Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “But why?”

  Jim thought it over. “I think,” he said slowly, “it has something to do with the box.”

  “The antique writing box?”

  “Yeah. She never sent me a copy of the revised will. I’m wondering if she was hoping I’d never know he wanted me to have the box.”

  “Which again begs the question. Why?”

  He closed his eyes and let his head fall back. His laugh was unamused. “I have never had the first idea why my mother does anything.”

  Sylvia was silent for a moment. “Maybe there’s something in it she doesn’t want you to see.”

  “I can’t think what. And I’ve got it now.”

  “You haven’t opened it yet?”

  “No.”

  “Three, no, four days now, and you haven’t opened it?”

  “No.”

  She was silent for a moment. “It’s the last message you’ll ever get from your dad.”

  “Yes.”

  “I wouldn’t be in a hurry to open it, either.”

  He turned his head to look at her, at the sun-kissed skin, the wet hair slicked back, the strong throat, the high, firm breasts. There were a lot of pleasant memories built into the package riding next to him, and even more promises, and he was fully alive to all of them.

  He wondered how Kate Shugak would fill out that suit.

  Sylvia turned her head to meet his eyes, and he knew she had known he was watching her. “Want to get something to eat?”

  They went to a diner in Ventura he remembered from his high school days, where the burgers were thick and juicy, the fries salty and greasy, and the shakes too thick to drink through a straw. After that they went to a bar for a nightcap and talked for hours, playing catch-up and do-you-remember. They even danced.

  It was after midnight when they went out to the parking lot. She leaned against her car and smiled up at him.

  He bent his head to accept the invitation, with no thought but of paying homage with a perfect ending to the glorious day on the water, the good junk food, and time spent with the pretty girl. Inches away he stopped and said, “How did you get my cell number?”

  Her eyes opened to blink up at him. “What?”

  “How did you get my cell phone number?”

  An interrogation was not how Sylvia had been expecting this evening to end, and she frowned. “Your mother gave it to me.”

  “Did she,” he said, and took a step back.

  * * *

  He let himself into the darkened, quiet house and went upstairs to find that his room had been searched, probably right around his first wave.

  It wasn’t that easy to tell, given that the room bore no resemblance to the one he had left behind the day his father had driven him to the airport for his flight north. Beverly had probably been in here with a sledgehammer before the plane was off the ground. Or no, he wronged her, she would have been in here with a decorator and a contractor. Beverly would never have endangered her manicure with anything as plebian as tools.

  The built-in bookcase that had covered one wall had been ripped out, the wall encased in a new layer of Sheetrock and hung with a painfully angular Picasso whose only saving grace was that it was the original and worth a fortune. His four-poster had been replaced by a severely modern platform bed, the reading lamps on either side replaced by a swirled glass pendant fixture that trained light everywhere except where someone attempting to read in bed might reasonably be expected to hold a book. There was an Eames chair made of uncushioned wood that was comfortable for just long enough to put on your socks and shoes, a floor lamp with a circular table on the pole that wasn’t big enough for either a glass or a mug, and a low, six-drawer dresser planted squarely on the way to the bathroom with corners that felt as if they’d been sharpened on a whetstone. Jim’s shins had the bruises to prove it.

  But still. He knew. His room had definitely been searched.

  Oh, it wasn’t blatant, it wasn’t as if his suitcase had been upended and everything in it dumped out, or the clothes hanging in the closet ripped from their hangers or drawers pulled out from the dresser or the bedclothes ripped free of the mattress and the mattress shoved to the floor. In other words, it hadn’t been tossed.

  No, this was a strictly amateur effort, an attempt to evaluate the contents of the room while leaving no trace behind. But the ditty bag he’d left on the right side of the sink was now on the left, the hangers in the closet were now neatly instead of irregularly aligned, and the book he’d left open and facedown on the nightstand was now faceup and closed, his place lost, a thing he never allowed to happen.

  So. Not a professional job, then.

  * * *

  The next morning he went to the garage and found his mother fiddling with the trunk of his father’s car.

  He stood in the doorway until she looked up. Those cool cheeks went a pale pink.

  He walked around to stand next to her. The trunk was still closed. “You have to use the key on this model,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed, those electric blue eyes so disconcertingly like the ones that stared back from his mirror every morning.

  “You gave Sylvia my cell phone number,” he said.

  She stared at him, eyes inimical, mouth a thin line.

  “You wanted me out of the house so you could search my room.”

  “Where is your father’s writing box?”

  He had to admire her ability to cut right to it without shame or remorse. “What’s in it that’s so important that you’d risk chipping a nail to get at?”

  “Nothing that concerns you.”

  “Which would be why he left it to me.”

  She looked at him with something that felt uncomfortably close to hatred. And perhaps a little, just a little, like fear. “It changes nothing.”

  “I don’t know that.” He got into the car and punched the button on the garage door opener. She watched as he backed out of the garage, a crease between her perfectly shaped eyebrows. She was still there when he pulled away down the street.

  He drove at random, trying not to get either lost or T-boned by one of the Hummers that had become so ubiquitous on LA’s streets while he figured out where to go. And then he remembered the local public library. Thankfully, it was still in the same place, although interior and exterior both had been remodeled. The librarian, a Ms. Millward, was new to him, too. There were three private reading rooms now, an unimaginable luxury that could only be justified by the Forbes ratings of the people who lived in its zip code. Two were in use. Ms. Millward let him into the third one, told him he had an hour, and left without question, for which incuriosity he was grateful.

  The room was small, with enough space for a table, a chair, and a computer with Internet access. There was a sidelight next to the door, so his privacy was not complete, but it was infinitely better than the house, and after all, the librarians would need a way to check that he wasn’t jerking off over www.blondbabesinbikinis.com. He locked the door and put the writing box on the table.

  It really was beautifully made. The joints fit together seamlessly and the stain was a dark, rich brown. The brass fittings clung to each corner as if they’d been cast to it. It was an artifact of a life of privilege and leisure, redolent of the great divide between the noblessly obliged and the great unwashed.

  He tore open the envelope and let the little brass key fall into his palm. It, too, was finely crafted, a skeleton key, heavy for its size, with a round shank and an oval bow. It was a good thing his mother hadn’t managed to get her hands on the writing box, because a warded lock designed for a skeleton key could be as easily opened with a nail file.

  He slid the bit gently into the lock. There was a muted click, and he raised the lid.

  It was every bit the treasure chest he remembered.

  The inkwells were crystal, with fitted ebony stoppers. The blotter had been recently replaced with something that felt very much like velvet. There were two fountain pens inside, both Montblancs
. Each was a work of art in its own right, one made of rose gold and the other he was pretty sure made of platinum, both etched with flowers and leaves and embedded with tiny gemstones. The cost of either was probably equal to his salary for a year.

  Both looked well-used and well-cared-for. His father had always preferred a fountain pen, and his penmanship, a graceful, flowing script with the letters and words evenly spaced, up and down loops equally sized, had done it justice. No blots, that went without saying. Jim remembered standing at his father’s elbow, watching the nib of his pen move across the page, holding his breath until the dot of the period was placed exactly and precisely following the last word of the last line.

  “What happens if you make a mistake?” he’d said once.

  “I start over,” his father had replied.

  “No eraser?”

  His father had looked down at him, one of his rare smiles lighting his face. “No eraser.”

  Jim’s eyes were full of tears. He blinked them away, lifted up the green blotter, and set it to one side.

  There was a hollow compartment beneath, containing an envelope bearing his name written in his father’s hand, probably with one of the pens nestled into the tray between the inkwells above. He took it out and weighed it in his hand. The envelope was made of heavy paper that felt as if silk had somehow been woven into the mix.

  He held it for a long time without opening it.

  James Chopin the elder had not been a demonstrative man. In that, he was well-matched with his wife. Jim had known little affection in his childhood, and he was self-aware enough to realize that it was probably why he had never married. Let him admit the truth now, at least, here within the four walls of this tiny room three thousand miles from what had become his home. Sylvia had been more an act of rebellion than of at long last love, proven by the alacrity with which he had decamped to Alaska when he’d been accepted to the trooper academy in Sitka. The string of women that had followed her had by design never lasted more than a year each, because after a year he found that a woman started to pick out china patterns, and because after a year he was bored.

  Or maybe he was just afraid that after a year, he would start to bore them.

  Kate Shugak had never bored him. Fascination, respect, yes. Terror, lust, rage, as much as it galled him to admit, even jealousy—he had felt all of those things in relation to Kate Shugak, but never boredom.

  He pictured a meeting between Kate and his mother, and an involuntary grin spread across his face. He could sell tickets.

  He pictured a meeting between Kate and his father, and the grin faded. What would his father have thought, presented with a five-foot package of Aleut dynamite? Would he have taken her down to the club and exhibited her as a curiosity?

  He was immediately ashamed of himself. His father’s friends and coworkers had been unrelentingly white, but he had never displayed any sign of being a bigot or a racist. True, he had allowed his wife to dictate the terms of his relationship with his son, but there was no honesty and less honor in ascribing more faults to him than he already had. If being a cop had taught Jim anything, it was to imagine no more than the evidence could prove.

  He opened the envelope.

  * * *

  Only two wrong turns and one near collision with an iridescent Volkswagen Beetle whose driver had flipped him off and he was in West Hollywood. It was a bitch finding a parking space, and when he did find one in a lot that already had more cars than spaces he had to use his credit card in a machine that made him jump a foot in the air when it spoke. Oh, for the last-century ways of the Park.

  The desk sergeant gave him the once-over and identified him as a fellow officer without any unseemly display of badge, which Jim displayed anyway as a gesture of solidarity. It got him in the door.

  Sylvia met him on the other side. “What’s up?”

  He wasn’t forgiven for the way their surf date had ended. He waited to reply until they were inside her office with the door closed. “I told you there was someone in Alaska.”

  “You didn’t sound that convinced.” Her lips tightened. “You didn’t act like it, either.”

  “No, I didn’t. I should have.”

  “So it’s serious?”

  He thought of Kate Shugak, and took a deep breath, held it for a couple of seconds, then blew it out again with an expressive sigh. “It’s serious.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Hey, that took some effort.”

  “Yes,” he said grimly. “It did.”

  She’d painted the walls different colors—red, orange, yellow, green, all pastels, if anything red could be pastel. The ceiling was a pastel blue, and the walls were hung with Mexican folk art, a brightly colored serape, a mirror with a hand-painted tin frame, a sun plaque with eight arms embedded with milagros, tiny religious charms he remembered warded off the devil, or maybe they brought the rain. “Nice,” he said.

  “Why are you here?” she said, annoyed. “Certainly not to admire my office décor.”

  “I came to apologize,” he said.

  She looked at him, her face closed.

  “I should have been up-front with you,” he said, “and I wasn’t. The thing is—”

  Well, what was the thing about him and Kate Shugak, anyway? Damned if he knew. “No excuse,” he said. “I fucked up. I’m sorry.”

  “All you had to do was say,” she said. “I don’t poach.”

  “I know,” he said. Jim Chopin, Diplomat.

  “I knew you were going to Alaska,” she said.

  He looked up, startled.

  One shoulder rose and fell again. “All those books about it. The walls of your room were papered with travel posters with totem poles on them, and how many times did you make me watch that horrible scratchy copy of Nanook of the North on VHS? And Call of the Wild, not to mention North to Alaska? And I hate John Wayne.”

  He laughed, and she relaxed into a reluctant smile. “I always knew you were not long for LA. So if you’re thinking you broke my heart when you left and that I’ve been mooning around, waiting all this time for your return, think again.” She fussed with some paperwork on her desk. “I was happy to see you again. We had some good times. I wouldn’t have minded hooking up while you were here, but it’s not like I expected a lifelong commitment out of it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  “You sure are,” she said, and laughed, her spurt of temper over. “Men,” she said, to which he wisely returned no comment. “Okay. You in town for much longer? Dad would like to see you.”

  “Not much longer,” he said. “I don’t think.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Remember the writing box?”

  “The one your dad left you? Sure.”

  “I opened it.”

  “Ah.” She sat back in her chair. “What was in it?”

  “An envelope with my name on it.”

  “Containing?”

  “This.” He handed it over.

  It was a black-and-white photograph with a white border and scalloped edges. The image was of two girls in their early teens, slender, dressed in skirts and blouses and flats, arms wrapped around each other’s waists, standing in what looked like a small yard with a lot of unkempt shrubbery in the background. They looked at the camera with shy, up-from-under expressions.

  “Twins,” Sylvia said.

  “Looks like,” he said.

  She looked up at him and back at the photograph. “Boy, the gene for that jaw sure is a strong one. Can you tell which one is your mother?”

  “The one on the left,” he said.

  “Really?” She fished a pair of cat’s-eye reading glasses with rhinestone frames from the welter of debris on her desk and took a closer look. After a moment’s study she took them off and handed the photograph back. “If you say so.”

  He looked down at the image again. “I think.”

  “Did you know your mother had a twin sister?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t
remember Mom ever mentioning family, other than when I asked her who my grandparents were.”

  “And she said?”

  “That they died young.”

  “Maybe the sister died, too.”

  He shrugged. “Why not say so?”

  “And your father never said anything either?”

  “Nope.”

  “But he left you a picture of the two of them together.”

  “Yep.”

  “And no explanation?”

  “Nope.”

  “But if he left you the picture, he must have known.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I think my family is dysfunctional.” Her eyes narrowed. “What did you really come here for, Jim?”

  He looked her straight in the eye and said firmly, “To apologize.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “And?”

  “And to ask you to run someone for me.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Twenty-two

  She rose early the next morning and with Mutt walked up to City Market for a Kaladi Brothers venti americano and a canela, reason alone for the trip to Anchorage. There was a high, scattered overcast and the air had a bite, but there was no snow in Anchorage yet. Southcentral was the banana belt of Alaska.

  She watched for tails and found none, although it didn’t stop her from giving a hard look at every car that passed, most of them containing parents driving their kids to Inlet View Elementary School. Standing in the coffee line at the market, she checked out everyone before her and behind her to five places. They all looked guilty, in a half-asleep, early morning kind of way. The ones who weren’t giving Mutt the nervous eye.

  She had to pull herself up short when it was her turn to be served and the barista, a fresh-faced, cheerful young man with orange and purple hair and a Black Eyed Peas T-shirt took on a sinister air when he asked if she wanted room in her venti for half-and-half.

  This was ridiculous. They hadn’t killed her yet, they’d barely laid a glove on her. She repressed the memory of the dented roof of the pickup. What the hell, it was still running.

  Back at the town house she got her cell phone out of the kitchen drawer. A message. At last. She called. “Cell phones for seniors! Call 888—”