The Darkening Archipelago (27 page)

But she could guess. Thirty-six years of choices had provided her with a pretty solid grounding on the consequences of her decisions.

Her most recent moment of truth had come about five hours before the wheels-up of the airliner in which she was now seated.

She hung up the phone. She had been parked on the side of the road, pulled off into somebody's gravel driveway. The trucks that raced by on Highway 22 rocked her car. She put the phone down on the passenger seat and let her hands fall lightly onto her lap.

Now what? she wondered.

Cole Blackwater was in trouble. Again. He believed that Archie Ravenwing had been murdered: his death at sea had been no accident. Cole had asked Nancy to come to Port Lostcoast — about as near to the end of the earth that you can get in Canada — and help him figure out what was going on.

Why? Why had he asked her?

“I'm a reporter, Cole. Is that what you want? A reporter helping you? You know what that means, right? We've been through this before.”

Cole had been silent on the phone for a long time. Finally he had told her that he knew that she was a reporter, and he knew what that meant. He didn't know where else to turn.

He sounded lost. Adrift.

She sat in her car and tried to think her way through this. Cole had told her that Archie Ravenwing's boat had been found, and that there was a red, tacky substance that Cole thought must be traces of blood found where no blood should have been. If Archie had in fact been swept over the side of the boat and into the sea, why was there so much blood so far from where his body should have been swept overboard? Then Cole had said something about a marine chart with blue and red Xs on it, notes to call something called the sos coalition, the RCMP, the media, and himself. What did the Xs mean? she asked. He said that the red Xs were fish farms. The blue Xs were a mystery.

Cole then told her about the package that he had received at his office in Vancouver just days after he had flown to Lostcoast, and the letter and cheque. And finally he told her about his suspicions about the fish farms doing genetic engineering, though to what end he didn't know.

Could she help him? he wanted to know.

She had said she would think about it and call him back.

He had sounded weary. Worn thin.

There was so much about him she didn't know. She shook her head, trying to shake off the conversations with Walter and Dorothy Blackwater, and with Sergeant Reimer.

As she sat there, a thought occurred to her. Was Cole Blackwater aware that she had been to the Blackwater ranch? Had Walter Blackwater called him the moment she had left the Porcupine Hills and told him some ex-girlfriend, the same one who had ruined his marriage and destroyed his career, was now snooping around their old man's death? If that was the case, what was Cole Blackwater's motivation for pleading with her to come to Port Lostcoast?

She shook her head, her raven-black hair falling across her face. Another truck passed her on the highway and her car shook.

She opened her phone and speed dialled a number.

“You were supposed to be back in Edmonton this morning. Where are you?”

“I'm about an hour south of Calgary.”

“You better have broken down or been accosted by cowboys, Nancy.”

“I wish,” she said. “No, it's more complex than that. I just got a call from a source about a story that is unfolding. I want to pursue it.”

“Is this the same story that has had my star reporter creeping around the foothills for the last four days?”

“Sorta.”

“Explain sorta.”

“I don't know that I can.”

“But you want me to let you follow this source's information without being able to make my own evaluation of it, is that right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Where?”

“Well, that's the rub,” she said. “It's on the north end of Vancouver Island.”

“That's a joke, right? You're joking.”

“No joke. My source is onto a cover up of a big environmental story out there that might involve murder. Nobody else has this yet.”

“You know that you write for the
Edmonton Journal
, right?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“And that we don't sell many papers on Vancouver Island, right? I mean, I could check with circulation if you want, but it's likely very, very few. You know that, right?”

“Get off of it, okay. We're part of a national chain. Bump this story up to the
Post
.”

“What should I tell them?”

“Tell them to trust me. The last time I followed my nose we — won a National Newspaper Award.”

The line was silent. Then he said, “I'll see what I can do.”

It was easy, thought Nancy Webber, face pressed to the window, to ask others to trust her. But did she trust herself? Why take such a risk for Cole Blackwater? Why take such a risk
on
Cole Blackwater?

The flight attendant offered her something to drink; she chose coffee. She sipped from the tiny cup and witnessed the final moments of day, the last brilliant fire of sunlight disappearing from the tips of the mountains below, as if the rosy light was being sucked from the peaks by the approaching darkness.

She finished her coffee. Again she asked herself the question: why take such a risk on Cole Blackwater? She was fairly certain he wouldn't lie to her again. He'd learned his lesson the hard way. But what Nancy Webber couldn't reconcile was this: was she on this plane because of the
story
, or because of Cole Blackwater
himself?
And if it
was
the latter, was it because of what Cole Blackwater had once meant to her, and might mean again, or because of the unanswered questions she had about his father's death? Was it Nancy Webber, reporter, on the plane, or Nancy Webber, once and possible future lover of Cole Blackwater, who watched the darkness consume the light far below?

She made her living asking hard questions, and now found herself in the awkward place of not being able to answer her own troublesome inquiries.

— In the morning she awoke and wondered where the hell she was. It took her almost a full minute to remember that she was in a hotel within sight of the Vancouver airport and not in one of several places she had slept in Alberta during the last week. She rose and walked naked to the shower. She had forgotten what it felt like to wake up on the coast after having been in Alberta. Her skin didn't crawl, her eyes didn't itch. Her nose wasn't raw and dry. She felt as though her body was sucking in the moisture from the air around her rather than exhaling it into the parched air of the prairies.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was messed from sleep and there were dark circles under her eyes, the result of not enough sleep the last few nights. She pressed her hands to her face and ran them through her hair. Then she let her hands trail down her body, over her breasts and across her hips. She straightened and sucked in a breath of air. There was no denying that she was getting older. But everything still held its shape. She still felt good about her body. No issues there. The running helped. She let out the breath and turned the water on in the shower. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror, then caught herself thinking about Cole. About the way they used to make love. She astride him, her hair trailing over his chest. His big hands on her hips, moving her back and forth.

She shook her head.

There was no denying that she was drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

Nancy caught a flight from Vancouver to Port Hardy at ten am. Shortly after noon she rented one of the three available cars at the Port Hardy terminal and began driving south to Port McNeill. At times she felt her breath coming fast, and she fought to control convoluted emotions. Fear was there, and anticipation. Was it anticipation of the hunt, a journalist's instincts for tracking the story? Or something else?

Nancy couldn't deny that the tingling she felt was lust.

She felt a flush of anger at herself. She was here for the story. One of the stories. Right now, any story would do.

It was late in the afternoon when she reached Port McNeill, just in time to catch the 5:10 ferry. She dialled Cole from the ferry lineup.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Feels like the middle of nowhere.”

“Actually, it's not even that central. You're on the fringes of nowhere.”

“I'm in Port McNeill waiting for the ferry. Where can I meet you?”

“When you get off the ferry, turn left and come to the government docks. It's only a few hundred yards. I want to show you the boat. They've got it up and out of the water at the end of the pier.”

It had been years since Nancy had been on a ferry. On the ride over, she stood at the bow of the boat and shivered, watching the shoreline pass, watching clouds scud along the ragged, clear-cut peaks of Vancouver Island. As she approached Alert Bay, a bank of fog rolled along the shore and obscured the town. When the boat docked, she climbed back into her rental car and drove up the pier; she turned left and found a place to park at the government docks.

All too soon she found herself standing where the metal ramp dropped onto the wooden wharf. The afternoon was cold, and she had only the clothing she had grabbed for her trip to High River last Sunday morning. She had put on her leather jacket for the crossing and now pulled it tightly to her body, the cool, wet air clinging to her, burrowing into her bones. Mist clung to the water. There wasn't a trace of wind, and the fog seemed to move of its own volition. Above, the sun tried to push its way into the vapour, to burn it off, but the fog held its ground, pooling low on the water and creeping like an ethereal snake across the heavy boards of the government pier, only to drop again into the pit of mist below.

She stood and breathed and wondered if a person could drown in such a heavy fog. She shivered and momentarily wondered again what she was doing there.

Then she saw the figure appear from the mist at the far end of the dock. At first it was merely the outline of a man, heavyset but moving lightly, arms swinging at his sides. Then the figure took form. Dark, curly hair. Heavy slicker pulled up around his neck. Jeans. Face emerging from the gloom of the fog. Cole Blackwater walked toward her from out of the miasma of the darkening day.

20

The long journey back to Port Hardy gave Archie Ravenwing plenty of time to think about his encounter in Fan Tan Alley the night before. He opened his battered leather briefcase and looked around the tiny airplane to see if he recognized anyone. Then he hefted the inch-thick envelope out and put the briefcase between his feet on the floor. He opened the envelope again. Of course, when he had returned from Fan Tan Alley he had briefly glanced at the stack of paper, but exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep with the reading light on, the papers scattered across his chest and blankets.

In his dreams he revisited the encounter.

“Who are you?”

“I'm a friend. On the inside.”

“Why all this deep throat stuff?”

The man laughed. “Yeah, pretty dramatic.”

“Really, why?”

“You'll see when you read this.” The man handed him a thick envelope.

Archie took it. “They'll be able to trace this back to you, won't they? I heard that they can trace things to photocopiers or individual printers now.”

“It won't matter.”

“You'll get fired.”

“We've got whistleblower protection.”

“Why me? Why not the media?”

“You've got the complete picture. I only have pieces. You'd never get this from Freedom of Information. This is the stuff that's always blacked out.”

“How'd you get it?”

“Best that I not say.”

“Stolen?”

“Liberated.”

“Does this have anything to do with the First Nation's economic agreement that's going to be announced?”

The man looked around him, as if the alley had ears. “I think the minister is in the dark. I think he's walking into a trap.”

“What do you mean, trap?”

“I think he's in the dark about what's going on up in the Broughton.”

“Lance Grey is running the table?”

“Yeah, and he's really just a pawn in the game that Stoboltz is playing.”

“And now they have Greg First Eagle.”

“And others….”

“Who?”

“I don't know.”

“From the North Salish?”

“I don't think so. Other bands up the coast. They're running the whole trap line.”

Archie shook his head. “Can't someone get to the minister before he walks into this mess with both feet?”

“We're trying. But Lance Grey has built a wall around the minister. Nobody from the department can get in. Nobody inside that office gets out.”