Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  The ghost of the C-47 seemed to ripple. They held their breath, watching, but the plane stayed where it was. “We’ve got to get up there,” Charles said. “We’ve got to get those men out.”

  “Sooner or later they’ll come to us, Colonel,” Wy said. At his look she added, “You can’t climb up the face of the glacier for the same reason. You can’t rappel down from the top for the same reason. The whole thing is just too unstable. Really the only thing you can do is wait.” She paused, and then, because she too was a pilot, repeated gently, “They’ll come to us.”

  There was a brief silence. “How long?”

  Wy shrugged. “It’s a glacier. It’s also October. It’s going to get colder very soon, and it’s going to snow a lot. I’d leave any recovery attempt until next year. Check it out in the spring, see what kind of a snowfall there has been, see how long it will take to melt off. Try to get in sometime between then and when the glacier goes into full calving mode. No guarantees it won’t have, and no guarantees the whole thing won’t slide off the face of the glacier the moment we fly out of here, but at least nobody else gets killed.”

  They stood staring at the glacier. After a moment, Wy touched Liam’s arm. “Liam? Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?” Liam became aware of a faint buzzing noise, increasing in volume. It got louder and louder, until he looked over his shoulder at where the trail ended at the edge of the trees to see five four-wheelers burst into the clearing. Their drivers saw the little group and the man in the lead shouted out a warning but it was too late.

  “Look out!” Liam said, and picked up Wy around the waist and leaped left. Charles and Mason both jumped right. The vehicles skidded to a halt.

  Paul Urbano looked at Liam picking himself out of the blueberry bushes, his uniform smeared with blue stains, and said, “Oh, shit.”

  Teddy Engebretsen, John Kvichak, and Kelley MacCormick looked as if they were trying to will themselves into invisibility.

  The fifth man, Evan Gray, laughed out loud.

  Peering around him, her short cap of blond curls ruffled and adorned with the odd desiccated birch leaf, so did Jo Dunaway.

  December 10, 1941

  That plane that went in four days ago? They found two of the guys! Both pilots were kilt in the crash but there were two other guys on board and although they were hurt they fixed up some kind of wooden slats they call skis (they use these skis to travel over the snow in Norway, I hear) and strapped them to their knees and feet and crawled out. They only made it three miles but that was enough for them to be seen from the highway and be picked up. The story is it was fifty-eight below. I cant believe they’re alive. Nobody can.

  I wonder if Ill ever be abel to tell my son what I did in the war. I cant even tell them at home where I am. Its this big secret that were giving planes to Russia and China. Like March said the other day, theres hundreds of planes going through Nome every day, do the brass think the Germans and the Japs havent notised? He was taking a talley on a tablet and saw I was watching is why he said it. He said if I can keep cownt anybody can.

  TWELVE

  First on the list of Lydia’s book club members was Bill Billington. As Newenham’s one and only magistrate, she was a walking, talking database on the community and its citizens. She knew who was sleeping with whom, where all the bodies were buried, and if the check really was in the mail or likely to be anytime in the near future.

  Besides, Diana Prince had skipped breakfast, and the best lunch going was at Bill’s. She bellied up to the bar a little past one o’clock and grabbed a stool at the end. The lunch crowd was already thinning out, although she didn’t know where everyone was going. Over to the Breeze Inn to play pool, probably. Winter in southwestern Alaska, particularly for the unemployed, could be just one long, cold, dark stretch of boredom and inertia, and after the last two pitiful fishing seasons, there wasn’t a lot of incentive to work on boats or hang gear for the next one.

  She wondered where Col. Charles Bradley Campbell was sleeping that night. She wondered if he would find a way to let her know.

  “What can I do you for?” Bill said, running the bar rag in Diana’s direction.

  “How about a steak sandwich, fries, green salad with bleu cheese on the side? And a diet Coke with a wedge of lime, if you’ve got it. Lemon if you don’t.”

  “Coming right up.”

  “And talk, when you have a few minutes.”

  Bill raised an eyebrow, and went into the kitchen to slap a slab of meat down on the grill. The air was filled with the satisfying sound of charring beef. She made Smokey Pete another vodka martini on the rocks, blended four margaritas for a group of giggling young women who were celebrating the twenty-first birthday of the last of them to become legal, and stuck her head into the office. Moses was dozing on the couch. She pulled a throw over him and closed the door silently behind her. She assembled the steak sandwich, loaded the plate with fries, and delivered it just as Prince was forking up the last of her salad. “What’s up?” she said, pulling her stool opposite Prince’s.

  “Liam wants me to ask you about Lydia Tompkins’ book club. Says you were a member.” Prince wiped her hands on a napkin and got out a notebook. “Says you, Lydia, Alta Peterson, Mamie Hagemeister, Charlene Taylor, Sharon Ilutsik and Lola Gamechuck were all members.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How often did you meet?”

  “Once a month.”

  “All of you pretty close?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “Did she mention that she was having trouble with anyone lately, her children, business acquaintances, friends?”

  Bill blew out a sigh. “I still can’t believe she’s dead. I would have bet my last dime she would have outlived the youngest of us.”

  “Bill?”

  “Sorry. Children. Stanley Tompkins left Lydia very well-off. One or the other of them had money before they married; some said it was Lydia, but I don’t buy that. Her father was a local fisherman who never made it very big, who drank a little too much, and who fathered a few too many children ever to be seriously in the chips. Stanley, now, I think she married Stanley because he was her father’s exact opposite. A very hard worker, and from the stories I hear tell from the old farts had an absolute genius for finding fish. Clarence knew Stanley pretty well.”

  “Clarence Saguyuk?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, when Stanley died, he left Lydia well dowered and all the children well provided for. None of them have to work unless they want to.” She indulged in a snort. “And most of them don’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Stan Jr. is the only one of them with a real job, but even he plays at it. You ought to take a look at that boat of his sometime, theArctic Belle. It’s got all the bells and whistles on it, thousands of dollars of electronic equipment; I think he bought the first GPS in the Newenham boat harbor. He gets a new reel practically every year, he’s always upgrading his skiff, he gets one hole in his gear and that’s it, got to hang some new and right now, too. He’s the nicest one of the kids, certainly the easiest one to talk to, but he’s fifty-five going on twelve. Or fifty-six,” she added. “I don’t keep track of my own age, let alone anyone else’s.”

  “Does he live beyond his means?”

  “I don’t think so. I’d bet Karen does, though. She’s a shopper, that girl; she never walks in here in the same outfit twice running and she’s always got some new piece of gold-nugget jewelry hanging off her.”

  “Is he married? Stan Jr.?”

  Bill shook her head. “No. He’s had a thing going off and on with Carol Anawrok for years, ever since high school. It stopped while she was married to Melvin Delgado, and then started up again after Melvin died. It stopped again while she was married to Keith West, and then started up again after Keith died.” Bill shook her head. “Both cancer of the lungs. Carol keeps marrying smokers.”

  “And the rest of the kids?”

  “Betsy’s the oldest, ab
out fifty-six or -seven, I think. Her husband is David Amakuk, whose family moved down from New Stoyahuk. He’s a foot shorter and two feet wider than she is. They met in high school, married the week after they graduated. He runs theDaisy Rose, a drifter I think Betsy financed. He does pretty well out of it, generally comes in just under high boat. They have two daughters, Daisy and Rose, both living in Anchorage now. Jerry’s the other son.” She paused.

  “What’s wrong with Jerry?”

  “Everything.”

  “That sounds pretty comprehensive.”

  “He’s one of those lost souls, no ambition, no direction. He’s been up before me on possession I don’t know how many times, and DWIs, too. I took away his driver’s licence and I threatened to suspend the rest of the family’s, too, if they didn’t keep him away from a steering wheel. Stan Sr. tied up Jerry’s inheritance so that he’d get an allowance from Lydia, so he wouldn’t blow it all on one toot at the Great Alaskan Bush Company in Anchorage. Which Jerry is capable of doing, if nothing else. His apartment is in Lydia’s name; she pays all the bills. Paid.”

  “Did Jerry resent having his money tied up that way? Would he threaten Lydia to get more?”

  Bill reflected. “He was more along the lines of pathetically grateful, would be my guess. The most wretched thing about Jerry is that he knows just how worthless he is. He knows he’d be homeless in a heartbeat if he had control of his own money.” She shook her head. “I remember one time, during one of the possession busts or whatever it was, he told me he had a home and a fixed income, and that he wasn’t a vagrant. He was proud of it.”

  “Great.”

  Bill regarded Prince not without sympathy. “Yeah, I know, you’d like a motive. Sorry about that.”

  “There was no forced entry. It’s likely she let whoever it was in.”

  “Who in Newenham locks their doors?”

  “Yeah, well, okay, never mind. There’s a fourth child, isn’t there?”

  “There would have been, if Karen had ever been a child.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That kid was sprung full-grown from the head of Zeus, and when she landed she was hot to trot and ready to go. She’s very pretty, which doesn’t help. During her high school years alone, there were three accusations of statutory rape brought against three different boys, all dropped for lack of evidence. She moved into one of the Harborview Town Houses the week after she graduated from high school, I think the better to see which boats are in and which crews are available for plucking. She doesn’t have any other vices of which I’m aware, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink much, doesn’t do drugs-does the local provider, though; she and Evan Gray were an item a while back, but I think she wore even him out. She surely likes her men.”

  “Anything kinky going on there? Something that might result, say, in blackmail? That she needed money to pay off? That she might go to her mother for? And her mother might refuse her?”

  Bill laughed. “Karen would consider it advertising.”

  Prince sighed. “Okay. What about her friends? What about the ladies who lunch?”

  “The Literary Ladies,” Bill said.

  “Sorry. The Literary Ladies. Stand by one.” Bill made a round of the house. The girls in the booth were getting very giggly, and so was their designated driver. Bill served up a round of sodas and forced a jumbo order of nachos on them. She came back and settled in across from Prince.

  “The Literary Ladies were formed in 1988, November, I think.” She smiled at a memory. “First book we read was Toni Morrison’sBeloved, because it won the Pulitzer that year. Scared the shit out of everyone, and nearly busted up the group right there. One woman never did come back-what was her name, Margaret, Melody something? Anyway, we never saw her again. I haven’t seen her since, as a matter of fact, so she must have moved away.”

  Prince was more interested in the current members, and said so, with emphasis.

  “All right, all right. There’s me. There was Lydia, of course. There’s Alta Peterson, who owns and minds the hotel. There’s Mamie Hagemeister, you know her, and there’s Charlene Taylor and you know her, too. They’re all originals, except for Charlene, who joined when she was posted to Newenham, back in, oh, 1992, I guess. Sharon and Lola are newcomers, the youngsters in the group. Sharon joined when she was still in high school, and about two years later brought Lola in. Sharon does hair down at the Prime Cut and Lola works in the cannery in the summer and answers the phone for the Angayuk Native Association in the winter.”

  “You’re all pretty close?”

  “Pretty close,” Bill said cautiously.

  “You don’t seem sure.”

  “Close for getting together only once a month,” Bill said.

  “Any disagreements?”

  Bill raised one eyebrow, but Prince refused to back down. “Of course we fight. Lola married the wrong man, we told her so, and she stopped coming for the duration of her marriage, about thirteen months, I think it was. Charlene arrested Sharon’s cousin Richard for fishing inside the markers up Kulukak River, and Sharon stopped speaking to Charlene until I found him guilty, and then she stopped speaking to me instead. Alta was pissed at Sharon because Sharon gave Alta a punk-rock haircut without permission, and she stopped speaking to her until it grew out.”

  “Anybody ever get mad at Lydia?”

  “Nope. Not that I remember. Well.”

  “What?”

  “She used to tell raunchy stories that embarrassed the hell out of Sharon and Lola.”

  “Raunchy stories?”

  “Yeah, I think she liked giving them the needle. Especially the younger ones. Hell, if half the stuff she said about her and Stan Sr. was true, she wasn’t even bragging.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  Bill grinned. “One time, when the kids were off on a basketball trip to Anchorage, Stan Sr. borrowed a pair of handcuffs off Martin Gleason-a city cop here, before your time-stripped Lydia butt-naked and kept her chained to their bed for twenty-four hours, during which he invited five guys over to play poker in the kitchen. He visited her between hands, with the other guys thinking he was using the john. She said after the second time all he had to do was walk into the room for her to come. Lola just about died.”

  “Jesus.” Prince remembered Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, a short, plump, bright-eyed woman who had most definitely achieved elder status, and tried to reconcile that picture with the sexual dynamo Bill was describing.

  “Yeah. I want to be Lydia when I grow up.” Bill paused. “It must have about killed her when Stan Sr. died.”

  “So you never had any disagreements with her yourself?”

  “Oh, hell, yes. You can’t be even once-a-month friends for over twenty years and not fight. Not if the friendship is real. I told her she was spoiling Karen and she was mad at me for, oh, about five minutes, I think it was. But Lydia could never stay mad at anyone for long.”

  Bill sighed. “I should be angry at who killed her. I should be breathing fire and smoke up one road and down another, as far as roads go in this town, until I sniff out the bastard and annihilate him. But all I can think of is that I’ve lost a friend, and all I can feel is tired.”

  It was the closest Prince had ever heard Bill come to admitting to human weakness, and she didn’t know quite what to say in response. She fell back on formula. “You can’t think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her?”

  Bill shook her head.

  “Can you give me directions to Lola’s house? I can track down everyone else.”

  “Okay.” Bill drew Prince’s notebook to her and began to write.

  Alta Peterson, owner and proprietor of the Bay View Inn, Newenham’s only hotel, was long-limbed and lean in the best Scandinavian style of construction, and wore tiny little round glasses through which she was peering at a copy ofGirl with a Pearl Earring. The book was propped in her lap. Her feet were propped on the check-in counter. She wore a lime-green sweater over a pair of polyester slacks the
color of Welch’s grape juice, and an orange chiffon scarf in an artistic knot at her throat.

  Prince narrowed her eyes against the glare and cleared her throat.

  “Diana. What can I do for you?” Alta did not leap to her feet. This was Newenham. It was October. Jo and Gary Dunaway and Special Agent James G. Mason were the only three customers she had at present, and she wasn’t expecting Diana to bring her any more.

  “You hear about Lydia Tompkins?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m talking to everyone who knew her.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Bill Billington tells me you were a member of Lydia’s book club.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were good friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Before she died, did she say she was having trouble with anyone? Anybody threatening her, anything like that?”

  “For what reason?”

  “I don’t know; I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”

  Alta closed the book, marking her spot with one forefinger, but she didn’t pull her feet off the counter. “Lydia Tompkins was a good and true friend of mine from the time my husband first brought me to Newenham. If anyone had threatened her and I had heard about it, I would have sought them out and kicked their behind. What’s more, I would have had to stand in line to do it.”

  “She had a lot of friends?”

  “She didn’t have anything but friends.”

  “You remember her talking about any problems she might have had with her children?”

  “No.”

  Alta had elevated the monosyllablic response to an art form. “Well, if you remember anything-”

  “If I do.” Alta opened her book again.

  Prince took the hint and left.

  Mamie Hagemeister was Alta Peterson’s polar opposite in temperament. She burst into tears at her desk at the local jail and had to be ministered to with Kleenex and a can of Coke from the machine down the hall. “She was the greatest gal,” Mamie said, blowing her nose. “One time I was sick with the flu, really sick, and she came and got my kids and kept them for three days so I could sleep. She did things like that for everybody. And she did things in the community, too. She taught Yupik at the grade school, and ran the fund-raising drive for the new fire truck, and donated time down at Maklak Center. She had an uncle who was a drunk.” With a rare flash of pragmatism, she added, “Everybody in Newenham has an uncle who’s a drunk. But Lydia did something about it.” Dissolving once again into tears, she said, “I just don’t know who would do such an awful thing. Everybody loved Lydia.”