A Study in Sherlock

by Laurie R. King

  I could feel my face get red. “There’s lots of stuff that isn’t about Van. I wrote about the caribou count I did with Ruthe up on the Gruening last year. You know, on our second try.” I hesitated. “I wrote about Old Sam.”

  She was standing at the stove with her back to me, but she kind of stopped with the spatula in her hand. “You did?”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to forget him.”

  The spatula started moving again. “Good.”

  “And I write about your cases.”

  This time she looked over her shoulder. “What?”

  “I write about your cases.” I shrugged. “As much as I know about them, anyway.”

  One of her eyebrows went up. “You write about yesterday?”

  I nodded.

  “Huh.” She turned back to the stove and started piling French toast and link sausages on two plates. “Okay, Dr. Watson. What do you think?”

  Kinda cool that she asked, so I did a recap while we ate breakfast. When I was done she said, “So? What do we do first?”

  “Uh,” I said. “Go to Merrill, talk to the air traffic controllers?”

  “What kind of surface did they take off on?”

  “Gravel. Oh. Merrill’s paved. Birchwood? Campbell Air strip?”

  “What did Totemoff hear when they were stuffing him into the plane?”

  “Oh. Jet engines, real close. So, Stevens International.”

  She pointed a finger at me. “Ding, ding, ding. Lake Hood airstrip. What do we ask when we get to the tower?”

  “About small plane takeoffs that night. It was late, there can’t have been that many.”

  “Good. But first we get out a map.”

  “Why?”

  “Totemoff said he thought it was a 170 or a 172. If I remember right, a 172 cruises at about a hundred and forty miles per hour. He said he thought they’d been in the air about an hour. He’d been drinking and they’d been thumping on him so he isn’t the most reliable witness, but we can at least make a stab at figuring out where they took him within that radius.”

  We got the map out.

  The thing about Alaska is that there’s a dirt strip pretty much everywhere you look (Atlas Aviation has a good page on aviation facilities in Alaska), over three thousand of them, Jim says, and most of them unmaintained. First thing a gold miner does is hack one out of the scrub spruce so he can get in and out. Somebody’s building a cabin or a lodge, same thing. And then there’s the natural resource companies, they put in airstrips long enough to take a Herc carrying a drilling rig or a commercial gold dredge. When they’re done digging or drilling it’s not like they can roll it up and take it with them, so when the oil or gas company is gone the hunters and the fishermen and the backpackers start using it as a staging area.

  That’s good news if you’re in the air and you’ve got trouble and you need to put her down. It’s not so good if you’re trying to figure out where one small plane went late one October night. There are literally hundreds of possibilities. We narrowed it down some, but not much. “If you were going to eliminate a few more of these, how would you go about it?” Kate said.

  I didn’t know.

  “Where’s Totemoff from?”

  “Red Run,” I said.

  “Where are his cousins from? The ones he met at the AFN convention?”

  “Tatitlek. Oh. Oh! Plus the guys who kidnapped him needed an Eyak speaker to talk to the elder. So, Prince William Sound? But isn’t it too far for a 172?”

  She smiled. I guess I did look kind of excited. But it was kind of cool, brainstorming a backtrail that way. “Maybe you’d need a bigger plane to get that far that fast, but remember Totemoff was only guessing. What about Myra?”

  “Myra? Oh, you mean when the elder told him to tell Myra he said no?” Kate nodded. “You want us to look for her, too?”

  She laughed. “Don’t sound so downhearted. I admit, if we were trying to find somebody from Shaktoolik, we’d have a problem. But if Myra is from Tatitlek, or Chenega, or even Whittier or Seward or Valdez, we’ve got an ace in the hole. Four of them, in fact.”

  And then Bobby posted that comment on yesterday’s post, about Auntie Balasha going to Chulyin. I told Kate.

  She laughed. “See?”

  Comments

  Auntie Vi says, “Bobby makes me wirte this pretty cool ride-along.”

  MiketheMan says, “Dude, cool that you’re putting in all the links so I don’t have to google any for my own blog. Mrs. D. will never know.”

  RangerDan says, [Comment deleted by author.]

  RangerDan says, “What mother-effing moron gets himself kidnapped out of the Bush Company by anybody but one of the dancers?”

  RangerDan says, “Hey, when you finally get your asses back to the Park, could you and Kate stop by the NPS Anchorage office on your way to Merrill and pick up a box of the new Park maps for me? It’s been sitting there for two months while they try to figure out where Niniltna is.”

  RangerDan says, “Is the Girdwood strip gravel or paved? Lots of anonymous little cabins tucked away in the mountains there.”

  Mrs. Doogan says, “You write, When they’re done drilling it’s not like they can roll it up and take it with them … Roll up what? The drilling rig or the air strip? I know, the context makes it clear, but you need to pay more attention to your pronouns. And, Michael Abraham Moonin, Mrs. D. most certainly does know.”

  Wednesday, October 26th, 12 P.M., by Johnny

  We went out to Stevens International and talked to the guys in the tower. (Really cool up there, lots going on, planes in the air everywhere you look, passenger 737s and cargo 747s almost nonstop in and out of Stevens International, F-22 squadrons training at Elmendorf, hunters coming and going from Lake Hood, not to mention all the wannabe pilots doing touch-and-goes at Merrill. (Here’s a story on AlaskaDispatch.com about somebody ground-looping a Super Cub on the Lake Hood strip yesterday. Like Jim says, that’s what happens when you learn on a tricycle and then buy a taildragger. Lucky nobody died.) They told me to come back in the summer to see it when it’s really hopping. Later Kate said they are always looking for new controllers, it’s a tough job and they burn out fast. I believe it.)

  Anyway, the plane. Whoever was flying it didn’t file a flight plan (I know what Dad would have said about that) but the tower had the tail numbers. We tracked down the owner and he says he doesn’t know anything about the flight and that he was home asleep when it took off. Now his plane is gone. He sounded really pissed off, and said he was going to have a conversation with “those f****** airport rentacops.” He lives with his wife and two kids and everybody was home in bed at the time. Kate checked with Brendan, the guy’s had like one ticket for speeding in his whole life, so I think she kind of believes him. As much as Kate ever believes anybody.

  2 P.M.—Got a text from Van, who got a text from Bobby, who heard from Auntie B on the marine band, who says there was a Myra Gordaoff born in Cordova nineteen years ago. I checked, she’s on Facebook. Her profile says she graduated from Cordova High, that she’s working for the AC, and that she’s in a relationship. One of her friends tagged her in a photo at a party, she’s sitting on some guy’s lap. He looks white, but you can’t see his face because he’s got a ball cap pulled down over his eyes.

  The ball cap has an Anchorage Aces logo on it.

  She hasn’t posted anything for a week and there are messages from three friends wondering where she disappeared to. I e-mailed all of them on Facebook.

  7 P.M.—Heard back from one of Myra’s friends, a woman named Louise. She says Myra is engaged to be married to some guy named Chris, a cheechako who moved to Alaska last summer. He came to Cordova with a pal of his, an older man who is maybe a relative, she didn’t know for sure, both of them looking for jobs on a fishing boat.

  Louise also says that Myra’s grandfather, Herman Gordaoff, is a big noise in the local Native community, one of the last surviving elders. Myra is his only grandchild, and besides both of the
m being shareholders in the local Native Association, Herman has a lot of money and property, including a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot home on the slough, twenty-five acres out Hartney Bay road, a couple of gold mines, and a vacation cabin at Boswell Bay, not to mention a fifty-foot salmon seiner and a fishing permit whose area includes the Kanuyaq River flats, which even I know is probably the most lucrative permit a fisherman can own in the state. I asked Louise if Herman spoke English. She said yes. She was kind of mifty about it.

  I told Kate. She looked grim. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said, “living with ‘No dogs or Natives allowed’ signs in the store windows fifty years ago, or Native women being preyed on today because they’ve got a big fat quarterly shareholder dividend coming in.”

  “You think this Chris guy wants to marry Myra so he can get his hands on her money?”

  “I think he wants to marry Myra so he can get her hands on her grandfather’s money,” Kate said. “I’ll bet they came to Alaska with the intention of finding a female shareholder they could live off of. They nosed around, zeroed in on the Gordaoffs, and either followed Herman out to his cabin or kidnapped him and took him there. Herman was smart enough to play dumb, pretend he couldn’t speak English, figured to buy himself a little time so maybe he could make a break for it.

  “So Chris and his buddy went to AFN looking for Eyak speakers, found Gilbert, kidnapped him, and took him to the cabin. When that didn’t work, they took him back to Anchorage and dumped him off.”

  “What about Herman Gordaoff?”

  Kate was already dialing her cell phone.

  Comments

  Mrs. Doogan says, “Who asked you to come back to the tower, the air traffic controllers or the people who crashed in the Super Cub? Who doesn’t have a record, Brendan or the plane’s owner? Who does Kate believe, Brendan or the plane’s owner? Who didn’t know, Myra or Louise? Spend a little time matching your nouns and verbs before you hit ‘Post.’ Also, employing parentheses within parentheses requires more care and caution than you show here. I understand that the blog format is a conversational one, but can you imagine being allowed to get all that out in a conversation? And being understood?”

  Thursday, October 27th, by Johnny [Reblog]

  (http://www.thecordovatimes.com/) BODY OF EYAK ELDER FOUND—Acting on information received from Alaska private investigator E. I. “Kate” Shugak, authorities discovered the body of Herman Obadaiah Gordaoff at a remote cabin on his gold claim on Cheneganak Creek in Prince William Sound. Evidence at the scene indicated that Gordaoff had been physically assaulted and that he had been dead for some time before his body was found. The Alaska State Troopers say that the investigation is ongoing.

  Comments

  Friday, October 28th, by Johnny

  We went home by way of Cordova. We met up with Myra Gordaoff at the Cordova House, who had been out at her grandfather’s cabin at Boswell Bay. She’s a quiet, pretty girl with a lot of black hair who seems younger than nineteen. We told her what we think happened.

  She was, I don’t know, kind of frozen. She wouldn’t believe us about the boyfriend, but she did say she didn’t like his friend, Fred. She said Fred was a pilot, that he was older than Chris, and that they had both come to Alaska this summer, looking for work. She said that she and Chris had gone out to Boswell Bay to spend the weekend, and then Fred flew out to pick him up because he said he had a line on a couple of high-paying jobs in Prudhoe Bay. Chris told Myra he’d be right back and to wait for him. When he didn’t show up, she hitched a ride back to Cordova with a fisherman named Hank and his daughter, Annie.

  I remember once Jim telling me that the worst part of being a state trooper was having to inform the victim’s family. “You never know how they’re going to react,” he said.

  You sure don’t.

  Comments

  Mrs. Doogan says, [Comment deleted by author.]

  Katya says, “I got my Mr. moon”

  Katya says, “mom says thanks JOhnny!!!!@!”

  Thursday, December 5th, by Johnny [Reblog]

  (www.ADN.com, 10am) USCG CALLS OFF SEARCH—The U.S. Coast Guard has called off the search for a small airplane missing since the end of October. The pilot, Frederick Berdoll, age 41, of Anchorage and his passenger, Christopher Mason, 37, also of Anchorage, took off in Berdoll’s Cessna 172 from Cordova, where Mason was visiting his fiancée, Myra Gordaoff.

  Rescuers, including response teams from Kulis Air National Guard Base and the Civil Air Patrol, searched for weeks but found neither debris nor any sign of either Berdoll or Mason. Since much of the flight plan was over the Sound, it is assumed that the plane must have gone down in the water. “Currents and tides in Prince William Sound are pretty powerful,” NWS meteorologist Jim Kemper said. “That plane is probably halfway to Hawaii by now.”

  The day after the plane failed to arrive at Lake Hood as scheduled, Myra Gordaoff said, “I waved them off from the Cordova airport. They should have been back in Anchorage later that afternoon. I watched until they were out of sight and I’m no pilot but the plane seemed okay to me.”

  (www.ADN.com, 4:13pm update) The disappearance of Berdoll and Mason took an odd twist when this afternoon a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers reported that the Cessna 172 in which the two men were flying was revealed to have been stolen from Lake Hood airstrip the week before it disappeared. The aircraft was registered to Matthew Liedholm of Airport Heights, who said he had been notified of its theft by the police. “Kinda wonder what I’m getting for my tiedown fee,” Liedholm said. He also said that to his knowledge he had never met either of the missing men.

  Comments

  George says, “Lots of easy ways to screw with an airplane engine so it don’t get where it’s supposed to go. Hell, sugar in the gas tank. Don’t have to be an A&P to figger that.”

  Jim says, “No wreckage, no evidence. No evidence, no case.”

  Bobby says, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

  Mrs. Doogan says, “Libel: a written statement in which a plaintiff in certain courts sets forth the cause of action or the relief sought. (www.merriam-webster.com)”

  RangerDan says, [Comment deleted by author.]

  Bernie says, [Comment deleted by author.]

  Bobby says, “Wimps.”

  Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on a seventy-five-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first science fiction novel, Second Star, sank without a trace; her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar Award; her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list; and her twenty-eighth novel and nineteenth Kate Shugak novel, Restless in the Grave, comes out in February 2012. Stabenow currently lives in Alaska. Her long, intimate relationship with Sherlock Holmes began when she got to the Ds of the Seldovia Public Library when she was ten years old. She only hopes Mary Russell doesn’t find out.

  An eerily similar adventure is recounted by Dr. Watson in “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” which was first published in The Strand Magazine in 1893, and can be found in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

  THE CASE THAT HOLMES LOST

  Charles Todd

  John Whitman rose as the door to his office opened and an energetic man, his face lined with worry, walked in.

  “Sir Arthur,” he said, offering his hand.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took it in a firm grip, saying, “Thank you for seeing me so quickly, John. It’s rather urgent.” Taking the chair across from his solicitor’s desk, he went on, “Holmes has got himself into a great deal of trouble.”

  Hiding a smile, Whitman said, “Indeed.”

  “Yes,” Conan Doyle replied testily. “He’s being sued.”

  “Sued! Are you quite serious?”

  “I don’t joke about such matters, I assure you.”

  “But Holmes—I beg your pardon for saying this—but he’s your creation. I can underst
and that someone might sue you. It’s not that unusual for an author to be sued. Plagiarism, for one thing; libel for another. Infringement of rights. But no one sues his chief character.”

  “Yes, well, there’s a first time for everything. It’s a frivolous suit. I want it dismissed.”

  Whitman reached for a sheaf of paper and his pen. “Let’s begin at the beginning. Why is Holmes being sued?”

  “Smith—my editor—wanted a new story, and I wrote one for him. It was loosely based on something that happened while I was in Edinburgh, studying medicine. Of course I changed the setting from Scotland to London, and I changed names. The result was a very different case, and well suited to Holmes. There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have uncovered the source of the plot.”

  “And what has become of this story? Have you turned it over to your editor?”

  “As soon as it was finished. Three days later I was informed that someone intended to sue Holmes.”

  “How did this someone come to know of the existence of your manuscript?”

  “There is the crux of the problem, you see. He couldn’t have. Only two people had read the story. I was one, of course, and my editor was the other.”

  “How did you send this manuscript to him?”

  Conan Doyle smiled. “A question worthy of Holmes. By private messenger. But from the time the manuscript left my hands to the time it was delivered was no more than three quarters of an hour. Hardly time to read the story, much less make a copy of it for anyone.”

  “Had you told anyone else you were writing this particular story?”

  “No, no. That would have defeated my purpose in changing the details.”

  “Will you tell me a little about this case?”

  Conan Doyle hesitated, then said, “Yes, of course. You must know what it is about, if you are to shut down this ridiculous business before it becomes public knowledge.”

  He got up and walked to the window, gazing down into the busy street below.

  “You see, Scottish law isn’t quite the same as English law. In addition to the usual verdict of guilty or not guilty, there is a third possibility: not proven. It is sometimes a limbo, where one is neither exonerated nor convicted. There have been a few famous cases where this verdict became a millstone around the neck of the accused.”