Black Tide Rising (3 page)

But that was for later. Now he had a more urgent task, and it didn't take long for him to see that there was no sign of the woman. No sign of anyone, in fact. The place was silent and lifeless, except for the carved figures standing as sentries, and those seemed to have a life of their own.

Dan walked back out into the sunshine and met Gene coming up the path from the house.

“No one home,” Gene said. “I think they must have gone over to Gold River. Probably won't be back for a couple of days.” He shrugged. “The house is locked but I looked in the windows. No sign of anyone or anything there.”

That left the studio on the beach where the figures that occupied the church had been created. Gene said the carver, Sanford, was the son of the family that lived in the house.

They headed down toward the water, eyes scanning the ground for any signs that might show them where Margrethe had gone, but there was nothing. Like the house, the studio was locked and empty, the wide windows that formed the major part of every wall providing a clear view of a partially carved log laid out across two stumps. It was beginning to look as if Jens's wife had simply walked out of the house and vanished.

“Any ideas?” Dan asked.

“Nope. Doesn't make any sense.”

“Maybe she went out and slipped on the rocks. Fell into the water.”

Gene shook his head. “She was damn near as scared of the water as she was of boats. Maybe more. Never saw her outside on the beach unless she was with Jens. Can't figure out why they ever came here.”

“Did Jens ever talk about it?”

“Jens? Hell no. Jens isn't much of a talker. He's kind of like me—spent most of his life on the lights, but in his case they were all close to the city. Don't think either one of them really thought about whether they liked boats or how they would handle being out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Think Margrethe might have just walked away? Got tired of it all?”

Again, Gene shook his head. “Where would she walk to? And in the dark? Alone?”

Dan nodded. He had asked himself the same questions. “So how about Jens? How is he handling the isolation? Think he might have reached breaking point?”

“Jens?” Gene looked at him in amazement. “Not a chance. He loves it. He's a weather guy. Studied meteorology at university before he went on the lights. Margrethe might have some issues with living out here, but the two of them are real good together. She's as quiet as he is, although in her case it's probably because she's got a bit of a hearing problem. She's not deaf, mind you, but she doesn't hear all that well, so she keeps pretty much to herself. She cooks half the day. Sends bags of cookies and bread and buns and stuff up for Mary and me—not that I need it.” He glanced down at his stomach. “Anyway. Rest of the time she reads or weaves. Got some kind of loom thing over there. Makes all kinds of shit—scarves and towels and stuff. We've got a bunch of those up at the house too. And Jens putters. He fixes things and makes stuff down in the workshop. Spends hours there. They're happy together.”

The two men stood together looking out over the cove, trying to come up with something that would make sense. The woman had to be somewhere. She couldn't have vanished into thin air.

“What's that over there?” Dan noticed the gap first. Not really a gap. More of a space in the wide stretch of seagrass that formed a barrier between the beach and the shallow bowl of the cove and rustled in the breeze.

“Where?” Gene followed his gaze. “Hey, that's odd. That's about where the old totem is. Been there for years. But I've never seen the grass laid down like that. Looks like it's been trampled or something.”

“Maybe you had better wait here a minute, Gene,” Dan said. “I'll go check it out.”

“Sure,” said Gene, a note of wariness creeping into his voice as he realized the reason for Dan's caution. “No problem.”

It wasn't just a gap. It was more like an open wound, the grass flattened in a wide swath and a deep gouge in the sand where the ancient pole had been dragged from its resting place. The eyes of an eagle still stared sightlessly up at him from the grayed cedar, but its beak had been ripped away, one wing was broken off, and the snout of the bear had been hacked open to expose a core of new wood. Below that, the striped coils of a lightning snake the bear had once held in its jaws were slashed in two places and lay off to one side.

The damage was recent, the exposed wood still a bright and glowing yellow. Dan stared at it in puzzlement. He had stopped believing in coincidence a long time ago. This had to be linked with the woman's disappearance, but how? He looked back at Gene and beckoned him down.

“What the hell!” Gene was stunned. “Who would do this? And why? Doesn't make any sense.” He shook his head. “This is going to upset a lot of people.”

Dan looked at him. “You think there's any way Margrethe could have done it?”

“Margrethe?” Gene looked at him in horror. “Hell no. She loves it! Loves all the stuff Sanford does. Even asked him if she could use his designs in her weaving. I'll show you some of the stuff she's done. It's good.”

Dan looked back down at the exposed wood. “When was the last time you saw this?”

“Me? Damned if I know. A while, I guess. I don't come down here that often, but Mary walks the beach almost every day. You can ask her.” Gene started to leave, then turned back. “You should ask Sanford too. He comes over here all the time. It was one of his family that carved it way back. Can't remember the year, but it was a long time ago. It's been part of his heritage ever since he was born.” He shook his head. “Sure going to be pissed off.”

The two men looked down toward the water, silently scanning the beach for any sign of footprints, but the tide was coming in and the driftwood made it difficult. Behind them, up on the hill, a ray of sunlight lit the steeple of the church like the finger of God pointing the way home.

“Damn,” said Dan. “We sure could use Walker here.”

“Who the hell is Walker?” asked Gene.

“What? Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to talk out loud. Walker's just a guy I know. Lives up north around Hakai Pass somewhere. He helped me out last year when Claire and I ran into some trouble. He's the best tracker I ever met, and he knows the tides and currents like—well, like a fish!”

Dan noticed Gene staring at him intently. “What?” he asked.

“He Native, this Walker guy?”

“Uh, yeah. He is. Why?”

“Big guy?”

“Yeah. Guess so.”

“His legs all banged up? Can't walk well?”

“You know him?” Dan couldn't believe it. Gene couldn't possibly know Walker. Walker was almost a recluse, living his life in the traditional way of his people at least a couple of hundred miles away. Probably more. Even Dan didn't know exactly where his home was or how to find him. He had run into him purely by chance the previous year when he had tied up at a floating store in Dawson Inlet to take on supplies. A man had hobbled across the float in front of him and Dan had recognized him from his days as a detective. Back then, Walker had been a punk kid living in the city and Dan had been part of a response team that had chased Walker and his friends across a roof after a bank robbery had been called in. Walker had tripped and fallen to the street below, breaking his pelvis and both legs. Dan had spent a good deal of time questioning him while he was in the hospital and had come to believe that, given a chance, this was a kid who might be able to turn his life around. It turned out he had been right. The man he had met the previous year was no punk. He was quiet and confident, spending most of his time on the water, where his damaged legs were not a handicap.

“Can't be the same guy,” he told Gene.

“Sure sounds like the same guy,” Gene answered. “Paddles a canoe?”

Dan stared at him. “Yeah,” he said. “He does. But how the hell do you know him?”

“Well, if it is the same guy, he comes here every once in a while,” Gene answered. “His family's related to Sanford's somehow. I think his sister married Sanford's cousin or something. The sister and her husband live over in Gold River, but I guess Walker goes to visit them occasionally. Don't know how he gets there, but he always comes here by canoe.”

It was unreal. When Dan had run into Walker the previous year, it had been a coincidence—a very fortunate one, as it turned out, because it had been Walker's knowledge and skills that had helped prevent a major disaster. To have him turn up again here would be simply unbelievable.

But it was Walker they were talking about, and as Dan had been forced to acknowledge, strange things happened when Walker was involved. Things Dan still could not fully explain even though he had experienced them himself.

“I don't suppose he's there now?” Dan felt foolish even asking the question.

“I don't know. I don't think so, but then again it looks like the whole family's probably heading over to Gold River, so if it's a big gathering he might have come in. Guess we'll find out in a few days.”

“Yeah. Well, that's going to be too late to help us figure out what's happened to Margrethe. We'd better head back and see if Mary and Jens have come up with anything yet, and if they haven't, you'd better call the police.”

Gene nodded glumly. “Guess so,” he said. “Although it sure is going to be a mess. The cops are going to call the coast guard, and those guys'll be swarming all over here like ants at a picnic.”

Dan looked at him. “Don't you work for the coast guard?”

“Yeah, I guess I do—but the coast guard we usually see are the boys on the supply boats, and we only see them every six months—although once in a while it's a whole lot longer than that. On the real remote lights, you have to depend on them for food and clothing, even water, and I'll tell you something. You spend a whole winter waiting for a supply boat that doesn't arrive and you start to get a little disenchanted with 'em.” Gene laughed. “Happened to us a few years back when we were up at Quatsino. Now every time I see one of those damn boats I start remembering a whole winter of eating nothing but Spam and canned peas. Kind of hard to feel a whole bunch of brotherly love after that.”

Dan laughed. “I guess I can understand that. Never could stand Spam myself.” He braced himself against the top of a log as he worked his way past a mound of driftwood.

Gene snorted. “Yep. Never eaten the stuff since.” He glanced back at Dan. “What?”

Dan had stopped and was standing absolutely still, staring at his hand. Slowly he lifted it up and turned it toward Gene. A patch of dark red glistened on his palm.

“Ah, Jesus! That what I think it is?”

Dan raised his hand to his face and sniffed. The coppery smell of blood was unmistakable. “Yeah. It is.”

It was early morning, the sky still dark and scattered with stars. Off the western shore of Nootka Island, the Alaska current moved relentlessly north, carrying with it everything its progenitor, the Pacific current, had met on its long journey from Japan: logs and plastic, discarded oil drums, bottles and boxes, shipping crates, tsunami debris—and now it picked up yet another passenger. The body was submerged and fully clothed, and it had drifted a little west of the lighthouse on an ebb tide. The current picked it up as it passed and carried it on up the coast until, with the push and swirl of a local eddy, it released it into Nicolaye Channel to drift gently into the embrace of a kelp bed just off the shore of Aktis Island. Only the sea otters that called the kelp bed home noted its presence.

—

Leif Nielson was sixty-nine years old, and he had spent all sixty-nine of them in the tiny village of Kyuquot on Walters Island, on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, just south of the Brooks Peninsula. He knew every one of the three hundred or so folks who lived in the two communities surrounding Walters Cove, and all he had ever dreamed about was fishing. He had learned to operate a boat long before he was old enough to learn how to drive a car. Boats were a necessity, the lifeblood of the two villages, and even kids of six or seven knew how to run them. As far back as he could remember, it seemed like all people ever talked about was fishing. Was there going to be a good run of pinks? Were the Rivers Inlet sockeye going to take the inside or the outside passage? Who had caught the biggest chinook? If someone had netted some chum salmon, there would be gutted fish spread out on the drying racks over on the reserve and hanging in all the smokehouses. Celebrations of any kind involved filling a forty-five-gallon drum with freshly netted prawns and cooking them with a steam hose.

But then the big schools of herring disappeared, and one after another the fishboats became idle. A few of the younger men got work on the big seiners over at Port Hardy, or at Campbell River on the east side of the island, but most of them left to get jobs in the mines or with the logging companies or even down in the city. Only the old-timers stayed behind to cater to the tourists who arrived each summer in the fancy inflatables they launched up at Fair Harbour, near the eastern end of Kyuquot Sound. By the time Leif decided to beach his boat, unable to justify the cost of maintaining her, the only job available was guiding for the guests at the fishing lodge. It wasn't the kind of fishing he wanted to do, but it was still fishing, and at least he was out on the water every day. Besides, the guests tipped well, laughed at the yarns he told them, and never left without a salmon.

The lodge had been busy and Leif had worked twelve-hour days for the past week, taking guests out to the fishing grounds in one of the big Lund outboards. Today had been the last day for the biggest group, and they had wanted to get out on the water early. He had been up at four and on the water by five. By the time he brought them back to shore, off-loaded their fish, cleaned and refueled the boat, and then reloaded both the guests and their luggage for their trip back to Fair Harbour, he had another nine hours racked up. He was tired. Tired of helping other people fish. Tired of telling the same old stories. Tired of hearing the same old jokes. Tired of every damn thing. He was too old for this shit. He needed a break and he was damn well going to take one, even if it was just one afternoon and evening. Maybe tomorrow he would feel better.