Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Dana Stabenow

  “Who checks their mail here, sir?”

  “There are about thirty-two people in the immediate vicinity.” He caught her eye. “Well, okay, within a day’s hike. From the look of things, most of the people with mailboxes here don’t make the trip over that often, they let the mail pile up and come in once or twice a month to collect it. She ran a little sundries store, too: over-the-counter medicines, magazines, candy, like that. It would be known, so she’d get the occasional stranger.”

  “Maybe somebody else saw him.”

  “Maybe somebody else did,” he said.

  They borrowed a couple of four-wheelers from Leonard and set off. It took them the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon, following the map Leonard had made for them. Everyone was shocked at Opal’s murder. No one had seen anyone strange. Very few had alibis, but then very few had motive, either.

  Dusty Moore was a man in his fifties with a much younger Yupik wife and five children under the age of eight, all of whom swore that Dusty had been right there with them every day since coming back from a supply run to Newenham in May. He didn’t deny wanting the postmaster job, but in an eerie echo of Leonard’s own words said, “Jesus, who would want it this way?”

  He escorted them firmly to the edge of his property and left them there.

  “Hell,” Prince said.

  “Hell,” Liam agreed. “Well, I guess they can’t all be easy.”

  “If this yo-yo-”

  “I know. And chances are we can’t do anything unless and until he hits again.”

  Prince’s lips were tight. “I don’t like it.”

  “What do you want to do, Prince? Set out across country? In what direction? We looked everywhere on the Nunapitchuks’ homestead for a trail and didn’t find squat, except for game trails. We can’t follow them all. Maybe we could bring in some dogs, pick up a trail that way. Chances of that are, oh, maybe a trillion to one, and it’s even odds they’ll track down the local grizzly first, which would be bad for the dogs and worse for us.”

  He stopped, ashamed of having lost his temper. The Nunapitchuks seemed like nice people: hardworking, self-sufficient, capable, intelligent, everything he admired. He didn’t like the thought that he was about to let them down. He sighed. “We won’t close the file. The M.E. will be able to tell us about the weapon, and the prints will go into the system. We’ll put out a bulletin, circulate it among all the air taxi services in the Bay area in case he tries to fly out and gives himself away. Of course, he’ll have to give himself away because we don’t have a clue as to what he looks like. He could be a woman for all we know, or a Texas horned toad, or a little green man from Mars.” He felt himself getting angry all over again, and took a deep breath and blew it out explosively.

  “Canneries,” Prince said. “They could pass out copies to their fishermen. In case he tried to hitch a ride downriver.”

  “Most of the canneries are closed for the winter,” Liam said shortly.

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Shit,” Liam said.

  They thanked Leonard for the loan of the four-wheelers, made vague noises when he asked them what they had discovered, and got the hell out of there.

  The Cessna 185 had been in the air less than twenty minutes when the call came in. Liam, as usual preoccupied with holding the plane up in the air by sheer effort of will, didn’t hear it until Prince turned up the volume. “This is eight-two Victor November to the distress call, say again?”

  A calm, confident female drawl repeated, “This is Alaska Airlines one-three-three calling any small aircraft in the area of Nenevok Creek.”

  Prince and Liam exchanged glances, and simultaneously looked down at their watches. It was seven minutes past six. “What’s the last flight into Anchorage?” Liam said.

  Prince keyed the mike while Liam looked up through the windshield, trying to locate the other plane. “Alaska one-three-three, this is Cessna eight-two Victor November. I am twenty minutes out of Kagati Lake on a heading for Newenham. How may I assist you?”

  “Eight-two Victor November, this is Alaska one-three-three, I have received a distress call from someone in Nenevok Creek. I repeat, I have intercepted a distress call from Nenevok Creek. The caller did not identify himself.”

  “Alaska one-three-three, eight-two Victor November, did he identify the problem?”

  “Eight-two Victor November, Alaska one-three-three, he said someone had been shot and that they need help now.”

  Prince looked at Liam, who was already unfolding the map. She watched his forefinger locate Kagati Lake and trace a line south-southeast, until it stopped at Nenevok Creek.

  He looked up. Her face was flushed, her eyes were bright and it looked as if her short dark hair was curling into even tighter curls. “Go,” he said.

  She stood the plane on one wingtip and keyed the mike at the same time. “Alaska Airlines one-three-three, this is Alaska State Trooper Diana Prince on board eight-two Victor November. We’ll take it from here. Eight-two Victor November out.”

  NINE

  Nuklunek Bluff, September 2

  “Well, hell,” Wy said grumpily. “I wasn’t that late.”

  The fishermen at the lodge had been packed and waiting for pickup. She had deposited them in Newenham, refueled and flown straight back to the overgrown strip on the edge of the bluff. She found the camp easily, festooned with tents and a card table and bagged moose and caribou haunches, and congratulated herself on the fact that it was barely half an hour past the time she had said she would be there.

  She climbed out and no one was there. She walked to the camp and it appeared deserted. She was confused until she saw the two cases of beer, one empty and the other halfway there.

  “Well, hell,” she said again, this time with a long, depressed sigh. Her least favorite thing in the world was flying a drunk. They were prone to airsickness, which did the interior of the plane no good at all and her frame of mind even less. John and Teddy were probably out helling around somewhere under the influence, using each other for target practice or some other damn fool thing.

  It was odd, though, and unlike them to leave such a big meat stash unprotected. There was enough here to feed both families until the first salmon hit fresh water.

  It was also a first-class bear magnet. She rummaged around in the back of the Cessna for the shotgun. She’d wait until a half hour before dark, that was it. If they didn’t show, she would leave the meat to the mercy of any wandering critter who happened by, two- or four-legged.

  She propped her back against a boulder and closed her eyes against the slanting rays of the lowering sun. The rock radiated heat soaked up during the day, and she felt no need for the jacket in the plane.

  She thought of last night. The Nunapitchuks had a small cabin out back of the homestead, one with four bunks they used when family showed up to stay for a while. They had given them sleeping bags and pillows with fresh-smelling cases and left them alone. She loved making love to Liam, in a hard, narrow bunk, in the shower, on the bank of the Nushagak River, it didn’t matter, she loved making love to him. She’d read or heard something somewhere, something about when a couple was going through a bad time, the sex helped keep things together until they came out the other end, and that when the relationship was good anyway, it was just the icing on the cake.

  That was what it was like with Liam, icing on the cake. She smiled without opening her eyes.

  She liked to talk to him, too, about everything and nothing. He kept up most of the time, but sometimes he was way ahead of her, and she liked that too; she didn’t think she could live with someone who wasn’t as smart as she was. She liked him with Tim, friendly, not pushy, letting Tim get to know him at Tim’s own pace. It was important for Tim to learn that all men don’t hit.

  She liked it that Liam read recreationally. The does-he-read test was the only test she required the men she allowed into her life to pass. She didn’t care if they were tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, she didn’t c
are if they were Yupik from Bethel or Hindu from India-or Caucasian from Anchorage-they had to read. She didn’t care what they read, they didn’t even have to read the same things she did (a good thing because she read fiction, mostly, and Liam read non, mostly), but if they didn’t read, they were out.

  She’d read out loud to Tim while he lay in the hospital. Half the time she didn’t know if he heard her or not. She read to him anyway, books from her childhood likeLittle House on the Prairie andThe Lost Wagon andNancy and Plum andAnne of Green Gables andThe Lion’s Paw. It was make-believe, but it was what Tim needed, and she read them all to him every minute she could spare. The business suffered some that month.

  When he came home with her from the hospital, she had already furnished the second bedroom in her house, empty until then. Just the basics, a bed, a nightstand, a reading lamp, a desk with another lamp, some new clothes in the closet, khakis and T-shirts she’d ordered over the Internet from the Gap. There was also a bookshelf she’d filled with books, the Heinlein juveniles, all fourteen of the Oz books,The Hobbit andThe Lord of the Rings, everything by Gary Paulsen. By then he was reading on his own.

  He’d stopped for a time earlier this year, when he’d gotten in with a group of kids who had maximum security written all over their futures, but he’d begun easing away from them after Liam’s arrival, and he’d broken with them entirely after Kerry and Michael Malone had died. He had respected and admired Michael, who played opposite him on the basketball court, and Wy suspected he had been a little in love with Kerry, a pretty cheerleader.

  Liam had handled that with Tim, talking to him honestly about what had happened to the two kids, offering intelligent sympathy without ever once resorting to “Bad things happen to good people.”

  Liam was good with kids. She’d never seen him with Charlie, the son who had been killed by a drunk driver before he was two, but she’d bet Liam had been great with him, too. He wanted more kids. Well, so did she.

  She had to tell him. She could feel something like tears well behind her eyelids and blinked them away.

  There was a sudden snapping of twigs and cracking of branches and she shot to her feet, checking that both barrels were loaded and that the safety was off.

  It was only Teddy and John. The smell of beer preceded them into camp by a good twenty feet. “Oh hell,” she said, disgusted all over again.

  “Let’s go,” John said shortly, brushing by her to head for a caribou haunch hanging from a tree. Teddy barreled after him. Both of them were pale of face and sweating. Both seemed a lot more sober than she had expected. “How much can we take with us?”

  “I thought I was flying you out one at a time,” Wy said, standing with the shotgun hanging from the crook of her arm, muzzle down.

  He looked at her. “Yeah. Right. Of course. Sorry.” He looked at Teddy. “You go in first.”

  “No, you go in first.”

  “Goddamn it, Teddy, I said you go in first!”

  “And I say you do!”

  They went toe to toe, glaring at each other, and it was a moment before Wy, watching stupefied from the sidelines, stepped forward to pull them apart. “Guys. Relax. Toss a coin or something. Whoever gets left behind is only going to get left behind for ninety minutes.”

  They continued to glare. Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak had never been known to raise a hand or even a voice to the other. They stood shoulder to shoulder against all comers, but never against themselves. And now here they were fighting over who should go into town first?

  Teddy broke the stalemate eventually. “Okay, John.”

  Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Good,” John said gruffly. “Help me load up.” He caught Teddy’s eye. “It’s okay, Teddy. I’ll be all right.”

  “What’s going on?” Wy said.

  “Lend me a hand with this line, will you, Wy?” Teddy said.

  Old Man Creek, September 2

  They ate salmon fresh out of the creek, sticky rice with generous helpings of soy sauce and steamed wild celery, the latter gathered by Amelia, who had finally gotten back out of bed. After dinner they got out the cards and played single-deck pinochle, girls against boys. Bill had to carry Amelia, but Moses told Tim, “Jesus, boy, you think you’re some kind of card shark, don’t you?” Tim, still sore from the second practice of the day-this one had lasted two hours-trumped Bill’s ace of diamonds and shot the moon. Bill sighed and subtracted thirty-three points from their score, which put them at minus ninety-seven. “Another fifty-three points and we can go out the back door,” she told Amelia.

  Amelia blinked at her. “What am I doing here?” It was the first time she’d spoken all day.

  She didn’t look good, Bill thought, surveying the girl with a critical eye. Her eyes had deep dark shadows beneath them, the natural warm brown of her skin had turned a pasty kind of yellow in between the big blue and purple bruises, and she kept pulling at her hair.

  Bill looked at Moses. “Because you’re a damn fool, is why,” he said. “Shuffle the goddamn cards.”

  The girl focused on him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Uncle.”

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “Where’s my husband? I want my husband.”

  He looked at her, at the bruises blooming beneath her skin, at the swelling of her eye only now going down. Darren Gearhart had a mean right; short, stiff, packed a lot of power. Amelia wasn’t a pygmy but she wasn’t his equal in size. Moses remembered Joe Gould, the Newenham ambulance’s emergency medical technician, describe a head injury once over a lot of beer at Bill’s bar. Joe had just lost a patient to head trauma suffered when a fight at the small-boat harbor led to a fall between boats. “One of the guys told me you could hear the crack all the way up to the harbormaster’s office when the guy went in. Like breaking an egg.” He went on to explain, with a delivery that became more didactic as the drink in his glass dwindled, that the human brain floated inside the skull like a cork bobbing in the water. When something hit the front of the skull, the brain inside was knocked against the back of the skull, which was why so many blows delivered by fists caused injury to the back of the cerebrum, not the front.

  Maybe, Moses thought, maybe I should have run her by the hospital before I packed her onto a plane to get her out here.

  He consulted the voices on the subject. They were silent. Figured. Most of the time they wouldn’t shut up. Now, when he was actually looking for insight, they wouldn’t talk.

  “I want my husband,” Amelia repeated. Her voice sounded more stubborn than whiny. If that stubborn could be harnessed for her own benefit, she might make it after all.

  “No, you don’t,” Moses told Amelia, and snatched up the cards and began to shuffle them himself.

  Later, when both kids were in bed and asleep, Bill and Moses moved to the porch. “What are we going to do with her?” she said.

  “Come here, woman,” he said. She curled easily into his lap. One of his hands settled naturally on the rise of her hip, the other on the curve of her breast. She sighed a little and wriggled as if to press into both. He gave her a smack on the back. “Be still before I haul you down to the ground and have my way with you.”

  “You mean you won’t if I stay still?”

  “I will no matter what you do and you know that perfectly well.” He smacked her again, turning it into a caress. “I’m going to keep them isolated and safe for a few days. I’m going to teach them tai chi. I’m going to sweat the evil spirits out of them in the banya.”

  “It won’t be enough for Amelia.”

  She felt him shrug beneath her cheek. “It’s what I can do.”

  “You told her not to marry him, didn’t you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I was there in the bar, I remember.”

  “I didn’t tell her anything. She asked me if she should marry that little prick, and I said her father’s name.”

  “That was all?”

  “Yep.”

 
Bill sat up and looked at him. “Maybe you should have tried a little harder.”

  He stood up, dumping her without ceremony or apology to the selfsame floor he had been giving serious thought to wrestling her to. “How many times do I have to explain it, Bill? How many times do you have to see it? They come to me for all the answers. They think the voices will speak through me and take them by their goddamn little hands and lead them through the goddamn wilderness. It doesn’t work like that, even if they do listen, which they most of the time don’t.”

  She picked herself up to wrap her arms around him from behind. “I know.”

  He anchored her arms against his belly with his own. “They talk at me, all the time they talk at me. They tell me what’s going to happen, they tell me flat out. I used to try to tell people what they were saying, but nobody wanted to hear. Nobody does now.”

  “A prophet has no honor in his own country,” she said softly into that firm, erect back.

  “Shit,” he said. “I can’t remember when I didn’t hear them. This man will abuse you if you marry him, this boy will leave the village forever if you let him leave once, this girl will die drunk beside the road in winter, this man will fall off his boat and drown next summer. At first I thought everyone heard them. When I was ten my Auntie Christine took me to a shaman in New Stoyahuk to ask him to drive the evil spirits from my brain. He told her he could do nothing, that the spirits chose through whom to speak and nothing we could say or do would change that. When I was thirteen she sent me to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. They said I was delusional but functional and sent me home. That’s when I started drinking. When I was seventeen, I got Auntie Christine to sign me into the Air Force. I got posted to the Far East, where I learned to do form. First thing that helped.”

  She’d heard bits and pieces of the story, but never before the story from beginning to end. “I stayed there, traveled all over the world, looking for answers in some of the goddamnedest places. Cassandra was cursed with telling the truth and never being believed. I remember the first time I heard that story, I was happy. I wasn’t alone, at least not in myth.