Run Cold

by Ed Ifkovic

  “You have no idea what she wanted to tell me?”

  “Not a clue.”

  After a lunch with Clint at Mimi’s, I returned to my room on the second floor—back by the staircase at the rear of the building, a room I chose because it was away from the clamor of the street—I found myself doing what I’d done all morning. I gazed out the window at the barren landscape, a parking lot, sagging log cabins, stunted spruce and alders bent under ice, and in the distance a rise of white hills. If I stood on tiptoe at the window and shifted my head to the left, I could see the distant summit of Mount McKinley—Denali, to the Natives. The Great One—with its snow-shrouded peaks. Late in the day it wore a rosy hue. Too tired to linger at the window, I just lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. The old chenille spread, a little frayed and linty, cut into my flesh. I thought I’d nap before leaving for an obligatory supper with the head of the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce and some schoolchildren who’d read one of my novels. Cimarron, I’d been told. I’d have to say a few words to the bubbly youngsters. Three hours at the high school, they’d promised me, imploring—just three hours of my time. I smiled. Cimarron—another frontier I wrote about. The Oklahoma land rush.

  Well, I thought, some game was now afoot. I looked at my wristwatch. Dinner and reception with the schoolchildren, over by nine, as promised. And Sonia’s show-and-tell to follow. Not a bad day’s bill of fare.

  The evening’s events were predictable, if pleasurable. The head of the Chamber of Commerce was appropriately fawning in his generous remarks, the cafeteria food at the high school gelatinous and fearsome, save a bread pudding that tickled my fancy, and the nervous high-schoolers said nice things about Cimarron and I said nice things back.

  But my mind was elsewhere, back at the Nordale lounge where I arrived a few minutes before nine, warming my hands before the blazing fireplace. Sonia hadn’t arrived yet. But everyone else was there—Clint, Ty Gilley hidden behind a newspaper. Even Jeremy Nunne was talking with someone, although when I turned around, he was gone.

  Clint beckoned me to the corner where he was slumped in a chair, a pipe in his mouth.

  He was sitting with a young man I didn’t recognize. Introduced as Harry Hilmar, a machinery salesman from Walla Walla, the young man kept tugging at the bulky wool sweater he wore, doubtless given to him by a loved one who feared he’d freeze in the Alaskan icebox. “We was talking about statehood,” Clint told me.

  What else? Three verities in the land of the Chinook: death, taxes, and the debate over statehood. Death, of course, preferable to the last.

  Harry struck me as a genial bumbler, given his propensity to pick at the fabric of his sweater, as well as his curious manner of suddenly thrusting out a moist tongue, frog-like, to gather the drool that seemed to collect at the corners of his mouth.

  “What exactly do you do?” I asked him.

  “I represent generator parts, mostly governmental contracts, over to Ladd Air Force Base.”

  I stopped listening.

  “Harry here is a real jackeroo greenhorn.”

  “Yeah, a cheekacho.” I used the name for an Outsider who’d yet to endure one full Alaskan winter.

  “I sure am,” Harry beamed.

  For a while, Clint and Harry talked about prospecting. Harry had been to the gold dredge across town, which Clint portrayed as a waste of money: “Give me a tin pan and a stream anytime.” But Clint had found a receptive audience, regaling the young man with tales of old Fairbanks—thirty-three saloons in a four-block stretch of First Avenue. His friendship with Chee-chaco Lil, whorehouse madam extraordinaire. Claim-jumping, armed miners. Hordes of killer mosquitoes and black horse flies driving men mad. Life in the hungry bush. Barroom fights and dollar-a-dance girls. Ten bucks for a dozen eggs. Life in Fort Yuk, as he called it. I smiled whenever Clint glanced at me. I assumed he was making it all up.

  Quietly, I watched as Mary, the young Indian girl who was the housekeeper in the lounge, moved silently about the room, emptying ashtrays, picking up glasses and cups, stepping out of the way of the loungers. Her look was a combination of Lower Forty-eight civilization—a white frilly blouse, the clinging black wool skirt, and the sensible oxford shoes—with a hint of something Indian—a beaded whalebone comb tucked into her hair and a bone ivory bracelet trimmed with a tuff of some fur, trinkets that clashed with her prim New England schoolmarm uniform. When she bent over, a necklace slipped out of her blouse. At first I thought it was an amulet, a chiseled jade stone, but when she turned, I realized it was a stone crucifix. So she had been educated at one of the Episcopalian missionary schools. Chubby, fat-cheeked, with straggly black hair, she looked like one of the Navajo women I had talked to in the Southwest.

  Clint was telling Harry that the sourdough yeast he used to fry up his breakfast flapjacks dated back to a “good old gal who give it to me winter of 1914.” Harry had no idea what he was talking about.

  I checked my watch. I’d been in the lounge for nearly an hour and a half. Ten-thirty now. Sonia was late. Harry excused himself—“Need my beauty rest”—and I watched him walk away, headed to the stairwell.

  “You missed Noah,” Clint said quietly. “He was here earlier tonight. Around seven. Looking for Sonia—maybe. Sonia’s talking double murder now, and scaring the daylights out of everyone. Noah slipped in, said hello, then headed home. He sat right in that chair you’re in. I told him you was off to the high school.”

  I looked at my watch again.

  “You waiting for someone, Edna?”

  “Sonia. I’m supposed to meet her at nine. Here.” I fidgeted.

  “Well, you missed her.”

  “What?”

  He looked puzzled. “I mean, she was here—like at eight, I think. She looked around, seemed to be waiting for someone.” He smiled. “You, I guess. But she didn’t come over to where I was. She was talking to Teddy, then sitting by herself, going over some papers she had.”

  “I’m sure the note said…” I rushed my words. “When she came here earlier, did she stay long?”

  He shrugged. “Nah. She went up to reception, but by then I was yammering with that guy Harry. She took off, I guess. When I looked over to reception, she was gone.”

  “Lord, I missed her.” I shook my head. Had I misread the time in her note?

  “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “I don’t like waiting.”

  He chuckled. “Try living in a wilderness cabin all winter long up in the Yukon Flats. You learn patience.”

  “Thank you, but I’ll stay in New York in winter. Everyone there is impatient, let me tell you. A hint of ice on a sidewalk, and people weep out of control. I fit right in.” I sighed. “Good night, Clint.”

  Upstairs I walked down the long hallway, weary, but I paused, extracted the note from my purse, reread it. Nine o’clock: clear as day. Why me? I’m the Outsider. Outsiders, folks from the Lower Forty-eight. I smiled. Cheechakos. Lord, I hurled that bizarre term at that hapless Harry Hilmar, military machinery man, he of the drooling mouth and frog-like tongue. A johnny-raw, that boy. Must make a note about him, a description. Maybe use him in a novel. A story. A character…but not tonight.

  Sleep. I need sleep.

  I opened the door and stepped into the dark room, reaching for the light switch on my left. But I stumbled, struggled to right myself, and when the light suddenly flooded the room, I realized that my foot had kicked a body sprawled in a heap on the floor. I stifled a scream and pivoted wildly, this time toppling onto the body, then crawling away. My hand touched the dead woman’s head, and I found myself staring at a face with eyes wide-open, glassy, brilliant, staring back at me.

  Chapter Eleven

  I sat in the small room behind the reception desk on a plaid-covered lumpy sofa covered with coffee stains. I squirmed, uncomfortable. I could still hear echoes of my own ragged screaming as I fell upon the body
of the hapless Sonia. For those few horrid minutes I went blank, a condition I don’t approve of in myself, but I recalled, with not a little embarrassment, a strange man grasping my arm and somehow maneuvering me into the hallway, down the stairs, and into the reception area where, spotting my trembling face, Teddy rushed over, his face white.

  That was an hour ago—maybe more, time having collapsed—and I sat with an untouched cup of cold tea by my elbow, next to it a snifter of brandy, barely touched. For a minute I sat sobbing, grieving for that young woman. Folks skirted around me, Teddy quietly placing a box of tissues at my elbow. I did notice that he had been reading my Giant, open to the middle and placed facedown on a table, my dreadful profile staring up at me, a ghostlike photograph that probably looked more lifelike than I did now. A helter-skelter assembly of souls rushed in, rushed out, officious, noisy, crazed, dizzy with questions I couldn’t answer. An ambulance siren, echoing against a howling night wind, grew louder.

  At one point Clint straggled in, his face ashen, and he took a seat next to me in the tight room, mumbled something incoherent—I felt as though people were talking at me through a large, clogged funnel—but then, at one point, he seemed to disappear. Now oddly, he was back, sitting across from me.

  “What?” I asked, irritated.

  “You all right?”

  I nodded. “What’s happening?”

  “Chief of Police Joe Rawlins’s coming to talk to you. After they take care of things upstairs.”

  Upstairs: that beautiful girl, lying there, twisted and blank-eyed, a clot of thick brownish blood caking that lovely blond hair and forming a pool on the gray carpet. Sonia, no more. The laughing girl with her poisoned pen.

  Then, a lightning flash in my head, I remembered something. When I’d been led down the stairs by that stranger, I’d spotted Ty Gilley by the front door, watching, stone sober, his eyes hard as diamond coal. A fleeting image: Ty, uninterested in the chattering woman being escorted down a creaky stairwell, slipping out the door. My mind raced. He didn’t have on his parka or gloves. Or did he? Was he leaving? Or returning?

  “What?” Clint asked. “You look like you’re gonna say something.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  He whispered, “Joe Rawlins says they’ll move your stuff to a room down here. You can’t go back up there.”

  Suddenly I wanted to, not so much to retrieve my suitcases and books and notes, and really not to see the body of that young woman lying there—no, I just wanted to be in that doorway, to walk in as I had earlier, unsuspecting, switching on that light and then toppling over. Somehow, being there, I could reconstruct that moment, I could see something, perhaps understand. But understand what? Yes. Why my room? Why kill Sonia there? What did I have to do with it?

  Which, of course, was the first question that Chief Rawlins asked me when he sat down across from me.

  “I have no idea,” I told him.

  The chief was a fortyish man with a weathered look about him, a mountain-climber’s sun-baked visage, all those deep and pitted crevices. A red bulbous nose—a drinker, perhaps. Rail thin, Lincolnesque, with salt-and-pepper hair and beard stubble. A thin moustache, untrimmed. But he had stone-agate eyes that were unblinking and accusing one minute, the next soft and watery. A good-looking man, if you liked someone who preferred hunting grizzly bears to a soul who kept the home fires burning.

  My answer seemed to stymie him. He waited.

  So I demanded, “How did she get into my room? How did the…the killer get in?”

  Teddy, sitting nearby, cleared his throat and glanced at the Silas Taylor, the hotel manager, who just arrived, his face pale and his eyes flashing. “Our locks are old-fashioned, easily manipulated. Lots of folks know that most keys can, you know…” He stopped. “Well,” he sputtered, “we’re a trusting people, we Fairbanks folks.”

  Icily, I held his stare. “Well, not everyone obviously is a model citizen.”

  He turned away.

  Clint told the chief that Sonia had, indeed, showed up before eight, talked to a few people in the lobby, the regular nighttime crowd. Teddy said she’d talked about the potlatch she’d attended, bubbly, in fact.

  “But I was at a supper…”

  “Maybe not everyone knew that.”

  “We were to meet at nine.”

  “Yes,” Rawlins noted, “we found the note in your purse.”

  “You opened my purse?” I was furious.

  “Ma’am, it was on the floor. You must have dropped it. Unclasped. Contents askew, including the note.”

  “So there. I knew I wasn’t insane. Sonia forgot the time of our meeting…”

  He bit his lip. “No, ma’am, in her pocket we found a scribbled card, a note from the secretary at The Gold, saying plans had changed, you were busy later, for her to come here at eight.”

  “I never…”

  “Of course,” he cut me off. “Seems like she picked up her messages at her office sometime after she got back from Tanacross, and assumed you’d called her.” He was nodding. “A ruse, obviously.” He nodded at Teddy. “What did you tell me?”

  Teddy, uncomfortable, made a raspy sound. He began talking but, scattered, looking into my pale face, he began again. “Miss Ferber called.” He hesitated. “Or someone. Her room. Said for Sonia, when she comes, to have her go up to her—Miss Ferber’s, I mean—room.”

  My mouth flew open. “From my room? A woman?”

  He squirmed. “I didn’t pay much attention. I mean, the voice sounded real sleepy, whispering-like. Like you were waking up, hoarse and raspy. So quick—a few words. I first thought—a man in Miss Ferber’s room, so low…I’m sorry, I…” He smiled without realizing it.

  “What?”

  “Well, ma’am, like a whiskey voice, like someone at the end of a night’s ferocious drunk. I get calls like that all the time—folks drunk in their rooms.”

  I pursed my lips. “Well, I have every reason to start doing so now.”

  “So we can’t get anywhere with that. Man or woman, who knows?”

  “What did I supposedly say?”

  “Brief, to the point. ‘When Sonia arrives, send her to my room.’ That was it. No thank you, very abrupt.” He bit his lip. “I started to say, ‘Anything else, Miss—’but the person hung up.”

  “Yes, my usual gracious phone manner.”

  “Sonia was here. I mean, just missed Noah, she said, laughing, Noah’d be the death of her.” He stopped, panicked at the words that popped out of his mouth. “I mean…”

  “For heaven’s sake, Teddy.”

  Squeamish, he looked down. “I don’t know what to say.” A helpless shudder.

  “How did she seem?” the chief asked Teddy.

  He shrugged. “Nothing peculiar. Nice. Like always. Always sweet. I told her the message. She walked away, took some papers from her purse, read them. Then she was gone.”

  The chief noted. “No papers found on the body.” Puzzled, he addressed Teddy. “What did you think when you saw Miss Ferber in the lounge at nine?”

  Teddy looked into my face. His lips trembled. “I could see she come from the outdoors, face cold. I figured she’d stepped out with Sonia for a bit—like was returning now.” He swallowed. “None of my business, you know. Then Miss Ferber was gone. Up to her room.”

  “And into a nightmare.” My voice shook.

  “When did you get the note?” the chief asked me.

  “This morning. May Tighe…”

  The hotel manager kept looking around the small space. But now he interrupted. “Last night Sonia rushed in around ten or so. I was at the desk”—he glanced at Teddy—“Teddy had to carry yet another set of towels to Mrs. Leyerson on the third floor, a royal pain, that woman.”

  The chief glared at him. “And?”

  “Sonia was happy to see me. I mean, she d
idn’t seem—nervous. She told me she didn’t want to wake Miss Ferber. Could I put a letter in her cubbyhole? I did, but then she asked for it back, tore it open, and scribbled something on it. I didn’t see what. But I gave her a new envelope, she sealed it, and left. Her last words, ‘Tomorrow a potlatch in Tanacross. I can’t wait.’ She seemed—normal.”

  The chief was talking to himself. “Someone knew Miss Ferber was away for the night. Someone knew Sonia was coming for Miss Ferber at nine. Someone called The Gold to change the time. Eight o’clock. Someone…”

  “Who knew what she was going to tell me,” I said loudly.

  “And what was that?”

  I sucked in my breath. “Who killed Jack Mabie. Who killed Sam Pilot. She was hell-bent on that story.”

  The chief held up his hand. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Her death could be something different…”

  “No.” I shook my head vigorously as my hand reached for the cup of tea. “No. We’re talking three horrible murders here.”

  “Who said Sam Pilot was murdered, ma’am?” the chief said.

  Suddenly I felt the walls of the tiny space closing in on me. Squirming in my seat, facing these men, I gasped for air. Why were we huddled in the tight little room? Outside in the lounge a babble of voices—doubtless hotel guests, townspeople, scattered souls drifting in after hearing of the murder. Macabre, ghoulish voyeurs.

  My eyes lingered on a narrow cot along the back wall. Teddy’s refuge—snoring when on duty. Now, exhausted, I wanted to lie down on that cot, close my eyes, fall asleep. A box of opened Ritz crackers, crumbs on the desk. A faded black-and-white photo of a family dressed in their Sunday best. An adolescent Teddy in a slough-boy cap and kickers. A snapshot of Teddy in front of the Nordale, his long arm pointing up at the sign. Rumpled blankets on the cot—I wanted desperately to leave these men, to snuggle under those covers, wrap myself in the covers, disappear. On the table a knitting basket, its contents spilling out. A box of chocolate-covered cherries from Lavery’s Groceries. May Tighe’s ratty sweater. Her needlework—a bit of embroidery, the beginning of a motto: “Laugh, and the world laughs with…” My mind recoiled. You! I finished the line in my head. You you you. I felt like screaming.