So Sure Of Death

FOURTEEN

The next morning dawned early, like all summer mornings in the Bush. The sun would be officially up by six-fifteen, although it had been light out for hours before that. By the end of July they were losing four minutes and twenty-four seconds of daylight every day. You'd never know it by the extended sunrise.

The advantage was that there were very few times of day or night during the summer when you couldn't see your way down the path. It was a steep one, carved into the crumbling side of the bluff, a length of manila line looped between wooden posts the only thing between Wy and disaster. Some of the steps were large rocks, flat sides up, set into the dirt. Others were reinforced with scraps of wood left over from various building projects, onebytwelves, two-by-fours and one piece of metal grating. On normal days she rather enjoyed testing the limits, seeing how fast she could get down to the beach, but this morning she walked slowly, one hand just touching the rope, tapping each post with her fingertips as she passed it.

The mouth of the Nushagak opened before her, a wide stretch of water gray with glacial silt moving with stately deliberation between banks a mile apart. It formed part of the lifeblood of the Bay, along with the other hundred rivers of the area, providing the way home for salmon returning from the sea. It was, as well, the umbilical cord connecting the interior villages to Newenham. It was to Newenham they came, by boat in summer and by snow machine in winter and by plane year-round, to shop, visit relatives, play basketball, buy duck stamps, apply for moose permits, attend school, stand trial, serve time, take communion. Wy flew the river every day, upstream and down, and its size and power and importance in all their lives never failed to impress her.

In her more fanciful moments, she thought of the river as a woman, old and infinitely wise, loving but stern, never capricious but never quite predictable, either. When she took a life, or lives, when she sucked down a skiff with swift gray intent, or opened a lead in her frozen winter face to swallow a snow machine, she had her reasons, good ones, and if those on shore were left to mourn, why, death was a part of life, after all, and that was the way of the world, and the river, to give and to take with the same hand.

The beach was a wide strip of gravel and sand littered with driftwood bleached white by time and tide. That driftwood made for wonderful fires, and Wy could see the smoke from several here and there. Fishermen out early for the first red of the day.

The closest one was right at the base of her cliff. The last step was a big one, twenty inches to the beach. She jumped it, landing both feet solidly in a patch of gravel that rattled loudly on impact.

The man feeding the fire didn't so much as turn around.

“I already practiced, old man,” she said to his back.

“I know,” he said. “I saw you on my way down.”

“Oh.” She hesitated, and then moved forward to sit next to the fire, a little apart from him.

They contemplated the flames in silence. The weight of the river pulled at the banks, tangling in its current here a downed spruce, there an empty skiff that had slipped its mooring. A river otter chittered at her young where a creek flowed into the river. An eagle soared overhead, causing a flock of ducks and half-grown ducklings clustered at the edge of the water to fall silent. The tide was out, revealing the muddy banks of the river and the goose grass growing there. The water was half salt, half fresh, and the marsh on the Delta supported a rich and varied avian lifestyle. The ducks were fattening nicely, and both Moses and the eagle eyed them with approval. When the last salmon had made its run up the river, the ducks and the geese would be next on the menu.

Wy looked at Moses. He wore a dreamy expression, one she didn't see often, one he did not permit to show through his usual cantankerous crust. His mouth, usually held in a disapproving line, was relaxed, caught in a half-smile. He seemed to be remembering something pleasant. It didn't happen often, and she didn't try to interrupt.

He looked up suddenly and caught her eyes in his. “Are you angry when it rains? Do you blame God?”

“Blame?” she said, puzzled. “Who's to blame? The weather's the weather. It happens.”

A light, brief shower of raindrops fell on her hair and she looked up, startled. There were clouds overhead, big, cottony cumulus clouds not heavy enough with moisture to shed any of it. Had they been there when she came down the bank?

“Are we less, then, than the rain?” he said softly, his face turned up into it. A sliver of sun, a deep, rich gold, appeared on the northeastern horizon. “Are we more than the sun?”

She sat very still. Moses was a drunk, but he was also a shaman, and, no matter how thorough her indoctrination had been at the hands of her adoptive parents and at the University of Alaska, Wy remembered enough of the first five years of her life not to reject the presence of what she couldn't see.

Moses opened his eyes and added a piece of driftwood to the fire. The salt crystals caught in the wood flared with color. The wood burned steadily, radiating warmth and light.

“You didn't answer my question,” he said.

“I don't have an answer,” Wy replied.

“No?” He smiled. “Need some help?”

Wy swallowed. She wanted to say no. “I don't know.”

“I say you do,” Moses said firmly.

Wy made a show of looking at her watch. “Gee, look at the time, it's past six-thirty. I'm flying in a couple of hours, so-”

“Sit down.”

She sat down with a thump, heart beating uncomfortably up high in her throat. “Look, I-”

“You will listen,” he said firmly, “and when questioned, you will answer truthfully.”

Sez you, Wy thought.

He eyed the mutinous line of her mouth and grinned, a wide, wise grin as full of charm as it was of guile. “Wy,” he said, his voice not ungentle, “what do you want?”

She huffed out an impatient breath. “I want to live my life. I want my business to succeed. I want to fly, and I especially want to fly this morning.”

Moses contemplated the fire. “You're in danger.”

She was startled again. She looked over her shoulder. No one nearby on the beach, no one on the river. “What do you mean?”

“What do you want?” he repeated.

“Goddamn it!” she shouted. “I want to adopt Tim! I want to live my life!” She leapt to her feet. “I want to be left alone!”

“Sit down,” he said again, and she subsided like a puppet who had lost its strings.

He picked up an eagle feather lying next to him in the sand, and used it to cup smoke from the fire over his face, eyes closed, expression meditative. She struggled for composure, and found it in the tuneless humming that emanated from his rusty old man's voice.

He opened his eyes. “Are you so afraid?”

“I'm not afraid of anything,” she said, and was immediately ashamed. She sounded exactly like a child whistling past the graveyard. “I'm afraid of everything,” she said, as her defenses fell with an almost audible thump. “I'm afraid customers will show up who won't fly with me because I'm a woman. I'm afraid I won't earn enough to make my loan payments. I'm afraid Tim's natural mother will steal him back. I'm afraid-” She stopped.

“Yes?” Still with that unnaturally gentle voice.

“You know what I'm afraid of.”

“He's a good man.”

“I'm not a bad woman,” she snapped. “I'm smart, I'm capable. I don't need rescuing, or redemption.”

“How about company?” he snapped back, a momentary backsliding of role, wise shaman to cranky drunk. “He's pretty good company, that guy, even if he is a cop.”

“There's nothing wrong with being a cop!” she said indignantly. “They catch the bad guys. They keep the peace. Every day they get their noses rubbed into the worst of human behavior. When someone's shooting off a gun, they have to go take it away. They don't get near enough credit or even half the pay they deserve.”

He smiled, a brief, nasty little smile, and she blushed hotly, annoyed at being maneuvered into defending Liam.

“So you don't object to his profession.”

“Of course not.”

“What is it, then? What stops you from going to him?”

“Maybe,” she said through her teeth, “just maybe I don't think there's anybody out there more fun to live with than me.” She pushed her jaw out, daring a response.

She got it, a full-throated belly laugh that rocked him backward. “Oh yeah,” he said, wiping away a tear, “oh yeah, you are just like your mother, just full of piss and vinegar, self-righteous and pigheaded and so damn sure you're right.”

She said sharply, “You knew my mother? My natural mother?” He said nothing. “Moses?”

“Yes,” he said finally. His smile faded. “I did. She's dead.”

“I know that much. And I know our family came from Icky. What I don't know is her name. Mom and Dad would never tell me.” She waited.

He rearranged himself, refolding his legs, and produced a pint of Chivas Regal. Uncapping it, he took a long swallow.

“Moses-”

“Make up your mind, Wy. You either want him or you don't. You don't have much time left. You may have none.”

“What? What does that mean?” She rose to her feet as he did, and followed him to the steps. “Moses, you can't say things like that and then retreat into that goddamn druidic silence of yours! Talk to me!”

“Got me a smart woman in a real short skirt,” he said, winking at her, “or in this case, a pair of really tight jeans. Time I got back to her.” He took another swig from the bottle and headed up the steps.

“Moses?”

Something in her voice halted him halfway up.

“Did you know my father, too?”

There was a long silence, into which crept the sounds of a Bush village waking up: a light plane taking off, the hum of an outboard motor, the start of a truck, bird calls, fish jumping.

“Yes.” He began to climb again.

“Moses?”

He halted without turning around.

“Are you my father?”

He stood for a long time on the makeshift stairs, his back to her, and then he continued up and over the edge of the bluff. Moments later, she heard the engine of his truck turn over, heard it grind into gear, heard it leave the clearing and trundle down her lane to the road.

She stood where she was for a long time, listening, watching, waiting for him to come back. He didn't.

Liam donned his only other clean uniform, also tailored, also immaculately pressed, and boxed up yesterday's for mailing to the dry cleaner in Anchorage.

The post office was open, with a new clerk behind the counter, a young, plump-faced man with a sunny smile and a name tag which read Malachi Manuguerra. Malachi sent Liam's uniform priority mail and chatted about his new baby girl, just a week old that day. Liam dutifully admired the picture of the squinched-up, red-faced mite bundled in hospital white, and from the post office went to the Bay View Inn, Newenham's only hotel. It was a twostory building that looked suspiciously modular, sporting neat green siding with brown trim and a corrugated silver roof. It had been kept up, though; siding and trim were freshly painted and the wooden stairs leading up to the front door had recently had some of their steps replaced. The sun shone benignly down on pansies and nasturtiums planted in two homemade rock gardens, and the windows had that just-washed gleam.

The lobby was empty but for a clerk behind a counter. She was readingThe Celestine Prophecythrough little round glasses that had slid down to the very end of her long, thin nose. Her gray hair was cut closely around her face, and she wore a bright yellow cardigan over an even brighter orange shirt and red polyester pants.

It took him a moment to recover from the glare of the primary colors. “Excuse me.” Sharp eyes the color of wood smoke looked at him over the silver rims of her glasses and took in his uniform. She moved finally, straightening to reveal a tall frame, lean, long-limbedand supple. Norwegian, Liam thought, or Swedish. Scandinavian, anyway. There was a lot of that going around the Bay.

“You're the new trooper.”

“Corporal Liam Campbell.” It was getting easier to say.

She extended a hand, square-shaped, callused and confident. “Alta Peterson. You looking for your new trooper?”

So Prince had found the hotel after all. “She spend the night here?”

“Uh-huh. She left early, though. Said she was going out to the lake, service her plane.”

“Good.”

“She's pretty young for a trooper.” She let the remark lie there, with a question mark hanging over it.

He shrugged. “Maybe a little. She's certainly new to the area, just got in yesterday.”

She surveyed him. “You haven't been here all that long yourself. How are you liking the posting?”

“I like it a lot.” He remembered jumping out of Wy's plane yesterday afternoon, and a sudden grin spread across his face, surprising both of them and making her blink. “Never a dull moment. Alta, is this your hotel?”

She nodded, a positive movement indicative of pride. “My husband and I built it. He was a fisher from Anacortes, came up on his uncle's boat the summer of 1977, and never left. The kids and I came up that fall, and we've been here ever since.”

“How many kids and what kind?”

Alta had a wallet full of pictures on the counter before the last word was out of his mouth. He admired the two sons and the one daughter-“All in school at the University of Washington,” she mentioned with an elaborate disinterest that fooled neither of them-all three tall, blond, blue-eyed Vikings, all with their mother's firm jawline.

“I suppose the boys went on the boat and the girl helped out around the hotel when they were kids,” he suggested.

“You suppose wrong. We were all on the boat at the start,” she retorted. “We lost the boat, though, in 1980, coming back from Dutch Harbor. Peri-that was my husband-decided to take the insurance and build this hotel. That was the time of the big runs.”

“Yeah,” Liam said. Peri, spoken of in the past tense. “I remember reading about them in the newspaper. You could pull in a quarter of a million dollars in reds in one period, you had a big enough boat and an experienced crew.”

“Those were the days,” she agreed, and they both sighed a little, totally fraudulent expressions of nostalgia for a time gone by. After three summers spent kneeling over the edge of a skiff picking reds out of a net, she was perfectly happy to be permanently shore-based, and after spending three months sleeping on theDawn P,he would have been delirious at the news of an apartment for rent on solid ground.

Liam recovered first. “So this is the only hotel in town, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah. We've heard rumors for years that a Best Western was going to come in, but it hasn't happened yet. Lots of bed and breakfasts, though, since the Wood-Tikchik State Park opened up. And the Togiak Wildlife Refuge,” she added, “long as they can afford to hire a float plane.”

Liam studied the countertop with absorption, presenting all the appearance of a man deeply embarrassed to ask the next question but forced by profession to do so. “I imagine you have a few, ah, local customers.” He risked a look and saw that Alta's unblinking stare was back and fixed unwaveringly on his face.

“If there is something you want to ask me, Corporal Campbell, ask,” she said, gathering up her pictures and putting them back in her wallet.

“I'm afraid there is,” he said, still more apologetically.

She drummed her fingers on the counter. “Stop tap-dancing. What is it?”

“I suppose you've heard about theMarybethia.” Beneath lowered lid he watched her reaction.

Her lips tightened, but that was all. “Yes.”

“Did you know the Malones?”

“Yes.”

“Any one of the Malones in particular? Molly, for example?”

Her smile was frosty around the edges. “If, Liam, you want to know if Molly Malone ever spent the night here with a man not her husband, the answer is yes.”

“Ah.” His breath expelled on a long sigh. “Who?”

“That I don't know. I never saw him.”

His brow creased. “Then how do you know she was with anybody?”

“I make the beds.”

“Oh.”

“He wasn't with her when she checked in. She must have let him in the back door because he never came through the lobby. But that girl definitely wasn't sleeping alone the nights she spent here.”

“Maybe her husband joined her.”

“Then how come I never saw him? She was always alone, coming and going.”

“How often did she stay here?”

“She came into town on shopping trips on average about once a month.”

“For how long?”

“One or two nights, usually. Oh, you mean how long had she been making these trips into town.” Alta thought. “I guess about a year. Since before last fishing season, anyway. Last April, maybe, around tax time?” She shrugged. “I can't say for sure.”

Liam gave Alta his most winning smile. “Could I see the register?”

She barked a laugh. “We don't have a register.” She nodded at the office in back of the counter.

He followed her through the door, and beheld the latest in Dell computers, hooked up to a scanner, a printer, a copy machine and a fax. “Great,” he said. “How far back do your records go?”

“Since we bought the place,” she said complacently, and sat down. “What do you want?”

“Can you print out a list of all the dates Molly Malone stayed here?”

“Certainly,” Alta said with a trace of scorn, and did so forthwith. Liam scanned the piece of paper. “Thanks, Alta, I owe you one.”

“I had one of the Malone deckhands in here, too,” she said. “Beginning of last season, all pissed off because David Malone had fired him. What the hell was his name…”

“Max Bayless?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Why, I believe that was it. Scrawny little guy, nose off a fairy tale witch, big brown eyes like a cow's, mouth that wouldn't stop.”

Alta Peterson had a gift for characterization; a vivid picture of Max Bayless materialized before Liam's very eyes. He produced his notebook. “What did he say about the Malones?”

“Said David Malone booted him off theMarybethiafor no good reason, right in the middle of the season.”

“He get paid?”

She nodded. “Oh yes. I made him sign his crew share check over to me before I'd let him register. You can't trust a fisher at settlement. They're liable to drink every dime of their checks the first day they step off the boat, either celebrating a great season or drowning a bad one. I never had that problem with Peri, bless his heart. Anything else you wanted?”

He indicated the computer. “Can you look up the exact date Bayless was here?”

“I don't have to.” She smiled, revealing a set of large, yellowing teeth. “He was in on July fourth, out again on the fifth.”

“Easy dates to remember. Did he get another job?”

“I'd say about an hour after he flew in,” she said, nodding. “I was surprised, since it wasn't that good a year, and it didn't sound to me like he was that good a deckhand. David Malone has-had a good reputation on the Bay. He wouldn't fire someone in the middle of the fishing season for no good reason. It would leave him short-handed, and it would take too much time to find someone to replace him.”

“Maybe his kids were coming along,” Liam suggested.

“Maybe.” Alta didn't sound convinced. “My kids couldn't wait to set foot on dry land, themselves.” Humor gleamed in the blue eyes. “There's not a one of them majoring in fisheries management, either.”

“What are they majoring in?”

The gleam of humor increased to deepen the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes. “Pre-Columbian art, high-altitude botany, and Eastern religions. Respectively.”

Jesus, Liam almost said, but recollected himself in time to snatch the word back. “Well, thank you for all your help, Alta.” He pocketed his notebook and turned to leave.

She waited until he was halfway out the door before she said, “You want a list of the dates David Malone stayed here?”

He halted in his tracks. “What?”

Her smile was wicked. “He didn't sleep alone, either.”