Better To Rest

by Dana Stabenow

  “What?” Moses said.

  Eric looked sheepish. “Oh, hell. I was in the bar when Wy called Bill to come stay with her boy. I figured it’d be easy enough to take a shot at you on the way home. I know the flight path for the approach into the Mad Trapper; I live right under it. I took the skiff across the river and…” He shrugged and dropped his head.

  Moses shot to his feet and began slapping Eric’s head, open-palmed slaps with the full force of his arm behind them. “You old fuck! You were shooting at my granddaughter!” He started slapping with both hands. “Get on your feet! Get up! Get up, goddamn it, so I can take a decent shot at you!”

  Eric cringed away.

  “Goddamn you, Cal, we’ve known each other since high school! What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Moses. Moses. Moses!” Liam came around the table and pulled Moses away. “Knock it off. Just calm down, now.”

  Moses backed down, fuming.

  Perfect peace, all right.

  “You called him Cal,” Liam said.

  “It’s his name,” Moses snapped. “Calvin Eric. We called him Silent Cal in school, when we were studying Coolidge.”

  TheSC on Lydia’s calendar. Silent Cal.

  “Calvin Eric Mollberg, I’m arresting you for the murders of Lydia Tompkins and Karen Tompkins. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney…”

  TWENTY

  “Sad,” was Wy’s verdict.

  “Pitiful,” Liam said. “You know what I hate?”

  They were lying in Wy’s bed, the infamous twin-size bed that was too short for Liam on both ends and too narrow for both of them to sleep in side by side. It wasn’t a problem for either of them at the moment, but Wy had a feeling it was right around the corner. “What do you hate?”

  “I hate stupidity. I hate incompetence. I hate ignorance, and ineptitude, and all those other words that begin with ‘I’ that denote idiocy. For crissake, Wy. The man’s seventy-five years old, he’s lived a mostly blameless life, he was a good husband, a good father, a goddamn pillar of his community. Now he gets to spend what’s left of his life locked up with a bunch of drug dealers and child molesters and, of course, his fellow murderers. I mean, Jesus! Can you see him in a cell with Gheen?”

  She tucked herself more securely into the curve of his body. “I don’t think they’re going to put anybody in with a serial killer, Liam.” Although she had liked Lydia a lot and it wouldn’t have hurt her feelings if the Alaska Department of Corrections in their infinite wisdom had decided that Gheen and Eric Mollberg were destined as cellmates.

  “And Lydia. Goddamn it. I liked her. Hell, I think I was halfway in love with her. I told you about her beaning Harvey with the jar of tomatoes, didn’t I?”

  “About five times. And they were sun-dried tomatoes.”

  “She was a great old gal. She flirted with me. Seventy-four and the juices were still running. And come to find out she’s who she is because she’s a grave robber.”

  Wy had known Lydia some, enough that Lydia had offered her a place in the Literary Ladies book club, but Wy’s job kept her in the air so much she would have missed meetings the entire summer. She had declined, but every now and then she’d run into Lydia at the post office and they’d trade titles. “I liked her.”

  “Everybody liked her. A lot of people loved her. Some downright lusted after her, even after she was a grandmother, too. Doesn’t mean what she did was right.”

  Wy had spent more time in the Bush than Liam had. “Someone would have come along and taken it.”

  “Human nature, I know, I-”

  “No, Liam.” Wy squinched around until she was facing him, her butt hanging precariously over the edge of the bed. “Nothing ever goes to waste in the Bush. She had a good use for it; she bought her husband a boat. That gold was like the Blazo cans they beat flat into shingles, and the fifty-five-gallon drums they turn into stoves. It was like when a SeaLand cargo ship hits a storm and washes everything overboard and it all floats up on shore. Finder’s keepers. It’s the law of the land.”

  “She was saying they should tell at the end. She must have known it was thieving when she did it if it came home to roost sixty years later.”

  “You think she’d been agonizing over it all these years, wallowing in her own guilt?”

  Liam thought of some of the interviews he and Diana Prince had done. “No.”

  “She lived her life, right through up until the end. I think,” Wy said, propping herself up on an elbow, “I think when she heard about the plane being found and the arm and the coin, that maybe she thought it was time, that was all. It wasn’t an attack of conscience.” She tapped his chest. “But Eric Mollberg heard it that way because he was feeling guilty. He was happy to shuffle off the burden of the coins to her in the first place, happy to join the army and go off to war. She was sixteen, Liam. She wasn’t a criminal mastermind; she was just an opportunist, like everyone else who lives in the Alaskan Bush, like everyone needs to be to survive.”

  She smiled down at him, and in a lightning move he reversed their positions. “I’ll make you a deal.”

  “State your terms.”

  “I won’t take the job in Anchorage if you get us a bigger bed.”

  She flushed a faint, rosy pink. “Do you mean it, Liam?”

  “I emphasize the one word in that sentence that means the most: bigger.”

  “I don’t want you to stay in Newenham for me, Liam, or for Tim. I want you to stay here because you want to stay here.”

  “Not king-size, that’d be too big, I’d never find you.”

  “I mean it, Liam. I don’t want to live my life having to be grateful to you because you stayed with me the second time around.”

  “A double isn’t big enough. My feet would be bound to stick out over the edge, and I hate that.”

  “I don’t want you to turn down a job you really wanted just because I don’t want to leave Newenham.”

  “A queen,” he said, kneeing her legs apart and coming into her. “Now that would be juuuust right.” He kissed her thoroughly.

  She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “Are you sure? Are you very, very sure?”

  “I am very, very sure.”

  Her nose ran when she cried. It was very, very unattractive, and he waited while she fumbled a Kleenex off the nightstand and blew. It was very, very unromantic.

  “Liam?”

  “What?”

  “Will you marry me?”

  His eyes widened. He smiled, a long, slow, sweet smile.

  “I thought you’d never ask.”

  She called Gary the next day before her first flight. “Gary? It’s Wy.”

  His voice warmed. “Hey, girl.”

  “Jo sent you home, huh?”

  “Yeah, she said it would be best.” He paused. “And it was. Wasn’t it?”

  “It was.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’re part of my college days, Gary. You’re part of my youth. I’ll always care. I’ll see you at-”

  “Don’t,” he said, and hung up.

  “-Thanksgiving at your folks’ house,” she said to a dial tone. She replaced the phone gently in its cradle. She’d hurt him, and she knew it, but her future was here.

  With Liam, and Tim, and Bill, and Moses. She smiled.

  Moses was sitting on a stool at Bill’s. Bill was nowhere to be found. “Arraigning Eric,” Moses said.

  “I’m sorry, uncle,” she said. “I know he was a friend of yours.”

  “This one I never saw coming,” he said, and tossed off the rest of his beer. “Who says there’s no god?”

  “Come to dinner tonight. Bring Bill.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.

  “Why? What for?”

  “For being your grandfather. For making you who you are. I’m sorry as hell. A man like me has no business scattering his seed around.”

  She was hurt, though she tried not to show it. “Come
to dinner tonight. You and Bill. A family dinner.”

  His face was creased with weariness, and for the first time in her eyes he was showing his age. His smile, when it came, was lacking its usual malice. “You sure you don’t want to keep your distance?”

  “I’m sure.” She sounded surer than she felt, but he was her grandfather, he’d owned up to it at last, and she wasn’t going to let him draw back. She might not have that much time left to learn from him.

  “I’m good for a while yet,” he said, and laughed his rich, knowing laugh when he saw the expression on her face.

  They went back up to the crash site two days later, after the snow stopped falling, to watch Charles’ crew pick at the remains. There was an open fracture of the tibia before the morning was out, and in the first fifteen minutes after lunch a dislocated shoulder and a near miss with a calving chunk of ice. The crew chief flatly refused to put his men back to work after that. His men were in complete agreement.

  “I could probably court-martial the lot of you,” Charles said.

  “You probably could, sir,” the man agreed. “But at least we’d all still be alive while we were locked up in the brig.”

  Charles sighed. “Pack up your gear and head back to base.”

  Liam, listening in the background, stepped forward when the men moved off, carrying a stretcher. “So we’ll never know who the spy was, or if there even was one. Or who was carrying the gold, or why.”

  “Short of a written confession discovered under a rock up on that glacier, miraculously intact after all these years, no.”

  “The general won’t be pleased.”

  Charles removed the aviator’s cap that looked so well on his head and smoothed down his hair with the same hand. “Ah, hell. Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”

  They laughed together.

  Wy, picking her way over a fractured slab of ice, which was now covered with a foot of snow, heard the sound and smiled to herself. Campbellpere et fils seemed to be getting along better. Good.

  Something prickled at the base of her neck and she shivered. The temperature was dropping, or so it seemed. Her feet carried her forward, a little too close to the face of the glacier for Liam’s comfort. “Wy, don’t get so close to that damn thing!”

  She didn’t hear him, the prickling at the base of her neck driving her on. She waded through snow to another slab of ice and peered into a dark blue hollow.

  “Wy!” Liam was coming up behind her. “Wy, come on, get back.”

  He stopped beside her. “What are you looking at?” When she didn’t reply, he bent over and looked. “What’s that?”

  He reached inside the hollow. It was narrow and very deep, and he had to stretch to find anything. It was a tight fit, too tight. He stood up and pulled his arm out of his parka and reached inside the hollow again. This time his hands closed over it, a book, short and wide, maroon in color and embossed with very faint gold letters. The flash of the letters was what he had seen, winking up at him from inside the hollow.

  “ ‘The Standard Pilot Logbook,’ ” he read out loud.

  He opened it up carefully, afraid it would fall apart in his hands. The pages were damp but the writing on them was still legible. “Sgt. Obadiah Etheridge, pilot navigator, U.S. Army Air Corps,” he read, followed by a serial number and an address in Birmingham, Alabama.

  He turned the page.

  Thanksgiving, 1941

  Turkey and stuffing in the mess. It was awful. The cook runs a laundry in Memphis Tennessee in civilian life. He says he told them that when he signed up and doesnt know how he got assigned to be a cook. Typical army situation normal all fucked up.

  “That’s one of our guys,” Charles said, coming to stand at Liam’s shoulder. He looked at Wy, standing mute before them. Her face looked bleached of color, and her expression was strained.

  So was Liam’s. “How the hell did you know it was there?”

  December 20, 1941

  Im writing this in the air. We took off in the dark but then its dark all the damn time up here. It was so cold the fuel wouldnt ignite at first and for awhile I dint think we were going to make it up. I saw Roepke come out of the old mans office before we took off. March was watching too. Wonder what thats about he said to me. I dont care I just want to do the job and get back.

  Captain Ross had to have his lower lip cut away because of frostbite.

  I wonder if I could transfer to a base closer to home. If I told the old man about Helen losing the baby maybe hed okay it. Maybe not, because theyre expecting the Japs to invade any minute now and theyre bringing more men in all the time. Everybodys coming north nobodys going south. I have to do my duty. We got us a real war now.

  Its okay though, after this trip Ill have some more money to send her and shell be okay for awhile.

  I hope shes okay. Helen, I love you. I wish you were here. The northern lights are all over the sky all different colors red and white and green you wouldnt believe how beautiful.

  Have to take a bearing now.

  Dana Stabenow

  ***

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