A Study in Sherlock

THE EYAK INTERPRETER Dana Stabenow

[Note to my twenty-seven Park Rat followers, who think reading along is such a hoot. This blog is a yearlong assignment for Mrs. Doogan in my honors English class. Don’t screw with my grade by being trolls in the comments. I can delete you, you know.]

Tuesday, October 25th, by Johnny

We’re not in the Park anymore, Toto.

I hate dentists. I floss and brush and all that stuff every day, I don’t know why I had to have a cavity. I hate Kate, too. She’s never had a cavity in her whole life. Makes me want to hold her down and force-feed her a five-pound bag of sugar.

Although this dentist she took me to in Anchorage, Dorman, was okay, even if he was way too tan to be an Alaskan. He likes Kate, I can tell, but then every man she’s ever met likes her. Except maybe all the ones she put in jail, and sometimes I’m not so sure about them. Except if she’s never had a cavity I don’t know why she needs her own dentist. She sure was awful quick to get us on a plane when I got my toothache.

Here’s the grossest picture I could find of a cavity on the Internet. Mine was a lot smaller.

So here we are in Anchorage, staying at Dad’s town house on Westchester Lagoon. Kate and Mutt are out for a walk on the Coastal Trail. There’s nothing on television and I don’t want to go anywhere until I don’t drool when I talk. Disgusting. So I’m sitting here writing a post for my twenty-seven followers (Bobby, you better not read this one over Park Air like you did the one about counting caribou with Ruthe Bauman. She didn’t speak to me for a week). We’d be on a plane back to the Park right now if the weather hadn’t socked in behind us. Van texted me that it’s blowing snow and fog and Mrs. Doogan strung a rope from the front door to the bullrail so everyone could feel their way to their vehicles. I checked the National Weather Service website and the forecast is for more of the same for the next day and maybe two.

I’d still rather be there than here. Too many people in Anchorage, going too fast in too many cars.

So would Kate, and Mutt. We’ve been weathered in in Anchorage before and they both get antsy and cranky and snappish. Mutt I can understand, but Kate doesn’t want to go to the movies or shopping or out to eat, she just keeps looking east, trying to get a bead on what’s coming next out of the Gulf, and if it’s flyable.

Okay, a few minutes later, they’re back and Kate got a call (she actually answered her cell phone!) and we’re going to go see somebody. Later …

Comments

Bobby says, “Too late, kid.”

Ruthe says, “I’m still not speaking to you.”

Van says, “Miss you, babe.”

Katya says, “johnny bring me a unclmilton moon form toyzrus”

Katya says, “mom says please”

Mrs. Doogan says, “Good narrative flow, Johnny, if a little elliptical on occasion. Topic sentences aren’t mandatory in journal form, but you do want the reader to be able to follow the thread of the story. Resist the parenthetical phrase, too. For a moment there in the fifth paragraph I thought you were in Anchorage with Ruthe, not Kate.”

Tuesday, October 25th, that evening, by Johnny

We have a case, and I get to help!

Well, I get to go along, anyway.

We went downtown to this old restaurant on Fifth Avenue, the Club Paris, and met this old fart named Max. He’s a retired state trooper (here’s the Alaska State Trooper website) and I mean really retired, he’s so wrinkled he looks like he shrunk in the wash and then got left in the dryer for a week. He’s kind of feeble, walks with a cane, but he’s even smarter than Kate and he sure can put away the martinis. The waitress, a total babe named Brenda, calls him by his first name and she never lets his glass get more than half empty before she’s got a refill on the table. Brenda gave Kate a funny look when Kate ordered a Diet 7UP. Real women drink martinis, I guess.

Best steak sandwich I ever ate. About halfway through it Max said, “Heard a weird story last week. Grandson of an old flying buddy from Red Run.”

“Red Run?” Kate said.

Max nodded. “I know, last village on the Kanuyaq before you hit the Gulf. Why I thought to tell you about it.”

“What’s his name?”

“He’s a Totemoff.”

“Which one?”

“Gilbert.”

Kate forked up a big hunk of New York strip and chewed with her eyes closed for a minute. She swallowed and opened her eyes and said, “Chief Evan’s grandson.”

Max nodded.

“What’s his story?”

“He got kidnapped.”

Kate actually stopped chewing. “What?”

Max nodded. I felt cold air on the back of my neck as the door opened and Mutt’s ears went up. “But I’ll let him tell you the story himself. Gilbert, you know Kate Shugak.”

Gilbert Totemoff was short and stocky with dark hair that had been cut under a bowl and big brown eyes like a cow’s. His Carhartt’s looked like they’d started life going over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, and he smelled like woodsmoke and gasoline and tanned moosehide. His voice was so low I had to lean forward to hear him. He had a little bit of an accent, too, sounded like one of the aunties when they’re going all Native in front of a gussuk they don’t like. Village raised, for sure.

Max was right. Totemoff’s story was a weird one.

He had come to town on a Costco run the week after the permanent fund dividend came out from the state (http://www.pfd.state.ak.us/), the same week as the Alaska Federation of Natives convention (http://www.nativefederation.org/convention/index.php). He took his pickup on the fast ferry from Cordova, where he lived in the winter, to Whittier and then drove up to Anchorage.

“I met up with some cousins from Tatitlek and we went down to AFN and spent the afternoon there. That night we went to the Snow Ball to check out our old girlfriends.”

Kate grinned, Max laughed, and Totemoff blushed. “But there wasn’t much going on, so my cousin Philip said we should go somewhere else.”

“Where else?” Kate said.

Gilbert wouldn’t look at her. He mumbled something.

“Where?” Kate said.

He still wouldn’t look at her. “The Bush Company.”

Again he shut up. This time I think he was more embarrassed at telling a woman he’d gone to a strip club, especially a Native woman, especially a Native woman who was his elder. Brenda came over and gave us the fishy eye but Max winked at her and she went off and brought him back another martini. His third. Might have been his fourth.

Totemoff said that he and his cousins had a lot to drink, and between that and the lap dances they had their PFDs spent before midnight. Totemoff didn’t say all this, of course, but you can read a lot into a Native silence.

They were just about to leave when these two guys they knew showed up.

“What two guys?” Kate said.

“They were at the convention,” Totemoff said. “Not Natives, but hanging around the craft fair. One of them said he was looking for an ivory cribbage board for his mother. We got to talking, they asked us what tribe we were, and they seemed interested when we told them Eyak.”

So the two guys sat down at their table at the Bush Company and offered to buy them a round. One round turned into two and maybe more. Totemoff didn’t know what time it was when he got up to go to the john. When he stepped out of the door, somebody hit him, hard, a couple of times, and while he was trying to get his knees back up under him they threw a blanket or a bag or something over his head and carried him outside and tossed him in the back of a car.

“I was in and out,” he said. “Felt kind of sick. Maybe we drove for fifteen minutes. Maybe longer. Next thing, the car stops and they pull me out and toss me in the back of an airplane.”

“What kind of airplane?” I said. Totemoff stopped talking again. Kate frowned at me, Max said, “Shut up, kid,” and even Mutt gave me a dirty look. I could feel my ears turning red, and we had to wait until Totemoff started talking again.

“We flew about an hour,” he said. “I think. My head was hurting pretty bad and I barfed all over the inside of the blanket. They cussed me out and one of them hit me again and then I was out of it until we landed. They pulled me out of the plane and walked me into a cabin and pulled off the blanket. It was the two white guys from the convention who showed up at the bar.”

The cabin was one room, built of logs. “Looked pretty old,” Totemoff said. “The wind was whistling through the holes where the chink had fallen out.” There was a woodstove, the table a plywood sheet laid on a pair of sawhorses, some mismatched dining chairs, and a cot in one corner.

On the cot was an old man. A very old Native man, bruised and emaciated.

The whole time Totemoff was telling his story, Kate sat without moving a muscle, staring at her plate. I’ve seen her do this before. It’s a Native thing that you don’t look directly at the person speaking to you, but it’s like she’s listening with every cell of her body.

The old man was tied to the bed. The younger of the two kidnappers brought a chair and the older man forced Totemoff down on it. “Ask him if he’ll sign the papers,” the older one said.

“I didn’t know what he meant,” Totemoff said. “I was confused, so I didn’t say anything. He hit me, knocked me off the chair. When my ears stopped ringing, I heard the old man say something. In Eyak.”

Kate seemed to sigh, and sat back a little in her chair.

“They got me back in the chair and the young one hit me this time,” Totemoff said. “ ‘Tell him to sign the papers,’ he said.”

He was silent again for a while. “I was afraid,” he said. “They wanted me to talk to the old man in Eyak. But they don’t know that there’re no Eyak speakers left. When my grandmother died, the language died with her. I know what it sounds like, but I don’t have more than a couple cuss words.”

Eyak, Kate told me later, was an Alaska Native language from east of Cordova and west of Yakutat. The Tlingits crowded it out from the south and the Athabascans from the north and the Aleuts from the west, and Kate says after the whites took over, the elders wanted the kids to learn English so they wouldn’t be at a disadvantage when they grew up. When the kids got sent away to the BIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau of Indian Affairs) schools in Sitka and Outside, they could even be beaten for talking anything but English. So most of the Eyak speakers are gone, except maybe a few elders.

Like the old man in the cabin.

“They brought me a long way, used up a lot of gas getting me there,” Totemoff said. “If they found out I couldn’t speak Eyak, I was afraid they would kill me.”

He was quiet again. I was getting used to his silences. They had a rhythm to them, he’d get so many words out, and then stop for a while like he was recharging. The tougher the story got, the more his grammar deteriorated. “The old man figured it out before they did. He started making signs when they’re not looking. I think maybe he spoke English just fine. From the way he looked at them sometimes.

“When they hit me I’d say the few words I knew. Wet snow. Dry snow. Snow drift. Bear. Wolf. Fish. Beaver. Titty.”

I don’t think he meant to say that last word because his face got red again.

“I mixed them up and changed the way I said them so they would think I was saying whole sentences. They made me tell him, over and over again, to sign the papers. The younger man pulled out a bunch of papers and waved them at him. The elder, I think he was pretending to be weaker than he really was, he’d just shake his head and moan.” Totemoff smiled for the first time. “What words he said that I understood, I’m pretty sure my mom would have washed my mouth out for using.” He shrugged. “But they don’t know the difference.”

Another silence. “I was there for a day and a night, I think. They had the windows covered up. It was a long time.” He paused. “Once when the younger man was outside and the older man was feeding the stove, the elder, he whispered something to me.”

We waited. Again, Kate didn’t move a muscle. I’m not sure if me and Max and Mutt even registered on her peripheral vision, she was concentrating so hard on every word Totemoff said.

“I was hungry and thirsty and hungover, so I’m not sure, but it sounded like he said, ‘Tell Myra I said no.’ ” He was quiet for a long time then.

“I think I must have passed out, because the next thing I knew I was on a bench in front of the convention center and the guy from the Community Patrol was trying to wake me up and get me into the van to take me to the Brother Francis Shelter. There was a cop there, too. I tried to tell him what happened, but I guess he figured I was drunk and he wouldn’t listen.”

Kate didn’t say anything but I wouldn’t be that cop for a million dollars.

“I stayed at the shelter for a couple of days, until I felt better. I didn’t know what to do. And then I remembered my dad’s friend Max.”

For the first time he looked directly at Kate. “I’m worried about the elder.”

He sat back in his chair. He was done talking.

Max waited a minute before he drained his fifth—or maybe his sixth—martini and cleared his throat. “Victoria’s got me up to my ears in a security overhaul,” he said, looking at Kate. “My life ain’t my own anymore, thanks to you, or I’d look into this myself. When I heard you were in town, I thought you might take it on.”

Kate looked at me. “We’re weathered out of the Park for the next day or two anyway. Might as well.” She turned to Totemoff. “I have to ask you some questions, Gilbert. No right or wrong here, okay? Take your time, tell me as much as you can remember.” Totemoff nodded without looking up.

“When you took off in the airplane. Was it on pavement, or on gravel?”

“Gravel.”

“Could you hear any other planes?”

He started rubbing his legs and he still wouldn’t look at any of us, but he nodded.

“What kind of planes? Small planes? Jets?”

“Both,” he said.

“Jets? Like they were close by?”

“Real close,” he said.

Kate nodded. “Do you have an idea of what kind of plane they put you in?”

“Sounded like a Cessna,” he said. “They were both sitting up front. Maybe a 172. But maybe a 170.”

“Okay. What about a description of the two strangers? What did they look like?”

“They were white.”

“Young? Your age? Or old? Like Max?”

“Old,” Totemoff said. “Like you.”

Max laughed. Well, it was more like a cackle. Kate ignored him. “Tall? Or short?”

Totemoff shrugged. “Little taller than me, maybe.” He was about five foot six.

“Fat or thin?”

Totemoff shrugged again. “The older guy was kind of bony. The younger guy had all the muscle.”

“Hair long or short? What color?”

“Old guy never took his cap off, but he looked gray around the ears. Young guy was blond, lots of hair scraggling down the back of his neck.”

“How did they talk? Southern, like somebody from Tecks-ass, yawl? Or northern, like somebody from Bahstan? Or, I don’t know, like Sylvester Stallone, dem and deese and dose?”

Totemoff shook his head. “Just white.”

Kate nodded. Not once did she seem impatient or irritated. “How were they dressed?”

“Jeans. Boots. Jackets. Baseball hats.”

“Hats?” Kate said. “Anything on them? A logo, like for Chevron, or the Seattle Seahawks?”

Totemoff thought. “The young guy’s hat had an Anchorage Aces logo on it.”

“Anchorage Aces?” Kate said.

“Local semi-pro hockey team,” Max said.

“You didn’t know the elder?” Kate said to Totemoff, who shook his head. “Not that many Eyaks left,” she said. “You sure?”

Totemoff shook his head again. “Never saw him around Cordova. He doesn’t come from Red Run. Never saw him in Anchorage.”

The only three places Gilbert Totemoff has been in his life, I bet. That’s one more than a lot of people who live in the Bush.

“Know anyone named Myra?”

Totemoff shook his head again. “No.”

“How much longer are you in town?”

“Saturday. It’s the soonest I could get a space on the fast ferry back to Cordova.”

“Got a phone number?”

Totemoff produced a cell phone.

“All right,” Kate said, getting to her feet. “We’ll be in touch.”

Comments

Bobby says, “Auntie Balasha was my on-air guest on Park Air this morning. She’s going downriver tomorrow to teach a quilting class in Chulyin. She says an Eyak family used to live there and she’ll ask around for Myras.”

Katya says, “did you get it yet”

Katya says, “mom says please”

Mrs. Doogan says, “Watch out for run-on sentences, as for example in paragraph 19. Remember the compound clause rule for commas. This may seem nitpicky to you, but if your followers can’t trust your punctuation (or spelling, or grammar), why should they trust anything you say?”

Van says, “Mrs. Doogan has been reading your blog out loud in class. Can you tell?”

Van says, “Wait a minute. A total babe named Brenda?”

Bernie says, “Busted.”

Wednesday, October 26th, by Johnny

Kate was making breakfast in the kitchen by the time I got downstairs. I had my computer and I was writing the previous post. “What are you writing?” she said, so I told her.

“Can I see?” she said.

“No,” I said.

She laughed. “Anything in there that isn’t about Vanessa?”

I could feel my face get red. “There’s lots of stuff that isn’t about Van. I wrote about the caribou count I did with Ruthe up on the Gruening last year. You know, on our second try.” I hesitated. “I wrote about Old Sam.”

She was standing at the stove with her back to me, but she kind of stopped with the spatula in her hand. “You did?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to forget him.”

The spatula started moving again. “Good.”

“And I write about your cases.”

This time she looked over her shoulder. “What?”

“I write about your cases.” I shrugged. “As much as I know about them, anyway.”

One of her eyebrows went up. “You write about yesterday?”

I nodded.

“Huh.” She turned back to the stove and started piling French toast and link sausages on two plates. “Okay, Dr. Watson. What do you think?”

Kinda cool that she asked, so I did a recap while we ate breakfast. When I was done she said, “So? What do we do first?”

“Uh,” I said. “Go to Merrill, talk to the air traffic controllers?”

“What kind of surface did they take off on?”

“Gravel. Oh. Merrill’s paved. Birchwood? Campbell Air strip?”

“What did Totemoff hear when they were stuffing him into the plane?”

“Oh. Jet engines, real close. So, Stevens International.”

She pointed a finger at me. “Ding, ding, ding. Lake Hood airstrip. What do we ask when we get to the tower?”

“About small plane takeoffs that night. It was late, there can’t have been that many.”

“Good. But first we get out a map.”

“Why?”

“Totemoff said he thought it was a 170 or a 172. If I remember right, a 172 cruises at about a hundred and forty miles per hour. He said he thought they’d been in the air about an hour. He’d been drinking and they’d been thumping on him so he isn’t the most reliable witness, but we can at least make a stab at figuring out where they took him within that radius.”

We got the map out.

The thing about Alaska is that there’s a dirt strip pretty much everywhere you look (Atlas Aviation has a good page on aviation facilities in Alaska), over three thousand of them, Jim says, and most of them unmaintained. First thing a gold miner does is hack one out of the scrub spruce so he can get in and out. Somebody’s building a cabin or a lodge, same thing. And then there’s the natural resource companies, they put in airstrips long enough to take a Herc carrying a drilling rig or a commercial gold dredge. When they’re done digging or drilling it’s not like they can roll it up and take it with them, so when the oil or gas company is gone the hunters and the fishermen and the backpackers start using it as a staging area.

That’s good news if you’re in the air and you’ve got trouble and you need to put her down. It’s not so good if you’re trying to figure out where one small plane went late one October night. There are literally hundreds of possibilities. We narrowed it down some, but not much. “If you were going to eliminate a few more of these, how would you go about it?” Kate said.

I didn’t know.

“Where’s Totemoff from?”

“Red Run,” I said.

“Where are his cousins from? The ones he met at the AFN convention?”

“Tatitlek. Oh. Oh! Plus the guys who kidnapped him needed an Eyak speaker to talk to the elder. So, Prince William Sound? But isn’t it too far for a 172?”

She smiled. I guess I did look kind of excited. But it was kind of cool, brainstorming a backtrail that way. “Maybe you’d need a bigger plane to get that far that fast, but remember Totemoff was only guessing. What about Myra?”

“Myra? Oh, you mean when the elder told him to tell Myra he said no?” Kate nodded. “You want us to look for her, too?”

She laughed. “Don’t sound so downhearted. I admit, if we were trying to find somebody from Shaktoolik, we’d have a problem. But if Myra is from Tatitlek, or Chenega, or even Whittier or Seward or Valdez, we’ve got an ace in the hole. Four of them, in fact.”

And then Bobby posted that comment on yesterday’s post, about Auntie Balasha going to Chulyin. I told Kate.

She laughed. “See?”

Comments

Auntie Vi says, “Bobby makes me wirte this pretty cool ride-along.”

MiketheMan says, “Dude, cool that you’re putting in all the links so I don’t have to google any for my own blog. Mrs. D. will never know.”

RangerDan says, [Comment deleted by author.]

RangerDan says, “What mother-effing moron gets himself kidnapped out of the Bush Company by anybody but one of the dancers?”

RangerDan says, “Hey, when you finally get your asses back to the Park, could you and Kate stop by the NPS Anchorage office on your way to Merrill and pick up a box of the new Park maps for me? It’s been sitting there for two months while they try to figure out where Niniltna is.”

RangerDan says, “Is the Girdwood strip gravel or paved? Lots of anonymous little cabins tucked away in the mountains there.”

Mrs. Doogan says, “You write, When they’re done drilling it’s not like they can roll it up and take it with them … Roll up what? The drilling rig or the air strip? I know, the context makes it clear, but you need to pay more attention to your pronouns. And, Michael Abraham Moonin, Mrs. D. most certainly does know.”

Wednesday, October 26th, 12 P.M., by Johnny

We went out to Stevens International and talked to the guys in the tower. (Really cool up there, lots going on, planes in the air everywhere you look, passenger 737s and cargo 747s almost nonstop in and out of Stevens International, F-22 squadrons training at Elmendorf, hunters coming and going from Lake Hood, not to mention all the wannabe pilots doing touch-and-goes at Merrill. (Here’s a story on AlaskaDispatch.com about somebody ground-looping a Super Cub on the Lake Hood strip yesterday. Like Jim says, that’s what happens when you learn on a tricycle and then buy a taildragger. Lucky nobody died.) They told me to come back in the summer to see it when it’s really hopping. Later Kate said they are always looking for new controllers, it’s a tough job and they burn out fast. I believe it.)

Anyway, the plane. Whoever was flying it didn’t file a flight plan (I know what Dad would have said about that) but the tower had the tail numbers. We tracked down the owner and he says he doesn’t know anything about the flight and that he was home asleep when it took off. Now his plane is gone. He sounded really pissed off, and said he was going to have a conversation with “those f****** airport rentacops.” He lives with his wife and two kids and everybody was home in bed at the time. Kate checked with Brendan, the guy’s had like one ticket for speeding in his whole life, so I think she kind of believes him. As much as Kate ever believes anybody.

2 P.M.—Got a text from Van, who got a text from Bobby, who heard from Auntie B on the marine band, who says there was a Myra Gordaoff born in Cordova nineteen years ago. I checked, she’s on Facebook. Her profile says she graduated from Cordova High, that she’s working for the AC, and that she’s in a relationship. One of her friends tagged her in a photo at a party, she’s sitting on some guy’s lap. He looks white, but you can’t see his face because he’s got a ball cap pulled down over his eyes.

The ball cap has an Anchorage Aces logo on it.

She hasn’t posted anything for a week and there are messages from three friends wondering where she disappeared to. I e-mailed all of them on Facebook.

7 P.M.—Heard back from one of Myra’s friends, a woman named Louise. She says Myra is engaged to be married to some guy named Chris, a cheechako who moved to Alaska last summer. He came to Cordova with a pal of his, an older man who is maybe a relative, she didn’t know for sure, both of them looking for jobs on a fishing boat.

Louise also says that Myra’s grandfather, Herman Gordaoff, is a big noise in the local Native community, one of the last surviving elders. Myra is his only grandchild, and besides both of them being shareholders in the local Native Association, Herman has a lot of money and property, including a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot home on the slough, twenty-five acres out Hartney Bay road, a couple of gold mines, and a vacation cabin at Boswell Bay, not to mention a fifty-foot salmon seiner and a fishing permit whose area includes the Kanuyaq River flats, which even I know is probably the most lucrative permit a fisherman can own in the state. I asked Louise if Herman spoke English. She said yes. She was kind of mifty about it.

I told Kate. She looked grim. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said, “living with ‘No dogs or Natives allowed’ signs in the store windows fifty years ago, or Native women being preyed on today because they’ve got a big fat quarterly shareholder dividend coming in.”

“You think this Chris guy wants to marry Myra so he can get his hands on her money?”

“I think he wants to marry Myra so he can get her hands on her grandfather’s money,” Kate said. “I’ll bet they came to Alaska with the intention of finding a female shareholder they could live off of. They nosed around, zeroed in on the Gordaoffs, and either followed Herman out to his cabin or kidnapped him and took him there. Herman was smart enough to play dumb, pretend he couldn’t speak English, figured to buy himself a little time so maybe he could make a break for it.

“So Chris and his buddy went to AFN looking for Eyak speakers, found Gilbert, kidnapped him, and took him to the cabin. When that didn’t work, they took him back to Anchorage and dumped him off.”

“What about Herman Gordaoff?”

Kate was already dialing her cell phone.

Comments

Mrs. Doogan says, “Who asked you to come back to the tower, the air traffic controllers or the people who crashed in the Super Cub? Who doesn’t have a record, Brendan or the plane’s owner? Who does Kate believe, Brendan or the plane’s owner? Who didn’t know, Myra or Louise? Spend a little time matching your nouns and verbs before you hit ‘Post.’ Also, employing parentheses within parentheses requires more care and caution than you show here. I understand that the blog format is a conversational one, but can you imagine being allowed to get all that out in a conversation? And being understood?”

Thursday, October 27th, by Johnny [Reblog]

(http://www.thecordovatimes.com/) BODY OF EYAK ELDER FOUND—Acting on information received from Alaska private investigator E. I. “Kate” Shugak, authorities discovered the body of Herman Obadaiah Gordaoff at a remote cabin on his gold claim on Cheneganak Creek in Prince William Sound. Evidence at the scene indicated that Gordaoff had been physically assaulted and that he had been dead for some time before his body was found. The Alaska State Troopers say that the investigation is ongoing.

Comments

Friday, October 28th, by Johnny

We went home by way of Cordova. We met up with Myra Gordaoff at the Cordova House, who had been out at her grandfather’s cabin at Boswell Bay. She’s a quiet, pretty girl with a lot of black hair who seems younger than nineteen. We told her what we think happened.

She was, I don’t know, kind of frozen. She wouldn’t believe us about the boyfriend, but she did say she didn’t like his friend, Fred. She said Fred was a pilot, that he was older than Chris, and that they had both come to Alaska this summer, looking for work. She said that she and Chris had gone out to Boswell Bay to spend the weekend, and then Fred flew out to pick him up because he said he had a line on a couple of high-paying jobs in Prudhoe Bay. Chris told Myra he’d be right back and to wait for him. When he didn’t show up, she hitched a ride back to Cordova with a fisherman named Hank and his daughter, Annie.

I remember once Jim telling me that the worst part of being a state trooper was having to inform the victim’s family. “You never know how they’re going to react,” he said.

You sure don’t.

Comments

Mrs. Doogan says, [Comment deleted by author.]

Katya says, “I got my Mr. moon”

Katya says, “mom says thanks JOhnny!!!!@!”

Thursday, December 5th, by Johnny [Reblog]

(www.ADN.com, 10am) USCG CALLS OFF SEARCH—The U.S. Coast Guard has called off the search for a small airplane missing since the end of October. The pilot, Frederick Berdoll, age 41, of Anchorage and his passenger, Christopher Mason, 37, also of Anchorage, took off in Berdoll’s Cessna 172 from Cordova, where Mason was visiting his fiancée, Myra Gordaoff.

Rescuers, including response teams from Kulis Air National Guard Base and the Civil Air Patrol, searched for weeks but found neither debris nor any sign of either Berdoll or Mason. Since much of the flight plan was over the Sound, it is assumed that the plane must have gone down in the water. “Currents and tides in Prince William Sound are pretty powerful,” NWS meteorologist Jim Kemper said. “That plane is probably halfway to Hawaii by now.”

The day after the plane failed to arrive at Lake Hood as scheduled, Myra Gordaoff said, “I waved them off from the Cordova airport. They should have been back in Anchorage later that afternoon. I watched until they were out of sight and I’m no pilot but the plane seemed okay to me.”

(www.ADN.com, 4:13pm update) The disappearance of Berdoll and Mason took an odd twist when this afternoon a spokesman for the Alaska State Troopers reported that the Cessna 172 in which the two men were flying was revealed to have been stolen from Lake Hood airstrip the week before it disappeared. The aircraft was registered to Matthew Liedholm of Airport Heights, who said he had been notified of its theft by the police. “Kinda wonder what I’m getting for my tiedown fee,” Liedholm said. He also said that to his knowledge he had never met either of the missing men.

Comments

George says, “Lots of easy ways to screw with an airplane engine so it don’t get where it’s supposed to go. Hell, sugar in the gas tank. Don’t have to be an A&P to figger that.”

Jim says, “No wreckage, no evidence. No evidence, no case.”

Bobby says, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

Mrs. Doogan says, “Libel: a written statement in which a plaintiff in certain courts sets forth the cause of action or the relief sought. (www.merriam-webster.com)”

RangerDan says, [Comment deleted by author.]

Bernie says, [Comment deleted by author.]

Bobby says, “Wimps.”

Dana Stabenow was born in Anchorage and raised on a seventy-five-foot fish tender in the Gulf of Alaska. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first science fiction novel, Second Star, sank without a trace; her first crime fiction novel, A Cold Day for Murder, won an Edgar Award; her first thriller, Blindfold Game, hit the New York Times bestseller list; and her twenty-eighth novel and nineteenth Kate Shugak novel, Restless in the Grave, comes out in February 2012. Stabenow currently lives in Alaska. Her long, intimate relationship with Sherlock Holmes began when she got to the Ds of the Seldovia Public Library when she was ten years old. She only hopes Mary Russell doesn’t find out.

An eerily similar adventure is recounted by Dr. Watson in “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter,” which was first published in The Strand Magazine in 1893, and can be found in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.