Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  He told her the truth and she was grateful. “I don’t know how serious it was, but then I was accepted into the Alaska state trooper academy in Sitka.” A ghost of a laugh. “A Hispanic daughter-in-law or her son a cop. I don’t know to this day which my mother considered the greater evil.”

  Kate wondered what his mother’s reaction would be to his current girlfriend. “She may be my best friend,” Kate said. “One way or the other, you came to Alaska.”

  The smile again. “I was always coming to Alaska, Kate. You were just the bonus.”

  It didn’t occur to Kate until later that one of the reasons she might have decided on her trip to Ahtna was that her cell phone worked there.

  * * *

  Kate slept later than usual the following morning, and got to the dining room just as Stan was about to come roust her out so he could clean the griddle between breakfast and lunch. She got her papaya, sweetened with bacon waffles and homemade maple syrup that came steaming to the table in its own gravy boat. The coffee was excellent, a dark roast that would have peeled the enamel from her teeth if it had been allowed to brew one second longer, and there was cream in the pitcher, not half-and-half. Kate cleaned her plate, ignoring the sideways glances of the only other people in the room, a couple whose off-the-REI-rack outfits screamed tourist. Kate had never seen so many zippers on one article of clothing before in her entire life. They couldn’t decide what was more interesting, Kate’s shiners or Mutt sitting at her side. When she got up to leave they exchanged a glance and the man cleared his throat and said, a little nervously, “Excuse me?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is that, uh, a wolf?”

  “Only half,” Kate said.

  Mutt, bored, lifted her lip at him and he spilled his coffee all over the table. It seemed like a pretty good exit line so they took it.

  She and Mutt made their farewells to Tony and Stan and climbed into the pickup. It was nippy inside and out. She started the engine and turned on the heater for the first time that year and cranked it up to high. She wasn’t worried about gas consumption. Ahtna’s prices were cheaper than anything she could get in Niniltna, even in barrels she brought in herself, and she wanted to be running on empty by the time she hit the gas station on her way out of town.

  She pulled the Ahtna phone book from beneath the seat. Pete Wheeler answered his own phone. She introduced herself and he gave her directions to his office, telling her any time before noon was okay but after that he was going hunting.

  Kate disconnected and craned her neck to give the sky a long, hard look. It was still gray and it still smelled like snow, but so far it was holding it in. She went to Costco and loaded up the back of the pickup with dry and canned goods and tarped it. As an afterthought to Stan’s black eye prescription, she bought a fresh pineapple, which perfumed the air of the cab on the drive to the courthouse.

  Jane Silver wasn’t in her office. Kate backtracked to the front desk and asked for her, only to be told Jane hadn’t come in that morning.

  “Did she call in sick?”

  The clerk shook her head. “She just didn’t show up.”

  Kate knew a sudden, undefined chill. “Where does she live?”

  * * *

  The house on Quartz Street was sided with old wooden clapboards recently painted baby blue with white trim. The gray asbestos shingles looked new, too. Compared to the houses on either side, Jane’s house was small, from the outside maybe a thousand square feet, with most of the lot given over to Jane’s garden habit. Every square inch of dirt inside the chain-link fence that surrounded the yard was divided into square plots separated by neat, narrow paths. The raspberries were pruned to single canes, the rhubarb was cut back to the ground, the strawberries were headed and weeded, and everything was heaped high with mulch. Some kind of climbing vine covered the links of the fence, with no single identifying leaf remaining behind.

  Kate looked at the house. The curtains were drawn. Jane’s elderly blue Pinto sat in rusty dignity in the narrow driveway to the right of the house, about halfway up the drive. Something looked odd and she walked over to see that the driver’s-side door was not fully latched. She ducked down and looked in the window to find that the dome light was still on. A beat-up black leather purse sat in the passenger seat.

  Alarm bells went off in Kate’s mind. The Pinto hadn’t been sitting there all night with the door open or the battery would have run down. She looked at Mutt and saw her on tiptoe, nose sniffing the air, ears pricked. Mutt looked up at Kate and let out something between a growl and a whine. “Yeah,” Kate said. “I know.”

  Kate walked up the steps and knocked on the door. “Jane? Jane, it’s Kate Shugak. You there?”

  There was movement inside but no answer.

  “Jane?” Kate said. She put her hand on the doorknob.

  Mutt barked once, a sharp, unmistakable warning.

  There was a faint cry from behind the door, followed by thudding footsteps going away very fast. Mutt’s ears went back and she snarled. Kate turned the knob and shoved her shoulder against the door. It was unlocked, and she stumbled into the room and nearly fell.

  Jane Silver was lying on the floor of her living room, surrounded by books pulled from shelves against the wall. It was a scene so reminiscent of Kate’s own awakening in Old Sam’s cabin two days before that she was stunned into immobility, but for no more than a second. “Jane,” she said, dropping down next to the old woman. “Jane, it’s Kate Shugak. Can you hear me?”

  Jane moaned. She had a fast-contusing bruise on her left cheek and a cut on her temple above it that had bled a bright red cascade down her face and into her hair. Beneath her head a red pool was spreading across the floor.

  “Jane, stay with me now. I’m going to call an ambulance, we’ll get you to the hospital.” She fumbled in a pocket for her cell phone.

  She heard a door at the back of the house crash open and more rapid footsteps coming from the backyard. She looked toward the sound, looked back down at Jane, and then looked at Mutt, who was quivering next to her, hind legs gathered in readiness, only waiting for the word.

  She didn’t get it.

  Jane moaned, a faint, distressed sound, and Kate looked down to see the bright eyes fixed on her face. Jane’s mouth opened and she tried to say something. Kate leaned down, one hand still excavating pockets in search of her damn phone, finding her pickup keys, a couple of peppermints, a quarter, lint, but still no fucking phone. “Stay with me, Jane. I’m calling for help right now.”

  Jane raised her hand, reaching for something, and Kate caught it in her own. There was the feeblest of tugs. “Jane, let me call someone.” She shrugged out of her jacket and laid it over Jane’s torso, tucking it under her chin. She stripped off her T-shirt and held it against the cut on Jane’s head. The white of the fabric turned pink and then red at shocking speed.

  Mutt whined. That feeble tug on her hand was repeated, and Jane tried again to say something. “Can you tell me who did this, Jane?” Kate leaned down, eyes on Jane’s face. “Just a name, one name, Jane, and I swear Mutt and I will find the son of a bitch who did this to you and I promise you he’ll look a lot worse than you do when we’re done with him.”

  Impossible, but Jane’s mouth quirked at the corners, as if she were trying to smile. The tug again, so weak this time Kate barely felt it, but feel it she did. This time she put her ear right next to Jane’s mouth. “All right, tell me, Jane, and then we’ll get you an ambulance and get you to the hospital.”

  A word floated out on a breath of air.

  “What?” Kate was trying to look for Jane’s home phone without moving.

  Jane’s chest rose and fell. On the exhale she managed a few words, only one of which Kate could truly understand. “Paper?” Kate said. “What kind of paper?”

  Jane’s face twisted with effort. It was a horrible sight.

  “All right, Jane,” Kate said. “I heard you, I got it. Take it easy. I’m going to get you some help.” She
spotted Jane’s phone on the floor next to an overturned end table. Keeping her T-shirt pressed against Jane’s wound, she scrabbled crabwise over Jane’s body and the scattered books to snatch up the phone with her free hand and dial 911. The dispatcher was blessedly matter-of-fact and efficient and it wasn’t five minutes before Kate heard the wail of the siren.

  But in that time Jane Silver had breathed her last.

  * * *

  Kenny Hazen’s Blazer pulled up behind Kate’s pickup. Big and beefy, he had a dark beard that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times a day he shaved. He wore a khaki uniform shirt with a badge fastened over the pocket, faded jeans, and hiking boots that looked like they’d just come over the Chilkoot Pass.

  He came up the sidewalk with deliberate tread. “Kate.”

  “Kenny.” She was sitting on the top step. Mutt was pressed close to her side and she’d put her jacket back on and zipped it up to the throat, but she was still shivering.

  He inspected her face for a moment. “I thought we didn’t have raccoons in Alaska,” he said. “My mistake.”

  “I really have heard them all,” she said.

  “What happened?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at Jane’s house. “As unlikely as it sounds, pretty much what happened here this morning. Only I was luckier.”

  He seemed to sigh, and went past her and through the door. Kate remained where she was, her hand knotted in Mutt’s mane, but she couldn’t stop her imagination from following him.

  The door opened into the living room, which encompassed the front half of the house. The bedroom was in the left-hand corner, the kitchen in the right-hand corner, and the bathroom in between. There was a pass-through between the kitchen and the living room, with a tiny dining table and two straight-backed chairs on either side of it. A second door led from the kitchen to a tiny porch and into the back garden, a heavily planted square like the front garden, surrounded by a continuation of the same chain-link fence. When Kenny looked, he’d see the same fresh set of footprints Kate had seen, big feet in heavy-soled boots in a running stride headed for the back fence.

  There were three sets of freestanding shelves between the windows and against the back wall of the living room, filled with old books and old photographs in tarnished silver gilt frames and a row of dusty china dolls with their hair in Gibson Girl pompadours dressed in long skirts and leg-o’-mutton sleeves. There was an easy chair, fake brown leather on a steel frame, with a matching footstool, both looking worn and comfortable. A floor lamp with a tray table had been knocked over, and half the books on the shelves were on the floor.

  Kate looked down and realized she was still carrying the handset of Jane’s phone. The knees of her jeans were soaked with Jane’s blood.

  Kenny came back out on the porch and pulled the door closed behind him. He joined Kate and Mutt on the top step. “Well, shit,” he said.

  “There’s blood on the corner of the shelf closest to the door,” Kate said.

  “I saw that.”

  “Her car is unlocked and the keys are in it,” Kate said. “The driver’s-side door isn’t closed all the way. And her purse is in the passenger seat.”

  This wouldn’t have been unusual in the Park, but Ahtna was on a major highway between Fairbanks and Anchorage. Ahtnaners kept their vehicles locked at home and at work.

  They meditated in unison on the little garden that Jane had cared for with so much love and diligence. “You think she forgot something,” Kenny said, “remembered it on her way to work, turned around to come get it, and surprised a burglar in the act?”

  Kate nodded.

  “Why are you here?” Kenny said.

  The air was getting colder, not warmer with the increase in daylight. Kate shivered again. She pointed at her eyes. “I was packing up Old Sam’s cabin. Somebody coldcocked me with a piece of firewood while I was reading a journal written back in 1938 by the first judge in Ahtna.”

  “Judge Anglebrandt?”

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Oh yeah.” He jerked his head toward the house. “Jane volunteered at the library, led a monthly book club. I go sometimes. Once she picked a book called The Irish R.M. She said it was the story of Anglebrandt’s first years in Alaska. Stranger in a strange land. Pretty funny.”

  “Jane led a discussion group at the library?”

  His eyebrows raised. “Yes.”

  “Who else came?”

  He shrugged. “Anybody who wanted to. Anyone who read for fun. The same people never come every time. Just if you were interested in the book she picked for that month. Sometimes there’d be tourists in town overnight and they’d come whether they’d read the book or not. Why?”

  “I just—,” Kate said, and sighed. “I didn’t know. It appears I didn’t know a hell of a lot about Jane Silver. Anyway. When I woke up at Old Sam’s, the journal was gone.”

  “What was in it?”

  Kate hugged her arms. “A diary of the judge’s activities his first year in Ahtna.”

  “So you came to Ahtna to … what?”

  “Jane Silver has—had—been the recorder for property transactions in the Park since before I was born. There’s no one in state government, in Ahtna anyway, with more time served. She knows—knew—where all the bodies are buried. I thought she might know what was in the judge’s journal. Why someone would be willing to commit assault in the first degree to get their hands on it. Why Old Sam had it in his library.”

  “And?”

  “She knew something.” Kate’s head drooped and she sighed again. “But she didn’t say anything. She put the change of title paperwork through on the property Old Sam left me, and then told me to come back this morning.”

  “Why?”

  “She said she might have something else for me to look at.”

  “Helpful.”

  “Yeah. I went to the office. She wasn’t there, and she hadn’t called in sick. Scared me, somehow. Figured I should check on her. Got here in time to hear whoever it was beat feet out the back door.” Kate looked up at him. “This doesn’t have to be related. Jim told me you’ve had a rash of break-ins and burglaries. But if this wasn’t that, if anything I said or did—”

  “Stop right there,” Kenny said. “You didn’t attack her. Don’t blame yourself.”

  But she did.

  Ten

  Pete Wheeler’s office was tucked into the corner of a strip mall around the corner from the courthouse. It was one room and it contained one desk, one computer, and one phone, plus a continuous and contiguous series of white cardboard document boxes pushed against the walls, in two places stacked all the way to the ceiling. On the wall behind the desk was a series of framed diplomas. Bachelor of arts in justice from the University of Alaska Anchorage College of Health and Social Welfare. Master of arts in history from the University of Washington. Juris Doctor from the University of Oregon School of Law. On another wall were some framed prints, including an old Alaska Airlines poster with a grizzled sourdough bent over a mountain stream, a gold pan in his hands.

  On the adjacent wall were three maps of Alaska, same size, same scale, side by side, hung in chronological order. The first was of Russian America, dated 1864, three years before it was purchased by the United States. The second was of the Territory of Alaska, dated 1915. The third was a combined topographical-political map, recent enough to get Nanwalek’s name right. Above the maps were two gold pans, old ones, rusty with use, hung on either side of a crossed shovel and pickaxe, also showing evidence of being more than just decorative.

  Wheeler looked up from stuffing papers into a beat-up briefcase. His eyes traveled from Kate to Mutt and then back to Kate. “Kate Shugak?”

  “Yes.” She stepped forward. “Sorry, I got delayed.”

  “Pete Wheeler. You just caught me.”

  He was young, balding, and pouter pigeon plump, with a round face and ears that stuck out from his head at ninety-degree angles. There was something attractive in the t
winkle in his eye. “Appreciate your time,” Kate said. “You wrote a will for Samuel Leviticus Dementieff of Niniltna last month.”

  “Yes.”

  It was still hard to say the words. It was doubly hard given the scene she had left on Quartz Street that morning. “He died on Saturday.”

  “I know, I heard,” he said, closing the briefcase and setting it on the floor next to his desk. “I’ve heard about you, too, and”—he looked at Mutt—“she pretty much confirms your identity, but to observe the formalities, may I see some picture ID?”

  She pulled out her wallet, extracted her driver’s license, and passed it over. He looked from it to her face and back, and returned it. “Thank you.” He eyed the blood stains on her knees, but when she didn’t say anything he sat down, folding his hands on the belly that strained the buttons of his blue button-down shirt, and regarded her with a professionally sympathetic eye. “He told me you’d be here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He waved her to a chair. “When he came in to sign his will, what was that, two, three weeks ago? He said when he kicked off—his words, Ms. Shugak—to expect you on my doorstep shortly thereafter.”

  Kate sat down, Mutt taking up station on her left. “He didn’t—did he say he felt like he was about to die?”

  “Guy was nearly ninety, and even a damn well preserved ninety is still ninety,” Wheeler said.

  There was a little arrangement of rocks in a miniature gold pan on Wheeler’s desk. Kate focused her attention on them so she wouldn’t have to see the understanding in his eyes. “He never said—he never talked about it. Dying.”

  “I only met him three times, Ms. Shugak, but he struck me as someone who lived very much in the now.”

  They weren’t rocks. They were gold nuggets, ranging in size from a pencil eraser to a quarter. “True.”

  She looked up to see Wheeler smiling at her, revealing a charming pair of deep dimples. “Like I said, I only met him three times, but it’s pretty easy to see a man like that would have hated being ill.”