Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Mutt, don’t,” Kate said. “Come back here. Come on, girl.”

  But Mutt didn’t, and Kate wondered miserably what she was supposed to do. Let Mutt go into harm’s way, maybe wind up back on the vet’s table in Ahtna?

  She remembered Ruthe’s look at Mutt when Kate had told her about the attack at the cabin. Mutt’s look of shame when Matt Grosdidier had looked at her, clearly wondering where Mutt had been when Kate had been under attack. Kenny Hazen not asking why she hadn’t sent Mutt after Jane Silver’s attacker, when they had actually heard him running out the back door. Johnny’s care to say nothing at all.

  Before Mutt got shot, the two of them had always gone into harm’s way together, shoulder to shoulder, sharing the risk.

  Now …

  Moving slowly and with care, she reloaded her rifle and stood it against the wall next to the door. She poked up the fire and melted snow for coffee and biscuits and put bacon in a pan and set it on the stove. Grimly, she went outside to put up the outhouse again. This time it required some remedial work with hammer and nails, and this time she piled the snow so high against the walls it looked like it had flying buttresses. Although if she was going to keep this place she would have to come up with something a little more sturdy in the way of waste disposal.

  She replaced the tools. The headache had receded to a dull throb, and her stomach growled. No sign of Mutt. She went back inside and shed her parka. The smell of frying bacon was beginning to perfume the air, and when she had made herself a cup of coffee the two smells combined were enough to raise the dead. She rolled biscuits and dropped them into the Dutch oven. They and the bacon were a delicious brown at the same time and she ate biscuit and bacon sandwiches sitting on the snow machine seat, leaning against the wall of the cabin, and tried not to think how lonely the cabin felt with Mutt gone.

  She thought about the intruder that morning. Who the hell was he? Who the hell was his friend with the rifle? Why had they followed her all the way out here?

  First things first, who had known she was coming to Canyon Hot Springs? She thought back. Johnny. Auntie Joy. Phyllis.

  Oh. And Phyllis’s aunt Virginia Anahonak, also known as the Niniltna town crier, who had been listening in on their conversation. That widened the field considerably.

  She sat up with a jerk. “What map?” she said.

  Kate poured herself another mug of coffee, doctored it with evaporated milk and a packet of sugar, and sat back again to study the interior of the cabin.

  She’d tarped three of the four walls in an attempt to stem the cabin’s natural air-conditioning, and on the admittedly lame theory that they might be covering something Old Sam had left her to find she pulled them down again. The fourth wall held the windows and the door, each its own wind tunnel. She’d duct-taped a trash bag over both windows. The door she’d left free for easy egress, as well as, as events transpired, ingress. She subjected each of the four walls to minute inspection, and found zero for her pains other than the remnants of first-rate craftsmanship.

  The wood must have been very well seasoned before Old Sam had built the cabin. Kate wondered if he had felled the trees before the war and built the cabin afterward. She didn’t know enough to know if that would have been good or bad, but she didn’t think the temperature in this little canyon would have warmed up to the point that the logs, properly decked, wouldn’t have lasted seven years. The logs had been hand hewn, the smooth, regular marks still evident through the graying of the wood. Old Sam had evened them up as much as possible, and would have filled the inevitable openings between the logs with a mixture of moss and mud. Kate didn’t think Perma-Chink had been around then.

  She thought about that dense thicket of spruce the snowy owl had been roosting in, and wondered if that was where Old Sam had harvested this timber. In the sixty-odd years since, even a copse in Alaska would have had time to recover. She thought she remembered a gravel foundation as well—he had one beneath the cabin in Niniltna—and wondered where he’d found gravel up here. Maybe in that little notch where the wolves had materialized the night before; it could have hosted a small hanging glacier at one time and on retreat left a gravel deposit behind. She wouldn’t know until the following spring.

  She’d been used to thinking of this cabin as on its knees, ready to fall down at the first mild breeze. She recognized now that its original construction had been so solid that with only a moderate amount of remedial care it would probably stand another fifty years.

  “That’s all very well, Kate,” she said out loud, “but what about this map?”

  Mutt wasn’t there to answer. She banished the thought with another. Had Old Sam left a map behind to show her where he’d hidden the icon? If so, who else had he told about it? And why the hell would he?

  She found herself getting annoyed with the old man all over again.

  That, too, was a familiar feeling.

  The cabin was high enough to accommodate a sleeping loft, as evidenced by the supports set two thirds of the way up the east and west walls of the cabin.

  She was five feet tall. Old Sam had been a foot taller than she was.

  She peered up, above the section of wall she’d smacked into with her butt that morning. Was one of the supports out a little farther than the others? A littler farther out of the wall than it had seemed to be last night?

  She grabbed her mitts and went outside, where she unhitched the trailer from the snowgo. It just fit through the door. She hauled it over to stand beneath the loft supports on the east wall. She put the snowgo seat on top of that. It wasn’t the steadiest construction but it was what she had so it would have to do.

  When she climbed on top of the seat her face was just below the supports.

  They were log ends that had been notched into the walls at right angles to the wall logs. The second one out from the back wall extended a good half an inch beyond the ones on either side. Kate was sure that had not been the case the day before.

  With a little coaxing, she managed to pull it from the wall. The edges of the cut were sharp and unsanded, and a shower of fresh sawdust sprinkled down on the snowgo seat. This hidey hole had been made very recently.

  She wasn’t quite tall enough to see back into the hole. She set down the notched piece of wood and reached as far back into the hole as she could stretch. Her hand closed over something. She pulled it out and looked at it. A package wrapped in newspaper, fastened with duct tape.

  She put the notched wood back in its hole and used the hammer from the tool kit to tap it back into place, level with its fellow. No point in leaving behind any indication that something had been hidden, or that it had been found.

  She spent a moment admiring the artistry of it. The cutout fit flush and seamless into the wall. You’d never have known it was there, not even looking straight at it.

  If the force of her butt hitting the wall that morning hadn’t knocked it loose in the first place, she might never have seen it at all.

  One thing was for sure. Old Sam, pulling the puppet strings from beyond the grave, had not been interested in making things easy for her.

  She climbed down and moved the seat back to the wall. She stared at the package for a full minute before she opened it.

  It was another journal, the twin of the one she’d been reading in Old Sam’s cabin when she’d been attacked. She opened it. Yes, here again was the flowing hand of U.S. Judge Albert Arthur Anglebrandt. This volume was dated 1939, two years after the volume that had been stolen.

  She put down the journal and stuck her head outside. Small clouds that looked like torn cotton balls were scudding overhead, the sunlight winking in and out behind them, but in the protected little canyon it was still and calm. In the distance an eagle called, a wild, piercing cry that lasted seconds and faded. The sound was the wilderness itself on wings.

  No sign of Mutt.

  She tested the air against her cheek and found it crisp and cold and drier than it had been earlier in the day. She di
dn’t think it was going to snow again for a day or two, if not more. If it did snow, she had enough supplies to see her through. Of course, if it did snow, she would have no tracks to follow in the morning.

  Johnny was safe and snug at Annie’s, nothing to worry about there. Jim was in California, everything to worry about there but nothing that going home today would cure. Best to take it easy and head back down tomorrow.

  If it didn’t snow, their tracks would still be there. If it did, she would live to fight another day.

  Still no sign of Mutt.

  Kate went back inside, poured herself another mug of coffee, and opened the journal to the first page. She read steadily through the rest of the day, marking names, setting the dates in context with what she already knew, and taking the occasional nap when her wound began to ache and her eyes began to blur.

  By now, two years on, Judge Anglebrandt’s court was a going concern, with a courthouse, a jail and a bailiff, and two territorial policemen assigned to Ahtna. He issued warrants, ruled charges reasonable or—rarely—unreasonable, appointed counsel for the indigent, set bail, heard pleas, and presided over trials both criminal and civil. There were some familiar names—Heiman in a civil trial involving embezzlement of funds, Katelnikof in a criminal trial involving burglary. The apple hadn’t fallen far from either tree. There were a few capital crimes, including two murders and one kidnapping that sounded pretty straightforward, all three of which resulted in conviction.

  Life on the bench. Kate read on.

  It wasn’t until November of that year, November 17 to be exact, that she found what she was looking for.

  The judge had received notification from a California court that Herbert Elmer McCullough, also known as Mac, also known as One-Bucket, had been released on parole from San Quentin. Since he had been imprisoned in part for crimes committed within Judge Anglebrandt’s district, said judge would of course be notified. There had probably been notification of a parole hearing, for which his honor would have been solicited for recommendations, and probably to get into touch with Mac’s victims to see how they felt about time off with good behavior.

  In 1939, communications between Alaska and Outside would have been slow to nonexistent. By the time Judge Anglebrandt had received notification, Mac would have been on his way north, maybe even already back in the territory. Where he had been scooped up by General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. Kate did so love that name.

  Why had Mac joined the Alaska Scouts? Okay, he’d tried to do as right by his son as a born con man knew how, but that didn’t necessarily translate into a desire to serve one’s country. She couldn’t square patriotism with the man who had seduced Old Sam’s mother, gotten her with child, and left her behind with barely a backward glance.

  Kate had read Mac’s protestations that he’d done everything for the sake of Elizaveta and his child with a disbelief verging on scorn. Mac was a thief. Thieves steal.

  Still. She supposed a thief could be as patriotic as anyone else. For one thing, he had to know he was bound to prosper better in a free republic with ten constitutional amendments dedicated to giving him the benefit of the doubt.

  Although. He had just gotten out of jail. She would have thought he’d taken enough orders to last him a lifetime. He’d been inside for nearly twenty years.

  “Oh,” she said out loud, and would have smacked her forehead if that morning’s injury hadn’t made that unwise.

  Nobody spent twenty years inside without forming relationships. You had to talk to someone. Mac could have talked to someone about the icon, which story could have been handed down, one crook to another, possibly in written form, in a letter to a child, maybe, or to a friend on the outside.

  She had another thought. Hammett, if Hammett’s hand it was that had shaped that very straightforward account of Herbert Elmer McCullough’s life, had been a professional writer. Impossible to imagine him not making a copy of Mac’s story. Impossible, too, to imagine he wasn’t intrigued by a story of real-life stolen treasure. He could have set it aside after the war, meaning to go back to it, or even lost it in transition from the Aleutians to the South 48. It could have been found by someone else after he died.

  So there were two explanations for her being attacked three times in eight days.

  She wondered how much the icon was really worth. Her Google search had taught her that it could be valuable in itself. The stones embedded on the frame could be jewels of great price. It was valuable as an historical object to the state. It might be valuable as a cultural object to Kate’s tribe. It would certainly be spiritually valuable to the tribal elders.

  It wasn’t likely that something that valuable had traveled in a trader’s pack from Russia to Russian America, but it was possible. It wasn’t likely that the trader had been killed in an attack on his stockade by the Kolosh and his pack rifled by warriors afterward, but it was possible. It wasn’t likely that the warrior would recognize what he had and that it would become a family heirloom, but it was possible.

  She wondered how it had gotten its reputation for healing powers. Had some itinerant missionary seen it and used it to convert the heathen to the one true way?

  She got up and opened the door, breathing deeply of the cold, invigorating air. What little sun the canyon walls allowed was long gone and the stars were lighting torches against the encroaching dark.

  Still no sign of Mutt.

  The pools stair-stepped in front of her down the center of the canyon, shallow and serene, the water rising from the floor of the first pool and disappearing down some subterranean passage after the seventh one. Old Sam had built with an eye to the hot springs. The first pond was within three long strides of the front door. She would have liked to have had a long soak in it but she was still too twitchy from that morning’s mugging to take the chance of being caught outside the cabin, and naked in the bargain. She didn’t think those particular two muggers were going to come back—for one thing, she didn’t think one of them was going to be capable of riding a snowgo for a while—but at this point she had no idea who else Old Sam had told about some mythical map with buried treasure at the end of it, and she wasn’t taking any more chances.

  She made use of the facilities and went back inside to stoke the fire in the drum stove and light the lantern. She used more Bisquik, eggs, canned milk, a package of shredded cheese, and some canned green chilies to make a chile relleno pie, and washed it down with green tea, a new item in her pantry forced on her by Dinah Clark. It wasn’t bad if you didn’t mind grass-flavored water. Sweetened with honey it was almost tolerable.

  She frowned down at her crossed ankles. Someone had known there was something to find at Old Sam’s house, had known it before she did. Three days after he’d died they came to his house to find her reading one of Judge Anglebrandt’s journals. They knocked her unconscious and took it.

  It wasn’t what you could have called a professional hit. It wasn’t like they’d brought a sap with them. They’d used the first thing to hand, a piece of firewood. So, amateurs? But amateurs willing to commit assault, so either fairly earnest amateurs or ones unacquainted with Title 11, Chapter 41, Section 200 of the Alaska Statutes, and the penalties applied to the convicted thereof.

  When they read the journal they had stolen from Old Sam’s house and found, presumably, nothing relevant to their purpose, they would have known that the attack and the theft had alerted her, that she herself would now be looking for whatever it was, too. They must have followed her to Ahtna, to Jane Silver’s office, from where they would have followed Jane Silver home. They’d waited to break into her house until Jane was gone, which argued some sense, and it was just Jane’s bad luck that she had forgotten something and had come back home to get it, and their bad luck that Jane was a fragile old woman.

  Afterward … of course. Of course the incident on the road was related to the whole mess. Either they thought Kate had found whatever it was that Jane had—this map the asshole had asked her about that morning?�
�or they’d wanted to stop her from finding it, and they’d run her off the road. They must have left Niniltna before she had and waited on the other side of the Deadman until they’d seen her headlights.

  Which again argued in favor of locals. Strangers wouldn’t know about the Deadman. The Deadman averaged about one Outsider a year, most of them fished alive and swearing out of either the ditch or the river.

  And now this morning. They’d followed her all the way out from Niniltna, through the night. The one man’s outerwear and 110 were not new, which also made them, if not Park rats, people who had time served in the Bush.

  She went back in her mind over every detail of his appearance. Male, at a guess white or part white. Five ten accounting for the thick soles of his boots. A hundred and fifty pounds, although that was iffy given the added bulk of parka and bibs. There had been nothing familiar about his voice, but she had noticed that he took every care to speak as little as possible, single syllables spoken in a near monotone, as if he were afraid she might recognize it.

  Which meant that she knew him. Or had met him. Or that he knew she would meet him in future.

  She thought about Pete Wheeler.

  And she thought about Ben Gunn.

  She was certain that neither had been this morning’s intruder, but Wheeler was in a position to be fully cognizant of Old Sam’s affairs. Old Sam had not been what anyone would call loquacious, especially with strangers, but he might have let something slip in conversation with his attorney, some reference to something valuable in his possession. He might even have said something about sending his heir on a scavenger hunt, for which Kate could cheerfully kill him stone dead all over again.

  And Pete Wheeler could have decided to find it first.

  And then there was Ben Gunn. What with the loss of Old Sam and Jane Silver dying in her arms, her emotions had been far too close to the surface, and she had said too much to the newspaperman. He had said his grandfather had kept a journal (Had that been everyone’s invariable habit back then?) of the life and times of the region, and when Kate had said she would like to read them one day he’d gone all vague. If he was really attempting a novel based on his grandfather’s life, he would have had the journal ready to hand. Had George Washington Gunn written about the theft of the icon? Had he known who had taken it? And had that information passed to his son by way of his journal?