Though Not Dead (26 page)

Jim looked at his mother. “My copy must have been lost in the mail.”

Her mouth tightened.

Jim looked back at the attorney. “What was the second?”

Abernathy adjusted his glasses. “To my only child, James, in addition to his share of the estate as specified above, I also bequeath my mahogany writing box and all of its contents outright.” The lawyer picked up a box sitting at his elbow and stood to hand it to Jim. “He left this in my custody at the time he revised his will.”

It was twenty inches long, nine inches wide, and six inches deep, and a hymn to the woodworker’s art. The joints were dovetailed and reinforced with brass strips and brass screws that had been ground down to be even with the brass strips. There was a brass handle at each end and a brass lock on the front. The wood was like satin to the touch, the brass smooth and cool. It looked as well-loved as it looked well-used, and it had sat on his father’s desk in his office at the firm for as long as Jim could remember.

He swallowed hard and looked at Abernathy. “What’s in it?”

Abernathy, as well-trained as he was, could not forbore a glance at Jim’s mother. Jim looked at her, too, and then both of them looked away from the expression of suppressed rage they saw there.

“I was most specifically enjoined by my client not to inventory the contents,” Abernathy said primly. He pulled an envelope from the pocket inside his jacket and handed it to Jim. “Here is the key.”

Jim’s name was written on the envelope in his father’s hand, a little shakier than the last time he’d seen it. The small brass key had fallen into one corner. The flap of the envelope was securely sealed. The key was all that was inside. “Thank you,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Is that all, Mr. Abernathy?” his mother said.

Mr. Abernathy tided his papers. “Yes, Mrs. Chopin, I believe that concludes our business for today. I will put James’s instructions in hand at once, and I will of course keep you apprised of my progress.”

“Thank you.” The two of them rose to their feet and Beverly showed Mr. Abernathy to the door.

Jim sat where he was, fighting back unexpected tears.

The happiest times he had spent with his father had been those all too few late afternoons after school in his father’s office. He’d had to be quiet or he would be sent home, his father had said, and being sent home to his mother was sufficient threat to achieve practical invisibility. Tucked into an enormous Windsor chair, he sometimes lost himself in a book, sometimes drank in the language of the law as clients and colleagues and employees came and went and his father dispensed his wisdom to them all.

Or what had seemed like wisdom to the little boy in the corner. He looked down at the box in his lap. It was old, over two hundred years old. His father had told him that it had been carried by a family member who fought in the Revolutionary War, and George Washington and the rest of those old long-haired guys in their pedal pushers had never seemed so interesting to an eight-year-old. Some days, when the last client had gone, the elder Chopin would call the boy to him. They would bend their heads, one white, one blond, over the writing box as his father demonstrated the adjustable brass prop that held up the reading stand, the removable wooden stop that kept the paper or the book from sliding down, the ink-stained blotter, the original cut-glass inkwells with their brass tops, the storage compartment, the secret drawers.

For Jim, that writing box was filled with more mystery and more romance than any treasure chest buried by Blackbeard. It was a portal to another era. He’d grown up surrounded by screens—television screens, video game screens, computer screens—and the idea of putting ink in a pen and then using that pen to write on a thick sheet of cream-colored paper was almost exotic. The secret drawers didn’t hurt.

Neither did the time spent with his father.

Beverly never came to the office.

Eighteen

She set off at first light, taking the road south out of Niniltna and then cutting east cross-country well before Squaw Candy Creek. The last thing she needed was Bobby Clark demanding an explanation of her shiners. Or Dinah Clark deciding they needed to be filmed for posterity.

It had snowed another foot during the night. It was hard going in places where its own weight had yet to pack it down. Still, there was enough to make it an enjoyable ride, especially since yesterday’s dull overcast was broken today by the occasional errant beam of sunlight.

At noon they stopped for lunch at the entrance of what she prayed was the right canyon. Mutt went foraging while Kate lit a Sterno one-burner and made some instant chicken soup. She used it to wash down a sandwich made in Auntie Vi’s kitchen that morning, thick slabs of homemade bread, slices of roast moose alternating with slices of tomato, cream cheese, lettuce, mustard, and mayonnaise. The stuff cross-country snow machine treks were made of.

The snowgo was perched at the top of a rise that wind and avalanche kept clear of trees, and the view extended for miles. The Quilaks loomed at her back, magnificent and menacing. From here, the Kanuyaq River was a gray ribbon twisting between distant, snow-covered banks. In another month or two, it would be frozen solid beneath Park rats in pickups and on snowgos and four-wheelers, going to school, going to the store, going over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house. A few intrepid tourists had even been known to travel it on skis.

In summer the river was succor and sustenance, the birthplace and the harvest place of the salmon that fed them all. In winter it was transportation.

It was beautiful in any season.

She turned to look in the other direction. If the river was the heart of the Park, the Quilaks were its backbone, a ragged set of vertebrae trending in a great eastward arc, turning when they hit the Canadian border and from there running south, stopping just short of the Gulf of Alaska.

From where Kate sat, rocky spurs rose high on one side and higher on the other, with the intimidating bulk of the Quilaks taking up most of the eastern sky. They were not shrinking violets, the Quilaks, not some soft, rounded little knolls short enough to spit over masquerading in a mountain costume for Halloween. The year Kate had spent at Quantico, she’d made several weekend expeditions with classmates into what passed for wilderness east of the Mississippi, and the first time someone had pointed and said, “Look, there’s Mount Jefferson,” Kate had said in genuine confusion, “Where?” It had taken her a while to get used to the idea that you could call something a mountain that was only eight hundred feet tall.

The Quilaks were individually anywhere between five and sixteen thousand feet high, with Angqaq Peak at nineteen thousand and change the highest of them all.

The
mountain, Angqaq was a brutal wedge sharp enough to tear open the sky. Its nearly vertical peak dared climbers from all over the world to a duel that ended either in death or in the knocking back of a Middle Finger at Bernie’s Roadhouse. There were previously triumphant climbers who post–Middle Finger might have wished to have left their carcasses in a crevasse on Big Bump instead. The next mountain over, similar in shape, stood ready to take on whatever climbing fool might imagine two thousand feet less in height would be easier to summit. Climbers nicknamed it and Angqaq “Mother and Child,” not infrequently shortening that to “Mother,” and occasionally with feeling lengthening it again to “you mother.”

Big Bump dominated the skyline with a swagger and a sneer, but its cohorts were nothing to sneeze at, either, and taken together the Quilaks did not give way easily to the incursions of man. They were easier to drive around. On a clear day you could admire them at a safe distance from the Beaver Creek border crossing, which was as close as most people ever got. The range formed a very effective border, as the stampeders on the Klondike trail had learned in the winter of 1898–1899.

It wasn’t the great statue laying broken in the desert that inspired awe and despair, Kate thought, it was this eternal, unchanging bulwark thrown up by four billion years of tectonic shifts that squelched any sense of self-importance.

“You don’t scare me,” she said out loud.

Mutt, trotting up that instant with a ptarmigan feather caught in her teeth, gave her an odd look, and she laughed.

Whistling past the graveyard.

She packed up and they moved on.

The last time she’d traveled to the hot springs, a little over a year ago, she had lost the way three times before finding the correct dogleg that hid the entrance to the narrow little canyon. This time, she took it more slowly, paying attention. It looked like they were the first to visit this year. The only tracks she saw were the tiny prints of shrews and voles, the larger, leaping prints of the arctic hare, and the occasional disappearance of said tracks with the imprint of wing tips on either side as an explanation.

They came to a small saddle of rock. If you had never been there before, unless you looked closely you would never see that the saddle stopped short of the opposite wall, leaving a passage open to the narrow canyon on the other side. She slowed down even more, and Mutt hopped off and trotted ahead. Kate followed, with care.

They emerged from the passageway into a tapered vee of irregular stone walls, which met almost perpendicularly in an inclined floor that rose gradually from the saddle to what appeared to be a dead end. Next stop, sky.

The hot springs seeped out of the floor of the canyon, a series of seven interconnected pools that steamed gently in the cold air. The sides of the canyon were carpeted with spruce trees, a dark healthy green. The heat from the springs had created a microclimate for this lush little oasis, and the dogleg entrance and the steep walls had thus far protected the trees from the voracious appetite of the spruce bark beetles that had decimated the forests across the North American continent.

The tumbledown log cabin at the top of the springs still had a roof and walls—just. She pulled up in front of the door and killed the engine. Mutt came loping around the corner of the cabin, her tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth, and followed Kate through the door that hung cattywampus from its hinges.

Inside was a mess, courtesy of the cabin’s last occupants, not to mention decades of Park rats packing in and not packing out again like they were supposed to. Someone had replaced the original cast-iron woodstove with a crude but functional stove made from an oil drum, and Kate had seen a stack of firewood outside the door.

She cleaned the cabin by the simple expedient of propping open the door and pitching all the trash outside, building a burn pile a safe distance away from the cabin. Place could use a burn barrel. She made a broom out of a couple of spruce boughs bound together and swept the floor, which proved to be made of wood planks that creaked protestingly beneath her feet, but held. A screwdriver and some new screws from the tool kit on her snowgo lessened the draft between the door and the jamb.

The outhouse in back had fallen over the last time Kate had been there, not entirely at her instigation. It was still lying on its side. Kate held her breath and used the number two shovel she’d brought to knock down the pile of shit that had accumulated in the hole over the past sixty years. A bucket of lime had been inside the outhouse when it went over and there was enough left for a thick layer. A makeshift rope and pulley rigged to the nearest tree got the outhouse back on its feet, and she shifted it one corner at a time until it was recentered over the hole. Snow piled up around the sides would give it some insulation and help keep it steady, at least for a while. A roll of toilet paper placed in a coffee can with a plastic lid, and it was back in business. No flies this time of year, either.

She unpacked the rest of the supplies from the trailer and carried everything inside. She went back out to tarp snowgo and trailer both against the possibility of more snow, although if she stood still and looked straight up at what little sky the sides of the canyon allowed she could see a few faint stars beginning to appear. The mouth of the canyon faced south, so it wasn’t completely devoid of sunlight, but during the winter the high rock walls ensured that the day would be brief indeed.

She went back into the cabin, lit the Coleman lantern she had brought with her, and surveyed the scene. Someone had done a good job on the drum stove because the room was palpably warmer. The ventilated walls were a vivid memory of her last trip out to the hot springs, and she had brought more tarps because of it. She shed her parka and got to work with a hammer and tacks, covering most of three walls with two bright blue tarps and one dark green tarp. It made for a colorful interior and reduced the drafts to where the stove could go to work in earnest.

There was a whine and a scratch at the door. Kate opened the door and Mutt padded inside. “I’m guessing you’ve already had your supper,” Kate said, and indeed there was a trace of blood and fur on the iron gray muzzle. “I don’t suppose you’d care to share?”

Mutt looked shifty.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so, greedy guts.”

Kate got out a small cast-iron Dutch oven and lid and put it on top of the drum stove. A little oil, some sliced garlic quick fried and removed before it burned, and she added slices of a small caribou roast, the last of last year’s harvest. She might have to combine a neighborly visit to the Suulutaq Mine with a hunting trip up the Gruening River, which supported a healthy little herd of caribou. Or it had before Howie Katelnikof had orchestrated his hunt of wholesale proportions the previous winter. Kate would check with Ruthe before the season opened.

The meat had a nice crisp crust and a pink interior when she took it out of the pan, into which she now put a sliced onion and waited for it to turn translucent before draining a can of green beans. Stirred together, the leftover oil, the browned onion, and the green beans made Kate’s favorite vegetable dish, and it was even almost healthy, too.

Well. It was green.

She ate with a hearty appetite—there was nothing like working outside in the winter to make you hungry—and washed up with snowmelt. She melted more snow for cocoa and sat on the snowgo seat she had removed from the chassis and brought inside. She leaned against the dark green tarp tacked to the back wall, and looked around the cabin.