Though Not Dead (7 page)

Then she thought about telling Auntie Joy about Dan O’Brian’s offer to incorporate the hot springs into the Park. Again, she thought better of it. The love-hate relationship between the Park rats and the Parks Service was such an insubstantial little tightrope, capable of dissolving underfoot and dumping the high-wire walker on his or her ass at the slightest misstep. Park rats reveled in a subsistence lifestyle that was in great part due to the management skills of Chief Ranger Dan O’Brian and his pitifully small staff of tree-hugging bunny lovers. If a grizzly walked through someone’s yard, his presence could very well be attributed to Dan’s taking down yet another poacher hunting bears for their bladders, which ounce for ounce were the highest-selling commodity on the Asian black market. If you got your moose that year, most likely it was because Dan had been so vigilant in policing the moose population that dishonest big game guides had moved their illegal trophy hunting operations up to the Gates of the Arctic or over to the Wood-Tikchik State Park.

Like every other Park rat, Kate owed a great deal of the quality of her life to Ranger Dan and his gang. Unlike too many other Park rats, she knew it. She didn’t want to start a war between the Park rats and the Parks Service if she could possibly help it. Besides, it was Auntie Joy’s reaction that interested Kate most at present.

She waited, saying nothing, and finally, in a soft, insubstantial voice, Auntie Joy said, “He say what to do with hot springs?”

Kate shook her head. “No, Auntie. He told me what to do with a lot of his other stuff, but not that.”

The plump little woman with the faded, wrinkled face looked down at the tatting in her lap.

“Auntie?” Kate said, leaning forward, a hand outstretched. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Auntie Joy looked up, and the tears had filled her eyes and were slipping down her cheeks. Her smile was shaky. “Nothing, Katya. Ay, who knew we miss that cranky old man so much?”

And with a finality that would not be gainsaid, she changed the subject to Laurel Meganack and Matt Grosdidier, and Auntie Edna’s ballooning restaurant business, and the prospects for the Kanuyaq Kings basketball teams in this year’s forthcoming season. That little point guard on the women’s team, Anushka Tuktoyuktuk’s daughter—had Kate ever seen anyone go up after her own rebound like that? Gatcha, but that girl ferocious like a wolverine. If she don’t foul out, the women’s team never have to worry over turnovers like last year, didn’t Kate agree?

*   *   *

If anything, Kate was even more upset when she left Auntie Joy’s than she had been when she’d left the Step.

It wasn’t that she didn’t expect Old Sam to be missed. She missed him herself. She always would. He’d had an innate ability to cut through the crap in a way she admired and tried hard to emulate. That she had a bullshit detector at all was very much due to Old Sam, and her association with him had only fine-tuned it. It was one of her most useful tools, both on the job in Anchorage and today in her profession as private investigator. Nobody could lie to Old Sam, and that included Kate. He’d peeled her like an onion last spring, dissecting the reasons behind her general dissatisfaction at being stuck in the whirlpool between the Scylla of the Suulutaq Mine and the Charybdis of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association. Everybody wanted a piece of her. She had felt like the barbarians were at the gates and she was holding those gates against them all alone, with no surety that she—or the Association, or the Park, for that matter—would be able to outlast the siege.

Old Sam hadn’t waved a magic wand and cured all her ills that spring day, but in a few words and with one surprising quotation, he had illuminated her problem, given her insight, and made her feel better. She didn’t know anyone else who could do that.

Maybe Jim.

But Jim was in California.

She shoved her instinctive and knee-jerk resentment back down beneath the surface of her psyche and drove to one of six matching houses sitting on six matching lots. They were downriver from town, about halfway to Squaw Candy Creek and the turnoff to Bobby and Dinah’s. The little housing development was five years old, financed with HUD funds administered by the Niniltna Native Association. Bush Alaska was always low on housing, and this little development had been Kate’s Emaa’s last hurrah before she died, half a dozen brand-new homes brought upriver in modules via barge and assembled by Park rats grateful for paying jobs they didn’t have to go to Anchorage to find. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, with earth stoves for heat, propane for cooking, and running water from a communal well and wired for electricity to the Ahtna power line. These were the ne plus ultra in Park accommodation, all modern conveniences laid on and with minimal monthly mortgage payments at a negligible interest rate. Now that Kate thought about it, they might have been the first new houses built in Niniltna since Harvey and Auntie Vi built theirs twenty years before, when they got their ANCSA land allotments.

She pulled her pickup in next to a battered Ford Ranger that looked as if it had more miles on it than the space shuttle, killed the engine, and got out, followed by Mutt. The door opened and Virginia Anahonak stuck her head out. “Hi, Kate. Heard you pull up.”

“Hi, Virginia. Heard you were renting a room to Phyllis Lestinkof.”

“You heard right.”

“She here?”

“She’s here. Did you want to talk to her?”

“Please.”

“Come on, I’ll pour you a cup of coffee.”

“That’s okay,” Kate said. “I’ll wait out here.”

Virginia’s eyebrows worked a little overtime at that but she went back inside. Kate wanted to give the news to Phyllis first, without anyone listening in. She didn’t know how thin the walls were in these little houses, but Virginia had a well-deserved reputation as the Niniltna town crier.

The door opened and Phyllis came out, looking a little puzzled. “You wanted to see me, Kate?”

Phyllis looked thinner than she had the last time Kate had seen her, in the Riverside Café last May, pleading for help from the father of her child. She wasn’t much taller than Kate, with short dark hair, dark eyes, and smooth brown skin. She wore a loose-fitting T-shirt over jeans with the top button undone. She was eighteen years younger than Kate and a distant relative by way of, if Kate remembered correctly, Auntie Balasha. The Lestinkofs were originally from Tatitlek and relative newcomers to the Park, the family having moved here after the destruction of the original village during the tidal wave that followed the 1964 earthquake. The Lestinkofs had lost so much family that Mrs. Lestinkof, Phyllis’s grandmother, could not bear the thought of relocating with the rest of the village to a new site on the mainland. Phyllis’s father married into the Park, one of the Anahonak sisters, which made Virginia her aunt. It made Ulanie Anahonak her aunt, too, the difference being that Ulanie was a churchy type with definite opinions on children born out of wedlock to godless and amoral mothers. Virginia’s moral stance was far more relaxed.

Virginia peered at them through the living room curtains. “Walk with me,” Kate said.

Phyllis fell in next to her. Mutt took point, trotting ahead to sniff at various clumps of grass and tree roots, choosing a select few to anoint along the way.

“You deckhanded for Old Sam on the
Freya
this summer,” Kate said.

“Yes,” Phyllis said.

“He thought you did a pretty good job.”

They reached the river road and turned left, Kate walking slowly with her hands in the pockets of her jacket. It wasn’t really cold yet but it wasn’t warm anymore, either. The river moved past on their right, and the Quilaks bulked large on their left. A trio of ravens nagged at an eagle flying low across the river, prospecting for a late silver to take home to the nest.

“He said that?” Phyllis said.

“He wrote me a letter,” Kate said. “You know, to read after he died. He said so in that.”

“Oh.” They walked a couple more steps. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

They were far enough away from the house now. Kate stopped. “No. I’ve got some good news, or I hope you’ll think it is. Old Sam left me his cabin on the river, but he wanted you to live there when he was gone.”

Phyllis stopped dead in her tracks. “What?”

Kate had to repeat herself, and then say it a third time before Phyllis believed her. She started to cry. “Please tell me this isn’t a joke. Please, please tell me you aren’t kidding.”

“I’m not joking,” Kate said. “I own the cabin, but Old Sam told me to let you live there as long as you wanted to. With the baby coming, he knew you needed a place, and he knew your parents’ house wasn’t an option.”

Phyllis was so overcome she had to sit down on a driftwood log. Kate sat next to her. “That old man,” Phyllis said over and over again, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. “That old man.” She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and looked at Kate. “Virginia’s been really nice, but she doesn’t have room for me and her own kids, too, especially after the baby comes. Do you mean it, Kate? This really isn’t a joke?”

Kate looked at the round, anxious face swollen with tears. “It really isn’t, Phyllis. Old Sam’s cabin is yours to live in. Old Sam said to charge you rent.”

“Oh. Rent. Yeah.” Phyllis bit her lip. “How much?”

“A buck a year.”

Phyllis stared at her, dazed, and Kate let the grin she’d been holding back spread over her face. “Yes, I actually said that, a dollar a year, every year. What say we let the rental period begin the first of October?”

“I guess,” Phyllis said, still dazed. “Sure. I—I don’t have anything, like dishes or sheets, but it doesn’t matter; I’ll manage. I saved all the money I earned on the
Freya
and I can hitch a ride to the Salvation Army thrift store in Ahtna and—”

“You don’t have to,” Kate said. “I’ll leave all of Old Sam’s dishes and linens and household stuff in the cabin. Yeah, yeah, I know, and you’re welcome. Give me a day or two to pack up his books and guns and a few other personal things. Phyllis, listen to me now.” This said as Phyllis departed this realm for another altogether, one with her own roof over her own and her baby’s heads. “There’s a dozen cords of firewood; you can use that. You have to pay for your own electricity, and if anything breaks, you fix it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Phyllis said. “Okay, Kate.” She stood up, a different person than the one who had sat down ten minutes before. “I’m going to go tell Virginia. She’ll probably be as happy about it as I am.”

Kate noticed that Phyllis didn’t call Virginia auntie.

She wondered if that was yet another thing that was changing, from one generation to the next, in the maelstrom of other changes that had engulfed the Park when gold in commercial quantities was discovered fifty miles away.

Five

The red pickup stopped in the driveway leading to Old Sam’s cabin, which included a sod roof and a wooden walkway to a floating dock. The dock had a woven alder bench on it. Kate still had a hard time looking at the bench without seeing Old Sam slumped there, before a serene, slow-moving river, beneath a dark sky scored with stars.

She set her teeth and walked out to the end of the dock anyway. Clouds had rolled in overnight, according to the weather report the thin end of a frontal wedge that would probably bring with it the first fall storm. She sniffed. Next to her, Mutt raised her nose and sniffed, too. The breeze was not quite sharp and smelled moist. It was too cold for rain, not yet cold enough for snow, but there would be precipitation of some kind within the week.

Across the river the deciduous trees had yet to drop their leaves, and so formed a billowing golden glory that followed the water’s edge and even on this overcast day turned the usually gray surface of the river a dull yellow. Behind them the occasional tall sentinel spruce etched a lonely outline against the sky. They were few and far between following the past decade’s onslaught by the insatiable spruce bark beetle. The docks attached to the dwellings on the opposite shore tugged at the water flowing past, carving furrows and ripples into its surface.

She heard the sound of an airplane, identifying the high-pitched whine as Chugach Air Taxi’s single Otter turbo well before she looked up to track its path overhead. She waved, and George waggled his wings in reply. The plane disappeared behind the trees lining the airstrip in back of town. The same plane that had taken Jim away the night before was now returning with a load of Suulutaq Mine workers for Tuesday shift change. The Suulutaq changed out their hourly employees ten to twelve a day, five days a week. The salaried employees changed out less often. One of them was Vern Truax, the mine superintendent. Kate wondered how much longer he was going to remain superintendent, since two of his employees had recently been found to have committed industrial espionage and a third had tried to cover it up with murder. She imagined he was at this very moment doing some pretty fancy tap dancing in front of Global Harvest’s board of directors, and if his own libido had not contributed to his problems in the first place she could almost have found it in her heart to feel sorry for him. But for a guy who allowed himself to be led around by his dick, he was very smart, and very experienced in pulling minerals out of the ground.

Only four days had passed since the murderer had been apprehended.

To Kate it felt like a year.

She went back up the dock and let herself into the cabin.

With Phyllis in mind, she climbed the ladder to the loft and peered over the edge. A queen-sized bed, big enough for Old Sam if he slept from corner to corner, took up most of the floor space. There was a lamp on a Blazo box next to the head of the bed, and beneath the eave on the opposite wall more Blazo boxes were stacked on their sides, open ends facing the room, clothes sorted and folded inside them. She smiled. Old Sam had arranged the boxes in an attractive pattern by alternating which side they stood on, wide or narrow, and had painted them the same soft cream color as the rest of the loft. There were no windows in the loft and only four in the whole cabin, and the light-colored paint gave the area an inviting look, a place where sleep would be peaceful and deep.