Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  The woman considered this for a moment, then lifted her eyebrows. “I’ll get her. You could come in.”

  Active shut the door behind him as the woman shuffled through a doorway to the rear of the house. He was in a combination kitchen, living room, and dining room: gouged wooden dining table with mismatched chairs; an oil stove for heat and cooking; a sofa and easy chair, both old and brown; a big gray plastic trash can in a corner that probably held drinking water; clothes drying on a wooden rack behind the stove; a pair of jeans and a sewing kit on the table; a radio on a counter tuned to Kay-Chuck; a wall covered with family snapshots and a tapestry of the Last Supper.

  The four quarters of a dressed-out caribou hung from eyebolts screwed into the ceiling joists. They were dripping blood onto a green tarp, but not much. The animal must have been cooled out before it was brought in for Blanche Ahvakana to cut up. A second caribou was in the process of dissection on another tarp on the floor. It had been gutted and the legs severed at the knees, but the skin was still on, except for a flap peeled back from the right foreleg. An ulu, the traditional pie-slice-shaped Inupiat woman’s knife, lay in the chest cavity.

  He took a seat on the sofa. The door from the rear of the house opened and Active rose as Blanche Ahvakana led a sleepy-eyed young woman into the room. “This Ruthie,” she said. The older woman went to the stove and moved a teakettle onto a burner.

  Ruthie Silver looked to be about twenty-five. Short black hair, freckles on her nose and cheekbones, a chin like her father’s, a squarish, pleasant face that looked as if it might have been merry before life got so complicated. She wore black sweatpants and the heavy-ribbed white top from a set of thermal underwear. Her pajamas, Active surmised.

  “I’m Trooper Nathan Active,” he said.

  “I know,” Ruthie said. “My aana told me. Did you find out who, who. . . .” Her grandmother passed her a handkerchief, and she wiped her eyes, then her nose.

  Active shook his head. “Not yet.”

  She dropped into the armchair, and he settled onto the sofa again.

  “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “We thought you might be able to help us.”

  “My dad and me, we were so mad at each other. We, we—”

  “Too much alike,” Blanche growled from the stove. “Stubborn.”

  “We didn’t get to say good-bye,” Ruthie said. Then, after a long pause: “You worked with him, ah?”

  Active nodded. “He was a good man and a good policeman.”

  “He ever talk about me?”

  “Sure,” Active said. “He talked about how much he loved you and missed you, and he said he hoped that one day you two would get over your fight and be . . . like you were before.”

  “Dad said that?” Ruthie sounded disbelieving, but not suspicious. More like a dream was coming true.

  “Lots of times,” Active lied again, with not a murmur of protest from his conscience. In reality, Silver had never mentioned this daughter who had run off with an unsuitable suitor, but why not give her the comfort she needed? Besides making her feel better, it might increase the chances that she’d talk. “He said maybe he was too hard on Jae; maybe he could help Jae get on his feet after he was released.”

  “Really?” Ruthie sobbed and snuffled and used the handkerchief. “I sure miss him.”

  Active thought of asking which one, but decided against it. He cleared his throat and dived in. “We were wondering if your dad worked out at the Rec Center a lot.”

  Ruthie thought it over, then squinted a no. “Not when I’m living there. I don’t think he ever went.”

  “Do you have any idea why he would have gone the night it burned?”

  She squinted again. “I hadn’t talked to him since last week.”

  “How about Jae? Have you heard from him since he got out of prison? Is he back in Cape Goodwin yet?”

  Ruthie’s face froze for a moment, then collapsed into tears again.

  “She never hear nothing,” Blanche said, handing each of them a cup of tea. She knelt by the caribou on the floor and resumed separating the hide from the flesh with the ulu.

  “He called me a few days before he was getting out,” Ruthie said from behind the handkerchief. “He said he’d be here in a couple weeks, but he never did come, and he hasn’t called, and now I don’t know what happened to him. That’s why I called Dad last week, to see if he would check on Jae, but he just hung up on me. Can you find Jae?”

  Active considered. She was almost certainly too distraught to lie. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to push a little. “We heard Jae thought your father was the one who reported him and got him arrested?”

  Ruthie lifted her eyebrows. “He’s almost as bad as Dad when he gets an idea in his head. I tried to tell him Dad didn’t do it, but at first he wouldn’t listen. Then, couple months ago when he called from prison, he said it’s all right, now he knows who turned him in, and it wasn’t Dad.”

  “He changed his mind?”

  Ruthie raised her eyebrows again.

  “Did he say why? Or who it was?”

  “No, he just say he found out the truth, and he’s sorry he thought it was Dad.”

  Active was silent for a long moment. How much pain could he inflict? “Did you believe him?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Before he changed his mind, was he angry enough to want to hurt your father?”

  Ruthie’s face froze again as she realized what this visit was about. She set her teacup on the floor with a loud rattle and some spillage. “You think Jae started that terrible fire?”

  “We have to check all the possibilities.”

  “No, he. . . .” Active watched as Ruthie searched for solid ground and couldn’t find a spot to put her foot. “But he said. . . .” She looked at her grandmother. “Aana?”

  Blanche put down her ulu and looked at her granddaughter as if they were now separated by a huge polynya. “He’s one of them Koreans,” she said finally. “You know how they are. If he was going to do this thing, he wouldn’t want you to know.”

  “Don’t tell Mom it was Jae,” Ruthie said. Then she buried her face in the handkerchief again.

  Blanche came over and put an arm around Ruthie’s shoulders. “She’ll have to know sometime.” Then she turned to Active. “My daughter Jenny, that’s Ruthie’s mom, come up here yesterday. She’s at church right now.”

  Active set his teacup on the floor and stood. “There’s one more thing. Somebody stole a boat from Roland Miller and drove it up here two nights ago, when we had the fire in Chukchi. It’s swamped on the beach down that way.” He pointed south. “Have you heard who brought it up?”

  Blanche wrinkled her nose no. “We never hear nothing about that,” she said.

  Was it possible that somebody could bring a boat to a hamlet like Cape Goodwin and not be noticed? People were nosy and gossipy everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the tiny Inupiat villages of the northwest coast.

  The boat thief would have arrived at night, admittedly, and the boat had been beached out of sight and sound of the houses. Perhaps he could have walked into the village without being noticed, but then what?

  “Any strangers show up in the village yesterday?”

  Blanche squinted no again.

  Active thought it over and suddenly felt stupid. The thief had to be somebody from Cape Goodwin. He’d simply landed, walked home, and gone to bed. This was starting to sound like a drunk story. Maybe the theft was more like an involuntary loan. The guy would probably sober up, dig the boat out of the sand, take it back to Chukchi, and have a good laugh about it with Roland Miller.

  He looked at the two women, both watching him, waiting for him to go. “Anybody come home from Chukchi yesterday, maybe they’ve been drinking a little?”

  Another pair of squints.

  He left his card, asked them to get in touch if they heard from Jae, and took his leave.

  Outside Blanche Ahvakana’s house, he put his baseball cap b
ack on and pulled up the hood of his anorak against the rain and wind, both of which seemed to have picked up while he was inside.

  “Nathan? You’re up here? Did they find out about, about . . . ?”

  He turned and found himself facing Jenny Silver, who looked like an older and more Inupiat version of her daughter.

  “Jenny, I’m so sorry about Jim. I—”

  She moved toward him a little and, without thinking, he opened his arms. She stepped into them, and they huddled for a moment against the weather, like mother and son or sister and brother. “Arii, how am I going to live without him? We’re married twenty-eight years next month. He was taking me to Hawaii.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” he murmured after a few seconds.

  “You could catch whoever did it.”

  “We’re trying.” He patted her back and relaxed his embrace.

  She took the hint and stepped back, though she retained a grip on his elbow, as if unwilling to be without human contact for the moment. She peered into his eyes with a directness uncommon for any Inupiaq, particularly a woman. “You find out anything yet?”

  He shrugged helplessly and squinted a no. “We’re just getting started, but. . . .” He paused, momentarily frozen by the desperation in her eyes. “But we’re wondering if Jae Hyo Lee could have done it. We understand he blamed Jim for—”

  “Not any more. He tell Ruthie he found out it was somebody else.”

  “But he might lie if he was planning to do this.”

  Jenny Silver became still, then lurched back as if he had shoved her. He put out a hand and caught her shoulder. “You think he would—you never tell this to Ruthie, did you?”

  “I’m sorry. I—”

  “I have to go in there.” She pulled her shoulder free and turned toward the house.

  “Jenny, wait, I—there’s one more thing.”

  She faced him again. “Ah-hah?”

  “Did Jim go to the Rec Center a lot?”

  “He never go. Only that one night.”

  “Did he say why?”

  She squinted. “Just that he have to talk to somebody up there.”

  “He didn’t say who? Or why?”

  Another squint. “He’ll never say much about anything he’s working on, until it’s finished.”

  She turned and hurried through the door of her mother’s house.

  Active started past the school toward the water, turning his face a little to the side to keep the weather from blowing into his hood.

  At the beach, he swung left and headed for the blue dory, just visible through the mist, perhaps three hundred yards away. He descended the gravel slope to the packed sand near the water, where the walking was better, and trudged along, seagulls over the tide line shrieking at the intrusion, little breakers washing onto the beach with a sound like a long sigh of exhaustion.

  Thanks to the ebbing of the tide, the dory was now just above the water line, the waves no longer coming over the transom. First he studied the tracks leading from the dory to the upper beach. Rain and wind had done their work, leaving only faint depressions in the sand that offered no clue as to what kind of footgear had made them.

  Then he turned to the dory itself. An empty green jerry jug floated on the water that had washed into the boat earlier, as did a red-and-white Monarch vodka bottle, which he pocketed, and a red steel gas tank, still connected to the Johnson outboard by a black rubber hose with a squeeze-bulb primer in the middle. “R. Miller—Chukchi” was hand-lettered in black paint on the tank and on the jerry jug. A spare propeller lay mostly buried in the sand flushed in by the surf. A red plastic toolbox was buried up to its lid, also labeled “R. Miller.” He dug it out and, inside, found two screwdrivers, four small wrenches, vise grips, and a pair of spark plugs.

  The upper half of a gallon plastic jug, the mouth still capped, was tied to a gunwale. It was the Chukchi version of a bailer, used to clear the boat of water that came in via rain, spray, or the odd wave while under way. He used it to attack the sand in the bottom of the boat but quickly discovered the plastic was too soft. He dropped the bailer and combed through the sand with his fingers, but came up with nothing else.

  He stepped out of the dory and looked up the beach toward the village. It would be a couple of hours till Cowboy showed up, maybe more. What to do? Every village had at least one small store. He’d find it, buy something to eat, maybe a sudoku book too, and figure out a place to wait.

  He remembered from his telephone conversations with the Village Public Safety Officer that the man worked out of the same building that housed the health clinic and the city clerk’s office. He could hole up there. Wherever he was in Cape Goodwin, he’d certainly hear when Cowboy Decker buzzed the village in his Super Cub.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “THINK THEY WERE TELLING the truth?” Carnaby asked. They were gathered in the Trooper captain’s office for what threatened to become a standing afternoon meeting on the lack of progress on the Rec Center fire.

  Active nodded. “Struck me that way. I don’t think they’ve seen or heard from Jae since he called Ruthie before he got out.”

  “And he told Ruthie he’d changed his mind about Jim Silver turning him in? What do you make of that?”

  Long broke in. “Like the grandmother said, of course he’s going to tell them that if he’s planning this thing. Otherwise they’re gonna know he did it.”

  “And Jim didn’t tell Jenny anything except he was going to the Rec Center to see somebody?” Carnaby asked. “Nothing about Jae Hyo Lee?”

  Active shook his head.

  Carnaby swiveled his chair to gaze out a window. Across the lagoon and the rolling folds of tundra, a wet, gray night was gathering in the east. “So where the hell is Jae Hyo Lee?” He swiveled back and looked at Alan Long. “Alan? You’re the only one here who’s ever met him.”

  Long shrugged. “Like I said, he’s really good out in the country. He could be anywhere by now if he has a boat and travels at night.”

  “That reminds me.” Active looked at Long. “I found your stolen dory. It’s swamped a few hundred yards down the beach from Cape Goodwin.”

  “No joke? The village, or the Cape itself?”

  “The village. Looks like the guy parked it there and hiked into town. I couldn’t find out who he was, but I found this sloshing around inside it.” He pulled the vodka bottle from his anorak and held it up.

  Long looked disgusted. “You know, it’s hard enough getting a boat up that coast and around the Cape even if you’re sober and it’s daylight. And some drunk does it by night. I’ll let Roland know he’ll have to go up there and get it.”

  “All right,” Carnaby said. “What else we got?” He studied a sheaf of notes on his blotter. “Let’s see, Dickie Nelson knocked on doors around the Rec Center. None of the neighbors saw anything till they heard the sirens and looked out their windows.”

  The other two nodded.

  “And how was your day, Alan?”

  “Not a lot better,” Long said. “I confirmed that none of our officers have heard anything about Jae being in town, and I checked with the ER at the hospital. No burn cases the night or morning of the fire. But we think we’ve got an I.D. on the owner of the last four-wheeler. The Honda dealer says he sold it to a guy named—” Long paused and flipped through a notebook. “—Tom Gage?”

  Carnaby and Active looked at each other and shook their heads.

  Long studied the notebook. “I didn’t know him either, but the name sounds kinda familiar. The dealer says Gage teaches aviation technology at the Tech Center. Or did teach it. White guy.”

  “Any family?” Carnaby asked.

  Long grimaced. “I went to his house back on the lagoon. Nobody home, small place, all right, looks like maybe he’s the only one that lives there. The Honda guy thinks he remembers Gage was in the middle of getting divorced when he bought the four-wheeler about a year ago, and the ex-wife-to-be had already gone back Outside.”

 
“Any sign of a girlfriend?” Active asked.

  “I don’t know,” Long said. “Place didn’t look very feminine from what I could see through the window. No vehicles around except for a pickup on jacks with the rear wheels off and the brakes pulled apart.”

  “Should we let the ex-wife know?” Active asked. “The Tech Center would probably have her on file as the next of kin.”

  Carnaby thought for a moment. “Let it ride for now. Put a message on Kay-Chuck for Gage to contact us. If we don’t hear from him in a day or two, then we can let his family know he probably died in the fire.”

  “All right,” Long said, writing in his notebook.

  “Where do we go from here?” Carnaby asked.

  Active chewed his lip for a moment. “If Jae did start this fire, seems like he would have to have been planning it for a while. Maybe he talked to somebody about it. He was shooting off his mouth before he went away, right, Alan?”

  Long raised his eyebrows yes.

  “So, we should talk to the prison in Oregon,” Active said. “Find out about his mail and visitors and phone calls, huh? See if the prison will interview his cellmate for us? You ask the prison about that, Alan?”

  Long looked chagrined. “I’ve been busy. I was in a hurry.”

  Carnaby sighed. “Take care of it, will you, Nathan?”

  Active looked at his watch. It was almost five-thirty and in Oregon it was an hour later. “Sure, first thing tomorrow.”

  “What else we got on our list?”

  Active spoke. “Jae blamed Chief Silver for getting him busted, but Jim told Alan he didn’t do it. And Jae ended up telling his girlfriend the same thing. What if he was leveling with Ruthie? What if the chief wasn’t the target at all?”

  Carnaby frowned skeptically. “And Jim just had the bad luck to be in the Rec Center the night Jae made his move on the real snitch?”

  “Everybody there had the same bad luck, except the snitch,” Active said.

  “Good point,” Carnaby said. “All right, Alan, you get on that. See if the Feds will tell us who their source was when they busted Jae.”

  Long pulled himself up and looked a little more official. “Absolutely, Captain. First thing tomorrow.”