Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “No,” Kate said.

  “I see. Have you a reference?”

  “No.”

  Ms. Sherwood nodded as if these brief and unequivocal answers had meant something more, and rose to her feet. She was a slim and elegant woman dressed in a slim and elegant gray knit dress with a white collar and cuffs, a thin white belt, and a hemline that hit her at mid-calf, over sheer stockings and elegant black pumps. She looked like Coco Chanel.

  She walked through the swinging door in the railing and held it open. “Please come in.”

  Twenty-five

  The Legacy of Alaska Museum was the largest privately owned collection of Alaskana in the state. Lucius Bell had started collecting Native art and artifacts the moment he set foot in the territory. He had also been a pack rat of the first order, from the looks of it never having thrown away so much as a used-up book of matches.

  The exhibit space took up almost the entire basement of the building, or a square block’s worth of space. Every square foot of it was utilized to the maximum to present the entirety of Alaska history from the pre-Russian to the post-statehood days. There was an Alutiiq kayak suspended from the ceiling, and a P and H Lines stagecoach in one corner. A framed photograph was fastened to the door of the stagecoach. It recorded the ceremony at which Hermann Pilz, Peter Heiman Sr., and P and H’s executive director donated the coach to the museum, presided over by a suitably grateful Marcellus Bell. The names listed on the caption at the bottom were interesting.

  There was a copy of the state constitution signed by all fifty-five delegates to the constitutional convention. There were bears carved from ivory and soapstone; storyknives carved from ivory, wood, bone, and baleen; rye grass baskets from the size of an eggcup to a five-gallon bucket. The walls above the shelves were hung with paintings by Laurence and Ziegler, Anuktuvuk face masks, harpoons with enormous, elaborately carved ivory hooks. There was a case holding all the Fur Rendezvous buttons ever produced, right next to another filled with wooden drink tokens from every bar that had opened its doors north of the fifty-three. There was a metal cabinet with a dozen wide, shallow drawers that proved to hold maps of Alaska from the days of Captain Cook, when most of the coastline was only guessed at, to USGS maps that were still inaccurate today.

  There was a display devoted to the oil industry from Katalla to Kenai to Prudhoe Bay, including a section of drill pipe attached to the tricone bit invented by Howard Hughes’s dad. There was a display of artifacts from the salmon industry, including caviar jars nestled in their original wooden box with the bright blue-and-red Japanese lettering on the side, an egg basket stained from use, half-pound flats, and one-pound talls.

  “I know someone who has a working salmon canning line set up in a shed in back of his house,” Kate said.

  “Really,” Ms. Sherwood said. “Would he be interested in selling it?”

  Kate looked around the room. “He might be interested in selling, but where would you put it?”

  “We have off-site storage facilities.”

  A corner shelf played host to a miscellanea of gold mining relics, gold pans, gold leaf suspended in vials of water, what looked like the entire ton of supplies, including stove and fuel, required to get someone across the border into Canada during the Gold Rush. There were framed front pages from the Dawson City Nugget, the Fairbanks Nugget, and the Nome Nugget, all of which featured at least one murder resulting over a claim jumping. A dogsled held all the required gear of an Iditarod musher, parka, sleeping bag, ax, snowshoes, dog booties, food for musher and dog, plus mail and even a box marked “Serum” to commemorate the original 1925 run to a diphtheria-stricken Nome. It looked familiar. She paused for a closer look, and said, “Is this—”

  Ms. Sherwood smiled. “Yes. It is the sled Ms. Baker was on when she won her first Iditarod. Along with all of the required items she carried during that race. The food is a representation, of course.”

  Mandy didn’t give up on gear that worked for her. “When did she donate it?”

  “In January,” Ms. Swanson said. “It’s one of our most recent acquisitions.”

  Just after she’d taken the job with Global Harvest, Kate thought. Mandy really had retired.

  One wall was covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves, the books sorted by year, beginning on the left with Alaska Native studies, followed shelf by shelf in order by Russian America, the Alaska Purchase, the Gold Rush, World War II, the oil discoveries, and the Alaska Native Land Claims, much of it original documentation, some of it handwritten journals. She saw a lot of names she recognized—Wickersham, Mitchell, Gruening, Peratovich, Hensley.

  Kate was enthralled, and she could have spent the rest of the day if not the rest of the year in this one room, but she was recalled to duty by a discreet cough. She looked up to see Ms. Sherwood standing nearby with her hands clasped lightly in front of her, head tilted to one side, the ghost of a smile on her lips.

  “Sorry,” Kate said, her voice hushed. “It’s just—”

  “I know,” Ms. Sherwood said without being at all condescending. “It is a little overwhelming. Especially when you realize the bulk of it comes from the work of one man, during one lifetime.”

  Kate indicated a label on the shelf in front of a tin gold pan that had seen hard use, labeled “Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Pilz.” There were other labels on other exhibits, all of them bearing names right out of the Alaskan history books. “He had help.”

  Ms. Sherwood’s shoulders raised in a slight shrug. “Everyone wanted to be a part of Mr. Bell’s museum.”

  Kate looked at the four wooden tables lined up behind Ms. Sherwood’s desk. Three were occupied by two men and one woman consulting various tomes and scribbling notes. “You get a lot of people in here?”

  Ms. Sherwood nodded. “Students from the university, scholars, writers doing research. There is nothing more valuable to a scholar than original source material.” She smoothed an errant mote of dust from a shelf with a forefinger.

  “It’s impressive as hell,” Kate said. “You’ve packed an awful lot into a relatively small space.”

  Ms. Sherwood inclined her head, accepting her due. “Thank you.”

  “Well.” With an effort, Kate pulled her head out of their collective past and back into the present. “What particular item does the slip refer to?”

  And then it hit her.

  Handwritten journals.

  She rotated where she stood, running her eyes over the spines of the books.

  She must have had a very peculiar expression on her face because Ms. Sherwood sounded worried. “Ms. Shugak? Are you all right?”

  Kate turned to her. “Ms. Sherwood, have you ever heard of Judge Albert Arthur Anglebrandt?”

  Ms. Sherwood looked surprised. “Why of course,” she said. “We have the journals he kept while he presided over the court in Ahtna.”

  “Not all of them,” Kate said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Kate held up the call slip. “Does this refer to one of them?”

  “It refers to all of the Anglebrandt journals. The gentleman did not ask for a particular volume.”

  “Could you show me? Please?”

  Ms. Sherwood navigated between various shoals of this historical and cultural sea to a bookcase halfway around the room and pointed at a shelf that was a good four feet over Kate’s head. “One moment.” She was back in short order with a wheeled ladder attached to a track that ran above all the bookcases. Very Henry Higgins. “Were you interested in a particular volume?”

  “Nineteen thirty-seven and 1939,” Kate said.

  Ms. Sherwood climbed the ladder and sorted through a line of journals once, and then again. “How very odd,” she said, and Kate could hear the steel threading through her voice.

  “They aren’t there,” Kate said.

  Ms. Sherwood descended the ladder. She looked angry, albeit in a repressed, upper-class Anglo-Saxon way. “No, they are not,” she said. “Would you mind telling me how you
knew that, Ms. Shugak?”

  “When was the last time they were inventoried?” Kate said.

  For the first time the curator looked nonplussed. She paused to collect herself, and then said, her voice returned to its muted lower register librarian tone, “During my tenure? Never.”

  She offered no apologies or explanations and Kate respected her for it. “Would there be a record?”

  Ms. Sherwood led the way to a door hitherto partially concealed by a magnificent Tlingit button blanket, which led into a room with a bank of file cabinets behind a desk with a computer on it. Ms. Sherwood sat down at the computer and indicated a chair. “Please have a seat.”

  Kate did so and watched Ms. Sherwood start the computer with a perfect composure that nonetheless gave the distinct impression that someone was for the high jump in the not too distant future. It took her only a few moments to access the needed data, whereupon Ms. Sherwood’s spine if anything grew even more straight. “The judge left his journals behind for the judge who succeeded him when he left the state in 1945,” she said.

  The year Old Sam came home from the Aleutians, Kate thought. The year he proved up on his homestead. The year Auntie Joy turned him down for the second time. “How did they come here?” she said.

  “They had been stored in the basement of the old courthouse in Ahtna,” Ms. Sherwood said. “When they built the new courthouse five years ago, Judge Singh asked us if we would like to have them.”

  Five years ago, Kate thought. Old Sam had done some work for the new courthouse, hauling Kanuyaq River rocks to Ahtna for the façade. “Do your records show 1937 and 1939 as missing?”

  Ms. Swanson shook her head. “I’m afraid they were not properly inventoried when they were accepted into the collection.”

  “So they could have been part of the collection,” Kate said. “Which means they could have walked out of the building at any time.”

  Ms. Sherwood’s nostrils flared slightly. “Not since I have been curator here, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you familiar with RFID technology?” She saw her answer on Kate’s face. “Radio frequency identification. It was the second mission I undertook after I was appointed.”

  “What was the first?”

  Ms. Sherwood nodded at the computer. “The digitization of all of our records.”

  “What does this RFID do?”

  “A small electronic tag is placed on each item in the collection. It does two things. One, it trips an alarm if it is moved from its display. Two, it tracks the item.”

  A chill ran up Kate’s spine. “How far?”

  “Up to forty feet. It will be more eventually, as the technology advances, but at present, so long as staff is vigilant, it is enough to intercept the item before it gets to the parking lot outside. And presumably a getaway vehicle.”

  Kate breathed again. The 1939 journal was tucked safely away at the Westchester Lagoon town house a mile away. “Sounds expensive,” she said.

  “Not very, when you consider that the combined value of the collection is in the millions of dollars. Many of the items are priceless simply because they are irreplaceable.” Ms. Sherwood hesitated. “Ms. Shugak. Am I correct in thinking you are related to Ekaterina Shugak?”

  “She was my grandmother.”

  “I see.” Ms. Sherwood rose to her feet. “There is something you might like to see.”

  She led the way back into the main room and to a glass-topped table planted directly in front of the Native studies bookcase. Inside was a Raven feast bowl, made of solid copper, eight inches wide, twelve inches long, and thirteen inches deep. The label read, “The gift of Ekaterina Shugak, 1972.”

  “Holy crap,” Kate said. They had been speaking in hushed voices, but at this the three people seated at the tables raised their heads.

  “Sorry,” Kate said to them. “Sorry,” she said to Ms. Sherwood. She looked back down at the bowl.

  “Do you know anything about its history?” Ms. Sherwood said.

  Kate shook her head. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it,” she said.

  “Is there someone older you could ask? The story behind the artifact is as valuable, if not more so, than is the artifact itself.”

  Kate thought of the aunties, and looked back at the bowl. The original carving was blunted by long use, and there were dents on the interior and exterior surfaces and scratches in the patina. It looked Tlingit.

  It looked, in fact, like something a Tlingit chief might bring as part of a bride price when he married into an Interior tribe. “I can ask,” she said. “I can’t promise you any answers. Is there a photograph?”

  There was, and Kate tucked it carefully away.

  Ms. Sherwood escorted her through the gate. Kate lingered while she reseated herself. “Ms. Sherwood?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you mind very much telling me the name of the person who first came to look at the judge’s journals?”

  “He did not give me his name,” Ms. Swanson said.

  “But you let him in anyway,” Kate said.

  Ms. Sherwood forbore to point out that she had let Kate in, too. “He had a quite impeccable reference.”

  “Did he,” Kate said. “Would you mind telling me who it was? And if he was in here again today?”

  Ms. Sherwood had an uncharacteristic moment of hesitation.

  “I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important,” Kate said. “I’m trying to track down another family artifact.” She looked over her shoulder at the display case holding the feast bowl, and from the corner of her eye saw Ms. Sherwood follow her gaze.

  She looked back to meet Ms. Sherwood’s direct gaze. There were no flies on Coco Chanel. “And if I tell you, you’ll try to find out about the history of the feast bowl?”

  Kate didn’t flinch. “Of course.”

  “Erland Bannister,” Ms. Sherwood said.

  * * *

  Kate arrived back at the Subaru without any notion of how she’d gotten there. Mutt, snoozing in the sun with her chin on the passenger-side windowsill, woke up with a snort. “Tell me,” Kate said to her, “explain to me how a guy I helped put away two years ago can be mixed up in this fucking scavenger hunt of Old Sam’s?”

  Mutt shook herself vigorously and let out with a large “Woof!” which startled a shriek out of a woman on the other side of the open window who was on her way into the bank to clean out the joint account she held with her husband, in preparation for filing for divorce that afternoon.

  Kate fished out her cell phone and called Brendan. The deep rich tones rolled over her like a warm bath of caramel. “Babe! You’re still in town! Dinner again tonight? I’m thinking sushi at Yamato Ya this time, and—”

  “Brendan, where is Erland Bannister?”

  A startled silence, then, “Right where we put him, last time I looked.”

  “You’re sure?” Something in the quality of the silence that followed put her on alert. “Brendan? Is he getting out?”

  “I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” he said.

  She hung up and stared, unseeing, through the windshield.

  Erland Bannister was an éminence grise of the Alaskan robber barons, every bit as eminent and successful as Lucius Bell and Peter Heiman the elder, and Hermann Pilz, his grandfather, and Isaiah Bannister, his other grandfather.

  Erland Bannister had kidnapped Kate two years before because she had discovered a little too much about his family history. He’d had every intention of killing her shortly thereafter. She’d had other ideas.

  Upon her escape he had been arrested, tried, convicted, and incarcerated for what almost everyone involved hoped would be the rest of his natural life.

  She waited. The woman who had shrieked exited the bank and made a wide detour around the Subaru to get back to her own car. Seven minutes later Kate’s phone rang and she snatched at it. “Brendan?”

  “He’s right where we left him, Kate. In Spring Creek.” But she could hear the relief in
his voice.

  Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward was the state’s only maximum security prison, built for felony offenders. Seward was a hundred miles down the only road south from Anchorage, on a narrow fjord called Resurrection Bay. “For how much longer?” she said.

  Again, he let the silence speak for him.

  She swore, imaginatively and at length. “Can you get me in to see him?”

  She could hear the surprise in Brendan’s voice. “You want to see Erland Bannister?”

  “Yes.”

  A short silence. “When?”

  “As soon as I can get down there.”

  “Wait a minute.” She heard the keys click on his keyboard. “He’s in the general population. Tomorrow’s Sunday, so either one P.M. to four P.M., or six thirty to nine.”

  “I can be there by one.”

  “I’ll clear it with the superintendent.” A pause. “He doesn’t have to see you if he doesn’t want to, Kate.”

  “He’ll want to,” she said.

  Twenty-six

  She picked up a sliced smoked ham hock and a small cabbage on the way back to the town house. She put the ham hock into a pot of water with a bay leaf and a couple of cloves of peeled, smashed garlic, brought it to a boil, and reduced it to a simmer. “Come on,” she said to Mutt, and they went out to join the throng of walkers, bikers, rollerbladers, and skateboarders on the Coastal Trail.

  It was a clear, cool autumn afternoon during one of Alaska’s rare Indian summers. The sky was pale blue, Knik Arm a pale gray, and the leaves of the deciduous trees every shade from pale yellow to golden brown, drifting delicately down to the ground one at a time to form crisp, colorful piles that begged to be scuffed into a cloud. Mutt romped through every one she came to, delighting a few commuters, alarming more. “You should keep your dog under control,” one said.

  “She is under control,” Kate said.

  “She should be on a leash.”

  Kate didn’t raise her voice. “Mutt. Heel.”

  Mutt, sniffing at a promising hole in a way guaranteed to strike terror into the hearts of its inhabitants, streaked to Kate’s side and took up station to starboard, her shoulder precisely even with Kate’s hip, and cast a quizzical eye upon the volunteer trail warden.