Village of the Ghost Bears Page 5

  He would have thanked Grace and told her all this, but she had begun a series of tiny, delicate, endearing snores. He kissed her forehead, savored her lavender scent for a moment, and tiptoed out.

  Active had no problem finding the green house on Second Avenue. The dead Cat in the yard was a dead giveaway. The problem was finding a place to park. A pickup and two four-wheeler ATVs filled the driveway, and three more ATVs lined the street out front. Active stopped the Trooper Suburban behind the ATVs on the street and walked up to the house.

  The kunnichuk door was open, and the inner door swung open at his knock, disclosing a roomful of Inupiat women, most of grandmother age. “Arii, that Augie,” one of them was saying as Active took off his hat and waited to be noticed. “You remember when Barrow got that big tall naluaqmiu on their team and he try to stop Augie that time and when Augie go around him, that guy’s shorts are falling down on his ankles?”

  This produced a shower of giggles from the aanas, another of whom picked up the story. “That naluaqmiu boy try say Augie pull his shorts down, but them referees never see nothing, so they couldn’t even call him foul. Arii, that Augie!”

  There was more of the silvery laughter, fading as the women sensed his presence.

  “I’m looking for Lena Sundown?”

  The woman who had told the first part of the story pointed through a doorway into the kitchen. “Lena,” she shouted, “that Trooper is here.”

  A red-eyed woman came to the door, smiled in a small way, and motioned him through. “You could sit down,” she said.

  He took a chair at the table and watched as Lena Sundown worked at the stove, dropping batter into a pot. She had dark gray hair but was rather smooth-skinned and not fat. He doubted she could be much past fifty, which seemed a little young for the grandmother of a college kid. But, then, girls in Chukchi tended to become mothers at an early age. Suppose Lena gave birth to Augie’s father, the late Edgar, at seventeen, and Augie was born when Edgar was likewise seventeen. Augie had probably been about nineteen when he died, which would make Lena only about fifty-three.

  Fifty-three and bereft of both a son and a grandson— and possibly widowed too: he didn’t recall hearing of Lena having a husband.

  How to get into it? The Inupiat, particularly older Inupiat, were comfortable with long silences, but they gave him the fidgets, Anchorage-reared as he was. Suddenly he recognized the smell filling the room. And an opening.

  “You making seal oil doughnuts?”

  “Ah-ha,” she said. “Couple minutes they’ll be ready. You like ’em? Lotta people don’t, especially if they’re naluaqmiiyaaq.”

  Was she grinning a little? At a time like this? It was possible. He had never met an aana yet who could resist the temptation to rib him about his Anchorage upbringing. “Sure I like ’em. Everybody likes seal oil, right?”

  Her face turned sad again. “Augie always like ’em, all right, ever since he’s little. You want some coffee?”

  He nodded, and she brought him a cup, black, which was how he liked it.

  “Could I talk to you about your grandson?”

  “Arii, I come back here to get away from those ladies because I don’t want to talk about it no more.” She turned back to the stove and dabbed at her eyes with the corner of a dish towel. “First my son Edgar, now it’s Augie.”

  He drank some of the coffee before responding. She hadn’t quite refused to talk. “Did you hear we think somebody might have started the Rec Center fire on purpose?” he asked finally.

  “Who was it? You catch ’em yet?” She stayed busy at the stove, keeping her back to him, deciding whether to open up.

  “Not yet. That’s why we need to talk to people. To figure out who it was.”

  She slid the doughnut pot off the burner, turned to face him, and sighed. “Arii, that Rachel.” She came to the table and sat across from him, her hands around her own coffee mug.

  It took him a moment to make the connection. “Rachel Akootchuk?”

  Lena lifted her eyebrows in the Eskimo yes. “Those miluks. I try tell Augie she’s trouble, but he won’t listen.”

  It took him another moment to sift through his tiny vocabulary of Inupiaq for the meaning of miluks. Breasts. “She was Augie’s girlfriend? And she had—”

  Lena lifted her eyebrows again and cupped her hands in front of her chest. Quite some distance in front. “They’re like magnets for you guys, ah?”

  “Well, some guys—”

  Lena snorted.

  “All right, most of us, but. . . . Wait a minute, are you saying Rachel started the fire at the Rec Center? But she was killed, too.”

  “Not her. That Buck Eastlake. You know him?”

  Active struggled to place the name. “He was, wasn’t he on the Malamutes before—”

  Lena raised her eyebrows. “He’s on the team, too, all right, pretty good player, but not like Augie. Try for team captain, but Augie get it.”

  “And Rachel—”

  “That Rachel, she’s with Buck till Augie gets team captain, then Augie get her too. Girls with big miluks, they sure like basketball players, ah?” She gave a little chuckle of what sounded like reluctant pride, then frowned again. “I tell ’im she’s trouble, but he don’t listen.”

  “Guys that age usually don’t.”

  “Guys any age if a girl got big miluks, is what I see from my life.”

  Active couldn’t think of a response, so he just raised his eyebrows.

  “Ah-hah,” Lena said with a nod. “That Buck, he’s real mad about it, especially when Augie get that scholarship to go to Fairbanks and Buck don’t get nothing. He blame Augie for everything, say he better look out. Buck try fight him couple times, but Augie don’t want to and he’s so fast Buck can’t hit him, so there’s no fight, what Augie told me.

  “Anyway, Buck, he didn’t get no scholarships, so he have to stay around town, get that cargo job at the airport.”

  “Ah,” Active said. “That’s where I’ve seen him.” A face suddenly clicked into focus. A tall kid, especially for an Inupiaq, much taller than Augie’s five-eight, yet it was Augie who’d gotten the limelight and the scholarship. And Rachel Akootchuk of the magnificent miluks.

  Active pulled out his notebook and wrote down the name.

  “Then Augie leaves for Fairbanks, and Rachel’s still here,” Lena continued. “She’s mad because Augie never take her with him, so she goes back with Buck and I think if she doesn’t turn up pregnant from Augie in couple months, everything will be good.”

  “And she didn’t?”

  Her face took on an expression of remembered relief. “Nope, no babies. She’s here; Buck’s here; Augie’s in Fairbanks, so seem like it’s all right. But then he come home this summer and, next thing I know, he’s right back with that Rachel. And now he’s talk about she might come back to Fairbanks with him!”

  She gazed at him with a look of outrage and expectation.

  “Imagine that.” He gave his head a shake with a frown he hoped would convey an acceptable degree of disapproval. “And Buck started threatening Augie again?”

  “No, this time he never say nothing. He just have a look whenever I see him around town. Augie laugh when I try warn him, but I tell him, that Buck is a man that don’t care no more.”

  Active stifled a sigh. “Where does Buck live?”

  Lena put a finger to her chin, lost in thought. “Seem like him and Rachel have that little red cabin up by the radio towers. You know that place have all them old doghouses, that naluaqmiu musher used to live up there?”

  Active thought he could picture a red cabin at the north end of town, surrounded by the oil drums cut in half that provided all the shelter a husky needed, even in an Arctic winter. He started to make a note of the information.

  “And then she kick him out when Augie come home, and he’s . . . where he’s living?”

  Active put down his pen and waited her out.

  “His uncle’s place, I think.”
r />   “Ah,” Active said. “Uncle . . . ?”

  “Sayers.” She nodded in satisfaction.

  He picked up his pen and wrote this in his notebook. Sayers didn’t sound like a Chukchi surname. The uncle must have been an outsider who’d married an Eastlake female. “And his first name?”

  “Ah-hah.”

  He looked at her, then at his notebook. “Mr. Sayers. Do you know his first name?”

  She stared at him with a puzzled look. “S-A-Y-E-R-S, I guess.”

  “No, I mean—” Then he got it. “Sayers Eastlake is the uncle’s name?”

  Lena looked even more puzzled. “Didn’t I say that already?”

  “You did, but I—”

  “But you’re naluaqmiiyaaq. Everybody know that.”

  He gave his head a little shake to clear it and asked if she knew where Sayers Eastlake lived.

  She put her finger to her chin again. “I think he live somewhere up there, too, but I don’t know where. You could just go up there, ask around, ah? It’s E-A-S-T-L-AK-E.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  As he made his way toward the door, the women in the living room were watching a video of a basketball game. He recognized Augie Sundown and the other Malamutes, but not the opposing team. The boys on it were all white and tall. Definitely not the Barrow team that had had only the one tall naluaqmiu. Probably from a Christian school in Anchorage or Fairbanks. Chukchi played in the small-schools class at state tournaments, and the Christian schools in Anchorage and Fairbanks were the only small schools in Alaska with white student bodies.

  He watched for a few moments as Augie ran the team and the game, showing off the uncanny dribbling skills and the quick jump shot that seemed to come out of nowhere and had earned him the nickname Mr. Outside. Except he wasn’t really showing off. He looked like a creature at home in its environment, doing what came naturally without much conscious thought. Like a seal in an open lead or a polar bear loping across an ice pan.

  Active felt a touch on his arm and turned to see Lena behind him. She motioned for him to follow and led him down a short hall and into a bedroom.

  At least, it had once been a bedroom.

  “I call it the Augie Sundown museum,” Lena said with a sad little chuckle. “He always tease me about it, but I think he like it.”

  Active gazed around the little room. Trophies, medals, plaques, and photographs filled a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. A scrapbook stuffed with newspaper clippings lay open on a table near the door.

  “He always like basketball, even when he’s little,” Lena said. “We used to watch that NBA together on Saturdays. And he make me put up a toy basket out there in the living room when he’s maybe seven years old. Every time he practice his jump shot, this old house shake and it turn on the furnace.” She chuckled again, not quite as sadly. “Sure used to get hot whenever he play.”

  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” he said.

  “Me and Augie, we take care of each other. After my son Edgar split up with Augie’s mom, Augie stay here because Edgar don’t have no woman around and Augie’s mom, she go to Nome.”

  “That was where she was from?”

  “No, they got bars in Nome. That’s why she go. She’s still down there, what I hear, but Augie never see her in a long time.” She paused. “I don’t know if she even heard about our Rec Center fire yet.”

  “I’ll have the Troopers in Nome contact her,” Active said.

  “I hope you catch that Buck Eastlake,” Lena said. “Augie, he was a real good boy. He make some of these other boys around here think an Eskimo can do something, all right. Everybody like him, everybody but that Buck.”

  Active went out through the living room, where the aanas were still watching Augie on Lena Sundown’s TV, and to the Suburban. He drove north up Third Street in a fall rain, cold and steady and wind-driven, the kind of rain that seemed like it would go on until it turned to snow and winter set in.

  For lack of a better idea, he started at Rachel Akootchuk’s red cabin, which was as vacant as the oil drums in the yard, then drove around the neighborhood looking for someone to ask where Buck Eastlake’s uncle might live. But that turned out to be unnecessary, as the second house he passed bore a sign with “Sayers Eastlake” cut into the wood with a router.

  A teenage girl answered his knock, a cordless phone pressed to her chest. When she saw his uniform, she put the phone to her mouth. “I’ll call you back. There’s a State Trooper here. What? I don’t know what he wants. Arii, I said I’ll call you back!”

  She clicked the phone off, and he introduced himself. She said “Hi,” but didn’t offer her own name, so he plunged ahead. “I’m looking for Buck Eastlake, or Sayers?”

  “They both went caribou hunting,” she said. “At my dad’s camp up by Katonak village.”

  “When did they leave?”

  “Dad left three days ago, maybe. Buck, he only left last night. He had to work yesterday, so he couldn’t go before.”

  “Buck left last night? What time?”

  She chewed on the stubby antenna of the cordless. “Maybe about seven or eight?”

  “By boat?”

  She lifted her eyebrows, yes, then frowned in uncertainty. “How else would he go up there? Why you asking about my cousin?”

  “He took a boat up there at night?” The Katonak River drained hundreds of thousands of square miles of prime caribou country in the Brooks Range north and east of Chukchi. Katonak village lay about fifty miles upstream from the river’s mouth on Chukchi Bay. “That’s a long trip in the dark.”

  The girl lifted her eyebrows again. “That Buck is always on the river if he’s not working or playing basketball. He could do it at night, especially if the weather’s good and there’s a moon.”

  Active tried to remember. The weather had been clear in Chukchi the previous afternoon when he and Grace had crammed themselves into Cowboy’s Super Cub for the trip to One-Way Lake. But had there been a moon last night? He tried to visualize the scene at One-Way Lake as evening came on. Yes, he was sure of it, a full moon gliding up from the southeast as the sun dropped behind the ridge and draped their camp in shadow.

  So Buck Eastlake could have left Chukchi and navigated up the river by moonlight. He could have been fifteen or twenty miles away when the Rec Center went up in flames a little after ten. Or he could have parked the boat somewhere past the last houses at the north end of Chukchi spit and hiked back to the Rec Center to get even with Augie Sundown and Rachel Akootchuk before setting off for caribou country.

  “Where’s your father’s camp? Upstream or downstream from Katonak village? And which side of the river?”

  The girl shrank a little at this barrage of questions. “Why you want my cousin?”

  “We have to tell him Rachel Akootchuk was killed in the fire last night.” It wasn’t a complete lie, Active told himself. Just a half-truth.

  The girl put her hand over her mouth. “Rachel’s dead?”

  He lifted his eyebrows.

  “That’s sad, even if she was a tramp with that chest of hers. I always told my cousin she’s no good and he should just let that Augie Sundown have her. But it’s still sad she burned up.”

  Active felt an extra pang of sympathy for Rachel Akootchuk. Not only was she dead, but it appeared that, when she was alive, her miluks had earned her the undying enmity of every female she ever met.

  “Very sad,” he said in his gentlest voice. “Now can you tell me how to get to your father’s camp?”

  The girl closed her eyes for a moment, and he wondered if she was about to realize her cousin was a suspect and shut down on him. But, no, she opened her eyes and explained that her father’s camp was on the north bank of the river, second or third bend above Katonak village. It was easy to spot, she said, because the cabin was up on a bluff and painted yellow, like their house, and there was a dead snowmachine in the yard. And there should be two boats pulled up to the riverbank.

  Active thanked her
, returned to the Suburban, and radioed Dispatch for the name and address of his next interview.

  HE GOT to the five o’clock meeting a little early so he could report on the plan to retrieve No-Way the following morning. He dropped into an orange plastic chair in front of the boss’s desk.

  “It’ll have to do, I guess,” Carnaby said distractedly after Active had outlined the arrangements. “I just hope Cowboy gets to the guy before something else does. A family will never quite get to closure on a deal like this unless the remains are recovered and they can give him a proper burial.”

  “Anybody upriver been reported late from a hunting trip yet?”

  Carnaby shook his head. “Not a peep. Kinda odd, huh?”

  Active shrugged. “It’s the Arctic. Everything takes two weeks longer.”

  “Tell me about it,” Carnaby said. “What’s he look like, anyway?”

  Active was momentarily speechless. “Like I said, the pike—”

  Carnaby waved him off. “I mean otherwise.”

  Active recited the same statistics he’d given Cowboy Decker, then filled in details about No-Way’s clothing and rifle. “He seemed kind of light-skinned for a full-blooded Inupiaq,” Active added as an afterthought. “Lighter than me, certainly. Maybe a half-breed or a quarter white?” As he spoke, he heard people in the outer office and Dickie Nelson asking Evelyn O’Brien, the Trooper secretary, for Carnaby.

  Carnaby grunted. “Hard to guess, if he was in the water with the pike for a while. Anybody’d look like a ghost, probably.” He rose to wave Nelson and Alan Long into the office.

  Long took the other plastic chair near Carnaby’s desk, turned it around, and sat with his arms draped over the backrest. Dickie Nelson was left with the choice of standing or taking the ancient green leather couch. He opted for standing—or leaning, actually—against a four-drawer file cabinet. They all knew the perils of the green couch: it tended to swallow its occupants, effectively excluding them from any conversation.