Better To Rest

TWELVE

First on the list of Lydia’s book club members was Bill Billington. As Newenham’s one and only magistrate, she was a walking, talking database on the community and its citizens. She knew who was sleeping with whom, where all the bodies were buried, and if the check really was in the mail or likely to be anytime in the near future.

Besides, Diana Prince had skipped breakfast, and the best lunch going was at Bill’s. She bellied up to the bar a little past one o’clock and grabbed a stool at the end. The lunch crowd was already thinning out, although she didn’t know where everyone was going. Over to the Breeze Inn to play pool, probably. Winter in southwestern Alaska, particularly for the unemployed, could be just one long, cold, dark stretch of boredom and inertia, and after the last two pitiful fishing seasons, there wasn’t a lot of incentive to work on boats or hang gear for the next one.

She wondered where Col. Charles Bradley Campbell was sleeping that night. She wondered if he would find a way to let her know.

“What can I do you for?” Bill said, running the bar rag in Diana’s direction.

“How about a steak sandwich, fries, green salad with bleu cheese on the side? And a diet Coke with a wedge of lime, if you’ve got it. Lemon if you don’t.”

“Coming right up.”

“And talk, when you have a few minutes.”

Bill raised an eyebrow, and went into the kitchen to slap a slab of meat down on the grill. The air was filled with the satisfying sound of charring beef. She made Smokey Pete another vodka martini on the rocks, blended four margaritas for a group of giggling young women who were celebrating the twenty-first birthday of the last of them to become legal, and stuck her head into the office. Moses was dozing on the couch. She pulled a throw over him and closed the door silently behind her. She assembled the steak sandwich, loaded the plate with fries, and delivered it just as Prince was forking up the last of her salad. “What’s up?” she said, pulling her stool opposite Prince’s.

“Liam wants me to ask you about Lydia Tompkins’ book club. Says you were a member.” Prince wiped her hands on a napkin and got out a notebook. “Says you, Lydia, Alta Peterson, Mamie Hagemeister, Charlene Taylor, Sharon Ilutsik and Lola Gamechuck were all members.”

“That’s right.”

“How often did you meet?”

“Once a month.”

“All of you pretty close?”

“Pretty close.”

“Did she mention that she was having trouble with anyone lately, her children, business acquaintances, friends?”

Bill blew out a sigh. “I still can’t believe she’s dead. I would have bet my last dime she would have outlived the youngest of us.”

“Bill?”

“Sorry. Children. Stanley Tompkins left Lydia very well-off. One or the other of them had money before they married; some said it was Lydia, but I don’t buy that. Her father was a local fisherman who never made it very big, who drank a little too much, and who fathered a few too many children ever to be seriously in the chips. Stanley, now, I think she married Stanley because he was her father’s exact opposite. A very hard worker, and from the stories I hear tell from the old farts had an absolute genius for finding fish. Clarence knew Stanley pretty well.”

“Clarence Saguyuk?”

“Yeah. Anyway, when Stanley died, he left Lydia well dowered and all the children well provided for. None of them have to work unless they want to.” She indulged in a snort. “And most of them don’t.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Stan Jr. is the only one of them with a real job, but even he plays at it. You ought to take a look at that boat of his sometime, theArctic Belle. It’s got all the bells and whistles on it, thousands of dollars of electronic equipment; I think he bought the first GPS in the Newenham boat harbor. He gets a new reel practically every year, he’s always upgrading his skiff, he gets one hole in his gear and that’s it, got to hang some new and right now, too. He’s the nicest one of the kids, certainly the easiest one to talk to, but he’s fifty-five going on twelve. Or fifty-six,” she added. “I don’t keep track of my own age, let alone anyone else’s.”

“Does he live beyond his means?”

“I don’t think so. I’d bet Karen does, though. She’s a shopper, that girl; she never walks in here in the same outfit twice running and she’s always got some new piece of gold-nugget jewelry hanging off her.”

“Is he married? Stan Jr.?”

Bill shook her head. “No. He’s had a thing going off and on with Carol Anawrok for years, ever since high school. It stopped while she was married to Melvin Delgado, and then started up again after Melvin died. It stopped again while she was married to Keith West, and then started up again after Keith died.” Bill shook her head. “Both cancer of the lungs. Carol keeps marrying smokers.”

“And the rest of the kids?”

“Betsy’s the oldest, about fifty-six or -seven, I think. Her husband is David Amakuk, whose family moved down from New Stoyahuk. He’s a foot shorter and two feet wider than she is. They met in high school, married the week after they graduated. He runs theDaisy Rose, a drifter I think Betsy financed. He does pretty well out of it, generally comes in just under high boat. They have two daughters, Daisy and Rose, both living in Anchorage now. Jerry’s the other son.” She paused.

“What’s wrong with Jerry?”

“Everything.”

“That sounds pretty comprehensive.”

“He’s one of those lost souls, no ambition, no direction. He’s been up before me on possession I don’t know how many times, and DWIs, too. I took away his driver’s licence and I threatened to suspend the rest of the family’s, too, if they didn’t keep him away from a steering wheel. Stan Sr. tied up Jerry’s inheritance so that he’d get an allowance from Lydia, so he wouldn’t blow it all on one toot at the Great Alaskan Bush Company in Anchorage. Which Jerry is capable of doing, if nothing else. His apartment is in Lydia’s name; she pays all the bills. Paid.”

“Did Jerry resent having his money tied up that way? Would he threaten Lydia to get more?”

Bill reflected. “He was more along the lines of pathetically grateful, would be my guess. The most wretched thing about Jerry is that he knows just how worthless he is. He knows he’d be homeless in a heartbeat if he had control of his own money.” She shook her head. “I remember one time, during one of the possession busts or whatever it was, he told me he had a home and a fixed income, and that he wasn’t a vagrant. He was proud of it.”

“Great.”

Bill regarded Prince not without sympathy. “Yeah, I know, you’d like a motive. Sorry about that.”

“There was no forced entry. It’s likely she let whoever it was in.”

“Who in Newenham locks their doors?”

“Yeah, well, okay, never mind. There’s a fourth child, isn’t there?”

“There would have been, if Karen had ever been a child.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“That kid was sprung full-grown from the head of Zeus, and when she landed she was hot to trot and ready to go. She’s very pretty, which doesn’t help. During her high school years alone, there were three accusations of statutory rape brought against three different boys, all dropped for lack of evidence. She moved into one of the Harborview Town Houses the week after she graduated from high school, I think the better to see which boats are in and which crews are available for plucking. She doesn’t have any other vices of which I’m aware, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink much, doesn’t do drugs-does the local provider, though; she and Evan Gray were an item a while back, but I think she wore even him out. She surely likes her men.”

“Anything kinky going on there? Something that might result, say, in blackmail? That she needed money to pay off? That she might go to her mother for? And her mother might refuse her?”

Bill laughed. “Karen would consider it advertising.”

Prince sighed. “Okay. What about her friends? What about the ladies who lunch?”

“The Literary Ladies,” Bill said.

“Sorry. The Literary Ladies. Stand by one.” Bill made a round of the house. The girls in the booth were getting very giggly, and so was their designated driver. Bill served up a round of sodas and forced a jumbo order of nachos on them. She came back and settled in across from Prince.

“The Literary Ladies were formed in 1988, November, I think.” She smiled at a memory. “First book we read was Toni Morrison’sBeloved, because it won the Pulitzer that year. Scared the shit out of everyone, and nearly busted up the group right there. One woman never did come back-what was her name, Margaret, Melody something? Anyway, we never saw her again. I haven’t seen her since, as a matter of fact, so she must have moved away.”

Prince was more interested in the current members, and said so, with emphasis.

“All right, all right. There’s me. There was Lydia, of course. There’s Alta Peterson, who owns and minds the hotel. There’s Mamie Hagemeister, you know her, and there’s Charlene Taylor and you know her, too. They’re all originals, except for Charlene, who joined when she was posted to Newenham, back in, oh, 1992, I guess. Sharon and Lola are newcomers, the youngsters in the group. Sharon joined when she was still in high school, and about two years later brought Lola in. Sharon does hair down at the Prime Cut and Lola works in the cannery in the summer and answers the phone for the Angayuk Native Association in the winter.”

“You’re all pretty close?”

“Pretty close,” Bill said cautiously.

“You don’t seem sure.”

“Close for getting together only once a month,” Bill said.

“Any disagreements?”

Bill raised one eyebrow, but Prince refused to back down. “Of course we fight. Lola married the wrong man, we told her so, and she stopped coming for the duration of her marriage, about thirteen months, I think it was. Charlene arrested Sharon’s cousin Richard for fishing inside the markers up Kulukak River, and Sharon stopped speaking to Charlene until I found him guilty, and then she stopped speaking to me instead. Alta was pissed at Sharon because Sharon gave Alta a punk-rock haircut without permission, and she stopped speaking to her until it grew out.”

“Anybody ever get mad at Lydia?”

“Nope. Not that I remember. Well.”

“What?”

“She used to tell raunchy stories that embarrassed the hell out of Sharon and Lola.”

“Raunchy stories?”

“Yeah, I think she liked giving them the needle. Especially the younger ones. Hell, if half the stuff she said about her and Stan Sr. was true, she wasn’t even bragging.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Bill grinned. “One time, when the kids were off on a basketball trip to Anchorage, Stan Sr. borrowed a pair of handcuffs off Martin Gleason-a city cop here, before your time-stripped Lydia butt-naked and kept her chained to their bed for twenty-four hours, during which he invited five guys over to play poker in the kitchen. He visited her between hands, with the other guys thinking he was using the john. She said after the second time all he had to do was walk into the room for her to come. Lola just about died.”

“Jesus.” Prince remembered Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, a short, plump, bright-eyed woman who had most definitely achieved elder status, and tried to reconcile that picture with the sexual dynamo Bill was describing.

“Yeah. I want to be Lydia when I grow up.” Bill paused. “It must have about killed her when Stan Sr. died.”

“So you never had any disagreements with her yourself?”

“Oh, hell, yes. You can’t be even once-a-month friends for over twenty years and not fight. Not if the friendship is real. I told her she was spoiling Karen and she was mad at me for, oh, about five minutes, I think it was. But Lydia could never stay mad at anyone for long.”

Bill sighed. “I should be angry at who killed her. I should be breathing fire and smoke up one road and down another, as far as roads go in this town, until I sniff out the bastard and annihilate him. But all I can think of is that I’ve lost a friend, and all I can feel is tired.”

It was the closest Prince had ever heard Bill come to admitting to human weakness, and she didn’t know quite what to say in response. She fell back on formula. “You can’t think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her?”

Bill shook her head.

“Can you give me directions to Lola’s house? I can track down everyone else.”

“Okay.” Bill drew Prince’s notebook to her and began to write.

Alta Peterson, owner and proprietor of the Bay View Inn, Newenham’s only hotel, was long-limbed and lean in the best Scandinavian style of construction, and wore tiny little round glasses through which she was peering at a copy ofGirl with a Pearl Earring. The book was propped in her lap. Her feet were propped on the check-in counter. She wore a lime-green sweater over a pair of polyester slacks the color of Welch’s grape juice, and an orange chiffon scarf in an artistic knot at her throat.

Prince narrowed her eyes against the glare and cleared her throat.

“Diana. What can I do for you?” Alta did not leap to her feet. This was Newenham. It was October. Jo and Gary Dunaway and Special Agent James G. Mason were the only three customers she had at present, and she wasn’t expecting Diana to bring her any more.

“You hear about Lydia Tompkins?”

“Yes.”

“I’m talking to everyone who knew her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Bill Billington tells me you were a member of Lydia’s book club.”

“Yes.”

“You were good friends?”

“Yes.”

“Before she died, did she say she was having trouble with anyone? Anybody threatening her, anything like that?”

“For what reason?”

“I don’t know; I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”

Alta closed the book, marking her spot with one forefinger, but she didn’t pull her feet off the counter. “Lydia Tompkins was a good and true friend of mine from the time my husband first brought me to Newenham. If anyone had threatened her and I had heard about it, I would have sought them out and kicked their behind. What’s more, I would have had to stand in line to do it.”

“She had a lot of friends?”

“She didn’t have anything but friends.”

“You remember her talking about any problems she might have had with her children?”

“No.”

Alta had elevated the monosyllablic response to an art form. “Well, if you remember anything-”

“If I do.” Alta opened her book again.

Prince took the hint and left.

Mamie Hagemeister was Alta Peterson’s polar opposite in temperament. She burst into tears at her desk at the local jail and had to be ministered to with Kleenex and a can of Coke from the machine down the hall. “She was the greatest gal,” Mamie said, blowing her nose. “One time I was sick with the flu, really sick, and she came and got my kids and kept them for three days so I could sleep. She did things like that for everybody. And she did things in the community, too. She taught Yupik at the grade school, and ran the fund-raising drive for the new fire truck, and donated time down at Maklak Center. She had an uncle who was a drunk.” With a rare flash of pragmatism, she added, “Everybody in Newenham has an uncle who’s a drunk. But Lydia did something about it.” Dissolving once again into tears, she said, “I just don’t know who would do such an awful thing. Everybody loved Lydia.”

Prince’s ears pricked up at the news that Lydia had volunteered at the small clinic attached to the tiny hospital that treated drug and alcohol abusers. Users were notoriously unstable people, quick to take offense and slow to take responsibility, with a tendency to hit first when they were high and apologize later when they were sober and about to be jailed for the third time. There was a possibility that Lydia had offended someone and that it had resulted in a confrontation in her home. Counselors in the big city had unlisted phone numbers and had mail sent to a box at the post office. In small towns like Newenham, it just wasn’t that hard to find someone.

Charlene Taylor was in the air, tracking down a rumor of a group of hunters going for bear in an area the Fish and Game had closed to hunting the month before. Prince moved on to Prime Cut, Newenham’s lone beauty salon, located in the minimall that housed the Eagle grocery store. Sharon Ilutsik was blow-drying Jimmy Barnes’ hair. Jimmy Barnes, a rotund, bouncy little man and Newenham’s harbormaster, greeted Prince with some embarrassment and was out of the chair a second later. Sharon sighed a little over his tip, and then he came bustling back in, even redder of face, to mumble an apology and shove a couple of bills her way. She brightened and accompanied Prince to the espresso stand next door to order a double skinny latte with vanilla flavoring. Prince managed not to gag and got a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar with a lavish hand, and they sat down at one of two faux-wrought-iron tables.

“Lydia Tompkins,” Sharon said. “Yeah, we were friends. I usually only saw her once a month, at book club, except when she came in for a haircut. You could use one, by the way,” she said, giving Prince a critical once-over. “You’re getting a little shaggy around the ears and the back of your head.”

Prince ran a hand through her short, dark curls. “I’ll make an appointment after we’re done here. When did you last see Lydia?”

“At the last book club. Saturday before last.”

“Did she seem upset about anything? Anything at all, it doesn’t matter how unimportant it seems to you.”

“No. Although-”

“What?”

“Her daughter showed up about halfway through the evening. I remember because we were right in the middle of sitting down to dinner and Lydia ran her off. Karen was not best pleased.” Sharon sipped her latte. “But then Karen is never best pleased by much, unless it’s a man and he’s about to take his pants off.”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“Harsh but true,” Sharon said cheerfully. “Karen defines herself by the men she sleeps with. I swear the girl has notches on her bedpost. It’s probably posts, plural, by now.”

“Like her mother.”

“Lydia didn’t sleep around,” Sharon said sharply. “She and her husband had plenty of fun, and she liked to tease us with stories about it, but she wasn’t at all like Karen. She was a one-man woman.” She paused. “At least, she was while Stan Sr. was alive.”

Prince stared. Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, plump, seventy-four, mother of four, grandmother of two, brainer of muggers with jars of sun-dried tomatoes, was doing the nasty with somebody?I want to be Lydia when I grow up, Bill had said. So, suddenly, did Prince. “You mean she took a lover?”

“Why not?” Sharon said, bristling. “She was old. She wasn’t dead. Nobody says you have to stop having sex when you hit fifty. Look at Bill Billington and Grandpa Moses.”

Prince had fallen into the way of regarding Bill as more of a contemporary and an ally in the good fight against evildoers, but when Sharon said it out loud, of course it was true. Bill and Moses were both older than God, and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She readjusted her thinking. “So you think Lydia had a lover.”

Sharon hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Yes, you should,” Prince said firmly. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I went to her house about four months ago, and somebody had sent her this big bouquet of flowers, tulips, lilies, roses; it was gorgeous. You know we don’t have a florist here, so somebody had to have Goldstreaked it down on Alaska Airlines. I thought at first it was one of her kids, but she blushed when I asked her, and said no, a friend had sent them for her birthday. She never did say who, but I got the impression the friend was a guy.” Sharon studied the milky stuff swirling around in her cup, and looked up with a smile. “It was kind of cute, you know? Here she was, seventy-four years old, little old Grandma Lydia, and she’s getting flowers from a guy. Kinda makes you not be afraid of getting old yourself, you know?”

Lola Gamechuk, thin, dark, and careworn, answered the phone six times while she talked to Prince. Five of the calls were from her daughter, Tiffany, who didn’t like her babysitter and wanted Mom to come home right now. The sixth call Lola put through to Andrew Gamechuk, the current president of the Angayuk Native Association and Lola’s cousin. Andrew interrupted his game of one-on-one with a sponge basketball and the hoop mounted on the wall of his office, which Prince had been watching through the open door of his office, to take the call. After a moment he got up and closed the door. Prince looked back at Lola.

“How well did you know Lydia?”

“Not very.”

“You were a member of her book club.”

“I saw her once a month.”

“Never any other time?”

Shrug. “Sometimes in the store.”

“Did you know of anyone who was bothering her, someone who might have held a grudge against her, who might have wanted to hurt her?”

Silent stare.

“Lola,” Prince said, surrounded on every side by Yupik storyknives and finger fans and dance masks and feeling whiter than white, “all I want is to catch the person who did this to Lydia. Did you know that she worked down at Maklak?”

Lola, who had been staring fixedly at her desk, met Prince’s eyes for the first time. Hers were a deep, dark blue, framed in wings of straight black hair that curved gently beneath her jawline. With some sleep and a little animation, Lola Gamechuk could knock the world on its collective ear with that face alone. “Everybody knew that.”

“Did anyone there get mad at her for any reason?”

A long silence. “Maybe.”

Prince tried not to pounce. “Would you know of anyone who maybe had done that?”

A longer silence. “Ray.”

“Ray who?”

Lola looked at her fingers. “Ray Wassillie. Sometimes he drinks too much. Sometimes when he drinks too much he gets mean.”

“Was he mean to Lydia?”

Lola’s face closed up. “I don’t know.”

That was all she was going to say. Prince packed up and left, trying not to look as if she was running away. The Yupik mask mounted on the wall next to the door laughed at her from within a circle of ivory and fur and feathers. She glared at it as she went out, but the grin didn’t change.

“Lola was married to Ray Wassillie for about a century one year,” Charlene told her, unfastening her gun belt and placing it in the second drawer down in her desk. She turned the key in the lock and put the key in her pocket.

“Oh, hell.”

“Don’t be mad at her. He treated her pretty badly. She told us once she never would have left him if he hadn’t hit the baby.”

Prince remembered the phone calls. “Tiffany?”

Charlene nodded. “Tiffany wasn’t even two months old, colicky, cried a lot. Ray came home drunk and lost his temper. I saw the marks. Lola gets back every way she can. Can’t say I blame her much.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah.” Charlene stretched. “Man, it’s windy up top. It was a bitch keeping her on course. My shoulders feel like they’ve been frozen.”

“You catch them? Mamie said you were tailing some hunters going after bear in a closed area.”

Charlene made a disgusted face. “No. I checked all the likely strips but I couldn’t find the plane. I’ll go up again tomorrow, but you know what it’s like. I might as well be on foot, for all the good I can do.” She touched her toes and sat down. “So you want to know about Lydia.”

Charlene and Bill would be her best sources; Prince had known that from the beginning. Bill, as magistrate, would take an impartial, innocent-until-proven-guilty view. Charlene, on the other hand, was a cop. She worked where the human rubber met the road. Cops never took anything on faith, and disbelieved every story that was told them on principle until and unless they could confirm that the story told was fact in all its essentials, and even then remained wary and unconvinced. Cop shops bred skeptics. Skeptics cherished few illusions about human nature, and therefore were seldom disappointed. “Tell me about Lydia,” Diana said.

Charlene linked her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling for inspiration. “Lydia Tompkins. Seventy-four years old. Widow of Stanley Tompkins Sr. Mother of Betsy, Stan Jr., Jerry and Karen. Born in Newenham, went to school in Newenham, married another Newenhammer. Never went farther than Anchorage when she traveled. So far as I know, never wanted to. Had an excellent relationship with her husband.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Charlene laughed. “I’ll bet. Gets along with her children. Stanley Sr. made a lot of money fishing and, unlike most of his fellow Bay fishermen, invested well and left a tidy sum, evenly divided between all concerned. Lydia could have spent a lot more money than she did. You’ve seen her kitchen.”

“Yes.”

“Right out of 1957, isn’t it? We used to tease her that Mamie Eisenhower was going to come walking out of it one day with a plateful of pork chops. She could have afforded to remodel it once every five years, but she said everything still worked.”

“Was she a miser?”

“No, just frugal. She was very generous with her grandchildren. She was very generous with her friends, come to that. She gave the Literary Ladies Christmas and birthday presents every year.” Charlene nodded to a large painting by Byron Birdsall on the wall. A narrow creek crooked its way between snow-covered banks, leading the eye to Denali, gilt in the setting sun. The creek seemed to shimmer with life and the whole painting radiated an inner glow. “I saw that in Artique one year and came home raving about it.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. She was generous to a fault. Especially to her children.”

“How so?”

“Karen and Jerry regularly run out of money. All they had to do was ask.”

“Did fishermen really used to make that kind of money? The kind of money that would set a whole family up for two generations?”

Charlene gave her a tolerant look. “Given the year you came to Newenham, I suppose it’s hard for you to imagine, but yes, salmon fishermen, especially the seiners, used to make that much money. Some of it was luck but mostly it was experience-experience and good equipment. Stanley Sr. had both. He worked deckhand on his father’s gillnetter from the time he was six, according to Lydia. And that was back when the law said you could only fish under sail.”

“No kidding?” Prince had a brief vision of the bay covered with white sails skimming over a deep blue surface.

“No kidding. So, anything else?”

Prince gathered up her notes. “Not for the moment. I’ll call if I think of anything else.”

“Me, too. Diana?”

Prince paused, one hand on the doorknob.

Charlene’s voice remained pleasant and even. “I’d take it as a personal favor if you found this son of a bitch and strung him up by his balls.”

Diana touched the brim of her flat-brimmed hat. “I’ll do my best.”