They turned onto the old wooden stairs leading up to Warren Street. They slowly climbed above narrow Hopkins Alley where there were steep banks of scrub and low trees, below ranged the backs of old warehouses wearing their gray paint as if to compete with the gray sky. The stairs creaked and groaned as they climbed them, but by Ketchikan standards this was a major thoroughfare, you could walk two abreast without a problem. Once they broke free of the warehouses they had a clear view over the tops of a light industrial stretch of Water Street and out to Pennock and Gravina Islands defining the Tongass Narrows.
Jo saw a jet lifting off the runway on Gravina, slowly filling the Narrows with its dull roar before turning south for friendlier climes. She’d pay good money to be done and aboard. Now there was the constant thought of her youth. “Get me out of here!” She could feel the shout rooted deep inside. But just as when she was a girl, she kept it bottled deep inside. Kept it there because once again her life had drifted out of her control.
No escape for today at least. All of the businesses she’d need to contact would be closed on a Sunday. Maybe she could escape tomorrow.
She squeezed Angelo’s hand again, just so pleased that he was there with her. That anyone was there with her.
Because next came the hard part.
Angelo looked at the strange houses lining the uphill side of whatever street they were on. His head was still spinning at the foreignness of this place. Sure, it was technically on U.S. soil, but it didn’t belong there. Everything was surreal. An airport separated from the town it served by a ferry that didn’t stand a chance in rough weather. And this was Alaska. He’d bet that there was a lot of waiting for the waters to be calm enough for the ferry during the winter months, which up here was probably about ten months of the year.
And the Crab Hole…he had to send some of his New York friends there, it was performance art at its finest, and most authentic. No edgy display observed by urban crowds dressed in black. That crab shell art and the patrons had been for-real surreal.
This street reminded him oddly of the Amalfi Coast of Italy. Houses perched on the edge of impossible cliffs. Long, stick-like understructures reaching multiple stories down to the street to support the front of houses who had their backsides planted firmly against the hill. He knew where they were going before Jo even turned toward it, and he really hoped he had it wrong.
Beyond a pickup truck made of equal parts red metal and brown rust, towered a house. A house that had clearly been built before the apocalypse and somehow survived. It perched upon a structure he wouldn’t trust to hold up a garden shed. Twenty-foot tall four-by-fours with a couple of two-by-four cross braces looked impossibly spindly, too little to support even the stair rail nailed into the side of them, never mind the house atop.
A long flight of stairs climbed along the sloping hillside straddled by the stickframe understructure. The steps reached the back end of the shack where the house rested against the cliff face. The only entrance was on the right side at the very back end of the house against the cliff.
The one-story structure that perched twenty or thirty feet above them might have once been white. Or perhaps blue. It was hard to tell with all of the peeling paint. He could see the green encroachments of moss or lichen or something else that wasn’t supposed to be growing on buildings but had on this one. This is where James Patterson should put his next psychotic murderer. There’d be no question about what had twisted up the villain.
Angelo opened his mouth to ask if she’d actually lived here, but snapped it shut when he saw that her dark skin was almost sheet white and her jaw was clenched so hard he was afraid for her next dentist appointment. He changed tacks.
“Do you really have to go up there?”
Her nod was tight, but affirmative. She was staring up the steps wide-eyed, having stumbled to a halt with her hand barely inches from the rail.
“Okay,” he’d be the stable one at the moment, even if merely looking at the place made him want to rent a flamethrower and call it done. “Let me have the key.”
He didn’t comment on her chilled fingers as she handed it over, merely led the way up the stairs, trusting that she’d follow. It took a few moments, but he began to feel the structure shaking with steps other than his. At the top he kicked aside a spool of rotting fishing line and unlocked the door.
Showing none of the hesitation he felt, he stepped inside, leaving the door wide open, and flicked on a light. Electricity was still working. That was a good start.
They entered at the back, where house met slope. A door straight ahead was tightly closed. A narrow, dark hallway led to the front of the house. Being braver than he felt, Angelo went down the hall hoping the building didn’t collapse from under him. Another closed door to the side. Then the main room. The front half of the house, the part perched out in space on spindly legs, was a single room. Kitchen, living, and what euphemistically could be called dining, faced a window hazy with dried salt. The furnishings were old but looked serviceable. The room was clean and neat, nothing much here but a sofa, a couple of chairs, and an old television.
One more door at the far end of the room stood open. The back half of the house, other than the narrow hall to the door, had clearly been divided into three rooms. Two bedrooms, with the bath in the center would be his guess.
How had the miracle of Jo Thompson come from such a past? He turned to look at her. She stood at the threshold to the main room, posed as if perfectly calm and collected. Her hands tucked easily in the front pockets of her rain jacket. And tears running down her face.
“Okay, I’m getting you out of here.” Angelo tried to sweep her out of the room and out of her father’s house, but Jo held her ground.
“No. I need to do this now before I lose all of my nerve. This isn’t hard,” she spoke more to herself than Angelo. It had to be easier than the murder scene she’d had to visit and catalog as an intern, an experience that had driven her hard into corporate law where most of the crimes occurred in sterile board rooms.
“What are we looking for?”
She’d think of it as collecting evidence. That’s all. Objective. She could be objective.
“A box.”
“Any more guidance than that? What’s in it?”
“An empty one, or a bag. We’re going to make one quick pass and gather any paperwork we can find, checkbooks, stuff like that. One pass, then out.”
Bless Angelo. He came back moments later with an old wooden box out of which he’d dumped a pile of broken winch blocks that her father had been meaning to repair since before she left for college.
“Could you do that one?” she indicated her father’s room. She simply couldn’t go in there.
He was gone in moments. She’d have to remember to thank him later. Thank heavens her father was a creature of habit and not a pack rat. By the time Angelo came back with the box about a third full, she’d completed her pass on the living room. Checkbooks in the second drawer of the coffee table along with two unpaid, but not yet overdue bills. A quick flip revealed that he’d gotten a hundred thousand for his boat, but medical and other outstanding bills had chewed up about half of that. He’d always lived season to season, and she remembered all too well how hard the bad seasons were. At his death, his savings were probably the highest they’d ever been in his life.
She found his spare truck keys. She’d drop them at the Crab Hole in case anyone wanted the old vehicle. The first drawer of the file cabinet revealed neatly filed bills in the separate hanging folders that she’d set up for him long ago. She pulled the most recent from each folder so that she’d know who to cancel. The other drawer included the truck title, which would go with the keys, and a small life insurance policy in her name. How hard had it been for him to maintain that? It wouldn’t have paid for a year of her college or what she now made in a month or two, but she was touched nonetheless.
Finally, she found what she’d really been wanting, his will. The old envelope cracked with ag
e as she opened it. The paper had yellowed, but was otherwise fine. Jo flipped to the back page, signed and witnessed, dated shortly after she was born.
She flipped back and scanned down the first page. Dan was named as the executor if Jo was under eighteen, otherwise Jo was executor. That simplified matters immensely.
Jo made it halfway down the next page before her knees let go and she dropped onto the couch.
Her father’s will named both Jo and Eloise Thompson as beneficiaries. Fifty-fifty split if they were both surviving and Jo was over eighteen.
Now she was legally required to find her mother, the woman who had abandoned her before she was three.
Chapter 29
“Together.” Angelo said when Jo froze at the last room. The door by the entrance must be Jo’s bedroom.
He opened the door, turned on the light, and stepped inside. There was a narrow, north-facing window that had been overgrown by moss. A tree in full leaf pressed hard against the cracked glass. The overhead bulb behind a faded papier-mâché shade did little to light the room.
It was perhaps the most depressing place he’d ever been. A desk, a narrow bed, and a closet that stood empty. The walls had posters curling from the damp, of astronauts and the space shuttle. Of the Martian surface and fantastic science fiction spaceships.
“Those were from my ‘How far can I really get from Alaska?’ phase,” Jo stared at them blankly.
“I would say that culturally, you succeeded.”
“I don’t know,” she kept staring at the curling posters. “Ketchikan doesn’t look quite so bad as an adult. You couldn’t pay me to live here,” she threw up her hands, normally so quiet, in a very Italian gesture as if to block the possibility of such a thought. “But there is community. There are good people here. They’re just not my people. When I was a kid, I swore that I would never again set foot on Alaskan soil for as long as I lived.”
Angelo eyed her carefully. “Yet your legal practice is mainly Alaskan.”
“Don’t remind me.” She shuddered. And to Angelo’s eye, what she’d intended to be mock horror had turned to very real disgust.
This was not the time or place to ask about that particular problem. So, instead, Angelo looked about the room, narrow enough to touch both walls with out-stretched arms and barely twice as long.
“Anything in here you want? If not, I’m getting you out of here.”
“Let me go through the desk drawers just in case.”
Nothing surfaced, and Angelo was going to shoo her out when he spotted a picture on the wall that didn’t seem to fit the others.
“What’s that one?” He pointed at the one image. It was small. A postcard of a penguin Photoshopped to be flying above the clouds with a little thought bubble. “Look Ma, I’m an eagle!” You could see the penguin’s trajectory was failing and headed for a splashdown in the ocean far below. The “Ma” had been crossed out and replaced with “Jo” in faded pen.
Jo reached out slowly and pulled out the thumbtack holding it to the wall.
She turned it over and held it so that they could read it together.
Dearest Jo, I could find no way to fly in K-kan. By the time I could remember even how to crawl, it was too late for us. Say hi to Dan for me. All the best! Eloise (not the boat)
And a somewhat pathetic smiley face.
It was dated five years ago.
She and Angelo had a quiet night at the Cape Fox Lodge. They ate a meal at the restaurant, with no seafood involved, as if they’d both been overwhelmed by the Salmon Fishing Capital of the World. Jo had the Russian Chicken and Angelo the Pepper Steak. They split a piece of Chocolate Cheesecake, but had been unable, or unmotivated to finish it.
She slept like the dead, curled against his chest, wrung out to her very core. Somewhere in the middle of the night she’d needed more. He’d woken easily, in that quiet way of his, and been very good to her, kissing away her tears of exhaustion that found their way out even as her body released the spring wound so tightly inside.
In the light of morning, with room service pancakes cooling on the small table, she’d finally faced the task of sorting through the box. Angelo stayed out of the way, pretending to watch a baseball game with the sound turned way down, which she appreciated. When she had it sorted and started on the phone calls, he’d gone for a run. A dozen phone calls later she’d arranged for someone to clean out the house, someone else to sell it in the name of the estate, the land had to be worth something. She cancelled utilities, medical, and car insurance. By the time the first round was done, she had a couple of pages of a hotel pad covered with notes.
She could draft her first motion for probate, except for the conditions of the will that mandated she find a woman twenty-six years gone. She could argue for probate in absentia and probably get it. Even throw her mother’s half into a trust in case she ever surfaced. But was it worth the pain and aggravation? She didn’t know, couldn’t think. So she set it aside for the moment.
Angelo drifted back in just as she started digging into what he’d recovered from her father’s room. No letters. No strange postcards from the past. Mostly junk she could just throw out once she’d looked at it. Near the bottom, there was a photo. Her father and a woman she didn’t recognize, or at least not completely.
She’d snooped often enough as a child trying to find some evidence of her mother, and found none. Yet here in a cheap wood frame stood a much younger version of her father, his face and hair dark with Tlingit blood. Behind him, the newly painted prow of the Eloise, her name in bold blue lettering on the white hull. Beside him, a pretty woman with her own dark hair almost down to her waist, but fair features, perhaps of the East Coast, perhaps California. She wore bright yellow fisherman boots, jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt. Though her eyes seemed hidden, hazed in some way that Jo couldn’t quite discern, her smile appeared bright.
And she cradled a tiny child in her arms. A child, Jo now knew, who had skin the color of her father’s and the features of a mother she’d never met but would recognize in the mirror.
“One last stop, then we’re gone.” It was early in the afternoon and she and Angelo had managed two seats on the evening flight back to Seattle.
Jo pulled up in front of the Crab Hole and cursed when she saw the “Closed for Funeral” sign. She checked her watch and cursed again, there was still plenty of time.
They drove down to the docks, the Eloise still floating in the slip. A small group had clustered on the dock. Jo parked and took the truck title and keys with her, and the postcard.
“Engine’s conked,” Carl informed her. “Doesn’t matter, crematorium mixed up the preserve-the-ashes order, so there’s not a thing to scatter anyway. Didn’t know you could get a cremation with no ashes, but seems you can order it that way. We figured we’d go down to the end of the pier, drink a pint, and piss inta the Narrows.”
Jo managed a laugh. It was so fitting that it was sad and funny and touching all at the same time. Her body didn’t know what to do with the collision of the conflicting feelings and so she just nodded her head in approval.
She pulled out the title and keys, “Do you need a truck?”
“Yeah, one of us will take the thing. Best thing to do for that beast is drop her off the end of the pier to make a fish reef for divers, like them old battleships.”
Jo hugged him. She knew that was as close as any of them would get to saying they’d liked her father and would miss him. He held her lightly when he returned the gesture, patting her back like a child’s.
“He was proud o’ you. Even when we didn’t understand what you were doin’, he was so proud of you. Missed you as much as Eloise, but was proud.”
She wondered if he meant Eloise her mother or Eloise the boat after he’d sold her. She decided the politic action was not to inquire.
Then Carl was gone and turned into the wind so that he’d have an excuse to wipe at his eyes.
Each came to hug her goodbye and pat her back. Fred gro
used about his arthritis and that if anyone else was gonna die before him they’d better be doin’ it soon or he wasn’t comin’ to their funerals. Gerta offered Jo a nod. Bernie said something about it being a good thing they didn’t have any ashes or old Earnest might get pissed when they pissed on him.” Adam just rolled his eyes at Bernie’s back and shook her hand.
Angelo, bless him, was hanging with them by the Eloise easing any awkwardness. He gave them someone to speak to besides Earnest’s daughter after they’d already said goodbye to her.
When Dan came up to her last of all, the others had moved off a bit to check on the status of the engine repairs and to get a beer. Dan gave her a big, hard hug as if she were his own daughter somehow. Being hugged by Dan was like being enfolded in the arms of a gentle papa bear, someplace warm, soft, and very safe.
He started to turn away, and Jo almost let him go. It was an option. Burn the will and postcard, turn her back, and let the state take it all. She was technically in violation of the laws of probate for doing what executor tasks she’d done so far, by canceling utilities and removing items from the house. She should first have filed the death certificate and will with the state who would then certify her in the role of executor.
However, she was licensed to practice law in Alaska and while this wasn’t her area of specialty, she knew the Alaskan laws well enough to know the penalty wouldn’t amount to much more than a scowl from the judge, if that. At this point, she could take the wooden crate back and dump it on the living room floor, throw the key in behind it, and walk away clean.
Except it wouldn’t feel clean.
Instead, she stopped Dan with a hand on his arm, and pulled the postcard from her coat pocket. His broad, dark face went bright when he saw the writing, then sad before he could possibly have read even the few lines there.
“You were closest to her, weren’t you?”
Dan nodded slowly, “In coupla ways.” He rubbed a meat cleaver-sized hand across his face. “Earnest sat ta’ end. Eloise sat twixt us’n. He wanted her included.”
The Complete Where Dreams Page 48
