“He could have been a quadriplegic and you couldn’t have forced him through the doors of a hospital,” Kate said. “He hated hospitals even more than he hated doctors.”
“I got that impression when I suggested he sign a DNR. He was very, ah, colorful and pretty adamant about not falling into the hands of the medical profession, whatever his condition.” Wheeler glanced at the clock on the wall. “So you found his copy of the will.”
“I did.”
“He left a note for you.”
“I know, I’ve got it, although it’s more like a letter. Five pages telling me what to do with his stuff.”
He shook his head. “Not that one. The one he told me to give you when you came in.”
“What note?” Kate said. To be fair, it was barely past noon and it had already been a very long day.
He reached into a drawer and pulled out a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. There was a notary seal and signature over the flap. “To Pete Wheeler, shyster, Ahtna,” Old Sam had written across the front. “After I die, when Kate Shugak, my executor and chief beneficiary, comes to your office, give her this. Samuel Leviticus Dementieff,” followed by the same date on his will.
It was signed by Old Sam, all right, but it was the notary’s signature that made her feel as if the room were beginning to revolve around her. “Jane Silver notarized this?”
“Yeah. Old Sam had her stop by my office that day. She witnessed the will, too.”
Kate pulled out her copy of the will and for the first time looked at the last page. There it was, the same name in the same hand next to the same seal. She said the first thing that came into her head. “Didn’t those used to be embossed?”
“Now they’re peel-and-stick. Or ink stamps.”
Kate looked down at the envelope. Was this the paper Jane had meant? But if so, why hadn’t she said “letter”? And why alert Kate to it when she knew it would be put in Kate’s hands? She looked up. “Do you know what it says?”
He shook his head. “He wrote it himself, he sealed it himself, and then he handed it over to Jane so she could seal it in front of both of us. Your eyes only, he said.” He looked at the clock again, and got to his feet.
She rose with him, and on impulse said, “The homestead he left me?”
“Yeah?” he said, shrugging into his jacket.
“The Parks Service might think it’s theirs.”
His eyebrows went up. “They’d be wrong about that. I cleared the title before your uncle signed the will.”
“You did?”
“Of course,” he said, a little stiffly.
“Did he show you the original documents?”
“Of course.”
“Do you still have them?” His eyebrows drew together, and she said, “Because I can’t find them. He kept everything else in a file box”—she hoped—“but not those.”
“Really,” he said. “How very odd.”
“I talked to Jane Silver yesterday, and she arranged for the names to be changed on the title deed and in the tax records, and she said there shouldn’t be any problem, but if the Parks Service wants to argue about it…”
He grinned. “Am I available? Sure. They won’t, though. Their lawyers don’t like spending money on cases they can’t win.”
Kate thought of Dan’s set expression and wasn’t so sure.
Wheeler looked at the clock again and came out from behind his desk. “Sorry, Ms. Shugak, but if I don’t leave now I’m going to be late, and I really don’t want to be late today.”
The door to his office opened and the reason why stepped inside. Wheeler’s face lit up. “Babe. You didn’t have to walk over.”
“I spend all my time sitting. I can use the exercise.”
They didn’t embrace but they might as well have for all the heavy lifting the vibe was doing.
Sabine Rafferty was one of the new pilots George Perry had hired to cope with all the extra work the Suulutaq Mine had brought into the Park. She was a little older than Kate, with streaked brown hair and artfully applied makeup. She wore a brown bomber jacket lined with sheepskin over a cream-colored turtleneck and a pair of jeans. It should have been jodhpurs to complete the Amelia Earhart ensemble. Her figure was excellent and her clothes fit as if they’d been tailored to the purpose. “Sabine,” Kate said.
“Hello, Kate,” Sabine said all eyes for Wheeler.
Just for the hell of it Kate said, “So, you’re going hunting?”
“Hmm? Hunting? Oh. Yeah, I spotted a smallish herd wandering around Blowout Creek on my way back from Anchorage yesterday. Ready?” she said to Wheeler.
“Oh yeah,” he said wholeheartedly. “Ms. Shugak? If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask, but right now I hear a caribou calling my name.”
Kate thought he was hearing a little more than that but she and Mutt took the door held open as a hint.
Back in the pickup, she watched Rafferty and Wheeler move quickly down the street and around the corner, heading for the Ahtna airport. Or his house, whichever came first. She looked at the sky. Still low, still thick, still a dark gray, still holding back on the snow, but she could almost feel the kiss of the first flake of a four-foot drift on her cheek. She didn’t think Sabine would be going anywhere in the air for a while. But then she didn’t think it was what either she or Wheeler had had in mind.
* * *
The Ahtna Adit had been publishing weekly since 1910, when it was started by George Washington Gunn, a stampeder who had come north in 1898 and stayed. He married locally and had a son, John Adams Gunn, who had also stayed, married locally, and had his own son, Benjamin Franklin Gunn.
The newspaper had begun life as a broadsheet, mostly merchant ads that paid for stories about goings-on in the Park and the territory that would have had its owner up for libel in the local courts, if there had been any local courts around at the time. Grandfather, father, and son had succeeded to the concurrently held posts of publisher, editor, and chief correspondent over the years, until five years before Benjamin Franklin Gunn had yielded to the blandishments of a communications conglomerate from California that made a hobby out of snapping up local Alaska newspapers and radio and television stations. Now they were all run out of a single building in Anchorage with a sales manager to market ad space and a small pool of reporters to generate copy, so that the same story ran the same week on the front page of the Ahtna Adit as on the Bering Beat and the Newenham Seiner. The only consistently local news and the first item anyone turned to was Cops and Courts, a compilation of local arrest reports from state and local police and a list of arraignments, trials, and judgments from the clerk of the Ahtna court.
The good news was that Ben had been able to pay off his mortgage and send his own son, Alexander Hamilton Gunn, to college. His new overlords had kept him on at a decent salary in the rare event that anything of statewide interest happened in the Park so he could cover it for the news bureau back in town. Either lucky or foresighted for them, because the Suulutaq Mine certainly qualified as a story of statewide and possibly even global interest, and he’d been in and out of Niniltna on a monthly basis ever since Global Harvest had announced their discovery.
The Adit’s local office was in another strip mall on another street corner about a mile down the road. Kate parked next to a large white pickup with the chassis jacked up over snow tires large enough to rumble over a decent sized butte without pausing for breath, and went in. There was a counter between the door and a couple of desks and rows of rickety shelving holding up stacks of yellowing issues. Ben sat at one of the desks, typing at a keyboard, staring into a monitor with a bad-tempered expression. As she closed the door behind her he said “Shit!” with great feeling. He put his finger on the delete key and held it down.
“Want me to go back out and come in again?” she said.
He looked up. “Oh, hi, Kate.” He let up on the delete key.
“Work not going well?”
He looked back at the monitor and ma
de a disgusted sound. “Writing copy and writing fiction are two very different things, I’m finding out.”
Kate thought of all the things she could have said to a journalist about what appeared in his newspaper. Instead she said, “Fiction?”
He looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah, well, I’m trying my hand at a novel.”
“You’re kidding.” Again she refrained from the obvious comment. “What about?”
“Based on my grandfather’s life. You know. Klondike stampeder to frontier journalist to delegate to the state constitutional convention. Sort of a look at that fifty years of Alaska history through one person’s lifetime.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Not the way I’m writing it,” he said, glaring at the monitor again.
She looked at the books stacked on the desk, some open, some closed, all of them festooned with yellow sticky notes. “Research?”
He gave a gloomy nod. “I swear to god, I don’t think anyone’s ever come to Alaska without writing a book about it. Hell, I think half of them come with that intention.” He nudged one stack of books, which teetered alarmingly. “Granddad kept a journal, too, but at least he had the sense not to publish it.”
“Maybe you should just write his biography.”
He shook his head. “Nobody’d believe the truth. The Wild West had nothing on the Frozen North, Kate, believe me. Soapy Smith was an amateur compared to some of the crooks that operated around here, taking the miners for everything they could get. Christ, if even a fraction of Granddad’s stories are true, half the gold they took out of Alaska during those years was stolen before it ever got to the assayer’s office. And a lot of the time people had been murdered for it.”
“Make for a fun read, I would think,” she said, and wished Old Sam had kept a journal. The letter Wheeler had given her, which she had yet to open, felt heavy in the inside breast pocket of her jacket.
“It is that. When you can read it. Granddad had the world’s worst penmanship.” He grinned at her. “What can I do for you, Kate? Oh.” He sat up and looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Come to give me that interview I keep asking you for? The Niniltna Native Association Chief Speaks?”
“I’m not the chief,” Kate said.
“Near as,” he said. “Well?”
“No.” Kate looked down at her hands, which had folded themselves on the counter. “Can you help me write an obituary?”
His grin faded. “Old Sam?”
“Yes.”
He got up and held open the swinging half door at the end of the counter. “Have a seat.”
She settled into a chair next to his desk. She talked, he typed. It took a full hour because Kate kept remembering more stuff, and when they were done he sent it to print and sat back in his chair. “Had one hell of a life,” he said. “I didn’t know he was Chief Lev’s grandson. That’s back a ways.” He counted on his fingers, and whistled. “Damn, going on a century now.”
“You know about Chief Lev?”
“Granddad knew him. There was some stuff about the chief and his tribe early in the journals. A lot of crap went down during and after the Spanish flu epidemic. Lev and his wife both died in it.” He frowned. “There was something about the potlatch—”
“Your grandfather wrote about the Natives in this area?” Ben nodded. “I wouldn’t mind reading that myself.”
“Sure, anytime. Like I said, though, you sort of have to decipher it as you go along.”
“Sounds like something to do on a dark winter night.”
“Yeah, with a hundred-fifty-watt bulb and a magnifying glass.” He leaned forward to pull Old Sam’s obituary out of the printer tray. “I’m guessing you want copies.”
“A thousand,” she said. At his look she said, “Potlatch in January. All the people who come will want their own copies so they can tell me everything I got wrong.”
He laughed. “Mail them to Niniltna when they’re done?”
“Yeah.”
“You want it in the paper, too?”
She nodded.
“Hate to have to tell you this, but we charge to print obituaries nowadays.”
“I figured. How much?” When he told her she only blanched and dug out the fistful of cash she’d gotten from the bank when she hit town yesterday afternoon.
“You want to run it statewide?”
She hesitated. The Ahtna Adit was a local paper. Old Sam had been very much a local guy. So far as she knew, the farthest he’d ever been from home was the Aleutians in World War II. Still, he’d been well known statewide in the Native community. He’d taken over Emaa’s seat on the board, serving in the capacity of resident old fart without fear or favor. He had leavened more than one board meeting with an acid commentary that had flayed the skin off any board member unwise enough to float a plan Old Sam considered to be either too expensive to implement or just plain silly on the face of it. She smiled at the memory, and winced a little, too, because she had not been exempt.
Old Sam had been the Greek chorus of the NNA board. Who could fill those shoes?
She sat up with a jolt. Oh god, no.
She saw by Ben’s expression that she’d said the words out loud. “Sorry. Thinking about something else.” His journalist’s nose gave an inquisitive twitch, and she said, “How much to run his obituary statewide, in all of your newspapers, one time?”
More money exchanged hands. Ben busied himself logging on so he could distribute Old Sam’s obituary to the other newspapers via e-mail, while she sat and thought with increasing dread about who would take Old Sam’s place on the board. How could she have forgotten the empty seat he’d left behind until this moment?
The waters the NNA board sailed could get pretty choppy, especially with Ulanie Anahonak ready to fire the first shot in a Park culture war on one side, and Harvey Meganack on the other ready to sign off on anything anybody wanted to dig up or cut down or fish out in the Park. Old Sam had been her sheet anchor on the board, ready to cut the argument from beneath the feet of whichever board member he considered to be behaving foolishly, selfishly, or greedily. The perfect mixture of sarcasm and common sense, along with the rock-ribbed fearlessness to say what he thought when he thought it, added to the already considerable gravitas of having more time served in the Park than anyone else around the table.
Old Sam had sat on her left hand. Auntie Joy sat on her right. In neither word nor deed had either ever betrayed a prior relationship other than that of cousins. He’d cut Auntie Joy no slack over her motion to charge for berry picking on Native lands in the Park at the last board meeting, either. There had certainly been nothing of the lover or even ex-lover about him that day.
Come to that, how close cousins were they? First cousins, or third cousins once removed? It might have something to do with why their relationship, if a relationship there had been, had gone south. “When did your grandfather die?” she said.
He looked up from the keyboard, surprised. “Granddad? Ah, October 1945. He made it through the war. He waited until Dad got home from the Aleutians. He died two days later, I think it was.”
October 1945. The same month Old Sam’s homestead claim had been affirmed. Kate couldn’t see what the connection might be, if any. A lot of veterans coming home at the same time. “Your dad was in the Aleutians?”
Ben nodded. “Castner’s Cutthroats. Same as Old Sam. You know the kind Castner was looking for. The Aleutians in wartime weren’t for sissies.” He shuddered. “Ever read up on the Battle of Attu? Two weeks of some of the bloodiest fighting of the whole war, including Europe and the South Pacific. When you look at the casualty rate as a percentage of troops involved, the Battle of Attu rates second only to Iwo Jima. And that’s just the Americans. When it was over, there were only twenty-eight Japanese taken prisoner, none of them officers. Six hundred Japanese troops committed suicide at once by exploding their own grenades against their chests.”
“Old Sam never talked about it.”
“Neither d
id Dad. I learned most of what I know about their war the way we all did.”
Kate gave a rueful nod. “Garfield’s The Thousand-Mile War. Who ran the paper while your dad was gone?”
“Mom and Granddad. Mom would write any stories that came in the door and Granddad ran the press. Never missed an issue. Even if it was mostly rip-and-read.” He saw Kate’s look and elaborated. “Cut and paste from the wires, like the Associated Press and Reuters. But hell, Granddad said all anybody wanted to read back then was war news, and that’s about all there was on the wires.”
On impulse Kate said, “Did your father ever talk about meeting Dashiell Hammett in the Aleutians?”
“Dashiell Hammett?”
Ben raised an eyebrow, and Kate supposed it was something of a stretch for a segue. “The guy who wrote The Maltese Falcon.”
“I know who wrote The Maltese Falcon, Kate. He also wrote The Thin Man.”
“Yeah, well—”
“Also Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Glass Key—”
“Yeah, okay, Ben—”
“And a bunch of short stories about the Continental Op under various titles, my favorite of which is ‘The Creeping Siamese.’ His CO in the Aleutians was a big fan and made him the editor of the camp newspaper. The Adakian was said to be the best written and the best edited newspaper in the army.”
Kate waited a moment before saying, “Are you done?”
“Not even.” He was still a little miffed. “Why do you ask if Dad met Hammett?”
“Jane Silver was telling me yesterday that Old Sam met him.” And Tony at the Ahtna Lodge, and who knew who else before she was done winding up Old Sam’s affairs.
Ben frowned. “Old Sam met Hammett, did he?”
“That’s what Jane said. When they were both in the Aleutians.” She paused. “Did your dad say anything about meeting him?”
He shook his head. “Not a peep. I’ll have to rod on over to the courthouse, interview Jane myself.”
“Jane Silver is dead,” she said.
He stared at her. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. She died at her house this morning.” The blood on the knees of her jeans had dried to a mud-brown.
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