Nothing Gold Can Stay

TEN

Newenham, September 2

In the end, it took three trips in the Cessna to get all of Teddy and John’s catch home, and it was with sore muscles and a feeling of relief that Wy saw them off in John’s truck. They were still jumpy and irritable, and they still wouldn’t acknowledge it, let alone say why. It was one of their most successful hunts ever; they should have been over the moon. Instead, they were short-tempered and nervous, starting every time a plane landed or a vehicle went by.

Wy shook her head. The evidence, specifically a case and a half of empties, indicated the strong possibility of a hangover. At any rate, it was not her problem. She cleaned out the Cessna, tied it down, piled into her own truck and headed for home, wondering if Liam had beat her there. She chastised herself for being glad that Tim was at fish camp with Moses.

The old man’s truck hit a pothole and launched itself a foot in the air, and she realized she was driving a good twenty miles above the speed limit through the heart of Newenham. She hit the brakes, slowing to a more sedate twenty-five, and made herself pull into the parking lot at NC. They needed half-and-half, and her friend Olga had called this morning and told her that the recent NC shipment of Red Delicious apples was good. The Fruit Hotline, they called it; whenever NC or Eagle got in good fresh produce, phones started ringing all over town and all the way up to Icky, the village on the edge of One Lake forty miles up the road. Wy loved a crisp, juicy apple.

She hated shopping, though. Her idea of shopping heaven was a phone, a credit card and an Eddie Bauer catalogue. Unfortunately for her, NC had yet to accept phone orders. She forced herself to get a cart and walk the aisles in search of specials, too, and even found a few. She counted the items in the cart, came in at one over the limit for the express lane and scrupulously lined up in another, behind a short teddy bear of a man with a stunning brunette on his arm. They were stocking up on Bugles and Corn Nuts, and from the bags in the cart had already paid a visit to the liquor store next door in search of the best Newenham had to offer in the way of merlots. Ah, the food of love.

The brunette nuzzled the teddy bear’s ear, and the teddy bear laughed and let his hand, until then resting casually around her waist, slip as casually down to her ass in a brief and, Wy was sure he thought, surreptitious caress. Somebody get these two a motel room, fast, she thought.

At that moment the teddy bear looked around, and Wy gaped at him. “Jim? Jim Wiley?”

The teddy bear revealed himself to be a moon-faced man in his mid-forties with button eyes, plump cheeks and a full head of white hair that looked fresh off the pillow of a very comfortable bed. “Do I know you?” he said.

“No,” Wy said, “but I’ve seen pictures of you swilling beer in college, in company with a certain state trooper of our mutual acquaintance.”

The button eyes widened, and a smile spread across the moon face that creased the plump cheeks. He looked like a teddy bear from the front, too, soft, cuddly and eminently huggable. “Wyanet Chouinard?”

“Hi, Jim.”

They shook hands. Wy felt the dampness on her palms and hoped he didn’t. This was Liam’s best friend since college. This was the one person other than the two of them who knew exactly and precisely how long Wy and Liam had known each other, and how well. He’d been Liam’s college roommate. He’d been best man at Liam’s wedding. He had stood godfather to Liam’s son, Charlie. He had a history with Liam that far surpassed her own. His opinion probably counted more with Liam than hers did simply by virtue of that long history. “Liam didn’t tell me that you were coming to town,” she said, trying hard to keep the uneasiness out of her voice.

“Liam doesn’t know,” Jim said. He brought the brunette forward. “This is Bridget, a friend of mine from Ireland. Bridget, this is Wyanet Chouinard.”

“How nice to meet you, Wyanet, and what a lovely name. Does it mean something special, now?”

“It’s Lakota Sioux,” Wy said, “and, before you ask, I’m not. Call me Wy.” Bridget had a soft, lilting accent that stressed the penultimate word in every sentence. She sounded to Wy’s inexperienced ears as if she had just stepped down from the frame ofThe Quiet Man, one of Wy’s favorite movies. “So, you’re visiting Alaska?”

Bridget looked at Jim and smiled. “I’m visiting Jim.”

“Ah. Oh. Well. Where are you staying?”

“With you,” Jim said, and grinned.

It was an impish grin, cheerful and attractive, but there was something in his eyes, a considering look, that kept Wy from succumbing. “Good,” she said, summoning a return grin that she hoped didn’t look as forced as it felt. She would have loved to have shown him the door, but Liam’s friendship and Bush hospitality forbade it. “My son is out of town for the Labor Day weekend, so Bridget can have his room.” She didn’t say where Jim could sleep, deciding they could figure it out on their own. “Have you got a car?”

They nodded. “Okay, let’s pay for our groceries and you can follow me home.”

Luckily she’d set a moose roast out to thaw that morning, and it was a big one. She let Jim open and pour the wine while she got busy behind the counter, and Bridget and Jim took their glasses out on the deck and exclaimed over the view of the wide expanse of Nushagak River opening up on the limitless vista of Bristol Bay. An eagle was obliging enough to fly by at just that moment, and three ravens were even more obliging: they launched themselves from where they’d been skulking in the branches of a white spruce tree and started harassing him. The eagle flapped grimly on, ignoring the three black devils as they swooped and dove and k-kkk-raked at him.

Bridget came back in from the deck, glowing. “How amazing that you live in a house where eagles fly by the front windows, Wy!”

“It’s not bad,” Wy admitted, measuring white wine, raspberry vinegar, sugar and minced green onions into a saucepan. She turned the gas on low beneath it and rolled the roast over again in a marinade made of olive oil, garlic powder and crushed thyme. The thermometer in the oven read three-fifty, and she put in the roast. “I don’t know when Liam will be back. He didn’t leave a message on the machine, so it’s best if we just cook dinner and act like he’ll be home on time.”

“A cop’s life doesn’t run by the clock,” Jim intoned, raising a glass. “Let’s hear it for the chef.”

Wy raised her glass in turn. “Only for tonight. The rule is whoever gets home first has to cook. I’m later than he is most of the time.”

Bridget had been watching the preparations with an inquisitive eye. “And you said that this was moose meat, then?”

“Yeah, honey, like the big bruiser we saw that morning in my backyard,” Jim said. “Chowing down on my mountain ash.”

Bridget was properly horrified, and Wy and Jim exchanged a grin before they remembered that they were rivals for Liam’s affection. “If he’d beat me home, he would have sliced the roast into steaks, shaken them in his very own special flour mixture and fried them in an inch of peanut oil.”

“Why peanut oil?”

“You can get it hotter at higher temperatures without burning. Liam fries everything. If he could figure out a way to do it, he’d fry peanut butter.”

The two women laughed. Jim, putting on a puzzled expression, said, “And your point is?”

At eight o’clock the phone rang. “Hey, flygirl, you crash any planes lately?”

Wy grinned, a wide grin of pure pleasure. “Hey, Jo. Driven any politicians to suicide lately?”

“Give me time. Labor Day’s coming up.”

“You are one hell of a reporter, I’ll say that for you,” Wy said, one eye on the sauce.

“Smart-ass. I was thinking about coming down.”

“Oh yeah?” Wy said. “Were you thinking you might have a place to stay?”

“Smart-ass,” Jo repeated. She hesitated.

It wasn’t like Jo to hesitate. Wy turned the heat under the sauce down and took the portable phone around the corner and into the hallway. “What’s wrong, Jo?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Jo said irritably.

Wy frowned at the wall. “You sound funny.”

Jo huffed out an aggravated breath. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Wy blinked. “Someone you want me to meet.”

“That’s what I said.”

Now that she was listening for it, Wy could hear the self-consciousness and maybe even a little embarrassment in Jo’s voice. Tongue in cheek, she said, “Would this someone by any chance be, ah”-she paused delicately-“male?”

“Kiss my ass,” Jo said, varying a theme.

Wy grinned at the opposite wall, and waited.

“Yeah, all right, it’s a guy.”

“And you want me to meet him.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Have you taken him home yet, or am I the first test?”

“Fuck you, Chouinard.”

“I love you, too, Dunaway,” Wy purred. “By all means, put this paragon on the first available plane, and get on after him.” Voices came from the living room. How nice. Liam could have his ex-college roomie and main squeeze to stay, and she could have hers. One big, very full, deliriously happy house. “You’ll have to sleep on the couch.”

“That’s where I slept last time,” Jo said.

“Yeah, but this time it’s a full house. Tim’s up the river with Moses, and I’d let you have his room, but there’s somebody already in it.”

“Who? Liam?”

“Nope. One of your favorite people. Jim Wiley.”

There was a long silence. Unlike Wy, Jo had actually met Jim Wiley. They both lived in Anchorage, not that big a town, and they were both involved in the information-gathering business, more or less. Her paper occasionally employed his services to track down subjects in cyberspace, something they both preferred to keep quiet. “Oh.”

“And friend,” added Wy.

“Oh.” Jo rallied. “Where from this time, Sri Lanka? Peru? Pago Pago?”

“Ireland.”

“Figures.” Another pause. “So, you need backup.”

Wy peered around the corner to see Jim murmuring sweet nothings in Bridget’s ear. “It couldn’t hurt.”

“See you tomorrow.” Click.

She walked around the corner and hung up the phone. “It’s going to be a full house.”

“I thought it already was,” Jim said.

“Jo’s coming down for the Labor Day weekend.” She watched with interest as his eyes narrowed and his jaw set. Wy didn’t know what had happened between the two of them because Jo refused absolutely to discuss it. Other than inventing new and better invective to describe Mr. Wiley, his progenitors and his character. Well, this certainly promised to be one of the more interesting three-day weekends of the year. She smiled to herself, and added innocently, “You remember my friend Jo Dunaway, don’t you?”

He reached for his wine and drained it with one gulp. “Sure. Jo Dunaway. Pudgy blonde. Nosy reporter type. I’ve had to work with her a couple of times. Definitely not a fun date.” He put his arms around Bridget and said brightly, “Now where were we before we were so rudely interrupted?”

Wy hid a grin and went back to the sauce. It would be nice for Jim to have another moving target at which to aim over the weekend.

It would be nice for her not to be the only target he was aiming at.

At eight-thirty the roast was ready to come out of the oven, the potatoes were done, the salad was dressed with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Bridget and Jim set the table while Wy stepped the sauce.“Beurre à montre la sauce,” she said. In answer to Bridget’s quizzical look, she added, “My friend Jo and I backpacked across Europe the year we graduated from college. In Paris we took a cooking class. Madame Claudine was delighted when she heard where we were from, and she made up this sauce for us to use on game. It’s dead easy, it just takes forever. You reduce the initial ingredients to a couple of tablespoons, and then use butter to step the sauce.Beurre à montre la sauce. ” She held out the spoon to Bridget first.

“That is simply heavenly,” Bridget said.

“Okay, you get to eat,” Wy said, and everyone laughed again.

The door opened as they were sitting down and Liam walked in. “Sit, sit,” he said. “Jim, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Come to make your life a living hell,” Jim retorted. “You’ve had it too easy way too long. This is Bridget, a friend who is visiting from Ireland.”

“Bridget.” Liam shook hands with Bridget, and put a hand on Wy’s shoulder. When she looked up he leaned down to kiss her. It flustered her, this casual demonstration of their relationship, and he knew it and grinned. “Yum, moose roast. No, keep eating, I’ll wash up and be with you in five.”

When he reappeared, attired in jeans and a T-shirt, he took the seat across from Wy and filled a plate, ladling on the sauce with a lavish hand. “My favorite. My girl, I think I’ll keep her.”

It was all so domestic that Wy expected the theme forThe Waltons to begin playing at any moment. She sniffed around the edges of the feeling, decided she could live with it, and joined in the general conversation. Jim was explaining how Bridget and he were both ham radio operators and how they’d met on the air a few months before.

A few months? Wy thought. You’re a fast worker, Jim Wiley. As if he could read her mind, Liam winked at her.

Bridget was a computer programmer for a software manufacturer-“We make the buttons work when you click on them”-and she had some amusing stories about people with new systems calling for help. “The first thing you tell them is, Check to see if it’s plugged in. You’d be amazed at how offended they get, and how frequently they don’t have the machine plugged in.”

Liam told them about his week, beginning with the killing of the postmistress in Kagati Lake.

Bridget seemed more interested in how he got to Kagati Lake than in what he found there. “Well, it’s not exactly the garda, now is it.” She caught Wy’s glance. “The garda are our local police,” she explained. “They get around on foot, or in cars.”

“Not planes,” Liam said.

“Not planes,” Bridget agreed.

“I should move to Ireland,” Liam said ruefully, and in response to Bridget’s raised eyebrow said, “I hate to fly. We had to stop off at Nenevok Creek on the way back to Newenham. You should see the strip into that place.” He shuddered, a gesture not wholly feigned.

“Why Nenevok Creek?” Wy said, thinking of Rebecca Hanover counting down to Labor Day and liberation.

“Alaska Airlines picked up a Mayday from there and relayed it to us.”

Wy put down her fork. “A Mayday from Nenevok Creek? Is that the Hanovers?”

“You know them?”

“I flew them in in May, and I’ve been doing supply runs in there all summer.”

Liam considered. “How well did you know them?”

Wy raised her shoulders in a slight shrug. “Not personally, it was business-wait a minute.” She stared hard at Liam. “Why are we speaking in the past tense?”

He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Wy. Mark Hanover is dead.”

“How?”

“One shot, point-blank, from a shotgun.”

“Who did it?”

“We don’t know.”

“Where’s Rebecca?”

“We don’t know that, either.”

She was still for a moment. Jim and Bridget sat silent, listening. “Who made the distress call?”

“That’s what’s weird,” Liam said. “We don’t know. Alaska Airlines one-three-three intercepted a Mayday from somebody who said they were at Nenevok Creek, that someone had been shot, and that they needed help. They didn’t identify themselves, and when we got there, all we found was Hanover’s body.”

“And no Rebecca,” Wy said.

“No. It could be that she saw it happen, that she ran for her life, and that she was too afraid to come out. We’ll go back in the morning, do a search of the area, see if we can’t pick up her trail.”

“You think it could be the same guy who shot Opal?” Wy said, echoing Prince’s words.

“The postmistress in Kagati Lake,” Liam explained to Jim and Bridget. “She was killed the day before.” In answer to Wy’s question he shook his head. “It’s possible, but I don’t think so. That’s a long way to travel in a pretty short time. Guy’d have to be part mountain goat and part moose.”

“He doesn’t have to be traveling on foot,” Jim said. “Too early for snowmobiles, but maybe a four-wheeler?”

Liam shook his head again. “True, but the terrain is up and down a lot of mountains and over and around a lot of creeks and rivers between Kagati and Nenevok. It’d probably take him just as long to walk as ride. Plus, a different weapon was used the second time, too, although there’s no law says he has to use the same one twice.”

He paused. “Wy, you said you felt sorry for Rebecca Hanover. Why?”

Wy made a face. “From what I could see, her husband had the gold bug bad. She was the one who met the plane because he was always hip deep in the creek, washing that dirt. She seemed lonely.” Wy thought for a moment and added, “She seemed bored.”

“Did she ever seem resentful?” Liam suggested. “Angry, maybe?”

“No,” Wy said. “Like I said. Lonely. She looked tired every time I saw her, too, like she wasn’t used to doing without Chugach Electric.” She speared her last bite of moose with her fork and smeared up the last of the sauce, cooling now and a little congealed but still delicious.

The fork paused halfway to her mouth. “Wait a minute,” she said, a sick feeling beginning in the pit of her stomach. “Nenevok Creek?”

Liam looked at her, alert to the sense of strain in her voice. “Yeah. Nenevok Creek, or rather the airstrip about halfway between Nenevok Lake and Nuklunek Bluff. Why?”

She put down the fork, rose to her feet and walked over to the wall map, tracing the same route Liam had the day before. She located the creek without difficulty, and estimated the distance between the airstrip at Nenevok Creek and the airstrip on Nuklunek Bluff at a little less than ten air miles. For someone hiking the same distance, say going from the bluff to the creek, he could follow a relatively easy slope down the bluff, wade through about a mile of swamp, the most difficult portion of the route, and then pick up the creek and follow it the rest of the way. The airstrip was right on the creek, and the gold mining camp was a two-minute walk from the airstrip. It wouldn’t have been a particularly difficult hike, especially if the hiker was someone who knew the area.

Someone, say, like John Kvichak. Or Teddy Engebretsen.

Wy thought back to the last trip she had made into Nuklunek that afternoon. John Kvichak had waited with the last of the moose meat, and had helped load it into the Cessna with swift efficiency. Wy couldn’t remember a time when John hadn’t had a smile and a joke ready to share. This afternoon, he’d been silent and serious. He had also been in a hurry, so much so that he’d dropped his pack when he went to put it into the airplane. The zipper of the flap pocket had been open, and out had spilled a copy ofRiders of the Purple Sage, a spoon smeared with peanut butter, and a cell phone.

“Wy?”

She turned and looked at Liam. “Can a cell phone on the ground raise a jet airplane at twenty thousand feet?”

The three people at the table exchanged glances.

“They’re always after making you turn the things off before they take off,” Bridget said.

“Depends on what channel they’re both on,” Jim said. “If the communications man on the jet was channel-surfing and the guy on the ground was broadcasting steadily, probably. It’d be mostly a matter of chance, I think.”

“There was that guy hunting caribou in Mulchatna,” Liam said.

Jim snapped his fingers. “Right, I remember that story.”

“Yeah,” said Liam, “he ground-looped it and an Alaska Airlines jet going to Gambell picked up his Mayday. It was in the paper.”

The sick feeling in the pit of Wy’s stomach increased.

“What’s bothering you, Wy?” Liam said. “You see something when you were out there today? Come on, I can use all the help I can get.”

“Oh shit,” John Kvichak said when he opened the door.

She was so beautiful, in her own way as beautiful as Elaine, so rounded and so feminine. She was frightened at first, of course, but as soon as she realized she had no choice, she calmed right down.

Women were like that. They were a lot smarter than most men gave them credit for, they knew how to survive. They were the weaker sex, certainly, but that didn’t mean they were any less intelligent. She knew the instant she looked into his eyes what survival would entail.

He had nothing but contempt for her husband. The cabin was poorly built, there wasn’t enough food to last more than a month, the man hadn’t done any hunting to take up the slack when the food ran out. A poor provider.

And she didn’t weep when she saw her husband’s body. Her eyes were fixed on him. Poor little woman, she needed rescuing. Lucky for her he happened along.

Or was it? Was it instead part of God’s holy plan? She was a gift to him as much as he was to her; could one argue with any conviction that such things were the product of simple fate? No, it could not be so. She was a gift, and he would guard her and treasure her accordingly.

He told her that he was hungry. She cooked for him, noodles with green onions sliced into them at the last moment before serving and a few drops of sesame oil added, a dish new to him but which he liked very much. He said he was thirsty. She made him coffee, good coffee, too, the best he had had in many years.

She fussed a little when it came time to take off her clothes, but that was only due to the natural modesty of women.

She lay still beneath him, like Elaine, Elaine-fair, and kept her eyes closed, the way Elaine had at first. Her skin was so soft to the touch. He told her to open her eyes. They were so large, the pupils expanded almost to the edge of the blue irises. Her breath came in soft expulsions of air that touched his face in quick pants. Her hands lay at her sides until he told her to place them on his back. It was fine, so very fine, to be held within those arms again.

She was weak and he was strong. It was his duty to protect her, it was her duty to submit. Where he led, she would follow. Their roles had been laid down by God and the Church many years ago.

At last, at last, Elaine had come back to him.