Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  “Catching a lot of cases?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “Now there’s a modest statement if I ever heard one, Colonel,” Jo said. “Just last month Liam busted a serial killer who’s been kidnapping and murdering women around these parts for the last twenty-five years.”

  Charles nodded at the stripes on Liam’s arm. “I noticed the promotion. Good job.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Still flying out to the Bush?”

  “Yes.”

  “Still hating it?”

  “Yes.”

  Charles fortified himself with a drink. “I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Charles plowed on. “If you learned how to fly, if you learned the reasons why planes stay up in the air and how to keep them there, you wouldn’t be nearly as afraid to travel in one.”

  Liam made no reply.

  Jo met Special Agent James Mason’s eyes. Special Agent James Mason had been careful to keep his mouth full of food during this exchange, which made Jo think highly of both his intelligence and his sense of self-preservation.

  Clearly there was a problem of communication going on here strong enough to overwhelm any residual parent-child affection. She wondered how hard Charles had pushed Liam to learn to fly as a child. She wondered how hard Liam had resisted. But that wasn’t all there was to it. On the surface, Charles was trying to reach out to his son, and Liam was refusing to see the outstretched hand. On the surface, Charles appeared fatherly and, well, maybe not loving, but at least proud and friendly.

  Liam, on the other hand, looked sullen and churlish and about twelve years old. Charles had done something to make Liam angry, and Liam had not forgiven him for it. Charles was pretending it had never happened. Liam was reminding him.

  She wondered what it was, and if there was a story in it. She was immediately, if only mildly, ashamed of herself. Looking for the story in everyone she met was an occupational hazard. There was always a story, though, and it was never the story the person wanted told. Some were worthy of her editor’s attention and some weren’t. A very few she kept to herself. She nearly always got the story, though, and she idled away a few moments, letting Charles’ questions and Liam’s monosyllabic replies join the slipstream, while she pondered what this one might be. Had Charles broken a law? Had he broken it in his son’s posting?

  “Where’s the arm?” Charles said, and she woke from her reverie.

  “At the crime lab in Anchorage.”

  Jo looked down at her plate. Her filet mignon stared back up at her. With a shrug, she took another bite.

  “I should take custody of it.”

  Liam was uncertain of the protocol involved, but on general principles he decided that the arm should stay in the custody of the state of Alaska. “They’ll take fingerprints. Did they take fingerprints in World War Two?”

  For the first time Charles looked uncertain. “I don’t know. I think they relied more on dog tags back then. Seriously, Liam, I can take charge of the arm and fly it back to D.C. I’ll turn it over to the FBI lab.” He hooked a thumb at Special Agent James Mason. “They’ll track him down. It’s what they do, and really, it’s only a matter of deciding between which of the three. It was a military plane, the property of the federal government. The FBI probably has jurisdiction.” He looked expectantly at Mason.

  Mason, caught with his mouth full, chewed and swallowed without any noticeable embarrassment. “The only interest the FBI might have is if the wreck was anything other than accidental. We don’t really think it is.” He smiled, and Jo noticed because she was incapable of not noticing that it was a very nice smile, if not of the full wattage of Colonel Campbell’s, then with its own amount of shy charm. “I’m here mostly on a field trip. My boss wants to get as many of the Anchorage-based agents into the Bush as possible. This was an opportunity for him.”

  An expression passed over Charles’ face that was as unpleasant as it was fleeting.

  “I think I’ll stick with the plan, Dad,” Liam said. “The ME will turn it over in due course.”

  “There are families waiting for word, for some kind of closure. These men have been missing a long time. They deserve an honorable burial as soon as possible.”

  “It’s not like the families don’t know how or when they died,” Liam said. There was no answer to this. “Oh, and I guess you’ll probably want the gold coin, too.”

  “The what!”

  Charles’ exclamation was somewhere between a bark and a shout. It had a parade-ground kind of feel to it, and if activity in the bar did not come to a halt, it slowed down and heads turned their way.

  Liam, not expecting this reaction, said, “The gold coin in the arm’s hand. It, uh, fell out.” He didn’t say where or when.

  Charles had himself under strict control. The smile was gone, though, and Jo gave him a long, thoughtful look. This was the face behind the gun sight on his jet. She wouldn’t care to have that face on her tail. He lowered his voice. “There was a gold coin in the hand?”

  “Yeah.” Liam, for his part, didn’t know what this was leading to. “It’s an American twenty-dollar gold piece. Bill’s got it.”

  “Get it.”

  Liam raised an eyebrow at the snapped order, but he got to his feet and walked to the bar, aware that most of the bar was eyeing him, openly or covertly. Moses was one of the former, that connoisseur of upheaval and disaster, and he grinned at Liam as he walked by. Eric Mollberg was one of the latter, nearly tucking his head beneath his arm to avoid eye contact. Clarence took advantage of Moses’ distraction by nipping off with Moses’ other knight. Liam and rest of the bar learned some new Yupik when Moses turned back and discovered the loss.

  “Well?” Bill said.

  “He wants the gold coin.”

  Bill jerked her head. “Top drawer, in the office.”

  “Thanks.” He found it and brought it back.

  Charles almost snatched it out of his hand and then seemed to notice the odd looks he was getting. He laughed. It didn’t convince them. He saw it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It took me aback a little. I have a list of personal effects from the families, things the flight crew might have had with them on board. One of the copilot’s grandchildren said he remembered his grandmother talking about a lucky gold piece that her grandfather had carried. It had quite a legend attached to it, was supposed to have been won from Wild Bill Hickok in the poker game before the one he got shot in, and been in the family ever since. In the normal course of events, it would have gone to the son and then to the grandson. It’d be nice to get it back to him.”

  It was a charming story, told with style and just the right touch of sentimentality. It was a pity that the only person at the table who believed it was the storyteller himself. He seemed to want to move on, and quickly, too. He looked at Liam and said, “Does anyone else know about this piece?”

  Liam thought back to the scene in the bar two nights before. “Pretty much everyone in Newenham by now, I’d guess.”

  “Damn it. Liam, we can’t wait until spring to recover the bodies. We have to do it now.”

  “Dad, I told you, and so did Wy. That’s pretty much next to impossible. It’s October-hell, it’s almost November. Winter’s coming on. It’s snowing right now. That airstrip isn’t maintained, and there’s no way to get the wreck down off the glacier even if it were.”

  “We’ll use helicopters. I’ll call Elmendorf, see what’s available. And there’s an Air National Guard base, too-Kulik, isn’t it? I’ll ask them what they’ve got.”

  “I know those guys, Dad,” Liam said evenly. “They’re on call for rescues all over the state. I don’t think they’re going to volunteer their crews and their equipment to recover bodies that have been lying there for sixty years. We’re coming up on storm season. They’ll have plenty of work on their hands rescuing the living.”

  Charles’ eyes narrowed. “Those guys who came bu
sting up on the four-wheelers when we were out at the wreck…”

  “What about them?” Liam said, wondering where this was going.

  “They were treasure hunting.”

  “They said they were caribou hunting.”

  “Crap. They knew about this gold coin and they went looking for more where it came from.”

  Liam couldn’t deny it. “So?”

  “So if we don’t get that wreck out of there you’re going to start losing Newenhammers who think there might be gold in them thar hills.”

  Liam remembered the slab of ice that had nearly killed him and Wy the previous morning. “You’ll lose just as many going after it.”

  “Not if I round up good equipment and good equipment operators. Leave it to me.” Charles stood up and threw down a couple of bills. “Excuse me. I’ve got some calls to make.”

  The three of them watched him stride out the door. When it closed behind him, Liam looked at Mason and said, “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Mason said. “I don’t,” he added when he saw Liam’s skepticism. “My boss heard about the wreck and called the commander out on Elmendorf. The BOC told him that Colonel Campbell was flying in. My boss asked him to ask Colonel Campbell to let me hitch a ride to Newenham. He said okay. I have to say we were all a little surprised. I mean, the United States Air Force doesn’t exactly hand out rides on an F-15.”

  “So the inference is he wanted you here. Why?”

  Mason was using a french fry to mop up the last drop of steak juice and was very intent on the job. “He said that co-operation between federal organizations was essential to the smooth working of government, and that he was happy to be able to contribute to it, in however small a way.” He met Liam’s eyes with a bland expression in his own.

  “What can you do here?”

  “Not much,” Mason said. “I don’t have a lot of authority over the sixty-year-old wreck of a military plane. If it was sabotaged, or the flight was in any way related to espionage of some kind, then I could step in, maybe. And only maybe.” He smiled. “In Alaska the FBI is more concerned with Russians importing underage girls who come thinking they’re going to be part of an ethnic dance group and who wind up shaking it down in the strip clubs.”

  “Were you on that case?” Jo said.

  “From the start.” Mason didn’t sound happy about it.

  “Were the girls in on it?”

  “The older one, the twenty-year-old, maybe. The two younger ones, no way.”

  “Are they still in jail?”

  Mason winced. “We prefer to call it protective custody.”

  “Waiting on the INS?”

  “That, and the fact that we need them to testify against the guys who brought them into the country.”

  Liam reached for his wallet. “I’m due home.”

  “Give Wy my love.”

  “Where’s Gary?” Liam said, suddenly noticing her brother’s absence.

  “Relax,” Jo said. “He’s doing some patchup work for a guy he knows in Ik’ikika.”

  Liam tried not to show his relief.

  She waited until he was inches from a clean getaway. “What’s going on with your father, Liam?”

  “I know as much as you do, Jo. And sometimes I think,” he added, a trifle grimly, “a lot less.”

  “Man,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Sons and their fathers.”

  “What about them?”

  “Tell the truth. You guys just sit around thinking up ways to fail each other, don’t you?”

  “Go to hell,” Liam said, and marched to the bar, wallet in hand.

  Jo watched him go, admiring the straight spine that managed to broadcast every ounce of the offended dignity that he was feeling.

  Fathers and sons, she thought.

  There oughta be a law.

  She was unaware that she’d said the words out loud until Special Agent James Mason said, “Against what?”

  “Many things,” she said, recovering. “Many, many things.”

  “There already are,” he said. “And speaking as a member and on behalf of the law-enforcement community, I have enough laws to make people mind already. My old man used to say that every time Congress enacted another law, they took another little piece of our freedom away.”

  “Sounds like a right-wing reactionary to me.”

  He laughed. “It’s early,” he said, reaching for his jacket. “You’re at the Bay View Inn.”

  “Yes.”

  “So am I. I’ve got a bottle in my room. Want a drink?”

  She looked him over with care. He met her eyes without guile, something to mistrust in any member of any law-enforcement agency. “Sure,” she said.

  After paying his tab Liam paused at the chess table. “Get the hell outta my light,” Clarence said. Eric Mollberg had gone to the bar for a refill. Moses looked up and growled, “What?”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  Moses moved his last pawn to the last row and exchanged it for his queen.

  “Do you?”

  “Check,” Moses said. Clarence swore loudly.

  “Goddamn it, old man,” Liam said.

  “Goddamn it, yourself,” Moses said. He reached for a bottle of Oly and flatfooted it. “Beer!” he bellowed, and behind him Liam heard the bar cooler open. “I don’t know,” he said finally, glaring up at Liam, who seemed to have planted himself like a rock.

  “You’d tell me if you did.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. You’ll find him.” He tried for one of his fallen-angel smiles, not quite succeeding. “Besides, you’re not a believer, boy. What you doing bothering the old shaman when you know you’re going to do whatever the hell you were going to do in the first place? Go on home. She’s waiting for you.”

  “I am.” Liam didn’t move.

  “Go on, then! Quit interfering with my chess game.”

  Clarence gave a sudden cry that sounded just like the cackle of a raven, and moved his rook. “Checkmate.”

  “Fuck,” Moses said.

  Clarence sat back in his chair and looked up at Liam beneath shaggy brows. “You talking about Lydia?”

  Liam shifted his gaze from one side of the table to the other, and nodded.

  “You should have seen her when we was all young,” Clarence said. “That girl had boys buzzing around like mosquitoes, wanting to suck that juicy little thing dry.”

  Moses uttered a sharp bark of laughter. “Including you.”

  “Including you,” Clarence retorted. His beady little black eyes sparkled and he all but smacked his lips. “Those were the days. Get hold of a truck and drive your girl and your friends and their girls to Icky and have an all-day party on the beach at One Lake. You remember that party out the beach that one summer?”

  Moses grinned.

  “Yeah,” Clarence said. “I see you do. Bet Leslie and Walter and Silent Cal and Stan do, too.”

  “Stan’s dead.”

  Clarence frowned. “Stan’s dead?”

  “Going on five years.”

  Clarence was outraged. “Goddamn! How’s a man supposed to get drunk with his friends if they keep dying on him!”

  “What about Lydia at the beach?” Liam said.

  Moses and Clarence got matching faraway looks on their faces. “We went up to the fish camp used to be at Icky.”

  “Wasn’t Icky,” Moses said. “The fish camp was out the end of River Road.”

  “It was up Icky way, this fish camp,” Clarence said, glaring. “A bunch of the guys and the girls in the school. We took some beer, and somebody had some records and had figured out a way to run a record player off his pickup battery. We stayed up there two days and two nights, dancing and singing and laughing and pulling fish out of the river.” Clarence looked at Moses. “Remember the eagles?”

  Moses nodded. “Couple eagles sitting in this cottonwood snag, old Silent Cal got too close and one of those eagles hoisted up its tail feathers
and shot a stream of yellow shit straight into old Silent Cal’s face.”

  Both old men shook with remembered glee, until Liam was afraid Clarence at least might go off into an apoplexy.

  “I think he thought he was going to get lucky that night,” Clarence said, mopping his eyes. “But his girl wouldn’t have anything to do with him after that.” He winked at Liam. “Not to say she didn’t get lucky herself.”

  Moses leaned forward and leveled a forefinger. “Clarence, you are a dirty old man.”

  “I wasn’t then.”

  Again both men fell into choking fits.

  “When was that?” Liam said.

  “Oh, hell,” Clarence said, knuckling his eyes. “Long time. Long time ago. Before the war.”

  “Not long before,” Moses said instantly.

  “Long time before,” Clarence said, glaring.

  “We weren’t that old long time before the war, old man.”

  “Set up the pieces; we’ll see how old I am!”

  Liam left them to it.

  December 15, 1941

  Its cleer but god its cold they say its thirty-seven below the coldest in twenty-five years. Our mechanic Billy hes from Duluth in Minnesota hes a good guy he lost a filling the other day just by breathing in. He can only do a twenty-minute shift and even then he has to work in mittens. It took him two hours to replace a plug yesterday.

  Haven’t written for a while because we spent a week tdy flying out of Anchorage One day we went to Adak to pick up eighteen patients. 1250 miles and usually eight to ten hours flying time. There was a front hanging off Umnak and it was rough as hell. The nurse was a pistol she piled blankets all over the patients to keep them from bouncing around and give her parka to another. Roepke brought us down to 50 feet. Everybody puked. He brought us back up to thirteen thousand and the cabin temperature dropped to twenty below but at least it smoothed out. He put her down at Naknek in a forty mile an hour crosswind he had to really crab her in. Man that was no fun. While we were on the ground another Gooney crashed and burned on landing. The crew got out okay. We overnighted. The whole flight took two days two hours and ten minutes.

  Came back to find a letter from Helen. She lost the baby. Says shes sick and needs money to pay the hospital.