Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “No shit,” Matt said. “You’ve got a lump on your head the size of a cantaloupe. You’re gonna have shiners that glow in the dark.”

  Kate groaned. Mutt growled and snapped. A testament to his nerves, again Matt managed not to jerk back. “Mutt, you are one pissed-off dog. I get that. But I didn’t hit Kate, and I’m trying to help her, so just give me a little room to work here, okay?”

  He checked Kate’s pupils and made her squeeze his hands and move her feet. He put a C-collar around her neck. “Will she let us put you on a stretcher?”

  “I don’t need a stretcher. Help me up.”

  “Kate—”

  “Help. Me. Up.”

  Matt shook his head and muttered something uncomplimentary under his breath. He got an arm around her waist and heaved her to her feet. The room whirled around her as if she were on a merry-go-round and she almost threw up.

  “Take deep breaths,” Matt said.

  She took deep breaths. The whirling subsided a little, and Matt assisted her into Old Sam’s recliner. He looked about him immediately for a receptacle of some kind, found a plastic bucket that had once contained paint stripper, and set it next to her. The fumes nearly finished her off and Matt hastily replaced the bucket with an old Tupperware container Old Sam had been using for spare nuts and bolts and screws. It didn’t look big enough to him, so he swapped it out for an ancient coal scuttle Old Sam had used for his woodstove tools.

  Seeing Kate in a more or less vertical position seemed to reassure Mutt, and her hackles lowered. She leaned so hard into Kate’s knee she pushed her into the opposite armrest. “It’s okay, girl, really,” Kate said, although she wasn’t quite sure if she meant it. She blinked, and for the first time since she’d regained consciousness, the rest of the cabin came into focus. “What the hell?”

  Now she understood why Matt had tripped. The cabin was completely trashed. All the books she had so carefully packed away were out of their boxes and tumbled across the floor. All the books remaining on the bookshelves, any item left on every shelf and both tables, was on the floor, too. Canned goods had rolled beneath the dining table. Boxes of ammunition had burst open where they landed; bright brass cartridges shone from all four corners. Pots and pans and plates and knives and forks and spoons looked as if they had been thrown over a shoulder and left to fall where they might. Nuts and bolts and nails and screwdrivers rolled underfoot. There were clothes everywhere, too, jeans and bib overalls and plaid shirts and moth-eaten T-shirts and Jockey shorts, so whoever had trashed the main floor must also have climbed the ladder to the loft.

  “Can you remember what happened?” Matt said.

  Kate tried to think. “I was packing up his books. I hadn’t closed the door. I think … somebody hit me.”

  “No shit,” Matt said again. “With this.” He hefted a piece of firewood. “See the blood? Betting that’s yours.” He looked at Mutt. “And you were where?”

  Mutt dropped her head and gave a soft whine unlike any of the others she had given that night. There was what appeared to be a tuft of rabbit hair hanging from a corner of her mouth.

  “Did you see who did it?” Matt said.

  Kate started to shake her head and thought better of it. “No. I heard a sound, a footstep, something. And then somebody lowered the boom.” The room started to go around again, and Kate shut her eyes.

  “Okay.” Matt stood up. “You’re not driving home tonight. No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re spending the night in our clinic, under observation. Since she’d probably rip my arm off if I tried to shut her out, your werewolf is welcome to stay with you.”

  Any resistance drained out of her. “Okay,” she said. “Need to lock the door.”

  “There isn’t a lock.”

  “Then Mutt and I stay here,” Kate said.

  “Kate—”

  “Look at this cabin,” she said. It wasn’t easy to get the words out, but it was necessary. “Old Sam’s not dead three days and somebody trashes his place. Why? What were they looking for? And does it look to you like they found it?”

  “Kate.”

  She looked up to see Harvey Meganack standing in the doorway, although he wasn’t coming any farther in. “I’ve got a spare hasp and a padlock,” he said. “I’ll go get it and put it on the door. I won’t give anyone the keys except you. Okay?”

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Harvey’s the one who found you,” Matt said. “He came and got us.”

  She looked at Harvey. In spite of her blurred vision and throbbing pain and recurring nausea, there was still room for the old antagonism to raise its ugly head, and mistrust and suspicion along with it. “How did you know somebody had jumped me?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Matt said. “You could have heard Mutt from Anchorage. Harvey just got here first, is all.”

  * * *

  The next morning the swelling had gone down, to be replaced by the promised shiners. The Grosdidier brothers stood around her in an awed circle. “She looks like Joan Collins on Oscar night,” Peter said.

  “Scorpius on Farscape,” Luke said.

  “I was thinking a panda,” Mark said.

  Mutt stared up at her with solemn yellow eyes. At least Kate’s dog still recognized her.

  Matt handed Kate a mirror. The brothers weren’t exaggerating. “How long?” she said.

  They communed with one another for a moment. “Ten days,” Matt said. “Two weeks at most.”

  “Great.” She put the mirror aside with a sigh.

  “Pair of sunglasses will cover up most of that,” Mark said.

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “Can I go now?”

  “Sure. No evidence of concussion. Your hard head wins again. You’re good to go.”

  “You want me to tell Nick Luther?” This from Maggie Montgomery, Jim’s dispatcher and the closest thing left in the Park to a trooper after Jim went Outside.

  Kate shrugged, relieved after the fact to have felt no pain in the act. There was a localized ache in her forehead, and her shoulder was sore from where she had fallen, but that was all. “You can tell him, but there’s no suspect and no reason for him to fly down here. Tell him I said I was fine, and I don’t have a clue who did it or why.”

  Maggie looked doubtful, but she said, “Okay.”

  “Could you give me a ride to Old Sam’s?” Kate didn’t want to walk through the village with these beauties, mostly because she didn’t want to have to explain what had happened two hundred times. She had a thought, and looked at her trauma team. “You didn’t tell the aunties, did you? Tell me you didn’t tell the aunties.” Johnny had already been to the clinic and gone to school that morning. Once assured of her well-being, he had seemed more inclined to laugh over her shiners than worry about the attack. Men. The aunties would be a different story.

  The brothers exchanged a look. “Well, we didn’t tell them,” Matt said.

  Kate was able to finish that sentence on her own. She stood up. “But they’ll know soon enough. Get me out of here, Maggie.”

  * * *

  Maggie dropped Kate and Mutt at Old Sam’s cabin after a detour to Harvey’s to pick up the key to the sturdy padlock that now secured the door. The mess inside looked even worse than what Kate remembered in her admittedly less than functional state the night before.

  Most of the boxes had survived, and those that hadn’t could be repaired with duct tape. Sighing, she got to work.

  By late that afternoon, all of Old Sam’s books were in boxes in the back of Kate’s pickup, and everything else had been restored to its proper place. Operations had been hampered somewhat by Mutt’s insistence on remaining no less than twelve inches from Kate at any given time. She had actually growled at Kate when Kate tried to shut the outhouse door on her.

  Kate stood in the center of the room, hands on her hips, and addressed the ceiling. “What the hell happened here last night?”

  Why had she been attacked? She wasn’t familiar enough wi
th Old Sam’s belongings to say with confidence that nothing was missing, but there was enough of value left to preclude the motive as simple robbery, some opportunist hearing of Old Sam’s death and coming to clear out what he could. None of the ammunition had been stolen, all the cans from the case of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup were still present and accounted for—even the loose bills and coins in the Darigold butter can were still inside, the plastic lid still on, though the butter can had been tossed to the floor. If the object of the attack had been burglary, she would have instantly suspected that weasel Howie Katelnikof, but even Howie was smart enough to wait until Kate was gone. What on earth was the purpose in smacking her upside the head at that particular—

  She stood very still. And then she went out to the pickup and opened up every single one of the boxes of books to check every single title.

  Judge Albert Arthur Anglebrandt’s daily journal was missing.

  Eight

  She went to the school to tell Johnny he was spending the night at Annie Mike’s in town, stopped at Annie’s to tell her she’d have an extra kid for the night, and drove home, where she unloaded the boxes into the shop and for the first time in living memory padlocked the shop door. She debated leaving Mutt to guard the premises, but Mutt divined this intention via some heretofore unsuspected lupine telepathy and refused categorically to get out of the pickup. Kate swore at her, went into the house to pack some necessaries into her daypack, and spent ten blasphemous minutes searching in vain for her cell phone only to have it drop from the driver’s-side visor halfway to Ahtna after they bumped through a particularly obnoxious pothole. She spent at least part of the journey casting anxious glances at the gray sky. If it snowed before she made it home, her pickup would remain in Ahtna until the snow had been packed down by enough snow-machine and four-wheeler traffic to sustain the drive. Which could be December, depending on how thick the snow fell, and how fast.

  At least it held off as far as the Lost Chance Creek bridge, an ex–railroad trestle seven hundred feet long and three hundred feet high and a bitch to navigate in low visibility. This milestone safely negotiated, Kate stepped on the gas and achieved pavement in record time. She drove straight to the courthouse, a massive, curving two-story building on the edge of the river, with a striking metal sculpture of Raven stealing the sun, the moon, and the stars spread across the front doors. The door opened as she came up the steps, Ben Gunn holding it open for Roberta Singh.

  “Your Honor,” Kate said, pausing. She exchanged a nod with Ben.

  “Kate, how nice to see you.” Judge Singh looked like a cross between a ballerina and a princess out of the Arabian nights, tall, slim, sloe-eyed, her black hair pulled back from a broad forehead and knotted at the nape of her neck. She had such immense dignity that she seemed always to be attired in her robes, although today she was in fact dressed with her usual panache in a smart tweed coat with a fur collar, high-heeled boots, and black leather gloves. Kate always felt like the ugly stepsister in Judge Singh’s presence, but then so did every other woman in the Park. Sartorial misery loves company.

  “I was so sorry to hear about Old Sam,” Judge Singh said.

  “Me, too,” Kate said. “But thanks.”

  “We shall not look upon his like again,” Judge Singh said.

  Kate smiled. “No. We shall not.”

  Singh nodded at the courthouse. “You’re here to begin settling his affairs?”

  “Yes, I’m his heir. I’m hoping Jane Silver can help me straighten it all out.”

  “I’m sure she can. Well, if there’s anything I can do…”

  A smile, a handshake, and Judge Singh swept down the steps, the reporter pattering behind. “Judge, I just need to know if—”

  “Mr. Gunn, you know very well I may not discuss—”

  Whatever it was Judge Singh couldn’t say on the record was cut off by the closing of the door.

  Not by so much as the raising of an eyebrow had the judge remarked on Kate’s shiners. A class act, the judge.

  The local lands office was tucked into a corner of the first floor and consisted of a single, very small room containing a desk with a bank of gray filing cabinets crammed behind it.

  At the desk sat Jane Silver, who looked like she ought to be hunched over a steaming cauldron chanting in chorus with the other two weird sisters. A large head lowered between humped shoulders, scalp shining pink through thin flyaway gray hair cut short in no perceptible style, a nose that could have been used to hook halibut, long, yellow teeth—she even had warts. Her faded polyester plaid two-piece suit was missing a button and her orthopedic shoes squeaked even while she was sitting down.

  She looked up when the door opened and fixed Kate with a piercing stare. “Kate Shugak,” she said, in a mellow soprano voice that sounded nothing at all like the cackle it should have been. “That is you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Kate said, stepping inside, followed by her four-footed shadow.

  “What the hell happened to you?”

  Kate had been asking that same question just the night before. “Somebody walloped me with a piece of firewood.”

  Jane inspected her. “Well, they were sincere about it, I’ll give them that.”

  Kate grinned. “Keep the women and children off the streets when they see me coming, for sure.”

  Mutt went around the counter to rest her chin on the top of Jane’s desk. “No mistaking who you are,” Jane told her, and fished around in a bottom drawer, producing a pepperoni stick. She stripped it of shrink-wrap and held it out. Mutt took it delicately between her teeth and it vanished in two bites. She retired to the door, the office being so small and its occupant so decrepit (and so willing to pay homage to Mutt’s Muttness) that she could be reasonably certain no one was going to bash her human over the head again, at least not in here. She kept one yellow eye peeled for anyone coming down the hall with fell intent, though, and frightened Bobby Singh’s law clerk into dropping a document box on the floor, where it burst open with a splat and scattered files from there to the back door. Mutt, watching with no more than casual interest, sent the clerk scuttling upstairs for the public defender, a musher in his off time who might be expected to have the sangfroid to face down an indoor wolf.

  Jane Silver was older than god and had been the lands clerk for the Park since before Kate was born. She was a tough old bird with a sharp tongue and an encyclopedic memory, and held the record at the Alaska State Fair for the most blue ribbons won in a row for jam making. Her specialty was rhubarb butter, just the memory of which made Kate’s tongue prickle and her mouth fill with anticipatory saliva.

  “I was sorry to hear about Old Sam,” Jane said.

  “Thanks,” Kate said, “me, too.” Had it really only been five days? “Me, too,” she said again, and cleared her throat to speak in a stronger voice. “He’s why I’m here. I’m the executor of his will, as well as his main beneficiary.”

  “I had an idea. What’s up?”

  Kate pulled out the will. “Turns out the old fart had some property nobody knew about.”

  “The Canyon Hot Springs homestead?”

  Kate picked up her jaw and put it back into working position. “Well, yeah, now that you mention it. Nobody knew he’d staked a homestead up there.”

  Jane reeled off the numbers and Kate looked down at the paper she held to see that Jane had them down pat. “Jesus, Jane, is there a tax ID or a property ID in the Park that you haven’t memorized?”

  “No,” Jane said, like it was the simple truth, which it probably was. She typed something into the keyboard sitting in front of her and watched the monitor. Something beeped and the reflected light from the monitor changed on her face. She got to her feet, shoes creaking, and went to a filing cabinet, opened a drawer, and extracted a file. “Hmm, yes,” she said. “Nothing unusual here. Homestead requirements met and applicant’s eligibility sworn to by reputable members of the community.”

  “He was underage,” Ka
te said, “and he wasn’t married. He wasn’t a father, either.”

  Jane gave a dismissive wave with a hand that more nearly resembled a claw, a similarity enhanced by the long, bloodred nails that tipped each finger. Kate wondered how Jane could type. “The government was in a hurry to get as much land settled as fast as possible, so there was a lot of winking at that particular requirement. The only thing they really stuck at was if you had borne arms against the United States. Sam had a strong back and a reputation for paying his bills.” Jane paused, her ugly face unreadable. “It was assumed he’d marry eventually. Most everyone did back then.”

  “You remember all that?” Kate said.

  Jane looked up and grinned in an alarming display of long yellow teeth. “Hard to believe, I know, but yes, I am that old.”

  “You lived in Ahtna then?”

  Jane nodded, eyes back on the file. “I came to town with Mrs. Beaton.”

  Again, Kate had difficulty in getting her jaw back in place. “Mrs. Beatrice Beaton? Of Mrs. Beaton’s Boardinghouse?”

  Jane gave her a sharp look. “Yes. How do you know that name?”

  “I, ah, I saw it in an old ledger Old Sam had. Written by the first judge in Ahtna.”

  “That would be Albie Anglebrandt.” It wasn’t quite a question.

  Albie? Kate nodded. “He had a list of all the license fees each business paid to the government. Mrs. Beaton’s Boardinghouse was one of the businesses listed there.” She fixed her eyes on a map of the Park tacked to the wall behind Jane’s desk and said, “I would guess a boardinghouse would require a lot of hired help. Cooks and waitresses and maids and suchlike.”

  If she hadn’t been watching for it out of the corner of her eye she wouldn’t have seen that infinitesimal relaxation in the muscles around Jane’s mouth. However curious Kate was—and however titillating might be the answers to any questions she might ask—she decided on the spot that this was no time to enquire into what, besides room and board, Mrs. Beatrice Beaton had been selling in Ahtna back in the day. Kate couldn’t help seeing Jane Silver with new eyes, though. Jane Silver, lady of the evening? Of course she would have looked a lot different all those years ago. And there had been even fewer women in Bush Alaska then than there were now, so the customers would have been a lot less picky. She remembered pictures she’d seen of the some of the women on the infamous Fairbanks Line. A younger Jane would not have been out of place. For that matter, neither would an older Jane.