Killing Grounds (17 page)

Mary Balashoff's cabin perched at the edge of the trees across the creek, a plywood shack with tarpaper shingles and the long bow line of a skiff tied off to a cleat attached to the deck. It had a small porch hanging off the front door, and on this porch sat two figures, one small, one large. The small one had his chair tilted back and his feet up on the porch railings. The large one was rocking slowly back and forth in her rocking chair.

Kate was dripping water like a rain forest when she came to a halt in front of the cabin. Standing with her head bowed, she said, "I'm sorry, uncle. I was rude. Please forgive me."

He grunted. Taking his time, he put down his mug, removed his gimme cap to scratch tenderly at the back of his scalp, resettled the cap to his satisfaction and finally leaned over to reach down to a tray resting in front of the door. From a chipped china teapot he poured her a mug of steaming Russian tea, liberally sweetened with honey squeezed out of a plastic bear. She cradled the hot porcelain thankfully between cold, clammy hands. The tea scalded all the way down. Grateful, she took another long swallow, and Old Sam, teapot at the ready, topped off her mug again, adding another dollop of honey.

Implicit in his pouring of the tea was forgiveness. Implicit in her acceptance of it was their mutual understanding that at the first opportunity she would also apologize to Anne Flanagan. The proper balance of aged authority and penitent youth restored, the subject was dismissed.

Mary Balashoff looked from one to the other. Kate was serene. Old Sam was imperturbable. She shook her head. 'Jesus, you Shugaks. I never will understand you."

Kate looked at Old Sam, whose mother had in fact been a Shugak, and smiled. He grinned back, his usual face-splitting, people-eating grin. "Well hell, Mary," he said, "can't let you pluck out the heart of our mystery, now can we?" He cocked a hopeful eyebrow at Kate, who valiantly swallowed any astonishment she might have felt at Old Sam Dementieff quoting Shakespeare on the shores of Alaganik Bay. Thwarted by her lack of response, he reached over and pinched Mary on the behind.

Again he was disappointed. Mary shook her head. "Shugaks," she repeated, and heaved herself to her feet. An amiable giant of a woman, she stood six feet, one inch in her stocking feet and had startlingly blue eyes at odds with her brown face and black hair. Back when such things were not done, her father, a handsome Aleut from Tatitlek, had run off with the beautiful daughter of a Norwegian seiner. Speaking of Shakespeare, Kate thought. The seiner, a proud and bigoted man, had washed his hands of the affair and returned to his Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, also known as Little Norway, righteously to declare himself to be without issue from that day forward.

It had been a happy marriage, so far as Kate could remember the tale, made all the more so by the fact that the union had scandalized the Tatitlekers as badly as it had the Ballardians, which allowed the couple to live in happy obscurity on a homestead outside of Copper Center, unhampered by advice from either family. They'd had five children, four boys and one girl, all of whom had blue eyes like their mother and black hair like their father and all of whom grew to a minimum of six feet in height. The boys went off to school, moved Outside and never came back. Mary had stayed, and by default had inherited the family setnet site.

She had been fishing it for thirty years. The Amartuq fish camp had been abandoned by federal decree for almost the same amount of time, and until the aunties had gone back up the creek a generation of Park children, including Kate, had learned to pick fish from Mary's skiff, to mend nets at Mary's knee, to fillet salmon and to tend the fire that burned beneath the drying racks after they had been filleted. Park parents had come to regard the Balashoff setnet site as on-the-job training for those offspring unlucky enough not to be chosen as deckhands.

Mary had also had a longtime summer romance going with Old Sam. Kate remembered this interesting fact just in time for Mary to save her from further speculation by saying, "Come on, honey. Let's get you into some dry clothes before you catch cold."

Kate, shivering now in spite of the tea, followed her inside, and emerged a few minutes later dressed in a worn Aran sweater that hung to her knees and a pair of jeans rolled up twice at the ankles and cinched at the waist by a frayed length of half-inch polypro and a thick pair of wool socks. She sat on the porch with her back to the wall, and at that moment the sun broke through the clouds and bathed the bay in a warm, golden light. It was nine-thirty, and with the sun came a small breeze that rippled the surface of the bay, rocking the boats gently at anchor.

Mary refilled the teapot and they drank in comfortable silence. At last Mary stirred. "What's this I hear about someone getting killed yesterday?"

"Let me guess," Kate said. "Wendell Kritchen bring you the news?"

Mary grinned, showing off a set of perfect white teeth. 'He stopped by this morning."

"He's better than a town crier," Kate said, and left it to Old Sam to explain. Mary rocked, and listened.

When he was done they sat in silence. Out on the bay, a bowpicker's engine turned over. Its skipper weighed anchor and headed west, Cordova probably. Maybe he wasn't coming back. Maybe, like Old Sam, he didn't think fifty cents a pound was worth tearing up his gear for. Kate sighed.

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy," Mary said.

Kate looked from the bowpicker to Mary and back again.

"No," Mary said. "Cal Meany. Now there's a name was well deserved. He was one mean son of a bitch."

"How did you know him?"

Mary refilled her mug from the pot. "He cut my nets." She saw their expressions and smiled without humor. "Oh yes. And not just once. Twice. The first time was during last month's king opener. Snuck down and cut my gear from the anchor."

Mary's anchor was a heap of sandbags on the beach, tied together and attached to the beach end of the gear. The sea end of the gear was weighted with a small Danforth and marked with a fluorescent-orange buoy. When the tide came in, the corks floated to the top of the water and the net hung below, weighted at bottom by the lead line. The salmon, swirling in schools along the coast on a course for the creek, encountered the net en route, or hopefully some of them did, and got their gills stuck in the mesh. The thrashing of the caught fish in the water below caused the corks above to bob, at which time Mary would climb in her skiff and move up and down the cork line, hauling up the gear and picking the fish and then letting the gear drop down again. When the period was over, she pulled her gear and delivered the fish to the Freya. Or she did when not on strike.

And when her gear was intact. The anchor end cut, Mary's gear would float free, causing a hazard to boat traffic, not to mention that a free end was illegal as hell and Mary could be fined big-time for it, maybe even jailed, maybeKate went a little pale at the thoughtmaybe even have her permit pulled. "Did you see him?" Kate demanded. "Did you see Meany cut your gear?"

"Honey, if I'd've seen him, he would have been dead before now," Mary said flatly. "No, I didn't see him, or at least not that night. But he dropped by after the period was over. Said he'd noticed I was having some trouble. Said he knew how tough things were on a woman fishing alone. Said it couldn't get anything but tougher. Said he'd be happy to make me an offer on the site, and for my permit, too."

Kate looked at her for a moment, and then said deliberately, "I don't know if I really care all that much who killed this son of a bitch."

Old Sam grinned his cackling grin. "Now, now, what would Chopper Jim have to say to that?"

"Who gives a shit?" She said to Mary, "You say he did it a second time?"

Mary nodded. "This Monday. I went down at five to start setting up. This time he'd cut the cork line in half a dozen places." She drained her mug. "I was thinking maybe I should get a dog." She smiled at Kate. "Now I don't have to."

Kate's heart sank. "Mary."

Mary took one look at Kate's apprehensive expression and burst out laughing. "Oh honey," she said, still laughing. "Oh honey, if you could see your face." She wiped away a tear. "No, I didn't kill him. I'd like to pin a medal on whoever did, but I didn't do it myself."

Kate examined the level of tea in her mug with all the scrutiny of a Socratic scholar trying for the perfect dialectic on surface tension. "Where were you last night, Mary?"

Mary raised an amused eyebrow. "Why, I was right here, Kate, right where I always am every night of the summer, right where I've been since the end of May, right where I'll be until the middle of September. And no, before you ask, there wasn't anybody here with me to say I was." She reflected. "Unless," she added with an air of innocence that fooled no one, "well, unless you count Edna and Balasha." Her smile was benign, and it didn't fool anybody, either. "They came to dinner, and we played pinochle until, oh, midnight I guess."

"Mary!" Kate said, indignant. "Why didn't you say so up front?"

Mary laughed again. "Sorry, Kate, I couldn't resist. Probably my only chance to be suspected of murder."

Old Sam was laughing, too. "You always were a pisser, Mary. Shame on you."

Kate finished her tea and let them laugh. The overcast had dissipated completely by now and the sunlight was warm on her face. Her hair, braided back into its usual plait, was still wet and as thick as it probably would be for another eight hours, but the rest of her was dry and comfortable. Her stomach growled.

Mary heard it. "Should I feed you?"

"Not just a woman but a god," Kate said.

"How's leftover pirogue sound?"

"Yum."

By the time the late dinnercreamed salmon and canned mixed vegetables in a flaky crust, Mary's specialtywas ready, Kate's clothes, hung over the stove, were mostly dry and she changed into them. They ate in silence on the porch, and when they were done Kate cleaned up and put water on for coffee, which she served, again on the porch. The sun was low on the western horizon, outlining what Kate thought was the hint of an incoming front. She wasn't worried. For now at least, her feet were dry and her stomach was full. "Mary?"

Mary, stretched out in her chair with her feet propped on the railing, sounded almost as sleepy as Kate felt. "What?"

"Did you see anything last night?"

"Like what?"

"Like anything, like any goings-on over at the Meanys'. Do you know what Cal Meany's drifter looks like?"

"The no-namer?" Without hesitation Mary pointed to where it rode at anchor. "Sure. Saw it come back last night."

"You did?" Kate sat up straight. "What time?"

Mary squinted thoughtfully at the horizon. "Was about the time the girls left, midnight or thereabouts. Well, maybe closer to one."

"Did the aunts see him, too?"

"They might have. They were in their skiff by then, and I was waving from the porch. We didn't get a chance to comment."

Gull had seen Meany in Cordova a little before ten-twenty. If Mary saw him at one, there was just enough time for a drifter with that much horsepower to get from point to point. "Could you see Meany?"

Mary shrugged. "Sure. He was on the flying bridge."

"Did you see his boy?"

Mary shook her head. "There was a light on in the galley, though. He could have been inside." She frowned.

"What?"

"Come to think of it, Meany had to shinny down off the flying bridge to drop anchor. If the boy had been on board, he would have been in the bow, wouldn't he?"

Kate wished her sympathies were not quite so much with the boy; when she got good news of this kind it made her heart lift, and it was much too early in the investigation for her heart to be doing anything of the kind.

"Clumsy," Mary added.

"Who?"

"Meany, last night. Stumbling around the boat like it was midnight January instead of midnight July. Course it was the Fourth, he could have been drunk," Mary added. "Most of them were. Idiots."

"Yeah," Kate said, but absently. Gull had said something like that, something about Meany nearly stripping the gears on the drifter. Clumsy, on deck as well as on the throttle? The stories Mary and Gull told didn't square with what Kate had seen. Meany had moved with a feral grace, quick, nimble, never putting a foot wrong, always reaching for the proper tool and wielding it with a casual competence that elicited, however reluctantly, admiration and even envy.

She sat up with a jerk.

"What?" Mary said.

"Huh? Oh. Nothing." Kate relaxed again, eyes narrowed in thought. If Meany hadn't been acting like Meany, either at the small boat harbor or in Alaganik, maybe it hadn't been Meany on the boat. Maybe it had been someone else. Maybe even the murderer, trying to extend the span of Meany's life while he, or she, set up an alibi.

Mary said, "Just what was all that business today with you and Old Sam and the wet clothes?"

"What? Oh." Kate drained her mug. "I behaved like a horse's ass, and he pitched me into the bay for it."

Mary grinned. "That's my boy."

Kate wondered when in the last hundred years anyone had called Old Sam Dementieff a boy. Probably only Mary Balashoff could get away with it. She nudged Old Sam with her foot.

He'd been dozing, his head resting on the back of his chair, his mouth open and a gentle, inoffensive little snore rippling out at regular intervals. "Ggggsnort?" he said, his chair falling forward on its two front legs. "What?" He knuckled his eyes and yawned, his bones popping audibly. "Guess I must have dozed off there. Sorry."

"We're not," Mary said maliciously. "Gave us a chance to practice our girl talk."

Immediately suspicious, Old Sam demanded, "Girl talk? What? What did I miss?"

"We'll never tell," Kate said, and got to her feet. "Want to take a ride up the creek?"

"What, up to the fish camp?" Kate nodded and Old Sam said, "Been a while since I got a chance to visit with the old girls."

For "visit" read "aggravate," Kate thought, but was wise enough not to say so out loud. One dunking a day was enough.

By some trick of the slanting rays of the setting sun the water assumed the color and viscosity of molten gold, seeming to slow their forward motion while at the same time lending a touch of splendor to the journey. Kate dipped a finger over the side and watched tiny eddies appear, looking like the gilt tracings she'd seen in a book once, something elaborate and baroque and ItalianBernini?