.”

  “Yeah….”

  “I still think that if we’re going to bag these guys, she ought to get the story, don’t you think?”

  “I guess it’s just sinking in that there is going to be a story on my father being murdered.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, look, I’ve got to go. Darren is jumping up and up — down. The Rising Moon sails with the rising sun!” Cole hung and turned to Darren. “Okay, let’s hit it.”

  Grace hung up the phone and turned to Nancy, who was in the kitchen making coffee. “Guess you’ll want a quote.”

  Nancy put two cups on the counter. “I know that this is awkward.” “It’s okay. The story needs to get told. So let’s have some breakfast and then do this right.”

  Nancy smiled. “Okay.”

  They ate breakfast at the table as they watched the sun paint the eastern horizon crimson red. “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning,” Grace singsonged.

  “Is that really true?”

  “Who knows? Around here we listen to the marine forecast.” “Shall we start?” asked Nancy.

  “Let me get some of my papers and stuff together. That way we’ll have everything at our fingertips.”

  Grace went into Archie’s office and began to collect her own notes, the brown envelope of materials that had travelled from Victoria to Port Lostcoast to Vancouver and back in the last month. As she rummaged through the files on Archie’s desk, making sure she didn’t overlook anything germane to the story, she came across the will. She sat down on the chair. She hadn’t opened it after Archie had disappeared, refusing to believe that her father wasn’t coming back. But now she knew he was gone. Grace unfolded the papers and scanned them. She made it as far — as page three, then stopped reading, turned, and looked out the window at the red eastern sky.

  Cole sat next to Darren in the cabin of the Rising Moon, wrapped in a heavy overcoat with an orange life jacket and a musty woollen blanket over his shoulders. The boat skipped lightly over the water as they powered eastward. They made the wide waters of the channel near Tribune in good time, and were rewarded with an extraordinary view of the Coast Mountains backlit by the rising sun. Cole turned in his seat and saw the constellation of islands at the mouth of the inlet light up, and, behind them, the mountains of the north end of Vancouver Island glowing in the day’s first light. He took a deep breath of the salty air and let the events of yesterday drain from his aching body.

  Darren was silent. He stared straight ahead as the Rising Moon cut swiftly across the calm waters, bearing for Tribune Channel.

  Cole considered his decision to make for Jeopardy Rock, knowing that Dan Campbell was walking around Port Lostcoast a free man. He yelled to Darren, “Do you think we made the right decision leaving, what with Dan and his friends at large in Lostcoast?” Darren continued to look straight ahead, but yelled, “You mean, are the girls okay?”

  “Yeah. What if Dan tries to get at something from Archie’s records?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Something that might tie him to Archie’s death.”

  “I thought you said there wasn’t any connection between Dan and the salmon farms.”

  “I’m just guessing. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think there is,” said Darren. Then he said, “You think he killed Archie?”

  “Seems like our best bet right now. You think we should go back?”

  “I think Nancy and Grace are fine,” Darren said, still focusing on the water ahead.

  Cole pulled the blanket tighter. He drew a deep breath and tried to piece together what could have transpired between Archie and Dan that would move the man to commit murder. It wouldn’t have taken much, Cole thought, given Dan’s volatility.

  For years Archie and Dan had been beating each other up in the media. When conservation groups began working to protect the mid-coast of British Columbia’s ancient rainforest from clear-cutting, Archie Ravenwing was a freshman band councillor and had worked to secure the support of his people for the proposed agreements. Dan Campbell had lobbied strenuously against it, siding with logging companies in their fight against First Nations and environmentalists.

  When many of those same environmentalists waged a bitter battle to ban the hunting of grizzly bears across the province, Archie had been their champion on the coast. He made the economic argument that a portion of his living was made taking American tourists up Knight Inlet to view grizzly bears feeding on spawning salmon each fall. Dan Campbell’s main business was outfitting and guiding similarly rich Americans in the pursuit of grizzly trophies.

  That the two men had lived side by side in the town for a decade was a wonder to Cole. What could have pushed Campbell over the edge? Salmon farming?

  Cole guessed that Campbell’s support of salmon farming was ideologically driven. He didn’t seem to be directly linked to the practice. Like many men of Campbell’s stripe, Cole figured that he simply supported industry of all kinds, believing one of two things: either God had given man dominion over all of earth’s creatures, and thus the right to gobble them up; or nature simply knew no bounds, and the supposed decline in wild salmon was part of a natural cycle that would correct
itself in time, as it always did.

  Cole found himself wishing he knew more about Campbell’s involvement in the Aquaculture Advisory Task Force. What role had he played? And what was his connection to Greg White Eagle, Darvin Thurlow, and Lance Grey? Cole exhaled heavily. In none of the packages of information he’d seen so far did there seem to be any connection. Was Archie Ravenwing’s murder completely unrelated? Had Dan simply had enough of Archie Ravenwing’s proselytizing and followed him out to Jeopardy Rock that morning? Confronted him? Killed him? How?

  Maybe the answer would become evident when they reached the former dfo station and got a look at the lay of the land.

  There were so many unanswered questions. What had Campbell done with the boat? Cole closed his eyes to visualize the day unfolding. He pictured the Inlet Dancer making its way toward Jeopardy Rock. Then he imagined the Queen Mary Two do the same. Maybe Dan had landed at the dfo station and snuck up on Archie when Archie himself was sneaking around, clubbed him on the head with the fish club he had used on Cole the previous evening, and dragged his body back to the Inlet Dancer.

  Dan had seemed pretty handy with that club. Cole felt his cheek. He’d need to go for x-rays. But Cole had gotten the better of him, hadn’t he? That wouldn’t have happened a year ago, thought Cole. The last eight months of nearly nightly workouts had helped. His reflexes were much sharper, his fists faster. His punch much more solid. But there was something else. Something that hadn’t been there a year ago. Something that hadn’t been there before his last trip to the ranch after the Oracle debacle. The anger that had lain dormant after his father’s suicide had exploded to the surface while in Alberta, drawn from him like a poisoned magma, but never fully purged from his system.

  That anger had fuelled him, burned in him, and had eaten at him as a poison does. And now he couldn’t ignore it. Nancy Webber knew. She knew the truth about his father’s death. Would she write about it? Cole shook his head, which he immediately regretted. Who cared if she did? He had no reputation left to protect. But he felt a wave of sickness and knew intuitively that more was at stake than his ego. Nancy Webber was at stake. His anger the previous evening had been in part fuelled by the flood of memories around his father’s last act of anger and futility. It had also been fed by the bitter sense of loss he felt knowing finally that Nancy Webber really was in it just for the story.