Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  Many of the stampeders who came north in the Klondike Gold Rush had colorful nicknames, usually with an equally colorful story attached to it. “Why One-Bucket?”

  “I was interested, too, so I did a little research in the newspapers back then.”

  “The Ahtna Adit?”

  “That was one of them,” Ruthe said, nodding. “He’s mentioned in passing in a couple of books written by stampeders, too.”

  Kate remembered Ben’s remark that every stampeder who stepped foot in the Klondike wrote a book about it.

  “It seems,” Ruth said, “that One-Bucket McCullough was famous in certain circles for his ability to stake a claim on the richest section of any creek, pull one bucket of nuggets out, and sell the claim to the first guy who asked.”

  Kate thought about it. “Sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?”

  “Well,” Ruthe said, “from the accounts of the miners who bought his claims, which never paid out in a manner you might expect of a claim previously productive of a full bucket of nuggets in one day, there was some speculation as to whether he sold the same bucket of nuggets more than once.”

  “Oh.” Kate started laughing, and Ruthe joined in. “And that was Old Sam’s father?”

  Ruthe shrugged. “Might have been. Old Sam never came right out and said so. Why this interest?”

  “Old Sam left me this note.” Kate pulled it out and handed it over.

  Ruthe read it. “Hmm. Not particularly self-explanatory, is it.”

  “No,” Kate said with feeling. “It isn’t.”

  Ruthe gave her a speculative glance. “Anything to do with you getting attacked in Old Sam’s house?”

  “I don’t know. I was packing up his books, and I’d gotten sidetracked by a judge’s journal, the first judge in Ahtna before World War Two. The next thing I know I’m trying not to throw up in Matt Grosdidier’s lap. And you haven’t heard the latest.” She told Ruthe about her eventful trip to Ahtna, and the even more eventful return.

  “Jane Silver’s dead?” Ruthe said.

  Kate nodded. “You knew her?”

  “Who didn’t. She had a front-row seat to the last seventy years of Alaska history. I tried to use her as a source for the timeline but she just wouldn’t play.”

  Kate cleared her throat delicately. “There may have been a reason she didn’t want anyone looking too closely into her history.”

  Ruthe made a rude noise. “I know all about Beatrice Beaton’s Boardinghouse,” she said.

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Well. Not as big a secret as Jane had hoped, then.”

  “And you say she’s dead?”

  Kate nodded. “Day before yesterday.”

  “How?”

  Kate sighed. “It looks like she surprised a burglar. They shoved her and she fell and hit her head.”

  “A burglar, huh?”

  “Yeah. Her place was ransacked, or in the process of being ransacked. I heard him heading out the back door when we were coming in the front.”

  Ruthe looked at Mutt, snoozing peacefully in front of the wood stove. “Mutt with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t send her after him?”

  “No.”

  Ruthe raised an eyebrow. “Time was you wouldn’t have hesitated.”

  Kate looked at Mutt, too. Time was she hadn’t seen Mutt near death from intercepting a bullet that had been meant for Kate.

  Mutt’s eyes snapped open and she raised her head to meet Kate’s stare full on.

  Kate was the first one to look away. “There have been a lot of break-ins in Ahtna lately,” she said. “It could be that simple. Or…”

  “Or what?”

  Kate shrugged. “Working Mrs. Beaton’s side of the street does put one in the way of hearing the real story behind all the gossip. Best snitch any cop can have is a working girl.”

  “You think she knew something to do with Old Sam? And that that was what got her killed?”

  “It could be that complicated.” Kate drained her mug and got to her feet. “Johnny’s pretty sure it is.”

  Ruthe grinned. “And how is my boy?”

  Unbeknownst to her, Kate’s expression was one of love and pride. “Damn near perfect.”

  Ruthe nodded as if it was only to be expected. “You’re very lucky,” she said.

  “I know,” Kate said.

  * * *

  At Old Sam’s the snow was drifted three feet high against the door and there was a set of fresh tracks circumnavigating the cabin. It looked as if the person had stopped to peer into every window. Kate squatted for a closer look. “Small,” Kate said to Mutt, who was peering over her shoulder. “An older child or a younger woman. I’m betting Phyllis. Maybe she’ll come back while we’re here.”

  Mutt made a noise that could have been agreement, but when Kate unlocked the padlock Mutt stationed herself squarely in front of the door, and she did not relax her vigilance until they left. Mutt had a long memory, and she was not about to suffer the indignity of leaving her human undefended from attack a second time.

  She’d already taken care of the books. As promised, Kate left towels and bedding, dishes and food. She packed Old Sam’s clothes and personal belongings, listing the contents on the outside of each box in black Marks-A-Lot. By the end of the day she was heartily sick of the whole operation—Who knew the old man would have had so much stuff in him? Although she was sure Mike Doogan would have called it gear—and had begun to toss boxes of ammunition in the same box with frayed Jockey underwear and Christmas ornaments. Where the hell had Old Sam come by those?

  Phyllis, if it had been her, didn’t come back. On the way home Kate dropped off Old Sam’s clothes with Auntie Balasha, who ran a sort of thrift shop out of her garage. When Johnny got home from school that afternoon he found Kate unloading the last of the boxes from the snowgo trailer. He gave her a hand and they closed up the garage against a wind-driven snowfall that promised to have a lot more on the ground by morning.

  Kate busied herself with dinner as Johnny leaned on the counter and kibitzed. The pork chops were in the oven and Kate was using the last of a bunch of very sad apples from the fruit bin in the refrigerator for applesauce by the time she was done catching him up on the day’s activities. “We were just talking about the Spanish flu in history today,” he said. “Mr. Tyler says it was proportionally really bad in Alaska, partly because of the communal lifestyle of Alaska Natives.”

  Kate nodded, turning on the rice cooker. “It’s estimated that half the Native population died. The elders called it the Black Death. They still do.”

  “Wow.” Johnny was impressed. “Reminds me of that stuff in the Middle Ages.”

  “The bubonic plague.”

  “Yeah. Only this wasn’t rats.”

  “No.” She turned on the rice cooker and leaned on the sink. “Think about it, Johnny. Every second person you know, dead. Me, Jim, you, Van, the aunties, Ruthe, Annie. Count them off.”

  Johnny looked stricken. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “It was exactly like that. And the people who got it who didn’t die were too weak and debilitated to fight off the vultures, and the people who didn’t get the flu had enough on their hands caring for the survivors to be paying attention.”

  “So you think this One-Bucket McCullough seduced Old Sam’s mom and stole this icon thing?”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me.”

  “And then his mom married Quinto Dementieff.” He thought about that for a while. “Do you think Quinto knew?”

  “If he didn’t know before, he would have known when Old Sam started growing up looking like does. Did.”

  “I hope he didn’t…” Johnny’s voice trailed off.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  “Do you think Old Sam knew?”

  “Yes.” Kate folded a dish towel and hung it over the handle on the oven door. “Maybe not until later, but he knew. It’s the only way to explain his note.”


  “So you think he wanted you to find this One-Bucket McCullough?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  Kate’s laugh sounded more like a sob. “Beats the hell out of me.” She paused. “But one thing about Old Sam.”

  “What?”

  “He wasn’t interested in information that didn’t have a practical purpose. Whatever this crazy road is he’s sending me down…”

  “There’s something important at the end of that road.”

  “I think so. Christ, I hope so.”

  She started loading plates, and nothing interfered with dinner, not even Old Sam’s edicts from beyond the grave. But afterward Johnny said, “So. What are you going to do next?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that.” It was Kate’s turn to lean on the counter and kibitz while Johnny did the dishes. It was black and dark on the other side of the windows and the house creaked in what sounded like gale-force winds. “If this blows itself out by morning, I think I’m going to take the snowgo up to Canyon Hot Springs.”

  “Why?”

  Kate gave a half laugh. “I wish I had a good answer for that.” She moved her shoulders, as if trying to shake off a persistent fly. “I’ve got a feeling I’m supposed to. I didn’t know he owned it until he left it to me in his will. Now there’s this business about who his father was or wasn’t, and the—I can’t believe I’m saying this—the missing treasure.”

  “The icon.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Tyler’s been telling us about the Russian Revolution, and the massacre of the czar and his family. Did you know the Russian Orthodox Church made them saints?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, and he showed us pictures of icons with their pictures on them. All kinds of gold and jewels. Is this icon like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Kate said slowly. “I never saw it. No member of my generation has.” Maybe treasure wasn’t too overblown a word after all.

  “Would the aunties know?”

  “They might. All four of them were contemporaries of Old Sam. More or less.” She thought of Auntie Joy. She didn’t want to add to Auntie Joy’s pain, but she knew the reaction she’d get trying to ask questions of the other three. Auntie Edna would scowl and refuse to answer on general principle, Auntie Vi would scold and refuse to answer on the grounds that Kate was poking her nose into elder business (“You not there yet, Katya!”), and Auntie Balasha would smile and offer her fresh cookies and give Mutt some moose jerky and get her grandson Willard to service Kate’s truck and give Kate half a dozen jars of her justly famous smoked salmon to take home, all the while never answering anything to the purpose. Auntie Balasha was the most approachable of all the aunties, and without question the most inaccessible.

  “You could ask them.”

  “I could,” she said. Another gust of wind hit the house. “But not tonight.” She pointed at the table, and at his daypack sitting on one of the chairs. “Homework for you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She gestured at the boxes stacked in the living room. “Get Old Sam’s books up on the shelves.”

  He grumbled less than usual over the homework, which led her to think better of Mr. Tyler than she already did. One good teacher made all the difference.

  They worked away at their respective jobs for the next couple of hours to the sound of Jimmy Buffett. It wasn’t even October, so she wasn’t ready to shoot six holes in her freezer. Come to think of it she wasn’t ever ready to do that.

  After the frenzied activity of an Alaskan summer—quick catch the fish, quick clean the fish, quick smoke and can the fish, quick pick the berries, quick make the jam, quick weed the garden and chop the wood and fix the roof and paint the shed and get your moose and fill the cache and make that last Anchorage run for new glasses and get your teeth cleaned and buy school clothes and supplies—you were just plain exhausted, worn-out, ready to crawl into a hole and sleep the winter away.

  Winter in the Park, everything slowed down. You had enough time for the first time in months, enough time to sleep in, read a book, spend days experimenting with a new bread recipe until you got it right. You had time to snowshoe over to Mandy’s or spend an evening at the Roadhouse or a couple of days at Bobby and Dinah’s getting to know your goddaughter again.

  So it was dark, so it was cold—so what? Kate never sentimentalized her life, but when you lived a subsistence lifestyle, if Alaskan summers were a time for nonstop work, then Alaskan winters were a time for nonstop leisure, at least comparatively.

  Unless of course your surrogate father died on you, the son of a bitch, and seemed to have deliberately left a mystery to unravel that stretched back to before the moment of his conception.

  She shelved a biography of Captain Cook by Alistair MacLean with unnecessary force.

  Tomorrow she was going to go back into town and talk to Auntie Joy about Old Sam, and Elizaveta Kookesh, and Chief Lev, and find out who the hell One-Bucket McCullough was.

  And then she was going to go up to Canyon Hot Springs to find whatever the hell Old Sam had left her to find.

  Sixteen

  A foot of snow had fallen overnight, and the day dawned with a high overcast that promised more snow but not right this minute. Her most recent experience in survival very much on her mind, she packed enough food and supplies and extra fuel for a small army into the trailer and hitched it to the snowgo before heading out.

  On the way to Auntie Joy’s she detoured by Virginia Anahonak’s to see Phyllis, who confirmed that she’d waded through the snow to the cabin the day before. Phyllis was overjoyed to hear that she could move in that very moment. “There’s wood enough to last the winter,” Kate said. “It’s yours to use. I checked the oil drums; they’re about half full. There is flour and salt and sugar and butter and some canned goods, and sheets and towels.”

  Phyllis started to cry again. “I spent last night packing.” She then shocked and embarrassed Kate by throwing her arms around her and kissing her, as Virginia watched from her open door, all eyes and ears.

  “Uh, yeah,” Kate said, extricating herself from Phyllis’s embrace. “I’m heading out to the hot springs, I’d better get going so I don’t lose the light before I get there.”

  “I can never thank you enough,” Phyllis said, sobbing.

  “Don’t thank me, Old Sam did it. You need a ride?”

  Phyllis wiped her eyes on her sleeve and gulped. “You’ve got a full trailer. Virginia will take me over, she wants to see the place anyway.”

  Of course she did. Phyllis bolted back inside the house, presumably to grab her stuff, and Kate started the engine and got out of there.

  She was an only child who’d been orphaned young and raised by two old men and one old woman, none of whom was comfortable with either emotion or gratitude. It showed.

  * * *

  Auntie Joy’s usual beaming smile was absent when she opened the door to Kate that morning.

  “Hi, Auntie,” Kate said brightly. “Where’s your shovel? I’ll dig you out while you make me coffee, and if you’ve got any of those great cookies left I wouldn’t turn them down.”

  Thus serving her elder’s needs as well as serving her elder notice that she was there for however long it took to get the story. In half an hour she had cleared the path between Niniltna’s main street and Auntie Joy’s front door. She leaned the shovel against the cabin wall, kicked the snow from her boots, and went inside. Mutt, who had provided an honor guard for the ungainfully employed, sat down square in the middle of the doorstep with an intimidating thump that was audible inside.

  The round mahogany dining table was set with the full rosebud tea service this time, creamer, sugar bowl with the delicate lid, cups and saucers and dessert plates on a lace tablecloth. She’d even gotten out the rose flatware, which Kate remembered from back in the day when Auntie Joy still hoped the child Kate would succumb to the lure of ruffles and dolls and tea parties.

  Yes, Auntie
Joy had her own defenses. For one thing, Kate was immediately sidetracked into trying to remember how many of the fragile little cups the child Kate had broken before Auntie Joy finally put them up out of her reach.

  It was odd, but however many cups Kate broke, there was always a full set the next time she appeared.

  “Sit,” Auntie Joy said.

  It was an order, not an invitation. Kate sat. Tea was poured, milk was added, sugar was offered, cookies were placed on dessert plates. Polite conversation ensued while the proprieties of Park hospitality were observed. Early snow this year. More on the way. Auntie Vi was wearing herself out changing the beds so often in her B and B, she was thinking of hiring help, perhaps a high school girl. Did Kate think Vanessa would be interested? The kids sure liked those new computers, and the things they found. Little Anuska Moonin had found a website—Auntie Joy was very proud of her mastery of this new word—a website that had tatting patterns by the hundreds. She had printed some out and brought them to her auntie. Such a thoughtful girl. Auntie Balasha had taken her grandson Willard to Anchorage for his annual checkup. Auntie Edna was still doing a roaring business in Filipino take-out from the back door of her house. Katya Clark was in preschool, and the principal had had to physically stop her father from wheeling his chair into the classroom to take up a permanent position along the back wall. He was armed, if the principal, a veteran himself, was not mistaken, with a 7.62-mm Tokarev automatic pistol that weighed over two pounds fully loaded, on the off chance any terrorists infiltrated the school during nap time.

  Kate ate and drank and waited until Auntie Joy ran out of words. The silence that followed yawned between them, uneasy and fraught with portent. Kate put her cup down on its saucer with the exaggerated care she employed with all of Auntie Joy’s china, and said, “Auntie, there are things I must know so I can carry out Old Sam’s wishes.”

  Auntie Joy put down her own cup with equal care and a certain finality. “All right, Katya,” she said. “I tell you, then.”

  Kate had had her arguments prepared and ready to trot out, and she was caught flat-footed by this unexpectedly capitulation. “Why now?”