Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

“Hear what?”

Still not looking at Liam, Gabe said, “That she died.”

“Who died?”

McGuire did look at him this time, clearly annoyed. “Kate Shugak.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know? I thought Alaska was the original seventh grade classroom, everybody knows everything about everybody else.”

“Kate’s not dead, Gabe.”

“She got shot. I heard. Her and that monster dog of hers, too.”

“True,” Liam said, “but she didn’t die. Monster dog, either.”

McGuire stared at him. “Kate Shugak’s alive?”

Liam got the feeling McGuire was tap dancing but he couldn’t figure out what around.

“I was told she was dead,” McGuire said slowly.

“Who told you that?” McGuire didn’t answer, and the answer dawned. “Erland Bannister? Your business partner in Newenham?” McGuire looked away and Liam said, “Yeah, well, he actually is dead. And never a man whose word you could trust when he was alive, by the way.” Liam checked his phone again. “I gotta book.”

The one-lane dirt road was just as awful going out as coming in and he achieved the paved surface of East Bay Road again with the feeling of having dodged an enormous repair bill. McGuire could afford to turn that poor excuse for a road into the Champs-Elysées, so why put up with what was basically a hog wallow?

A second later he answered his own question. Why would Gabe McGuire of all people want to make it easy for anyone to come visit?

Mystery solved, he headed back into town with a heart that lightened with every mile. He was already smiling when he turned left on Airport Road, and he was positively grinning when he entered the code to get through the gate onto the field. He drove to Wy’s tie-down and got out. The sun was warm on the back of his neck and he stood there for a moment, enjoying the place, the day, the anticipation of greeting his wife in his best Duke of Marlborough imitation.

Perhaps just to remind him that all joy is conditional and fleeting, his brain brought up the images of Jenny and Charlie, his first wife and their son, both killed by the same drunk driver. That event had begun a downward spiral that had nearly destroyed him mentally and emotionally, and very nearly professionally as well. That spiral had culminated in his being assigned to the post in Newenham, a location so remote and a town so lacking in all the mod cons they couldn’t even keep a city cop on the payroll, never mind a trooper.

But there he had found Wy again. He looked at the image of Jenny’s face in his mind’s eye and saw her smile at him. They had been such good friends, and generous woman that she was she would never have wanted him to live out his life in loneliness and misery. She would have been happy he had found Wy again, and again, he hoped with all his heart that she had never suspected the affair. Jenny had been and always would be the best person he had ever met in his life, and this far on the other side of his loss he knew he was all the better for having had her in it.

It was harder to look at Charlie, even in his own imagination, to see again that soft, tiny bundle of gurgling charm blowing bubbles at him, those tiny fingers grasping his own. Sometimes Liam’s arms actually ached to hold his son again. His heart did ache at the loss and always would.

He heard the distant drone of an airplane and looked up, squinting into the sun.

Five

Monday, September 2, Labor Day

STRETCHING ALMOST TWO HUNDRED MILES from the city of Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska, the vast estuary called Cook Inlet was host to tides second only to those off the Newfoundland Banks, as well as some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Wy crossed the southernmost tip of Kalgin Island and continued on a southeasterly heading, to cross the coast of the Kenai Peninsula at Tikahtnu, a town of a thousand people perched on a bluff divided by a river and its tributarial creek.

That bluff began in Turnagain Arm in the north and continued west and around and all the way down the west side of the Kenai Peninsula and up to the head of Chungasqak Bay which, as she rounded Cook’s Point, unfolded before her in all its forty miles of glory. She studied up on it in advance but nothing could have prepared her for the disparities between the north and south shores. The north shore was almost agricultural-looking, a broad bench of mostly flat land between a short bluff at water’s edge and a much taller bluff farther inland. The south shore looked like Norway, where a range of sharply pointed, white-capped mountains slid precipitously into slivered eighty-fathom fjords. The fjords alternated with five massive piedmont glaciers, themselves depending from a seven-hundred-square-mile ice field only the mountains held in check. Between the fjords were small, rocky inlets and bays and coves and lagoons, along with the occasional spit, tongues made of millennia of glacial silt washing down Cook Inlet. The largest spit thrust out four miles perpendicularly from the north shore. A handful of islands lined up in front of two of the larger fjords on the south side, with a few more so small they could more properly be called rocks scattered by an indiscriminate hand.

Liam’s first reaction to being offered the job of the new trooper post in Blewestown had been to dive into the crime statistics in the area. Wy had hit Naske and Slotnick’s Alaska: A History of the 49th State , the Alaska Atlas & Gazetteer , Merle Colby’s A Guide to Alaska: Last American Frontier , one of the state guides published by the Federal Writers Project back in the day, and of course her personal copy of AOPA’s Airport Directory. She glanced at the clock on the dash, and on impulse turned right to follow the spit across the Bay for an aerial tour of the south side. The longer this big high hung in over Southcentral, the bigger the first fall storm would be that was certainly building up behind it in the Gulf of Alaska. If you don’t like the weather in Alaska, wait ten minutes.

She’d been making a slow descent since Tikahtnu and now she leveled out at a thousand feet, maintaining a course that held just offshore, watching and listening for traffic. There were half a dozen airstrips in the various villages and towns on the south side of the Bay, and where there weren’t airstrips at low tide they used the beaches. She checked the tide app on her phone. Low tide was just an hour away. She grew the extra pair of eyes that all good pilots held in reserve for situations like these and proceeded with enough caution to avoid a mid-air collision but with enough attention to appreciate the view. Over the headset she heard pilot chatter from three different aircraft; from Chuwawet (taking off), Beaty’s Hot Springs (landing), and Jefferson Cove (humpback cow and calf alert). The Chuwawet pilot announced his ETA for Blewestown, which prompted a brief but incendiary blast from someone on the ground in Engaqutaq who apparently had passengers and freight waiting for transport to Blewestown. No reply from the pilot, although the resulting silence on the channel was electric with expectation, everyone muting their mics in the hope of hearing the Engaqutaq ground crew tear the pilot who had changed the schedule mid-flight a new one.

Wy grinned and drifted west, the throttle up just enough to keep her from falling out of the sky, giving her time to peer up every nick and notch big enough to admit a tide. The mountain peaks held up almost to the very end of the peninsula but there was no level ground to be seen afterward, just multiple rough granite slabs off the vertical by only a few degrees. Two different collections of islands, one close in about five miles offshore and another about ten miles further south and sixty degrees more to the west, looked just as horizontally challenged. There wasn’t a cove big enough to spread a beach towel on or a place flat enough to land even a Super Cub. Maybe there was somewhere to land on floats but she wasn’t on floats today. She circled and headed back up the south coast of Chungasqak Bay.