by Mark Ellis
“Oh, come on,” she flirted.
“OK, but I’ll deny everything.”
“Mum’s the word, sir.”
“Have you heard of the Tea Party?”
“I’ve heard things. That’s, like, the far right, right?”
“If you consider upholding the Constitution and the founding documents, advocacy for states’ rights, small government, and free markets, and a commitment to individual liberty to be far right.” He threw up his hands. “Guilty.”
Melissa flashed on the refresher history courses she’d taken at Cape Lookout, and farther back, to grade school history. Worried that she would soon be out of her depth in any discussion of America’s founding, she grabbed the reporter’s fallback.
“Looks like I’ll have to acquaint myself with your party,” she demurred with a bigger smile.
They were gone, and she finally had her room back.
Whatever his politics, Dan’s presence had somehow affected her. He was different somehow from the Seattle guys, even the Port Rachel guys. He recalled to her feelings that life after leaving home were supposed to have drummed out of her. A sense that was suspicious to her, the old fallback of depending on a man. The forbidden desire to give up some of the independence ghost and let a man handle things.
A woman overboard, a killer afoot. Yet there still existed a longing that could rear up and surprise her, even amidst all this. A longing and loneliness that grabbed her heart when Randy and Shauna laughed together at some shared silliness. An empty feeling she got sometimes after she did her laps after work each night. When she fantasized after turning out the condo lights and laying in her bed at home, listening to the whoosh of traffic on the Port Rachel Expressway.
Lying now in her stateroom, ready for sleep, her fantasy of a man like Dan waning like
ripples in the waters away from Wrangell, Melissa opened her iPhone email.
As she glared at her screen, a new email tinkled through, from Charon. She felt as much relief seeing it as she’d felt learning her stateroom had not been invaded. A sense of being looked after by more than just Captain Squier, more than just Sharpe with his avuncular kidding, and more than any possible backup she could expect from the inscrutable Griffin.
It was from Mr. Scrimshaw.
Ms. Blythe:
Trust everything is going well. What fine weather you’ve been having.
Are you in a position to share anything you may have uncovered?
Cornelius Scrimshaw
This night out of Wrangell brought her ever closer to the first anniversary of Lara Svenko’s death. After turning out the light over her bed, Melissa lay awhile, thinking about what it must have sounded like from inside the room when whoever it was had stood outside trying to unlock her door. She might have heard the near-inaudible plastic scrape of an access card and then the click-click of a try at the physical lock. How long would they have stood out there, twisting and jimmying like a skulking alley thief in a Dickens novel?
She sat back up, turned on the bedside lamp, and iPhone set to compose.
Mr. Scrimshaw:
Have reason to believe Lara Svenko was murdered by her lover, female, Barb Stamen, aka Barbara Stafford, who is presently employed as a sauna technician on this cruise.
I believe Stafford threw Svenko off the ship, escaped detection in the official investigation, and then returned to her position for the 2009 cruise for reasons that may have to do with my presence here.
Have reason to believe Investigator Griffin has also connected the dots regarding this suspect, but not sure how far.
My stateroom lock was tampered with tonight. Please advise.
Melissa Blythe
She almost hit Send but stopped short.
There was a sudden intuition that her transom to the Old Turtle might be compromised. That people who did not have her best interests at heart might be listening in, waiting to learn everything her research, hard work, and gut had revealed to her.
No, not yet. She would stay independent for now, and not turn to the Charon men. She shut down the phone, turned out the stateroom light again, and allowed better thoughts, better fantasies to lull her to sleep.
Viktor Svenko knew how the story ended, and there were not that many words left in
Lara’s laptop file.
Some days he thought he might read to the end, worried that his daughter’s lover would send again her fearsome accomplice to rob him of that closure, demanding the machine that held Lara’s last words on earth. God only knew how the second thoughts of a creature like Barb Stamen boded for his remaining time on earth.
Other days he wished the narrative would never end, that the words entered would never run out.
7/3/08. One hour before the dawn of Independence Day, Year of Barack. I’ll allow myself a share of Glory Halleluiahs and profound thanks to the Goddess. What is it the ops say when their candidate has it locked? “It’ll take a live boy or a dead girl.”
It’s funny tonight on the ship. Coming out of Wrangell, the waves mellowed, and you could almost feel a sense of camaraderie with the conservatives. I guess if you travel with somebody long enough, hit enough ports along the way, the old adversity recedes. Why do these people have to be so goddamn wrong?
It drives you crazy, especially on a night like this, everybody happy/tired from the bustling wharf, and scenery that becomes more otherworldly with every cape and cove.
No. Then you realize that most of the people of color here are engaged in servitude. Diversity and multiculturalism are lip-serviced and then spit out like a bad oyster. The women are vehemently anti choice. Any gay or lesbian is closeted—ain’t any Log Cabin boys at this dance. Any system or philosophy beyond grind-house capitalism is looked upon as degenerately subversive rot.
How can they not see how things could be on the planet? I cannot say a single earth-prayer for them, even on this gorgeous night, all of us floating, sailing along in this great steel tub with Juneau ahead of us. Human they may be, their day is done, and it has to be.
Sleep well, Barb. Maybe if we were both here, holding on to each other as we always did after sex. After you made me feel like you being good at that was the most important thing in the world. A few nights like this, like the one I’m having with these poor, outmoded conservatives, and maybe we could bury the hatchet.
Like Frost wrote, together, you and me again, the fiery, irresistible way it was, gently into the night.
Chapter Twenty
Captain Squier knew the streets of Juneau like he knew every tree-lined street and flowered median in Niles Timberland’s dream development, the gated paradise of Arbor Glen.
He’d lost count of his many visits to Alaska’s center of government long ago, but he vividly remembered two in particular. One summer after Vietnam, he booked passage with his Ford Torino on an Inside Passage ferry, a voyage that foretold the very route he would someday command as a Trans Oceanic captain. It was 1974, and the Arab oil embargo was in full swing. Makers of the Alaska pipeline were crying out for laborers. Rad welcomed the prospect of a break from open water, and his memories of the horrendous evacuation from Saigon. He sensed that working in the heart of the north continent to supply oil for the lower forty-eight might offer purge for his spirits. Unfortunately, by the time he arrived in Fairbanks, all the jobs had been filled, and the highway south was lined with turned-back men trying to hitch a ride. He didn’t have enough money to sail home on the ferry, so he hooked up with three guys and a gal who could chip in for gas. The return trip over the Alcan Highway was a gorgeous drive through what was still, and is still, mostly wilderness.
The other Juneau visit that resonated over the years was the 1985 Rainier Policy Institute gala cruise. Nancy was along, and all of them were giddy with the reelection of Reagan. What a party!
Now, as he stood on the bridge on the morning of what was shaping up as another unseasonably warm day, that gregarious Alaska capital came into the Northstar’s sights up the Gastineau Chann
el. President Obama’s first Independence Day in office was twenty-four hours away, a milestone that would go uncelebrated on the ship. But July Fourth in the capital of America’s forty-ninth state was always a treasured moment on the Passage cruises. The drumbeat of strategy had given way to rituals of observance. Everybody was sporting a flag pin.
A pair of barge-towing tugboats was underway out of the main Juneau harbor, likely headed back to Ketchikan to pick up gravel for the back roads. Rad thought about giving a short-blast welcome but decided to save all such demonstration until the festivities and fireworks scheduled for that evening. Juneau would first lay eyes, not ears, on the Northstar’s grand entrance.
Cocaptain Briggs was glued to the command window, watching one tug that seemed not to have the sense to get out of the way.
“They’re signaling something in Morse, Captain.” The use of the antiquated system was an inside joke smaller craft sometimes sprung on approaching luxury liners, like a basement blogger sending show notes to Grant Sharpe. It took seconds for Briggs to decipher the blinking code: “Hot enough for you?”
The ship’s helmsmen laughed as one, but the message had an unfunny edge. The projected high for the day was 89, fifteen degrees above normal, a temperature to be expected on a Hawaiian Islands cruise. It was almost enough to make Al Gore’s inconvenient truth plausible.
“What’s it going to take to get you gentlemen to accept the reality of climate change?” challenged Briggs.
Whereas talking politics violated not only protocol on the bridge but also good taste, the subject of climate change theory served as a relatively benign substitute. As long as it was just about the weather, nobody got too ruffled.
“First,” Navigator Holdren replied, “you’ll have to explain why it was just as hot on the planet millions of years ago as it is now. Dinosaur flatulence?” Holdren reiterated his skepticism for the umpteenth time. “This is nothing more than an extremely remarkable high-pressure stagnancy that has stalled and continues to circulate over the northern coast of North America.”
Briggs reasserted his belief with “The ozone layer is depleting. Laugh all you want about Gore’s shoreline mansion—the icecaps and glaciers are melting, including Hubbard Glacier.”
Holdren rebuffed. “Whatever melting is occurring at the North Pole is being offset by an expanding icecap at the south pole. How do you explain that?”
Rad agreed with his navigator, but like a good tactician, he let his bridgemates joust.
Juneau was the only scheduled overnighter on the cruise, and Rad wondered if he might toss and turn with thoughts of Nancy. She’d regularly called from Palm Springs, so he knew every detail about the holiday with Rebecca and her family. But he missed her closeness to him, her bells of laughter, and her quiet, considered conservatism. For the first time since the voyage had begun, he had a real throb of longing when he thought of sleeping alone through the wee hours of the nation’s 233rd birthday. On the occasion of that day he had also had turned her thought about letting the Democratic Party have its day in the sun over in his mind. Nancy was sure they’d blow it, overreach, and turn off the great middle of the country for a generation. As his retirement neared, and life after Trans Oceanic appeared on the horizon, the blessing of the time he’d have to spend with Nancy Squier came more and more to his thoughts, and frankly, argued against what everybody around him seemed to want, a Captain Squier run for the 7th District.
Rad’s last action on the bridge that morning was to reach out with professional acknowledgement to Trans Oceanic’s competition. A big Carnival ocean liner was berthed at the first docking pier. The waterfront would be crowded, every establishment full to brimming.
Rad wouldn’t have his wife with him at the famous Bellwether Inn that night, but his seat of honor at the feast celebrating the approach of Disenchantment Bay and Hubbard was secure. As Briggs aimed the Northstar like a sextant at Juneau’s port, Rad retired to the captain’s suite for an in-room lunch. The suite was cool and quiet, and lonely as the holiday drew near. After not finishing his touristy boxed lunch, he lay on the bed mulling over possibilities for the speech that would surely be coaxed out of him.
He’d struck gold at the Captain’s Dinner with his nod to the Northstar and his responsibilities at the helm. But Independence Day eve demanded something that transcended his hand on the rudder. There would be talk of the future, and Grant Sharpe would be looking to draw him out. Rad’s plan was to offer a preemptive toast, coded with intent and discretion, over the drinks that would follow a sumptuous feast.
He drifted off around four and dreamed of Nancy.
A slant of sunlight tweaking off his galley’s stovetop hood and winking into the bedroom disturbed the twilight between deep sleep and wakefulness. Rad glanced at the wall clock worriedly and knew that he had not missed his moment at the Bellwether. What had seemed in his dreams like transported hours with his wife—a cycle of harmony, discord, and lovemaking—had been a power nap of less than a half hour.
He rose to the landward portal and was puzzled to see that though all gangplanks reached out to the ship, only a trickle of passengers were wending their way to shore. By his reckoning, from the time he lay down to the time it was now, the ship could not have been in harbor more than twenty minutes. And yet the swift and excited disembarking that usually followed arrival was not in evidence. Out the forward glass was another mystery. All those conservatives not headed for Juneau’s waterfront were also wholly absent from the chaise lounges around the One World Pool.
Where the hell is everybody?
He called Beckman. “How long have we been in port?”
“Eighteen minutes, sir.”
“Where the hell is everybody?”
“There have been some political developments, sir. Many of the passengers are still onboard, most in the Banff Theater.”
“What political developments?”
“Sarah Palin has resigned the governorship of Alaska, sir.”
Stan Hundtruk found himself the recipient of a deep sense of inner satisfaction. He stood at the ship’s prow, comfortable in a polo shirt and shorts, watching the lights of Juneau enliven against a backdrop sky growing midnight blue with nightfall. Sarah Palin made things interesting; her floundering departure made his job more secure and the goals of his leaders more inevitable.
His shell-shocked fellow passengers had finally adjourned their emergency meeting in the Banff Theater and gone ashore, but it was a dawdling procession. From the deck rail, Hundtruk watched the pairs and foursomes egress over the gangplanks and down the pier. Their backs were turned, but he knew the looks on their faces: good old Nixonian worry. He’d worn the same look the night an overbearing Al Gore sighed during his debate with Bush Junior and cost the Democrats an election.
Assorted in the twinkling of city lights were the government buildings. The people, the underlings and functionaries who occupied the buildings, had struck a significant victory today. Hundtruk imagined the black little celebrations, the Machiavellians in their cups, the happy-hour hubris now occurring in progressive watering holes that visiting conservatives would never find. McCain’s wild and woolly running mate looked pale and distraught on the Lake Lucille shoreline, rambling—it was sad, really—quitting because the contact sport of politics had gotten too rough. She invoked her family and alluded to a dysfunctional government full of paper-pushing petty-crats bent on wrapping her in red tape and charging her with trumped-up ethics violations.
The people she was talking about were Hundtruk’s people.
First laying eyes on Sarah Palin, Hundtruk, absent political considerations, fantasized that if ever a man faced life-threatening peril in a wild place, it was a woman like her, and all the possibilities such a situation presents, that a man would want with him. She had seemed so formidable, this earth mother in sweatpants. Despite rapidly trending insider knowledge that tabbing the Alaska governor would turn out to be a big McCain blunder, her debutante charisma shone from the 20
08 Republican convention podium like preacher fire.
Hundtruk flipped open his laptop to monitor the official reaction to events. Cable was in a furor, with the Fox News holiday crew scrambling. Bill Kristol appeared, seemingly plucked from a family gathering, to predict that Palin’s step-down would ultimately prove wise, the key to breaking away into national prominence. But Charles Krauthammer was waxing funereal about the implications for this pretty hockey mom, and Hundtruk was inclined to agree. Americans don’t like a quitter.
Hundtruk felt the political rush even as he knew he would miss Palin. The lady-in-waiting was dead, and Hundtruk had an official invitation to sit as innocuous Jeff Griffin at a table with the mourners.
While not as deflated as they’d been immediately following the resignation, the Bellwether Inn crowd was decidedly subdued. Hundtruk found himself a table on the fringe of the lovely dining room but close enough to divine gradations between stiff upper lips and new realities.
Grant Sharpe was at the center of the innermost circle, just next to a comported Captain Squier. There was anticipatory silence as the servers brought out the mussel bisque, and Hundtruk didn’t envy whomever it was that would break it. He dipped into the cool soup and prepared to witness a road-show version of damage control.
The Rainier Policy Institute wonks wore inscrutable expressions that titillated Hundtruk’s operative soul. Whispers that Palin’s ascendancy had troubled the old guard were rife, surfacing as a low collective murmur. Officially everybody liked her. But Hundtruk smelled another truth in their abiding glumness. The arrival in Juneau had been reset into its proper quadrant of the political universe, nothing more or less than another weigh station on a cruise in search of a platform, and a legitimate frontrunner.
Dinner proceeded, with tings of cutlery the loudest noises in the room. Before dessert Hundtruk saw that, fittingly, it was Sharpe who would speak first to the assembled. Hundtruk could almost hear the violins go up.