The Darkening Archipelago Read online

One thing Edmonton and Ottawa had in common was cold, hard winters, winters that seemed to stretch from November right through to April, even May in a bad year. But if Nancy Webber was honest with herself, she would admit that Edmonton’s winters were even worse than Ottawa’s. They were longer and the city was bleaker, lacking the romance of skating on the Rideau Canal and the quick escape to the pretty Gatineau Hills. Sure, you could drive to Jasper, but it took about four hours if the roads were clear. And from November until well into spring, you couldn’t count on bare roads.

  March in the nation’s capital meant that tulips were just around the corner. It meant Saturday mornings in ByWard Market, shopping for that night’s dinner, buying fresh flowers, and stopping for a coffee to read her own reporting in the Globe and Mail. March in Edmonton meant grey skies and sleet. Sometimes Edmonton would catch the northern edge of a chinook and the snow would melt, but a hard freeze would still turn the city into an ice rink the next day, and not the kind where Beaver Tail shops were just around the next frozen bend.

  Nancy sat at her favourite table in the window of the Star-bucks at the corner of Jasper Avenue and 100A Street, just a dash through traffic to the editorial offices of the Edmonton Journal. She sipped a latte — nothing fancy, just a latte, thank you — and read the Saturday papers.

  Outside, the sky hung like a tattered grey tapestry over the city. The temperature hovered around freezing, but the wind off the Saskatchewan River made it feel much colder. If it would only warm up a little, thought Webber while sipping her coffee, she might be motivated to go for a run along the river valley that afternoon. But as it was, she was more likely to end up at her office, working on a feature about homeless people in the capital.

  She finished the front section of the National Post and began to leaf through the Globe and Mail. The paper still held a strong allure for Nancy Webber, though it had been more than four years since she had penned a story for it. She read an article about the country’s new prime minister, who was doing what every prime minister since Pierre Elliot Trudeau had done — concentrating power in the Prime Minister’s Office. Nothing new. No news. She read a story about the everlasting conflict between Israel and every other country in the Middle East, and about the war in Iraq. It seemed to Nancy that there was no news anymore. Just olds. The same old stories told again and again and again. Maybe that was why she felt like her job was becoming harder and harder.

  She sipped her coffee and flipped the page. She scanned the “Canada in Brief” section. Three stories down, she stopped and read a short blurb.

  “Fuck,” she said out loud, and a woman reading a novel at the next table looked up. Nancy smiled apologetically and dug out her cellphone.

  She held the phone for a full minute before flipping it open and activating the search function, scrolling for the number. Finding it, she hesitated so long that the phone turned itself off again.

  “What the hell,” she said, eliciting another curious look. She turned on the phone and dialled the number.

  He answered as he always did. “Blackwater.”

  “Cole, it’s Nancy.”

  There was a momentary silence. Then, “Hey, Nancy.”

  “Cole, I just read that Archie Ravenwing is presumed dead. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, it’s some pretty bad news. I’m sorry, too.”

  “When did you talk with him last?”

  Cole told her. “It’s been a while.”

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, Cole. That’s the way the world is. Some people we talk to all the time, some we don’t.”

  She heard him draw a long breath. Exhaling, he said, “It’s a bad habit with me, Nancy. I let things slip. Let people slip.”

  Nancy drew a breath. “How is Sarah?” she asked, knowing that Cole was sensitive about staying connected with his daughter. “How old is she now? Like ten?”

  “She’s nine, going on nineteen. And she’s good, thanks for asking. She’s actually here right now, cooking me breakfast as usual.”

  Nancy laughed. “I hope she didn’t have to drag your sorry ass out of bed again, Blackwater.”

  “My butt isn’t so sorry these days, Webber. I’ll have you know I came this close to winning a fight last night.”

  “Another Friday night at the Cambie, Cole?”

  “In the ring, wise guy. I almost had Frankie Fingers on the mat when I got the call about Archie.”

  “Frankie Fingers? You’re kidding me.”

  “No, really. I had him on the ropes, and, well.…”

  “The fights just haven’t been the same since they let you guys take your cellphones into the ring, have they?”

  Cole laughed. “You know what I mean. Anyway, I’m feeling pretty good.”

  “That’s saying something for you.”

  “It is.”

  A silence hung there for a moment. Then Nancy said, “Well, I just wanted to call and tell you how sorry I am. He was a good man.”

  “You met him when he was at the a fn?”

  “That’s right. I covered a couple meetings he attended when he was on the Assembly of First Nations. Back in the bad old days.”

  “Right,” said Cole, not wanting to delve too deeply into just how bad the old days had been.

  “He was a stand-up guy as I recall. Always high class. Eloquent. Really cared about his people.”

  “He was also a pompous prick who got under the skin of nearly everybody who knew him,” said Cole.

  “Well, there’s a lot of that out there,” quipped Nancy. “I know a few pompous pricks myself.” She took a breath as Cole didn’t respond. “Are you going up? The paper said there would be a traditional ceremony this week.”

  “I am. I’m actually flying as far as Port Hardy tonight, then catching a charter to Parish Island and Port Lostcoast in the morning. I guess some muckety-mucks arranged for a few flights straight into Lostcoast, so I lucked out. Maybe I’ll be sitting next to the minister or some other big cheese. You’re not covering this by any chance, are you?”

  “No. I don’t know if the chain is going to have someone there or if they’ll just make something up and file from Vancouver.”

  “Okay,” said Cole, distracted.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “No reason. Just asking.”

  “You sure?” she pressed.

  “Of course I’m sure. I was just making conversation,” he said, sounding testy.

  Talk about pompous jackasses, she thought. “Sorry. Forget I asked.”

  Silence again. Finally Cole broke it. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just still in shock about Archie. I need to get my things together, hang here with Sarah for a little while, and then head for the airport. I’ll call you from Lostcoast and let you know how things go at the potlatch if you like. Keep you in the loop.”

  “Only if you want to. Otherwise, give my condolences to his family, will you?”

  “I will. I’m staying with his youngest daughter, Grace, at Archie’s place. It’s going to be a little strange.”

  “Take care of yourself, Cole,” she said. What she wanted to say was, “Don’t drink and get in too many fights,” but she knew there was no sense trying to change that.

  “Okay, Nancy. Thanks for calling.” The line went dead.

  The man was a mystery to her.

  She finished her latte and stepped out onto Jasper Avenue, pulling her coat collar up around her cheeks and hurrying down the street, the wind whipping her long, raven hair all around her. To hell with the run, she thought, crossing the street to her office.

  She rode the elevator to the fourth floor and made her way through the maze of cubicles that was the Journal’s newsroom to find her own little box awaiting her. The room was quiet. Only a few reporters came in on Saturday, since the paper published only a slim edition on Sunday. She sat down in her straight-backed chair and turned on her computer. She knew that Cole would feel guilty about not keeping in touch with Archie Ravenwing. He let that kind of thing get to him. When he
was away from Sarah, he got pretty agitated if he didn’t talk with her every other day. And God help those around him if he forgot to call for more than a few days in row.

  Nancy Webber wondered if it got to Cole Blackwater when he was out of touch with her.

  “Now that’s a stupid thought,” she said out loud.

  Just the same, how long had it been since she had seen him? Since the debacle in Oracle last May, she had found only one excuse to see him — the National Newspaper Awards in Vancouver. She had been nominated for an award in the investigations category for her work on the murder of Mike Barnes and the small-town politics that had swirled around his killing. That murder had brought Cole Blackwater back into her life, and their reunion had been volcanic. The wounds of their time together in Ottawa were reopened and some blood was shed. But in the end they had formed a working truce to get to the bottom of the man’s untimely death. And by the time the case was closed, they had actually begun to feel something for one another again. Or so Nancy believed.

  So when she had arrived in Vancouver for the awards, she had called Cole. They had met for dinner at the Raincity Grill on Denman Street near her hotel.

  “How was your visit to your mother’s place?” she had asked as they sampled albacore tuna and honey mussels before their main course.

  Cole sat across from her. He still looked like a hoodlum, his dark hair falling in ragged curls over his forehead. That night he had worn a dark patterned shirt that had been pressed for the occasion, and a glint in his eyes that she hadn’t seen since their days together in Ottawa. It wasn’t exactly light, that glimmer — there was something mischievous, or perhaps sinister, in that flash.

  Other things seemed different, changed. His face was leaner, and the dark scars that still crossed his cheek and eyebrow made him look dangerous. They would fade with time, she thought, but now, only five months after those jagged imprints had been made, they told a dark story. And Nancy wondered, looking at him across from her, if the darkness that seemed to have flourished would ever recede. Was it just the Mike Barnes affair, or was it something else?

  “It was fine,” he said, sampling the beef tataki. “This is good. I wish there was more than just one spoonful.” He drank from his bottle of Heineken.

  “That’s all I get? It was fine?”

  “What’s there to tell? The old ranch is just as it’s always been. Nothing to report.”

  “Did you see Walter?”

  “Yup, he was there for most of Sarah’s and my stay. We rode together a few times, which was great. I’ll tell you, keeping up with my older brother, be it in the saddle or on foot, is a heck of an incentive to get back in shape.”

  “You look good, Cole.”

  “You do too.”

  She thought she did. She’d been running and going to the gym, and she’d had her hair done that afternoon at a place on Robson Street in preparation for the awards ceremony the next night.

  “You know, I really don’t know anything about your family,”

  she said, sipping her red wine. He topped up her glass from the bottle of Ravenswood Zinfandel on the table.

  “Not much to tell, really.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “My mom is pushing seventy now, but is still hale and hardy. Walter is forty going on twenty-five. Still working for the Parks Service in Waterton Lakes. Puts the cows out each spring, rounds them up every fall. Keeps the ranch a working proposition, though it’s really just to maintain our grazing lease. We don’t make any money on the operation. Hardly ever did. Even when Dad was running it.…” His voice trailed off, and he filled the space with a long pull from his bottle of beer.

  Nancy sat and watched him. A beautiful young woman with blonde hair and emerald eyes took away the plate of appetizer spoons. Nancy looked up at the server and then back at Cole. “You were saying?”

  Cole had been looking at the woman, too. He pursed his lips. “Only that the ranch is still a working outfit, but only for show.”

  “You were saying that your father could never make a go of it.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about my father,” said Cole, looking sideways and shifting in his seat.

  “You are an enigma to me, Cole Blackwater.”

  “Yeah, well, to me too,” he said, returning her gaze.

  The blonde served their dinners. Cole ate grilled venison tenderloin with a black trumpet mushroom and lentil ragout, with turnips and brandy jus. He had had to ask the waitress what a ragout was, and then what a jus was, but it was mostly to flirt, Nancy figured. She watched him wash his food down with another bottle of Heineken.

  Nancy dined on wild coho salmon with yam purée, sherry-glazed radish, and daikon. She enjoyed her Zin. They ate in silence, in part to savour the meal, in part to let the awkwardness pass.

  After dessert they made their way out onto Denman Street and strolled toward Burrard Inlet. It was warm, and the street was busy with tourists and locals enjoying the temperate evening and the light before the cold grey of winter set in. They walked along the seawall toward Stanley Park and sat on a bench as the sun sank low.

  Nancy didn’t know where the nerve came to ask, but she did.

  “What happened to your father, Cole?”

  He sat implacably beside her, looking across the inlet at the North Shore Mountains, the fading light touching the houses and high-rises that swarmed the slopes of the lower hills. He sat that way for a long time, his face in shadow as the sun slipped below the horizon.

  She touched his arm. “Cole?”

  He turned his head toward her as if awakening from a dream. His eyes were vacant.

  “Cole, what happened to your father?”

  “It’s really none of your business, Nancy. It’s a family thing.” His tone was flat, expressionless.

  “You need to talk about — ”

  “I don’t need to do anything, Nancy.” He stood. “I’ll walk you to your hotel.”

  — Nancy Webber sat at her desk and let her fingers trail across the National Newspaper Award she had won that evening. Did Nancy Webber believe in redemption? Not as others might. But she did believe in resurrection, and winning the award had certainly contributed to her own slow-but-sure phoenix-like rise from the ashes of defeat. The irony was that Cole Blackwater had led her to the story that led to the award, and that disturbed her. Had he not been responsible for her precipitous fall from grace? It had been his fabrication about a major government environmental initiative that had got her fired when she printed the false story. Of course, it was more than that, Nancy admitted to herself. Pillow talk with a married man and the scandal it produced on the Hill has also contributed to her being fired from her dream job.

  Nancy reluctantly admitted to herself that she would never have dug into the story of Mike Barnes’ murder if Cole hadn’t encouraged her to do so. She sighed at the thought. In the years since her estrangement from Ottawa, she’d grown lazy and complacent. But something happened in Oracle that rekindled her excitement for investigative journalism. Her three-part series that chronicled the swirl of intrigue, deception, corruption, and politics that surrounded Barnes’ death won her the award. It had opened doors, too. The Journal gave her better assignments, and she was free to write her own ticket again, and to follow her reawakened instincts more and more.

  Something else had been rekindled in Oracle, but when she and Cole had been together in Vancouver last fall, it had seemed more dormant than alive. And she had plunged in with her reporter’s zeal, probing him about his father, knowing he wore that wound openly on his sleeve. Nice move, Webber, she thought.

  Nancy turned on her computer and checked her email. She scanned a few newswires for anything about Archie Ravenwing and found nothing. She looked at the North Island Advocate website, which served the tiny communities hunched together on the northeastern edge of Vancouver Island. There she found a feature on the life of Archie Ravenwing.

  She read that he had been born into a family of seven children, that his
father was a salmon fisherman, and his mother worked at odd jobs in Alert Bay and Port McNeill when she wasn’t busy with her four boys and three girls. Archie himself had been a salmon fisherman for his entire adult life, first taking over his father’s boat and then buying his own small vessel about a decade ago. In the last six years he had started to operate salmon fishing tours from that boat for tourists, taking them into Knight Inlet and Tribune Channel to fish for pink salmon. Neither the boat nor Archie Ravenwing’s body had been recovered yet. There would be a traditional potlach ceremony on Tuesday. Gary Kwakana, the band chief of the North Salish First Nation, would lead the ceremony. Greg First Eagle, the representative on the band council for Parish Island and Port Lostcoast, would also be in attendance, as would representatives of the provincial government.

  And so would Cole Blackwater. Nancy felt Cole’s loss. Archie had been more than a client to Cole. He had been a friend.

  She closed the browser for the North Island Advocate and opened the website for the High River Tribune. She quickly found the archive section and was pleased to see that she could search for stories as far back as 2001; Cole had travelled west in 2002. She knew that he had stopped at the family ranch in the Porcupine Hills, south and west of High River, and that his father had passed away while he was visiting.

  She searched for “Henry Blackwater” and found an obituary. What she read unnerved her.

  No wonder Cole didn’t want to talk about his father. His obit revealed that he had taken his own life with a shotgun. Suicide was “the likely cause of death,” the story said. He had used a branding iron to pull the trigger. And the story left the distinct impression that Cole had found the body.

  “You must have been one miserable old fuck,” said Nancy, looking for follow-up stories that confirmed the medical examiner’s initial impression of suicide. “To kill yourself and leave your body for your family to find. No wonder Cole hates you.” She searched through several other stories about the death of Henry Blackwater but found no further reference to the cause of death. Nancy went to the staff kitchen for a cup of coffee. The cream curdled at first but she stirred it in and sipped. Not too bad.