Their faces closed up.
“Guys,” she said, “come on. It’s good you found a bolt-hole, but it’s temporary. It won’t be long before I go home. What are you going to do then?”
“I’ll look out for them,” Garrett said immediately.
In a voice carefully devoid of ridicule, Kate said, “How?”
“I’ll take them home with me.”
“Your parents up for two more kids in the house?”
She saw the answer on his face. More important, she saw it on Kevin’s and Jordan’s faces, too. “It’s okay,” Jordan said. Kevin looked at him, and he dropped his eyes. “Most of the time.”
Kate felt a touch on her arm and looked down to see that Kevin had drawn close, his small, pleading face raised imploringly to hers. “Don’t make us leave our mom,” he whispered. “Please don’t.”
“What are you going to do?” Jim said when the door closed behind them.
“I don’t know yet,” Kate said, rubbing her face with both hands. “But something.”
Jim looked as if the struggle to remain silent was difficult.
Kate drove to the library, wondering what to do about them. Jim was right. She should call DFYS and let them sort it out.
Two things stopped her. One, she had taken control over where she would live when she was in kindergarten, meeting and beating her grandmother’s determination that Kate live with her in town. Two, she remembered Abel, the surrogate father Emaa had found for Kate when Kate refused to leave the homestead. He was the one who had found her there when Emaa was frantically scouring the Park for her missing granddaughter. Abel had respected Kate’s act of self-determination enough not to manhandle her over to his cabin.
Kate felt that if she manhandled Kevin and Jordan’s future, she would somehow be demonstrating a lack of respect for her foster father, another crusty Alaskan old fart who believed absolutely in independence and self-reliance. She couldn’t do that. Not yet, at any rate.
Not to mention that young Garrett had left her with the distinct impression that he expected better of her than that.
She pulled into the library parking lot and found a space in the first row, facing the fountain, the same row she always parked in when she came to the library, so she could find the car again. On impulse, she got out her cell phone and after three tries managed to dial Auntie Vi’s cell phone number. She wondered what color Auntie Vi’s phone was today. The last time she’d seen it, it had been lime green. The time before that, it had been cherry red.
Auntie Vi answered. “If’s me, Auntie,” Kate said. “Is Johnny there?”
“Hey, Kate,” Johnny said, trying to be cool but clearly delighted that she had called home just to talk to him.
They chatted for a while, Kate telling him about her overworked bullshit detector at last night’s party and Johnny grilling her about her shopping list at Costco to make sure she didn’t forget the important things, like batteries and bags of chips.
She told him about the boys. She didn’t ask, but he said anyway, “You can’t do anything else and still have them trusting you.”
“I know.”
“Besides, you cook a mean breakfast, Kate. Don’t worry, they’ll be back.”
She was still smiling when she got out of the car. She left the windows rolled down in case Mutt wanted to grab a snack from the flocks of geese that were currently nibbling the grass around the fountain, and went directly to the third floor and the microfiche stacks. She pulled the rolls for the Anchorage Times for a year before Victoria’s imprisonment and a year after and sat down at a machine with a notebook and a pencil.
Two hours later, she was suffering mild nausea from watching so much film scroll past and hadn’t discovered much in the way of additional information either to help or hurt her investigation of Victoria’s case. The facts were reported pretty much as they appeared in the police report and the trial transcript. The fire and the death of the boy, William, the discovery of the arson, and his mother’s subsequent arrest and conviction were sensationalized beneath screaming banner headlines, but that was primarily due to the prominence of the family. Crimes even more heinous were reported every day; they were just bumped back to the inside of the paper because the victims were poor or unelected.
More out of guilt at the immense salary she was pulling down than from a conviction that she’d find anything, she turned to the roll of microfiche for the year following Victoria’s conviction.
A year and one month after Victoria’s imprisonment, Pilz Mining and Exploration declared bankruptcy.
Well now. Kate sat back in her chair and contemplated this new information. Here might be an answer as to why Victoria burned down her house for the insurance money. Maybe the Pilzes and the Bannisters really were out of money.
But if this was the case, why hadn’t this information been brought forward at trial? It sure as hell provided motivation, which from the beginning had seemed to be lacking, at least in Kate’s opinion.
She thought of last night’s party in the Turnagain mansion. If the Bannisters had been broke, they had certainly recovered well.
She leaned forward again and began to read slowly through the story, placing the facts of the bankruptcy in chronological order. The Anchorage Times had been so obliging as to devote an entire business section of one Sunday issue to a history of the company, which wasn’t surprising when you realized that over two hundred people would have lost their jobs if the company had just folded. Of course, they were only making ninety-three cents an hour, but the mine commissary made a point of selling goods to miners’ families at or near cost. Back in 1941, the commissary made a profit of just $247 on $36,000 in sales. No, Skyscraper Mines had a history of high pay, good food, and fair dealing, and never lacked for labor.
Kate, back before the injury that left the scar on her throat and the permanent damage to her vocal cords, used to play the guitar and sing. A crowd-pleasing favorite was always “Sixteen Tons.” She didn’t think Tennessee Ernie Ford himself could have put it over at the Skyscraper Mines.
Not that this had anything to do with the matter at hand. Kate scrolled forward.
Pilz Mining and Exploration had been formed as a partnership between the scions of the houses of Pilz and Bannister, to share the expenses and profits of, primarily, the Skyscraper Valley Mines and, secondarily, additional mines outside of Fairbanks and Juneau. The first lode of the Skyscraper Valley Mine had been discovered by one Torrance Hurley in 1906 near the top of Skyscraper Mountain in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Anchorage. The gold was fine, but the ore was high grade enough to haul in a sluice box, and of course as soon as the news got out, every miner with a gold pan showed up, and pretty soon the 3,500-foot alpine valley was wall-to-wall claims. Over the years, the mines consolidated into two controlling corporations, and in 1935 along came Herman Pilz, who bought them both out, and the Pilz Mining and Exploration Company, adding to their holdings in Fairbanks and Juneau, became the largest producer of gold in the state. From 1936 to 1942, the Skyscraper Valley mines produced a total of 152,429 ounces of gold. At $35 an ounce, that was $5,334,015. At the time, that was real money.
In 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the nation was at war shortly thereafter, and the U.S. War Production Board declared gold mining to be a nonessential industry. There was a brief period of fierce activity on the part of PME to extract as much gold as was humanly possible in the time before the closure, followed by a war-long hiatus. The mine didn’t get back up to speed until 1947. In 1951, gold was selling at $34.72 an ounce. PME began to diversify, beginning in the 1950s with oil leases in Cook Inlet, more oil leases in Prudhoe Bay in the 1960s, coal leases near Healy in the 1970s, zinc and lead leases near Kotzebue in the 1980s, and still more oil leases in Cook Inlet and on the North Slope in the 1990s.