Nothing gold can stay (17 page)

“Not indefinitely, Jim said, and hung up.

Liam drove out to the airport, and was lucky enough to see 68 Kilo coming in on final. It was a runway paint job, smooth as silk, and Liam, safely on the ground, could admire the skill and the professionalism and be proud that his woman was so good at her job.

He thought of his wife, put in a coma by a drunken driver, from which she had never woken. He had enjoyed married life. He liked snuggling beneath the covers every night with the same woman. He liked drinking coffee with her the next morning and talking about what the day would bring. He liked coming home to eat dinner with her, catching up on what had gone right and wrong with the day. Hed liked long, lazy weekends on the couch, reading and watching television and eating popcorn and making love.

There hadnt been as much of that last as he would have liked, given the responsibilities of his job, but Jenny had never complained. Jennifer. Jenny with the light brown hair. Jenny-fair, their high school French teacher had called her, and fair she had been. He still missed her, would always miss her. Theyd been best friends all through middle school and high school, and when they came back from their respective colleges it had seemed as natural as breathing to marry. There had been no highs and no lows in his relationship with Jenny, no uncertainty, no anxiety.

Unlike his relationship with Wy. With Wy, it was either mountaintop or abyss. But then he hadnt known there were mountains to scale or an abyss to plumb during his marriage to Jenny.

He missed his friend more than he did his wife, and he missed his son more than either of them. He wondered if he should be ashamed of that fact. He wondered if Jenny would understand.

The Cessna stopped ten feet away. Practically before the prop had slowed, the passenger door opened and a man bailed out. “Bailed was the right word; he managed to miss the step on the strut entirely and hit the ground walking, rapidly, in the opposite direction.

Liam had exited planes in just that manner himself on one or two occasions, and he sympathized. “Rough flight? he said to Wy as she walked toward him.

She shook her head and smiled. “That was Mr. Frederick Glanville of the Internal Revenue Service. He went out to Kokwok to perform an audit.

Liam began to grin. “Let me guess. Hed never flown in a small plane before.

“Nothing smaller than the 737 that got him to Newenham, would be my guess, Wy said, nodding. “Plus, Stanley Sacaloff was waiting for him on the other end.

Liam started to laugh. “He was auditing Stanley Sacaloff?

“That was his plan. He was pretty tight-lipped when I picked him up this morning, so I dont know how successful the audit was.

“Pretty successful, Liam pointed out, “if Stanley let him walk away from it. He slid a hand around her neck and kissed her. It started out to be a quick greeting and evolved into something more.

She pulled back with a flush in her cheeks. “Remember the uniform, she said, trying for casual and not succeeding very well.

“The hell with the uniform.

She stepped out of reach and tried to frown. “Behave. What are you doing out here, anyway?

His hands dropped and his smile faded. “I need a ride.

“Sure. Where to?

“Nenevok Creek.

“Oh. She was silent for a moment. “Did you talk to John and Teddy this morning?

“Yes. They said all they did was find the body.

“They didnt see Rebecca?

“They say not.

“She could have been scared. Running from the real killer. Maybe the same person who killed Opal Nunapitchuk.

“Maybe.

“You dont sound convinced.

“Im not, he said. “I know youve known them forever. I know you dont think they could kill anyone. But Wy, youve flown me out to incidents before. You know anyone can do anything, given the right motivation. They were on the scene. They had the weapon. They were drunk. And they have a history of harassing people in the area.

“But not killing them, she said quickly, repeating his own argument back to him.

“But not killing them, he agreed. “Anyway, alive or dead, weve got to find the wife. If shes alive, shes got to be terrified, maybe lost. Ive already talked to Search and Rescue out at Chinook Air Force Base. Theyve been quartering the area since dawn.

“Anything?

“Nothing, no sign of her, no smoke or flares. No signal of any kind. He didnt know how wilderness-savvy Rebecca Hanover was going to be, but even a beader from Anchorage ought to be able to follow a creek downstream. Trouble was, the killer would very probably be right behind her. If he wasnt locked up in the Newenham jail.

“Any sign she returned to the creek?

“No smoke from the stack, and she didnt come out to wave when the plane went over. They told me they made enough noise to make sure she would hear them.

No more bodies, Wy thought, I dont want to find any more bodies. “Do you think shes dead?

“That would be the most logical assumption, he admitted.

“But?

He gave a frustrated shake of his head. “I dont know, but I dont like the smell of this. Something about the mine site is itching at me. Something important I saw that didnt register. I want to go back and find out what it is. Are you available?

She smiled then, a long, slow, incite-to-riot smile. “Im always available. Im just not easy.

“Youre telling me.

TWELVE

Wood River Mountains, September 3

She was so tired.

Tired and numb to anything but putting one foot down after the other.

That morning there had been planes flying overhead, and he had kept them both in the rough shelter of spruce boughs he had built the night before. He wouldnt allow a fire, and she was as cold as she was tired. He had insisted she put on every article of clothing she had, and still she was cold, shivering, teeth chattering, she couldnt seem to stop them.

It didnt matter, because none of it seemed real, not from the moment she had heard the shots and come running down the path from the creek to see him standing over Marks body.

Mark, already dead. Mark, to whom she would now never be able to say she was sorry.

Somewhere deep inside, the pain and the grief stirred once, stilled again. To feel pain, to feel grief, one must think, and she would not allow thought.

She would not think of how he had stood looking at her as seconds passed, then minutes, as she did nothing, said nothing. No protest, no scream for help, she hadnt tried to run, nothing. Hed told her he was hungry, and shed made him the lunch she had planned for Mark. Hed admired her beadwork, and shed said thank you. Hed told her to take her clothes off, and she had. Hed told her to lie down on the bed, and she did. He had raped her, and she had endured it, motionless, unprotesting, her husbands body cooling in the creek not fifty feet from where they lay.

She didnt know where they were, except that they were in the mountains, tall ones. He seemed to know where he was going, and she was aware enough to see the sun rise in the east and to see that they were traveling in a southeasterly direction.

They had seen grizzlies feeding on salmon in the creeks they crossed. They had seen moose standing in still ponds, up to their shoulders in water and with their heads submerged as they rooted for forage. They had seen rabbits beginning to shed their brown summer coats and replace them with winter white. They had seen no other people.

He carried a backpack, and they ate food cold from cans. They couldnt risk a fire, he said, not now that they were so close to home. When they got home, he said, he would build her a fire in the stove and she would be warm again. Hed missed her, he said, hed had no one to cook for him, to clean for him, to put the buttons back on his shirts, to help him tan the hides of the mink and the marten and the beaver he trapped during the winter, to help him dress and butcher the caribou he shot in the fall, to plant the garden in spring. He smiled at her, his odd light-colored eyes serene with happiness.

He waited for an hour after the sound of the plane engines died away before he crawled out of the shelter. He stood at the opening for a long time, listening. She stared at the backs of his knees.

He turned and bent down to hold out his hand to help her to her feet. She came out clumsily, her hair catching on a spruce branch, a lost bead, red as a drop of fresh blood, spilling from her pocket. He brushed the twigs from her jacket and jeans, plucked a spider from her collar, adjusted the straps of her knapsack. He stood looking down at her, smiling. “Ive been looking for you everywhere, he said, “and now Ive found you. He traced her cheek with a finger and smiled. “And now we can go home.

She shouldnt have run off, he had told her reproachfully during the night. She was safest with him, he would protect her, watch over her, and their children. She almost came alive at that, but then he spread her legs and raped her again, and again she went numb.

It was all happening to someone else, anyway. She, Rebecca Hanover, had a husband and a home and a job. She, Rebecca Hanover, lived in Anchorage, and went ice-skating on Westchester Lagoon during the winter, and bicycling on the Coastal Trail in the summer, and took beading lessons at Color Creek Studio, and had coffee with Nina on Saturday mornings at City Market. She, Rebecca Hanover, did not hike through the backwoods, cold and tired and hungry and terrified. She, Rebecca Hanover, was not raped in those woods by a stranger who had murdered her husband.

So of course none of this could be happening to her. It was a dream, a bad one, from which she would soon wake up, warm and safe in her own bed.

All she had to do was wait.

Old Man Creek, September 3

The second morning began the same way the first had, with tai chi and a sweat. Afterward, Moses put Tim and Amelia in the skiff and took them down to his favorite fishing hole.

Bill sat on the front porch with a lap full of files that needed closing after the latest spurt of infractions during the most recent fishing period. She regarded the thick pile with some disfavor, wondering if perhaps she wouldnt rather be hip deep in fish gurry after all.

Bill was in the business of justice, not retaliation, and she evaluated every case brought before her with the same care and attention. The problem was, the fishermen against whom fish and game trooper Charlene Taylor swore out complaints kept saying the same things, over and over again, until they sounded like a sixth grader excusing the loss of his homework. The engine broke. The trooper didnt give us the signal. My clock stopped. The bilge pump went out. The engine broke. The mechanic got seasick. The net got caught in the prop. The engine broke.

So far Bill had heard every excuse except “My dog ate it, and it was difficult to summon up the necessary compassion to temper the letter of the law and still enforce it. Her problem was she had no tolerance for fools, and after sitting on an average of three hundred such cases every summer, along about August most of the fishers looked pretty foolish.

First file, Gary Samidia, fishing over the line, two-thousand-dollar fine, four points on his fishing license. Another four and he wouldnt fish next year. Eric Redden, nets in the water before the period started. It was his second time before her that summer and the third time in two years, and she was tired of smelling his unwashed self in her courtroom, which was very small and lacked ventilation. Three thousand dollars, five hundred suspended, and six points. Silas Wood, spotted from the air with his nets in the water a good hour after the period on Friday before last. Hed pled a burst hydraulic line, and had held up a length of tubing that he swore was the guilty party. Silas, Silas, Silas, you dumb son of a bitch, if you take all the fish before they hit the creeks, there wont be any left alive to spawn and send chilluns back out to sea.

Still, Silas had lost his wife two years before and was now the sole support of seven children, all under twelve years of age. One thousand, seven hundred fifty suspended, no points, and forty-five hours of community service. Bill had already talked to the high school principal. Silas would serve out his sentence in the computer lab there, proctoring the fall semesters students during the day and at night receiving some tutoring in the finer arts of data entry. Mayor Jim Earl was chivvying the town council into hiring another clerk for City Hall, and Bill was pretty sure he would succeed.

She put aside the stack of fishing violations with relief and made herself a cup of coffee. By the time she came back out on the porch, Moses had returned with the two kids and a boatload of fish, and they were unloading down at the dock. She stood watching for a few moments, sipping at her mug. Tim liked cleaning fish and he was good at it, the tip of the knife inserted in the anus, the quick slit up the belly, the efficient scooping out of guts. Amelia was equally efficient, if a little slower. Lack of practice, probably. She hadnt been out to her familys fish camp this summer. Her husband wanted her home. Probably to use as a punching bag.

Bill sighed and sat back down, setting the mug on the railing and picking up a single legal file sitting separate from the others.

It was the record of a presumptive death hearing, the results of which the parents of the deceased were challenging. A young man, one of a youth group affiliated with a Presbyterian church out of Akron, Ohio, who had come to Alaska for a lesson in wilderness experience, had gone hiking with three friends on a glacier in the Wood River Mountains. The young man had gone for water and disappeared, and after four days Liam Campbell had called off the search and requested a hearing on the presumptive death of the young man.

At the hearing, he had displayed photographs of the area, photographs of the pot lying on its side next to a sluggish stream of meltoff, a map with distances penciled in showing a narrow, easily overlooked and seemingly bottomless crevasse a few feet away from which Liam reported the sound of a lot of water running hard, and SARs report of lowering a fiber-optic cable down the crevasse and finding no body. The troopers best guess was that the boy had gone for water, slipped and fallen into the crevasse, and immediately been caught up in the subglacial river. The location of the boys disappearance was near the mouth of the glacier, and the force of the subsurface meltoff swift and strong, but given the slow rate at which glaciers melted, it would be a long time before the body could be recovered, if ever. With luck the glacier would calve quickly and in ten or fifteen years one of the slabs that fell from its face would yield up the body of the lost boy.