Read Online Anarchy by James Treadwell - Free Book Online Page A

weathered barn of two significant stories. On the street side it was supposed to look like one of the big houses the coastal people used to live in. They’d decorated its long flat windowless front with a mythical creature painted in the distinctive northwest coastal manner and put up a kind of statue in front in the same traditional style.
    As she got out of the car, Goose saw that both the painting and the statue had been defaced.
    They must have used charcoal. The effect was worse on the painting, where both heads of the double-headed serpent thing had been all but blotted out. The statue was in the shape of two bearlike creatures supporting a pole across their shoulders, and a bird—probably a raven, Goose knew they were big on ravens—sitting on the pole. All three animals had been smeared black around their mouths. Margaret Sampson was close to tears. “It’s so disrespectful,” she kept saying, as Goose opened her notebook. “They should be ashamed.”
    â€œWhen did this happen?”
    â€œThis morning.” They all agreed. “Just now.”
    â€œJust now?”
    One of them had walked by not half an hour ago, she said. “Plain daylight.”
    â€œBut someone must have seen something?”
    They looked at each other. No one had seen anything.
    â€œYou’re sure this happened in the last half hour?”
    â€œAbsolutely sure.”
    A man walking with a cane had come out of one of the ramshackle houses nearby. “Hey, are you the police?”
    â€œOfficer Maculloch, sir. From Hardy.”
    â€œYou gonna fix the TV?”
    â€œWhy don’t you keep quiet?” one of the women asked.
    â€œTV isn’t working.”
    Goose concentrated on Mrs. Sampson. “No one saw anything at all? It might not have been kids. Anyone on the street? A car?”
    â€œKeeps showing junk.”
    â€œWill you be quiet?”
    Goose stepped away to give herself some room and found herself looking out across the bay. It was the same kind of day it had been ever since she’d arrived, as wet as the weather could be without rain, the clouds like a misty lid resting on top of the world, everything you looked at—sea, sky, trees, or the abrupt sawtooth silhouette of the mainland peaks far across the water—a variation on the underlying green-grey. Like every other stretch of the fifteen-hundred-kilometer waterway that ran tight under the mountainous shadow of the continent’s northwest coast, the bay was studded with islands, overlapping each other in perspective so that water, rock, and damp conifer forest blended together in the middle distance as if they were all the same substance. In the summer, so they told her, there’d be cruise ships going up and down the Inside Passage every day, and cruising yachts stopping off in all the bays, but all Goose had ever seen offshore was the endless indistinct jumbled wilderness.
    Until now. A single yellow kayak was splashing toward the islands, its small dark-haired pilot little more than a smudge even though it couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred meters out.
    Her stomach knotted.
    â€œI need a boat.”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œA boat. I need a boat. Who can lend me a boat?”
    â€œOfficer Maculloch.” Mrs. Sampson wasn’t the kind of person who forgot names. “This is a crime.”
    â€œWhere’s the crime?” asked the man with the cane, momentarily distracted from his malfunctioning TV.
    â€œRight here in front of your nose, you old fool.”
    â€œThis is urgent. Police matter.” Goose shouldered away from the small women’s offended dignity toward the beach. She couldn’t be sure what she was seeing, and yet she was sure, somehow; who else would be paddling steadily away into the misty emptiness? She scanned the town for a vessel. In Hardy and Alice there always seemed to be trailers pulled up by the landings, people’s fishing boats