Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

For four months everything was wonderful. The overwhelming ache of loneliness receded, and Lydia astonished Eric by showing him that he was still interested in sex. They left Newenham separately and met in Anchorage for the Fourth of July holiday; she stowed away on the Mary M. and they motored down to Chichagof Cape and back one sunny July week; they went over to Egegik to his grandmother’s fish camp and skinny-dipped in the lagoon like they were kids again. It was a halcyon four months.

And then he had to go and ruin things by proposing. She wouldn’t marry him. She didn’t want to marry again, not after Stan.

That was when he realized that Lydia really had loved Stan, that she had most probably never loved him. That was when he realized that Betsy probably was Stan’s child, after all. That was when he realized that Lydia hadn’t waited even a month after he’d joined up before she slept with another man.

He still loved her, but sneaking around, as fun as it had been in the beginning, didn’t look attractive in the long term. Marriage or nothing, he said. Nothing, she said.

“That was when you went on the toot,” Moses said. “We all thought it was some kind of delayed reaction from Mary dying.”

Drunk seemed to be the easiest way to get through it, so Eric did his best to drink the town dry. Even that wasn’t enough.

Then they found the wreck of the C-47. And the arm. And the gold coin. The memory of the night the plane had crashed and he and Lydia had hiked up the glacier returned full-force. He’d forgotten it, until he saw the coin.

He went to her house and told her. Maybe we should tell, she said. No, he said. He was a town councilman, a city father; he had the respect of everyone in Newenham. You did until you fell down a bottle, she said. He slapped her. She slapped him back, and called him names. He grabbed her and shook her, and she fought and pulled away and tripped and fell against the counter. He was just trying to calm her down, trying to talk some sense into her. And then she was dead.

“Why did she want to tell about the gold?” Liam said.

Eric looked at Moses. “You know what she was like. A good woman, a righteous woman. She said we stole that gold. She said she’d sold the coins to a collector Outside to finance Stan’s first seiner. She said her family was rich because of that gold, and that her children were ruined because of it. I think she thought if we told that it would reverse things somehow. I don’t know how. It wasn’t like we could give it back. We never knew who it belonged to in the first place, and Lydia said it was illegal for people to own gold back then so we’d never be able to find out.”

“What about Karen?” Moses said.

Eric hung his head. “She knew about the gold. She’d heard her mother talking to her father when she was little. All she heard was that her mother and me had found some gold when we were kids, and she decided there had to be some left, and that I knew where it was. She wanted some, and she called me to meet her at her mother’s house.”

“And you strangled her.”

“She said such hateful things, things about her mother. Things about how her mother slept around with a hundred men and how I shouldn’t think I was anything special. And then she got into details. Things about how when she was short of cash Lydia was too busy spending money on her men to give her daughter any. How Lydia had written her a check for five thousand and said that was the last of it. Then she started in again on the men, and what she’d seen Lydia and Stan Sr. doing when she was a kid. And there we were, standing in the kitchen of her own mother, the woman I loved.”

The woman you murdered, Liam thought.

“I was trying to rip her tongue out, tell you the truth. There was no bearing it. She had a mouth on her, that girl.” He clasped tough, stringy hands together on the table. “She just wouldn’t shut up. So I shut her up.”

The three men sat in silence. Outside, snow was falling softly in big fat flakes. Snow had a quality of hush like no other, Liam thought, a muting, calming influence. Peace.

“How did you know we flew up to Anchorage last night?”

“What?” Moses said.

Eric looked sheepish. “Oh, hell. I was in the bar when Wy called Bill to come stay with her boy. I figured it’d be easy enough to take a shot at you on the way home. I know the flight path for the approach into the Mad Trapper; I live right under it. I took the skiff across the river and…” He shrugged and dropped his head.

Moses shot to his feet and began slapping Eric’s head, open-palmed slaps with the full force of his arm behind them. “You old fuck! You were shooting at my granddaughter!” He started slapping with both hands. “Get on your feet! Get up! Get up, goddamn it, so I can take a decent shot at you!”

Eric cringed away.

“Goddamn you, Cal, we’ve known each other since high school! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Moses. Moses. Moses!” Liam came around the table and pulled Moses away. “Knock it off. Just calm down, now.”

Moses backed down, fuming.

Perfect peace, all right.

“You called him Cal,” Liam said.

“It’s his name,” Moses snapped. “Calvin Eric. We called him Silent Cal in school, when we were studying Coolidge.”

The SC on Lydia’s calendar. Silent Cal.

“Calvin Eric Mollberg, I’m arresting you for the murders of Lydia Tompkins and Karen Tompkins. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney…”

“Sad,” was Wy’s verdict.

“Pitiful,” Liam said. “You know what I hate?”

They were lying in Wy’s bed, the infamous twin-size bed that was too short for Liam on both ends and too narrow for both of them to sleep in side by side. It wasn’t a problem for either of them at the moment, but Wy had a feeling it was right around the corner. “What do you hate?”

“I hate stupidity. I hate incompetence. I hate ignorance, and ineptitude, and all those other words that begin with ‘I’ that denote idiocy. For crissake, Wy. The man’s seventy-five years old, he’s lived a mostly blameless life, he was a good husband, a good father, a goddamn pillar of his community. Now he gets to spend what’s left of his life locked up with a bunch of drug dealers and child molesters and, of course, his fellow murderers. I mean, Jesus! Can you see him in a cell with Gheen?”

She tucked herself more securely into the curve of his body. “I don’t think they’re going to put anybody in with a serial killer, Liam.” Although she had liked Lydia a lot and it wouldn’t have hurt her feelings if the Alaska Department of Corrections in their infinite wisdom had decided that Gheen and Eric Mollberg were destined as cellmates.

“And Lydia. Goddamn it. I liked her. Hell, I think I was halfway in love with her. I told you about her beaning Harvey with the jar of tomatoes, didn’t I?”

“About five times. And they were sun-dried tomatoes.”

“She was a great old gal. She flirted with me. Seventy-four and the juices were still running. And come to find out she’s who she is because she’s a grave robber.”

Wy had known Lydia some, enough that Lydia had offered her a place in the Literary Ladies book club, but Wy’s job kept her in the air so much she would have missed meetings the entire summer. She had declined, but every now and then she’d run into Lydia at the post office and they’d trade titles. “I liked her.”

“Everybody liked her. A lot of people loved her. Some downright lusted after her, even after she was a grandmother, too. Doesn’t mean what she did was right.”

Wy had spent more time in the Bush than Liam had. “Someone would have come along and taken it.”