Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  “Anyway, this was right before Augie graduated,” Active said.

  “With honors,” Long added.

  “It’s like he had Role Model coded into his DNA,” Active said.

  “First kid from Chukchi ever to get a full-ride sports scholarship anywhere,” Long said. “And then Edgar disappears.”

  “Everybody wondered if Augie would crash,” Active said. “Just hang around town, shoot hoops in the city league—”

  “Get drunk,” Long interjected.

  “He didn’t, obviously,” Barnes said.

  “Not Augie,” Long said.

  “He’s gonna leave a hell of a hole in the Nanooks lineup.” Barnes didn’t seem to notice the outraged stares produced by this remark as he took Long’s notebook with the list of victims.

  “You guys know anybody who’s mad at any of these people? You got a police chief here, some other teenagers besides Augie, sounds like. How about it, Alan, anybody ever threaten your boss? Either of these girls have a bad breakup with a mean boyfriend lately?” He looked at the three officers.

  Carnaby sighed. “Yeah, I guess we’ve got some interviewing to do.”

  “How about we all meet again around five, see where we are?” Barnes suggested. “Your office, Captain?”

  Carnaby nodded. “We Troopers can take the interviews with Augie Sundown’s family and Rachel Akootchuk’s. Alan, do you need to stay here with the ATVs, or can you work some of this?”

  “The paramedics can watch the four-wheelers.” Long gestured at the ambulance. “They’ll radio in the names as people come by and claim them.”

  “Okay, then how about you check around Public Safety, see if anybody was madder than usual at Jim? Talk to the other cops, the dispatchers, jailers, that kind of thing.”

  “Sure,” Long said. “And I’ll work back through the files and see if anybody he put away got back on the street recently.”

  “Good idea,” Carnaby said, not sounding very optimistic.

  “It’s a moon shot, but you never know.” Long trotted off to the ambulance and huddled with the paramedics.

  “I think I’ll get something to eat,” Barnes said. “Anybody around here serve steak and eggs?” Carnaby directed him to the Korean hamburger joint near the state court building, and Barnes set off on foot.

  Active turned to Carnaby. “He seems pretty calm about it all.”

  “Barnes? Guys like him are like that.”

  “Like what? Cold-blooded, you mean? Abnormally detached?”

  Carnaby shook his head. “It’s not that simple. It’s just— well, I never met an investigator worth a shit who was motivated by anything other than ego.”

  “Ego?”

  “Ego. Not pity for the victims, not revenge, not a passion for justice. Intellectual vanity, pure and simple.”

  Active swiveled to watch Barnes’s departing back. “It doesn’t seem natural, though.”

  “You’re like that yourself, you know.”

  “Me?”

  “Let me ask you this: when a case isn’t going right, do you get madder at the bad guy for what he did, or at yourself for not being able to figure it out?”

  Active thought for a moment, then shrugged in acknowledgment.

  “So,” Carnaby said. “You want to talk to Augie’s family, or Rachel’s?”

  “Augie’s, I guess,” Active said.

  Carnaby nodded. “I heard he was staying with his grandmother. Green house up on Second Avenue, kind of behind the tank farm. Dead Cat in the yard.”

  Active gave Carnaby a blank look.

  “As in D-8,” Carnaby said. “You know,

  “As in D-8,” Carnaby said. “You know, yellow, treads, a blade?”

  “Ah, right, the dead Caterpillar,” Active said. “I do know the place.”

  “I’ll send Dickie Nelson to talk to Rachel’s family, then. Why don’t you take the Suburban and drop me at headquarters? You can swing by Grace’s place to get out of your camp clothes and clean up before you get started, if you want.”

  “Yeah, I guess a shower wouldn’t hurt,” Active said. “It’s starting to look like a long day.”

  “Lots of ’em, probably,” Carnaby said.

  “Oh, hell.” Active frowned in irritation. “We forgot about No-Way.”

  “What?” Carnaby said. “Who?”

  “No-Way,” Active said, and told Carnaby about the dead hunter at One-Way Lake.

  “Who was he?” Carnaby asked.

  Active shrugged. “There wasn’t any I.D. on him, no initials on his clothes or gear.”

  “Inupiaq or white?” Carnaby asked.

  “Inupiaq,” Active said. “From one of the villages up the Isignaq, I’d guess.”

  “Well, the lack of I.D.’s not that surprising, then,” Carnaby said. “Your average village guy tends to figure the Fish and Game Troopers are out to bust an Eskimo the minute they get an excuse, so he doesn’t carry any. That way, it’s more hassle for the Fish and Game cops, more forms to fill out. Maybe they’ll let him off with a warning.”

  “Not worth the paperwork?”

  Carnaby nodded.

  “Yeah, but hunting without a license?” Active asked, annoyed as usual by how people not from Chukchi always seemed to know more than he did about how things worked on his alleged home turf. “That’s a fairly serious bust.”

  “Oh, most of ’em get their licenses,” Carnaby said. “They just don’t carry them. Makes it even more annoying for Fish and Game.”

  “So how do we figure out who this guy was?”

  Carnaby brushed his moustache with his fingers and thought it over. “Sorta like with the four-wheelers over there, maybe? Put a message on Kay-Chuck that someone was found dead on One-Way Lake and if anybody doesn’t come back from hunting, people should report it to their Village Public Safety Officer or the Troopers. Then maybe they can identify him by his stuff.”

  “If we can get him out of there,” Active said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Carnaby said. “After you drop me off, run by Lienhofer’s and see when Cowboy can go back up there and bring him in. Then you can get cleaned up and go see Augie’s grandmother. By the time you’re done, the paramedics should have some more names for us.”

  Active nodded, and they climbed into the Suburban and rumbled down Third Avenue toward the Chukchi Public Safety Building.

  A few minutes later, Active pulled up at the Lienhofer offices and hangar on the north side of the airport. He went inside and tensed up when he saw that the only occupant was Delilah Lienhofer, who owned fifty percent of the business and one hundred percent of the worst disposition that Active had ever encountered in a member of the human species, or any other.

  Her husband, Sam, owned the other half of the business; but Sam, according to Cowboy, had become a full-time drunk as the Chukchi winters rolled by and nowadays did far less than half the work of keeping Lienhofer’s going, though he spent far more than half the money. Sam’s high overhead was due to the fact that Chukchi had voted itself dry a couple of years earlier. Now drinking meant doing business with bootleggers, which meant prices four or five times what they had been when Chukchi was wet.

  Delilah, once as much of a drinker as her husband, had dried out about the time Chukchi did, though no one knew if that was because of the new law or because she figured out the business was in a nosedive and needed at least one sober principal if it was to stay aloft. Now she was that most toxic of personalities: the drunk who had reformed without the benefit of AA or any other program and lived with a mate who hadn’t.

  All of which, Active agreed in theory, provided ample justification for her evil temper. But this insight was no comfort if you were the person facing it.

  Which he assuredly was at this particular moment. “Can you tell me where Cowboy is?” he asked.

  “The fuck you want him for now?” Delilah said from her desk behind the counter. She was a squarish, strong-looking woman with collar-length gray-brown hair. Her only concession to v
anity was a carefully maintained set of long red fingernails. Now she was leaning forward in her chair, hands gripping the armrests, as if preparing to leap over the counter and use them to rip out Active’s jugular. “He wakes up, he’s gotta go up to the Gray Wolf mine and pick up a load of GeoNord executives from Anchorage.”

  “He’s asleep?”

  “Back there in the hangar,” she said. “But don’t bother him. Like I said—”

  “It’s just a quick run up to—”

  “No, I said! No more nickel-and-dime Super Cub shit for the Troopers today. This trip to the Gray Wolf is in the twin, and that airplane not only costs a lot more than a Super Cub, but GeoNord pays its bills with a lot less paperwork and no damn whining about the state budget.”

  Cowboy poked his head in from the hangar. “Hey, Nathan,” he said.

  “Get back in there and shave and brush your teeth and wash that soot off your face,” Delilah said. “You’re not going anywhere but the Gray Wolf today. And find one of our jackets with the epaulets.”

  “We’ve got to get that guy out of One-Way Lake,” Active told the pilot. “If you could just. . . .”

  “Sorry, man, it’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” Cowboy said. “He’s not going anywhere, right?”

  Active frowned. “I still don’t like leaving him up there. This time of year, everything’s on the move and hungry. Bears, wolves, foxes, ravens. Wolverines too.”

  Cowboy gave him a what-can-I-do? shrug. “One more day won’t hurt.”

  “I don’t know,” Active said. “What about somebody else? Didn’t you say there were a couple guys that can get in there?”

  “Usually there is, but right now there’s only me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know Dood McAllister?”

  The name sounded familiar. He must have heard it around town—maybe on the Mukluk Messenger service on KCHK. Sooner or later, everybody’s name appeared in one of Kay-Chuck’s Mukluk messages, anything from a birthday wish, to an arrival or departure time for a snowmachine trip between villages, to a request to pick up or send something at the airport, to a funeral or birth announcement. But Active couldn’t recall ever having met the man. He shook his head.

  “He flies for us sometimes when he’s between clients in his guiding operation. Unfortunately, right now his Super Cub’s parked out on the Katonak Flats with busted floats. His engine quit on him a couple days ago, and he couldn’t make it to anything wet, so he had to put her down on the tundra.”

  “He wasn’t hurt?” Active didn’t remember anything about a crash. Usually the Troopers were notified.

  Cowboy shook his head. “Dood’s rolled up a plane or two, like anybody, but, well, like they say, you don’t fly a Super Cub: you wear it. He kept her right side up, but he did tear up one of his floats. Apparently he found the only pile of rocks in the Flats.”

  Cowboy chewed his lip for a moment, then rambled on, almost to himself. “He’s got a Cessna 185 on wheels, and I guess maybe you could set down on that ridge above the lake, but then you’d have to horse the body all the way up there—nah, I think we’re out of luck till tomorrow.”

  “Couldn’t he take your Super Cub?”

  Cowboy’s face took on a pained and incredulous expression. Active raised his hands in supplication. Apparently he had proposed an unimaginable breach of the bush-pilot code. The Arctic had a way of making simple things complex, and this was another example. “Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow it is.”

  “You coming?” Cowboy asked. “Kind of a job, dragging a corpse up the creek and then wrestling it onto a float by yourself.” He paused. “Creepy, too.”

  “I doubt I can make it,” Active said. “We’re all on the Rec Center fire.”

  “How’s that going? Your expert from Fairbanks come up with anything yet?”

  Active shook his head. “He’s just getting started. The site is still pretty hot.”

  “Sure.” Cowboy rubbed his chin absently. “How big is the guy at One-Way, anyhow?”

  “Average size Inupiaq,” Active said. “About five-eight, five-nine. One-fifty, one-sixty, maybe.”

  Cowboy grunted. “I guess I can handle him by myself.

  But you owe me. This is when bush piloting gets to be un-fun.”

  “Nothing around here’s going to be fun for a while, Cowboy.”

  The pilot looked at his toes for a few seconds. “How’s Grace? She seemed a little—”

  “Yeah, freaked out.”

  Cowboy nodded. “In the van, yeah.”

  “I don’t know what that’s about. It’s new to me.”

  Cowboy nodded again, and Active sighed, then forced his mind back to business. They agreed that Active would arrange to have No-Way flown to Anchorage on Alaska Airlines’ evening jet the next day. That would give Cowboy time for the round trip to One-Way Lake, even if the Arctic threw him a curve or two before the trip was done, as was highly likely.

  Active signed the paperwork for the charter, then set off for the house Grace Palmer had inherited from her murdered father. It was a relief to be able to forget about No-Way for a while. If the Anchorage crime lab was as backed up as usual, it would be at least a couple of weeks before they heard anything. And by then, someone from one of the villages up the Isignaq River might have reported a friend or relative missing. With a little luck, Active would be able to scratch the dead hunter off the Trooper to-do list with almost no work.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHEN HE LET HIMSELF in, Nita was watching the Animal Channel, the big blue backpack she had taken to Martha’s on the floor at her feet. “Hi, Uncle Nathan,” she said when she spotted him.

  “Hi, sweetie.” He bent and gave her a peck on top of the head. “Where’s your mom?”

  “Upstairs,” she said, just as he’d feared.

  He looked around for the remote to mute the TV. It was nowhere in sight, so he spoke over a story about the mystery of where ravens go at night. “I’ll go up and talk to her.”

  Nita twisted to look up at him. “I think she’s sad again. Is it because of me?”

  “Of course not, sweetheart,” he said. “You know how much she loves you.”

  “Mm-mmm,” she said, sounding like an aana for a moment. “But why does she get so sad?”

  Active thought about this for a long time before answering. “I don’t know. It’s just how she is sometimes.”

  Nita was silent, watching the show about the ravens, but not watching.

  “Could you put your backpack away?” he asked finally, to get them focused on something mundane and manageable.

  “Can I wait till there’s a commercial?”

  “Sure, that’s fine.”

  Why does she get so sad? Telling Nita he didn’t know was only partly a lie, he decided as he made his way up the stairs. He did know the name of Grace Palmer’s demon, it was true. But the feel of it, what it was like to carry it around inside, always—of that he knew nothing, could know nothing.

  He stopped at the door of the room he knew she’d be in—not the bedroom she used now, but her childhood bedroom, with the sports gear still piled in corners, the purple wallpaper, the posters of long-faded rock stars, the memories of the nighttime visits from her father.

  He stepped insided. The blinds were drawn, and she lay on the bed in the dusk, still in her camp clothes, an arm thrown over her eyes. Her old Discman lay beside her, and she had earphones on. The case of an Enya CD was open on the nightstand, which was a good sign. Enya, bland as she might be, was at least optimistic, at times even uplifting.

  Grace raised her arm, made eye contact, and pulled off the headphones. “Hi, Nathan,” she said. “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

  “I have a few minutes.” He smiled, bent, kissed her forehead, and put his hand on her arm. “You take something?”

  “Some Tylenol PM,” she said. “It’ll kick in soon, and when I wake up . . . well, maybe it’ll be gone. Fingers crossed.”

  He made Xs of the firs
t and second fingers on each hand and held them up. “You want to talk about it at all?”

  “He had my sister cremated, you know. Seeing the Rec Center like that, it kind of . . . and his birthday’s in two weeks. That always. . . .” She put her arm over her eyes again, and her shoulders shook.

  He slid down beside her and worked his arm under her neck. She pushed the Discman aside, half-turned toward him, and put her head on his chest, eyes wet. “Your body is always so warm,” she said, her voice low and drowsy, and snuffly with tears. “Your thermostat must be set different. Do they know who started it?”

  It took him a moment to shift gears. “We’re not even sure yet it was arson. Our fire expert from Fairbanks will go in as soon as it cools off enough. We’re supposed to meet him at five for the report.”

  “Can you stay till then?”

  “Ah, I have to go interview some of the families—” He stopped at the look on her face. “But I can lie here till you fall asleep.”

  “Sorry for all the drama. You should find someone normal.”

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “Thanks.” She slid a hand under his shirt and laid it on his chest. Her breathing slowed, and he was about to ease off the bed when she spoke again. “He must have had a boat.”

  “Who did?”

  “Or a four-wheeler. How else would he . . . ?” She gave a deep, slow sigh and fell silent.

  It was a minute before he realized she had meant No-Way, and another minute before he realized she was right. As he eased her hand out of his shirt and worked his arm from under her neck, he felt a little stupid for not thinking of it himself. The nearest of the upper Isignaq villages, Walker, was at least twenty-five miles from One-Way Lake. Nobody hiked that far to hunt caribou.

  Active decided his money was on a boat and a four-wheeler. Load the ATV into the boat, take the boat to the right spot on the Isignaq, drive the ATV into the hills, and start shooting caribou. Then you’ve got a way to get the caribou to the boat without spending a week packing out meat. He made a mental note to catch Cowboy and tell him to scan the riverbank above and below the mouth of One-Way Creek for a boat and to search the area around the lake for a four-wheeler, or four-wheeler trails, or signs of a camp. Maybe there would be something to identify No-Way, or at least indicate which village he was from.