The Darkening Archipelago Read online

  The minister smiled warmly. “No, you don’t have to tell me. The federal minister and I were just discussing it this morning. We’re doing all we can —”

  “Hear me out, Minister,” said Archie. “I’m not oblivious to the various demands, the pressures on our salmon population, and I’m aware of the argument that more salmon farms should mean less pressure on wild stocks. But the correlation doesn’t exist. Demand for both wild and farmed salmon is on the rise, despite our best efforts to talk people out of buying the farmed stuff. You’re going to have to do a whole lot more than you are right now if wild salmon are going to survive.”

  “I agree, Archie. I really do. Between us and the feds we’re starting to develop recovery strategies for pink, coho, chum, even steelhead. It takes time, and there’s a lot of politics involved, I don’t need to tell you that. We’re working toward a solution.”

  The minister stood. “I’m afraid I have a plane to catch. I really appreciate your time, all of you. Thank you.” He walked around the table again, shaking a few hands, and left the room in silence.

  “Well, there you have it,” said Jerry Cooper.

  “Yes, there you have it,” said Archie, standing to leave.

  10

  “What’s this all about?” asked Sergeant Reimer. She and Nancy Webber sat in a coffee shop near the RCMP detachment in Fort Macleod. Nancy sipped her coffee. “I’m not really sure,” she sighed.

  “You drove all the way here from Edmonton and you’re not sure?”

  “It might just be stupid. I feel a little foolish pursuing this — it’s about Cole Blackwater.”

  Reimer stiffened. “What about him?”

  “Look, I know that whole business in Oracle was bad news for you. I don’t blame you if you’re sore at both Cole and I.”

  “I’m a professional,” said Reimer, drinking her coffee. She was in plain clothes, her hair down and framing a young and pretty face. She didn’t look anything like what a small-town RCMP staff sergeant looked like in Nancy Webber’s memory.

  Nancy smiled. “Okay, well, from one professional to another, I’m looking into the death of Cole’s father, Henry.”

  Reimer sipped her coffee. “You said that on the phone. I dug up the medical examiner’s report and read it.”

  “Did you bring a copy?”

  “You know I can’t do that. If you want it there are official channels. I can tell you that the death was ruled a suicide, and that’s that.”

  “It was reported as a being consistent with suicide. Another report used the world ‘likely.’”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Cole never talked about his old man with me. Even when we were in Ottawa, you know, together, he never said a word about him. Then he left Ottawa for the west coast, stopped off for a month at the family ranch, and while he was there his father killed himself.”

  “Do you think —?”

  “I don’t think anything.”

  “But you do. You’re wondering if Cole popped his old man.”

  Nancy looked around the room. Nobody was within earshot.

  “I’m just saying that it all seems a little fishy. Why wouldn’t the local RCMP investigate?”

  “I’m just going by what’s in the file. It said that Cole heard a shotgun blast around dinnertime on a Sunday night, and when he went to the barn, he found his father lying on his back with a gaping wound under his chin. The shotgun was at his side, as was a branding iron. Apparently the old man used that to push down the trigger. It was a full-length barrel. You can’t reach the trigger and still have the muzzle against your chin. Too long. Cole called it in. The ambulance arrived first, then the RCMP.”

  “So why call it ‘likely?’”

  “You tell me. I can’t figure out why journalists write anything they do about police procedure.”

  They finished their coffee.

  “Do you mind me asking you a personal question?” Sergeant Reimer levelled her gaze at Nancy.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why are you doing this? I thought that you and Cole were, you know, close.”

  Nancy smiled. “We have been in the past.”

  “Not anymore? You spent a week at his bedside when he was recovering in Oracle.”

  “Yeah, well, he needed someone to look out for him.”

  Reimer just looked at her.

  “The truth is, I thought that maybe we were going to get back together. But he’s aloof. Distant. Distracted by something. Sometimes when we’re talking he just disappears into his head. And a few times, when we’ve been talking, he has said things that seem funny to me.”

  “Like?”

  “Just little things. Stupid things. About his father, about his family. He never talked about them before. I didn’t even know that he had a brother until recently.” She laughed. “But when he does talk about his father now, it’s really dark. He’s got so much anger in him.”

  “Was he abused?”

  “How the hell should I know? Like I said, he never said anything about his family until after his father’s death.”

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, I think you’re letting the journalist in you get the better part of your judgment.”

  Nancy turned her face and looked out the window. “Maybe.”

  “But you’re still not satisfied.”

  “I guess I’m not.”

  “Okay then. What next?”

  “Would you do me one more favour?”

  Reimer raised her eyebrows. “Depends.”

  “Will you call around the Claresholm detachment and see if you can learn anything?”

  “No promises, Nancy.”

  “Okay.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  Nancy stood up. “It’s lovely in the Porcupine Hills at this time — of year. Think I’ll take a drive.”

  She explained herself to her editor. “I need a little time,” she said.

  “What are you on to?”

  “Maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

  “But you want me to pay you to chase it down?”

  “Yup,” she said, her cellphone at her ear, steering the car with her knee as she peeled back the top of a cup of Tim Hortons coffee.

  “Two days,” he said.

  She hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Ungrateful bastard, she thought to herself. She had won a national newspaper award after chasing what appeared to every other reporter to be a dead end. She thought about Vancouver. The Sun had made her an offer. She hadn’t given them an answer. After she had met Cole for dinner all those months ago, she had attended the award banquet and the next day met with the editor-in-chief. They had discussed her career. She had been very forthcoming with him. Her precipitous decline at the Globe and Mail’s Ottawa Bureau was well known — there was no sense concealing that from anybody.

  “What do you want to do?” Frank Pesh had asked her. He was a lean man, with long fingers yellowed from a lifelong addiction to cigarettes. His longish hair, greying at the sides, was combed back over his ears. He wore very small, very stylish glasses.

  “If I could write my own ticket?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said, looking out the window of his office at Burrard Inlet.

  Nancy looked, too. Would she go back to Ottawa? she wondered. The place that had been the centre of her professional desire for so long, from where she’d been banished when she had printed Cole Blackwater’s lie, no longer seemed to hold any appeal. At least that’s what Nancy Webber told herself. “I’d write a combination of politics and human-interest stories. The human dimension behind the politics of a place.”

  “What do you know about bc?”

  “Not much. Never lived here. Don’t have a lot of contacts.”

  “Not much of an incentive to hire you,” said Pesh, smiling.

  “I can learn all I need to in two months on the job.”

  He turned and studied her. She had worn a power suit that morning, her most expensive, an
d her hair fell over her shoulders with the blue-black sheen of a raven’s back.

  “Let me think about it.”

  That happened in October. In December, just before Christmas, Pesh had called her. If she wanted to write for the Vancouver Sun there would be a job for her. Junior provincial affairs writer. She’d split her time between Victoria and Vancouver.

  She spent the holidays examining her life. And it always came back to one thing, one man: Cole Blackwater. Was she now ready to face whatever it was that Cole kept buried? So deep inside that he might not even know what it was? She didn’t want to show up in Vancouver until that dark question had been resolved.

  The landscape of southern Alberta rolled past. What had he told her before he left the province last spring? Alberta could break your heart. It was spring again, the rolling prairie was brown and wasted, the rough, dry fescue that remained was pressed flat against the earth. The sun, lying low on the western horizon, painted the prairie the colour of burnt umber. Before her, rising from that horizon, mountains appeared like a serrated spine the colour of wild roses. She thought about Cole. The man was like the landscape he had been raised in: stark, prone to extremes. One moment he was warm and kind and tender, and the next minute full of rage, a gale wind blowing snow and sleet and needling rain. It was hard to open up to that. Hard to let that into her life.

  Alberta could break your heart, all right.

  She spent the night in the Motel 6 on the highway in Claresholm, and in the morning she went to a diner to have coffee and breakfast. She sat at the counter and ate toast and drank coffee from a porcelain cup. When she was done she walked to the newspaper office, but there was nobody there, so she strolled to the library and had to wait for it to open. When it did, she asked if she could look back through their newspaper files, and tried to learn more about the death of Henry Blackwater. Instead, she read about his life, served up in public interest stories dating from the end of World War II. He had returned from England to recover from undisclosed wounds suffered on D-Day, but he never spoke about the role he had played in the landing at Juno Beach.

  In the years following the war, Henry Blackwater had won awards for his cattle, sold stock at auction, and maintained a low profile for the better part of a decade. In the 1960s, stories began to paint a different picture of Henry Blackwater. He was arrested once in 1963 and twice in 1964 for being drunk and disorderly in a Claresholm bar. In 1965 he was arrested for his role in a barroom brawl at the Longview Hotel saloon in which he broke the jaw of an oil man who had made a comment about cowboys. In 1967 he was arrested for assaulting the local Reeve from the municipality after a debate about irrigation in the district. None of the arrests resulted in Henry Blackwater being charged, or in his having a criminal record; he had settled both of the assault charges out of court. But it was pretty clear that Henry Blackwater had a reputation in the foothills as a hothead and a scrapper who would just as soon crack a man’s head as settle a difference of opinion like a gentleman. Then, after the late 1960s, Henry Blackwater’s name didn’t appear in the paper again until the 1980s, when his sons boxed at the provincial level.

  The final Blackwater stories were about Cole. In 1987 he had fought for the provincial junior welterweight championship, and had lost his final bout in a split decision. There was a picture of Cole, lean, muscled, his face stern and resolute after the loss. She searched for any resemblance to the man she now knew and could detect only vestiges of his old self in the present one.

  Like father like son, she thought. Both men solved their problems with their fists. Nancy leaned back in the plastic library chair. She rubbed her eyes. She tried to recall details of her time with Cole in Ottawa. She and Cole hadn’t been together in situations that might provoke Cole Blackwater’s hair-trigger temper. They hadn’t hung out in dark bars where loggers drank. She hadn’t witnessed any back alley confrontations with disgruntled miners. Had she seen any evidence of violence? She pressed the fingers of both hands into her temples. No, she didn’t remember a violent incident. Cole did always seem paranoid, at least when they entered a bar together, like he was looking for a fight. Or for someone who might start one. Nancy had written this off as the mark of a man cheating on his wife in a town that had no secrets. Maybe there was more to it.

  But violence? She hadn’t seen it in Ottawa.

  But things had come unravelled there, and Cole had skipped town to Vancouver. He had stopped in at the Blackwater ranch for the better part of a month, and while he was there, his father had committed suicide.

  Had Cole been abused? That was Sergeant Reimer’s question. It seemed entirely possible that loose-lipped oil men in the Longview Saloon weren’t the only ones to feel Henry Blackwater’s anger and frustration.

  What had gone wrong during those few weeks in the spring four years ago? Was it the tragic culmination of a lifetime of abuse?

  She stood up, her back sore and her feet numb from being locked around the legs of the flimsy chair for so long. It was time to find out, she thought to herself. It was time to follow this story to its source.

  11

  “Did you know what your father was up to?” Cole asked Grace Ravenwing. They were sitting together in her father’s office. Her brothers and sisters, their families, and some friends were gathered in Archie’s home. From the kitchen, over the din of pots and pans and serving utensils, were the raised voices of many cooks preparing a meal. The air was rich with the aroma of supper. Every so often, Cole and Grace were interrupted as a group of laughing children raced into the office, hiding behind various pieces of furniture — desks, chairs, tables, Cole and Grace themselves — and were subsequently discovered in a game of hide-and-seek that had been going on for more than an hour.

  “Nobody really ever knew what Dad was up to, Cole. You know how he was. He’d just go off on some foolish crusade. One month it was grizzly bear hunting, the next logging, the next mining.”

  “But salmon farming had been his cause célèbre for many years.”

  Grace nodded, tousling the hair of one of her nephews as he slid behind her to hide.

  “He didn’t tell you about the package he sent to my office?”

  “No,” she said.

  Cole was silent. The youngster who was hiding behind Grace was caught and the game started again.

  “He said in the letter that he trusted Cassandra Petrel, but that she was skeptical. What do you think he meant?”

  “Cassandra is a scientist. She’s really committed to this issue. She truly believes that sea lice are killing wild salmon, and that salmon farming is to blame. I think she might have thought my father went out on a limb sometimes.”

  “Did he?”

  “You know how Dad is — was. He really believed in his heart that what he was doing was right for his people, for our land, for the sea. Sometimes he got carried away.” Grace Ravenwing looked down as she said it. Cole took her hand.

  “This is hard, I know. I just want to honour what it was your father was fighting for.” And I want to make amends for letting him down, thought Cole, tightening his hand around Grace’s small but strong fingers.

  She looked up. “So do I,” she said, wiping a tear with the knuckles of her free hand. “So do I. Let’s talk with a few folks. I think we need to talk with Cassandra — I know we can trust her — about what Dad was up to. Maybe he told her more than he told me. And I think we should talk with Darren. I know he seems kind of simple sometimes, but Dad really loved him. They worked together for so long that if anybody knew what Dad was doing it would be him.”

  Cole let go of Grace’s hand and looked at her. “You’re very brave,” he said.

  She smiled. “I don’t think so. But I love and honour my father, and I want to ensure that whatever he was working on before he died is kept alive somehow.”

  “Grace, I can’t help but wonder about something,” Cole said.

  “What is it?”

  “Well, your father leaving his will somewhere that you co
uld find it. Don’t you think that’s, well, odd? I mean, the timing…?”

  Grace drew in a sharp breath. “I’ve been thinking about that too,” she said. “Dad never told me that he made up a will. He did say once that he should, given all the flying he was doing, going down to Victoria for meetings. He figured he might die in a plane wreck, and said he wanted to make sure this place and his boat went to family and friends. But he never discussed it with me. I don’t know why he would have got it out. Though as you can see,” she said, looking around the office with its stacks of papers and open file drawers, “Dad wasn’t exactly the most organized person in the world. Maybe he just came across it and had meant to file it soon. Or take it with him when he went to Port McNeill to put in a safety deposit box.”

  “Doesn’t really sound like Archie,” said Cole, looking around. “Shoebox, maybe. Safety deposit box, not so much.” Cole paused and looked at the sheath of papers. “Have you looked at it yet?”

  “I’m not ready,” she said. Then she thought of something. “Will you do something for me, Cole?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Your mentioning a safety deposit box makes me think of something. Dad, like a lot of the older men in our community, had a treasure box. I guess it seems kind of funny to a white person, like maybe it’s a hope chest, but it’s a very old tradition with our people. Before the potlatch was outlawed, our chiefs and elders would keep a lot of their ceremonial pieces in these boxes. Important possessions would be put in the boxes for safekeeping. The boxes were ornate, beautifully painted.

  “Anyway, Dad had such a box. It had been his father’s, and his father’s before him. I don’t think Dad had anything of real value in it anymore. A few years back, when our people were repatriating our sacred potlatch masks, Archie gave what few authentic possessions he had to the U’mista Museum in Alert Bay for display. It was just a drum and a mask, but they had been kept hidden from the Indian agents and were very important to the people of Port Lostcoast. Dad used his box mostly as an extension of his filing cabinet. Cole, I wonder if you’d go through it and see if there is anything in there that might be of help to us?”