Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

“You catch them? Mamie said you were tailing some hunters going after bear in a closed area.”

Charlene made a disgusted face. “No. I checked all the likely strips but I couldn’t find the plane. I’ll go up again tomorrow, but you know what it’s like. I might as well be on foot, for all the good I can do.” She touched her toes and sat down. “So you want to know about Lydia.”

Charlene and Bill would be her best sources; Prince had known that from the beginning. Bill, as magistrate, would take an impartial, innocent-until-proven-guilty view. Charlene, on the other hand, was a cop. She worked where the human rubber met the road. Cops never took anything on faith, and disbelieved every story that was told them on principle until and unless they could confirm that the story told was fact in all its essentials, and even then remained wary and unconvinced. Cop shops bred skeptics. Skeptics cherished few illusions about human nature, and therefore were seldom disappointed. “Tell me about Lydia,” Diana said.

Charlene linked her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling for inspiration. “Lydia Tompkins. Seventy-four years old. Widow of Stanley Tompkins Sr. Mother of Betsy, Stan Jr., Jerry and Karen. Born in Newenham, went to school in Newenham, married another Newenhammer. Never went farther than Anchorage when she traveled. So far as I know, never wanted to. Had an excellent relationship with her husband.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Charlene laughed. “I’ll bet. Gets along with her children. Stanley Sr. made a lot of money fishing and, unlike most of his fellow Bay fishermen, invested well and left a tidy sum, evenly divided between all concerned. Lydia could have spent a lot more money than she did. You’ve seen her kitchen.”

“Yes.”

“Right out of 1957, isn’t it? We used to tease her that Mamie Eisenhower was going to come walking out of it one day with a plateful of pork chops. She could have afforded to remodel it once every five years, but she said everything still worked.”

“Was she a miser?”

“No, just frugal. She was very generous with her grandchildren. She was very generous with her friends, come to that. She gave the Literary Ladies Christmas and birthday presents every year.” Charlene nodded to a large painting by Byron Birdsall on the wall. A narrow creek crooked its way between snow-covered banks, leading the eye to Denali, gilt in the setting sun. The creek seemed to shimmer with life and the whole painting radiated an inner glow. “I saw that in Artique one year and came home raving about it.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. She was generous to a fault. Especially to her children.”

“How so?”

“Karen and Jerry regularly run out of money. All they had to do was ask.”

“Did fishermen really used to make that kind of money? The kind of money that would set a whole family up for two generations?”

Charlene gave her a tolerant look. “Given the year you came to Newenham, I suppose it’s hard for you to imagine, but yes, salmon fishermen, especially the seiners, used to make that much money. Some of it was luck but mostly it was experience-experience and good equipment. Stanley Sr. had both. He worked deckhand on his father’s gillnetter from the time he was six, according to Lydia. And that was back when the law said you could only fish under sail.”

“No kidding?” Prince had a brief vision of the bay covered with white sails skimming over a deep blue surface.

“No kidding. So, anything else?”

Prince gathered up her notes. “Not for the moment. I’ll call if I think of anything else.”

“Me, too. Diana?”

Prince paused, one hand on the doorknob.

Charlene’s voice remained pleasant and even. “I’d take it as a personal favor if you found this son of a bitch and strung him up by his balls.”

Diana touched the brim of her flat-brimmed hat. “I’ll do my best.”

The phone rang as he was getting out of his blueberry-stained uniform and into the last clean one hanging in Wy’s closet. Since Wy didn’t own a lot of dress-up clothes, most of hers were folded into the dresser drawers and he had most of the closet for his own. It hadn’t been like that with Jenny, a true disciple of the women’s department at Nordstrom. He remembered having to hang his uniforms in Charlie’s closet, and thinking that that would be a problem in fifteen or sixteen years.

He wondered what kind of a teenager Charlie would have been. Probably not as high-maintenance as Tim Gosuk, but you never knew. He’d dealt with enough parents in severe shock at their offspring’s behavior to know that all biological, sociological and anthropological studies to the contrary, much of the time procreating was a crapshoot. He’d read another study recently that claimed that a bad kid in a good neighborhood had a better chance of succeeding in life than a good kid in a bad neighborhood. The author of that study had obviously never been to the village of Ualik, where Tim had gotten his start.

The phone rang. He heard Wy answer it in the living room.

She was upset about something, and it wasn’t his not coming home last night. He’d finally told her that he’d spent the night at the office, and she’d nodded without much interest, her mind obviously elsewhere. He’d expected irritation, even anger. What he hadn’t expected was indifference. It unsettled him.

It made him wonder where Gary had spent the night.

“Liam?”

He buckled his belt and padded out to the living room, snagging his shoes on the way. He tucked the receiver in between his shoulder and his chin and sat down on the couch. “Campbell.”

“Sir, this is Prince. I have interviewed all of Lydia’s book club members.”

“Yeah?”

“No hope there; they were all pretty tight. But she did do some volunteer work down at the Maklak Center.”

The MC on Lydia’s calendar. “Any run-ins with clients?”

“They’re closed for the day. They open again tomorrow at eight.”

“Baloney. Nose around, find out who works there, call them at home.”

“Yes, sir. Also, one of Lydia’s friends thinks she might have had a gentleman caller.”

“A what?”

“A boyfriend, sir.”

Liam remembered the frankly female appraisal in Lydia’s eyes the night they had met. “I wouldn’t bet the farm against it. Got a name?”

“No. One of the Literary Ladies-”

“The who?”

“The book club, that’s what they called themselves. Anyway, one of them saw a bouquet of flowers Lydia got. She said it was a birthday present from a friend, and that she got the distinct impression that the friend was male and that the relationship was romantic.”

“Any indication it was a local guy?”

“No. But Charlene Taylor says Lydia never went farther from Newenham than a Costco run to Anchorage.”

“So a local guy. How did the flowers get here?”

“Sharon-Sharon Ilutsik, the one who saw the flowers-didn’t know, but she figured they were Goldstreaked down from Anchorage. There isn’t a florist in Newenham, and this was a professional arrangement.”

“She remember the date?”

“No, but Lydia said they were a birthday present.”

Liam got his shoes tied and stood up, changing ears. Wy was standing out on the deck, staring across the river. The wind had picked up and was teasing curls out of a fat braid, forming a bronze corona around her head. Clouds, low and thick and dark, were scudding by, and Liam thought he saw a snowflake in the dimming light. “Okay, Diana,” he said, “find out Lydia’s birthday and call Alaska Airlines to check their records to see when the flowers came in. Should have been paid by credit card, if he called it in to Anchorage.”