Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  They were allowed to continue on their way in peace. After Lyn Ary Park the traffic abated and Kate picked up the pace. It felt good to stretch her legs, and unless she went for a hike on one of the trails into the Chugachs, this was as close to a wilderness experience as she was going to get in Anchorage.

  She had hiked those trails regularly when she lived in Anchorage, working for the DA. Flattop was too crowded for her taste, but the less-well-known Near Point was only three and a half hours trailhead to summit to trailhead, and in late June was awash in a sea of wildflowers, everything from chocolate lilies to western columbine. She’d climbed it two or three times a week in season, back in the day, and on visits to Anchorage after she’d moved back to the Park.

  She hadn’t hiked it since she had been kidnapped and brought unconscious to a cabin in the back range of those same Chugach Mountains.

  Coincidence? Survey says not.

  “Erland Bannister is in prison for murder and kidnapping,” she had said to Ms. Sherwood after a moment of stunned silence.

  Ms. Sherwood had waited a moment to reply. “That may be so, Ms. Shugak, but he is not forgotten by his friends.”

  Sherwood took her orders from the Bells, owners of the Last Frontier Bank. Which meant Bannister had asked for a favor, and one of Lucius Bell’s descendants had granted it.

  If Abbott was working for Bannister, then Bannister had ordered him after Kate. If it were simple revenge for locking him up for life, why would he have waited two years?

  No, she’d been right the first time. Whatever was going on, it began with Old Sam.

  So how did Old Sam know Erland? They weren’t contemporaries, Old Sam must have had at least twenty years on the other man.

  But the Bannisters had come north in the Gold Rush, if Kate remembered her Alaska history correctly. So Erland’s father might have known Old Sam.

  Mutt gave her an affectionate shoulder bump that nearly knocked her off her feet. They had reached the bench below Earthquake Park. The light was fading and she wondered how long she had been standing there lost in thought.

  She turned and headed for home. When she let them in the door, the aroma of dinner had flooded the entire house. Drool pooled in her mouth. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Shoes kicked off, jacket tossed on a chair, she tuned in the radio to All Things Considered and cut half of the cabbage into one-inch squares. She removed the ham hock from the broth, cut up a potato, and added the cabbage and potato to the broth. She brought it back to a boil, reduced it to a simmer, and set the timer for twenty minutes. In the meantime she separated the meat from the bone and the fat. The meat went on a plate in a warm oven and the bone and the fat went into a bowl for Mutt, who settled down with it in the postage-stamp-sized backyard with an air of deep content.

  The dinger went. She removed the plate of meat from the oven, ladled out potato and cabbage, buttered a slice of whole wheat bread from Europa Bakery, sat down, and tucked in. She didn’t think about Old Sam or Bruce Abbott or Erland Bannister. Nothing ever came between Kate and food.

  After cleaning up she let Mutt back in and moved operations to the living room, where she built a fire in the fireplace and put her feet up, watching the flames flicker over Mutt’s prone form and sipping from a mug of steaming hot cocoa. Then and only then did she allow the case, for lack of a better word, to reinvade her consciousness.

  Something had been tickling at the back of her mind since she’d found the second journal in the cabin.

  Was Old Sam really leaving breadcrumbs for her? Had he known someone would come looking for something he had? Why would they wait until he died? She’d been attacked three times and Jane Silver once. The number argued in favor of someone looking for something valuable, and looking with considerable urgency, too. If they wanted it that badly, why not go after it when Old Sam was still living? He’d been a tough old bird, true, but no one was invulnerable. She thought about her pickup going ass over teakettle off the road.

  But that was odd, too. The attacks in Old Sam’s two cabins had robbery as a motive. The attack on the road, on the face of it, had only assault with intent as a motive. No one had come stumbling out into the snow after her to search her or her truck for the icon or a clue as to its whereabouts. Or to dispose of competition.

  The person who had attacked her at the cabin in Niniltna didn’t have to be the same person who had killed Jane Silver, and the person who had killed Jane Silver didn’t have to be the same person who had run her off the road on the way home. And the two people at Canyon Hot Springs didn’t have to be either of them. So it could be Wheeler and Gunn and Abbott all three, severally or together. And/or anyone within earshot of Virginia Anahonak.

  She shook her head, frustrated. It was like playing Whack-A-Perp. It might be better to look at it from a different perspective. How many people could have known about the existence of the icon?

  Other than what appeared to be an entire generation of Park rat elders, many of whom were still living.

  Grandma used to say he shouldn’t have been a shareholder at all.

  And even if it had never percolated as far as Kate, at least one of those elders had told their children’s children. Which widened the pool of suspects considerably.

  Not a significantly better perspective, then. Her heart sank, but only for a moment. “Occam’s razor, Kate,” she said out loud.

  Mutt cocked a warning ear without opening her eyes.

  The simplest answer was the one most likely to be true. She wasn’t going to complicate things until she had to. One set of antagonists with the one goal would do her just fine until she had hard evidence that there was more than one.

  One thing was very clear. Old Sam was at the center of this, whatever it was.

  What would Old Sam have done, confronted first with the knowledge of his true parentage, and then with the knowledge that that father had stolen a revered tribal artifact?

  Well, he was young, and he was in love, and he was a guy. Maybe he thought given enough time Auntie Joy would change her mind. In the meantime he would go looking for the icon, because how could Auntie Joy possibly turn down the man who returned something that valuable to their common heritage?

  On the face of it, in those pre-Google years, the task would have seemed almost impossible. According to Mac’s story, the icon had been sold along with the contents of the rest of his pack on the docks of Seattle to the first person he’d met with cash in hand, whose name he said he couldn’t remember.

  One step ahead of the clap on his shoulder.

  Old Sam had had two of the judge’s journals, which he had probably acquired during the teardown of the old courthouse, very probably by means that would not bear close examination. One he had left in plain sight on the shelf in his cabin in Niniltna. The other he had secreted in a hiding place made specifically for that purpose in the old cabin at Canyon Hot Springs.

  She got up and checked to see that the drapes were securely drawn, that no one standing in what was now the dark could see inside. From there she went to the book shelf that stood against one wall and pulled down a book whose bright jacket announced it to be an omnibus volume of The Lord of the Rings. Inside the jacket was the journal.

  She took it back to the couch and spent the next hour paging through it, one part of her enjoying the judge’s observations on his fellow man, the other impatient to discover why Old Sam had hidden it. She came to the last page with no further clue, and closed the book with more force that was owed a tome of its age and venerability.

  Kate replaced the Lord of the Rings jacket, and noticed for the first time that the back cover of the journal was slightly thicker than the front cover.

  Her heart skipped a beat. She pulled the lamp closer, so that it would shine directly on her lap, and opened the journal from the back. Substantial leather, marked with use and faded from age. The lining was of some paper so heavy it was almost fabric, trimmed to a finished edge and glued over the edges of the leather used to cover the b
ook boards.

  She compared the inside of the back of the book with the inside of the front of the book, and her excitement grew. The paper covering the inside of the back of the book was a different kind than had been used to cover the inside of the front of the book. And it was obviously newer.

  She ran her fingers over it once, and again. Was there something hidden beneath it?

  Still, she hesitated. Desecrating a book went against the Shugak grain. Maybe she could steam it open. But the steam might ruin whatever was beneath. She picked at an edge with a fingernail, and was rewarded when a tiny section of it separated from the leather.

  Working steadily, so intent on what she was doing that she didn’t notice the ache in her shoulders as she sat hunched over the task, she picked patiently at the paper lining the inside back cover of the journal of Judge Albert Arthur Anglebrandt, Ahtna Judicial District, Territory of Alaska, 1939. It was midnight before she had enough peeled away so she could see what lay beneath.

  The board beneath the paper and the leather had been hollowed out, not much and very deliberately and carefully, so that what it contained fit into it so well one of Kate’s fingernails could barely fit between it and the board. The small blade on her Leatherman did the job, though.

  The piece of paper, folded twice, fell into her hand.

  She unfolded it. It was a map.

  She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding, and took the map into the kitchen. She turned on the overhead light, which was of a wattage sufficient to illuminate Carnegie Hall, and spread the map on the kitchen table, smoothing out the creases and weighting down the corners with salt and pepper shakers, a bottle of malt vinegar, and an apple out of the refrigerator.

  Unfolded, it was eighteen inches square, and it seemed to have been done by a professional cartographer, although it was hand drawn, not printed out of a computer program, and she was pretty sure it was the original, not a copy, but it was deteriorating. The folds and corners were frayed, the paper dry and brittle. Maybe this was what an as-built survey looked like circa 1920.

  It was a faithful rendering of the Canyon Hot Springs homestead, all one hundred and sixty acres represented, contours drawn in. The cabin and the outhouse were there, along with a well, which Kate had never seen. Probably collapsed by now anyway. She couldn’t conceive of the sweat equity that would go into drilling a well back then, or the backbreaking necessity of hauling the drilling equipment that far in country in the first place.

  The homestead property included all of the little canyon from the switchback around the saddle to well above the switchback behind the springs. Kate’s brow furrowed. She’d never thought to go back there. There there be glaciers, and what was the point, other than having a piece fall on you? She wasn’t the suicidal type.

  She looked more closely. The buildings of the homestead appeared to have been added to the topographical map much later. The ink of the topography was faded by comparison to the ink of the buildings.

  She noticed something else, something she had thought at first were specks of ink or dirt or mildew, but no. They were small black dots—six, no, eight, no, nine of them—all located up around the corner of the higher switchback.

  She straightened. Huh.

  She bent over again, looking for a key. It was right on a crease, naturally, and the fold had frayed the key almost to the point of illegibility.

  She went upstairs to the office and rummaged around in the desk until she found a magnifying glass, and brought it back to the kitchen.

  Almost, but not quite. The magnifying glass, of a size and clarity that was worthy of Sherlock Holmes, caused the ragged edge of every minuscule fray and tear to spring into acute focus.

  She looked at the black dots again. They weren’t black dots at all; they were tiny little crossed picks and shovels.

  The topographical symbol for a mine.

  After a single, stunned moment, her first reaction was fury. Not for the first time that week, she could have reanimated Old Sam, she would have, for the pleasure of killing him and burying him all over again.

  Just what the Park needed, another fucking gold mine.

  And not just one more fucking gold mine.

  Nine of them.

  She sat there in stupefied silence for longer than she cared to remember, before tucking the map back inside the lining of the journal and placing the journal once more under cover of Tolkien and the journal back on the shelf.

  That night she dreamed of Old Sam in the captain’s chair on the bridge of the Freya, one hand on the spoke of the wheel, his head thrown back, laughing, and laughing, and laughing.

  Twenty-seven

  The next morning she gassed up the Subaru and hit the road that led east down Turnagain Arm, up through the red and gold autumnal glory of Turnagain Pass, and down again to Resurrection Bay. She stopped at the bakery in Girdwood for a cake donut to tide her over until breakfast in Moose Pass. There was little traffic on this Sunday morning in late September and it hadn’t snowed yet enough to stick on the highway, so she was in Seward in less than three hours.

  She spent those three hours thinking about Erland Bannister. She was not looking forward to the coming interview.

  Other than at his trial—oh, and when he’d kidnapped her and tried to kill her—she’d only met him twice, once at a party at his palatial home in Turnagain and one evening for dinner at a restaurant. He was charming, intelligent, arrogant, manipulative, and absolutely ruthless. He also had, give the devil his due, immense courage, in that he had done his own kidnapping and attempted murdering instead of farming it out. Although, now that she thought about it, the decision to do so would have been more a matter of security. You do your own dirty work and then you only have to keep your own mouth shut, you never have to worry about anyone else’s.

  He had of course been able to afford the very best defense attorney, one imported from Texas, a colorful and eloquent man who had endeared himself to the jury with his cowboy boots and his cowboy hat. Alaskan juries, while notoriously determined to find someone guilty for every crime, were susceptible to someone who not only looked like a Texas Ranger, he sounded like Jimmy Stewart.

  Fortunately for the state, they had Kate Shugak as their star witness, notorious for being impervious to any attempted seduction by the defense. Their case was also helped by the judge, whose grandfather had been a businessman who had come north during the gold rush, and whose attempts to join the coalition of the venal had been roundly snubbed by Pilz, Heiman, Bannister, et al. He eventually went bankrupt and killed himself in 1929, which event had been faithfully handed down to the next generation and the generation after that, sparing none of the gory details and taking no prisoners in naming names. We are what our parents make us.

  Her sangfroid on the stand had not come without effort. Every moment she was in the courtroom, she could feel Erland’s eyes on her. She met them from time to time, refusing to be intimidated. She saw no anger there, or resentment, only a cold calculation, a summing up of her every word and expression, filed away for future reference. She had thought little of it at the time, and less after his conviction, but alas, the enmity of the judge’s family for the Bannister family had revealed itself in some of the judge’s subsequent rulings at trial. According to Brendan’s phone call that morning, the rulings provided a legitimate basis for an appeal. Which meant Erland could get out.

  An Erland Bannister on the loose was not a pretty picture, especially an Erland Bannister with a grudge against Kate Shugak. This was a man with a lot of money and a lot of power, and he knew how to use them both. Kate had very little power and no money at all, and over the space of ten years she had somehow acquired a lot of hostages to fortune.

  Auntie Joy being a case in point. She’d called the trooper post that morning to see if Maggie had talked to Auntie Joy, quite forgetting it was Sunday. No one had picked up, and only after a strenuous effort to convince herself that no news was good news did she manage to get herself
on the road south instead of on a plane north.

  Seward was a small town of three thousand people on a stunning fjord surrounded by jagged mountains capped with snow. She turned left on Nash Road and five miles later was pulling into the visitors’ parking lot at Spring Creek Correctional Center. It was five minutes before one.

  The prison was a large complex of half a dozen buildings on three hundred acres tucked into a valley surrounded by national park land. It could house five hundred prisoners, with two hundred staff, and it had a good reputation and a low incidence of violence, with so far only one escape attempt, cut short mostly because the two inmates involved had chosen to make a break for it in winter.

  She went in, identified herself, emptied her pockets, and was shown into a large, airy room with not uncomfortable chairs and thick windows that looked out on the view. Kate couldn’t make up her mind if the view was a good thing or a bad thing for the inmates. It was beautiful enough to feed the soul, but it was also emblematic of what very few inside these walls would ever be able to experience again.

  She was one of many other visitors that afternoon, some mothers, no fathers, a lot of wives and girlfriends. She didn’t spot any lawyers, but then she no longer testified in court on a regular basis. She recognized a couple of prisoners, and they recognized her right back, but she stared them both down. She even smiled at one of them, a murderous sadist who had kidnapped, raped, and killed two sisters a week apart. He would never get out of this place, and she was proud that she had helped make that happen.

  Okay by her if the view through the windows tortured him with all he’d lost.

  “Intimidating little thing, aren’t you?” an amused voice said.

  She felt her spine stiffen, and turned to face Erland Bannister.

  “My goodness,” he said, inspecting the fading bruises beneath her eyes and the healing scab on her forehead. “You aren’t looking as beautiful as usual, Kate. What happened?”