Stabenow, Dana - Liam Campbell 02 - So Sure Of Death

by So Sure Of Death(lit)

  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 gleam 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 begunhad been dragooned into, was more like itlearning 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 prophesyor 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 brotherher 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 digunder 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 similarsince 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 villageI won't tell you the name, I'm saving that for publication but I'll give you an exclusivewhere I found items in use by the people who live there thisa thump of a fist“veryanother thump“daya third thump“that are so similar to thousandyearold artifacts which I have excavated from thisthump “verythump“sitevery 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. “Iit 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?

  “You mean Nelson?

  “He was going to ruin it! Ruin it all! Destroy my thesis, negate twenty years of work, besmirch my standing in the academic community, all for what? All because he'd found a storyknife and decided that all by itself that proved that the Yupik of Kulukak were an offshoot of the lower Yukon tribes, instead of a migratory band of Chuckchi from Siberia!

  Wy's smile faded.

  “What nonsense! Anyone with half a brain would review the evidence, the artifacts, and know the truth for what it was! Look at this! A stone lamp with a bear fetish, a classic Siberian Yupik design! Look at this!

  “What is it?

  “Can't you tell? It's a fragment of an armored vest! Look at the weaving! That pattern never originated on this side of the Bering Sea!

  “If you say so. Jo was doing her best to be soothing.

  At first, McLynn seemed to calm. “I told Nelson there was nothing in it, that it had been left behind by a much later group passing through.

  “Certainly seems like a viable possibility. Desmond, what I really wanted to ask you was

  “You see my whole thesis is predicated on the movement of peoples between the Siberian Chuckchi region and the subarctic region of western Alaska.

  “Er, yes, Jo said. “The Aleuts used to row their kayaks

  “Baidarkas.

  “whatever, across eight hundred miles of open sea to get from one continent to the other. I remember learning that in Alaska history in high school. Very, ah, daring. Gutsy. Admirable, even. But what I

  “And they settled here, McLynn said firmly.

  A barely repressed sigh. “Yes.

  “No matter what Don Nelson said. A contemptuous sniff. “A grad student. Really. What could he know?

  “Less than the dust beneath your chariot wheels, Jo agreed, “but what about

  “He had to be stopped.

  “what he says here, where What?

  “Nelson had to be stopped.

  Silence.

  “I couldn't let him do it. Years of fieldwork, excavation after excavation, most of the time pulling up nothing but potsherds. The semesters teaching undergrads with minds like sieves the ABCs of anthropology. All for nothing, if I let Don Nelson tell his theory of the storyknife. I couldn't let him. I had to stop him. Now I have to stop you.

  Before Wy could yank back the flap, she heard the sound of a dull, metallic thunk. When she finally got the canvas out of the way, she found Jo in the act of rolling into one section of the excavation, her eyes closed and blood draining from her temple.

  There was a movement to her right and her gaze shifted just in time to see McLynn, a determined frown on his face and a number two spade in his hands. The spade was already on the downswing and Wy instinctively stepped back, tripped over the Blazo box and went sprawling.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Sir! Sir! An ungentle hand shook his shoulder. “Sir, wake up!

  Liam swam up from a great depth. The light was dim and distant at first, steadily increasing in wattage, until it became so bright it hurt his eyes. The light resolved into a long, rectangular fixture on a ceiling somewhere. The two fluorescent bulbs behind the white plastic cover seemed to burn right through his retina, and he closed his eyes. Somebody groaned.

  “Sir! Are you okay?

  His head hurt. No, that wasn't right, his head was thumping, pounding, hammering with pain. He felt his gorge rising. He opened his eyes again and this time saw Prince, her expression anxious. “Help me up.

  “What?

  “Help me up.

  Prince helped him sit up, and he staggered to the sink and vomited. The water ran cold and clean from the faucet and he held his head under it. The water swirling in the bottom of the sink turned pink. He kept his head under the faucet until it ran clear again. She was waiting with a tea towel when he stood up.

  “Help me to a chair.

  He propped his head in his hands. “How long have I been out?

  “Over an hour, if you got clobbered right after we split up.

  He explored his scalp with tentative fingers; there was an enormous lump over his
right ear and his right eye felt puffy. “Am I going to have a shiner?

  Prince regarded him gravely. “It looks like it. Who hit you?

  “I didn't see him. Where's my cap?

  Prince found it where it had rolled beneath the table. It no longer fit around his head. He adjusted the band to its widest extension. It perched on top of his lump at a precarious angle.

  “Who do you think hit you?

  “I don't have a clue, Liam said. “How about you?

  Head trauma often resulted in short-term memory loss. Prince pulled out a chair and sat down. “I got Chad Donohoe's statement.

  “Good.

  “He saw the skiff pass him that night, he thinks around three a.m. Monday morning.

  “You told me that two days ago.

  “He signed his statement.

  “Good.

  “So did Fred Wassillie.

  Liam squinted at her through his one good eye. “You didn't say Donohoe had somebody with him.

  “He didn't.

  Liam sighed and shifted carefully in a tentative attempt to sit upright. His head didn't fall off, so he was more patient than he might have been. “Look, Prince, you've obviously discovered some new evidence that you think is important, and any other time I'd be willing to let you lead me to it a piece at a time, but I've just been sucker-punched by an unknown assailant, I'm sitting here with a lump on my head the size of Denali, I've just lost my breakfast and most of last night's dinner, I can only see out of one eye and NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO GET CUTE! Yelling hurt. He dropped his voice. “Talk. And keep it short and to the point. Who's Fred Wassillie, and what'd he say?

  Prince looked hurt. “He saw the skiff coming out of Kulukak Bay, too, she said stiffly.

  “So we've got two witnesses. All the better.

  “He saw it three hours earlier.

  A short, charged silence. Liam wanted to lay his head carefullyin his arms and close his eyes for the next month. “At midnight.