Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Dana Stabenow

  She had never felt so isolated, so abandoned, so alone.

  She looked at her palette, a paper plate with piles of beads, seed, square, frosted, tubular, in shades of green and purple and gold.

  “Say it,” she said out loud. “So bored.” She looked at the piece in her hand, which had begun to curve eastward around the vintage German teardrop, and threaded a faceted garnet onto her needle. A little splash of color in this otherwise otherworldly piece, something to draw the eye but not enough to overpower the whole. Yes, she thought. Alone, lonely, but most of all, bored.

  Mark, on the other hand, was thriving. He’d pulled nineteen ounces of gold out of the creek, once he had identified a deposit and had worked out how to pan it. Rebecca thought of his salary as a BP geologist, working one week on and one week off the North Slope oil fields, and one evening took pencil in hand to figure out the dollar value of Mark’s take. Gold had been selling for two hundred fifty-four dollars an ounce when they left Anchorage in June. Nineteen times two hundred fifty-four equaled four thousand eight hundred and twenty-six dollars. The mine and the surrounding five acres had cost them twenty thousand dollars, which didn’t include state permits and fees, supplies and transportation, or the house sitter’s fee. Mark’s salary was one hundred and fourteen thousand a year, which would be cut by nearly a third because of all his time off this summer. Paid vacation time only covered three weeks.

  She looked back down at her work, and sighed. One good thing to come out of this summer, she’d filled her Christmas list. A woven bead necklace for Mom, a sweater for Dad, sweatshirts with beaded designs for her niece and nephews, beaded Christmas ornaments for friends, all were done and already neatly packed away in the single box that contained her personal belongings, all that she had brought in and all she was taking out.

  Mark, on the other hand, had not even begun to pack. Every available inch of space was littered with his clothes and geology books and gold pans and pickaxes and pry bars and what seemed to be hundreds of rock samples. The shack was too small for this much clutter, but Rebecca had soon given up on trying to keep Mark’s gear in order. She kept the cooking area clean because they had to eat, but she left Mark’s stuff strictly alone. He didn’t complain, at least out loud.

  She heard his step on the path to the cabin and looked up when the door opened. “You’re early,” she said. “I haven’t even started lunch.”

  “I know. No, it’s okay,” he said when she put her work to one side and began to rise. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  His face was grave and her heart skipped a beat. “What about? Is something wrong?” Had Nushagak Air Taxi somehow left a message that through some unavoidable mix-up they wouldn’t be picked up on Monday?

  He pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her, leaning forward to place his hands on her knees.

  She looked at him and some part of her thrilled yet again to his dark good looks, the thick black hair curling against his collar, the dark eyes, the firm-lipped mouth. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow, his legs long and well muscled. Naked, he looked like a god. They had made love standing in front of a mirror once, and she still marveled at the memory, dark and light, masculine and feminine, strength and softness. It remained her best orgasm to date.

  He took the piece from her hands and examined it. “What’s this?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What do you call the method again?”

  “Bead weaving.”

  “Right, right. Pretty, whatever it is.”

  She removed it from his hands, square hands with strong fingers and neatly clipped nails, permanently grimed now after three months of grubbing in the dirt. “You didn’t quit work early to come in and talk about my beading. What’s up?”

  “Besides me?” His hands traced a firm path up her hips, urging her legs apart. It melted her, as it always did. He knelt between her legs to suck at the pulse in her throat, nibble on her earlobe, bite her nipples through the knit fabric of her T-shirt.

  He raised his head and kissed her, long and slow, flirting with his tongue and his teeth. She dropped her beadwork and reached for his zipper.

  He pulled back and framed her face in his hands to smile down at her. In a low, husky voice, he murmured, “What would you say if I told you I wanted to quit my job, and for us to stay out here year-round?”

  Newenham, September 1

  The hopelessly drunk, the terminally idiotic and the criminally inclined had for a change taken the rest of the day off, and Liam was home by five-thirty and gloriously off duty, as Prince was on call for the evening. “Tim?” he said when he stepped in the door. “Wy?”

  No answer. He went out on the bluff between the house and the river and stood post for fourteen minutes, until his thighs decided enough was enough, and then went through all thirty movements of the form three times. It was thirty now instead of sixty-four, Moses had informed him a week earlier, because Liam had learned enough not to have to break each movement down into each of its component parts, and had given him a whole new set of names to memorize. Liam was fully conversant with the statutes describing assault in its various degrees, and had kept his hands in horse stance instead of fastening them around Moses’ neck.

  Doing form wasn’t enough to soothe his conscience-Bill’s “social worker” remark still rankled-but he showered and changed into jeans and unpacked the bag of groceries he’d bought on the way home. Dinner for two, with wine, no less. She couldn’t be mad at him if he made her beef Stroganoff washed down with cabernet sauvignon, could she? The cabernet had cost more than all the rest of the ingredients put together.

  He cut up the beef and put it into a frying pan to brown, adding a dollop of the wine for the hell of it. He poured out a glass of Glenmorangie for himself and broke into the bag of egg noodles. He was filling the pot with water when the phone rang.

  “Yeah?” he said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear.

  Prince’s voice said, “We’ve got a body down at Kagati Lake, sir.”

  He put down the noodles and turned off the burner. “Where?”

  “Kagati Lake, a hundred or so miles north of here.”

  Something about the name niggled at the back of his mind. He carried the walk-around phone into the living room, where the one wall that didn’t have a window had a map of the Bristol Bay area taped to it. He found Newenham and followed the river up. “I don’t see it.”

  “North and west. North of the lakes,” she said, and he moved his finger to the left, encountering the mail route Wy had penciled in, asterisks marking the stops. He traced it up the map, Four Lakes, Warehouse Mountain, Weary River, the names some people hung on some places. Russell-he stopped.

  The route ended at Kagati Lake.

  Prince had taken the floats off the Cessna and put the wheels back on the week before in anticipation of freeze-up, and they were in the air forty-five minutes later. “You sure she said she wasn’t hurt?”

  “I’m sure,” Prince said patiently. “She found the body, is all.”

  On either side Newenham airport fell rapidly away from them and Liam’s stomach gave its usual takeoff flip-flop. “She’s going to kill me,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

  He hadn’t meant to be heard, but the headset was a good one and Prince turned her head to stare. “Why would she be mad at you?”

  The plane hit a pocket of dead air and dropped fifty feet. Liam grabbed for the edges of his seat. “Because she’s done nothing but find dead bodies since I came to town.”

  “That’s not your fault.”

  He forgot his terror long enough to send Prince a pitying glance. “You’ve never had a permanent relationship, have you, Prince? A serious one?”

  Defensive now, she shook her head. “Still-”

  “Still nothing,” Liam said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s my fault or not. It will be by the time I get there.”

  He stared resolutely ahead, trying to ignore the thousand feet of sp
ace between himself and Mother Earth.

  Prince mumbled something he couldn’t hear. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Prince said, and tossed Liam the FAA’s Airport/Facility Directory. He opened it, and found the airport sketch for Kagati Lake. “It’s a gravel strip, two thousand forty-five feet long, fifty-five wide.”

  “Elevation?”

  “Eight hundred eight feet.”

  “Light?”

  Liam squinted down at the page. “Says it’s unimproved. That mean no lights?”

  “If there were lights it would say.” Prince tapped the dial of a gauge on the control panel. The needle didn’t move. “We’d better hustle if we’re going to beat the sun.”

  It hadn’t registered with Liam until this moment that the sun was in the act of setting. There wasn’t any snow yet, piled into neat, defining berms along the sides, so it could be hard to spot an unfamiliar runway in the dark. “How long?”

  “We’ve got a little bit of a tailwind,” Prince said. “I’d say about an hour.”

  Liam thought of Wy, alone on the ground in Kagati Lake but for the doubtful company of a corpse. “Can we push it?”

  Prince grinned beneath mirrored aviator lenses that made her look like one of the extras inTop Gun. “What the hell, the state’s buying.”

  She kept the throttle all the way out and they raised Kagati Lake in fifty-nine minutes. It was still light enough to see 68 Kilo parked at the west end of the strip, near a large sprawling building that looked as if it had begun its long life as a one-room log cabin, and then had skipped the split-level phase entirely to metamorphose into something that was a cross between a plantation house and a barn. The roof was variously shingled, tarpapered and capped with sheets of corrugated plastic.

  Wy emerged from beneath the wing of 68 Kilo and looked up. Prince waggled her wings. Wy didn’t wave back.

  “See?” Liam muttered.

  The 180, which even Liam had to admit was a well-mannered beast, set down smoothly, jounced once in and out of a pothole, recovered neatly and rolled to a stop.

  As always, Liam was first out. Wy was waiting for him.

  “I don’t want to find any more dead bodies,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I never used to find dead bodies.”

  “I know.”

  “I never, ever found a single dead body before this year.”

  “I know.”

  “No more dead bodies,” she said. She was very definite. “Of any kind. Nobody I know, nobody I don’t know. Not next to the fuel pump at the Newenham airport, not in the middle of the ruins of an abandoned village, and especially not at a Bush post office where I’m delivering the U.S. mail.”

  “Okay,” Liam said.

  “Good,” she said. “So long as we’re clear.”

  “Perfectly,” he said.

  “I mean it,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He could feel Prince beginning to get restive, and he said, “Tell me what happened, Wy.”

  “What happened?” she said. “What happened is I’m on my mail run, I’m landing at my last stop on the route, I start unloading the mail, and when Opal doesn’t come out to carry it inside I go in looking for her.” She swallowed. “And I found her.”

  “Did you know her?” Prince said.

  “Of course I knew her,” Wy snapped. “I knew her like I know everybody on my mail route. She was the postmistress, I talked to her once or twice a week, weather permitting.”

  “What did you say her name was?” Prince got out her notebook.

  “Opal. Opal Nunapitchuk. Oh god.” There were a couple of benches arranged around a lovely little copse of plants, shrubs and trees native to Alaska, evidence of someone’s inspiration and loving care, and Wy went over and sat down hard on one of them. “Oh god,” she repeated, and bent over to put her head between her knees.

  “She in the house?”

  Wy nodded without looking up.

  “Better take a look,” Liam said to Prince, and led the way up the path.

  Opal Nunapitchuk lay sprawled on her back behind the counter that fenced in the corner of the room to the left of the door. Her eyes were wide open, her head at an odd angle because of the cramped quarters of the space behind the counter. Her left shoulder was shattered, a mess of white splinters of bone and congealed blood.

  He looked at her face first, something he had trained himself to do from his first crime scene. He wanted to imprint the face of the victim in his memory, be able to call it up at need. He wanted the face of the victim right there as he gathered evidence, as he interviewed witnesses, as he swore out an arrest warrant, as he arrested a suspect, as he conducted the interrogation, as he testified in court. He made sure that the victim was always with him.

  His first impression was how young she seemed, clear brown skin tanned from a summer in the sun, a long fall of shining black hair, a slim, muscular build that looked as if it had been vigorously active in life. There were creases in the corners of her eyes, laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, the telltale crepe beneath her jaw. Not so young, then, but a very attractive woman. Rape? No, she was still fully dressed, her jeans belted tightly around a slim waist. He looked at the wound. It seemed high, as if the shooter’s aim had been off. Or she had pushed it off.

  “Not a body shot,” Liam said, more to himself than to Prince, but she picked up on it.

  “Not aiming to kill, maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  Prince stooped and raised the body slightly to peer beneath. “Entrance wound. She was shot from behind.”

  “Bullet spun her around.”

  “Yeah.” She stood up. “Guy pulls the gun, what, going for the cash?” She looked in a few of the half-open drawers. “Aha.” She pulled out a rectangular aluminum box and opened the lid to show him. It was divided into sections for bills and change, and it was empty.

  “She turns to run… behind the counter?” he added doubtfully.

  “For a weapon?” Prince said. She reached beneath the counter. “There are clips here, I’d say for a rifle.”

  “But no rifle?”

  “No.”

  “He probably took that, too.”

  “So, she turns to go for the rifle, he shoots, she spins around, falls. He takes the cash and the rifle and leaves.”

  “From the look of the wound, I’ll bet the slug ricocheted off a bone,” he said. “It could be anywhere.” Bullets frequently had minds of their own once they impacted their target and Liam placed no dependence on their being able to find this one. Which didn’t mean they wouldn’t look.

  A series of large V-shaped shelves took up the corner from floor to ceiling, the top half divided into square, open-ended boxes, some with mail in them, some not. The bottom half was divided into drawers, and the two were bisected by a narrow counter, also V-shaped.

  “She hit her head on the way down,” Prince said, pointing at a dark brown smudge on the edge of the counter.

  “Twice,” Liam said, looking at another smudge on the second drawer down. They checked and found blood matted in Opal’s hair.

  Envelopes, letter size, business size, nine-by-thirteen manilas and priority mail, were scattered across the floor, the shelves they had fallen from teetering dangerously at the edge of the desk they sat on. At least she went down fighting, they both thought.

  Liam prodded Opal’s arm. “Rigor’s coming on.” He looked at his watch. “It’s going on seven o’clock.” He looked up. “What would you say the temperature was in this room?”

  “Fifty-five, maybe.”

  “Outside?”

  “Temperature at Newenham airport was fifty-four when we left.”

  “But this is farther north, and higher up. The walls are pretty thick, not many windows. Probably didn’t get above sixty-five all day in here.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “So, she died ten, maybe twelve hours ago, you think?”

  Prince shru
gged. “M.E. will tell us more.”

  “Yeah, but I want to know how much of a head start the son of a bitch has on us, and we’re going to miss the last jet to Anchorage by the time we get the body back to Newenham, which means it’ll be two, three days before the M.E. has a time of death.”

  “Not smelling much yet.”

  “No. Which could mean she hasn’t been here that long, or that it never warms up in here.” He looked back down at the body. “Robbery, you think?”

  Prince spotted a group of pictures sitting on a table, and went over to look. The dead woman was in several, surrounded by what looked like husband and children, and more than one with the house they were standing in in the background. “Could be. This is probably her home, too. We don’t know what’s missing.” She pushed back her cap to scratch above her ear, resettled the cap. “If this were Anchorage, I’d say someone was making a hit on people’s Social Security checks. But way out here… well, I don’t see some thug hiking five hundred miles through the Bush to coldcock some old woman for her hundred-and-fifty-dollar Social Security check.”

  “Yeah. We’ll have to find out how many were due to this post office today, how many people collect it hereabouts.”

  “Goody.” Prince paused. “You think it was someone she knew?”

  “Usually is.” Liam stood up and looked around. “And this would be an awfully big house to live in alone.”

  It was a large, rectangular room, furnished with couches and recliners and dominated by a fireplace made of rock that boasted its own spit. Alaskan memorabilia was piled in every corner there wasn’t a bookshelf, including a Japanese glass float with the net still on that looked a foot and a half in diameter. There were black-and-white pictures of tall, thin men in leather jackets and hats with chin straps standing in front of open-cockpit biplanes, interspersed with paintings in oil and watercolor, some good, some bad, and a small one of a cache on stilts in winter that could have been an original Sydney Lawrence. Considering how much Lawrence traveled around Alaska, and considering how often he painted for booze, the possibility was not at all unlikely. If that was the case, why would the robber leave something so valuable behind? Liam was fuzzy on the valuation of art, but even a small painting by Lawrence had to be worth two or three thousand dollars, and this one was a very portable size.