A Study in Sherlock

“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.