Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  She shrugged again. The sweater slipped a little more. “It’s not my fault if you choose to snooze in Mom’s bed. Let’s just say you were a temptation too strong to resist.” She backed up a step and gave the mattress a testing shove. “Mmmm,” she said, and smiled at him. “I’ve always liked this bed. And God knows Mom got enough use out of it. You sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he said grimly.

  And he was.

  Her breasts pushed at the sweater in a sigh.

  Wasn’t he?

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” she said, wandering over to the vanity and picking up the perfume bottles one at a time.

  He was a grown man, with adolescence far in the past. He no longer thought with his cock. If she was going to take things coolly, he was going to be even cooler. “I didn’t have time to go over the place as thoroughly as I wanted this afternoon.”

  “Hmm.” She uncapped a bottle and sprayed an infinitesimal amount on the inside of her wrist. She held it out to him. “What do you think?”

  “Very nice,” he said without leaning forward to smell.

  “ ‘Very nice,’ ” she said, mocking. “Is that the best you can do? A woman wants her perfume to be irresistible.”

  “I looked at your mom’s files,” he said. “She was pretty well-off.”

  She shrugged an indifferent shoulder. “Dad was a good fisherman, and they saved their money.”

  “I didn’t find a copy of a will. Was there one, do you know?”

  She shrugged again. The sweater slipped all the way off her shoulder and halfway down her arm. She skimmed a finger down and pulled it back up very slowly, watching him all the while, one speculative brow raised, her mouth curved in a smug smile. “I guess. Mom said there was.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did your mom have an attorney?”

  “Probably Ed Kaufman. He’s pretty much everyone’s lawyer around these parts.”

  “Do you know who inherits your mother’s estate?”

  “It’s divided three ways.”

  “Three?”

  “Me, Betsy and Ted.”

  “Jerry doesn’t get any?”

  “Dad said he’d just piss away whatever he got left. The way he left things, when Jerry got too down and out Mom was supposed to help him. Now that Mom’s dead, we’re supposed to.”

  She wasn’t exactly overcome with grief, Liam noted, and with tremendous relief felt that knowledge reach his shorts. “Who were your mother’s friends around town?”

  “Well, there was us.”

  His stare was patient, and he waited.

  She pouted, what she obviously considered to be her very best thing, and when that didn’t work pouted harder. “She had a book club that met once a month. They used to meet once a year in Anchorage or somewhere, too. I guess they’d know her best.”

  “Who were they?” He wrote down their names. “Okay, that’s all, I think.” He closed his notebook and pocketed it.

  She followed him to the door. “Y’all come back now, you hear?” she called after him.

  The Blazer was doing seventy-two on the unpaved surface of the River Road, ice, ruts, potholes, washouts, rock slides, snow drifts and all, in ninety seconds flat.

  December 8, 1941

  The news about Pearl Harbor came over the radio. The CO stood us down to listen. Sounds like the guys in Pearl really got it in the neck. Pearl was our main base in the Pacific. Whats to stop the Japs now? Im so thankful Helens back in Birmingham. They cant get to her there. The CO says we have to expect an attack and put everybody on alert. Were standing one in four watches on the aircraft in case of sabotage. March is bitching but then March is always bitching. I think he’s got a girl in town, he’s always off base when we arnt in the air. Im not sure Roepke really knows were at war hes always got his nose stuck in a book and when I asked him what he thought about Pearl he said, the barley, the onion, or the oyster?

  Peters worried about family he’s got at home. The way the brass talks they’re expecting an invasion of Jap forces any minute and for sure the people in the islands and on the coast will get hit first. He wants to send money home and he asked me if I know anyone whos flying to Russia. He really harps on this Russia thing.

  NINE

  By ten o’clock Liam still wasn’t home, and Wy was restless, the conversation with Jo replaying in her head. Was Jo right? Was Wy so untrusting that she was afraid to make a commitment? If so, was that something she could live with, or something she had to change? Did she want to change it? Which, when it came down to it, meant one thing: Was she ready to commit the rest of her life to Liam Campbell?

  One thing seemed sure: Men left her. Men came into her life, made her love them, and left. Her father, Bob DeCreft, Liam.

  She could get really angry about that if she wanted to. She could let herself get royally pissed off.

  The conversation she’d had with Tim that evening came back.Sooner or later you have to accept what happened to make you angry, acknowledge it and move on.

  Her father had given her life. Bob had given her wings. Liam had taught her to love. Would she change any of it, just to spare herself pain?

  No. She would not.

  There. It was amazing how much relief one unequivocal answer provided.

  There were other questions she needed answers to. Would Liam stay in Newenham or return to Anchorage? If he stayed, was she willing to make him a permanent part of her life? If he went, would she go with him? Would Tim?

  She went out on the deck. It was crisp and cold, with frost already forming underfoot. The stars burned white-hot holes in the night sky and were reflected in the river below. They called it the Nushugak but really, it should have been called Bristol Bay Route 1. It carried boats up and down its one-hundred-fifty-mile length all summer long, and then it froze over and turned into a highway for snow machines, lasting until breakup. The river was the breath of life for Newenham and the hundred villages and homesteads and fish camps along its length. Wy liked living next to it. Sooner or later, everyone you knew floated or drove by.

  Sooner or later, it brought everyone home.

  She dropped into horse stance, to see if tai chi would give her some peace of mind, but they were working on the four Fair Ladies and she needed Moses to untangle her.

  Or Liam.

  Screw it.

  She went back inside, started her computer and got on-line. She checked her Web site first, to see if anyone had posted a reservation. The Web site was a new innovation and had cost her a lot of money, but contrary to her fear that no one would search the Net for “air taxi-Bristol Bay,” it was already paying off. Four caribou hunters from Anchorage wanted a ride to Mulchatna. Someone else wanted to take his girlfriend and another couple out to a lodge at Outuchiwenat Mountain. A pilot up in Niniltna she had met at the air show in Anchorage the year before had written complimenting her Web site and asking her who maintained it. She sent confirmations to the first two and a name, phone number and e-mail address to the pilot.

  She wasn’t sleepy, and the house was very quiet. The crack beneath Tim’s door was dark. Maybe Liam had driven back up to the crash site, although she couldn’t think why. On impulse she keyed into a search engine and looked up DC-3s. The amount of information that came up made her blink.

  The Douglas C-47 Skytrain was a redesign of the civilian DC-3 twin-engine commercial airliner, which she already knew. The RAF called them Dakotas, the U.S. Navy the less romantic R4D. The military used it to transport troops and cargo, including carrying paratroopers over enemy territory, especially during the Normandy invasion. She shuddered. Why the hell anyone would want to jump out of an airplane was beyond her. The whole point was to stay in the air, where the Wright brothers had intended you to be, until you were ready to come down with, not without, your aircraft.

  This of course led memory back to the previous summer, when none other than Trooper Liam Campbell had jumped out of a Piper
Super Cub into a lake in hot pursuit of a felon getting away on a four-wheeler. The Super Cub had been hers and she’d been on the stick at the time, aiding and abetting the aforesaid trooper. Plus the felon hadn’t been quite as felonious as previously thought.

  Which, of course, was completely different from parachuting into a war zone. She clicked on the first link in the list and thought she’d made a mistake when a site on Lend-Lease popped up. She knew what Lend-Lease was, sort of: It was the act under which the United States shipped war materials to friendlies in World War II before Pearl Harbor brought them directly into the war themselves. March 11, 1941, was when the site said the act had gone into effect. The Japanese attack had come barely nine months later. She thought of the glacial processes of the Federal Aviation Administration, and nine months didn’t seem long enough to move the federal government into that much action.

  They’d called it “An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States,” and like all government documents, it went on forever. She waded through thenotwithstanding s and theheretofore s until she got to what seemed to be the relevant clause. It began, of course, with

  Notwithstanding the provisions of any other law, the President may, from time to time, when he deems it in the interest of national defense, authorize the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, or the head of any other department or agency of the Government (1) To manufacture in arsenals, factories, and shipyards under their jurisdiction, or otherwise procure, to the extent to which funds are made available therefor[e], or contracts are authorized from time to time by the Congress, or both, any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.

  Any defense article for the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital.That seemed pretty broad, even for the president of the United States. Someone should have been looking over Roosevelt’s shoulder. Where was Congress? Where was Jesse Helms? She was pretty sure her teacher had mentioned something about checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government in her high school civics class.

  And then, after he caused them to be built, the act said the president could sell them, transfer them, lend them, or lease them. The act covered food, machinery, and services. Harry Hopkins, FDR’s good friend and true, started the ball rolling before handing it off to one Edward R. Stettinius Jr., of whom Wy had never heard and probably never would again. Originally intended to benefit China and the British empire back when Churchill was still fighting like hell to keep it one, in November 1941 the act was extended to include the Soviet Union. Yeah, that had worked out well.

  The budget for Lend-Lease was a billion three, back when a billion three was serious money. Of course, in the way of government programs everywhere, it wound up costing much more than that, exceeding $50 billion in the end. Nobody ever paid it all back. Most of the countries settled for lesser amounts within fifteen years, although the USSR didn’t get to the table until 1972.

  She scrolled down. Well, well.

  It turned out that C-47s came under the heading ofdefense article.

  She wondered, a little guiltily, if any of this stuff should have been a surprise to her. She held a degree in education, which had included a three-hundred-level class in Alaskan history. Had they studied Lend-Lease? Seemed like they ought to have, but she couldn’t remember doing so. True, she hadn’t been the most dedicated student ever to pass through the doors of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

  Wy had gone to college at the behest of her adoptive parents, teachers both. The only classes she’d ever taught had been during her student-teaching internships, as the day after graduation she’d enrolled in flight school. She’d soloed after eight hours and from then on, as much time as possible was spent in the air, filling up her flight log until three years ago when Bob DeCreft, in anticipation of his eminent retirement, offered her the Nushugak Air Taxi Service at a bargain-basement price. The sale brought her a Piper Super Cub, a Cessna 180, two tie-downs at the Mad Trapper Memorial Airport, a shed at same, and a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on the Nushugak River. It also brought her a lot of goodwill in Bristol Bay. People were willing to take on faith anyone Bob DeCreft recommended.

  Professionally, it was what she had been aiming at since she’d earned her pilot’s license; a business small enough to run by herself that kept her in the air most of her working hours. Personally, there had been two benefits, one expected and one not: It got her out of Anchorage and away from Liam, at the time a much-married man and father, and, one day on a flight into Ualik, it had brought her Tim.

  So she couldn’t complain, and neither could her parents, retired now and living in Anchorage, with twelve weeks of each winter spent in a condo on a golf course on the Big Island. They couldn’t say she had wasted her education, independent businesswoman that she was now. But the fact of the matter was, she’d never been that good a student. It was probably more rebellion than anything else. She was maintaining an outward show of compliance by studying something her parents wanted her to, while determining inwardly to retain as little of it as possible.

  She did another search, and discovered that World War II had been good to the territory of Alaska. During the war, the federal government had spent over a billion dollars on infrastructure, including docks, wharves and breakwaters in harbors up and down the coast. The Alaska Railroad was updated and improved, and roads were constructed, including the AlaskaCanada Highway, the only highway into Alaska. The Alcan had been built by the military during World War II-she knew that much-but she hadn’t realized how much it had to do with Lend-Lease. Lend-Lease aircraft were supposed to be flown through Canada, following the route of the highway, on to Nome and then across the Bering Strait to Russia.

  The phone rang, the business line next to the computer. “Nushugak Air Taxi,” she said into the receiver.

  “I’ll be late tonight.”

  She looked up at the clock. It was ten minutes to twelve. “You already are.”

  “Surprised you noticed.”

  She winced away from the force of his hang-up. Ouch. Was he really that angry about Gary Dunaway being in town? Liam had never struck her as the jealous type.

  But then, how well did she really know him? They hadn’t had that much time together. A few months of flying him to crime scenes when she was on contract to the state’s Department of Public Safety, four intense days in Anchorage, and the last six months, during which they hadn’t exactly lived in each other’s pockets.

  She knew he preferred single-malt scotch, read poetry and history, could tutor Tim at math. He had allowed himself to be browbeaten into learning tai chi under the direction of that fiery little tyrant, Moses Alakuyak. He loved wearing the uniform of the state trooper; he seemed to expand inside it, some mysterious alchemy transforming him into more than a man. Call it a manifestation of the law of the land.

  And he was good at it. Even after six months of laying it down, even as new to the area and to the people in it as he was, in a place where the previous trooper had made himself despised by his indifference and his indolence, Liam had earned the respect of town dweller and villager, hunter and guide, fisher and fish hawk, white and native alike. The main difference, so far as she could tell, seemed to be that Liam loved the job. He seemed to love being a trooper the way she loved being a pilot, and in some way she had yet to explain to herself it was the reason Wy loved him most.

  And, yes, she was in love with him-she knew that-madly, passionately in love with him, the love-story kind of love, the rip-your-heart-out-and-serve-it-up-on-a-platter-to-do-with-as-you-will, the Pyramus-and-Thisbe, Tristan-and-Isolde, Abelard-and-Heloise kind of love.

  Although, come to think of it, most or all of those couples wound up dead. Or castrated. She placed the receiver in the cradle and pushed back from her desk. The screen of the computer went black, with points of light zooming into and then out of range. The traveling-through-space
screen saver. She could wish for a little journey to the stars at the moment.

  She got the Bushnells out of the desk and went out on the deck. The stars hadn’t gone anywhere, Orion and the Pleiades and the Dippers and Cassiopeia, Taurus the Bull, the Great Square of Pegasus. It was cold out, below freezing, according to the thermometer fastened to the frame of the living room window, but she put the binoculars down and went into horse stance and forced herself through the form, blowing through the Fair Ladies like she knew what she was doing. The second time it was easier; the third time she was sweating freely and her thighs were trembling. She went through it a fourth time just to prove she could, and when she reached Step Up, Parry and Punch she really let loose.

  “That Liam you knocking on his ass?” a voice said.

  She slid into Apparent Close-Up and Conclusion, brought her right fist into her left palm, and bowed, once and low, in Moses’ direction.

  The old man was sitting on the top step of stairs leading from the deck to the edge of the cliff and the beach below. That beach was littered with shards of ice, which, in another snow and a few more high tides, would join together and reach out to the opposite shore, where the same process was taking place. In a month, perhaps less, the two would meet in the middle in a frozen handshake that would last the winter long.

  “I didn’t know you were there,sifu. ”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of things you don’t know.”

  His words were a little slurred, which meant he’d been drinking. Although she wasn’t sure he was ever entirely sober, and he had to drink a lot before it affected him in speech or gait. He claimed to drink to drown out the sound of the voices that afflicted him with prophecy. He could tell the future, could Moses Alakuyak, and it never brought him any joy. Perhaps it was because people had always done what they wanted to in the first place, regardless of the best advice given them, and always would. It didn’t help Moses’ disposition any to watch lives going down in flames all around him, when the way out of the inferno was so clearly seen only to himself. He was a prophet without honor in his own country.