Dana Stabenow: Nothing Gold Can Stay

She’d also had a thing going with Liam’s father during Charles’ visit to Newenham in July, but that was something Liam preferred not to think about if he could possibly avoid it, which he couldn’t. It was hell when your father’s sex life was better than your own. Although that wasn’t the case now, he thought, and had to repress that grin again. “How did they wind up stuck in Elizabeth’s window?”

“Near as they can remember, they thought it would be a dandy idea to serenade her. When she didn’t come out, understandable as she was stocking shelves at AC at the time, they decided to crawl in. They made it halfway, and passed out cold.”

Liam didn’t bother to hide the grin this time. “Must be a little window.”

“Nah. Both Art and Dave could stand to lose a little weight.”

“Why didn’t the local police respond to it?”

“Roger Raymo’s in Anchorage testifying at trial, and Cliff Berg just pulled a thirty-six-hour shift and his wife says he’s in bed and staying there.”

“Where have you got them?”

“Over to the city jail.”

“You going to arrest them?”

She looked surprised. “Of course. Drunk and disorderly, breaking and entering, resisting arrest.”

“Art Inga resisted arrest?”

Prince grinned. “Well, I don’t think he would have if Dave hadn’t shoved him so hard he fell backwards out of the window when I woke them up. He did come up swinging, though.”

Liam hung up his hat. “Is Elizabeth pressing charges?”

“She was kind of lukewarm about it at first, but then Art tried to kiss her, and since he’d thrown up at some point during the night on the floor beneath her window, she wasn’t pleased.” She saved the file and hit the print button. He motioned her up and out of his chair and took her place. The printer coughed into awareness and he reached over to turn it off before it began to print.

“Sir?”

Liam sat back. “There’s the letter of the law, Prince, and there’s the spirit. Art Inga and Dave Iverson have been in love with Elizabeth Katelnikoff since all three of them were in high school together.”

“So?”

“So she can’t make up her mind, she goes out with one and then the other and then switches back and then switches back again.”

“What’s that got to do with them breaking into her house?” Prince demanded. “They did break into her house. Sir.”

“Yes, they did, but this charge will never make it to trial. Elizabeth will never testify against them, and besides, you won’t get an arrest warrant out of Bill because she’ll laugh you out of her bar first.”

A short silence. “Drunk and disorderly?” she said, almost pleadingly.

“Sorry.” Liam shook his head, and deleted Prince’s report. “Unless Tatiana made a complaint?”

Reluctantly, she shook her head.

Liam cocked an interrogatory eyebrow.

There was a brief pause.

“Hell,” Prince said.

“Relax,” Liam said dryly, “you had eight solved murders on your record before you’d been in town a week.”

“I know,” she said glumly.

“Even somebody named for Wonder Woman ought to be happy with that.”

“Up yours,” she said, still glum.

He grinned at her. “We’ll try to scare up another one for you sometime soon.”

Later, he would remember saying those words, and curse himself for a fool. Now he said, “Anything else?”

“Yeah, the phone was ringing when I walked in the door. Some guy, name of Montgomery, looking for-”

“Lyle Montgomery, looking for his daughter,” Liam said with a sigh, and glanced at the calendar. First of September, first of the month. Right on schedule.”

“You know him?”

“He’s got a daughter missing. Name of Cheryl.” Liam opened one of the desk drawers and rummaged through it, producing a file. “She was canoeing alone through the Wood-Tikchik State Park. Finn Grant dropped her off at the Four Lakes Ranger Station. She had a full load of supplies, plus the canoe. The rangers gave her a map and the standard warnings. She left around noon of that day, with the stated intention of camping her way up to Outuchiwenet Mountain Lodge. She had scheduled a fly-out from there with Grant at noon two weeks from the day he put her down.”

“And she didn’t show?”

“No.”

“When was that?”

“August.”

“Just last month?”

“No, that’s the problem. August 1997.”

“Oh.” Prince was silent for a moment. “And her father’s been calling ever since?”

“He’s called the first of the month every month since I got here. I assume he had been doing so before. Corcoran didn’t stick around long enough after I showed up to fill me in.”

“Doesn’t it say in the file?”

He took a last look at the photograph stapled inside the folder. She was a looker, Cheryl Montgomery, a long fall of straight fair hair, large blue eyes with ridiculously long lashes, a dimple in her right cheek. Born in Juneau, a graduate of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, she had been a wildlife biologist working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Anchorage. Twenty-six years old. A daughter who at the very least deserved a phone call once a month.

Just another overconfident backpacker swallowed up by the Alaskan wilderness. He closed the file and tossed it to Prince. “Corcoran wasn’t into keeping up with the paperwork. I talked to John Barton about it, and he said the family was all over the Wood-Tikchik for four months. They fought us suspending the search. And they fought the presumptive death hearing.”

“And now her father calls us the first of every month, checking to see if we’ve found her.”

“Yeah.”

Prince closed the file and tossed it back. “Okay, you can be boss.”

“Gee, thanks,” Liam said, but he knew what she meant. Next to domestic disputes, reporting deaths to surviving family and friends was the law officer’s least favorite job.

The phone rang and they were called out to a shooting at a home eleven miles up the road to Icky, which turned out to be an accidental discharge by a thirty-six-year-old man who shot himself in the hand with a.401 shotgun while taking it down from an overcrowded gun rack. His five-year-old daughter had been standing next to him at the time, and had caught some buckshot in her shoulder. Joe Gould, Newenham’s local and it would seem only paramedic, judging from the many crime scenes where Liam had encountered him, was already there, soothing the girl with a cherry Tootsie Roll Pop as he picked pellets out of her shoulder with surgical tweezers. She was sitting on her mother’s lap. The mother would occasionally glare over her shoulder at the father, who sat in a corner, largely ignored, weeping and wailing over a hand that would never pull the trigger on a weapon again.

Prince got the story out of the man (between sobs) and observed to Liam, “I’d call this a violation of basic safety rules, wouldn’t you, sir?”

“I would, and I’d arrest him for it, too,” Liam said, so they did and brought him before Bill for arraignment. Bill flayed what skin the guy had left with a blistering indictment of his lack of judgment, and they delivered him into the tender hands of Mamie Hagemeister at the local jail, who turned out to be a bosom buddy of the guy’s wife and godmother to his daughter. They found out later that she didn’t feed him for two days.

Meanwhile, back at the post, the door opened and a woman walked in. She was short, with the thick-waisted build of the Bay Yupik. Her eyes were dark and narrow, her expression wary. She was dressed in shabby slacks and a windbreaker, wore no makeup, and her long black hair was clean and neatly combed.

Prince strode forward, every inch the trooper. “Yes, ma’am? How may we help you?”