Though Not Dead (50 page)

“No,” Kate said.

The disarrangement of limbs caused by the zip-tied hobble frustrated his attempts to cover himself completely. Eventually he gave up and laid back. “Who’s coming?”

She looked at him. “You don’t know?”

He was silent.

“You ever hear of the Lady of Kodiak?”

“No.”

He occupied himself again with grunting and yanking and thumping the sleeping bag in place. He got enough material over and under him to be satisfied, if not comfortable, finally, although he was breathing a little harder from the effort.

Kate wasn’t feeling his pain. “I don’t believe you, Ben,” she said. “You’re a newspaperman. So was your father, and so was your grandfather. Your grandfather had to have known the story. He was here, he was practically an eyewitness. He had to have told your father about it, and I don’t for one moment believe that your father didn’t tell you.”

He tried and failed to zip up the bag. “The Lady?”

“The Lady of Kodiak. Or the sainted Mary. It’s the name of the icon.”

He tried to shrug into the bag, but it just wasn’t happening in his bent-over position. “Maybe I could remember something if you could zip up this goddamn bag.“

She rose to her feet and stepped across the room. Before he could do or say anything she had her foot on his throat. Automatically his left hand came up to wrap loosely around her ankle. “Let go,” she said, leaning her weight on her foot.

His eyes went wide. He wheezed. His hand tightened.

She leaned harder. “Let go,” she said again.

His hand fell away. While he was gasping for breath she pulled up the zip on the bag and nipped back to the snowgo seat before he had a chance to recover.

When he got his breath back he scowled at her. “There was no need for that.”

“No?” Kate said. “Then I apologize. Really I do. About the Lady?”

But he was sulky after the foot in the neck, so conversation lagged. After an hour of tossing and turning, he finally fell asleep. He snored, a deep, loud gurgle through his wounded nose that sounded like a clogged drain. Good thing Kate had no intention of sleeping.

Kate turned off the gas in the Coleman lantern, and the inside of the cabin was dark but for the light of the wood fire flickering through the cracks and the new bullet hole in the stove. If people kept shooting off weapons in here, a new outhouse was going to be the least of it to keep the place a going concern.

The hours crawled on, nine, ten, eleven, midnight, one. Kate had just reached the end of David McCullough’s
John Adams,
and was trying, for the most part unsuccessfully, not to break into sobs over Abigail’s death when she heard Mutt howl. It sounded a lot farther off than it should have.

Kate set the book down, turned off the book light, and rose soundlessly to her feet. She was still fully dressed.

She looked over at Ben, whose snoring continued unabated. She stepped into her boots, shrugged into her parka, and slid outside and around the back of the cabin, pulling on hat and gloves as she went.

If she hadn’t been listening for it she wouldn’t have heard it: the faint buzz of an engine. Not a plane, not a four-wheeler. No, this was a snow machine. Kate couldn’t tell if it was the Polaris that had followed her the last time she’d come to the canyon. The sound of the engine was muted, probably deliberately so. Without Mutt’s warning she wouldn’t have heard it until it was much closer.

It took another fifteen minutes for them to approach the saddle. Again, they stopped just before the canyon entrance. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Kate was leaning against the back wall and Ben’s snoring was of such power and volume that she didn’t hear the footsteps until they were almost at the door of the cabin. But she heard the latch click, and the creak of the door opening, and she stepped quickly and quietly around to the front, to reach the intruder still in the doorway. She pressed the muzzle of Ben’s pistol into the small of his back. “Careful,” she said. “There be dragons here.”

The back froze in mid-step.

“Good plan,” she said.

Something cold and hard pressed against her own back. “Better plan,” a voice said.

“I don’t think so,” Kate said.

There was a corresponding growl so loud and so menacing that if it wasn’t a grizzly it had to be a T. rex.

All three of them looked over their shoulders.

Mutt, a gray ghost scudding crablike and soundless across the snow, legs stiff, hackles raised, head lowered, lips drawn back. Luck was with Kate still and the moon chose that moment to crest the ridge. It lit Mutt’s narrowed yellow eyes and sharp white teeth with an unearthly glow, just as she let forth with another rumbling growl that sounded like the promise of lightning striking.

The person standing behind Kate let out something between a scream and a squawk. “I’ll shoot her! I will!”

“No, you won’t,” Kate said. “Mutt?”

The thunder filled the horizon.

“Take,” Kate said.

1958

Anchorage

Emil had the true spirit of Alaskan hospitality. Sam, while marveling at the other man’s evident inability to see the obvious resemblance between his son and his newfound friend, had to give him that. The hand of friendship might be oblivious but it wasn’t insincere, and from the time they met in Nikiski, Emil treated Sam like any one of his two hundred best friends, grabbing the check for lunch at the Ace of Clubs, buying the first round at the Inlet Bar, holding out the promise of a room at his house in Anchorage should Sam make it to town. He wasn’t too proud to visit Sam on the
Freya,
and ate enthusiastically of everything put before him, from moose tongue to seal liver.

He had a confiding nature that invited confidence in return. When he heard what part of Alaska Sam was from, Emil questioned him closely about the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and the possibility for other discoveries in the Quilaks. His enthusiasm was catching. At one point Sam found himself pulling out the map of his homestead, marked with all the mines Mac had dug into the granite walls. None of them had paid out, of course.

Erland, on the other hand, was the human equivalent of Switzerland, not quite unfriendly but distant, aloof, neutral. Sam understood, having suffered through his own discomforting doppelgänger recognition at that first meeting in the Nikiski oil field. And Erland was just a kid. It didn’t help that Erland and Emil didn’t get along, and again, Sam wondered if this was because at some level Emil knew Erland wasn’t his son.

Sam had a half brother.

If nothing else, it proved that Mac had survived the wounds he’d received saving Sam’s life, which made Sam feel less guilty.

And more pissed off. He thought again of writing to Hammett, but it seemed to him that most of his answers were right here. He developed a lively curiosity about Emil’s wife and Erland’s mother, and the year after their first meeting maneuvered a delivery to the embryonic port of Anchorage. After a hair-raising docking during which he nearly grounded the
Freya
twice, he almost forgot the purpose of his visit, expatiating in full and at length and with emphasis to Emil, who was by now one of the city fathers, on the dangers of building a port on a shallow and ever-shifting bottom of glacial silt, a situation unimproved by forty-two-foot tides. Emil replied soothingly, and tucked Sam into a two-tone Cadillac with foot-high fins and bug-eyed taillights. It was the first automatic shift Sam had ever seen.

Anchorage had grown from the military outpost from which Sam had transited to and from the Aleutians during the war to a bustling city of fifty thousand, with an air force base, an army base, a high-end residential district south of town, and farther south even a suburb. Spenard, Emil said with a wink, where all the action was. Sam made a noncommittal reply, eying the house in front of which the Cadillac was sliding ponderously to a halt. Two stories high, it had bow windows in both front corners connected by a large porch whose roof was held up by ornate wooden columns. Everything was painted white, reminiscent of Greek temples seen in schoolbooks.

Be hard to find the front door in a snowstorm, was Sam’s first thought.

Erland opened the door as they came up the steps. Now that Sam was over the first shock, he saw that Erland was older than he’d thought from their first meeting, although that might have had something to do with the sullen expression Erland had worn then. No kid liked being scolded in public. This was not a boy, this was a young man near college age, and today his expression was carefully pleasant, his handshake brief but firm.

“And this is my daughter, Victoria,” Emil said jovially.

The daughter looked nothing like her brother or her father. She was tall, with a chin too large for beauty, thick blond hair shoulder-length in a well-manner pageboy, and steady blue eyes.

“Where’s your mother?” Emil said. “Dorothy? Dorothy!”

“In here, Emil.”

They followed the voice into what proved to be a dining room. It held the longest table lined with the most chairs Sam had ever seen. It was proving to be a day of firsts for him, and it wasn’t over yet.

Dorothy, the genetic template from which her daughter had been constructed, was bent over the table, setting out china and flatware.

“Dorothy, this here’s Sam Dementieff,” Emil said.

Dorothy straightened up and turned, a practiced smile at the ready. Dressed in a yellow shirtdress and heels, diamonds sparkling in her ears and on her hands, Dorothy was the consummate society hostess, ready to welcome one extra guest or twenty for dinner at a moment’s notice.

But the smile faded when her eyes met Sam’s. Her face went paper white, and she reached blindly for the back of a chair. She recovered herself in an instant, and went on to serve a tasty dinner of meat loaf, canned green beans, and potatoes, with apple pie and ice cream for dessert. If her smile was more rigid, her gaze when she looked at Sam more set, then surely only he noticed.

But notice he did. After dinner the kids vanished upstairs and Emil took a phone call in his study. Sam got up to help when Dorothy started to clear the table. “No,” she said quickly. “Really, there’s no need.”

He pursued her into the kitchen. “Mac McCullough,” he said. “Was that his name?”

She was standing at the sink, her back to him, but he could see her shudder.

“He was my father, too,” he said. “Is he still—Do you know how I could get in touch with him?”

She cast a quick look over her shoulder toward the door. “He’s dead,” she said.

He was silent for a moment, assimilating the news. He’d had plenty of time to mourn Mac’s death, from the moment he’d received the package from Hammett until that morning in Seattle when Pete Pappardelle had told him Mac had come looking for the icon after the war. “When did he die?”

She cast another glance over her shoulder. “Not here.”

“Where, then?”

Emil’s cheerful bellow sounded. “Sam! Sam! Come on in here. Let’s light up and set a spell!”

Sam looked at her. “The Fly By Night in Spenard, tomorrow morning,” she said quickly. “I’ll try to be there by nine.”

“Sam!”

Sam joined Emil in his study, a square, dark-paneled room at the front of the house. There was a large mahogany desk and a leather chair in one corner, a slate fireplace in another, and a series of tall, glass-topped display cases spaced at intervals around the walls. Seeing Sam’s interest, Emil said, “I’ve been collecting Alaskana since I came into the country. See this? It’s a storyknife. Made of ivory. Brought that back from a trip to Bethel just last year. Even Marcellus Bell doesn’t have one of them yet.” Emil chuckled. “Little kids tell stories with it on the Y-K. And this of course is an oosik.” Painful dig in the ribs. “Guessing I don’t have to tell you what that’s for.”

Sam moved on to another case. “What’s this?”

“That? Why, that’s a Sydney Laurence. Got it off the bartender down at the 515. Laurence used to go in there and drink, and then he’d whip out a little painting to pay off his bar tab.”

The subject was a blue and white church with a dome surmounted by a cross, standing high on a hill overlooking blue water, with the hint of a mountain or mountains in the background. The colors glowed like gemstones. “Where’s the church?”

Emil shrugged. “Beats me. Kenai, Ninilchik, maybe Seldovia. It’s a Laurence, is all I know. From what I hear he was all over the place. Say, if you’re interested in Russian stuff, I got a shitload of that. Look here.”

Sam joined Emil in front of another display case crowded with babushka dolls and amber. The amber was polished and set in rings and bracelets or carved into flowers and animals. There was one piece in its natural state, rough and lumpy, with a speck inside it that proved to be an imprisoned insect.

Next to the lump of amber sat a Russian icon.

There were three panels, all featuring the Virgin. On the left she cradled the baby Jesus in her arms, in the center she was holding the adult Jesus at the foot of the cross, and on the right she was on her knees, arms upraised to a Jesus arrayed in sunbeams, ascending to heaven, a rolled stone in the background. The illustrations were impressed on sheets of soft metal that might be gold. The frame was wood covered with gilt and studded with dull, uncut stones set in more of that same soft metal.

“Nice, huh? Picked her up in a junk shop in Seattle a while back.”

The Sainted Mary, the bride gift of Victoria Kookesh, the purchase price of Lev Kookesh’s chieftainship, and the long-lost heritage of the Niniltna Native tribe stared up at Sam, all three sets of her gilt eyes filled with foreseen pain.

*   *   *

The Fly By Night was a bar on the edge of Spenard Lake that was sufficiently dark inside for Dorothy not to be recognized. Still, she had tucked her hair beneath a brimmed hat pulled low over her eyes, had removed all of her jewelry including her wedding ring, and had wrapped herself in a nondescript black cloth coat. She wore dull oxford shoes with rubber soles that did not squeak.

It looked like a costume she had worn before. The bartender didn’t give her a second glance, and she slid into the booth in the corner, her back to the door, her shoulder to the room.