Everything To Prove

“The minimum charge for any remote salvage operation is twenty-five grand. The retrieval cost of the last plane we dredged up out of a lake ran three times that amount. If you don’t mind my asking, why is salvaging this plane so important after twenty-eight years?”

“It’s not the plane so much as what it was carrying,” Libby said. “Thank you for your information. It’s been helpful.”

He gave her a keen look and rubbed the stubble on his jaw again. “My name’s Dodge. I own this business. Let me know if you want us to take a look.”

“Thank you,” Libby said, accepting the business card he pulled out of the chest pocket of his coveralls and glancing down at it briefly. Carson Colman Dodge. Fancy name.

She left the Quonset hut in a discouraged mood. Twenty-five thousand dollars was an impossible amount for her to come up with, never mind seventy-five. She had the sinking feeling that she’d made a terrible mistake in giving up the residency at Mass General. But she was here, so she might as well persevere for as long as she could. By 10:00 a.m. Libby was on a flight to Fairbanks, hoping to speak to Charlie Stuck’s son, Bob, about what Charlie might have told him about the incident.

CHAPTER TWO

“MY FATHER NEVER said nothin’ to me about anything,” an overweight and balding Bob Stuck said seven hours later, standing outside the door of his one-bay garage in Moose Creek in the watery spring sunshine. Six rusted trucks cluttered the small yard and another took up the garage. He sported a gold hoop in his left ear, a diamond stud in his right and his hands were black with grease. “He was never home. Always off chasing poachers and fish hogs and women. That was more important to him than raising a son.” He spat as if talking about his father put a bad taste in his mouth.

“Did he have any close friends that you know of? Anyone he might have talked to about that plane crash?” Libby asked.

“Most of ’em are dead now. But Lana’s still alive. She lives over on the Chena. She and Charlie shacked up together about ten years back. She took care of him better than he deserved, cooked for him, cleaned his cabin, washed his clothes and waited up nights till he came home from the bars. Then he had that stroke and the hospital put him in the old folks’ home. She wanted the doctors to let him come back home. She ranted and raved in the hospital, made a big scene, said she could take care of him better than any nursing home.” Bob shook his head. “Yeah, she might remember something. She don’t talk to me, but she might talk to you.” He gave her a baleful stare from red-veined eyes. “You’re Indian, ain’t you?”

LANA PAUL LIVED IN an old cabin sitting on sill logs that had rotted into the riverbank over the years, giving the building a decided tilt toward the water. When Libby parked her rental car next to the dilapidated wreck of an old Ford truck, the cabin door opened and a stout older woman with a bright blue kerchief tied over her head peered out.

“Lana?” Libby said, climbing out of the car. “I’m Libby Wilson. I’d like to talk to you about Charlie Stuck.”

The black eyes glittered with suspicion. “Charlie’s dead. They locked him away in a place full of old people and bad smells and he died.”

“I know that, and I’m sorry. But I want to talk to you about what he did, about his job as a warden. I think he might have known something about my father’s death. My father was Connor Libby. He lived in a lodge on Evening Lake.”

“Charlie might have known something, maybe, but I don’t,” she said, and the door of the old cabin banged shut. Libby stood for a few moments in the drab detritus of mud season, listening to the Chena rush past and wondering why the cabin hadn’t been swept away by floodwaters years ago. She was turning to leave when the door opened and the woman leaned out, giving her a sharp look.

“You got any tobacco?” she said. “I got papers but no tobacco.”

“I can bring you some,” Libby replied.

The woman nodded and the door closed again. Libby drove into Fairbanks and at the big grocery store she bought rolling papers and tobacco. She also bought a cooked rotisserie chicken and a tub of coleslaw from the deli, half a dozen freshly baked biscuits and cookies and two bottles of wine, one red, one white. When she returned to the cabin the door opened immediately and Lana Paul ushered her inside. The interior was surprisingly neat and clean, in stark contrast to the muddy, cluttered yard. Libby set the bag of groceries on the Formica table and took out the contents. “I picked up some food, too, in case you hadn’t eaten supper yet,” she said, handing the foil-wrapped package of tobacco to the woman.

Lana took it from her with gnarled, eager hands. “I remembered something while you were gone,” she said, unwrapping the package. She sat down in an old wooden rocker near the woodstove, which threw a welcome warmth to the room. “I remembered how Charlie talked when he came home from the bars. Sometimes, he would talk about his past.” She was filling a paper with tobacco as she spoke, and rolled it with swift, practiced dexterity. “I remember a story he told me about a boy with eyes like yours and a three-legged dog. They lived on Evening Lake.”

Libby froze in the act of setting the chicken on the table. “That was my father.”

“Charlie told me this story.” Lana reached for a wooden match in an old canning jar on the table and scratched it to life on the top of the woodstove. She lit the thin cigarette and inhaled with an expression of reverent content, smoke wreathing her deeply wrinkled face and sharp eyes. “The boy came home from a place faraway and brought a three-legged dog with him.”

“He came back from the war in Vietnam with a dog he called HoChi,” Libby said, sinking into a chair and staring transfixed at the old woman. “The dog’s hind leg had been blown off by a land mine that killed three soldiers.”

“This boy fell in love with a young girl from a village on the Koyukyuk,” Lana continued.

“My mother,” Libby said, her heart hammering with hope that Lana would say something that would help her find her father.

Lana pushed her feet against the floor and made the old rocker move back and forth as she smoked her cigarette. A floorboard creaked in time to the movement. “They were going to be married, but the boy was killed on his wedding day.”

Libby waited for several long minutes while a big water pot hissed atop the woodstove and the old woman rocked and the warm, delectable aroma of spit-roasted chicken filled the little cabin. “Is that all he said?” she finally asked.

“Charlie was drunk,” Lana mused, rocking. “He was sad. He walked back and forth and said he wished he found the boy’s plane. He said he always wondered about the plane.”

Libby leaned forward in her chair. “What do you think he meant by that?”

Lana shrugged. “I think he wondered why the plane crashed.” She looked toward the food Libby had placed on the table. “Boy, that chicken smells good.”

Libby got up, found two plates in a drain rack on the sideboard and a sharp knife in a kitchen drawer. She carved up the chicken and heaped generous portions onto both plates. She hadn’t eaten anything since the can of cold beans the night before, and she was hungry. She put two biscuits on each plate, divided the coleslaw into two green mounds, then found eating utensils in another drawer and placed them on the table. Lana threw the stub of her cigarette into the woodstove while Libby opened the bottle of red wine and poured two glasses. They sat at the table together and ate in silence. The food was good and the warmth of the woodstove a welcome radiance in the cooling evening. Sagging into the earth and leaning toward the river, the weathered old cabin gave Libby a sense of peace.

The old woman cleaned her plate. She ate deliberately, as if trying to memorize each mouthful of food. She drank her wine and Libby refilled her glass. Lana kept her attention on the meal until it was finished, and then returned to her rocker and rolled another cigarette and lit it as she had the first.

“Charlie said the young girl was very beautiful, and he didn’t know why the old man didn’t like her.”

“The old man? You mean Daniel Frey?”

Lana nodded. “The rich man who lived on the lake and didn’t like Indians.”

Libby gathered up the plates and silverware and carried them to the sink. She poured hot water from the pot on the stove into the dishpan and added a squirt of detergent from the plastic bottle on the sideboard. There was a small window set into the wall above the sink and Libby could look out at the river rushing past as she washed. It made her a little dizzy. When the dishes were done she wiped off the table and draped the dishcloth over the faucet. “Did Charlie ever mention that the young village girl had a child?”

The old woman shook her head, but as Libby was leaving, Lana pushed out of her chair. “Take this with you,” she said, reaching onto a shelf and lifting down an old tattered leather-bound journal. “It belonged to Charlie. He scribbled in it ever since I knew him. It was important to him, but his son don’t want it and it don’t do me no good. I can’t read.”

THERE WERE SEVERAL STORES in Fairbanks that Libby visited after stopping at the warden service’s office to get a copy of Charlie Stuck’s report and before flying to the village the following morning. She bought a pretty dress for her mother, bright with the colors of spring, and outfitted herself for a few weeks in the bush. She had no idea how long it would take for her to accomplish her mission, so she erred on the side of caution with the clothing. Warm long underwear, thick wool socks, serious field boots, a parka that would turn the worst weather, iron-cloth pants, several pairs of warm gloves and a good fleece hat. She packed all of it into a duffel bag in her hotel room near the airport and lastly, before checking out, took one last and very long hot shower, knowing that the amenities in the Alaskan bush wouldn’t be nearly as luxurious as these.

The flight from Fairbanks to Umiak took two hours, giving her time to reread the photocopy of Charlie Stuck’s official statement regarding the search for Connor Libby’s plane. The report was disappointing. It mentioned the daily weather, the specific grid patterns flown, the pontoons found in the Evening River, and concluded with the assumption that the plane had crashed near the outlet in very deep water. No hidden clues and nothing that Libby didn’t already know.

Next, she started on Charlie’s journal. She’d already scanned the dates. The entries began four years after the plane crash, but Libby read every single one, hoping he’d make some reference to the crash and the subsequent search, perhaps reflect some of his own theories on what might have happened in a retrospective entry. It was slow reading because Charlie Stuck had terrible handwriting which deteriorated steadily over time. The entire journal spanned almost twenty years, the entries being very brief. A sentence, maybe two. Sometimes months would pass without an entry. The journal read like a warden’s trophy log.

Caught R. Drew red-handed with twelve over the limit, gave him maximum fine, bastard deserved it.

There were also entries on the state of wildlife.

Moose population down fourth year in a row. Hunters are crying wolf. I’m sure it’s poaching. Wolves and moose have always coexisted. Increasing human population and hunting pressure are new on the scene, and where there are humans, there is poaching. No stopping it.

Libby decided she liked the way Charlie Stuck thought. She pored laboriously over his entries until, finally, she read one that was totally out of context, and the words jumped out at her, causing her to sit up in her seat and bend over the journal.

Two weeks late to Lana’s due to crash landing the plane in a white-out, bending the prop and being stranded until villagers found me south of the Dome, but she asked no questions. She waits the way that girl Marie waited. Still wonder what became of C. Libby but think my instincts are right about D. Frey. Why didn’t he go to the wedding? (This was underlined twice.) I know

Frey had something to do with that crash. Wish I could have found that plane. Wish others would have listened to my theory, but money talks loudest and always has.

Libby read the passage several times, her heartbeat racing, dizzied by the words. Charlie Stuck had believed that Frey had something to do with her father’s death! The rest of the journal revealed nothing relevant to Connor Libby, but that one passage gave her hope that maybe, once the plane was found, others would listen…especially if it could be proved that the crash hadn’t been an accident. Was it possible? Could Frey have deliberately killed her father? Somehow she had to come up with the money to salvage the wreckage!

The commuter flight stopped in Tanana, Ruby and Galena before landing in the Koyukyuk River, dodging several large ice floes and a flock of Canada geese while taxiing to the village dock. Her gear was put out of the plane and for the first time in six years Libby stood in the village of her childhood. Umiak hadn’t changed much. There were a few more houses, a few more junked vehicles, a few more boats drawn up on the gravel bank next to the fish wheels. The place looked bleak and dreary to her, and she felt guilty for feeling that way. This was, after all, where she’d been born. She waited for a few moments, searching for her mother among the faces, some familiar and some not, who had come to see if the plane had brought mail or supplies, but if Umiak hadn’t changed much in her absence, nothing prepared her for her mother’s appearance.

Libby felt a jolt clear to the bottoms of her feet when she saw how Marie had aged. Fear clenched her up inside and her heart raced.

Marie came to a stop at the end of the dock. Her hair had gone almost completely white. She had shrunk. This couldn’t be real. Her mother had always been so strong and vital, the anchoring cornerstone of Libby’s existence, always there for her. Weekly phone conversations had perpetuated the myth that her mother was the same as always, that nothing had changed, yet obviously it had. Libby felt the hot prickle of tears beneath her eyelids.

“Mom?”

Marie spotted her and her eyes lit up. “Libby?” She came toward her and raised her arms to clasp her in a trembling embrace. “Libby. It’s good to see you. I’m so glad you came. How long can you stay?”