The Darkening Archipelago (23 page)

“That's right.”

“Where does Walter figure in all this?”

“I don't know.”

“I met him last night,” said Nancy.

“Where?”

“At the ranch.”

“You really got balls, don't you?”

“You know it. I went out for dinner and when Mrs. Blackwater and I were having coffee afterward, in walks Walter. He was pretty surprised to see me. I guess Cole had told him about me. Anyway,” she said, “we went for a walk this morning and had a chat. He's a real likeable guy.”

“Likeable, and unlikely to punch up his brother, it seems to me.”

“Yeah, he seems to care about Cole a lot. Maybe that's guilt.”

“For what?”

“For letting his father beat the snot out of his little brother and not doing anything to stop it.” Nancy looked around the café. She was alone.

“Well, it doesn't help to say this, but I will. Not much a teenager can do to stop a fully grown man from taking out his anger on another boy. Walter's a big lad, but old man Blackwater was a real bruiser. Did you know he fought for the overseas title in 1944?”

Nancy shook her head. “How did you find that out?”

“Got a friend on the base at c fb Suffield with connections.”

“I'm impressed. And a little humbled. How did he do?”

“Draw. A black man named Bombshell Bismarck who was in the artillery was the other boxer. He outweighed Blackwater by some forty pounds and towered over him by four inches.”

“Jesus. You think that old man Blackwater felt jaded by that and started reliving his glory days back on the ranch?”

“Who knows? I'm no shrink. I did ask about his service record. Apparently Blackwater landed at Juno Beach —”

“On D-Day?”

“Yeah. Pretty impressive. Says that he suffered ‘unidentified wounds' and was shipped back to England. Missed all the action.”

“What does that mean?”

“Seasick.”

“You're kidding.”

“That's what my friend at Suffield thinks, anyway. It's not in his military record. He went on to do mop-up work in northern Europe, but missed most of the fun in France and Germany.”

“That would piss a guy off, especially if he was a hothead spoiling for a fight.”

“Seems consistent with that we've learned.”

“That's some good detective work, Sergeant. Thanks.”

“No trouble. We're even now.”

“That we are.”

“So that's pretty much what I know at this point. I don't know if you're any further ahead.”

“I don't know that I am either, but this does shed some light on Henry Blackwater,” said Nancy. She'd taken her cheque to the counter and paid it with a five-dollar bill. She stepped out onto the gravel in front of the Four Winds. “But, I think in the long run I might be farther behind.”

“How so?”

“I think I've got two brothers with good reason to pop their old man instead of just one.”

“So long as you know that's your problem, not mine,” said Reimer.

“For now,” said Webber. “Well, thanks for this. Now I think
I
owe
you
one.”

“I'll collect, trust me.”

Nancy hung up and went to her car. She opened the door and sat down, but left the door open. The weather was warm, the wind out of the west. It blew dust into little swirls that skipped across the road like tornadoes in training, bouncing their way between the freshly painted walls of the Longview Hotel and the rusted-out auto-repair shop next door. The sky above was streaked with oblong clouds that Nancy thought looked like spaceships. It was warm, nearly fifteen degrees, and the birds sang as if there would never be another snow again.

Walter Blackwater had said it was a chinook.

“Chinook. Isn't that just in the winter?”

“Well, technically speaking it still is,” said Walter Blackwater. They stood at the top of the ridge above the ranch, the naked branches of aspens bending in the steady wind. Nancy leaned into it a little. “But chinooks can blow year-round. They are just more dramatic in the winter. They melt all the snow. Turn a winter deep-freeze into a thaw over night.”

“You really are a park ranger, aren't you?”

“Warden. We call ourselves wardens in Canada.”

Nancy nodded, looking west toward the ridges that made up the Whaleback, a thirty-kilometre chain of hills that looked like the spine of a long, beached whale. Below, hidden by the folds of the Porcupine Hills, ran Highway 22. After that, the hills rose and fell until they pressed up against Livingstone Ridge, the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Beyond its jagged back she could see more mountains, blue and grey in the morning light, their crowns and leeward slopes still plastered with spring snow.

“That's the Continental Divide,” said Walter, pointing to a triangular shaped peak on the horizon. “That peak is called Tornado Mountain.”

Nancy nodded again, pulling the warm, dry air into her lungs. “This is a beautiful place,” she said. “It must have been amazing to grow up here.”

“The landscape couldn't be beat. Cole and I would sometimes disappear into these hills for a few days — take off when we got off the bus after school on a Friday — and show up for dinner on Sunday, sunburnt and full of bug bites and scrapes and bruises. Scared the hell out of our mother. Caught hell from our father for letting our chores go. It was worth it. Yeah, it was a pretty great place to be a kid.”

“You'd catch hell from your dad?”

“Dad was pretty much giving us hell all the time, so it really didn't matter what it was about. I don't think he knew how to deal with us boys.”

“How'd you take that?”

“Don't know what you mean.”

“I guess I just mean that must have been hard.”

“Yup, he was a tough old man. He served, you know? World War II. Before Cole or I were born. But I heard that he had a pretty rough time overseas. He never really talked about it.”

“Was he angry about something?”

“Henry Blackwater was angry about everything. Angry and frustrated as hell.”

“And did he take it out on you?”

“Cole caught the worst of it. I guess he's told you. The old man liked to use him as a punching bag sometimes.”

“Cole told me,” Nancy lied.

“I never seemed to get under the old man's skin, you know? Somehow Cole always did.”

“He's good at that. It's a skill. Hell, I've slugged him a few times,” said Nancy, sitting down and leaning against an aspen.

Walter squatted and plucked a piece of dried grass and put it in his teeth. With his stained Stetson, Wrangler jeans, and canvas coat he looked like someone out of an ad for Alberta beef. Nancy looked at him. Walter was smiling at her joke.

“I'm sorry. That was crass,” she said. The sun had crept along its arc and now spilled light like liquid honey across the convoluted folds of earth before them. In the darkness of the dales little could be seen, but along the brightly lit ridges the naked shapes of aspens and the twisted forms of pine trees were easily distinguishable. The whole Livingstone Range was bathed in the radiance.

“There's nothing a little boy could do to deserve what our old man gave us. Gave Cole.”

“It was pretty hard on you, wasn't it?”

Walter looked across at Nancy. She was watching the sun on the distant mountains. “It was. Pretty hard. I felt impotent. I couldn't stop him. I couldn't stop him from hurting Cole. And I was stupid enough to believe that he wouldn't hurt our mother, so I didn't even think to try and stop him from doing that.”

Nancy kept her focus on the distant peaks. “Did he hit your mom?”

He sighed. “I think so. In the later years. After Cole left he seemed to lose much of his rage. It was like the wind went out of his sails. But as he got older, it seemed to fester again, that anger. I only learned about it by accident. I saw Mom covering up a bruise with some makeup. She said she had fallen. But I've spent enough time reading people's eyes that I know when they're lying,” he said. “And I'm pretty sure she was.”

“Did you tell Cole?”

Walter sighed again. “No. Not me. I only found out after the old man died. I think our mom let it slip. When Cole was back here.”

“How did he take it?”

“How do you think? You know Cole.”

“Not well.”

“He confronted the old man. The rest is history.” Walter stood up, dusted off his Wranglers, and extended a hand to Nancy. “What went on between Cole and our old man that day in the barn is between the old man, Cole, and whatever god he's currently aligned with, if any at all.”

Nancy took Walter's hand and stood. “Something is eating away at Cole, Walter. He's shut down. He's put up a wall between whatever it is that's eating him and the rest of us. He's closed down from everybody who cares for him. He's terrified and angry. I'm afraid of what it might do to him, Walter.”

Walter looked across to the Livingstone Range in the distance, that space filled with golden light, deep shadows, and only a few places left unknown to a man who had lived his life exploring these hills and valleys. “I'm afraid, too,” said Walter when he finally turned to step back onto the trail that led back to the ranch house. “I'm afraid, too.”

Nancy looked up at the white cinder block wall of the Four Winds Café. Her hands were tightly wrapped around the wheel of her car. Her knuckles white. Cole, you bastard, you need to come clean, she thought to herself, or it's going to kill you. Or someone else.

Now what? she thought. Now where? I'm no farther ahead than I was when Cole called me on Saturday morning. I'm supposed to be back in Edmonton today, or I'm going to lose another reporting job. Whose fault will that be? Cole Blackwater's, she thought, tightening the grip on the wheel. She checked the time on her cellphone. It was ten-thirty in the morning. A long day already. Bloody ranchers getting up before the sun. And her with miles to go before she slept. But miles to go where?

When her cellphone rang, she screamed and jolted her arm violently, knocking it against the driver's side door, dropping the cell to the floor. She bent forward to get it and bumped her head on the steering wheel. “Jesus Christ,” she said, blindly retrieving the phone from the floor. “Webber,” she said, snapping the phone open.

“Nancy, it's Cole.”

Speak of the devil. Her mind raced. “Cole, hi. How are things in Port Lostcoast? How is Archie's family?”

“They're fine, Nancy. Things are fine. Well, not exactly fine.

Nancy, I have a problem and I need some help.”

17

The night had grown colder still. The sky was clear of clouds. To the north and west, the dim lights of Port McNeill glowed faintly on the horizon. Beyond that intrusion, Cole Blackwater could see stars beyond counting. The smear of the Milky Way was painted across the heavens, a broad tapestry behind which hung a million galaxies. Each star nothing more than a pinprick of light seen from the government dock on an island off an island on the far western shore of North America.

It had been a few hours since Constable Derek Johns had ushered him, Grace, Jacob, and Darren from the
Inlet Dancer.

“What happens next?” Cole had asked Johns.

Johns looked at the boat from the dock while he spoke. “We bring in the forensic id section from Campbell River. We'll work with the harbour master to find a dry dock for the boat, and we'll go over it with a fine-toothed comb. The forensics team has a trained serologist on staff — that's someone who specializes in things like blood — and they will do some tests on the boat. If it is blood, we'll first determine if it's human, and then if it's from Mr. Ravenwing. If we get that far, we'll need a dna sample. A hairbrush or toothbrush.”

The four friends were silent.

Cole turned to look from Constable Winters to the
Inlet Dancer.
“Does this mean you're changing the nature of the investigation?”

“No. But it does mean that the boat is off-limits now. Blood indicates trauma, and we'll need to make sure it doesn't come from fish he had on board before he went missing, that it's not a result of any … foul play.”

After leaving the
Inlet Dancer
, Cole, Grace, Jacob, and Darren ate dinner together at a pub, then found accommodation. Grace and Jacob bunked with a cousin who lived on the hilltop near the Big House on the west side of town. Darren opted to sleep on Jacob's boat. Cole found a bed and breakfast near the centre of town.

“Will you be all right?” he asked Grace.

“I'll be fine,” she said. “Fine.”

But he didn't believe her. The image of Derek Johns' tacky red fingertips kept Cole awake that night. So violent an end for Archie Ravenwing. A man who had made the sea his life should be consigned to it, thought Cole Blackwater, his breath forming vapour clouds before him as he stood at the top of the metal ramp that led to the wooden pier. But why so violently?