Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

“I am really, really tired,” Wy said. “You’re going to have to explain better than that.”

“Okay, try this on for size. It’s December twentieth, 1941. Nineteen forty-one, hell, I didn’t even think of that! Pearl Harbor was attacked ten days before. We were at war, and Alaska was way too close to Japan. They practically started building the Alaska Highway the next day.”

“I still-”

“Think a minute!” He actually gave her a little shake. “The attack had been ten days before, and it was so kick-ass that the military from Nome to San Diego was expecting an invasion at practically any moment. They would have alerted every American coastal community on the Pacific Ocean to be on the watch.”

“So, if somebody saw the C-47 go into the mountain, they might have thought it was the beginning of an invasion?”

“Why not? The blood wasn’t dry from Pearl. Midway hadn’t happened yet, and Japan looked invincible. So say a guy was out with a girl-Clarence told me the big deal was to get hold of a truck and drive your girl and your friends and their girls to Icky and have an all-day party on the beach at One Lake. That’s forty miles closer to Carryall Mountain and Bear Glacier.”

“An all-day party on the beach at One Lake,” she said, considering. “I hate to rain all over your parade, Liam, but I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“It was December.”

“Oh. Oh. Well, hell. Okay, maybe not. Damn it.” He couldn’t stand it; he had to pace. He rose to his feet and began to quarter the office. “Okay, then they saw it from Newenham.”

“Liam, I’m willing to stipulate that they saw the plane go in. They weren’t that long out of Nome and they were probably pretty heavy with fuel, so it probably went off with one hell of a bang. I just don’t know,” she said pointedly, “what all this has to do with Lydia.”

“If I’m right, it has everything to do with Lydia. Listen, Wy.” He sat down again and pulled a third sheet of paper toward him. “Here is Lydia, sweet sixteen, out on a date with one of her many swains.” He drew two boxes, one Lydia, one swain. “It’s evening-what did they say; they think the plane went in around midnight. Maybe they’re parking and making out.”

“Did they make out in 1941?”

“Then boom ! and fire on the mountain. They’re curious, so they go take a look. The plane is a total loss, but something has been thrown clear.”

“What?”

He looked at her. “Gold.”

She snapped her fingers. “The coin!”

“What if there were more of them?” He drew another square and put all Lydia’s kids inside it. “One thing that’s been bothering me, all the Tompkinses have enough money not to work. I know the bay used to be a bonanza for salmon fishermen, but I don’t see anyone else in Newenham with a lifestyle like theirs. Most of the old-timers, their houses are paid off and some of them their boats, but they’re still out there hustling for anything with fins that swims into range. Lydia, yes, I could understand her being provided for, but the kids, too, and so well? Well, what if the money came from Lydia, not Stan Sr.? What if it came from what she and her date found at the crash site?”

“She could have gone up there alone.”

“Then she’d still be alive.” He sat back. “And then, sixty years later, the wreck resurfaces. I bring the arm to Bill’s and everybody sees the coin.”

Wy was still puzzled. “I still don’t understand. Why was Lydia killed?”

He was sitting in Lydia’s chair, and he thought of her again as he had seen her the evening he met her, feisty, strong, independent, with a bawdy eye and a fearless spirit. “Maybe she wanted to tell the truth, that they’d stolen the gold from the crash site. Maybe he didn’t want her to.”

“Who, Liam? Do you know who?”

He looked down at the sheet of paper, and traced over the outline of the box marked swain.

“Yes,” he said.

“I love younger men,” Jo said, bouncing into Wy’s house an hour later. “Give your friend Mr. Wiley my compliments, and tell him I said so.”

“First thing on my list,” Liam said.

Jo peered at Wy. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“So do you,” Wy said, and shoved a cup of coffee at her and another one at Liam.

Jo perched on the stool next to Liam’s. “Your father is a piece of work,” she told him.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” he said before he thought, and then scowled away any lingering trace of willingness to discuss his father with the press, or with anyone, for that mattter.

Jo sipped her coffee, looking at him over the rim of her mug. “He came here planning on retrieving that C-47.”

Liam sent Wy a warning glance, and shrugged. “So? Like he said, the air force brings back its own. Nothing new or wrong in that.” He kept his inevitable reflections to himself.

“This wasn’t an ordinary crash,” Jo said. “I just got off the phone with a friend in D.C. This wasn’t an ordinary crew on board this flight, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“The copilot’s name was Aloysius March.”

Liam and Wy exchanged glances. “That name supposed to mean something to us?”

“Aloysius March was Walter March’s father.”

“And Walter March is…?”

Jo huffed out an impatient sigh. “How the hell am I supposed to make a living if my own friends won’t read my own paper?” Snit over, she smiled, and it was a low-down, mean, dirty, nasty little snake of a smile. “Gen. Walter March is the nominee for chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force.”

They absorbed that in startled silence. “So Dad’s going after his boss’s dad’s body,” Liam said. “Sucking up to the n th degree, one more step up on the career ladder, but so what?”

“He’s using air force funds to do it.”

“I’m shocked-shocked-to hear of misappropriation of funds going on in the U.S. armed forces,” Liam said, very dry.

Wy agreed. “I don’t see the big scandal here. Like he said, he’s going after three of their own. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, frankly. I think it’s kind of, I don’t know, right. We’re still looking for the bodies of American servicemen in Vietnam. We should be. How is this any different, other than being a different war?”

Jo added half-and-half to her coffee. “I don’t think recovering the bodies of the honored dead is what this is about, Wy.”

“Why not? Why does it have to be any more complicated than that? Honest to God, Jo, you see more conspiracies than John Birch.”

“Maybe you’re right, Wy, maybe I’ve been in the newspaper game too long, I can’t see the simple truth when it’s staring me in the face. But I don’t think so. Not this time, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because I asked my friend to pull the service records of the three crew members.”

“And?”

“And he couldn’t. They’re listed as classified.”

Moses’ side of the bed was empty when Bill woke up. She found him down at the bar when she got there, back in the office growling at the computer. “If this keeps up, I’m going to hire you to keep the books,” she told him.

“I’d rather spend the rest of my life listening to Puff Daddy,” he said. “Look at this.”

She came around the desk to look over his shoulder. “Oh, man. Are you back at that?”

“I think it’s important.”

“Think, or is something telling you so?”

He leaned back. “I’m telling you, babe, there’s nothing going on here except my nose is itching.”

“I can fix that,” she said.

He dodged her hand. “Where’s the coin?”