Dana Stabenow: Better To Rest

“Oh, yeah,” he said lazily, a little later. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it’ll do. I owe you.”

She snickered, buttoning her shirt up cockeyed. “You’ll pay, Campbell. Oh, yeah, you’ll pay. Come on, let’s get out of this bucket and go home.”

“I’ve got to check in,” he said.

“Why?” She almost wailed it.

He stepped from the Cessna and snatched her up into a comprehensive embrace. “Because it’s what I do. Come on.”

They drove to the post in the Blazer, and if the state of Alaska had been peering in the windows it would have been shocked at the behavior going on in the front seat of this vehicle, purchased and maintained for the purpose of enforcing the law and apprehending the violators thereof. Once Liam pulled off and for a few breathless moments Wy feared that they were going to do something Liam could arrest them for. A little farther down the road he drove into the ditch, churned through the snow, uprooted a birch and a couple of alders, and skidded back up on the road. “Keep your hands to yourself next time,” he said severely.

The post, not surprisingly, was empty, since it was nearly four o’clock. “Five minutes,” Liam said, giving Wy a brief, fierce kiss.

Inside, he found Prince’s notes in the computer and scrolled through them. The stuff on Karen was interesting. Mad about something in the will, was she? Something Betsy and Jerry and Stan Jr. got that she wanted? Something even loser Jerry noticed she wanted? Badly enough to confront one of them for it? Bad enough to start a fight over it, and lose?

And no visible means of support and a paid-up mortgage, or what looked like one. Although the Visa bill was odd.

The most likely scenario was that the person who had killed Lydia had killed Karen. Lydia had died of a blow to the head suffered in a struggle that could likely have begun without murderous intent, according to Brillo Pad. Lydia’s death could have been involuntary manslaughter, not murder.

Karen’s death was murder, though. He thought again of her body’s outline on the kitchen floor. A murder that had been made to look as if it had been done by someone caught in the act of robbing the house. Thereby suggesting a stranger. Which, ergo, suggested no such thing.

He sat down at his desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the printer. He penciled a square in the center and labeled it Lydia. He penciled another square just below it, labeled it Karen and connected the two with a line. He made three other squares and labeled them Betsy, Stan Jr. and Jerry, and connected them to Lydia and to Karen.

In the upper right-hand corner he made another square and labeled it the boyfriend and connected it to Lydia.

The boyfriend hadn’t come forward. Could be scared. Could be guilty. Could be nonexistent; witnesses had been wrong before, and Sharon hadn’t seen the boyfriend, only his flowers. Or flowers Lydia said had come from him. Had Prince tracked down those flowers yet? He found a note in the file. She’d called Alaska Airlines Goldstreak; they hadn’t gotten back to her.

He made another box and labeled it blackmailer? and connected it to Karen. Karen lived a pretty high and free lifestyle, according to just about everyone. So far as he could tell, he was the only functional male in the bay who hadn’t slept with her. Ripe for blackmail. Look at that Visa bill, at total odds with the paid-up mortgage and bills. If she had money, and it wasn’t going to pay her Visa bill, where was it going? Except then there was the bank account, a very healthy ten grand. And why would her blackmailer kill her, thereby killing his cash cow? And it wasn’t like she tried to hide what she did, and she didn’t have anyone to hide it from, no husband, no children, and her family didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Odd, that. Lydia was Yupik, at least part, and the Yupik had some of the strongest cultural ties to family that Liam had ever seen. The Three Musketeers could take lessons; it really was all for one and one for all on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River delta. Still, there were dysfunctional families of every race, color and creed. And the Tompkinses weren’t dysfunctional, exactly, just not that close. It wasn’t a sin, it wasn’t all that unusual, and it certainly wasn’t a crime.

He looked at Lydia’s chair, and remembered what Clarence had said over the chessboard. That girl had boys buzzing around like mosquitoes, wanting to suck that juicy little thing dry.

He tried to imagine a teenage Clarence, and failed. He tried to imagine a teenage Lydia, and was more successful. Stan Tompkins Sr. must have been one hell of a guy to come out ahead of the bunch chasing Lydia. She was seventy-four when she had died, which meant she would have been a teenager during World War II. He doodled some numbers. She would have been born in 1926. A kindergartner in 1931, sweet sixteen in 1941, able to vote in 1946.

“Liam?” He looked up and saw Wy yawning in the doorway. “I must have dozed off,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, hell, Wy, I’m sorry,” he said, shoving the grid to one side and standing up. “I started doodling and I lost track of time.”

“It’s okay.” She slid into his lap and tucked her head beneath his chin. Her firm, soft weight felt very sweet. She looked down at the grid. “Oh, you’re doing that square thing you do.” She pulled it toward her. “Lydia was born in 1926? God. I wonder what the world was like then. About all I know is they couldn’t use boats with engines to fish for salmon on Bristol Bay. Plus we were a territory, not a state.”

He stared down at the grid, something tickling at the back of his brain, something he ought to be seeing.

Wy stirred. “She was born in Newenham, right?”

“Yeah. It’s on her birth certificate.”

“She has a birth certificate?”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“A lot of people her age who were born in the Bush don’t have birth certificates. No hospitals and damn few doctors back then. It’s hard for Native elders to get social security sometimes because they can’t prove they were born in the U.S.” Her finger traced the line to the box where he had written Lydia’s milestone dates. “Sixteen in 1941. Wasn’t that the year that C-47 augered into Carryall Mountain?”

He stared at the top of her head.

“I was wondering if you could have seen the crash from town,” she said. “It isn’t that far away, and if it was a clear night…”

“I need to get a new job,” he said.

“What?” She blinked up at him, soft-eyed and sleepy.

“Filing at City Hall ought to be just about my speed.”

“Liam-”

“I love you,” he said, and kissed her hard.

She blinked. “Okay.”

“No, I mean it, I love you, but it’s just that right now I love you because you have the one working brain between us.” All thoughts of sleep vanished and he dumped her unceremoniously off his lap and pulled a fresh sheet of paper to him. “Look.” He drew a grid this time, and put a list of dates down one side. “Lydia was sixteen in 1941. On the night of December twentieth, 1941, a C-47 crashes into Carryall Mountain. Suppose it was clear enough between here and there to see the crash? What would you do if you saw something like that?”

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?”