Village of the Ghost Bears

by Stan Jones

  “I’ll make us some sourdock tea,” she said, hobbling toward the kitchen. “And I gotta get some water for my iq’mik.”

  Iq’mik was a noxious chew made by mixing cigarette tobacco with the ashes of burnt tree fungus. It was acutely unhealthful and apparently about as addictive as heroin. Though nearly unheard-of around Chukchi, it was wildly popular in the Bethel area, where, Active knew, a much younger Nelda Qivits had spent several years as a cook in a government hospital. He felt only mildly guilty for feeding her habit. For one thing, he could only get it a couple of times a year. How much of an addiction could that cause? For another, Nelda was well past eighty, as best he could determine. If iq’mik hadn’t done her in yet, what were the chances it would carry her off to the Inupiat hereafter before some more natural process did so?

  In any event, she was a doctor of sorts—a tribal doctor, actually—and she deserved to be paid. Sometimes he left money, which she seemed to resent. When he happened to come into possession of fish or game, he’d leave some of that, which she liked a great deal. But nothing made her happier than an ounce or two of iq’mik. Who was he to deny an old lady her pleasures?

  He followed her into the kitchen, where she was dipping a spoon into a bowl of water and dribbling a few drops at a time into the iq’mik. She stirred the stuff around in the foil, rolled a pinch between thumb and forefinger in appraisal for a few seconds, then tucked it into her cheek with an expression of anticipatory bliss. “Arigaa,” she said again. “You want some?”

  “No, thanks,” he said. “I, ah—”

  “You think you’ll puke it up like before, ah?” She chuckled and dropped some sourdock root into a teakettle, lowered it into the sink, and turned on the faucet.

  “I wouldn’t want to mess up your couch again, no. I should probably stick to the sourdock.” He nodded toward the kettle.

  “Naluaqmiiyaaq.” She turned off the faucet and set the kettle on a burner.

  They made small talk for a few minutes, primarily about the delayed onset of winter and the likelihood that it was caused by, in Nelda’s phrasing, “that global warning, what them naluaqmiuts call it.”

  Finally the sourdock tea was ready. Nelda poured out two cups, and Active took a swallow from his. It was vile and bitter, though nothing compared to iq’mik. Nelda claimed sourdock could cure nearly anything. Active didn’t know if it could or not. It was true that he never seemed to get sick now that he drank it regularly.

  Nelda, meanwhile, was gulping hers with gusto as she made her way back to the easy chair. He wondered how she was getting the sourdock past the iq’mik in her cheek. Chewers like Nelda must have solved the problem long ago, he concluded.

  He perched on the couch, near the stain from his experiment with iq’mik, and sipped a little more sourdock as Nelda’s eyes played over him. He had learned there was no use saying anything before Nelda finished her intake exam. It seemed to be her equivalent of a naluaqmiu doctor checking your temperature and blood pressure, even if you came in for a sprained ankle.

  Finally her eyes settled on his. “Grace tell me you want to take her and Nita to Anchorage.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “The Troopers want to send me there.”

  “What I heard, you’re the one want it.”

  He lifted his eyebrows again, trying to decide if he’d been caught in a lie. “I’d be getting a promotion in the Troopers.”

  “You’re still too much naluaqmiiyaaq for Chukchi, ah?” She sighed and smiled in a familiar way. He had come to recognize this smile as indicating that Nelda Qivits, with the perspective of eighty-something years of life, was resigning herself to the fact that human nature was not to be changed, only abided.

  “How do you think they’ll do down there?” he asked. Grace and Nita both visited Nelda for the Inupiat version of counseling, and she possessed insights into their souls that astonished him. Better yet, unlike a white counselor, she would discuss these insights with him.

  “That little Nita, she’ll probably be okay anywhere if Grace is around, and you.”

  He lifted his eyebrows again. “And Grace?”

  Nelda thought it over for a while. Then she said, “No quiyuk yet?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly.”

  Nelda’s wise old eyes burned into him. “Ah?”

  His face turned hot, and he was sure he was blushing. “She, ah, she used her hands on me at One-Way Lake.”

  “First time?”

  He raised his eyebrows yes. “I think it was because she wasn’t in her father’s house.”

  “She let you do anything for her?”

  He squinted no. “She still freezes up when I touch her . . . her, anywhere below the neck.”

  “Arii, that Gracie.” There was another long silence. Nelda looked into her sourdock, took a swallow, then did something with her mouth that puzzled Active until he realized she was shifting the iq’mik from one cheek to the other. “You know why she still want to live in that house, after what happen?”

  He wrinkled his nose in negation and dismay. It was a painful subject. “I’ve never understood it. And she’s never explained it to me.”

  “That’s because she never understand it herself.”

  He waited out another long silence, knowing they were inevitable in any conversation with an elderly Inupiaq. At last he could stand it no longer. “And you do?”

  She lifted her eyebrows yes. “That house, it’s kind of like her daddy to her. Long as she’s there, it’s like he’s still around.”

  “But why would she want that, after what he—after she. . . .”

  “Ah-hah,” Nelda said. “After he do what he do to her when she’s little girl, then she go on Four Street in Anchorage all that time what they call her Amazing Grace, then she come back and try kill him, but her mother do it first?”

  Nelda phrased it as a question, though she knew Grace Palmer’s history as well as he did. As usual, the old lady didn’t flinch from looking at things straight on. The question she was really asking was, “This is what you can’t bring yourself to say?”

  He nodded, feeling numb.

  “Ah-hah,” Nelda said again. “A girl need her daddy. Down deep inside, she know he should take care of her. That’s his job, and that’s what she need, no matter what. If he don’t, she’ll think it’s something wrong with her; maybe she’ll never get over it. Boyfriend rape her, uncle rape her, probably she’ll be okay someday maybe. But if it’s her father, maybe not.”

  She peered intently at him with a questioning look: did he understand?

  “But I don’t—”

  She held up a finger to stop him.

  “If she’s got his house, if she’s safe and warm, maybe if you’re there too, then in her mind it’s kinda like she can make her daddy do right after all this time. She’s making him take care of her like he should, even if he never do that when she’s little girl.”

  She sipped the sourdock, gazing at him over the rim of the cup.

  He gazed back in his usual amazement at the things she came up with. What Nelda said sounded right. He seemed to remember reading somewhere that the human psyche could rebuild itself after most forms of emotional trauma. But father–daughter incest was the hardest. “I have to get her out of there.”

  Nelda shrugged. “If she get ready to leave on her own, that’ll be good. It’ll mean she got better from what her father did.”

  “And if she’s not ready?”

  “If you make her leave, maybe it’s good for her, she’ll get over him faster. But maybe not too. She might leave Anchorage, come back up here to that house. Or maybe she’ll go back on Four Street again. It’s full of girls like her, what I hear.”

  He took a swallow of sourdock, wishing real life were more like police work. In police work, you investigated a case and closed it. Or, if you couldn’t close it, it cooled off and you forgot about it eventually. But in life, no issue could ever be completely closed, or completely forgotten. One way or another, it woul
d come up again and again.

  “You go to that meeting at the school last night?” Nelda asked.

  “Mm-mm. It was really crowded in the gym.”

  “Ah-hah. I listen on Kay-Chuck, all right. So sad about all them people burn up, ah?”

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  Nelda was silent for a long time, sipping sourdock and staring into the blank face of the television. “You never catch ’im, things will be bad around Chukchi for long time. Maybe never get better again.”

  It was said in a way that didn’t require a response. He sighed, set his cup on the floor, and stood up.

  “Who you fellas think it was?”

  “You know I can’t talk about that. It’s Trooper business.”

  “Ah-hah. But you’ll catch ’im soon, whoever start that fire?”

  “We’re doing everything we can,” he said, embarrassed by the fatuity of the officialese. He took his leave from the old lady. As he closed the outer door of the kunnichuk, he heard the television click back on, this time to what sounded like an iPod commercial. What could Nelda Qivits possibly imagine an iPod to be?

  It was almost nine by the time he got to work, shucked his coat, checked his e-mail and voice mail, and—Diet Pepsi in hand—joined Carnaby and Long in the captain’s office.

  “That deal at the high school was brutal,” a red-eyed and slightly groggy-looking Carnaby was saying as Active slid into a chair. “I felt like a deer in the headlights.”

  “No joke,” Long put in. “I’m just glad the mayor didn’t call me up there. As it was, I couldn’t get to sleep until three or four.”

  “I guess people need to vent,” Active said. “Did you notice anything from the stage?”

  “Nothing but grief,” Carnaby said. “More grief than I, I. . . .” Carnaby shook his head and gulped his coffee until the cup was half-empty. “Times like this, I remember why I got into the business, and I wish I hadn’t.”

  Long just lifted his eyebrows.

  Active nodded as if he felt the same way. He didn’t, not yet, but the Rec Center fire was a start.

  “How about you guys?” Carnaby asked. “Spot anything from the floor, Alan? Or by the door, Nathan?”

  Neither of them spoke.

  “Nothing?” Carnaby said. “All right, then, who’s gonna do this?”

  It took a moment for Active to remember their reason for gathering was to call Ronnie Barnes and go over the evidence from the fire scene again.

  “I brought Barnes’s card.” Active patted his shirt pocket. “I guess I could.”

  “Feels kind of pathetic,” Long said. “Like we’re panhandling for a break in the case.”

  Carnaby frowned. “Alan, the first thing that pops into your head shouldn’t necessarily be the first thing that pops out of your mouth.”

  “Sorry, Captain.” Long hid his face by taking a slow pull at his coffee cup.

  “Especially when everybody else is thinking the same thing,” Active said.

  Carnaby’s frown deepened, and he glared at each of them in turn. “I don’t know which one of you two is worse.” He sighed. “Both, I guess.”

  He looked at Active again. “All right, Nathan. You call him. Alan and I will just listen unless we think of something to say.” He turned his glare on Long. “Something helpful and intelligent, right, Alan?”

  Long lifted his eyebrows.

  Active pulled out Barnes’s card and had laid it on the desk when Evelyn O’Brien rapped on the captain’s door and stuck her head in. The three of them relaxed slightly at the reprieve.

  “Call for Nathan.”

  “Take a number,” Carnaby said. “He can call them back.”

  “It’s the crime lab in Anchorage,” O’Brien said. “They’ve got an I.D. on the body we sent down there.”

  The three men looked at each other. “What body?” Carnaby said.

  Several seconds of silence passed before it dawned on Active. “Maybe it’s No-Way. I completely forgot about him.”

  “No-Way?” Carnaby asked. “Oh, the guy from One-Way Lake. Really?”

  Active counted backward in his head. “But we only sent him down there, what, two days ago? The crime lab couldn’t have worked him already, could they? ”

  “Nah,” Carnaby said. “It normally takes them at least a week to get around to one of our bodies. Look, you better go straighten them out. They must have switched the toe tags or something.”

  Active trudged across the reception area to his own office, picked up the phone, and punched the line that was blinking. “Active here,” he said.

  “John Park,” said a faintly Asian voice. “From the state crime lab?”

  “Right,” Active said. “Our secretary said you had an I.D. for us, but we’re thinking there must be a mixup. We did send a body down, but it was only a couple days ago.”

  “Yeah,” Park said. “The guy from the lake, right?”

  “You worked him already?”

  “Sure. We had an opening, so I slipped him in. Happens sometimes.”

  “And?”

  “The I.D. is a little complicated, so I’ll do the cause of death first. That part was easy.”

  “Okay.”

  “Broken neck, to put it in plain English. Kind of a rotational thing, like his head was twisted. Did he take a fall or something?”

  “That’s how it looked,” Active said. “His rifle and some other stuff were scattered down the face of a cliff, like he lost his footing higher up the slope and basically cartwheeled down into the water. Whatever he hit or got caught on that made him lose the rifle, it ripped the sling out of the stock.”

  “Sounds right,” Park said. “That could have done it.”

  “So he didn’t drown in the lake?”

  “Nope, no water in his lungs. Which is why he floated around in the lake for the fish to eat his face. Pike, I’m guessing?”

  “That’s what we think,” Active said. “They’re thick in those lakes along the Isignaq. But who was he?”

  “That’s the hard part,” Park said. “The fish ate most of the flesh off his hands along with his face, and there was some decomposition as well, but we did get a reasonably good impression off his right thumb.”

  “And?”

  “I ran it through the system, and it came back with five possible names. I can give ’em all to you if you want, but only one of them is even from Alaska, much less your area up there, so I figure he’s gotta be your guy.”

  “Gotta be,” Active agreed. “Go ahead.”

  “He’s a long-lost cousin of mine,” Park said.

  “Eh?”

  “I mean, he’s Korean too.”

  Ah, Active was thinking, that would explain the slight accent. His brain skidded to a halt as Park said the name, then began to list the other four possibilities.

  ACTIVE WAS still more or less deaf and blind as he walked back to Carnaby’s office a few minutes later. He banged a knee on a corner of Evelyn O’Brien’s desk and failed to respond in kind when she snarled at him as he rubbed the spot before limping on.

  “What?” Carnaby said after a look at Active’s face.

  “Well, we found Jae Hyo Lee.”

  “What?” Long said. “They picked him up? Where? Did he confess?”

  “Oh, shit.” Carnaby met Active’s eyes, then looked away in pain. “No!”

  Active nodded.

  “What?” Long said.

  Carnaby cleared his throat. “Alan, I think Nathan is trying to tell us that the guy in One-Way Lake was Jae Hyo Lee.” He looked at Active, eyebrows raised in the white expression of inquiry.

  Active nodded again, Long’s mouth shut with an audible pop, and a depressed silence settled over the room.

  “Let’s hear it,” Carnaby said finally.

  Active sketched Park’s findings on the cause of death and explained that a thumbprint had identified No-Way from One-Way Lake as Jae Hyo Lee from Cape Goodwin, thereby depriving them of their only suspect in the Rec Center
fire.

  “Only the one thumbprint? Any room for doubt there?” Carnaby asked, not sounding very hopeful. “What about the other possibles?”

  Active shook his head. “One of them is in custody in Reno, one’s a female bank embezzler on parole in Chicago, one’s a sixty-year-old Russian pimp from Brooklyn— admittedly between jail stretches at the moment—and the other’s a black kid from Omaha.”

  They pondered the implications.

  “But if Jae. . . .” Long said at one point, but was unable to proceed farther.

  “And then who. . . .” Carnaby mumbled a little later, then sank back into the silence.

  Finally Carnaby sighed. “So, when did he die?”

  “According to Park, he was in the water a couple weeks, plus or minus a couple days,” Active said.

  Carnaby looked at the calendar on his desk blotter, and, with a pencil, tapped his way backward through it. “In other words, he was in that lake within a week of getting out of Sheridan.”

  Active nodded. “Plus or minus.”

  “And he died of a broken neck? Not drowning?”

  Active nodded again.

  Carnaby toyed with the pencil a moment, then began ticking the sequence off on his fingers. “Let’s see. He gets a visit in prison from Tom Gage, he gets out of the system a couple months later, then turns up in One-Way Lake with a broken neck a few days after that. And by the time you stumble across him up there, Nathan, Tom Gage is dead too, as is Jim Silver. Anybody want to bet Jae Hyo Lee dived off that cliff by accident?”

  “He didn’t necessarily break his neck coming down the cliff,” Active said.

  “No?”

  Active shook his head. “I asked Park if he was sure Jae broke his neck in the fall. He said, ‘All I know for sure is, he wasn’t breathing when he hit the water.’”

  “You think he was dead before he fell, then?”

  “You think we can rule anything out in this case?”

  Carnaby grimaced. “You’re right. But there’s a hell of a cliff there, right? If he was already dead, how would anybody get him up that slope from the lake?”

  Active thought it over. “I don’t think anybody could. But they might have brought him in along the face of the slope somehow and let him go. Maybe they came through the mountains by four-wheeler?”