Though Not Dead (21 page)

“How are you doing?” Ruthe said, setting mugs, a stack of sliced homemade bread, and a Darigold one-pound butter can on the table. For a change, the butter can was actually full of butter, instead of foam earplugs or leftover nails. Or spare cash.

“I’m okay,” Kate said. “I already miss the hell out of the son of a bitch.”

Ruthe smiled, a reminiscent gleam in her eye. “Me, too.”

“Wait a minute,” Kate said. “I thought Old Sam and Mary Balashoff—”

Ruthe waved a hand. “Don’t worry. Old news. Very old news, back when Dina and I first came into the country. Sam brought up a lot of the construction material we used to build Camp Teddy on the
Freya
. We … got acquainted.”

Jesus, Kate thought, is there anyone in the Park you haven’t slept with? Ruthe and Jim had been a brief and relatively unknown item back when she first came into the country. Kate could not forbore a glance at the floor of this very cabin, that had supported, barely, what had followed her own discovery of that interesting fact. Now Old Sam, too?

Ruthe read Kate’s thought with no difficulty, and chuckled. “Hard to believe a couple of old codgers like us could be—”

Kate held up a hand. “Stop right there. I’m begging you.”

At that Ruthe laughed outright. “Don’t worry, Kate, I’m just ragging on you. Old Sam and I were friends, good friends. I’ll miss him, too.” But she paused. “Is there a time you can foresee when you won’t want to sleep with Jim?”

It might have been Kate’s overactive imagination, but Ruthe seemed to cast a significant glance at the floor of her cabin as she spoke. She couldn’t know. Oh god, please, she couldn’t possibly know.

And then Ruthe’s words wormed their way into her consciousness. She thought of the night just past, when she had woken in the wee hours to reach for the man who wasn’t there, his side of the bed cold and lonely. “It’s a moot point,” she said out loud. “Everybody knows what Jim’s like. He won’t be around when it becomes a question.”

Ruthe cast her an amused glance. “Sure, he won’t.”

“He’s in California right now,” Kate said, with perhaps a little more force than she was aware of.

“Why?”

“His father died.”

“Oh well,” Ruthe said, sitting down across from Kate and picking up a spoon to stir sugar into her coffee. “The man has abandoned you for no good reason. Throw him out, by all means.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Kate said.

Ruthe’s glance was cool. “Didn’t you?”

Nettled, Kate said, “You know, Ruthe, I didn’t come here to talk about my love life.”

Ruthe raised her eyebrows. “ ‘Love’ life, is it?”

“Ruthe!”

The older woman burst out laughing. “Sorry, Kate, it was irresistible. What’s up?”

“It’s about Old Sam.”

“So you said.” Ruthe’s gaze sharpened. “What about him?”

“Demetri told me—”

“Demetri?”

“Demetri Totemoff, yeah.” There was a note in Ruthe’s tone that Kate couldn’t identify. “What about Demetri?”

Ruthe made a dismissive gesture. “Later. What did he say?”

“He said Dan O’Brian had commissioned you to write an article on the history of the Park for the Parks Service.”

Ruthe nodded. “True, for their website. Everything’s on a website nowadays. Mostly it’s a timeline, who came here when. Sort of an exercise in global perspective, you know: Spanish flu kills fifty million people worldwide March 1918 to June 1920, kills thirteen thousand people in Alaska November 1918 to June 1919, Chief Lev Kookesh and wife Ekaterina die in Spanish flu pandemic in Niniltna in 1919.”

“Context,” Kate said, sidetracked for a moment.

Ruthe nodded.

“But I’ll have to go online to see it.”

“You will,” Ruthe said.

Kate sighed. “Okay. Demetri said you might know something about Chief Lev, and Chief Lev’s daughter, and Chief Lev’s grandson, who to my surprise turns out to be Old Sam.”

“You didn’t know?”

Kate shook her head. “He never told me. In all the time I knew him, I don’t think he ever talked about his grandparents. For that matter, he didn’t talk about his parents much.”

“Ah.”

“Does that ‘ah’ have something to do with the possibility that Quinto Dementieff was not Old Sam’s natural father?”

Ruthe’s gaze sharpened. “You know that?”

“I don’t know it, per se,” Kate said. “I heard the aunties talking about it once, sort of, and Demetri says there was a rumor going around that Ekaterina, Old Sam’s mother, was friendly with a stampeder before she married Quinto.”

Ruthe nodded, and seemed to make up her mind. She began with a caveat. “I don’t know anything for sure, you understand.”

“Yeah, but you just said that you and Old Sam were buds.”

Ruthe grinned. “Were we ever,” she said, and laughed again when Kate made a cross of her fingers and held it up between them. “I made a remark once about his height, which as you know wasn’t your Alaska Native’s average height, and he said his father was six two.”

Old Sam had been a tall man. Why had Kate never made the connection? “Quinto Dementieff was half Filipino and half Aleut,” she said. “Doubtful if he was much over five feet.”

“Filipinos not being known for their tallness, either.” Ruthe watched Kate, waiting. Waiting for what?

“Do you know the stampeder’s name?” Kate said. “Demetri said it was something weird like Bucket of Blood.”

Ruthe smiled approvingly, as if Kate had just said something very smart. “One-Bucket,” she said. “One-Bucket McCullough.”

Many of the stampeders who came north in the Klondike Gold Rush had colorful nicknames, usually with an equally colorful story attached to it. “Why One-Bucket?”

“I was interested, too, so I did a little research in the newspapers back then.”

“The
Ahtna Adit
?”

“That was one of them,” Ruthe said, nodding. “He’s mentioned in passing in a couple of books written by stampeders, too.”

Kate remembered Ben’s remark that every stampeder who stepped foot in the Klondike wrote a book about it.

“It seems,” Ruth said, “that One-Bucket McCullough was famous in certain circles for his ability to stake a claim on the richest section of any creek, pull one bucket of nuggets out, and sell the claim to the first guy who asked.”

Kate thought about it. “Sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?”

“Well,” Ruthe said, “from the accounts of the miners who bought his claims, which never paid out in a manner you might expect of a claim previously productive of a full bucket of nuggets in one day, there was some speculation as to whether he sold the same bucket of nuggets more than once.”

“Oh.” Kate started laughing, and Ruthe joined in. “And that was Old Sam’s father?”

Ruthe shrugged. “Might have been. Old Sam never came right out and said so. Why this interest?”

“Old Sam left me this note.” Kate pulled it out and handed it over.

Ruthe read it. “Hmm. Not particularly self-explanatory, is it.”

“No,” Kate said with feeling. “It isn’t.”

Ruthe gave her a speculative glance. “Anything to do with you getting attacked in Old Sam’s house?”

“I don’t know. I was packing up his books, and I’d gotten sidetracked by a judge’s journal, the first judge in Ahtna before World War Two. The next thing I know I’m trying not to throw up in Matt Grosdidier’s lap. And you haven’t heard the latest.” She told Ruthe about her eventful trip to Ahtna, and the even more eventful return.

“Jane Silver’s dead?” Ruthe said.

Kate nodded. “You knew her?”

“Who didn’t. She had a front-row seat to the last seventy years of Alaska history. I tried to use her as a source for the timeline but she just wouldn’t play.”

Kate cleared her throat delicately. “There may have been a reason she didn’t want anyone looking too closely into her history.”

Ruthe made a rude noise. “I know all about Beatrice Beaton’s Boardinghouse,” she said.

“Oh,” Kate said. “Well. Not as big a secret as Jane had hoped, then.”

“And you say she’s dead?”

Kate nodded. “Day before yesterday.”

“How?”

Kate sighed. “It looks like she surprised a burglar. They shoved her and she fell and hit her head.”

“A burglar, huh?”

“Yeah. Her place was ransacked, or in the process of being ransacked. I heard him heading out the back door when we were coming in the front.”

Ruthe looked at Mutt, snoozing peacefully in front of the wood stove. “Mutt with you?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t send her after him?”

“No.”

Ruthe raised an eyebrow. “Time was you wouldn’t have hesitated.”

Kate looked at Mutt, too. Time was she hadn’t seen Mutt near death from intercepting a bullet that had been meant for Kate.

Mutt’s eyes snapped open and she raised her head to meet Kate’s stare full on.

Kate was the first one to look away. “There have been a lot of break-ins in Ahtna lately,” she said. “It could be that simple. Or…”

“Or what?”

Kate shrugged. “Working Mrs. Beaton’s side of the street does put one in the way of hearing the real story behind all the gossip. Best snitch any cop can have is a working girl.”

“You think she knew something to do with Old Sam? And that that was what got her killed?”

“It could be that complicated.” Kate drained her mug and got to her feet. “Johnny’s pretty sure it is.”

Ruthe grinned. “And how is my boy?”

Unbeknownst to her, Kate’s expression was one of love and pride. “Damn near perfect.”

Ruthe nodded as if it was only to be expected. “You’re very lucky,” she said.

“I know,” Kate said.

*   *   *

At Old Sam’s the snow was drifted three feet high against the door and there was a set of fresh tracks circumnavigating the cabin. It looked as if the person had stopped to peer into every window. Kate squatted for a closer look. “Small,” Kate said to Mutt, who was peering over her shoulder. “An older child or a younger woman. I’m betting Phyllis. Maybe she’ll come back while we’re here.”

Mutt made a noise that could have been agreement, but when Kate unlocked the padlock Mutt stationed herself squarely in front of the door, and she did not relax her vigilance until they left. Mutt had a long memory, and she was not about to suffer the indignity of leaving her human undefended from attack a second time.

She’d already taken care of the books. As promised, Kate left towels and bedding, dishes and food. She packed Old Sam’s clothes and personal belongings, listing the contents on the outside of each box in black Marks-A-Lot. By the end of the day she was heartily sick of the whole operation—Who knew the old man would have had so much stuff in him? Although she was sure Mike Doogan would have called it gear—and had begun to toss boxes of ammunition in the same box with frayed Jockey underwear and Christmas ornaments. Where the hell had Old Sam come by those?

Phyllis, if it had been her, didn’t come back. On the way home Kate dropped off Old Sam’s clothes with Auntie Balasha, who ran a sort of thrift shop out of her garage. When Johnny got home from school that afternoon he found Kate unloading the last of the boxes from the snowgo trailer. He gave her a hand and they closed up the garage against a wind-driven snowfall that promised to have a lot more on the ground by morning.

Kate busied herself with dinner as Johnny leaned on the counter and kibitzed. The pork chops were in the oven and Kate was using the last of a bunch of very sad apples from the fruit bin in the refrigerator for applesauce by the time she was done catching him up on the day’s activities. “We were just talking about the Spanish flu in history today,” he said. “Mr. Tyler says it was proportionally really bad in Alaska, partly because of the communal lifestyle of Alaska Natives.”

Kate nodded, turning on the rice cooker. “It’s estimated that half the Native population died. The elders called it the Black Death. They still do.”

“Wow.” Johnny was impressed. “Reminds me of that stuff in the Middle Ages.”

“The bubonic plague.”

“Yeah. Only this wasn’t rats.”

“No.” She turned on the rice cooker and leaned on the sink. “Think about it, Johnny. Every second person you know, dead. Me, Jim, you, Van, the aunties, Ruthe, Annie. Count them off.”

Johnny looked stricken. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

“It was exactly like that. And the people who got it who didn’t die were too weak and debilitated to fight off the vultures, and the people who didn’t get the flu had enough on their hands caring for the survivors to be paying attention.”

“So you think this One-Bucket McCullough seduced Old Sam’s mom and stole this icon thing?”

“That’s what it sounds like to me.”

“And then his mom married Quinto Dementieff.” He thought about that for a while. “Do you think Quinto knew?”

“If he didn’t know before, he would have known when Old Sam started growing up looking like does. Did.”

“I hope he didn’t…” Johnny’s voice trailed off.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Do you think Old Sam knew?”

“Yes.” Kate folded a dish towel and hung it over the handle on the oven door. “Maybe not until later, but he knew. It’s the only way to explain his note.”

“So you think he wanted you to find this One-Bucket McCullough?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Kate’s laugh sounded more like a sob. “Beats the hell out of me.” She paused. “But one thing about Old Sam.”

“What?”

“He wasn’t interested in information that didn’t have a practical purpose. Whatever this crazy road is he’s sending me down…”

“There’s something important at the end of that road.”

“I think so. Christ, I hope so.”

She started loading plates, and nothing interfered with dinner, not even Old Sam’s edicts from beyond the grave. But afterward Johnny said, “So. What are you going to do next?”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” It was Kate’s turn to lean on the counter and kibitz while Johnny did the dishes. It was black and dark on the other side of the windows and the house creaked in what sounded like gale-force winds. “If this blows itself out by morning, I think I’m going to take the snowgo up to Canyon Hot Springs.”

“Why?”

Kate gave a half laugh. “I wish I had a good answer for that.” She moved her shoulders, as if trying to shake off a persistent fly. “I’ve got a feeling I’m supposed to. I didn’t know he owned it until he left it to me in his will. Now there’s this business about who his father was or wasn’t, and the—I can’t believe I’m saying this—the missing treasure.”