Halfway down to where the skiff was beached, not far because the tide was coming in, their ears were assaulted by a high, thin voice rising into a piercing shriek, coming from the trees that lined the bank. "This is your last chance, Jabba! Surrender, or die!"
Two disheveled twins emerged from the bushes, one with a slingshot, the other with a bow and arrow. Both weapons were loaded, and the enemy looked hostile.
Where was Mutt when she needed her? Kate thought, staring down at the twins. The twins stared back, pugnacious and unafraid.
Old Sam shot his hands up in the air and quavered in a high, falsetto voice, "We surrender! Don't hurt us! Please! Take us to your leader!"
This was more like it, and the twins relaxed without taking their fingers off the triggers.
Unwisely, Kate said, "Watch where you're pointing those things, you might hurt somebody."
Their expressions hardened instantly. "You should have bargained, Jabba," the twin holding the bow and arrow said ominously. She raised her weapon and sighted and an arrow whizzed between Old Sam and Kate.
"Hey!" Kate retreated a step. Old Sam was already beating feet for the skiff. A rock zinged past six inches in front of her startled eyes, and the enemy was reloading.
It was with distinct relief that she heard Anne Flanagan's voice raised from the cabin. "Caitlin! Lauren! You knock that off, right now!"
With more haste and less dignity than she would have liked, Kate retreated to the skiff, pushed it off the beach and jumped into the bow. By the time they were afloat, the twins had vanished back into the undergrowth, their mother in hot pursuit.
"I've got to hand it to you, Kate," Old Sam said when they were safely offshore, "when you hold a grudge, you hold a grudge."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Kate lied, sitting very erect on the midship thwart.
"The hell you don't," he said, his voice hard and flat and, yes, angry. "You had a run-in with that born-again zealot in Chistona last summer, so now you figure every preacher is tarred with the same brush. You know better, Kate, or you should. It just ain't so that everybody called to God is a fanatic fixing to burn your books. You ain't never been in Anne Flanagan's church. You never heard her speak. You don't know that she's anything like that Seabolt asshole." She heard the sounds of the starter cord being ferociously yanked, to no effect. "And you oughta know by the way I acted around her that she ain't nothing like him at all. You ought to march your butt right back up that beach and apologize." He yanked on the starter again. The engine spluttered and didn't catch. Old Sam swore. "I ought to by God march it for you."
Kate, momentarily forgetting who she was speaking to, bristled and snapped, "Try it on, old man. Just you try it on."
She was sitting facing forward, arms folded, jaw tight, glowering at the bow of the skiff. The next thing she knew, there was a hand at her collar and another at the waistband of her jeans and a sudden sensation of weightlessness, followed by a tremendous splash.
She came up spluttering and coughing. They were still close in to shore and the water was shallow enough for her to find her feet. She sluiced off her face with one hand and glared up at the old man. "What the hell do you think you're doing!"
"Teaching you respect for your elders," he said calmly, wrapping the starter cord around the top of the kicker. It caught this time, and he throttled it back to a low roar.
"Hey!" Kate said, as the skiff began to move slowly away from her.
His voice floated back to her. "Walk it off, girl. I'll be waiting for you at Mary's."
And he left her there, waist-deep in the Gulf of Alaska, as he put-putted peacefully down the bay.
It was five miles from the Flonagon setnet site to the Balashoff setnet site, and the distance was not made any easier by the soft, wet gravel underfoot, the weight of her soaking clothes, the sight of Anne Hanagan emerging from the trees, twins in tow, in time to see her squelch off, the knowledge that only ten or twelve fishermen had to be watching from the boats anchored around the bay and, last but most definitely not least, the sting of her own conscience.
Ekaterina Ivana Shugak was thirty-three years old, and the last time she had had to be reprimanded for disrespect to her elders was twenty-five years before, when at a potlatch she had failed to yield her chair to a visiting tribal leader from Port Graham. Her grandmother had said nothing of her granddaughter's breach of manners, nothing at all, not during the potlatch, and not for seven days afterwards. The other Niniltna elders had followed her lead, even Abel, who had turned the emotional temperature way down at his homestead for the longest week of her life. She had never forgotten it.
She had never repeated her error, either.
Until today.
The recognition of her violation of etiquette, of her dereliction of duty was slow and labored in coming. It took a mile of beach just to burn off her temper. She churned up the gravel better than a four-wheeler, and it was only exhaustion that slowed her down in the end. She was a grown woman, a person with education and experience, loved by her family, valued by her colleagues and looked up to by her community, not to mention feared by her enemies; what call did Old Sam have to correct her manners? One lousy little remark, not shouted, barely spoken, whispered even, and suddenly it was time to bob for apples, full-body-immersion style. This was the goddam Gulf of Alaska, after all, where the temperature of the water never rose above forty-two degrees Fahrenheit, she could come down with hypothermia in two minutes, count 'em, two, and go into shock and die right there on the beach, if not lose consciousness while she was still in the water and drown, and wouldn't Old Sam be sorry then.
By the second mile she'd slowed down enough to become miserably aware of her physical state. Damp denim chafed her thighs and her bra strap cut into the flesh beneath her arms. A residue of seawater tickled her sinuses and made her sneeze. Her skin was sticky, her shirt stuck to her back, her hair was falling out of its braid and, worst of all, her shoes squished. Above any other physical discomfort, Kate hated getting her feet wet.
By the beginning of the third mile she could see the Meanys' cabin, and spent the next twenty minutes preparing to ignore with dignity any comment that might come her way. Her worst fears were realized; the two kids, Dani and Frank, were sitting on the beach, heads together, talking earnestly. They broke off as she approached, their expressions at first hostile, then incredulous and finally delighted. They had the same eyes and the same chin; there wasn't a lot of difference in their broad grins, either.
"Been wading?" Dani inquired in a bland voice as Kate stumped grimly by.
"You're supposed to take your clothes off before you get in the water," Frank added helpfully.
Another time, Kate might have been relieved to see that Frank could smile and joke; now, all she could feel was the red creeping up the back of her neck. She marched on.
It was another mile to Amartuq Creek. By then Kate was wet, tired and humiliated, and her defenses were down for the count.
She had been rude to Old Sam. She had been even ruder to Anne Flanaganrude hell, actively offensive, deliberately so. Further, Old Sam was correct when he said that Kate's experiences at Chistona had colored her perception of Anne Flanagan from the moment she had been made aware that the woman shared a profession with the Right Reverend Simon Seabolt. Her grief for Daniel Seabolt had left scars, deeper ones than she had realized. Kate had never been one to agonize over past failures; nevertheless, under even the most superficial self-examination it was obvious that the events of the previous June had been nagging at her like an unhealed wound ever since.
And poor Anne Flanagan, her mere existence a prod at the open sore, bore the brunt of an accumulated frustration Kate hadn't even known she was carrying around.
She had deserved the dunking for being rude to Sam, who had told her nothing less than the truth, and she had deserved the long walk in wet clothes for being rude to the Right Reverend Anne Flanagan, who had done nothing but offer Kate tea, cookies and her other cheek.
And here at long last was the creek, its sandy mouth stretching wide, the incoming tide hiding the sandbar bisecting its channel, salmon making V-shaped ripples as they struggled upstream against the current. She halted at the water's edge. And there was Old Sam's skiff, beached on the other side of the creek. With the tide coming in, the channel was full of water. There would be no skipping across the sandbar that guarded the channel, which meant her shoes would get soaked again, and they had yet to dry out from their first dunking as it was.
For a split second she was angry all over again, and then the humor of the situation struck her and she burst out laughing. It was slightly uncontrolled, maybe even a little hysterical, but laughter it was, warming and cheering. She felt a lot better afterwards. It didn't even bother her when, halfway across, she tripped over a red salmon, lost her balance and fell in, getting all-over wet for the second time that day. What the hell, at least it was mostly fresh water this time. She got up, wrung out her hair and squelched up the bank.
Mary Balashoff's cabin perched at the edge of the trees across the creek, a plywood shack with tarpaper shingles and the long bow line of a skiff tied off to a cleat attached to the deck. It had a small porch hanging off the front door, and on this porch sat two figures, one small, one large. The small one had his chair tilted back and his feet up on the porch railings. The large one was rocking slowly back and forth in her rocking chair.
Kate was dripping water like a rain forest when she came to a halt in front of the cabin. Standing with her head bowed, she said, "I'm sorry, uncle. I was rude. Please forgive me."
He grunted. Taking his time, he put down his mug, removed his gimme cap to scratch tenderly at the back of his scalp, resettled the cap to his satisfaction and finally leaned over to reach down to a tray resting in front of the door. From a chipped china teapot he poured her a mug of steaming Russian tea, liberally sweetened with honey squeezed out of a plastic bear. She cradled the hot porcelain thankfully between cold, clammy hands. The tea scalded all the way down. Grateful, she took another long swallow, and Old Sam, teapot at the ready, topped off her mug again, adding another dollop of honey.
Implicit in his pouring of the tea was forgiveness. Implicit in her acceptance of it was their mutual understanding that at the first opportunity she would also apologize to Anne Flanagan. The proper balance of aged authority and penitent youth restored, the subject was dismissed.
Mary Balashoff looked from one to the other. Kate was serene. Old Sam was imperturbable. She shook her head. 'Jesus, you Shugaks. I never will understand you."
Kate looked at Old Sam, whose mother had in fact been a Shugak, and smiled. He grinned back, his usual face-splitting, people-eating grin. "Well hell, Mary," he said, "can't let you pluck out the heart of our mystery, now can we?" He cocked a hopeful eyebrow at Kate, who valiantly swallowed any astonishment she might have felt at Old Sam Dementieff quoting Shakespeare on the shores of Alaganik Bay. Thwarted by her lack of response, he reached over and pinched Mary on the behind.
Again he was disappointed. Mary shook her head. "Shugaks," she repeated, and heaved herself to her feet. An amiable giant of a woman, she stood six feet, one inch in her stocking feet and had startlingly blue eyes at odds with her brown face and black hair. Back when such things were not done, her father, a handsome Aleut from Tatitlek, had run off with the beautiful daughter of a Norwegian seiner. Speaking of Shakespeare, Kate thought. The seiner, a proud and bigoted man, had washed his hands of the affair and returned to his Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, also known as Little Norway, righteously to declare himself to be without issue from that day forward.
It had been a happy marriage, so far as Kate could remember the tale, made all the more so by the fact that the union had scandalized the Tatitlekers as badly as it had the Ballardians, which allowed the couple to live in happy obscurity on a homestead outside of Copper Center, unhampered by advice from either family. They'd had five children, four boys and one girl, all of whom had blue eyes like their mother and black hair like their father and all of whom grew to a minimum of six feet in height. The boys went off to school, moved Outside and never came back. Mary had stayed, and by default had inherited the family setnet site.
She had been fishing it for thirty years. The Amartuq fish camp had been abandoned by federal decree for almost the same amount of time, and until the aunties had gone back up the creek a generation of Park children, including Kate, had learned to pick fish from Mary's skiff, to mend nets at Mary's knee, to fillet salmon and to tend the fire that burned beneath the drying racks after they had been filleted. Park parents had come to regard the Balashoff setnet site as on-the-job training for those offspring unlucky enough not to be chosen as deckhands.
Mary had also had a longtime summer romance going with Old Sam. Kate remembered this interesting fact just in time for Mary to save her from further speculation by saying, "Come on, honey. Let's get you into some dry clothes before you catch cold."
Kate, shivering now in spite of the tea, followed her inside, and emerged a few minutes later dressed in a worn Aran sweater that hung to her knees and a pair of jeans rolled up twice at the ankles and cinched at the waist by a frayed length of half-inch polypro and a thick pair of wool socks. She sat on the porch with her back to the wall, and at that moment the sun broke through the clouds and bathed the bay in a warm, golden light. It was nine-thirty, and with the sun came a small breeze that rippled the surface of the bay, rocking the boats gently at anchor.
Mary refilled the teapot and they drank in comfortable silence. At last Mary stirred. "What's this I hear about someone getting killed yesterday?"
"Let me guess," Kate said. "Wendell Kritchen bring you the news?"
Mary grinned, showing off a set of perfect white teeth. 'He stopped by this morning."
"He's better than a town crier," Kate said, and left it to Old Sam to explain. Mary rocked, and listened.
When he was done they sat in silence. Out on the bay, a bowpicker's engine turned over. Its skipper weighed anchor and headed west, Cordova probably. Maybe he wasn't coming back. Maybe, like Old Sam, he didn't think fifty cents a pound was worth tearing up his gear for. Kate sighed.
"Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy," Mary said.
Kate looked from the bowpicker to Mary and back again.
"No," Mary said. "Cal Meany. Now there's a name was well deserved. He was one mean son of a bitch."
"How did you know him?"
Mary refilled her mug from the pot. "He cut my nets." She saw their expressions and smiled without humor. "Oh yes. And not just once. Twice. The first time was during last month's king opener. Snuck down and cut my gear from the anchor."
Mary's anchor was a heap of sandbags on the beach, tied together and attached to the beach end of the gear. The sea end of the gear was weighted with a small Danforth and marked with a fluorescent-orange buoy. When the tide came in, the corks floated to the top of the water and the net hung below, weighted at bottom by the lead line. The salmon, swirling in schools along the coast on a course for the creek, encountered the net en route, or hopefully some of them did, and got their gills stuck in the mesh. The thrashing of the caught fish in the water below caused the corks above to bob, at which time Mary would climb in her skiff and move up and down the cork line, hauling up the gear and picking the fish and then letting the gear drop down again. When the period was over, she pulled her gear and delivered the fish to the Freya. Or she did when not on strike.
And when her gear was intact. The anchor end cut, Mary's gear would float free, causing a hazard to boat traffic, not to mention that a free end was illegal as hell and Mary could be fined big-time for it, maybe even jailed, maybeKate went a little pale at the thoughtmaybe even have her permit pulled. "Did you see him?" Kate demanded. "Did you see Meany cut your gear?"
"Honey, if I'd've seen him, he would have been dead before now," Mary said flatly. "No, I didn't see him, or at least not that night. But he dropped by after the period was
over. Said he'd noticed I was having some trouble. Said he knew how tough things were on a woman fishing alone. Said it couldn't get anything but tougher. Said he'd be happy to make me an offer on the site, and for my permit, too."
Kate looked at her for a moment, and then said deliberately, "I don't know if I really care all that much who killed this son of a bitch."
Old Sam grinned his cackling grin. "Now, now, what would Chopper Jim have to say to that?"
"Who gives a shit?" She said to Mary, "You say he did it a second time?"
Mary nodded. "This Monday. I went down at five to start setting up. This time he'd cut the cork line in half a dozen places." She drained her mug. "I was thinking maybe I should get a dog." She smiled at Kate. "Now I don't have to."
Kate's heart sank. "Mary."
Mary took one look at Kate's apprehensive expression and burst out laughing. "Oh honey," she said, still laughing. "Oh honey, if you could see your face." She wiped away a tear. "No, I didn't kill him. I'd like to pin a medal on whoever did, but I didn't do it myself."
Kate examined the level of tea in her mug with all the scrutiny of a Socratic scholar trying for the perfect dialectic on surface tension. "Where were you last night, Mary?"
Mary raised an amused eyebrow. "Why, I was right here, Kate, right where I always am every night of the summer, right where I've been since the end of May, right where I'll be until the middle of September. And no, before you ask, there wasn't anybody here with me to say I was." She reflected. "Unless," she added with an air of innocence that fooled no one, "well, unless you count Edna and Balasha." Her smile was benign, and it didn't fool anybody, either. "They came to dinner, and we played pinochle until, oh, midnight I guess."
"Mary!" Kate said, indignant. "Why didn't you say so up front?"
Mary laughed again. "Sorry, Kate, I couldn't resist. Probably my only chance to be suspected of murder."
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 08 - Killing Grounds Page 13
