“Pete,” Jo said, setting the bottle down with a satisfied smack and burping without apology. “My managing editor. He wants me to check out your story. I need to talk to Liam. He didn't answer at the post.” To Tim she said, “You know which slip theDawn Pis tied up at?”

He shook his head. “There's a map at the head of both ramps. It'll show you.”

“You want to walk down with me?”

He brightened. “Sure.” He looked at Wy. “Can I, Mom?”

“Why not?”

“Great,” Jo said, reaching for the Killian's again. She paused with it halfway to her mouth. “You could come with us.”

Wy shook her head. “Not just now. I was going to go down the bluff to the river, see if I could catch us a few late reds or a couple of early silvers. I want to get some in the can before they all get up the river.”

Jo waited until Tim's head was turned before mouthing the word, Coward.

Tim groaned. “Salmon sandwiches for school again.”

“Just for that, you little ingrate, I'm telling Moses I want ten gallons of blueberries, not five, when he brings you back from fish camp, and guess who gets to pick them?”

Tim groaned again.

“Life's tough all over, kid,” Jo said. “Now hurry up and finish, I want to catch up to that trooper.”

“Are you writing a story?”

“Sure am,” Jo said, rising to carry her plate to the sink.

“What about?” Tim said, following her.

Jo dropped her voice to a deep baritone filled with terrible secrets. “Murder and mayhem on the high seas, me boy.”

“Wow!” he said, brightening. “You mean like pirates?”

Jo paused in the act of putting dishes in the dishwasher. “Maybe,” she said slowly. “Maybe, by god. Anything's possible on the Bay.”

Before the door closed behind them, Wy heard Tim ask, “Jo, what's an ingrate?”

THIRTEEN

Back at the post, Liam assembled two piles of evidence. One pile consisted of Nelson's notebook, the pencil drawings he'd made of the scene of Nelson's death, the notes he'd made after talking to Frank Petla, Wy, Prince and McLynn. The other pile consisted of the notes he'd taken at Kulukak, the picture of the Malone family sailing in Hawaii, the notes of the conversations with the Kulukak elders, Bill, Tanya and Ballard, the tender summary, the two rolls of film he'd taken of theMarybethia.The film would have to go into Anchorage by pouch tomorrow morning for development into trial exhibits. He wouldn't need to see the photographs. The scene was etched on the gray matter of his mind for life.

It was after eight o'clock in the evening. The day was three hours away from sunset. He thought about going over to Wy's. He had this need to see her, to breathe her air, to feel her flesh beneath his hands. It was growing stronger with every day, and half the time when he started going somewhere in the Blazer he'd find himself on the road to her house.

He picked up the local paper and turned to the classifieds. There was an actual house for sale, south of town on the road to Chinook, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a five-acre lot. Neither price nor location was listed. He dialed the number.

The phone rang once. The voice that answered was male and brusque. “Yeah?”

“Hi, my name's Liam Campbell. I was calling about the ad in the paper. The house for sale?”

“What's your driver's license number?”

Liam blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“What, you don't understand English? I asked you what your driver's license number was. And I don't got all day.”

Liam found himself fishing out his wallet. He read the number off, and waited.

“Huh. You born here?”

“Germany.”

“Huh. Army brat, I suppose.”

“Air Force, actually,” Liam said, struggling not to sound apologetic. “We moved to Anchorage that year.”

“Huh.” The syllable was disparaging.

Liam maintained a hopeful silence. Although it was heresy to admit in Alaska, he kind of liked Anchorage, but he wasn't going to say so if liking Anchorage was going to make the man on the other end of the line deem him an unsuitable candidate to purchase the house.

“Well, you can come over and look at it, but I ain't making no promises. Somebody comes along with a lower number, I give them first consideration.”

“Right,” Liam said. “Makes perfect sense. I understand completely.” He paused. “Okay. No, I don't. Mind telling me why?”

“I guess you really don't understand English, do you? The lower your driver's license number, the longer you been in the state. The longer you been in the state, the more likely you are to stay. If you look like a stayer, you get the house. If you don't, forget it. When you coming over?”

“How about tomorrow morning?” Liam said meekly.

“Can't, I'll be out fishing. Next Monday. Nine a.m. And don't be late.”

“Wait! I need directions!”

There was a grunt, and then directions, grudgingly given.

“And what's your name? Sir? Sir?”

The dial tone was his reply. He replaced the receiver, wondered what was going to happen on Monday, remembered waking up on theDawn Pthis morning and decided that if the house had working plumbing and a good roof, he would take it, no matter what kind of price had been hung on it.

There was one other house listed for sale in the paper, in Manokotak, forty miles west by air, which, according to the ad, needed a lot of work, was ineligible for financing and was available for rent for fifteen hundred a month with an additional month's rent for a security deposit, but only until the owner found a buyer. If it had running hot and cold, Liam might have been interested.

On the other hand, there were three boats for sale, two thirtytwo-foot drifters and a fifty-four-foot seiner. One drifter was going for fifty thousand or best offer, one for two hundred thousand if you bought the permit, too, and the seiner for eighty, although the electronics needed replacing.

He folded the paper and put it down. Bristol Bay was looking at a fifty percent bankruptcy rate for fishermen these days, what with the vanishing salmon runs and the rise of farmed salmon everywhere but Alaska, where farmed salmon was out-lawed. A lot of people were making career-changing decisions, including sons and daughters whose families had made their livings on the Bay since back before engines were legal and all the Bay drifters operated under sail. It was anybody's guess what would happen next.

It didn't mean the availability of real estate was going up, or its price coming down, though.

His stomach growled. One of Bill's burgers sounded about right, but Bill's Bar and Grill was a public place. You never knew who you might run into there. He decided he was more in the mood for the deli takeout at the NC market, and a cozy evening at home with a couple of fingers of Glenmorangie and a good book.

Even if that home was slowly sinking into the boat harbor, one inexorable inch at a time.

An hour later, he'd settled back with a porcelain mug half full of single-malt scotch and a copy ofPillar of Fireby Taylor Branch, a historian who managed to combine scholarship with a talent for writing. Liam liked reading history, and it wasn't often he came across the two skills in the same package. He piled pillows in back of his head and paged through the preface to chapter one. He always read prefaces and prologues and introductions after he'd read the book. Partly he was impatient to get on with the story, partly he didn't want anything in the book spoiled for him, partly he didn't care how many people the author wanted to thank and partly he just wanted to get on with it.

He got on with it, and the scotch was down by half when he reached page 26 and first mention of Eugene T. “Bull” Connor, police commissioner in Birmingham, Alabama, whose actions in the late fifties and early sixties were still being lived down by police departments all over the nation. Liam had seen videotapes of the Birmingham police using fire hoses and German shepherds to quell demonstrators, most of them black, most of them nonviolent. They hadn't needed quelling, but then that hadn't been the point. Liam thought of Rodney King and wondered when America was going to get it right.