by Ed Ifkovic
“So I noticed.” I followed his gaze to the doorway. “He’s late, but I know he’ll arrive.”
Noah fidgeted. “You know, I think I scared him. I knocked on his door, stared him in the face, and said, ‘Three people have been murdered, Ty Gilley. And Edna Ferber and I suspect you know something about it.’”
I laughed out loud. “As good an opening line as I can imagine, but perhaps not even true. He didn’t cower in fear?”
“He turned white, stepped backward, grabbed the doorjamb for support. I couldn’t believe what he said back to me. ‘We want to talk to you,’ I added, and he simply nodded. ‘I know. I suppose it’s time. I don’t want people suspecting me.’”
“I knew we were on to something.” My palm slapped the table, and Noah flinched.
He went on. “‘Is there a reason they might suspect you?’ I asked him. ‘Yes.’ That was it. And he agreed to meet us here”—he checked his wristwatch—“a half hour ago.”
“Be patient.” But I checked the doorway. “I’ve felt that Ty Gilley, mystery man, creeping around the Nordale, holds one answer. I’m not certain what—but a step we need.”
“But a murderer?” Noah asked, wide-eyed.
“I think we’ll know that this afternoon—if he shows.”
Again the quick, nervous glance toward the doorway. “I’ll hunt him down.”
“Like a sun-dizzy caribou on the taiga.”
He laughed a long time. “You’ve started talking like an Alaskan.”
I sipped my coffee and watched him over the rim, my words now dark. “Who gains by murdering these three souls, Noah?”
“Jack was killed for a reason, and then Sam Pilot, who’d probably suspected who killed Jack.”
I held his eye. “And then Sonia, investigating, probing, interviewing, a shadow on the wall, suddenly suspected who did the murders.” I qualified that. “Though she first assumed Sam had killed Jack.”
He blew out his cheeks. “Which meant she had to die. She got too close to the answer.”
“Who gained?” I asked again. “Sonia learned—and rightly so, I now believe—that the roots of the first murders could be traced to the far North. Maybe even Fort Yukon.”
“Something to do with Tessa and the murder of her missionary friend?”
“Or lover.”
“Preston’s father?”
I thought about that. “I don’t think so, but who knows?”
“Jack and Sam—so many murders they committed, real or imagined. Legendary.”
“Probably the one that mattered here and now—Ned Thomas. The only one with a connection to Tessa. Hence Sonia’s note.”
“Tessa’s scandalous past coming back to haunt her? Her vast power now. She knew but kept her mouth shut when you questioned her. She played games.”
“Preston,” I said. “Preston had problems with Jack, despised him, hated how he hurt his business, fought in the street. Jack threatened him. But I don’t know if he knew about his mother’s connection to Ned Thomas. Tessa may have feared something would come out—tarnish her name in Fairbanks. The old rumors might resurface.”
Noah sighed and checked the doorway. “I can’t see Tessa commanding Preston to kill Jack. And then Sam.” His voice trembled. “Then Sonia.”
“Unless there’s a deeper story we don’t know about. A darker motive.”
He made a face. “Always possible. But what about Jeremy Nunne, the one who started the rumble with Jack down at the Bristol Bay cannery?”
I considered that for a moment but shook my head. “Jeremy strikes me as an overblown frat boy with some sentimental urges—remember how he went to see Jack in the Frontier Home?—a man floundering, probably unhappy in Alaska, unhappy with his imperious Aunt Tessa.”
Noah broke in, “And probably disliking his gruff but slick-as-polished-leather relative Preston Strange.”
“Preston intrigues me. All that money and so little control of his temper.”
“Another mystery man. I keep thinking of Sam’s line—‘He was there.’ And Jack’s—‘Maybe it ain’t him.’”
“Those lines tell us something. Told Sonia something.”
“They talked, Jack and Sam. They both were face to face with…” I stopped.
Ty Gilley walked in the door. He stood in the doorway, bundled up, his face almost hidden behind a dark purple scarf, though his gloved hands clutched a manila folder. For some reason he waited there, watching us, until, impatient, I waved him over. He shuffled, stopped, then moved. May I take two steps? Children at recess.
He stood by the table. “Please sit down,” I stared up into his face, but he still didn’t move. “Is there something the matter?”
A harsh, guttural voice. “Of course, there is. I didn’t come to Alaska for this.”
“What you came to Alaska for is the subject of our invitation to you, Mr. Gilley.” My voice louder. “Sit, please.”
Unburdened of his layers, dropping a glove on the floor, bending over to retrieve it and banging into Noah’s side, he finally settled into a seat opposite me. His shoulder brushed against Noah’s, and he breathed deeply. He placed the manila folder on the table, and the three of us stared at its worn, crumpled edges, scribbled pencil markings, a food stain perhaps, a coffee ring. He smiled at it. “My life.” He touched the folder tenderly.
A small, round man, he shifted on the chair, adjusting himself, uncomfortable, tugging at the sleeves of his bulky green and red sweater. Santa’s elf, I thought grimly, though gone to seed. A haggard, freckled balloon face. When he smiled, he revealed a prominent overbite. A pug nose, unlovely on the flushed face. Strands of whitish hair floated above his head, loosened by the static of his hat removal. Self-consciously, he drew his hand over his scalp, an attempt to flatten the vagrant hair, though his quick gesture did nothing but send his electrified hair in different directions. His small brown eyes darted from Noah to me, back and forth, waiting.
I began slowly, softening my words. “Coffee?” He nodded, and the waitress, who’d been hovering nearby, rushed over and filled a cup for him. He gulped it down, black, hot, his lips twitching from the heat.
“Mr. Gilley.”
“Ty,” he said. “Please.”
“Ty, you approached Sonia, then Jack, then Sam, all with your story about searching for information about your father. All three of these folks were murdered.”
He shuddered. “But not by me.”
“Then help us. Your story…”
“Is true. Every word. My father came to Alaska and disappeared.”
Noah watched him closely. “But that’s not the whole story, is it? Something else is going on?”
He smiled thinly at Noah. “Yeah.”
“Tell us.” I spoke so sharply Noah glanced at me, a hint of a smile on his face.
Ty relaxed. “I never knew my father, but Mom told us stories about him—heroic, wonderful stories.” He laughed out loud. “A wonderful hero, bigger than life, though a wanderer. A man who craved adventure but, real poor, wanted more for us. He headed to the Army but wandered to Alaska to make his fortune…and never returned.” He breathed in, bit his lip. “He was hanged. For a crime he didn’t commit.”
I sat up. “Hanged?” The word caught in my throat.
“Somewhere. Who knows where? We thought Dawson over to Canada. Then Skagway. Then Circle City. We never found out. We found an old magazine he left behind—he circled a small village called Old Crow. Far, far up north.”
“What happened?”
Slowly, he opened the tattered folder and pulled out a folded sheet of typescript, opening it carefully, the edges of the yellowed paper crackling. “As a young man I spent hours in libraries, old bound newspapers that talked of the North. Nothing, no records. Like it never happened. Until by chance in a Seattle paper, an article on Alaska, a territorial mar
shal’s notebook, found on his frozen body and published—I found and copied this.”
He slid it across the table. I read: “Clay Fowler, 40 or thereabouts, drifter, hanged for common thievery outside an Indian village.”
“Your father?”
He nodded. “1915. The only thing I ever found. And by chance, really.”
“So it set you on a lifetime mission?” Noah asked sympathetically.
“Yeah, though life got in the way. A bad marriage, this and that, sickness.”
“But not much to go on.” I hesitated. “You said an innocent man, Ty.”
He reached back into the folder. “After my mother died, I went through her stuff. She never mentioned a letter she got around that time. It’s a letter that got me nuts—like a sense of injustice, everything wrong, horrible. It’s what finally got me to take a job here in Alaska.”
His fingers gripped a yellowed envelope, jagged tears at the edges, and a childlike block address on the front. Gingerly, he withdrew a small slip of lined paper, so chalky now, gray at the edges. When I reached for it, he held it back, but held it out so I could read it, though he read the words out loud—and from memory:
Sad silence at the table, the awful deed covering us. The smell of old paper, so intense, like old winter apples in a farm bin. His fingers shaking, Ty carefully folded the letter and tucked it carefully into the envelope, and then back into the folder. For a moment he closed his eyes, moist at the corners.
“No return address,” Ty said. “No nothing.”
“Mr. Gilley…Ty,” Noah began, “how horrible for you.”
He nodded up and down furiously, his eyes still closed. “It haunts me. Still.”
“So you thought Sonia could…?”
“When I read her ‘White Silence’ interviews, all those old times, the old-timers from the Bush, I thought, hey, someone will know where it happened. Remember him. Someone still alive to this day. How do you forget a hanging?”
Noah added, “And you thought Jack Mabie, a man who boasted of killing, might be the man?”
Again the furious nodding. “Yes.” His voice rose. “I thought—God is giving him to me. Here in Fairbanks.”
“But you got no answers?” I went on.
“Nothing. Not from Sonia, from Jack.”
“Sam Pilot? You approached him in the Nordale.” Noah waited.
“Yeah, another one who dismissed me.” His tongue rolled over his lower lip. “He made me feel foolish.”
“The inscrutable Indian,” Noah said.
With a note of desperation in his voice, Ty said, “I even tried to see Tessa Strange.”
“Why her?”
“I had a talk with Sonia in the lounge, the night before she died. She mentioned Tessa Strange. ‘She was there.’ Strange words. Sonia told me she was up in the North in those early years. A missionary. Fort Yukon. Venetie. I figured she might remember the awful story.”
I sucked in my cheeks. “But she wouldn’t see you, right?”
He gulped. “I couldn’t get past her son, Preston. He got real belligerent, said I was crazy—even said his mother was never up in the North. A bold-faced lie that made no sense. Everybody I talked to knew that. I figured what is he—or even she—hiding?”
I caught Noah’s eye. “Good question. Tessa seems always to be hiding a lot of things. I wonder how much she’s told Preston.”
Noah grumbled, “Preston, the hatchet man of her empire.”
“And then there’s Jeremy.”
Noah drummed his fingers against his lips. “The court jester, maybe. The fool who may be privy to the inner workings of the empire.”
“But it seems to me Tessa is more concerned with her reputation now—she believes the events of long ago mean nothing.”
Ty was following our exchange, anxious to say something. “I sometimes wonder if Jack Mabie was involved with my father. Farfetched, yeah, but…an evil man.”
That stopped me. “True.”
“I even told that to Sonia.”
“In which case,” Noah went on, though his voice softened, “the police might still consider you a suspect, no?”
Ty’s jaw got slack and he fumbled with the folder, seemed ready to bolt. Suddenly he became nervous, twisting in the seat, one hand gripping his parka. “But I’m not.”
Noah looked into his face and summed up, “Jack Mabie was legendary in inflicting his wide-ranging misery across the Arctic for decades, and real proud of it. Sam Pilot often was there to lie and scheme and rush the evil man out of town.”
Ty’s voice broke, ragged. “Do you believe me a killer, Miss Ferber?”
I didn’t answer him. Instead, thinking aloud, I said, “The first time Sam Pilot sat in the Nordale lounge, up against the back wall, facing out, he seemed to watch you when you stepped into the room. I remember thinking—what in the world? That glassy stare, that frozen face that stayed focused on yours. Almost a trance. Do you remember that?”
He swallowed noisily. “Yeah, I do. It wasn’t pretty, that moment. I walk in and there’s this frightening-looking Indian, that old leathery face and that long white hair, like someone from a goddamn nightmare, and he catches your eye.”
“And held it, right?”
He shook his head. “No.” He reconsidered. “I mean, I turned away, uncomfortable. But I thought maybe he got an answer. But he scared me that first time.”
“But something happened,” I went on. “Within seconds, flummoxed, he stood and fled the lounge. Perhaps trailing you.” I turned to Noah. “You heard him say something in Athabascan.”
Noah nodded. “Gwich’in. ‘He was there.’”
Ty pursed his brow, confused. “What the hell does that mean? Really. I wasn’t anyplace, for God’s sake.”
“But he seemed to recognize you,” Noah insisted.
“No, I don’t think so. How? Maybe because I was staring at him so hard, so crazily.”
“You never met him before?” I asked.
He thought a second. “‘He was there.’ Those words can’t mean me. No way. Christ, I don’t remember my father. You know, I was maybe two when he took off. A toddler. Not even one memory of him. Some faded picture of him, yes, but that’s it. In a few years my mother remarried, a fool named Gilley.” He grinned sloppily. “He adopted us, and I got this goofy last name. In school—‘Silly Gilley, will he?’ Nice gift for a bumbling kid, right?” His voice trembled. “I was just a son trying to get some feeble justice for a wronged father.”
“Justice for a wronged father.” I echoed his words.
My mind roiled—yes. A father-son bond that stretched out across a half-century, tenuous, mysterious but always there. Suddenly I got dizzy as an idea percolated in my brain—a fierce image that settled in the corner of my mind and intruded, like a pebble in an old shoe.
Noah and Ty were staring at me, Noah’s eyes wide with alarm. “What, Edna?”
“Ty, I think you should share your story with Hank Petrievich. He was part of that world. He knew folks. And maybe Clint, another old-timer. In fact, Preston and Jeremy.”
Puzzled, Noah said, “Edna, what are you up to?”
I smiled. “What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know,” Ty began. “I don’t like talking about the…the hanging.”
I cut him off. “I know the ending of this story now.”
Chapter Twenty-three
Hank Petrievich paused in the doorway of the Nordale lounge, stopping so abruptly that Irina, close behind him, crashed into his back and whimpered. Clint Bullock, shuffling alongside him, frowned as Hank announced, “Christ, I haven’t been in this lounge in so long.” His eyes scanned the room and held mine. “Nothing’s changed. Everything still cherry red and old and worn.” But there was a nervous timbre to his voice as he threw a small wave at me.
I sat with Noah in a corner of the lounge. Eight o’clock at night, the lounge largely deserted, though a foursome of businessmen bunched near the reception desk, a cloud of cigarette smoke over their heads, sheaves of papers in their laps. They glanced up as Hank passed, one of them nodding at him familiarly, but Hank was focused on Noah. The two men watched each other warily. When Hank sat down, at angles to Noah, he nodded slightly, a tacit acknowledgment of the man he believed murdered his daughter—or believed it in vagrant moments. Irina, leaning forward, suddenly grasped Noah’s hand and squeezed it. Clint looked at me, a look that suggested he’d brokered the inevitable reunion.
Ty Gilley strolled in, his head spinning around as if on ball bearings, and took a seat to my right. He mumbled at Hank, “Sir, Miss Ferber wants me to tell you my story.”
Gruff, coldly, Hank replied, “I know. I still don’t understand why.”
At that moment Preston Strange and Jeremy Nunne walked in together, Preston loudly announcing to a gaping Teddy at the reception desk that he did not like to be summoned places. Jeremy, his face grim, tried to shush him. Teddy purposely looked down at some papers on his desk, though from where I sat I could see his eyes followed Preston as the officious businessman shuffled past. An amused look on his face, Teddy was a man used to dealing with self-important guests at the hotel.
Though Jeremy said nothing, his eyes wide with consternation, Preston began chatting with Hank about some business venture long on the drawing boards for Fairbanks, a purposeful avoidance of Noah and me—and a cavalier dismissal of the unknown Ty Gilley. Hank replied in monosyllables, unhappy with Preston’s nervous bluster.
As I cleared my throat, I noticed Paul Petrievich slip quietly into the room, something his mother spotted as she raised a welcoming finger at him, though he settled into a chair a few feet from our group, a chair turned halfway toward the doorway, so that I observed his profile—tense, his jaw rigid.
“Paul,” I said, “welcome. Join us.”
“I have.” Then he laughed. “I think I’ll be able to hear what’s going on.”
Preston grumbled, “I have no idea why we were asked to come here for this…this carnival show.” He threw back his head and smirked.