Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

His hands loosened from around Liam’s throat. He rolled to one side to lie on his back on the floor and blink up at the ceiling in a puzzled way.

Wy reached him first, kicking his rifle out of reach. “You son of a bitch!” she said fiercely.

He ignored her, turning his head to look at Rebecca Hanover sprawled in an ungainly heap, only just beginning to blink her way back into consciousness. “Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable,” he said dreamily. “Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat. My own Elaine.”

Behind them, Moses had crawled to Amelia and was cradling her in his arms. Tim knelt at his side, his face white and shocked. Blood had gathered and pooled on the floor beneath all three of them, but it had ceased now to flow.

“Goddamn it,” Moses said, in a tired voice Bill had never heard before. “Goddamn it all to hell.”

He put back his head and yelled, “You have to be right, don’t you, you sons a bitches! You just have to be right!”

Bill put her hands on his shoulders. “Hush, old man,” she said. “Hush now.”

“Goddamn it,” he said again.

He closed his eyes and rested his head on Bill’s breast.

Newenham, September 16

Liam came in at ten that evening. “She found it,” he said flatly, and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Would you like to sleep in the camper tonight?” she said suddenly.

His nose startled out of The Lost Wagon, Tim looked up from where he was curled on the couch and said, “What?”

“Sleep in the camper tonight,” she said. “That’s an order.”

He looked toward the bathroom, and when he spoke she could have wept at the effort it took him to make the joke. “What’s it worth to you?”

“A smack upside the head,” she said, grabbing for him.

He hot-footed it out of reach, not quite smiling but nearly there. He loved sleeping in the trailer, having his own little self-contained house around him.

She eased the bathroom door open and slipped inside. Liam was outlined behind the curtain, hands propped on the wall on either side of the shower head, head bent beneath the stream of steaming water. She stripped and stepped into the tub behind him.

He jumped when he felt her hands on him, but he was instantly responsive. He tried to turn, tried to reach for her, and she wouldn’t let him. It was part seduction, part subjugation and part the staking of a claim. He recognized it for what it was and the sum of all its parts, and he let her have her way with him.

She made him a late supper of cold moose roast sandwiches and Corona, and then they made love again on the living room couch, a fire in the fireplace and the curtains open to the river and sky. “My turn,” he murmured.

“Do your worst,” she whispered, lying back.

“God,” he said later, “the worst day fucking is better than the best day fishing.”

She shoved him off the couch and he landed smack on his bare ass, yelping and laughing. She hung over the side, looking at him. “Can you talk about it now?”

“Yeah.” The laughter faded. He climbed back up on the couch and snuggled next to her. Her hair was a wild tangle that tickled his nose, and her elbow was jabbing uncomfortably into his chest. He cupped a palm around her breast and trailed a finger down her spine. Her thigh was between his and pressed up against him, his was pressed against her. Marking their spots. He could live with the elbow and the tickly hair.

“We were about to pack it in for the day, but she insisted we stay out as long as there was light to see by. She spotted it up this canyon, nearly a ravine, totally overgrown. We couldn’t have made it in a plane.”

“No strip?”

“No strip. He liked his privacy, the sick little bastard. Search and Rescue had to set the chopper down nearly a mile out. We hiked in, and it wasn’t easy. I don’t know how she got away.”

“She told us. Windex.”

A faint laugh rumbled up out of his chest. “Right. Your all-purpose cleaner and killer deterrent.”

She trailed a fingertip down the crack of his behind, and he twitched, distracted, as she had meant him to be.

“Guy’s a master builder, I’ll say that for him. Everything hand-hewn, fitted together like pieces of a puzzle. And literally invisible from the air. You couldn’t even see the smoke rising from the chimney.”

“Fine, he can bid on the addition to Spring Creek. That ought to be a lifetime guarantee of work.”

“If he doesn’t get off by reason of insanity.”

“He couldn’t. They wouldn’t!”

He said nothing.

After a moment, she said, “Were there twelve graves, like she said?”

His chest rose and fell on a sigh. “Yes. There wasn’t time to dig them up this afternoon. We logged the location on the GPS. We’ll go back tomorrow with shovels and body bags.”

He rolled over, pinning her to the back of the sofa, nudging her legs apart to slide smoothly home. Something between a gasp and a moan caught in the back of her throat, and he smiled at her. “Why is it we’re screwing around on this couch when there is a perfectly good bed in your bedroom?”

“You tell me,” she whispered back, and pushed back, rolling so that she was on top. She rode him, she rode him hard, so that his only thought, at least for those precious few minutes, was of her and only of her, and when he came she was watching, waiting for it, and she whispered, “I love you, Liam,” and followed him over.

The next day Liam returned to the perfect little cabin in the perfect little canyon. They disinterred the bodies, one beneath each of the wooden markers. There were no years carved into the markers, only the name and the line of verse, repeated twelve times, barely legible on the earlier markers, crisp and clean around the edges on the more recent ones.

They found a small arsenal in a concealed locker in the crawl space beneath the cabin, one that appeared to have been acquired along with the victims. The BAR Hairy Man (the killer was resisting all attempts at identification) was carrying at Old Man had been registered three years before in Cheryl Montgomery’s name. A twenty-two pistol was eventually proved to have been the weapon that killed Opal Nunapitchuk; later another of the victims’ parents identified it as having belonged to the victim’s grandmother, who had given it to her granddaughter on her twenty-first birthday. There was a Winchester Field Model 16339 shotgun, and Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak were released into the relieved arms of their families.

When they had the bodies loaded and were ascending once again into the air, Liam looked his last on the cabin, now engulfed in flames. He glanced at the woman sitting beside him, who had insisted on accompanying them that day. He had protested, but Wy had said, “She earned it, Liam. Let her go.”

Rebecca had started the fire herself, on the floor in the middle of the cabin with a Firestarter log and a match. The wood, seasoned over thirty years, spread fast and burned hot, reaching up with greedy fingers to engulf first the walls and then the roof. He supposed he should have stopped her doing it, but he hadn’t, and it was beginning to rain anyway, a gentle pattering on the bracken. A heavy gray layer of clouds building between the surrounding peaks promised more on the way.

None of them, in fact, had tried to stop her. They stood behind her, almost at attention, an honor guard, watching the flames lick across the floor, catch at the walls, crawl to the ceiling.

“Are you all right?” he said to her as the helicopter hovered over the canyon.

She looked at him. “I want to go home now.”

“You heard the lady,” he said over his headset.