Read Though Not Dead for Free Online

caused the first telephone line to be strung in the Park, although it hadn’t been a Park yet and wouldn’t be for another seventy years. The telephone lines had not survived the closing of the mine. Now, a century later, twenty-four-seven communication was about to come back with a vengeance. She’d done a little after-hours Googling on one of those donated computers at Niniltna Public School at the start of the school year. Typically, mobile communications service providers paid anywhere from a thousand to three thousand a month to lease tower space, for five-year terms that customarily included an option for extending the lease in five-year increments up to twenty-five years. The price paid generally increased in direct proportion to how long the landowner was willing to lease the land for. If Tikani looked like a good prospect for a tower, for example, Vidar Johansen, its last living resident (or last living resident who wasn’t in jail), could pull down as much as a hundred and seventy-five large.
    Money like that hadn’t been seen in the Park in a long, long time, the Suulutaq Mine notwithstanding, and Kate could only imagine the stampede when the news got out.
    She hated talking on the telephone. She just wasn’t one of those people who had an answer when it rang and someone said, “Hey, how ya doing?” She wanted to see the face of the person she was talking to, watch as their expression changed, take in the lift of an eyebrow or the sideways glance that told her what they were really saying. In Kate’s experience, and after five and half years working sex crimes as an investigator for the Anchorage DA and another—god, was it really?—almost ten years now working as a private investigator out of the Park, the difference was vast. Words could mean anything, anything at all. Faces, now, faces told a different story, often as you were sitting there listening to their mouths say something else entirely.
    Still. The brat had a point. If they’d had cell phone service in the Park right now, Jim could have called her from the airport. The airport in Anchorage. The airport in Seattle. The airport in Long Beach.
    Every day he was gone.
    A shooting star painted a fading streak across the night sky. She looked north to see if the lights were out, but it was too early in the evening. A cold nose touched her hand and she looked down to see that Mutt had followed her outside.
    “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “I know. In the immortal words of Billie Holiday, what lonely hours the evening shadows bring, when your lover has gone.”
    Mutt stared at her with wise yellow eyes.
    “Oh, shut up,” Kate said, and went back inside to make cocoa.

Three
    Johnny drove his own pickup to school the next morning, Kate and Mutt following behind an hour later. She paused at the Riverside Café long enough for one of Laurel Meganack’s first-rate americanos and a giant two-pump French vanilla nonfat latte, Dan’s favorite, extra hot so there was a chance it’d still be lukewarm by the time it got to the Step. Lucky she wasn’t staying for breakfast, as every table and booth and counter was jammed with raucous, unshaven Suulutaq miners. Every Park rat with a four-wheeler was renting it out by the hour to any miner who came along, and the miners had lost no time in tearing a track into the muskeg between the Suulutaq and Niniltna, after which they had very quickly found their way to Bernie’s Roadhouse. When it snowed, the Park rats would probably switch out rentals from four-wheelers to snowmobiles, at equally extortionate rates.
    When she stepped outside again, Luke Grosdidier was just pulling up on a four-wheeler with a trailer attached. The trailer had two newly fabricated metal bench seats bolted inside it and three people Kate didn’t even know sitting on them. They climbed out, counted money into Luke’s hand, and vanished inside the café.
    Kate looked at Luke. He grinned. “Niniltna Taxi, at your service. Sorry, gotta go,