Somebody's Secrets Read online

  Kitka was just under six-foot, part of the heritage of his white mother, with the warm brown skin and black hair of his Tlingit father. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man, but at 36 it was time for him to settle down, Purdue thought. Maybe with Candace, although she might have some trust issues to resolve after her abusive husband. He sighed.

  “What’s that sigh for?” Mary asked, smiling up at him. He shook his head. Should leave the matchmaking to her anyway, he thought. She probably knew exactly what was going on and had figured out how to bring the two together.

  The plane landed smoothly, and everyone sighed with relief. “She did it!” Purdue said as the plane taxied to a stop in front of them. The crowd rushed toward Candace as she crawled out of the cockpit. Robert Brown came around from the other side.

  “A perfect flight,” he said, shaking Candace’s hand. He handed her the results of his observations. “Keep that until you get your pilot’s certificate in the mail,” he said. “But you’re good to go.”

  Purdue’s oldest grandson Andy cheered, and the others clapped. Candace smiled, and then gave Purdue a hug. “Thank you,” she said softly.

  “My pleasure,” he said, hugging her back. Then everyone was hugging her, except for Paul. She glanced around, missing him, and seeing he had stepped away to take a call.

  Paul Kitka stood a bit away, with a finger in one ear so he could hear. “Mom?” he said. “What’s wrong?” He loved his mother, and they talked regularly on Sunday afternoons. He couldn’t remember the last time she’d called him during the week. His jaw clenched. Something had to be wrong. “Are you OK?”

  “I’m fine,” she said reassuringly. He didn’t relax, waiting for the rest of it. “It’s Jonas.”

  Figures, Paul thought. “What’s he done now?”

  There was a moment of silence, and then his mother whispered, “They’ve arrested him, Paul. They say he murdered a cop.”

  Paul’s jaw clenched. “He what?”

  “He didn’t do it, Paul, I know he didn’t. I know he’s wild, but he wouldn’t do that.”

  “Who, Ma?”

  She sighed. “Petras. They say he killed Hank Petras.”

  Shit, Paul thought. His mom may not have thought Jonas did it, but she’d be the only one. Eighteen years ago, Police Officer Hank Petras killed his father, Luke Kitka, Jr., and was exonerated. No one would have any problems believing that one of Luke’s wild sons would have killed him.

  “Paul, please. I know you and Jonas don’t get along, but I need you. Please. Come to Sitka. There’s no way Jonas is going to get a fair trial here, you know that.”

  Paul sighed. He looked over at Candace still circled by their friends. “I’ll come as soon as I can get there,” he said.

  He closed the phone and joined the group. He put a smile on his face that he didn’t feel and gave Dace a big hug. “Congratulations!” he said smiling down at her. “So, are you ready to take on customers?”

  Dace laughed, pretty with more color in her checks than usual. “Can’t do that,” she said, “but I can give you a ride home.” Like she’d be able to compete with that Corvette he and Calhoun drove in.

  He laughed and hugged her again. “Actually, I was hoping for a ride to Sitka,” he admitted. “Lanky?”

  Purdue frowned slightly, mentally reviewing the demands of the trip. “Should be OK,” he said. “You pay expenses; she flies you for free. Every new pilot needs a maiden voyage.”

  “OK then!” Dace said, happily. “When do you want to go?”

  “Now?” he asked.

  Everyone looked at him. “This police business, Paul?” Lanky Purdue asked.

  Paul shook his head. “No. Personal. Mom needs me to come home.”

  Conversation swirled up again, as Mary and Purdue haggled over what would need to be done before Dace could leave. “She doesn’t even have a change of clothes with her,” Mary exclaimed.

  Dace ignored them. She could buy things in Sitka if they stayed long, that didn’t worry her. She was more interested in Purdue’s thinking out loud about fuel and time. But her focus was on Paul’s face. “What’s wrong?” she asked quietly.

  He shook his head. “Not here,” he said. “We’ll have time to talk on the way.”

  The next hour passed quickly. Mary packed a lunch bought from the stands inside the Anchorage airport, and put together a small overnight bag of underwear, jeans and T-shirts, all she’d ever seen Candace wear anyway. Dace and Purdue filed a flight plan and worked out the details of her trip. Paul Kitka made phone calls. Candace watched him worriedly.

  “This isn’t just a fun trip to Sitka,” Bill Abbott said quietly watching Paul along with her. “Something’s wrong. Too bad. Sitka’s a beautiful place.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  Bill nodded. “On company business.” Bill Abbott worked on the North Slope for Arco. “It’s green and lush. Lots of trees. The ocean is beautiful. It’s an old town, lots of history.” He snorted. “Lots of Paul’s history.”

  “You got ideas about what this is about?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve heard a little gossip. Not enough to help I’m afraid. He’ll have to tell you.”

  She nodded. Maybe he would. Maybe not. Neither of them were good at talking about their feelings. They both had secrets they didn’t share. Really, they shared a house, and not a lot more than that, although no one believed it. Paul had quite a reputation, she’d found. But he’d never made a move on her. In fact, today was the second time he’d ever touched her — a hug now, and a hug nine months ago when he’d raced his red Corvette across the state to beat her plane when she’d been kidnapped. That had been a promising hug, she’d thought, but then they’d retreated, and she didn’t know how to fix that. She’d developed skills in avoiding touch in her marriage, not seeking it out.

  It was almost noon when Dace headed the plane back down the runway with Paul sitting in the copilot’s seat. She relaxed as the plane hit cruising speed. As noisy as the plane was it was soothing after all the hubbub of the morning. She let the sounds of the plane sooth her. It was truly a glorious day to be in the air. There was nothing like it. The sun was brighter above the clouds, which were fluffy white today. The sky was a crystal blue. She sighed with pleasure.

  Neither of them said anything for the first hour. Paul seemed lost in his own thoughts, and Dace was content to focus on her plane and the simple demands of flying.

  “You going to tell me about it?” she asked as they headed more to the south over the southeast islands. Juneau would be coming up shortly. And Sitka wasn’t far from that.

  “Too hard to shout about it,” Paul shouted back. They didn’t have headphones. Truth was, he wasn’t sure what to say. That his father had been the town drunk? That one morning he was out waving a gun and taking potshots as people commuted to the lumber plant for work and a cop had shot and killed him? Not memories he wanted to shout over the roar of the plane.

  Dace opened her mouth to say something, but then just nodded. She refocused on flying and left Paul to his thoughts.

  Candace gasped at the beauty below her as she sank below the cloud layer over Sitka. Snow-topped mountains, dark green forests, blue water. She could see why this was a popular port with the tour ships.

  She made contact with the airport tower and circled over the bay just looking. When she started studying the airport runway, she swallowed hard. “I thought they landed jets on this runway,” she shouted to Kitka.

  He nodded. “Alaska Airlines lands here three times a day going each way,” he shouted back.

  “On that runway?”

  He grinned. “Yup. The flight attendants used to have the cherry tomato race in the aisle when they landed — the descent is steep enough the tomatoes would roll all the way down the aisle to the front of the plane.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. Plenty of runway for her small plane, but she couldn’t imagine landing a jet here. Good Alaska pilots are crazy, she reminded herself. Bad
ones are dead. What did that make her? She grinned.

  “We used to come out here and just watch the planes land and take off,” Kitka said. “I’ve seen the planes crow-hop in the snow. Once, I saw a plane get enough lift by running off the end of the runway. It’s built on a dike out into the bay, so he had about 30 feet of lift when his wheels left the ground.”

  Candace shuddered, but she noticed that Kitka didn’t have any problem talking about this over the roar of the plane. Just personal stuff. And who was she to criticize? She couldn’t talk about personal things either — not even to save her life. Literally, last fall, Paul had to figure things out for himself, because she couldn’t say the words “he abused me.” Still couldn’t say them out loud. She knew all about words you just couldn’t get out.

  She smiled with delight when she executed a perfect touchdown and taxied to the tie downs. She shut off the engine, and hopped out to make arrangements for the plane, but Kitka was already dealing with it.

  “Come on,” he said. “We can catch a taxi into town, get some supper before I call Mom for a ride.”

  “Your mom got a name?”

  He snorted. “Elizabeth Crowe Kitka, professor of English literature.”

  “And Sitka’s got taxis?”

  “So to speak.” Kitka opened the door into the small airport, and 20 paces later, led her out the other side. A Sitka taxi — it said so on the door — stood idle at the curb. It was a dirty, battered Toyota probably 20 years old. She thought the original color had been blue.

  “Not many car-proud people here,” Kitka said, interpreting her look accurately. “There’s only 30 miles of road. The salt eats cars up something fierce. It costs money to bring a car in here on the ferry, and it costs almost as much to get rid of a junker. No space for junkyards. So, people drive them for as long as they can.” He leaned in the window, said something to the driver, and then opened the back door for Candace. He got in the front.

  “So where are we now?” Dace asked, looking around with interest.

  “This is Mount Edgecombe,” Paul answered. “Coast Guard base, airport and Indian Boarding School.”

  The taxi driver, an Alaskan Native man of 50 or so looked at Paul. “Paul Kitka, aren’t you?”

  Paul nodded.

  “Been awhile since you’ve been home,” the man observed as he crossed over the arching bridge that connected the island of Mount Edgecombe to Baranof Island and Sitka proper. “Benny Johnson,” he said. “You went to school with my cousins.”

  Paul nodded. “I remember. What are they doing now?”

  Johnson shrugged. “Addie, he’s fishing. Peter’s not doing much. Sally got married, has three kids. They’re doing good. I see your brother around. Heard he’s got himself into some trouble. That why you’re home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hope you can help him out. He’s a good man. “

  Dace listened, fascinated by the man’s lack of shame as he pried into what Paul was up to. Although Paul didn’t respond to the last, she thought he was startled by the assessment of his brother.

  “You going to eat at the Bayview?”

  Paul nodded. “Still good food there?”

  “Best in town.” Benny Johnson pulled up in front of a beautiful wood building with large pane glass windows that reached out into the bay. “You say hello to your mother for me,” he said as he took Paul’s money. Paul slammed the door and patted the roof to send him on his way.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’m hungry, and you must be starved.”

  Dace marveled at the beauty of the restaurant. “I wouldn’t have expected this here,” she said as the waitress escorted them to a table in the bar overlooking the bay.

  “Tourism is Sitka’s biggest business.”

  Just reading the menu made Dace even hungrier. She chose a seafood platter that started with a shrimp salad and clam chowder. The waitress, also Tlingit, nodded as she took the order. When Paul gave her his order, she looked at him carefully.

  “You’re from here aren’t you?” she said. “Angela and Deborah’s brother — you must be Paul. I remember you, but you were older and ignored us little girls. I’m Susan Adams — was Susan Whitcomb back then.”

  He smiled at her. “I remember you. Knew your brothers.”

  “Welcome home,” she said as she walked away to put in their order.

  Candace looked at him curiously. “When was the last time you were home?”

  He sighed. “Eighteen years ago.”

  Chapter 2

  (Sitka. Paul’s story. 1996.)

  Paul was a week out of high school and trying to figure out what he was going to do next. Not college. He didn’t have any interest, and his grades weren’t that great. What was the point if you didn’t know what you wanted to do? Well, sports and girls crossed his mind, but he needed a job. He had work on the fishing boats lined up for the season just as he’d done the last two years, but that wasn’t a long-term plan. He saw what happened to the guys who fished for someone year after year. You worked hard for four months, drank hard for eight months. No thanks.

  So he’d put in applications for the pipelines and oil companies. Hard work, yeah, but the pay was really good. And it would get him out of Sitka. God, he wanted out of Sitka.

  Sitka had a population of 9,000 and sat on an island with no road longer than the seven miles out to the ferry terminal. The road to the old lumber mill was five miles long, and you could go over the bridge to the airport and Coast Guard terminal in three miles. Newcomers to Sitka called it Depression Drive: drive out to the ferry terminal, back to town, then to the old lumber mill, back to town, and then to the Coast Guard base. If you really had cabin fever you could drive it twice for a grand total of 60 miles. Kitka snorted. He’d been born here. If you wanted to go somewhere? That’s what planes and boats were for.

  And he did want to go somewhere. Anywhere but the town where he’d grown up. He was tired of being one of those damn Kitka boys. Tired of fights because someone sneered at him or his mom. Tired of backing down bullies who made his kid sisters cry.

  Really tired of rescuing Jonas. His brother was two years younger, and he didn’t just defend himself, he went looking for fights. All too often, it seemed, Paul had to jump in. And Jonas knew he would, damn him.

  Most of all he wanted away from his dad. His dad was a drunk. He hadn’t worked full time in years. He wasn’t a violent drunk. He didn’t hit his mom or the kids. He just drank. And then he’d stagger down the streets after the bars closed, giggling and talking smack to anyone else who was out.

  Paul didn’t fear his dad. He was embarrassed by him. He wondered how his mother stood it. Of course, that was part of the problem. His father was Tlingit; his mother was white. And no one approved. It was particularly difficult because the Tlingit were matrilineal— who your mother was determined who you were. Who you could marry. He and his brothers and sisters had no Tlingit identity because their mother was white. And no identity in the white world, because no one could see past the color of their skin.

  He loved his mom. She was an English teacher at Sheldon Jackson College in town. She wore granny dresses and oversized glasses and talked about books when no one else cared. She insisted all her kids read. Although Paul wouldn’t admit it, he actually loved books. They took you places. Right now, he was all about going places.

  So, she’d come to the island to teach literature and fell in love with Luke Kitka. They married, had four kids, and here they were 20 years later. Paul figured his father must have been very different when his parents met, but he’d been an out-of-work drunk for most of Paul’s life. He wondered what had changed. He wondered if he cared.

  Paul stood on the gunwales of boat Sitka Surprise as it pulled into the cannery docks at 2 p.m. They’d been out since dawn at 4 a.m. The Sitka Surprise was a small operation with a captain and just two crew. They did day runs, putting back in each night. Kitka liked that better than the bigger boats that stayed out for a week at a tim
e. No matter how big the boat, it was too small to spend that much time with six other guys.

  He jumped off the boat and onto the dock and grabbed the line to tie it up. He looked up to see his brother standing there. He looked angry, and even more he looked like he’d been crying — or at least trying very hard not to cry.

  “Come on, we gotta go,” Jonas said harshly.

  “I’m not done yet,” Paul said evenly. He caught a second line and tied the stern of the boat.

  “Paul, Mom says you need to come back now. Dad’s....” Jonas gulped.

  Paul stopped what he was doing and looked at Jonas.

  “Dad’s dead,” he whispered. “He was out on the mill road this morning waving a gun around, and a cop shot him. Killed him.”

  The next week went by in a blur of anger and sorrow and downright rage. The hardest part was the inquest.

  The cop who shot Luke Kitka was a Swede named Hank Petras. He was about 30, blonde to the point of having almost white hair, even his eyebrows. He wore his hair military short, and his uniform was pressed and creased perfectly. He was a family man, a church deacon, and was known to be a fair, if harsh, man. During the inquest he sat in the front row of the courtroom with his wife, his minister, and the police chief. His fellow officers filled the rows behind him.

  Paul and his mother sat in the back row. His mother made the other kids stay home, but when Paul insisted he was going with her, she hesitated and then agreed.

  “You’re an adult,” she said. “You can make your own choice. But you need to be very sure you won’t lose it. No matter what the verdict, you have to take it silently. When the judge leaves, we leave. We speak to no one. Do you understand?”

  Paul nodded. “He didn’t need to kill Dad. Dad never hurt anyone.”

  His mom agreed. “That’s true. But it isn’t going to matter. The inquest will exonerate Hank Petras. He’s a cop. And the cops take care of their own.”

  Paul wasn’t so sure. There was much talk around town. A lot of the Tlingit community was angry. Everyone knew Luke was an easy-going drunk. What he was doing with a gun out on the mill road no one was sure. He hadn’t owned a gun. No one knew where the gun came from. Everyone knew him. Including Hank Petras.