Toward the end of the visit, Liam and Wy exchanged a glance, and Wy said, “We were so sorry to hear about your brother Hilary.”
“Who?” Sybilla said vaguely, and for a moment Liam thought she was going to phase from one reality to another. He looked around and spotted a robe lying on her bed. Just in case. And then Sybilla’s eyes sharpened into the now and she said, “Oh yes, Hilary. Well, my dears, I appreciate the sentiment but Hilary and I were never close.”
“What a shame,” Wy murmured.
“Yes, well, he was a bit of a prude, my brother. He did not approve of either my job or my lifestyle, I’m afraid.”
“He didn’t like you singing?”
“Not singing or slinging liquor, either,” Sybilla said cheerfully. “Although to be fair, his dislike of my owning a bar might have had something to do with his intolerance for alcohol. It wasn’t as if he could partake himself, you see.”
There was a pause. “His intolerance for alcohol?” Liam said.
“You mean like allergic?” Wy said.
“Oh my yes,” Sybilla said, “acutely. We found out when we were teenagers. The two of us were at a party at a friend’s house and his parents weren’t home so of course we got into the liquor cabinet. After one drink Hilary started vomiting and his blood pressure dropped so low and so fast that he actually fainted. No, he never touched liquor, my brother.”
“Who else knew this, Sybilla?” Liam said in a voice that sounded strange to his own ears.
She shrugged. “Myself, a few close friends. It wasn’t something he talked about.” She reflected. “The fainting incident didn’t do his social life any good afterward, I’m afraid. The other kids nicknamed him the Dying Swan and he was incapable of laughing it off, so he carried that all the rest of the way through high school. I think he went to college out of state to get away from it. And then, when he did come home, the arthritis kicked in. He was three years younger than I was and he looked thirty years older.”
Illness might have had that effect, Liam thought.
So might guilt.
“Poor Hilary,” Sybilla said. “He never really had a chance at life, you know? I’m certain he died a virgin.”
She looked up to see them staring at her. “What?”
Acknowledgments
ALL MY GRATITUDE GOES TO BARBARA Peters and Nic Cheetham, who never beat up on me for being first one, and then two, and then three, and now four months over deadline. The price of an understanding editor and publisher is far above rubies. The title of my next work is going to be Love and Not Writing in the Time of Covid-19.
Astute readers will notice the geographic similarities between the real life Kachemak Bay and the wholly imaginary Chungasqak Bay. Liam’s new post was inspired by but not based on the real thing, in much the same way his old post of Newenham was inspired by but not based on Dillingham. It is, you might say, a distinction with a difference, and in this case a whole lot of differences, beginning with place names. I love true local place names and many of the names herein were found in online dictionaries like Liicugtukut Alutiit’stun. By all accounts the old folks were practical people and if there was a bay where the blueberries grew especially well I’m betting they would have called such a place Blueberry Bay, so I did, too.
Oil companies were run out of Kachemak Bay decades ago, mostly due to their own ineptitude. Chungasqak Bay, not so much. I mean it to be a fictional reflection of the eternal Alaskan fight between maintaining the natural resources that have nourished Alaskans for millennia and the commercial extraction of fossil fuels and precious minerals that provide jobs and the state taxes that pay to fix potholes. If you want to start a fight, stand on a street corner anywhere in Alaska and take one side or the other.
The bits and pieces found by the archeologist were inspired by Janet R. Klein’s ‘The Fort Kenai Collection,’ collected in 150 Years: Proceedings of the 2017 Kenai Peninsula History Conference. Klein has written a lot about history and archeology in Alaska, including Archeology in Alaska and Kachemak Bay Communities: Their Histories, Their Mysteries, and with her daughter co-authored a children’s book called Alaska Dinosaurs and other Cretaceous Creatures. It doubles as a coloring book, and the icon for carnivore is hilarious. My recommendation for any kid’s next birthday present. You’re welcome.
About the author
DANA STABENOW was born in Anchorage, Alaska and raised on a 75-foot fishing tender. She knew there was a warmer, drier job out there somewhere and found it in writing. Her first Kate Shugak book, A Cold Day for Murder, received an Edgar Award from the Crime Writers of America. Find her online at stabenow.com
LIAM CAMPBELL INVESTIGATIONS
KATE SHUGAK INVESTIGATIONS
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