Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

Tim saw her looking and thought it was at the hot dog. “Just a snack,” he said, and with one bite made the rest of it disappear.

“Uh-huh,” Wy said. “Is that what we're having for dinner again?” He drew himself up, offended. “No. We're having something different, like you said you wanted.” He stepped back, revealing the culinary riches behind him on the counter. “We're having polish sausage and sauerkraut,” he said proudly. He held up an empty package of Alaska Sausage's finest, and pointed at a quart jar of Claussen's Crisp Sauerkraut, also empty.

Wy, who after a year's steady indoctrination knew enough to be grateful that Tim allowed himself to be part of the kitchen crew rotation, said, “Looks good. Do I get anything green along with that?”

He looked doubtful. “Well,” he offered, “the sauerkraut used to be cabbage, and cabbage is green.” He brightened. “I got ice cream for dessert, though.”

“What kind?”

His smile was sly. “Häagen-Dazs. Vanilla.”

Wy sighed. “I am so easy.”

Jo laughed, and tugged Wy out of the room. “Come on, let's get you cleaned up while Chef Paul here does his thing.”

In her bedroom, Wy stripped off her clothes as Jo lounged on the bed. “Still sleeping alone, I see.”

Wy stopped, half in and half out of her jeans. “How can you tell?”

Jo made a face. “I'm a reporter. I notice the details. Like a fullsize bed in the room of a woman hankering after a king-size-bed guy.”

Liam was six-three. Wy tossed her jeans in the hamper and grabbed for the Sea Wolves T-shirt she used for a robe. “I'll be right back.”

She used up all the hot water and then some. When she came back into her bedroom Jo had picked up the little embroidered box on Wy's dresser, identical to the one Jo had on hers, both of which had been acquired on the isle of Crete during the European vacation that had been the reward of both sets of parents following a successful graduation from college. “Remember the store where we got these, how the guy behind the counter tried to pick us up?”

“Remember how we let him?” Wy said dryly, stepping into clean underwear.

“Ah yes, the Labyrinth by moonlight,” Jo said dreamily. “One of my favorite memories.”

“All you saw was stars, girl,” Wy retorted, “which is generally what you do see from lying on your back outside at night.”

“Slander, calumny and defamation of character,” Jo said peacefully. “I'll sue. What's this?”

Wy pushed her head through the neck of her T-shirt and peered over Jo's shoulder. “That? It's my high school class ring. Mr. Strohmeyer told me not to buy one, that I'd probably never wear it again. He was right, as usual.”

“Don't you just hate that? What's this?”

Wy looked, and her hands stilled on the zipper of her jeans. “A pair of earrings, what do they look like?”

“They are beautiful. I don't generally like gold nuggets, but these are really nice.” Jo held one of the flat, heavy loops up to her ear, admiring the effect in the mirror. “Where'd you get them?”

“A friend,” Wy said. She was sure there was no inflection in her voice to give warning, but she felt Jo's eyes boring into the back of her head. Being friends with a reporter could be a pain in the ass. “What are you doing in town, Jo?”

“Liam gave them to you.”

A real pain in the ass. “Yes.”

Jo put the earring back in the box and the box back on the dresser. She regarded it for a moment, and then turned to look at Wy. Jo had newspaper eyes, a steady, unwinking, patient stare that watched and weighed and waited, waited for the answers to her questions, waited for the truth. You could dodge, evade, equivocate, you could even lie, but those newspaper eyes would wait you out every time.

Joan Dunaway was a reporter for theNews,and had been one since she and Wy had returned from Europe the year they graduated from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Wy with a degree in education and Jo with a degree in journalism. She'd built up a reputation over the years for ferreting out bad behavior on a legislative and bureaucratic level and writing pull-no-punches stories about it. One of the more delightful stories Wy remembered had exposed the invariable habit of the commissioner of the Department of Corrections in hiring longtime friends for jobs tailored to suit their special talents. One of them had been a grocer, Wy recalled. At least the Department of Corrections had made some terrific deals on fresh produce for the four and a half months of the grocer's tenure of office.

Jo's juciest story to date had concerned the then sitting governor who had vacationed, all expenses paid, in Baja, Bali and Biarritz courtesy of one of the North Slope's major oil producers. The executive responsible had made the grievous error of not recognizing Jo in the bar of the Baranof Hotel. He had compounded this error by picking her up, seducing her and afterward indulging in pillow talk that drew connections between the vacations and a revision of the state's subsurface mineral rights law being debated before the legislature the following day. This not unnaturally wound up on the front page of theNews.He was a very attractive slimeball, she explained later to Wy, with very blue eyes and an ass as firm and round as a Delicious apple. “I swear to god, I wanted to bite it,” she declared, and she was regretful when he and his ass were indicted and later convicted, fined and imprisoned for bribery of a public official. The governor narrowly escaped prison only by payment of a $330,000 fine, but when the legislature changed hands two years later, they vacated the judgment and repaid the fine to him, with interest. “Ah, Alaska,” Jo had said fondly when she heard. “Gays can't marry and you have to speak English, but you can legally smoke pot and embezzlers never go hungry. Gotta love it.”

And she did, and she wrote about it every day, not only stories of bribery and corruption in the legislature, but stories of how the state worked. She wrote profiles of the weights-and-measures man who checked to see that you got the five gallons of gas you'd paid for, the waitress at Simon and Seafort's who retired after nineteen years on the job, the Alaskan old fart who cut firewood from his lot in Talkeetna and delivered it, one cord at a time, to buyers in Anchorage. She wrote about the people who fixed the potholes and tarred the roofs and shoveled the snow and loaded luggage onto planes, about the gardeners at the Municipal Greenhouse and the clerks at City Hall, about the woman who answered the phone at Victims of Violent Crimes in Juneau and the man who ran the flight service station in Soldotna. She was on a first-name basis with just about everyone in the state, from the man who set the tracks on the cross-country ski trails at Kincaid Park to the ranger who tracked down poachers in the Gates of the Arctic. Some of them loved her. Some of them hated her. None of it stopped her.

And it didn't stop her now. “How's it going? You and Liam?”

“It's not,” Wy said, hoping that would be the end of it.

A vain hope. “Why not?”

Wy sighed. All right, then, and maybe it would help if she said the words out loud. “Jo, if he'd left Jenny and Charlie…” She stopped. It was incredible how, even now, three years later, she had to force their names out of her mouth. “Wife and child” were generic terms, without personalities, wants, demands. “Jenny and Charlie” were people, people with needs and privileges that superseded hers.

She looked at Jo. Jo looked back with an uncharacteristically solemn expression. “I've got a Puritan streak a mile wide, Jo. What I did was wrong. You don't screw around with someone else's husband, you just don't. And you don't take the attention that rightfully belongs to his child. Children need their fathers.” Her shoulders slumped and she sighed. “If he'd come to me, if we'd married, I would have spent the next fifty years trying to make it up to his son. I would have been oh so considerate and understanding, I would have relinquished my time with Liam so he could spend time with his son, I would have tried to be friends with his wife, no matter how much she hated me, and she was bound to hate me.”