The Darkening Archipelago by Stephen Legault Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œCole, what happened to your father?”
    â€œIt’s really none of your business, Nancy. It’s a family thing.” His tone was flat, expressionless.
    â€œYou need to talk about — ”
    â€œI don’t need to do anything, Nancy.” He stood. “I’ll walk you to your hotel.”
    â€” 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