Auntie Joy took Old Sam’s hand and with an agility that belied both age and rotundity climbed over the gunnel to the deck. The other three women followed. Kate made the introductions. “Doug, Jim, this is Joyce Shugak, Viola Moonin, Edna Aguilar and Balasha Shugak. My aunties.” She said it proudly, if inaccurately. Only one of them was really an auntie, the other three were great-aunts and cousins, but the relationships were so convoluted, involving Kate’s grandmother’s sister’s husband who had divorced his first wife and married again and moved to Ouzinkie, that it would have taken half an hour to unravel. Balasha was the youngest of the four of them, a mere child of seventy-six. The rest of them were in their early eighties, although Auntie Vi never got very specific about it. They were as brown as berries, as wizened as walnuts and as round and merry as Santa Claus. It raised the spirits just to breathe the same air they did.
“You on your way to fish camp, Joy-girl?” Old Sam said.
Kate remembered then, the family fish camp a mile or so up Amartuq Creek, the very creek across the mouth of which Yuri Andreev had tried to cork Joe Anahonak not half an hour before.
“Yes,” Auntie Joy said, “we fly George in from Niniltna, and come from town on the morning tide.” She beamed. “Fish running good, huh?”
“Real good,” Old Sam said.
As if to corroborate his judgment, they heard a whoop off to port. Pete Petersen on the
Monica
had just hauled in what looked like a seventy-five-pound king, which was selling delivered to the cannery for three dollars a pound.
Kate looked at Old Sam. “We’re going to need this deck pretty soon.”
Old Sam nodded. “Get the knives.”
Kate went to the focsle. A storage area formed where the bow came to a point, the focsle served as food locker, parts store, tool crib and junk drawer. It was black as pitch inside, and Kate held the door open with one hand while she fumbled with the other for the flashlight hanging from a nail on the bulkhead to the right. The focsle was so crammed that the flashlight didn’t help much; she scraped her shin on a crate of eggs, caught her toe on a small cardboard box full of dusty brass doorknobs and snagged her braid on a bundle of halibut hooks before she found the sliming knives.
They were broad, sharp blades with white plastic handles, and when she brought them out on deck they got down to the almost mutually exclusive jobs of butchering out the halibut and salvaging Doug and Jim’s gear. The four old women pitched in next to them, each producing her own personal knife in a gesture that reminded Kate irresistibly of the rumble between the Sharks and the Jets. The aunties’ knives had long, slender, wickedly sharp blades with handles carved variously of wood, bone and antler, with which they out-butchered even Old Sam, who had only been doing this for a living for sixty years.
To everyone’s surprise and to Jim’s ebullient relief, the gear was in better shape than it had looked with the halibut caught in it. Doug said nothing as his brown, callused hands measured the gaping holes that would have to be mended before they could fish again. It wasn’t like there was a net loft up on the nearest beach, either. Kate remembered that his wife, Loralee, had had a baby six months before, a Christmas baby named Eddie, a chuckling, fair-haired child with enormous blue eyes like his mother’s and a jaw squared with a lick of his father’s stubborn.
Doug must have felt the weight of her gaze and looked up, eyes narrowing on her face. Kate, who had a lively sense of self-preservation, refrained from offering sympathy. Doug would have taken it for pity and as a matter of pride refused any offer of further help, and if Kate knew her aunties, an offer of help was forthcoming.
Next to her Auntie Vi spoke. “You got needles and twine?”
Doug’s gaze moved from the young woman to the older one. “What?”
Patiently, Auntie Vi repeated, “You got needles? You got twine?” He said nothing and even more patiently she said, “To mend your gear?” She gestured at the other women. “My sisters and me, you got needles and twine, we help mend.” She waited.
He looked from her face to the faces of the other three. They were impassive. He looked back at her. “Well, sure,” he said slowly. “I’ve got needles, and twine, too.”
“I’ve got a spare case in the focsle,” Old Sam put in, and looked at Kate. Kate, nursing her scraped shin, sighed heavily and went back to the focsle.
Auntie Vi gave a decisive nod. “Good. We fix.”
“I don’t know,” Doug began, and Auntie Vi said, patience gone, “
Freya
not going nowhere. We hang the cork line from the bow, one end from
Tanya,
other end our dory, use Samuel’s skiff to mend from, work toward middle.” Doug opened his mouth and she beat him to it. “We reef the net to cork line as we mend.”
Doug still looked doubtful, but Jim slapped him on the back. “Sure, it’ll work. There’s no chop or swell, and with all of us working we’ll get it done in no time. Maybe even before the period’s over.” He knew, and Doug knew it, too, that this was an offer they couldn’t refuse. The four old women between them had more net-mending experience than the rest of the fleet combined.
Doug was a proud man, with an innate disinclination for accepting handouts and an even stronger dislike for being beholden to anyone. Kate, watching him, saw him bite back that pride and bow his head to necessity and, perhaps, to the generosity of age and experience as well. With their years on the river, the four aunties had probably torn up their share of gear. They knew what it was like to watch impotently as the year’s catch passed them by, and they knew, too, what a hungry winter was like. “Thanks, Viola. I—Thanks.”
She shrugged. “We helping each others. You help us sometime.”
And that was that. In less time than it took to tell it, they had the gear draped over the bow of the
Freya,
Auntie Edna and Auntie Balasha mending toward the center from the dory, Doug and Jim mending toward the center from the
Tanya,
and Auntie Vi and Auntie Joy darting back and forth in the
Freya,
plastic needles flashing in the sun, talking and laughing nonstop.
It isn’t easy, mending a wet net, but they did it. The task was made easier by the fact that the gear was fifteen mesh, or fifteen feet deep from cork line to lead line, for fishing the shallower waters near shore. Still, it was fifty feet long, and mending a net on water was a tricky business at best, swell or no swell, and it was two hours before the eight of them manhandled the mended net back to the
Tanya
’s deck and Doug and Joe rewound it on the reel in the bow.
“Hold it,” Jim said as Doug prepared to cast off, and vaulted the gunnel to the
Freya
’s deck. He slipped and almost fell in the gurry and blood left from the halibut that Kate and Old Sam had been butchering out as the others mended the
Tanya
’s gear. Before she could nip out of the way he had scooped Auntie Vi up in his arms, bent her over backwards and thoroughly kissed her. He pulled back and grinned down at her. “Thanks, Viola. I’d propose but I’m already married. Want to shack up instead?”
Auntie Vi flushed deep red and scolded him in Aleut, with a couple of extra words Kate recognized as being Athabascan and profanity thrown in for good measure. The other three aunties were rocking with laughter, and Jim, grinning widely, jumped down to his own boat.
Even Doug was smiling. “Thanks, aunties,” he called as they pulled away. “I owe you one. Hell, I owe you ten!”
“We’ll save you some steaks!” Kate called, and the two men waved once before getting back to the serious business of fishing salmon for a living.
They watched the
Tanya
find a spot to set their gear and turned their own attention to the halibut. It had white flesh but its blood was as red as any salmon’s, and a considerable amount of it was spread across the
Freya
’s deck, mixed in with seawater that had kept it fluid.
Kate had always been interested in the stomachs of everything her family shot and ate. The stomach contents of game were stories in themselves. She remembered a Sitka doe once that had had a belly full of seaweed dotted with blueberries and a couple of pop-tops. Halibut were especially fun to excavate since they spent their lives vacuuming up the floor of the ocean. This monster’s most recent meal had consisted of a Dungeness crab, two pollock, about a hundred tiger shrimp, a can of cat food with holes punched in it, a small piece of coral and one dark brown rubber hip boot, a little the worse for wear.
“Tell me there’s not a foot inside that boot,” Old Sam commanded. Unenthusiastically Kate investigated. The boot was empty. Everyone relaxed. They all knew halibut were bottom feeders, and they all knew what sank to the bottom of the ocean when it fell overboard, and they all knew that halibut liked their food ripe. It didn’t stop them from eating halibut, or crab either, for that matter, but a foot in the hip boot might have given them indigestion afterwards.
They pitched the guts over the side and began carving the carcass into cookable chunks. The halibut cheeks alone would be enough for an evening meal for the six of them. When they finally got the spine out the resulting fillets were immense.
So was the heart. “Jesus,” Old Sam said. “Look at that, will ya.”
He handed it to Kate. She needed both hands to hold it.
The dark red lump of grainy flesh pumped once against her palms. In one leap she was at the railing, where she dumped the still-beating heart down on the gunnel and backed away. Old Sam cackled with laughter, and the four old women giggled. A tinge of color darkened Kate’s face. She should have tossed the damn thing over the side and be damned to it.
Mutt came to her rescue. She stood two feet from the rail, neck stretched to its farthest limit, the stiff hairs on her ruff raised, lips curled back from her teeth, nostrils flaring. She looked at Kate, eyes wide, and didn’t find any help there. She turned back to the halibut heart, extended her neck another inch and sniffed once at the jerking flesh. Her lip curled even farther and she backed up a step, uttering a low “woof” deep in her throat. That sound had been known to stop a brown bear in its tracks; unintimidated, the halibut heart beat on without pause. A rumbling growl and Mutt backed away on stiff legs, yellow eyes never leaving the palpitating lump of red flesh, and retreated to the bow, where she stayed until they got back to Cordova the next morning.
Kate felt like joining her. Cut out from its chest, separated from its body which even now was being boned and sliced into steaks behind her, the organ beat on relentlessly, heaving up and down on the black-painted surface of the gunnel. “How long’s it keep doing that?” she said.
Old Sam shrugged. “I seen ‘em beat for hours after getting cut out of a body. Just ain’t ready to give up, I guess.” He grinned at her. “Bothering you, girl?”
Kate drew herself erect and lied like a trooper. “Of course not.”
Old Sam laughed, and the damn halibut heart kept beating while she hauled buckets of water up over the side to wash down the deck. It kept beating as she wrapped and stowed the halibut fillets in the walk-in freezer next to the engine room below aft, and it was still beating when Old Sam moved them back to their original anchorage just in time to meet the first laden bowpicker as she waddled up, hold spilling a mound of fish from gunnel to gunnel.
“Okay, girl, get them hatch covers off,” Sam bawled from the bridge. “Time to hunt and gather.”
Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on 75-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and after having a grand old time working in the Prudhoe Bay oilfields on the North Slope of Alaska, making an obscene amount of money and going to Hawaii a lot, found it in writing.
Her first crime fiction novel,
A Cold Day for Murder
, won an Edgar award, her first thriller,
Blindfold Game
, hit the
New York Times
bestseller list, and her twenty-eighth novel and nineteenth Kate Shugak novel,
Restless in the Grave
, will be released in February 2012.
Find her on the web at
stabenow.com
.
A Cold Day for Murder
A Fatal Thaw
Dead in the Water
A Cold-Blooded Business
Play with Fire
Blood Will Tell
Breakup
Killing Grounds
Hunter’s Moon
Midnight Come Again
The Singing of the Dead
A Fine and Bitter Snow
A Grave Denied
A Taint in the Blood
A Deeper Sleep
Whisper to the Blood
A Night Too Dark
Though Not Dead
Restless in the Grave (2012)
Fire and Ice
So Sure of Death
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Better to Rest
Second Star
A Handful of Stars
Red Planet Run
Blindfold Game
Prepared for Rage
If you downloaded this book from a filesharing network, either individually or as part of a larger torrent, the author has received no compensation. Please consider purchasing a legitimate copy. They are reasonably priced and available from all major outlets. Your author thanks you.
This digital edition (v1.0) of “Conspiracy” was published by
Gere Donovan Press
in 2011.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Gere Donovan Press
is committed to producing e-books of the highest quality. If you encountered any errors, typos, or formatting issues in this text, please bring them to our attention, so that the next edition may be improved for future readers.
Please email
[email protected]
, stating the name of the e-book, the type of e-reading device you have, the version (see copyright page), and the details of the error. Because e-readers paginate differently, an excerpt of the passage (a sentence or two) containing the error would be most helpful.