The mind was a peculiar thing, capable of rebuilding and renewing itself without necessarily growing a lot of new cells, just new pathways through the old cells. With some patience and a fair degree of effort, he had been reorganizing his approach to living. Life had become well ordered with his return to his roots.
One part of his beginnings involved his father, a man who had made nature a challenge and man a conqueror. It was a one-dimensional worldview that Sam could never fully understand, much less put a name to.
All that had changed when Sam found his mother and his grandfather, Stalking Bear. Until his death, his grandfather had been his pipeline to his heritage; these days it was his mother and Kier, his cousin. Sam saw himself as the strangest of paradoxes: fascinated and nourished by the old of the Tilok past, but made rich, and by some calculations successful, in the technology-driven world of supersleuthing. Although he retained only remnants of his professional life, it was that life that had bought him his freedom in more ways than one. Of course it had also bought him his son’s death. Now, apart from his involvement with the Tilok, his days were mostly workouts and the usual sailing routine of reading, hikes, maybe a little flirtation with the tourist ladies, and exploration of ancient native sites and landmarks throughout the British Columbia coast and Vancouver Island.
It had been months since the last time he had seriously wanted a drink. The good in his old personality, the keen instinct, the incredible memory, his ability to organize had all remained. But the cravings and the restlessness, the need for alternate kicks of booze and adrenaline had finally left him. Before the moment he decided to go pull Anna from a rock, skydiving or rock climbing and other artificially created risk was all he needed. An annual near-death experience wasn’t a requisite for life.
But from the moment this woman had fallen into his world, he felt like a guy with something big to do.
He tried to tell himself that his feelings for Suzanne, the only major love of his life, were like the populist love for Kennedy that may have grown considerably once the president was dead and gone forever. Nevertheless Sam persisted in his nearly sacred feelings toward the memory of Suzanne. Further complexity came when he tried to unravel Suzanne’s and his son’s deaths. Maybe to his poor mind, honoring his son somehow went hand-in-hand with preserving his feelings for Suzanne, for whom his son had died.
He looked at Anna as she slept.
Occasionally, Sam became possessed of an urge to uninhibited, screaming copulation, distinguishable from the urge to make love, but during the year since Suzanne’s death there had been only an occasional warm body from women who wanted a bump in the night before Sam sailed on. As to serious romance, there hadn’t been a whiff.
Of course when he sat under a clear night sky with chocolate-covered coffee beans to clear his mind, and the grandeur of the firmament to bring out the truth, he realized that he hadn’t a clue how he could have managed with Suzanne’s celebrity status-even assuming he could have found something in the humdrum of glitz that might have saved them from the usual unhappy end.
Sam had always stayed cool when the fires of romance would have taken lesser men to the altar. His father had been the ultimate Mr. Cool, never getting excited-not even about his own death, because he ended his life so unobtrusively. It could also be said that he didn’t give a damn about Sam’s life or he would have stuck around to watch. Sam recognized the bitterness in himself, but he considered his feelings about his father to be realistic, even inevitable. Of the three souls that he might have loved, only his mother still lived, and he loved her very much.
Anna stirred and blinked.
“You look like you’re thinking. You’re no doubt pissed. I can understand that,” Anna said.
“So for the sake of my dead Harry, why don’t you tell me what’s happening?”
She hesitated. He could feel her indecision.
“How do I know you’ll keep my secret?”
“You’ll have to figure out what kind of a fellow I am. Tough assignment on short notice. Or you could take a leap of faith and trust me.”
“Why is trust so good for me and so bad for you?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “The truth is I don’t have any better choices. So swear to me you won’t betray my confidence.”
“You and I both know that no amount of swearing buys you anything. I’m either honest or I’m not.”
“Humor me.”
“I promise I won’t reveal your secrets unless compelled to do so by a court, or unless it will save the life of innocents, including your own. How’s that?”
“Spoken like a lawyer.”
Astute, he thought.
She inched her bag closer to the stove and began the story of her morning.
Six
Anna sat on the back step of the lodgelike facility on South Windham Island and watched Nutka paint. Jason’s house had a name-Cedar Spirits, a reference to a common Kwaikutl phrase, according to Nutka. Anna had befriended her and found her to be unmarried, thoughtful, and unburdened by cultural expectations, a confident woman who seemed to be able to make her own freedom. Surprisingly, Nutka managed the household staff and groundskeepers, most of whom were men and many years her senior. Although Frank Stefano, a Grace Technologies employee from France, officially ran the place, he always spoke with Nutka in order to get the work done.
Nutka had good-humored eyes and was small of stature, maybe 110 pounds and five feet four inches. She kept her hair braided and wore a clean and pressed slightly faded house dress under an earth-toned, elaborately designed, hand-made blanket that she draped over her shoulders.
Nutka was painting from memory a stream that poured into Knight Inlet, an immense fjord to the south that penetrated well into the British Columbia mainland wilderness.
“Many artists have to look at what they are painting,” Anna said.
“I prefer to see it through the mind of the child I was when I first saw it,” Nutka said. “I used to go there every summer with my grandparents. We said it was a place for owls because the spirits were strong there; my grandfather said they were wise spirits and you could feel them in the breeze.”
“Was it a spiritual place for you?”
“Oh, yes. It is where old men go to build a sweat house and see visions. They find meaning in being Salish.”
“I thought you were Kwaikutl.”
“I am half and half. This is the Kwaikutl land and my mother’s family is Kwaikutl. My father’s family is Salish. The Salish are in the south. But I am painting a place near a village of people called Kwakwaka’wakw. Confusing, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is hard to say.”
“I don’t go there anymore, at least to the place I’m painting. As my people say, the government’s giant giving hand tends to take more than it gives.”
“You know, I’m worried that it’s that way with my brother and Grace Technologies.”
“Yes,” Nutka said, her eyes shining and gaze direct.
“Tell me something about my brother.”
“Yes?”
“I know that your massage must be good, but why does he crave it so?”
“When I miss more than two days he is very nervous until he gets the massage, unless one of the other girls does it, which he doesn’t like.”
“And why doesn’t he like the other girls?”
Nutka looked away and giggled. “He is, uhm. I don’t want to say it.”
“But if I could understand…”
“Maybe he has a crush on me. It embarrasses him.”
“You mean he… can’t help being drawn to you?”
“Yes. Most definitely.”