Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Getting the feeling you’re not going to be one of those parents who suffers from the empty nest syndrome when Katya goes to school full-time.”

  “Not hardly,” Dinah said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Bobby said, glowering at his wife.

  “Coffee,” Kate said.

  Caffeine accompanied by pound cake and stewed rhubarb did much to restore everyone’s good mood.

  “So what’d you do that pissed off someone so bad they felt they had to whack you between the eyes? Not that on occasion I haven’t felt like doing the same thing myself.” Bobby’s grin was taunting.

  Kate waggled her eyebrows. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  She looked at their expectant expressions. There was no one in the Park she trusted more to keep their mouths shut when she asked them to, and no one whose counsel could be more relied upon. Neither was a shareholder, and therefore they were not subject to the shifting allegiances of either shareholders or Park rats. Going into the beginning of an Alaskan winter was no time to start any rumors or fights. There were six long dark months ahead and they all needed each other to survive. “You don’t tell anyone this,” she said. “I don’t care who comes asking, I didn’t tell you anything, and you don’t know anything.”

  Her voice dropped unconsciously and they leaned in. Kate told them everything, beginning with the first of Judge Anglebrandt’s journals found on Old Sam’s bookshelf ten days ago, and ending with the second, found secreted in the wall of his homestead cabin yesterday morning. The documents shown to her by Dan O’Brian, the talk with Jane Silver, followed by her death less than twenty-four hours later, the note Old Sam had left for her with his attorney, getting run off the road on the way home, Auntie Joy, Mac McCullough, and the manuscript, Demetri, Ruthe, the attack at the cabin yesterday morning, her suspicions of Pete Wheeler and Ben Gunn, all of it. When she was done she folded her arms and sat back, awaiting judgment and hoping for advice.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Bobby said, which was not unexpected. What followed was. “You’re thinking it’s the icon they’re after.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  “Not necessarily.” He pushed back from the table and rolled over to the console, pulling himself around to his computer, slapping the mouse to lighten up the screen. He had a satellite dish on the tower outside and he was never not online. Kate got up to peer over his shoulder, to see a Google for Dashiell Hammett give way to five hundred thousand hits. Five minutes’ worth of clicking and Bobby sat back from the computer. “Get a load of this.”

  By this time Kate had been joined by Dinah and they read down the screen together. Dinah let loose with a long whistle. “A hundred and thirty-six thousand dollars is pretty steep. Even for a signed first edition of The Maltese Falcon.”

  “I had no idea,” Kate said, and kicked herself. The problem was that she thought like a reader, not a collector, but even she had heard of Sotheby’s. “So you think they’re after the Hammett manuscript, not the icon?”

  “No,” Bobby said, “I think they’re probably after both of them. Wouldn’t you be? Double the treasure, double the score.”

  “Great,” Kate said glumly. Of course he was right.

  Bobby led the way back to the table, where Dinah refreshed their mugs and Bobby cut a second piece of cake to hide beneath the rest of the rhubarb. “About the icon,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not thinking big enough.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Yeah, it’s a historical artifact. Yeah, it’s a cultural artifact. Yeah, it might even have real value, if the description in the story is accurate and those stones are jewels and if nobody’s prized them loose and sold them off individually since it was lost.”

  “Okay, and?”

  Bobby’s expression was uncharacteristically serious. “What you haven’t taken into account is that it is also a political artifact.”

  Kate was silent for a long moment, and they let her be while she thought it through. “You mean … by tradition the chief held it in trust for the tribe.”

  “According to Ruthe’s research, and to the ruckus Auntie Joy said the tribe raised when it was stolen. I bet Old Sam wasn’t considered ineligible by Joy’s parents only because he was part Filipino. I bet he was considered ineligible because his mother was the one who lost the icon.”

  “So it’s like some holy grail for Park Natives,” Kate said.

  “Might be overstating it just a little, but yeah.” He shook his head. “You’ve always been a little blind to symbolism, Kate. Symbols are important.”

  “You mean like the cross?”

  He pointed a finger at her. “There it is, that knee-jerk assumption that symbolism has to be about religion. Well, people have been suborning religion to their own purposes since the first guy decided pouring a few drops on the ground from every bottle of wine they drank was an honor to Zeus.”

  “Zeus?”

  “Whoever. You know what I mean.”

  “The thing I don’t get,” Kate said, “is why have I never heard of this icon before now? I am indisputably an Alaska Native, an Aleut and a Park rat. I’ve got more relatives than I ever wanted going back ten thousand years, and sometimes it feels like most of them are still alive and well and living within mug up distance of my house. Why, if this thing is this important to my people, to my tribe, has no one in my generation ever heard a peep about it?”

  Bobby and Dinah exchanged glances. “Good question,” Bobby said. “For which I do not have an answer.”

  Kate thought some more. “Okay,” she said at last. “So you’re saying that someone is looking for the icon who wants the power it will give them, inherent or implied or imagined.”

  He shrugged. “I’m saying it’s motive. You remember motive, don’t you, Kate?”

  “Smart-ass,” Kate said without heat.

  “It’s what I do,” Bobby said with modesty unbecoming. “And, you know, I’m good-looking.” And he grinned.

  Dinah rolled her eyes, and beneath the table rubbed her foot against her husband’s thigh.

  “And,” Bobby said, serious again, “if that is the motive, then it’s someone close to home, someone you know, someone we all know. Which would explain why he or she knew just where to wait to run you off the road, and had the mad skills to sneak up on you.”

  “The guy yesterday morning could have shot me in my sleep,” she said. It still rankled that she hadn’t heard anything, not even the door opening.

  “And he didn’t,” Bobby said.

  Kate stared at him. “No,” she said slowly. “He didn’t, did he.”

  Bobby meditated for a moment. “If Virginia did pass on your whereabouts to every Park rat she stumbled across that day—”

  “As is her invariable wont,” Dinah said.

  “—then the field’s wide open.” He bent a sapient eye in Kate’s direction. “Let’s face it, it’s not like you’re a member in good standing of the How to Win Friends and Influence People Club. By the way, when all of this was going on, where the hell was Mutt?”

  In front of the fireplace Mutt looked up at the sound of her name, and then went back to her whale vertebrate. “Dancing with wolves,” Kate said. “She showed up when it counted.”

  “Too bad she didn’t go for his throat.”

  “He was pretty well-padded,” Kate said. “She ripped the sleeve off his parka when she pulled him off me, and she did bite him in the ass, twice, once in the cabin, and again as she was chasing him out of the canyon. She had blood on her muzzle when she came back.”

  Bobby’s look at Mutt this time was much more approving. “My kind of girl.” Mutt’s tail thumped the floor. “So now we’re looking for a Park rat who has a parka with one arm and who can’t sit down.”

  “Why didn’t Old Sam just tell me?” Kate said, irritated all over again. “Why send me on a wild goose chase?”

  “If that old fart sent you on a wild goos
e chase,” Bobby said, “he must have thought you needed one.”

  Before Kate could formulate an answer to the unanswerable Dinah said, “I’d been taping him.”

  Kate looked at her, startled. “You’re kidding.”

  Dinah shook her head. “No. I’ve got about three hours’ worth of uncut footage.” She grinned. “He’s hard to edit.”

  Dinah Clark had come to Alaska originally with the intent of honing her skills as a videographer. Life, in the shape of the Park, Bobby Clark, and a daughter, had only put that ambition into temporary abeyance. Dinah was seldom seen without a video camera in hand, fully half the center console of the A-frame was taken up with her editing equipment, and no one within a fifty-mile radius of Squaw Candy Creek had escaped the red on-air light.

  Three hours of moving pictures of Old Sam in spate. Kate had only one still photo of him, taken unawares on the Freya the third summer she had deckhanded for him. He was standing on the starboardside gunnel, hanging off a guy wire with one hand to chew out a sheepish Ansel Totemoff, standing below on the deck of the Tiffany T., for a rough docking. It was a sunny day, and Old Sam’s face was outlined against a blue sky, the dark skin, the broad brow, the deep-set eyes, the beaky nose, the jutting chin, every fold and wrinkle faithfully recorded. And his mouth was open. She had been thinking that she should get the picture blown up and framed, and have copies made to give out at the potlatch along with the obituary.

  But three whole hours of Old Sam off the chain, talking straight at a camera … it seemed that he was not done sending her messages from beyond the grave. Yet again, the old son of a bitch had her blinking back tears.

  Dinah didn’t notice, or pretended not to. “I’ve been trying to get as many of the old farts on tape as I can before they’re gone. It’s an incredible oral history, and since it’s the only Park history there is, it will be invaluable in future.”

  “You going to make a documentary?” Kate said. Dinah was always going to make a documentary on this or that subject, before being sidetracked, usually by another topic uncovered in the investigation of the current one.

  In response, as always, Dinah sounded as certain as she was enthusiastic. “Old Sam was like a—a prism for Alaskan history, Kate. He and his immediate family were part of or on the periphery of every big event in Alaska for the past eighty years. His grandparents died in the flu pandemic, he homesteaded, he fought in the Aleutians, he was in Juneau for the vote on the constitution—”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, he’d been herring fishing in Southeast and he delivered a load to a buyer in Juneau so his crew could vote. He was working on the Kenai Peninsula when the Swanson River oil field was discovered—”

  “He was?” Kate said. “I didn’t know that.” It was a continuing shock to learn that Old Sam had had another life.

  Possibly more than one.

  “He was a supervoter,” Dinah said. “He never missed an election, I checked the voting records. He was on a first-name basis with every governor we’ve ever had, and a couple of the territorial ones.”

  “I know he knew Ernest Gruening,” Kate said.

  “And boy was he pissed when Gruening failed reelection as senator,” Dinah said, grinning. “He said—you want to see the footage for yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Kate said, and looked at the clock. “Can you make me a copy?”

  “Sure, I can burn you a DVD. But you can watch it here right now if you want.”

  “I can’t. I’m grabbing George’s last flight to Anchorage this afternoon.”

  “Aha,” Bobby said. “Kurt Pletnikof, PI?”

  “Library?” Dinah said. “Museum? Archives?”

  “My friends are smarter than the average bear,” Kate said. “I don’t know enough to figure out what the hell is going on here. I can sic Kurt on some of it, and I can look up some myself.”

  Bobby, watching Kate’s face, said, “Yeah, bullshit, Shugak.”

  “What do you mean?” Dinah said.

  Bobby with the finger again. He was as bad as Auntie Joy. “She’s hoping they’ll follow her to town.”

  “What?” Dinah said, looking from one to the other. “Kate, are you nuts? At least here you’ve got friends who’ll watch your back. Anchorage…” She shook her head. “Lots of dark alleys in Anchorage, and too many people who don’t know you.”

  Kate remembered how easy it was to take down the guy in the cabin. “These people aren’t professionals, whatever else they are.”

  “Even Dortmunder gets lucky once in a while,” Bobby said.

  “And they can always hire somebody for a pint of Windsor Canadian,” Dinah said.

  “Dinah,” Kate said, getting to her feet, “welcome to my world.”

  Twenty-one

  Still protesting, Dinah dropped Kate and Mutt at the airport, where George bundled them into the single Otter turbo and took off. Ninety minutes afterward they touched down at Merrill. A cab ride later, Kate was letting them into the town house on Westchester Lagoon, a three-story dwelling with a barn-shaped roof and common walls with identical homes on either side. It had belonged to Jack Morgan, Johnny’s father, and was now part of Johnny’s college fund. In the meantime they used it when they were in Anchorage, and the first thing Kate did was deliver half a dozen cans of last season’s smoked salmon to the neighbors on either side. It was understood by both that they’d keep an eye on the place when it sat empty, as the mortgage was paid off and Kate didn’t want the hassle of being an absentee landlord.

  She let herself in the front door, turned up the heat, and turned on the refrigerator. The first floor was the garage, the second the living rooms, and the third the bedrooms. In the garage was a Subaru Forester. Kate made a quick run to City Market for essentials like coffee and half-and-half. An overheard conversation led her to the rebirth of Wings ’n Things on Arctic and Thirty-sixth, and while it lacked the ambiance of the converted wood-frame house of its original location, when you ordered your wings nuclear they still came in a dark, crisp golden brown, swimming in burnt orange grease and spicy enough to melt your esophagus. She missed all the religious tracts tacked to the walls, though, not to mention the life-size poster of the bleeding heart Jesus Christ.

  Back at the condo she checked upstairs to see that she still had sufficient spare clothes in the dresser to keep her in clean underwear for at least a couple of days, since she hadn’t allowed herself the time to go home and pack. Despite what she had told Bobby and Dinah, she didn’t know quite what she was doing in Anchorage, other than responding to an instinctive feeling that the next piece of the puzzle Old Sam had left her as his main legacy was to be found there.

  And of course Bobby was right. She hoped whoever else was chasing Old Sam’s legacy would follow her here. She’d spent five and a half years in Anchorage, working sex crimes for the Anchorage DA, and there wasn’t one seedy little corner of it she didn’t know, whether said seediness was to be found on the top floor of a corporate office building on Eighth Avenue, or a dank little kitchenette off North Flower Street, or a five-thousand-square-foot home with six bedrooms and six bathrooms down Discovery Bay Drive. She could hold her own in Anchorage. If Bobby was right and her pursuers were Park rats themselves, they might not be able to.

  If they weren’t, if they were street-smart city dwellers, well, she’d deal with that when it happened.

  She’d checked her cell phone before they landed and there were no messages waiting. She put the bags on the kitchen table and checked again. There still weren’t any. She cursed herself for checking, she cussed out Jim for not calling, and she threw the phone in a drawer and slammed it shut so she wouldn’t hear it if it went off.

  She let Mutt into the backyard to use the facilities, loaded a plate with wings, blue cheese dip, and celery sticks, let Mutt back in, and moved operations to the living room, where she inserted Dinah’s DVD of Old Sam into the player. She turned on the television, put her feet on the coffee table and her plate in her lap, and pushe
d Play on the remote.

  * * *

  His cell phone rang. His heart, that heretofore reliable organ, gave an anticipatory thump. He fished it out and answered.

  “Surf’s up, board man,” Sylvia said. “Want to catch a couple of waves?”

  Well. Kate had told him to take his father’s board out.

  He’d almost forgotten the sting of salt water in his eyes and nose, the stretch down the board, the pull on his shoulders during the paddle, the quick push to his feet. He’d forgotten the triumph of achieving that perfect balance down the centerline. He’d forgotten the thrill of catching that line of white water at exactly the right moment, the sheer ecstasy of all three—man, board, water—moving as one toward the line of golden sand that was always too close too soon.

  Sylvia, trim in a black one-piece, rode a board that showed steady use, and was ready with a laugh whenever he wiped out, which since he hadn’t ridden a board in twenty years was often. It came back, though, slowly at first, and then fast in a rush of elation that he also remembered from those long-ago days. Surfing was probably the main reason he’d never bothered with drugs back in the day. He couldn’t imagine, then or now, any high that would be comparable, let alone better, so why bother?

  They watched the sun set that evening from their boards, sitting in the water beyond the surf, rising and falling with the gentle swell, legs touching occasionally and companionably beneath the water, and Jim felt more at peace in that moment than he had since he’d landed in LA.

  Sylvia was easy to talk to, listening without comment to his account of the past week, of the reading of the will on Monday, the packing up of his father’s clothes, the cleaning out of his father’s office, the forced march of lunches and dinners and drinks at the club with his father’s friends and colleagues.

  The continued tension of living in an armed camp, although this he did not share with Sylvia.

  “Why did your father want the will read aloud?” she said at one point.

  “My question exactly,” he said. “The lawyer said Dad specifically requested him to.”