Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Dana Stabenow

  She pulled away. “I’m the councilman’s wife,” she said, enunciating her words with care.

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re the councilman’s wife,” Moses said, and stood up to grab her and muscle her into a chair. “You’re not gonna arrest her,” he told Liam shortly, “and you’re not gonna charge her,” he said to Bill, “so don’t stand around with your thumbs up your asses like you are.”

  “You have an alternative suggestion?” Bill said, irritated.

  “She’s going to hurt herself eventually, Moses,” Liam said.

  “She did that when she married the jerk,” Moses replied.

  Liam remembered the evening in Bill’s in May, the first day he met the shaman, when Amelia and Darren had come to Moses for his blessing. Moses, drunk and verbally abusive, had withheld any such thing, and at the time Liam had thought him harsh. “The problem is, she might hurt somebody else at the same time,” he said now.

  “I’ll handle it,” Moses said.

  “How?” Bill said.

  “I said I’ll handle it!”

  Bill refused to be outshouted. “HOW?”

  Moses glared at her. “I’ll take her up to fish camp, dry her out, talk some sense into her.”

  If it were possible for Bill to pout, she would have pouted. “But you just got back.”

  Moses’ expression changed. “Turn the bar over to Dottie and Paul, and come with.”

  Bill stood very still for a moment, and then leaned across the bar and swept Moses into a lavish kiss, to which he responded wholeheartedly.

  Liam examined the king net hanging from the ceiling for holes and found it in himself to be grateful there was a bar between Moses and Bill. For two people who were older than God and who woke up nearly every morning in the same bed, their enthusiasm for each other never seemed to wane.

  He thought of Wy, of waking up in the same bed every morning with her, and found himself looking forward to being older than God himself.

  Bill pulled back, her face flushed. “Well, fish camp ain’t New Orleans, but it’s not a bad second best.”

  Moses responded with what could only be described as a salacious grin. “We’ll have to boat you home, lady, because you won’t be able to walk.”

  When Liam got to the post, Prince was already there and in his chair, typing up a report. He nodded at the computer. “What have you got?”

  She made a face. “Elizabeth Katelnikoff got off the night shift at AC this morning at eight a.m. like she always does, and got home to find Art Inga and Dave Iverson wedged into the window of her bedroom, half in, half out.”

  “What, they were stuck?”

  “You could say that,” Prince said, considering the matter with judicial impartiality. “Seems they’d had a little too much to drink last night at a party at Tatiana Anayuk’s. You know about the permanent party at Tatiana’s, don’t you?”

  “Been invited a time or two.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” said Prince, who’d only been assigned to Newenham two months before, but appeared to be integrating into the local population without strain. “Anyway, Art and Dave decide they’re both in love with Elizabeth and fight a duel to see who gets her. Tatiana-who was not happy to be woken up at ten this morning, and from whom you may receive a complaint later today-says nobody won, and after that she closed the party down.”

  “What time?”

  “About four a.m., she said. Art and Dave staggered off, she thought down to their boat in the harbor.”

  “But no,” Liam said.

  “But no,” Prince agreed. She was a tall, lithe woman with deep blue eyes and short dark curls. She was slim enough to look good in a uniform, and on duty, at least, had a crisp, formal manner that did little to conceal her enthusiasm for the job. Fresh out of the academy, she was ready, willing and eager to serve and to protect, preferably at gunpoint.

  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 stand
ard 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?”

  The woman pulled a piece of paper from her windbreaker pocket. “I have this court order,” she said. “From Anchorage.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?” Prince said, and took the paper.

  “Natalie Gosuk,” the woman replied, and Liam stopped lounging back in his chair and sat up straight. “That paper says I get to see my son.”

  Prince finished reading the order. “Yes, it does,” she said, and passed it off to Liam.

  He scanned it briefly. Judge Renee Legere had signed the order. It was legal, all right. He folded the order and handed it back to Natalie Gosuk, taking his first real look at the woman. She wasn’t saying much, letting the court order speak for her. She kept her eyes lowered, but the curve of her mouth was set and resentful.

  Four times she’d been accused of assaulting a minor child, and Judge Legere had allowed visitation anyway. It was so easy in Anchorage, looking at the perp across a room, a perp cleaned up and sobered up and scared into something approaching civil behavior, it was so easy to judge them human and worthy of the rights of other humans, of second, third, fourth, fifth chances, and besides, the jails were all full. So what if she smacked her kid around a little? She was rehabilitated, look at her standing there next to her lawyer, all neat and tidy and vowing repentance and an ache in her heart for the son lost to her.

  Out here, where the human rubber met the road, there was a different view. Here one lived next to the victims, broken, bleeding, bloodied, terrified, most of them so intimidated they couldn’t even be brought to testify.

  Since it didn’t look like he was going to say anything, Prince stepped in. “Was there a problem with the order, Ms. Gosuk?”

  “She won’t let me see him.”

  “Who won’t?”

  “The woman my son lives with. She won’t let me in the door of the house. I want you to make her let me in.”

  Prince looked at Liam. When he said nothing, she asked the woman, “Have you shown her this document?”

  Natalie Gosuk hesitated. “Not yet.”

  “Show it to her,” Prince advised. “If she won’t let you see the boy, come to us.”

  “This paper says she has to,” Natalie Gosuk insisted.

  “Yes,” Prince said. “It does. Limited, supervised visitation. It means you can see him but you can’t take him out of the house and you can’t see him alone.”

  The woman’s eyes shifted. “They told me.”

  “Call us if you have any trouble.”

  The door closed behind her with a soft sigh. Prince looked at Liam. “Domestic disputes,” she said with loathing. “God, how I hate them. Give me an old-fashioned ax murder any day.” He remained silent. “Whose kid was she talking about, do you know? Who’s the ‘she’ in ‘she won’t let me see him’?”

  Liam looked at Prince. “Go on down to the jail and give Art and Dave a talking-to and turn them loose.”

  “We could leave them where they are until their twenty-four is up.” Suspects had to be released after twenty-four hours if no arrest warrant had been sworn out against them.

  He pointed a finger at her. “Better.” He stood and reached for his hat. “I’ve got a few errands to run. I’ll take lunch and then come back and relieve you for yours.” He paused at the door and grinned at her. “Monthly report’s due today.” She groaned, and he added, “Hey, I’m the corporal, you’re the trooper. Low man does the paperwork.”

  The answering smile on her face faded as soon as the door closed behind him, and Prince was left to wonder what had produced the lines of strain around her boss’s eyes, lines that hadn’t been there when he first walked in the door.

  THREE

  Nuklunek Bluff, September 1

  John Kvichak and Teddy Engebretsen had been sworn companions since kindergarten. They’d studied grammar together beneath the beady eye of Mrs. Johnson in the fourth grade, stood shoulder to shoulder against the bully boys in the seventh grade, they’d lusted after the same girls in high school and they’d graduated together attired beneath their caps and gowns in the same jeans and gray sweatshirts, ready to party as soon as the diplomas were given out and the caps tossed into the air. They fished salmon together, hunted caribou and moose together, trapped beaver together. When they reached legal age, they drank together. It was said in Newenham, their home
town, that they would never marry because they could never find a woman capable of putting up with both of them, and although the saying began as a joke, there was probably some truth to it.

  They owned a drift netter together now, theIsabella Rose, named for both of their mothers. Isabella, Teddy’s mom, won the coin toss for whose name came first. Rose, John’s mom, took it well, frying up a panful of bread and bringing it down to the christening. Of course, it was all charred to a crisp. Isabella laughed and laughed, and made John and Teddy eat up every bite.

  Each fall, after the fishing season was over and theIsabella Rose was hosed down and put into dry dock for the winter, John and Teddy would go hunting together in the Wood River Mountains. They concentrated on moose and caribou, but took time out on occasion to bring out the shotguns and go for geese, ptarmigan and spruce hens.

  Neither one of them was a pilot, so they chartered Wy Chouinard to fly them into their preferred hunting area, the long, level plateau between the broad plain that sloped down into the Nushagak River in the east and the Wood River Mountains in the west, where a small but fecund herd of caribou fattened on lichen, where the occasional moose wandered up the narrow chasms and canyons. Birdlife was plentiful, and one year Teddy even brought down a brown bear with a beautiful coat, which now hung in a place of honor on his mother’s living room wall.

  So long as they stayed sober they were responsible hunters, harvesting what they killed, packing out the meat, taking no more than they could eat in a winter, in no way giving Newenham’s fish and game trooper Charlene Taylor cause to arrest them for violating the wanton waste law.

  They had, however, come to feel somewhat proprietary about the bluff: the Kvichak-Engebretsen Private Hunting Preserve. Hikers and campers, thinking they were well within the boundaries of the Wood River-Tikchik State Park, had occasionally run across John and Teddy’s path and been apprised of their error. Once a couple had returned from a hike up Kanuktik Ridge to find their tent slashed and all their belongings scattered in the creek. “Could have been a bear,” Charlene told Liam. Two others had had their canoe shot out from under them on Three Lake. “Probably not a bear,” Liam told Charlene. A group of Great White Hunters in the tender care of Dagfinn Grant had been in hot pursuit of a bull moose sporting what looked like a record rack when suddenly gunshots fired from an unknown source had spooked the bull, who was last seen heading across the Middle Fork at a clip that would put a four-wheeler to shame.