So Sure Of Death

by Dana Stabenow

  “Larsgaard is the tribal chief,” Liam said. “He is probably a popular man, and even if he wasn't, he is still an important one.” Liam cast a look over his shoulder. Action, momentarily suspended, resumed with immense vigor. “And he is a local boy. No matter what he has done, a local boy is still a local boy first and foremost, especially in a Bush village. We work for the state government, remember.”

  “I think I remember you saying that about five or six times in the past twenty-four hours, yes.”

  They reached the foot of the gangway. “Okay,” Liam said, “you track down Chad Donohoe and get his statement. What's his boat again?”

  “Snohomish Belle.” Prince pointed. “Right over there.”

  Liam squinted at the trim forty-footer moored near the mouth of the breakwater. “Okay. I'll head up to Larsgaard's, talk to his father.”

  “How you going to make him let you in?”

  “Innate charm,” Liam said.

  The tide was low and the gangway at a steep angle. Liam hoofed it to the top in long strides. A man stood at the dock, blocking the way. “Excuse me,” said Liam, who like any other man had an excess of pride in his physical abilities and was trying not to puff too heavily.

  The man moved a half step back. “You're the trooper, aren't you?”

  Liam stopped and took a long, he hoped subtle breath. “Yes. Corporal Liam Campbell, Newenham post.”

  The man looked at his plaid shirt and jeans with a puzzled expression, then seemed reassured when he saw the trooper badge on Liam's ball cap. He was a thin, wizened man with bandy legs that looked like they'd just stepped down from a mustang. He took two quick steps for every one of Liam's strides. “Name's Greasy Rust. I'm the oil man.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  Greasy waved a greasy thumb in the direction of the small tank farm on the hill. “I work for Standard Oil. I sell fuel to the boats.”

  “Yeah.” Liam's stride didn't slow. “Nice to meet you, Greasy, but I've got to talk to somebody, and I'm in kind of a hurry, so if you'll excuse me-”

  “You really think Walter killed those folks?”

  “The case is still under investigation,” Liam replied with exactitude.

  “Yeah, but you've got him in jail in Newenham, right?”

  Liam paused at the end of the dock to get his bearings. Larsgaard's house was up the hill on the right, as he remembered. “Mr. Larsgaard is helping us with our inquiries, yes.”

  “I can't believe I sold him the gas to go out there,” Greasy said.

  Liam looked down at Greasy, the top of whose balding head came barely to his shoulder. “You sold Walter Larsgaard gas last Sunday?”

  Greasy had inquisitive brown eyes veined with red like a map of downtown Los Angeles. He preened a little now that he had Liam's full attention. “Yeah. Well, I fueled them all up, you know.”

  “No, I don't know, Greasy. Tell me.”

  “When the fleet came in from fishing the period. Even if they haven't pulled that many fish, everybody always tops off the tanks afterward, just in case the Fish-and-goddamn-Game pulls their thumb out in time for another period the next day. You don't want to be caught at the dock with an empty tank if that happens, believe me. I remember old Mick Kashatok got caught that way one day a couple of years back, missed the biggest run of reds Kulukak has seen in the last ten years because he'd come in from the previous period running on fumes. By the time he'd fueled up, the fleet was an hour ahead of him, and by the time he'd gotten to the fishing grounds, everybody had their nets in prime water and no room left for him. He tried to cork Nappy Napagiak and of course old Nappy don't put up with that for a New York minute and he run his prop right over Mick's gear. Cut Mick's corkline. Course it fouled Nappy's prop and neither of them got much fish that period. Bob Halstensen said he'd never seen such a Chinese fire drill in his life, and then he got into it because both boats were without power and they drifted across the markers and the Fish-and-goddamn-Game got into it-”

  Liam, fascinated though he was with this flow of reminiscence, had to break in. “That's all very interesting, Greasy, but you say you refueled everyone, the whole, er, fleet on Sunday afternoon?”

  “Yeah.” Greasy shifted a lump from one cheek to another and spat a wad of tobacco juice, accurately hitting the area where the upright on the dock railing intersected with the crossing two-by-four. “Everyone who'd been out fishing that day. Which was pretty much everyone, including a bunch of jerry cans for outboards. Except maybe Alan Seager. Seeing as how theCheyennesunk at the dock the week before. It was my busiest day this month.”

  “So it wasn't out of the ordinary for you to refuel Walter Larsgaard, too.”

  Greasy's brow creased. “Well, no. I guess not.”

  “Okay, Greasy. Thanks for the information, we can use all the help we can get.” It was wise for Liam to build relationships with as many members of the local populations of the villages in his district as he could, and the fuel man in a marine community would see more of the populace more of the time than most. After all, he never knew when he might be back in Kulukak on another case.

  “You're welcome,” Greasy said, wiping his palm carefully down his pants leg before accepting Liam's hand. “Always glad to help out.”

  “Good to know,” Liam said. He smiled and eased his hand free. “Be seeing you.”

  “Anything you need to know, you ask,” Greasy called after him. “I been here forever, and I ain't going nowhere.”

  Five minutes later Liam was knocking on Larsgaard's door. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still no answer. He tried the knob. It turned and he stuck his head in the door. “Mr. Larsgaard? Sir? It's Liam Campbell, the trooper from Newenham. I need to ask you a few questions.”

  He pushed the door open and stepped inside, and something came down on his head like a sledgehammer, knocking the legs right out from under him. He fell backward, landing with his back half supported against the wall, and the last thing he saw before the lights went all the way out was the walrus head on the opposite wall, the ivory tusks rising in what seemed like a knowing leer.

  The same sledgehammer hit him again and a wave of blackness overwhelmed his vision and he stopped thinking at all.

  The ride to the dig was uneventful, not so much as a bump on the way. They touched down smoothly and rolled to a stop. As Wy pushed up the door, McLynn stuck his head out of the work tent. He had a peevish expression on his face. Looking at him, Jo said, “You didn't tell me what an attractive man Professor McLynn was, Wy.”

  Wy looked at her. “Oh god, are we doing the come-on thing again? I hate it when you do that, Jo.”

  She climbed out of the plane, Jo right behind her. Jo smoothed her T-shirt, patted her hair and walked toward McLynn, giving her hips that extra roll the oil executive could have recognized and would have advised Professor Desmond X. McLynn to run from, as fast as his little legs could carry him.

  But the oil company executive was still in jail, and Professor McLynn was only human. He tore his eyes from the way Jo was walking to the way Jo was smiling, smoothed his hair, sucked in his gut and advanced to meet her. By the time Wy reached them, Jo was listening, round-eyed with rapture, to an account of Professor McLynn's personal discovery of the abandoned settlement of Tulukaruk. “Really?” Wy heard Jo say. “Why, Professor McLynn, how positively prescient of you!”

  Wy made an abrupt ninety-degree turn and veered toward the edge of the bluff. She thought about jumping off, and then thought better of it, sitting down instead to hang her legs over the edge.

  Tim was helping Moses mend his gear. In a couple of days they'd head upriver to Moses' fish camp, to pull in their share of the season's silvers. Wy wouldn't see Tim again for two weeks, maybe three. The one condition she'd laid down to Moses was that Tim had to be back in time for the first day of school. Moses had bitched and whined and in the end made her promise to practice her form twice a day, instead of just once, before reluctantly acquiescing. There had been a gle
am in his eyes that made her wonder if he hadn't been driving her in that direction all along.

  Neither of them referred to her question of the day before. She hadn't forgotten asking it. She could wait for her answer, though, so long as she got one. The Yupik in her, she thought, willing me to patience. What if he is? What if he isn't? What does it matter either way?

  Three years before, she'd moved to Newenham, bought out an air taxi business, had rescued an abused child and acquired a son in the process and had begun-had been dragooned into, was more like it-learning tai chi. She had come to Newenham to start a new life, and all Moses could say was that she was escaping from her old one. He knew things, that old man, and he was always around to prophesy-or pontificate.

  And now here he was telling her that he'd known her mother. Martha and Ed Lewis had been BIA teachers all over south-western Alaska, a year in Ouzinkie, two in Old Harbor, one in Egegik, four in Togiak, five in Manokotak, two in Icky, nine in Newenham. They retired two years before Wy graduated from high school and moved to Anchorage, to a home in Spenard they had bought years before. At West High she made her first real friend, Joan Dunaway, and in spite of the trauma of being yanked out of high school and moved from a Bush community into the big city, she had never resented it.

  Martha and Ed had demanded A's on her report cards but had not punished her for her occasional lapse into the nether world of the C student, made her go to mass when Father Mike flew in but had deferred baptism into the church until she came of age and hadn't objected when she'd decided against it, hadn't let her date until she was sixteen but thereafter had set her curfew at midnight and had trusted her enough not to stay up to see that she kept it. They'd loved her, she was sure they still did, but she often wondered if it was a love that had grown more out of duty than any real affection.

  She worried that she was doing the same thing to Tim; if what she felt for him was obligation, if she had acted out of compassion and pity, or maybe because she felt she had to pass it on. That was their mantra, Martha and Ed: Pass It On. If someone did something for you, don't pay it back, Pass It On. Was she doing the Pass It On thing with Tim?

  Martha and Ed Lewis had removed Wy from the cycle of alcoholism and abuse embraced by her birth family before it had had a chance to take hold of her, the way it had Frank Petla and so many others. She would always be grateful, she would forever honor them, but try as she would, she could not remember a time when one of her adoptive parents had hugged her. Jo's father had hugged her the first time she went home with Jo at Thanksgiving. He hugged everybody, big bear hugs strong enough to lift you right off your feet. So did his wife, so did Jo's sisters and especially her brother-her mind veered away from that memory. It was the first real affection she had ever felt, and the Dunaways heaped it on her lavishly, without question. She was Jo's best friend, therefore she was family. She hadn't known families could be like that. It was what she wanted for Tim.

  And Liam? How did Liam fit into the picture? She didn't know yet. She wanted him physically, but then she always had; that was nothing new. She respected the work he did, and that was very important; she could never commit to someone who was not good at his job. It didn't matter if he dug ditches or programmed computers or cleaned teeth or was a state trooper; a man had to be good at what he chose to do with his life or Wy wouldn't look at him twice. Gary, Jo's brother, had been the first in his class of petroleum engineering. He worked for British Petroleum now, from the North Sea to China to Siberia. If they hadn't- No. She wouldn't go there. That was then, this was now, and now she had a business, a son and, on the horizon, a relationship forming with a man she wasn't sure she either trusted or respected, at least in a personal, emotional sense. They were dating, that was all she knew for certain. If it was possible to date in Newenham.

  Her thoughts hounded her up and back to camp. The deck chairs had vanished and she heard the murmur of conversation coming from the work tent. She made a seat back out of a Blazo box and sat down on the ground, stretching in the sun. So much of an air taxi's business was hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait on the customers, hurry up and wait on the fish, hurry up and wait on the caribou, hurry up and wait on the weather. Especially the latter. She thought of the omnipresent fog in Kulukak and was grateful it was keeping to that side of the Bay for the moment, unusual for this time of year, when the normal weather pattern called for blankets of fog and mist miles in diameter to come sweeping up the Nushagak and envelop all of the coastal communities in a dank, damp shroud.

  She closed her eyes and was dozing off when she heard Jo say firmly, “He wrote to me several times, Desmond.”

  “Did he?” There was a rustle of movement. “What did he say?”

  McLynn's voice sounded stern, even harsh, as if he were calling Jo to account for something. Wy got up and maneuvered around a Blazo box full of what to her untrained eye looked like clods of dirt, and waited outside the tent flap, listening.

  Jo didn't seem concerned. “He said he'd discovered something at the dig that I would be interested in seeing.”

  “Really? What was that?”

  “He wanted me to come out so he could show me in person.”

  “I see.” More rustling. “You see this, Jo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  Jo, voice puzzled, said, “It looks like a manuscript.”

  “It is. It's mine. It's the product of twenty years of study and work and making aerial maps and grubbing around in the dirt and no summers off.”

  Jo oozed respect and deference for the sacrifice involved. “A long-term project.”

  “Very long. My wife left me over it,” he added abruptly.

  “Oh.” Jo sounded startled, then rallied. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

  “Her name was Noreen.”

  “Oh,” Jo said again, adding lamely, “It's a beautiful name.”

  Wy grinned.

  “Yes. She was a good worker. There wasn't anything she couldn't turn her hand to: cooking, cleaning, bookkeeping, mending. She'd even take a hand in the dig-under strict supervision, of course.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  Jo's irony was lost on McLynn, who was lost in reminiscence. “It halved the work, having her here.”

  “I imagine it did. How long was she here?”

  “One summer.”

  Another tiny pause. “One summer out of the last twenty?”

  “Yes. She walked away from me at Anchorage International Airport, when we were on our way back to campus for the fall semester. She said she was going to the ladies' room. I never saw her again.”

  “I see. What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I went back to school, and I taught my fall and spring semester classes, and then the next summer, I came back here. It was all I had left.”

  “I see.” Jo was noncommittal, but Wy could hear her thoughts as if she'd spoken them out loud. If McLynn hadn't treated his wife like his own personal serf, he might not have run her off.

  Wy was more charitable. McLynn had loved, and lost, and nineteen years later, he was still grieving. It explained a lot of his behavior, if it didn't excuse it.

  McLynn's voice rose a little. “Twenty years I've been coming here, most of the time alone, sometimes with an assistant. None of them ever had the commitment to the project that I did.”

  Jo was soothing. “I'm sure they didn't.”

  “Not one of them ever believed in my thesis, that the Bristol Bay Yupik was an entirely different people from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta tribes. Have you ever looked at a map of Alaska?” He rushed on without waiting for a reply, which was probably just as well. “There's a mountain range that divides the Delta from the Bay. That's one thing. Another is that the Yupik used to paddle regularly across the Bering Sea from Siberia to the Aleutians, first to make war and then to visit relatives.”

  “It's almost a thousand miles, continent to continent, in some places.” Jo was noncommittal, reserving judgment.


  McLynn's voice went up again, a specialist mounted securely on his own personal hobbyhorse. “There are family names in common between the Siberian Yupik and the Aleutian Yupik, did you know that? Right down to the present day. There are some very fine examples of woven armor, too, and waterproof boatwear made from seal gut. The art is very similar-since the Wall came down I've been to Korjakskoe, I've seen some of the villages there.” He was excited now, skipping from subject to subject, eager to bolster his thesis. “There is one small village-I won't tell you the name, I'm saving that for publication but I'll give you an exclusive-where I found items in use by the people who live there this”-a thump of a fist-“very”-another thump-“day”-a third thump-“that are so similar to thousandyearold artifacts which I have excavated from this”-thump- “very”-thump-“site”-very loud thump-“that the items could be exchanged and put into use with little or no familiarization on the part of the user.” A triumphant pause.

  “Well.” Jo seemed at a loss as to what to say next. “I-it does seem to support your premise, sir.”

  “It proves it!” Thump!

  Jo maintained her respectful silence, and again Wy could almost hear her thinking. Jo didn't know anything about archaeology or anthropology, Alaskan or otherwise, but she knew enough about fanatics to realize that any opposition to pet theories could get one killed. Wy smothered a chuckle and waited to see how Jo would divert McLynn back to the topic she was investigating.

  Surprising them both, he returned to it voluntarily. “And after all this, after twenty years' hard labor, the ridicule of my colleagues, the funding reduced and then taken away, the days spent fighting mosquitoes in Alaska and the nights spent fighting Stalin's revenge in Korjakskoe, do you know what that ignorant little brat was going to do?”