The Darkening Archipelago (9 page)

Cole felt his stomach rumble, and he hoped it was from hunger and not his airsick hangover. “I could eat,” he decided.

They sat at the dining room table, floor-to-ceiling windows providing a panoramic view over the Queen Charlotte Strait to the north and the mouth of Knight Inlet to the east. To the west were the humpbacked shapes made by the clutter of islands scattered up the southwestern side of the Broughton Archipelago.

“Good grief, it's beautiful here,” said Cole, swabbing his bowl with freshly baked bread.

Grace nearly spit out a mouthful of stew, not quite able to suppress a laugh. She dabbed at her mouth and smiled. “I see you're maintaining your promise to Sarah, Cole. You sound more like Charlie Brown than a brooding hoodlum.”

He scowled at her. “Who's a hoodlum?”

“You are. You look like the guy who stands at the back of the room in gangster movies — you know, in the shadows. And when the guy can't pay the money he owes, the boss says something like —” Grace improvised an Italian accent — “my man Guido here's goin' a breaka' you knees.”

Cole laughed. “That's pretty good, Grace. I know this Italian guy named Frankie Fingers who does a pretty good Salish accent. You should hear him!” Then he added, “Truth is, I slip up every now and again, but I'm trying. I'm really trying.”

“You're a good father, you know.”

“Thanks, but it doesn't always feel like it. We've had our ups and downs.”

“Every father and daughter does. My God, my dad and I fought like badger and bear, but we loved each other and there was always respect.”

Cole stood and brought their empty bowls to the sink. He sat back down.

“So Grace, can you tell me what happened?”

She drew a sharp breath. “I don't really know, Cole. The RCMP and the local search teams haven't recovered Dad's body yet, and they haven't found the
Dancer
. They haven't officially declared him dead,” she said, tears spilling from the corners of her eyes, creating glistening tracks over her face. Cole reached out and took her hand, and she squeezed his fingers. Even in her grief she was beautiful, with her high, round cheeks, almond eyes, and thick, black hair that fell halfway down her back. She was full bodied, but by no means heavy. Voluptuous, the kind of body Rembrandt loved to paint. She was in her late twenties and looked youthful. Natural. Her beauty had stopped Cole in his tracks more than once.

“Our people think it's important to send the spirit on to the next world quickly, so we're not willing to wait for the official medical examiner's report.” She stopped a moment and looked out the window. Cole let the silence sit between them.

After a few minutes she spoke again. “The RCMP and the people from the Joint Rescue Centre down in Victoria figure that Dad was trying to make it home through a big gale that blew up. He had been out nosing around the mouth of Tribune Channel, looking for trouble as usual. They figure he must have misread the storm and pushed for home after dark. He didn't make it. The Coast Guard, the RCMP, and even the Navy had boats, helicopters, and those big airplanes from Comox in the inlet looking for the
Dancer
. My brother Jacob and Darren First Moon have been out on Jacob's boat all week. So have many other men, from all over the place. There were boats here from as far away as Victoria. But no sign of him….” Her voice trailed off. Cole grasped her hand tightly.

Grace held her face upright, wiping her tears with the back of her free hand.

“You said he was looking for trouble. You think he was being reckless?”

“Dad was never reckless when it came to the sea. He was pretty cautious. No, I think he was nosing around that farm at Jeopardy Rock, or further up Tribune Channel. He told me that he was onto something. Something that just wasn't right, but he didn't say exactly what.”

Cole looked out the window as a glaucous winged gull landed on the patio of the new addition.

“We had a bit of a tussle recently, and, well, he stopped telling me what he was doing then.”

“What did you fight about, Grace?”

“God, it seems so stupid now,” she said, fresh tears forming in her red eyes. “Dad could be such a conspiracy theorist sometimes. He was going on about how Stoboltz was doing research at one of their farming operations, where the old dfo labs are up at Jeopardy Rock. He thought they were doing genetic engineering or something, breeding super salmon. I guess I didn't take him seriously enough. But you know how he was. He really rubbed people the wrong way when he thought he was right and everybody else was wrong.”

“Your dad could be pretty persistent.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I know where I get it from. But the thing is, Cole, he was really rattling people's cages lately. Since he lost the election to Greg, he was impossible to get along with. Always fighting with someone. If it wasn't Greg, it was Darren. If it wasn't Darren, it was one of the rednecks from the bar. That bigot Dan Campbell. And Lance Grey, and the minister, too. He seemed to be on their cases constantly. People would cross the street when they saw him coming. They just didn't want to deal with him. Even Darren First Moon and he were at each other's throats.”

“Seems like he was really upset about something. You don't know anything more about what he was onto at the dfo station? Maybe there's something I can help with, you know….”

“No idea.” Grace shook her head. “But you're welcome to have a look through his papers and his computer, Cole. Maybe you can figure it out. I really don't know much. He just shut everybody out, at least when he wasn't picking a fight. He still talked with Cassandra, but not often. He was off on his own most of the time.”

“That doesn't really seem like Archie's style, does it?”

“He was always a bit prickly, but the way he was provoking people the last few months was a bit much, even for him.”

Cole found himself very curious about Archie's preoccupation.

“Cole,” said Grace thoughtfully. “There's something else.”

“What is it?” he asked, distracted by his own ruminations.

“Well, it seems pretty strange, timing wise.”

Cole looked at her, listening.

“The day before he went up Knight Inlet and didn't come back, he dug his will out of a file and left it on his desk.”

Cole felt a shiver clamber up his vertebrae.

Grace shook her head. “I didn't even know he had a will. He sure never talked about it. But when he didn't come back, I went to his office to see if there was anything that might be helpful to the Coast Guard and I found it on top of his usual clutter. What do you think about that?”

Cole broke eye contact with Grace. “I don't know,” he lied, looking out the window at Knight Inlet. But it seemed obvious; for whatever reason, Archie Ravenwing believed that his life might soon end.

6

What usually got Nancy Webber into trouble was too much thinking, too much reflection. Her first impression was most often correct, her first impulse the one she should follow. But given sufficient time to brood, she could find a hundred reasons to second-guess her intuition and jump to all manner of erroneous conclusions.

The drive from Edmonton to High River takes about four hours if Calgary's main highway, Deerfoot Trail, isn't backed up with commuter traffic. Intuition told her to let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie. Cole Blackwater was a dog that should just be left to doze through his life — as he did so well, Nancy thought. Before clearing Edmonton's city limits, she had twice almost turned around. But the longer she drove the more she second-guessed her intuition, and by Airdrie, hundreds of kilometres south of Edmonton, she had convinced herself of a massive cover-up of Henry Blackwater's death, and also that she was the one to get to the bottom of it.

That morning the lack of traffic on the Deerfoot allowed Nancy Webber to sail down to High River at a nice prairie coast of one hundred and twenty kilometres per hour. She arrived just after noon on Sunday, March 20. She tried to remember when she had last been in High River but couldn't recall, and decided that this must be, in fact, her inaugural visit. She parked near the newspaper office and searched for lunch.

What began as a service centre for the ranching community, and had later served the region's short-lived coal mining operations and then the oil and gas developments that pocked the foothills, was now a bedroom community for burgeoning Calgary. Like many foothills towns, High River maintained a small, rustic, though not antiquated, downtown with the usual assortment of curios shops, a quilt store, a genuine First Nation's jewellery and artwork boutique, and a bookstore that doubled as a coffee shop. But High River's current energy sprang from the sprawling developments that ringed the downtown centre of the community, threatening to suck the life out of the historic downtown core.

Nancy found a place that served milkshakes and ate a salad for the sake of achieving balance, and then walked back to the
High River Tribune
's office to look for Casey Brown.

As she walked to the newspaper's front doors in a circa 1970s strip mall, she heard a voice call from behind her. “Ms. Webber?”

She turned to see a man pedalling his bike up onto the sidewalk. He wore a helmet with a blinking red light on top and an orange safety vest, and his pant leg was safely tucked into one woolen sock. She waited for him to dismount and offered her hand. “It's Nancy.” She smiled at him.

“Hi,” said the man, catching his breath. “I'm Casey Brown. Sorry to be late. The auction went a little longer than I expected. I hope I haven't kept you waiting?”

“Not at all. Just got here myself.”

Casey opened the door to the newspaper office and pushed his bike inside. “Come on in.”

He wheeled his way between the desks to the back, and when he re-emerged he had doffed his cycling attire and was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt.

“I bet you fit in around here better when you're dressed like this, rather than with the bicycle road-warrior get-up on,” said Nancy, looking around the cluttered space.

“You can say that again. I grew up in Toronto. I rode my bike everywhere. When I graduated from Ryerson, I didn't just want to go to work for some leftie Toronto magazine filled with ads for gay dating services, you know what I mean? Not that I have anything against gays. God, listen to me, now I'm starting to sound like an Albertan. Anyway, I applied for positions at a bunch of little papers in the Rockies, and this is where I landed. The folks around here are actually pretty used to seeing cyclists now. Lots of the Calgary commuters ride the trails in Kananaskis on the weekends. The old-timers still have a tough time with it. But they give me a wide berth. I guess it's like passing a horse on the road.”

“Sure,” said Nancy. “Except I doubt you'll kick a headlight out if you get spooked.”

“You never know,” said Brown, sitting on the edge of a desk. “So what was so important that you had to drive all the way down here on a Sunday?”

Nancy considered this question herself. What was so important? She'd spent four hours on the road devising cockamamie stories about a cover-up of Henry Blackwater's suicide, convincing herself it was the reason that Cole kept her at a distance now. But she couldn't very well share this with Casey Brown. “Well,” she began, “I don't know if it's anything at all. I just want to look through your coverage on Henry Blackwater's suicide.”

“Like I said on the phone, I wasn't here then. But it's all on file. I'll show you the way.”

Casey led Nancy to the back of the office to a microfiche scanner and filing cabinets filled with reels of stories filed by date. “You said it was around the spring of 2002?”

“Yeah, around then. I don't know the exact date.”

Brown flipped through the files. “Well, here you go. This is the first story. You should be able to easily scan through the files that follow.”

“Thanks,” said Nancy, sitting down on a small stool to begin her research.

“No trouble. Holler if you need anything.”

Nancy Webber didn't need to holler. It took her a little over an hour to scan everything the
High River Tribune
had written on the death of Henry Blackwater. In that time she learned little that she didn't already know: Henry Blackwater had presumably used a branding iron to engage the trigger of a Remington 12-gauge shotgun, shooting himself under the chin. According to the medical examiner, he died instantly. The suicide had occurred in the middle of a boxing ring in the barn on the Blackwater Ranch in the southeastern side of the Porcupine Hills. The youngest of two sons — Cole — had discovered his father after hearing the shotgun blast. Walter Blackwater had been on the ranch at the time as well and had arrived at the barn shortly after Cole.

There had been no RCMP investigation of the shooting, as the me had determined that the death was consistent with that of a suicide.

There it was again, thought Nancy. That ambiguity. Consistent with that of a suicide.

Nancy couldn't get over that ambiguity. It kept coming up in relation to the death of Henry Blackwater.