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So of course none of this could be happening to her. It was a dream, a bad one, from which she would soon wake up, warm and safe in her own bed.
All she had to do was wait.
Old Man Creek, September 3
The second morning began the same way the first had, with tai chi and a sweat. Afterward, Moses put Tim and Amelia in the skiff and took them down to his favorite fishing hole.
Bill sat on the front porch with a lap full of files that needed closing after the latest spurt of infractions during the most recent fishing period. She regarded the thick pile with some disfavor, wondering if perhaps she wouldn’t rather be hip deep in fish gurry after all.
Bill was in the business of justice, not retaliation, and she evaluated every case brought before her with the same care and attention. The problem was, the fishermen against whom fish and game trooper Charlene Taylor swore out complaints kept saying the same things, over and over again, until they sounded like a sixth grader excusing the loss of his homework. The engine broke. The trooper didn’t give us the signal. My clock stopped. The bilge pump went out. The engine broke. The mechanic got seasick. The net got caught in the prop. The engine broke.
So far Bill had heard every excuse except “My dog ate it,” and it was difficult to summon up the necessary compassion to temper the letter of the law and still enforce it. Her problem was she had no tolerance for fools, and after sitting on an average of three hundred such cases every summer, along about August most of the fishers looked pretty foolish.
First file, Gary Samidia, fishing over the line, two-thousand-dollar fine, four points on his fishing license. Another four and he wouldn’t fish next year. Eric Redden, nets in the water before the period started. It was his second time before her that summer and the third time in two years, and she was tired of smelling his unwashed self in her courtroom, which was very small and lacked ventilation. Three thousand dollars, five hundred suspended, and six points. Silas Wood, spotted from the air with his nets in the water a good hour after the period on Friday before last. He’d pled a burst hydraulic line, and had held up a length of tubing that he swore was the guilty party. Silas, Silas, Silas, you dumb son of a bitch, if you take all the fish before they hit the creeks, there won’t be any left alive to spawn and send chilluns back out to sea.
Still, Silas had lost his wife two years before and was now the sole support of seven children, all under twelve years of age. One thousand, seven hundred fifty suspended, no points, and forty-five hours of community service. Bill had already talked to the high school principal. Silas would serve out his sentence in the computer lab there, proctoring the fall semester’s students during the day and at night receiving some tutoring in the finer arts of data entry. Mayor Jim Earl was chivvying the town council into hiring another clerk for City Hall, and Bill was pretty sure he would succeed.
She put aside the stack of fishing violations with relief and made herself a cup of coffee. By the time she came back out on the porch, Moses had returned with the two kids and a boatload of fish, and they were unloading down at the dock. She stood watching for a few moments, sipping at her mug. Tim liked cleaning fish and he was good at it, the tip of the knife inserted in the anus, the quick slit up the belly, the efficient scooping out of guts. Amelia was equally efficient, if a little slower. Lack of practice, probably. She hadn’t been out to her family’s fish camp this summer. Her husband wanted her home. Probably to use as a punching bag.
Bill sighed and sat back down, setting the mug on the railing and picking up a single legal file sitting separate from the others.
It was the record of a presumptive death hearing, the results of which the parents of the deceased were challenging. A young man, one of a youth group affiliated with a Presbyterian church out of Akron, Ohio, who had come to Alaska for a lesson in wilderness experience, had gone hiking with three friends on a glacier in the Wood River Mountains. The young man had gone for water and disappeared, and after four days Liam Campbell had called off the search and requested a hearing on the presumptive death of the young man.
At the hearing, he had displayed photographs of the area, photographs of the pot lying on its side next to a sluggish stream of meltoff, a map with distances penciled in showing a narrow, easily overlooked and seemingly bottomless crevasse a few feet away from which Liam reported the sound of a lot of water ru
The parents had flown up from Akron, and they fought Bill’s finding of death by misadventure every step of the way. They reported quarrels between the hikers, a grudge held against their son by another of the hikers, whose girlfriend their son had taken, and even floated the idea that the instructor had harbored feelings of animosity and possibly homicide toward the boy because of some disagreement over grades back in McKinley High School.
Bill understood; it was difficult to accept the fact that your golden boy had tripped over his own feet and fallen headfirst into a glacier, never to be seen again. There was no sense in that kind of death. Better foul play, a murder, an event that would give them someone to blame, to punish.
Presumptive death hearings were Bill’s least favorite duty. When a fisher was lost at sea, when a climber died on Denali, when a plane was lost in the Bush, and when the bodies of the fishers and the climbers and the fliers were unrecoverable, a presumptive death hearing was held. Most of the time the procedure gave the families some closure, the insurance companies the go-ahead to pay off policies and the lawyers permission to file for probate.
Sometimes, though, the families could not or would not accept the inevitable.
Like Lyle Montgomery. The first of the month, every month, he called, looking for his daughter. He didn’t weep anymore during his phone calls. Bill couldn’t decide if it was worse now than when he had. You wanted to do your best for the families and especially the parents. You wanted to give them a way to put their missing children to rest and a chance to get on with their lives. Some accepted your help. Some did not.
They’d never found Ruby Nunapitchuk, either, lost on a hunting trip eight years before. Opal and Leonard had handled their loss better than Lyle Montgomery had his, though. Probably helped that they lived in the Bush, and knew the risks inherent in a Bush lifestyle. Probably also helped that they’d had three other children, and grandchildren shortly thereafter.
A hand grabbed her hair and pulled her out of her melancholy reverie. She saw daylight for approximately one second before it was blotted out by Moses’ grin. He kissed her, completely and thoroughly, and as always she felt the world go a little fuzzy around the edges, as if everything else went out of focus when he stepped into the frame.
He pulled back, inspected her and seemed satisfied. “You looked sad.”
“Do I now?”
“No,” he said smugly, and she had to laugh.
He took the file from her hand and tossed it behind him without noticing where it fell. “You can either work on your trip to New Orleans, or you can help us get the fish into brine. Your choice.”