Past Lies

by Bobby Hutchinson

  There was also a copy of Roy’s hand-drawn map showing the route he’d planned to follow, and a photograph. Alex hadn’t seen this particular one before. It was a head-and-shoulders shot, the type used in passports, and it was a profound shock to see his own mouth and jawline reflected in Roy’s face.

  Linda had followed the letter up with phone calls, and the troopers began an investigation. They’d sent out an all points bulletin with Nolan’s picture on it. Valdez was small and there were names of half a dozen people who’d seen Roy in town that April—a waitress from some café, a man from the hostel, a clerk from the general store who’d sold him supplies.

  Alex skimmed down the names and came to an abrupt halt, as an electric shock passed through his body.

  Tom Pierce’s name jumped off the page. Alex read the typewritten words and then read them again, hardly able to believe his eyes.

  The report said that Tom had picked Nolan up early one morning, hitchhiking along the Richardson Highway. Pierce was believed to be the last person to speak to Roy Nolan.

  CHAPTER NINE

  This boat is full of characters. They all have an opinion, and they don’t hold back telling you if they figure you’re a fool. They seem to think they’re the only ones who know much of anything.

  From letters written by Roy Nolan,

  April, 1972

  PIERCE WAS BELIEVED to be the last person to speak to Roy Nolan.

  Alex read that single sentence over and over before he finally was able to move on, his heart thundering.

  In the police report, Pierce said that Roy had told him he’d worked his way to Valdez as a deckhand on a freighter. He was heading for the Alaskan interior, intending to walk deep into the bush and live off the land for a couple of months. Roy had ridden with him for about seventy miles, and Tom described in detail where he’d dropped him off. There was another hand-drawn map, probably made by Tom, indicating the place.

  The last he saw of Roy Nolan, Pierce reported, he was standing on the side of the Thompson Highway. As far as the investigating officer could tell, Nolan had never been seen or heard from again.

  His knapsack was found by a hiker late that fall, and it was surmised that a bear had been at it. The report concluded that Roy Nolan was officially a missing person, believed to be deceased.

  A detailed list of the search operations followed. The area Roy’s map covered had been divided into a grid, and planes had flown over, searching for him. Among the searchers, Tom Pierce.

  Alex closed the folder and got to his feet. The next logical step was to talk to Ivy’s father, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  TOM HAD JUST LANDED and taxied in to the dock. He saw Ladrovik standing there, obviously waiting for him. Tom swore and took his time shutting down and climbing out. He couldn’t pinpoint why the young man got under his skin so bad, but he did, had from the moment he’d met him.

  He hadn’t known then that Ivy would take a shine to him. It had been Alex this and Alex that for the past week, and of course she’d dumped the doc. Which Tom figured probably meant there was something going on between her and this yahoo.

  If Ivy had feelings for Ladrovik, there wasn’t much Tom could do, but he didn’t have to like it. Besides, it wouldn’t last, they never did. Ladrovik would head back to California at summer’s end, and Tom knew Ivy wasn’t about to leave Valdez.

  What worried him was that she was going to get her heart broken one of these times, getting tangled up with no-account drifters from Away.

  Ladrovik was walking toward him now. If he was here to try to butter him up, get on his good side because of Ivy, he was sadly mistaken. Tom clenched his teeth and smoothed his mustache.

  “Tom, could I talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “Talk away.” Tom kept walking toward the trailer, a lot faster than was comfortable. To his shock, Ladrovik reached out and grabbed a handful of his wool jacket, pulling him to a stop.

  “What the hell—”

  “I just got this from the police station.” Ladrovik held out a file folder.

  “You got business with the cops, that’s your problem.” Tom didn’t even glance down. He yanked his arm away and started to walk again.

  Ladrovik followed. His voice was low, and there was something about it that made Tom think maybe the yahoo was tougher than he looked.

  “It’s about my father, my birth father,” he said. “Roy Nolan. You remember Roy Nolan, don’t you, Tom?”

  Tom stopped so abruptly, Alex banged into him.

  “Nolan? You’re Nolan’s kid?” Tom studied Alex’s face through squinted eyes, feature by feature. The resemblance was there, from what he remembered. And what he remembered had given him nightmares for years.

  Ladrovik nodded. “According to my mother I am, and she should know.” His expression telegraphed to Tom that he wasn’t making a joke.

  Tom tried to hide his shock. “You don’t use his surname.”

  “How could I? I didn’t even know about him until six weeks ago, when my adoptive father died. I was two years old when my mother remarried. Up till then, my name was Jack Nolan. Steve insisted on changing it, Mom said. He wanted me to grow up thinking I was his son. And I did.”

  “Up here to find him, are you?” Tom made a derogatory noise in his throat. “Lots of luck, is all I can say. We searched for weeks, never found hide nor hair. And that was well over thirty years ago. Only thing ever turned up was that knapsack he was carrying.”

  “I know.” Alex jerked a thumb at his own backpack. “The police gave it to me along with this file.” He held the file out again. “It says here you were the last person to see Roy Nolan alive.”

  “And?” Bad as they were, Tom’s nightmares had never stretched this far. In the first few years after Nolan disappeared, Tom had wondered if some relative might turn up asking questions. But as the years passed, that particular fear had dissipated. The guilt never had. It was a guilt of omission, unlike others Tom had racked up over the years.

  “I’d just like to know what he was like, what you talked about.” When Tom didn’t answer, Alex said, “Look, I’m naturally curious about my father. I’m trying to get a feel for the sort of man he was. Anything you remember would be helpful to me. And you don’t have to sugarcoat anything, I just want the truth.”

  “It was a long time ago, I don’t remember a whole lot,” Tom lied, walking again. The truth was, he could recount practically word for word what had passed between him and Nolan that rainy morning. He sifted through the memories, tying to figure out how much to tell Ladrovik. “I was heading for Anchorage real early that April morning,” he began. “Saw him standing on the side of the highway with his thumb out. It was raining, but there was still snow on the ground in the higher regions.”

  He remembered how his leg had hurt that morning. The injury was still new, and the pain had skewered up into his groin like a corkscrew pushing its slow way through flesh. He’d swallowed pain-killers, but they hadn’t taken effect.

  The hitchhiker had looked cold and wet, huddled inside a cheap parka. Tom figured he’d be someone to talk to, take his mind off his bloody leg.

  “He was carrying a knapsack, had a rifle sticking out the side, looked like a .22. There was a sleeping bag tied on the bottom. Don’t know how much grub he had, but it didn’t look like a lot.”

  Tom had offered him coffee from a big steel thermos, and Nolan had thanked him. He’d wrapped his hands around the cup and taken deep gulps of the sweet hot liquid.

  “A .22 isn’t a very powerful gun,” Alex commented. “It’s not big enough to kill a moose or a bear, is it?”

  “Nope. He might have had a bigger gauge weapon inside his pack, rolled in his sleeping bag. I didn’t ask.” Tom had reached the door of the office. He went in, praying that Bert or Kisha would be there to deflect this conversation.

  The office was empty. Alex was right on his heels, and Tom had the feeling there wasn’t enough air or space in the room for both of them.<
br />
  “Did he say where he was going, what he planned to do?”

  Tom shrugged, picked up a neat stack of paperwork Kisha had left for him. He pretended to study it. “Told me he was planning to walk into the bush and live off the land for a few months.” Tom snorted. “Damn fool people from Outside, get some lame-brained idea in their head that they’ll find the part of themselves they’re missing if they come up here and go walkabout in the wilderness.”

  Alex’s voice was soft. “Is that what Roy told you he was doing? That he was trying to find himself?”

  Tom shook his head. “We didn’t exactly get into the philosophy of life.”

  That, at least, was the truth. They’d talked politics instead. As the miles passed that morning, he and Nolan had gotten into a heated argument about Vietnam and the war.

  Nolan was a peacenik, a Canadian hippie, scathingly critical of the U.S. policy in Vietnam. He said some things that were hard to defend, and Tom’s anger had started to escalate.

  With his leg throbbing, reminding him exactly where and how and why he’d gotten the piece of shrapnel that had crippled him forever, Tom soon lost his temper. He was still fiercely patriotic in those days. How could he admit the conflict he’d fought in was wrong? It would mean the two years he’d just spent in Vietnam, the injury he’d sustained, the friends he’d watched die…it would mean all of it was pointless. Wasted. Useless.

  Nolan was oblivious. He’d gone on and on, a regular soapbox politician, until Tom’s anger reached the boiling point. He’d slammed on the brakes and ordered the other man out of his truck.

  And now his son wanted to know things.

  “What did you talk about?”

  Tom had to tamp down the panic the questions raised. Damn fool wasn’t about to give up. Tom put the desk between them and slumped into the chair.

  “We talked wildlife, how best to live off the land.”

  That’s what they should have talked about. Tom had been brought up in Alaska. He knew the other man wasn’t dressed adequately even for a hike into the wilderness, never mind a long stay. He should’ve warned Nolan about the dangers, the bears just coming out of hibernation, the snow pack that still lay on the ground in most of the region, the rivers that would flood as it melted. He should’ve done his best to talk Nolan out of going anywhere.

  “And did he seem to know much about camping and hunting?” Alex was still standing, leaning over with both hands propped on the desk, his smoldering eyes boring holes in Tom. “About living off the land?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. It was too early in the season to try it, anyways.” He should have insisted Nolan come back to Valdez, wait another week or two, get properly equipped. Instead, Tom had dumped him in the middle of nowhere, and if that wasn’t bad enough, he didn’t stop later that day and tell the Alaska State Troopers about Nolan.

  Let the damned loudmouthed fool learn the hard way, Tom had fumed. Easy to talk about right and wrong when you’ve led a sheltered life. See what he has to say after he’s been in the bush for a week or so, the know-it-all hippie.

  He’d driven off and not even looked back. He’d ignored the unspoken law of the Arctic.

  All men are brothers, regardless. And Nature is the common enemy.

  He’d thought of Nolan a couple times that summer, but that was the summer Tom had met Frances, and he wasn’t thinking much at all. He’d never really loved a woman before her. He’d never dreamed that any woman as beautiful as she was would give him a second look. But she had, and it threw him off balance.

  And then that fall the police had sent out word Nolan was missing.

  Tom had told them pretty much what he’d just told Alex. He’d spent untold hours and his own gas money flying back and forth and up and down the grid, covering Nolan’s map east to west, north to south, hoping against hope that somebody would spot him, or that he’d turn up in Anchorage or Fairbanks. Skagway, maybe.

  Autumn turned to winter, and that’s when Tom’s guilt had really taken hold. That’s when he realized the other man was likely dead. And it was partly his fault.

  “Not much else I can tell you. We searched for him all that fall.”

  “I know, I saw the details in the report.” Alex straightened, rolling his shoulders to get the tension out. “I want to thank you for that. I read that you played a major part in the search.”

  Shame and guilt made Tom mean. “It’s what we do up here, sonny, regardless that it’s a waste of time and money and energy. You crackpots from the lower forty-eight who come North to live out some Jack London wet dream oughta be locked up. Or shipped back to California where you belong.”

  Alex’s expression changed. The smoldering anger was back, hotter this time.

  Tom had to force himself to keep on looking straight up into the younger man’s face. It had been a mistake to sit, it put him at a disadvantage, but getting up again meant levering slowly and awkwardly out of the chair because his leg had gone numb. He wouldn’t show weakness, not now.

  “I don’t know what you’ve got against me, Pierce.” The words were quiet, the tone firm and cold. “If I’ve done something to piss you off, it wasn’t deliberate and I apologize. But I’ve sure as hell had enough of your insults. Either level with me about what’s biting your ass or get over it.”

  Tom held the other man’s gaze, his own deliberately belligerent, but respect niggled at him all the same. It took guts to challenge a man on his own ground, especially when he had a daughter you fancied.

  And of course Ivy would choose that exact moment to barge through the door.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The nights are long up here, Linda. I wake up and for a minute I think you’re beside me. I really miss holding you.

  From letters written by Roy Nolan,

  April, 1972

  “HEY, GUYS, what’s up?”

  Animosity must have been as thick as farts in the air, because she instinctively moved around the desk to stand beside him, one hand on his shoulder. “Dad? Alex? What’s going on?”

  Tom knew he was being an asshole. He just didn’t know how to admit it. And he sure didn’t want to get into it in front of Ivy.

  But Alex had no such reservations.

  His tone was cool. “I just found out that your father was the last person to see mine alive. I was asking him some questions about it.”

  “Your father?” Ivy frowned and shook her head. “I don’t get it. Dad’s never been to San Diego, not for years. What do you mean, he was the last person to see your father alive?”

  “Remember I told you, Steve Ladrovik was not my biological father,” Alex said. And then he went on to tell her the whole story as he knew it.

  It was obvious Ladrovik hadn’t told Ivy any of his real reasons for being in Valdez. Tom could see the surprise on her face.

  “So you really came up here to—to what, find your father?”

  “Not find him, of course not.” Ladrovik’s voice was impatient. “I simply want to know whatever there is to know about him, and I plan to follow the route he took when he went into the bush. But I’ve got no illusions about finding him, that’s not the point.”

  “So what were you and Dad arguing about? And what’s this about Dad being the last one to see him alive?”

  “It says so right here.” Alex held out the file. She laid it on the desk and went through it, item by item. It seemed to take a long time.

  “I never heard anything about this.” She looked at Tom, her eyebrows raised in question. “Captain? You never mentioned this.”

  “No reason to,” he blustered. “It happened long before you were ever born.”

  She slowly nodded. “So what were you two arguing about, then?”

  There was a charged silence. Ladrovik gave Tom a look that said, ball in your court.

  “I said something I maybe shouldn’t have, about people coming here and getting lost.” It was as far as Tom was willing or able to go.

  Ivy narrowed her eyes at him. “Oh,
yeah? Would that be your patented speech about brainless yahoos from Outside wasting everyone’s time and money, Captain?”

  Reluctantly, Tom said, “Something like that.”

  “Lucky Alex didn’t deck you,” Ivy said with a smile that looked more than a bit forced. “And now, Alex, if you two have finished butting heads, we’d better get back to the lodge. Mavis needs shortening for pastry—we’re having meat pie for supper and God help me if I don’t get it there in time.”

  “Bert said he’d give me a ride back in the boat.”

  “Well, Dad will tell him he doesn’t have to bother, then, won’t you, Dad? C’mon, Alex.”

  Tom watched as Alex retrieved the file and then held the door open for Ivy. He didn’t look back as he followed her over to the copter pad.

  Tom swung around so he could see out the window. It didn’t look to him as if the two of them were doing much talking. Ivy’d been put out over something Alex said, all right, but Tom had no idea what it might be.

  He lifted up the phone to call Frances, talk the whole mess over with her, and then set it down again. It was far too late to look for comfort there. He’d burned his bridges with his wife as surely as he had with Roy Nolan—a long time ago.

  You can’t change the past, his mother used to say. She was a dour Scotswoman long dead now, but the older he grew the more her sayings would come back to haunt him. You made your bed, Tommy. Now lie in it.

  And it was about as comfortable as a bed of nails.

  IVY DIDN’T IMMEDIATELY begin the procedures leading to takeoff. Instead, she slowly fastened her safety belt, thinking over what she’d just learned about Alex.

  It was hard to figure out why she felt betrayed and angry with him, but she did. She tried to remind herself that there was absolutely nothing between them, so she had no reason to get pissed at him for holding back on his reasons for being in Valdez. It didn’t help.