Though Not Dead (12 page)

Kate swallowed a mouthful that was suddenly too large. “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

“He used to call us the Fairy Barn,” Tony said.

Kate was surprised into a laugh. “You’re kidding.”

Tony grinned. “No. Only to me and Stan, never in front of anyone else. Just trying to stir the shit.”

“He was good at that.”

“He’d close down the bar and hang out with us, and Mary Balashoff when they were here together on one of their weekends.”

“What did you talk about?”

Tony laughed. “What didn’t we. Nothing was off-limits. Old Sam had an opinion about everything—politics, religion. And don’t get him started on Alaska history. Hell, he lived through most of it. He knew a lot about Captain Cook, too. When he got on that hobbyhorse it could get really interesting. Sometimes it was like listening to Scheherazade, it’d be three, four o’clock before we’d break up. Did you know Cook was raised by Quakers?”

Kate shook her head.

“Me, either. And Old Sam said Cook was born in a pigsty, too. I’d always figured him for, I don’t know, one of those bastard sons of a crown prince whose legitimate son was a no-goodnik, and they had to give the illegitimate but more able kid a job that would get him out of the country.”

Kate paused. “Either you have an active fantasy life or you read too much Frances Hodgson Burnett when you were a kid.”

Tony gave a modest shrug. “Why not both?”

Kate sopped up the last remaining dribble of juice on her plate with the last sliver of bread and savored it for a moment. “Old Sam had a copy of Cook’s log. Three volumes, one for each voyage.”

“Wow. I’d like to see that.”

“He left me his books.” Kate gave her plate a significant look. “Play your cards right and I’ll let you look at them next time you’re in the Park.”

“Yeah, but would you let me borrow them to read?”

She grinned. “Limited, supervised visitation rights.”

She pushed her plate away and sat back in her chair. The river moved past the window. It was lower and slower than it had been even a week ago. Every day closer to winter the temperature dropped even more, and it got colder faster at the higher altitudes, where the year-round snow and the glaciers were. Melt off was over and freeze up was on its way.

She turned to look at the dining room, less than half full. The snow marched down the sides of the mountains, and the tourists emptied out of the state.

“He loved you.” When she looked at him, he said, “Oh, God, no, he’d never say so in so many words, but it was obvious in the way he spoke of you. He took such pride in you.”

“He talked about me?” Kate took another look around the room, at the bar along one end, the door to the kitchen at the other, the tables and chairs spaced evenly between. It was odd to think of Old Sam perched on one of the stools there, surrounded by a dumbstruck audience as he held forth on her manifest virtues.

“Who doesn’t?” Tony said. “He was in here a little over two weeks ago. I guess, yes, that would have been the last time I saw him.”

Which would have been when Old Sam had revised his will, Kate thought. “What did he talk about that night?”

Tony’s brows drew together. “Some about the fishing season.” He smiled. “Some about the two new deckhands you wished on him. And…”

“What?”

“Well.” Tony spread his hands. “World War Two.”

“Really?” Kate was startled.

“Yeah.”

“Well, he was in it, in the Aleutians.”

“So he said. I hadn’t known that before.” Tony grimaced. “And now I have to go buy the book about Castner’s Cutthroats.”

Kate’s smile was wry. “Yeah. Talking to Old Sam did tend to have that effect. Nothing like meeting someone who lived through it to make you want to read up on it.”

Tony stood up and reached for Kate’s plate. “Dessert?”

“What you got?”

Tony’s grin was evil in the way of someone who was about to serve you three thousand calories in three bites. “It’s chocolate.”

“Sold.”

He laughed and turned, and then turned back. “Oh, hey, one more thing we talked about that evening.”

“What?”

Tony came back and rested the dishes on the table. He was smiling. “He spun us this tale about Dashiell Hammett. Said they were both stationed on Adak for part of the war.”

Jane had told her the same thing an hour before, and only then did Kate remember the complete works of Dashiell Hammett on Old Sam’s shelves, the only crime fiction represented thereon. So that was why. “He never told me he met Hammett.”

She was trying not to sound aggrieved and she didn’t think succeeding very well, but Tony, caught up in the story, didn’t pick up on it. “Yeah. Funny. He said Hammett wrote him after the war, too. Oh yeah, and he said that Hammett was writing a book.”

“Not all that surprising,” Kate said. “Kinda what he did.”

Tony laughed. “Sounded that way when Old Sam told it, too. He had us right up until the time the manuscript went missing, and then he cussed us out when we started laughing. He was a spellbinder.” He picked up the dishes again. “And a helluva good guy. I’m sure going to miss him.”

“We all will,” Kate said, laughter draining out of her.

Tony touched her shoulder briefly with his free hand, and vanished through the swinging door into the kitchen.

*   *   *

Kate looked at her cell phone, which had been charging in her room since before dinner. Alaska was only an hour off California. Jim’s cell number was number one on her speed dial. Come to think of it, it was the only number on her speed dial.

She hesitated, and didn’t know why.

The phone vibrated in her hand. She jumped and dropped it. It fell on the bed and bounced out of reach and she scrambled after it, catching it just before it went off the other side onto the floor.

The number on the screen was Jim’s cell. She fumbled to answer and pressed the wrong button and disconnected the call. “Damn it!” While she was trying to figure out how to call him back the phone vibrated again. This time she took her time, located the button with the green phone on it and pressed it. “Hello?”

There was a brief silence and for a moment she thought she’d disconnected him again. “Kate?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“I didn’t expect you to pick up.”

“Why’d you call then?”

She could hear the smile in his voice. “I was going to leave you a message that you’d get the next time you went to town. Something that would have embarrassed you to listen to in company.”

She laughed, a husky sound. “Sorry I answered then.”

“ ’S okay. Next time. Where are you?”

“Had to make a run into Ahtna. I’m staying the night.”

“Business?”

Kate looked up to see her reflection in the mirror over the dresser. The shiners had achieved an almost fluorescent hue, a sort of neon plum. “The snow’s holding off so I figured I’d come into town to check with Old Sam’s attorney. How are you?”

A sigh. “Fine.”

“And your mom?”

She could almost hear the muscles in his jaw tighten. “She’s fine, too.”

A brief silence. “Talk to me,” she said, her voice as soft as the scar on her throat would allow.

“They figure it was ALS.”

She winced. “Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

“Yeah.”

“You said he was a pretty active guy.”

“Yeah. Well, for someone who lived in LA. He didn’t have an aerobics instructor or anything, but he went a couple of rounds of golf every weekend, and he played tennis. He taught me to swim and to surf. His board’s still in the garage, so I’m guessing he kept it up.”

She was silent for a moment. “You should take his board out.”

“What?”

“Take his board out. Go surfing. Remember him that way.”

They listened to each other breathe for a few moments. The wonder was, it did not feel awkward to either one of them. “Is there a service?”

Another sigh. “The funeral’s two days from now. There’ll be a memorial in their church, a graveside service, and a reception following at the club. Monday will be the reading of the will.”

Kate didn’t let herself say the first thing that came into her mind, which was,
You’re going to be there another five days?
Instead she said, “It sounds like the prologue to a country house murder in an Agatha Christie novel.”

He laughed, and sounded surprised that he could. “That’s exactly what it’s like. All very structured and well-mannered. Butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths.”

“What is it with you and your mom?”

For moment she thought he wouldn’t tell her. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Chemistry, maybe? And different ideas about what I wanted to do with my life, oh yeah. My best friend when I was eight was Enrique, the gardener’s son, so she fired the gardener. I walked away from the prep school she put me in after a month. I wouldn’t study art or literature, I insisted on sociology and the law, and then I wouldn’t go to law school, because what else was I going to do with a BA in criminal justice. She was all for me going to work for Dad’s firm and making partner before I was thirty-five.” She heard a joint pop as he stretched. “And then of course I refused to marry any of her friends’ daughters. When I brought Sylvia home to meet them—not one of my better moves—I thought the air in the house was going to freeze solid.”

“Uh-huh,” Kate said. “Who was Sylvia?”

A telling silence, while he thought about whether he should tell her who Sylvia was.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “It’s none of my business, before my time. I didn’t mean to pry, I was just—”

“Sylvia Hernandez,” he said briskly, giving the
r
its proper roll, “was the daughter of the LA county sheriff with whom I had my first ride along when I was making up my mind to be a cop. Jesus invited me to dinner at his house, where I met his eldest child, Sylvia. We dated for about a year.”

“A year,” Kate said, proud her voice didn’t squeak. In the Park, until her, Chopper Jim Chopin’s legendary string of girlfriends had considered themselves lucky if they’d lasted a month each. “Sounds serious.”

He told her the truth and she was grateful. “I don’t know how serious it was, but then I was accepted into the Alaska state trooper academy in Sitka.” A ghost of a laugh. “A Hispanic daughter-in-law or her son a cop. I don’t know to this day which my mother considered the greater evil.”

Kate wondered what his mother’s reaction would be to his current girlfriend. “She may be my best friend,” Kate said. “One way or the other, you came to Alaska.”

The smile again. “I was always coming to Alaska, Kate. You were just the bonus.”

It didn’t occur to Kate until later that one of the reasons she might have decided on her trip to Ahtna was that her cell phone worked there.

*   *   *

Kate slept later than usual the following morning, and got to the dining room just as Stan was about to come roust her out so he could clean the griddle between breakfast and lunch. She got her papaya, sweetened with bacon waffles and homemade maple syrup that came steaming to the table in its own gravy boat. The coffee was excellent, a dark roast that would have peeled the enamel from her teeth if it had been allowed to brew one second longer, and there was cream in the pitcher, not half-and-half. Kate cleaned her plate, ignoring the sideways glances of the only other people in the room, a couple whose off-the-REI-rack outfits screamed tourist. Kate had never seen so many zippers on one article of clothing before in her entire life. They couldn’t decide what was more interesting, Kate’s shiners or Mutt sitting at her side. When she got up to leave they exchanged a glance and the man cleared his throat and said, a little nervously, “Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“Is that, uh, a wolf?”

“Only half,” Kate said.

Mutt, bored, lifted her lip at him and he spilled his coffee all over the table. It seemed like a pretty good exit line so they took it.

She and Mutt made their farewells to Tony and Stan and climbed into the pickup. It was nippy inside and out. She started the engine and turned on the heater for the first time that year and cranked it up to high. She wasn’t worried about gas consumption. Ahtna’s prices were cheaper than anything she could get in Niniltna, even in barrels she brought in herself, and she wanted to be running on empty by the time she hit the gas station on her way out of town.

She pulled the Ahtna phone book from beneath the seat. Pete Wheeler answered his own phone. She introduced herself and he gave her directions to his office, telling her any time before noon was okay but after that he was going hunting.

Kate disconnected and craned her neck to give the sky a long, hard look. It was still gray and it still smelled like snow, but so far it was holding it in. She went to Costco and loaded up the back of the pickup with dry and canned goods and tarped it. As an afterthought to Stan’s black eye prescription, she bought a fresh pineapple, which perfumed the air of the cab on the drive to the courthouse.

Jane Silver wasn’t in her office. Kate backtracked to the front desk and asked for her, only to be told Jane hadn’t come in that morning.

“Did she call in sick?”

The clerk shook her head. “She just didn’t show up.”

Kate knew a sudden, undefined chill. “Where does she live?”

*   *   *

The house on Quartz Street was sided with old wooden clapboards recently painted baby blue with white trim. The gray asbestos shingles looked new, too. Compared to the houses on either side, Jane’s house was small, from the outside maybe a thousand square feet, with most of the lot given over to Jane’s garden habit. Every square inch of dirt inside the chain-link fence that surrounded the yard was divided into square plots separated by neat, narrow paths. The raspberries were pruned to single canes, the rhubarb was cut back to the ground, the strawberries were headed and weeded, and everything was heaped high with mulch. Some kind of climbing vine covered the links of the fence, with no single identifying leaf remaining behind.

Kate looked at the house. The curtains were drawn. Jane’s elderly blue Pinto sat in rusty dignity in the narrow driveway to the right of the house, about halfway up the drive. Something looked odd and she walked over to see that the driver’s-side door was not fully latched. She ducked down and looked in the window to find that the dome light was still on. A beat-up black leather purse sat in the passenger seat.