Though Not Dead (45 page)

So of course that was exactly what he did.

He did some snooping around the capitol and learned that Emil Bannister lived in Anchorage and was considered to be one of those behind-the-scenes political powerhouses, involved in everything from shipping to banking. He was a boon companion to the Bells, Pilzes, and Heimans and a charter member of the Spit and Argue Club, whose members had their fingers in every commercial pie north of the fifty-three. He had the ear of the territorial governor and was on the correct side of every issue from fish traps to statehood.

Sam made friends with an aide to one of the Anchorage representatives, from whom he learned that Bannister was partner in a consortium that was drilling exploratory wells on the Kenai Peninsula, hoping to strike oil. Sam remembered running supplies to a cannery in Tuxedni Bay and being beguiled for an evening by the old caretaker with tales of drilling for oil at Iniskin in the 1890s, but this was the first he’d heard about oil exploration on the Kenai.

He told his crew he was moving the
Freya
to Cook Inlet in hopes of scaring up some work running supplies for the exploration companies there. Five of his six hands were from Southeast and he paid them off in Juneau and left the next day. Cook Inlet was a dicey proposition, an ever-changing bottom caused by a constant flow of glacial silt pushed around by forty-two-foot tides. He put the
Freya
at Nikiski’s rudimentary dock and went ashore. The next day he returned with a handshake contract to ferry supplies between Seattle and Nikiski for the Richfield Oil Company. He spent most of the following year in transit on the Gulf of Alaska.

Pete was dead by then, but Kyle was still at the old stand in Seattle, and Sam had a standing invitation to dinner whenever he was in town. The house in Wallingford was by now fully restored to sleek and gleaming health. Kyle had bought out Pete, opened a storefront in downtown Seattle, and opened a second store in Snohomish, which, he informed Sam, was rapidly becoming the antiquing capital of the Pacific Northwest. He had acquired a live-in friend that Sam didn’t much like the look of. The friend returned the feeling with interest, and when Kyle sent him off on a spurious errand Sam cocked an eyebrow. Kyle sighed. “I know, but what can I do? I love him.”

The conversation threatened to descend into melancholy, so Sam told him about finding Emil Bannister. Kyle positively glowed with excitement, even positing the possibility of traveling north with Sam on the
Freya
to meet the man in person. This caused Sam to choke on his after-dinner coffee, and they had a good laugh.

The following July he docked with a load of pinto beans and drill pipe when Richfield brought in the Swanson River discovery well, which tested out at nine hundred barrels a day. It was Alaska’s first commercially viable oil discovery.

Sam was invited to the celebration, and ate ham hocks and beans washed down with large quantities of beer, surrounded by accents that ranged from Houston, Texas, to Dallas, Texas, with maybe a little Oklahoma thrown in there for seasoning. For sure he’d never seen so many cowboy boots outside of a Randolph Scott movie.

A couple of roughnecks got into an argument over who had been throwing the chain when the well came in, and Sam thanked the rig boss for his share of the celebration but said he had to get back to his boat now. The rig boss, a big man with a big belly and a big bald head named, originally, Tex, said, “Need you to run around to Seward, grab the latest shipment of freight off the docks, bring it right back here.”

“Can do.” Sam stood up, and Tex escorted him to the dock. En route a skinny little guy with a face like an orangutan named, originally, Okie, came rushing up in excitement to tell Tex than one of the partners had flown down from Anchorage with his son and wanted a tour.

Father and son appeared a few moments later, and Sam found himself shaking the hand of Emil Bannister, a fair man of medium height, in his mid-forties, with an incipient pot belly straining the vest of his three-piece suit. He had a shrewd eye and the indiscriminate and ingratiating smile of a politician. “Isn’t this something?” he said, beaming. “First commercial discovery of oil in the territory. They can’t say no the next time we come asking for statehood now, can they?”

Sam said no, they probably couldn’t. Inevitably, Emil’s next question was how long Sam had been in the state. His eyebrows went sky-high when he heard the answer. “Not many of your generation can say that,” he said. “Most of the Alaskan-born are my son’s age.” Before Sam could point out that Alaska Natives pretty much had the drop on everyone else in that regard, Emil said sharply, “Erland! Get down off that thing.”

The boy, who was up on a forklift being shown the controls by the operator, flushed and climbed down again.

“I didn’t bring you down here to get covered in grease,” Emil said. “Now shake hands with this good gentleman.”

“Hello,” Sam said, holding out his hand. “I’m Sam Dementieff.”

And found himself staring into a face last seen in a hospital ward on Adak Island, fourteen years before.

Twenty-eight

It was full dark by the time she let herself into the town house. She went into the living room and sorted through Jack’s selection of music, settling on a compilation of live Jimmy Buffett performances and cranking up the volume so that it sounded like Jimmy was in the kitchen with her. She put the takeout pad thai in the microwave and sat down to the fresh spring rolls while it was heating. She was polishing off the last one when her phone rang. “This is Kate.”

“Hey.”

It was Jim. “Hey,” she said indistinctly.

“Feeding your face?”

“It’s what I do best.”

“Don’t I know it.”

She swallowed. Mutt trotted in from the next room, ears cocked. “Your love slave says hi.” She held the phone up so Jim could say, “Hey, Mutt!”

Mutt gave a happy yip in reply. Kate put the phone back to her ear. “I gather you’re still in California?” A thousand miles from her.

“Not so much,” he said.

She sat up. “Are you on your way home?” She was already making plans to pick him up at the airport. She looked at the kitchen clock. If he was about to get on a plane, flying in from LA would put him into Anchorage well after midnight. No problem, she could—

“I’m on the road,” he said.

She was confused. “You’re driving home? What, you bought a car?”

“Not exactly,” he said.

Apparently, she would not be picking him up at the airport any time soon. She leaned back again, and tried not to sound as sulky as she felt. “What’s going on?”

He sighed. “This’ll take a while.”

She crossed her feet on the table, ignoring the microwave dinger when it went off. “I’m all ears.”

It didn’t take that long after all, because he’d condensed the mini-drama into an incident report, referring to everyone involved in the third person, with the sole exception of himself. When he was done she let him listen to her breathe while she thought it over. “So you have an aunt you didn’t know about,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Of whose existence your father ensured you would learn after he died.”

“Yes.”

“Can’t wait to see that writing box, by the way.”

“It’s a work of art,” he said. “Could we stick to the point?”

“So you had the girlfriend—”

“Ex-girlfriend,” he said.

She smiled to herself and kept her voice very cool. “So the ex-girlfriend runs a make on your mother”—she closed her eyes and shook her head—“and turns up a birth certificate for twin girls.”

“Yes.”

“So you have the girlfriend—”

“Ex-girlfriend.”

“So you have the ex-girlfriend run a make on the aunt.”

“Yes.”

“And she lives in Oregon.”

“Yes.”

“And you have an address.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re driving up to see her.”

“Not exactly.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m already in Oregon, but she moved from the last address Sylvia could find for me.”

“Which was?”

“In Portland. Found the house the first day, and the people in it now say they never heard of her. Took me a day to find a neighbor who said the sister moved three years ago, right after her husband died, and the house has changed hands twice since then.”

“She didn’t leave a forwarding address?”

“Yes, with the post office.”

This was like pulling teeth. She reminded herself it had to be that much worse for him. “And?”

“They finally gave it to me. It was for a condominium in Eugene. That’s where I am now. According to the current owner, she remarried last year and moved in with her new husband.”

“Jim,” Kate said, and stopped, at a loss.

“What?”

Kate took a deep breath. “Why don’t you just ask your mom?”

His turn to take a beat. “We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

“What, you don’t talk to each other?”

“Not really, no. Well, she doesn’t talk to me.”

“I’m sorry?”

A faint sigh. “It’s not a habit she ever got into.”

Kate thought of her parents, whom she’d lost so long ago. Her smart, silent father, who had taken her hunting from before she was old enough to walk. Her kind and gentle mother, who had tried so gallantly and failed so miserably to stay off the booze.

What wouldn’t she give to have them both back, drunk or sober. “You’re an only child, Jim,” she said. “You just lost your dad. You have no siblings, no other relatives so far as you know, this unknown aunt excepted. You mother is all you’ve got left.”

“No,” he said, immediately and distinctly, “she isn’t.”

Off-limits. Okay. “Where are you now?”

“I took I-5 up so I switched over to 101, the coastal highway, for back down. I stopped in Newport for dinner. You’d love it, Kate. If you look north you can practically see all the way home, and there are all these Art Deco bridges the WPA built back in—”

“Where are you going next?” she said.

He sighed. “Medford. The condo guy said she’d moved there with her new husband. I’ll be there probably before midnight, check into a motel.”

“And go looking for your aunt tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve never met her.”

“No.”

“What if she doesn’t want to meet you?”

“Why would it matter to her one way or another?”

Kate could think of a lot of reasons. Jim was on an unacknowledged quest for a family member he might actually like, and after passing her thousand and one relatives in quick review, she couldn’t blame him all that much. But this meant he was that much longer Outside, that much longer away from the Park, that much longer away from her, and she missed him.

“Good,” he said, and to her horror she realized she had said the last three words out loud.

“Yes, well,” she said briskly, jumping to her feet, her chair going back with a loud screech, “I’ve got to go, my dinner’s getting cold on me. I’ll be in Anchorage at least another day, so let me know what happens, okay?
The Case of the Missing Aunt
. Erle Stanley Chopin.”

She was babbling now. Mutt, listening with all of her considerable ear power to the faint sound of Jim’s voice, gave an admonitory yelp.

“Mutt says bye,” she said brightly.

“I miss you, too,” he said.

*   *   *

Later, dishes washed and put away, Kate shed her clothes for an old UAF sweatshirt washed to a smooth nap, flannel pajama bottoms, and a pair of thick wool socks, and came downstairs again to build a fire in the fireplace. The cord of word Jack had laid in the last year of his life was by this time so well-seasoned that she could practically light a log with one match. She exchanged Jimmy Buffett for Bonnie Raitt, made herself a mug of strong hot cocoa, and curled up on the couch. She had detoured by Barnes and Noble on the way home to pick up the latest titles by Tanya Huff and Ariana Franklin. Both books sat forgotten on the coffee table while she tried to divine what came next in
The Tale of Old Sam
from the leaping flames.

Old Sam had put the map in the second of the judge’s journals and hidden it in the cabin at the hot springs. He’d left the other book for Kate to find, and he must have left something in that first journal that would have pointed her to the second if the first one hadn’t been stolen.

She looked up at the bookshelf. The spine of the omnibus volume of
The Lord of the Rings
stared back at her reassuringly.

She remembered the jumble on Jane Silver’s floor, all the books pulled from their shelves. There was obviously some history between Jane and Old Sam that both had been reticent about, but assuming pillow talk for the moment, he might have told her about the map. And Jane might have, must have, told someone else. Pete Wheeler? Ben Gunn? She had to have had something in her possession relevant to Old Sam’s past, or why the break-in?

Old Sam’s death was the trigger to all subsequent events, and by then someone besides him had known about the icon. Kate still didn’t know how he had found it again. Or even for that matter
if
he’d found it again. Everyone could be chasing around—and in the process committing injuries to Kate’s person—after something that didn’t even exist.

Still, there were the journals. And now there was the map. A map without a big red X on it, so she didn’t know what use it was.

If Bruce Abbot was working for Erland, then Erland had to be after the icon, too. But why? How could possession of the icon be worth risking the possibility of an early release from prison?

She could hear Erland’s smug drawl again.
It has certain, shall we say, family connections.

She would go straight to Kurt’s office in the morning. She had to explain the whole car tow thing, anyway, and she could ask him to do that record search wizardry for which he was becoming so well-known. A search on Mac McCullough, just to backstop Brendan, and a search on Erland, just to dot all the
i
’s and cross all the
t
’s.

She thought of Jim’s running a make on his mom.

Maybe she should ask Kurt to run one on Old Sam.

And Bruce Abbott, so she could tell him he was blown and find out what he knew. Although if Erland was operating true to form, it wouldn’t be much.