Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  How often had he been up there lately? Had the memories of that hopeful young man been so painful that he’d stayed away? The cabin had been abandoned. The outhouse had been supplied with toilet paper and lime when someone who came for a dip in the hot springs remembered to bring them. The cache and the well had vanished.

  He had certainly never told anyone he owned it. He’d never warned anyone away from it. Even Dan O’Brian hadn’t known it was privately owned.

  She went back to the dining table and spread out the map. She was still poring over it when Johnny got home.

  “Hey!” he said, kicking snow from his boots and slinging his backpack across the floor in the general direction of his room.

  “Hey yourself,” she said.

  He inspected her face. “At least you’re looking a little less like Alice Cooper these days.”

  “Good to know.”

  He looked at the map. “What’s that?”

  “A map of Old Sam’s homestead,” she said.

  “No kidding? Cool.” He bent over the table to peer at it. “Where’d you find it?”

  “Where he left it for me. At least I hope it was me he wanted to find it.”

  He listened to her as she caught him up on events, a frown of concentration between his brows. “He’s really running you all around the rosemary bush, isn’t he.”

  “He sure is,” Kate said with feeling.

  “You know where the icon is yet?”

  She pointed at the mine symbols on the map.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “Why nine? Do you really think he found nine gold mines up there?”

  “He might have made nine tries,” she said. “And it might not have been him, or only him.”

  “You think somebody else might have made this map? Maybe Mac McCullough?”

  “It seems old enough.”

  “Why would Mac dig nine different mines?”

  “So he could schnooker nine different saps, I expect.”

  “You think Old Sam hid the icon in one of them?”

  “I sure hope so, because I don’t know where the hell else it would be.” She looked out the window. “I listened to the forecast this morning before I left town. This high is supposed to hang in for a while.” She reached for her mug. The coffee had gone cold. She wrinkled her nose and went back into the kitchen to refill it. “I’m going back up there tomorrow.”

  “Back up to Canyon Hot Springs?”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t mention Herbie’s news, that someone had been looking for her.

  He straightened. “You know, Kate, you’ve been beat up, run off the road, and shot. My guess is someone’s trying to stop you finding the icon, or whatever it is that Old Sam wanted you to find.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, but they’re not very good at it.”

  His head gave a disapproving shake. “You really shouldn’t go back up there alone.”

  “You’re volunteering?”

  He brightened. “Can I?”

  “Tomorrow is Wednesday. Been a long time since I’ve been in school, but I believe it’s still in session on Wednesdays. And I’m overnighting up there, so that would be Thursday, too.”

  His face fell.

  “Nice offer, though,” she said. “I appreciate it.”

  He tried to sulk but it didn’t come naturally to him, so he took himself off to his room in wounded silence, only to barrel back out again when the caribou steaks hit hot oil. The bread came out of the oven a little before the steaks came out of the pan. She made a Caesar salad with anchovies and lemons and romaine she’d brought back from town.

  After dinner, he sat back from the table with a satisfied burp. “I wonder what the poor folks are eating tonight.” He stretched and shoved his plate away. “What are you going to do up there?”

  “Find those mines. Find the icon.”

  He looked skeptical. “It snowed another foot while you were gone.”

  “I noticed.”

  “If it snowed a foot down here, it probably snowed five feet up there. Finding those mines won’t be easy.”

  “If it was easy, everybody’d be doing it.”

  He gave her an appraising look. Even at seventeen there were no flies on Jack Morgan’s son.

  She sighed. “Someone’s following me. Maybe, no, probably more than one. They have been since Old Sam died. It’s starting to piss me off.”

  He was as quick as his father had been, too. “So, what, you’re going to set yourself up as bait?”

  “Anyone who’s willing to travel fifty miles minimum across country on a snowgo at this time of year, chasing after a bit of wood and gilt with allegedly magical powers…” She shrugged. “I figure they’re just crazy enough to do it again.”

  “I repeat,” he said. “They got the drop on you three times already.”

  “Good-looking and smart, too,” she said admiringly, and grinned when he blushed.

  “You have to sleep sometime, Kate,” he said.

  “The difference this time is I know they’re coming,” she said. “And it’s long past time I met these yo-yos face-to-face.”

  He stacked the silverware on top of the plates. “Have you talked to Jim?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When’s he coming home?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  He looked at the shining cap of black hair, all he could see when she was bent so intently over the map. “If you waited until the weekend, I could go with you.”

  She raised her head. Her smile looked a little forced. “I don’t want to wait, Johnny. I’ve been chasing around after Old Sam for two weeks now, in a race with competitors I don’t know for some lost treasure I’ve never heard of.”

  It has certain, shall we say, family connections.

  “Maybe there is no treasure,” Johnny said. “You don’t even have a picture of it, Kate.”

  “Somebody thinks there is,” she said. “If I do nothing, they’ll just watch me until I start looking again. The guy who tried to jump me the last time I was up there was looking for a map. I’m guessing that map.”

  “Who told him about it?” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  * * *

  She packed that night and rose early the next morning, her all! new! and Herbie-improved! Arctic Cat shining bravely in the early morning sun. The snow had hardened to a nice crust in the below-zero temperatures overnight and the road was trackless when they got out to it. Kate loved being the first down the road after a snowfall.

  She escorted Johnny to school, next stop Annie Mike’s. “What’s going on, Kate?” Annie said.

  There was no not answering a direct question from the most discreet person in the Park. Kate filled her in. At the end Annie said gravely, “Are you sure about this, Kate?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “I’m sure.”

  From there she went to Bingley’s and bought some stuff she didn’t need just so she could tell everyone in line she was buying supplies for a trip up to Canyon Hot Springs, which, oh by the way, had been homesteaded by Old Sam back in the day and now belonged to her.

  She continued to spread the awe and wonderment and some envy over breakfast at the Riverside Café. She lingered over her americano until she heard the mail plane overhead and adjourned to the post office along with the rest of the village. While they waited for Bonnie to sort the mail, she regaled everyone in line with the same story, too.

  The Roadhouse was too far to get there and back again and still make the canyon before dark, so she did the next best thing, she went to Bobby’s, where she hijacked the better portion of the morning edition of Park Air. She told everyone listening all about Old Sam’s mysterious legacy and how she was going up to Canyon Hot Springs to take stock of the property.

  She didn’t mention Auntie Joy, or Erland Bannister, or the map. It was a long enough story as it was.

  When he signed off, Bobby gave her the evil eye and spoke to her in an unaccustomedly stern voice. “You wanna be the worm,
I got all kinda hooks for you to hang off of, Shugak.”

  She laughed, although it sounded a bit forced, and the concern from both Bobby and Dinah as she went out the door had her a little spooked. “They haven’t killed me yet,” she told Mutt staunchly as she threw a leg over her snowgo.

  “Woof,” Mutt said, hopping up behind her.

  And with that, they left civilization, such as it was in the Park, behind them.

  It took a little under three hours to make the hot springs, the second half of the journey undertaken up switchbacks and around ridges, but it was still light out when they emerged from behind the little saddle and made the run past the steaming ponds to stop in front of the cabin. By now it felt almost like coming home.

  She killed the engine and listened. It took a moment for the intrusive noise of the snowgo’s engine to stop echoing off the walls of the canyon. When it did, the only sound remaining was the scrape of spruce boughs against rock and the mocking caw of a raven.

  “I think we’re alone,” she told Mutt, who yipped agreement but nonetheless stood guard as Kate unloaded the snowgo and the trailer. She’d brought spares of certain items this time—knives, weatherproof matches, fire starters, hand and foot warmers—and she cached a bundle of them in a weatherproof pack behind a rock near the cabin. She’d brought the shotgun, which she stood next to the door, loaded.

  Her note was still on the door and the tarps were still up on the walls. The support behind which the second journal had been hidden was still flush with the wall. So far as she could tell, no one had been here since she left.

  She brought in wood and started a fire in the stove and set up camp in the cabin. This time she put the bed behind the door. This was farther away from the stove, but whoever came in would have to step all the way inside to see her. By which time she’d have the business end of her shotgun in his face.

  She emptied a Ziploc bag of moose stew into a pot and set it on the stove to thaw, and stood there, thinking for a moment. She hadn’t noticed anyone following her, and for the first twenty-five miles it was a long, open stretch of snow. But you never knew. Smarter to be cautious.

  “The hell with it,” she said out loud and went back outside, taking the shotgun with her. She stripped down to her skin, shivering in the cold and the approaching dark. She took a long, running jump, pulled herself into a ball in midair, and hit the first pool with a resounding splash. She surfaced again with a whoop, her feet on smooth stone. It was the only one of all the pools that had a gravel bottom. The rest of them were muddy. Had Old Sam lined it with the same gravel he’d used for the foundation of the cabin? She straightened her legs, pushing up to the surface, where she found Mutt jumping up and down on at the water’s edge, barking hysterically. She slicked back her hair and grinned. “Scared you, didn’t I?”

  Mutt gave her a narrow-eyed look that promised retribution.

  Kate hit the water with the side of her hand, sending a wave of water Mutt’s way. There was a startled yelp, not unlike the sound Kate had once heard a woman in a bar give when her ass was pinched. Mutt’s front half dropped to the ground, her tail wagging back and forth, her haunches gathering themselves for launch. And then she did launch, arcing over the pond and doing something on the order of a somersault with a half twist somewhere in the middle of it to nip Kate’s shoulder in passing. She made a perfect four-point landing on the bank on the other side. Her great yellow eyes were dancing and her jaw dropped in a lupine belly laugh, tongue lolling out.

  Kate nearly drowned in the rumpus that followed, but she was proud to see that they were both soaked when she came out of the water. They dried themselves in front of the stove, tired from the drive and the horseplay and replete with moose stew and snickerdoodles.

  Kate did notice that Mutt’s ears twitched with every sound that came from outside the cabin. Her ears were doing a little twitching of their own.

  The next day she rose before first light, ate a hearty breakfast of sourdough pancakes, eggs, and bacon with hot maple syrup poured over the lot, and donned snowshoes. The first thing she did was take the empty Gerber baby food jars she had brought with her and, with the help of the map, locate the corners of the homestead closest to the springs. Into the tree nearest to each corner, she nailed the lid of one of the jars. She put a copy of her title deed into the jar and screwed it into the lid.

  It was called taking possession. Kate had no illusions that she could keep people away from the hot springs or out of the cabin, not without mounting a twenty-four, three-sixty-five guard. But she could stake her claim. At least until she found the icon, she wanted everyone to be very clear who owned this homestead.

  She returned the hammer to the toolbox, pocketed a candy bar and a Ziploc bag full of gorp, and set off on a slog up the valley.

  Locating the mines on the map required every calorie she had ingested that morning and a whole lot more at lunch, and she was still ravenous by dinnertime. Some of the adits, or mine entrances, were low and accessible by snowshoe. Others were emphatically not.

  Toward the end of the day, following a ripped mitten and skinned knuckles, a wrenched ankle and a short fall that knocked the breath out of her for what felt like several very long moments, Old Sam’s character came under loud and pungent review. Indeed, some people might have been offended by her choice of words, and any law officer of her acquaintance might have been sufficiently concerned to consider the possibility of charging her under AS 12.60.040, had the threats to torture and dismember been made against someone living.

  Matters were not helped when Mutt, whose memory of their last excursion to this canyon had not faded with time, and who had taken her reinstatement as full partner in the firm seriously to heart, sounded the alarm for everything from the raven who continued to caw at them from annoyingly well-placed branches just ever so slightly out of Mutt’s reach, to a vole scuttling from beneath one bush to the shelter of another that fell dead from fright when Mutt pounced on her with a snarl that could have been heard in Canada. Mutt did look a little self-conscious after the vole incident, but she would not relax her excessive vigilance, not even at Kate’s express command.

  It made for a long day. Kate found six of the nine mapped mines in a string that led up and around the dogleg of the upper canyon. They were much of a muchness, upright rectangular holes in the rock face about the height of a tall man who didn’t want to bump his head going in and coming out. They looked as if they’d been hacked out of the rock face with a pickaxe. Three of them didn’t go back more than ten feet. One of them went back fifty. From the wear of weather and erosion on the tool marks, the closest mine was the oldest, with the mines decreasing in age the further one went up the canyon.

  All of them had been concealed with slabs of rock cleverly stacked to look like they were part of the face of the cliff. The undirected eye slid right over them, especially beneath a thick layer of snow. Kate would never have been able to find them without the map, and she no longer wondered that she’d never heard anyone talking about stumbling into one.

  She emerged from the eighth adit to find the sun low in the sky and alpenglow on distant peaks. Any of its lingering warmth had long since vanished. Her breath steamed before her face, her nose felt numb to the touch, and her front teeth were frozen. If anything, it was even colder inside the adits than it was out here.

  There had been so much climbing up and down and snowshoeing in between that she had very little feel for how far she was from the cabin. “Man, I am whipped,” Kate said out loud. “And starving.”

  Ten feet below, pacing back and forth on the canyon floor, Mutt woofed her approval. It would be much easier to guard Kate’s precious ass if she was at Mutt’s elevation.

  There had been nothing except the claw marks of the pickaxe in any of the mines, and Kate wasn’t enough of an expert to see if Mac had ever found a legitimate claim or if Old Sam had struck it rich. But then, if he had, wouldn’t he have said so? Wouldn’t he have flashed it around? Bought a new
truck? A new boat?

  Well, maybe not a new boat. Old Sam and the Freya were a couple, an item, a long-term romance, even a religion. Thou shalt put no other boats before me.

  Kate pulled the map from the inside pocket on her parka. The last mine was all the way around the next bend of the canyon and at a considerable increase in elevation. She could check it out tomorrow.

  She climbed tiredly down the canyon wall, strapped herself unenthusiastically into her snowshoes, and slogged back to the cabin.

  They had company.

  Thirty-one

  Kate thumbed the latch on the homemade door handle and pushed the door open as far as it would go. It hit the inside wall with a gentle thud.

  Ben Gunn looked up from where he was crouched in front of the stove, into which he was poking wood. “Hey, Kate.”

  “Hey, Ben,” she said.

  “I thought you’d be surprised to see me,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I figured Old Sam talked to Jane, and she talked to you.”

  “I helped myself to some of your coffee,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not a problem,” she said.

  He looked behind her. “Where’s Mutt?”

  “Around.” She stepped inside and let the door swing closed, shedding her parka. She poured herself some coffee and sat down facing him, her back to the wall. “I gotta give you credit for coming here in broad daylight, Ben. Figured you’d wait until it was dark, see if you could take me out when I was sleeping.”

  He listened with a quizzical expression on his face. “You’re pretty relaxed.”

  She blew at the surface of her coffee, and took a sip. “No reason not to be. You only beat up on old women.”

  His face reddened. “That was an accident.”

  Kate took another sip of coffee, cradling her mug in both hands. Outwardly she sat at her ease, but she was perched on the edge of the snowgo seat, her knees bent, her legs spread, leaning just that little bit forward with enough weight on her feet that she could move when she had to.