Restless in the Grave

by Dana Stabenow

  He yawned again, his jaw cracking this time. Over a third of the Newenham population was under eighteen, which didn’t make his job any easier, the hormonally challenged being terminally and all too often fatally prone to acts of stupidity.

  There was also the problem of village flight, people leaving the villages for the big city in hopes of finding a job so they could feed their kids. The population of Newenham had increased by almost five hundred over the past two years, to almost twenty-five hundred in the last census, which made Newenham city-sized in Alaskan Bush terms. Most of them were Yupik and a lot of them were living out of town on Native allotment lands, which put them outside the city limits, which meant they didn’t have to pay city taxes but also meant they couldn’t vote in city elections. This had incurred a lot of acting out on property both civic and private. That this was the outward adolescent manifestation of a lot of inward adult resentment, Liam was well aware.

  He did his best to stay the hell away from local politics, but there was no way he could avoid the fallout from all of the above in the form of domestic disputes, alcohol-related abuse, the blood feuds that went back generations, and the usual civic disharmony on a scale that was, so far, mostly misdemeanor, and mostly manageable. But if Hizzoner and His Eminence didn’t get their acts together, soon, Liam was going on strike.

  He topped a small rise and pulled over to the side of the road, and checked the rearview mirror. No traffic for the moment. He rolled down the window and took a deep, invigorating breath of cold, clean winter air.

  A raven croaked at him from a nearby treetop, and he looked up to meet a cocked head and a beady black eye.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Liam said.

  The raven looked at him out of his other eye and gave a mocking series of throaty croaks and clicks.

  “I mean it,” Liam said.

  The raven must have decided Liam meant it because he spread his wings and dropped off his branch to do a death-defying strafing run over the top of Liam’s vehicle, before vanishing over the trees on the opposite side of the road.

  Close encounters of the Corvus corax kind. To this was he reduced. Liam rubbed his hands hard over his face and looked at the view.

  Newenham sprawled up and down forty square miles of riverbank, about a thousand buildings, twenty-five hundred people, three fish processors (couldn’t really call them canneries anymore), a town hall, a courthouse with its very own public prosecutor and public defender, two cop shops (one of them vacant except for two dispatchers working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week and who knew how long that would last), a hospital, and what Liam thought had to be a contender for the title of world’s largest boat harbor. From this vantage point, it sprawled along the waterfront the way the town sprawled along the riverbank, a veritable floating forest of masts and booms and flying bridges surrounded by two immense gravel arms, breakwaters separated by an entrance that looked minuscule even when you were on a boat going through them. Liam heard tell that time was, most of those boats had been hauled out of the water every year before winter ice could crush their hulls into matchsticks. The harbor hadn’t frozen once since he’d been assigned here. Nobody bad-mouthed global warming around Newenham.

  At Newenham the incoming tide mixed with the outflowing snowmelt and the Nushugak River was wide enough to require a clear day and a squint to see from one side to the other. It was here that another, smaller river whose name was lost to the ages had provided rich provender for the Yupik who had worked seasonal fish camps there. In 1818 the Russians showed up, established a settlement, and called it Rika Redoubt. Twenty years later the Russian Orthodox Church followed, establishing a mission and building a church that still stood, if a little tentatively. In 1897 the U.S. Army Signal Corps brought in a telegraph line, in 1903 the Alaska Steamship Company added Newenham to its western route, and in 1905 the first Alaska Packers salmon cannery opened its doors, followed by a rush of others, all Outside interests. Alaska Natives were catching their own fish during the summer months and too busy to work for anyone else, so the canneries brought in crews from Mexico and China and the Philippines. At one time, according to Moses Alakuyak, the drunk shaman who was older than god and the generally acknowledged patriarch of Bristol Bay, not to mention Liam’s father-in-law, there had been nine salmon canneries operating in Newenham.

  Which might go a long way toward explaining why the salmon population was not what it once was.

  Something flashed in the sun, the window of a pickup moving in his direction. Wouldn’t do to have the state trooper, the law of the state made manifest, found pulled over only to admire the view. And dozing off while he was at it. Liam shook himself out of his drowse and started the engine and went on into town.

  Most of Newenham was built off one main road, variously known as the main road, the airport road, the lake road, and the Icky Road. The road went north, along the riverbank, passing the Anipa Subdivision five miles out, the airport ten miles out and turning inland to end forty miles later on the shore of One Lake in the village of Ik’ikika.

  The road also went south along the river, twenty-five miles to Chinook Air Force Base, or it had until the winter the senior senator from Alaska lost a twenty-year congressional battle and the base was closed. Everything movable was loaded onto barges and towed around the Aleutian Peninsula through Unimak Pass to Dutch Harbor, where it was loaded on a container ship headed south. What was left now belonged to Finn Grant’s estate, and on the plane home Saturday Liam had heard a rumor that Angayuk Native Association was negotiating terms for lease or sale of the property. Two very nice paved runways in prime condition came with it, not to mention a barracks big enough to sleep fifty and administration and support buildings to go along with them, so it would be a very attractive property to someone with a use for it.

  Which only opened up motive for another couple of hundred people, all of them Angayuk shareholders, he thought gloomily.

  The town’s only supermarket appeared on his left. Alaska Commercial Company, known locally as the AC, had the usual full parking lot, with the expected congregation of kids playing hooky standing around the door, smoking cigarettes, playing grabass, and killing time. He slowed down as he drove past, letting them see him and returning look for look.

  Next to the AC the liquor store opened up. Out of habit Liam checked the clock on the dash. Eight A.M. on the money. Martha Pauk was first in the door, followed by Jimmy Creevey and Manuel Chin. It would be two more long hours before Bill’s Bar opened up, and they couldn’t wait.

  He thanked his lucky stars yet again for being posted to a place with only two bars and one liquor store, unheard of in Alaska for a city this size unless the community had by a miracle voted itself dry. Jim Earl and the town council kept a death grip on liquor licenses, and no amount of encouragement from the Alaska liquor lobby was going to shake a fourth license loose. The only way somebody could open a new bar was if Bill or whoever owned the other bar this month died and the new business bought or inherited the old business’s liquor license. Bill’s bar was never a problem, partly because of the .30-06 she kept behind the bar and partly just from sheer force of personality.

  The other bar—Seaside Inn? Breeze Inn? Dew Drop Inn? He honestly couldn’t remember what it was called at present—was a dive that had changed hands twice and possibly three times since Liam’s arrival four years before. It never seemed to become stable enough to become a base of drinking operations for reliable patrons like Teddy Engebretsen and Kelly McCormick and Johnny Kvichak, so it was no wonder it kept going out of business in the same location.

  Besides, everybody went to Bill’s. Bill never watered down her drinks, Jimmy Buffett and the Neville Brothers were always on the jukebox—nowadays on the SoundDock—and if on that rare occasion someone was clueless enough to cause a ruckus, why, it so happened that Bill Billington was also the Newenham magistrate. It had a calming effect on the customers, while in no way dissuading them from having a good time.

&
nbsp; Of course, the downside of only two bars was nine churches, but half of them were teetotalers, and Liam was professionally in favor of teetotaling. Sobriety cut down the workload, especially in rural Alaska.

  Personally, he liked his Glenmorangie straight up. Probably a throwback to his Scots ancestry. Bill kept a bottle behind the bar just for him, and even if the hamburgers hadn’t been the best in town, that would have been enough to guarantee his loyalty. Besides, he liked a quiet drink in good company as much as the next man, and Bill took misbehavior in her bar personally, especially when said misbehavior resulted in destruction of property. It was widely known that in her magistrate persona she could get a little punitive in her sentencing. It had a bracing effect on her patrons’ manners.

  Failing that, Moses Alakuyak could always see fit to prophesy on your ass if you gave his girlfriend, Bill, any trouble.

  The Bay View Inn, Newenham’s only hotel, passed on his right, across the street from city hall. Alta Peterson, the hotel’s owner, looked up from breaking ice from the patch of asphalt in front of the door and waved. Sometimes he wondered if the woman ever slept.

  Boat harbor, harbormaster’s office, bulk store slash Costco wannabe, a bunch of chandler’s stores, a four-space strip mall with a Subway holding down one end and apartments above, the Newenham Telephone Cooperative, the Newenham Electrical Association, a stubby set of town houses with a river view. He turned right and went up a hill, past some old clapboard houses with snow hiding collections of leftover lumber and fifty-five-gallon drums—no one in Bush Alaska ever threw anything away—and around a corner and pulled up in front of the trooper post. It was a small building with one office and two temporary holding cells. The impound lot behind, surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence, was twice the size of the building and currently corralled a posthole digger belonging to Crawdad Homes, who on one of his semiannual benders had seen fit to take it for a joyride up the road to Icky. That would have been fine with Liam if Crawdad had managed to keep it on the right side of the road, and out of Elias Anayuk’s living room.

  Crawdad was now enjoying the hospitality of the Pre-Trial Correction Facility in Anchorage, where he would be smart to stay for as long as possible, given Sally Homes’s sworn oath to yank his liver out through his mouth when he got home.

  He got out and was greeted by a soft croaking. He looked up and found the raven on a branch near the top of a tall spruce, peering down at him with the same beady black eye.

  “What now?” he said, and his voice wasn’t friendly.

  It croaked and clicked at him again.

  “You forget,” Liam said, “I don’t speak raven.”

  The raven clicked some more.

  He waved a dismissive and probably foolhardy hand and said, “Yeah, yeah,” and went inside, closing the door firmly behind him.

  He slung jacket and cap on the coatrack and put his sidearm in a drawer, and sat down to fire up his computer with no little dread. Dispatch called him directly for emergencies, which he actually preferred to the picayune reports that would have stacked up overnight online. The Newenham City Council, like every other city council in the state and the nation, was in a perpetual knot over finances, and filling the vacant positions at NPD had dragged out over two years. Dispatch worked out of one dingy little room in the city hall basement and triaged 911 calls before they got to his cell phone, but that didn’t mean they didn’t all eventually wind up in his in-box, requiring some response on the part of what remained of law and order in Newenham.

  Maybe the next time he got a call to respond to a domestic dispute in Delinquentville, he should just roll over, put his arm around his wife, and go back to sleep.

  Yeah. That’d happen.

  The door opened, and he looked up to behold Jo Dunaway. “And this started out to be such a good day,” he said.

  “Great to see you, too, Liam.” she said. She came in and draped herself decoratively across a chair in front of his desk.

  A thirty-something zaftig blonde with short corkscrew curls and sharp green eyes, Jo was a reporter for the Anchorage News, the state’s newspaper of record. Normally that would be more than enough for him to escort her right back out his door and look not upon the order of her going.

  Normally didn’t include Jo being his wife’s college roommate and lifelong best friend. He bared his teeth. “Great to see you, Jo. How soon will you be leaving us?”

  She bared her teeth right back, and they were sharper than his. “Gary sends his love.”

  Gary being her brother, an Anchorage building contractor who had something of a history with Liam’s wife. Liam felt, not for the first time, that the world was a little too tolerant of the amount of Dunaways in it. “What can I not do for you, Jo?”

  She slid fully into her chair and made an elaborate pretense of getting out her reporter’s notebook, heaving a dramatic sigh, and putting it back in her pocket. “Remember Wes Hardin?”

  He looked and indeed, felt, blank.

  Jo elaborated. “John Neville Hardin, nicknamed Wes? After the famous Wild West gunfighter?”

  “The name rings a bell,” he said cautiously.

  “It should.” From between the pages of her notebook she pulled a piece of paper folded into quarters and handed it to him.

  It was a printout of an obituary from the Anchorage News. “Coastie, State Legislator, Businessman, Philanthropist,” Liam read out loud. “John Neville ‘Wes’ Hardin, a hundred and three, died December twenty-sixth, at the Pioneer Home in Anchorage.” He looked up. “So?”

  “Keep reading,” she said.

  A celebration of his life will be held at 2 P.M. Saturday at the Wendy Williamson Auditorium on the University of Alaska–Anchorage campus. The public is invited to attend. He will be interred in Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery in a private ceremony in the spring.

  Born and raised in Westchester, Connecticut, and a graduate in engineering of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, Wes served 20 years in the U.S. Coast Guard, half of it under way. He rotated ashore for the last time into the job of harbormaster in Juneau, where he was instrumental in the smooth integration of the cruise industry into Southeast Alaska. At the age of 65, he formed his own cruise line, Hardin Cruises, with a fleet of small ships that eventually numbered 10, specializing in luxury cruises with an ecotourism theme. At 70, he sold the line and ran for the state legislature on the Republican ticket, where he served Southeast Alaska for 10 terms. He never won by less than a landslide.

  At the age of 90, he retired from the legislature to start By Your Bootstraps, a nonprofit organization to fund microbusiness start-ups in Alaska employing less than five people and generating less than $300,000 in revenue. Within five years, By Your Bootstraps had awarded grants to over 100 small businesses, and as of the end of the last fiscal year, 76 of those businesses had moved into self-sustaining profitability. For this he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the first Alaskan to be so honored.

  Among many other things, over the years Wes endowed the Hardin Chair of Engineering at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, and founded the John and Geraldine Hardin Cancer Wing at Gastineau Hospital in Juneau, the Geraldine Reid Haven House in Ketchikan and the Geraldine Reid Girl Scouts Jamboree Center in Sitka. He was a past president of Rotary Club Alaska, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Alaska and the Alaska Chamber of Commerce. He was the recipient of honorary PhDs from the University of Alaska and Alaska Pacific University. He and Geraldine leave behind a combined estate valued at over $500 million.

  Wes was preceded in death by his wife of 60 years, Geraldine Reid Hardin, daughter of historic stampeders Elvira and Edward Reid, and by his son, John Reid Hardin, who died in combat in Vietnam. He is survived by his granddaughter, Alexandra.

  He looked up again. “Okay. All-around Alaskan powerhouse and do-gooder dies after a long and useful life. Figure his name was familiar to me in the same way it probably would be to anyone alive and breathing in the state of Alaska during the last century. C
an’t say I ever met him personally. I don’t remember arresting him for anything.”

  Her green eyes narrowed on his face in a way he particularly disliked, mostly because he was afraid she could see right through to his brain to read what was sparking between his synapses. “His name hasn’t come up in conjunction with any investigations you can’t comment on at this time?”

  His eyebrows snapped together. “No.”

  “How about his daughter’s name? Ring any bells?”

  He looked down at the obituary. “Alexandra? No.”

  “Hardin left a lot of money behind,” Jo said. “Settled in a trust for his daughter, Alexandra.”

  “So far, I can see no reason to rush out and cuff and stuff anybody.”

  She gave him a sweet smile. “A lot of Alexandra’s money has gone missing.”

  Her words sank in, and his heart sank.

  Jo Dunaway was a first-class snoop, with a string of awards to her credit, one of them for a recent story in which he had had a prominent role. Since a certain ex-governor had turned Alaska into must-see TV, Jo had also become a regular talking head on various news channels. If Jo was following money to Newenham, it was all too depressingly certain that there was money here to be found.

  When he didn’t say anything, she sat up and leaned forward, elbows on her knees, green eyes intent on Liam’s face, alert to any change of expression. “Alexandra suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s. She requires twenty-four-hour care. Her affairs, including the counting of something on the order of five hundred million dollars in cash, securities, and real property, rest in the irreproachable hands of Chapados, Reid, Reid, McGillivray, and Thrall.” She waited, and when he didn’t say anything, continued. “Which, you may remember, is also the law firm of the estate of the late, unlamented Dagfin Arneson ‘Finn’ Grant.”

  He remembered. Hugh Reid had sprouted on the scene within twenty-four hours of Finn Grant’s death, and appeared to enjoy the full confidence of Finn’s wife and family. His heart sank further but he maintained what he hoped was a neutral and impenetrable expression. “And?”