by Fire
Bill arrived at the booth with a handful of Kleenex and a glass of water. "You okay, Laura?" she asked, with a hard glance at Liam.
Laura fought back a sob and nodded, used three Kleenexes to mop her eyes and blow her nose, and drank the glass of water down. She looked drained. "I guess I better get back to work."
"Just a couple more questions," Liam said. He hesitated. "Look, Laura, there's no nice way to ask this. That day, the day I came out to your house."
"The day my father died," she said, and fresh tears welled up.
"Yes. Did you call your mother that day?"
"No, she just came over," she said dully. "She'd heard about Bob." She looked up, surprised. "How did you know she was there?"
"She drove up as I was leaving," he said, and hesitated again. This woman had been through enough in her young life, but he had to ask the question, there was no way around it. "Laura, did you tell her about Wolfe?"
Her face shut down. "What about him?"
Liam gave up and went for the jugular. "Did you tell her that he raped you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about. I have to get back to work now."
He caught her hand as she stood. "Cecil Wolfe is dead, Laura."
She stared down at him. "What?"
"Wolfe is dead. Somebody murdered him on his boat a couple of hours ago."
"Cecil is dead?" she repeated.
"Yes, Cecil is dead."
Liam hadn't exactly expected a cartwheel, which was good because he didn't get one. She stood in front of him, staring blankly into space, mute, uncomprehending. He squeezed her hand for emphasis. "He'll never bother you again."
She looked at him then, and he was saddened by the dead expression he saw in her eyes. "It doesn't matter. There's always another one just like him a little farther down the road."
He watched her walk back to the bar, saw her dismiss Bill's concern with a shrug. She picked up her tray and walked over to bus a table and take an order for refills with the bright, flashing smile he had seen her use before, the smile that was so full of warmth, and meant less than nothing.
* * *
FIFTEEN
The Gilberts lived in a small white house a few feet from the church. Richard Gilbert opened the door. "Oh." He cast a nervous look over his shoulder. "Trooper Campbell."
"Hello, Mr. Gilbert. I'd like to talk to your wife. Is she in?"
"Well, I, uh, no, she isn't, she's--"
Liam took a not very big chance and said, "I think she is here, sir. I have to talk to her. May I come in?"
"Let him in, Richard," a voice called from the back of the house.
Liam pushed on the door. Richard Gilbert fell back.
"In here, Mr. Campbell." Liam followed the voice into a back bedroom, where he found Becky Gilbert calmly folding clothes into a small suitcase. "I expect you'll want these," she said, and handed him a brown paper grocery bag.
He opened it and looked inside to see a shirt and slacks, both stained with blood. "I was wearing them when I killed him," she said. "Richard insisted on washing the knife. It's in the dish drainer next to the kitchen sink." She went to the dresser and collected some underwear.
Liam judged that the flight risk presented by Becky Gilbert was minimal and went into the kitchen. Sure enough, the dish drainer held a large skinning knife with a yellowing bone handle, still wet from washing. He wrapped it in a paper towel and placed it in the brown paper bag along with the clothes.
Becky met him in the living room, suitcase in hand. He got a good look at her face for the first time.
She had been transformed. He'd seen her at work with her husband, toadying and subservient. He'd seen her submerged in grief at the death of a man he now knew was greatly loved. He'd glimpsed the urgency of a woman on a mission on the way into her daughter's house.
This was a different person altogether from the previous three. She held herself erect, her chin high with pride, and looked Liam straight in the eye in a manner that most women raised in Bush villages did not do. "Let's go."
"All right," Liam said, and opened the door.
"What are you doing?" Richard Gilbert said in a panic.
"Telling the truth," she said.
"But you can't!" Richard Gilbert said in anguish. "What will people say?"
His wife looked at him and replied, "I guess they'll say a mother killed the son of a bitch who hurt her daughter." She paused, and added with a smile, "And they'll be right."
She sat across the desk from Liam, perfectly composed, hair neatly combed, gray knit pantsuit freshly pressed (liam knew a wistful thought for her obvious ironing skills), her words calm and precise.
"When I was very young I had a daughter. The circumstances don't matter, but I gather you have already guessed who her father is, or was."
"Bob DeCreft."
She inclined her head. "Yes. I was traveling with the Ilutuqaq Native Association Board, as a board member." Her chin raised. "I was the youngest person ever elected to the association board. I wanted to keep my seat after I married, but Richard said ... well, it doesn't matter what he said. This all happened long before I met him. The board had chartered a plane. Bob was our pilot." She smiled, a wide smile rich with memories. "I was the youngest, so I always got to ride shotgun. My auntie Sada was supposed to be looking out for me, but she would get airsick and take pills to go to sleep." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "We had some fine times in the front of that plane. I'll never forget them."
Liam remembered the first few months he'd flown out to crime scenes with Wy as his pilot. Sometimes her Cub; sometimes, when there was a body to bring back for autopsy, a chartered Cessna. Sometimes four seats, sometimes only two, him sitting behind her as he had today, or yesterday, now. The smell of Ivory soap on her skin, the quick crinkle of flesh at the corners of her eyes when she laughed, the rub of her shoulder against his. It was a long way between places in the Bush, and they'd talked, nonstop it seemed in hindsight, about everything: his cases, her flights, books, music, movies, politics, religion.
It was a hothouse environment, forcing relationships to rapid fruition, with no time-outs to cool down or reconsider. He'd never understood anyone so well or so quickly, and just the memory of it now was so powerful that it took a serious effort to draw himself back to the present, to Newenham and the woman looking over his shoulder with a dreamy smile on her face.
She sighed. "We, well, we were together constantly over a period of three months, flying around the state, talking to legislators and businesspeople and shareholders and boards from other Native regions, finding out how they were managing their ANCSA funds, how they were administering their land grants. We were coming into our share of the ANCSA settlement, and we wanted to do a good job for all the shareholders, not waste the money or give away the lands."
"Like the Anipa Subdivision?"
She bestowed an approving smile on him. "Yes, exactly like that. Native investors funding Native projects with federal backing, built by Native workers for Natives to live in. We were all so charged up and full of purpose. We were like the Blues Brothers."
"I beg your pardon?"
She smiled faintly. "On a mission from God."
"Oh." It had been a long time since Liam had seen the movie, but eventually he got the joke, and returned her smile. "I see."
"And then there was Bob. I saw him almost every day, sat next to him everywhere we flew. He was funny, and nice, and smart--he was a pilot, after all--and the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes weren't the only things he saw about me. I liked him right away. He was twenty years older than I was, but I didn't care." Her smile was rich and warmly reminiscent. "And then I loved him, and he loved me, and for a month we were happy. So very happy." She paused.
"What happened?"
Her smile faded. "Auntie Sada saw what was happening and called my parents. My parents came and took me home."
"And you went?" Liam said involuntarily. It was almost impossible to reconcile
this strong, composed woman with the subservient, submissive wife he had seen at the post office, or for that matter with the picture she drew of the idealistic young board member of twenty-two years before.
"Yes," she said soberly. "I went. They were my elders. It wasn't that easy, Mr. Campbell, not in the seventies; it isn't that easy even today to disobey your elders in the village. And Bob was white. That didn't help. They were horrified that I would consider marrying a gussuk, let alone sleep with him. So I went home, hoping that I could change their minds."
"And when you found out about the baby?"
All the life drained from her face, leaving it a mask with nothing alive behind it. "They sent me to Anchorage to have her, and then they took her from me. They wouldn't allow a half-white child to be raised in the Ilutsik home. They took her from me and gave her to the Nanalooks in Newenham, or so I found out later."
Her fists clenched on the arms of the chair. Liam had not cuffed her. It wasn't necessary. Elizabeth Rebecca Ilutsik Gilbert had already committed her murder. She would not kill again.
"I take my commandments seriously, Mr. Campbell, but if I'd known where Laura was and what the Nanalooks were doing to her, you'd have had to arrest me for murder a long time before this."
Liam didn't doubt it for a minute. "Off the record?" he said.
She was curious. "Off the record," she agreed.
"I'd have held your coat."
She smiled at him then, the same wide, warm, transforming smile of before, with an extra dollop of approval added. Liam would have wagged his tail if he'd had one, and for the first time saw the woman Bob DeCreft had been attracted to so many years before. "Thank you."
"How did you come to marry Richard Gilbert?"
The smile faded. "My parents wanted me off their hands and out of their house, and they figured I was already tainted anyway. He was a missionary who needed a link to the community he was trying to convert. They arranged it between them. I didn't much care one way or another, so I went along with it. I thought I could have more children, that that would help. But I didn't."
"I'm sorry," Liam said inadequately.
"Thank you," she said softly. "I am too."
Liam, who had lost his own child, cleared his throat and said, "Why didn't you try to call Bob? When you found out you were pregnant?"
"My parents wouldn't allow it." She added in a lower voice, "And when I was back in the village, I was ashamed."
The words were so simple, and encompassed so much. "When did Bob get in touch with you again? When he moved here in 1992? You went up the river with him, didn't you?"
Enough of the minister's helpmate remained that she looked alarmed. "How did you know that?"
"You were seen. Don't worry, they didn't recognize you, they only recognized him."
"Oh. Good. I guess." The alarmed expression faded, as if it had only been habit in the first place. "It doesn't matter now. We got away by ourselves, and we talked and talked and talked, and he told me that he figured I was never coming back, so he didn't bother leaving a trail for me to follow. I thought he'd moved on to another woman, but he hadn't." Pride showed through again. "He wanted me to leave Richard and move in with him, and have Laura move in with us."
"Why didn't you?"
She paused, thinking it over. "I don't know," she said finally, a puzzled crease appearing between her brows. "I should have. I suppose I was--afraid."
"Afraid of what? Your husband?"
She shook her head. "No. No one who truly knows Richard is afraid of him. No, I suppose I was afraid of what God would think of me if I did." She saw Liam's expression and smiled again, this time without humor. "Yes, I know what you're thinking. Nowadays people sling His name around like they're on a firstname basis with Him. It's true that my parents arranged my marriage to Richard--even if he was a gussuk, they figured that at least he was a holy one--but I said the words. For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, so long as you both shall live. Those are truly terrible words, Mr. Campbell, if you think about them. Very few people do. But I did, and when I said them I meant them."
Liam had meant them himself, once upon a time. The difference was that Becky Gilbert had kept her vows.
"And," Becky Gilbert added, confirming Liam's previous thoughts, "at that time there was still enough of the preacher's wife in me to shudder at the thought of all the talk."
"You were afraid," he said, repeating her words.
"Yes." She said it without shame.
So was I, he thought. Afraid to leave, afraid to love, afraid to rock the boat.
"So I stayed with Richard."
And I with Jenny and Charlie. "And asked Bob and Laura not to give away your secret."
"Yes. She despises me for it," she added, sighing. "But Richard ordered me to keep it a secret. He said a pastor has to set an example, that we couldn't be seen to be condoning children born out of wedlock, it would send all the wrong messages to the young people in the church."
She folded her hands in her lap. "So I agreed to keep it a secret. She moved in with Bob, and everyone thought they were lovers. Bob wasn't interested in anyone but me"--again that flash of pride--"and Laura ... well, I don't know if Laura is ever going to have a normal relationship with a man. She has been hurt so much. So that's the way we left it."
"Which was where things were when Bob died."
She nodded.
"Why did you kill Cecil Wolfe, Becky?"
She looked surprised. "Why, I've just told you. Laura Nanalook is my child. She is the child of my body, and of my heart. She is my only child. Mothers are supposed to look out for their children, protect them, keep them safe."
"You killed Cecil Wolfe to protect your daughter?"
"Yes. He raped her. He came into her home on the day her father died and he held her down on her own couch in her own living room and he raped her, he raped my baby girl." Her breast was heaving, her voice was rising, her hands had clenched into fists. "He hurt her, and he had hurt her before and he would have hurt her again. That's what he was. A hurter. A taker. A--a spoiler."
She closed her eyes and took one long, deep breath. "So I waited, and I watched. I've been following him off and on for the last two days. He was so big and so strong, and I--" An eloquent sweep of one hand indicated her small form. "I knew I had to be careful, that if I had any chance to do it successfully I had to take him by surprise, I had to catch him off guard." Her chin came up again. "I was real good at skinning when I was a kid, Mr. Campbell. I could strip a caribou of its hide faster than any other girl in the village, and faster than most of the boys. My father was real proud of me. He took me hunting a couple of times, even when the other elders said it wasn't right for girls to hunt. He even gave me my own knife."
"This knife?" Liam said, pointing at the bone-handled skinning knife, properly bagged in plastic by now.
She nodded. "Yes. That is the same knife. It's a good one; it holds an edge for a long time. My father gave it to me because I was so good at skinning."
"I don't doubt it, Becky," Liam said. "Tell me how you killed Cecil Wolfe."
"Oh, of course. I'm sorry; I know you need all this for my statement, don't you? And it is awfully late. What is it, one o'clock? My goodness, it's almost two o'clock in the morning--the sun will be coming up any minute." She smiled, and he couldn't help smiling back. "All right," she said briskly, "let's finish this story. Then you can put me in my cell and we can both get some sleep."
"Thank you," he said meekly.
"You're welcome," she said, waving a dismissing hand. "Like I said, ever since I learned what he did to my daughter, I've been watching Wolfe. I kept my knife with me all the time, and I was just waiting for the right opportunity." She spread her hands. "I was looking for him tonight, to see if he was back from herring fishing."
"Yeah," Liam said. "I didn't put it together at first, but I saw your station wagon parked in the lot when I came out of Bill's."
She nodded. "Yes, I was there. I we
nt around the back and went into the kitchen. Bill's cook is a cousin of mine."
"I wondered where you were."
"When Wolfe left with that pilot--I can never remember her name; it sounds like it should have a question mark after it--I followed them down to the boat harbor. When I saw she didn't go down to his boat with him, I parked and went down the west gangway so she wouldn't see me."
Liam remembered getting lost on the way back from the Mary J. Two different entrances that doubled as two different exits. It was so easy when you knew your way around.
Becky ended her story with devastating simplicity. "And then I killed him." She pursed her lips a little. "I was horribly angry, and at the same time so completely without fear. His back was to me, and I slipped the knife in up under his ribs, straight for his heart. I must have missed it, though--humans and caribou are built different, I guess--because he turned around as he fell and saw me, and when I saw his face I just had to stab him again. And again. I just had to." She paused. "His blood was everywhere. All over the knife, all over me, all over the galley. I didn't care. It was what I had wanted--his blood on my hands. It was what I had come for."
Liam waited.
She looked up. "I bet I sound like a raving lunatic, don't I?" She smiled a little, an expression made up half of humor, half of resignation, containing neither regret nor bitterness. "Oh well. I don't imagine sanity matters much where I'm going."
Liam typed the statement on the post computer, printed it out, and had her read it and sign it. "Do you know any attorneys, Becky?" he said as he rose to his feet.
"I don't believe so. Unless you count the attorney the association board has on retainer."
"No. He--"
"She," she broke in.
"She, then; she'll be a corporate attorney and she most definitely won't do." He looked up a name in his personal address book, and scribbled it and a phone number down on a piece of paper. "Here. Call him in the morning."
She looked askance at the name and number. "Why? It's not like I need a lawyer to prove my innocence--I've already confessed." She added sternly, "I'm not fighting this, Mr. Campbell. You made me aware of my rights, and I confessed anyway. I did it. I'm glad I did it. I have no regrets and I will pretend to no remorse. My girl needed help, and for the first time in her life I came through for her. If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't change a thing."
