Running Off Radar, page 15
Maji took a leap as the harbor came into sight. “That why you haven’t asked her out?”
“Jesus, you sound like Abby now,” Taira complained, flushing. She pulled into a spot by the harbormaster’s office.
Maji didn’t wait for her to cut the engine. “Thanks for the lift,” she said and slid out.
After stopping in the office to drop the envelopes off and get direction to the Eagle Song’s slip, Maji headed for the docks. She scanned the parking lot for a gaggle of buff guys with an SUV and kayaks trying to blend in. But if the SEALs had arrived, they had taken overwatch farther away. Then Maji spotted Taira at the bottom of the ramp, heading for Dee’s boat. Damn it. She jogged down the ramp carefully, mindful not to catch her toes on the nonskid strips. As she approached Dee’s dock, Maji recognized her boat as a troller, from the tall poles on either side of the cabin, now pointing to the sky. There were similar fishing vessels on Long Island Sound, quite different from the motor yachts and pleasure trawlers also popular in both locales.
Maji caught up to Taira by the stern of the Eagle Song, her head cocked to one side, listening. Maji stopped and honed in on the sound. There was a string of expletives followed by, “Maybe you’ll tell me the depth if I put you on a line and drop you in!”
Taira’s face lit up with pleasure. She motioned for Maji to wait, then banged on the hull in a clear greeting rhythm.
“What?” came the voice from inside the cabin.
“Permission to come aboard?” Taira called out.
The salon doors leading into the cabin cracked open and an angry face appeared. Maji recognized a fierce kind of beauty to her features, a passion missing when Dee had been drugged and staggering.
When Dee recognized Olivia Taira, her expression transformed. Surprise turned almost to fear before composure wiped the slate clean. “Hey, Liv. Howzit?”
“All good here. You need a loving touch on that depth finder?”
Dee looked like she wanted to disappear back inside. But she blinked and swallowed and said, “If you’ve got a minute, sure.” She pushed the salon doors wide and stepped into the cockpit.
Taira scrambled up and into the cockpit, and Maji grabbed a side rail and swung herself on board. She landed carefully, mindful of how slippery the gutting floor could be even after a day or two at the dock.
“Who the hell are you?” Dee asked as if just noticing her.
Taira grinned and swept a hand in Maji’s direction. “Didn’t you know? This is what a guardian angel looks like.” At Dee’s blank look, she added, “Sergeant Rios saved your ass yesterday. Checking up on you today.”
“Hey,” Maji said, keeping a straight face. “Nate said you might be here.”
Dee looked down at her waterproof overalls and battered Xtratufs. “Guess I’m predictable.”
“You’ve got a business to run,” Taira said. She gestured toward the salon. “May I?”
Dee blushed. “Yeah. Thanks.”
When Taira had slipped inside, Dee closed the cabin doors and turned back to Maji. “What do you want?”
“To know what happened yesterday. What those men wanted, what they said. Anything you can tell me, really.”
Dee squinted warily at her. “You some kind of cop?”
“Army counterintelligence.” To defer any questions that might generate, Maji added, “You do know those guys were released, right?”
Dee sighed. “Yeah, I heard. What’d you want to know, again?”
“Anything you know about those guys, starting with when you first met them.”
Dee snorted. “We didn’t exactly get introduced. I was in the head up on land, getting ready to show-and-tell for the tourists, when they walked right in. Told them they were on the wrong side, and it just gets fuzzy from there.”
“Never seen them before?”
Dee shook her head.
“And they didn’t say anything before they drugged you?” Depending on what the Russians had used, Maji knew she might not remember it even if there had been an extended conversation.
Dee frowned. “They did. I just…it’s all garbled in my head. Maybe it was Russian. They wanted something—I remember that. One grabbed me, and I hit him. Why would they talk to me in Russian?”
Maji expected they had spoken to her in English and to each other in Russian. The brain would conflate the two in hindsight, unscrambling events as she cleared the toxins from her system. Or maybe never bringing the memory back in focus. “Don’t worry about it. If something comes back to you, I’d appreciate it if you’d call.”
“Why? What can you do?”
The cabin doors opened, and Taira emerged. “All good. That’ll be seventy-three dollars.” Seeing Dee’s face react, she smiled. “Kidding.” To Maji, she asked, “You need a ride back?”
“No, thanks.”
Maji made no move to leave, and Taira scrambled back over the railing onto the dock. When she turned to wave good-bye, Maji saw the two women connect briefly across the distance, before Dee glanced away.
“Thanks,” Dee said, looking at her feet before turning her eyes back to Taira on the dock. “See you at bingo?”
“Not this week. Night shift.” Taira gave them a conciliatory smile and a little wave and headed back toward her truck.
Maji watched Dee’s eyes follow the petite Coastie. “Charlie went missing the day a sport fishing boat Maydayed, right?”
“Yeah. Coasties to the rescue, like always.”
“Well, those two guys who assaulted you were also crew on that boat.”
Dee processed that information in silence, her widened eyes the only change in her studiously impassive face. “You think they killed Charlie?”
Maji shook her head. “No idea, really. But I don’t like coincidences. Intuition says whatever they were doing the day Charlie died is connected to them coming after you yesterday.”
“Well, that’s better than some bullshit about Charlie doing drugs and falling in. As if.” Her face hid none of her contempt for the idea or the people who proposed it.
“I can’t bring Charlie back. And I can’t promise we’ll end up with good answers, or justice. But if you help, I’ll try. And you will be in some danger—but not alone.”
Dee’s expression changed to disbelief, then almost to amusement. “Wow. You sell on commission?”
“Well, you don’t get rich on a soldier’s pay.”
Holding the cabin door open, Dee shook her head. “Screw it. Come on in.”
Maji stepped around the nets, traps, and lines in the wide, flat cockpit of the troller and walked into the structure that served as wheelhouse and salon combined, the main cabin above deck. Beyond the pilot’s wheel and nav station by the forward-viewing windows, a passage led into a forward cabin tucked into the boat’s bow. Dee ducked under the lintel and disappeared below with practiced movements, not inviting Maji to follow.
“Has anybody been on board, that you can tell?” Maji asked, projecting her voice. “Taken anything?”
“Nope,” Dee’s voice came back at her. “Cops tore the place up, left dusting prints on everything. Since then it’s been like I left it after cleaning up.”
Looking around the neat cabin, the papers squared away at the navigator’s desk and the single cup and plate drying on the rack by the galley’s little sink, Maji reckoned the woman would know. “What about other places Charlie used? Storage? A truck? His home?”
“Nope.” Dee stepped back up into the salon, ducking by habit as she did so. “We shared all three. I’d know.”
Huh. Maji would have sworn that AET Taira was the captain’s type. “You were a couple?”
“Couple of fools with a boat loan between us.” She squinted, then sighed. “Look, I got errands. You can come if you do what I tell you.”
“Anybody getting hurt?”
Dee laughed for the first time and her face transformed. “Talked to death, maybe. Can you shut up around old people?”
“I’m game.”
* * *
Dee drove the big diesel truck to the back of the Community House. In the large commercial kitchen, three chest coolers sat on the floor. “Grab one end.”
Maji took a handle and hefted her half out the door and onto the truck, impressed with the other woman’s strength. Dee was about her height, barely five six with a boost from her boots’ rugged soles. Fishing would require upper body strength, of course.
They loaded the first cooler in silence and went back in for the next. As the back door banged behind them, Heather popped in from the service entry. “Dee, you got time to wash down a van with me—” She stopped and cocked her head in surprise at the sight of Maji. “Hey, Ri. She sucker you into the elder run?”
“Looks like.”
Dee shrugged. “She wants to ask me questions. Got to pay to play.”
“What kind of questions?” Heather’s gentle teasing came to a screeching halt.
“About those guys. And Charlie.”
Heather crossed her arms, taking a stance Maji thought must run in the family. If stubbornness was a matrilineal trait, she bet their father won few arguments. “I heard those guys were back on the street. Maybe you shouldn’t be out.”
“I’ve never hid from assholes before. Why start now?” A flicker of a smile crossed Dee’s face. “Besides, I got a guardian angel with me.”
Heather looked torn. “Mom’s not going to like it.”
“Then don’t tell her.” Dee took a cooler handle, looked to Maji, and nodded.
Maji wasn’t about to get into whatever family politics lay beneath the exchange. If it didn’t lead her closer to Sirko, it wasn’t any of her business. She grasped the other handle and lifted in time with Dee.
Heather was still in the kitchen when they came back for the third and last chest. “Hey, you and Rose should come for dinner tonight. Mom wants to meet you two.”
“Way to sell it,” Dee said to her sister. “You don’t have to,” she added to Maji.
“No, I’d like to. Thanks. I’ll ask Rose.” She would love that, especially if they let her help in the kitchen. If today’s search took Maji back to Japonski Island instead, at least one of them could enjoy some normal people time.
Dee drove several miles out Sawmill Creek Road, Maji quietly letting her pay attention to the road. After turning up a smaller road into the hills, and then onto a rutted trail, Dee glanced sideways. “Well? Aren’t you going to ask me anything?”
“Okay. Tell me about Charlie.” Maji intentionally left the question wide open.
A minute went by. “He was alone that day. I had the flu, so he took the boat out by himself. Wanted to harvest one last haul of herring eggs before they were all gone.”
Maji kept her eyes on Dee’s profile. “How do you harvest the eggs?”
“Depends. Most commercial boats take them from kelp out in open water, then sell it with the eggs attached to the Japanese. Serious money. But we follow the old way, put hemlock trees into the water at the shoreline. Then you go out in your skiff, pull the branches up. Charlie had his favorite spots. Hardly anybody but me knew where.”
“What about your boat?” The Coast Guard had located it in their search.
“He used it to tow the skiff out, get more branches in one run. Charlie always promised a big haul, and a lot of people depended on him to deliver.”
Charlie’s big troller with the little skiff reminded Maji of the big sub with the little subs. And the Russian trawler waiting on the surface. Could they have used the Eagle Song instead, with or without Charlie’s agreement? No—the Russian trawler had made it to dry dock for salvage. So why would they have bothered? And if Charlie had stayed at a distance, why would they have paid him any mind? Not questions Dee could answer.
Then Maji remembered that Green and Kim had said the sub would have been gone before the cable pulling started. But what if it had come up and bumped the Eagle Song? Surely that would leave a dent. “Where’d the Coast Guard find your boat? And in what condition?”
Dee pulled up to a weather-beaten one-story house in a clearing. She cut the motor and turned to face Maji. “Anchored, safe and sound, in the next cove over from Charlie’s secret spot. Like he meant to come back soon.”
Okay, so not whacked by a sub then. “And the skiff? Where is it now?”
“On a trailer in Mom’s driveway. I told Nate he could use it for a while.”
If it had been her friend’s boat and she didn’t need it urgently, Maji wouldn’t have wanted to see the reminder either. “Could I take a look at it?”
Dee shrugged. “Sure. Before supper.”
Maji waited quietly in the living room of the little house while Dee helped an old woman stash large, paper-wrapped parcels in her fridge and freezer. Their words were soft, Dee’s tone mild and respectful. When she asked the old woman a question, she called her Auntie.
Across from Maji, an old man dozed in an overstuffed recliner tilted back to elevate his feet. His eyes opened to see her watching him. “Knew you’d be out today,” he said. “Like clockwork.”
Maji nodded, adding a small Dee-like smile. Either his eyesight was poor, or she wasn’t the first tagalong helper Dee had brought on her regular runs. The elder fiddled with a clear plastic tube that came around his face and settled under his nose, then leaned over and poked something by the side of his chair. A humming started up and he closed his eyes, inhaling. Oxygen. Breathing, food, and love—life’s essentials.
Dee came back into the living room followed by Auntie, and motioned with her head toward the door. Maji rose and preceded her down the front steps. She stopped by the truck and watched as Dee turned back, catching Auntie before she closed the front door. “Call if you need a ride to the doctor,” she said.
The old woman smiled and kissed Dee on her forehead, level with her face as the younger woman stood one step down. “You know it.”
The next few stops went about the same, with some bits of conversation and offers of coffee added in. Dee was gracious with all the elders but didn’t linger at any one house, always mentioning the other deliveries still to be made. Her beneficiaries seemed to understand her urgency and take it without offense.
As they pulled away from a house with several small children in addition to the adults, Maji asked, “How many households does your program feed?”
Dee frowned. “We deliver a share of the harvest to all the Tribe members who can’t fish or hunt for themselves anymore, or have a family member here who can. It’s not charity, you know. The elders are part of our Tlingit family. We take care of each other.” She sighed. “Heather explains it better.”
“Nah, I get it,” Maji replied. She thought of the surrogate grandmother in Brighton Beach who taught her Russian and how to make dishes from home. Maji smiled at the thought of cabbage rolls as traditional food. Mrs. K never asked her to work in return but did praise Maji when she carried the groceries, cleaned the kitchen, and otherwise helped out. Mrs. K asked for help without apology, told stories of her girlhood in Russia, and gave plenty of unsolicited advice. Maji could only imagine what that would have been like if she’d been Russian herself and looking to an elder to teach her who she was and where she came from. Growing up with only her parents in this country, Maji couldn’t quite stretch her imagination to being part of a community that had stayed in one place for ten thousand years, like Heather had told them on the tour. “Nobody seems to mind that I’m tagging along.”
Dee shrugged. “You’re with me. If I don’t introduce you, you must not need any explanation, eh? But you can bet there’ll be some talk later.”
* * *
The last home they visited sat up on a bluff, with a sweeping view of Sitka Sound from the front lawn. It was much larger than the rest, with a stone foundation and two stories. Big enough for several families, Maji thought. When they entered she learned why. Around her, two teens, a seven- or eight-year-old, and three toddlers worked on homework and after-school snacks. For the toddlers most of the energy went into squealing and playing with the food, which kept the kid with the shoulder-length hair and a paperback busy trying to keep them from throwing food at each other. Controlled chaos with a happy undercurrent.
The teens looked up from their schoolbooks to eye Maji with the studied indifference of adolescents. She gave them an up-nod of acknowledgment, and they blushed before returning to their homework.
“You two,” the middle-aged woman told them, “go help Dee with the coolers. Take the freezer bags out. Don’t try to lift that thing when it’s full. Hear me?”
They nodded and loped out.
“This is Ri,” Dee told her. “Came to town for that food conference. Helped me out at the harbor, and um, I invited her to see how this works.”
The woman smiled after them. “I’m Charlotte,” she said to Maji. “And you saw all of this lot at the Community House, with the Naa Kahidi Dancers.”
“Oh, yeah,” Maji replied, remembering how tiny the little toddler had seemed, bouncing to the rhythm of the music. The older kids followed actual steps, with equal enthusiasm. “They must practice a lot. The older ones.”
Charlotte looked both pleased and proud. “And they get to travel too, to competitions. Not as much time on the Highway as if they played sports, but bigger trips. It’s good, seeing the world a bit. Where you from?”
“New York City,” Maji replied.
Charlotte shuddered. “Anchorage is too big for me. Do you like it?”
“Nettie’s in the living room,” Dee announced from the kitchen doorway. “She wants to tell you something.” To Charlotte she asked, “You want these in the chest freezer?”
Maji left them in the kitchen. In the living room, she spotted a tiny, ancient woman in a rocking chair by the picture window. Maji crouched in front of her, palms on her knees. “Hi. You wanted to see me?”
Nettie looked her over, then gazed out the window. Maji wondered how much she could see out there at her age. Which could be eighty or a hundred and twenty-two. She must be the first of the four generations under this expansive roof. Finally, Nettie nodded to herself. “I seen that sub.”
“Jesus, you sound like Abby now,” Taira complained, flushing. She pulled into a spot by the harbormaster’s office.
Maji didn’t wait for her to cut the engine. “Thanks for the lift,” she said and slid out.
After stopping in the office to drop the envelopes off and get direction to the Eagle Song’s slip, Maji headed for the docks. She scanned the parking lot for a gaggle of buff guys with an SUV and kayaks trying to blend in. But if the SEALs had arrived, they had taken overwatch farther away. Then Maji spotted Taira at the bottom of the ramp, heading for Dee’s boat. Damn it. She jogged down the ramp carefully, mindful not to catch her toes on the nonskid strips. As she approached Dee’s dock, Maji recognized her boat as a troller, from the tall poles on either side of the cabin, now pointing to the sky. There were similar fishing vessels on Long Island Sound, quite different from the motor yachts and pleasure trawlers also popular in both locales.
Maji caught up to Taira by the stern of the Eagle Song, her head cocked to one side, listening. Maji stopped and honed in on the sound. There was a string of expletives followed by, “Maybe you’ll tell me the depth if I put you on a line and drop you in!”
Taira’s face lit up with pleasure. She motioned for Maji to wait, then banged on the hull in a clear greeting rhythm.
“What?” came the voice from inside the cabin.
“Permission to come aboard?” Taira called out.
The salon doors leading into the cabin cracked open and an angry face appeared. Maji recognized a fierce kind of beauty to her features, a passion missing when Dee had been drugged and staggering.
When Dee recognized Olivia Taira, her expression transformed. Surprise turned almost to fear before composure wiped the slate clean. “Hey, Liv. Howzit?”
“All good here. You need a loving touch on that depth finder?”
Dee looked like she wanted to disappear back inside. But she blinked and swallowed and said, “If you’ve got a minute, sure.” She pushed the salon doors wide and stepped into the cockpit.
Taira scrambled up and into the cockpit, and Maji grabbed a side rail and swung herself on board. She landed carefully, mindful of how slippery the gutting floor could be even after a day or two at the dock.
“Who the hell are you?” Dee asked as if just noticing her.
Taira grinned and swept a hand in Maji’s direction. “Didn’t you know? This is what a guardian angel looks like.” At Dee’s blank look, she added, “Sergeant Rios saved your ass yesterday. Checking up on you today.”
“Hey,” Maji said, keeping a straight face. “Nate said you might be here.”
Dee looked down at her waterproof overalls and battered Xtratufs. “Guess I’m predictable.”
“You’ve got a business to run,” Taira said. She gestured toward the salon. “May I?”
Dee blushed. “Yeah. Thanks.”
When Taira had slipped inside, Dee closed the cabin doors and turned back to Maji. “What do you want?”
“To know what happened yesterday. What those men wanted, what they said. Anything you can tell me, really.”
Dee squinted warily at her. “You some kind of cop?”
“Army counterintelligence.” To defer any questions that might generate, Maji added, “You do know those guys were released, right?”
Dee sighed. “Yeah, I heard. What’d you want to know, again?”
“Anything you know about those guys, starting with when you first met them.”
Dee snorted. “We didn’t exactly get introduced. I was in the head up on land, getting ready to show-and-tell for the tourists, when they walked right in. Told them they were on the wrong side, and it just gets fuzzy from there.”
“Never seen them before?”
Dee shook her head.
“And they didn’t say anything before they drugged you?” Depending on what the Russians had used, Maji knew she might not remember it even if there had been an extended conversation.
Dee frowned. “They did. I just…it’s all garbled in my head. Maybe it was Russian. They wanted something—I remember that. One grabbed me, and I hit him. Why would they talk to me in Russian?”
Maji expected they had spoken to her in English and to each other in Russian. The brain would conflate the two in hindsight, unscrambling events as she cleared the toxins from her system. Or maybe never bringing the memory back in focus. “Don’t worry about it. If something comes back to you, I’d appreciate it if you’d call.”
“Why? What can you do?”
The cabin doors opened, and Taira emerged. “All good. That’ll be seventy-three dollars.” Seeing Dee’s face react, she smiled. “Kidding.” To Maji, she asked, “You need a ride back?”
“No, thanks.”
Maji made no move to leave, and Taira scrambled back over the railing onto the dock. When she turned to wave good-bye, Maji saw the two women connect briefly across the distance, before Dee glanced away.
“Thanks,” Dee said, looking at her feet before turning her eyes back to Taira on the dock. “See you at bingo?”
“Not this week. Night shift.” Taira gave them a conciliatory smile and a little wave and headed back toward her truck.
Maji watched Dee’s eyes follow the petite Coastie. “Charlie went missing the day a sport fishing boat Maydayed, right?”
“Yeah. Coasties to the rescue, like always.”
“Well, those two guys who assaulted you were also crew on that boat.”
Dee processed that information in silence, her widened eyes the only change in her studiously impassive face. “You think they killed Charlie?”
Maji shook her head. “No idea, really. But I don’t like coincidences. Intuition says whatever they were doing the day Charlie died is connected to them coming after you yesterday.”
“Well, that’s better than some bullshit about Charlie doing drugs and falling in. As if.” Her face hid none of her contempt for the idea or the people who proposed it.
“I can’t bring Charlie back. And I can’t promise we’ll end up with good answers, or justice. But if you help, I’ll try. And you will be in some danger—but not alone.”
Dee’s expression changed to disbelief, then almost to amusement. “Wow. You sell on commission?”
“Well, you don’t get rich on a soldier’s pay.”
Holding the cabin door open, Dee shook her head. “Screw it. Come on in.”
Maji stepped around the nets, traps, and lines in the wide, flat cockpit of the troller and walked into the structure that served as wheelhouse and salon combined, the main cabin above deck. Beyond the pilot’s wheel and nav station by the forward-viewing windows, a passage led into a forward cabin tucked into the boat’s bow. Dee ducked under the lintel and disappeared below with practiced movements, not inviting Maji to follow.
“Has anybody been on board, that you can tell?” Maji asked, projecting her voice. “Taken anything?”
“Nope,” Dee’s voice came back at her. “Cops tore the place up, left dusting prints on everything. Since then it’s been like I left it after cleaning up.”
Looking around the neat cabin, the papers squared away at the navigator’s desk and the single cup and plate drying on the rack by the galley’s little sink, Maji reckoned the woman would know. “What about other places Charlie used? Storage? A truck? His home?”
“Nope.” Dee stepped back up into the salon, ducking by habit as she did so. “We shared all three. I’d know.”
Huh. Maji would have sworn that AET Taira was the captain’s type. “You were a couple?”
“Couple of fools with a boat loan between us.” She squinted, then sighed. “Look, I got errands. You can come if you do what I tell you.”
“Anybody getting hurt?”
Dee laughed for the first time and her face transformed. “Talked to death, maybe. Can you shut up around old people?”
“I’m game.”
* * *
Dee drove the big diesel truck to the back of the Community House. In the large commercial kitchen, three chest coolers sat on the floor. “Grab one end.”
Maji took a handle and hefted her half out the door and onto the truck, impressed with the other woman’s strength. Dee was about her height, barely five six with a boost from her boots’ rugged soles. Fishing would require upper body strength, of course.
They loaded the first cooler in silence and went back in for the next. As the back door banged behind them, Heather popped in from the service entry. “Dee, you got time to wash down a van with me—” She stopped and cocked her head in surprise at the sight of Maji. “Hey, Ri. She sucker you into the elder run?”
“Looks like.”
Dee shrugged. “She wants to ask me questions. Got to pay to play.”
“What kind of questions?” Heather’s gentle teasing came to a screeching halt.
“About those guys. And Charlie.”
Heather crossed her arms, taking a stance Maji thought must run in the family. If stubbornness was a matrilineal trait, she bet their father won few arguments. “I heard those guys were back on the street. Maybe you shouldn’t be out.”
“I’ve never hid from assholes before. Why start now?” A flicker of a smile crossed Dee’s face. “Besides, I got a guardian angel with me.”
Heather looked torn. “Mom’s not going to like it.”
“Then don’t tell her.” Dee took a cooler handle, looked to Maji, and nodded.
Maji wasn’t about to get into whatever family politics lay beneath the exchange. If it didn’t lead her closer to Sirko, it wasn’t any of her business. She grasped the other handle and lifted in time with Dee.
Heather was still in the kitchen when they came back for the third and last chest. “Hey, you and Rose should come for dinner tonight. Mom wants to meet you two.”
“Way to sell it,” Dee said to her sister. “You don’t have to,” she added to Maji.
“No, I’d like to. Thanks. I’ll ask Rose.” She would love that, especially if they let her help in the kitchen. If today’s search took Maji back to Japonski Island instead, at least one of them could enjoy some normal people time.
Dee drove several miles out Sawmill Creek Road, Maji quietly letting her pay attention to the road. After turning up a smaller road into the hills, and then onto a rutted trail, Dee glanced sideways. “Well? Aren’t you going to ask me anything?”
“Okay. Tell me about Charlie.” Maji intentionally left the question wide open.
A minute went by. “He was alone that day. I had the flu, so he took the boat out by himself. Wanted to harvest one last haul of herring eggs before they were all gone.”
Maji kept her eyes on Dee’s profile. “How do you harvest the eggs?”
“Depends. Most commercial boats take them from kelp out in open water, then sell it with the eggs attached to the Japanese. Serious money. But we follow the old way, put hemlock trees into the water at the shoreline. Then you go out in your skiff, pull the branches up. Charlie had his favorite spots. Hardly anybody but me knew where.”
“What about your boat?” The Coast Guard had located it in their search.
“He used it to tow the skiff out, get more branches in one run. Charlie always promised a big haul, and a lot of people depended on him to deliver.”
Charlie’s big troller with the little skiff reminded Maji of the big sub with the little subs. And the Russian trawler waiting on the surface. Could they have used the Eagle Song instead, with or without Charlie’s agreement? No—the Russian trawler had made it to dry dock for salvage. So why would they have bothered? And if Charlie had stayed at a distance, why would they have paid him any mind? Not questions Dee could answer.
Then Maji remembered that Green and Kim had said the sub would have been gone before the cable pulling started. But what if it had come up and bumped the Eagle Song? Surely that would leave a dent. “Where’d the Coast Guard find your boat? And in what condition?”
Dee pulled up to a weather-beaten one-story house in a clearing. She cut the motor and turned to face Maji. “Anchored, safe and sound, in the next cove over from Charlie’s secret spot. Like he meant to come back soon.”
Okay, so not whacked by a sub then. “And the skiff? Where is it now?”
“On a trailer in Mom’s driveway. I told Nate he could use it for a while.”
If it had been her friend’s boat and she didn’t need it urgently, Maji wouldn’t have wanted to see the reminder either. “Could I take a look at it?”
Dee shrugged. “Sure. Before supper.”
Maji waited quietly in the living room of the little house while Dee helped an old woman stash large, paper-wrapped parcels in her fridge and freezer. Their words were soft, Dee’s tone mild and respectful. When she asked the old woman a question, she called her Auntie.
Across from Maji, an old man dozed in an overstuffed recliner tilted back to elevate his feet. His eyes opened to see her watching him. “Knew you’d be out today,” he said. “Like clockwork.”
Maji nodded, adding a small Dee-like smile. Either his eyesight was poor, or she wasn’t the first tagalong helper Dee had brought on her regular runs. The elder fiddled with a clear plastic tube that came around his face and settled under his nose, then leaned over and poked something by the side of his chair. A humming started up and he closed his eyes, inhaling. Oxygen. Breathing, food, and love—life’s essentials.
Dee came back into the living room followed by Auntie, and motioned with her head toward the door. Maji rose and preceded her down the front steps. She stopped by the truck and watched as Dee turned back, catching Auntie before she closed the front door. “Call if you need a ride to the doctor,” she said.
The old woman smiled and kissed Dee on her forehead, level with her face as the younger woman stood one step down. “You know it.”
The next few stops went about the same, with some bits of conversation and offers of coffee added in. Dee was gracious with all the elders but didn’t linger at any one house, always mentioning the other deliveries still to be made. Her beneficiaries seemed to understand her urgency and take it without offense.
As they pulled away from a house with several small children in addition to the adults, Maji asked, “How many households does your program feed?”
Dee frowned. “We deliver a share of the harvest to all the Tribe members who can’t fish or hunt for themselves anymore, or have a family member here who can. It’s not charity, you know. The elders are part of our Tlingit family. We take care of each other.” She sighed. “Heather explains it better.”
“Nah, I get it,” Maji replied. She thought of the surrogate grandmother in Brighton Beach who taught her Russian and how to make dishes from home. Maji smiled at the thought of cabbage rolls as traditional food. Mrs. K never asked her to work in return but did praise Maji when she carried the groceries, cleaned the kitchen, and otherwise helped out. Mrs. K asked for help without apology, told stories of her girlhood in Russia, and gave plenty of unsolicited advice. Maji could only imagine what that would have been like if she’d been Russian herself and looking to an elder to teach her who she was and where she came from. Growing up with only her parents in this country, Maji couldn’t quite stretch her imagination to being part of a community that had stayed in one place for ten thousand years, like Heather had told them on the tour. “Nobody seems to mind that I’m tagging along.”
Dee shrugged. “You’re with me. If I don’t introduce you, you must not need any explanation, eh? But you can bet there’ll be some talk later.”
* * *
The last home they visited sat up on a bluff, with a sweeping view of Sitka Sound from the front lawn. It was much larger than the rest, with a stone foundation and two stories. Big enough for several families, Maji thought. When they entered she learned why. Around her, two teens, a seven- or eight-year-old, and three toddlers worked on homework and after-school snacks. For the toddlers most of the energy went into squealing and playing with the food, which kept the kid with the shoulder-length hair and a paperback busy trying to keep them from throwing food at each other. Controlled chaos with a happy undercurrent.
The teens looked up from their schoolbooks to eye Maji with the studied indifference of adolescents. She gave them an up-nod of acknowledgment, and they blushed before returning to their homework.
“You two,” the middle-aged woman told them, “go help Dee with the coolers. Take the freezer bags out. Don’t try to lift that thing when it’s full. Hear me?”
They nodded and loped out.
“This is Ri,” Dee told her. “Came to town for that food conference. Helped me out at the harbor, and um, I invited her to see how this works.”
The woman smiled after them. “I’m Charlotte,” she said to Maji. “And you saw all of this lot at the Community House, with the Naa Kahidi Dancers.”
“Oh, yeah,” Maji replied, remembering how tiny the little toddler had seemed, bouncing to the rhythm of the music. The older kids followed actual steps, with equal enthusiasm. “They must practice a lot. The older ones.”
Charlotte looked both pleased and proud. “And they get to travel too, to competitions. Not as much time on the Highway as if they played sports, but bigger trips. It’s good, seeing the world a bit. Where you from?”
“New York City,” Maji replied.
Charlotte shuddered. “Anchorage is too big for me. Do you like it?”
“Nettie’s in the living room,” Dee announced from the kitchen doorway. “She wants to tell you something.” To Charlotte she asked, “You want these in the chest freezer?”
Maji left them in the kitchen. In the living room, she spotted a tiny, ancient woman in a rocking chair by the picture window. Maji crouched in front of her, palms on her knees. “Hi. You wanted to see me?”
Nettie looked her over, then gazed out the window. Maji wondered how much she could see out there at her age. Which could be eighty or a hundred and twenty-two. She must be the first of the four generations under this expansive roof. Finally, Nettie nodded to herself. “I seen that sub.”
