Free The Darkening Archipelago by Stephen Legault

Bay, schmoozing everything with a pulse.” She laughed, and Cole thought she sounded just like her father when she did. “He’s a dirt bag. I think he means well, but there is something about the way he does things that’s just, well —”
    â€œSlimy?”
    â€œYeah,” she said, opening Cole’s door as he hoisted his bag into the cluttered bed of the truck. The box was strewn with fishing nets, broken paddles, floats, assorted tackle, a dented and rusty tool box, and an assortment of beer cans and soda bottles.
    â€œDad’s truck,” said Grace, seeing Cole take inventory. “Bit of a pig. I only drive it once in a while. I thought you might have had more luggage, or I would have walked.”
    â€œI like to keep stealthy. You know, slip in and out of town without any fuss.” Cole grinned.
    â€œI remember….” Grace said, not smiling.
    Red faced, Cole got in the cab and kicked a space on the floor for his feet. Grace slid in behind the wheel. “The only part of his life that wasn’t a junk heap was his boat. I’ve managed to keep the house in one piece since Mom died, but it’s been a Herculean task.” The truck rattled to life and Grace piloted it up the hill and between houses whose colourful paint jobs were weathered and chipped from the winter gales that howled down the Queen Charlotte Strait and over tiny Parish Island. Grace piloted the truck up a steep hill, past an exposed cliff face, and onto a hillock where seagrass blew in the light breeze.
    They parked in front of a ramshackled home that looked as though it was a perpetual work in progress. The original house was squat and sturdy, and two new wings jutted out on either side, one built into the rocky hillside devoid of trees and scoured by the ocean winds, the other built on stilts on the side of the cliff where it plunged down to the harbour. A broad deck, lacking a railing, circled that addition, twenty feet above the rocks below.
    â€œDad called it the Bluff House,” she said, shutting off the engine.
    â€œI remember,” Cole smiled. “Is that addition new since I was here last?” Cole asked, pointing to the precarious wing on stilts.
    â€œDad was never content to do just five or six things at once, you know,” Grace said, leading Cole up the oyster-shell pathway to the front door. “He was never satisfied to leave well enough alone. Always tinkering, finding fault, finding something more to do.”
    Cole nodded, and knew that Grace Ravenwing was talking about more than the house.
    They entered the main home, where the aroma of seafood stew greeted them. The front door led to a mud room, where slickers and boots and float coats were hung on pegs, and a broad deacon’s bench was open, exposing hats and gloves and assorted fishing paraphernalia. Cole pulled off his shoes and dropped his bags, looking around the sprawling home. A wide, open kitchen with broad windows providing a view out over the harbour and the strait beyond opened off the mud room. There were no cupboards above the counter to spoil the view, and Cole recalled many meals prepared in this kitchen while watching pods of orca or humpback whales swimming up and down the watery west coast highway.
    â€œIt smells great in here, Grace.”
    Grace swept into the kitchen and checked on the stew. “You hungry?”
    Cole felt his stomach rumble, and he hoped it was from hunger and not his airsick hangover. “I could eat,” he decided.
    They sat at the dining room table, floor-to-ceiling windows providing a panoramic view over the Queen Charlotte Strait to the north and the mouth of Knight Inlet to the east. To the west were the humpbacked shapes made by the clutter of islands scattered up the southwestern side of the Broughton Archipelago.
    â€œGood grief, it’s beautiful here,” said Cole, swabbing his bowl with freshly baked bread.
    Grace nearly spit out a