Everything To Prove

The magazine article had become the catalyst, and after Libby had finished reading it for the third time, she’d made her decision. Her mother had told her over and over again, throughout years of listening to Libby rail against the injustices of poverty, that there was no way to prove anything, and it no longer mattered. But it did. It mattered twenty-eight years ago, and it mattered just as much today. And her mother was wrong. There was a way to prove not only her paternity, but what kind of racist Frey really was.

Which was why she turned down the offer of a residency at one of the best hospitals on the Eastern seaboard and was now flying to Alaska. The flight was a long one and gave her time to think about her strategy. What she actually thought about was the fact that she didn’t have a strategy, and had no idea how to start the search for her father’s plane other than by confronting Daniel Frey in person, something she’d always wanted to do but never dared. This strategy was a poor one, given his attitude toward the native people. He’d certainly never admit to any wrongdoings, never admit that it was strange he hadn’t wanted to attend his own godson’s wedding, and equally strange he hadn’t been anywhere in the vicinity of the lodge when the plane crashed.

Her mother had mentioned a warden, Charlie Stuck, who had been kind to her after Connor’s death. He’d taken her in his plane while he searched for her missing fiancé. They’d searched for over a week before declaring him lost and presumed dead. No plane wreckage was ever found, just the two pontoons hung up in the rapids about a half mile down the Evening River, which led searchers to believe that the plane had gone down in the deep waters somewhere near the lake’s outlet. Charlie Stuck had been in his late fifties then, but with any luck he might still be alive. He might remember something helpful, and it was a starting place.

When her flight touched down in Anchorage it was 10:00 p.m. and still broad daylight. Libby rented a car and threw her bags in the backseat. She drove down Highway One to a right-hand fork that took her along Six Mile Creek to a place called Hope. An empty state campground, open for the season but devoid of tourists, offered her the choice of sites overlooking Turnagain Arm. She pitched her tiny tent, ate a can of cold beans sitting on the edge of the bluff then walked a short way in the violet dusk down Gull Rock Trail. She walked until the twilight thickened and jelled, then carefully retraced her way back to her tent site and climbed into her sleeping bag.

An hour later she heard a mysterious noise and crawled out of her tent to watch the ghostly movements of a pod of Beluga whales through the dark waters of Chickaloon Bay. Sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, she listened to them breathe as they surfaced and swam past, and she wondered why it had taken her so long to come back home.

Two hours later she was making coffee on her tiny camp stove, drinking it in the dawn while a cow moose browsed along the water’s edge. She cleaned up the site, packed her gear back into the rental car and returned to Anchorage. Once there, she headed for the regional office of the Department of Fish and Game and had to wait outside for an hour before the first employee showed up, still blinking sleep from his eyes. He introduced himself as Elmer Brown, and appeared surprised to find her waiting on the doorstep. He ushered her into the office and listened to her story while he made a pot of coffee. Libby told him about the plane crash, omitting any mention of her relationship to the pilot or any implications of foul play. She expressed her interest in locating the plane and speaking to the warden who had been involved in the search.

“So, you’re looking for this Charlie Stuck,” Brown concluded.

Libby nodded. “I’m hoping he’s still alive. He was in his fifties then, based out of Fairbanks.”

Brown reached for the phone book and placed a call to the Fairbanks office, briefly describing the circumstances and asking if they could look into their records, then hung up. “They said they’d call back. Coffee?”

“Love a cup, thanks,” Libby said, taking the offered mug. “Assuming the plane is still in the lake, how would one go about finding it?”

“Well, it’d be easier now than it would have been back then, but still, that’s a mighty big lake. Deep, too,” Brown said. “There’s a good salvage outfit not too far from here. They’re expensive, all those outfits are, but Alaska Salvage just about always get what they go after. They’ve hauled a lot of planes and boats out of a lot of deep water. The company is owned by a guy named Dodge. He spent eight years as a Navy special forces combat and demolition diver before starting Alaska Salvage maybe six, eight years ago. Loads of experience, but he nearly bought the farm in a freak diving accident while salvaging that commuter plane that went down in the inlet five weeks back. You probably saw that in the news.”

Libby shook her head. “No. I didn’t.”

Elmer seemed pleased to be able to enlighten her. “He had a new employee on board the salvage vessel, and the kid accidentally started the winch while Dodge was attaching the cable to a piece of wreckage a hundred feet below. He got tangled up in a big jagged piece of plane wreckage. His divers managed to free him and get him to the surface but he was more dead than alive when they brought him up. Spent over a month in the hospital getting put back together. Just got out. He’ll probably never dive again but he still ramrods the outfit and he’d be the one you’d want to talk to. His office isn’t far from here.”

“If he just got out of the hospital, I doubt he’ll be at work.”

“He’ll be at Alaska Salvage. He lives and breathes that place.” Brown wrote the name and phone number on a card, handing it to her just as the phone rang. He picked it up. “Oh?” he said after a long pause. “I see. Okay, I’ll pass that information along. Thanks, Dick.” He hung up and gave her an apologetic shrug. “Well, I’m afraid you’re out of luck when it comes to Charlie Stuck. He died last winter in the old folks’ home, but he had a son, Bob, who still lives in the Fairbanks area. Runs a garage out toward Moose Creek. Might be worth talking to him.”

He scrawled another name on another card, then went through the phone book and wrote the phone number down. “You might also check with the warden service based out of Fairbanks. They keep pretty good files on that stuff. They probably still have Charlie Stuck’s report on that particular search. Good luck.”

THE SUN WAS WELL UP when Libby pulled into the Alaska Salvage parking lot in Spenard. The building was a huge blue Quonset hut with a neatly lettered sign spanning the wide doors and three late-model pickup trucks blocking the entryway. The metallic sound of banging and clanging came from inside. She stepped between the trucks and into the dimness, startled to see several massive pieces of what appeared to have been a large commuter plane scattered all over the floor. Hoses snaked across the concrete, and in a separate alcove she caught the bright flash of welding light.

A side door opened into a small office, and when the man bent over a large nautical chart spread open on the desk glanced up and spied Libby he straightened, lifting his hands from both sides of the map, which immediately snapped back into a tight scroll. He was tall, broad-shouldered and clad in a pair of well-worn coveralls that could have used a good washing. His eyes were blue, his dark hair cropped short, his jaw shadowed with stubble. He looked to be in his mid to late thirties, long on experience but short on sleep. A jagged, raised welt slanted across his forehead and disappeared into his hairline, tracked with the marks of stitches that had been recently removed. Another shorter scar crossed the bridge of his nose, his left cheekbone was seriously abraded, and one hand was wrapped in a wad of bandages that allowed only the fingertips to show. Libby could only imagine what the rest of him looked like if his face had taken that much abuse.

“What can I do for you?” he said in a voice as rough as his appearance.

Libby indicated the wreckage on the concrete floor behind her. “Did you salvage this plane?”

“Most of it,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Look, lady, if you’re with the press, I have nothing to add to what’s been said, and if you’re a relative of someone who was on the plane, you’ll have to talk to the state police.”

“I’m neither,” Libby said. “You were recommended by Elmer Brown of the Fish and Game Department. He told me Alaska Salvage always got what it went after.”

“Almost always,” he corrected. “That plane behind you crashed in Cook Inlet just after takeoff with six souls aboard. The riptide took some of the wreckage out before we could get to it. My crew’s still looking for the missing pieces.”

“Was anyone killed?”

“There were no survivors.”

Libby glanced back at the pieces of wreckage and wondered who the people had been, and what their last moments had been like. She felt a sudden chill. “Did you…?”

“We don’t recover bodies. The state police dive team was in charge of that. We assist as necessary, of course. Their dive team isn’t nearly as good as mine.”

“What do you do with the wreckage?”

“The FAA likes to look it over, so we lay everything we find out for ’em in here. It’s a convenience for them and they pay us for the privilege. When they’re done with their investigation we’ll sell what we can and scrap the rest. Why? You looking for a grisly souvenir? Something with a little blood on it, maybe? If so, you’re out of luck. I already sold all that stuff off to help pay my medical bills.”

Libby’s chin lifted in response to the hostile sarcasm in his voice. “I’m looking to hire a salvage outfit to find a plane that went down twenty-eight years ago in Evening Lake, just south of the Brooks Range.”

Now that she’d announced her business for being there, he eyed her up and down as if trying to decide if she was worth talking to. “Evening Lake?”

“Yes.”

“Any idea where it crashed?”

“Not exactly. I’m hoping to find out more after I speak with some people.”

“Evening Lake is big. I’ve fished it. Spent a couple weeks camped up there a few years ago. Must be a good three, four hundred feet deep in some places.”

“So I’ve been told,” Libby said, wishing he wouldn’t stare at her quite so brazenly. She decided that he was both crude and rude and any sympathy she’d initially felt for his battered condition evaporated as the heat came up in her cheeks.

“When you’re talking remote salvage operations, you’re talking big bucks.”

“How big?” Libby asked.

“For a salvage operation on Evening Lake…that’d take a crew of at least three people, flying in all that gear and some pretty sophisticated equipment. Just finding the plane could take some time. Once it’s found, purchasing the salvage rights and getting the wreckage to the surface could run you maybe seventy-five, eighty grand. Possibly a lot more.”

“I see.” Libby was staggered by the sum. “What if the plane crashed in shallow water?”

“If it were in shallow water, the initial search party would have spotted it.” He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I’m assuming there was a search?”

Libby nodded. “But they may have been looking in the wrong location, and if there was a lot of chop on the surface, wouldn’t that have made it difficult to spot anything?”

“Maybe. But over the years a helluva lot of planes have flown in and out of there. If nobody’s reported seeing anything in all that time, I’d have to assume it’s way down there, and if you’re not sure the plane really crashed in the lake, you could be wasting a lot of time and money. Were there any eyewitnesses?”

Libby shook her head. “Not to my knowledge. But the plane was taking off from a lodge, the only one on the lake at that time. They think it went down just after takeoff. The pontoons were found half a mile down the outlet of the lake.”

“Must’ve crashed real close to the mouth of the river, then. The wind blows pretty strong through the pass there and would’ve pushed the pontoons clear to the opposite shore otherwise.”

“That’s what the searchers figured. How do you base your salvage fees?”

“Depends on the size of the plane.”

“It was a de Havilland Beaver. Six-seater.”

“We require a deposit of ten grand up front. You’d pay a straight hourly fee contingent upon the size of the crew and the equipment being used. When we find the wreckage, we’re willing to negotiate fair salvage trades toward payment if the plane is deemed restorable.”

“What shape do you think the plane would be in after all that time?”

“Pretty good, if it was down deep and wasn’t demolished when it hit the water. It’s the ice and salt water that plays hell with wrecks. The plane would probably be in close to the same shape as it was when it crashed.”

“If you found the wreckage in just two hours and raised it the same day, would that be less than ten thousand?”

“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.