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ISBN 0-525-94519-9

My father was dying as I wrote this book, and so I guess it’s understandable that the underlying theme would be fathers, Liam’s father, Wy’s father, spiritual fathers, ancestral fathers, genetic and adoptive fathers, cultural and community fathers. What do we owe them? What do they owe us?

About the Dedication

For Don “Slim” Stabenow
1927 - 1998
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.

One of the last conversations we had concerned a newspaper article about a woman who embezzled from her employer because of, the D.A. was quoted as saying, “low self-esteem.”

Dad said, “I’ve always taken too much pride in a job well done to worry about my self-esteem.”

That was my Dad.

Audio Excerpt

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Book Excerpt

“Now there is the sound of someone not flying his own plane.”

“Shut up and breathe.”

Wyanet Chouinard sank obediently into a modified horse stance as the float plane roared overhead on a final approach into the elongated fresh water lake that served as the seaplane base for the southwestern Alaska town of Newenham. She was a grown woman, a pilot, the owner and proprietor of her own air taxi service and mother to a soon-to-be adopted son. She didn’t have to take orders, but she would from this one old man.

The old man was Moses Alakuyak, short, thick through the chest and shoulders, with his Yupik mother’s brown skin and flat cheekbones and hints of his unknown Anglo father in the high bridge of his nose, the roundness of his eyes, the suppressed curl and color of his hair. Some called him a shaman. Some called him a drunk. On occasion, he was both, and neither.

This morning he was a teacher of tai ch’i, a sifu, and he demanded her full attention and submission. He got it, too, the little despot, Wy thought without rancor. He was standing to her left and a step behind. She could feel his eyes on her, checking the level of her hands, the cup of her palms, the height of her chin, the angle of her knees.

“Lower,” he said. “How the hell you supposed to strengthen your thigh muscles for the real work if you don’t push them in horse stance?”

She made a silent and anatomically impossible suggestion as to where he could put his horse stance, and bent her knees to a deeper angle, which after ten minutes were starting to tremble. Her center of gravity seemed off, and she swayed back an inch or so. There. She was supposed to feel the balls and heels of her feet rooted to the earth, the crown of her head suspended from a string. Root from below, suspend from above. Her breathing deepened. Her eyelids lowered, her eyes unfocussed on the horizon.

The sneaky little son of a bitch waited until she was completely engrossed in the first position of the Yang style of tai ch’i chuan before he brought out the big gun. “How long you gonna wait before you talk to Liam?”

She couldn’t control the start his words gave her, but she could control her verbal response. She said nothing, trying to recapture the peace of mind that had been hers only moments before.

“It’s been a month, Wy,” Moses said. He stood upright and walked around to face her and examined her set. He grinned, an expression that made him look more sinner than sinned against. “Too stubborn, is that it? Too damn proud to make the first move?”

She stayed in position, staring straight ahead like she could bore through his chest with her eyes. If only.

He waited. It was six a.m. on a sunny Sunday morning in July. The birds were singing, or honking, or chirping, as the case may be. At the foot of the cliff they were standing on the massive Nushagak River moved by with stately unconcern. Wy had a six-week contract to fly supplies into an archeaological dig ten miles west of Chinook Air Force Base, for the federal government, no less, which meant she would get paid late but paid in full and paid a lot–the feds were notoriously easy to gouge–when the check finally did come. Moses had volunteered to take Tim to his fish camp upriver for the silver run, away from the rough crowd of boys he had fallen in with during the school year. He’d learn to run a fish wheel, smoke salmon and, hopefully, realize what a rush it was to earn money of his own. Best of all, he’d be out of the reach of his birth mother, who was prone to fly in from Ualik and, after a night at the bars, shove her way into Wy’s house and demand Tim’s return, even if the last time he’d been in her custody he’d wound up in the hospital, broken, bruised and bleeding.

All in all, the next month looked positively rosy, especially when she compared it to the previous three years. She was marginally solvent, happy in her work and her family, and if the lawyer handling Tim’s adoption did call a little too frequently for more money, it was summertime and the flying was frantic. She could hear the cash register ringing with every takeoff, and the cash drawer sliding out with every landing. So what if she’d alienated the only man who ever meant anything to her? There were other fish in the sea, and in particular, there were a whole hell of a lot of other fish in Bristol Bay, with and without fins. The small voice that pointed out that she had yet to let any other than Liam swim up her stream to spawn could and would be ignored. She was content. She didn’t need anything more–or anyone else–to complicate her life. She was fine. She became aware that her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and made a conscious effort to relax.

Moses, naturally, persisted in attempting to suck the well-being right out of her. “You want him. He wants you.” He snorted. “And it sure as hell ain’t like you’re getting it anywhere else.”

“I have Tim to consider.” Her voice was flat, with perhaps just an edge of nerves to it.

Moses pounced. “Give your menfolks a tad more credit than that, Wy. Liam’s a grown man, and he had a son of his own. He knows how to handle kids, and he wants you. He’ll make friends with Tim. And as for Tim, hell, having a man–the same man–around be a new experience for him. Teach him all men don’t hit. A good thing for him to learn, I’d of thought. Of course that’s just me.”

Wy felt her teeth clamp together again. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Oh, really? How did you mean it, exactly?”

Her neck got warm. “I meant that I have to look good to the adoption board. They look at your lifestyle, at your habits.”

“Ah.” Mose gave a judicious nod. “I see. So the adoption board won’t let kids go to prospective parents who have the audacity to have lives of their own.”

The warmth seeped into her cheeks.

Moses had a mobile face that shifted with every mood. His eyebrows, thick and black, raised into interrogatory points. “Anything to say about that? Besides `I’m sorry for trying to bullshit you, sifu?’”

She hadn’t.

“Good,” he said briskly. “On your feet.”

She rose shakily to her full height, five foot eight inches. Her dark blonde hair, streaked with gold by the summer sun, had come loose from its ponytail, and thankful to have something to do with her hands, she made a business out of tying it up again. That done, there was nowhere to run. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve. “I’ve got an early morning flight, I’d better get going.”

“You said some harsh things to each other last month,” Moses said to her retreating back. “Hurtful things. Especially you.”

She halted in her tracks and spun around, her face furious with anger, shame and guilt. “I handed him my heart and he ate it for lunch. I am not on the dinner menu!”

Pleased with what she felt was a splendid exit line, she turned to march up the stairs and into her house.

From behind her she heard Moses’ voice, acerbic and irascible as always. “How about dessert?”

The slam of the door was his answer.

The old man sighed and shook his head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”

Unoriginal but true, the voices said.

“What do I do about her? About them?”

They will come together, or they will not. It’s up to them.

For once, the voices were rational, reasonable, undemanding. Mostly they were insistent, forceful, regular bulldozers, determined to make him a legend in his own time. He stepped to the edge of the cliff, and the voices stilled.

He could shut them up for good. That option had always been open to him, from the time he first heard them when he was twelve and they made him tell his mother that his father was going to kill her. She didn’t listen, of course, almost no one ever did, but that didn’t make the voices let up any.

They seldom told him anything straight out, and they had become so second nature that sometimes he wondered if, at the age of seventy-eight, he had perhaps acquired enough wisdom to make his own judgements, his own rulings, his own estimates of what kind of trouble his extended family, which stretched west from Newenham to encompass the entire Yukon-Kuskokwim River delta and all the way to Nome, needed his help to get out of.

Not that anyone ever looked happy when they saw him coming. Foresight, the open eye that looked inward to the future, was more of a curse than a blessing. Uilililik, the Little Hairy Man who snatched up village children and took them away, never to be seen again, was more welcome in the villages than he was.

He thought of Cassandra, and sighed again. Doomed forever to tell the truth, and equally doomed forever to be disbelieved. She’d died young, the lucky bitch. He stepped back from the edge of the cliff, from the fifty-foot drop to the vast expanse of southward moving water. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.

As he walked around the old but well-maintained house set twenty-five feet back from the cliff’s edge, he reflected on the gold shield he’d seen on the door of the float plane as it had flown overhead. Wy had been right; that had definitely been someone not flying their own plane. There was no need to be at full RPMs on final, and it didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise and move up the time for an overhaul.

But the pilot–ah now, the pilot. Moses smacked his lips and grinned. The voices were not without a sense of humor, however black it might be. Wyanet Chouinard might fancy herself content with her life, but she was about to receive a first-class wake up call. Good.

Meanwhile, he squinted at the sun. About seven-thirty, he estimated. “Then I guess it’s about time for a beer.”

The voices didn’t say anything, but he’d lived with them for so long he’d built up enough resistance to do what he wanted anyway. He might not be able to drown them, but he could and would drown them out, at least for a time.

Liam heard Charlie crying and sat up to go to him. A solid object whacked him in the forehead. “Ouch! Shit!”

He sat in the narrow bunk, rubbing his head. When his vision cleared, he saw that he was still sleeping on board the Dawn P., a twenty-eight foot Bristol Bay gillnetter that had seen better decades. It was the only place he could find to sleep, and again he wondered how much better it was than his office chair, in spite of the fact that the chair had casters and a tendency to roll out from under him at three in the morning. At least his office had a higher ceiling than the low bulkhead of this frigging boat. And it didn’t smell like an old sock.

This was all Wy Chouinard’s fault. He wasn’t sure why, but if he gave himself some time he was sure he could come up with three or four reasons.

He remembered the too-real sound of his dead son’s tears, and his heart ached. Before the sense of loss could take hold and pull him under as it had too many times in the last two years, he swung his feet to the floor, and swore again when he splashed down into a half inch of water. His office didn’t need its bilge pumped every morning, either.

He struggled into sweats that felt clammy against his skin and stamped up to the harbormaster’s office, where there was a public shower that was, for a change, blessedly empty. He stood a long time under hot water, and felt marginally better when he came out. A shave and a return trip to the Dawn P. and he felt almost human, if hungry. He straightened the tie of his uniform, walked up the gangway to check the knot in the mirror and emerged to come face to face with Jimmy Barnes, the Newenham harbormaster.

Most days, Jimmy looked as if he’d should have been wearing a red suit with big black boots and a white beard down to his waist. This morning, his usually rosy round cheeks were pale. Liam’s hand dropped instinctively to his weapon. “What’s the matter, Jimmy?”

The harbormaster swallowed convulsively. “I got an emergency call from Togiak. There’s a boat adrift offshore about halfway between us and them.” He swallowed again. “Crew of seven. All dead.”

“Has anyone taken it in tow?”

Jimmy shook his head. “No one wants to get anywhere near it.”

“Who found it?”

“The Jacobsons on the Mary J. were drifting just outside of Metervik Bay. They saw the Marybethia come out of Kulukak on the tide. They didn’t think anything of it until it got closer. Larry said you could see she wasn’t under power, and when he took the dingy over you could see the burn marks on the cabin.”

“Burn marks? It had been on fire?”

Jimmy nodded, looking sick, and Liam understood why. On a boat there was nowhere to hide from a fire. On a boat in Alaskan waters, which held an average temperature of forty degrees and hypothermia set in after two minutes’ immersion, it was especially dangerous. Nowhere to go, no place to hide. “Didn’t they have a skiff, or a life raft?”

Jimmy nodded. “Both. The skiff was tied off to the stern, and the raft hadn’t been popped. Maybe the fire burned too fast. Maybe they were all asleep, and died of smoke inhalation.”

“Where is the boat now?”

“Larry and his dad towed it into Kulukak Bay and anchored it off the village.”

“Can you fly in?”

Jimmy nodded. “There’s a gold mine a couple of miles inland. They fly supplies in on a Herc.” Liam repressed a shudder. “Okay. Thanks, Jimmy.” Liam pulled the billed cap with the Alaska State Trooper insignia on the brim low over his eyes and headed for the white Blazer with the same insignia on the door.

Once inside, he thought which would be the best way to approach her. It didn’t have to be personal, he was a state trooper, she was a pilot, there was a case, he needed a ride, the state paid top dollar. Pretty simple.

Except that nothing was simple when it came to Wyanet Chouinard. Perhaps it would be best to keep things formal. A phone call from his office, instead of a knock on her door. A door that could be slammed in his face. Of course, she could hang up on him, too.

He started the engine and drove to the post, a small, neat white building with a parking lot out back enclosed by a twelve-foot chain link fence. The Cadillac Seville had been sold at auction for restitution of a fine imposed on its drug-dealing owner, and the International pickup had been reclaimed by an angry fisherman who had thought parking in a handicapped zone was his god-given right. Liam still hadn’t been able to find out who the dump truck belonged to, or why it had been impounded.

He walked up the steps and opened the door.

There was someone sleeping in his chair. Shades of Goldilocks. The chair was tipped back and her feet were crossed on his desk. She was in uniform, dark blue pants with gold stripes down the side seams, long-sleeved lighter blue shirt with dark blue pocket flaps, dark blue tie. If he was not mistaken, that was the uniform of his own service.

He stepped inside and let the door shut, loudly. The woman sat up with a jerk, took Liam in with one glance and popped to attention. “Trooper Diana Prince, reporting for duty, sir.”

Trooper Diana Prince was almost as tall as Liam was, at least six one and that before her boot heels. With her boot heels she looked him straight in the eye. Everything else was height-weight proportionate, he noticed, and dragged his gaze up. Her eyes were a clear gray and thickly lashed, her black curls were cropped short and her pale skin looked susceptible to sunburn. There was a set of suitcases stacked near the door, maroon leather, bulging at the sides.

“I’m sorry, sir, I left Anchorage early this morning and I was tired when I got in.”

“How’d you get in the door?”

“Mamie at dispatch has a key. Sir.”

“Hold the sirs, I’m a trooper just like you,” Liam said.

Maybe now. She didn’t say the words out loud, but they hovered in the air regardless.

Just as well. Better she should know the story going in, how Liam had been busted down from sergeant to trooper because five people had frozen to death in Denali Park on his watch. He hadn’t been the trooper who had made the decision not to check out the call, but the trooper who had had worked directly for him, and someone’s head had to roll to satisfy the community’s not altogether unjustified cries for blood. Broken in rank and transferred in disgrace to Newenham, a town of two thousand on the southwestern edge of the Alaskan coast, just about as far as you could get from the center of the population and the seats of power and still be in the state. From fast track to siding in the thirty-six hours it had taken that family to die, and for the troopers not to respond to repeated calls reporting their disappearance.

It was not the Alaska State Troopers’ finest hour, and Liam felt very much on probation in his new posting. It didn’t help that the dead were Natives, and that a large portion of the population of Newenham and its environs was also Native.

All this Trooper Diana Prince would know, and probably more, since his life prior to his transfer had been pretty much on the front pages of every daily newspaper in the state for what seemed like forever, the automobile accident, Jenny’s coma, Charlie’s death, the trial, the drunk driver’s second arrest by none other than the surviving member of the family, Liam himself. It made for fine reading in the Sunday papers, oh my yes.

He pulled himself together. “John Barton brief you on the post?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s Liam. Call me Trooper Campbell in front of civilians.”

“All right, s–Liam. I’m Diana.”

She smiled, and it was a revelation, a broad, thousand-watt beam that lit her eyes and transformed her face into that of a little girl’s–enthusiastic, energetic, optimistic, all illusions intact and trumpeting a touching allegiance to truth, justice and the American way. She probably still believed in honor. She probably would lay down her life for duty. “When did you graduate from the Academy?” Liam said.

“Last year,” Diana Prince said promptly.

How the hell did you get a seven-step posting, Liam wondered, and knew without having to ask. Newenham was a Bush posting, which meant troopers assigned to it received a seven-step pay increase in recognition of the fact that they were living and working in the back of beyond. Because of the high pay, and because retirement was calculated on the last years you worked, these posts were competed for fiercely by troopers with enough seniority to make it stick.

Newenham was an exception. The previous first sergeant assigned to the post had publicly screwed up a very high profile case, and then capped his activities in the area by impregnating the trooper also assigned there. His behavior had apparently been so obnoxious that other troopers had not lasted much beyond the time it took to request a transfer.

And then along came Liam Campbell, whose name was well known to the law enforcement community, almost as much for his rise high and fast through the ranks as for his abrupt and equally spectacular fall. A post this size should have had a first sergeant and two troopers assigned to it, as minimum staffing. In the two, almost three months since Liam’s arrival, Liam had been it. Newenham was not the usual seven-step plum. The more superstitious among the force might even have said it was bad luck to be posted there. His boss, Lieutenant John Dillinger Barton, supervisor of Section E and Liam’s boss both in Glenallen and Newenham, had sent Liam to Newenham for two reasons: one, to tuck him safely out of sight until the fallout from the Denali debacle had deteriorated to a less toxic level, and two, in John’s words, “to take the fucking hoodoo off that posting.”

And now here was Trooper Diana Prince, John’s latest exorcist, all fresh-faced and new minted and ready to go out and be a hero. Liam made a mental resolve to go through any doors second. “How’d you get here?”

“I flew.”

“Commercial?”

She shook her head. “I brought in one of the new Cessnas.”

His gaze sharpened. “Floats or wheels?”

“Floats. The gear’s coming on Alaska Airlines.”

Shit, Liam thought. No need to call Wy now. Well, hell, it had been a cowardly solution at best to the extended silence between them. “Good,” he said. He resettled his cap on his head and sternly quelled the rumble of queasiness that always precipitated his reluctant rise to any altitude above sea level, in particular any one with wings attached. “Let’s go.”

“Where?” she said, following him out the door.

“Kulukak.”

“Where’s that?”

“Got a map?”