by Stan Jones
After taking his leave, Active drove the Suburban to his birth mother’s house.
When he was born, Martha Active had been only fifteen, interested mainly in partying and sleeping around. So she had turned him over to two of her teachers at Chukchi High. Officially, his adoption by Ed and Carmen Wilhite had been naluaqmiut-style, complete with lawyers, court proceedings, and documents on long paper. In practice, it had operated more like a village adoption, even after the Wilhites moved to Anchorage. They let him keep his mother’s last name, and he saw her from time to time when she came to the city. She sent him Christmas and birthday presents, and Carmen made him send her thank-you notes.
In time, Martha had tired of strange beds and stranger men. She had gotten her GED, then a job as a teacher’s aide at Chukchi High. The Wilhites had taken him to Chukchi for a visit about then, but for the entire visit he had refused to speak to the woman who had sent him away.
Martha had finally married, about the time he was old enough for Little League. The groom was one Leroy Johnson, an electronics technician at the nearby Air Force radar site that had peered across the Chukchi Sea for Russian bombers and missiles until the Cold War ended. Two years after the wedding, the Wilhites had reported to a sullen Nathan that he had a half-brother in Chukchi, but he hadn’t set foot in the village again until the Troopers, with the ancient and faceless perversity of bureaucracies everywhere, posted him to Chukchi for his first assignment.
And now Martha and Leroy were solidly ensconced in Chukchi’s version of married, middle-class comfort. He delivered stove oil for the local Chevron dealer and hunted and fished more than a lot of Inupiat, while she headed the teacher-aide program at Chukchi High. They lived in a modern house on a quiet back street. Leroy bought each of them a new snowmachine every year, plus a new Ford Ranger every other year, and maintained a shifting population of boats and four-wheelers.
Active parked the Suburban in front of the house, went past a pair of four-wheelers into the kunnichuk, knocked on the inner door, and braced himself for the discussion that lay ahead.
Martha, he knew, held the view that only one final detail needed nailing down to make her life perfect: persuading her older son to give up his ambition of a transfer to Anchorage and settle down in Chukchi with a suitable wife, one who was smart, educated, and not too much of a village girl, but nonetheless willing to make a home, a life, and a family right here on the shores of the Chukchi Sea.
And now—the inner door swung open to reveal Sonny Johnson, gym bag in hand and dressed for the rain that seemed to be increasing as the wind diminished. He slipped off the earphones of an iPod and said, “Yo, Nathan! Whaddup?”
Sonny, like every teenage male Active had encountered in the past few years, was into hip-hop music. “Not much, man, whaddup with you?” Active responded.
Active could tell from his half-brother’s look that it hadn’t come out quite right, and he vowed never to try to talk like a teenager again. Better to slide into the irrelevance of adulthood in dignified silence.
Sonny, however, was an exceptionally polite teenager and ignored Active’s gaffe after that one brief flash of scorn. “Not much, dog, not much. I’m on my way to the gym. City League basketball starts tonight.”
Then the boy’s face clouded and he forgot his hip-hop for a moment. “That’s terrible about Augie and everybody at the Rec Center, ah? You guys find out who did it?”
Active shook his head. “We’re not completely sure anybody did it. The fire may have been accidental.”
“I hope so,” Sonny said. “Augie was our coach in basketball camp this summer. He was sure good at it. I’d hate to think anybody around here would do something like that.”
“Me too,” Active said. “I’ve got to talk to Martha, then maybe I’ll come up and watch the game. Who you playing?”
“Nuliakuk,” Sonny answered with a feral expression.
“You’ll crush ’em,” Active said.
“Word to that,” Sonny said with a grin. “They’re just a bunch of village boys.”
As the teenager slipped around him and left the kunnichuk, Active pondered the phrase: Word to that. It signified emphatic agreement, clearly, but how could a simple, everyday noun like “word” have taken on such a load of meaning? Active shook his head and pushed open the inner door to the house.
“Hi, Sweetie!” Martha said, hurrying to him for a hug. “Good to see you!”
As usual after not seeing her for a few days, he was struck by her youthfulness. She was in her mid-forties, but she carried it well. No middle-age fat, black hair still glossy except for the first hint of gull-wings at the temples, smooth-faced except for the laugh lines around her mouth and sparkling black eyes.
“Hello, aaka, it’s good to see you.”
She frowned. “Isn’t it terrible about the Rec Center? You figure out who did it?”
He gave her the same non-answer he had given Sonny, then changed the subject. “What’s that I smell?”
She led him into the kitchen and lifted the lid from a pot on the stove. “Moose stew. Didn’t I tell you Leroy got one?”
Active tried to remember. “Probably.”
“Oh, it was lotta trouble. It ran into a lake after he shot it. He and Sonny had a terrible time getting it out. Leroy will tell you all about it when he gets back from caribou hunting.”
“I can’t wait.”
Martha shook her head. “Same old smart-mouth, ah?” She filled two bowls from the stewpot and set them on the table, along with a box of the CD-size saltines known as pilot bread. “How you going to be a real Eskimo if you don’t hunt?”
Active realized the moment had come, but he didn’t quite have the nerve to seize it. Instead, he filled his mouth with stew and pilot bread, eyes on the bowl.
Martha, of course, spotted the stall instantly. “What? You can’t look at me?”
He chewed slowly, stretching it out.
“Whatever you don’t want to tell your mother, that’s what she needs to hear.”
He met her eyes, finally. “I got my transfer. I’ll be moving to Anchorage around Christmas, probably.”
Martha’s spoon halted halfway to her mouth and hovered there. “No,” she said.
“What?”
“No. You can’t go.”
Active had never seen her look so upset. “But I. . . .” He filled his mouth with stew to gain time. What to do next?
She put down her spoon and stared at a spot in a far corner of the room. “But what about Gracie and Nita and . . . and everything?”
“And everything,” Active understood, meant “and what about me?”
“I don’t know yet about Grace and Nita. Grace is a little scared about it, but I need to get her out of here.”
“Maybe if you just got her out of that house.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to stay in Chukchi all my life. Look at it.”
She was silent, eyes liquid and dark. “It’s not so bad if you’re used to it,” she said eventually. “I thought you were getting to like it.”
He shrugged. “A little bit, maybe. Sometimes. But I have to make my way in the Troopers.”
“You want to get away from me, ah?”
“Of course not. I’ll come back for—”
“Because I gave you away, ah?”
“Aaka, please. Don’t say that again. You know I—”
“Well, it seemed like the right thing at the time. I couldn’t take care of any baby. I was too young and kinnaq, like any girl that’s fifteen.”
“I know, Aaka, and—”
“And weren’t Ed and Carmen
“And weren’t Ed and Carmen good to you?”
“Of course they were.” This was like a catechism now, a ritual exchange they had to reprise every few months. His role was to give the right answers and hold his resentment in check, so he no longer added “but not like real parents” to the obligatory praise of the Wilhites’ child-rearing abilities.
“Well, the
n, why?”
“Aaka, Anchorage is my home. It’s where I grew up.” He braced himself, belatedly realizing how Martha was likely to take this.
She blinked rapidly for a few seconds, then took a spoonful of the moose stew. “You can’t go away again,” she said. “It’s bad when I let them take you when you’re baby, it’s bad when you come visit me when you’re little boy, and . . . no, you can’t go again.”
“You can come down and visit us.”
“No.”
“I’ll come up and visit you, then.”
“You can’t go.”
They both fell silent. Martha dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. After a time, she blew her nose into the napkin and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans.
“Gracie doesn’t have any women still alive in her family, ah?”
“Not that I know of.” Where was this going?
“Maybe when you guys have baby, she’ll need me to come down, help her out, ah?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said, trying not to think of how many bridges he and Grace would have to cross to reach that point. Then he saw the effect of his words on his mother. “But, when the time comes, I’m sure Grace would like that.”
She ate silently for a few moments. “You tell your ataata yet?”
Active shook his head. “Not yet. I will. He talking to you these days?”
She squinted the Inupiat no and said nothing.
Exactly why Jacob Active didn’t speak to his daughter wasn’t clear to anyone, except perhaps Jacob, who never explained anything. According to Martha, the silence had started after the stroke that had deprived him of most of his English but left his Inupiaq intact. But the root cause, she believed, was the fact that Leroy Johnson was white. Jacob Active’s contempt for naluaqmiuts like Leroy was unshakable. Martha thought the stroke had also deprived Jacob of what little ability to mask his feelings he had ever possessed.
“Arii,” Martha said. “My father doesn’t talk to me, and now my son is leaving.”
“I said we’ll visit back and forth.”
Martha’s expression brightened, but not by much. Active decided to change the subject, and perhaps get a little work done as well. “What are people saying about the fire?”
She brightened a little more. Seeking her advice usually had that effect.
“They’re real mad to think someone around here would do that.”
“Like I said, we’re still not sure how it started.”
“They think, if Jim Silver was alive, he would figure it out. But they aren’t so sure about that Alan Long. So I tell them, my son Nathan will catch ’im.”
“Who do they think it was?”
“Nobody knows. We never had anything like this in Chukchi before.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ACTIVE WAS AT HIS desk at eight the next morning, on the phone to the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan, Oregon. After navigating a tortuous voice mail system and undergoing several interrogations as to who he was and what he wanted, finally he was connected to a businesslike female voice that identified itself as belonging to Correctional Treatment Specialist Lana Bickford.
“Jae Hyo Lee? Yes, I was his case manager,” she said. “We let him out a few weeks ago. Didn’t you guys call about him a couple days ago?”
“Right, that would have been Officer Alan Long. He’s also working this case.”
“And what is it you guys want with Mr. Lee? Let’s see, I think his file is still on my desk here somewhere.” There was a thunk as she laid the phone down, then a rustle of papers.
“Here we go,” she said at length. “I have my notes now. He’s an arson suspect, Officer Long said?”
“A person of interest,” Active said. “For now, we just want to question him.”
“Well, all right. Lessee—uh-huh, he’s the one was in for poaching bear gallbladders. We don’t get many of those. Although they’re usually Koreans when we do. Anyway, what can I tell you about him?”
Active sketched out what they needed to know— anything available about Jae Hyo Lee’s visitors, mail, and phone calls.
Bickford blew out a long breath. “Some of this I can help with, some of it I can’t be much use to you. Letters, we read anything coming in or going out, but we don’t keep any record unless we find something fishy, and there’s nothing like that in Mr. Lee’s file.”
Active, scribbling notes on a legal pad, nodded, then remembered he was on the phone. “Uh-huh.”
“Phone logs . . . ah, here we are. Looks like he called a Ruth Marie Silver about every two weeks the whole time he was here. And he called a Kyung Kim a couple of times.”
“Uh-huh. That’s his girlfriend and his uncle. Can you give me the dates?”
Active copied as Bickford read off the last few. Lee’s last two calls had been to Ruthie Silver and to his uncle, a few days before he got out of prison. Arranging his homecoming, no doubt.
“Any visitors?”
There was a long pause, with the sound of paper crackling in the background.
“Oh, yeah, here we go. Looks like he only had one visitor the whole time he was here.”
“Close-knit family, eh?”
“I don’t think it was a family member. A fellow from up your way looks like, Chukchi, right? He was logged in as, geez, this handwriting. Some of our correctional officers—a Thomas Gaines?”
“Thomas Gaines? I never heard of any—” Active stopped in mid-sentence. “The handwriting is bad?”
“Like a doctor’s.”
He could hardly bring himself to ask. “Any chance that’s Gage instead of Gaines? Thomas Gage?”
“There I go again,” she said. “I had a hard time reading it when the other guy called last week.”
“Officer Long? I thought he only called day before yesterday.”
“No, somebody else called before that. Now, what—uh-huh, here it is. Your police chief up there, a Jim Silber?”
“Silver? You told Jim Silver that Tom Gage visited Jae Hyo Lee?”
“I DIDN’T want to know this,” Carnaby said after Active broke the news a few minutes later.
“Me either,” Active said.
Carnaby ticked points off on his fingers.
“So Tom Gage goes to see Jae Hyo Lee in prison— when?”
“About two and a half months ago.”
“Then three weeks ago, Jae gets out of prison.”
Active nodded.
“And last week Jim Silver finds out about Gage’s visit?”
Active nodded again. “I guess he was checking on Jae like his daughter asked.”
“And three days ago the Rec Center burns down and Silver and Gage both die?”
“Thus killing the only visitor Jae had, the entire time he was in Sheridan,” Active said. “And the cop who called to check up on him.”
Just then the phone rang. Carnaby picked up and listened for a few seconds. “Yes, Senator. I know. We all feel the same way. But these things take. . . . Well, thank you, but we have all the resources we need for now.” Carnaby paused, listening, and rolled his eyes at Active. “Yes, I’ll certainly keep you posted.”
Carnaby hung up. “Our own Senator Darryl Beaver, wanting to know how we’re doing with the investigation. And letting me know in the kindest possible way that it’ll be very difficult for him to defend the line item for the Chukchi detachment if this thing is still hanging fire when the legislature convenes in Juneau.”
“Hanging fire? He said that?”
Carnaby grimaced. “Uh-huh. Oh, and the mayor also called this morning, by the way, and he says there’s a celebration-of-life memorial service thing tonight at the high school. And Roger Kennelly from Kay-Chuck called for an update. And Lena Sundown, and—” The captain stopped and shook his head. “Jesus. Jae Hyo Lee and Tom Gage. What the hell is this about?”
“Maybe Gage and Lee were in it together, and Gage isn’t really dead: he just left his four-wheeler in front of the Rec Center to throw us of
f.”
“But why? Was he in the gallbladder thing with Jae? And if he’s not dead and he did help Jae set the fire, where is he?” Carnaby thought for a moment, then answered his own question. “With Jae, obviously, in this infamous boat he’s running around in. And now what? They’re sailing off somewhere to start a new life together? Shit.”
“Yeah,” Active said. “So maybe instead—”
“Maybe he was working with Jae, all right,” Carnaby said with a look of inspiration. “But he really did get trapped and die in his own fire. Didn’t Ronnie Barnes say that happens sometimes?”
“Yeah,” Active said, “but why would he park his four-wheeler out front? Wouldn’t he come up on foot, sneak into the furnace room from the back, and do the whole thing with the ‘T’ fitting and the wire on the door?”
Carnaby shook his head. “None of it makes a damned bit of sense.”
“Wait a minute,” Active said. “What if Tom Gage was the Feds’ source in the gallbladder bust? And then Jae finds out about it and burns down the Rec Center to get even.”
Carnaby was silent, turning this over in his mind. “Yeah, it holds together a little better than anything else we’ve come up with. He did tell Ruthie he found out it wasn’t Jim who turned him in, right?”
Active nodded.
“But it still doesn’t explain Gage’s trip down to the prison to see Jae. Or why an aviation instructor would be involved with a Korean gallbladder smuggler.”
Active sighed. “Nah, it doesn’t.”
Carnaby picked up the phone. “Let me get Alan in here. He’s supposed to be talking to the Feds today to see if they’ll tell us their source in the gallbladder thing.”
A few minutes later, Long was seated beside Active at Carnaby’s desk, asking them what was up.
“Tom Gage visited Jae in Sheridan?” he said after hearing what they had learned. “Jesus.”
Carnaby outlined their theory that Gage had been the federal source in the gallbladder case, then looked hopefully at Long.
“It’s a little complicated,” Long said. “They won’t tell me outright who the source was, but they did agree to look at our list of fatalities and I.D. him if he’s on it. Plus they’ll call in the FBI to help catch Jae if it looks like he killed their source. So I faxed them our list.”
