The Darkening Archipelago (33 page)

Archie had introduced Cole to Grace as their great hope in the fight to bring down the salmon farmers. Grace sat in on their strategy sessions. A number of white activists from Victoria had come to Parish Island for the weekend; they, along with Archie, Darren, and half a dozen other members of the North Salish First Nation, sat in the living room of the bluff house to plot strategy. Cole had led them through the day, and by the end they had a working plan to stop the expansion of salmon farming. By the end of the day, Grace Ravenwing was quite smitten with Cole Blackwater. His brooding good looks, crooked nose, shaggy mop of dark curls, and his slightly softening, but still able, body stirred her.

Grace walked along the pier to the harbour master's office. She looked at her watch. The office opened at eleven am. She was right on time.

Grace had found Cole aloof. It was hard to read his intentions. She wasn't entirely unaccustomed to white men's lack of emotional maturity, but with Cole it was tinged with something else. Fear? Anger? It was hard to say. In the end, Grace knew it would never work. They had kissed one night at the end of the docks, the moon spilling ribbons of silver across the rolling water. But Cole had pulled away, explaining that it wasn't right. That Archie was his client. And that he wasn't ready for this.

“Okay,” she had said.

They had walked back to the bluff house arm in arm.

Cole Blackwater was,
is
, a good man, thought Grace, but he's got something to work out of his system, she mused. Some kind of poison. Everybody could see it. Except the great Cole Blackwater himself, she thought.

She knocked on the harbour master's door, then stepped inside.

“Hi, Grace, how you holding out?” said Rupert Wright from behind a small desk.

“I'm doing okay,” said Grace, closing the door to the small room behind her. She gave him a weak smile. The room smelled of pipe smoke and coffee.

“Can I offer you something to drink?”

“No, thanks, Rupert.” Grace looked around her.

“Something I can help you with?”

“Well, I'm curious about what records you have for the night my father disappeared. I want to see which other boats came and went that day.”

Rupert Wright looked at her. He was in his seventies, long retired from the Coast Guard. Port Lostcoast was his retirement posting. He maintained the part-time position of harbour master, and in exchange lived in the back of the tiny office and had free mooring on the government dock.

“I can have a look,” he said. He turned in his seat and clicked the mouse a few times, waking up his computer. “What's on your mind, Grace?” he asked, his back to her as he found the correct file.

“Oh, not much. I guess I'm just wondering if anybody might have seen my dad that day.”

“Lots of boats out in the inlet. Not all of them would have started here,” he said. “I don't have access to other harbour logs,” he said, still looking at the computer.

“It's okay, I'm just curious is all.”

“Can't blame you. Here you go. It's not complete, you understand. Just a head count at noon and at sunset. Though there wasn't much of a sunset that day, you'll recall. Hell of a blow.”

“Yes,” she said, stepping behind him. “Hell of a blow.”

He pointed to a screen and she read the names.

“Is that Greg White Eagle's boat?” she said, pointing to an entry.

“Yup. He calls it
First Eagle
.”

She read the list.

“What about this one?” She pointed to an entry.

“It was out all day,” said Wright.

“Can I look at the previous day's entries?”

“Sure.” He called them up.

She scanned the page. A shadow darkened her complexion.

“Whose boat is that?”

“That one is a Stoboltz boat. It came in around eleven in the morning. Left a few hours later. Find what you were looking for?”

“I found more than that,” she said, the smile now gone from her face.

Nancy Webber sat in Archie Ravenwing's office. What she was doing was dangerous, she knew it. She sipped a coffee and twisted in Archie's swivel chair. Coming to Port Lostcoast had been a mistake. She shouldn't have left Alberta. But here she was, sleeping under the same roof as Cole Blackwater. Cole had seemed somehow lighter since she had arrived. She guessed that the distractions of trying to unravel the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Archie Ravenwing had kept him from descending into the dark, brooding place where he sometimes fell. He seemed more alive. More vital.

But she couldn't help dwelling on her suspicions — of Cole himself. While she, Grace, Cole, and Darren worked through the various motives, means, and opportunities of the people who might have wanted Archie Ravenwing dead, Nancy reviewed what she knew of
Cole's
motive, means, and opportunity to want his
own
father six feet under.

She doodled in her notebook as she thought, slowly twisting back and forth in the chair. She wrote the word motive. Under it she wrote, “abuse, beatings,” and then she wrote “humiliation.” She tapped her pencil on the page. She drew a question mark and wrote “mother?” Cole knew. His mother had told him. Could that have pushed him over the edge?

She drank her coffee. Clear motive. No question about it.

Means. That seemed pretty easy. She wrote down “shotgun.”

Opportunity. She wrote, “Cole on the farm. First time in twenty years. Father dies.”

She drew a barn. Could Cole have entered the barn with a shotgun, walked right up to his old man, and blown his head off? Would the old man have seen him coming or not? Reimer had told her the blast was from below and into the face. Point blank. The sort of rage necessary to do that was beyond Nancy's comprehension. But then she hadn't been beaten as a child. And Cole certainly possessed a rage that at times made Nancy uncomfortable. That rage had seemed to fester since Oracle.

Sometimes those powerful emotions in Cole became passion, and it was that passion that had attracted Nancy to Cole in the first place. That continued to draw her to him.

She drew a drop of blood dripping from the barn.

The phone rang on Archie's desk and she jumped, almost knocking over her coffee.

“Ravenwing residence,” she answered.

“Who's this?”

“It's Nancy Webber.”

“Just the person I was looking for,” said the unfamiliar voice on the other end of the line.

— Cole Blackwater stepped into The Strait and crossed the plank floor to the bar, his boots making a heavy sound as he walked. Half a dozen tables were occupied, mostly by men eating a midday meal. The room was hot, and that warmth felt oppressive to Cole coming in from the cool of the harbour. He scanned the room and immediately recognized Dan Campbell sitting at a table with three other men. The conversation in the room grew quiet for a moment, and Cole could see out of the corner of his eye that his every step was being watched by the four men at Campbell's table.

The same bartender was there, placing a plate of food in front of a customer who sat on a stool. He looked at Cole. “Don't want any trouble from you today. We clear? You white boys want to mix it up, you go out in the street.”

Cole grinned. “You got it. What's the lunch special?”

Cole ordered food and a pint of Kokanee and sat at the bar, his back to Campbell. He took a long pull on the beer, his mind thumbing through the information that Cassandra Petrel had just given him about Stoboltz. But while he was thinking, his attention never left the table of men just twenty feet behind him.

If Petrel's suspicions were true, and Archie Ravenwing had found out, then there was a very clear motive for keeping Archie silent. But killing the man? Cole hadn't had more than a casual introduction to anybody at Stoboltz, but he did have a hard time imagining anybody at one of the world's largest aquaculture companies killing someone, even if that someone was an irritating First Nations activist like Archie. Then again, Cassandra Petrel's hunch was very serious. Businesses did hire people to take care of irritating problems, but in the western world? Here? Cole Blackwater assumed that sort of thing was reserved for Central America, South America, the darker corners of southeast Asia. And usually the businesses themselves weren't on the up and up to start with. Could that be the case with Stoboltz? What might they be hiding?

His food arrived. Cole hazarded a glance around the room as he slipped off his coat. Dan Campbell and his friends were still at their table.

He took a long drink of his beer and began to eat his sandwich and fries. Cole was halfway through his lunch when he heard a chair scrape back from Dan Campbell's table. He took a deep breath and focused on his surroundings. He turned slightly and watched from the corner of his eye as all four men at the table stood, wiping their mouths and hands on paper napkins. Three of the men scowled at Cole as they made their way toward the door, but Dan Campbell wasn't among them. Instead he pushed his chair in and walked to the bar where Cole sat. Cole looked straight ahead and drank from his beer.

“Had to get me some stitches the other night,” said Dan, pointing to his chin.

Cole turned to look at him. “Yup,” he said. “That doesn't look too comfortable,” he said.

“I could press charges, you know. You started it.”

Cole shrugged. “Go ahead,” he said.

Dan looked around him. “Yeah, well,” he said, “that's not the way we do it out here.”

“If you're saying that you want to settle a score, then let's get it over with,” said Cole.

“Whoa, take it easy there badass,” said Dan.

“What do you want then?”

“I'm told it's
you
that was asking around for me.”

“Word travels fast.”

“It's a pretty small town.”

“It is that.”

“What do
you
want then?”

“Let's take a walk,” said Cole, fishing a wad of money, gas receipts, elastic bands, and paperclips from his pocket. He found a five and a ten and left them on the bar. He threw back the rest of his pint and put on his coat. The two men left together. The rest of the people in the bar watched them go.

They stepped into the grey afternoon, the chill air feeling good against Cole's face and in his lungs. Cole had steadied himself for an attack once he had stepped outside, but none came.

“Let's walk down by the harbour,” said Cole. “You got a boat here?”

Dan pointed toward a slip at the far end of the harbour. “The last slip that way. The
Queen Mary Two
,” he said.

“Let's go have a look,” said Cole.

They walked along the harbour and onto the dock.

“What's this all about?” asked Dan.

“You and Archie weren't very good friends, were you?” asked Cole.

Campbell laughed. “You can say that again.”

“And it wasn't just because he was an Indian, was it?”

“Look,” said Campbell, “this is a free country. A man's got a right to his opinions.”

“True,” said Cole, “but part of living in a free country means that a man doesn't have the right to promote hatred.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You're a bigoted prick,” said Cole without looking at him. “You hate these people. What I can't figure out is why you live here with them. Why not live in Port McNeill or Port Hardy, or up the coast?”

“Hunting is good along the coast. Hunting is what I do. And I don't see where you get off calling a man a bigot. I don't hate the Indians. But I think they're lazy sons of bitches that would rather sit on their asses than work, and I'm sick and tired of my hard-earned money getting taken by the government to pay these people to sit around and carve masks.”

Cole drew a breath. “Archie worked hard.”

“Archie Ravenwing was a pompous jackass,” said Dan.

Cole began to think that this had been a bad idea. They stepped onto the pier in silence and made their way toward the
Queen
Mary Two.

“But he worked hard. What did you have against him?”

“Same thing I have against you, Blackwater. He was a meddler, just like you. Sticking his nose in where it don't belong. Fucking bleeding-heart liberal faggots always trying to tell other people how to live their lives. Don't do this, don't do that. Save the bears, save the trees. Look around you, Blackwater. Do you see any shortage of trees?” Campbell opened his arms and made a complete turn on the dock. “There is no fucking shortage of trees. And the bears are stumbling over one another to get at the salmon. I'm doing them a favour shooting them. Makes more room. But Archie was always sticking his nose in where it don't belong. It finally did him in.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Silly bastard was out in that storm is what I mean. Out dipping his nets for that bitch Petrel. And for what? What did it get him? Got the stupid bastard killed is what it got him.”