Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Is there any question about the title Old Sam held to the hot springs property?”

  Jane shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Are you sure?” At Jane’s look Kate said, “The reason I ask is because homesteaders were supposed to prove up in five years and he took eight. Dan O’Brian at Park headquarters? He showed me copies of the original paperwork. The application was taken out in 1937. It wasn’t granted until 1945.”

  Jane’s eyes narrowed. “There were a lot of rules forgiven an Alaskan homesteader between December 1941 and August 1945. Especially when he came back a war hero.”

  She said it in such a way that Kate found herself rushing to assure Jane that she had actually heard of World War II. “And I know he was one of the Cutthroats. It’s just, I think, well, I got the feeling that Dan felt that there might be something wrong with the title, given the, um, irregularities.”

  Jane snorted. “Irregularities! I’ll give that fish hawk irregularities right up his rule-ridden, land-thieving keister if he doesn’t watch out. There was nothing irregular in Sam going off to fight for his country. And there was nothing irregular in his government holding his coat while he did.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Kate said.

  “Quite a war they fought out there,” Jane said. “He ever talk to you about it?”

  Kate shook her head. “He’d change the subject any time the war came up.”

  Jane gave a thoughtful nod. “Most vets, the healthy ones, put it behind them and move on. Sam was one of those.”

  Kate noticed the omission of the honorific, and began to wonder just how well Jane had known Old Sam. Jane saw the expression on Kate’s face and said with a shrug that Kate saw as unconvincing, “I’d run into him at the Lodge every now and then. One thing I remember he mentioned about that time. Did you know he met Dashiell Hammett?”

  Kate knew she was being diverted, but the bait was too good to resist. “You’re kidding! Really?”

  “Yeah, he was in the army and stationed on Adak. Sam—Old Sam said he ran the army newspaper there.”

  “Geez.” Kate digested this in silence for a moment. She’d never read one of Hammett’s books, but like everyone else she’d seen the movie. “ ‘I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble,’ ” she said.

  Jane grinned. “Okay, I’ll play,” she said. “ ‘You always think you know what you’re doing, but you’re too slick for your own good. Someday you’re going to find it out.’ ”

  This fell a little flatter than it should have. After an uneasy moment, Kate said, “Um, one other thing, Jane. I don’t seem to be able to find the original documents relating to the hot springs homestead. Is that going to be a problem?”

  Jane stood there, fully occupied with looking inscrutable. Moments passed before she stirred and said in a brusque tone, “You’re the heir, didn’t you say? You going to be paying the taxes?”

  “For now, yes.”

  “Okay, then, fill out this form. We can start the process of getting the title changed over to your name.”

  “How long will it take?”

  Jane gave her a look. “Overnight.”

  “Right,” Kate said. “Forgive me. Forgot who I was talking to for a minute. Good thing I’m overnighting in Ahtna.”

  “Come back in the morning, I’ll have it for you then. We can get the tax records changed over to your name, too.”

  “Thanks, Jane.” Kate lingered at the door.

  “What?” Jane said. “I’m working here.”

  Kate would never find a better source about that place and time. “Judge Anglebrandt kept a daily journal.”

  The expression on Jane’s face didn’t change, but there was an immediate change in the air temperature. “How would you know about that?”

  “Old Sam had it, or one of them, and from what little I saw, the first one. I was reading it when whoever it was clunked me over the head.”

  “Really.” Jane brooded over her desk, and it was probably Kate’s imagination that her expression took on a tragic cast, as if Jane was mourning something that had happened long ago and far away, but not too long ago or far away to be forgotten.

  “Do you know if Judge Anglebrandt keep that journal the whole time he was here?”

  “Yes.” That came out way too definite and Jane knew it. “So far as I know.”

  The damage was done, but Kate wasn’t going to brace Jane on any possible relationship with Judge Anglebrandt, at least not yet. “Was the diary all business? It seemed like it from the little I read.”

  “So far as I know it was a log of the court’s business,” Jane said.

  “What I don’t understand is how Old Sam wound up with it,” Kate said. “Isn’t it part of the official record?”

  “Not necessarily. There was a clerk of the court who kept that.” Jane hesitated. Kate waited for her to make up her mind to trust Kate with whatever it was. “Tell you what,” Jane said. “Come back tomorrow morning, pick up your title, get your tax records in order. I might have something else to show you then.”

  “What?” Kate said.

  Jane grinned. “Youth today, it’s gratification in five minutes or they’re gone. I have to find something, and it’ll take a while. Come back tomorrow morning.”

  Kate heaved a martyred sigh, mostly for effect. “Elders today, it’s driving the youth crazy in four minutes or their life isn’t worth living.”

  They both laughed, and Kate collected Mutt and went looking for a place to lay her head for the night.

  Nine

  She went to the Ahtna Lodge for a room and Tony took one look at her and signed her in with a voice trembling with repressed amusement. Stan, Tony’s partner in the lodge as well as in life, didn’t even try to hold back his bellow of laughter when she walked into the dining room. “Jesus, Shugak,” he said, choking, “just tell me the other guy looks worse.”

  “I never even saw him,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, when you do,” he said. “The usual?”

  He seated her at a table next to the window and five minutes later she had a fresh papaya sitting in front of her, halved and seeded. Standing next to her table, Stan squeezed the juice from half a lime over it.

  Kate looked at her plate with disfavor. “I didn’t order this.”

  “Papaya has an enzyme that helps the body absorb the blood, good for your shiners,” Stan said. “Pineapple does, too, but I don’t have any fresh pineapple in the kitchen. Eat up. You’re getting one for breakfast, too. Oh, and here.”

  Kate took the capsule automatically. “What’s this?”

  “Vitamin C supplement. It’ll help, too.”

  Kate didn’t take vitamins, but under Stan’s watchful eye she washed this one down with a swallow of water and then dutifully if unenthusiastically ate all her papaya. She was rewarded with one of his justly famous steak sandwiches, and one of those same steaks for Mutt, raw and chopped fine with an egg and seasoned just as she liked it with salt and extra pepper. “You,” Kate informed her, “are spoiled beyond belief.”

  Mutt, lapping up her steak tartare with the air of one who knows what is her due, gave her a look that said “You should talk.”

  Tony slid into the seat opposite. “I stuck up a note at reception so I could come keep you company while you eat. Listen, Kate, Stan and I both want to say how sorry we were to hear about Old Sam.”

  Kate swallowed a mouthful that was suddenly too large. “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  “He used to call us the Fairy Barn,” Tony said.

  Kate was surprised into a laugh. “You’re kidding.”

  Tony grinned. “No. Only to me and Stan, never in front of anyone else. Just trying to stir the shit.”

  “He was good at that.”

  “He’d close down the bar and hang out with us, and Mary Balashoff when they were here together on one of their weekends.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  Tony laughed. “What didn’t we. Nothing
was off-limits. Old Sam had an opinion about everything—politics, religion. And don’t get him started on Alaska history. Hell, he lived through most of it. He knew a lot about Captain Cook, too. When he got on that hobbyhorse it could get really interesting. Sometimes it was like listening to Scheherazade, it’d be three, four o’clock before we’d break up. Did you know Cook was raised by Quakers?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Me, either. And Old Sam said Cook was born in a pigsty, too. I’d always figured him for, I don’t know, one of those bastard sons of a crown prince whose legitimate son was a no-goodnik, and they had to give the illegitimate but more able kid a job that would get him out of the country.”

  Kate paused. “Either you have an active fantasy life or you read too much Frances Hodgson Burnett when you were a kid.”

  Tony gave a modest shrug. “Why not both?”

  Kate sopped up the last remaining dribble of juice on her plate with the last sliver of bread and savored it for a moment. “Old Sam had a copy of Cook’s log. Three volumes, one for each voyage.”

  “Wow. I’d like to see that.”

  “He left me his books.” Kate gave her plate a significant look. “Play your cards right and I’ll let you look at them next time you’re in the Park.”

  “Yeah, but would you let me borrow them to read?”

  She grinned. “Limited, supervised visitation rights.”

  She pushed her plate away and sat back in her chair. The river moved past the window. It was lower and slower than it had been even a week ago. Every day closer to winter the temperature dropped even more, and it got colder faster at the higher altitudes, where the year-round snow and the glaciers were. Melt off was over and freeze up was on its way.

  She turned to look at the dining room, less than half full. The snow marched down the sides of the mountains, and the tourists emptied out of the state.

  “He loved you.” When she looked at him, he said, “Oh, God, no, he’d never say so in so many words, but it was obvious in the way he spoke of you. He took such pride in you.”

  “He talked about me?” Kate took another look around the room, at the bar along one end, the door to the kitchen at the other, the tables and chairs spaced evenly between. It was odd to think of Old Sam perched on one of the stools there, surrounded by a dumbstruck audience as he held forth on her manifest virtues.

  “Who doesn’t?” Tony said. “He was in here a little over two weeks ago. I guess, yes, that would have been the last time I saw him.”

  Which would have been when Old Sam had revised his will, Kate thought. “What did he talk about that night?”

  Tony’s brows drew together. “Some about the fishing season.” He smiled. “Some about the two new deckhands you wished on him. And…”

  “What?”

  “Well.” Tony spread his hands. “World War Two.”

  “Really?” Kate was startled.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he was in it, in the Aleutians.”

  “So he said. I hadn’t known that before.” Tony grimaced. “And now I have to go buy the book about Castner’s Cutthroats.”

  Kate’s smile was wry. “Yeah. Talking to Old Sam did tend to have that effect. Nothing like meeting someone who lived through it to make you want to read up on it.”

  Tony stood up and reached for Kate’s plate. “Dessert?”

  “What you got?”

  Tony’s grin was evil in the way of someone who was about to serve you three thousand calories in three bites. “It’s chocolate.”

  “Sold.”

  He laughed and turned, and then turned back. “Oh, hey, one more thing we talked about that evening.”

  “What?”

  Tony came back and rested the dishes on the table. He was smiling. “He spun us this tale about Dashiell Hammett. Said they were both stationed on Adak for part of the war.”

  Jane had told her the same thing an hour before, and only then did Kate remember the complete works of Dashiell Hammett on Old Sam’s shelves, the only crime fiction represented thereon. So that was why. “He never told me he met Hammett.”

  She was trying not to sound aggrieved and she didn’t think succeeding very well, but Tony, caught up in the story, didn’t pick up on it. “Yeah. Funny. He said Hammett wrote him after the war, too. Oh yeah, and he said that Hammett was writing a book.”

  “Not all that surprising,” Kate said. “Kinda what he did.”

  Tony laughed. “Sounded that way when Old Sam told it, too. He had us right up until the time the manuscript went missing, and then he cussed us out when we started laughing. He was a spellbinder.” He picked up the dishes again. “And a helluva good guy. I’m sure going to miss him.”

  “We all will,” Kate said, laughter draining out of her.

  Tony touched her shoulder briefly with his free hand, and vanished through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  * * *

  Kate looked at her cell phone, which had been charging in her room since before dinner. Alaska was only an hour off California. Jim’s cell number was number one on her speed dial. Come to think of it, it was the only number on her speed dial.

  She hesitated, and didn’t know why.

  The phone vibrated in her hand. She jumped and dropped it. It fell on the bed and bounced out of reach and she scrambled after it, catching it just before it went off the other side onto the floor.

  The number on the screen was Jim’s cell. She fumbled to answer and pressed the wrong button and disconnected the call. “Damn it!” While she was trying to figure out how to call him back the phone vibrated again. This time she took her time, located the button with the green phone on it and pressed it. “Hello?”

  There was a brief silence and for a moment she thought she’d disconnected him again. “Kate?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “I didn’t expect you to pick up.”

  “Why’d you call then?”

  She could hear the smile in his voice. “I was going to leave you a message that you’d get the next time you went to town. Something that would have embarrassed you to listen to in company.”

  She laughed, a husky sound. “Sorry I answered then.”

  “ ’S okay. Next time. Where are you?”

  “Had to make a run into Ahtna. I’m staying the night.”

  “Business?”

  Kate looked up to see her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. The shiners had achieved an almost fluorescent hue, a sort of neon plum. “The snow’s holding off so I figured I’d come into town to check with Old Sam’s attorney. How are you?”

  A sigh. “Fine.”

  “And your mom?”

  She could almost hear the muscles in his jaw tighten. “She’s fine, too.”

  A brief silence. “Talk to me,” she said, her voice as soft as the scar on her throat would allow.

  “They figure it was ALS.”

  She winced. “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said he was a pretty active guy.”

  “Yeah. Well, for someone who lived in LA. He didn’t have an aerobics instructor or anything, but he went a couple of rounds of golf every weekend, and he played tennis. He taught me to swim and to surf. His board’s still in the garage, so I’m guessing he kept it up.”

  She was silent for a moment. “You should take his board out.”

  “What?”

  “Take his board out. Go surfing. Remember him that way.”

  They listened to each other breathe for a few moments. The wonder was, it did not feel awkward to either one of them. “Is there a service?”

  Another sigh. “The funeral’s two days from now. There’ll be a memorial in their church, a graveside service, and a reception following at the club. Monday will be the reading of the will.”

  Kate didn’t let herself say the first thing that came into her mind, which was, You’re going to be there another five days? Instead she said, “It sounds like the prologue t
o a country house murder in an Agatha Christie novel.”

  He laughed, and sounded surprised that he could. “That’s exactly what it’s like. All very structured and well-mannered. Butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths.”

  “What is it with you and your mom?”

  For moment she thought he wouldn’t tell her. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Chemistry, maybe? And different ideas about what I wanted to do with my life, oh yeah. My best friend when I was eight was Enrique, the gardener’s son, so she fired the gardener. I walked away from the prep school she put me in after a month. I wouldn’t study art or literature, I insisted on sociology and the law, and then I wouldn’t go to law school, because what else was I going to do with a BA in criminal justice. She was all for me going to work for Dad’s firm and making partner before I was thirty-five.” She heard a joint pop as he stretched. “And then of course I refused to marry any of her friends’ daughters. When I brought Sylvia home to meet them—not one of my better moves—I thought the air in the house was going to freeze solid.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kate said. “Who was Sylvia?”

  A telling silence, while he thought about whether he should tell her who Sylvia was.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, “It’s none of my business, before my time. I didn’t mean to pry, I was just—”

  “Sylvia Hernandez,” he said briskly, giving the r its proper roll, “was the daughter of the LA county sheriff with whom I had my first ride along when I was making up my mind to be a cop. Jesus invited me to dinner at his house, where I met his eldest child, Sylvia. We dated for about a year.”

  “A year,” Kate said, proud her voice didn’t squeak. In the Park, until her, Chopper Jim Chopin’s legendary string of girlfriends had considered themselves lucky if they’d lasted a month each. “Sounds serious.”