Village of the Ghost Bears (13 page)

“One can only hope.” She grinned and punched his shoulder.

He parked in a slot at the state court building, which sat diagonally across the intersection of Caribou and Second from the restaurant.

Grace gestured at the big building perched on stilts to keep it from melting its way down into the permafrost. “This is why, isn’t it?” she said. “You Troopers just can’t stand the thought of somebody bootlegging in plain sight of the courthouse.”

“Should I be able to stand it?”

She hooked an elbow through his, and they angled across the intersection and pushed through the
kunnichuk
and into the dining room of the Pizza Palace. They found a booth and examined Kyung Kim’s schizophrenic menu. The left-hand page was burgers and pizza, in keeping with the name of the place. The right-hand page offered a long list of Chinese dishes that were, as Active knew from experience, remarkably good.

They agreed on the snow pea shrimp, and he went to the counter to order, peering at the back of the cook working over the griddle. Was it Tae Ahn, the bootlegging suspect, or not?

An Inupiat girl whom Active knew only as Googie came to the counter to take his order. “Is that Tae back there?” he asked.

“Tae’s off today,” Googie said. “You want something?”

“We’ll split an order of snow pea shrimp,” Active said. “When Tae comes in, tell him that Trooper Active said ‘hello,’ ah?”

“
Ee
,” the girl said, raising her eyebrows without a hint of expression. Active wondered if she was in cahoots with Ahn or maybe a customer. Or maybe just oblivious. Active filled two cups with coffee, put four packets of creamer in his shirt pocket, and returned to the booth.

“Not if you’re going to be you,” Grace said as he slid onto the bench across from her. A smile played at the corners of her lips.

He tried unsuccessfully to remember what they had been talking about before he went to order. “Not if I’m going to be me what?”

The smile took over her lips completely and the fox- eyes sparkled in their quicksilver way. “That makes absolutely no sense, you know.”

“But something tells me you understood it perfectly.”

She raised her eyebrows, still smiling. “You shouldn’t be able to stand the thought of Tae Anh selling liquor in sight of the courthouse. Not if you’re going to be you.”

“Ah.”

“Which I hope you are.”

“Are what?”

“Going to be you.”

“Totally,” he said. “I promise to be me twenty-four/seven.” They dumped the creamer into their coffees. “Look, I need to talk to my
Ataata
Jacob about, um. . . .”

Her smile vanished. “About going to Anchorage?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“And you need a translator.”

He raised his eyebrows again.

She was silent for a moment. “Can you find someone else?”

“He likes you.”

“How about Lucy? She’s good at it.”

Active flinched inwardly. Lucy Brophy, nee Lucy Generous, was his ex-girlfriend. Her journey toward that status had begun the moment he had seen the mural-sized photograph of Grace Palmer in her Miss North World days on the wall at Chukchi High. The problem was, it had taken both of them some time to grasp the enormity of his obsession with Grace Palmer, though Lucy had figured it out first. The breakup had been slow and agonizing, though it hadn’t ended as badly as it might have, all things considered. They were still . . . not friends, exactly. Amicable ex-lovers described it best, he supposed. Lucy was now married to Dan Brophy, a fourth-grade teacher at Chukchi’s elementary school and—

“Isn’t she due soon?” Grace asked.

Active had greeted Lucy at the dispatch station in the Public Safety Building just that morning. He tried to visualize how big her stomach was. “Couple months, I think.”

“You haven’t answered my question. Still too touchy there?”

This was the way with women. No woman would ever ask a question about a man’s old girlfriend that was merely about what it appeared to be about. He thought it over and decided to be honest, which he tried to make a firm policy with Grace.

“When I see Lucy looking so happy. . . .”

She waited a decent interval. “Yes?”

He studied his coffee, thinking, then decided to start over. “When I see that sunny normalcy of hers, I do sometimes think of the life I’ll never live with her. It’s like—”

“Would you rather be living it?”

He looked up in shock at the suggestion, then realized that was exactly how his rambling must have sounded to Grace. “You kidding? No, no way. This thing that we have—” He stopped, searching for the words.

“Yes?”

“I think it’s like your sexual orientation. Or being right-handed or your eye color, you know?”

She frowned. “Not exactly.”

“I mean, there’s no choice about it. Once I saw that picture of you at the high school and your father asked me to find you, that was it. That other life—”

“With Lucy?”

“Uh-huh. That other life, it’s off to the side of all this”—he gestured around the Pizza Palace, but knew that she knew he meant to take in the entirety of things—“to the side of this life I have now. It’s like an abandoned river channel in the tundra. It’s over there and its day is past, and you’re here, and this is now.

“Besides,” he continued, after some thought, “there was an imbalance in the relationship. She was more into me than I was her. I was afraid I was just using her for sex.”

“Nathan, don’t ever get arrested. You wouldn’t last ten seconds under interrogation.”

An image of Lucy naked and astride him—her favorite position—suddenly came into his mind, and he found himself at once embarrassed and aroused. “Well, yeah. But I, I mean, ah, we, ah, she—”

Grace patted his wrist. “It’s all right, Nathan. I have it on good authority she enjoyed it as much as you did. Probably more. Normal girls do.”

“You talked to her? Women talk about that stuff?”

Her fox-eyed smile was back. “Women talk about everything. Constantly.”

“Jesus. That’s terrifying.”

She lifted her eyebrows, then fell silent, swirling a spoon in her coffee. “Sunny normalcy, huh? Is that what you need? Because I doubt I’m capable of it. I think you know that.”

“What I need is you. Period.”

She was silent again.

“How’d I do?” he asked finally.

“Not so bad, Trooper.”

Something in the street caught her eye, and she frowned. “Is that Alan Long in Jim Silver’s Bronco?”

Active glanced out and nodded, trying to place the girl in the passenger seat next to Long. “I didn’t tell you? The mayor made Alan acting chief.”

“No.”

“Indeed.”

“And is that Queenie Buckland with him?”

“So it is,” Active said. “I couldn’t recall at first. Isn’t she supposed to be Calvin Maiyumerak’s girlfriend?”

“She was the last I heard. But Calvin’s only got that old Yamaha four-wheeler.”

“Ah. You’re thinking she. . . .”

Grace’s face lit up in a huge grin. “Yep, I think she’s upgraded. All the way up to a Bronco, complete with a cop who has a Bluetooth headset and wears a great big gun on his belt.”

Active shuddered. “Don’t remind me.”

“Some girls,” Grace said.

Googie deposited two bowls of white rice on their table. Active dribbled some soy sauce on his. “About my grandfather. I don’t want to crowd you. I can probably get one of the
aanas
at the Senior Center to translate.”

She shook her head. “No, I’ll do it. Call me when you’re done at the Tech Center. I’ll take my four-wheeler and meet you at the Senior Center.”

“Thanks,” he said.

She nodded silently. They unwrapped their chopsticks and put away a few bites of rice. She paused and looked into the bowl. “The Anchorage thing has to be faced.”

“It does,” he said as Googie brought the shrimp. “Is it too much?”

“I don’t know yet.”

THE ARCTIC Technical Center lay on Beach Street at the north end of town, just past the high school. It was a rambling complex of two-story wheat and slate-blue cubes on stilts. There, residents of Chukchi and surrounding villages learned how to tune up cars, set up computer networks, rebuild snowmachines, and fix or fly airplanes.

Active steered the Trooper Suburban into a visitor slot near the main entrance, between two four-wheelers.

Inside, a receptionist directed him to the office of a Gilbert Cividanes, head of the aviation program. Cividanes was in his mid-forties, Active guessed, balding, running to fat, but well-dressed and well-groomed for Chukchi, almost professional-looking in a blue sport shirt open at the neck and jeans pressed to a crease. How had a Hispanic yuppie ended up in Eskimo country? The only other Hispanic Active knew of in Chukchi was Hector Martinez, the Honda dealer, but he was no yuppie. Martinez wore cowboy boots and a Stetson, except in the dead of winter, and ate
muktuk
the year round.

“You’re sure it was Tom?” Cividanes asked after Active had identified himself and explained his mission. “I heard they hadn’t identified all the bodies from the fire yet.”

“Not a hundred percent sure,” Active said. “But what are the odds? His four-wheeler was out front, and he hasn’t shown up for work, right?”

Cividanes sighed. “I suppose. We better start looking for a new aviation mechanics instructor, I guess.”

Active raised his eyebrows in the white expression of surprise and disapproval.

“I didn’t mean to seem callous,” Cividanes said in an apologetic tone. “It’s just that I didn’t know him very well. None of us did.”

“How long did he work here?”

Cividanes furrowed his brow and glanced at some papers on his desk. “Seems like . . . yeah, he started a couple of years ago. His marriage broke up about a year later and I don’t think he was handling it very well.”

“No?”

“I suspected he was drinking pretty hard. You know, Monday-morning flu every few weeks, looked haggard most of the time. Bags under his eyes, kind of pasty-faced. Always smelled like gasoline and wood smoke or something. Of course, he liked to get out into the country, too—had his own plane, boat, snowmachine, so maybe. . . .”

“So maybe he just didn’t have time for details? Or sleep?”

Cividanes shrugged.

“He have any kids you know of?”

Cividanes scratched his temple and nodded. “Seems like the beneficiaries on his life insurance were kids.”

“It wouldn’t be the ex, I gather.”

“No, I shouldn’t think,” Cividanes said. “You want me to look it up?”

“It’s not important,” Active said. “I’ll talk to the wife. You’ve got the contact information I called about?” He pulled out his notebook, but Cividanes waved him off and handed him a sheet of paper.

“I printed it out for you.”

“Thanks.” Active rose and shook Cividanes’s hand, then walked out studying the paper. The ex-wife’s name was Donna and she lived in Vancouver, Washington. There were phone numbers for home and work.

ACTIVE PULLED the Suburban into the parking lot of the Chukchi Senior Center. Like nearly every other building in town, it boasted T1–11 plywood siding and a shingle roof. A gaggle of four-wheelers was parked in front, along with a pickup and a green van with a dire case of body rot.

The center was a wheel with three spokes and no rim. Each spoke was a wing where the residents had their bedrooms. The cafeteria, TV room, and administrative offices filled the hub.

Grace met him at the door, and they found Jacob Active in his wheelchair in the TV room, watching, or appearing to watch,
Animal Planet
. With most of his English lost to the stroke, perhaps he could only watch shows where the words didn’t matter.

Jacob Active had creased brown skin stretched tight over his cheekbones and a shock of white hair that stood straight out from his head like dandelion fuzz. He wore a hearing aid in his left ear. The lobe was missing, taken by frostbite on the trail long ago. The right side of his face still drooped a little from the stroke, though not as much as when Active had first come to Chukchi.

Active knelt beside the wheelchair and spoke into the hearing aid. “Hello,
Ataata
.”

The old man turned, blank-faced for a moment, then smiled, mostly on the left. His mouth had the caved-in look that meant he had forgotten to put in his dentures.