Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  Charles was taken aback. “I- What?”

  “The coin we found with the arm was minted in 1921.”

  “Oh,” Charles said blankly. A sudden and unexpected grin spread across his face. “I never was a very good liar.”

  Liam sat down without invitation in the room’s only chair. “Unless you’re doing something illegal by recovering that plane and the bodies of the crew, and I can’t see how you are, I don’t care why. I just don’t like being bullshitted. I can keep my mouth shut.” After last summer, Charles had to know that was the absolute truth. “Tell me enough so that I’ll want to and I’ll go away. Or I’ll buy you a beer, or take you caribou hunting, or whatever you want.”

  They stared at each other in silence. It was hard to tell which of them had been more surprised by Liam’s words.

  Finally Charles said, “You’d really take me caribou hunting?”

  “Sure.” Liam shrugged. “I’ve never been, but there’s a hell of a herd northwest of here, the Mulchatna herd. Hundreds of thousands of them, the Fish and Game’s practically begging people to go shoot some so they won’t eat themselves out of house and home and wind up starving to death.”

  The years of armed truce weren’t easy to shake. “I don’t know, Liam, you might shoot me and bury the body, once you got me out there.”

  Liam got to his feet, disgusted.

  Charles rose, too. “Don’t go, Liam. It was a joke. A bad joke, I admit, but it was a joke. Sit down.” He hesitated. “Please.”

  Liam couldn’t remember his father ever having used that word with him before. He sat down again, partly because he wasn’t sure his legs would carry him to the door.

  Charles reached for a plain buff file markedRestricted Access in big red letters and held it up. “The official investigation into the crash.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was too clear.”

  “What?”

  Charles smiled. “I know, doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? But it was. Unlimited ceiling, fifty-mile visibility. It was too damn clear, and too cold, and the aurora was out in full force, hanging right down to the ground, if you can believe the eyewitnesses. All the colors they come in and all over the sky. There was no distress call from the crew, no indication that anything was wrong.”

  “What were they doing so low? And weren’t they a little off course?”

  Charles’ laugh was short and unamused. “A little. Their flight plan was for Krasnoyarsk. Instead, they were on a heading for Dutch Harbor. Either their instrumentation was off or they were, or they were just blinded by the lights. A couple on the ground saw the fireball when they impacted, and then a plume high up on the mountain. They called a pilot who was living in Newenham at the time, some Scots name…” He thumbed through the file.

  “DeCreft?” Liam said. “Bob DeCreft?”

  Charles looked up. “That’s right. How did you know?”

  “One of the original Bush pilots. He’d lived here a long time. Go on.”

  “DeCreft was in the air within the hour. Said in his interview that he followed a creek up so he wouldn’t get fuddled-his word-by the lights. Said he saw the impact site at the eleven-thousand-foot level, and then where the remains of the plane had fallen three thousand feet onto a glacier and into a crevasse.”

  Liam was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand, Dad. Why are you so hot to pull this particular wreck out? Everything Wy said was true; it’ll be difficult and damn dangerous. Not to mention which the weather around these parts is not at its most reliable at this time of year. Your people could be getting themselves into some serious trouble.”

  “I know that, Liam. I’m not doing this because I want to; I’m doing this because I’ve been ordered to.”

  “Is it because the father of the guy who’s going to be your boss was one of the crew members?”

  “No,” Charles said. He shook his head. “If only it were that simple.”

  Trust builds trust. “Does it have something to do with the fact that the service records of the crew are classified?”

  Charles regarded him with exasperation and, if Liam was not mistaken, maybe even some pride. “So you know that, do you?”

  “I do.”

  Charles looked at the file, and set it to one side. Elbows on his knees, he linked his hands and stared at them. “The copilot’s name was Lt. Aloysius March, and yes, he was General March’s father. But there were two other members on board that flight. One was the pilot, a Capt. Terrance Roepke. The other was a navigator, a Sgt. Obadiah Etheridge.”

  “Where were they going?”

  “Officially? Krasnoyarsk.”

  “And unofficially?”

  “Oh, they were going to Krasnoyarsk, all right. After they had refueled, they would have continued on to Attu, and made a big circle back to Anchorage by way of Dutch Harbor.”

  “They were hunting.”

  Charles nodded. “For the Japanese fleet. It was right after-”

  “Pearl Harbor!”

  “Who’s telling this story? Buckner and Eareckson and the rest of them were expecting an invasion at any moment. They wanted intelligence. This flight wasn’t the only one of its kind.”

  “What makes this one special?”

  Charles was silent for a long moment. Liam kept quiet, thinking that if he did so he might actually hear the truth.

  “There was reason to believe,” Charles said, very carefully, “that there was a spy on board.”

  “What kind of a spy? A Japanese spy?”

  “A German.”

  This was starting to sound like the script for a movie. “I still don’t get this mad rush to recover the wreckage. Let it lie, Dad, and the story will die with it.”

  “Orders. From General March himself.” Charles smiled thinly. “We don’t know which member of the crew was a traitor.”

  Understanding came at last. “And General March is afraid it is his father.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which would not be good for his confirmation hearing.”

  “No. And then there’s that damn gold piece.”

  “Why does it bother you so much?”

  “I’m worried there might be more of it,” Charles said in a level voice. “And if there was more-”

  “You’re worried about what it was going to be used for,” Liam said. “Smuggling? Spying? Sabotage?”

  Charles nodded. “Any or all of the above.”

  “There was more gold, once,” Liam said, and had the satisfaction of seeing his father look surprised.

  “How do you know?”

  Liam told him, and at the end said, “May I see the file?”

  Charles hesitated for only a moment before handing it over.

  Only one of the names of the two people who had witnessed the crash surprised him.

  December 19, 1941

  We go tomorrow. Its cold as hell. Peter showed me a poem by this guy Service which is about another guy named Mcgee who climbs into the furnace of a ship to get warm. Man if there was a ship with a furnace around here Id climb into it too.

  We got the briefing on the route this morning. Supposed to be CAVU all the way. The Bering Strait is frozen over so it fucking well better be clear as a bell or were not going to know which way is up. The forecast calls for clear but this weather can turn completely around in twenty minutes or less you just never know. I asked Roepke what our mission was and he put his hands over his ears and looked under his bed. I don’t think Hitler gives a shit where were going. But the emperor of Japan might so maybe hes right. They told us to pack enough for a week so I reckon we won’t be gone long.

  No letter from Helen. No letter from Mom. I dont know whats going on but its a real war now and I cant think about that. There might be something I can do though. Ive got to try anyway.

  Peter gave me a present of a brown leather valise. Its old but nice and it looks smaller than it is. Ill have to recalculate the fuel load.

  NINETEEN

&nbs
p; Eric Mollberg’s small, neat house perched on the extreme edge of the bank of the Nushugak River, where it looked as if it was of two minds, either to take flight or to topple down the cliff. It had a yard full of outbuildings, and a power line looped its way down the driveway between poles. A snow machine sat next to Eric’s dirty white pickup, which Liam recognized on sight from having pulled it over half a dozen times since he’d come to Newenham. Next to the pickup was a small drifter on a trailer. The name of the drifter was theMary M.

  A red Nissan longbed with a white canopy was parked in back of the boat. “Shit,” Liam said, and parked in back of Eric’s truck.

  “It’s open,” he heard Moses yell when he knocked, and he went in.

  The kitchen had that thin layer of grime and that faint odor of fried everything associated with many men who live alone. That said, the dishes weren’t piled too high in the sink and Liam wasn’t afraid to take the seat opposite Eric, who sat nursing a mug in his gnarled hands. “Eric,” he said.

  “Liam,” Eric Mollberg said without looking up.

  Liam nodded to Moses. “What’s up?”

  “You still got that gold piece?”

  “Turned it over to the air force.”

  “There was a bunch more where that came from.”

  “I was getting there.”

  “I figured. That’s why I came out here.”

  They both turned to look at Eric, who seemed to shrink visibly in his chair. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, his voice quavering.

  Liam stifled a sigh. The annals of criminal investigation were riddled with pleas of “I didn’t mean to do it.” If everyone who hadn’t meant to do it hadn’t actually done it, law-enforcement agencies all over the world could go to half-strength and no one would ever notice the difference. He got out his notebook, in which he rarely wrote a word but which worked remarkably well to fascinate and intimidate suspects. “Can you tell us about it, Eric?”

  He was in love with her, with Lydia, madly, passionately, crazily in love. So were most of the junior and senior men at Newenham High School. Might have been because there were five guys for every one girl. Might have been because she was just so damned pretty. Lydia Akiachak was the belle of Newenham High School, and she had picked him. She’d picked him to take her to the Christmas dance at the high school, and after the dance she hadn’t said no when he suggested driving out River Road to watch the northern lights. There was a place where they went to park, and somebody had been out to the end of it that morning and told him that the snow was packed down enough to make it there. He didn’t care if they never made it back.

  So there they were, and just about the time things were getting interesting they saw the fireball. They drove back into town and told the first pilot they found, Bob DeCreft, who was two days away from leaving after he’d joined up. Bob went up to take a look, and when he got back told them the wreckage was right on the top of Bear Glacier but that it was about to slide into a crevasse, and that there was nothing they could do. But Lydia, she was that kind of girl, she wanted to check for survivors, even though Bob told her there couldn’t be any out of that wreck. What about parachutes? she said. What if there’s somebody hung up on the edge of the mountain, just waiting for us to come get them?

  So they went. Bob said they were nuts and he refused to go with them, but he loaned her his bibs and boots and they drove straight from the airstrip to Icky and then up the trail to the little airstrip the CCCers had put in the summer of ’38, back when they were surveying the refuge. It wasn’t a long hike after that, and what with all the lights it was bright as day out so they couldn’t get lost. The glacier wasn’t that hard to climb, maybe because the snow was piled so high along the sides and it was firm enough not to go through when they walked on it.

  They got to the wreckage about five in the morning, by his watch. Some of it was still smoking. A lot of it had already slid into the crevasse, the edge melted by the heat of the pieces of the plane. There were some body parts on the snow, and a headless body sitting in the front part of the plane. The smell was awful. They were both horrified, and in a hurry to get away from it, when she stumbled over a charred leather bag. It was heavy, and she hurt her foot. It made him curious, so he opened it. And that was when they found the coins.

  “There were hundreds of them,” Eric said, a faraway look in his eyes. “Gold coins, sewn into individual pockets in long strips folded over on each other. It was like… treasure. We’d found it; it was ours.”

  So they’d hauled the coins down the glacier and back to Newenham. Eric was all for selling them for the weight of the gold; it would be easy enough in Alaska. Lydia knew something about coins, though, and she made him wait while she wrote letters and waited for replies. It took most of six months, by which time the Japanese had invaded Attu and Kiska, and Alaska was really and truly at war. He joined the army and left Lydia and the gold coins behind. When he got back, four years later, she had married Stanley Tompkins the month after Eric had left, and already had one kid.

  “I always wondered about Betsy,” Eric said. He gave Moses a covert look. “I made it my business to look up her birthday. The time was about right. I figured then, I owed it to Lydia to leave her and the coins alone. And then I met Mary, and I did good for myself and for her, and, well, I didn’t think about those damn coins anymore.”

  You were just married and starting a family, Liam thought. The entire world was recovering from the war. Sure, you didn’t think about the coins.

  “The years went by, good years,” Eric said. “And then Mary died. And my life was over.”

  Or that’s what he’d thought, until Lydia came knocking at his door three months after they’d put Mary into the ground. Stan Sr. had been dead four years by then, of course. She was lonely, she said. She knew he was, too. Seemed foolish to be lonely when they lived right down the road from each other, and had known each other for so long, and at one time so well.

  For four months everything was wonderful. The overwhelming ache of loneliness receded, and Lydia astonished Eric by showing him that he was still interested in sex. They left Newenham separately and met in Anchorage for the Fourth of July holiday; she stowed away on theMary M. and they motored down to Chichagof Cape and back one sunny July week; they went over to Egegik to his grandmother’s fish camp and skinny-dipped in the lagoon like they were kids again. It was a halcyon four months.

  And then he had to go and ruin things by proposing. She wouldn’t marry him. She didn’t want to marry again, not after Stan.

  That was when he realized that Lydia really had loved Stan, that she had most probably never loved him. That was when he realized that Betsy probably was Stan’s child, after all. That was when he realized that Lydia hadn’t waited even a month after he’d joined up before she slept with another man.

  He still loved her, but sneaking around, as fun as it had been in the beginning, didn’t look attractive in the long term. Marriage or nothing, he said. Nothing, she said.

  “That was when you went on the toot,” Moses said. “We all thought it was some kind of delayed reaction from Mary dying.”

  Drunk seemed to be the easiest way to get through it, so Eric did his best to drink the town dry. Even that wasn’t enough.

  Then they found the wreck of the C-47. And the arm. And the gold coin. The memory of the night the plane had crashed and he and Lydia had hiked up the glacier returned full-force. He’d forgotten it, until he saw the coin.

  He went to her house and told her. Maybe we should tell, she said. No, he said. He was a town councilman, a city father; he had the respect of everyone in Newenham. You did until you fell down a bottle, she said. He slapped her. She slapped him back, and called him names. He grabbed her and shook her, and she fought and pulled away and tripped and fell against the counter. He was just trying to calm her down, trying to talk some sense into her. And then she was dead.

  “Why did she want to tell about the gold?” Liam said.

  Eric
looked at Moses. “You know what she was like. A good woman, a righteous woman. She said we stole that gold. She said she’d sold the coins to a collector Outside to finance Stan’s first seiner. She said her family was rich because of that gold, and that her children were ruined because of it. I think she thought if we told that it would reverse things somehow. I don’t know how. It wasn’t like we could give it back. We never knew who it belonged to in the first place, and Lydia said it was illegal for people to own gold back then so we’d never be able to find out.”

  “What about Karen?” Moses said.

  Eric hung his head. “She knew about the gold. She’d heard her mother talking to her father when she was little. All she heard was that her mother and me had found some gold when we were kids, and she decided there had to be some left, and that I knew where it was. She wanted some, and she called me to meet her at her mother’s house.”

  “And you strangled her.”

  “She said such hateful things, things about her mother. Things about how her mother slept around with a hundred men and how I shouldn’t think I was anything special. And then she got into details. Things about how when she was short of cash Lydia was too busy spending money on her men to give her daughter any. How Lydia had written her a check for five thousand and said that was the last of it. Then she started in again on the men, and what she’d seen Lydia and Stan Sr. doing when she was a kid. And there we were, standing in the kitchen of her own mother, the woman I loved.”

  The woman you murdered, Liam thought.

  “I was trying to rip her tongue out, tell you the truth. There was no bearing it. She had a mouth on her, that girl.” He clasped tough, stringy hands together on the table. “She just wouldn’t shut up. So I shut her up.”

  The three men sat in silence. Outside, snow was falling softly in big fat flakes. Snow had a quality of hush like no other, Liam thought, a muting, calming influence. Peace.

  “How did you know we flew up to Anchorage last night?”