She followed his gaze. “Yeah. Those poor people. What do you think happened?”
“The money’s gone from the till. There’s a bunch of jade and ivory artwork and a gold nugget the size of a red potato missing. She was robbed, she resisted, and something went wrong. She might have known him, but she ran the only post office in miles, so she could also have not known him. You get drifters out here the same way you get them everywhere else. It’s just that here you hope the Bush takes them out before they start killing people.”
“And usually it does.”
“And usually it does,” he agreed.
“Not this time.”
“No.”
“Her family seemed to love her very much.”
“Yes.”
A brief silence. “Liam. You think you’ll find him?”
He pulled his blue ball cap from his head and examined the cloth badge fastened to the crown. A brown bear with all of its teeth bared in a snarl held a badge between his front paws. “Alaska State Troopers,” the badge read. In between the “State” and “Troopers” was a circle with the unsetting sun and the Alaska flag set inside it. Eight stars of gold on a field of blue.
“I’ll look for him,” he said finally. “We dusted for prints, and if we’re lucky we’ll find some out of the hundreds that postal customers and family members have left behind that match up with some we’ve got on file. I’ll go around to the neighbors, see if any of them saw anything, got hassled by anyone. Of course, the nearest neighbor’s four miles away, so chances of that are not good. When I get back to Newenham I’ll call around to the other trooper posts in the area, see if they’ve had anything similar happen.” He put his hat back on and pulled it down over his forehead. “I’ll look for him.”
He got to his feet and reached for her hand and pulled her up next to him. “But unless he kills again, I’m probably not going to find him.”
“Not necessarily something you want to hope for.”
“No.”
She dusted her hands on her jeans and looked at the palms. “Liam.”
She looked at him, the rising sun causing her hair to gleam with dark red secrets. Half a smile kicked up one side of his mouth, and her heart turned over. She cleared her throat. “Ford Ranger,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” he said, smile spreading.
“Wide tires all around.”
“Okay.”
“Snap-on tool chest in the bed.”
“Got it.”
“Hot pink paint job.”
“Oh man, oh no,” he said, his head shaking in disgust, “no way, girl truck trying to look like a boy truck. Paint job’s a dead giveaway.”
In that moment she loved him as much as she ever had. “Liam-” There are some things I have to tell you, she wanted to say. There are things that have to be said.
“Hold it.” His hand touched her arm, and when she raised her head he was looking up. She heard the sound of the engine then. “Prince,” he said, and started for the airstrip.
She opened her mouth to call after him, closed it again without saying anything, and followed him up the path.
Old Man Creek, September 2
“You’re here because your mother’s in Newenham,” Moses said bluntly. Moses never said anything any other way. “She wants to see you, spend time with you. I don’t think that’s a good idea, so I brought you here to keep you out of her way.”
Tim paled beneath his summer tan, suddenly looking much younger and more vulnerable.
“She can’t last long without a drink. She never does. We’ll stay here three, four days, be home in time for the first day of classes. Your math teacher’ll still be there when you get back, don’t worry.”
Bill waited for Tim to wander disconsolately down to the mouth of the creek before she said, “Lower the boom, why don’t you.”
Moses shrugged. “No point in taking it easy on him. Life won’t.”
He was right, of course. Bill said no more, refilling her mug from the pot that sat warming itself on the Earth stove at the back of the cabin. She went outside to enjoy the contrast of hot, strong coffee and crisp, cool air. A porch fronted the little cabin, built of deck boards Moses had conned somebody out of a couple of years back. There was a creaky rocking chair, a bottomed-out armchair with square cushions covered in some nubby brown fabric, and a couple of metal folding chairs with no cushions at all. Bill opted for the armchair, propping her feet on the porch railing.
Moses Alakuyak’s fish camp sat on the confluence of Old Man Creek and the Nushagak River, about thirty miles upriver from Newenham, around Black Point and about halfway between there and Portage Creek, where Moses kept his skiff when he wasn’t at fish camp, and where there was a landing strip. And wouldn’t Wy be royally pissed when she discovered that Finn Grant had flown the four of them in.
The camp itself was a modest affair, a cabin with bunks for eight, a propane stove for cooking, a woodstove for heating, and two counters, one inside for cooking and one outside on sawhorses for cleaning fish. There were racks for drying salmon, a smokehouse made out of an old refrigerator for smoking them, a banya for sweats, a tiny dock made of wooden planks fastened to Styrofoam floats anchored to the bank. There was a well and a pump, although the water was brackish and had to be filtered. A clothesline was strung between the house and one of the few trees, an overgrown alder really. There wasn’t much between Scandinavian Slough and Bristol Bay that was over three hundred feet above sea level. It was one big swamp south of the Nushagak from here on, and the fish camp was on the leading edge of that swamp. It didn’t encourage tree growth.
Moses came out here every summer, to catch and dry and smoke and salt and kipper the salmon that every year made the long journey from the north Pacific Ocean to the upper reaches of the Nushagak and all its tributaries. He didn’t eat much of it, she reflected, staring toward the river, instead giving most of it away to family and friends. He had no place to store it, come to that; Moses didn’t own a house. Probably he would have said he didn’t own the fish camp, either, he was just borrowing it from the Old Man for a time. As near as she could figure, the sum total of Moses’ personal belongings amounted to a Nissan longbed pickup, his tai chi uniform and the clothes on his back. He ate-and drank-in her bar. He slept with her.
And he communed in solitude at fish camp. It was a good place for communing. Bill had never seen so much sky before, not in Alaska. She was more used to mountains jostling for position with the sun and the stars and the clouds filling up the spaces in between. Here, there was nothing to interfere with your line of sight, only a dome of pale blue over a flat marsh filled with dwarf alders and stunted willows and fireweed and reeds and ryegrass. The water table was very high here. The river had both split and narrowed by the time it got this far north, although it wasn’t really that far north, as it hung a right and then another right east of Newenham before correcting course for north again after the Keefer Cutoff.
It was a place to be valued, a home for hundreds of different species of birds and water-loving mammals. Case in point-an otter poked his or her head above the bank, whistled indignantly, as if to say, I thought you left for the year once already. A small splash and it was off again. Little trickles and tributaries riddled the country in every direction, all winding their way somewhere safe to the Nushagak River, and thence to the sea.
Tim needed a dog, she decided, a dog to drape his arm around when he was sitting on a dock with his feet dangling over the edge. Maybe the dog would make him look less frightened, less forlorn.
The door opened and Moses came out, dressed in his sifu clothes, a black jacket and black pants with the cuffs folded and tied closely at the ankles. He walked down the steps and into the yard, faced north, brought his feet together and his hands up, right fist cupped in left palm, and bowed once, holding it for a long moment.