Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “The problem was he didn’t know anything about them at the time he wrote his paper ten years before, after which it was way too late for a man like Hil to climb down. He knew he had to get rid of the artifacts, because if someone found them everything he’d ever done would be called into question. He was about to load up when he heard the kids’ voices from the beach. The Petroff boy was first in the cave and Hil panicked and hit him. He went out after Erik. Erik ran but he held on to his baby fat until puberty burned it off and at ten years he couldn’t run very fast, so Hil caught up with him, gimp and all, and laid him out, too.” He nodded at the cane. “That thing is not just another pretty face.”

  Liam didn’t smile.

  Jefferson shook his head. “Hil said he thought he’d killed him, Erik. He was terrified when he heard the boy was still alive, and so relieved when he heard he couldn’t remember anything about that day. I think he was always afraid he might, though. I think it was always in his mind.”

  “What did he do afterward?”

  If possible, Jefferson looked even grimmer. “This ain’t easy to tell and won’t be easy to hear. Hil went back into the cave and he, well, he made the boy’s body fit through that crack in the wall. Garvey told me about it and I don’t know how Hil managed, but he did.”

  “Why didn’t he at least drag Erik’s body into the cave?”

  “Got spooked, said he heard voices.” Jefferson shrugged. “Probably his imagination. He was scared enough telling the story, I expect he was fucking terrified at the time. He wasn’t ever a man prone to violence, Sergeant, especially since he never in his life had enough muscle to punch a hole through so much as a Kleenex. I reckon the situation just got away from him.”

  Pudgy little brat. There had been more than disgust at Erik’s pudginess, Liam thought. The reason Hilary Houten had left Erik where he had fallen was that Houten knew he couldn’t fit him through the crack. Liam willed his imagination away from that image only to be immediately assaulted by another.

  The Shawshank hammer. Houten would have used it to break up the boy’s body enough to feed it through the crack. “And then?” was all he said.

  Jefferson, eying him with caution, said, “And then he left. He didn’t even take the things he found in the cave with him, which mighta saved Erik’s life that time around. And he never told anyone. Until last night.”

  A brief silence. “Where is Mr. Houten now?”

  The old fart stared at him. “Didn’t I say? He’s dead. He only had the one drink but it made him sick as a dog afterward. I had to hold his head over the toilet and muscle him into bed. He passed right out.” He shook his head. “He always gets up when he smells the coffee. This morning he didn’t. I went in and he was dead. Already cold. His heart just gave out, I figure. Confession ain’t always good for the soul, you know.” He shifted in his chair. “I brung his body back in the boat, and called Fiona. He’s with her now, waiting on your call.”

  He nodded at the cane. “I expect those voodoo techs you law enforcement types got nowadays can find traces of Berglund’s blood on the handle.”

  Liam had recorded Jefferson’s entire statement on his phone. He gave it to Ms. Petroff to transcribe. Jefferson balanced a pair of cheaters with purple plastic frames on the very end of his nose, read it through carefully beginning to end, and signed.

  He pulled himself to his feet with his walker and resettled the Blewestown Ballers ball cap more firmly on his head, causing the white tufts of hair at the sides to stand straight out perpendicular to the cap’s edge. Unlike Sybilla Karlsen, he’d aged beyond vanity. He stared out Liam’s window and spoke in a reminiscent voice. “You should have seen this place back in the day. Bay was filled with shrimp and salmon and king crab, canneries on both shores, fishing boats all over the damn place. Bars busting out all up and down the streets and young men flush with cash blowing it all on girls and booze. Japanese buyers lining up all the way to Soldotna to buy anything we could pull out of the water.” He looked in the direction of RPetCo’s rig. “And now it’s gonna be oil wells and rigs up and down the Bay, and probably spills, and no self-respecting fish is ever gonna want to spawn in a stream in these parts ever again.”

  He turned and looked at Liam. “What happens now?”

  Blue Jay Jefferson was a man who took his medicine straight, no chaser. “At best you’re guilty of obstruction of justice. At worst, you’re an accessory after the fact.”

  The old man drew himself up as straight as his aged spine would allow and glared at Liam. “Good luck proving that, Sergeant. I didn’t see a goddamn thing and you can’t prove I did. I’m the only witness left alive.”

  Liam looked at him for a long moment. “I’ll run it by the judge,” he said, and then he said, “Oh hell. Go home, old man. I know where you live.”

  Jefferson had one foot over the threshold when Liam said, “Tom.”

  The old man looked over his shoulder.

  “Why did you tell me? You didn’t have to.”

  Blue Jay Jefferson tugged fiercely at the bill of his cap, pulling it even tighter to his head and causing his remaining hairs to make him look even more like the Scarecrow after the Wizard stuffed his head with brains. “I told you,” he said. “I didn’t know about the kids.”

  “How do you feel about all this?” Wy said that evening. They were curled up on the couch, watching the mountains turn an even darker blue and the Bay itself fade to black.

  “Kind of pissed off, you want to know the truth,” Liam said. “Two murders, one attempt, and the perp dies on me before I get to charge him.”

  “Anticlimactic,” she said.

  “Kinda.”

  “But nobody shot at you,” she said.

  “And I didn’t have to jump out of any airplanes.”

  “Or jump out of any boats.”

  “Or fall down any glaciers. I never even took my sidearm out of the glove compartment. Am I still in Alaska or what?”

  “And you didn’t mess up another uniform.”

  “There is that.”

  She raised her head to look at him. “Are you ever going to put one on again?”

  Twenty-One

  Sunday, September 15

  THEY WERE SUMMONED TO TEA WITH Sybilla the following Sunday in her room at Sunset Heights. Having been given a heads up by Liz, Wy was wearing the only dress she owned, a sunny yellow sleeveless cotton sheath with a scoop neck. She’d bought it to wear at her college graduation, mostly to make her parents happy, and worn it a second time at her wedding. It was a little wrinkled because upon seeing her in it Liam had immediately tried to get her out of it again.

  Liam, because what the hell and anyway he no longer owned a suit, came in full regalia, light blue shirt over dark blue pants with the gold stripe down the legs, dark blue tie, and the original babe magnet, his Smokey hat to top off the ensemble. He left the utility belt at home and the sidearm in the glove compartment.

  “You’re strutting,” Wy said when he came out of the bedroom.

  “Nonsense,” he said, and squared away his tie.

  Sybilla’s was a surprisingly pleasant room, spacious with a large window that actually opened. It was stuffed with old-fashioned furniture and knickknacks. The walls were covered with photographs, including several studio portraits of Sybilla in her various primes.

  “You look like a movie star, Sybilla,” Wy said, staring at one of them. The movie-star version was wearing one of those old timey velvet, V-neck dresses barely held up by the shoulders. Sybilla had turned to look directly into the lens of the camera. She was red-lipped and smiling, her brows two straight black slashes, her hair a dusky cloud.

  She looked like sex on a stick, Liam thought, but wisely did not say so out loud.

  Sybilla chuckled, busying herself with pouring the tea from a pretty flowered teapot into translucent cups that matched. “Yes, I cleaned up pretty well back in the day. You look nice yourselves. Thank you for indulging an old woman by dressing for the occasion. Th
at’s a lovely color on you, my dear.”

  She was in very good form, sparking on all four cylinders. She was fully clothed, today in a black and white dress that made her look like Grace Kelly in Rear Window. Again, it was about two sizes too big. She remembered who Wy and Liam were, their names, and that she had invited them for tea. They sat and she served them warm scones with butter and raspberry jam. Wy took the first bite and said with her mouth full, “You can cook, too?”

  Sybilla waved an airy hand. “I am a woman of many talents, my dear. And they do allow us kitchen privileges here, thank goodness.”

  It was a pleasant afternoon, and Sybilla wiled away the time by spinning tales of Alaskans in days gone by, when men were men and women did all the work.

  “So like now,” Wy said.

  Sybilla’s eyes sparkled. “Exactly like now, my dear.”

  Liam, outnumbered, reached for another scone.

  Among Sybilla’s collection of days gone by was a turntable and a collection of vinyl records. She selected an album by Ella Fitzgerald and put it on. Sybilla’s voice was still strong enough to sound good and she kept up with every word and every note of “It Don’t Mean a Thing.” She laughed at their expressions when the song ended. “By way of establishing my bona fides,” she said.

  A little later Liam said, “Did you know that Erik Berglund was Sally Petroff’s biological father?”

  Sybilla looked surprised. “Of course, dear. Erik and Kimberley were both students of mine.” She grimaced. “It was pretty obvious, but then it always is. Girls disappear for a semester or a year and there is always some plausible excuse, an exchange student program opportunity out of state, something like that. And then the following year they come back and life goes on.” Her face clouded over. “This was different, of course. Erik went Outside to college, and Kimberley married Alexei and seven months later Sally was born. A few snide remarks were made but—” She shrugged. “There was another scandal, as there always is, and that one was forgotten.”

  “They were from Kapilat,” Wy said. “Why didn’t they go to school there?”

  “Unfortunately at that time the Kapilat school had fallen beneath the ten-student limit and the state had closed it. Some families went the home schooling route but a few who had relatives in Blewestown they could board their children with sent them here to complete high school. The two were in the band together. Kimberley played the clarinet and Erik the saxophone.” She looked down at her hands and said softly, “I feel responsible. I paired them up on that duet. Benny Goodman, you know. And of course Kimberley’s parents would never have let them marry.” She saw their mystified looks. “He wasn’t Native, you see, and her parents were very traditional. Much like Alexei’s family.” She sighed. “Which was probably why she chose him.”

  Wy could feel Liam looking at her. She knew he was remembering her insistence on a small wedding, Bill to officiate, Moses to give her away, two random witnesses they’d pulled off their stools at the bar. None of Wy’s blood relatives from Ik’iki’ka. “Did Alexei know?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I wondered at the time. But Kimberley was smart and capable and a true beauty, quite the catch. He might have known and not have cared.”

  Toward the end of the visit, Liam and Wy exchanged a glance, and Wy said, “We were so sorry to hear about your brother Hilary.”

  “Who?” Sybilla said vaguely, and for a moment Liam thought she was going to phase from one reality to another. He looked around and spotted a robe lying on her bed. Just in case. And then Sybilla’s eyes sharpened into the now and she said, “Oh yes, Hilary. Well, my dears, I appreciate the sentiment but Hilary and I were never close.”

  “What a shame,” Wy murmured.

  “Yes, well, he was a bit of a prude, my brother. He did not approve of either my job or my lifestyle, I’m afraid.”

  “He didn’t like you singing?”

  “Not singing or slinging liquor, either,” Sybilla said cheerfully. “Although to be fair, his dislike of my owning a bar might have had something to do with his intolerance for alcohol. It wasn’t as if he could partake himself, you see.”

  There was a pause. “His intolerance for alcohol?” Liam said.

  “You mean like allergic?” Wy said.

  “Oh my yes,” Sybilla said, “acutely. We found out when we were teenagers. The two of us were at a party at a friend’s house and his parents weren’t home so of course we got into the liquor cabinet. After one drink Hilary started vomiting and his blood pressure dropped so low and so fast that he actually fainted. No, he never touched liquor, my brother.”

  “Who else knew this, Sybilla?” Liam said in a voice that sounded strange to his own ears.

  She shrugged. “Myself, a few close friends. It wasn’t something he talked about.” She reflected. “The fainting incident didn’t do his social life any good afterward, I’m afraid. The other kids nicknamed him the Dying Swan and he was incapable of laughing it off, so he carried that all the rest of the way through high school. I think he went to college out of state to get away from it. And then, when he did come home, the arthritis kicked in. He was three years younger than I was and he looked thirty years older.”

  Illness might have had that effect, Liam thought.

  So might guilt.

  “Poor Hilary,” Sybilla said. “He never really had a chance at life, you know? I’m certain he died a virgin.”

  She looked up to see them staring at her. “What?”

  Acknowledgments

  ALL MY GRATITUDE GOES TO BARBARA Peters and Nic Cheetham, who never beat up on me for being first one, and then two, and then three, and now four months over deadline. The price of an understanding editor and publisher is far above rubies. The title of my next work is going to be Love and Not Writing in the Time of Covid-19.

  Astute readers will notice the geographic similarities between the real life Kachemak Bay and the wholly imaginary Chungasqak Bay. Liam’s new post was inspired by but not based on the real thing, in much the same way his old post of Newenham was inspired by but not based on Dillingham. It is, you might say, a distinction with a difference, and in this case a whole lot of differences, beginning with place names. I love true local place names and many of the names herein were found in online dictionaries like Liicugtukut Alutiit’stun. By all accounts the old folks were practical people and if there was a bay where the blueberries grew especially well I’m betting they would have called such a place Blueberry Bay, so I did, too.

  Oil companies were run out of Kachemak Bay decades ago, mostly due to their own ineptitude. Chungasqak Bay, not so much. I mean it to be a fictional reflection of the eternal Alaskan fight between maintaining the natural resources that have nourished Alaskans for millennia and the commercial extraction of fossil fuels and precious minerals that provide jobs and the state taxes that pay to fix potholes. If you want to start a fight, stand on a street corner anywhere in Alaska and take one side or the other.

  The bits and pieces found by the archeologist were inspired by Janet R. Klein’s ‘The Fort Kenai Collection,’ collected in 150 Years: Proceedings of the 2017 Kenai Peninsula History Conference. Klein has written a lot about history and archeology in Alaska, including Archeology in Alaska and Kachemak Bay Communities: Their Histories, Their Mysteries, and with her daughter co-authored a children’s book called Alaska Dinosaurs and other Cretaceous Creatures. It doubles as a coloring book, and the icon for carnivore is hilarious. My recommendation for any kid’s next birthday present. You’re welcome.

  About the author

  DANA STABENOW was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised on a 75-foot fishing tender. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first Kate Shugak book, A Cold Day for Murder, received an Edgar Award from the Crime Writers of America. Find her online at stabenow.com

  LIAM CAMPBELL INVESTIGATIONS

  KATE SHUGAK INVESTIGATIONS

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