Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  It didn’t take that long after all, because he’d condensed the mini-drama into an incident report, referring to everyone involved in the third person, with the sole exception of himself. When he was done she let him listen to her breathe while she thought it over. “So you have an aunt you didn’t know about,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Of whose existence your father ensured you would learn after he died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t wait to see that writing box, by the way.”

  “It’s a work of art,” he said. “Could we stick to the point?”

  “So you had the girlfriend—”

  “Ex-girlfriend,” he said.

  She smiled to herself and kept her voice very cool. “So the ex-girlfriend runs a make on your mother”—she closed her eyes and shook her head—“and turns up a birth certificate for twin girls.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have the girlfriend—”

  “Ex-girlfriend.”

  “So you have the ex-girlfriend run a make on the aunt.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she lives in Oregon.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have an address.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re driving up to see her.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m already in Oregon, but she moved from the last address Sylvia could find for me.”

  “Which was?”

  “In Portland. Found the house the first day, and the people in it now say they never heard of her. Took me a day to find a neighbor who said the sister moved three years ago, right after her husband died, and the house has changed hands twice since then.”

  “She didn’t leave a forwarding address?”

  “Yes, with the post office.”

  This was like pulling teeth. She reminded herself it had to be that much worse for him. “And?”

  “They finally gave it to me. It was for a condominium in Eugene. That’s where I am now. According to the current owner, she remarried last year and moved in with her new husband.”

  “Jim,” Kate said, and stopped, at a loss.

  “What?”

  Kate took a deep breath. “Why don’t you just ask your mom?”

  His turn to take a beat. “We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

  “What, you don’t talk to each other?”

  “Not really, no. Well, she doesn’t talk to me.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  A faint sigh. “It’s not a habit she ever got into.”

  Kate thought of her parents, whom she’d lost so long ago. Her smart, silent father, who had taken her hunting from before she was old enough to walk. Her kind and gentle mother, who had tried so gallantly and failed so miserably to stay off the booze.

  What wouldn’t she give to have them both back, drunk or sober. “You’re an only child, Jim,” she said. “You just lost your dad. You have no siblings, no other relatives so far as you know, this unknown aunt excepted. You mother is all you’ve got left.”

  “No,” he said, immediately and distinctly, “she isn’t.”

  Off-limits. Okay. “Where are you now?”

  “I took I-5 up so I switched over to 101, the coastal highway, for back down. I stopped in Newport for dinner. You’d love it, Kate. If you look north you can practically see all the way home, and there are all these Art Deco bridges the WPA built back in—”

  “Where are you going next?” she said.

  He sighed. “Medford. The condo guy said she’d moved there with her new husband. I’ll be there probably before midnight, check into a motel.”

  “And go looking for your aunt tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’ve never met her.”

  “No.”

  “What if she doesn’t want to meet you?”

  “Why would it matter to her one way or another?”

  Kate could think of a lot of reasons. Jim was on an unacknowledged quest for a family member he might actually like, and after passing her thousand and one relatives in quick review, she couldn’t blame him all that much. But this meant he was that much longer Outside, that much longer away from the Park, that much longer away from her, and she missed him.

  “Good,” he said, and to her horror she realized she had said the last three words out loud.

  “Yes, well,” she said briskly, jumping to her feet, her chair going back with a loud screech, “I’ve got to go, my dinner’s getting cold on me. I’ll be in Anchorage at least another day, so let me know what happens, okay? The Case of the Missing Aunt. Erle Stanley Chopin.”

  She was babbling now. Mutt, listening with all of her considerable ear power to the faint sound of Jim’s voice, gave an admonitory yelp.

  “Mutt says bye,” she said brightly.

  “I miss you, too,” he said.

  * * *

  Later, dishes washed and put away, Kate shed her clothes for an old UAF sweatshirt washed to a smooth nap, flannel pajama bottoms, and a pair of thick wool socks, and came downstairs again to build a fire in the fireplace. The cord of word Jack had laid in the last year of his life was by this time so well-seasoned that she could practically light a log with one match. She exchanged Jimmy Buffett for Bonnie Raitt, made herself a mug of strong hot cocoa, and curled up on the couch. She had detoured by Barnes and Noble on the way home to pick up the latest titles by Tanya Huff and Ariana Franklin. Both books sat forgotten on the coffee table while she tried to divine what came next in The Tale of Old Sam from the leaping flames.

  Old Sam had put the map in the second of the judge’s journals and hidden it in the cabin at the hot springs. He’d left the other book for Kate to find, and he must have left something in that first journal that would have pointed her to the second if the first one hadn’t been stolen.

  She looked up at the bookshelf. The spine of the omnibus volume of The Lord of the Rings stared back at her reassuringly.

  She remembered the jumble on Jane Silver’s floor, all the books pulled from their shelves. There was obviously some history between Jane and Old Sam that both had been reticent about, but assuming pillow talk for the moment, he might have told her about the map. And Jane might have, must have, told someone else. Pete Wheeler? Ben Gunn? She had to have had something in her possession relevant to Old Sam’s past, or why the break-in?

  Old Sam’s death was the trigger to all subsequent events, and by then someone besides him had known about the icon. Kate still didn’t know how he had found it again. Or even for that matter if he’d found it again. Everyone could be chasing around—and in the process committing injuries to Kate’s person—after something that didn’t even exist.

  Still, there were the journals. And now there was the map. A map without a big red X on it, so she didn’t know what use it was.

  If Bruce Abbot was working for Erland, then Erland had to be after the icon, too. But why? How could possession of the icon be worth risking the possibility of an early release from prison?

  She could hear Erland’s smug drawl again. It has certain, shall we say, family connections.

  She would go straight to Kurt’s office in the morning. She had to explain the whole car tow thing, anyway, and she could ask him to do that record search wizardry for which he was becoming so well-known. A search on Mac McCullough, just to backstop Brendan, and a search on Erland, just to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.

  She thought of Jim’s running a make on his mom.

  Maybe she should ask Kurt to run one on Old Sam.

  And Bruce Abbott, so she could tell him he was blown and find out what he knew. Although if Erland was operating true to form, it wouldn’t be much.

  And then she could go home.

  The flames wavered, and she imagined she could see Old Sam’s face among them, those dark eyes with that customary expression of cynicism she now understood much better. She imagined that shit-eating, devil-worshipping
grin spread across that narrow face. He’d been Puck and the Park his fairy land, although that comparison brought an involuntary grin of her own to her face. But he had certainly been a knavish sprite during the time she knew him, and he had lived his life believing what fools his fellows were.

  Her grin faded. Old Sam had always been so attentive to the aunties. He had brought them the first kings of spring, filled their caches every fall with moose and caribou, made sure their woodpiles never shrank too low during the winter. She had thought he was being the good older brother, or surrogate brother. She saw now that it had all been a smoke screen, safety in numbers, that his real goal had been seeing to the needs of the object of his affections going back more than fifty years. Not that Auntie Vi and Auntie Balasha and Auntie Edna weren’t worthy of devotion and tribute and sweat equity.

  Well, maybe not Auntie Edna. But the other two, surely.

  She thought again of the omnipresent platter of deviled eggs that Auntie Joy never failed to bring to Old Sam’s end-of-summer blowout. None of the other aunties ever brought deviled eggs, which told Kate they knew. Maybe not everything, but something.

  Kate shook her head. A love affair writ in deviled eggs. Go figure.

  The four aunties were all about the same age, which made them contemporaries of Old Sam’s. And Emaa’s.

  She went upstairs to Jack’s office and rummaged around for a legal tablet and a couple of pencils and an eraser and brought them back to the couch. In her opinion, looking back was mostly a waste of time, but her family tree was beginning to feel like a mess of spaghetti, if not a nest of vipers. It might help disentangle Old Sam’s story to try to disentangle it.

  This story started with Chief Lev Kookesh, from the name a Southeasterner, imported to marry Alexandra, daughter of Clarence and Rose Shugak, from a family who had emigrated to the Park so many generations before that their only remaining link to their Aleutian forebears was their name.

  Although it wouldn’t have been called the Park then, Kate reminded herself.

  Lev and Alexandra had a daughter named Elizaveta, who married Quinto Dementieff from Cordova, but had a son by Herbert Elmer “Mac” McCullough, itinerant scam artist. This son was Old Sam. So far so good. Or bad.

  Alexandra, Elizaveta’s mother, had a brother named Albert. Albert married Angelique Halvorsen from Fairbanks. They had one daughter (Kate had noticed before this propensity for Park rats to have either one child or nineteen), Ekaterina, and they adopted three more, Viola, Edna, and Balasha, who were all related by blood in some distant fashion that had never been fully explained by any of the elders to any of their children. Kate had asked, one time, and pointedly had not been answered. So, some mystery there, but nothing to do with the mystery at hand.

  She didn’t think.

  Ekaterina married Feodor “Ted” Shugak of the Aleutian Shugaks. Like Auntie Joy’s her marriage had been orchestrated by her parents to cement the relationship between residents and emigrant families. Ekaterina and grandpa Ted, who had died before Kate was born, had one son, Stephan, who married Zoya Shashnikof of Unalaska, a Shugak cousin he had met at Chemawa, the BIA school in Oregon. Kate was their daughter.

  And now came Erland Bannister into the mix. It fair curdled her soul to imagine for one moment that they might be related, but if it was part of Old Sam’s story then it was part of her story, too, and she would have to grit her teeth and bear it.

  She looked at the digital clock on the DVD player and wondered if Jim had reached Medford yet. The gods had to be yukking it up somewhere, tossing Kate and Jim into the genealogical maelstrom at the deep end of two separate pools, and leaving them both to sink or swim on their own.

  Erland was in his sixties. Old Sam had been nearly ninety. That left one hell of a gap in their ages. A gap just as long as a prison sentence, perhaps? Or a prison sentence and army service. Mac was inside for almost twenty years, after which he was scooped up by General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. (truly, one of the great names in American military history, Kate thought again, toes curling) and drafted into the Alaska Scouts. Colonel Castner had been concerned only with his recruits’ survival skills in Bush Alaska. She doubted very much if anyone working for either delved too deeply into a Cutthroat’s past history.

  At any rate, he had joined, or been drafted, to serve from 1939 to 1943 in what had been dubbed by historians the thousand-mile war. Where he had saved his son’s life.

  Kate shook her head. She made another note to have Kurt find Mac McCullough’s army records. She didn’t expect to learn much, but the dates might be informative, and if as Hammett’s message to Old Sam would have it he had died of his wounds, surely the record would say so. And if he hadn’t, surely the record would say that as well.

  If Mac McCullough hadn’t died. If he had served his time first in San Quentin and then in the U.S. Army. He would probably have been demobilized about the same time as Old Sam, in 1945. If his wounds had been severe, he would have been shipped Outside to a veterans’ hospital and demobbed there.

  But Kate seemed to recall that Erland Bannister was a lifelong Alaskan, had been born in the Territory. Which seemed to indicate that if Mac McCullough had fathered him, then Mac McCullough had returned to Alaska.

  Did tigers really breed true? Was Erland Bannister’s face a faithful representation of his parentage?

  If it was, did Erland know it? Was that what all this was about, some ancient family scandal that Erland had hired Bruce Abbott to track down all traces of and destroy?

  Had Old Sam known it?

  She felt a cold chill.

  If Mac McCullough had returned to Alaska, had he contacted Old Sam?

  And if he had, what would Old Sam have done?

  “No,” she said, so violently that Mutt, snoozing peacefully before the fire, was startled awake. When no danger appeared imminent she gave Kate an indignant look and went through her pawing, circling, and flopping ritual, this time punctuating her displeasure with a loud and aromatic fart.

  “Sorry,” Kate said, and got up to open a window.

  She picked up the family tree again, assembled with many slanting lines and erasures and crossings out. Ekaterina and Elizaveta were daughters of a sister and brother, Alexandra and Albert (again, Kate reveled in the names), so they were cousins. So Old Sam was Ekaterina’s cousin’s son.

  And what did that make Old Sam to Kate?

  Her uncle.

  Good enough.

  If Old Sam and Erland were, say, half brothers, what did that make Erland to Kate?

  Still an asshole.

  Shared blood changed some things, but not that.

  Twenty-nine

  “What?” she said incredulously. “When?”

  “Nineteen fifty-nine.” Kurt handed over the printout and pointed to the relevant passage. “Murdered. He caught someone robbing his house. There was a struggle, Emil was knocked down, and the robber escaped.”

  “And Emil Bannister died?” Kate still couldn’t believe it.

  “Evidently Bannister had this big collection of Alaska Native artifacts he’d been collecting since he came into the country.”

  “Like Bell?”

  “All those old guys grabbed up everything they could back then. Sounds like it was kind of a contest between them. Anyway, crime scene evidence, such as it was in those days, indicates Bannister surprised the burglar in the act. There was a struggle and his desk got knocked over. He was under it at the time.”

  Kate winced.

  “Yeah. Crunch. Must have been a heavy sucker. The family was asleep upstairs. The commotion woke them up, and the son came down in time to watch his father die.”

  Erland. “He see who it was?”

  Kurt shook his head. “And they never caught the guy. It was a big deal, Kate. I think it’s even in some of the history books. Bannister was a pretty prominent guy. He was a partner in the Swanson River oil leases and he was even a delegate to the constitutional convention.”

  Kate was sitting
in Kurt’s office, coffee forgotten in one hand, a hard knot in her gut. It was like being in Jane Silver’s living room all over again, fifty years removed. “What was stolen?”

  Kurt looked at her, concerned. “Are you okay, Kate? You look a little green around the gills.” Like Erland, like everybody, Kurt took in her fading shiners and the scabbed-over crease on her forehead. “Not that anyone could tell. You want Agrifina to get you some aspirin or something?”

  “I’m fine,” Kate said. She remembered her coffee. It was hotter than hot, a little sweet, a lot creamy, and helped steady the world beneath her feet. “Does the police report have a list of what was stolen?”

  He shook his head. “It just says some smaller antiques and Native artifacts.” He closed the report and tossed it on the table. “This was Anchorage in 1959, Kate. Guys like Emil Bannister didn’t get burgled. I bet he didn’t even have insurance. Do you want me to track down the wife?”

  “No,” she said, after consideration. “Not yet, anyway. Let me see if I can get in to see Victoria.”

  The other eyebrow went up to join the first. “She kinda owes you.”

  “She kinda paid me,” Kate said. “A lot. Services rendered, check cashed.”

  He was unconvinced. “Still … You got a way in?”

  * * *

  “Kate Shugak!” The wrinkled, shriveled giant beamed at her from behind an acre of desk.

  “Hey, Max,” she said.

  “And Mutt, too, I see,” he said when Mutt trotted around for her due. “This must be an official visit.”

  “I don’t know what the hell it is, Max,” Kate said ruefully.

  “Sounds interesting, which is more than I can say for the rest of the crap that crosses my desk every day. Imogene! Imogene, goddammit!”

  Imogene was a plump woman Kate guessed to be in her early sixties, with a face set in pleasant lines beneath a neat cap of soft gray curls. She materialized in the doorway and said in a tart but resigned voice, “Max, how many times do I have to tell you? You don’t have to yell, all you have to do is press the intercom button.”

  Max, improbably, looked abashed. “I hate them damn things,” he said, which Kate correctly took to include anything run on electricity, with the possible exception of the ignition on a Piper Super Cub. “Could we have some coffee?”