Nothing Gold Can Stay

SEVENTEEN

Old Man Creek, September 5

The wind howled around the little shack. The walls creaked, but they were well caulked and Moses had built up the fire in the woodstove so that it was toasty warm.

“Do you think the roof will hold?” Bill said, eyeing it, a collection of water-stained bits and pieces of three different grades of plywood, Sheetrock and one-by-twelves, neatly trimmed and fitted together like a patchwork quilt. Softened by the golden light of four gas lanterns, it looked like a work of art instead of a creation of convenience.

“The walls will go before the roof does,” Moses said quite cheerfully, and grinned his evil grin when his three guests exchanged apprehensive glances. “Okay,” he said. “Mr. Plum, in the library, with the pipe wrench.”

He won, for the second time that evening, and Bill threw down her cards in disgust and eyed him in a frustrated way.

Moses worked his eyebrows. “Sorry, little girl,” he purred, “not in front of the children.”

After they finished picking up all the pieces, they retired Clue in favor of Monopoly. Moses won that game, too. In desperation, Tim suggested crazy eights, and aided and abetted by Bill and Amelia, who by this point didn’t care who won so long as it wasn’t Moses, he won handily.

They celebrated with mugs of hot cocoa. Bill leaned her back against Moses’ chest, his legs curled around her, her head on his shoulder. Amelia sat on her bunk, hanging over the edge as Tim showed her a card trick that involved a story of ace islands with diamonds buried on them, jacks coming to dig the diamonds up, kings coming to drive the jacks away and the queens bringing their hearts. “Then a big windstorm comes and blows them all away,” Tim said, stacking the cards and cutting them repeatedly. “Here.” He offered the stack to Amelia. “Go ahead, cut them.”

She did so, a puzzled expression on her face, trying to work out the trick.

Tim dealt the cards out again in piles facedown. One by one he turned the piles over, with all the diamonds in one pile, all the jacks in another, all the hearts in another, and so on.

Amelia was impressed. “How did you do that?”

Tim did his best to keep his face impassive, but a delighted grin kept leaking out around the edges. “I can never tell. I took the oath.”

Amelia giggled, and Moses nudged Bill. “They’re getting along all right.”

She cast him an amused glance over her shoulder. For a man who could read the future with devastating and occasionally horrific accuracy, he could be remarkably obtuse about the now.

“What?” he said.

She shook her head and snuggled against him, smiling to herself when she felt him react. Too bad, so sad, old man, she thought, and looked across the room at Tim and Amelia. Tim looked like a kid with a brand-new toy. He cast quick, sidelong glances at Amelia when he thought she wasn’t looking, he blushed when she caught him, he took every opportunity of brushing against her, a finger touch to the back of her hand as he scooped up the cards, a shoulder brush when he leaned in, even a bump of heads when they fought out a game of Snerts, resulting in shared laughter.

He was thirteen and she was seventeen, and Bill didn’t think that this was the beginning of a lifelong romance. But it did Tim no harm for his first time to be with a young woman who, he well knew, had been brutalized in her previous sexual encounters, and who therefore would require patience and kindness. It helped that he was young and inexperienced enough to be entirely intimidated, and would therefore be very slow. And it did Amelia a world of good to discover the difference between a lout and a gentleman in bed. Bill had a shrewd idea as to what had started them down this road, and she had an even shrewder idea as to who first reached for whom.

Well, she was a poor guardian of teenage morality, no doubt, but Amelia was looking less like a forty-year-old barfly and more like a seventeen-year-old girl, and Bill couldn’t regret that. It wasn’t just the newfound discovery of good sex, of course; nothing was ever completely about sex, no matter what the Freudians said. The tai chi was giving her control over her body, a physical confidence. Moses had left the filleting of the day’s salmon entirely up to her, and had viewed the results with nothing more than a disparaging grunt. From anyone else, that was like being awarded the Olympic gold medal, and judging from Amelia’s flushed, proud face, she knew it. She hadn’t been hit in four days. And a young man was looking at her with something close to adoration in his eyes.

Tim looked proud and confident, with no hint of the swagger so common among adolescent boys after their first score. Held together for the first terrible years of his life by some inner, unplumbed strength all his own, rescued by Wy in what sounded like the nick of time and given a home, regular meals, rules by which to abide and, above all, unconditional love, Tim had the makings of a truly good man.

“Amelia,” Moses said.

Amelia looked up, her olive skin flushed with laughter. “Yes, uncle?”

“It’s Sunday,” he said. “We go home tomorrow.”

Her smile faded. “Yes, uncle. I know.”

On the floor Tim straightened.

“Do you go back to your husband tomorrow?”

Amelia sat up and pushed her hair behind an ear. A log split in the stove and hissed and spit when the flames hit sap. The damper flapped when a gust of wind tangled itself in the chimney. Boughs creaked outside.

“No, uncle,” she said. “I won’t go back to Darren.”

Bill felt Moses stiffen, she thought with momentary surprise, and smiled to herself. “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”

“I am.” She said the words as if she were taking a vow.

It was amazing what four days of tai chi, sweats and fishing would do for the self-confidence, Moses thought complacently. The voices whispered a warning. He ignored them. This time they would be wrong. It had happened before, not often, but often enough to allow him to retain some hope in the face of unrelenting forebodings of death and disaster.

Bug off, he thought, and somewhat to his surprise, they did. And he wasn’t even drunk.

Across the room Moses murmured something in Bill’s ear, and she laughed. “Do you think they know we saw?” Tim whispered.

Amelia looked at the older couple. “I hope not.” But she wondered. She’d seen Bill looking at her with a speculative glint in her eyes, and when she came back from the outhouse this evening her knapsack had been moved and the pills inside had shifted location. She didn’t mind; she didn’t want to be pregnant, either. She didn’t know what she wanted, exactly, but then it had been so long since she had felt the courage to want anything.

Five months ago she had married Darren Gearhart with no desire other than to be a good wife and the mother of his children. She had wanted to sleep with him, too, and she now knew enough to know he had wanted to sleep with her. If he hadn’t, he would never have married her. The realization didn’t hurt as much as it once had.

A good wife, she had thought, meant keeping a clean, neat house, serving good meals on time, keeping the checkbook balanced. The second shock, after her wedding night, came when he told her to close her bank account, one she had been building since she first began to earn money as a baby-sitter at the age of twelve, and deposit its holdings into his own. She asked, timidly, if he would put her name on it, too. That was the first time he had hit her. It didn’t hurt much, not like later, but it was the third shock, and then the shocks piled up so thick and fast that she lost the ability to differentiate between them.

She no longer had money of her own, there was only his money, doled out a few grudging dollars at a time. If she couldn’t stretch them to cover the purchase of food and the maintenance of the trailer they lived in, she had to ask for more, and she learned quickly that she didn’t ever want to ask for more. She learned not to visit her mother, too; he would either accompany her and be so rude that she would leave before she was too embarrassed, or on those few occasions when she managed to slip her leash and go off on her own, he would track her down and take her home.

Her mother knew, though. Amelia remembered her father. Oh yes, her mother knew, all right.

If Darren wasn’t yelling at her, he was hitting her. If he wasn’t hitting her, he was fucking her. It never stopped. She had thought he would be gone fishing most of the summer, but he’d been fired off theWaltzing Matilda practically before the season began. The skipper of theMatilda was Amelia’s uncle’s oldest son, and he had sought her out afterward, to apologize, she thought, but Darren had picked a fight with him and run him off before he could say so.

The five months had seemed like five years, and there had seemed no end to them. She could no longer sleep through the night, starting at noises when he wasn’t next to her, and under constant assault of one kind or another when he was.

She’d been sleeping at fish camp, four dreamless nights of uninterrupted unconsciousness, in a bunk with clean sheets and a soft pillow all her own. She looked at Moses and felt something as close to love as she’d ever felt for a man. She thought how wrong people were who said he was an evil spirit. Even her mother, an elder who should have known better, had warned her children against him.

Tim’s hands stopped shuffling the cards, and she looked up to see him watching her with grave eyes. “Are you okay?” he whispered.

She smiled. “Oh yeah,” she whispered. “I’m perfect.”

You sure are, he thought fervently.

To him, she was beautiful. The bruise on the side of her face had faded to a faint yellow and the dark shadows beneath her eyes were gone. Her hair, which she hadn’t combed until her second day at fish camp, hung in a sleek, shining, black fall. Her olive cheeks were darker after three days spent outside and she moved with a new assurance. She looked him straight in the eye and smiled, and he had a hard time not ducking his head. He couldn’t stop the flush that rose to his own cheeks.

“It was so good,” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said. She stretched a little in memory, her breasts pushing at the front of her shirt. “Yes, it was. The second time especially.”

He swallowed. “Yeah.” He shuffled the cards and they went all over the place. He bent over, picking them up, glad of the opportunity to hide his expression. “Amelia?”

“What?”

He gathered together all his courage and whispered her own question back at her. “Can we do it again?”

He heard her inhale, her involuntary, delighted and slightly surprised chuckle, and then Moses got to his feet, giving Bill a surreptitious tickle on the way up. “Come on, boy, time to bring in some more wood.”

The last thing Tim wanted to do was leave before his question was answered, but he rose obediently and followed Moses into the storm. A gust of wind ripped the door from his hand and slammed it shut. “Moses!”

“What? And come on, let’s get that goddamn wood before we both freeze our nuts off.” He nudged Tim, his grin a white blur in a dark smudge. “Especially now that you know what they’re for.”

Tim was glad the darkness hid his flush. He should have known the old man would see, would know. He turned his head into the wind, feeling drops of moisture cool his cheeks. “Is that snow, Moses?”

“Feels like,” the old man said, allowing the change of subject, much to Tim’s relief. He rooted through the woodpile, going down a layer in search of the dry stuff, and stacked Tim’s arms full.

“It’s too early for snow,” Tim said.

Moses added another piece of wood, and Tim could no longer see the blur. “It’s never too early for snow out here.”

A bird called, barely audible over the wind, a low note, followed by clicking sounds, the sound of bare branches rubbing together.

Moses, his arms full of wood, stood still, looking to the west.

“What?” Tim said.

“I thought I heard-”

“What?” The snow stung Tim’s cheeks and he shivered.

Moses looked at him. “Go on, get back in the house.”

Tim went inside ahead of him. Moses stood on the front porch for a minute longer, listening, but the raven didn’t speak again.

They built up the fire and Amelia made more cocoa, lumpy, just the way Tim liked it. He looked at her with his heart in his eyes.

She looked up and saw him. The color in her cheeks deepened, and her smile was part shyness, part mischief and part warm wealth of shared knowledge.

Moses shoved the table into a corner and tossed blankets and pillows down on the floor. He turned down all the lanterns and opened the fire door. They gathered in a half circle around the flames, light flickering across their faces. “Story time,” Moses said with that evil grin.

Bill settled down next to him. “Which one?”

Moses sampled his cocoa. “No contest. On a night like this, Uuiliriq.”

“The Hairy Man? Oh brother.”

Tim jumped. Amelia gave him a questioning look.

“Quiet, woman.” Moses fixed a piercing eye on the two younger members of the group, and began to speak.

It was hard to say, afterward, just what it was about his voice that so compelled the attention. It dropped to a low tone you had to strain to hear, it fell into a cadenced rhythm that had your head nodding in almost hypnotic attention. He donned finger fans, made of woven straw and trimmed with caribou ruff, and used them to help tell the story, palms out, forefingers crooked around the tiny handles, hands moving in minute, precise jerks back and forth, up and down, side to side, expressing joy, fear, laughter, pain. Once Tim thought he heard drums sounding faintly in the background. Once Amelia looked around for the other singers. Even Bill was seduced, hearing the stamp of mukluks, the rustle of kuspuks, the cheers of the crowd.

It was an old story, never written down, known only to those who told it and those who listened, deep in the tiny settlements and villages of the Yupik. It was a story your grandfather told your father, and that your father told you, and that you would tell your children, in hopes that it would keep them safe inside after dark. It was a story that gave meaning to otherwise mysterious disappearances when it did not.

And it was a way to maintain a sense of cultural identity in a world increasingly white and Western.

“Uuiliriq lived in the mountains,” Moses began.

“High in the mountains he lived.

“High in the mountains, in a dark cave.

“High in the mountains, in a dark cave.

“That cave so high, nobody climb there.

“That cave so high, nobody see it.

“That cave so high, nobody find it.

“Only Uuiliriq.

“All alone he live in this cave.

“He have no mothers.

“He have no fathers.

“He have no brothers.

“He have no sisters.

“All alone he.

“All alone he sleep.

“All alone long he sleep.

“Sometime he wake up.”

Moses’ voice deepened. “Sometime Uuiliriq he wake up.

“Sometime he wake up hungry.”

Something not quite a shiver passed up Tim’s spine. “Are you okay?” Amelia whispered.

He managed a smile and nodded.

“Sometime he wake up so hungry, he go get food.”

The beat quickened.

“Sometime he leave that cave so high up in the mountains.

“Sometime he come down from those mountains.

“From those mountains sometime he come to village.

“One time he come to our village.

“Our little village by the river.

“The river she is wide.

“The river she is deep.

“The elders tell children to stay inside after dark.

“Children stay inside or the river will get them.

“But this one young boy he don’t listen.

“This boy he wait till everybody sleeping.

“Everybody sleeping he go outside.

“Go outside he go down to the river.

“Can’t catch me! he yell to her.

“Can’t catch me! he yell to the lights in the sky.

“Can’t catch me! he yell to the mountains.

“He yelling so loud.

“So loud Uuiliriq creep up behind.

“Creep up behind and grab him.

“Grab him and take him up the mountain.

“Up the mountain to that cave he got there.

“That cave so high, nobody climb there.

“That cave so high, nobody see it.

“That cave so high, nobody find it.

“The village it wakes.

“It wakes and that boy gone.

“The men they light torches.

“Light torches and climb those mountains.

“Climb those mountains and search all night long.

“All night long they see the torches from the village.

“From the village they see the torches go far away.

“Go far away and come back.

“Come back without that boy.

“Without that boy and his mother cry.

“His mother cry and his father cry.

“His father cry and his sisters cry.

“His sisters cry and his brothers cry.

“His brothers cry and his aunties cry.

“His aunties cry and his uncles cry.

“That boy gone.

“That boy long gone.

“That boy gone forever.”

The fans slowed again, beating a dirge against the air. Moses’ voice dropped to the merest breath of sound.

“Some nights.

“Some night when dark outside.

“Some night when dark outside that village wake up.

“That village wake up and hear something.

“Hear something crying

“Crying far off in that night.

“Maybe that boy.

“Maybe that boy he crying for home.

“Crying for home.

“Those people they lay in their beds.

“They lay in their beds and they listen to that crying.

“They listen to that crying.

“But they don’t go out.”

The fans beat the air, the white strands of caribou fanning the air in precise, graceful arcs.

“Stay inside after dark.

“After dark stay inside.

“Stay inside after dark or Uuiliriq come.

“Uuiliriq come.”

The fans stopped in midair. The room was still, the wind only a faint howl outside, the lamps the merest hiss of sound. Did a dark shape shift in the shadow near the door?

“AND GET YOU!”

Amelia screamed and grabbed Tim. Tim, to his everlasting shame, yelled and jumped. Bill spilled the rest of her cocoa and cursed roundly.

Moses fell backward laughing, a deep bellow of a laugh that rolled out of his chest and reverberated off the patchwork ceiling.

“Uncle!” Tim said. “You’re scaring the women.”

“Yeah, like you weren’t peeing your pants afraid,” Amelia said, and patted her chest as if reassuring her heart that everything was all right. “Uncle, you sure know how to tell a story.”

Moses sat up again, still laughing, and stripped the fans from his fingers. “Gotcha,” he said.

“Okay, that’s it,” Bill said, rising to her feet. “Story time’s over. Everybody hit the rack. And as for you, old man.” She leveled a glance at him. He grinned back at her irrepressibly.

“You’ve got to sleep sometime,” she warned him.

She stoked the stove while Moses turned out the lanterns. A lecherous murmur and a reproving slap came from their bunk, followed by the sound of a long kiss and a rustle of covers as the two elders nestled together like spoons and settled in for the night.

Tim stretched out in his sleeping bag, arranging things so his head was near the head of Amelia’s bunk. He wished he could crawl in with her, but he hadn’t been invited. Besides, he didn’t know how Bill and Moses would feel about it.

The howl of the wind, held in temporary abeyance by Moses’ voice, was back with a vengeance, snarling and snapping, making the trees outside creak and the cabin shudder.

“I’m sure glad I’m not outside in this,” he said unthinkingly.

“Me, too,” Amelia whispered.

“You awake?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

She was silent for a moment. “How come you jumped?”

“What? Oh. You jumped, too. So did Bill.”

“Not then. Before. When he said the story was about the Little Hairy Man.”

“Oh.” Caught in the spell of the old man’s story, he’d forgotten his initial reaction.

He was silent for a long time, so long that she thought he had fallen asleep. “In my village, there was this girl,” he said finally. His head twisted on his pillow and he looked up at the face pressed against the side of the bunk. “She was teaching me Yupik.”

“You didn’t grow up speaking it?”

“My birth mother wouldn’t. She said it was a dead language of a dead people, and if I wanted to get anywhere in life I had to speak English. She spoke only English at home.”

His voice was matter-of-fact, but the undertone of bitterness betrayed him.

“But in school, you had to be fluent in both. So the teacher got a girl from the high school to teach me. She was really nice, so nice. She showed me how to learn. I never knew I could learn anything before her, but I could. She gave me that.”

He stopped.

“Did you learn Yupik?” she said.

“Some. Before she went away.”

“Went away? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knew. One day she just wasn’t there anymore.”

“Did she-how did she leave?”

“Nobody knew,” he repeated.

“Nobody found her?”

“They looked. But nobody found her.” He looked up at her. “Some said it was the Hairy Man. That he came down from the mountains because he was hungry. And he took her.”

They were both silent. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

“Her name was Christine,” she heard him say just before she slid into sleep. “She was pretty.”

And then, words so indistinct she might have dreamed them, “She looked like you.”

Newenham, September 6

“I’m willing to try it if you are,” Prince said hopefully.

Liam took one look at the clouds, so low that if he went outside and reached up he thought he might touch them, and said firmly, “I’m not.”

“I’m grounded,” Wy said. “At least until this afternoon.”

Prince pounced. “Why, did you hear something on the forecast? Is it going to clear?”

Wy shook her head, almost amused. “Not likely. There’s a gale warning out for Area 5A. It’ll be moving north.”

Prince stared out at the dark skies with a gloomy expression. The third interrogation of Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak the night before had produced no changes in their story, the result of which was that Prince now wanted very much to talk to Rebecca Hanover. She had shown up at Wy’s house at first light on the off chance that the weather might look better out of Wy’s window than it did from the trooper post. Liam had invited her to stay for breakfast.

“At least it isn’t snowing anymore,” Jo said, refilling coffee mugs all around.

A timer dinged and Bridget opened the oven door. The heavenly aroma of Bisquick coffee cake wafted through the room. Jim and Luke were sitting on the couch with their feet propped on the coffee table, Liam in the armchair. Jo replaced the coffeepot and perched on a stool at the counter next to Wy. Bridget cut the cake into squares and handed the squares around on saucers. For a while the only sounds were the dulcet growlings of Bob Edwards on the radio, the creaking of the house beneath the undiminished onslaught of wind, and grunts of pleasure as the coffee cake went down. Bridget was complimented lavishly all around, and she put her finger in her chin and curtsied in response.

Prince paced restlessly in front of the windows, until Liam said, “Why don’t you go on down to the post?”

“What for?”

He shrugged. “Somebody might call in a triple homicide.”

“Like we could respond in this,” she said, but she picked up her hat.

When the door shut behind her Jim said, “What a hot dog.”

Liam gave a tolerant shrug. “She’s smart and quick and ambitious. All she needs is a little seasoning.”

“She had two different homicides, one a multiple, the first day she got here,” Jo said. “She got her name in the paper and everything.”

“Thanks to you,” Liam said.

Jo refused to curtsy, but she did bow her head in arrogant acceptance of what wasn’t exactly an accolade. “In fact, you both did.”

“Yeah, I was thrilled.”

Jo snorted. “If you didn’t want your name in the paper, you shouldn’t have become a trooper.”

“More coffee, anyone?” Bridget said brightly.

Jo gave Wy a long look. Wy wasn’t talking much, and she noticed that her friend was keeping to the opposite side of whatever part of the room Liam was in. She wondered what had happened out at Nenevok Creek. She noticed Jim looking at Liam and wondering the same thing.

Bridget was still standing in front of her with the coffeepot and a smile. “Sorry,” Jo said, and held out her mug. “Sure, and thanks.”

Wy and Liam had come in separately the night before, and had exchanged perhaps ten words total before Liam went out to his camper for the night. There was no sneaking back in, either, not that there would have to be with Tim out of town. It wasn’t like there hadn’t been plenty of noise already to contend with from the back bedroom, she thought acidly. Not that she hadn’t done her best to put Luke through his paces on the living room couch.

She looked at Luke. She should have known better. Beautiful men, like beautiful women, knew that their faces were their fortune. They didn’t have to do anything but be beautiful. Luke, it must be admitted, was extremely beautiful, but beauty went only so far in bed, and even less far out of bed.

Bridget was beautiful, too, but she was also smart and funny. Jo hated to admit it, but Jim’s taste in the opposite sex might be better than her own. “So you think Rebecca Hanover killed her husband and ran off because she didn’t like being stuck out in the Bush for three months?” she said out loud.

“That’s not for publication, Jo,” Liam said sternly.

Jo’s fair skin, the bane of her existence, flushed right up to the roots of her hair. “I heard you the first time,” she said between clenched teeth.

He examined her expression for a moment, and then, amazingly, backed down. “I know. I’m sorry, Jo.”

She managed a brief nod, and to salvage her pride added, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t write about it. But I won’t use anything you tell us here today without your say-so.” She looked at Wy, who was glaring at Liam.

“I know,” Liam said again.

“I thought Woodward and Bernstein used two sources for every story,” Jim said.

Jo appreciated the effort he was making to lighten the air. “They did.”

“You don’t?”

She matched his effort. “Not if the first source is a state trooper with twelve years on the job and a reputation for upholding truth, justice and the American way.”

There was a round of nervous laughter. Everybody looked at Liam, who sighed. “Yeah, okay.” He looked at Wy, who was studiously examining her coffee mug. His lips tightened.

“From the beginning,” Jo prompted him. She didn’t know what was going on there, but she was willing to act like the lightning rod for the time being.

Liam didn’t strike. Instead, he told the story simply, beginning with the Mayday intercepted by the Alaska Airlines flight deck crew and his and Prince’s arrival at the scene. He put together the case against Engebretsen and Kvichak in clipped, disinterested terms, including their passionate denials.

“I never met anyone who was arrested who ever was guilty of anything,” Jo observed.

“Yeah. I know.”

Liam’s smile was thin and strained, and Wy tried not to feel guilty. What else could I do? she thought. He had to know. Maybe he’s right, I should have told him sooner, but it’s only five months since I saw him again, only a month that we’ve been together.

She thought back to the afternoon at the mining camp. I love you, Wy, Liam had said, and so she had told him, then and there, and he, at first disbelieving and then enraged, had stalked up to the cabin in a huff, ostensibly to search for evidence to help solve the mystery of Mark Hanover’s murder but really, she knew full well, to put her far enough out of reach that he wouldn’t be tempted to deck her.

She didn’t blame him, but she wouldn’t fall into the trap of blaming herself, either, not a second time. Shit happens. You can’t let it define you, you can’t let it define the rest of your life. She hadn’t, and she wouldn’t let him do so, either.

Jo’s voice recalled her to the present. “But you still don’t like them for it.”

The trooper shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right. Why’d they call in the Mayday? According to Wy the Hanovers weren’t due to be picked up until Labor Day. If they did it, they could have left the body lying where it was, ready for the nearest grizzly to wander out of the woods and eat the evidence.”

“In that case, where’s Rebecca?” Jo said.

Labor Day, Wy thought, and remembered the last time she’d delivered supplies to Nenevok Creek. Three fishermen getting restive as she fought the cargo netting and the bungee cords. Rebecca watching with a wistful expression on her face, arms cradling the stack of magazines Wy had brought in for her. Mark Hanover coming up the path and-oh. “Oh hell,” Wy said.

Everyone looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I totally forgot.”

“What?” Liam said.

“The fishermen were in a hurry to get to the lodge and I was humping it to get the plane unloaded and we’d hit an air pocket on the way in and the cargo had shifted a little in flight, you know, just enough to wedge itself into-”

“Wy,” Liam said. “What did you forget?”

Wy took a deep breath. “The last time I made a supply run into Nenevok Creek, Mark Hanover pulled me to one side and said they might need another order of supplies, a big one this time. Like I said, my passengers were in a hurry and I wasn’t paying much attention. I told him to get me a list and he said he would and we took off.”

There was a brief, electric silence.

“You only just remembered this now?” Liam said.

“I’m sorry,” Wy said helplessly. I’ve had other things on my mind, she thought, and knew by the shift of expression on his face that he had seen that thought reflected in her eyes.

“A big order of supplies,” Jo said, her eyes bright, her nose all but twitching. “At the end of the summer? Nobody orders supplies at the end of the summer. You’re just inviting the bears in, leaving a bunch of food sitting around your cabin.”

“Unless,” Liam said.

“Unless,” Jim said, “you’re ordering up enough to see you through the winter in that cabin.”

“From what her friend Nina said,” Liam said slowly, “Rebecca Hanover wasn’t more than lukewarm about spending the summer out there.”

“If he told her about this wonderful new idea just before they were scheduled to leave-” Jo said.

Liam looked at Wy. “Tell me everything you remember about Rebecca Hanover.”

“I already did.”

“Tell me again.”

He was all trooper now, firm, implacable, totally focused on the job. He bore no resemblance whatever to the furious man who had raked her over the coals at Nenevok Creek. In one way, she welcomed it. In another, she did not. She got up and went to the corner desk from where she ran her business, and pulled out a tall red book filled with dated, lined pages. She opened it and flipped through May, until she found the day she wanted. “Here it is, May twenty-ninth, the Saturday before Memorial Day. Passengers Mark and Rebecca Hanover, along with two hundred pounds of freight, to Nenevok Creek.”

Wy looked up. “She was frightened. First time she’d been in a small plane, I think. But he jollied her on board. They sat in the back-we had to take the Cessna because of all the freight-and I strapped some of their canned goods into the front seat to balance out the load. It was a clear day, maybe an eight-knot wind, easy flight, eighty-five minutes there and back again, no problem.”

“How did she strike you?”

Her eyes narrowed in memory. “As a dyed-in-the-wool city girl,” she said after a moment. “She’s beautiful, blond hair, blue eyes, great figure. Immaculate manicure. Soft voice, called him honey a lot. She’s not your typical Bush rat. Her husband had the gold bug, and she was along for the ride.”

“Willingly?”

She considered. “If you mean by that, did he have a pair of handcuffs on her, no.”

“But?”

“But.” She met Liam’s eyes straight on for the first time in forty-eight hours. “But she wasn’t happy about his decision.”

“She think it was pie in the sky? Gold mining is, mostly.”

Wy shook her head. “Wasn’t the money. She just didn’t want to be out there. It was like pulling up a hothouse orchid and trying to transplant it on the moon. She knew it. He didn’t.” She looked down at the Day Timer, leafed through some more pages. “I dropped off supplies half a dozen times. Every time, she was waiting at the strip. I took her some newspapers and magazines and she was, well, almost pathetically grateful.”

She closed the book and raised her head. “I don’t think she killed him, Liam. She isn’t the type.”

“Everybody’s the type, Wy, given the right provocation.”

“I know you always say that,” she said stubbornly, “but she loved him. They had this kind of, I don’t know, sexual thing going on that practically gave off sparks. He was gorgeous, too, one good-looking hunk of man. What’s more, I’d say he loved her as much as she did him.”

“Never underestimate what three months in the Bush will do to a relationship,” Jim observed. “You see the results in the front pages of her rag every day.” He hooked a thumb at Jo.

“Hey,” she said, faintly protesting. “I resemble that remark.”

Wy put the book back on the desk. “Are you still absolutely sure Hanover’s death has nothing to do with Opal’s?”

His eyes went from her to the map on the wall behind her. “Different weapon. A long way to go on foot in a very short time. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.”

The phone rang and Bridget answered it. Liam could hear Prince’s voice. “One moment,” Bridget said. “It’s for you,” she added unnecessarily, and handed it over.

Prince wasted no time in pleasantries. “I just got a call via the marine operator. She relayed a call from an old guy up at”-he heard the rustle of paper in the background-“at Weary River. Is that right, Weary River?”

He carried the walk-around phone to the map on the wall. “Yeah,” he said, locating Weary River. About halfway between Rainbow and Russell. “I’ve got it.”

“Well, this old guy, he’s Italian or used to be before he homesteaded out at Weary River and turned American, and she couldn’t hardly understand him but she thinks he called to say that he’d found a body.” Prince’s excitement crackled down the line.

“Where?”

“A place called Rainbow.”

He moved his finger up. “Got it. Rainbow.” He was very conscious of Wy looking over his shoulder and the rest of them crowding around behind her. “Who’s dead?”

“A guy name of Peter Cole.”

“Peter Cole?” He felt Wy’s indrawn breath and looked at her. “Hold on.” To Wy he said, “You know him?”

She nodded, dazed. “He’s on my mail route.” She swallowed and met his eyes in sick apprehension. “The same day I went to Kagati Lake and found Opal Nunapitchuk.”

“You saw him that day?”

She shook her head. “I almost never do. He’s a hermit, doesn’t like being around people much. He left the bag to be picked up on the strip. I took it and left the incoming mailbag in its place.”

“Is that any way to treat the U.S. mail?” Jim said.

Wy shrugged. “It’s his way. He doesn’t hurt anybody.” She winced. “Or he didn’t.”

“Prince,” Liam said into the phone. “How did Peter Cole die?”

Her voice was triumphant. “The old Italian guy said he was shot.” She couldn’t have been happier if Ted Bundy were loose in the Bay.

“With what?”

A little deflated, Prince said, “He didn’t say, just that Cole was shot. He’s got a pretty thick accent,” she added. “It’s not easy to understand him over the radio.”

He was looking at the map, following the thick black line that marked Wy’s mail route, some of the destinations printed on the map, some penciled in later by Wy. Kagati Lake. Russell. Weary River, where the old Italian guy homesteaded. He tapped the map. “What’s his name, do you know?” he asked Wy.

“Julie Baldessario.”

“Julie?”

“Giuliano. But everyone calls him Julie.”

“He’s a reliable kind of guy?”

She nodded. “He’s about a million years old, came into the country after World War II. Lost his family in the Holocaust. Just looking for a little peace and quiet, I think.”

“Good story,” Jo said, interested.

Jim smacked her lightly on the arm, and she subsided.

“But he’s very much all there,” Wy said. “If he says he found Peter Cole shot, he found Peter Cole shot. The question is, what was Julie doing out in this?” She waved a hand at the storm outside.

Liam ignored her, continuing to trace the map with his forefinger. “Rainbow, Kemuk.” His finger had to make a little jog to one side. “Nenevok Creek.”

He stood up. “We’ve got dead people at Kagati Lake, Russell and Nenevok Creek. All were murdered. All were killed within five days of each other. Some nut is shooting his way from settlement to settlement.”

Wy was still staring at the map. Her face was white.

“Wy?” he said, touching her arm. “Wy, what is it?”

Mute, she pointed.

Her mail route took a dogleg between Rainbow and Kemuk and another between Warehouse Mountain, Kokwok and Akamanuk, but south of Akamanuk…

South of Akamanuk was Old Man Creek.