Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  “What is it?”

  Her hands were already a blur of movement. “I think someone’s shooting at us.”

  “What!”

  “I said I think-”

  There was another whine, followed this time by the unmistakable impact of metal on metal. The prop began to shudder, and the cowling and indeed the entire front of the aircraft with it. “Hang on!” she shouted, and kicked the rudder and put the Cessna into a shallow dive and a spiraling turn.

  It was an unnecessary command; Liam had his hands clenched around the edge of his seat and with every muscle strained upward, keeping that plane in the sky. Oh, God yes, anything but down, please, please, I’ll never get drunk again, I’ll do all of Miranda every single time no matter how the Supreme Court rules, I’ll marry and settle down and live a nice, quiet life, just please don’t let this plane go down with me on board.

  But when he risked a glance out the window, down seemed to be coming up very fast indeed, and now he cursed the light of the moon that so clearly illuminated the river beneath them. No, not into the river-it was too cold; they’d never survive long enough to make it to the shore-and then the shore was beneath them-oh, no, not the shore, they were going to crash, the plane was going to hit the ground and break into pieces and they were going to break into pieces with it, not the shore, please not the shore. Wy’s face was tight-lipped and grim, the yoke shook back and forth in her hands in time with the shaking of the propeller and the cowling and the whole front of the plane, Oh, God, he thought he was going to be sick.

  The ground rushed up at them and suddenly he saw a stretch of open ground, oh, God, was it an airstrip? It was white with snow or frost but it was long and straight and there were no trees in the middle of it, no trees for the plane to run into, no trees to decapitate him or impale him or skewer him, a Campbell shish kebab. “Is it an airstrip?” he shouted.

  “Shut up!” she shouted back, and the ground rushed up, filling his range of terrified vision, up, up, up, until they hit down, hard, bounced once, hit again, and then, miraculously, all three gear were on the ground and she had cut the engine and they were running out the length of the airstrip, this blessed airstrip that had appeared out of nowhere to aid and to succor them in their time of need.

  The Cessna rumbled and rolled and thumped and chunked over hummocks of ice and snow and what might have been a fallen tree and finally stopped.

  It was very quiet in the cabin of the little plane. Liam could hear himself inhale, exhale, inhale. His heartbeat was clearly audible, too, a rapid thudding sound, like a drumbeat, slowing now.

  “Liam.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry I told you to shut up.”

  “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. I’m fine. You’re fine, and I’m fine, and we’re on the ground, oh, God, how I love the ground, and everything’s fine.” He was light-headed, a little dizzy.

  “Liam?”

  “Really. I’m fine. I’m just-I’m fine.”

  Another silence. “Wy?”

  “What?”

  “Why does the plane always break when I’m on board?”

  She ruffled up. “It doesn’t always break. It’s only broken once before when you were on board. And it didn’t break this time; somebody broke it.”

  She opened the door and climbed out. He followed.

  One end of the propeller had been hit, it looked by, yes, by a bullet. The squared-off end of the prop was not quite holed but sort of splooshed, dented, cratered, if you could call something that small a crater.

  Liam could. “I have to sit down,” he said, and staggered over to a tree trunk.

  “Me, too,” Wy said, and followed him.

  They both sat down at the same time, not bothering to clear off the trunk, and as a result the snow on the trunk wet their pants through immediately. They didn’t move, except that Liam put his head between his knees.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” Liam said, his head still between his knees. “Where are we?”

  “Bulge. The village across the river. Their front street.”

  “Oh.” He peered around, and now that the terror had cleared from his eyes he saw the three little houses, shacks, really, clustered at one end of the airstrip. “Where is everybody?”

  Wy let her head fall back and closed her eyes against the glare of the moon. “Nobody lives here during the winter.”

  “Yeah? Summer cottages.”

  “One room, river view.”

  He turned his head, still keeping it low. “You sound almost cheerful.” She looked it, too, as near as he could make out her expression in the moonlight.

  “I am,” she said, and laughed out loud and opened her eyes.

  He sat up with caution. “What’s so damn funny?”

  She laughed again, a joyous sound. “I didn’t know it was coming!”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t know anybody was going to shoot at us!”

  He stared at her. “Okay,” he said. “I didn’t, either, which goes without saying, as I’d much rather shoot it out on the ground, although I’d rather never shoot it out at all. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I didn’t know anybody was going to shoot at us, and I didn’t know we’d have to make an emergency landing! I didn’t know anything about it! I didn’t hear any voices, or feel any feelings! I didn’t have any visions!”

  “Wy, honey,” Liam said, “you’ve got a first-aid kit in the plane, don’t you? Is there any, well, you know, Valium in it?”

  “I’m fine, Liam,” she said, and got up to do a neat dance step, of necessity shuffling a bit because of the snow, but still… “Listen,” she said, coming to sit back next to him. She seized his hands in both of hers and kissed him soundly, a loud smack that echoed off the sides of the plane and back at them, and made her laugh again.

  “Wy-”

  “Moses came to see me last night,” she said.

  “Wy, let me get the first-aid kit. You’ve got some whiskey in it, don’t you? I think you could use a drink, and I know I could.”

  He tried to stand up and she wouldn’t let him. “Wait a minute, Liam. I know I sound crazy, but listen. Moses came to see me last night, and he told me he was my grandfather.”

  “Oh.” All that meant to Liam was that the little martinet was going to be his grandfather-in-law. He could only imagine how much Moses was going to be beat up on him now. There were probably one hundred additional movements in tai chi that Moses had been saving up to torture him with, and he’d have to learn them all. “Maybe I don’t want to marry you after all.”

  She laughed again, a clear, full-throated sound that rang down the airstrip like a bell. “He’s a shaman.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Liam said dryly.

  “No, no, listen.” She shook his hands. “Listen, Liam. I’m his granddaughter, and he hears voices.”

  “Wy, I don’t-”

  “He told me I was going to hear them, too.”

  “-think- What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean just what you think I mean. He told me that hearing the voices is hereditary in our family, that sometimes it takes a while for them to kick in. He told me the reason I made us come to the fish camp last month is because I knew Gheen was coming and that Tim was in danger.”

  He looked at her and remembered how determined, how in fact implacable she had been to fly into the teeth of thirty-five-knot winds, blowing snow and fog and the year’s first winter storm. She was going to go; nothing anyone could say or do short of busting up the plane with a crowbar was going to stop her. He had been angry with her, and terrified, because he knew he’d have to go with her. “Did you?”

  She rounded on him. “Of course not! I told Moses last night that all I did was follow the trail of dead bodies that crazy bastard left. It was pointing right toward Old Man Creek. It didn’t take any voices to see that; it was right there on the map!”

  She looked as fierce as she sounded; th
ere was plenty of moonlight to show him that. “That’s why you were nervous about the flights,” he said.

  “What flights?”

  “The one to the glacier this morning and the one to Anchorage tonight. You were looking for advice from the voices if you should fly or not.”

  “Voices,” she said with scorn. “Imagine. I’m a pilot, Liam. I’m not a shaman. Besides, a shaman is a man. All the shamans I’ve known are men.”

  “How many have you known?”

  “That’s not the point. Okay, one, all right, Moses! But I’ve never read about a woman shaman, or heard about one, and besides, I don’t believe in any of that stuff anyway. He’s my friend, and my tai chi teacher, and it turns out he happens to be my grandfather, too.” She made a visible effort to calm down. “He’s also a drunk, and he was drunk on his ass last night. He probably didn’t have a clue what he was saying.”

  He always had before. Liam kept that thought to himself.

  “And besides,” Wy added, “if any voices were going to kick in they would have kicked in before this flight. They would at the very least have kicked in before we left Anchorage. I haven’t got any; I don’t care whose granddaughter I am.”

  Suddenly, right over their heads, a raven cawed loudly. They both jumped. Wy leapt to her feet and shouted, “Yeah, your mother, you little black bastard!”

  She marched off.

  Liam stood up and brushed at the seat of his pants, searching out the cawer in the tree above. He’d been there the month before, or someone very like him, and had followed them down the river in the skiff. They would have missed the mouth of Old Man Creek if it hadn’t been for the raven.

  Although it wasn’t necessarily a he. It was impossible to tell a male raven from a female raven from a distance. Liam had been making it his business to read up on ravens. As a practicing law-enforcement professional, he preferred his science straight, unencumbered by myth or legend, but it was hard to get away from either in this country. He read Bernd Heinrich and Richard K. Nelson, and he learned that Alaska Natives regarded the raven as a trickster, not a helper. You had to watch Raven or he’d steal you blind, food, home, woman, children, the sun, the moon and the stars, for that matter.

  All Liam knew was that something big and black and winged had come between him and disaster three times in the last six months, and he was grateful. There was a series of soft croaks from a branch above him. He thought he caught a blue-black gleam of raven wing, a glimpse of a beady eye.

  He also thought he might be going a little insane. Disney-ham was finally getting to him. He followed Wy to the plane.

  She had the toolbox out of the plane and was rooting through it. She stood up as he approached, hacksaw in hand. “What are you doing with that?”

  She got a plastic crate out of the back of the plane and went to the front, upended it, and climbed on top.

  “Wy?”

  She put one hand on the prop and rested the hacksaw on the end, to just before the bullet nonhole.

  “Wy!”

  She started to saw. She might even have been whistling.

  “Wy!”

  SIXTEEN

  Karen Tompkins’ town house was on the south end of the complex, looking directly over the small boat harbor. There was a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room downstairs, and two bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. There was no yard in front, only two parking spaces. It was exactly like the other seven units in the building, with a narrow deck running across the front and five sets of evenly spaced stairs providing access. There was a small wrought-iron table with two matching chairs on the deck in front of Karen’s.

  Inside, there was a lot of pink. The sheets on the bed were pink and satin. The towels in the bathroom were pink and fluffy. The china dishes in the kitchen cupboard had pink roses on them. The purple leather couch had pink plush accent pillows. The carpet was maroon, and the walls were hung with watercolor paintings of flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies.

  The bed was king-size. So was the tub in the master bath. Two drawers of the dresser were devoted to toys intended to be played with in both, some of which raised eyebrows all around.

  There was a calendar hung over the kitchen counter, with a dentist’s appointment coming up on November second, and that was about it. Envelopes were tucked into the calendar’s pocket. Diana shuffled through them. Bills, electric, gas, garbage, telephone, all due at the first of the month. An Alaska Airlines Visa bill, carrying a thirteen-thousand-dollar balance and a two-hundred-dollar periodic finance charge.

  In the spare bedroom, which didn’t look as if it had seen much use, there was a plastic box with a handle on top, the size to fit letter-size files. Inside were Karen’s birth certificate, her high school diploma, her bank statements, the deed to the town house. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

  There was no clue as to who her most recent bed partner had been, but from what Diana had heard so far, you could pretty much throw a dart anywhere within the Newenham city limits and hit someone who’d spent time between Karen Tompkins’ sheets.

  She had interviewed Betsy Amakuk and her husband at Lydia’s house, although Betsy was nearly incoherent with grief. She’d lost a mother and a sister within the space of two days, so Diana didn’t blame her. Her husband said they’d been home that evening, sorting through Lydia’s bills, which they’d fetched from Lydia’s house that morning, and writing Lydia’s obituary for the newspapers. Betsy had made a quick run back to her mother’s house to look for Lydia’s birth certificate to run with the obituary, and had found Karen dead on the kitchen floor. No, they couldn’t think of anyone who wished Karen harm. “She had a lot of boyfriends,” Betsy had said in an exhausted voice. “She liked men, sure. But she wouldn’t have stayed with anyone who threatened her, or hurt her.”

  Diana thought of the toys found in Karen’s house and reserved judgment.

  She had interviewed Stan Jr. at his house, a ranch-style home with two bedrooms and one bath in the Anipa subdivision, painted forest green with white trim and a corrugated metal roof. Inside there was a lot of overstuffed furniture, a fireplace, a kitchen of near-sanitary cleanliness, a large bathroom with a soaker tub and terra-cotta tiles. It looked very comfortable, and very expensive. Stan Jr. was pale and tightly controlled. He shook his head when she asked him if he knew of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Karen. He’d seen her with a number of different men, most recently with Roger Hayden, who worked for the Newenham Telephone Cooperative.

  “When was the last time you saw them together?” Diana asked.

  He thought. “About a month ago, I guess. They were having dinner at Bill’s.”

  Lastly, Diana had interviewed Jerry at his place, a cramped, barely one-bedroom apartment in a six-plex next door to the Last Frontier Bank. It was painfully neat, partly because it looked like Jerry didn’t own much. He scurried into the bathroom after letting her in, probably flushing his stash down the toilet, and she wandered around, poking her nose into this and that. The kitchenette cupboards held four place settings of flowered melamine and a set of Ecko pots and pans. The glasses and flatware were from Costco, and it all looked brand-new. The refrigerator was almost empty but for half a loaf of cheddar cheese, a carton of eggs with one left, and a quart of two-percent milk with a week-old expiration date. The lesser part of a case of Rainier beer filled up the bottom shelf.

  The bedroom held a full-size bed, neatly made with white sheets and a flowered comforter that no man had picked out. The dresser drawers were only half-full of underwear and T-shirts and socks, and a spare change of bed linens. The closet was echoingly empty, a blue suit, two lighter blue shirts, a pair of black oxford shoes, a pair of sneakers. The suit was inexpensive and so new it still sported a tag. Betsy had probably bought it for him for Lydia’s memorial service, scheduled for the following Saturday afternoon.

  The baseboard heating clinked as it came on, and the smell of burning dust filled the air. She went back into the living room and sat do
wn gingerly on the nubbed fabric of the hard, narrow couch. On the wall opposite was a velvet painting of the Beatles back when they shaved. Copies ofAlaska Magazine were stacked in two neat piles on the press board coffee table. There was a stereo, in her opinion the only evidence of human habitation, and a collection of CDs, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones. Jerry was a rock-and-roll boy.

  There wasn’t a book on a shelf, or a family photo in a frame, or a birthday card or a graduation announcement on the refrigerator. She’d never seen a lonelier or unlovelier five hundred square feet in her life. It depressed her just to look at it.

  The sound of the toilet flushing for the third time faded away and Jerry emerged from the bathroom, ostentatiously drying his hands on his jeans, and sat down on the matching nubby chair next to the couch.

  “I’m sorry to bother you so late at night,” Diana said, “and I’m sorry to have to ask these questions at a time like this, but can you tell me the last time you saw your sister Karen?”

  His thin, anxious face seemed to sink in on itself, but she couldn’t tell if it was from grief for his sister’s death or apprehension at having to deal with a cop. “Last night, I think. Or was it this morning?” He stopped. “I can’t remember, exactly. I can’t believe she’s dead.” He leaned forward. “Are you sure she’s dead, ma’am? I mean, couldn’t you have made a mistake? Could it maybe have been someone else who got killed?”

  “I’m sorry, Jerry. It’s Karen. Your sister Betsy found her. There’s no mistake.”

  His eyes were shiny with tears. “She was so cute when we were little. I liked her best of all. We used to hide together from Bossy Betsy.”

  “Jerry, I really need you to concentrate. When was the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “I think- Oh, wait. It was when we went to the lawyer’s.”

  “What lawyer?”

  “Ed. He wrote Dad’s will. And Mom’s.” A tear rolled down his face. He smeared it with the back of one hand, leaving a shiny track down one stubbled cheek.