Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  She leaned against the desk, crossing her arms and hugging them to her. “I’d go look.”

  “You bet your ass you would. Maybe you went looking to aid survivors, maybe you went just to see what you could see, but you would go look, and so would anyone else who saw it happen.”

  “I’m sorry, what does this have to do with Lydia?”

  “Wy. The wreck is found one day, and the next day Lydia is murdered in her own kitchen, with no signs of forcible entry, which means she most probably knew her attacker. And in Newenham, that could be someone she has known a long time. I was just talking to Clarence down to the bar and he has some very fond memories of Lydia in high school. So did Moses. I wonder who else did?”

  “I am really, really tired,” Wy said. “You’re going to have to explain better than that.”

  “Okay, try this on for size. It’s December twentieth, 1941. Nineteen forty-one, hell, I didn’t even think of that! Pearl Harbor was attacked ten days before. We were at war, and Alaska was way too close to Japan. They practically started building the Alaska Highway the next day.”

  “I still-”

  “Think a minute!” He actually gave her a little shake. “The attack had been ten days before, and it was so kick-ass that the military from Nome to San Diego was expecting an invasion at practically any moment. They would have alerted every American coastal community on the Pacific Ocean to be on the watch.”

  “So, if somebody saw the C-47 go into the mountain, they might have thought it was the beginning of an invasion?”

  “Why not? The blood wasn’t dry from Pearl. Midway hadn’t happened yet, and Japan looked invincible. So say a guy was out with a girl-Clarence told me the big deal was to get hold of a truck and drive your girl and your friends and their girls to Icky and have an all-day party on the beach at One Lake. That’s forty miles closer to Carryall Mountain and Bear Glacier.”

  “An all-day party on the beach at One Lake,” she said, considering. “I hate to rain all over your parade, Liam, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was December.”

  “Oh. Oh. Well, hell. Okay, maybe not. Damn it.” He couldn’t stand it; he had to pace. He rose to his feet and began to quarter the office. “Okay, then they saw it from Newenham.”

  “Liam, I’m willing to stipulate that they saw the plane go in. They weren’t that long out of Nome and they were probably pretty heavy with fuel, so it probably went off with one hell of a bang. I just don’t know,” she said pointedly, “what all this has to do with Lydia.”

  “If I’m right, it has everything to do with Lydia. Listen, Wy.” He sat down again and pulled a third sheet of paper toward him. “Here is Lydia, sweet sixteen, out on a date with one of her many swains.” He drew two boxes, one Lydia, one swain. “It’s evening-what did they say; they think the plane went in around midnight. Maybe they’re parking and making out.”

  “Did they make out in 1941?”

  “Thenboom! and fire on the mountain. They’re curious, so they go take a look. The plane is a total loss, but something has been thrown clear.”

  “What?”

  He looked at her. “Gold.”

  She snapped her fingers. “The coin!”

  “What if there were more of them?” He drew another square and put all Lydia’s kids inside it. “One thing that’s been bothering me, all the Tompkinses have enough money not to work. I know the bay used to be a bonanza for salmon fishermen, but I don’t see anyone else in Newenham with a lifestyle like theirs. Most of the old-timers, their houses are paid off and some of them their boats, but they’re still out there hustling for anything with fins that swims into range. Lydia, yes, I could understand her being provided for, but the kids, too, and so well? Well, what if the money came from Lydia, not Stan Sr.? What if it came from what she and her date found at the crash site?”

  “She could have gone up there alone.”

  “Then she’d still be alive.” He sat back. “And then, sixty years later, the wreck resurfaces. I bring the arm to Bill’s and everybody sees the coin.”

  Wy was still puzzled. “I still don’t understand. Why was Lydia killed?”

  He was sitting in Lydia’s chair, and he thought of her again as he had seen her the evening he met her, feisty, strong, independent, with a bawdy eye and a fearless spirit. “Maybe she wanted to tell the truth, that they’d stolen the gold from the crash site. Maybe he didn’t want her to.”

  “Who, Liam? Do you know who?”

  He looked down at the sheet of paper, and traced over the outline of the box markedswain.

  “Yes,” he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  “I love younger men,” Jo said, bouncing into Wy’s house an hour later. “Give your friend Mr. Wiley my compliments, and tell him I said so.”

  “First thing on my list,” Liam said.

  Jo peered at Wy. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”

  “So do you,” Wy said, and shoved a cup of coffee at her and another one at Liam.

  Jo perched on the stool next to Liam’s. “Your father is a piece of work,” she told him.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” he said before he thought, and then scowled away any lingering trace of willingness to discuss his father with the press, or with anyone, for that mattter.

  Jo sipped her coffee, looking at him over the rim of her mug. “He came here planning on retrieving that C-47.”

  Liam sent Wy a warning glance, and shrugged. “So? Like he said, the air force brings back its own. Nothing new or wrong in that.” He kept his inevitable reflections to himself.

  “This wasn’t an ordinary crash,” Jo said. “I just got off the phone with a friend in D.C. This wasn’t an ordinary crew on board this flight, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The copilot’s name was Aloysius March.”

  Liam and Wy exchanged glances. “That name supposed to mean something to us?”

  “Aloysius March was Walter March’s father.”

  “And Walter March is…?”

  Jo huffed out an impatient sigh. “How the hell am I supposed to make a living if my own friends won’t read my own paper?” Snit over, she smiled, and it was a low-down, mean, dirty, nasty little snake of a smile. “Gen. Walter March is the nominee for chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force.”

  They absorbed that in startled silence. “So Dad’s going after his boss’s dad’s body,” Liam said. “Sucking up to then th degree, one more step up on the career ladder, but so what?”

  “He’s using air force funds to do it.”

  “I’m shocked-shocked-to hear of misappropriation of funds going on in the U.S. armed forces,” Liam said, very dry.

  Wy agreed. “I don’t see the big scandal here. Like he said, he’s going after three of their own. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, frankly. I think it’s kind of, I don’t know, right. We’re still looking for the bodies of American servicemen in Vietnam. We should be. How is this any different, other than being a different war?”

  Jo added half-and-half to her coffee. “I don’t think recovering the bodies of the honored dead is what this is about, Wy.”

  “Why not? Why does it have to be any more complicated than that? Honest to God, Jo, you see more conspiracies than John Birch.”

  “Maybe you’re right, Wy, maybe I’ve been in the newspaper game too long, I can’t see the simple truth when it’s staring me in the face. But I don’t think so. Not this time, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I asked my friend to pull the service records of the three crew members.”

  “And?”

  “And he couldn’t. They’re listed as classified.”

  Moses’ side of the bed was empty when Bill woke up. She found him down at the bar when she got there, back in the office growling at the computer. “If this keeps up, I’m going to hire you to keep the books,” she told him.

  “I’d rather spend the rest of
my life listening to Puff Daddy,” he said. “Look at this.”

  She came around the desk to look over his shoulder. “Oh, man. Are you back at that?”

  “I think it’s important.”

  “Think, or is something telling you so?”

  He leaned back. “I’m telling you, babe, there’s nothing going on here except my nose is itching.”

  “I can fix that,” she said.

  He dodged her hand. “Where’s the coin?”

  “I gave it to Liam.”

  “Damn it. I’d like to get another look at it.”

  It was an hour before opening and she had time to humor him. “Tell me why you think it’s important.”

  He decided to give her a little history. “The U.S. didn’t even make twenty-dollar gold pieces until the California gold rush. Until then, 1849, the U.S. minted only one-dollar, two-fifty, five-dollar and ten-dollar gold coins.”

  “Two-fifty?”

  “Yeah, I know. But we used to have a two-dollar bill, don’t forget. The early nineteen hundreds, man, they were making some cool-looking money. The buffalo nickel, the Mercury dime, you know the guy with wings, and the dime was still silver back then. The quarter with Lady Liberty on it.” He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and slammed it down on the desk in disgust. “Look at this crap. That could be Albert Lincoln who owns the Ford dealership, and Greg Washington who plays forward for the New York Knicks, and I can’t even tell who the guy on the dime is. Plus, ain’t none of them made of enough of any precious metal to actually be worth what the face value on the coin is. Always assuming you can read it without a microscope.”

  Moses was very indignant. Bill concealed her amusement. “But our coin was minted in 1921, didn’t we figure? That’s not even a hundred years old.”

  “Well, I haven’t quite figured out how valuable it is,” he admitted. “There a lot of stuff I don’t understand, like grading and luster and I don’t know what else.” He thought for a moment, and added, “I got tangled up on an auction site and accidentally bid five hundred dollars for one, though.”

  “You did what!”

  He looked a little sheepish. “It’s okay; somebody outbid me. It went for five forty-nine.”

  She whistled, and he nodded. “So I been thinking, Bill.”

  She matched his tone. “What you been thinking, Moses?”

  “I been thinking there might have been more of those coins on that plane.”

  She sobered. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Me, either,” he said grimly. “Imagine the treasure hunt a rumor like that would start.”

  “It’s already started.” She told him about the Gray gang. He swore. She looked at the monitor screen. “It’s too bad Lydia isn’t still alive.”

  “Why?”

  “She knew about coins.”

  Moses stared at her.

  “It’s true. She had a collection of old American coins, old quarters and nickels and dimes and pennies, just pocket change really, that she’d been saving up since she was a kid. She subscribed to a magazine,Quarters R Us or something like that. I used to see it lying around the house when we were at her place for book club.” She brightened. “In fact, I’d forgotten all about it, but I think she had some other, more valuable coins, too. Yeah, I remember she pulled out an album one time, it was really cool, had all these little pockets inside it for each individual coin.” She smiled. “She was annoyed with me, because I was more interested in the album construction than I was in the coins.” Her smile faded. “You know, now that I think of it, she might have…” Her voice trailed away.

  Moses’ face had gone very hard. “Might have what?”

  “It’s silly, it couldn’t possibly…” She met his eyes. “I’ve got to be wrong about this, Moses.”

  He was inexorable. “Wrong about what?”

  “Now that I think back, she might have had one of those coins in that album. Just like the one that was in the hand.”

  Wy had a pickup in Ekwok she couldn’t get out of, so Jo accompanied Liam to the post. They arrived at the same time as Diana, who looked as drug-out as Liam felt. He brought her up-to-date. She listened, nodding, and when he finished said, “Makes sense to me. I just rousted Brewster Gibbons out of bed and hauled his butt down to the bank. Karen bought her town house for cash.”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred and twenty thousand.”

  “Jesus. What’d she do, write a check?”

  “She did, and this is the interesting part. She didn’t have much left over.”

  “Her bank balance looks pretty good.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the least amount it’s ever been. Gibbons says she’s been steadily depleting her trust fund.”

  “What else?”

  “While I was at it, I checked on Lydia’s finances. Her house is paid off, too, although that’s not quite so surprising. I checked on the other kids. All of them have very healthy cash balances, and none of them have any outstanding debts, at least not with Brewster’s bank. Jerry’s balance is just as healthy, it’s just that every check has to be cosigned by his mother.”

  Liam frowned at the figures she’d scribbled. “Healthy. I’d call that filthy rich, myself.” He picked up the phone and dialed a number in Anchorage.

  It rang five times before Jim picked it up. “Yeah.”

  “Jim, it’s Liam.”

  “Like I didn’t know.” There was a protesting female murmur in the background. “Sorry, honey. I’ll take this in the other room; I have a feeling I’m going to have to get on the computer.”

  “Thanks, Jim.”

  “Fuck you, Campbell. What do you want?”

  “I need everything you can dig up on the Tompkins family in Newenham.” He gave Jim the names. “I’m particularly interested in their financial affairs. If they owe any money, if there is any money coming in. Like that.”

  “Gee,” Jim said without enthusiasm. “Is that all?”

  “And I need it in thirty minutes.” Liam hung up on the resulting explosion and looked at Diana. “Go down to the school. See if they’ve still got records for who was enrolled in high school in 1941. Make it for four years either way. Since the students are in their seventies, there probably won’t be any surviving teachers, but ask anyway.”

  “Gone.” She went.

  Liam looked at Jo. “I meant to ask you. Where’s Gary?”

  She smiled. “I sent him home first thing this morning.”

  He leaned back and gave her a long, considering look, which she met with equanimity. “Did you, now.”

  “I did. That was a mean, rotten thing to do to you, Liam, and I’m sorry.”

  He cocked his head. “Once more, with feeling.”

  She laughed. “Look, Wy’s the best friend I ever had. For a few months, she was even my sister-in-law. Friends watch out for their own.”

  He couldn’t resist. “Like the air force.”

  “Even better than. The thing is, I got this idea you might be bad for her. You were, the first time around.”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “No?”

  “No. For Wy, the first time around I was a fucking disaster.”

  “Thank you for not making me say that,” she said primly, and grinned.

  “So I’m not a disaster this time?”

  She met his eyes head-on. “No. Understand me, Liam, I can get along with the devil himself, if the devil is dating my best friend. Nothing gets in the way of the friendship, not for me. Loyalty is what I do best.”

  “It’s my favorite thing about you.”

  She looked surprised, and suspicious, and maybe even a little flattered. “Wy’s family. Wy loves you. That makes you family, too.”

  “A cop and a reporter,” he said. “It’ll never last.”

  She laughed again. “That’s what they said about Chuck and Di.”

  The phone rang. “Okay, you prick,” Jim said, “get a pencil.” He dictated rapidly, without che
cking to see if Liam was keeping up. “That do you?”

  “That does me just fine.”

  “Dunaway there?”

  Liam was surprised. “How did you know?”

  “I know everything. Put her on.”

  Liam handed Jo the phone. “Somebody wants to talk to you.”

  She took it. “Dunaway.” She listened for a moment. Liam watched as her face flushed a deep, dark red. “None of your goddamn business,” she said, and slammed the phone down. Liam got his fingers out of the way just in time.

  “What was all that about?”

  “None of your goddamn business either,” she snarled. “Just so you know, Campbell, that family business doesn’t extend to your friends.”

  “Okay,” he said, and refrained from any comments about younger men because it seemed safer. He made a mental note to call Jim back at his earliest opportunity.

  “What do we do now?” she said, seeming to master her rage.

  “I don’t know aboutwe, ” he said. “I’m going out to the base.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No.”

  The base officer quarters was of a piece with the rest of Chinook Air Force Base, freshly painted and tidy, the sidewalks neatly shoveled and the storm windows fastened down. He found Charles in the same room he had stayed in that summer. The colonel was surprised to see him and, Liam thought, somewhat wary. “Come on in,” he said.

  Liam closed the door behind him. “What’s with the crash site, Dad? What do you expect to find?”

  “I expect to find the bodies of three men who died serving their country in time of war,” Charles said.

  “One of whom fathered the man currently nominated for the air force spot on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

  Charles looked startled and then rallied. “Who he happens to be related to doesn’t lessen his sacrifice.”

  “No,” Liam admitted. “But there’s something else.” He was suddenly sick of the dance they always did. “Ah, hell, Dad. Wild Bill Hickok died in 1876.”