by Ed Ifkovic
Paul was sitting in an armchair near the fireplace, turned slightly away from our group. Sarcasm laced his words. “Headline news. Breaking news.”
His father shot him a curt look, but turned to Sonia. “Noah tells me he believes Sam didn’t kill Jack Mabie.”
Sonia glanced at Noah, but addressed me. “Edna has doubt. I see it in her face.”
“True,” I admitted, “but all of Alaska remains a mystery to me, especially the white North, so I’m hardly in a position to—”
“Of course you are,” she interrupted.
Swiveling in his chair, Paul sneered at his sister. “And what’s your take, Sonia?”
Sonia glared at her brother, but shrugged, dismissing him. Restless, she stood up, circled behind Noah and let her fingers rest on his neck. Surprised, he twisted his head up, looking into her face, a quizzical smile on his lips.
“White silence, the end of the long story.” Sonia rustled Noah’s hair.
“What now?” Hank asked, shaking his head. “Sonia, what?”
She stepped away from Noah and dropped into a chair. “I have a theory—maybe it’s a theory. The sins of the North end up here. I’ve been making notes for a piece for ‘Town Topics.’” Paul groaned and wagged a finger at her. “No, no, listen. The North is filled with horrible stories of violence, anger, cheating, brutality, dreaming, hoping. Think of all the stories I’ve collected. Think of Jack the other day.” She looked at me. “Sam and Jack, maybe ambushing gold runs from Dawson to Skagway. Bodies floating in the Yukon. Lynchings, floggings, Indians killing whiskey peddlers. A wilderness saga. But now, years later, these old pioneers drift down here to Fairbanks, linger in the bars, and the old angers resurface. The settling of scores years later.” She bowed. “The end of a horse opera.”
Noah sat up straight. “You’re saying Sam harbored anger against Jack and killed him to settle an age-old score.”
“Why not?”
“C’mon, Sonia, no.”
Her voice louder. “The vices of the past come back to haunt us.”
Now Paul laughed out loud. “You say that so much you should wear a sign on your back.”
Hank shot his son a look. “For God’s sake, Paul, that’s a little…”
“Realistic?” he finished.
Irina tittered, “I don’t like when we…”
“Talk?” Paul said to her.
Irina sucked in her cheeks and fiddled with the coffeepot.
“Proof?” I said to Sonia in the unpleasant silence.
Sonia was pacing the floor now, excited. She fingered a stone carving on the fireplace mantel. An Indian relic. She tapped it. “The mysteries we can’t imagine. No proof. Common sense. Well, maybe a little proof. That squabble of Jack and Sam on the street—I was there. Sam threatened Jack’s life. ” She frowned. “It was chilling.”
Anger swept into Noah’s voice. “Sonia, for all your writing about the North, you seem to miss something important—the way these sourdoughs dealt with each other. Their world.”
“I know what I heard.”
I counted a beat. “Sonia, in your columns you also mention Preston and Jeremy. Their squabbles, public battles, their ugly encounters with Jack.”
“I mentioned them for…human interest. But I didn’t accuse them, Edna. Can you really see Preston Strange and Jeremy Nunne waiting in an alley to clobber the old drunk in the back of his head with a club?”
“Yes,” I said emphatically. “Why not?”
She rolled her eyes. “Edna, the president of Alaska Enterprises has a lot to lose. Preston is a slimy worm, admittedly, a general annoyance—”
“Whom you dated,” Paul interjected, though Sonia ignored his remark.
“But he’s not venal. And Jeremy Nunne, that overfed frat boy given too much power by an indulgent aunt. No, I can’t believe it.”
Noah glowered. “And yet you assume Sam Pilot, an old sickly Indian, lay in wait.”
Sonia was getting irritated. “I know, I know, I heard Edna’s tale of arthritic proof.” She barely looked at me. “But in a fit of anger it’s amazing what strength a man can have.”
Paul added, “Even Preston and Jeremy.”
“Or Ty Gilley,” I added.
That name stopped everyone cold. Confusion, puzzled eyes, even a sigh from Irina. Only Paul laughed out loud.
“What in heaven’s name?” asked Sonia.
“I’m sorry—when Sam Pilot sat in the lounge and muttered those strange Athabascan words, Ty Gilley was standing in the doorway. Facing him. A hard stare. I think Ty’s presence caused Sam to speak. Something triggered…” My words trailed off.
Hank reached over and patted Sonia’s forearm. “Be careful, Sonia. A good reporter—”
She flashed back, “I am a good reporter, Dad.”
Noah’s voice rose. “Sonia, the police are investigating. They interrogated Sam for hours. Let them do their job. If you start rumors in the paper—in that chatty gossip column you write, local news—if you accuse…”
She yelled back, “I’m not accusing. I’m recounting talk I heard.”
Furious, Noah shot out, “It’s feeble accusation. Unfounded.”
She crossed her arms, glared into his face. “Noah, you’re being unreasonable.”
He scoffed at that. “No, Sonia, you are.”
Noah stood up, nodded at Hank and Irina, smiled apologetically at me, and said, “I’m going home.”
Hank pleaded, “Noah, stay for dinner. Irina wants you here.”
“No,” Noah said. “Not tonight.” He looked at Sonia, who avoided his face. He waited, but she never looked up. Hunching his shoulders, he swore under his breath. He stormed out of the room as the rest of us stared at one another. In the grim, painful silence, Sonia suddenly looked unsure of herself, her eyes dropped into her lap, her fingers interlocked. When she looked back up, catching my eye, she blinked furiously. The determined little girl, I thought, Nelly Bly with scattershot news passion, but a young woman who didn’t understand what had just happened. Her eyes sought the doorway, and I suspected she was hoping Noah would walk back in.
Hank’s words were slurred. “Be careful, Sonia. Be careful.”
Sonia insisted on driving me back to the Nordale. Bundled up, shivering in the cold car, I watched Sonia’s profile as she maneuvered the car out of the driveway. A rigid chin, tension in her jaw, her hands gripping the steering wheel tightly.
“What’s the matter, Sonia?” I asked quietly.
“I offended Noah.”
“Yes, you did.”
She looked into my face. “I do that a lot, I’m afraid. And I don’t want to. Edna, I want to talk to you about something. Something’s bothering me. I can’t talk to anyone else.” One hand flew off the steering and waved helplessly in the air.
“About Noah?” I probed.
“Well, yes, but more so…Edna, I’m so glad you’re visiting in Alaska.”
I laughed out loud. “That’s why you’re bothered?”
She shook her head. “I’m not explaining myself well.” She breathed in, looked into my face. “I’m a journalist, Edna. My passion. I sit at my typewriter and get so—so insanely happy. But then…” She stopped. “I’m like my father. I live for that newspaper. But…I’m drifting. What I’m saying is that I’ve always been an independent woman, fierce almost, dedicated, and my passion for a career clashes with…”
“With the world you find yourself in.”
“Exactly. My mother can’t understand me. She’s content to be at home, dithering around my father’s life, obedient, smiling, telling us to eat more, sleep more, behave ourselves in public. My father expects it.” Her voice got loud. “That’s what bothers me. The expectations. Okay for her, but not for me. I look in the pages of Look magazine and see all these housewives in the floral dresses hovering
like hummingbirds over the supper table. Fathers in business suits read newspapers while Mom shuffles the children off to bed. My mother keeps saying to me—marry, marry. They want me to marry Noah. They love him.”
“You love him,” I stressed.
She laughed. “Yes, I do. More than anyone else in the world.”
“But you don’t want to marry him?”
“No. Maybe. Yes.” A sigh. “I don’t know. A career is more important.” A quiver in her voice. “Is that heresy?”
“You know what I think, Sonia. It explains why we’re having this conversation.”
She clicked her tongue and smiled at me affectionately. “That’s why I’m glad I met you, Edna. Last summer. This year. All winter I smiled at the fun we had, you and me, arm in arm, wandering the streets, laughing. Your life thrills me. The way you carved out your own identity, your own space, a woman alone, you dug your way into a man’s world and said, ‘Hey, look at me.’” Another sigh. “I want that.”
“I’m an old maid.”
“I hate that phrase. As a girl I refused to play that stupid card game with Paul.” She pointed a finger at me. “A little girl in pigtails as early feminist.”
“Good for you. Some see it as a badge of honor—survival.”
A long silence as she focused on the road. Her fingers gripped the steering wheel.
“And then there’s Noah?”
She sighed. “Bingo. The wrinkle in the fabric. I’ve known him all my life but now, these days, a genuine love. Companionable, delightful.”
“And good-looking,” I chuckled.
She grinned. “That, too. But I can only fail him.”
“Maybe he knows that.”
“I don’t know. He gets intoxicated when we’re alone, thrilled with me, the puppyish look in his eyes. It—scares me.”
“You’re afraid of hurting him.”
“I will hurt him. When he asks me to marry him, I say yes, then no.”
I counted a heartbeat. “And tonight? What makes you talk of this now?”
She took a long time answering. “Sam Pilot. His blood, of course. And that article I want to write. I could see in his face that he wants me to avoid the subject.”
“Maybe you should.”
A harsh look. “Would you, Edna? As a reporter back in the day?”
“I’d follow my instincts.”
“Exactly.” She breathed in and faced me. “Edna, have you ever been in love?”
The question took me by surprise, and for a moment I got uncomfortable. Then, slowly, “Yes, as a young girl. My first years in New York.”
“Your career got in the way?”
“My mother. The iron Madonna.” I looked out into the bleak darkness. “A different world then.”
Her car pulled up in front of the Nordale, but neither of us moved to get out. The heater blasted hot, dry air in my face, but I still shivered from the cold. Finally, reaching over, I touched her sleeve. “What are you going to do, Sonia?”
Her voice trembled, “I have to make a decision. I can’t keep him…waiting. But anything I do will hurt Noah. It can’t be avoided. And he’s the one person in the world I don’t want to hurt.”
I struggled to say something. “He’s an intelligent man. He’ll understand.”
Fierce, sad. “No, he won’t.” She sighed. “Let me walk you inside, Edna.”
Outside, she cupped her arm beneath my elbow as we walked into a snow squall. Frost bit my cheeks. She pulled me closer and whispered, “Maybe I should marry him.”
I stopped walking. “Yes? No? Maybe?”
“I know, I know. I’m a teenaged girl babbling over matinee idols’ pictures taped to my bedroom mirror.”
“And your article?”
She didn’t answer at first. Then, finally, her voice faraway, “I already have the words in my head.”
“Be careful, Sonia.”
She opened the door of the hotel and I stepped in. “What do you mean? Why does everyone keep telling me that?”
“I believe that Sam Pilot has a secret that has to do with Jack’s murder. His cryptic remarks, yes, but something about the way he acted today led me to think he knows something. We’re talking about murder.”
“Okay, but I owe it to Noah to investigate.”
“I don’t know about that, Sonia, but—be careful. If Sam Pilot didn’t kill Jack, then somebody else did—and that person is still around.”
“I’m a reporter.”
“Don’t let those be your last words, Sonia.”
She leaned in and hugged me. I could smell her perfume, some spring-like scent. Lilac? Jasmine? She held on to me a long time, as though hesitant to let go, but finally said, “Goodnight, Edna. You give me strength.”
She waved mischievously as she walked back out into the street.
Chapter Nine
Late the next night, a bitter wind howling off the Chena, Sam Pilot staggered out of Omar’s and headed back to Maria’s apartment, a few blocks away. He never made it. His body was discovered when a bread van, headed to the morning markets, blew a tire and the driver, careening onto the sidewalk, came to a stop against some old oil drums outside a grocery store. He spotted a ragtag shoe, bent. Then he realized it was a leg. He stared down into the contorted body of an old man with long, white hair glistening with ice pellets.
“No foul play,” Chief of Police Rawlins announced. Not uncommon, such pitiful deaths. Omar’s regularly witnessed a string of them each winter. Sam Pilot—one more. An accident. Unfortunate. An old drunk, falling.
That afternoon Noah approached me as I lingered over coffee at the Gold Nugget. He slid into a seat across from me, his face purple, his hands waving a newspaper. I nodded—I’d already read Sonia’s rushed column.
“Edna, did you see this?”
I nodded. “Yes, Noah. But…”
His lips in a tight line, then, slowly, a bitter smile. “I guess we were warned.”
I sighed, “Noah, you know Sonia. You know her incendiary journalism. She likes muckraking.”
“I don’t.”
“I know that, but she has her own way of doing things.”
He spread the newspaper on the table, his fingertips tapping the article, and read out loud: “‘Arctic Justice: The Final Chapter.’” Sarcasm in his voice, though I thought I detected a hint of sardonic humor. “Her obsession with emphatic endings.”
Good to her word, Sonia had dwelt in her rambling column on Jack Mabie’s murder but her stated belief that Sam Pilot, Jack’s old—and possibly only?—frontier buddy had followed through with his street brawl threat to kill the hapless old man. Somehow, to Sonia, it validated her thesis that the ancient animosities and creaky alliances forged long ago in the brutal North would inevitably find resolution years later. Strings tied. Scores settled. Vengeance exacted. End of the chapter. In her words—“A curious if bizarre poetic justice. Frontier justice.” Obviously, in the hours immediately following the discovery of Sam Pilot’s frozen body, she’d tacked a coda to her column—even more of a fitting conclusion. Sam, she posited, haunted by his drunken killing of his one friend, himself an old man nearing the end of his life and filled with remorse, had drunk himself into a stupor. Wandering from Omar’s in the early morning hours, reeling, in a fog, he’d somehow willed his own death. The end of a long periodic sentence that began a half-century earlier in the white silence of the Arctic Circle.
“Insane,” Noah now thundered.
“But effective,” I countered.
Noah was mumbling. “She condemns a man—she convicts a man. Sam Pilot cannot defend himself against these accusations.”
I waited a moment. “Noah, are you bothered because Sam was your blood?”
He twisted his mouth into a grimace. “Yes, of course. Who wouldn’t be?” Then, pointing a finger at
me, he added, “But, you know, I’m more offended because I’m a lawyer. This goes against everything I believe in. We believe in. We—Americans.”
“You believe Jack’s murderer is still walking these streets?”
“Without a doubt. Not Sam.”
“You’re convinced of that?”
“In my soul.”
“Blood?”
He nodded. Grinning, he placed his hand over his heart. “Shidril’. That’s it, Edna.”
When I looked confused, he smiled. “My heart.”
Late that night I walked into the Nordale lounge to discover Sonia wrapped in conversation with Clint, who didn’t look happy. Spotting me in the doorway, Clint waved me over, a look of relief on his face. Sonia, intent on reading notes on a pad she’d rested in her lap, gave me a puzzled look. I hesitated, stepping first to the reception desk to ask for my mail.
Teddy checked, joked that I was forgotten by the Outside. “Not even a Sears Roebuck flyer.” Then he leaned in. “You missed the battle.”
“This probably involves Sonia, right?”
He nodded, whispering. “A flash fire yelling match between Sonia and that Indian.”
I frowned. “Teddy, he has a name. Noah.”
He didn’t look contrite. “I know his name.”
“What was it about?”
He pointed to the newspaper on his desk, opened to Sonia’s inflammatory column. “The sins of the past come down to fair Fairbanks.” He glanced in Sonia’s direction. “Well, I agree with her. Sometimes the past won’t stay—past.”
“You’re a philosopher, Teddy.”
“Miss Ferber, I’m a man who sorts the mail.”
“Noah left angry?”
“Like a bat out of hell.” Then, looking over my shoulder, he muttered, “Folks who don’t live in this hotel riling up guests, causing paying guests to avoid the lounge.”
I smiled at him. “The Nordale lounge is Fairbanks’ agora, Teddy. Sooner or later everyone gathers here.”
He rolled his eyes. “Agora? Whatever that is.”
I left him shaking his head and joined Sonia and Clint. Sonia, looking up from jotting something in her pad, offered me a thin smile. “Edna.”