Where Dreams Books 1-3

by M. L. Buchman

  “She never done divorce him.” Again the deep declaration.

  “One postcard is all Earnest ever spoke of.” Carl inspected his beer then the mussel-shell ceiling as if searching his memory and finding nothing else. “Sent it the day she left. Jes’ to let him know she were alive. Maybe said something about goin’ to feed kids in Africa or somethin’. Don’t quite recall. No return address. Postmarked at Seattle airport.”

  Jo looked over at Angelo. His mother was so alive, so vital, so present. She’d been and clearly still was such a force in Angelo’s life. What would that be like?

  Well, that was something she’d never know.

  Chapter 28

  Over Fred’s protests, Jo had settled the bar tab, though it wasn’t too bad. Her father used to pay it off once the fishing season income started rolling in. Knowing he was dying, he’d sold the Eloise, “Which came as close to killing him as your mother leaving. Then he started into paying his tab monthly, makin’ the rest of us look bad.” Bernie, of course.

  So, that was done. One less thing for her to worry about was all she could think. They’d already cremated him. Tomorrow evening the new owner was going to take them all out on the Eloise and scatter the ashes. She hadn’t committed to that, but she hadn’t said no either.

  She had promised she’d come back through before leaving town. Still holding her hand, Angelo walked with her as she headed up Young Street, then Warren Street to her father’s house.

  “What day is this?” Jo’s brain had already become scrambled by the events of the last two days. “Sunday?”

  “Sunday,” Angelo confirmed.

  “How could you leave the restaurant?”

  Angelo laughed and shook his head, “I don’t really know, I just had to. I wondered about that on the flight up, but some part of me must have known it would be okay, even if I wasn’t thinking very clearly. Manuel can run the restaurant as well as I can. Apparently Graziella has had her eye on someone for front of house help, and she’s going to do a trial this afternoon. My mother loved your idea, so she’s going to be filling in for Eugene. There is no way I would ever have thought that up. How did you?”

  Jo shrugged. She noticed the gesture was very unlike herself, but was one she saw on Angelo all the time. What other influences was she picking up from him?

  “It simply made sense. Your mother is charming, a brilliant cook, and you clearly love each other so much that you can barely stand it. So, of course, she’d want to be with you.” Now why had she phrased it that way? Of course, his mother would want to help him. But that’s not what she’d said. Nor what she’d thought. “Want to be with Angelo.” Why did that phrase feel as if she were speaking of someone other than his mother? She pulled her flannel shirt tighter against the back of her neck.

  Angelo inspected the sky which had briefly eased from misting to merely humid. With the temperature in the sixties it only dampened the air, rather than being muggy. He looked back down, apparently he hadn’t found anything up there to help him find a response to that.

  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 its butt 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 God 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 age 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 a damn, crematorium screwed up the preserve-the-ashes order, so there’s not a damn 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.”