Though Not Dead (40 page)

“Thank you,” Kate said, making it heartfelt. “And could you do one other thing for me? Could you tell Johnny not to go out to our house alone? To stay at Annie Mike’s until I get back?”

“What the hell is going on here, Kate?”

“I’m in Anchorage trying to figure that out. Will you tell Johnny?”

“I’ll tell him. What was it Auntie Joy supposed to take with her?”

“The story. She’ll know what I mean.”

Kate hung up and sat there, the Subaru shuddering whenever a vehicle hurtled past, trying not to shake, cursing herself for not making sure Auntie Joy was safe before Kate left the Park.

If Old Sam was the contributory factor to all these assaults, then it followed that an ex-fiancée, were she known to exist, would be highly at risk. Wheeler, Gunn, and Abbott might all be amateurs, but as Bobby had rightly said,
Even Dortmunder gets lucky once in a while
.

When she stopped trembling, she started to get mad. She looked at Mutt. “If anyone lays a hand, if anyone lays so much as a finger, if they so much as look cross-eyed at my auntie, I will feed them to you. One. Piece. At. A. Time.”

*   *   *

Kate pulled into the Last Frontier Bank parking lot and this time there was nothing surreptitious about her actions. She left Mutt in the Subaru with the windows rolled down and went inside.

The Last Frontier Bank had been founded back in the days of the gold rush by a missionary stampeder who had come north to do good and had stayed to do right well indeed. With Hermann Pilz and Isaiah Bannister, Lucius Bell had formed part of a commercial triumvirate that had been either primarily or peripherally involved in the construction of the state of Alaska from the Klondike on. Banking, transportation, consumer goods (a roaring business), natural resource extraction (gold, copper, coal, oil)—there was no Alaskan pie in which they didn’t have a finger, if not their whole hand up to the wrist.

Bell had founded the first Alaskan bank in Circle, and when the gold played out moved operations to Fairbanks. In the 1950s his son, Marcellus, had upon the insistence of his wife moved the head office to Anchorage, where it was warmer and there was more light for longer and where there were more people and more things to do. It was also that much closer to a trip Outside, of which she took a great many.

Last Frontier Bank had built their new headquarters in downtown Anchorage, only to see the building destroyed during the 1964 earthquake. Marcellus and his son, Vitus, had been among the first to rebuild, making manifest their belief in the future of Alaska.

It was a handsome building, the first floor two stories high with pillars and marble flooring and original wood counters. Plush runners kept the noise from footsteps to a minimum. There were Art Deco wall sconces that gave the large room a retro feel. No Muzak profaned the air, and the security guard maintained an unobtrusive scrutiny from an alcove to one side of the door. Gray-haired, with a face that showed its age, he still looked more fit and much more alert than most bank security guards. Kate approached him. “Hi,” she said. “Where’s the museum?”

He showed her to the descending staircase and returned to his post.

Downstairs the ceiling was lower and the lights were fluorescent, but the shelving was solid and the display cases were made of plate glass. A receptionist sat at a desk that formed part of a railing. One did not just barge inside. All the better, Kate thought. “Hi,” she said.

The receptionist, on the evidence about the same age as the security guard, was also conspicuous by her alert eyes and vigilant attitude. She gave Kate a quick once-over, was either smart enough or had enough time served in Alaska to discount the jacket, jeans, and tennis shoes as an indication of true worth, and said, “May I help you?” Her manner gave one to understand that only serious researchers were welcomed into the inner sanctum, and anyone on a mission to waste her time would not be tolerated.

Kate’s instincts about people were generally good, and she decided to go with the truth, or at least some of it. “My name is Kate Shugak,” she said. She pulled the crumpled piece of paper from the SUV and handed it over. “I lost my uncle recently, and I’m the executor of his estate. He left me a small mystery, and I’m hoping you can help me solve it.”

The woman, whose name tag read Ms. S. Sherwood, smoothed out the piece of paper, which proved to be a call slip, with Bell’s Legacy of Alaska Museum imprinted at the top. “That’s my handwriting,” Ms. Sherwood said.

“I thought it might be,” Kate said. “Do you remember who asked for those materials, and when?”

Ms. Sherwood frowned. “A gentleman, I believe, on the Monday before last.” She consulted her desk calendar. “The fourteenth.”

The Monday after Old Sam died. “Might I look at those same materials?”

Ms. Sherwood considered. “Lucius Bell collected many things of great value during his life in Alaska,” she said. “Generally, we require references before we admit scholars to the collection. Are you a scholar?”

“No,” Kate said.

“I see. Have you a reference?”

“No.”

Ms. Sherwood nodded as if these brief and unequivocal answers had meant something more, and rose to her feet. She was a slim and elegant woman dressed in a slim and elegant gray knit dress with a white collar and cuffs, a thin white belt, and a hemline that hit her at mid-calf, over sheer stockings and elegant black pumps. She looked like Coco Chanel.

She walked through the swinging door in the railing and held it open. “Please come in.”

Twenty-five

The Legacy of Alaska Museum was the largest privately owned collection of Alaskana in the state. Lucius Bell had started collecting Native art and artifacts the moment he set foot in the territory. He had also been a pack rat of the first order, from the looks of it never having thrown away so much as a used-up book of matches.

The exhibit space took up almost the entire basement of the building, or a square block’s worth of space. Every square foot of it was utilized to the maximum to present the entirety of Alaska history from the pre-Russian to the post-statehood days. There was an Alutiiq kayak suspended from the ceiling, and a P and H Lines stagecoach in one corner. A framed photograph was fastened to the door of the stagecoach. It recorded the ceremony at which Hermann Pilz, Peter Heiman Sr., and P and H’s executive director donated the coach to the museum, presided over by a suitably grateful Marcellus Bell. The names listed on the caption at the bottom were interesting.

There was a copy of the state constitution signed by all fifty-five delegates to the constitutional convention. There were bears carved from ivory and soapstone; storyknives carved from ivory, wood, bone, and baleen; rye grass baskets from the size of an eggcup to a five-gallon bucket. The walls above the shelves were hung with paintings by Laurence and Ziegler, Anuktuvuk face masks, harpoons with enormous, elaborately carved ivory hooks. There was a case holding all the Fur Rendezvous buttons ever produced, right next to another filled with wooden drink tokens from every bar that had opened its doors north of the fifty-three. There was a metal cabinet with a dozen wide, shallow drawers that proved to hold maps of Alaska from the days of Captain Cook, when most of the coastline was only guessed at, to USGS maps that were still inaccurate today.

There was a display devoted to the oil industry from Katalla to Kenai to Prudhoe Bay, including a section of drill pipe attached to the tricone bit invented by Howard Hughes’s dad. There was a display of artifacts from the salmon industry, including caviar jars nestled in their original wooden box with the bright blue-and-red Japanese lettering on the side, an egg basket stained from use, half-pound flats, and one-pound talls.

“I know someone who has a working salmon canning line set up in a shed in back of his house,” Kate said.

“Really,” Ms. Sherwood said. “Would he be interested in selling it?”

Kate looked around the room. “He might be interested in selling, but where would you put it?”

“We have off-site storage facilities.”

A corner shelf played host to a miscellanea of gold mining relics, gold pans, gold leaf suspended in vials of water, what looked like the entire ton of supplies, including stove and fuel, required to get someone across the border into Canada during the Gold Rush. There were framed front pages from the
Dawson City Nugget,
the
Fairbanks Nugget,
and the
Nome Nugget,
all of which featured at least one murder resulting over a claim jumping. A dogsled held all the required gear of an Iditarod musher, parka, sleeping bag, ax, snowshoes, dog booties, food for musher and dog, plus mail and even a box marked “Serum” to commemorate the original 1925 run to a diphtheria-stricken Nome. It looked familiar. She paused for a closer look, and said, “Is this—”

Ms. Sherwood smiled. “Yes. It is the sled Ms. Baker was on when she won her first Iditarod. Along with all of the required items she carried during that race. The food is a representation, of course.”

Mandy didn’t give up on gear that worked for her. “When did she donate it?”

“In January,” Ms. Swanson said. “It’s one of our most recent acquisitions.”

Just after she’d taken the job with Global Harvest, Kate thought. Mandy really had retired.

One wall was covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves, the books sorted by year, beginning on the left with Alaska Native studies, followed shelf by shelf in order by Russian America, the Alaska Purchase, the Gold Rush, World War II, the oil discoveries, and the Alaska Native Land Claims, much of it original documentation, some of it handwritten journals. She saw a lot of names she recognized—Wickersham, Mitchell, Gruening, Peratovich, Hensley.

Kate was enthralled, and she could have spent the rest of the day if not the rest of the year in this one room, but she was recalled to duty by a discreet cough. She looked up to see Ms. Sherwood standing nearby with her hands clasped lightly in front of her, head tilted to one side, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

“Sorry,” Kate said, her voice hushed. “It’s just—”

“I know,” Ms. Sherwood said without being at all condescending. “It is a little overwhelming. Especially when you realize the bulk of it comes from the work of one man, during one lifetime.”

Kate indicated a label on the shelf in front of a tin gold pan that had seen hard use, labeled “Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Pilz.” There were other labels on other exhibits, all of them bearing names right out of the Alaskan history books. “He had help.”

Ms. Sherwood’s shoulders raised in a slight shrug. “Everyone wanted to be a part of Mr. Bell’s museum.”

Kate looked at the four wooden tables lined up behind Ms. Sherwood’s desk. Three were occupied by two men and one woman consulting various tomes and scribbling notes. “You get a lot of people in here?”

Ms. Sherwood nodded. “Students from the university, scholars, writers doing research. There is nothing more valuable to a scholar than original source material.” She smoothed an errant mote of dust from a shelf with a forefinger.

“It’s impressive as hell,” Kate said. “You’ve packed an awful lot into a relatively small space.”

Ms. Sherwood inclined her head, accepting her due. “Thank you.”

“Well.” With an effort, Kate pulled her head out of their collective past and back into the present. “What particular item does the slip refer to?”

And then it hit her.

Handwritten journals.

She rotated where she stood, running her eyes over the spines of the books.

She must have had a very peculiar expression on her face because Ms. Sherwood sounded worried. “Ms. Shugak? Are you all right?”

Kate turned to her. “Ms. Sherwood, have you ever heard of Judge Albert Arthur Anglebrandt?”

Ms. Sherwood looked surprised. “Why of course,” she said. “We have the journals he kept while he presided over the court in Ahtna.”

“Not all of them,” Kate said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Kate held up the call slip. “Does this refer to one of them?”

“It refers to all of the Anglebrandt journals. The gentleman did not ask for a particular volume.”

“Could you show me? Please?”

Ms. Sherwood navigated between various shoals of this historical and cultural sea to a bookcase halfway around the room and pointed at a shelf that was a good four feet over Kate’s head. “One moment.” She was back in short order with a wheeled ladder attached to a track that ran above all the bookcases. Very Henry Higgins. “Were you interested in a particular volume?”

“Nineteen thirty-seven and 1939,” Kate said.

Ms. Sherwood climbed the ladder and sorted through a line of journals once, and then again. “How very odd,” she said, and Kate could hear the steel threading through her voice.

“They aren’t there,” Kate said.

Ms. Sherwood descended the ladder. She looked angry, albeit in a repressed, upper-class Anglo-Saxon way. “No, they are not,” she said. “Would you mind telling me how you knew that, Ms. Shugak?”

“When was the last time they were inventoried?” Kate said.

For the first time the curator looked nonplussed. She paused to collect herself, and then said, her voice returned to its muted lower register librarian tone, “During my tenure? Never.”

She offered no apologies or explanations and Kate respected her for it. “Would there be a record?”

Ms. Sherwood led the way to a door hitherto partially concealed by a magnificent Tlingit button blanket, which led into a room with a bank of file cabinets behind a desk with a computer on it. Ms. Sherwood sat down at the computer and indicated a chair. “Please have a seat.”

Kate did so and watched Ms. Sherwood start the computer with a perfect composure that nonetheless gave the distinct impression that someone was for the high jump in the not too distant future. It took her only a few moments to access the needed data, whereupon Ms. Sherwood’s spine if anything grew even more straight. “The judge left his journals behind for the judge who succeeded him when he left the state in 1945,” she said.

The year Old Sam came home from the Aleutians, Kate thought. The year he proved up on his homestead. The year Auntie Joy turned him down for the second time. “How did they come here?” she said.