Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

“Liam?” Wy’s voice came to him from far away. “Liam?”

He realized she was standing stock-still, her head cocked as if she were listening. The oars came up and he paused, trying to hear what she did. “What? What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said, and he could hear the tired smile in her voice. “Nothing at all.”

It took him a minute to comprehend what she meant. Sometime, somehow the wind had died down completely. Stopped, as if someone had thrown a switch. The surface of the river had smoothed out, hardly any chop left.

“What happened?” he said, dazed.

“It stopped,” she said, sounding as punchy as he felt. “It stopped.”

One minute later, as if in compensation, they floated into a gloomy soup of fog. It parted grudgingly before them and closed in again greedily behind them as they passed through it, and Liam had the sensation of being swallowed alive. He knew a sudden sympathy for Jonah. Water sloshed at his feet.

Moisture condensed on their faces and hands in tiny droplets. They couldn’t see ten feet in any direction. Liam kept them as close to the bank as he dared. The riverbank undulated in curving S’s, flirting with sandbanks, opening suddenly into the mouths of creeks-the wrong creek, time after time. They heard the sound of an occasional fish jump, the lost cry of a goose, the rustle of brush as something moved through a thicket. No croaking of ravens, though.

“I feel like Charon,” Liam said, his voice hushed.

Her laugh was forced. “Where is Cerberus?”

“That was him before. The wind. Sounded like a three-headed dog howling to me.”

This time her laugh wasn’t quite as forced. “Now that you mention it…”

He could barely see her through the mists that curled between them, a ghostly outline in the bow. To keep her talking, he said, maybe at random, maybe not, “Do you remember your mother?”

“Not much.”

“Was your father around?”

“No.” There was a brief silence. “I don’t remember him at all.”

“Lucky,” he said, thinking of his own father.

Her voice came gently out of the night and the fog. “He’s not that bad, Liam.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.” She didn’t know what he knew about his father and what Colonel Charles Campbell would do, had done, for promotion. She didn’t know why he had made her fly him out to that archaeological dig south of Newenham and west of Chinook Air Force Base when his father had left this summer. Wy had met Charles twice. She didn’t know him the way he did.

“You named your son for him,” her disembodied voice reminded him.

“That was Jenny’s idea.”

“You could have changed her mind.”

“Yeah.” He rowed. “Yeah, I suppose I could have. And the fact that I didn’t says something.”

“He’s your father.”

“Yeah. He is that. Did you ever know who yours was?”

A raven croaked suddenly from overhead and Liam started violently, jerking the oars free of the water. Water splashed, catching both him and Wy. The stern of the skiff started to drift. The dock loomed up suddenly out of the fog, materializing into a dark rectangular shape off the starboard bow.

They both saw it at the same time. “There!”

He pulled for shore with short, powerful strokes, and a moment later they were alongside. Liam shipped the oars while Wy fastened the bowline off to a cleat on the dock. She trotted up the dock, Liam right behind her, and they threaded their way up the path that followed the creek. Moments later they emerged into the clearing and there was the cabin. She paused just long enough to grin at him. “I told you we could make it.”

He kissed her. He hadn’t meant to, but he did it anyway. “I’ll never doubt you again.” He added, following her to the door, “I’ll never fly into a storm with you again, either.”

“I swear I hear voices,” they heard someone say, and the door of the cabin opened as they walked up the steps.

Bill stood there, astonished. “What the hell are you two doing here? And how the hell did you get here?”

Newenham, September 6

“Do you think the wind’s slowing down a little?”

“In the last five minutes since you asked, no.”

“Wy’s going to be seriously pissed if you break her computer.”

Jim spared a glance over his shoulder. “Oh, please.”

Jo, pacing restlessly back and forth across the living room of Wy’s house, glared at the back of his head as he sat hunched over the monitor. “What are you doing, anyway?”

“Destroying your credit rating.”

She halted. “What?”

He grinned at the screen. “Relax, Dunaway, it was joke.”

Suspiciously, she came to peer over his shoulder. “It better be.” She squinted. “For god’s sake. Isn’t that the state troopers’ database?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get in?”

“Talent, Dunaway, loads and loads of talent.” He scrolled down.

“Liam gave you the password.”

He snorted. “The perfect cop breaking faith with his own force? Give me a break.”

“You hacked in?” Jo glanced around nervously, as if expecting the FBI to break down the front door in the next moment. “You can get arrested for that.”

“They’ll have to catch me first.” He turned and they practically bumped noses. For that single moment, time seemed to stop. She could feel his breath on her face. He could see every separate dark blond lash on her eyelids. For a frozen moment, neither of them moved. Bridget and Luke, playing a noisy game of cribbage at the kitchen counter, seemed to fade from the room.

She jerked back, eyes wide with dismay.

“Well, well,” he said, just as startled but quicker to recover.

“Well, well, nothing,” she said. She took what she hoped was an unobtrusive step backward. “I asked you what you were looking at.”

You, he thought. And now that I am, I won’t stop until I get you. But he was a patient man, and there was a time and a place for everything. Not here, not now. But somewhere and soon. “Disappearances,” he said, turning back to the computer.

“Disappearances?” She took a cautious step forward, positioning herself so that she could just barely read the text on the screen over his shoulder, but far enough away to run if she had to. Not that she would, she wasn’t a coward.

“Yeah.”

“What disappearances?”

“Women. Young women. Gone missing. All from the Bristol Bay area.” Unconsciously, she took another step forward, and he smiled to himself when he felt her warmth at his shoulder.

“You mean like Rebecca Hanover?”

“I mean exactly like Rebecca Hanover.” He sat back. The fuzz of her sweater brushed the back of his head. She didn’t notice. He did. “Last night at dinner you were talking about another woman who went missing.”

“Stella Silverthorne.”

“Yeah. Then Wy was talking about the daughter of the postmistress that got killed, what was her name…”

Jo’s reportorial instincts were kicking in, the mental Rolodex whirring, click, stop. “Ruby Nunapitchuk.”

“Yeah.”

“I remember that story. The dad took the kids out hunting, right? Two sons and two daughters?”

“Yeah, and lost one of the daughters.”

“They never found the body.”

“Nope.” He nodded at the screen. “Bill Billington ruled on a presumptive death hearing the following spring. Accidental death due to misadventure. The parents filed an appeal, which was denied.”

“What was the basis of their appeal?”

“You ever talk to a magistrate about presumptive death hearings?”

She shook her head.

“Nobody wants to believe in accidental death. It’s too-it’s too-”