So Sure Of Death

by Dana Stabenow

  She met his eyes without flinching. “Yes.”

  “If he hadn't been married…?”

  She took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. “Does your investigation require that I answer that question?”

  “No,” Liam said, conscious of a feeling of shame. “No, Tanya, it doesn't. I'm sorry.” He got up to leave.

  Her voice stopped him at the door. “If he hadn't already been married when I met him, Mr. Campbell, he would have been shortly thereafter. But he was.”

  “Did he feel that way, too?”

  Again she hesitated. “I think so, yes.” Her smile was bleak. “I made sure we never had the opportunity to speak in private.”

  He nodded. “You were both better people than I was,” he said, and went out the door before he had to face the surprise he knew would show on her face.

  TWELVE

  Wy had dogged Prince from the dig all the way into Newenham, unloaded McLynn and accepted a last-minute charter to Three Lake Lodge for two corn growers from Iowa. They were both blond and blue-eyed, short and stocky and pink-cheeked with excitement. They'd never been to Alaska before, they'd never fished for salmon and, as it turned out, they'd never flown in a small plane, either, as was made manifest when one of them had to throw up into his brand-new hip waders while they were going through Jackknife Pass.

  The good news was that he did use the waders, without spattering so much as a drop on the brand-new carpet she'd just installed in the 180, and that they paid in advance in cash. She arranged to pick them up a week later and made the trip home a short one. It had been a long, long day, and she was weary to the bone.

  “Tim?” she said, as she walked in the door of the white clapboard house on the bluff of the Nushagak River. “You home?”

  “I'm in here.”

  The kitchen. It figured. Tim spent half his life with his head in the refrigerator.

  “What's for dinner?” She closed the door.

  “I have to cook again?” he whined, but she heard the smile in his voice.

  “It's your turn, I told you that this morning,” she said, and then halted in surprise in the kitchen doorway. “Jo!”

  The short, stocky woman with the blond, frizzy hair came around the counter and enveloped Wy in a warm, solid hug. “Hey, girl.”

  Wy returned the hug with as much energy and enthusiasm as she was capable of on this day, and Jo pulled back. “You're a wreck.”

  “Gee, thanks, you look great, too.”

  “I can go away, if you need me to.”

  Wy made a rude noise. “Like hell. If I can't be mean to you, who can I be mean to?”

  Jo's green eyes were shrewd. “Liam?”

  Wy looked at Tim, leaning against the kitchen counter, dipping a plain hot dog into a jar of mustard. He was slight and dark, with flat cheekbones and compact frame. His dark eyes were wary and suspicious, and much older than the rest of him. No child of twelve should look out on the world with such distrust.

  Tim saw her looking and thought it was at the hot dog. “Just a snack,” he said, and with one bite made the rest of it disappear.

  “Uh-huh,” Wy said. “Is that what we're having for dinner again?” He drew himself up, offended. “No. We're having something different, like you said you wanted.” He stepped back, revealing the culinary riches behind him on the counter. “We're having polish sausage and sauerkraut,” he said proudly. He held up an empty package of Alaska Sausage's finest, and pointed at a quart jar of Claussen's Crisp Sauerkraut, also empty.

  Wy, who after a year's steady indoctrination knew enough to be grateful that Tim allowed himself to be part of the kitchen crew rotation, said, “Looks good. Do I get anything green along with that?”

  He looked doubtful. “Well,” he offered, “the sauerkraut used to be cabbage, and cabbage is green.” He brightened. “I got ice cream for dessert, though.”

  “What kind?”

  His smile was sly. “Häagen-Dazs. Vanilla.”

  Wy sighed. “I am so easy.”

  Jo laughed, and tugged Wy out of the room. “Come on, let's get you cleaned up while Chef Paul here does his thing.”

  In her bedroom, Wy stripped off her clothes as Jo lounged on the bed. “Still sleeping alone, I see.”

  Wy stopped, half in and half out of her jeans. “How can you tell?”

  Jo made a face. “I'm a reporter. I notice the details. Like a fullsize bed in the room of a woman hankering after a king-size-bed guy.”

  Liam was six-three. Wy tossed her jeans in the hamper and grabbed for the Sea Wolves T-shirt she used for a robe. “I'll be right back.”

  She used up all the hot water and then some. When she came back into her bedroom Jo had picked up the little embroidered box on Wy's dresser, identical to the one Jo had on hers, both of which had been acquired on the isle of Crete during the European vacation that had been the reward of both sets of parents following a successful graduation from college. “Remember the store where we got these, how the guy behind the counter tried to pick us up?”

  “Remember how we let him?” Wy said dryly, stepping into clean underwear.

  “Ah yes, the Labyrinth by moonlight,” Jo said dreamily. “One of my favorite memories.”

  “All you saw was stars, girl,” Wy retorted, “which is generally what you do see from lying on your back outside at night.”

  “Slander, calumny and defamation of character,” Jo said peacefully. “I'll sue. What's this?”

  Wy pushed her head through the neck of her T-shirt and peered over Jo's shoulder. “That? It's my high school class ring. Mr. Strohmeyer told me not to buy one, that I'd probably never wear it again. He was right, as usual.”

  “Don't you just hate that? What's this?”

  Wy looked, and her hands stilled on the zipper of her jeans. “A pair of earrings, what do they look like?”

  “They are beautiful. I don't generally like gold nuggets, but these are really nice.” Jo held one of the flat, heavy loops up to her ear, admiring the effect in the mirror. “Where'd you get them?”

  “A friend,” Wy said. She was sure there was no inflection in her voice to give warning, but she felt Jo's eyes boring into the back of her head. Being friends with a reporter could be a pain in the ass. “What are you doing in town, Jo?”

  “Liam gave them to you.”

  A real pain in the ass. “Yes.”

  Jo put the earring back in the box and the box back on the dresser. She regarded it for a moment, and then turned to look at Wy. Jo had newspaper eyes, a steady, unwinking, patient stare that watched and weighed and waited, waited for the answers to her questions, waited for the truth. You could dodge, evade, equivocate, you could even lie, but those newspaper eyes would wait you out every time.

  Joan Dunaway was a reporter for theNews,and had been one since she and Wy had returned from Europe the year they graduated from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Wy with a degree in education and Jo with a degree in journalism. She'd built up a reputation over the years for ferreting out bad behavior on a legislative and bureaucratic level and writing pull-no-punches stories about it. One of the more delightful stories Wy remembered had exposed the invariable habit of the commissioner of the Department of Corrections in hiring longtime friends for jobs tailored to suit their special talents. One of them had been a grocer, Wy recalled. At least the Department of Corrections had made some terrific deals on fresh produce for the four and a half months of the grocer's tenure of office.

  Jo's juciest story to date had concerned the then sitting governor who had vacationed, all expenses paid, in Baja, Bali and Biarritz courtesy of one of the North Slope's major oil producers. The executive responsible had made the grievous error of not recognizing Jo in the bar of the Baranof Hotel. He had compounded this error by picking her up, seducing her and afterward indulging in pillow talk that drew connections between the vacations and a revision of the state's subsurface mineral rights law being debated before the legislature the following day. This not
unnaturally wound up on the front page of theNews.He was a very attractive slimeball, she explained later to Wy, with very blue eyes and an ass as firm and round as a Delicious apple. “I swear to god, I wanted to bite it,” she declared, and she was regretful when he and his ass were indicted and later convicted, fined and imprisoned for bribery of a public official. The governor narrowly escaped prison only by payment of a $330,000 fine, but when the legislature changed hands two years later, they vacated the judgment and repaid the fine to him, with interest. “Ah, Alaska,” Jo had said fondly when she heard. “Gays can't marry and you have to speak English, but you can legally smoke pot and embezzlers never go hungry. Gotta love it.”

  And she did, and she wrote about it every day, not only stories of bribery and corruption in the legislature, but stories of how the state worked. She wrote profiles of the weights-and-measures man who checked to see that you got the five gallons of gas you'd paid for, the waitress at Simon and Seafort's who retired after nineteen years on the job, the Alaskan old fart who cut firewood from his lot in Talkeetna and delivered it, one cord at a time, to buyers in Anchorage. She wrote about the people who fixed the potholes and tarred the roofs and shoveled the snow and loaded luggage onto planes, about the gardeners at the Municipal Greenhouse and the clerks at City Hall, about the woman who answered the phone at Victims of Violent Crimes in Juneau and the man who ran the flight service station in Soldotna. She was on a first-name basis with just about everyone in the state, from the man who set the tracks on the cross-country ski trails at Kincaid Park to the ranger who tracked down poachers in the Gates of the Arctic. Some of them loved her. Some of them hated her. None of it stopped her.

  And it didn't stop her now. “How's it going? You and Liam?”

  “It's not,” Wy said, hoping that would be the end of it.

  A vain hope. “Why not?”

  Wy sighed. All right, then, and maybe it would help if she said the words out loud. “Jo, if he'd left Jenny and Charlie…” She stopped. It was incredible how, even now, three years later, she had to force their names out of her mouth. “Wife and child” were generic terms, without personalities, wants, demands. “Jenny and Charlie” were people, people with needs and privileges that superseded hers.

  She looked at Jo. Jo looked back with an uncharacteristically solemn expression. “I've got a Puritan streak a mile wide, Jo. What I did was wrong. You don't screw around with someone else's husband, you just don't. And you don't take the attention that rightfully belongs to his child. Children need their fathers.” Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. “If he'd come to me, if we'd married, I would have spent the next fifty years trying to make it up to his son. I would have been oh so considerate and understanding, I would have relinquished my time with Liam so he could spend time with his son, I would have tried to be friends with his wife, no matter how much she hated me, and she was bound to hate me.”

  “And after a while,” Jo said slowly, “you would have come to resent it.”

  “Probably.”

  “And to take it out on Liam.”

  “Probably,” Wy repeated.

  “And yourself.”

  “Especially myself.” Wy stood up. “So you see, Jo, as much as it hurt, it was the right thing to do.”

  “Cutting things off, never seeing him or talking to him again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Except that now you are.”

  Wy wandered over to the window and looked out at the fascinating view of her truck and Jo's rental car parked in the driveway. “Yes.”

  There was a brief silence. Jo looked at the top of Wy's dresser. There was very little clutter: the embroidered box from Greece, a few ivory carvings, one a walrus rearing up with his tusks on display and his fat sides wonderfully wrinkled, another that looked like a little knife, no more than three inches in length, with a curved blade and a mask carved into the hilt. From the right eye of the mask a tiny face looked out, laughing. “You still love him.”

  “Only because NPR's Scott Simon's never given me a tumble, and that's only because I have not been afforded the opportunity to meet him, swamp him with my extensive personal charm and carry him off to my tent.”

  Jo had the reporter's indispensable and extremely irritating ability to stick to the point. “Jenny and Charlie are dead.”

  “I know. Convenient, isn't it?”

  “Oh Jesus,” Jo said, disgusted. “Martyrdom does not become you, Wy.”

  Wy turned. “What?”

  “You heard me,” Jo said, the ruthless gleam back in her newspaper eyes. “You've steeled yourself to make this great sacrifice, you've even managed to round up a child of your own without having to betray the great love of your life-speaking of convenient-”

  “Wait just a goddamn minute!” Wy said hotly. “Where do you get off-”

  “-and now that the love of your life-we may fairly call him that, I suppose, since you haven't let anyone else within sniffing distance since, other than that wimpy little wing cover salesman-”

  “He wasn't a wimp!”

  “-now that the love of your life is free, due, I might add, to no fault of your own, so that the two of you can join hands and waltz off into the sunset together, you're so in love with this noble renunciation act of yours that you're willing to do it all over again.” Jo shook her head. “Shit happens, Wy. It happened here, and it had absolutely nothing to do with you.” She paused, and gave Wy a considering look. “You didn't even wish them dead, did you?”

  “What?” Wy said, horrified. “No! Never!”

  “God, you were right about that Puritan streak,” Jo said, disgusted. “Sometimes I think you're not even human. Saint Wyanet, your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure.”

  “Fuck you, Dunaway!”

  “Backatcha and times two, Chouinard!” Jo stepped up to go nose to nose. In your face was her specialty, and where she scored most of her best stories. “Jenny and Charlie were killed by a drunk driver. Liam is single, and has somehow managed to find you again.” Her brows snapped together. “Are you afraid that it wasn't real after all?” she said with sudden suspicion. “Are you afraid that what you could have with Liam won't measure up to what you did have?”

  “Oh for crissake,” Wy exploded, “don't say ‘what we had’ like I was Streisand and he was Redford. ‘What we had’ amounted to twenty-three flights into the Bush, four days in Anchorage and a thousand dollars in phone bills. It wasn't like we ran away to Paris together or something.”

  Jo's smile was sly. “What?” Wy said, on the defensive. She knew that smile.

  “Twenty-three flights, huh?” Jo said smugly. “Pretty specific number. Interesting that you remember it so exactly.”

  Wy blushed again. The hell with this. She went to the bureau and picked up her hairbrush, yanking it ruthlessly through her shower-tangled curls. “So,” she said in an artificially bright voice. “What are you doing in town, anyway?”

  Jo weighed Wy's determination to change the subject, found it inflexible, decided she'd said enough and dropped the subject of Liam. For the moment. “Following up on a story.”

  “Oh yeah? What one?”

  “I can't say right now.”

  Jo's voice was sober, and Wy put down the brush. “Why not?”

  Jo saw Wy's expression and made an obvious effort to lighten up. “Because it has to do with government shenanigans at high levels,” she said teasingly. “My specialty.”

  “What, theNewsis looking for another Pulitzer?” Wy said, falling in with the new mood. One reason they'd been friends for as long as they had was because they respected each other's boundaries. Another was that they could get mad at each other, secure in the knowledge that neither was going anywhere, no matter how heated-or personal-the debate became.

  Jo shook her head. “I'm on my own on this one. A source contacted me with the story. I'm here to talk to him in person.”

  Wy's brow creased. “It isn't about the killings, is it?”

>   “Killings?” Jo's eyes narrowed. “What killings?”

  Wy hesitated, but there wasn't any point in not telling her. Like Liam, she was well aware of the efficiency of the Bush telegraph. “Seven people were killed in a boat fire in Kulukak. It might not have been an accident. Not to mention which, I found a-”

  “Seven people?” Jo vaulted off the bed. “Jesus! Are you serious?”

  “No, Jo, I made it up. Plus I myself just happened to-”

  “And not an accident? You mean murdered?”

  “Liam thinks so, and by the way, I-”

  “Is Liam the investigating officer? Where's your phone? Kitchen, right?” Jo shot out of the room and down the hall, where Wy heard her badgering Tim for the phone. Sighing, she sat on her chaste, full-size bed and put on her socks. One body wasn't much by comparison to seven, she supposed. Still, stumbling across murder victims wasn't something she did on a regular basis. Once every three months was about her average.

  She remembered Bob DeCreft, the occupant of the last body she'd stumbled across, and chastised herself, although Bob, the crusty old coot, would have been the first to laugh. She wondered how Laura Nanalook, Bob's daughter, was doing on her own in Anchorage. Well, she hoped. If anyone deserved a break, it was Laura.

  Liam. His face rose unbidden before her eyes and she thought of Jo's words. Was it true? Was she so afraid that an actual relationship with Liam would pale in comparison to their affair? She winced away from the idea. She'd never thought of herself as a coward. She flew in Alaska for a living, didn't she? She'd taken on the raising of a twelve-year-old boy with a lot of nasty relatives, hadn't she? She'd returned to Newenham, hadn't she, risking contact with her birth family?

  The first time she'd seen Liam he'd been just another uniform. Then, seated next to each other in her plane, on their way to a stabbing northwest of Glenallen, she'd noticed his hands gripping the sides of his seat. His knuckles were white and his face was the same color. Here was this big, tall, strong, good-looking man, an officer of the court, an enforcer of the law. Why did she suddenly feel the need to help him fight his fear? They'd talked about books that day. She'd been reading Barbara Tuchman'sA Distant Mirrorfor the second time, and they'd compared notes on the calamitous fourteenth century, arguing Tuchman's comparison of that century to this.