by Ed Ifkovic
Outside a sudden blur of ice crystals slapped against the window. As I looked up, I spotted Jeremy Nunne sitting across the room, but suddenly he approached, trying to get my attention, hovering over my table and making gulping sounds.
“Yes?” I tapped my coffee cup, Morse code clicking. I held up my hand. “Yes?” I repeated.
He rolled his tongue over his lips, smiling crookedly. “I just want to say—I need to say—I know nothing about Sonia’s murder. Preston’s behavior is not—mine.” He went on, almost panicky. “I don’t know why he confronts folks.”
I watched him, this gawky young man with tuffs of cowlicky brown hair, washed-out eyes, a chubby man not attractive but somehow charming, an overfed huckleberry boy. He should be painting Tom Sawyer’s picket fence somewhere in a Norman Rockwell illustration.
“Why are you telling me this, Mr. Nunne?”
Exasperated, “Because I don’t want to be in the middle of…murder.” He shivered.
“So I’m assuming you didn’t kill Sonia?”
He yelped. “For God’s sake, Miss Ferber. I met Sonia a couple times, talked to her, you know, and I don’t understand how this could have happened. I’m just getting to know Alaska, new here, don’t like it here, I think, but…” He looked over my shoulder.
“But what?”
“Alaska confuses me.”
Suddenly I was intrigued by the young man. “How so?”
“You know, I walk out on Second Avenue”—he pointed out the window—“and I feel like I’m in a foreign country. I never expected a part of the United States so…foreign. I fly to Anchorage and I walk down gravel roads in the center of town. But what gets to me are the old Klondike ghost towns, like Dyea or Knik. Falling shacks and faded signs. The shacks with the broken windows and sagging boards. Too much death, Miss Ferber. In Alaska death is only a step away. It’s like a step into darkness. So the murder of Sonia strikes me as—I don’t know—part of the curse of Alaska. My aunt Tessa insisted. The cannery at Bristol Bay—a horror show. And now Fairbanks—me heading Northern Lights Airways.” A thin smile. “And the dark part of Alaska’s soul. Jack Mabie. And Sam Pilot. Dead. Dead. Somehow it…doesn’t surprise. I…” He faltered. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m sorry. I don’t want to be a part of this.”
“Is Preston part of this?”
He blanched. “He’s a good man.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Maybe it was a mistake talking to you.”
With that, he turned and walked out of the café. He crossed paths with Clint, and the two men stopped, considered each other. Jeremy made a half wave that he seemed to regret. And then he was gone.
I watched Clint walk toward me. “Morning, Clint. Join me.”
“Was planning to. A woman alone at breakfast is a lonely sight.”
“How about a man alone at breakfast?”
“Just pitiful, that’s all.”
Clint settled in, ordered flapjacks and blueberries. I chose sourdough pancakes and one scrambled egg. Lots more hot coffee.
“Does everybody in Alaska have to cover everything with blueberries?”
He nodded. “Yes—and steaming coffee, a pot of it.” Which he drank black, in big, hearty gulps.
Clint grumbled, “That Jeremy is a strange bird, no? He looked like he seen a ghost.”
I laughed. “He did—me. We just had a strange talk, the two of us. He’s so…” I stopped, startled, pointed to the doorway. “Round two, I suppose.”
Preston Strange was standing in the doorway, looking around. Impatient, he ignored the waitress who approached him. I motioned to Clint. “Look.”
“Fairbanks’ most annoying citizen,” he sneered.
“You don’t like him?”
“A coward who…” He stopped as Preston, spotting us, strode across the room, pulling off gloves and a beaver-skin cap.
“Miss Ferber.” His tone was all business. “Clint. Hello.” We nodded. Then, without asking, he slid into an empty seat next to Clint. Preston nodded as the waitress put a cup on the table, and he poured coffee from Clint’s pot. Clint eyed him, a frown on his face, but Preston was looking at me. “The hotel told me you were here, Miss Ferber.”
“Can I help you with something?” I wasn’t happy. “Can I pour milk into your coffee?”
He was momentarily taken aback, glancing at the cup, but shook his head. “No, thanks, I drink my coffee black.”
I looked at Clint, who rolled his eyeballs.
Preston spoke hurriedly. “Miss Ferber, I’ve been looking for you.”
“And now you’ve found me.”
He didn’t look happy. “Yes, I have. I’ve been sent here by my mother. She wishes to see you, if you’re free.”
“Now?”
“If you’re free.”
“What is this about?”
He squirmed and shrugged his shoulders. “I have no idea. None whatsoever. But Sonia’s murder has rattled her.” He looked at Clint as he took a sip of coffee. “I just do her bidding.” He made a face. “This death is beyond the pale. It…baffles.” He stopped, letting his voice trail off. Then, leaning in, speaking in a soft voice, “My mother collapsed last night—just passed out. The doctor said it was stress, really. And cigarettes, of course. And too much drink. We thought we were going to lose her. Now she’s lying in bed, medicated.” He grinned stupidly. “Though the pills don’t seem to stem her tirades.”
“And she wants to see me?”
“First thing this morning, she said—‘Preston, implore Miss Ferber to see me. It’s urgent.’” Resentment seeped into his voice. “Everything my mother does is labeled urgent. So I warn you—expect to be disappointed.”
“I’m not certain what to do.” I looked at Clint.
A pleading voice. “She’ll only send me back to bother you, Miss Ferber.”
I fussed with my coffee, indecisive. Preston sat there, a slick man in double-breasted suit, a speck of dried shaving cream on his cheek. He started to stand, but slipped back to the seat. “I’m just the messenger boy here.” He sucked in his cheeks. “Don’t shoot me.”
I found Tessa in her bedroom, a large high-ceilinged room at the back of the house, probably once a den. Floor-to-ceiling knotty-pine paneling and empty bookcases and corner hutches. A big sleigh bed was positioned in the center of the room. Black lacquer Art Deco bureaus and mirrors and chests lined the walls. Rose-colored flocked wallpaper hung on one wall, decades old, peeling. Novels on a nightstand. A stack of Francis Parkinson Keyes paperbacks. Peyton Place in hardcover. Another thick tome, the spine cracked. Craning my neck, I read the title: Not as a Stranger. Another pot-boiler bestseller I refused to read.
I glanced out the back window: a white wasteland out there, cords of wood stacked neatly against a shed, a bank of pale green spruce that led to a frozen rivulet, shadowy under the hazy sky.
Tessa was a mound of flesh, lying prone under fluffy pink blankets, her head inclined and resting against a stack of pillows.
“My request is intrusive, Edna.” She struggled for breath. “I know.”
“I’m sorry to hear you’ve had a spell…”
“I thought I was dying.” She sighed audibly, motioning to a chair. “Such a moment does wonders for clarity.”
Preston, nearby, busied himself in the room. Tessa looked at her son. “Could you please leave us alone, Preston?”
“Mother, I…”
“Now.”
He hesitated, but her unblinking stare made him back out. She turned to me. “My son is waiting for me to die.”
“Preston?”
“Yes, I only have one son, dear Edna.” She closed her eyes. “Preston…he always had a temper. Unfortunate.”
I pulled up my chair, closer. Tessa hadn’t bathed: an odor that suggested old rag
s, an unwashed body, too much flesh lying there, unmoving. I pushed my chair away. “What can I do for you?”
Tessa narrowed her eyes. “First, close the door.” She waited while I got up and shut the thick oak door. “Murder is so…messy.” For a second she closed her eyes, seemed to be asleep. When she opened them, she stared at me. “Hand me a cigarette, Edna.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Of course, it isn’t. But do it.”
I took a cigarette off the nightstand and handed it to her. I struck a match and lit it. Tessa immediately began to cough, and, assailed by the obnoxious odor, I fell back into my chair.
“Smoke bother you?” Tessa asked.
I waited a second. “Why am I here?”
A long coughing fit. “I’m an old fat lady so it doesn’t matter anymore. Except to him.” She nodded toward the closed door.
I was impatient. “I don’t see how I…”
Tessa raised her hand. “Let me finish, for God’s sake. I’m the one telling the story. Our family is a powerful Fairbanks family, as you know. Of course, you know that.”
“I still don’t see…”
Her look shut me up. She snubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray placed on her bed, by her pillows. I could see a half-dozen butts piled there. One had slipped out onto the bed linens.
She struggled to sit up in bed, pulling herself up so that she was almost sitting, but she started coughing. “So much going on. Sonia’s murder. Last night I thought I was dying. I…”
“Tessa, does this have to do with Sonia’s murder? With the other murders?”
She shivered. “She came here. I wouldn’t talk to her.”
Surprised, I said quickly, “Sonia? When?”
“A day before she was murdered.” Again the shiver, the trembling hand. Tessa’s face blanched, her lips drawn into a tight line. Anger in her eyes. “Yes, she was here, but I wouldn’t let her in.” Tessa looked away. “Perhaps a mistake.”
“But I don’t understand.”
She reached out and her fingers grasped a slip of paper. “She left me this note.” She handed it to me. “Read it.”
A short note, scribbled on a piece of lined paper:
The note shook in my hand. “My God.”
“Exactly.”
“The players? You? When? She thought you could name the murderer of those two men?”
Her body shook. “I should have called after her.” A harsh high laugh. “But I didn’t trust her—didn’t like the girl. What players? Jack Mabie, that dreadful man she profiled. Killed by—that Indian. Sam Pilot. I never knew them, Edna. Believe me. Reputation, yes. Dangerous men from the North. Maybe I spotted them—once. I can’t remember. But never…knew him—them.”
“Then why did she need to see you? She thought…”
Her face got pale. “I’m too old for this…these shenanigans.”
My words sharp. “Tessa, c’mon. Three people have died—murdered.”
She avoided looking at me. “I hate that—word.”
“What do you want me to do, Tessa?”
She breathed in. “Doesn’t this point to Noah? The man who carried all that past out of Fort Yukon to Fairbanks? Because of the Indian. His relative—that Sam Pilot.”
My fury grew. “Quite a stretch, Tessa. Noah, a little boy back then.”
“You heard me. A relative of Sam Pilot, I’ve been told. Family vengeance. He exacted a price.”
“So?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you? The sins of the father. Age-old blood feud. Indians are very tribal, Edna. I know them. Shamans, blood lust, warriors. Noah in his lawyer’s suit—nothing but an Indian in the boardroom. An old wrong must be righted.”
I counted a beat. “Perhaps your fears are close to home. Your Preston.”
She ignored that. “It’s obvious. Indian revenge.”
“No,” I broke in. “You’re wary of a new scandal—especially with Preston. Somehow Sonia connected somebody to—you. Or your son.” I glanced at the note. “This note has to go to Chief of Police Rawlins. Now. It may help him solve this murder.”
She screamed at me. “I want you to understand Noah and that dark world up there, Indians, blood feuds, angers.” She threw a sidelong glance at me. “Rumors, Edna. A spy told me Sonia’s note to you that night had a warning at the end—Don’t tell Noah. She was meeting you with information.”
I paused, alarmed. “True, but…”
“Because she knew Noah was a murderer.”
“You’re assuming a lot, Tessa.” I counted a heartbeat. “This note from Sonia… You’d better call the chief.” I paused. “Or I will tell him to make you a visit.”
She fumbled. “My name must be kept out of this.”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Edna.”
“No.”
I grunted to make my point, gathered my parka, and fled the room. As I strode down the hallway into the living room, I suddenly came face to face with Preston. He froze as I neared, his upturned face expectant, solemn. He’d probably listened outside Tessa’s bedroom.
“Miss Ferber.”
“Preston, did your mother tell you about that note from Sonia?”
He blanched, stammered, “No, I…She…”
From the back bedroom came a low, moaning sound: Tessa, listening to us in the living room. For a moment we were quiet, startled by the noise. Putting on my coat and gloves, I moved past him and headed to the door. “Preston,” I demanded, “I need a lift to the hotel.”
Begrudgingly, he followed me to the door.
In the car he said in a quiet voice, “My mother worries that I killed Sonia.”
“Did you?”
His jaw dropped. “How dare you!”
“This is a house of secrets. Your mother, you. Tell me.”
His face got pinched, drawn. “I don’t have a secret.”
“I don’t know if I believe you.”
“Well, I can’t help that.”
“Do you think Noah West killed Sonia?” I asked so bluntly his hands slipped off the wheel.
Mechanically, he drummed his fingers on the dashboard. He spoke through clenched teeth. “Of course not. He wouldn’t swat a fly, that man.”
“But…”
“None of this makes any sense to me.” His voice broke. “I’m an innocent man, Miss Ferber.”
“Does your mother believe that?”
He didn’t answer.
A long pause as I watched his profile. “Your mother is a liar, Preston.”
A slight pause, then he burst out laughing, ending with a dry chuckle. “Miss Ferber, this is not news.”
Chapter Fifteen
Clint Bullock asked me to go for an early supper, and he suggested a restaurant he liked at the edge of town, out on the dirt road that led to the airport. I’d suggested pan-fried chicken at Count’s Dinner House on Noble and Lacey, but Clint pooh-poohed that. Too highfalutin, he claimed. So, bundled against the bitter night cold under a clear, bright sky, I waited outside the Nordale as Clint pulled up in an old beat-up Army-surplus Jeep that spewed blue-black fumes into the still air.
“It ain’t mine,” he confessed.
In the front seat I felt smothered under jets of warm air. In the night sky, far overhead, wispy tracks of aurora borealis appeared, drifting ribbons of pale green and yellow and rose. To me, it looked eerie, a narcotic reverie, these Fairbanks nights, but what startled me was that most citizens seemed to take the fairy-tale splendor for granted.
At first glance the Bunker Roadhouse looked like no-man’s land. Clint just chuckled when I said I was hesitant to enter a place that was a ramshackle two-story log cabin leaning precariously to one side, with one window boarded over and two rusted Standard Oil drums positioned by the entrance, with running pic
kups and sagging station wagons lined up in front, some hooked up to headbolt heaters.
“You got that right. If I had to lay odds for a bar fight that landed one or both parties in the hospital, odds are here’s the place. Tonight.” He looked at me. “But the food is damn good. I know you’re an eater, Edna.”
“True, though I prefer my dessert not be served to me as I lie on a gurney in some emergency room.”
He punched me in the arm.
I expected booming jukebox music, some irritating and horribly nasal country-western song about lost or unrequited love or honky-tonk licentiousness. I wasn’t disappointed. We walked through a packed barroom, noisy and boisterous, and Clint yelled over the hoopla. “Place was a typical roadhouse in the old days, but the city sort of growed out to reach it. Neighborhood place, locals. No tourists—the place scares them.”
“It scares me.”
He looked at me. “Nothing scares you, Edna.”
I breathed in. “Always a first.”
“You’re old. Too late to start being scared.”
He led me into a small dining room, away from the front bar, where folks sat quietly at the pinewood tables, and no one seemed to be talking. Too quiet. Not a waitress in sight. The smell of burnt grease in the air. I sniffed.
“Bear grease,” Clint announced, and I looked to see whether he was joking.
At one point, glancing back to the bar, I saw a young girl working her way among the men. I whispered to Clint. “A call girl.”
“Yeah,” he answered, nonplused. “That what you call her.” He was enjoying himself. “So what?”
That stunned me, this cavalier manner, but I thought, Yes, so what?
“Who are these people?”
“Place was abandoned some years back, just walked away from, but Johnny Miner picked it up. Mainly-white but part-Athabascan gent from up Chalkyisik, in the North. Drifted down here, opened this here tavern, and probably is responsible for the dereliction of a good many of the Indians and shanty whites around here.”
“How noble.”
“Hey, I didn’t say it was good. But the place attracts the locals, mostly Natives, but some whites, down-and-out guys, especially the ones married to Native girls. Lots of stuff happens here, and most of it ain’t nobody’s business.”