Killing Grounds (13 page)

So Meany was still alive at ten, and his son may or may not have been on board. She should head on out to Alaganik, start banging on hatches, talking to fishermen to find out if they'd seen anything at Alaganik the night before. But they'd chased him off hours before the period ended, none of them had given pursuit, none of them had been fishing except for Meany, and most of them had been drinking and partying besides, and Meany had been such a popular guy that none of them would be inclined to care one way or the other if the murderer was caught, anyway.

Except the murderer.

She ought to take a look at Meany's boat, too. They'd left it in Alaganik at anchor. Someone had given the son a ride to his family's setnet site, where his mother and uncle were supposed to be. Her next stop, she thought drearily.

They were startled out of their separate reveries by the crackle of the radio and Lamar Rousch's voice, rendered thin and reedy by the FM bandwidth, announcing the next fishing period. Gull leaned over to turn up the volume, and when Lamar signed off, turn it down again. "No period," he said. "Escapement must be down."

"For crying out loud," Kate said, "about a million reds must have gone up the Kanuyaq yesterday from Alaganik Bay alone, and nobody was hanging any nets in their way. Well, two, but hell."

Gull gave his head a sympathetic wag. "I wonder sometimes myself how accurate those fish counts can be. You know, there was a trader from Andromeda riding deadhead on the last SeaLandSpace freighter through here, he was telling me"

A movement caught her eye and she looked up to see Old Sam heading down the ramp. "Oops. There's my boss. Gotta go. Thanks again for the truck."

Gull waved her off with a regal hand, very much master of all he surveyed. "Okay, Kate. See you."

She caught up with Old Sam as he was about to board the Freya. "Hey, Sam."

"Hey, girl." Nimble in the face of eighty winters, Sam hopped over the gunnel and landed lightly on the deck.

She followed him into the galley, and sat down as he began assembling the ingredients for dinner. With something of a shock, Kate realized that it wasn't even six o'clock. It had been a full day. "Listen, Sam?"

"What?" he said, pulling a package of mooseburger out of the sink where he'd left it to thaw at breakfast. He turned a burner on and got out a frying pan.

She sidled in next to him and made her own patty. She liked hers thicker than he did his. "Could we maybe head back for Alaganik after dinner?"

He paused. "Why? It's early yet. And we don't even know what hours the period's going to be, let alone is anybody fishing it."

"There isn't one," Kate said. "It was on the radio in the harbormaster's office."

"No period?"

Kate shook her head.

"Why the hell not?" Old Sam said indignantly. "Christ on a crutch, what about all the fish we saw heading north yesterday? And hardly anyone with a net in the water?" He slammed his patty into the frying pan with unnecessary force, and the resulting sizzle nearly took off his eyebrows. "It's those goddam sport fishermen, is what it is, and their idiot escape demands. That goddam Bill Nickle won't be satisfied until the only red taken from the Sound is taken with a silver spinner."

Kate set her patty down next to his. The subsequent tantalizing aroma made her mouth water. There was nothing better than mooseburger, especially in the middle of the summer, when it seemed you would never get the smell of fish out of your nostrils or the fish scales out of your hair. Frying mooseburger was the smell of fall, and dry land beneath your feet, and settlement time.

Kate waited until they'd eaten before broaching the matter of their departure a second time. Old Sam was much more approachable on a full stomach. For that matter, so was she.

"We might as well put 'er in dry dock," he said glumly, "all the fish we're likely to haul in this year. Hardly worth the price of copper paint."

Kate wasn't sure she'd ever seen Old Sam glum before. A mischievous, sometimes malicious, always impudent elf of a man, he enjoyed life and irritating the people in it too much to squander time brooding. As annoying as he usually was, she found she didn't like it when he wasn't. "Listen, Sam, I need to talk to some people on the Alaganik beach. Maybe even some of the drifters." She paused. "It'd be a lot easier to have the Freya as a base of operations."

He raised his head, examining her with sharp old eyes almost hidden in folds of wrinkles. "This got something to do with Meany?"

She nodded. "I promised Chopper Jim I'd nose around a little."

It was like she'd thrown a switch. He jumped to his feet and chucked plate, silver and mug into the sink on top of the unwashed frying pan. "Why didn't you say so, girl?" he said, grinning a grin that rivaled Chopper Jim's for sharkness. "Cast off, I'll wake her up."

As Kate went to the bow, she reflected that cops-and-robbers was the one game boys never really grew out of.

The beach that edged Alaganik Bay began in the west at the Kanuyaq River delta and ended in the east in the high cliffs that abruptly broke off the southward march of the Ragged Mountains. There were three creeks big enough to be named, Calhoun, Amartuq and Coal, and a dozen rivulets that only appeared at low tide.

It was a broad, steep expanse of fine, dark gray sand mixed with tumbled gravel. Heaped piles of seaweed and driftwood logs bleached white by the salt of the sea were scattered across the high-water mark. Tidal pools formed in the rocks exposed by low tide, sheltering sticklebacks and hermit crabs and sea urchins, and now and then a flounder or a bullhead, and occasionally a small salmon. Kate loved a tidal pool, and had ever since she was a toddler splashing after bidarkys.

No time for tidal pool exploration or a seafood harvest today. Kate stood on the bridge of the Freya and surveyed the beach through Old Sam's binoculars. Just above the high-tide mark the rain forest closed in, pine and cedar and alder and cottonwood and birch and spruce all jostling for place. The setnet sites had been hacked out of this jungle by main force, and the cabins built there constructed either of prefab kits freighted in by barge, or of the detritus of sea and land, their split log-tarpaper-plywood designs reminding Kate of Emaa's add-on, multilevel, any-thing-goes-for-siding-including-the-sawed-off-bottoms-of-beer-bottles home in Niniltna.

The Meanys' nearest neighbor to the west was Mary Balashoff; to the east, the Flanagans. "Widow woman," Old Sam said briefly. "Got herself a couple of girl kids that are holy terrors. You can go talk to them all by yourself."

She wanted to talk to everyone all by herself, but Old Sam wasn't having any. He ignored gentle hint and loud protest alike and climbed down into the skiff like he owned it. He did, so she yielded the kicker and moved forward to sit on the thwart in the bow, feeling reduced to ballast. Mary Balashoff's site was on the west side of Amartuq Creek, Meany's on the east. It was far and away the richest creek that emptied into Alaganik Bay (Kate's ancestral elders had been no fools), and she wondered how Johnny-come-lately Meany had acquired title to the site. She asked Old Sam.

Old Sam took his time steering the skiff around a clump of seaweed. A sea otter kept a wary eye on them from the center of the clump, paws clutching a clam and a rock. "He didn't. He didn't need to."

"Why not?"

"Alaska beaches are public beaches up to the high-water mark. Setnet sites can't be personal property."

Kate knew this, but held her peace. Old Sam never passed up an opportunity to relieve her ignorance, whether or not she suffered any. He resembled Shitting Seagull in that respect. She turned her head to hide a smile.

"However," Old Sam said pontifically, "if somebody's family has been fishing the same site for a hundred years, it's their site for the next hundred, unless you want to try to move in at the point of a twelve-gauge."

Kate's gaze sharpened. "So you're telling me Meany brought a twelve-gauge?"

"Pretty much. Nate Moonin used to fish it, but he sold his cabin to the Ursins, a married couple from Anchorage." Kate remembered Lamar telling her that nearly a third of the setnetters on the Sound were neither traditional nor professional fishermen. "Teachers," Old Sam said. "Well hell, makes some kind of sense, I guess. Teachers get the summer off, so they buy a permit and move their families down for the duration." He grinned. " 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation.' "

"How'd Meany get in on the act?"

Old Sam shrugged. "Way I heard it, school got out and the Ursins came down and Meany was already on the site."

"That's all?"

Old Sam snorted. "Hell no, that's not all. I wasn't there, and Ursin didn't slow down enough to talk to on his way north, so I don't know what happened firsthand."

"But you can guess."

"I can guess," Sam said, nodding. "I figure Meany offered to buy the cabin, because Meany always was one to keep things nice and legal. Probably for ten cents on the dollar, but he sure as shit'd steal it legal." He paused, and added, almost reluctantly, "They had those three kids, ages ten and under."

It was a moment before Kate realized what he was saying. "You think he threatened them? You think Meany threatened to hurt the Ursin kids if the Ursins didn't sell to him?"

With flat conviction Old Sam said, "I think Meany did whatever was necessary to get the job done."

Kate thought again of the boy on the boat. Meany had been more than capable of beating on his own kid. Threats to someone else's would have come naturally to him.

The buzz of the outboard was loud against the silence of the day, the smell of salt water sharp and demanding. "That Mrs. Ursin, now, there was a nice gal," Sam said suddenly. "Womanly," he added with emphasis, nodding at Kate to make sure she got the idea that she herself might be somewhat lacking in that department. "Made one hell of a pineapple upside-down cake."

So do I, Kate thought, given enough Bisquick. But if she said so she'd be making two a week for the rest of the summer, so she kept quiet.

"They didn't know much about fishing, but they were learning. Didn't sell much, but then they canned half "of what they caught. I was going to show them how to smoke fish this summer." He nodded toward the beach. "Jeff cleared a bunch of alder last fall, cut and stacked a cord of it next to the cabin. I see the Meanys been burning it, probably for fuel." He spat over the side, and shipped oars as the skiff's bow ran up on the beach.

Kate jumped ashore and pulled the skiff up, tying the bow line to a driftwood log above the high-water mark. She looked toward the cabin and saw a curl of smoke rising up out of the chimney. It was half past seven, and the sun was still struggling to fight its way inside the low overcast. The bay was like glass, and although most of the fleet had headed back for town on the morning tide, there were enough boats left with men occupying themselves with make-work jobs in their laps for Kate to realize she was under better surveillance than she could have hired through the Continental Op. She was not overjoyed to see that the Bush telegraph was doing its usual efficient job. Gossip tainted memories. She hoped potential eyewitnesses were keeping themselves to themselves, but it was a vain hope and she knew it.

She felt a nudge in the small of her back. "Well, come on, girl," Old Sam said impatiently, "what are you waiting for?" He set off up the steep slope at a brisk pace, and Kate followed. By the time she caught up with him, he was hammering on the door of the cabin.

It was a trim little building, one of the prefabricated ones, with a corrugated-tin roof and neat powder-blue plastic siding. It stood over the high-water mark on pilings, its back to the bank as the forest primeval leaned down and tried to snatch it up in great green arms. The deck was unvarnished cedar that had gone a beautiful silvery gray, and still smelled wonderful in the salt air. The door opened abruptly just as Old Sam was fixing to hammer on it a second time.

By her age and general air of wear and tear, the woman standing in front of them was the wife. "Mrs. Meany?" Kate said. "Mrs. Calvin Meany?"

"Yes." The single word was uninviting, either of further conversation or of entrance.

"My name is Kate Shugak. This is Sam Dementieff. We're the ones who found your husband's body this morning."

She didn't say anything, just stood in the doorway with her arms folded tightly against her. She had been pretty once, and with luckwidowhood, perhaps?and a change of occupation might be pretty again. Dark auburn hair streaked with gray was matted against her skull, her skin was freckled and sunburned and her eyes were green and tired. Her figure was spectacular; from the neck down Mrs. Meany looked like Sophia Loren. Kate was impressed; anyone who could look statuesque in high-tops, filthy jeans and a faded brown plaid shirt was definitely out of the ordinary, and deserving of respect.

Mrs. Meany did not appear to be stricken with grief. On the other hand, neither did she appear to be overtly hostile, or nervous. "May we come in?" Kate said.

Mrs. Meany didn't move. A voice came from the cabin. "Better let them in, Marian."

A man appeared behind Mrs. Meany. He was short of stature and stocky in build, much like Calvin Meany, but the blunt, nearly simian features of Meany's face had been by some subtle transmutation thinned down, even refined here. The brow was broader, the nose high-bridged, even aristocratic, and when he met Kate's eyes there was no trace of the predator that had lurked at the drifter's shoulder. He was massaging a shoulder, and the knuckles of his hands were swollen and scraped and bruised. He looked as if a change of occupation might benefit him, too. "I'm Neil Meany," he said. "Calvin was my brother. This is Marian, his wife. Please come in."

A gentle touch on one shoulder and Marian stepped obediently to one side. She didn't close the door behind them, Kate noticed, but left it open, probably to encourage an early departure.

It was a one-room cabin, lined with pink insulation between the two-by-four studs. Two sets of bunk beds stood against the far wall, a table and six chairs in one corner and a stove, a sink and cupboards in another. There was one window in each wall, the panes stained with smoke. The room was dim except for the muted light of the cloudy evening through the open door. No one had bothered to light a lamp, and the stove, a converted fifty-five-gallon drum, was cold to Kate's casual touch.