Though Not Dead (17 page)

She looked like a one-woman fashion plate right out of the AARP magazine, chic, elegant, and fashionable. To be fair, everyone in attendance was similarly attired, the women in subdued colors with discreet necklines, the men in suits with silk ties in muted patterns, everything fitting in a way you just knew was personally tailored and designed on the most recent dicta from
Vogue
and
GQ
.

He snorted beneath his breath. The only fashion season Jim recognized was when Kate switched from jeans in summer to lined jeans in winter. Mostly all he cared about were the buttons, a fashion statement he’d always liked better than zippers. Zippers were over so fast. With buttons you could take your time.

He stopped looking at clothes and looked at faces instead. It took a while to find them in the crowd, but there were a few people who looked familiar in a twenty-years-ago sort of way. Before approaching them he decided he required some liquid courage and got in line at the bar. The conversations he overheard were exactly what he expected.

“It’s such a shame. He wasn’t that old.” This from a Methuselah who looked a hundred if he was a day.

“I didn’t even know he was ill. Did you?” His companion, a woman who had given up on her figure, was heaping her plate high with shrimp.

“Beverly would never have told anyone anything
about any
thing. She’s pretty reserved.”

“Is that what you’d call it?” A woman his mother’s age who was even thinner and better put together sounded like a cat and looked as if she’d meant to. “I’ve always thought of her as an iceberg, myself.”

“A fine-looking woman,” said the man standing next to her. “He owned the building his law firm occupies, did you say? Even in this market, that’ll fetch a nice chunk of change.”

“She won’t need it, his broker told a friend of my sister’s that James left behind a very healthy portfolio.”

“Really.” Jim could almost hear the calculator clicking between Methuselah’s ears. “Haven’t I heard something about a son?”

Jim and his mother had been early to the church and Jim, quailing at the thought of being polite to that many people and more than a little upset by all the stories about his father he’d never heard being told by people he’d never met, had delayed walking out until almost everyone was gone. His mother had not introduced him to anyone, and few people who’d seen him knew him for who he was. It was a blessing in keeping himself below the radar.

Not so much standing in line for a beer.

They had it on tap, a nice crisp lager, and just looking at it in its tall, frosty glass made him feel a little better. From the corner of his eye he could see his mother looking his way, an unmistakable command in her eye. He took himself off to the terrace.

The breeze was warm and balmy and only faintly tainted by the layer of car exhaust hanging heavily over the greater Los Angeles area. You never smelled car exhaust in the Park unless you’d duct-taped yourself to the rear bumper of somebody’s Ford F-150.

He wondered what the temperature was in Niniltna.

“Hey.”

He turned. It took him a minute, not because he didn’t recognize her but because he couldn’t believe she was there. “Sylvia?”

She smiled. “Here come the Mounties, somebody hide.”

“Sylvia,” he said, and it was the most natural thing in the world to step forward and sweep her up into a bear hug.

She emerged from it laughing and a little flushed. “Long time no see, Chopin. How the hell are you?”

He inspected her from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She was five seven and a hundred and thirty-five pounds that was mostly muscle, clad today in a short black dress with a scoop neck and three-quarter-length sleeves. She wore modest gold hoops and a thin gold chain with a cross on it, and her heels weren’t so high she couldn’t run in them if she had to. She was tanned, there were laugh lines at the corners of her bright brown eyes, and her hair was an artfully tousled cap of rich dark brown streaked with highlights that looked natural. But then everyone in LA had great hair. Great hair and great teeth. There was probably a law for that, too. “Looking good, Hernandez.”

“Backatcha, Chopin.” Her smile faded. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“Yeah.” He let her go. “Me, too.” He looked through the glass door and saw an older man dressed in a hand-tailored three-piece suit—one of his father’s partners? Henderson? Harrigan? Haverman, that was it—take one of his mother’s hands in both of his and bend over it in what was nearly a bow. Jim looked back at Sylvia. “She didn’t even tell me he was sick.”

She grimaced but she didn’t say anything. Sylvia Hernandez knew everything she needed to know about Beverly Chopin. “How are you otherwise?” She smiled again. “How’s life up in the frozen north?”

“Good,” he said. “Better than, even.”

“Still with the troopers?”

“Yeah. Sergeant now, with my own post.”

She raised an eyebrow. “On the fast track?”

He shuddered. “No way, no how. They keep trying to promote me. I keep resisting.”

“Tell me about the post.”

He described Niniltna and the Park, cutting himself short when he became aware of the unconscious longing in his voice. “How about you?”

“Like father, like daughter. County sheriff. Detective division.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Homicide?”

She shook her head. “Major crimes.”

“Impressive.”

“Well, I don’t fly to work in my own airplane,” she said.

He grinned. “How’s your dad?”

“Good. Retired. Him and Mom moved up to Shasta. Took a woodworking class and now everybody gets whatnot shelves for Christmas.”

He laughed. “I bet they’re good shelves.”

“Yeah, well.” Sylvia’s smile was sly. “Okay, I’ll ask first. You married?”

“No.” For a moment he hesitated, thinking of how to describe his relationship with Kate. Hell, he couldn’t even describe Kate out of her Alaska context, nobody’d believe it, especially no one in sunny, ultra-civilized southern California. “There is someone, though. And you?”

“Was.”

“Ah. It was his fault, of course. Is he still living?”

She laughed. “So far as I know. He moved away. Most of the men in my life do.”

“Yeah, well.” His smile matched her own in slyness. “You could do a better job of picking ’em.”

She punched his arm with her free hand, hard enough to be felt.

“Police brutality,” he said.

“James.”

They turned to see his mother standing in the doorway. Jim tried not to look as guilty as he felt at laughing out loud at his own father’s memorial reception. And then he got pissed off that his mother would dare to condemn his behavior anywhere, at any time. His jaw set, and he met her glacial stare for glacial stare.

Beverly was first to look away. “I’m glad you could come, Sylvia. My husband always spoke fondly of you.”

That was the first Jim had heard of it.

“Thank you for inviting me, Mrs. Chopin,” Sylvia said.

Beverly had invited Sylvia to the reception? Jim felt the earth move beneath his feet, and it wasn’t the San Andreas fault.

His mother looked at him. “There are some people who would like to renew their acquaintance with you, James.”

Jim downed the rest of his beer. “Later?” he said to Sylvia.

She toasted him with her wine. “Later.”

Twelve

The snow started in Niniltna just as school let out.

“You could stay the night again,” Van said. “You know Annie won’t mind.” A slight, slender girl with glossy brown hair, creamy skin, and wide-set brown eyes, she stood next to him just outside the main door of the school, her face upturned to catch the first flakes on her cheeks.

Who could not have kissed her in that moment? So he did, to a chorus of jeers and cheers from everyone in seventh through twelfth grades erupting out of the doors behind them. He raised his head and grinned down at her. “I know she wouldn’t, but Kate will be back from Ahtna by now. I want to make sure she’s okay. But I’ll give you a ride home.” The privacy of the cab of his pickup, even for a brief time, was an alluring prospect.

They started to walk toward it. “Is she pretty shook up over Old Sam?”

“I think so.” A gust of wind enveloped them in a swirl of snow. “He’s about the last Park rat of his generation, if you don’t count the aunties, and they were pretty close.”

“How were they related, exactly?”

“I think he was her great-uncle, or maybe her great-great-uncle.”

Van worked this out. “He was her grandmother’s uncle?”

“Or maybe her grandmother’s brother? I don’t know, I never asked. Annie probably knows.”

“Annie won’t tell.” He looked at her and she said, “Haven’t you ever noticed? None of the aunties will talk about family in front of the children. Even their own.”

He hunched his shoulders against another gust of wind. “Doesn’t matter how or if they were related by blood. Her father died when she was pretty young. I think Old Sam kind of stepped into the role. He sounded like her dad every time he yelled at her, that’s for sure.”

They climbed into his pickup and spent the next fifteen minutes in an exchange of mutual admiration, before Van pulled back and said, “Okay, that’s enough for now.”

His heart was pounding in his ears and he was breathing as fast as she was, but he let her move to the other side of the seat. It took him a minute to remember where the ignition was. He turned the key and looked at her before putting the engine in gear. “No pressure, Van. When you’re ready.”

She nodded, her hair falling forward to hide her expression.

And sure as hell not in the front seat of his pickup, he thought, and spent the too-short drive to Annie Mike’s wondering where.

*   *   *

He got home to find the house dark. The snow was piling up fast, and he parked the pickup between the old outhouse and the shop, where he knew from experience there was at least some shelter from drifting. He checked to make sure the snow shovel was next to the door, kicked the snow from his boots, and went inside.

Mindful of the cost of fuel, instead of turning up the thermostat he started a fire in the fireplace, although he veered immediately from the path of rectitude afterward, assembling the ingredients for an enormous sandwich, piling the very small portion of the plate that remained high with potato chips, putting
Transporter 3
on the television, and cranking the volume on the remote as far up as it would go. An empty house was not to be wasted.

He woke up when the credits were rolling to peer out the door at the foot of snow that had accumulated on the deck and the stairs. Kate, whose weather sense he knew to be pretty acute, was most likely sitting out the storm in Ahtna. “Probably eating one of Stan’s steak sandwiches right now,” he said to the storm, and had to close the door hastily before any more snow blew inside the house.

If Kate had been home, she would have nagged him to do his homework and he would have bitched and moaned and whined and complained before allowing himself to be forced to the books. He didn’t feel like it would be fair to take advantage of her absence, so he settled down at the dining room table with a martyred sigh he was sorry no one was there to hear. Could have been worse, could have been civics. It was history, American history from 1900 to the present day, with the new teacher, Mr. Tyler, who was kinda cool. He wasn’t much taller than Kate and he wasn’t much older than his students, and he crackled with energy in the classroom. Every class period was a performance. Nobody ever dozed off in one of Mr. Tyler’s classes.

His list of required reading was interesting, too. It was mostly novels, one a week, and some of them really old novels, too, like
The Great Gatsby, All the King’s Men, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Native Son.
Right now they were reading
The Magnificent Ambersons,
although there was a rumor that somebody had made a movie out of it, albeit in black-and-white, which Jessica Totemoff was said to have put on her Netflix queue.

They were supposed to write a one-page report on every book, identifying things that happened in the book with events that had happened in real life. There was a timeline of events in their lone textbook. Mr. Tyler had already been discovered to be a stickler for spelling and grammar—at the beginning of the semester he’d threatened to fail anyone who screwed up
lay
and
lie
—so Johnny found Kate’s copy of
The Elements of Style
on the shelves in the living room and set to work.

An hour later he had a paper that wasn’t too bad. The book hadn’t been that hard to take, either—surprising since it was almost older than Niniltna. He looked at the copyright page of his paperback edition. Nineteen eighteen. Two years older than Old Sam. He wondered if Old Sam had read the book. Would have been interesting to have asked him what he’d thought of it.

He put the book down and thought about that tough, stringy old man who had hounded him from bow to stern of the
Freya
his first summer on board. Pitching fish, swabbing decks, scrubbing pots—Old Sam kept him moving every moment he wasn’t actually asleep, and he rolled him out of his bunk pretty early every morning. He’d never dared complain.

He smiled. The first time Old Sam had let him take delivery on his own was one of the proudest moments of his life. He could remember the details of his first boat as if he’d caught the bow line yesterday, Hank Carlson on the
Annie C.,
eleven kings and a hundred seventeen reds with an average weight of seven-point-nine pounds.

He looked at the Model 70 in the gun rack. There was another proud moment. Old Sam wouldn’t have left his pride and joy to Johnny if he hadn’t thought Johnny could and would take care of it. Then and there, he made a vow to himself that he would never use it without cleaning it immediately afterward. And that he would do his best to shoot straight and clean, to wait for the shot, never to be in so much of a hurry that he would shame himself or his weapon by not taking the time to zero in on the heart or the lung.

Johnny was going to miss the hell out of the old man, and at the same time he was excited at the thought of getting his first moose with his new classic rifle. He thought Old Sam would have understood.