Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

“And after a while,” Jo said slowly, “you would have come to resent it.”

“Probably.”

“And to take it out on Liam.”

“Probably,” Wy repeated.

“And yourself.”

“Especially myself.” Wy stood up. “So you see, Jo, as much as it hurt, it was the right thing to do.”

“Cutting things off, never seeing him or talking to him again.”

“Yes.”

“Except that now you are.”

Wy wandered over to the window and looked out at the fascinating view of her truck and Jo's rental car parked in the driveway. “Yes.”

There was a brief silence. Jo looked at the top of Wy's dresser. There was very little clutter: the embroidered box from Greece, a few ivory carvings, one a walrus rearing up with his tusks on display and his fat sides wonderfully wrinkled, another that looked like a little knife, no more than three inches in length, with a curved blade and a mask carved into the hilt. From the right eye of the mask a tiny face looked out, laughing. “You still love him.”

“Only because NPR's Scott Simon's never given me a tumble, and that's only because I have not been afforded the opportunity to meet him, swamp him with my extensive personal charm and carry him off to my tent.”

Jo had the reporter's indispensable and extremely irritating ability to stick to the point. “Jenny and Charlie are dead.”

“I know. Convenient, isn't it?”

“Oh Jesus,” Jo said, disgusted. “Martyrdom does not become you, Wy.”

Wy turned. “What?”

“You heard me,” Jo said, the ruthless gleam back in her newspaper eyes. “You've steeled yourself to make this great sacrifice, you've even managed to round up a child of your own without having to betray the great love of your life-speaking of convenient-”

“Wait just a goddamn minute!” Wy said hotly. “Where do you get off-”

“-and now that the love of your life-we may fairly call him that, I suppose, since you haven't let anyone else within sniffing distance since, other than that wimpy little wing cover salesman-”

“He wasn't a wimp!”

“-now that the love of your life is free, due, I might add, to no fault of your own, so that the two of you can join hands and waltz off into the sunset together, you're so in love with this noble renunciation act of yours that you're willing to do it all over again.” Jo shook her head. “Shit happens, Wy. It happened here, and it had absolutely nothing to do with you.” She paused, and gave Wy a considering look. “You didn't even wish them dead, did you?”

“What?” Wy said, horrified. “No! Never!”

“God, you were right about that Puritan streak,” Jo said, disgusted. “Sometimes I think you're not even human. Saint Wyanet, your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure.”

“Fuck you, Dunaway!”

“Backatcha and times two, Chouinard!” Jo stepped up to go nose to nose. In your face was her specialty, and where she scored most of her best stories. “Jenny and Charlie were killed by a drunk driver. Liam is single, and has somehow managed to find you again.” Her brows snapped together. “Are you afraid that it wasn't real after all?” she said with sudden suspicion. “Are you afraid that what you could have with Liam won't measure up to what you did have?”

“Oh for crissake,” Wy exploded, “don't say ‘what we had’ like I was Streisand and he was Redford. ‘What we had’ amounted to twenty-three flights into the Bush, four days in Anchorage and a thousand dollars in phone bills. It wasn't like we ran away to Paris together or something.”

Jo's smile was sly. “What?” Wy said, on the defensive. She knew that smile.

“Twenty-three flights, huh?” Jo said smugly. “Pretty specific number. Interesting that you remember it so exactly.”

Wy blushed again. The hell with this. She went to the bureau and picked up her hairbrush, yanking it ruthlessly through her shower-tangled curls. “So,” she said in an artificially bright voice. “What are you doing in town, anyway?”

Jo weighed Wy's determination to change the subject, found it inflexible, decided she'd said enough and dropped the subject of Liam. For the moment. “Following up on a story.”

“Oh yeah? What one?”

“I can't say right now.”

Jo's voice was sober, and Wy put down the brush. “Why not?”

Jo saw Wy's expression and made an obvious effort to lighten up. “Because it has to do with government shenanigans at high levels,” she said teasingly. “My specialty.”

“What, theNewsis looking for another Pulitzer?” Wy said, falling in with the new mood. One reason they'd been friends for as long as they had was because they respected each other's boundaries. Another was that they could get mad at each other, secure in the knowledge that neither was going anywhere, no matter how heated-or personal-the debate became.

Jo shook her head. “I'm on my own on this one. A source contacted me with the story. I'm here to talk to him in person.”

Wy's brow creased. “It isn't about the killings, is it?”

“Killings?” Jo's eyes narrowed. “What killings?”

Wy hesitated, but there wasn't any point in not telling her. Like Liam, she was well aware of the efficiency of the Bush telegraph. “Seven people were killed in a boat fire in Kulukak. It might not have been an accident. Not to mention which, I found a-”

“Seven people?” Jo vaulted off the bed. “Jesus! Are you serious?”

“No, Jo, I made it up. Plus I myself just happened to-”

“And not an accident? You mean murdered?”

“Liam thinks so, and by the way, I-”

“Is Liam the investigating officer? Where's your phone? Kitchen, right?” Jo shot out of the room and down the hall, where Wy heard her badgering Tim for the phone. Sighing, she sat on her chaste, full-size bed and put on her socks. One body wasn't much by comparison to seven, she supposed. Still, stumbling across murder victims wasn't something she did on a regular basis. Once every three months was about her average.

She remembered Bob DeCreft, the occupant of the last body she'd stumbled across, and chastised herself, although Bob, the crusty old coot, would have been the first to laugh. She wondered how Laura Nanalook, Bob's daughter, was doing on her own in Anchorage. Well, she hoped. If anyone deserved a break, it was Laura.

Liam. His face rose unbidden before her eyes and she thought of Jo's words. Was it true? Was she so afraid that an actual relationship with Liam would pale in comparison to their affair? She winced away from the idea. She'd never thought of herself as a coward. She flew in Alaska for a living, didn't she? She'd taken on the raising of a twelve-year-old boy with a lot of nasty relatives, hadn't she? She'd returned to Newenham, hadn't she, risking contact with her birth family?

The first time she'd seen Liam he'd been just another uniform. Then, seated next to each other in her plane, on their way to a stabbing northwest of Glenallen, she'd noticed his hands gripping the sides of his seat. His knuckles were white and his face was the same color. Here was this big, tall, strong, good-looking man, an officer of the court, an enforcer of the law. Why did she suddenly feel the need to help him fight his fear? They'd talked about books that day. She'd been reading Barbara Tuchman'sA Distant Mirrorfor the second time, and they'd compared notes on the calamitous fourteenth century, arguing Tuchman's comparison of that century to this.

By the time they landed in Mentasta Lake they were old friends. How could anything be that simple? Nothing else ever in her life had been up to then.

She followed Jo into the kitchen, and found her talking rapidly into the phone as Tim set the table. He folded paper napkins and placed them beneath the flatware, a frown of concentration on his face. He performed the simple task the way he did every household chore, as if getting it wrong meant expulsion from Eden. Compared to what Tim had come from, a place where he'd been beaten regularly and the last time nearly to death, her home probably did seem like heaven on earth.