by Jon L. Breen
The door felt solid against my hand. Everything about the house felt solid. Old. Settled.
I stood in the old woman’s kitchen. It was dark and cool. Neat. I tiptoed quietly, as though I were in a church. I would be respectful even if the old woman didn’t deserve it. I found the light switch and flipped it on.
The kitchen cabinets were knotty pine, matching the paneling on the walls. Matching, like her shoes and purses. I lifted the teakettle on the stove and found it full of water. I lit the burner beneath it. I discovered an uncut pound cake under a ceramic cover painted to look like a strawberries-and-cream layer cake. Like she’d been expecting me.
How many times had my mother sent me to a neighbor’s house, my arms aching under the weight of her heaviest casserole dish, filled to the top with fragrant noodles or a chicken and rice bake? Here I’d come to the old woman’s house empty-handed. I felt ashamed and mean.
I took a long, serrated bread knife from a block on the counter and green china plates and teacups and saucers from the cupboard. I put the dishes on the table and cut a piece off the pound cake.
“Charles?” The old woman spoke from down the hall-way. “Charles, are you home?”
I quickly sliced another piece of pound cake, thinner this time. Less generous. Old women don’t eat much. I put the cake on the waiting second plate. Fat, honey-colored crumbs dropped from the knife. I touched my fingers to them and put them to my lips. Heaven.
“Charles?” The old woman sounded worried now. Definitely not the way a hostess should behave.
She stood in the doorway, looking much smaller to me than she had from a distance. She was really quite petite. Her hair was disheveled, odd. Up close, her skin was less wrinkled than I’d imagined. Perhaps she wasn’t such an old woman.
“Cake?” I said. “The water will boil in a minute. Where do you keep your tea?”
She took it all in—me, the cake, the crumbs on the table. “The police,” she said. “Get out, or I’ll call the police.” But she was frozen where she stood. Her eyes looked wild, a little crazy. I was just a woman, a mother, no one to fear. It was a hell of a welcome.
I reached out for the phone hanging on the wall just a foot or so from the old woman’s head. She flinched. I took the receiver in one hand and jerked on the cord, breaking it free from the phone. The plastic connector skittered across the floor. It seemed such a silly, dramatic thing for me to do that it made me laugh.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I think I broke your phone. I’m sorry.”
“You did break my phone,” the old woman said. “Now get out.”
I carefully hung the phone back on its cradle. I could have left then. I probably should have. But there was the cake and the tea I hadn’t yet made. I was hungry. So hungry.
“I just wanted to sit down,” I said. “I’m tired. Can’t you just sit with me and have some cake?”
The old woman eased her way into the kitchen, keeping her distance from me. “Have all the cake you want,” she said. “Take it. Just take it.”
“You don’t understand,” I told her. She didn’t understand. And suddenly, I was so profoundly tired that I was having a difficult time driving the words from my mouth. “Sit,” I said. “Please.” My head felt heavy.
“I wouldn’t sit at a table with a piece of white trash like you in a million years,” she said. She pointed at me, her arm shaking in the long, apricot sleeve of her robe. “I know you,” she said. “I know who you are.”
“But we haven’t met,” I said. “My name is Cathy.” I heard my voice speaking, but it seemed to come from far away, somewhere far below me.
“You’re going to get out of here,” the old woman said. “And they’re going to take that little bastard child of yours away from you when I tell them what you’ve done.”
My angel. She was talking about my angel-baby. What was she saying? I couldn’t see her very well. My face felt cool and wet. Rain? I looked up, but there was nothing but ceiling above me.
The shriek of the tea kettle’s whistle shook me from the daze into which I had drifted. The old woman lunged for the door, but I grabbed her around the waist before she could pull it open. She was light, so light, as though she were hollow. She flopped forward, over my arm. A rag doll.
“Sit down!” I screamed. I pulled out a chair with one hand.
The old woman didn’t resist. She slumped into the vinyl seat, her shoulders resting against its back.
I slid the plate with the slice of pound cake on it into the space in front of her.
“Eat it,” I said.
She was still, looking down at the floor. “I won’t,” she said.
“Eat the goddamn cake!” I was shouting at her.
When she made no move to take it, I picked up the piece of cake in my hand. I jerked her head back by her hair and the red hair—I saw now that it was a wig—came off in my hand. The old fraud. A bitch and a fraud.
When I pitched the wig across the room, the old woman tried to get up out of the chair, her head pitifully small now, and gray. But I was too fast and too strong for her. I pushed her back down.
The old woman began to wail. A high, mournful quaver.
“You have to eat the cake,” I told her, firmly, as though she were a child. I pushed the piece of cake into her open mouth. She gagged, tried to spit it out again. When she tried to close her mouth, I pulled her jaw down. I tore more cake from the loaf, a handful, and pushed it, too, into her mouth. She struggled, turning her head from side to side. We fell to the floor, but I had the entire cake in my hand now. I fed her and fed her. I filled the empty, old woman with the rich, buttery cake. Finally, she stopped struggling. She was full of sweetness.
Standing in the old woman’s driveway, I could see into my own living room: the baby (my darling, sweetest angel) sleeping in his swing; the flickering glow of the television. Like looking into my own life.
Inside, I stopped in front of the gold-framed mirror that my mother had bought and made me hang by the front door. “To touch up your lipstick on the way out the door,” she said. But I didn’t recognize the woman I saw in the mirror. Was I this haggard witch with the deep, purplish circles beneath her eyes? When had my hair lost its color of fluid sunshine and taken on that steely tone? Why couldn’t my eyes meet themselves in the mirror?
I sat down in my chair beside the front window and dialed the number of Barry’s motel. “Hello,” he said. “Cathy?” He sounded awake, as though he’d been waiting.
“Come home,” I said. I put the phone back in its cradle, gently, quietly, so as not to wake the baby. Leaning my head against the back of my chair, I closed my eyes and fell into a hard, dreamless sleep.
Dana Stabenow
“Missing, Presumed . . .”
Of several writers setting mysteries in the State of Alaska, the best-known and most prolific has been Dana Stabenow, author of novel series about Liam Campbell and Kate Shugak. In a rare short story, she offers a view of the legal system in the 49th state.
One
Sec. 09.55.020. Petition and inquiry. If a petition is presented by an interested person to a district judge or magistrate alleging that a designated person has disappeared and after diligent search cannot be found, and if it appears to the satisfaction of the judge or magistrate that the circumstances surrounding the disappearance afford reasonable grounds for the belief that the person has suffered death from accidental or other violent means, the judge or magistrate shall summon and impanel a jury of six qualified persons to inquire into the facts surrounding and the presumption to be raised from the disappearance. If no one submits a petition within 40 days, a judge or magistrate may submit the petition from personal knowledge of the case.
—Alaska Statutes, Code of Civil Procedure
Eli Sylvester Horrell, fisher, husband, father, went overboard halfway between Dutch Harbor and the Pribilof Islands. Weather conditions that day in January included fifteen-knot winds and twelve-foot swells. The crew of the Jeri A. had seen Horrell go in. In spite o
f an intensive search by the United States Coast Guard, the Jeri A., and three other crabbers, his body had not been recovered.
Now it was June. Horrell’s widow, two sons, and one daughter were seated in the front row. The widow, daughter, and youngest son were weeping. The oldest son stared at nothing, white-faced and without expression.
Magistrate Linda Louise Billington, known to friends, defendants, and bar patrons as Bill, was new to the state, new to the town of Newenham, and new to her job. The hearing had come less than six months into her first term of office. It was a balmy spring day, sixty-three degrees with sunny skies and a light breeze. The last of the snow had melted, the last of the mud had dried and the birch and the diamond willow and the alder all showed tiny leaves of a bright, vivid green. She wanted to be outside, catching her first monster king salmon, or climbing her first Alaskan mountain, or taking her first ride in a float plane with a real bush pilot, or even slapping away her first horde of the infamous Alaskan mosquitoes. She looked around the cramped, windowless courtroom lodged in a forgotten corner of the prefabricated building that served as the seat of the third judicial district of the state of Alaska, and thought, How I Spent My Summer Vacation.
In the six months since she had been sworn in she had stumbled through her first arrest warrants, fumbled through her first search warrants, and muddled through her first arraignments. She had figured out how to set bail, and how high. She had issued half a dozen restraining orders, and had taken emergency action in one case of child abuse that still gave her nightmares. She had tried, convicted, and sentenced no less than sixteen drunk drivers. She had tried and convicted one fisher of fishing without a permit, a second for fishing past the end of the period, a third for harvesting female opilio, a fourth for harvesting undersized kings, and a fifth for fishing outside the district to which his permit restricted him. She had learned to discount most excuses offered by fishers, because if all the engines alleged to have broken down in her courtroom really had, half the Bering Sea fishing fleet would be in dry dock.
She was beginning to build a reputation. The night before in the bar she’d heard one fisher mumble at her approach, “Gawd, here she comes, Hanging Bill.” No compliment in her life had ever tasted so sweet.
This, however, was her first presumptive death hearing.
Sudden, violent death was no stranger to Alaska, especially the Bush. Pilots wrecked planes. Hikers disappeared into national parks. Climbers fell down mountains. Snow machiners started avalanches. Cross-country skiers fell into glaciers.
And, as in this case, fishers fell overboard. Alaska had thirty-six thousand miles of shoreline. Much of its living was made on the water.
Many of its missing people were lost on that water.
When it became obvious that the missing was dead, a presumptive death hearing was held to engage the machinery of the state to issue a death certificate.
The two-by-four folding table that stood in for a judicial bench was stacked with the necessary tools as specified by the Magistrate Correspondence Course: the case file, the list of witnesses, no exhibit list as there were no exhibits, her jury instructions, a log sheet, a blank verdict form, paper and pencils, and a box of Kleenex. There was a copy of the Presumptive Death Hearing Script, extracted from the correspondence course binder, held between her knees and the bottom of the table in case she forgot what she was doing midway through the process. She’d already checked the tape recorder twice; she checked it a third time on the principle that it was a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize its own importance. Hattie Bishop had been sworn in as bailiff. The jury was impaneled. The witnesses were waiting.
One of the fluorescent lights flickered overhead behind a plastic lens yellowed and cracked with age. Her back brushed against the standards bearing the American and Alaskan flags. Metal chair legs scraped the floor when someone shifted his weight, somebody else coughed. The second hand on the plain white face of the clock over the door clicked loudly up to twelve: 9:00 A.M.
She cleared her throat and restarted the tape recorder. “We are again on record. This is the district court for the state of Alaska at Newenham, Alaska, Magistrate L.L. Billington presiding.” She noted the date and the time, the name of the deceased, and the case number. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Eli Sylvester Horrell, deckhand on the fishing vessel Jeri A., went into the Bering Sea somewhere between Dutch Harbor and St. Paul the night of January 12 of this year. His body has not been recovered. It is your duty to decide if sufficient evidence is available to presume that he is dead.”
She paused, and peeked at the papers in her lap. When she looked up again the sixth juror was staring at her, as he had been staring at her pretty much unblinkingly since she had sworn in the panel. She straightened in her chair and frowned at him to dispel the notion that she’d been caught cheating. “The standard of proof is probable cause, which means you must find it to be more reasonable than not”—she underlined those last four words with her voice—“that Mr. Horrell is dead.”
Mrs. Horrell gave a gasping sob. Bill held out the box of Kleenex. Mrs. Horrell took one with a damp and grateful look.
“You may ask questions of the witnesses; indicate that you wish to do so by raising your hand after the witness has finished testifying. You may take notes.” She gestured at the pads and pencils. “Once all the witnesses have testified, you will retire to deliberate your verdict. That verdict must be unanimous; that is, all six of you must agree on the verdict.” She paused. “Are there any questions?”
There weren’t. Hiding her relief, she said, “Very well. The court now calls its first witness, Alaska State Trooper Daniel Reynoldson, to the stand.” Trooper Reynoldson, whose uniform had seen better days, stood up and came forward, hat under his arm. “Raise your right hand. Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you will give in the case now before this court will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
Trooper Reynoldson’s voice was thin and reedy, unexpectedly so coming from such a large, barrel-chested man. “I do.”
“Please be seated.” Reynoldson sat and straightened his spine as if to counterweight the bulging belly sitting in his lap. “State your full name, your mailing address, and your occupation.” He did so, declared he had no relationship to the deceased, and told the jury what he knew about the circumstances of Horrell’s disappearance, which wasn’t much. When the Jeri A. had docked, Captain Quinn had called the trooper post. Reynoldson had been catching that day and he had responded to the call, taking Quinn’s statement, talking to the other three deckhands, and talking to the family about the deceased’s state of mind (code for whether he was suicidal; he wasn’t).
“Thank you, Trooper Reynoldson. Does the jury have any questions for this witness?”
They hadn’t. Bill called Captain Enrique Quinn to the stand. Captain Quinn, a tall, wiry man in his mid-forties with elegant Latino features and nervous hands, took the oath and described the night (dark, temperature and barometer both dropping, twelve-foot swells, wind blowing out of the northwest and creating spray that turned instantly to ice), the crew’s activities (hot on the crab, pulling one pot after another, the hold half full and less than twelve hours left in the fishing period), and his last sight of Horrell. “We were moving from one string to another when we started to ice up. Eli got a bat out of—”
“Excuse me,” Bill said, “a what?”
“A baseball bat.”
She was new to the place and the job, so she was careful to keep the incredulity out of her voice. “You use a baseball bat to fish for crab?”
Everyone looked tolerant, even the jury. “We use them to break ice off when the deck starts icing over.” When she continued to look blank, he added helpfully, “If we don’t, the weight of the ice might pull the boat over, make it turn turtle.” He paused. When she didn’t say anything, he added, “So then we’d be in the water and—”
“Thank you, Captain Quinn, I’ve got the pic
ture,” Bill said, and wondered how long it was going to take her to learn everything she needed to know about the fishing business. She wasn’t sure but she thought the sixth juror winked at her.
“Mick, Joe, and Harlen”—Quinn nodded at the three scruffy young men sitting at the back of the room—“baited pots while Eli beat ice.”
“What happened then?”
“He slipped,” Quinn said. His voice was suddenly weary, his face drawn. “He just—he slipped. He skidded right across the deck, came up hard against the gunnel, and somersaulted right over the side.” He ran a hand through thick black hair. “It all happened so fast, I—”
He stopped, and into the silence that followed Bill prompted, “What did you do?”
“I stopped the engines, tripped the beacon, took a bearing, yelled ‘Man overboard’ on the loudspeaker.” Quinn’s voice dropped.
“Captain Quinn,” Bill said, gently but firmly, “I’m going to have to ask you to speak up.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. His voice deepened, his words becoming more clipped. “I stopped the engines, marked our location, triggered the emergency locator beacon, yelled ‘Man overboard’ on the loudspeaker. We already had all the deck lights on. Everybody ran back to the stern, we heaved life rings and a raft over the side, hollered Eli’s name. There was no answer.” A pause. “I called the Coast Guard”—he nodded again, this time toward a trim young man in a crisp blue uniform—“and told them what happened. We sat there until dawn, about nine, nine-thirty, I guess. Some other boats showed up to help look, the Sandy C.,the Rhonda S., and”—he thought—“oh, yeah, the Dixie G. Search and Rescue showed up about then, too. They couldn’t find him either.” His voice dropped again. “We looked for two days. There was—he was just—gone.”
“And then?”
“And then we went back to Dutch. The period was over, the quota was met, we couldn’t do any more fishing.”