Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

Home, he was home again, and Elaine had come home with him, was with him, again. That first night was like heaven on earth, renewing her acquaintance with the snug little cabin tucked away at the head of the creek. Hand-hewn logs, sanded to a smooth finish inside and gleaming warmly from years of lovingly applied polish. A high-peaked roof with a loft beneath twin skylights, a large, square bed piled high with soft sheets and a down comforter. A stove with a stained glass door, behind which a banked fire glowed. Two chairs drawn up at either side, hand-hewn like the rest of the furniture from the same logs that built the house, sanded smooth and piled high with cushions in nubby fabrics and muted colors. The simple dining table, a slab of wood lathed and sanded to show the grain of the wood swooping and swirling across the perfectly flat surface, so level a marble dropped upon it would roll to a stop before it fell off the edge.

Outside, a thick stand of spruce and cottonwood crowded the eaves, so that fifty, even twenty feet away the logs, unfinished, unoiled and allowed to fade to a silvery gray, shimmered and shifted between the restless boughs like an illusion, an oasis trembling at the edge of a subarctic dream. From the air, the cabin, nestled between two overlapping ridges in the eastern foothills of the Wood River Mountains, was virtually invisible.

It was a beautiful home, in a beautiful place. How could she not love it? How could she not wish to stay here forever, with him? She’d run away, but he had brought her back, and she had fallen in love with the place again, with him again. He’d had to be firm, of course. She was only a woman after all, gentler, weaker, in need of protection and guidance, but that was what he was for, what men were for, and the strength of a man was measured by his ability to forgive, by his tolerance, his patience.

He smiled at her. “We will live here together, forever.”

She looked at him with wide eyes and was silent, as he had taught her. The silence of the wilderness was a sacred thing, and not to be violated with impunity. The silence called to him in ways no one could comprehend, not even Elaine the fair.

Newenham, September 4

Trooper Diana Prince walked into the post at precisely 8:00A.M. The phone rang at precisely 8:01. “Hey, Princess Di.”

She leaned back in her chair and smiled. “Hey, Nick.”

“Have I told you lately I love you?”

“Let me check my watch.”

He laughed, a low, rich, husky sound, and as sensibly and methodically as Prince had chosen her duty assignment, she did find occasion to regret it now and then, just the tiniest bit. Usually whenever she was on the phone with Nick Schatz, the head ballistics man at the Crime Lab. He’d lectured her class on the fine art of telling which bullet came from which rifle. It remained her favorite week out of the sixteen, although she’d come perilously close to losing her head-of-class standing due to lack of sleep.

“So when you coming to visit me in Anchorage?” he said.

“You still married?”

“Yep.”

“Then I’d better keep my distance.”

“Come on, Diana. You know you want to.”

“I don’t always give myself everything I want.”

“How about what you need?”

The purr of that deep, sexy voice was almost irresistible. Almost. “Sitka was one thing, Nick. Your wife was a thousand miles away. In Anchorage, she might as well be in the next room.”

A brief silence. “What if I came to Newenham?”

She sat up. What was this? “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Maybe the best idea I’ve had all day.”

“And it’s only five after eight,” she said dryly. He laughed again, and she said, “Why did you call? Other than to whip me into a frenzy of sexual frustration.”

“Well, that was my first priority, but as it happens I also have news of an interesting professional nature to relate.”

“Relate away.”

“Those two shotguns you sent me yesterday?”

“Yeah?”

There was a smile in his voice that told her he heard the excitement in her tone. “The Winchester produced a splatter pattern pretty near identical to the pattern on the body you sent Brillo Pad the day before.”

“Yes,” she said, with emphasis.

“God, you’re just so sexy when you’re in hot pursuit.”

“Is it a positive match?”

“Could I swear in court that the Winchester you sent me is the weapon that killed Mark Hanover? Not without a shell casing, and you didn’t recover one from the scene, did you?”

“No.”

He sighed. “Then all I can say absolutely is that the shot that killed Mark Hanover came from a Winchester Field Model, probably a 16339.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, I know, there’s only about ten thousand of those floating around the Bush. Good duck guns. And they’re relatively cheap, I don’t think any one of the Field Models goes for over four, five hundred dollars. Hell, they’re all over Anchorage, too, people buy them for home defense every day. Quicker than calling the cops.”

“Ha ha.”

“Try to find me a shell casing.”

“There wasn’t one, Nick. We searched the area thoroughly.”

“We, that’d be you and Trooper Liam Campbell.”

She smiled at the opposite wall. “Yep.”

Another brief pause. “Good trooper, I hear, until that mess in Denali. He’ll do well in Newenham. Take the hoodoo off that post, Barton says.”

“Yep.”

“Good-looking guy, too. Pity about his wife and kid.”

“Yep.”

“Bitch,” he said without rancor.

She laughed. “Thanks, Nick. Talk to you soon.”

As she hung up the phone, the door opened and Jo Dunaway walked inside with three other people. Before Prince had a chance to stiffen into official press-repulsing mode, Jo said, “Wy and Liam didn’t make it home last night.”

Old Man Creek, September 4

Tim’s first year in Newenham had been fine. He stayed home mostly, except for school. He’d always liked to read, but his birth mother (he’d quickly learned the jargon of the adopted child, especially anything that might hurt his birth mother if she ever came to know of it) had never seen the need. “Go out and play,” she’d said, pulling the book from his hands and shoving his coat at him. Of course, that was usually when his uncle Simeon (or his uncle Curtis or his uncle Jeff) had come over and he was more than happy to leave the house.

The trouble was, he didn’t have a lot of places to go. It was a small village, to which his mother had come with her man thirteen years before. Her man had lived long enough to father a child and then been killed three months later when his snow machine had plunged through an open lead on the Nushagak River. He’d gone up the river to Bright’s Point, where there was a liquor store. This was the return trip. It happened all the time.

Back at Ualik, his grandmother washed her hands of Tim’s unwed mother, and when his grandmother washed her hands of someone, the whole village did, too. Tim was born after twenty-nine hours of hard labor, his mother alone in the shack that was all the worldly goods his father had left her.

His first memory was of being curled up on the cot jammed into one corner of the shack, trembling behind a length of worn chintz suspended from a string tied between two nails, as the shack jolted from the force of blows being struck, bodies falling, people screaming. His mother and his uncle Simeon. Or maybe it was Uncle Felix, or one of his other uncles, it was a long time ago and he couldn’t say for sure. There was a loud, smacking sound and another jarring thump that shook his bed, and silence. He gathered all his courage together and peered around the edge of his makeshift curtain. His uncle was lying stretched out full length on the floor, his head next to the honey bucket. The honey bucket was a tin pail with a sharp rim. It was overturned and the contents spilled across the floor, the piss and shit mingled with the spreading red pool beneath his uncle’s head.