Killing Grounds

by Dana Stabenow

  “He took the skiff and Evan McCafferty out to the drifter that morning. You and Jim didn’t show up until late afternoon. Why didn’t he just raise anchor and sail away?”

  Kate had wondered about that, too, with no result. “I don’t know.”

  Anne increased a stitch. “Maybe he wanted to get caught.”

  “Maybe.” And maybe he had, maybe Neil Meany had waited for discovery, not knowing who would come, knowing only that someone would. Which might put an entirely different interpretation on whether he knew what he was doing when he pushed the starter. If he had, he’d not only have been committing suicide, he would have been committing his third and fourth murders. Maybe his brother had been right, maybe he was too dumb to drive a boat.

  It was all academic at this point, anyway, Kate thought. Neil Meany had killed two people and had taken a third with him when he’d killed himself, accidentally or by design. Either way, he was bent on self-destruction, and Kate had no time to waste on the self-destructive, who all too frequently managed to be as destructive of the people around them as they were of themselves. She thought of her mother.

  No. Life, as Old Sam might have said, was too goddam short.

  There was a whoop from offshore, and they looked out on the water to see Jack hold up a king salmon, balancing carefully in a skiff that was rocking exuberantly from side to side with the enthusiasm of its crew.

  Anne’s eyes narrowed. “Sixty pounds?”

  Kate squinted. “Fifty, maybe fifty-five.”

  “We’ll give it to Mary to smoke.”

  “Good idea.”

  Anne began the next row. “He was a Yeats scholar. Neil Meany. He could quote everything Yeats ever wrote.”

  “Um.” Kate turned her face more into the sun and closed her eyes. “I never did like Yeats much myself.”

  “But he’s terrific!” Anne was shocked. “He loved women.”

  Kate snorted without opening her eyes. “Yeah. ‘The broken wall, the burning roof and tower and Agamemnon dead.’ I remember the first time I read that, I thought, yeah, and Iphigenia, too, Agamemnon’s firstborn daughter, sacrificed by her father for a lousy fair wind to Troy.”

  There was a brief pause. “You didn’t like Neil Meany much, did you, Kate?”

  Kate opened her eyes and said flatly, “I don’t like killers. Neil Meany killed his brother, killed his niece, killed Evan McCafferty and tried like hell to kill me, twice. Lucky I have a harder head than Dani, and that he assaulted me on the deck of the Freya, not in some little upstream backwater where he could have finished the job. No. I didn’t like Neil Meany. And no, I’m not sorry he’s dead.”

  Anne worked a few stitches. “You’ll have to forgive him, you know. Forgive him, to get past it.”

  “No.” Kate was definite without being overly emphatic. “No, I won’t.”

  *

  “What did you do with Cal Meany the night of the Fourth, Auntie?”

  “Not much, Katya,” Auntie Joy said with elaborate nonchalance. “I just take him down to dock and shove him off.”

  “Auntie!”

  The old woman heaved a deep sigh and added, “But tide is in. He just trip and fall on knees on his own deck.”

  The four aunties burst into gusts of merriment at the expression on Kate’s face.

  “Make big cuss words, too,” Auntie Joy added, to the sounds of additional merriment.

  Evidently there would be no potlatch held to honor Calvin Meany’s memory, Kate thought. He would not be missed. She thought of his wife and son, now on their way back to Ohio. He would not be missed by anyone.

  It was maybe eight o’clock by the slant of the sun, and all of the sailors were home from the sea, and one hunter home from the hill as well. Aunties Vi and Joy were still at the Flanagans’ cabin, Aunties Edna and Balasha had gone back to fish camp. Jack and Johnny were scarfing up the last of Anne Flanagan’s superb spaghetti. Anne was washing dishes, Kate drying.

  Chopper Jim, none the worse for wear, looked Kate over with a critical and not wholly approving eye, nodded once and said. “I guess it takes more than blowing up a boat to kill a Shugak.”

  He had a lovestruck twin on either knee. Kate was relieved to see that the little monsters had some human instincts.

  The trooper said to Auntie Joy, “Why didn’t you just tell me that you’d taken Meany back to his boat, Joyce?”

  Auntie Joy got up and left the deck. A moment later they heard the creak of the outhouse door.

  “Because she’s stubborn,” Kate said, stacking plates in a cupboard. “Because it’s an insult that you asked her to account for her time, like some village kid answerable to his parents for checking the fish wheel or the smokehouse fire. She’s an elder. She’s not answerable to you.”

  “Because I’m a trooper?”

  Kate shook her head. “No. Or it’s not first on the list.”

  “What is?”

  Kate smiled. “You’re thirty years younger than she is.”

  Mutt jumped up and barked once. A shout made everyone look from her to the beach. Auntie Balasha was at the edge of the outgoing tide in the fish camp dory and she was waving her hand urgently enough to ship water over the dory’s sides. “Where’s Joy? She must come! The fish hawk is back with his paper!”

  “Son of a bitch,” Kate said, and dropped the towel to head for the door.

  Nineteen

  WHEN THEY GOT TO THE FISH CAMP they found Auntie Balasha and Auntie Edna sitting on their stumps around the campfire, faces set in unrevealing lines. Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy went to sit next to them without a word.

  Also next to the fire were Bill Nickle, who had seated himself, and Lamar Rousch, who had not, by which Kate deduced that neither had been invited to. “I don’t have much choice in this, Kate,” Lamar said the moment he saw her. “The governor ordered me out here this time.”

  Bill Nickle looked smugger than ever. “What’s he here for?” Kate said, nodding at him.

  Lamar was unhappy and he didn’t care who knew it. “He’s got a seat on the board of Fish and Game. He’s a gubernatorial appointee. The boss said to let him come if he wanted.”

  “And I wanted,” Bill Nickle said. “Give it to her.”

  Mutely, Lamar held out a document, folded in thirds. Kate took it and ripped it in half and handed the pieces back.

  There was a murmur from the four old women. Auntie Vi permitted a wintry smile to cross her face. “The case is still in federal court, Lamar,” Kate said. “The state can put their cease-and-desist orders where the sun don’t shine.”

  Bill Nickle erupted to his feet. “Now wait just a goddam minute!”

  “Watch your goddam language in front of my aunties,” Kate snapped.

  “Oh, why don’t you just fuck off, Shugak! This is none of your goddam business, anyway!”

  Jack, standing at the rear of the group, stepped back out of range and sent up a prayer of thanks that there hadn’t been room in the skiff for Chopper Jim. In the telling, felony assault could always be reduced to a misdemeanor.

  Kate moved forward swiftly, and Nickle raised himself hurriedly to his feet. He was eight inches taller than she was, but Kate didn’t seem to find it a disadvantage. “It is my business, Bill. These are my aunties, and this is our family’s fish camp. We come here every summer—”

  “Yeah, right, where were you for thirty years, when the rest of us were working at building up a state!” It was nothing but empty bluster and they knew it, and after the words were out, so did he.

  “—and we fish to eat,” Kate continued without missing a beat. “We don’t fish so we can stuff the skin and give it glass eyeballs and hang it on a wall somewhere and brag about the big one that got away. We take the fish and we dry it and we can it and we kipper it and we smoke it and we fill our pantries with it and then we by God eat it, and no one, especially not some jacked-up old fart from Anchorage that some other jacked-up old fart from Juneau misnamed to a state commission is going to tell us di
fferent.” She stepped back. “Now get out. And don’t come back.”

  She didn’t add a warning to the last command. She didn’t have to.

  Nickle appealed to the fish hawk. “You have to stop them. The judge says so. The governor says so.”

  “The governor in on this little deal you and Meany cooked up?” Kate said.

  “What deal?” Lamar said.

  Nickle paled. “What deal? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “What deal,” Kate mimicked him. “Why, the big fly-in fishing and hunting lodge you and Meany had planned for Amartuq. What did Neil Meany say you called it? A single-destination resort?” As she spoke, she remembered the scene at Mudhole Smith International Airport, all the sport fishermen with their fly-fishing gear taking off for fishing holes unknown. There was one hell of a market there, even she could see that. How much more of a temptation would it have been to Meany, clearly a man with an eagle eye on the main chance? And then there was a perfectly serviceable airstrip less than a mile from fish camp. He would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

  Instead, he’d just died. To Bill Nickle she said. “Meany acquired the Ursins’ setnet site, by means that will not bear close examination. And then he tried for Mary Balashoff’s site so you could nail down both sides of the creek, probably for a moorage, and you wanted the fish camp for a lodge because it’s the only site on the creek suitable for one, never mind that it’s also the only one suitable for the people who actually live here to have a fish camp.”

  Her lips twisted. “And what the hell, with virtually no overhead after the initial investment because you good-old-boy guides don’t have to pay a lick in taxes, and since there’s an old guide network in state government that goes back to territorial days, you figured you had it made. You almost did.”

  She laughed. “You know, you’re nothing but a carpetbagger, Nickle. You don’t give a damn about the land or the people, you just want to make a buck however you can.” She looked around at the aunties, four round brown faces lined with patience and stoicism and a fortitude that had endured and survived a three-hundred-year threat of racial and cultural extinction.

  That fortitude was not going to be put to the test today. Kate looked back at Bill Nickle. “Take your fishing flies and your bamboo pole and your two-pound test and get lost.”

  Faint but persevering, Nickle appealed once more to Lamar Rousch. “They can’t do this. We’ve got the law on our side. We’ve got a goddam judge on our side!”

  They stood there, at an impasse, the rushing sound of the creek loud in their ears. At last Lamar Rousch sighed and shoved his hat to the back of his head. “You know what, Bill? I’m just not ready to start World War Three, right here, right now. Okay?”

  “No, it’s not goddam okay! They’re not supposed to be fishing here, you’ve got the papers, serve them!”

  Lamar, well aware that he was putting his entire professional future on the line, smiled and said cheerfully, “No.”

  Twenty

  THE AUNTIES DID NOT CHEER as the two men disappeared into the grass, which was probably a good thing. At this point, they had Lamar on their side. Kate waited for the sound of the Zodiac’s motor, and then waited longer until it had faded from earshot. When it had, she said, “Jack?”

  “What?”

  “Could you and Johnny take a walk, please? Like up the trail to the airstrip and back?”

  He looked from her to the four aunties, perched in their solemn row, and said, “Want us to take our time?”

  She smiled at him. “No. Normal speed is fine.”

  “Sure.” He fetched his rifle from the cabin. “Johnny?”

  “Daa-aad.”

  “Come on.”

  Johnny tugged off his Mariners cap with the Ken Griffey Jr. signature on it, beat it a couple of times against his leg, resettled it just so on his head, heaved a martyred sigh and followed his father into the brush.

  Kate, now that the adrenaline rush that always accompanied flouting authority had faded, sat down on a tree stump, facing her aunties.” She looked only at Joyce, however. “I know all about it, Auntie.”

  Auntie Joy said nothing. Neither did any of the others, but Kate detected a group stiffening of spine, and was satisfied. “I had breakfast with Lamar Rousch in town last week, at the Coho Cafe. When we got the news about the price drop, a man at the counter offered a penny more a pound. Lamar said he was Joe Durrell, and that he was an independent fish buyer. Lamar said Durrell usually bought for the restaurant trade, in Anchorage and in cities down the West Coast, but I heard that sometimes, when it looked like he’d make a buck on the deal, he’d buy in bulk for Japan, too.”

  Auntie Joy maintained her owl-eyed stare.

  “Guess where I saw him next? Mr. Joe Durrell?” They didn’t answer her, but then she didn’t expect them to, not now, not ever. “He was in George Perry’s plane, on his way up Amartuq Creek.” She paused. “Could I have a little of that tea? With honey, please. I’ve been so thirsty since I finally woke up.” She threw in a wince and a hand to her sore ribs for good measure.

  Woodenly, Auntie Balasha rose to her feet, poured out a cup of tea from the pot on the spider grill at the side of the fire, anointed it with honey and handed it over. Kate sipped at it gratefully. “Thanks, Auntie. I needed that. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Durrell on his way up Amartuq. Yes, well, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, in fact I didn’t even recognize him at first, but then George came back without him.” She sipped tea. “He had you in the backseat instead, Auntie Joy.”

  She cradled the hot mug between her palms and regarded her aunties. They stared steadily back, without expression, it seemed without blinking. “I couldn’t figure it out, why you’d be going to town, and especially why you’d be flying to town. And then I got too busy to think about it, until I got laid up.” She smiled at the four old women. They didn’t smile back. “Nothing to do but think when you’re laid up.”

  She drained the mug and set it down. “The way I figure it is this, aunties. You’ve been fishing subsistence, all right. But I took a look at that pile of bones behind the camp. That’s an awful big pile. You’ve been catching yourself a bunch of fish.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of family,” Auntie Joy said. Auntie Vi put a calming hand on her knee.

  “Yes, you do,” Kate said, nodding. “Yes, you do, Auntie, but the amount of fish you’ve got smoking doesn’t square with that pile of bones.” She waited. She waited in vain, and sighed. “Okay. You’re selling them to Durrell, aren’t you? King salmon, filleted and boned and ready to slap on a grill. Nobody fillets a salmon the way you do, aunties. How did you hook up with Durrell, anyway?” They didn’t enlighten her, and she waved a hand. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. What happened on the Fourth? Did he commit the cardinal sin of paying by check? So you had to go into town and cash it in the bar, while you held him hostage, along with his fillets?” She grinned. “Or did you just con him into a round-trip ticket to the Fourth of July parade?” She laughed, but she laughed alone. “Whatever. I have to admit, you guys got style.”

  Her laughter seemed to break the spell. The aunties shifted in their seats, exchanged covert glances. Auntie Balasha even got up to refill Kate’s mug.

  “Thanks, Auntie.” She sipped at the brew, strong and sweet and reviving. “You know, aunties,” she said dreamily, gazing off into the distance, “if you sell the fish you catch on that fish wheel, you are not subsistence fishing, you are commercial fishing.” She looked across the fire at the four old women one at a time, all trace of laughter gone. “And there are only two places in Alaska where you can legally commercial fish with a fish wheel. One of them is the Tanana River, and the other is the Yukon, and Amartuq Creek doesn’t run into either one of them.”

  No one claimed ignorance of geography.

  “Refusing to serve a questionable legal document, and a federal document at that, is one thing.” She took a deep breath, and let it out. “But Lamar’s a
natural born fish hawk. He believes in what he’s doing, and he’s good at it. I got a sneaking suspicion he might already have an idea of what you’re up to. And aunties, if Lamar catches you selling a subsistence catch to a commercial buyer?” The firelight flickered across her unsmiling face, and her voice held no trace of its former laughter. “He catches you at that, and he’ll have you out of here in two seconds flat, tribal history, cultural imperative and all.”

  Footsteps sounded in the brush behind her, and she rose to her feet. “Thanks for the tea, aunties. Hey, guys. What, Jack, you couldn’t find a bear to feed the kid to?”

  *

  Kate smiled at the eagle sailing thirty feet above the creek. The eagle, not overwhelmed by her charm, glared balefully back, and backwinged to land in a treetop to scan the creek for unwary salmon.

  “What?” Jack said.

  She raised her hand. “Taste.”

  He took her hand automatically. “What?”

  “You said I tasted salty. The last night we were on the bank of this creek. Don’t you want to make sure?”

  His eyes lifted quickly to hers, and his slow smile told her exactly what he was thinking. Still, he hesitated. “How are your various aches and pains?”

  “Variously achy and painy,” she said, “but don’t let that stop you.”

  “In that case.” He accepted her hand and took his time pushing back her cuff. His lips were warm against her wrist, his tongue warmer. “Um,” he said. “You do taste kind of salty.”

  “As salty as the other day?”

  One eyebrow quirked up. “Let me check.”

  Checking took a while, and involved unbuttoning the cuff of her shirt and rolling the sleeve back to her elbow.

  The sun had tangled in the tops of the trees, flushing the clouds with a rich pink-orange glow, and the fish camp had settled into its routine of gutting and splitting and hanging the day’s catch, followed by dinner and, Kate was startled to see, the production of the Monopoly board. Edna caught up the dice and shook them like she was standing at the craps table in Vegas. She saw Kate looking and one of her eyelids lowered in a long, slow wink. Johnny, for a change, was asleep.