A Death on The Horizon

by Mark Ellis

  The morning status reports appeared on Rad’s Trans Oceanic laptop. Among them, he found that reporter Sue Ross had formalized her request for an interview. He anticipated questions about Lara Svenko, his career, and public affairs and politics.

  By the time Rad got dressed, the Northstar had slowed by twenty knots, and upon entering the bridge, he saw that Briggs had a bead on the Ketchikan pier.

  “How do the tides look?” Rad asked Holdren.

  “We’re going to have to move out into the channel at nightfall.”

  Rad raised Beckman to arrange a ship-wide communiqué about the spill and the scheduling change. “Oh, and I want to respond to Ms. Ross, the reporter,” he told Beckman. “Please relay to her that I’m available tonight at seven thirty, provided she can attend the festivities at Yukon Pete’s.”

  “I’ll relay the message, sir.”

  Closer and closer, the pier of Ketchikan reached for them, its pilings as browned and grayed as a wild-jacketed creature of the forests. A delivery truck cruised up a waterfront drag made singular by the unwelcoming faces of a massive totem pole. Rad sat down at the communications console, then heard the officious, amplified voice of Lieutenant Beckman, as if the ship itself spoke: “May I have your attention please? Please stay tuned for a message from the captain.”

  “Ladies and gentleman, this is Captain Squier. Apparently, we’ve got a bit of an oil spill along our route up ahead—nothing serious, I’m told. However, it will necessitate an overnight stopover in Ketchikan. For those with scheduling conflicts, please contact Lieutenant Beckman in communications. For everyone else, I invite you to enjoy your night in Ketchikan.”

  As the navy-blue prow moved into Ketchikan Harbor on the rising tide, Briggs sounded one medium blast on the ship’s horn. Despite the fact that the Northstar was the only ship in harbor, trade on the boardwalk was brisk. The streets were stocked with overland tourists; families with strollers, toddlers, and teens in tow; some elder marrieds; and a smattering of young couples. Every table on Yukon Pete’s waterfront deck was occupied, and more hungry patrons waited on the sidewalks.

  After the Northstar came along the weather-beaten pier, Rad heard the roll of harbor gangplanks on the pier.

  Rad had ported at Ketchikan forty times in his career—give or take. On his maiden Inside Passage cruise, as a cocaptain like Briggs, he had uncharacteristically gotten quite drunk at Yukon Pete’s. He was too fresh off the Vietnam boat and behaved that night as if on shore leave. There was some talk, and Trans Oceanic issued a general advisory about how every employee, from the captain to the apprentice deck runner, represented the line while on shore. Rad met Nancy the summer after, and all carousing ended.

  While the Northstar was in port, most passengers would disembark to explore the shops, coffee bars, curiosity shops, and specialty-item kiosks. The ship’s staff and crew would either go ashore or remain at posts, based on the revolving system for shore privileges. Young crewmembers as yet impressed with the novelty of the Passage ports of call would go ashore. Many old hands would stay on the ship, some for the entire voyage.

  Rad picked up the phone to dial Alvin Alderson’s cell, but it went through to voicemail. His Arbor Glen pal had complained over a quick coffee at the Victoria Station Café that he was not getting enough time with his friend. “Don’t forget the little people,” Alderson teased, reminding Rad that once they were back home on the seventh hole, “things will equal out again quickly.”

  Rad’s thought was to invite Alvin to sit stage right at that evening’s dinner, and he left the message. He had two hours before he would be expected at the head of Yukon Pete’s longest wood-plank table, and he thought a nap might refresh him. He’d be required on the bridge at eleven that night to oversee the ship’s low tide return to deeper waters.

  Lying in the berth he usually shared with Nancy, Rad imagined her now, likely on some excursion with Rebecca’s family in Palm Springs or perhaps napping in the guest bedroom.

  First Sue Ross would ask about Lara Svenko, no problem. Rad had told his version of the story so many times that he had the liturgy about his doomed passenger memorized.

  He had been notified that something was amiss around six in the morning, when what were described as repeated phone calls to Svenko’s cell phone from Imbroglio went unanswered. Svenko was known for riding her cell at all hours. A ship-wide page came up empty. Protocol demanded that a deck runner be sent to lightly knock on the door if such calls or pages went unanswered for two hours. If no one answered the knock, the captain could order security to enter the stateroom. Rad did exactly that, but the young reporter was not in the room. A thorough search of the ship, including off-limits areas, came up empty.

  Protocol further demanded that when a passenger was discovered missing, the ship should come to a full stop, unless stopping would endanger the ship. After all, there was always the possibility that the missing passenger had fallen, survived the plunge, and could still be alive. The morning Svenko was discovered missing, the surface of the channel was like the silky underbelly of a seal. And warm, about 60 degrees, at least near the surface. Within ten minutes of a distress call to the United States Coast Guard station at Yakutat, the wake of the Northstar included zigzagging rescue helicopters. Beyond ten miles, which represented about thirty minutes, there wasn’t much hope for an overboard passenger with no lifejacket, but they searched anyway. When Svenko washed up eighteen miles back down the Passage two days later, it was clear she’d gone overboard sometime during the night.

  After Ross questioned Rad about Svenko, her likely tact would turn to the comparatively lighter vein of politics. This, Rad was prepared for too. It would be truthful when he told her he was weighing his options.

  The ship was preternaturally quiet, most everyone having disembarked to enjoy Ketchikan. After a nap Rad would be ready for Yukon Pete’s and Sue Ross’s questions.

  As he drifted off, a thought came unbidden, a sad fact that blindsided him. If Lara Svenko had somehow survived the 2008 cruise, she would be about the same age as the young reporter who wanted to interview him. And daughter Rebecca’s age exactly.

  Together Rad Squier and Alvin Alderson walked Ketchikan’s wharf. Rad wore his uniform, Alvin a salmon leisure suit that recalled the heyday of The Lawrence Welk Show. The night was balmy, as shirtsleeves and halter tops on the roving tourists indicated. Out on the water, the Northstar floated and seemed to be an alternate universe.

  “So,” asked Alderson, “what do you think?”

  You could not extrapolate the state of the GOP from a cadre of notable conservatives on a sumptuous cruise. Millions back in the homeland were muttering class war oaths as the capitalist free market continued its spiral.

  “As microcosms go, things seem OK,” answered Rad.

  “Microcosms, eh?”

  A queue with the recognizable faces of Rad’s passengers waited outside Yukon Pete’s. They brightened when Rad appeared with his epaulets. The entire top floor had been reserved for the Rainier Policy Institute cruisers. With the arrival of the captain, they were shown through and seated upstairs according to arrangements laid out by the think tank’s coordinating committee. Grant Sharpe had a table and was joined by a reverent half dozen. Sue Ross was seated at the press table near the wait station. Rad had placed one request—that Alvin sit where Nancy normally would.

  It was a grand dinner, and Alderson took full advantage of his proximity to command. He had a great knack for projecting his positivism. When the salad course came, he edified the table with a report on the Arbor Glen bylaw that prohibited noncitizens from landscape maintenance in the development. “There are plenty of legal Hispanic Americans out there who are happy to have those jobs,” he said. With soup came his assertion that “anybody who thinks there’s no real difference between the major parties need only look at this monstrosity of a healthcare bill they’re planning to shove down our throats. They don’t even know what’s in it.”

  With the main course
came a challenge to Old Party globalism. One of the younger Rainier Policy Institute diners asked about the trade imbalances with other countries, especially China. “What do Romney, Huckabee, and Palin have to say about the outsourcing of manufacturing, the loss of living-wage jobs, the consequences of NAFTA and other trade agreements?”

  “Rad, you want to take this one?” said Alderson.

  “Look, we can get in on it, or we can be left behind,” Rad answered. “While I would support rooting out some of the unfairness that in boom times was acceptable but is hurting us now, we can’t be economic isolationists. The potential markets are too great to close ourselves off. That doesn’t mean we can’t send a clear message that the days without reciprocal agreements are over.”

  Alderson couldn’t resist putting a finer point on it, to an affirming hoist of glasses. “Bottom line, buy American whenever possible. Squeeze the bastards—pardon my French.”

  Over dessert, things lightened up as the drinks had been flowing. Alderson told about the year a big ACLU junket had hit Ketchikan at the exact same time as the Rainier Policy Institute cruise. “Those lib lawyers were walking around as if the town had been invaded by Huns,” he laughed. “By the way,” Alderson continued, “I talked to the mayor a week later, a Canadian conservative of all things. We outspent them three to one.”

  Rad’s Alderson-inclusive gesture included having his friend propose the closing toast.

  “To the Grand Old Party. May she succeed in 2010.”

  A younger guy with an embossed alligator asked if he could also propose a toast. Graciously, Captain Squier obliged him.

  “To the Tea Party,” he toasted with raised glass, to quizzical looks all around.

  After dinner Rad found Sue Ross at her table. They were escorted to a raised booth along the window wall, at which time Ms. Ross set off to freshen up in the ladies’ room. Rad was left to gaze out at the Northstar as it sat in the harbor. A handful of smaller crafts had sailed out to float around the behemoth. She was close enough that Rad could see the light he always left on in the captain’s suite.

  Across the water, starlight showed the dark pine and looming precipices of the interior. Unlike the route of Trans Oceanic’s tropical cruises, the Inside Passage to Alaska could never be described as exotic. In the northern reaches of a hemisphere that wrote history in Darwinian strokes, some other descriptor remained on the tip of Rad’s tongue. Out beyond the quelled lights of a trapper’s wharf-turned-temple-of-commerce, life ran on prehistoric time.

  The glass of wine with dinner would be his only drink that night. There was a backing maneuver to be performed, out to where the bottom lay at twenty-five fathoms.

  From his booth near the main entrance, Stan Hundtruk nursed an iced tea and focused like a robot on Captain Squier and Melissa Blythe. Both had dour faces during the early questioning, and Hundtruk knew they were talking about the drowned Russian. Hundtruk knew Squier was smart, so he would just now be offering the same pat, compassionate recitation of events he’d given time and again. Blythe might throw him a curve, asking whether upon further reflection and the distance of a year he had made any new, possibly helpful, connections. He’d be ready for that too: “No, I think this is just one of those tragic accidents.”

  About ten minutes into the interview, Hundtruk watched their faces brighten. They were off the subject of the girl. Here, Blythe would be more direct than she dared be at any roundtable. She would ask him point-blank if he planned a run for office, perhaps even floating the idea of a campaign for the 7th Congressional District. He would craftily not rule anything in, or out. Assuming he’d done some self-polishing in anticipation of entering the field, Squier might toss off something like, “If I thought I could do something positive for Arbor Glen, Washington State, or my country, I would have to look closely at that.”

  Now the captain and his inquisitor were smiling broadly, and Hundtruk imagined that the interview was winding down, that he was probably offering up some light humor. Their forthright position in the center of a roomful of conservative strategists precluded anything but thoughts about how photogenic they both were.

  Then they got serious again. No. It was more like his body language began to indicate withdrawal from the conversation; the physical inference was that he would divulge no more. She had stung him with some kind of nail-on-the-head question. Hit him with something he’d never thought of before, something he did not want to think about.

  Halfway through his iced tea, Hundtruk connected the bad point in the interview to the sauna tech Blythe had seen him with on the upper plaza of the One World Pool. His strong hunch—like a hint from on high, though he was an atheist—was that his co-investigator had shared with the captain some suspicion about Barbara Stafford.

  The pair came down out of the booth, and it appeared as if Squier meant to escort Blythe back to the ship. They passed Hundtruk on the way out, and the look she flashed him was different from the disparaging look-downs she’d thrown at him before. It was an expression far removed from any sense of investigatory rivalry. It was a look that seemed to have little to do with whether or not his hiring boded well for her future employment.

  The look Blythe gave him was searching, subtly imploring, as if to say, if things get crazy here, will you have my back?

  The captain watched from his seat at the bridge command console, mulling over reporter Ross’s troubling revelations. A same-sex attraction at the bottom of Svenko’s death was something he had never for a moment considered—and to think the murderer might have come aboard his ship as an employee.

  The Northstar slowly backed into the deep channel, until her lights and Ketchikan’s harbor lights ceased to play across the same water. At around three in the morning, another medium pod of orcas swept past the ship, headed north earlier than usual. Only the night command witnessed it, duly logged it, filed and forgotten.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Melissa felt she’d done the right thing by apprising Captain Squier of her theory: a soured lesbian love affair at the bottom of Lara Svenko’s death. But she felt herself similarly wise I not confirming her suspicions about Barb Stafford, and the alarming reality that Stafford at made her way onto the Northstar again.

  With co-investigator Jeff Griffin having apparently intuited who her quarry was, she needed an ally now, and she was betting that a preemptive alliance with the captain might help maintain her investigative edge. Despite the tragic consequences for Ms. Svenko, company-man Squier and his superiors would appreciate any storyline that veered away from Trans Oceanic liability or political murder.

  Understandably, the captain’s face had momentarily fallen when she confided her hunch. “I thought you were here to report on politics, Ms. Ross.”

  “Reporters hear things,” Melissa replied, fully intending not to divulge the extent of her knowledge. She withheld the onerous Deathknell linkage she had established between sauna tech Stafford and Svenko, and she held her cards on the subject of Stamen having re-upped. In the interest of protecting her investigative turf, it was only for Melissa to know, for now, that the murderess had returned to the scene of her crime. She wanted to give the captain a heads-up about her coalescing theory but nothing more than that. The thing now was to stay one step ahead of Griffin and hope that, if the chips fell badly, he’d be her comrade in arms. He had obviously deciphered something wrong about Stafford’s presence on the ship.

  Melissa was willing to bet a promotion on what she now believed to be true. Barb Stamen had signed on for the 2008 cruise with malice aforethought. Melissa could picture the death-obsessed webmistress viewing the Trans Oceanic site after learning that her fleeing lover had been assigned to report on the cruise. After learning of the fortuitous sauna job opening—sheer occultist’s luck that a replacement tech was needed, but she would have taken any job—a quick charter flight to coincide with the Northstar’s Ketchikan arrival would have been easy for Stamen to arrange. Charter flights weren’t cheap, and Melissa had no way o
f knowing the kind of income Stamen stashed at Deathknell, but with mugs and t-shirts for sale, it was obviously more than a mom’s-basement enterprise.

  Stamen had committed the murder on a starlit summer night, absconded with the laptop, and then successfully ridden out the cruise to its bittersweet Seattle return. Once you operated on that theory, the real end of Stamen’s means now came clear, a clarity that argued strongly for Melissa to keep her firearm near: Stamen had sought employment for 2009 after learning that a case thought to be concluded had been reopened. While Imbroglio wanted a private investigation, they had also made it known publically that they were conducting it. Stamen had likely learned about Charon’s Svenko investigation through some conduit of the subculture related to her previous employment on the ship. It was possible that the same informants who knew that also tipped her that so-called Lewis & Clark thirty-something cub reporter Sue Ross was not all she was cracked up to be on the Rainier Policy Institute cruise.

  Parlaying what had been a flawless performance in the sauna arts from the previous cruise into a reprised position, Stamen had come aboard looking for someone, again. Employing the powers of deductive reasoning she’d been adequately versed in at Cape Lookout Community College—Melissa inescapably deduced that she herself was Stamen’s most likely person of interest on the 2009 cruise.

  The next port of call was Wrangell. There, Melissa would follow if Barb Stamen went ashore, like she had followed other persons of interest in the pre-Meltdown days, when people still gave a shit about the tawdriness of personal lives.

  Viktor Svenko opened Lara’s Rainier Policy Institute file on a rainy Sunday evening in Manhattan, knowing that each installment moved closer to the journal’s end. At that point the laptop would go into the spare bedroom closet that contained everything that was left of his daughter’s memory.