Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Valuable?” Auntie Joy paled, and she looked at Kate, eyes suddenly fierce. “You be careful out there, Katya.”

  “I always am, Auntie.”

  Auntie Joy gave Kate’s shiners a pointed glance.

  “They snuck up on me,” Kate said.

  Auntie Joy looked at the door.

  “Mutt was off feeding her face.”

  Auntie Joy’s raised eyebrow said it all.

  * * *

  On impulse, when Kate left Auntie Joy’s she went up to the school, where Mr. Tyler was happy to let her use one of the computers, and to root around in his bottom drawer for a piece of beef jerky for Mutt, which of course made her his slave for life. The feeling appeared to be mutual. Mutt vamping the male half of the Park with her usual abandon was almost comforting. At least there was one thing that didn’t change.

  At the computer Kate got online. After she’d read Mac’s story in Auntie Joy’s house this afternoon, she thought she now knew why she’d been attacked in Old Sam’s cabin.

  She had been standing there reading what was obviously an old book. The slip case for it had been laying on the seat of Old Sam’s recliner, visible in a clear line of sight from the door. To someone looking in from outside, it could have looked like a box of a size to contain an icon.

  According to his own confession, One-Bucket McCullough had stolen the icon.

  She immediately cautioned herself. The manuscript was undated and unattributed. There was no return address on the box. Old Sam hadn’t left any message saying who had written it or who had sent it to him.

  But One-Bucket was a known con man, according to Ruthe Bauman. According to Auntie Joy, he and the icon had disappeared at the same time. And he had confessed to it in the manuscript.

  The last paragraph had read, “Pop’s writing this down for me and he’ll see that it gets to you. I picked up the consumption when I was on the inside and the docs tell me I haven’t got much time. Tell your mother I’m sorry, son.”

  It might even be a dying declaration.

  How would someone find out about Mac’s thievery, sans access to the manuscript?

  That was even easier. Pillow talk between Old Sam and Jane Silver. At that time and since, Jane’s experience of the world of Ahtna and the Park would have been large and varied. She called Judge Anglebrandt “Albie,” for crissake.

  Old Sam must have told her the story. She could have told anyone and everyone.

  If Mac had stolen the icon, and if it became known that Old Sam was Mac’s son, and then Old Sam died …

  The icon had pretty much fallen off the radar. Kate’s generation of Park rats had gone secular in a big way. Ekaterina had enthralled the after-school youngsters with all kinds of stories, and Kate thought she might even remember one about a lost treasure, but she’d been so young she’d thought it meant a chest full of pieces of eight. She certainly didn’t remember any stories about a holy tribal relic with a direct line to God and the power to heal.

  It was odd, that. She would have thought a scandal that had changed so many lives would have lasted at least three generations. Although to be fair, the Park had suffered a great deal of incident in the interim. The Kanuyaq mine closing. War. The influx of Aleuts displaced from the Aleutians resettling in the Park, and the consequent friction between them and the tribes already living there, whether they were related or not. The oil boom, the discoveries on the Kenai Peninsula and in Prudhoe Bay that changed every Alaskan’s life. Statehood. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the consequences of which were still being worked out between the tribes and the courts. A string of Republican representatives in Washington who had channeled federal funds into the state like they were holding a fire hose.

  When you lined it up like that, it was a wonder anyone had a moment to spare for an item venerated with superstitious awe by a small and insular group of people almost a century before. The old customs and traditions had been left behind. Hell, who even went to fish camp anymore? The aunties, yeah, but nobody under fifty. Commercial fishing for pay rather than subsistence fishing for survival was the order of the day. Ekaterina was the last elder who had spoken English as a second language, and her Native dialect had been altered by the move from the Aleutians to the Park. The BIA schools and the Molly Hootch law had finished off Native dialects all over the state, and various native cultures along with them.

  Jack Morgan had still been alive the last time Kate danced when it hadn’t been at a potlatch to honor the dead.

  There was more than one motive here, Kate thought. If there was someone out there who was watching this happen, who deplored the loss of culture and tradition, someone who was trying to think of a way to stop it or even just slow it down, if they had heard of the existence of an icon revered in a collective ethnic memory that wasn’t quite extinguished, what would they do to recover it?

  She thought of Jane Silver, dying on the floor of her house five days before.

  Maybe that question should be, what wouldn’t they do?

  That hole is going to be a mile deep and two miles wide square in the middle of the Park, Demetri had said. A lot of people won’t ever be able to find middle ground with that.

  And Demetri was a descendent of Chief Lev, a man many believed was the last of the great chiefs. The last known guardian of the Sainted Mary.

  Kate thought how ironic it was that a Russian Orthodox icon had come to be a tribal icon, a gussuk’s creation subverted to the service of an Alaskan Native tribe.

  She Googled Russian icons, and the result rocked her back in her chair.

  A Russian icon made in 1894 that had been in the private possession of the last Russian czar had recently sold at auction for $854,000.

  That many decimal places was a powerful motivator.

  So, someone was looking for the icon, either for its own cultural value to the tribe or for its monetary value on the open marketplace.

  Or both.

  One-Bucket McCullough had told his story, say to Dashiell Hammett because why not, who had written it down and sent it to Old Sam. Old Sam had told Jane, and whoever was now looking for the icon had learned about it from Jane or from someone Jane had told.

  True, Jane Silver had never struck Kate as the confiding type, but she supposed everyone had a weak spot.

  The fact that they had waited for Old Sam to die to come after the icon argued that they knew him, or at least knew of him. No one in their right mind who did would ever have tried to steal from him when he was alive.

  Which meant there was a good chance she knew them, too.

  Kate frowned down at her crossed arms.

  But why would they think that Old Sam had the icon? The story clearly said that Mac had sold it off to someone on the docks, but only three people, four if you counted Hammett, had ever read it.

  Someone in Seattle.

  Had Old Sam gone to Seattle in pursuit of the icon? He’d suffered through a pretty traumatic week in Niniltna, finding out his father wasn’t who he’d thought he was, which experience had been capped off by being rejected yet again by the love of his life. He would not have been a happy man in the days following, and unhappy men were prone to rash and often unwise action.

  Kate’s brows drew together. Would Old Sam have wondered what would happen if he found the icon and brought it home? Would he think the tribe would forgive him his Filipino blood? Or, now, his white blood?

  Perhaps more important, would he think that Auntie Joy’s parents might decide he was a fit person for her to marry after all?

  If he had gone after the icon, he hadn’t told Auntie Joy about it. And if he’d found it, he hadn’t told her that, either.

  Kate called up the computer’s menu and found that someone had downloaded Skype. She created an account and called Jim’s cell phone.

  Voice mail. Shit. “Hey,” she said brightly. “It’s me. I’m in Niniltna overnight and I’ll be sleeping in your room at Auntie Vi’s. I j
ust wanted you to know I’ll be tossing the room, pulling up floorboards and lifting ceiling panels, looking for all those love letters you wrote to your other girlfriends. I’m thinking I could get a good price for them on eBay.”

  By not so much as a raised eyebrow did Mr. Tyler, grading papers at his desk, betray that he had overhead one word.

  Auntie Vi was happy to let Kate sleep in Jim’s room at the B and B. Kate parked the snowgo out front and checked in with Annie Mike before Auntie Vi served her a hearty meal of smoked moose hocks and beans, along with a litany of complaints about how hard she was working. “You could quit,” Kate said, and was roundly snubbed for daring to suggest anything so sensible.

  In Jim’s room, she undressed and got between the sheets naked. Two-hundred-count percale against her bare skin wasn’t much of a substitute, but at least it was percale that had touched his skin, too.

  Mutt lay down in front of the door, and spent the night listening to Kate toss and turn.

  * * *

  Mr. Abernathy looked so much like a Hollywood version of the old family attorney that Jim wondered if it was an impression he deliberately cultivated. His three-piece suit was tweedy and bagged a little at the elbows and knees; his bow tie was bright red and flamboyant enough that it gave the impression it would squirt you if you got too close. He wore round, black-rimmed glasses behind which gray eyes could be imagined to twinkle, and his white hair was a positive pompadour in the style of Lyle Lovett. There was the merest hint of a drawl when he spoke, as if he’d come west from South Carolina long enough ago to be forgiven secession but not too long ago to have forgotten his roots.

  “I don’t see the need for this,” Jim said. “There is no legal requirement for reading a will. Besides, both my mother and I have copies. We already know what’s in it.”

  “James,” his mother said, radiating an austere reproof.

  Abernathy twinkled at him from behind his black rims. Jim had a suspicion the lenses were plain glass. “It was your father’s wish that the will be read in your and your mother’s presence, Sergeant Chopin.”

  From the corner of his eye Jim could see the moue of distaste cross his mother’s face. General, admiral, attorney general, those were titles she could have lived with. Sergeant? Much too far below the salt. “Call me Jim,” he said. She didn’t like that, either, a deplorable lack of formality, yet another characteristic of the great unwashed.

  Abernathy inclined his head without taking advantage of the invitation. “There being no further objection, let us proceed.”

  He cleared his throat, rattled his papers, and got to it. He was a pretty good reader, Jim thought, only half listening, lending life to the spare, dry language that summed up the material reward of his father’s life and works. There were no surprises, not at first. His mother got the house and its contents outright. The firm’s building was to be sold to the surviving partners at fair market value. The rest of the real property was to be sold on the open market—his father had even named the realtor to be employed—and the proceeds were to be divided equally between Jim and his mother following the settlement of any outstanding debt. Jim’s share was left to him outright, with no conditions. His mother’s share was left half to her outright and half in trust, the income from the latter going to her during her lifetime and reverting to Jim following her death.

  Most of the real estate was within an hour’s drive of the chair he was sitting in. His father had always had a kick-the-tire philosophy when it came to investing. Even in the current economy the proceeds would realize a huge chunk of change. Jim would never have to work again, if he didn’t want to.

  There were a few small bequests to longtime associates and employees. An original edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England to a friend at the office. His set of TaylorMade clubs to his golfing partner. Lump sums to Maria and the manager of the club and to half a dozen charities. Jim was surprised and touched when he heard that the largest amount went to the Los Angeles Police Foundation. “When did he do that?”

  “James revised his will six months ago,” Abernathy said. “There were two alterations. That was the first.”

  Jim looked at his mother. “My copy must have been lost in the mail.”

  Her mouth tightened.

  Jim looked back at the attorney. “What was the second?”

  Abernathy adjusted his glasses. “To my only child, James, in addition to his share of the estate as specified above, I also bequeath my mahogany writing box and all of its contents outright.” The lawyer picked up a box sitting at his elbow and stood to hand it to Jim. “He left this in my custody at the time he revised his will.”

  It was twenty inches long, nine inches wide, and six inches deep, and a hymn to the woodworker’s art. The joints were dovetailed and reinforced with brass strips and brass screws that had been ground down to be even with the brass strips. There was a brass handle at each end and a brass lock on the front. The wood was like satin to the touch, the brass smooth and cool. It looked as well-loved as it looked well-used, and it had sat on his father’s desk in his office at the firm for as long as Jim could remember.

  He swallowed hard and looked at Abernathy. “What’s in it?”

  Abernathy, as well-trained as he was, could not forbore a glance at Jim’s mother. Jim looked at her, too, and then both of them looked away from the expression of suppressed rage they saw there.

  “I was most specifically enjoined by my client not to inventory the contents,” Abernathy said primly. He pulled an envelope from the pocket inside his jacket and handed it to Jim. “Here is the key.”

  Jim’s name was written on the envelope in his father’s hand, a little shakier than the last time he’d seen it. The small brass key had fallen into one corner. The flap of the envelope was securely sealed. The key was all that was inside. “Thank you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Is that all, Mr. Abernathy?” his mother said.

  Mr. Abernathy tided his papers. “Yes, Mrs. Chopin, I believe that concludes our business for today. I will put James’s instructions in hand at once, and I will of course keep you apprised of my progress.”

  “Thank you.” The two of them rose to their feet and Beverly showed Mr. Abernathy to the door.

  Jim sat where he was, fighting back unexpected tears.

  The happiest times he had spent with his father had been those all too few late afternoons after school in his father’s office. He’d had to be quiet or he would be sent home, his father had said, and being sent home to his mother was sufficient threat to achieve practical invisibility. Tucked into an enormous Windsor chair, he sometimes lost himself in a book, sometimes drank in the language of the law as clients and colleagues and employees came and went and his father dispensed his wisdom to them all.

  Or what had seemed like wisdom to the little boy in the corner. He looked down at the box in his lap. It was old, over two hundred years old. His father had told him that it had been carried by a family member who fought in the Revolutionary War, and George Washington and the rest of those old long-haired guys in their pedal pushers had never seemed so interesting to an eight-year-old. Some days, when the last client had gone, the elder Chopin would call the boy to him. They would bend their heads, one white, one blond, over the writing box as his father demonstrated the adjustable brass prop that held up the reading stand, the removable wooden stop that kept the paper or the book from sliding down, the ink-stained blotter, the original cut-glass inkwells with their brass tops, the storage compartment, the secret drawers.

  For Jim, that writing box was filled with more mystery and more romance than any treasure chest buried by Blackbeard. It was a portal to another era. He’d grown up surrounded by screens—television screens, video game screens, computer screens—and the idea of putting ink in a pen and then using that pen to write on a thick sheet of cream-colored paper was almost exotic. The secret drawers didn’t hurt.

  Neither did the time spent with his fath
er.

  Beverly never came to the office.

  Eighteen

  She set off at first light, taking the road south out of Niniltna and then cutting east cross-country well before Squaw Candy Creek. The last thing she needed was Bobby Clark demanding an explanation of her shiners. Or Dinah Clark deciding they needed to be filmed for posterity.

  It had snowed another foot during the night. It was hard going in places where its own weight had yet to pack it down. Still, there was enough to make it an enjoyable ride, especially since yesterday’s dull overcast was broken today by the occasional errant beam of sunlight.

  At noon they stopped for lunch at the entrance of what she prayed was the right canyon. Mutt went foraging while Kate lit a Sterno one-burner and made some instant chicken soup. She used it to wash down a sandwich made in Auntie Vi’s kitchen that morning, thick slabs of homemade bread, slices of roast moose alternating with slices of tomato, cream cheese, lettuce, mustard, and mayonnaise. The stuff cross-country snow machine treks were made of.

  The snowgo was perched at the top of a rise that wind and avalanche kept clear of trees, and the view extended for miles. The Quilaks loomed at her back, magnificent and menacing. From here, the Kanuyaq River was a gray ribbon twisting between distant, snow-covered banks. In another month or two, it would be frozen solid beneath Park rats in pickups and on snowgos and four-wheelers, going to school, going to the store, going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house. A few intrepid tourists had even been known to travel it on skis.

  In summer the river was succor and sustenance, the birthplace and the harvest place of the salmon that fed them all. In winter it was transportation.

  It was beautiful in any season.

  She turned to look in the other direction. If the river was the heart of the Park, the Quilaks were its backbone, a ragged set of vertebrae trending in a great eastward arc, turning when they hit the Canadian border and from there running south, stopping just short of the Gulf of Alaska.