Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  Prince’s ears pricked up at the news that Lydia had volunteered at the small clinic attached to the tiny hospital that treated drug and alcohol abusers. Users were notoriously unstable people, quick to take offense and slow to take responsibility, with a tendency to hit first when they were high and apologize later when they were sober and about to be jailed for the third time. There was a possibility that Lydia had offended someone and that it had resulted in a confrontation in her home. Counselors in the big city had unlisted phone numbers and had mail sent to a box at the post office. In small towns like Newenham, it just wasn’t that hard to find someone.

  Charlene Taylor was in the air, tracking down a rumor of a group of hunters going for bear in an area the Fish and Game had closed to hunting the month before. Prince moved on to Prime Cut, Newenham’s lone beauty salon, located in the minimall that housed the Eagle grocery store. Sharon Ilutsik was blow-drying Jimmy Barnes’ hair. Jimmy Barnes, a rotund, bouncy little man and Newenham’s harbormaster, greeted Prince with some embarrassment and was out of the chair a second later. Sharon sighed a little over his tip, and then he came bustling back in, even redder of face, to mumble an apology and shove a couple of bills her way. She brightened and accompanied Prince to the espresso stand next door to order a double skinny latte with vanilla flavoring. Prince managed not to gag and got a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar with a lavish hand, and they sat down at one of two faux-wrought-iron tables.

  “Lydia Tompkins,” Sharon said. “Yeah, we were friends. I usually only saw her once a month, at book club, except when she came in for a haircut. You could use one, by the way,” she said, giving Prince a critical once-over. “You’re getting a little shaggy around the ears and the back of your head.”

  Prince ran a hand through her short, dark curls. “I’ll make an appointment after we’re done here. When did you last see Lydia?”

  “At the last book club. Saturday before last.”

  “Did she seem upset about anything? Anything at all, it doesn’t matter how unimportant it seems to you.”

  “No. Although-”

  “What?”

  “Her daughter showed up about halfway through the evening. I remember because we were right in the middle of sitting down to dinner and Lydia ran her off. Karen was not best pleased.” Sharon sipped her latte. “But then Karen is never best pleased by much, unless it’s a man and he’s about to take his pants off.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “Harsh but true,” Sharon said cheerfully. “Karen defines herself by the men she sleeps with. I swear the girl has notches on her bedpost. It’s probably posts, plural, by now.”

  “Like her mother.”

  “Lydia didn’t sleep around,” Sharon said sharply. “She and her husband had plenty of fun, and she liked to tease us with stories about it, but she wasn’t at all like Karen. She was a one-man woman.” She paused. “At least, she was while Stan Sr. was alive.”

  Prince stared. Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, plump, seventy-four, mother of four, grandmother of two, brainer of muggers with jars of sun-dried tomatoes, was doing the nasty with somebody?I want to be Lydia when I grow up, Bill had said. So, suddenly, did Prince. “You mean she took a lover?”

  “Why not?” Sharon said, bristling. “She was old. She wasn’t dead. Nobody says you have to stop having sex when you hit fifty. Look at Bill Billington and Grandpa Moses.”

  Prince had fallen into the way of regarding Bill as more of a contemporary and an ally in the good fight against evildoers, but when Sharon said it out loud, of course it was true. Bill and Moses were both older than God, and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She readjusted her thinking. “So you think Lydia had a lover.”

  Sharon hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “Yes, you should,” Prince said firmly. “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know. I went to her house about four months ago, and somebody had sent her this big bouquet of flowers, tulips, lilies, roses; it was gorgeous. You know we don’t have a florist here, so somebody had to have Goldstreaked it down on Alaska Airlines. I thought at first it was one of her kids, but she blushed when I asked her, and said no, a friend had sent them for her birthday. She never did say who, but I got the impression the friend was a guy.” Sharon studied the milky stuff swirling around in her cup, and looked up with a smile. “It was kind of cute, you know? Here she was, seventy-four years old, little old Grandma Lydia, and she’s getting flowers from a guy. Kinda makes you not be afraid of getting old yourself, you know?”

  Lola Gamechuk, thin, dark, and careworn, answered the phone six times while she talked to Prince. Five of the calls were from her daughter, Tiffany, who didn’t like her babysitter and wanted Mom to come home right now. The sixth call Lola put through to Andrew Gamechuk, the current president of the Angayuk Native Association and Lola’s cousin. Andrew interrupted his game of one-on-one with a sponge basketball and the hoop mounted on the wall of his office, which Prince had been watching through the open door of his office, to take the call. After a moment he got up and closed the door. Prince looked back at Lola.

  “How well did you know Lydia?”

  “Not very.”

  “You were a member of her book club.”

  “I saw her once a month.”

  “Never any other time?”

  Shrug. “Sometimes in the store.”

  “Did you know of anyone who was bothering her, someone who might have held a grudge against her, who might have wanted to hurt her?”

  Silent stare.

  “Lola,” Prince said, surrounded on every side by Yupik storyknives and finger fans and dance masks and feeling whiter than white, “all I want is to catch the person who did this to Lydia. Did you know that she worked down at Maklak?”

  Lola, who had been staring fixedly at her desk, met Prince’s eyes for the first time. Hers were a deep, dark blue, framed in wings of straight black hair that curved gently beneath her jawline. With some sleep and a little animation, Lola Gamechuk could knock the world on its collective ear with that face alone. “Everybody knew that.”

  “Did anyone there get mad at her for any reason?”

  A long silence. “Maybe.”

  Prince tried not to pounce. “Would you know of anyone who maybe had done that?”

  A longer silence. “Ray.”

  “Ray who?”

  Lola looked at her fingers. “Ray Wassillie. Sometimes he drinks too much. Sometimes when he drinks too much he gets mean.”

  “Was he mean to Lydia?”

  Lola’s face closed up. “I don’t know.”

  That was all she was going to say. Prince packed up and left, trying not to look as if she was running away. The Yupik mask mounted on the wall next to the door laughed at her from within a circle of ivory and fur and feathers. She glared at it as she went out, but the grin didn’t change.

  “Lola was married to Ray Wassillie for about a century one year,” Charlene told her, unfastening her gun belt and placing it in the second drawer down in her desk. She turned the key in the lock and put the key in her pocket.

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Don’t be mad at her. He treated her pretty badly. She told us once she never would have left him if he hadn’t hit the baby.”

  Prince remembered the phone calls. “Tiffany?”

  Charlene nodded. “Tiffany wasn’t even two months old, colicky, cried a lot. Ray came home drunk and lost his temper. I saw the marks. Lola gets back every way she can. Can’t say I blame her much.”

  “Christ.”

  “Yeah.” Charlene stretched. “Man, it’s windy up top. It was a bitch keeping her on course. My shoulders feel like they’ve been frozen.”

  “You catch them? Mamie said you were tailing some hunters going after bear in a closed area.”

  Charlene made a disgusted face. “No. I checked all the likely strips but I couldn’t find the plane. I’ll go up again tomorrow, but you know what i
t’s like. I might as well be on foot, for all the good I can do.” She touched her toes and sat down. “So you want to know about Lydia.”

  Charlene and Bill would be her best sources; Prince had known that from the beginning. Bill, as magistrate, would take an impartial, innocent-until-proven-guilty view. Charlene, on the other hand, was a cop. She worked where the human rubber met the road. Cops never took anything on faith, and disbelieved every story that was told them on principle until and unless they could confirm that the story told was fact in all its essentials, and even then remained wary and unconvinced. Cop shops bred skeptics. Skeptics cherished few illusions about human nature, and therefore were seldom disappointed. “Tell me about Lydia,” Diana said.

  Charlene linked her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling for inspiration. “Lydia Tompkins. Seventy-four years old. Widow of Stanley Tompkins Sr. Mother of Betsy, Stan Jr., Jerry and Karen. Born in Newenham, went to school in Newenham, married another Newenhammer. Never went farther than Anchorage when she traveled. So far as I know, never wanted to. Had an excellent relationship with her husband.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  Charlene laughed. “I’ll bet. Gets along with her children. Stanley Sr. made a lot of money fishing and, unlike most of his fellow Bay fishermen, invested well and left a tidy sum, evenly divided between all concerned. Lydia could have spent a lot more money than she did. You’ve seen her kitchen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right out of 1957, isn’t it? We used to tease her that Mamie Eisenhower was going to come walking out of it one day with a plateful of pork chops. She could have afforded to remodel it once every five years, but she said everything still worked.”

  “Was she a miser?”

  “No, just frugal. She was very generous with her grandchildren. She was very generous with her friends, come to that. She gave the Literary Ladies Christmas and birthday presents every year.” Charlene nodded to a large painting by Byron Birdsall on the wall. A narrow creek crooked its way between snow-covered banks, leading the eye to Denali, gilt in the setting sun. The creek seemed to shimmer with life and the whole painting radiated an inner glow. “I saw that in Artique one year and came home raving about it.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. She was generous to a fault. Especially to her children.”

  “How so?”

  “Karen and Jerry regularly run out of money. All they had to do was ask.”

  “Did fishermen really used to make that kind of money? The kind of money that would set a whole family up for two generations?”

  Charlene gave her a tolerant look. “Given the year you came to Newenham, I suppose it’s hard for you to imagine, but yes, salmon fishermen, especially the seiners, used to make that much money. Some of it was luck but mostly it was experience-experience and good equipment. Stanley Sr. had both. He worked deckhand on his father’s gillnetter from the time he was six, according to Lydia. And that was back when the law said you could only fish under sail.”

  “No kidding?” Prince had a brief vision of the bay covered with white sails skimming over a deep blue surface.

  “No kidding. So, anything else?”

  Prince gathered up her notes. “Not for the moment. I’ll call if I think of anything else.”

  “Me, too. Diana?”

  Prince paused, one hand on the doorknob.

  Charlene’s voice remained pleasant and even. “I’d take it as a personal favor if you found this son of a bitch and strung him up by his balls.”

  Diana touched the brim of her flat-brimmed hat. “I’ll do my best.”

  THIRTEEN

  The phone rang as he was getting out of his blueberry-stained uniform and into the last clean one hanging in Wy’s closet. Since Wy didn’t own a lot of dress-up clothes, most of hers were folded into the dresser drawers and he had most of the closet for his own. It hadn’t been like that with Jenny, a true disciple of the women’s department at Nordstrom. He remembered having to hang his uniforms in Charlie’s closet, and thinking that that would be a problem in fifteen or sixteen years.

  He wondered what kind of a teenager Charlie would have been. Probably not as high-maintenance as Tim Gosuk, but you never knew. He’d dealt with enough parents in severe shock at their offspring’s behavior to know that all biological, sociological and anthropological studies to the contrary, much of the time procreating was a crapshoot. He’d read another study recently that claimed that a bad kid in a good neighborhood had a better chance of succeeding in life than a good kid in a bad neighborhood. The author of that study had obviously never been to the village of Ualik, where Tim had gotten his start.

  The phone rang. He heard Wy answer it in the living room.

  She was upset about something, and it wasn’t his not coming home last night. He’d finally told her that he’d spent the night at the office, and she’d nodded without much interest, her mind obviously elsewhere. He’d expected irritation, even anger. What he hadn’t expected was indifference. It unsettled him.

  It made him wonder where Gary had spent the night.

  “Liam?”

  He buckled his belt and padded out to the living room, snagging his shoes on the way. He tucked the receiver in between his shoulder and his chin and sat down on the couch. “Campbell.”

  “Sir, this is Prince. I have interviewed all of Lydia’s book club members.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No hope there; they were all pretty tight. But she did do some volunteer work down at the Maklak Center.”

  TheMC on Lydia’s calendar. “Any run-ins with clients?”

  “They’re closed for the day. They open again tomorrow at eight.”

  “Baloney. Nose around, find out who works there, call them at home.”

  “Yes, sir. Also, one of Lydia’s friends thinks she might have had a gentleman caller.”

  “A what?”

  “A boyfriend, sir.”

  Liam remembered the frankly female appraisal in Lydia’s eyes the night they had met. “I wouldn’t bet the farm against it. Got a name?”

  “No. One of the Literary Ladies-”

  “The who?”

  “The book club, that’s what they called themselves. Anyway, one of them saw a bouquet of flowers Lydia got. She said it was a birthday present from a friend, and that she got the distinct impression that the friend was male and that the relationship was romantic.”

  “Any indication it was a local guy?”

  “No. But Charlene Taylor says Lydia never went farther from Newenham than a Costco run to Anchorage.”

  “So a local guy. How did the flowers get here?”

  “Sharon-Sharon Ilutsik, the one who saw the flowers-didn’t know, but she figured they were Goldstreaked down from Anchorage. There isn’t a florist in Newenham, and this was a professional arrangement.”

  “She remember the date?”

  “No, but Lydia said they were a birthday present.”

  Liam got his shoes tied and stood up, changing ears. Wy was standing out on the deck, staring across the river. The wind had picked up and was teasing curls out of a fat braid, forming a bronze corona around her head. Clouds, low and thick and dark, were scudding by, and Liam thought he saw a snowflake in the dimming light. “Okay, Diana,” he said, “find out Lydia’s birthday and call Alaska Airlines to check their records to see when the flowers came in. Should have been paid by credit card, if he called it in to Anchorage.”

  “Will do. You coming back in?”

  “No. I’ve got a dinner date with my dad.”

  “Lucky you.” She meant it.

  “Yeah.” He didn’t.

  He hung up and joined Wy on the deck. “Hey.”

  She looked up at him with a faint smile showing through the escaped wisps of hair. “Hey, yourself.”

  “How was your day, dear?”

  She laughed, as he’d meant her to. “Not bad. Got a flight from the U.S. Air Force, a thing that hardly ever happens, since they prefer to fly the
ir own. Not to mention the FBI. We small-time air-taxi outfits just love federal expense accounts.”

  He grinned. “I should start taking a commission.”

  “Right after you take your first flying lesson.”

  “That’ll happen.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  A gust of wind whistled overhead and tugged at their clothes. She was in a blue plaid shirt tucked into blue jeans cinched down by a wide leather belt. Her hiking boots were stained with salt, mud and wax, held together by a new pair of shoelaces, red-and-white-striped like a barber pole. It didn’t vary much from what she had been wearing the day before, or three years before. It had to be one of the most unseductive outfits he’d ever seen on a woman of his acquaintance, and he didn’t understand why his first, last and only inclination was to rip it off.

  As if he had spoken his need out loud she looked up and met his eyes.

  “Where’s Tim?”

  Her eyes widened. “Basketball practice.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “They’re going out for pizza after.” Her knees were shaking. She wasn’t sure how much longer they’d hold her up.

  His eyes narrow and intent, he reached out a hand and unbuttoned the top button of her shirt.

  “Not out here,” she said, her voice weak, her head falling back.

  “Why not?” He unbuttoned the second button.

  “In the wind, and the snow, and the cold?”

  “I’ll keep you warm.” He lowered his mouth to her throat.

  “Someone will see.”

  “Let them,” he said, and bit her.