Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  “Hey,” Wy said.

  “Hey,” Tim said without looking around.

  Wy sat next to him. “What are you reading?”

  He turned the cover of the book toward her, and went back to reading.

  “Little Fuzzy,”Wy said, pleased. “One of my favorites. For fun or for work?” Mrs. Cash, the English teacher for seventh, eighth and ninth grades at Newenham Public School, was teaching a science-fiction lit class this semester.

  “Work.”

  “You like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  She refused to let his laconic replies deter her. “What else is she assigning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stifled a sigh, and then was startled when he actually volunteered a remark.

  “She made us watch television today, before she handed out this book.”

  “What?”

  He angled a sly look up at her.“Star Trek.”

  She grinned. “Which one, and which episode?”

  “ ‘TNG.’ The one where Data has to prove he’s not a toaster.”

  “Ah.” She thought. “So you’re headed for a discussion on sentience.”

  “Looks like.”

  “How do you like the course?”

  “It’s okay, so far.” He turned back to his book.

  She looked at him, his hair cropped and spiked with gel in the approved current style, the blue jeans that now, mercifully, fit instead of hanging off his butt. His watch was the X-Men one she had given him for Christmas, to match the Wolverine T-shirt and his very own VHS copy of the movie, which by now was about worn out.

  His desk was a disaster area, littered with textbooks and notebooks and CDs and a Walkman and a Game Boy, undoubtedly loaded with Tim’s beloved Tetris and ready to go. On the wall was a poster of Euclid holding a pair of calipers, with a caption reading,There is no royal road to geometry. Next to Euclid was a poster of Jennifer Lopez holding nothing and wearing less.

  On a short picture ledge, ordered specially for the purpose, sat a photograph of a girl with pale olive skin, a mass of straight brown hair, and tip-tilted, laughing brown eyes. The brass of the frame was newly shined, and the ledge, unlike any other level surface in the room, was dust-free.

  Wy steeled herself. “Natalie’s coming over tomorrow afternoon.” She had learned the hard way not to refer to Natalie Gosuk as his mother.

  His back stiffened into one hard, inimical line. “What time?”

  “Four o’clock.”

  “You’ll be here?”

  “Yes. Every time. Always.”

  He put down the book and rolled to look at her. “I don’t want to see her.”

  “I know.”

  “But you’re making me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  If was the first time he hadn’t shouted the question at her in a rage, and she wanted so badly not to blow the answer. “She’s your birth mother, Tim.”

  “You’re more my mother than she ever was or ever will be.”

  Wy thought of the shivering, wounded scrap of humanity she had found crouched beneath his mother’s front porch on a flight into Ualik over two years ago, and said, “I can’t argue with that.”

  “Then why?”

  Hard as she tried, she couldn’t go straight at it. “I understand your anger at her, Tim. I share it. Anger is a good thing in many ways. Anger makes you fight back. A lot of times it’s the difference between surviving and going under.”

  He looked at her.

  “It’s just that, sooner or later, you have to accept what happened to make you angry, acknowledge it and move on.”

  “What if I don’t want to? You bet I’m mad at her.” His voice rose. “I hate her! And she deserves it!”

  “Yes, she does, but are you going to spend the rest of your life angry with her?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “You have that choice. It’s up to you; you can live from now until you die blaming everything bad that happens to you on your lousy childhood and the awful things your mother did to you.”

  “It wasn’t just her.”

  It was as close as he’d come to talking about the rest of it. “I know,” she said gently, when what she really wanted to do was rip and tear. “But what I’m telling you still goes. You can’t do anything to change the past. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be angry, but you’ve got to learn to put it aside and move on. The jails are full of people who never learned to do that.” Interesting, she thought, how sometimes she opened up her mouth and Liam Campbell came walking out of it.

  In that maddening way teenagers have of making logic where none exists, he said, “You saying I’m going to jail if I don’t let her visit?”

  “No. I’m saying if you can learn to tolerate her company for a few hours a week, you’ll be a better person for it.” She hesitated. “She’s an alcoholic, Tim.” He shot up, knocking his book to the floor, and she held up a hand. “It’s not an excuse, I know. But it is a reason. Sober, she might have been a completely different person. A completely different mother.”

  “She wasn’t sober.”

  “No, she wasn’t. And she lost her chance to be that person with you. But she’s sober now, and she’s reaching out. And you have to remember something.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever else, she gave you life.”

  “It wasn’t much of one.”

  “It is now.”

  His eyes held more bewilderment than rage. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this.”

  She said the only thing she could say. “I love you, Tim. I will always be on your side, no matter what.”

  She wasn’t sure he believed her, but she was wise enough to leave it at that.

  EIGHT

  Liam rousted every one of Lydia Tompkins’ neighbors within a ten-mile radius, starting with the one right next door, hiz-zoner Jim Earl, the mayor of Newenham.

  “Lydia’s dead? Well, shit,” was Jim Earl’s response. “Son of a bitch, that was one feisty old broad. There were some tourists camping out on the river below her house last summer, making a lot of noise and mess, and she took her twelve gauge down the bluff and ran them off. And made them take their garbage with ’em, too. Hell.” Jim Earl, who was about Lydia’s age, scratched a bristly chin. “What a flirt.”

  “She flirted with you?”

  Jim Earl grinned. “Lydia flirted with everybody. She liked men and she made no bones about it. Didn’t matter if they were young or old or fat or skinny, she liked ’em all. Drove her kids nuts after Stan Sr. died.”

  Liam remembered the overly elaborate crossing and recrossing of Lydia’s legs at the post the night she’d decked Harvey with the sun-dried tomatoes. “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “Wasn’t for lack of trying it wasn’t me.”

  “Aren’t you married?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice.”

  Liam waited but Jim did not feel the need to explain further. “Did you see her with anyone else?”

  “Nah. There’s a lot of coming and going down this road; it’s the only road along the river. Kids drive down to the end and park at Peter’s Point; there’s a lot of traffic from that.”

  “Did you see anybody on the road on your way to work?”

  “Well, shit, sure, everybody else on their way to work. Everybody who’s got a job. Murdered, you say? Lydia? Man, that just plain makes no sense at all.”

  The story was the same all up and down the road. The good news was, fishing season was over, so everyone who lived year-round in Newenham was home. The bad news was, the smallest house sat on at least an acre, and most of that acre was thickly forested, deliberately so. People lived in the Alaskan Bush because they liked their privacy. Usually the only view was east and south, overlooking the river, the opposite bank, and the beginnings of Bristol Bay.

  He woke Elizabeth Katelnikoff, a nightshift worker at AC, from a sound sleep. She was not pleased with him, but when he told her why he was there her irr
itation quickly changed to distress. She’d gone to school with Karen Tompkins, and had eaten her share of Lydia Tompkins’ fry bread on afternoons after school. “No, I didn’t see anyone. Or not anyone I don’t know. Jim Earl passed me going to work. So did Dave Lorenz, and Sarah Aguilar, and Mike Engebretsen. I didn’t see Eric Mollberg, but his truck was in the driveway, parked kind of crooked. Probably sleeping it off.” She paused, and frowned.

  “What?” Liam said. “Anything, Elizabeth. I don’t care how silly you think it sounds.”

  “There was this white pickup ahead of me when I turned off on the River Road.”

  “Whose?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Alaska plates?”

  “Probably.” She thought. “No, definitely Alaska plates. I would have paid more attention if they weren’t, especially at this time of year.”

  “The gold and blue, or the Chilkoot? A vet’s, maybe, the one with the purple heart? The University of Alaska plate?”

  She closed her eyes, her face scrunched up in thought, and opened them again. “Nope. I just don’t have a clue, Liam. I’m sorry.”

  “I want you to look up every white pickup registered in Newenham,” he told Prince back at the post.

  “What make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What year?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That narrows things down.” She caught his look and became very professional. “Magistrate Billington called. She wants to know how long she’s going to have to keep that goddamn arm in her freezer.” Prince cleared her throat. “Er, that’s a direct quote. Says it’s scaring Dottie.”

  It took a moment for him to place the arm Bill was talking about. “Tell her we’ll get to it once we find out who killed Lydia Tompkins.” He picked up the phone, forestalling further comment, and called Mamie Hagemeister. “Mamie? Liam Campbell, down to the trooper post. Can you get hold of Cliff Berg or Roger Raymo and tell them I need some help canvassing a neighborhood?”

  There was a brief silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Mamie?”

  There was a long sigh. “Liam, Roger moved back to California to join the state troopers there. He and his wife left Newenham last week.”

  “What?”

  “And Cliff Berg went to work for Alyeska Pipeline last month. Good job in the safety department, at about three times what Jim Earl was paying him. And you know his wife never has liked Newenham; she’s been chomping at the bit to get back to Anchorage ever since they moved here.”

  For a moment Liam was completely at a loss. Not only did he not know Mrs. Berg, he’d never actually managed to speak to Cliff face-to-face. Come to that, he’d only ever talked to Roger Raymo on the phone. He’d been in Newenham since the previous May, almost six months. In that time he had managed to miss connecting with the two remaining local law-enforcement officers who, besides Mamie and her night-shift counterpart down at the lockup, constituted what was left of the Newenham Police Department. And now, when he needed them most, they’d run out on him to better-paying jobs in Anchorage and Outside. It was difficult not to feel ill-used.

  He rallied. “Who did Jim Earl hire to replace them?” Silence. “Mamie?”

  “Nobody yet,” she said.

  “But he’s got someone in mind.”

  “He doesn’t consult with me about who he’s going to hire and fire, Liam,” Mamie said testily.

  “He’s not going to hire anybody, is he,” Liam said with a sudden flash of inspiration. “What, the troopers are supposed to do it all, in town and out of it?”

  She hung up without answering.

  He wondered if her irritation was because she wanted one of the officer jobs. He hoped she got it, but Jim Earl was the cheapest bastard who ever lived, and if it were legally possible not to fill those officers’ positions he wouldn’t, not so long as the complaints on response time didn’t pick up. They were going into winter, after two bad fishing seasons. Everyone was broke, and with the stocks of just about any creature in the Bering Sea with fins and claws so far down as to be in the toilet, people were scared. A lot of people, when they got scared, got drunk. When they got drunk, they got into trouble.

  When they got into trouble, the cops got into it.

  Only now there weren’t any cops. Just him and Prince.

  Everything inside the Newenham city limits was, ostensibly, the province of the now nonexistent NPD. Everything outside of it, from Anchorage to Togiak and including every unincorporated town and village between, was within the province of the Alaska state troopers. So it wasn’t like they didn’t already have enough to do.

  He saw Diana Prince give him a curious look and realized his knuckles were white on the handset of the phone. He sat down and replaced it with elaborate care.

  He knew he was emotionally too close to the Lydia Tompkins murder. He’d fallen hard for her when she’d marched into the post, carrying her artillery in with her in two double-bagged brown paper grocery bags. She was so proud to have apprehended Harvey in the act of breaking into her car, so pleased with her own initiative. And the great legs hadn’t hurt. He couldn’t help but adore her, her character, her spirit, her courage.

  And he couldn’t help but hate her killer with every part and fiber of his being. He wanted to find him and break him in half. And after that he wanted to hurt him.

  He almost wished he hadn’t met her. He wished like hell he hadn’t had to respond to the scene of her murder. If she’d lived closer to town, and had there been any cops in that town, the troopers wouldn’t have responded to the call reporting her death. Everyone on River Road was outside the municipal boundaries of Newenham. The upside was they didn’t have to pay municipal taxes. The downside was they couldn’t vote in municipal elections. When Jim Earl scored a federal grant large enough to build a new city hall, he made sure that the second floor was made of apartments, of which he made equally sure the largest was rented to him before the last doorknob was installed. The apartment was his legal address, but the house on the bluff was where he lived. It was a polite fiction everyone was willing to maintain, since nobody else wanted to be mayor.

  “Sir?”

  “What?” He looked at Prince.

  “I’ve entered all of the Tompkins family interviews.”

  “Did you talk to the kids?”

  “Daisy and Rose? No. Betsy wouldn’t let me. She said to come out to the house tomorrow, maybe then.”

  “Any of the others have kids?”

  “No. Just Betsy.”

  “I would have bet my last dime Lydia Tompkins was grandmother to nineteen.” He looked at the chair she had been sitting in the night before, and the rage was back like a hammer blow. “Son of abitch.”

  “Sir?”

  “Nothing.” He mastered his anger and reached for the phone again. “Joe Gould, please. Joe, it’s Liam Campbell.”

  “I don’t do autopsies.”

  “I know that,” Liam snapped. “I’m just asking. You’ll get the body on the first plane out tomorrow morning? I want the medical examiner to get a look at her right away.”

  “He’s not going to tell you anything I haven’t. She fought with someone in her kitchen. She got hit, she hit back, she got hit harder.”

  “What with?”

  “Fists only, it looks like to me. I think she fell back and hit her head on the counter. There is a sharp, straight wound on the back of the skull, and there was blood and hair on the edge of the kitchen counter.”

  Liam hung up.

  “I brought her calendar and her most recent bank and credit card statements from the house,” Prince said. She indicated a pile on the deck in front of her.

  “Good.” He was only half listening, having logged on to his own computer to review her witness reports.

  “I called Elmendorf Air Force Base,” Prince said. “Talked to the PRO and gave him those partial numbers you brought back.”

  Partial numbers. Oh. Right. The plane in th
e glacier. “What did he say?”

  “He said he didn’t know of any recent crash, but that he would check the records from World War Two.”

  “Good. Does he want the arm?”

  “I didn’t offer it. He did ask for prints. I told him we’d already sent them to the crime lab, but that the skin on the fingertips was pretty deteriorated.” She hesitated. “I didn’t tell him about the coin, either.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “I want to keep it in evidence for a while. At least until we identify the body.”

  “What makes you think we will?”

  “The crew roster. There are bound to be records that match up with the tail number. The crew have been missing in action for over forty years. Their families will be glad to know what happened to them. Might even find enough to bury.”

  “What’s that have to do with the coin?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want it part of the official record yet. Just in case…”

  “Just in case what?”

  “Just in case somebody on that plane was doing something they shouldn’t have. Their families will be glad to know what happened, but-”

  “Just maybe not all of what happened?” Liam said.

  Prince shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “Well,” Liam said, saving the report and exiting the program, “I don’t see that it can do any harm.”

  He dismissed Prince, who protested not too much, as she had an appointment to look at a house for sale on the Icky Road. Normally housing was tight in rural Alaska, given the high costs of transporting building materials and the fact that less than one percent of the land in Alaska was privately owned. The times weren’t normal. Two lousy salmon seasons and a severely curtailed snow crab season the previous winter, and every other house had a For Sale sign in the window, the owner hoping against hope for a rich tourist to drive by in his SUV rental and fall in love with the place. Naturally, it was just his luck that the housing market opened up after Liam had spent his first summer in Newenham sleeping, sequentially, in his office chair, then on a gradually sinking boat, and now sharing Wy’s twin bed, which was approximately fourteen inches too short for him.