Though Not Dead (25 page)

Auntie Joy raised her eyebrows. “And Hammett in the Aleutians in the war.”

“He was, Auntie.” Without thinking Kate added, “Jane Silver told me Old Sam told her that he met Hammett during the war.”

Auntie Joy stiffened. “That woman.”

“Oh,” Kate said. “Ah. Um. You knew about her. And, uh, him. Them.”

“I say to you already, I not stupid,” Auntie Joy said in an acid tone. “Of course I know. Everyone know unmarried men go to Beatrice in Niniltna, and married men, too. When Northern Light close down in Ahtna, nowhere else for them to go for that.”

“The Dawson Darling’s place,” Kate said.

Auntie Joy nodded. “Where Meganack house is now.”

“Really.” Kate smiled. She loved the idea of Iris Meganack’s rigidly rectitudinal ass sitting on the foundation of a house of ill repute. She wondered if Iris knew.

And if not, how and when she might be informed of such an interesting piece of Niniltna history.

Kate gave herself a mental shake. “Jane Silver is dead, Auntie.”

“What?”

“She was killed Thursday in her own home. Chief Hazen says it looks like she forgot something on her way to work, went home to get it, and surprised a burglar in the act.”

Auntie Joy was motionless for a moment, staring into space.

“Auntie?”

Auntie Joy came out of her trance and fixed Kate with a beady stare. “You think this burglar maybe have something to do with Old Sam?”

So much for keeping Kenny’s suspicions quiet. “Yes, Auntie. I do.”

“Maybe with people who attack you, too?”

“Yes, Auntie. I do.” Kate tidied the manuscript, tucked it into its box, and replaced it in the secret drawer. The drawer vanished into the base of the armoire without a trace. “Apart from the priceless value it has as a piece of tribal history, I’m thinking that manuscript might be commercially valuable, Auntie. You want to take very good care of it. Keep it in the drawer. Don’t tell anyone else it’s here.”

“Valuable?” Auntie Joy paled, and she looked at Kate, eyes suddenly fierce. “You be careful out there, Katya.”

“I always am, Auntie.”

Auntie Joy gave Kate’s shiners a pointed glance.

“They snuck up on me,” Kate said.

Auntie Joy looked at the door.

“Mutt was off feeding her face.”

Auntie Joy’s raised eyebrow said it all.

*   *   *

On impulse, when Kate left Auntie Joy’s she went up to the school, where Mr. Tyler was happy to let her use one of the computers, and to root around in his bottom drawer for a piece of beef jerky for Mutt, which of course made her his slave for life. The feeling appeared to be mutual. Mutt vamping the male half of the Park with her usual abandon was almost comforting. At least there was one thing that didn’t change.

At the computer Kate got online. After she’d read Mac’s story in Auntie Joy’s house this afternoon, she thought she now knew why she’d been attacked in Old Sam’s cabin.

She had been standing there reading what was obviously an old book. The slip case for it had been laying on the seat of Old Sam’s recliner, visible in a clear line of sight from the door. To someone looking in from outside, it could have looked like a box of a size to contain an icon.

According to his own confession, One-Bucket McCullough had stolen the icon.

She immediately cautioned herself. The manuscript was undated and unattributed. There was no return address on the box. Old Sam hadn’t left any message saying who had written it or who had sent it to him.

But One-Bucket was a known con man, according to Ruthe Bauman. According to Auntie Joy, he and the icon had disappeared at the same time. And he had confessed to it in the manuscript.

The last paragraph had read, “Pop’s writing this down for me and he’ll see that it gets to you. I picked up the consumption when I was on the inside and the docs tell me I haven’t got much time. Tell your mother I’m sorry, son.”

It might even be a dying declaration.

How would someone find out about Mac’s thievery, sans access to the manuscript?

That was even easier. Pillow talk between Old Sam and Jane Silver. At that time and since, Jane’s experience of the world of Ahtna and the Park would have been large and varied. She called Judge Anglebrandt “Albie,” for crissake.

Old Sam must have told her the story. She could have told anyone and everyone.

If Mac had stolen the icon, and if it became known that Old Sam was Mac’s son, and then Old Sam died …

The icon had pretty much fallen off the radar. Kate’s generation of Park rats had gone secular in a big way. Ekaterina had enthralled the after-school youngsters with all kinds of stories, and Kate thought she might even remember one about a lost treasure, but she’d been so young she’d thought it meant a chest full of pieces of eight. She certainly didn’t remember any stories about a holy tribal relic with a direct line to God and the power to heal.

It was odd, that. She would have thought a scandal that had changed so many lives would have lasted at least three generations. Although to be fair, the Park had suffered a great deal of incident in the interim. The Kanuyaq mine closing. War. The influx of Aleuts displaced from the Aleutians resettling in the Park, and the consequent friction between them and the tribes already living there, whether they were related or not. The oil boom, the discoveries on the Kenai Peninsula and in Prudhoe Bay that changed every Alaskan’s life. Statehood. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, the consequences of which were still being worked out between the tribes and the courts. A string of Republican representatives in Washington who had channeled federal funds into the state like they were holding a fire hose.

When you lined it up like that, it was a wonder anyone had a moment to spare for an item venerated with superstitious awe by a small and insular group of people almost a century before. The old customs and traditions had been left behind. Hell, who even went to fish camp anymore? The aunties, yeah, but nobody under fifty. Commercial fishing for pay rather than subsistence fishing for survival was the order of the day. Ekaterina was the last elder who had spoken English as a second language, and her Native dialect had been altered by the move from the Aleutians to the Park. The BIA schools and the Molly Hootch law had finished off Native dialects all over the state, and various native cultures along with them.

Jack Morgan had still been alive the last time Kate danced when it hadn’t been at a potlatch to honor the dead.

There was more than one motive here, Kate thought. If there was someone out there who was watching this happen, who deplored the loss of culture and tradition, someone who was trying to think of a way to stop it or even just slow it down, if they had heard of the existence of an icon revered in a collective ethnic memory that wasn’t quite extinguished, what would they do to recover it?

She thought of Jane Silver, dying on the floor of her house five days before.

Maybe that question should be, what wouldn’t they do?

That hole is going to be a mile deep and two miles wide square in the middle of the Park,
Demetri had said.
A lot of people won’t ever be able to find middle ground with that
.

And Demetri was a descendent of Chief Lev, a man many believed was the last of the great chiefs. The last known guardian of the Sainted Mary.

Kate thought how ironic it was that a Russian Orthodox icon had come to be a tribal icon, a gussuk’s creation subverted to the service of an Alaskan Native tribe.

She Googled Russian icons, and the result rocked her back in her chair.

A Russian icon made in 1894 that had been in the private possession of the last Russian czar had recently sold at auction for $854,000.

That many decimal places was a powerful motivator.

So, someone was looking for the icon, either for its own cultural value to the tribe or for its monetary value on the open marketplace.

Or both.

One-Bucket McCullough had told his story, say to Dashiell Hammett because why not, who had written it down and sent it to Old Sam. Old Sam had told Jane, and whoever was now looking for the icon had learned about it from Jane or from someone Jane had told.

True, Jane Silver had never struck Kate as the confiding type, but she supposed everyone had a weak spot.

The fact that they had waited for Old Sam to die to come after the icon argued that they knew him, or at least knew of him. No one in their right mind who did would ever have tried to steal from him when he was alive.

Which meant there was a good chance she knew them, too.

Kate frowned down at her crossed arms.

But why would they think that Old Sam had the icon? The story clearly said that Mac had sold it off to someone on the docks, but only three people, four if you counted Hammett, had ever read it.

Someone in Seattle.

Had Old Sam gone to Seattle in pursuit of the icon? He’d suffered through a pretty traumatic week in Niniltna, finding out his father wasn’t who he’d thought he was, which experience had been capped off by being rejected yet again by the love of his life. He would not have been a happy man in the days following, and unhappy men were prone to rash and often unwise action.

Kate’s brows drew together. Would Old Sam have wondered what would happen if he found the icon and brought it home? Would he think the tribe would forgive him his Filipino blood? Or, now, his white blood?

Perhaps more important, would he think that Auntie Joy’s parents might decide he was a fit person for her to marry after all?

If he had gone after the icon, he hadn’t told Auntie Joy about it. And if he’d found it, he hadn’t told her that, either.

Kate called up the computer’s menu and found that someone had downloaded Skype. She created an account and called Jim’s cell phone.

Voice mail. Shit. “Hey,” she said brightly. “It’s me. I’m in Niniltna overnight and I’ll be sleeping in your room at Auntie Vi’s. I just wanted you to know I’ll be tossing the room, pulling up floorboards and lifting ceiling panels, looking for all those love letters you wrote to your other girlfriends. I’m thinking I could get a good price for them on eBay.”

By not so much as a raised eyebrow did Mr. Tyler, grading papers at his desk, betray that he had overhead one word.

Auntie Vi was happy to let Kate sleep in Jim’s room at the B and B. Kate parked the snowgo out front and checked in with Annie Mike before Auntie Vi served her a hearty meal of smoked moose hocks and beans, along with a litany of complaints about how hard she was working. “You could quit,” Kate said, and was roundly snubbed for daring to suggest anything so sensible.

In Jim’s room, she undressed and got between the sheets naked. Two-hundred-count percale against her bare skin wasn’t much of a substitute, but at least it was percale that had touched his skin, too.

Mutt lay down in front of the door, and spent the night listening to Kate toss and turn.

*   *   *

Mr. Abernathy looked so much like a Hollywood version of the old family attorney that Jim wondered if it was an impression he deliberately cultivated. His three-piece suit was tweedy and bagged a little at the elbows and knees; his bow tie was bright red and flamboyant enough that it gave the impression it would squirt you if you got too close. He wore round, black-rimmed glasses behind which gray eyes could be imagined to twinkle, and his white hair was a positive pompadour in the style of Lyle Lovett. There was the merest hint of a drawl when he spoke, as if he’d come west from South Carolina long enough ago to be forgiven secession but not too long ago to have forgotten his roots.

“I don’t see the need for this,” Jim said. “There is no legal requirement for reading a will. Besides, both my mother and I have copies. We already know what’s in it.”

“James,” his mother said, radiating an austere reproof.

Abernathy twinkled at him from behind his black rims. Jim had a suspicion the lenses were plain glass. “It was your father’s wish that the will be read in your and your mother’s presence, Sergeant Chopin.”

From the corner of his eye Jim could see the moue of distaste cross his mother’s face. General, admiral, attorney general, those were titles she could have lived with. Sergeant? Much too far below the salt. “Call me Jim,” he said. She didn’t like that, either, a deplorable lack of formality, yet another characteristic of the great unwashed.

Abernathy inclined his head without taking advantage of the invitation. “There being no further objection, let us proceed.”

He cleared his throat, rattled his papers, and got to it. He was a pretty good reader, Jim thought, only half listening, lending life to the spare, dry language that summed up the material reward of his father’s life and works. There were no surprises, not at first. His mother got the house and its contents outright. The firm’s building was to be sold to the surviving partners at fair market value. The rest of the real property was to be sold on the open market—his father had even named the realtor to be employed—and the proceeds were to be divided equally between Jim and his mother following the settlement of any outstanding debt. Jim’s share was left to him outright, with no conditions. His mother’s share was left half to her outright and half in trust, the income from the latter going to her during her lifetime and reverting to Jim following her death.

Most of the real estate was within an hour’s drive of the chair he was sitting in. His father had always had a kick-the-tire philosophy when it came to investing. Even in the current economy the proceeds would realize a huge chunk of change. Jim would never have to work again, if he didn’t want to.

There were a few small bequests to longtime associates and employees. An original edition of
Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England
to a friend at the office. His set of TaylorMade clubs to his golfing partner. Lump sums to Maria and the manager of the club and to half a dozen charities. Jim was surprised and touched when he heard that the largest amount went to the Los Angeles Police Foundation. “When did he do that?”

“James revised his will six months ago,” Abernathy said. “There were two alterations. That was the first.”