Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  Diana made a note. “Did Ed read the will to you this morning?”

  “No, but he told us what was in it.” As an afterthought, he added, “Karen was mad.”

  Diana sat up straighter on the very uncomfortable couch. “Mad about what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Mom gave away something Karen wanted.”

  “Do you remember what it was?”

  He screwed up his face. “A picture, maybe? It was old. I didn’t care.”

  He was lying; it stuck out all over him. Karen might have been mad about something, but it hadn’t been a picture. “Betsy and Stan Jr. were there, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Diana made a note. “Jerry, was anybody mad at Karen, that you know of?”

  “Nobody ever got mad at Karen,” he said earnestly. “Everybody loved her. Why, every time I went over to her house, there was somebody there hugging her and kissing her.”

  Diana gave him a long, thoughtful look. He meant it, every word. “Do you remember who you saw there the last time you were at her apartment?”

  He shrugged, and she gave it up for the night. “Okay, Jerry, thanks. I might have to talk to you again.” She got to her feet. “Are you going over to Betsy’s?”

  He looked at his feet. “I don’t know.”

  Translated, that meant that he knew he usually wasn’t welcome. “She’ll want you there, and you shouldn’t be alone. I’ll give you a ride over.” It was impulsive, and with this family she didn’t know if Betsy really would want him, but she couldn’t leave him alone in that cold, bare excuse for a home, mourning the loss of the only person left in his family who seemed to give a damn. Or at least Jerry thought she had.

  She left him in Betsy’s driveway and returned to the post to type up her interviews. She hadn’t discovered a hell of a lot about who might have killed Karen, but some areas of interest did present themselves.

  Karen had been upset at the meeting with the attorney. Why? Neither Betsy nor Stan Jr. had mentioned it, only Jerry. She made a note to call them both in the morning, and Kaufman, too.

  Karen slept around, most recently with Roger Hayden, the telephone guy. It was almost three o’clock, and Diana was bone-tired. She’d call him in the morning, too.

  Karen owned the town house free and clear, no mortgage. Unusual for someone so young, and so unemployed. She also had a very healthy bank balance. If it had all come from her father, and if the other three kids were in the same financial health, Stan Tompkins Sr. must have been a very good fisherman indeed. Diana made a note to ask Kaufman if Karen had a will. If Karen hadn’t, as too many people of her age did not, it would be interesting to see where her money went. She’d call Brewster Gibbons, too, to get an update on Karen’s bank account. If Karen had so much money, why hadn’t she paid off her Visa bill?

  Either Special Agent James G. Mason was older than he looked, or he’d had some excellent and intensive tutoring in the horizontal arts. Jo, deeply appreciative, lay flat on her back and stared at the ceiling while she waited for her vision to clear and her heartbeat to return to normal.

  “I believe I have just discovered the secret of the universe,” Special Agent Mason said. His head was at her feet.

  She discovered she had enough energy left to laugh.

  “But my thesis may require further investigation,” he added, and crawled up the bed to flop down next to her.

  Later they conducted a raid on the pop and candy machines down the hall, and curled up on the bed to tear into Doritos and Reese’s peanut butter cups, and spiked diet Cokes with what was left of Special Agent Mason’s whiskey.

  He touched an experimental finger to her skin. “You know you actually glow when you come?”

  “You roar like a lion. My eardrums will never be the same.”

  “Can’t help it. Always do.”

  “Louder with me, though.”

  He grinned. “Oh, yeah. Way louder.”

  She leaned forward and caught his lower lip between her teeth. He angled his head. When she pulled back, she licked her lips and said, “Mmmm. Who taught you to kiss like that?”

  “Did the top of your head lift completely away?” he said, as complacent as a twenty-seven-year-old special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation can be, stark naked and in bed with a newspaper reporter six years his senior. She pinched him and he caught her hand. “Behave yourself. Or at least wait until I’ve finished my drink.”

  “You’re no fun.” She stuffed pillows behind her and leaned up against the headboard. “You going back to Anchorage tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. Colonel Campbell hasn’t said.” He looked at her, amused. “Is this where I get pumped for information?”

  Jo put on her best Scarlett O’Hara voice. “Only if you want to be, sugar.”

  He reversed to sit next to her, and picked up her hand to trace the lifeline in the palm. “I’m in a pretty good mood at the moment. Pump away.”

  “Why is Campbell so interested in that wreck?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t, Jo. I really am just along for the ride. It’s not every day somebody so low on the food chain gets a ride on an F-15. My number came up and I lucked out.”

  “That’s you. What about him?”

  He linked their hands together. “He’s determined to haul out this wreck. I repeated everything that pilot friend of yours said to him, but he is determined.” He paused.

  “What?”

  “I think he was always going after it, even before the trooper said anything about the gold this evening. Colonel Campbell was on the phone all afternoon. Every time I tried to call him to find out when we were leaving the line was busy. After a while I figured it must be out of order and I went to his room. I heard him talking through the door.” He kissed her hand.

  “Don’t stop there.” He turned with a grin and kneed her legs apart. “I didn’t mean that and you know it.”

  He kissed her, eliciting a long, low purr. “I do like the sounds you make when you’re getting some, Dunaway.”

  Her toenail made a line up the back of his leg. “Tell.”

  He explored her ear with the tip of his tongue. “It sounded like Colonel Campbell was ordering up some kind of helicopter, one equipped for high altitudes, low temperatures and rough terrain, capable of hovering for long periods. And he wanted it stripped. One pilot, one loadmaster, and nothing else.”

  She shivered and bit his shoulder. “Room for cargo.”

  “Be my guess.” His lips traveled to her earlobe.

  “And this was when?” She hooked one leg around his waist.

  “This afternoon. About three o’clock.” He moved over her, settling fully into that good old standby, the missionary position, and smiled into her eyes.

  She shifted her legs and slid her hands down to his ass. Her voice was a little breathless. “Four hours before dinner, when Liam told him about the coin, which seemed to trigger Colonel Campbell’s decision to recover the wreck, which he seemed until then to be willing to leave until next spring, or forever.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded distracted, his attention elsewhere.

  “Ahhhh,” she said.

  “Any more questions?” he whispered.

  “No.”

  “You sure? I can talk and fuck at the same time.”

  “Not tonight you can’t.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Told you.”

  December 17, 1941

  March says were making a special trip to Krasnoyarsk not a ferry job this time were bringing the same plane back instead of catching a ride. I asked Roepke and he said how did I know so I guess we are. I saw the CO talking to Roepke and they shut up when they saw me and the old man was pretty snappish when he told me to get back to work.

  No letter from Helen. I wish I could call. I hate not knowing whats going on I hate it I hate it. I hope shes allright. I hope Moms with her.

  I talked to Peter. I’m going down to his house again tonight.

  SEVENTEEN
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  He couldn’t believe she’d talked him back into the plane.

  He couldn’t believe the plane had actually made it back into the air. He couldn’t believe it had actually managed to stay in the air over the river to Newenham. Most of all, he couldn’t believe it had brought them safely back to earth, rolling out down the length of the one runway the Mad Trapper Memorial Airport boasted with the engine vibrating like a three-legged washing machine.

  He especially couldn’t believe it when she kicked an abrupt right rudder and they swung off the runway before they’d reached what he would have considered a safe taxi speed. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I don’t want anyone to see us. I got enough problems without filling out forms in quintuplicate for the goddamn FAA.”

  He bit his tongue as they narrowly missed a Beaver tied down at the end of a row of small planes, swung in behind it and taxied briskly down to Wy’s shed.

  When she killed the engine he sat there for a moment, staring at the sign nailed to the top of the shed.NUSHUGAK AIR TAXI SERVICE, and Wy’s phone number, beneath which new paint added in smaller letters,WWW.NUAIRTAXI.COM. He felt he’d never really looked at it before, noticed the brightness of the colors, even in the dark, the inventiveness in the arrangement of the words, the sheer artistry in the lettering.

  In fact the whole night felt pretty damn good to him. He stretched out his legs and touched the rudder pedals. “What do these do again?”

  “They push the rudder back and forth. Liam, don’t-”

  “And what does the rudder do, exactly?”

  “The force of the wind against the rudder pushes the plane in the direction you want it to go,” she said, dumbing it down for her audience.

  “You’re so cute when you’re playing teacher.” He grabbed Wy and kissed her, hard. Since she was halfway out of her harness, this proved awkward, but doable.

  “Whew!” she said, emerging. “What was that for?”

  “General principles,” he said, and grabbed her again.

  She squirmed. “We’ve got a perfectly good bed at home.”

  “It’s a twin.”

  “It’s a bed.”

  “I’ve always wanted to lay you in a plane.”

  “Don’t con me, Campbell; the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do in a plane is get out of it.”

  He was fumbling at the buttons on her shirt. “We’re on the ground. Against all odds, against any realistic expectation, we were shot out of the sky and we made it home alive and in one piece. Gimme.”

  She giggled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her giggle, if ever. They were always so everlastingly serious about everything. “I wanna have some fun,” he said. “I want you to have some fun. Come on, Wy.” There wasn’t a lot of room and the damn yoke kept getting in the way. He finally found the lever that pushed the seat back. It gave suddenly and his seat slid back with a bang. She was half-on and half-off his lap, half-dressed and half-not, and she was laughing so hard that she was no help at all.

  “Shit.” He rested his forehead on hers. “What am I going to do with this?”

  “No point in wasting it,” she said. In some fashion best known to pilots she managed to eel backward down into the rudder well, and he forgot the world.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said lazily, a little later. “That wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it’ll do. I owe you.”

  She snickered, buttoning her shirt up cockeyed. “You’ll pay, Campbell. Oh, yeah, you’ll pay. Come on, let’s get out of this bucket and go home.”

  “I’ve got to check in,” he said.

  “Why?” She almost wailed it.

  He stepped from the Cessna and snatched her up into a comprehensive embrace. “Because it’s what I do. Come on.”

  They drove to the post in the Blazer, and if the state of Alaska had been peering in the windows it would have been shocked at the behavior going on in the front seat of this vehicle, purchased and maintained for the purpose of enforcing the law and apprehending the violators thereof. Once Liam pulled off and for a few breathless moments Wy feared that they were going to do something Liam could arrest them for. A little farther down the road he drove into the ditch, churned through the snow, uprooted a birch and a couple of alders, and skidded back up on the road. “Keep your hands to yourself next time,” he said severely.

  The post, not surprisingly, was empty, since it was nearly four o’clock. “Five minutes,” Liam said, giving Wy a brief, fierce kiss.

  Inside, he found Prince’s notes in the computer and scrolled through them. The stuff on Karen was interesting. Mad about something in the will, was she? Something Betsy and Jerry and Stan Jr. got that she wanted? Something even loser Jerry noticed she wanted? Badly enough to confront one of them for it? Bad enough to start a fight over it, and lose?

  And no visible means of support and a paid-up mortgage, or what looked like one. Although the Visa bill was odd.

  The most likely scenario was that the person who had killed Lydia had killed Karen. Lydia had died of a blow to the head suffered in a struggle that could likely have begun without murderous intent, according to Brillo Pad. Lydia’s death could have been involuntary manslaughter, not murder.

  Karen’s death was murder, though. He thought again of her body’s outline on the kitchen floor. A murder that had been made to look as if it had been done by someone caught in the act of robbing the house. Thereby suggesting a stranger. Which, ergo, suggested no such thing.

  He sat down at his desk and pulled a sheet of paper from the printer. He penciled a square in the center and labeled itLydia. He penciled another square just below it, labeled itKaren and connected the two with a line. He made three other squares and labeled themBetsy, Stan Jr. andJerry, and connected them to Lydia and to Karen.

  In the upper right-hand corner he made another square and labeled itthe boyfriend and connected it to Lydia.

  The boyfriend hadn’t come forward. Could be scared. Could be guilty. Could be nonexistent; witnesses had been wrong before, and Sharon hadn’t seen the boyfriend, only his flowers. Or flowers Lydia said had come from him. Had Prince tracked down those flowers yet? He found a note in the file. She’d called Alaska Airlines Goldstreak; they hadn’t gotten back to her.

  He made another box and labeled itblackmailer? and connected it to Karen. Karen lived a pretty high and free lifestyle, according to just about everyone. So far as he could tell, he was the only functional male in the bay who hadn’t slept with her. Ripe for blackmail. Look at that Visa bill, at total odds with the paid-up mortgage and bills. If she had money, and it wasn’t going to pay her Visa bill, where was it going? Except then there was the bank account, a very healthy ten grand. And why would her blackmailer kill her, thereby killing his cash cow? And it wasn’t like she tried to hide what she did, and she didn’t have anyone to hide it from, no husband, no children, and her family didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  Odd, that. Lydia was Yupik, at least part, and the Yupik had some of the strongest cultural ties to family that Liam had ever seen. The Three Musketeers could take lessons; it really was all for one and one for all on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River delta. Still, there were dysfunctional families of every race, color and creed. And the Tompkinses weren’t dysfunctional, exactly, just not that close. It wasn’t a sin, it wasn’t all that unusual, and it certainly wasn’t a crime.

  He looked at Lydia’s chair, and remembered what Clarence had said over the chessboard.That girl had boys buzzing around like mosquitoes, wanting to suck that juicy little thing dry.

  He tried to imagine a teenage Clarence, and failed. He tried to imagine a teenage Lydia, and was more successful. Stan Tompkins Sr. must have been one hell of a guy to come out ahead of the bunch chasing Lydia. She was seventy-four when she had died, which meant she would have been a teenager during World War II. He doodled some numbers. She would have been born in 1926. A kindergartner in 1931, sweet sixteen in 1941, able to vote in 1946.

  “Liam
?” He looked up and saw Wy yawning in the doorway. “I must have dozed off,” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, hell, Wy, I’m sorry,” he said, shoving the grid to one side and standing up. “I started doodling and I lost track of time.”

  “It’s okay.” She slid into his lap and tucked her head beneath his chin. Her firm, soft weight felt very sweet. She looked down at the grid. “Oh, you’re doing that square thing you do.” She pulled it toward her. “Lydia was born in 1926? God. I wonder what the world was like then. About all I know is they couldn’t use boats with engines to fish for salmon on Bristol Bay. Plus we were a territory, not a state.”

  He stared down at the grid, something tickling at the back of his brain, something he ought to be seeing.

  Wy stirred. “She was born in Newenham, right?”

  “Yeah. It’s on her birth certificate.”

  “She has a birth certificate?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “A lot of people her age who were born in the Bush don’t have birth certificates. No hospitals and damn few doctors back then. It’s hard for Native elders to get social security sometimes because they can’t prove they were born in the U.S.” Her finger traced the line to the box where he had written Lydia’s milestone dates. “Sixteen in 1941. Wasn’t that the year that C-47 augered into Carryall Mountain?”

  He stared at the top of her head.

  “I was wondering if you could have seen the crash from town,” she said. “It isn’t that far away, and if it was a clear night…”

  “I need to get a new job,” he said.

  “What?” She blinked up at him, soft-eyed and sleepy.

  “Filing at City Hall ought to be just about my speed.”

  “Liam-”

  “I love you,” he said, and kissed her hard.

  She blinked. “Okay.”

  “No, I mean it, I love you, but it’s just that right now I love you because you have the one working brain between us.” All thoughts of sleep vanished and he dumped her unceremoniously off his lap and pulled a fresh sheet of paper to him. “Look.” He drew a grid this time, and put a list of dates down one side. “Lydia was sixteen in 1941. On the night of December twentieth, 1941, a C-47 crashes into Carryall Mountain. Suppose it was clear enough between here and there to see the crash? What would you do if you saw something like that?”