by Mark Ellis
“There are things going on in our party now that we, me included, don’t yet fully understand,” Sharpe sonorously broke the silence.
His tack was that they had a midterm to think about, that presidential politics should be the last thing on their minds. He managed to conjure air and water in the same sentence. “The situation is extremely fluid—we have to let this thing breathe.”
Then the hammer: “Win back the House and Senate in 2010, and 2012 will take care of itself.”
The ensuing applause was genuine but more about esteemed personage than renewal. There was no putting a happy face on Palin stammering and going verklempt on the blustery shores of an ice water lake.
Sharpe had a final statement: “Don’t count Sarah Palin out.”
The polls on Sarah would be out soon enough, but Hundtruk commissioned his own imaginary poll. Would you still vote for a President Sarah Palin? If you asked that question on this ship tonight, how would she fare?
Melissa Blythe sat three tables over from Hundtruk. Unlike during her debut performance at the Captain’s Dinner and her media-genic interview with Squier in the booth at Yukon Pete’s, she struck Hundtruk now as less interested in the political circus and more interested in the shadowy corners of the room, the galley ways and restroom alcoves. There was a loud crash from the kitchen, the cacophony of a dropped entrée platter. Many in the Bellwether were startled, but especially Blythe, who nearly jumped out of her seat. The maître d' was quick to appear and explain the mishap. Melissa caught Hundtruk watching her, and he quickly averted his eyes.
It was as clear as the crystal water glasses at every table: Blythe was on to something, further on to it than he was. Something to do with Barbara Stafford. The last thing Hundtruk wanted was to alert his politically centrist co-investigator. She would not catch him looking her way again.
Captain Squier rose to address the room. “Just my luck to have to follow Grant Sharpe.”
New blood had been shed, and it was fitting that new blood would deliver the eulogy. Rad had never quite gotten his mind around the political reality of Sarah Palin. How skillfully would she manage a foreign policy crisis or respond to a major terrorist event? This ambiguity offered him two possible angles on this night of her long knives; he could play up the positive like Kristol did or wax pragmatically like Krauthammer. Having Palin’s days in office numbered made her easier to praise. There were no stakes now but the retained symbolism.
“I’ll never forget Governor Palin’s speech at the convention,” Rad began. “What that speech showed was that there was something new under the sun, and we all loved her.”
Rad turned to Sharpe’s table and locked his gaze on the radio giant. “Grant, I’d say I agree with you 99.9 percent of the time.”
The talk star had become sanguineous under the Bellwether’s honeyed lights.
“And this time will be no exception.”
Broad laughter rolled across a room redolent with the scent of after-dinner candles, coffee, and spirits. Rad raised his glass in a sweeping motion. “To Governor Sarah Palin.”
The response was enthusiastic, if not uproarious. Rad looked over the opulent and regionally correct dining room. Lots of RNC moms put their hands together, the Schafly troops, grannies, and Mary Katharine Ham–style maidens getting a dose of the old-time religion. Some of the men beamed, willing to forgive Mama Grizzly, but others were nursing a newly reinforced skepticism.
Rad saw Alvin Alderson applauding at a midrange table. His friend had chided him at breakfast on the Kodiak Terrace, before news of Palin’s resignation: “Just don’t say anything stupid and you’ll be fine.”
Rad hadn’t said anything stupid. The dessert was Baked Alaska.
One the afternoon of July 4, 2009, there was a huge picnic in Savikko Park. A legion of children who would do 2010 election night homework under darkened skies frolicked in sunshine. Love blossomed, yards got mowed, and nitrate-laced beef products were eaten. Rainier Policy Institute swells with alligator emblems on their shirts raised glasses in wharf-side bars with biker types and their women. Stan Hundtruk roused himself for the evening ahead with an uncharacteristic late cup from his berth’s coffeemaker.
Dusk in Juneau fell on what went into the record books as one of the city’s hottest national birthdays ever recorded.
Before leaving the ship to watch the fireworks display from the waterfront, Hundtruk checked his email. Nothing, from Blythe, Scrimshaw, his supervisors, or anyone else. Across the spectrum of politics and investigations, Independence Day was being observed, one way or another.
He left his room and the idling turbines of the ship in harbor. Meltdown be damned, hundreds of thousands’ worth of incendiaries were scheduled to go off just as the late-falling sun fell into the coastal mountains west of Juneau. There was that instinctual countdown, when every American patriot knows the bombs will soon burst in air and the flag will again endure. But before the first rocket’s red glare, before all of that commenced and filled his heart with the wonder of his country, Hundtruk was struck with a memory of the uneasy behavior of his co- investigator at the Bellwether Inn, and quietly understood.
Blythe has established a link between Stafford/Stamen and Lara Svenko’s death.
Viktor Svenko waited for the fireworks display that would soon light the sky over Manhattan Island. He and Lara had made progress in celebrating the country they had immigrated to, had always taken public transportation to a nearby channel-front park to watch the show. He didn’t go on the holiday Fourth after her departure to Seattle last summer, instead watching from his apartment balcony. Tonight, he would go out on the balcony again, to watch and listen as America celebrated in its bellicose way her freedom from the British mother country. But first he would dip into the inexorably concluding entries in his daughters rescued laptop.
7/4/08. Great news today. Experts now believe that Hillary Clinton cannot overcome Barack’s delegate count. I can’t believe it. She was so next in line—first woman president, first husband-wife presidential couple. I could have lived with that all day long. But it is not to be. Barack has done it. I can almost feel sorry for my shipmates today. Not—lol.
Do they honestly believe they can avoid defeat now, running this old, white male and his wind-up Fox News fox? Against the first black president, young, handsome, correct in every imaginable way? I’m almost 1,000 percent sure that Barack and Michelle will find a place for Hillary in the administration.
I will allow myself some giddiness tonight. Of course, there is lots of work yet to be done. It will take a constant effort to ensure that Barack is not tainted and pulled down into the mud by people like Joe Lieberman. The progressive left must be ever vigilant that once in office our man could be co-opted by corporations, the military, even the repudiated right. They have a way of sticking around, even when the nation has rejected them.
I’ve got my story. No need to dredge anything up. Toast is toast.
I really enjoyed the fireworks. Maybe I can sit back and enjoy the cruise a bit. I’m anxious to see the Hubbard Glacier. I’m concerned about the icecaps, the glacial melting. That could be another angle here, the inevitability of Obama and the importance of having his administration finally do something about global warming. Maybe he could appoint Gore head of the EPA.
I have been thinking about Barbie a lot tonight.
I fear to think of what personal demons I freed and how they are loose now like the carrion birds I watch circling the antiquated ideologies on this ship.
I’ve got Barack Obama alone at the top, with beautiful Michelle. What have you got tonight, Barb? Where are you tonight? Do you really want to make me one of your web pages?
I rue the day and pine for the day that I first tasted you.
The heart knows not from logic. And, Goddess help me, at some pit of my being, I still care about you.
I’ll take a long sauna, try to soak out some of the fear, the disillusionment, the loss.
Goodbye.
Now Melissa hit Send.
She imagined Scrimshaw firing back, ordering that the apprehension of the suspect for questioning take place with minimal to no disruption of onboard activities. Melissa was ready to implement the takedown Charon wanted. In a perfect world, Barb Stamen would be off the ship and in federal custody before the press or anyone on the ship got wind of anything. Melissa’s job was to sit tight. Some kind of directive would come.
Noon, and too hot around the pool. Melissa was thinking about cooling off with some artichoke al pesto in the Victoria Station’s air-conditioned atrium when she saw Lieutenant Beckman hurrying down the mid-deck rail, followed by a familiar locksmith. She thought of Dan Waldenburg, who’d come to her rescue the night she’d gotten locked out. Standing in her yellow one-piece, Melissa made a swift, smooth dive into the pool’s tepid water.
She wanted the glacier. She wanted to be the one who slapped the cuffs on Lara’s arrogant killer. Welling up suddenly, but with less of a surprise now, was the feeling that she wanted Dan, who’d helped get her room back, or someone very much like him.
Lieutenant Beckman stood by while the locksmith tinkered with the lock on Barbara Stafford’s stateroom door. Once it was open, he entered. The room was spotless, not a trace of its occupant. The only thing missing was the sanitary strip that housekeeping snuggled over the toilet lid to signify it had been cleaned.
He raised the bridge. “Captain Squier, we have a possible staff absence. Apparently one of our sauna techs signed off at Juneau but never signed back on.”
Beckman listened and then turned to the locksmith to convey Rad’s order. “Change it out.”
Returning to the communications office, Beckman linked to the ship-wide intercom and paged Barbara Stafford, directing her in measured tones to report to flagship embarkation.
Then, after another conference with his captain, Beckman called ship security and relayed Rad’s order for a low-profile, unobtrusive search of the ship.
Chapter Twenty-One
In Cape Lookout’s psych courses, you learn to give yourself a break. You won’t last if you let the big nasty world that constitutes an investigator’s territory into your own struggles, your own loneliness. Compartmentalization is the three-dollar word here, as Melissa’s father would say. Don’t internalize the lives you are investigating. It takes a certain mental toughness to keep the venal and the criminal from getting under your skin. Fail at this key occupational prerequisite and you won’t just be unhappy; you’ll be unhappy and unemployed. Now, sitting almost alone in the Northstar’s admirably stocked Edmondson Library, reading up on the inscrutable marine predator that’d raced the ship that balmy night out of Seattle, Melissa mulled over the reality of her aloneness in the world. If there was one thing Lara Svenko wasn’t, it was lonely, at least until the very end. She was apparently surrounded by friends, like-minded liberal and lesbian friends in Seattle, at Imbroglio, and at the university that had accepted her.
Melissa’s reverie ran to where the heated passion in Svenko’s life had gotten her—death at the hands of an unhinged lover--but could not avoid the strong sense that the void she was feeling of late had much to do with the lack of such passion in her own life.
Only a monitor-enrapt librarian and an elder gentleman reading Golf Digest shared the soft-lit alcove, which was lined with pungent cedar shelving and two thousand volumes. The library had four possible exits, unlike Melissa’s stateroom, and was possibly the one place that tonight no one would expect her to be. She was hiding, displaced from the Northstar’s imminent arrival at Disenchantment Bay. Night was falling; at dawn they would confront the Hubbard Glacier.
The slow-moving Ice Age remnant had put politics under stiff sail, a renewal of purpose in the wake of Sarah Palin’s withdrawal. There was much ado in the restaurants, the Wapiti conference room, and the Banff Theater. A reporter should be part of that. Perhaps later, when recollecting, they would remember the auspicious night that they had not seen the woman they knew as Sue Ross.
While reading a passage that explained how while orcas could mercilessly take down a narwhale they rarely attacked humans, Melissa heard the ship’s resonant voice, Lieutenant Beckman. “Paging sauna tech Barbara Stafford. Please report to communications office.”
Hearing the name of her prey was final, a pull as irresistible as that which had probably held Svenko to loving her murderess up to the hour of her death. Passion was like that. Melissa could only imagine the thoughts, dreams, and desires of a woman like Lara Svenko, living under the Damocles sword of a pathological ex, still thinking, dreaming, desiring. But she could imagine her being in love. Concordant with those thoughts was her perception of the oppressive state of Soviet Russia and Svenko’s sexual orientation. She could easily conjure a vision of men and women closeted, harassed, in fear of intimacy.
The man with the golf magazine peered up from his reading and seemed to read her mind. Then it was as if Scrimshaw himself, or maybe old Professor Hastings at Cape Lookout, had whispered in the library.
Don’t miss your chance.
Melissa dialed Lieutenant Beckman on her iPhone, speaking quietly so as not to draw the ire of the librarian.
“I need to see Captain Squier.”
“The captain is indisposed on the bridge, Ms. Ross. Is there anything I can help you with?”
After brusquely promising to relay Melissa’s request, Beckman hung up. The librarian was deep in his monitor, and the old duffer had fallen asleep in his chair. Her sidearm tucked near her breast and her iPhone cocked in an inside pocket, Melissa ascended the library’s spiral bronze staircase to the main deck.
Due north was something she’d not seen since Seattle. Any Northwesterner knows what such a pronounced gray pillow on the horizon means: fair weather was coming to an end. The reaches of Yakutat Bay were shrouded in various concentrations of sea-hugging fog. Hushes of wind came warm over the water.
The Victoria Station Café had a full house—there was a redoubled focus on what the Republicans had to do to regain power in 2010. Melissa wondered mordantly if she would live to see her family’s party back in the driver’s seat. As she reflected over another salmon salad—they were so good! —her eyes wandered over the restaurant’s gold-embossed crimson wall covering and out the big front window. A Trans Oceanic uniform moving along the rail caught her eye. She knew the face, Maria Centavos. Throwing a twenty-dollar bill down on her seventeen-dollar tab, Melissa took a quick last sip of her decaf iced tea and was out the door.
“Maria,” she called.
The server stopped, smiled, remembered. “Oh yes, one of the reporters.”
“Can I speak with you for a moment?” said Melissa, nodding toward the ship’s rail. “Maria, this is important. There was a page for a Barbara Stafford. What can you tell me about it?”
Her open expression became guarded. Melissa discerned loyalty, unsure of whom or what the server was displaying loyalty to. “A woman lost her life one year ago, near this very spot.”
“What’s that got to do with Barbara?”
First-name basis—Maria Centavos knew something.
“It could be a matter of life and death.”
Sniffing out her quarry, Melissa caught a whiff of ship’s diesel wafting under the lowering sky. Maria divulged more than Melissa could have hoped with her defensive tone.
“Why would I know, something to do with the sauna center probably,” she said before softly hurrying away.
Melissa looked out over the black water, until a gust of wind and moisture roused her. She heard the telltale pitter out beyond the deck lights, felt a patter on her shoulders: odd, still warm, but rain.
Rad peered out the captain’s suite’s socked-in starboard window. A light rain was falling. He called the bridge and ordered Cocaptain Briggs to troll Yakutat Bay. Hubbard Glacier was the grand finale, and Rad held authority to wait out bad weather. Navigator Holdren had his report ready: the unseasonably warm weather and a slow-moving Pacific system had collided and birthed a stubborn zone of condensation.
A quick conversation between Lieutenant Beckman and a Rainier Policy Institute liaison confirmed that even with the delay that the Wrangell layover had already caused, waiting out fog to see the glacier would not be a problem for the passengers.
As the gloom-pressed liner settled into its sweep of the bay, Rad took the intercom. “This is your captain speaking. As you see, we’ve got a pretty thick stew out there. We’re going to hang tight in Yakutat Bay, see if this thing clears.”
Five minutes later, Beckman raised the bridge with a request for a meeting from Sue Ross. Rad agreed, directing that she be brought to flagship embarkation as soon as possible. When he arrived, he saw in the smoke-tinted light that Ross’s aspect of reportorial inquisitiveness had changed since their conversation in the Yukon Pete’s booth only nights before. The next words out of her mouth sizzled like a fuse.
“Sir, it is my duty to inform you that my real identity is Private Investigator Melissa Blythe, from Charon Investigations.”
Rad let the surprise wash over with little surface effect.
“Lara Svenko’s killer is a Trans Oceanic employee, and I believe she is on the ship.” Melissa recounted her jimmied lock and opened her iPhone. Holding it so Captain Squier could see, she logged onto Deathknell.com.