Not Dead Enough

by Warren C Easley

  “Philip told me that you went to law school at Berkeley and that you were a prosecutor for the city of Los Angeles.”

  “That was a while ago, Winona, another world.” What I didn’t tell her was that it was a world I’d left and didn’t care to revisit.

  “Well, Philip said that if anyone could help, it would be you. He said you’re brilliant.”

  I laughed. “He must have been talking about my fly fishing.”

  She didn’t smile. “I’ll pay you, of course.” Then she lifted a hand, palm out. “Before you make up your mind, let me tell you the rest.”

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “I found something the other day I think might be important.” She raised her eyes to meet mine. Hers were filled with an eagerness that made me uncomfortable. “I was going through some of my grandmother’s papers. She, uh, died two weeks ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Winona nodded, a weak smile creasing her lips, and surveyed the lake again. “She raised me. My father was killed in a logging accident when I was two. My mother has never been in the picture much. Alcohol and drugs. I think she’s somewhere in Eastern Oregon now. She didn’t make it to the funeral. Anyway, last Wednesday I came across a trunk in Grandmother’s bedroom closet. This dress was in it,” she said, looking into her lap as she swept her hands downward in a gesture of display.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Thank you. She was married in it. I also found a packet of letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother. She had TB during the time the falls were flooded and was in a sanatorium in Warm Springs. Grandfather was a faithful letter writer, and he told her what was going on in Celilo Village in great detail.”

  I leaned in a little.

  “I mentioned the letters to Philip, and that’s when your name came up. Cal, I think there’s new information in the letters. My grandfather had enemies, and the so-called witness, Sherman Watlamet, was one of them. I don’t think it was an accident. I think someone murdered him.”

  “Why did your grandmother keep the letters to herself if they shed light on what happened to him?”

  She smiled wistfully. “Grandma Tilda was a very private person. I don’t think she could bring herself to let anyone else read the letters. But I’ll never know for sure.”

  I looked out at the lake this time. A ragged row of gulls followed above the wake of the barge, which had moved well to the west. Trying to solve a fifty-year-old cold case—even with a handful of chatty love letters—is undoubtedly a fool’s errand, I told myself. But what could I say? Even if she wasn’t the cousin of the first good friend I’d made in Oregon, the earnestness of her request made it hard to say no.

  I exhaled a long breath. “Tell you what, I’ll take a look at the letters and make a few inquiries, and then we’ll decide if there’s anything we can do here. How does that sound?”

  She gave me the full radiance of her smile. “Thank you, Cal. I…uh…have read the letters a couple of times and put some notes together. Do you want to see those, too?

  I paused to consider her question. “No. Hang on to those for now. I want to read the letters with fresh eyes. We’ll compare notes afterwards.”

  A quick read. A few phone calls. That would be the extent of it. Or so I thought.

  Chapter Four

  I was hunched over a pile of papers at my law office in the middle of the following week when my phone rang. “I didn’t catch you working, did I?” It was Philip Lone Deer. My friend had this deeply ingrained notion that unless you’re out rowing drift boats through white water or felling trees, you’re not really working.

  “Actually, I was just finishing my manicure.”

  Laughter. After some additional banter, he said, “Thanks for talking to Winona, Cal. You think you can help her? Nelson Queah’s disappearance has been eating at her for years.”

  “Too early to tell. Fifty years is a helluva long time, Philip. A lot of the people who might’ve known something are dead and gone by now.”

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right.” He paused. “You think there’s anything in those letters she found that might help?”

  “I’ve been jammed up and haven’t gotten around to them yet.” I felt a stab of guilt. “I was planning to take a look tonight.” In truth, I was having a hard time getting started, despite my promise to Winona Cloud. The accordion folder she gave me still sat on my desk at home, untouched.

  “You don’t really want to help her, do you.”

  It wasn’t a question. I tried to come up with the right response but couldn’t seem to find it. “Uh, not really.”

  “Goddamnit, Cal, I—”

  “Okay, I’m on it tonight. It’s just that you both need to understand that the chances of this going anywhere are slim to none. Fifty years is an eternity in a case like this.”

  “I get that, and I’m sure Winona does, too. Just give it a shot. And look, if you need any help, anything at all, just let me know.”

  I thought for a moment. “As a matter of fact, there is one thing. Winona mentioned a witness, allegedly the last person to see Nelson Queah alive. Name’s, uh, Sherman Wat-something.”

  “Watlamet. Sherman Watlamet. I remember her telling me.”

  “Yeah. That’s the guy. She said he was a Yakama. Could you try to get a line on him? I’d like to talk to him if he’s still breathing.”

  “Consider it done.”

  I locked up my law office around five and headed for home with my pup, Archie, in the backseat. Dundee and its three thousand inhabitants sat wedged between the Willamette River and the Dundee Hills, thirty-five miles southwest of Portland on the Pacific Highway. A blue-collar farm town careening down the path of gentrification, it was becoming known as the center of the Oregon wine country, at least by those owning vineyards there. I urged my old BMW out of town and up into the hills, which rose sharply on the west side of the highway, the road winding through orderly rows of pinot noir grapevines whose buds were swollen but had not yet unfurled into leaves.

  Archie, a six-month-old Australian shepherd, began to whimper as we turned off and made the final climb up Eagle Nest, the graveled lane that serves my house and that of my only neighbor. When I let him out to open the gate, he jumped from the backseat without hesitation and landed chin-first. Undeterred, he picked himself up and, ignoring my laughter, shot past me to scatter a covey of quail grazing up by the weeds that marked the vegetable garden of the previous owner.

  I’m perched on five acres that slant down to a ridgeline overlooking an abandoned gravel quarry. My old farmhouse, a four-square with a wraparound porch and the original shiplap siding, sits with its back to the ridge. The view out the back is straight south and carries the eye down through the vineyards and out to the Willamette Valley, a hundred-and-fifty-mile-long agricultural cornucopia that’s squeezed between the Cascade Mountains and the Coastal Range.

  The old farmhouse is no treasure, but the view’s worth a million bucks, as far as I’m concerned.

  Archie followed me through the front door, and we both headed for the kitchen. I fed him, let him out, and then opened a bottle of pinot noir. I was still acquainting myself with the local wines. This particular bottle was made from grapes grown in a vineyard I could see from my kitchen window. I poured some, swirled it, and held it up. Not inky like a typical cabernet sauvignon, it scattered the light like a jewel. I sipped it, enjoying the complex flavor that belied its lighter color. “This will do nicely.”

  My stomach grumbled, which started me thinking of dinner. My cooking skills were severely limited. Not because I was indifferent to good food. Just the opposite. My wife had been an exceptional cook, but I’m ashamed to say I took her skills for granted. Now I found myself trying to recreate some of the magic she worked in the kitchen, but with decidedly mixed results. My daughter, Claire, had insisted I bring Nancy’s c
ookbooks in the move from L.A., but they remained packed in a box up in the attic. I thought about bringing them down every now and then but hadn’t gotten around to it. Too many ghosts up there.

  I hated to shop more than anything, so it was no surprise that the fridge was nearly bare that particular night. I settled for two grilled cheese sandwiches made with the last slices from a block of Gruyere I’d picked up at a shop in McMinnville. A couple of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and Kalamata olives dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar completed the meal. At least I had a good wine to go with it.

  After dinner, I carried a second glass of wine down the hall to my study and slid the contents of Winona Cloud’s file onto my desk. Three curled and yellowed newspaper articles from The Dalles Chronicle were on top. The first was dated March 13, 1957—a small item noting that Nelson Queah, resident of Celilo Village, was missing. He’d failed to pick up his daughter, Rebecca, at the Warm Springs Reservation on March 11 and had not been seen in Celilo Village since the falls were inundated on the 10th.

  A follow-up piece two days later quoted Sherman Watlamet, a fellow falls fisherman: “I saw Nelson Queah cross the highway and head toward the river at about 9:10 p.m. on the night of March 10th. He was weaving and staggering, and I figured he was very drunk.” The article also said that Queah’s house in the village had been broken into and apparently burglarized, although his daughter, Rebecca, stated that nothing seemed to be missing.

  The article went on to describe dragging operations performed by the police in newly formed Lake Celilo and the fact that no body was recovered. The final piece described a memorial ceremony held in Queah’s honor at the village a month later. His war record was highlighted, and a huge turnout of Native Americans from around the region was noted.

  I attacked her grandfather’s letters next. The envelopes had been opened carefully with a letter opener, and I could read most of the postmarks. The letters themselves had been written on cheap paper that had turned the color of dead leaves and was nearly as brittle. The ink was faded sepia, but Nelson’s handwriting was precise and legible. There were forty-six letters in the stack, and they were arranged in chronological order. The first was dated April 9, 1956, and the last, March 3, 1957, a week before the falls were flooded.

  I went over to the sound system looking for something mellow to work by. I put on Coltrane’s Blue Train and added one of Monk’s solo CDs behind it. By the time Monk came in on “Ruby, My Dear,” I’d finished reading the letters. My first reaction was full-on admiration for Nelson Queah. The Dalles Dam was nearing completion as he wrote the letters, and the social order at the falls and in the village was disintegrating as longtime residents drifted away, and the tribes began jockeying for compensation from the Corps of Engineers for the loss of their fishing grounds. But as Winona had told me, Queah was unwavering.

  In May of 1956 he wrote,

  “…Some of the tribes can’t wait to get their hands on the white man’s money. I told them today at the meeting I would take no money. It would be like putting a price on the moon and the stars. I cannot do that, Tilda…”

  There was precious little to go on. I had tossed the pages that might contain leads in a separate pile. When I finished reading I had only a half dozen pages.

  In August of 1956 Queah wrote,

  “…Chief Thompson has been sick this week. I am in charge of the fish committee, but some do not care to listen anymore. Sherman Watlamet told me I was a fool and that he would fish wherever he wanted. I told him as long as the falls are there, we would fish as it has always been done. I went to the river and put a lock on his cable chair. This made him furious, and I thought we were going to fight right there…”

  I imagined the scene unfolding. I knew the cable chairs were rickety affairs used by the fishermen to pull themselves by hand across the rapids to their fishing platforms. By locking the chair, Queah had denied Watlamet access to the other bank, where his fishing platform apparently was located. I set the item aside.

  The next page I set aside was from a letter sent in October of 1956,

  “…I ran into Cecil Ferguson and two other white men today. Ferguson is the man who offered me a job before construction of the dam started if I would stop speaking out against the project. He was angry when I turned him down. Do you remember this, Tilda? They were drunk and if Sam Katchia and Sonny Jim had not been with me, I think there would have been bad trouble. Dearest, I am trying hard to keep my promise to you not to fight, but I will not let this man Ferguson bully me…”

  Another item of interest was from a letter in late February of 1957,

  “…I met with the newspaperman I told you about, Tilda. His name is Fletcher Dunn. He works for the big Portland newspaper, The Journal, I believe it is called. He is writing a story about the falls and the dam, and he interviewed me for a long time today. I like this young man. He seems to be sympathetic to our side. It is too late to save the falls, but perhaps he will tell the truth about what is happening to us.

  I culled two entries from the last letter of the series, dated March 3, 1957. On the first page he wrote,

  “…The newspaperman came by this morning. He brought me a copy of his first article on the dam and the falls. I think it tells our story well, although I don’t think many white people can truly understand what losing the falls means to us. He also writes about what the whites are saying, that we need the dam to keep the country strong. I think he had to write this because mostly whites read the paper. I am enclosing the article for you to read. I hope you are proud of the words I spoke for our people, Tilda…”

  On the back of the second page he wrote,

  “…Something surprising happened tonight, Tilda. A young man named Timothy Wiiks came to see me here at the house. He is the nephew of a man I served in the war with, Jacob Morning Owl of the Umatilla Tribe. Jacob was killed in Sicily. Timothy works at the dam and has discovered that a contractor there has been cheating the Corps out of a great deal of money. He is afraid to go to the police and asked for my help. I told him I would talk to the newspaper reporter who interviewed me. I trust the reporter and I think he might know what to do about this…”

  I scanned back through the key pages and jotted down some actions on a single sheet of paper. It was a short list.

  1. Can Philip locate the witness Watlamet? This is key!

  2. Who is Cecil Ferguson? Who did he work for? Try to locate and interview him. Ditto for Timothy Wiiks.

  3. Find Fletcher Dunn and the articles he wrote about the dam and the falls.

  4. Assess possibility of an accident or suicide. Queah’s mental history? Drinking? Tribal attitudes toward suicide? Talk to Winona.

  I stepped out on the side porch to watch the sunset through a stand of Douglas firs on the west edge of my property. A Rufus hummingbird buzzed my ear on a last trip to the feeder. I watched through the trees as the sun sank in a pool of orange and red fire, the firs stark silhouettes against a violet glow.

  I still wasn’t optimistic. But after reading the letters, I was no longer indifferent. Winona was right—Nelson Queah deserved to have the truth told about him.

  Chapter Five

  Jake

  Later that same week, a man sat dozing in a camp chair with his cowboy hat shading his face when a text pinged him awake. Jake didn’t recognize the incoming number, and the message wasn’t signed, but he knew who the sender was. It read:

  We have a problem. The Old Man needs a favor and he needs it right away.

  Jake texted back: What kind of favor?

  You’ll be briefed at the guest house tonight.

  What the fuck? Jake said, “Tonight?” and texted back: I’d have to leave right away.

  This response came back: The Old Man’s counting on you and there’s good money in it.

  Jake sat up a little straighter. How much good money?

  Enough to mak
e your trip very worthwhile. Trust me.

  Things were slack at the moment, and money, or the lack of it, hung like a damn noose around his neck. He exhaled a sigh and replied: Okay. What do I need to bring?

  A change of clothes or two. Motels are out so bring your camping gear. You’ll have to do some fieldwork, so pack your binoculars and your Remington, the one with the scope.

  Why the artillery?

  Just bring it. Not a word about this to anyone. Do not call me, do not call the Old Man. All communications thru this number, text only. Am I clear?

  Text only? What’s that all about? Jake wondered. Some kind of security thing? He texted back:

  No problem. See you tonight. I’ll be in late, between 9 and 10.

  As Jake packed up his truck, he played the exchange back, coming around to the term “good money” several times. He was hanging on by a couple of fingernails right now. A good payday for a short job was just what the doctor ordered. Shit, who knows? He asked himself. Maybe it’ll be enough to get things turned around. God knows he could use some good luck.

  But something gnawed at him, deep down in his gut. He knew “good money” came with a price, a stiff price of its own. He’d done some bad shit in his life for money, but never, ever had he been asked to bring a gun to the party. What the hell am I getting myself into?

  Chapter Six

  “I found Watlamet.”

  The voice cut through the fog of deep, pre-dawn sleep. Had the phone rung? I wasn’t sure, but I had it pressed to my ear…My head cleared enough for me to know who it was. “Damn it, Lone Deer. Is that you? What the hell time is it?” I struggled to sit up and looked at the clock.

  “It’s five. I waited ’til five to call you, man. I found him. I found your boy, Sherman Watlamet.”

  A long pause ensued while I cleared my head and tried to figure out who he was talking about. Five a.m. was late for my friend, the quintessential morning person. “Oh, yeah,” I finally stammered, “the guy who claimed he saw Queah down by the river the night he disappeared.”