Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  Annie, who had spent the last fifteen years sitting in a corner taking minutes of board meetings, was unnaccustomed to so much direct attention. She came to the podium to accept the gavel, a little flushed. She kept her acceptance speech short and sweet, thanking Kate for the nomination and the shareholders for their votes and promising to work hard to keep their confidence and to help lead the Niniltna Native Association into a profitable and sustainable future. Her first act as chair was to announce that Phyllis Lestinkof had been hired as the new Association secretary. This found favor with everyone except for Phyllis’s family, boon companions of Ulanie’s, who had cast Phyllis out when she became pregnant with an illegitimate child and whom they had fondly hoped to find in a ditch sometime during the past winter, dead of hypothermia and despair. Instead, their sinful daughter now had a daughter of her own, a home with a supply of wood sufficient to last through two winters, and a good job. Dark and direful mutterings came from their section of the chairs. Phyllis, sitting in the front row, baby Samantha on her lap attired in a hot pink onesie, displayed a newfound composure and ignored them. She was a woman of substance and a mother now.

  As Annie spoke, Kate looked over the audience and found not a few faces turned her way. Most seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop. No one had quite believed her, however many times she had said it, that she was uninterested in being chair for another term, or for life.

  She looked at the new board. Auntie Joy, Harvey Meganack, Demetri Totemoff, who between them represented a minimum of sixty years’ time served on the NNA board. And the newer members, Einar Carlson, Herbie Topkok, Marlene Colberg, Ulanie Anahonak. The newest member of all, her cousin Axenia. Axenia met Kate’s eyes calmly, but Kate fancied she could detect suprise and disbelief in her cousin’s eyes, and perhaps just a hint of contempt as well. Axenia could not imagine anyone ever willingly giving up power.

  Kate had the sudden uncomfortable feeling that her cousin and their grandmother had a lot in common.

  “Very well,” Annie said, giving the gavel a tentative rap. “With thanks to our outgoing chair, who has agreed to continue to act for our interests in an advisory capacity, and in memoriam of Old Sam, who will be with us always in spirit, I declare this annual shareholders meeting of the Niniltna Native Association adjourned.” Before anyone could get to their feet she added with a stern look that would have done Ekaterina proud, “Please, everyone who can, stay behind and help us clear the room.”

  Her request was unnecessary. The Kanuyaq Kings would be playing the Cordova Wolverines this weekend, junior varsity and varsity, men’s and women’s teams, in a two-day matchup beginning tomorrow. Bernie Koslowski would have their collective heads with one fell swoop if so much as a crumb of fry bread were left on the wooden floor of the school gymnasium. “Free throws win ball games,” the coach was fond of saying, but so did a clean, dry floor to play on, and the cleanup crew was every one of them heart and soul a Kanuyaq Kings booster.

  Not to mention which, they didn’t want to be banned for life from the Roadhouse. As any miner in Suulutaq could tell them, the Roadhouse was the only watering hole around.

  Five

  FRIDAY, JANUARY 15, THAT EVENING

  Niniltna

  It was a clear night with a waxing crescent moon and the temperature way below zero. The exuberant manner in which Kate hit the panic bar on the gym door on her way outside would have given anyone watching the idea she was headed for Hawaii. Even Mutt had to scramble to keep up. By the time they reached Kate’s snow machine, Kate had her parka zipped, her hood up and buttoned, and her goggles pulled down over her eyes. The snogo came to life at a touch and Kate swung a leg over the seat and hit the throttle. Mutt gave a startled yip and it took her two strides to catch up and scramble up on the seat behind Kate. She had to snatch her a mouthful of parka shoulder before forward momentum tumbled her off again.

  The only official speed limit through the village of Niniltna was the one observed by common sense and a decent respect for the lives and property of others, neither of which did Kate have on display that January evening. She used the hill down from the school as a launchpad and hurtled the snogo into a long, heart-stopping skid of a right turn onto Riverside without letting up on the throttle, worthy of a 911 call all on its own. The Meganacks house flashed by on their left and that’s when Kate really hit the gas. Mutt let out another startled but this time also exhilarated yip and took a firmer grip on Kate’s parka.

  The snowgo’s top speed was ninety miles an hour, or it had been when it was new, but Kate had kept it in good shape. Eight feet of accumulated winter snow had been packed down by two months’-worth of traffic so that the road home was a hard, fast surface that more nearly resembled a luge run. Traffic was mostly going in their direction. Kate blew past them like the Road Runner outrunning an Acme rocket, with Wile E. Coyote still back in Niniltna. The only oncoming traffic was Willard Shugak’s ancient International pickup, and while Willard wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, even he had enough smarts to pull over as far to his side as he could without going into the ditch when he saw Kate’s rooster tail coming at him.

  Well before the turnoff to the homestead, Kate applied brakes and body weight in injudicious proportions to put the snogo into another death-defying sideways slide that jostled Mutt’s teeth loose from their hold on Kate’s parka. With a sound that could only be described as “Yikes!” Mutt tumbled from the back of the machine and went rolling off the road to be buried headfirst in a snowbank. Kate, laughing like a maniac, came to an exceedingly momentary stop with the nose of the snogo pointing precisely at the trailhead. She gunned the engine again and shot down it. Behind her she heard Mutt barking madly and she laughed again.

  The trail was narrow and twisting and she hit only the tops of the bumps. Woman and machine slid to a superbly executed hockey stop in the clearing, raising a spray of snow in another rooster tail that reached as high as the shop roof. With a war whoop that could have been heard fifty miles away in Niniltna, Kate vaulted off the seat, but Mutt, hurtling down the trail and into the clearing, was one second before her. On the fly she grabbed the hem of Kate’s jeans in her teeth and dumped Kate on her ass. Kate rolled to her hands and knees and tackled Mutt into a pile of newly snoveled snow that under the impact went up like a small atomic bomb. For the next ten minutes the 120-pound woman and the 140-pound wolf–husky hybrid roughhoused all the way around the clearing, a circumnavigation that shook the stairs to the house, nearly knocked the cache off its stilts, and knocked the door to the now blessedly retired outhouse off one hinge. They somersaulted into spruce trees that unleashed more clouds of snow from heavily laden branches and banged against the big sliding door of the shop before winding up once more at the foot of the stairs to the house.

  By now Kate’s short cap of black hair was frozen into icy dreadlocks, she had snow up her pant legs and down the back of her shirt, her parka was half off one shoulder, and she was losing her right boot. This called for drastic measures. She grabbed Mutt’s head in both hands and covered her muzzle with loud, lavish kisses. Mutt leaped back in horror and gave a mighty sneeze. Kate knew an opportunity when she saw it and in a flash she was on her feet and taking the stairs two at the time. There was an outraged “Whuff!” from behind her and Kate took the last three steps in one jump and hit the door with a crash that shook the house.

  She flung it open hard enough to shake the house again and took a giant leap inside. She landed on the floor with bent knees and raised arms, struck a pose like a Pamyua dancer and shouted, “With one bound, Kate was free!”

  Mutt romped in behind, scattering snow from the kitchen to the living room. Velocity overcame friction and she slid into Kate with a hard thump, knocking Kate off her feet, and the tendency of bodies in motion to stay in motion rolled them up into a ball that thudded ingloriously into the kitchen counter.

  Kate was laughing so hard she couldn’t speak. Mutt, more conscious of her dignity, or perhaps just readier
to reengage the enemy, made a mad scramble to reachieve the vertical.

  She froze in place. A tentative growl emerged from her throat.

  Kate blinked up at her, and raised her head.

  Johnny stood at the stove with a spatula in his hand, Jim sat at the dining table, and a total stranger sat on their couch. All three of them were regarding Kate and Mutt with identical quizzical expressions.

  “Oh.” She sat up. A hank of frozen hair fell into her eyes, and she made an ineffectual attempt to bat the ice out of it. “I didn’t know we had company.”

  “We noticed,” Johnny said, a grin spreading across his face.

  Jim’s attempt not to laugh was a little too obvious. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Kate said, and got to her feet.

  “Kate,” Jim said, “this is Liam Campbell. Liam, this is Kate Shugak.”

  Kate squelched over to shake hands. Liam’s was large and strong, Kate’s cold and wet. “Jim was your training officer in the Valley,” she said.

  “He was.” Liam looked at Jim. “She knows of me by repute.”

  “Trust me,” Jim said dryly, “you’re not our only topic of conversation.”

  Liam grinned down at Kate. “I should hope not.”

  Mutt, satisfied that she was not going to be summoned to repel boarders, broke the silence by shaking herself vigorously, spraying the entire first floor with ice pellets, and went to scuff up her quilt and sprawl in front of the fireplace.

  Kate let go of Liam’s hand and turned to look at Johnny. “Do I have time for a shower?”

  He flipped a burger in the cast-iron skillet. The resulting sizzle followed by the pungent aroma of crisping moosemeat was enough to make Kate weep. “Barely,” he said.

  “Excellent.”

  She waited until she was upstairs with the bedroom door closed safely behind her before whispering to herself, “Wow.”

  This Campbell guy was hot.

  * * *

  Dinner was massive mooseburgers with stacks of lettuce, cheese, onions, and tomatoes on buns toasted crisp and lathered with relish, mustard, and mayonnaise. Johnny, not just a boy but a prince, had made homemade fries to go with, and everything was washed down by Auntie Balasha’s homemade root beer, two cases of which she had been induced to part with in exchange for a cord of firewood. Old Sam had been the traditional provider of firewood for the aunties, and Kate foresaw a full-time future career with an ax in her hand if she didn’t find a reliable substitute. Something the NNA could organize, she thought, a group of teen shareholders paid to make sure their elders had adequate fuel supply for the winter.

  She would have to be careful how she suggested it, though, or Annie Mike would rope her in to run the committee.

  And she was so done with that.

  Johnny retired to his room with a fistful of dessert, aka Auntie Joy’s browned butter sugar cookies, fuel to spur the Googling of prospective colleges. Thanks to the small dish hanging off the eaves outside and the string of cell towers down the road from Ahtna to Niniltna, Kate’s homestead now had Internet access, or it did as long as she didn’t run out of fuel for the generator.

  She didn’t know quite what to think about this. It was just so unbearably uptown. At any moment someone was going to revoke her citizenship for frontier living.

  The adults moved into the living room, Kate and Jim on the couch and Campbell on the La-Z-Boy. He’d unbuttoned enough to have divested himself of jacket, tie, and boots, although he still looked like he’d just stepped out of an ad from GQ. He applied himself to dessert with the same enthusiasm he had shown toward dinner. Kate did like a man who enjoyed his food, whether she’d done the cooking or not.

  She licked the last of the sugar from her fingers and looked at Campbell. “This isn’t just a social call.”

  Campbell looked at Jim, who raised his shoulders in a faint shrug. Campbell looked back at Kate. “No,” he said. “I need help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “Investigatory help.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were some kind of trooper.”

  Unoffended, Campbell grinned. “The uniform sort of a giveaway? Yeah, well, that’s where it gets a little tricky. My vic was killed in a plane crash last month.” He got up and walked to where his jacket was hanging over the back of a chair. He fished a plastic bag out of a pocket and tossed it to Kate.

  She caught and examined it, frowning. It was an evidence bag, containing a nut threaded onto a tube. “What is this?”

  “It’s off a Super Cub. Holds on the bell housing over an oil screen.”

  She handed it back. “Why is it in an evidence bag?”

  Campbell set the bag down on the arm of the La-Z-Boy and regarded it. “December eleventh, pilot and businessman Dagfin ‘Finn’ Grant took off from Newenham in his Super Cub, headed for his FBO south of town.”

  “FBO?” Kate said.

  “A fixed-base operator,” Jim said. “A privately or publicly owned commercial business created to provide aviation support at a local airport.” He saw her look and shrugged. “What it says on Wikipedia. FBOs provide fuel, parts, maintenance, aircraft parking, aircraft rental, pilot housing, pilot entertainment.” He hesitated over that last word just long enough for Kate’s eyebrow to go up. “You name it,” Jim said, “an FBO has it on offer. Basically whatever they figure they can make money selling to pilots, air taxies, and small airline operators.”

  “Grant figured he could sell quite a lot,” Campbell said, “and he was right. His FBO was—is—located on the site of a former air force base about twenty-five miles south of Newenham. BRAC closed it four years ago—”

  “Base Closure and Realignment Commission,” Jim said.

  “—and Grant snapped it up for pennies on the dollar. Prior to that, he had been operating a flightseeing and air taxi service out of Newenham. Bristol Bay Air Freight. He renamed the business Eagle Air LLC and moved it to Chinook—the air force base—and started to expand. In two years he had bought up nearly every tourism-related business in the area, air taxies, fishing charters, hunting lodges.” Campbell paused. “I understand that sometimes he bought them whether the owners wanted to sell or not, although I’ve never been able to get anyone to say any more than that.” He shrugged. “And, of course, absent complaints, there was no reason to investigate one way or the other.”

  “He independently wealthy, or what?” Jim said.

  “Good question,” Campbell said, “and one I don’t have an answer for.” He looked at Kate. “Which may be where you come in. He married local royalty.”

  “Who?”

  “His wife’s maiden name was Clementina Tannehill.”

  “Tannehill.” Kate’s lips pursed together in a silent whistle. “That’s not local, that’s state royalty. Hell, that’s territorial royalty, and it might even be actual Romanov royalty if you go back far enough. You said Clementina? That’d be, at a guess, Thad and Lillie’s daughter. And…” She thought. “Carter’s sister?”

  Campbell consulted a notepad. “Yeah. She’s the sole survivor of her generation. I’m told they’ve had a finger in every business pie from Unalaska to Bethel, and that Thad staked the first platinum claim at Platinum.”

  Kate nodded. “They’re statehood stakeholders, all right, and high boat seiners, and stampeders, and before that fur traders. You name it, they’ve done it and made a pile of money at it. You were right about the royalty. If Grant married into that family, he was made in Alaska from that moment on. Although…”

  “What?”

  “I remember some rumor or other about the family falling on hard times. Nothing substantial, just a whisper on the wind.” She shook her head. “And it wouldn’t count locally, anyway. If the Tannehills let him marry into the family, it wouldn’t matter how high the number was on his driver’s licence. The old farts would take him at face value.” She looked at the part in the evidence bag. “He your vic?”

  Campbell nodded, too. “When he mo
ved operations to Chinook, he commuted between Newenham and Chinook in his Super Cub.” His voice was very dry, just the facts, ma’am. “On the morning of December eleventh, at ten-oh-six A.M. according to the flight service station, he took off for Chinook.”

  “Ten-oh-six being just about daylight?” Jim said.

  Campbell nodded. “Wy says it was at most a fifteen-minute flight. At eleven o’clock, one Tasha Anuyuk, Eagle Air employee, called Grant’s house looking for him. His wife, Clementina, reported him overdue to flight service, and local pilots went up to look for him.”

  “Weather?” Jim said.

  “Cold,” Campbell said, “but clear and no winds to speak of. Wy—my wife, Wyanet Chouinard, she’s a pilot with her own air taxi operating out of Newenham—spotted him first, about two miles short of the Chinook runway.”

  Kate got the distinct impression that Campbell would have preferred almost any other pilot in the world to have found the wreckage of Finn Grant’s airplane.

  “I took a four-wheeler out to the wreck. It’s all delta out there, built of glacial silt that came down the river. Lot of rolling hills and little lakes, thick brush, scrub spruce, lots of alders.”

  “I’ve flown over it,” Jim said. “Pretty lumpy landscape and none of the lakes are very big. Hard to find a smooth stretch long enough to set her down in if you were in trouble.”

  “Wy said Grant did his best to get her down in one piece,” Campbell said. “So did the NTSB guy. You could see where he’d tried to slow down on a couple of hillocks, but it had been cold for a while and the snow was frozen pretty hard. He couldn’t get the Cub slowed down enough before he plowed into the last hill.”