Spoils of the dead

by Dana Stabenow

  The mechanic, skinny, white, in his thirties, wearing Carhartt bibs he might have inherited from his grandfather, gave her the hangar owner’s contact info. She tapped it into her phone.

  Watching her, he said, “Would you like to meet me for a beer sometime?”

  She flashed her wedding ring. “Married.” She smiled at him to make sure that he understood the implied “if only” in her refusal. “Sorry.”

  His grin was gap-toothed and charming. “Worth a try.”

  She laughed and went back to her Forester with maybe just a little swash to her buckle and drove to Sunset Heights. Sybilla was already seated at a table in a small cafeteria that smelled strongly of Clorox and overcooked pasta. No cloth napkins here, but they did have table service in the form of a smiling teenager dressed in a blue and white striped apron. “Fried salmon steaks and a tossed salad today, Mrs. Karlsen.” She smiled at Wy. “Can I get you ladies something to drink?”

  “Water is fine for me,” Wy said.

  “Vodka martini, three olives,” Sybilla said.

  “Coming right up, Mrs. Karlsen.” She reappeared in a moment with tall glasses of ice water and a small pitcher for refills.

  “So nice that you could join me for lunch today, dear,” Sybilla said.

  “If you hadn’t called I’d be eating a PBJ standing over the sink.”

  Sybilla chuckled. “My good deed for the day.”

  The salmon when it came was not overcooked, an almost impossible feat in an institutional setting. Wy was impressed, and laid in with a will.

  “How is your young man settling in?” Sybilla said.

  “He’s at work on a case.”

  Again she saw that kind of click at the back of Sybilla’s eyes, where in an instant she seemed to be tracking everything said to her. “He has a case?”

  “He does.” Wy hesitated.

  Sybilla sniffed. “Afraid to upset the old lady, Wy? Is it Erik?”

  Wy paused with her fork halfway to her mouth.

  This time Sybilla snorted. “I thought you said you came from a small town.” She sighed. “I warned him.”

  It took a moment for her words to register. “I beg your pardon? You warned Liam?”

  Sybilla huffed an impatient sigh. “Not Liam. I warned Erik, when he came here to ask if he could rent my cabin.”

  “Erik? Erik Berglund?”

  Sybilla looked annoyed. “Of course, Erik Berglund. Unless someone else has been murdered this week I don’t know about. In which case your young man would certainly have been posted to the right place.”

  Wy put down her folk and said brightly, “Sybilla, why don’t I call Liam and see if he can join us for dessert?”

  Dessert was ice cream sundaes. Liam’s melted in front of him as he asked questions and Sybilla answered them between bites.

  Liam was, to put it mildly, chagrined. He’d asked everyone he had met in Blewestown if they knew where Erik Berglund lived, except for Sybilla. The one person he could be said to have spent more time with than the rest of them put together, and the one with more institutional memory of the place than anyone else save Jefferson and Houten. Seeing her marching down the street in the altogether had inclined him to dismiss anything she said. It was an epic fail on his part. “Where exactly is your cabin, Sybilla?”

  “At the end of Crow’s Nest.”

  Liam nodded. “And where is Crow’s Nest?”

  Sybilla had to get on the outside of a heaping spoonful of sundae before she could answer. Age had certainly not interfered with her appetite. “It’s off Backstay, which is off Telltale.” She saw his expression and relented. “It’s in the Full Sail Subdivision, about five miles out East Bay Road. The developer was a sailor.”

  “Who knew?” Wy said.

  He already had his phone out and Wy could see he had called up Google Maps. “Where on Crow’s Nest, Sybilla? What’s the street address?”

  She scraped her bowl with the spoon. “It’s the last cabin at the end of Crow’s Nest. Way up high, far away from anyone else.” Her smile was dreamy. “Stanley and I spent as much time there as we could spare from our jobs. Our aerie, we called it.”

  Liam pocketed his phone. “Well, thanks, Sybilla—”

  Wy touched his arm and he looked at her. “Sybilla,” she said, “you said you had warned Erik, when he came to ask you if he could rent your cabin.”

  Sybilla licked her spoon and set it and the bowl aside with regret. “Yes, I did. Erik was one of my students. Well, both of them were.” She sighed. “That’s the best age, ten, when everything is bright and shiny and new, when nothing is impossible, when they’ll believe anything you tell them without question, learn everything you have to offer and beg for more. Josh and Erik were inseparable.” She folded her hands in front of her and stared into the past.

  Liam would have said something, but again, Wy touched his arm. She waited long enough for the question to be only inquiring, not interrogational, and kept her tone gentle. “Who was Josh, Sybilla?”

  Sybilla blinked at her. “Josh? Didn’t I say? Joshua Petroff. He was Erik’s best friend.” She shook her head. “I never believed all that rubbish they said about Erik afterward. He was attacked and left for dead. It was ridiculous to insinuate that he was faking his amnesia. People can be so cruel, and to say such things of a ten-year-old boy was unconscionable.” Her eyes flashed. “And I said so at the time.”

  Liam had his phone out again and was doing another search. Wy guessed it was of Joshua Petroff. When he went rigid beside her, she was sure of it. “Why did you warn Erik, Sybilla?” she said.

  “Warn Erik?” Sybilla looked bewildered. “Whatever are you talking about, my dear? Erik who?”

  As they got up to leave Wy thanked Sybilla for lunch and Sybilla said brightly, “Don’t forget tea on Sunday.” She gave Liam an up-from-under look. “And bring your nice young man with you.”

  He surprised her by stooping to kiss her cheek. “I wouldn’t miss it, Sybilla.”

  She blushed and smiled.

  Outside, Wy said, “Can I come with you to check out the cabin?” She wanted to see what an aerie looked like.

  Liam stood with his hands on his hips, frowning at his feet. She recognized the signs and waited. It was a good five minutes before he looked up again. “Ride with me.”

  “Okay.” She climbed into his pickup and was surprised when they got to Sourdough that he didn’t turn left to head out East Bay Road. Instead he continued down Alder to the post.

  He pulled in and killed the engine. “Come inside with me and follow my lead.”

  “Okay?”

  Ms. Petroff was at her desk, looking every bit as terrifyingly poised as Liam had described. “Ms. Petroff, this is my wife, Wyanet Chouinard.”

  “How do you do, Ms. Chouinard.”

  Wy bit back a smile and said gravely, “Ms. Petroff.”

  Liam led the way to his office. He had left the door open. Wy felt her amusement fade when she understood what that meant.

  He stood in front of the map that covered half of one wall. “What did Sybilla say, Wy?” he said in a voice pitched to carry. “About five miles out East Bay Road?”

  “Yes,” she said, at a matching volume. “And all the streets were named for sailboat parts or something weird like that.”

  “Let’s see if we can find it on this map.” He poked his head out the door. “Ms. Petroff? Do you have a ruler I could borrow?” Wy closed her eyes and shook her head. Subtle Liam was not.

  “Of course, sir.” Did Ms. Petroff’s voice sound a little higher? A drawer opened and closed, followed by footsteps.

  “Thanks.” He ducked back into the office. He wasn’t smiling. Wy took the ruler and held it against the bar scale and then against the road. “That’s about five miles.”

  They brought their faces close to the map. “There?”

  Wy pushed his finger away. “No, there.”

  Mainsail Drive was a left turn off East Bay Road and if the elevation co
ntours were accurate, climbed nine hundred feet in a series of twists and turns to end just beneath the bluff that held up the road their own house was on, Heavenly View Drive. There were many streets in the subdivision but the scale wasn’t large enough to include their names.

  Wy looked at Liam, eyebrows raised.

  He stepped back from the map, still speaking in that unnaturally loud voice. “Damn it, I’ve got that interview with Garfield at three o’clock and it’s going to be a long one. I can’t get out there and back in time. I’ll have to wait until afterward.”

  Garfield? Wy mouthed at him, and he made a come-along motion with his hand.

  “I’ve got some errands to run,” she said obediently. “Why don’t we meet up at home and drive out after dinner?”

  She was rewarded by an approving nod. “That sounds great, I’ll see you then.”

  “Okay.” She took a step back, only to be snatched up in his arms and thoroughly kissed, just long enough for things to get interesting before he let her go again. Her hair had come loose from its braid and fallen into her eyes and she frowned at him while she tried to tuck it away again with shaking hands.

  He noticed and grinned.

  She stuck her nose in the air and left with as much flounce as she could muster on shaky knees. “Ms. Petroff,” she said as she passed the aide’s desk.

  “Ms. Chouinard.”

  In the fleeting glimpse Wy had of her, she saw that the aide’s professional mask had slipped a little.

  She looked, Wy thought, afraid.

  Liam didn’t close his door as that might have given the game away. He sat down at his desk and pulled open the central drawer where he’d put the file folder containing the square and his notes on the list of suspects. He stopped himself from picking it up at the last moment.

  He couldn’t be sure but he thought it wasn’t in the same place he had left it. It was farther back in the drawer now, exposing the pencil tray.

  He raised his head and looked in the direction of the front office. If he had had any doubts, they were gone now.

  Wy was waiting at the door when he drove up and she hustled down the steps and into the truck. She was carrying a paper bag. “I made you a sandwich,” she said. “What did she do?”

  He investigated the bag. Tuna with mayo, onions, and sweet pickles on white, his favorite.

  She handed him a thermos. “Coffee.”

  “I love you.”

  “I know. Now give.”

  “She stayed at her desk all afternoon,” he said around his first bite. He put the Silverado in gear and backed out of the drive one-handed and turned right on Heavenly Drive.

  “You were there, too? What about your fake appointment?”

  “I turned up the volume so she could hear it and hit the ringtone on my phone, which I pretended to answer and pretended to be disappointed that my fake meeting had been cancelled.” He looked at her. “‘F*ck and Run,’ Wy? Really?”

  “What?” she said, making with the big eyes. “Who doesn’t love Liz Phair?”

  “Maybe a little NSFW with the ringtones, is all I’m saying.”

  “You should talk.” She made a strategic change of subject. “You don’t really think Ms. Petroff killed Erik Berglund, do you?”

  He glanced at her before turning right on Alder. “Anybody can kill anybody, Wy. As you well know.”

  “But—”

  “Did you follow the link I sent you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you know that thirty years ago her father’s brother and Erik’s best bud disappeared off the same stretch of beach that Erik’s dig fronted. Erik was found unconscious from a knock on the head. Due to retrograde amnesia he never regained his memories of that day.”

  “Yes.”

  “She would have known the story from her family. I think when Erik showed back up in the Bay that she would have wanted to talk to him. But she didn’t mention that.” He stopped at Sourdough at the bottom of the hill and turned left, crossing Spit where it became East Bay. He pushed the trip meter until it registered zero and continued down the road. “Her parents know something, too. You were there, you saw their reactions to Berglund’s death.”

  Wy thought of Kimberley, weeping silently over the sink in her kitchen. “I don’t know, Liam. I think there might be something else going on there.”

  “She lied to me about knowing where Erik was living,” he said flatly.

  Liam could forgive a lot, but seldom a lie. And he had liked young Ms. Petroff, so the betrayal stung all the more. And he had liked Erik Berglund, too, which only added to his determination to find out what had happened to him. “Just… talk to her before you slap the cuffs on her, okay?”

  They took two wrong turns before Wy spotted a street sign leaning up against a telephone pole. The white letters on the green sign were faded but legible. “Mainsail Avenue,” Wy said, pointing.

  Liam turned left and immediately the road went from a two-lane paved blacktop to a one-lane, continuous buffalo wallow. Liam wasn’t prepared for the first dip and bounced both of them off the roof of the cab. “I’m guessing not a borough-maintained road,” Wy said, grabbing the handle and hanging on for dear life. “This is worse than that goat track that leads to the judge’s house.”

  He slowed down to a crawl, which helped a little. The trees overgrew the road to where their branches whapped the pickup’s rear views hard enough to move them so far out of alignment that he couldn’t see behind him. Not that he could have anyway. It was as if the sun had set three hours early.

  Mainsail Avenue was fairly straight for about half a mile, when it ended in a cross street called Reefpoint, so marked by another faded sign, and saw their first house, followed by six more equally spaced along the road that stretched an equal distance either side of Mainsail. “One-acre lots, you think?”

  “Looks like,” Wy said.

  “And fighting the vegetation back every minute of every day. Noon is probably the only time these people see daylight.”

  Reefpoint climbed to Halyard, where another six houses were carefully spaced out along its length. Halyard climbed higher, with a switchback thrown in, and ended at Turnbuckle. “What were the roads that Sybilla said led to Crow’s Nest?”

  “Telltale, then Backstay,” Wy said. “She called it an aerie. I think we’re good if we just keep going up.”

  Sure enough, Turnbuckle ended in Telltale, this time after two switchbacks and a decrepit wooden bridge over a narrow creek.

  “Did your ears just pop?” Wy said.

  “Uh-huh.” Liam wrestled the truck around another hairpin turn and up another switchback. He checked the indicators for engine temperature. Nothing in the red so far. “If they lost some of these trees…”

  “I was thinking the same.”

  Here the houses were smaller and closer together and built only on the right, or up side of the street. “Developer must have run out of money,” Liam said.

  Backstay had no homes at all on it that they could see, but the amount of fill necessary to put in a foundation would have beggared anyone who wasn’t a billionaire. The ground now fell so steeply away from the road that they caught glimpses of the view they had both imagined and it promised exceedingly fair.

  There was no street sign at Crow’s Nest but it was the only turn remaining so they took it, another hard hairpin right. The grade was so steep Liam shifted into low and let up on the gas very slowly. “I don’t think they have to worry about being burglarized.” He wondered how big a turnaround there was at the top. He was definitely turning in his miles for this case.

  They rocked and rolled for another interminable five minutes. It was a relief when they finally topped out on a narrow flat of gravel carved from the wall of the bluff. The top of the bluff and Heavenly Drive were less than a hundred feet above.

  A tiny log cabin was built flush against the face of the bluff. To the right there was an outhouse and to the left a six-by-six garden plot where the cabbages and Brusse
ls sprouts were doing well.

  Liam had stopped and Wy reached for the door handle. “Wait,” Liam said. He backed and filled until he had the truck pointing downhill again. “Okay, you get out and stay here. Crow’s Nest went a little way the other direction at Backstay. I’m going to leave the truck there and walk back up.”

  Wy nodded. If Ms. Petroff saw the truck in front of the cabin she might run for it. She got out and Liam inched over the edge of the rise and out of sight. He’d left the truck in low and she could hear it grinding its way down the hill. Better his truck than her Subaru.

  Before her Chungasqak Bay stretched from left to right with the Kenai Mountains lining the southern horizon in full relief. It was very nearly the same view out their new front window, just a little lower, and she wondered if custom would ever stale its infinite variety. She couldn’t imagine it. She knew in her head that the mountains were four and five thousand feet higher than where she stood, but her eyes told her she was level with their summits. Every white-topped crag and crest was clearly outlined against a sky going a rich, deep blue. The lagoon, inlets, bays, and fjords that lined the coast below cast dark, mysterious shadows on their waters. Lights twinkled from only a few far-flung locations. There were more lights scattered about the Bay, boats on the way home after a day’s fishing.

  She turned to look at the cabin. It had been made from logs a long time ago, and those logs had not been oiled in a long time. The roof was covered with a thick mat of vegetation that was more than moss and might even flower in the summer. The front door was offset to the right, and on the left was a large picture window. Wy couldn’t imagine how they’d gotten the glass up here without breaking it.

  She walked to the door and knocked. “Hello? Hello, is anyone home?”

  There was no answer. She reached for the handle and the door opened easily inwards. Inside was a single room, about sixteen feet by twenty, where a full-size bed took up most of one corner. A wood stove sat in the opposite corner with two easy chairs flanking it. A small dining table with two chairs sat in front of the window and a kitchen area consisting of a high, freestanding counter with shelves beneath stood against the wall in back of the door. There were two more windows, sliders with screens, one on each side.