• FOUR •
It was early morning, the sky still dark and scattered with stars. Off the western shore of Nootka Island, the Alaska current moved relentlessly north, carrying with it everything its progenitor, the Pacific current, had met on its long journey from Japan: logs and plastic, discarded oil drums, bottles and boxes, shipping crates, tsunami debris—and now it picked up yet another passenger. The body was submerged and fully clothed, and it had drifted a little west of the lighthouse on an ebb tide. The current picked it up as it passed and carried it on up the coast until, with the push and swirl of a local eddy, it released it into Nicolaye Channel to drift gently into the embrace of a kelp bed just off the shore of Aktis Island. Only the sea otters that called the kelp bed home noted its presence.
—
Leif Nielson was sixty-nine years old, and he had spent all sixty-nine of them in the tiny village of Kyuquot on Walters Island, on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, just south of the Brooks Peninsula. He knew every one of the three hundred or so folks who lived in the two communities surrounding Walters Cove, and all he had ever dreamed about was fishing. He had learned to operate a boat long before he was old enough to learn how to drive a car. Boats were a necessity, the lifeblood of the two villages, and even kids of six or seven knew how to run them. As far back as he could remember, it seemed like all people ever talked about was fishing. Was there going to be a good run of pinks? Were the Rivers Inlet sockeye going to take the inside or the outside passage? Who had caught the biggest chinook? If someone had netted some chum salmon, there would be gutted fish spread out on the drying racks over on the reserve and hanging in all the smokehouses. Celebrations of any kind involved filling a forty-five-gallon drum with freshly netted prawns and cooking them with a steam hose.
But then the big schools of herring disappeared, and one after another the fishboats became idle. A few of the younger men got work on the big seiners over at Port Hardy, or at Campbell River on the east side of the island, but most of them left to get jobs in the mines or with the logging companies or even down in the city. Only the old-timers stayed behind to cater to the tourists who arrived each summer in the fancy inflatables they launched up at Fair Harbour, near the eastern end of Kyuquot Sound. By the time Leif decided to beach his boat, unable to justify the cost of maintaining her, the only job available was guiding for the guests at the fishing lodge. It wasn’t the kind of fishing he wanted to do, but it was still fishing, and at least he was out on the water every day. Besides, the guests tipped well, laughed at the yarns he told them, and never left without a salmon.
The lodge had been busy and Leif had worked twelve-hour days for the past week, taking guests out to the fishing grounds in one of the big Lund outboards. Today had been the last day for the biggest group, and they had wanted to get out on the water early. He had been up at four and on the water by five. By the time he brought them back to shore, off-loaded their fish, cleaned and refueled the boat, and then reloaded both the guests and their luggage for their trip back to Fair Harbour, he had another nine hours racked up. He was tired. Tired of helping other people fish. Tired of telling the same old stories. Tired of hearing the same old jokes. Tired of every damn thing. He was too old for this shit. He needed a break and he was damn well going to take one, even if it was just one afternoon and evening. Maybe tomorrow he would feel better.
He steered the boat across the tiny harbor and over to the dock in front of the village of Houpsitas, on the reserve side of the water. He and Archie Jack had grown up together, had fished together, had gotten drunk together. They had both married local girls, the weddings held in the same church in the same year, and they had both buried those same girls after forty-seven years of marriage, in the same church, in the same month, just two years ago. If Archie was around, they could head across the inlet to the old village on Aktis Island. The sea otters had eaten most of the rock urchins the two men loved to eat, but there was a good oyster bed there. It would only take a few minutes to pick enough to make themselves a decent supper, and then he and Archie could shoot the breeze, maybe have a couple of beers, play a game of bones.
He didn’t have far to look. Archie was sitting on the dock, his legs dangling over the side, baiting a crab trap.
“Hey, old man. What you doing over here in that fancy boat?”
“Never mind the ‘old man’ shit. I’m younger than you are,” Leif retorted as he slid the dinghy up to the dock.
“Only two weeks and that don’t count. Us Indians age better than you white folks. Less wrinkles.”
“Yeah, right.” Leif’s laugh was more of a snort. “You got so many wrinkles you look like one of them dogs from China. What do they call ’em? Shar-pay or something. Wrinkle dog.”
Archie’s cackle of laughter echoed over the water. “Wrinkle dog! That’s good. I like that.” He lowered the trap back down, watching as it dropped through the clear water to the bottom. “So what are you doing over here this time of day? Thought you’d be outside, helping those tourists steal our fish.”
Leif nodded. “Just finished. Took a load of ’em back up to Fair Harbour. Next bunch don’t come in till Monday.”
Archie nodded. “Guess they’re good for business anyway. Billy James was tellin’ me Old Joe at the store had him take four loads of supplies over to the lodge after the freight boat unloaded yesterday.”
“Yeah.” Leif nodded. “They ain’t so bad, most of them. City folks. They just want to catch a few big ones so they can go home and brag about it. Never been out on the outside before. Don’t know shit about the ocean, but they mostly know how to fish. Sort of.” He laughed. “Did have one guy who couldn’t bait a hook. Didn’t matter much, though. He turned green the first big wave we got, and I had to bring him back in.”
They sat quietly for a while, listening to the water chuckle under the dock, enjoying the warmth of the day, and then Leif asked, “You want to go over to Aktis and get a few oysters?”
“Sure.” Archie never turned down a chance to go out on the water, and Aktis was both his traditional home and one of his favorite places. “You got any beer hidden away in there?”
“Might have one or two,” Leif answered. Houpsitas, like all the villages on the reserve, was dry. No booze was allowed, but that restriction didn’t include the fishing lodge.
Archie grinned as he lowered himself into the dinghy. “Gotta have beer with oysters. Don’t taste the same without it. My ancestors told me that.”
“Yeah right,” Leif retorted. “I guess they told you to catch crabs with ham too.” He had seen the chunk of meat Archie had put into the crab trap.
Archie nodded, his face serious. “Yep. They did.” Then the familiar grin returned. “Told me not to let anything go to waste, and them crabs can’t tell the difference between ham and a good salmon head anyway.”
“Why the hell didn’t you eat it yourself?” Leif still missed his wife’s cooking and ate mostly out of cans.
“If you’d ever tasted the ham Pearl cooks, you’d probably choose the salmon head.” Pearl was Archie’s daughter, and her cooking was infamous.
“That bad, huh?” Leif shook his head as he engaged the clutch and sent the little boat surging forward. “Seems like a ham would be a hard thing to ruin.”
The whine of the motor cut off any further conversation as the little boat ran through the narrow pass leading out of the harbor and turned into the sound, heading west toward the open ocean.
Leif cut the engine as they neared the shore at Aktis. “You want to try here or should we go ’round the other side?”
“Might as well try here first,” Archie answered. “The tide’s a bit high, but we should be able to get enough for the two of us.” He reached into a locker in the cockpit and pulled out a bucket. “You got any gloves?”
Leif pulled out a pair of heavy rubber gloves and passed them to Archie. “Here. I’ll bring us in a bit closer. Those kelp leaves’ll hold us in.”
Leif might not h
ave noticed the body caught between the fronds of kelp except for the long hair swaying back and forth on the waves, rippling in the angled rays of the afternoon sun. It was floating face down, and the dark shirt was almost invisible under the surface of the water. He cut back the motor as the dinghy drifted closer.
“Whatcha doin’?” Archie asked. “There ain’t nothin’ there ’cept those damn otters. The oysters are that way.” He pointed to his left.
“I don’t know. There’s something there. Not otters, that’s for sure.” Leif angled the dinghy to get a better look. “Looks like a shirt or something.”
“Where you looking?” Archie twisted his body to get a better look. “Hey, yeah. I see it. What the hell …”
“Oh shit!” Leif jerked the transmission into reverse. “Holy Christ. We gotta get out of here.” He spun the wheel and pushed the gearshift into forward. “Gotta call the cops. Let them handle it. I’m not touching that.” The little boat’s nose lifted high into the air and surged forward on its own bow wave. Behind them, the body bobbed in the wake.
• FIVE •
The sea was already rising, the waves smashing on the rocks below and sending up curtains of spray as Mary led Jens and Dan to the workshop. It had been Dan’s suggestion to check it out. He had needed an excuse to get the other two out of the house while Gene made the call to the Gold River police detachment.
“She’s not going to be here,” Mary said, keeping her voice low so Jens wouldn’t hear. “This is where Jens was working last night and she was already gone when he got up to the house.”
Dan shrugged. “She might have come back while we were out looking for her and come down here to check.” It sounded weak even to him, but there was no way he wanted to be the one to tell Mary and Jens about the totem and the blood. He hated giving bad news. It was the one thing about police work that he dreaded. Plus he didn’t know how either of them would react, and right now Mary was doing a good job of keeping Jens calm. They would find out soon enough once the police arrived.
“I guess.” She looked dubious. “At least it’s keeping him busy.”
Dan nodded. “We should check down on the rocks too. Can’t do anything on the outside, but we can look down by the fuel storage tanks. She might have slipped or lost her nerve and be stuck halfway down.”
“Maybe. Doesn’t seem likely, but I guess we have to check everything.”
The workshop was empty, and after they had checked it and scanned the rocks below, the three of them returned to Jens’s house and stood quietly in the kitchen, looking out through the open door to the ocean beyond. Silence grew like a physical presence, thick and heavy, stretching and coiling to fill the space around them until it muted even the crashing of the waves. It was finally broken by Jens’s choked sob. Mary turned to him and grasped his arm.
“Come on, Jens. Let’s go up and call the police. They’ll figure it out.” She pulled the distraught man close and led him back out. Dan followed.
—
“Already done,” Gene told them when Mary explained what she wanted to do. “I could see you hadn’t found her and I figured we shouldn’t wait any longer.” It seemed he too did not want to be the one to tell them the news.
“Okay,” said Mary, though she looked surprised.
“Did they say how long they’d be?” asked Dan, offering a silent thank-you to whatever power had allowed him to dodge that particular task. He knew he would have to wait for the police to arrive or face an unpleasant barrage of questions, not only from the guys who responded but also from Mike, Dan’s boss when he was on the anti-terrorist squad, and the rest of the group back in Victoria, who would undoubtedly hear about it. On the other hand, he had promised Claire he would meet her later that week up in Kyuquot, and the weather forecast was predicting another storm would move in early the following afternoon. He hoped to beat it by leaving later that day.
Gene shook his head. “Probably take them a few hours. They’ll make it high priority, but it’s a pretty small detachment. They may have to bring someone over from Campbell River.”
Dan fought to keep his frustration in check. Patience was not something he had a lot of, but he didn’t want to upset Jens more than he already was. Sitting around waiting, doing absolutely nothing when there were things to be done, would drive Dan crazy—and it wouldn’t help him figure out what had happened to Margrethe either. If that was her blood he had found, then there was a lot that needed doing. He knew the police would search Jens’s house. It was standard procedure. But if Jens wasn’t involved—and Dan thought he probably wasn’t—then the search of the cove and surroundings needed to start now.
And he couldn’t let Claire down. Their rendezvous might be almost a week away, but the weather on this coast was unpredictable. He cursed under his breath. It didn’t seem possible. Just last year, cruising up the inside coast, he had become involved in a search for a missing woman—Claire was that woman—and now here it was happening again. Walker would probably tell him that he attracted these events. Or more likely he would say the events attracted Dan—reached out to him somehow. That was how Walker explained the things that happened in his world, but Dan didn’t buy it—although, now that he thought about it, it had certainly seemed that way when he’d been on the police force. They’d called him “Copper” Connor because his watch always seemed to cop the big ones, and that had been fine with him. Why not? It was why he had joined up. But now? His life had changed. He had moved on. This had to be coincidence. But Dan didn’t believe in coincidence.
He pushed himself up from the table, feeling three pairs of eyes follow his progress.
“I’m going to go back out to the boat,” he told them. “I need to check on her. The tide’s dropping, and she’s in pretty close.” He saw them all nod their understanding: these were people who lived with the sea. “I have to call my partner too. I’m supposed to meet her up in Kyuquot in a few days, and if I don’t get out of here today, I might get held up by the weather.”
All three heads turned automatically to the barometer hanging on the wall and then moved in unison to look out the window before swinging back to focus on him. Dan fought back a smile. Old habits kicked in no matter what the situation.
“I won’t be long, although if the guys haven’t arrived by the time I’m finished, I might take another look around the cove,” he said, turning to leave.
Only Gene watched him go. Mary was already bent over Jens, comforting him again.
—
On board Dreamspeaker it took less than a minute for Dan to confirm what he already knew: the boat was fine, sitting in thirty feet of water well off the shoreline, bow steady to the wind. And he didn’t call Claire. He hadn’t planned to. She would still be down on the south end of the island, maybe meeting with the people at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, or testing out the Boston Whaler she had bought to replace the boat she had lost last year. Dan wasn’t happy with her choice. He didn’t like the idea of her taking what was essentially a small power boat out on the open ocean of the west coast for the research she planned to do, but he had found out she could be at least as stubborn as he was. Their argument had been short but intense, and he had lost—although making up afterward had eased the sting. He would call her tonight. Let her know there was a chance he might be delayed. He would blame it on the weather. No need to stir up bad memories with stories of a missing and possibly murdered woman.
He made his way out to the aft deck and pulled a length of yellow nylon rope out of one of the lockers. Nootka Island was a popular destination for kayakers and boaters, and the old totem was one of the best-known artifacts there. It was still early in the season, and so far today they had been lucky in not seeing any visitors, but that could change at any time. At least he could rope off the area and preserve whatever evidence was there.
He thought about digging out his shoulder holster and gun from the locked compartment up on the bridge where he kept them, but decided against it. He had no
authority even if he did happen upon something, and it would be hard to explain a gun to the police when they arrived. Instead, he slid a leather knife sheath onto his belt and settled it comfortably in front of his hip. Sailors and wood-carvers always carried a knife, didn’t they? So what if this one had a six-inch blade honed to a razor-sharp edge?
Dan motored back to shore and pulled the dinghy up on the beach a few yards away from the totem, near the log he had leaned on. It was impossible to see exactly where the blood was, so he carefully traced the path he had taken earlier, trying to keep disturbance to a minimum as he led the rope in a wide arc, wrapping it around the driftwood in an uneven line. The seagrass area was a bigger problem. He had to search farther along the shore to find branches he could break off and drive into the sandy soil, hammering them down with a rock he found on the beach, but at last he managed to create a complete circle of rope, a makeshift police line he hoped would keep out any visitors until the police themselves arrived. He knew he had trampled the grass even more as he created his barrier, but it couldn’t be helped, and he thought whoever had desecrated the totem—and maybe killed the woman—had probably come and gone by water, so the tide would have washed away any trace anyway.
He stood back to survey his work and caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Gene was coming down the beach to join him.
“Saw what you were doing and came down to see if I could give you a hand,” he said as he stepped down onto the beach to join Dan. “Guess I’m a bit late.”
“No problem. How are things up at the house?”
Gene grimaced. “Not too good. I told them the totem had been damaged. Had to tell them something when they saw you stringing up the rope. It really bothered both of them. Guess they know there must be some connection, but I didn’t say anything about the blood. Jens has got enough on his plate. No need to make it harder for him.”
Dan nodded. “Guess he’ll find out soon enough once the police get here.” He looked up toward the lighthouse. “Mary still there with him?”
Black Tide Rising Page 3
