Better To Rest

SIX

Diana Prince was waiting for them when they taxied up to Wy’s tie-down. “Did you find it?”

“Yeah, we found it.”

“Damn,” she said. “I figured it was just another one of Teddy and John’s big stories. A pretty good one, I admit, but still.”

“Me, too,” Liam said. “But it’s there, all right.”

“What is it?” She looked at Wy.

“A C-47,” Wy said. “World War Two vintage, if I had to guess.”

Prince whistled. “Wow. On its way to the Aleutians, maybe?”

“Maybe. That’s how Elmendorf got built, because of the traffic between Anchorage and the Aleutians after the Japanese invaded.”

“What kind of shape is it in?”

“We couldn’t get close to it. It’s sort of stuck in the face of the glacier.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Although I’d say, from the looks of it, and from the most recent evidence of calving, that a big chunk is due off any time now.” Wy remembered the sheer terror of those few moments when she had thought they were both about to be crushed in the fall of ice, and looked at Liam to see him reliving it, too. “All we can do is wait. We got the tail numbers, though.”

“Great, we’ll be able to trace it.”

“What are you doing here, Prince?” Liam said. “I thought you were going to check on that shooting out in the road last night. The one old Abe called in.”

“Yeah, I was.” Prince looked uncomfortable.

“Something else come up?”

Only one answer to that. For a state trooper, something else always came up. “Yeah.”

Suddenly Liam didn’t like the look on her face. “I’m not going to like this, am I.”

“No.”

Prince looked at Wy, who could take a hint of official police business when her nose was rubbed in it. Curiosity was not a trait that was encouraged to flourish in the significant other of a state trooper. She finished tying down the Cub. “I’ve got to pick up the mail for Kagati Lake. See you later.” She included them both in a vague salute and climbed into her truck. Liam saw her watching them in the rearview as she drove off.

He shook his head once, firmly, and turned to Prince. “What’s up?”

She took a deep breath. “You’re really not going to like it.”

She was right.

Death was careless of dignity. Sometimes Liam thought that that was what he hated most about murder scenes, and this one was no exception. Her flowered housedress was above her knees, revealing the legs he had admired the night before all the way up to the thighs. Her right foot was twisted so that one perfectly polished brown loafer had fallen off. The neat, shining cap of black hair was matted with blood. Her bowels had emptied themselves and the stink of urine and excrement fouled the air.

Her big brown eyes were open, looking at the ceiling with an expression of vague astonishment, as if she had tried and failed to understand how she came to be there and in that position.

She never would, now.

“You got pictures?”

Prince nodded.

Liam stepped forward, avoiding the blood, and closed the staring eyes, and then pulled the skirt down to a more decorous level. He turned to Joe Gould, a thin, intense man in his early thirties with a face by Giotto and hair as long and as black as the deceased’s. Gould, Newenham’s sole physician’s assistant, operator of the local ambulance and the nearest thing the town had to a medical examiner, stripped the plastic gloves from his hands. “My guess is death was caused by a blow to the head incurred during a fight. Bruising on the face, knuckles, defensive marks on both arms.”

“Anything under her fingernails?”

Gould picked up the corpse’s left hand and displayed it. “She kept her fingernails short and filed smooth. I did scrapings, but I doubt there will be much there.”

The house was silent, except for the sound of soft weeping and muted whispers coming from the living room. The three of them stared down at the body.

Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, a seventy-four-year-old housewife, mother of four, grandmother of two, would never again come to the defense of private property with a jar of sun-dried tomatoes.

“God damn it to hell,” Liam said.

Prince tried not to flinch away from the rage in his voice and on his face. Gould, impassive as ever, picked up the chair that had been lying on its side and set it at the table. He nodded at the counter and, following his gaze, Liam saw two mugs, both bearing the KAKM Anchorage public television logo, sitting next to the stove. The kettle was full, and cold to the touch. The mugs were empty. A canister of tea bags stood next to them, along with a sugar bowl and a spoon.

Gould nodded when Liam looked back. “I’d say she was making tea for two and never got the chance.”

“So she knew him.”

Gould shrugged. “Doesn’t narrow it down by much. Who doesn’t know everyone else in this town?”

The kitchen, a large room with windows overlooking the river and a table big enough to seat eight, had last been remodeled before Alaska was a state. The refrigerator was small, round-shouldered and noisy, a sea of white enamel surrounded the propane-fired stove burners, there was no microwave, and the coffeepot was a silver percolator with a black plastic lid. The overhead light was fluorescent behind a translucent, rectangular plastic lens. Yellow flowers bloomed on the wallpaper, matching the yellow and white squares of the shabby linoleum. The narrow cabinets were metal painted white, with chrome handles that looked like they’d come off a ’57 Chevy. The phone was an old black rotary dial, mounted on the wall with a bulletin board beside it. Among the usual kids’ pictures, grocery lists and plumbers’ phone numbers was a tattered Peanuts cartoon, a color one out of the Sunday paper, with Snoopy on his doghouse thinking about the time he’d tried to go over the fence of the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. “No matter where you are, you’re still in the world,” was his conclusion.

Liam lowered his eyes and saw the jar of sun-dried tomatoes sitting on the counter, shreds of dark red packed into golden olive oil.

Snoopy was right.

The room shone with elbow grease, not a coffee ground or a speck of egg yolk or a Cheerio dried hard anywhere. If it hadn’t been for the blood, it would have been spotless, but there was blood, a lot of it, splattered over the small, square porcelain sink, the dish drainer and the dishes in it, the face of the cupboard beneath, and the floor. Most of it had dried to a hard brown.

“Did you take prints?” Liam said to Prince.

She nodded, taking refuge in the minutiae of the job. “There were a lot of them.”

“And you got pictures?”

“Three rolls.”

“All right, then.”

Prince brought out the body bag she had carried into the house. Liam didn’t move.

After a moment, Prince said tentatively, “Sir?”

“God damn son of abitch, ” Liam said, and bent to the task.

Liam and Prince saw the ambulance off and went back inside, through the kitchen and into the large living room made much smaller by all the furniture in it. There were two couches, a recliner and a couple of easy chairs upholstered in three different fabrics in four different patterns, with end tables spaced between. A wicker basket held copies of theLadies’ Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, Jo-Ann Fabrics flyers,Coin World, the Denali Seed catalog, and theNew York Times Book Review. A jumble of toys spilled out of a toy box in the shape of a large hollow plastic frog with lime-green skin and yellow eyes. A television, big and black and brand-new, dominated one corner, but what drew the eye was the window that took up most of the east wall. Like the kitchen, this room faced the river. Lydia Tompkins must have enjoyed some spectacular sunrises.

The weeping sound was coming from two women who sat close together on one couch, and the whispers from two men on the opposite couch. They looked nothing alike, and yet it was evident at first glance that all four were the children of Lydia Tompkins.

Liam stepped forward. “I’m Liam Campbell of the Alaska state troopers. Who found her?”

Prince frowned a little at his blunt question, but after a surreptitious look at the expression on his face decided not to intervene.

One of the women blew her nose and rose to her feet. “I did.”

“And you are?”

“Betsy Amakuk.”

“You’re her daughter?”

“We all are. I mean, this is my sister, Karen.”

“Karen Tompkins,” the other woman said, standing.

“And my brothers.”

The brothers followed suit.

“Stan Tompkins.”

“Jerry Tompkins.”

Betsy was large and regal in clean blue jeans and a dark blue sweatshirt with the boat nameF/V Daisy Rose on the front. She wore pearl studs in her ears, her dark hair was immaculate, and her eyes and nose were red. Karen was petite and kittenish in hip-hugger cords and a cropped T-shirt. Her hair was short and streaked with gold and spiked with gel. Thin silver bracelets jangled from both wrists, and silver earrings touched her shoulders. Her belly button was pierced, and her mascara had run.

Stan, burly, tanned and fit, looked at Liam out of assessing eyes. His haircut looked left over from the marines, and his Carhartt’s, though worn, were clean and well-kept, as was the brown plaid shirt beneath them. Jerry, on the other hand, was thin and nervous, with eyes that couldn’t seem to stay focused on any one object for very long. He wore a dark blue windbreaker over a T-shirt with a large hole showing and a pair of jeans worn through at both knees.

They all looked to be in their late forties or early fifties, Betsy the eldest and, if he had to guess, Karen the youngest. He said to Betsy, “What time did you find your mother?”

“I don’t know.” She blew her nose again and looked at Stan. “What time did I call you, Stan?”

“About two o’clock, I think.”

“Did you call him the moment you found her?”

“You understand,” Prince said, “we have to ask these questions, Mrs. Amakuk. We’re very sorry for your loss.”

Liam glared at her and she shut up. He repeated, “Did you call your brother as soon as you found your mother?”

“Yes. No. Wait. I- No, I called the ambulance first.” Her eyes filled again. “Even though I knew it was no use. She was cold when I touched her.”

Rigor had begun to set in. The house was cool. A murder before breakfast, then, most likely. “Did you touch anything else?”

“What? I… no. No, I don’t think so.”

“The stove wasn’t on?”

“No.”

“Did you see anyone leaving the house as you arrived?”

“No.”

To Stan, Liam said, “And you came as soon as Betsy called?”

“Yes. Well, my wife had to come down to the boat to tell me Betsy had called and wanted me up to Mom’s.”

To Betsy, Liam said, “So actually you called Stan’s wife.”

“No. Well, yes, she answered the phone at their house.”

“You might want to ease up a little here, sir,” Prince murmured from the background.

Liam, who knew he was being a jerk, didn’t seem to be able to turn it off. “Why,” he said to Betsy, “did you come to the house today?”

A spark of anger glowed briefly in her eyes but she kept her voice level. “I come by every afternoon for coffee.”

Liam thought of the two mugs on the counter, the box of tea bags, the full kettle, the empty percolator. “Your mother lived here alone?”

“Yes. After Dad died, I wanted her to move in with us but she wouldn’t. Said she’d lived here for fifty-eight years and if she had another fifty-eight in her she wanted to live them in the same place.”

All four siblings gave the same involuntary smile as Betsy called up the memory.

“Now let me ask you something, Mr. Campbell,” Betsy said, drawing herself up to a height that allowed her to meet Liam’s eyes straight-on. “Who did this to my mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you’ll find out.” It was a statement, not a question.

“I’ll need to ask you all a lot more questions. I need to know what she did with her days, who her friends were-”

“A friend wouldn’t do this!”

Liam looked at Jerry, red-faced and teary-eyed. “Can you all come down to the post this afternoon? The sooner we interview you, the sooner we can move the investigation forward.”

He waited for their nods. “Who were your mother’s neighbors?”

“There weren’t any close by,” Stan said. “One of the reasons we wanted her to move in with Becky. Jim Earl bought out old Eric the Red six years ago when Eric had to put his wife in the Pioneer Home. That’s the place north of here. The next house down belongs to the Isaacsons.” He gave a dismissive wave. “Outsiders, haven’t been in the country long. Mom barely knew them.”

“We’ll talk to them all,” Liam said. “In the meantime, please leave the house as it is so we can have a chance to go through it.”

“Why?” Betsy said.

Liam, suddenly very tired, pulled off his cap and ran his hand through his hair. His scalp felt tight. “We might find something that will lead us to who did this thing.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Amakuk.”

“You’ll leave everything as you found it?”

Liam’s lips tightened. “Alaska state troopers are not thieves, Ms. Amakuk.”

She had the grace to look uncomfortable. “No,” she said quickly. “Of course not.”

“If you have a key, I’ll make sure we lock up behind ourselves.”

“Of course.” She went into the kitchen and they heard drawers and cupboards opening and closing. In Newenham, house keys were not normally ready to hand. Eventually Becky returned with a brass house key on a ring bearing a Last Frontier Bank fob and handed it over. She gathered what remained of her family together with a glance and they followed her out, Karen hanging behind to cast a languishing glance Liam’s way.

“You sure are tall,” she said. “I like tall men a lot.” She stepped in close to him and her voice dropped to a purr. “They make me feel all little and feminine.”

Liam slapped his cap back on and said to Prince, “Let’s start in the kitchen.”

“Yes, sir,” Prince said woodenly, and followed him from the room.

December 6, 1941

We lost one the other side of the Canadian border. The weather was shitty and it sounds like they might have flown into a mountain. Probably another one of those mountains thats ten thousand feet higher than the map says it is. Didn’t know anyone on board.

Peter invited me to dinner. It was great to get off base. He lives in this little dugout kind of a place down on this creek that is so muddy that the mud soaks through the snow and ice. He says its full of salmon in the summertime. I dont see any self-respecting fish swimming up that but thats what he says. He says the salmon get really big, forty, fifty pounds but I reckon thats just one of his storys. He fried some moose steaks and boiled potatos from his garden. There was even butter I dont know where he got it. Pretty good better than what were eating on base. He showed me some gold nuggets one was the size of a radish I never see such a thing. I asked how does one go about finding more of those and he says you dont stroll out and pick them up off the ground its hard work. He says he might have a proposition for me later on if I can find him a flight to Russia.

A letter from Mom today saying that Aunt Victoria saw Helen down to the Powder House dancing. Im glad shes feeling better. I wonder who she was dancing with. Ira said hed look after her for me.