Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  ANCSA hadn’t helped the housing situation either, or at least not in Newenham. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1972, in exchange for a right of way through aboriginal lands down the center of the state upon which to build the Trans Alaska Pipeline, had paid Alaska Natives a billion dollars and 44 million acres of land. Once the land selection process had been wrestled through, with, of course, the requisite amount of billable hours by as many lawyers as was humanly possible, lands were deeded to the twelve Native regions. The regions, in turn, had parceled out acres to their shareholders. In Newenham, this land was located mostly on the road to Ik’ikika on One Lake, all forty miles of it and for a good long ways off to either side. The individual shareholder did what any sensible person would do: Once they acquired title, they built on it and moved out of town, as a result like the folks on the River Road escaping local taxation and representation both. The people left living in town were, perforce, mostly white.

  Which meant that Newenham had a white mayor, an even whiter chamber of commerce, a mostly white city council, and until a week ago an all-white police department. Every time another family moved out of town, the city coffers suffered and so did city services. It made for a certain amount of resentment in the white population, which manifested itself in surprisingly little racial friction, a thing for which Liam was profoundly thankful.

  He wondered how Lydia Tompkins had felt about the situation in which Newenham and so many other towns and villages across the state found themselves. He would have liked to talk to her about it, to have sat at her feet and soaked up as much of the local history as she was prepared to ladle out.

  He looked at her chair and pictured her in it, bright-eyed, militant, determined, sturdy, stubborn, resolved. She’d had a good fifteen, twenty, maybe more years in her as she had sat in that chair. Someone had robbed her of those years, and robbed Liam of her acquaintance.

  Cops took murder personally. Vengeance was too strong a word, and given the current state of the judicial system you couldn’t really call it justice. Justice would have Liam beaning the killer with a baseball bat in Lydia’s kitchen and then going away to leave him to drown in his own blood.

  He went to Prince’s desk and opened Lydia’s calendar, an Alaska Weather calendar. October’s picture was of a night sky with stars showing through an auroral display of green and pink and orange and purple and white.

  There was a dentist appointment here, a doctor appointment there, a city council meeting, on the date of which Lydia had written in small, bold print,Take notes about when plow didn’t come! Liam wondered how far out the River Road the city grader was supposed to run.

  The lettersSC appeared with some frequency for about three months up until the end of July and then disappeared. Betsy and her family were over for dinner once or twice a month, the whole Tompkins clan every month. Lydia had written menus for each gathering on the dates: Salmon, asparagus, salad was one month; king crab, boiled and served with butter and mayonnaise, another; moose pot roast a third.

  Three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Lydia had a four-hour appointment with the initialsMC. The only other regular entries were on the last Saturday of every month: the lettersBC, a kind of food (Mexican, Thai, Italian), and what looked like titles of novels. He flipped backward through the calendar. July had beenHere on Earth, August had beenThe Red Tent, September had beenThe Poisonwood Bible, and October was to have beenTracks.

  He looked up at the clock on the wall. It was seven. He shut down his computer, locked up the post and climbed into the Blazer. There he sat, his hands slack on the steering wheel, and wondered without much interest what was for dinner. With slightly more interest, he wondered if Jo and Gary would be there.

  Lights approached the post, flooded the cab, and passed on down the road. He heard a sound and rolled down the window.

  The croak of a raven came from the top of one of the three spruce trees clustered together at the side of the post. He tensed, but it was somehow less derisive in tone than he was used to hearing, a series of soft clicks and something else pretty near a croon and maybe even a coo.

  He decided to drive out to Lydia’s house on the way home, see what he’d missed that afternoon. Never mind that Lydia’s house lay upriver and Wy’s house down. If it had been his and Wy’s house, he might have gone straight home. If the bed in Wy’s bedroom hadn’t been a twin, he might have gone straight home and straight to bed.

  He had proposed the purchase of a larger bed when he had finally moved out of the Jayco trailer parked on her front doorstep and into the actual house. Wy had avoided saying yay or nay and he had feared pressing the issue after John Barton’s job offer. The Jayco trailer was still out there and still available for banishment, and any bed with Wy Chouinard in it was good enough for him, or at least that was the way he had felt at first.

  He was suddenly very tired of being on his best behavior, of living his life on sufferance, of forever waiting for Wy to make up her mind. He loved her, didn’t he? And he’d told her so, over and over again, hadn’t he? What the hell else did she want?

  This time the raven’s croak was mocking and derisive. He rolled up the window so he didn’t have to listen to it and headed for River Road.

  The house was dark when he pulled into the driveway, the narrow windows in their old-fashioned wooden frames presenting a blank and bland appearance to the world. When no one answered his knock he stepped inside. The kitchen was sealed off with crime-scene tape. The living room was much as they’d left it that afternoon.

  He walked down the hallway and into the bathroom. It was small and narrow, with shelves on every spare inch of wall and the floor space reduced by clothes hamper, wastebasket, and a freestanding electric chrome towel rack that heated the towels hanging on it. The tub had a rubber-coated wire shelf stretched across it, filled end to end with bath salts, soaps and oils, a loofah, a pumice stone and a manicure set.

  One shelf held six different kinds of shampoo and conditioner, bottles and bottles of body lotion and a cut-glass heart full of cotton balls. Another shelf held thirteen kinds of nail polish, from bright red to dark green, and all the accompanying paraphernalia for putting it on and taking it off. Liam hadn’t seen anything like it since he’d lived with Jenny. Wy didn’t do nail polish or makeup. Not that he minded. Or that she needed it.

  A washcloth hung from a dragonfly hook over the sink. A silver porpoise, a green frog with one leg extended behind him, and a bronze twig formed the door and cupboard pulls of the sink cabinet. One drawer was full of exotically scented cakes of soap, another full of spare toothbrushes and small tubes of toothpaste. A third held several prescriptions, an anti-inflammatory, something for pain, and an antibiotic. The anti-inflammatory and the pain pills were three years out of date, the antibiotic only seven months so. Hidden in the back of the drawer beneath an arm splint with Velcro fastenings was a vaginal moisturizer. The box was half-empty of tubes.

  Liam shut the drawer again with more haste than finesse. He stood there for a moment, an unaccustomed flush on his cheeks at this unexpected and unwelcome glimpse into Lydia’s personal life. She’d been seventy-four, for crissake. Probably had more to do with comfort than, well, than sexual activity.

  Jim Earl’s words came back to him:Wasn’t for lack of trying it wasn’t me.

  He couldn’t remember ever being disconcerted by a discovery at a crime scene before. The first casualty of murder was privacy, and in fifteen years of tossing crime scenes he had discovered pretty much everything there was to find out about people, good and bad. He remembered the five men on the short list for the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, and on the basis of what he had found tucked away in every suspect’s house how he would have fingered any of the five except for the man who actually did the kidnapping, raping, torture and murder. He’d come out of that case, one of the first after his probation was up, with the conviction that nothing would ever surprise him again. “You don’t want to know what your neighbor
s are really up to,” John Dillinger Barton had told him afterward, and truer words were never spoken. For a while, when he walked down a street, he would study the faces passing him and wonder what they had secreted in their basements, behind the headboards of their beds, in the crawl space between ceiling and roof.

  Now he stood stock-still, frozen into embarrassed immobility at the prospect of a seventy-four-year-old woman having a sexual relationship.

  Although… nobody said it was a rule you ever had to stop having sex. He certainly couldn’t think of a day when he would want to. Why should Lydia have been any different? He’d read somewhere that a lot of women became more comfortable with sex after menopause, after the possibility of bearing a child had passed. While men could father children into senility.

  As it did often, but never often enough, the memory of Charlie came back to him. Charlie and his bright blue eyes and his red cheeks and his fat little fists and his dimpled legs kicking madly in the air and his gurgling laughter and his wounded cry when someone had the gall to put him down in his crib when it wasn’t his idea to be left there at all, uh-uh, and he said so, loud and clear. His son. Jenny’s son. Taken from him by a drunk driver before his second year.

  If Liam had been climbing the golden staircase up till then, it was all downhill from there. He’d stopped feeling, had stopped caring, had just stopped, period, until one day it was just too much trouble to respond to a call and five people had frozen to death in Denali Park.

  And then he had come to Newenham and found Wy again, and suddenly breathing out and breathing in were not quite the effort they had been the moment before. Was it only six months ago? The beginning of May, spring in the Alaska Bush. A time of renewal that had spread open its arms and included him in its embrace.

  Or so it had seemed.

  He wandered through the house, hat in hand. There were photographs everywhere, including the bathroom, pictures of family, children mostly, baby pictures, school pictures, snapshots of the family gathered around a Christmas tree, looking for Easter eggs in the alders in the backyard, on the deck of a seiner named theDaisy Rose, on the bank of the river with the house visible at the top of the cliff. He recognized the children, tracing their faces back in time to rosy-cheeked babies wrapped in the same soft white afghan. There was a picture of a teenage Lydia on a beach, posing with twenty or so others her age in a shot that smelled of Senior Skip Day. Some of the faces looked familiar to Liam, although he couldn’t quite place any of them. A tall, painfully thin boy had an arm draped around her shoulder and was laughing down at her. It wasn’t the man in the family photographs. She looked straight into the camera with a wide, joyous smile that in no way belied the determined set to her jaw. She had looked very like that when she had marched into the post, all flags flying.

  Her bedroom was ruffled and bowed within an inch of its life, and he wondered if she’d had it redecorated when her husband died. The curtains, comforter, pillow shams and padded headboard were trimmed in eyelet lace, and there was a vanity with a tiny stool padded in white velvet sitting before it. Dozens of bottles of scent in weird and varied shapes lined up in front of a mirror with an elaborate gilt frame, and the Kleenex box was hidden by a porcelain cover with hummingbirds painted on it. “I am a female, female,” Liam said, and then tried to remember where the line came from. Oh, yeah.Flower Drum Song. Jenny and her musicals.

  The other two bedrooms had the lingering resonance of adolescence, try as Lydia had to transform them into a guest room and an office. The guest room held a queen-size bed and a dresser, which were nearly crowded out by a pile of stuffed bears, a large cardboard box of basketballs and a shelf full of well-thumbed picture books, including the entire Dr. Seuss oeuvre. The office walls had been reserved for graduation pictures, four of them, eight-by-elevens in gilt frames, mortarboards tilted to the correct angle, tassels hanging on the correct side, Betsy slimmer and serious and dignified, Stan bluff and hearty like his father, Jerry thin to the point of emaciation and anxious about what was going to happen to him now, Karen giving the photographer an up-from-under look that said plainly,Know what it would be even more fun to do?

  For all her froufrou taste, Lydia had been a neat creature. Her bills were filed by utility name in the top drawer of a two-drawer filing cabinet. The bottom drawer held tax returns going back thirty years. Liam opened the most recent one and raised an eyebrow. Stanley Tompkins Sr., unlike many of his Bristol Bay contemporaries, must have saved his money from the years when the Bristol Bay salmon runs were the largest in the world. His widow had been very well-off, although you’d never have known it. On the evidence feminine to the core, still, Lydia wasn’t the diamonds-and-champagne type.

  Like the kitchen, the office was dated but functional. An old Smith-Corona electric hummed pleasantly into life when Liam pushed the switch. The office telephone was a heavy black desktop model with a rotary dial. There was no computer, no fax machine, no scanner, no printer. No answering machine. His heart warmed to her even more. Heaven, to Liam, was anywhere without an answering machine. He hated that little blinking red light that signaled messages waiting.

  He went back to her bedroom, not because he wanted to search it further but because of all the rooms in the house it seemed the most hers. He was afraid he would collapse the vanity stool if he sat on it, so he perched, gingerly at first, on the edge of her bed. “Tell me what you know, Lydia,” he murmured. “Who did this to you, and why?”

  He thought of fetching paper and pencil from the office to lay out one of his grids, with Lydia in a box at the center and arrows pointing to possible suspects, but he couldn’t summon up the necessary energy. He was suddenly so tired. He didn’t think Lydia would mind if he closed his eyes for a few minutes.

  He dreamed, dark dreams. John Dillinger Barton, disappointment and disapproval on his face. Charlie in the morgue, so tiny, so helpless, so white and cold and broken beyond repair. Jenny, day after day, month after month, quiet and abnormally still in her hospital bed, eyelids closed, face immobile except for what seemed like a tiny smile at the corners of her lips. Jim uncomfortable in a suit and a tie, standing next to an open grave.

  Wy. She had the most marvelous mouth, lush, full-lipped. She didn’t wear lipstick; a man didn’t have to worry about getting all smeared up. He’d wanted to kiss her the first time he saw her, and only managed to keep his hands off her because, first, he was married and a father and, second, she was his pilot, en route to a crime scene.

  It turned out she was just as attracted to him, and it hadn’t been long before they’d both begun behaving very badly indeed, culminating in a long weekend in Anchorage, at the end of which she had broken it off and disappeared. He’d gone back to Charlie and Jenny knowing she was right, knowing that they were doing the right thing, knowing, too, that the sun didn’t shine the same way it had before he had met her. He had tried for contentment. He hoped Jenny had never known, but the experienced philanderers he heard talking in the locker room at the club said wives always knew. God, he hoped she hadn’t.

  Wy would creep into his mind unbidden and unwelcome, once when he was making love to Jenny and doing his damnedest to do his best by her. Jenny came and then he did and all he could think of was Wy and her mouth and her hair and her arms and the way she made him feel.

  He could almost imagine her there now, her teeth nipping at his jaw, her hands deft on his belt, that lush red mouth nibbling at his own. He was hard in an instant. He pushed up into her hand and she made a low, purring sound. Her breast was covered; with an impatient sound he nudged the fabric aside, fumbled for the snap on her bra and sighed his relief when her breast snugged into his hand. He turned his mouth in to her kiss. She sucked his tongue into her mouth, and his pants were no longer big enough to contain him, he could hardly breathe, he ripped at his zipper.

  “Let me,” she said.

  The sound of her voice pulled him fully awake with a jerk that nearly dislocated his fifth, sixth, and seventh vertebrae. “Wh
at the hell?”

  “No, let me,” she said, sliding both hands inside his open fly and bending down. Her mouth was wet, warm, and eager.

  He grabbed her arms and pushed her off him, ignoring her protest. He rolled off the bed and staggered to the light switch next to the door. When the overhead light went on it revealed Karen Tompkins, looking much more like a cat than a kitten now, one who was in lapping distance of the cream. Her hip-huggers were unsnapped and the zipper halfway down over a taut, smooth belly. Her sweater was pushed up over her breasts. Her eyes were heavy, and she smiled. She sprawled on her back, her legs spread, and she slid a hand between them and up, crooking a finger, beckoning him back to the bed.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been this hard without Wy in the room. He caught sight of himself in the vanity mirror, his shirt unbuttoned, his pants unzipped, the head of his cock peeping out of the top of his shorts, still wet from her mouth. The fact that he was in uniform, or rather, almost out of it, was as shameful as the fact that he’d almost cheated on Wy. He stuffed everything back in and zipped up again with some difficulty.

  Karen pouted. She had a lower lip a man could suck on until next Tuesday. Her mother had had the same lip, he remembered. He avoided looking straight at it. “Could you zip up, please?” When she stretched instead, giving a soft little moan while she was at it, he said, “Just put it all together again, Karen, okay?”

  She sighed and slid off the bed, walking to within arm’s reach. Everything got pulled down and refastened, although it seemed to take her forever and she pouted the whole time. When she was done and giving him that patented come-hither, up-from-under look that she’d been working on since high school, he said, “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

  She shrugged, and one side of the wide-necked sweater slid down a shoulder. “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” she said, and smiled a long, slow, seductive smile.

  In that moment, she looked so much like her mother that it was difficult not to meld the two women in his mind. “It’s not your bed; it’s your mother’s.”