Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  “Never met him.”

  “I guess we have to trust him,” Active said.

  “Provisionally,” Carnaby said.

  “I trust him,” said Long, who had wandered up while they were looking at the photographs.

  Active pointed at the pictures from the whaling camp. “Think Gage was in the boat when they got that one?”

  Carnaby shrugged. “Who knows? Another violation if he was.”

  Long leaned in for a closer look at the group shot of the whalers. “Gage is the white guy?”

  “Presumably,” Active said.

  “Budzie!” Long said suddenly. “Budzie Kivalina.”

  The other two looked at him.

  “Budzie Kivalina. That’s her right next to Gage. She must have been the girlfriend the ex-wife was trying to remember. Now that I think of it, seems like I did hear she was killed in a plane crash up on the Slope a while back.”

  Long tapped one of the women in the snapshot. Carnaby and Active bent closer to see what Budzie Kivalina had looked like. But the print was small; it was a group shot, not particularly well focused; and the whalers had been backlit by the sky, so it was hard to tell much about her. Active had a vague impression of an animated and slightly simian face, nothing more.

  “You think she was on the crew?” Active asked.

  “On it?” Long said. “She was the captain. About the only woman I ever heard of that had her own crew. That’s probably how a naluaqmiu like Tom Gage got on it, if they were sweethearts.”

  “Probably,” Carnaby said, turning away from the photographs. “But that’s neither here nor there. Either of you guys find anything to explain why anybody would want to kill Gage bad enough to take out all those other people in the process?”

  “I’m not done in the bedroom,” Long said, and wandered off again.

  Active shook his head. He pointed at the sofa with its sleeping bag and trio of empty Budweisers. “Looks like Gage had company, though.”

  “Yeah,” Carnaby said. “New girlfriend, maybe?”

  “A girlfriend who sleeps on the couch? What would be the point?”

  Carnaby pondered for a moment. “Maybe they had a fight.”

  “And she decided to kill him and a half-dozen other people? Doesn’t sound like a girl crime to me.”

  “Nah, you’re right. A woman gets that mad, she’s more likely to hurt herself than the guy.” The captain swung his eyes around the room again. “Anyway, there sure hasn’t been any woman living here. Or even visiting more than a couple hours. Look at this place.”

  “So it was a guy?”

  “Had to be.”

  “We have to talk to him, obviously.”

  “Yeah, but who is he?” Carnaby said. “If he wanted to talk to us, he would have come in as soon as we put Gage’s name out on Kay-Chuck, right?”

  “Which makes him all the more interesting, eh?”

  Carnaby peered out one of the front windows. “We could canvass the neighbors, if Gage had any. Or we—”

  “Jesus, look at this!” Long shouted from the bedroom.

  Active and Carnaby crowded through the door. Long stood at a chest-type deep-freeze along the wall opposite the bed. The lid was open, and several folds of frost-covered black plastic were flopped over the rim.

  “I found something wrapped in trash bags in here, so I unwrapped it,” Long said as Active and Carnaby reached the freezer.

  “Is that a wolf?” Carnaby said.

  “What the hell happened to it?” Active grabbed the trash bags and lifted the head out, then motioned to Long to close the lid.

  He set it on top of the deep-freeze, pulled the plastic away, and stepped back. They all stared in silence. The neck had been severed just above the shoulders. The left eye was missing, just a bloody socket. There was a hole, also bloody, in the fur a couple of inches behind and below the eye. The jaws were closed, an inch or so of frozen tongue protruding out one side.

  “I think it was a husky,” Long said.

  Active decided he was right. Under the blood and frost, the fur appeared to be a mix of gray, black, and brown, and the remaining eye looked to have been blue.

  “Somebody shot out its eye,” Long said in a tone of wonder. He touched the hole behind and below the empty socket. “This must be the exit wound.”

  “And then they cut off its head,” Carnaby said.

  “And brought it home and put it in the freezer,” Active added.

  They looked at each other, then at the thing on the freezer.

  “This Tom Gage, whoever he was, was one strange guy,” Carnaby said.

  “Yeah, but he was a hell of a shot,” Long said.

  Carnaby and Active stared at him.

  “Well, you gotta give him that.”

  Neither man responded.

  Long turned back to the dog’s head. “So what do we do with it? Is it evidence?”

  “Of what?” Carnaby said. “It’s not illegal to shoot your dog or keep the head in the freezer if you want, just weird and mean. Put it back in there and leave it. We’ll let whoever has to clean the place up worry about it. Maybe the ex-Mrs. Gage?”

  He looked at Active, who shook his head. “No way she’s coming back up here.”

  “What if somebody breaks in?” Long asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Carnaby said. “We’ll put that lock you bought on the door, and we’ll nail up a sign telling people to keep out.” He looked at the dog’s head again. “And if they do break in and open the freezer, this’ll probably scare ’em right back out again.”

  After determining that the house held nothing else of interest, they went through Gage’s pickup, without useful result, then cut the lock off Gage’s shipping van and went through it as well. It was crammed full of tools, winter clothes, camping gear, a stack of two-by-fours, five sheets of T1–11, airplane parts, car parts, a half-dozen caribou hides, one yellow-white polar bear hide, several cans of aviation gas, and a snowmachine that appeared to be in the middle of an engine overhaul. None of it shed any light on the cause of Tom Gage’s demise or on his role, if any, in the Rec Center fire.

  “Sheesh,” Carnaby said as they stood on the gravel pad in front of Gage’s house, taking a last look around, their backs to the wind boring in from the north. “What a waste of a perfectly good afternoon. You got a crime with this few clues, you do start to wonder if it wasn’t an accident after all. You know?”

  Active nodded. “Except for the Jae Hyo Lee thing. Where the hell is he?”

  Carnaby grimaced. “Maybe in Vegas getting the taste of prison out of his mouth while we chase our tails up here. Asians like blackjack and blow jobs as much as anybody, right?” He looked at Active and Long. “Maybe it’s time to think about that run up to see Buck Eastlake at caribou camp?”

  “What if we call Ronnie Barnes first, go over it with him one more time?” Active suggested. “See if there’s something we should be doing that we’re not.”

  “Can’t hurt,” Carnaby said. He looked at his watch. “Ah, it’s too late now. We gotta get over to that thing at the school. Let’s keep our eyes open, see if we can pick up anything, then get a good night’s sleep and hit it again tomorrow, eh?”

  They climbed into the Suburban. Active steered it out of Gage’s nearly abandoned subdivision, then along Church Street to Second Avenue and up Second to Chukchi High on its forest of pilings at the north end of the spit. The school’s gymnasium had been deemed the only place in town large enough for the crowd likely to be drawn to the memorial service for the Rec Center fire victims. When the three of them walked in, the gym was already packed and as steamy as a sauna from body heat.

  They stood at the back and peered over heads and shoulders as best they could. There had to be six or seven hundred people in the bleachers and on the gym floor. Long gave a little cough of disgust and nudged Active. “Fat chance of spotting anything in this mob, huh?”

  Active and Carnaby grunted in assent. It was impossible to see a
nything except the people onstage.

  Carnaby sighed. “Alan, let’s you and me circulate through the crowd. Nathan, how about you hang around here, see who comes and goes?”

  Active lifted his eyebrows and watched as the other two disappeared into the crowd. Then he studied the group on the stage at the end of the gym. He spotted Chukchi’s mayor and a middle-aged Inupiat he recognized as Hubert Skin, pastor of the Friends Church, the biggest denomination in town. Behind them stood a choir of women in blue robes, hymnals in hand. One of them was Lena Sundown.

  The proceedings began with a prayer from the Reverend Skin, who expressed confidence that God would speedily receive into heaven the souls of the victims of the fire, regardless of past sinfulness or church membership, as the suddenness with which death had overtaken them had deprived them of any chance to repent or accept the Lord as their savior.

  Then Skin led the choir in “I’ll Fly Away” and “Amazing Grace.” After that, he got to the real point of the event—inviting anyone so inclined to come up and offer a testimonial on behalf of a loved one who had died in the fire.

  He lowered the microphone to the floor in front of the stage, and people began lining up. Lena Sundown left the choir and came down in her robe to speak first. She told the story about Augie shooting hoops in her living room and triggering the furnace, drawing a scattering of chuckles and “amens” from the crowd. A man in Carhartts and Sorels stepped up next. “I’m Benjamin Benson,” he said. “Lula Benson was my wife thirty-nine years before this fire. We had good times, and we had bad times, but she loved me, and I loved her. Now I know she’s with the Lord, but I miss her anyway and I hope she’s hearing me tonight. That’s all I have to say. Thank you very much.”

  And so it went for an hour, then two. Active hovered near the entrance as instructed, scanning the late arrivals, observing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, and wishing he was home with Grace and Nita, anywhere but here.

  Finally, the last person in line, an aana in a calico atikluk, took the microphone and spoke in Inupiaq for a long time, her old, whispery voice barely audible over the bustle of the crowd and an occasional wail from a baby nestled in the back of its mother’s parka. Active caught the word “Rachel” and concluded that the aana was part of the Akootchuk family. The crowd grew quieter as she went on. Men cleared their throats, and women pulled out tissues and dabbed at their eyes and blew their noses.

  The aana stopped and shuffled away from the microphone, and the crowd fell silent for a few moments. Then, somewhere on the floor, a woman began to sob.

  Skin looked around the room and, when no one else moved toward the microphone, pulled it back onstage. He glanced at the mayor, who nodded and came forward.

  The mayor of Chukchi was a forty-something Inupiaq named Everett Williams. He had dark skin and curly hair and was said to be descended from an African-American crewman on a long-ago whaling ship. He was so popular that he was mayor not only of the city of Chukchi, but of the new regional government known as the Aurora Borough as well.

  Williams was also, as he reminded the crowd, the uncle of Cammie Frankson, the Rec Center clerk who had died in the fire, apparently after trying to save the men trapped in the locker room. “A lot of our family’s hopes died with Cammie that night,” Williams said. Then he spoke for a few seconds in Inupiaq. Active caught enough to know that he was repeating his remarks in the only language many of the elders in the room could understand.

  “Cammie was a good girl. She didn’t drink or run around, she helped her mom with the other kids at home, she had her job at the Rec Center, and she was going to college,” Williams continued, translating into Inupiaq as he went.

  “We’re all shocked by what happened because we never had something like this in Chukchi before. But we who are left behind here, we have to go on and make the best of life that we can, because we never know when our day will come, like Cammie didn’t know—” Williams coughed, pulled out a handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and went on. “—didn’t know when she went to work the other day that she wouldn’t be going home again. We are all facing in that direction, and that same day is ahead of every one of us.”

  The big room was silent again. Williams stepped away from the microphone and Skin came up to it, presumably to end the service with a prayer.

  But a man’s voice called out from the steaming anonymity of the gym floor: “I see the cops are in here tonight, sneaking around among us. How about they get up there and tell us why they haven’t caught anybody yet?”

  A wordless rumble of assent rose from the crowd like river ice going out.

  “Well, that’s not the purpose of this gathering,” Skin said. “We’re here—”

  “Yeah, get ’em up here!” a different male voice called out. The rumble grew louder.

  “They should talk to us!” a woman yelled.

  Skin looked uncertainly at Williams, who returned to the microphone, looking as uneasy as Skin while the calls from the floor continued to build.

  “Well, maybe Captain Carnaby of the Alaska State Troopers could come up here and say a few words,” Williams said. “I see him right over there.” He pointed to where, even from the back, Active could see Carnaby towering over the crowd.

  Carnaby made his way to the stage and came to the microphone, looking off-balance and unprepared. He recapped what little had already been made public about the fire and extended his condolences to the families of the victims. “We have the Trooper arson specialist from Fairbanks working on it, and we’re following up all the leads that come in, and if it turns out this was arson, you can be sure we’ll find and arrest the person responsible.”

  “You’re getting nowhere,” a man shouted from the floor.

  “You should bring in the FBI,” a woman joined in. “If it was a bunch of white people at Anchorage that burned up, the FBI would be taking the case, all right.”

  The mayor raised his hands, and the rumble subsided slightly. Williams leaned toward the microphone. “The Troopers and our city police are doing all they can,” he said. “We all know that. I see Alan Long out in the crowd from our city force, and there in the back is Trooper Nathan Active. They’re Inupiat, like most of us. And many of the victims in the Rec Center fire were white. We all know that. So instead of dividing ourselves up tonight, let’s try and come together until Chukchi is through this and life can start to get back to normal again. Captain Carnaby, did you have anything more to say?”

  The rumble grew again, with individual voices rising above the din now and again to complain about the lack of progress on the case and the stupidity and indolence of the investigators. Carnaby stood silently at parade rest, shoulders squared, hands locked behind him, a neutral expression on his face, eyes on the crowd, waiting. After a minute, perhaps realizing he looked too military for the situation, he took off his hat, shifted his weight to one hip, tilted his head to the side, and softened his expression. Finally the crowd quieted again.

  “Let me just repeat that we do have some good, solid leads,” Carnaby said. “Of course I can’t go into detail about them, but I’m confident we’ll get to the bottom of this soon, especially if you can help us. If you have information that might help, please let us know about it. Anything at all, like if you saw someone hanging around the Rec Center about the time of the fire, or if someone said something funny, or if someone is acting funny since the fire.”

  The crowd rumbled again, but the tone was different, more thoughtful now.

  “You can call our anonymous tip line if you don’t want your name known,” Carnaby went on.

  Williams stepped up to the microphone. “And I’m sure most of you have heard the Lions Club and the Fire Department have a five-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of the person responsible for the fire,” he said.

  Now the rumble was just a murmur as heads nodded in the crowd.

  Carnaby gave the tip line number twice, then moved back from the microphone with a look of relief.<
br />
  Active feared the mayor would call him up next, or perhaps Alan Long as acting police chief. But Williams evidently figured enough had been said, because he asked Skin to give a closing prayer.

  Active wanted to slip away while everyone’s heads were bowed, but decided he should stay on post as people left the gym. Who could say when the thought of five thousand dollars for a boat or snowmachine might undermine family or romantic loyalties long enough for someone to whisper in the ear of law enforcement?

  CHAPTER TEN

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, Active braked to a halt at the little cabin on Second Street where Nelda Qivits lived and checked his coat to be sure the foil packet was still there.

  Satisfied, he climbed out of the Suburban and walked to the door. Like the rest of the place, the door might once have been brown, but was now pretty well paint-free. But a lot of old buildings in Chukchi were paint-free, and it didn’t seem to hurt them much. Being deep-frozen eight or nine months a year probably offered as much protection from the west wind and driving snow as anything the petrochemical industry could come up with.

  He let himself into Nelda’s kunnichuk and knocked on the door to the cabin proper.

  “Who’s that?” Nelda croaked from inside.

  Active heard a TV in the background. Nelda was probably in her easy chair, as usual. He nudged the inner door open. “It’s me, Nathan.”

  “Naluaqmiiyaaq! Good to see you!” She fumbled in the folds of her dress, came up with a remote, and clicked off an ancient Dukes of Hazzard rerun on the state’s bush television channel.

  “Good to see you too, atchak. Look what I brought you.”

  Her eyes lit up at the sight of the packet. “You found iq’mik again? Where you get it this time?”

  “One of our Troopers went to Bethel a few days ago. I asked him to look in the store there.”

  “Arigaa! Long time since I had iq’mik, all right.” She struggled up from the chair, Active checking the impulse to extend an arm. He knew from long experience that she would reject, with profanity, any such foolhardy offer.