Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

“Yes,” he said finally. His smile faded. “I did. She's dead.”

“I know that much. And I know our family came from Icky. What I don't know is her name. Mom and Dad would never tell me.” She waited.

He rearranged himself, refolding his legs, and produced a pint of Chivas Regal. Uncapping it, he took a long swallow.

“Moses-”

“Make up your mind, Wy. You either want him or you don't. You don't have much time left. You may have none.”

“What? What does that mean?” She rose to her feet as he did, and followed him to the steps. “Moses, you can't say things like that and then retreat into that goddamn druidic silence of yours! Talk to me!”

“Got me a smart woman in a real short skirt,” he said, winking at her, “or in this case, a pair of really tight jeans. Time I got back to her.” He took another swig from the bottle and headed up the steps.

“Moses?”

Something in her voice halted him halfway up.

“Did you know my father, too?”

There was a long silence, into which crept the sounds of a Bush village waking up: a light plane taking off, the hum of an outboard motor, the start of a truck, bird calls, fish jumping.

“Yes.” He began to climb again.

“Moses?”

He halted without turning around.

“Are you my father?”

He stood for a long time on the makeshift stairs, his back to her, and then he continued up and over the edge of the bluff. Moments later, she heard the engine of his truck turn over, heard it grind into gear, heard it leave the clearing and trundle down her lane to the road.

She stood where she was for a long time, listening, watching, waiting for him to come back. He didn't.

Liam donned his only other clean uniform, also tailored, also immaculately pressed, and boxed up yesterday's for mailing to the dry cleaner in Anchorage.

The post office was open, with a new clerk behind the counter, a young, plump-faced man with a sunny smile and a name tag which read Malachi Manuguerra. Malachi sent Liam's uniform priority mail and chatted about his new baby girl, just a week old that day. Liam dutifully admired the picture of the squinched-up, red-faced mite bundled in hospital white, and from the post office went to the Bay View Inn, Newenham's only hotel. It was a twostory building that looked suspiciously modular, sporting neat green siding with brown trim and a corrugated silver roof. It had been kept up, though; siding and trim were freshly painted and the wooden stairs leading up to the front door had recently had some of their steps replaced. The sun shone benignly down on pansies and nasturtiums planted in two homemade rock gardens, and the windows had that just-washed gleam.

The lobby was empty but for a clerk behind a counter. She was readingThe Celestine Prophecythrough little round glasses that had slid down to the very end of her long, thin nose. Her gray hair was cut closely around her face, and she wore a bright yellow cardigan over an even brighter orange shirt and red polyester pants.

It took him a moment to recover from the glare of the primary colors. “Excuse me.” Sharp eyes the color of wood smoke looked at him over the silver rims of her glasses and took in his uniform. She moved finally, straightening to reveal a tall frame, lean, long-limbedand supple. Norwegian, Liam thought, or Swedish. Scandinavian, anyway. There was a lot of that going around the Bay.

“You're the new trooper.”

“Corporal Liam Campbell.” It was getting easier to say.

She extended a hand, square-shaped, callused and confident. “Alta Peterson. You looking for your new trooper?”

So Prince had found the hotel after all. “She spend the night here?”

“Uh-huh. She left early, though. Said she was going out to the lake, service her plane.”

“Good.”

“She's pretty young for a trooper.” She let the remark lie there, with a question mark hanging over it.

He shrugged. “Maybe a little. She's certainly new to the area, just got in yesterday.”

She surveyed him. “You haven't been here all that long yourself. How are you liking the posting?”

“I like it a lot.” He remembered jumping out of Wy's plane yesterday afternoon, and a sudden grin spread across his face, surprising both of them and making her blink. “Never a dull moment. Alta, is this your hotel?”

She nodded, a positive movement indicative of pride. “My husband and I built it. He was a fisher from Anacortes, came up on his uncle's boat the summer of 1977, and never left. The kids and I came up that fall, and we've been here ever since.”

“How many kids and what kind?”

Alta had a wallet full of pictures on the counter before the last word was out of his mouth. He admired the two sons and the one daughter-“All in school at the University of Washington,” she mentioned with an elaborate disinterest that fooled neither of them-all three tall, blond, blue-eyed Vikings, all with their mother's firm jawline.

“I suppose the boys went on the boat and the girl helped out around the hotel when they were kids,” he suggested.

“You suppose wrong. We were all on the boat at the start,” she retorted. “We lost the boat, though, in 1980, coming back from Dutch Harbor. Peri-that was my husband-decided to take the insurance and build this hotel. That was the time of the big runs.”

“Yeah,” Liam said. Peri, spoken of in the past tense. “I remember reading about them in the newspaper. You could pull in a quarter of a million dollars in reds in one period, you had a big enough boat and an experienced crew.”

“Those were the days,” she agreed, and they both sighed a little, totally fraudulent expressions of nostalgia for a time gone by. After three summers spent kneeling over the edge of a skiff picking reds out of a net, she was perfectly happy to be permanently shore-based, and after spending three months sleeping on theDawn P,he would have been delirious at the news of an apartment for rent on solid ground.

Liam recovered first. “So this is the only hotel in town, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah. We've heard rumors for years that a Best Western was going to come in, but it hasn't happened yet. Lots of bed and breakfasts, though, since the Wood-Tikchik State Park opened up. And the Togiak Wildlife Refuge,” she added, “long as they can afford to hire a float plane.”

Liam studied the countertop with absorption, presenting all the appearance of a man deeply embarrassed to ask the next question but forced by profession to do so. “I imagine you have a few, ah, local customers.” He risked a look and saw that Alta's unblinking stare was back and fixed unwaveringly on his face.

“If there is something you want to ask me, Corporal Campbell, ask,” she said, gathering up her pictures and putting them back in her wallet.

“I'm afraid there is,” he said, still more apologetically.

She drummed her fingers on the counter. “Stop tap-dancing. What is it?”

“I suppose you've heard about theMarybethia.” Beneath lowered lid he watched her reaction.

Her lips tightened, but that was all. “Yes.”

“Did you know the Malones?”

“Yes.”

“Any one of the Malones in particular? Molly, for example?”

Her smile was frosty around the edges. “If, Liam, you want to know if Molly Malone ever spent the night here with a man not her husband, the answer is yes.”

“Ah.” His breath expelled on a long sigh. “Who?”

“That I don't know. I never saw him.”

His brow creased. “Then how do you know she was with anybody?”

“I make the beds.”

“Oh.”

“He wasn't with her when she checked in. She must have let him in the back door because he never came through the lobby. But that girl definitely wasn't sleeping alone the nights she spent here.”