by Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller

May 14, 2012: Kivalina, AK – It is difficult to know quite where to begin this story, but I have fixed my choice on a certain Wednesday at luncheon at the Bingo Parlor.  The conversation, though in the main irrelevant to the matter in hand, yet contained one or two suggestive incidents that influenced later developments.

I had just finished carving some boiled whale meat (remarkably tough, by the way), and on resuming my seat, I remarked – in a spirit most unbecoming to my profession – that anyone who murdered Davey Goode would be doing the world at large a service.

That stopped them.  Forks suspended in midair, my luncheon companions each in turn, and in his and her own way, gave me a look intended to express shock at such a flagrantly inappropriate sentiment.  You don’t wish that on anyone, least of all on a man you were hired to find by the very people with whom you are sharing whale meat.  But their shock, so eloquently written across their gaping faces, was a performance… as was my comment, to be perfectly frank.

After a moment’s awkward silence, the gentleman seated across from me coughed and shook his head.  “Murdered?” he said.  “Isn’t that a bit … uh … excessive?”

The woman to his right smiled a practiced smile and said, looking at me rather than him, “She doesn’t really mean it, Galen.  Do you?”

I pointed out that it was perfectly reasonable to mean what I said without wishing anyone killed.  The man’s look turned quizzical.  “Then what, pray tell, are we talking about?”

I granted him that, indeed, that was the question, and then, without answering, I rose from my chair and crossed the Bingo Parlor to find the ladies’ room.  Their eyes followed as they wondered what I was up to.

Native Americans and their bingo, I thought.  Just like the Catholics.  Or Episcopalians and their pinochle, Jamaicans and their Kalooki Rummy, Italians and canasta, Texans and poker.  Not to mention my ancestors, the Brits, and their passion for cribbage.  Strange, I thought, how different ethnic and religious groups seem to be drawn to the same parlor games.  Like Americans and their inexplicable passion for the frustratingly incomprehensible game of baseball.  It was one of those sports-sodden wits – name of Tom Boswell, if I remember right – who said, “Baseball creates the addictive allusion that it can almost be understood.”  Almost.

I didn’t need to visit the ladies’ room, so I made a U-turn as soon as I found it and circled slowly back toward my table, stopping along the way to read the headlines in the regional newspaper lying on an empty table.

On page three, under Alaska State News Briefs, was a story entitled “Bowheads New Executive Missing in Kivalina”.  How could someone be missing in Kivalina?  The first sentence of the article made it clear whoever had written the headline hadn’t paid much attention to the article.  The executive wasn’t missing in Kivalina; he was expected in Kivalina but had never arrived.  The distinction was likely lost on anyone in Nome, perhaps even on most of Kivalina’s residents.  Besides, I thought, it last week’s news.

The electronic age with its instantaneous communication has not entirely reached the most remote outposts of Alaska.  Only about ¾ of the state’s residents have cable TV, for example.  For the others, TV shows are beamed in via radio signals bounced off satellites, but the process takes hours and the shows are often shown to Alaskans a full day after the lower 48 has seen them.

Ditto for news.  Kivalina is too small to have its own newspaper, so the paper from Nome, Alaska, the Nome Nugget, distributes copies in Kivalina.  The Nome paper gets nearly instantaneous news feeds from the lower 48, but it takes a day or more to turn satellite transmissions into type, get a paper printed and make the news available to the citizens of Nome.  Then another day to fly the paper to Kivalina to make what is now 3-day old news available to Kivalinans, most of whom don’t care what’s going on in the lower 48 in the first place.  What’s national news in Seattle or Vancouver is of little interest in Kivalina, and local news is transmitted by the proven method of gossip and rumor, unbeaten in any corner of the globe.  Word of mouth is always faster and more reliable than the corporate feeds from down south – at least, that’s what most Kivalinans believe.

After 48 hours in this burg, I was beginning to appreciate their way of thinking.  The missing executive the headlines concerned had gone missing in Los Angeles, not Alaska.  He was some mid-management yes-man who hadn’t caught his plane flight to Kivalina, where he’d been banished by the ballclub he worked for.  Something about misappropriation of funds and forging signatures.  Nothing worthy of headlines, yet there it was; a bit tardy, but nonetheless loud for that, screaming in 48-point type.

The news was so old that I was already here.  In the time it had taken for the story to make its way from Yuma to LA to Kivalina, I’d been dispatched to this frozen end of the world to find a missing exec by the name of Swanfeld, either Bob or Robert, no one seemed certain.

In my first 24 hours here, I’d realized two things.  One, he couldn’t hide here.  Too small.  Barely 400 residents, each of whom knows everyone else.  And two, if he was here, he was dead.  Otherwise, he’d stick out like a sore thumb.

Outsiders like me are given the Kivalina eye and reported by word of mouth to the rest of the town the moment they step off the plane.  As I descended the steps to the tarmac, I could see a wave of information rushing away from me and splashing across the little village.  Before I’d recovered my bag, everyone who was anyone in Kivalina already knew I had arrived and what I was looking for.

This includes the two whispering at my luncheon table: Kivalina council member Colleen Swan and her Uncle Galen Swan, former mayor and now part-time patrol officer, the town’s only police presence.  Small towns are run by the largest families, and in Kivalina, that meant the Swans.  They occupied key positions throughout the town: on the town council, the tribal council, school board and relocation board.  You couldn’t cross the street – the only street – in Kivalina without stepping on a Swan.  Which made me wonder… is it mere coincidence that I’m looking for Bob or Robert Swanfeld in a town run by the Swan family?  Or is there some connection?

In this business, there’s two ways to find things out.  One is to ask.  The other… well, it’s a bit more devious, but it makes for a better story.  So no asking, I thought, as I rejoined my luncheon companions.

“Let’s talk about David Goode,” I said.

“We didn’t kill him,” Galen Swan said in a rush.

“He’s not dead,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, his whole body relaxing back into the chair.  “I thought – well, you said …”  He was at a loss for words, but his niece wasn’t.

“You’re toying with us,” she said.  She gave me a penetrating look.  Her eyes were unwavering.  “Why?”

“If,” I said, “somebody wanted to kill David Goode, how would they go about it?”

“Here, in Kivalina?” Galen asked.

“No, in New Orleans,” I said as sarcastically as I could.  “Where else would a runaway executive go to hide?”

“It’s a hypothetical, Galen,” Colleen explained to her uncle.  “Somebody else got killed and she’s trying to figure out who did it.”

“Not killed,” I said.  “Disappeared.”

“Folks disappear round here all the time,” Galen said.

Exactly, I thought.  But how?