Nothing Gold Can Stay

TWO

Kagati Lake, September 1

Opal Nunapitchuk was a happy woman. Fifty-six years old, with three children and eight grandchildren, she was the postmistress of the tiny (population thirty-four in summer) village of Kagati Lake. A corner of her living room, furnished with a wooden counter polished smooth by forty years of elbows and a cubbyholed shelf fixed to the wall, was devoted to the getting and sending of letters, magazine subscriptions, bank statements, utility bills, Mother’s Day cards and birthday and Christmas packages between the citizens of Kagati Lake and the outside world, and to the upholding of the generally fine standards of the United States Postal Service. People could sneer all they wanted to, but in Opal’s opinion the best federal service her taxes provided was the post office and priority mail (delivery guaranteed in two days for three dollars and twenty cents). She loved being the bearer of good tidings, and she was ready with Russian tea and Yupik sympathy when the tidings were bad. She was a thoroughly round peg in a thoroughly round hole and she knew it.

The residents of Kagati Lake, like those of any small Bush village, relied almost entirely on the United States Postal Service to keep them in touch with their friends and families and, indeed, with the rest of the nation and the world itself. Frequently it supplied more than that, in ways the Inspector General of the Postal Service had never dreamed. Mark Pestrikoff had engaged himself to be married and, deciding a one-room plywood and tarpaper shack might not put his best foot forward with his new bride, had flown into Anchorage, bought the makings for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house and mailed it home. He didn’t have time for the Nushagak River to thaw, he’d told Opal, and postage was cheaper than freight anyway. Construction on the house had lasted longer than the marriage. Mark was still working on the former. Opal had just yesterday taken shipment of two five-gallon buckets of Sheetrock mud, C.O.D., and they sat on Opal’s porch, tagged and waiting for Mark to pick them up.

Dave Aragon called his orders into Johnson Tire by radio, and in due course tires appeared at the post office, studded snow tires for winter driving and street tires for summer, although the only road in Kagati Lake was the ten-mile stretch between the lake and the dump, and it was neither paved nor maintained during the winter, so Dave didn’t really need the snow tires. Hell, he didn’t really need the truck, as the village sat right on the lake. People got around in boats during the summer and on snow machines during the winter. Half the people in Kagati Lake had no driver’s license.

And of course groceries came in by air. You could always tell when someone had made a Costco run to Anchorage by the way boxes of Campbell’s soup and pilot bread flooded in, always with the General Mail Facility’s postmark on them. Opal spared a sympathetic thought for the people at the post office at Anchorage International Airport. They were people who earned their paychecks. She’d heard that on April 15 they dedicated employees full-time to standing on the road leading into the post office just to accept income tax filings. After that, she started staying open late on April 15 herself, so she wouldn’t feel like a slacker.

Opal sprayed Pledge on the counter and paused for a moment to admire the flex of muscle in her upper arm. Not many women her age could display a muscle that firm, an upper arm that toned. No sagging, no spare flesh, just a smooth covering of muscle and bone. She flexed once more, shook her shining cap of hair into place and swept the dustcloth over the counter. It had been made of burlwood from a gnarled old spruce felled on Josh Demske’s homestead, and hand-hewn by her father into the counter she sold stamps over today. She was proud of the workmanship, and of the family history embodied in the dark brown sheen of the wood.

Her living room was filled with mementos of family and friends, most of them Alaskan in origin and some very valuable. There was the pair of ivory tusks carved with walrus heads and polished to a high gloss, yellowing now with age. A nugget of gold out of Kagati Creek, a rough lump the size of her youngest grandchild’s fist. A series of Yupik, Aleut and Inupiat masks, wonderfully carved and adorned with beads and feathers, human spirits laughing out of animal eyes. There was an upright, glass-fronted case filled with old rifles, too; one of which was said to have been brought north by Wyatt Earp when he took the marshal’s job in Nome. A mustard-yellow upright piano, ivory keys worn to the touch, occupied the place of honor in one corner.

Of all her children, her daughter Pearl was the nearest to her heart, and the most accomplished on the piano. She was with the rest of the family at fish camp now, and would not be home for long before going Outside to school. Opal sighed, sad and worried at once. She and Leonard had done their best; home schooling with an insistence of a B or better average, a firm grounding in the Methodist faith. Each of the children could skin a beaver, roast a moose heart, kill a bear, reduce the trajectory of a bullet fired from a.30-06 rifle to mathematical formula, even allowing for drift. They could bake bread, grow potatoes, keep a radio schedule, perform CPR, read. Opal just didn’t know how many of those skills would prove useful to Pearl Outside. The boys had chosen to remain home and take up the subsistence lifestyle of their parents, fishing, hunting, trapping. Andy and Joe had married girls from Koliganek and Newenham, respectively, although Newenham was an awfully big city compared to Kagati Lake and Opal and Leonard worried over how Sarah would settle in. Both boys had built homes north of their parents’ homestead, proving up on their state land in three years instead of the required seven. She was proud of them both, although she tried not to show it too much. She didn’t want the boys to get swelled heads.

She tried not to think of Ruby, her second daughter and fourth child, and as always, she failed. So she was glad when the door to the living room opened. She looked up. “Come on, you know the mail plane won’t be here until eleven, I-oh.”

A man she had never seen before stood in the doorway, short, stocky, dressed in faded blue jeans and a dark blue windbreaker. A red bandanna was tied round his forehead in a failed attempt to discipline a tremendous bush of dirty grayish blond hair that repeated itself in tufts curling out from the neck of his shirt and the cuffs of his sleeves. He carried a dark blue interior frame pack, fabric stained and worn at the seams with long use, with a shot gun in a sheath fastened to the back.

Opal was used to waiting on hermits, as this area of the Bush supported more than its share, and she smiled, teeth very white in her tanned and healthy face. “Hi there,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

He looked around the room slowly and carefully, missing nothing, and suddenly the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

“Nice place you’ve got here.” His voice was rough, almost rusty-sounding, as if he didn’t talk much and wasn’t used to it when he did.

“Thanks,” she said, watching him. “My father built it. Felled the logs, finished them, built the place from the ground up.”

“He the collector?” The man walked over to the nugget, sitting in a place of honor on a little table of its own.

It was nothing a hundred other people hadn’t done over the years, but all at once Opal was realizing that she was all alone in the house, and pretty much alone in the village, as most people were at fish camp, waiting for the last salmon of the season to make it this far north. Her husband and children weren’t due back until the weekend. “Yes. What can I help you with? Did you want to check general delivery for mail? I’ll need to see some identification.”

He touched the nugget with one forefinger, moved on to a hair clasp made from ivory and baleen in the shape of a whale. “No, you won’t have to do that.” He swung his pack down from his shoulders and pulled out a pistol. He didn’t aim it at her, or even in her general direction, let it hang at the end of his arm, dangling at his side.

“You have to come with me,” he said, and smiled at her.

Newenham, September 1

Bill’s Bar and Grill was one of those prefabricated buildings common in the Alaskan Bush, housing post offices, ranger stations, grocery stores, trooper posts and not a few private homes. The roof was always tin, the siding always plastic in blue or green or brown, the front porch always cedar that weathered gray in a year. Insulation was problematic at best, as during winter the metal siding contracted and shrank from doors and window frames alike, resulting in enormous heating bills. In summer, windows had the occasional alarming habit of bursting unexpectedly from their frames, and doors either wouldn’t open in the first place or wouldn’t close again if they did.

September was a good time for the prefabs, neither too cold nor too hot. Bill’s had a chipper, almost cheerful air. The front porch was swept, the windows clean, the neon beer signs glowing and the last of the nasturtiums bursting into bloom next to the porch. Liam escorted Amelia Gearhart up the stairs and in the door. Bill was washing glasses behind the bar. “Oh hell,” she said when she saw them coming. She was over sixty, silver of hair, blue of eye and zaftig. She knew it, too, and today had chosen to accent her manifest charms with blue jeans cinched in at the waist by a woven leather belt and a tight pink T-shirt which purported to advertise last May’s Jazz Festival in New Orleans but which really was advertising Bill.

Moses Alakuyak sat at the bar. Too tall for a Yupik, eyes too Asian for a white, he was a mongrel and gloried in it. “Ever see a purebred dog, missy?” he’d been heard to tell some poor tourist who had wandered in off the Newenham street. “Nervous, stupid, half the time got them some epilepsy or hip problems or some other goddamn thing. Always barking, always jumping on you or whoever else is in range, can’t trust them around kids or anybody else, either. Give me a good old Heinz 57 mutt every time for smarts and good manners.” He’d glared down at the hapless tourist. “Same goes for people. Mongrel horde, my ass. We’ll inherit the earth, not the goddamn meek.”

The tourist had murmured something soothing and drifted slowly but surely out the door. Anyone in Newenham could have told her she was in no danger; Mount Moses in full eruption was a common sight, worthy of attention and respect, but it was never necessary to get the women and children off the streets.

“Married five months,” Moses said, looking at Amelia, “and now she’s drinking her breakfast.” He said something in Yupik that sounded less than complimentary. Amelia wasn’t too drunk to understand, and colored to the roots of her hair.

“Knock it off, Moses,” Bill said. She looked at Liam. “What do you want to do, Liam?”

He sighed and looked around the bar. It was empty except for them, but it was going on ten-thirty and it wouldn’t be long before the lunch crowd showed. “Hell, Bill, I don’t know. This is the third time this week.”

“Want to swear out an arrest warrant?”

An arrest warrant. State of Alaska, plaintiff, versus Amelia Gearhart, defendant. To any peace officer or other authorized person, you are commanded to arrest the defendant and bring the defendant before the nearest available judicial officer without unnecessary delay to answer to a complaint/information/indictment charging the defendant with violation of Alaska Statute 28.35.030, driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. If Liam requested one, Bill would sign it; hell, she wouldn’t even have to take Liam’s oath, Amelia was her own worst prosecution witness. The criminal process would begin, he would arrest Amelia, Bill would set bail and order Amelia to court, and she would be charged, arraigned, tried, convicted and sentenced. DWI was a Class A misdemeanor and carried a mandatory sentence and fine. More important, she would have a record, and penalties escalated for repeat offenders.

He looked at her. She was just a kid, seventeen years old, a devout Moravian who had dropped out of school to marry without her parents’ approval. Her husband saw no reason for marriage to interfere with his previous lifestyle, which had included the determined chasing of skirts as far up the Nushagak as Butch Mountain. He spent more time in the bag than out of it and never refused a fight, and Liam knew it was only a matter of time before he had to pick up Darren on his own DWI. He’d won election to the city council by standing rounds for the regulars at Bill’s and the Breeze for a week straight before the voters went to the polls, and had thus far spent most of his time in office trying to change the local ordinance governing bar closing hours, at present set at two a.m., to five a.m.

Amelia stumbled in place, and her hair fell back from one cheek. Moses’ lips tightened into a thin line, and Liam stretched out a hand to raise Amelia’s chin, revealing a bruise high up on her left cheek. “Did Darren hit you, Amelia?” he said.

She pulled away. “I’m the councilman’s wife,” she said, enunciating her words with care.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re the councilman’s wife,” Moses said, and stood up to grab her and muscle her into a chair. “You’re not gonna arrest her,” he told Liam shortly, “and you’re not gonna charge her,” he said to Bill, “so don’t stand around with your thumbs up your asses like you are.”

“You have an alternative suggestion?” Bill said, irritated.

“She’s going to hurt herself eventually, Moses,” Liam said.

“She did that when she married the jerk,” Moses replied.

Liam remembered the evening in Bill’s in May, the first day he met the shaman, when Amelia and Darren had come to Moses for his blessing. Moses, drunk and verbally abusive, had withheld any such thing, and at the time Liam had thought him harsh. “The problem is, she might hurt somebody else at the same time,” he said now.

“I’ll handle it,” Moses said.

“How?” Bill said.

“I said I’ll handle it!”

Bill refused to be outshouted. “HOW?”

Moses glared at her. “I’ll take her up to fish camp, dry her out, talk some sense into her.”

If it were possible for Bill to pout, she would have pouted. “But you just got back.”

Moses’ expression changed. “Turn the bar over to Dottie and Paul, and come with.”

Bill stood very still for a moment, and then leaned across the bar and swept Moses into a lavish kiss, to which he responded wholeheartedly.

Liam examined the king net hanging from the ceiling for holes and found it in himself to be grateful there was a bar between Moses and Bill. For two people who were older than God and who woke up nearly every morning in the same bed, their enthusiasm for each other never seemed to wane.

He thought of Wy, of waking up in the same bed every morning with her, and found himself looking forward to being older than God himself.

Bill pulled back, her face flushed. “Well, fish camp ain’t New Orleans, but it’s not a bad second best.”

Moses responded with what could only be described as a salacious grin. “We’ll have to boat you home, lady, because you won’t be able to walk.”

When Liam got to the post, Prince was already there and in his chair, typing up a report. He nodded at the computer. “What have you got?”

She made a face. “Elizabeth Katelnikoff got off the night shift at AC this morning at eight a.m. like she always does, and got home to find Art Inga and Dave Iverson wedged into the window of her bedroom, half in, half out.”

“What, they were stuck?”

“You could say that,” Prince said, considering the matter with judicial impartiality. “Seems they’d had a little too much to drink last night at a party at Tatiana Anayuk’s. You know about the permanent party at Tatiana’s, don’t you?”

“Been invited a time or two.”

“Yeah, me, too,” said Prince, who’d only been assigned to Newenham two months before, but appeared to be integrating into the local population without strain. “Anyway, Art and Dave decide they’re both in love with Elizabeth and fight a duel to see who gets her. Tatiana-who was not happy to be woken up at ten this morning, and from whom you may receive a complaint later today-says nobody won, and after that she closed the party down.”

“What time?”

“About four a.m., she said. Art and Dave staggered off, she thought down to their boat in the harbor.”

“But no,” Liam said.

“But no,” Prince agreed. She was a tall, lithe woman with deep blue eyes and short dark curls. She was slim enough to look good in a uniform, and on duty, at least, had a crisp, formal manner that did little to conceal her enthusiasm for the job. Fresh out of the academy, she was ready, willing and eager to serve and to protect, preferably at gunpoint.

She’d also had a thing going with Liam’s father during Charles’ visit to Newenham in July, but that was something Liam preferred not to think about if he could possibly avoid it, which he couldn’t. It was hell when your father’s sex life was better than your own. Although that wasn’t the case now, he thought, and had to repress that grin again. “How did they wind up stuck in Elizabeth’s window?”

“Near as they can remember, they thought it would be a dandy idea to serenade her. When she didn’t come out, understandable as she was stocking shelves at AC at the time, they decided to crawl in. They made it halfway, and passed out cold.”

Liam didn’t bother to hide the grin this time. “Must be a little window.”

“Nah. Both Art and Dave could stand to lose a little weight.”

“Why didn’t the local police respond to it?”

“Roger Raymo’s in Anchorage testifying at trial, and Cliff Berg just pulled a thirty-six-hour shift and his wife says he’s in bed and staying there.”

“Where have you got them?”

“Over to the city jail.”

“You going to arrest them?”

She looked surprised. “Of course. Drunk and disorderly, breaking and entering, resisting arrest.”

“Art Inga resisted arrest?”

Prince grinned. “Well, I don’t think he would have if Dave hadn’t shoved him so hard he fell backwards out of the window when I woke them up. He did come up swinging, though.”

Liam hung up his hat. “Is Elizabeth pressing charges?”

“She was kind of lukewarm about it at first, but then Art tried to kiss her, and since he’d thrown up at some point during the night on the floor beneath her window, she wasn’t pleased.” She saved the file and hit the print button. He motioned her up and out of his chair and took her place. The printer coughed into awareness and he reached over to turn it off before it began to print.

“Sir?”

Liam sat back. “There’s the letter of the law, Prince, and there’s the spirit. Art Inga and Dave Iverson have been in love with Elizabeth Katelnikoff since all three of them were in high school together.”

“So?”

“So she can’t make up her mind, she goes out with one and then the other and then switches back and then switches back again.”

“What’s that got to do with them breaking into her house?” Prince demanded. “They did break into her house. Sir.”

“Yes, they did, but this charge will never make it to trial. Elizabeth will never testify against them, and besides, you won’t get an arrest warrant out of Bill because she’ll laugh you out of her bar first.”

A short silence. “Drunk and disorderly?” she said, almost pleadingly.

“Sorry.” Liam shook his head, and deleted Prince’s report. “Unless Tatiana made a complaint?”

Reluctantly, she shook her head.

Liam cocked an interrogatory eyebrow.

There was a brief pause.

“Hell,” Prince said.

“Relax,” Liam said dryly, “you had eight solved murders on your record before you’d been in town a week.”

“I know,” she said glumly.

“Even somebody named for Wonder Woman ought to be happy with that.”

“Up yours,” she said, still glum.

He grinned at her. “We’ll try to scare up another one for you sometime soon.”

Later, he would remember saying those words, and curse himself for a fool. Now he said, “Anything else?”

“Yeah, the phone was ringing when I walked in the door. Some guy, name of Montgomery, looking for-”

“Lyle Montgomery, looking for his daughter,” Liam said with a sigh, and glanced at the calendar. First of September, first of the month. Right on schedule.”

“You know him?”

“He’s got a daughter missing. Name of Cheryl.” Liam opened one of the desk drawers and rummaged through it, producing a file. “She was canoeing alone through the Wood-Tikchik State Park. Finn Grant dropped her off at the Four Lakes Ranger Station. She had a full load of supplies, plus the canoe. The rangers gave her a map and the standard warnings. She left around noon of that day, with the stated intention of camping her way up to Outuchiwenet Mountain Lodge. She had scheduled a fly-out from there with Grant at noon two weeks from the day he put her down.”

“And she didn’t show?”

“No.”

“When was that?”

“August.”

“Just last month?”

“No, that’s the problem. August 1997.”

“Oh.” Prince was silent for a moment. “And her father’s been calling ever since?”

“He’s called the first of the month every month since I got here. I assume he had been doing so before. Corcoran didn’t stick around long enough after I showed up to fill me in.”

“Doesn’t it say in the file?”

He took a last look at the photograph stapled inside the folder. She was a looker, Cheryl Montgomery, a long fall of straight fair hair, large blue eyes with ridiculously long lashes, a dimple in her right cheek. Born in Juneau, a graduate of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, she had been a wildlife biologist working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Anchorage. Twenty-six years old. A daughter who at the very least deserved a phone call once a month.

Just another overconfident backpacker swallowed up by the Alaskan wilderness. He closed the file and tossed it to Prince. “Corcoran wasn’t into keeping up with the paperwork. I talked to John Barton about it, and he said the family was all over the Wood-Tikchik for four months. They fought us suspending the search. And they fought the presumptive death hearing.”

“And now her father calls us the first of every month, checking to see if we’ve found her.”

“Yeah.”

Prince closed the file and tossed it back. “Okay, you can be boss.”

“Gee, thanks,” Liam said, but he knew what she meant. Next to domestic disputes, reporting deaths to surviving family and friends was the law officer’s least favorite job.

The phone rang and they were called out to a shooting at a home eleven miles up the road to Icky, which turned out to be an accidental discharge by a thirty-six-year-old man who shot himself in the hand with a.401 shotgun while taking it down from an overcrowded gun rack. His five-year-old daughter had been standing next to him at the time, and had caught some buckshot in her shoulder. Joe Gould, Newenham’s local and it would seem only paramedic, judging from the many crime scenes where Liam had encountered him, was already there, soothing the girl with a cherry Tootsie Roll Pop as he picked pellets out of her shoulder with surgical tweezers. She was sitting on her mother’s lap. The mother would occasionally glare over her shoulder at the father, who sat in a corner, largely ignored, weeping and wailing over a hand that would never pull the trigger on a weapon again.

Prince got the story out of the man (between sobs) and observed to Liam, “I’d call this a violation of basic safety rules, wouldn’t you, sir?”

“I would, and I’d arrest him for it, too,” Liam said, so they did and brought him before Bill for arraignment. Bill flayed what skin the guy had left with a blistering indictment of his lack of judgment, and they delivered him into the tender hands of Mamie Hagemeister at the local jail, who turned out to be a bosom buddy of the guy’s wife and godmother to his daughter. They found out later that she didn’t feed him for two days.

Meanwhile, back at the post, the door opened and a woman walked in. She was short, with the thick-waisted build of the Bay Yupik. Her eyes were dark and narrow, her expression wary. She was dressed in shabby slacks and a windbreaker, wore no makeup, and her long black hair was clean and neatly combed.

Prince strode forward, every inch the trooper. “Yes, ma’am? How may we help you?”

The woman pulled a piece of paper from her windbreaker pocket. “I have this court order,” she said. “From Anchorage.”

“What’s your name, ma’am?” Prince said, and took the paper.

“Natalie Gosuk,” the woman replied, and Liam stopped lounging back in his chair and sat up straight. “That paper says I get to see my son.”

Prince finished reading the order. “Yes, it does,” she said, and passed it off to Liam.

He scanned it briefly. Judge Renee Legere had signed the order. It was legal, all right. He folded the order and handed it back to Natalie Gosuk, taking his first real look at the woman. She wasn’t saying much, letting the court order speak for her. She kept her eyes lowered, but the curve of her mouth was set and resentful.

Four times she’d been accused of assaulting a minor child, and Judge Legere had allowed visitation anyway. It was so easy in Anchorage, looking at the perp across a room, a perp cleaned up and sobered up and scared into something approaching civil behavior, it was so easy to judge them human and worthy of the rights of other humans, of second, third, fourth, fifth chances, and besides, the jails were all full. So what if she smacked her kid around a little? She was rehabilitated, look at her standing there next to her lawyer, all neat and tidy and vowing repentance and an ache in her heart for the son lost to her.

Out here, where the human rubber met the road, there was a different view. Here one lived next to the victims, broken, bleeding, bloodied, terrified, most of them so intimidated they couldn’t even be brought to testify.

Since it didn’t look like he was going to say anything, Prince stepped in. “Was there a problem with the order, Ms. Gosuk?”

“She won’t let me see him.”

“Who won’t?”

“The woman my son lives with. She won’t let me in the door of the house. I want you to make her let me in.”

Prince looked at Liam. When he said nothing, she asked the woman, “Have you shown her this document?”

Natalie Gosuk hesitated. “Not yet.”

“Show it to her,” Prince advised. “If she won’t let you see the boy, come to us.”

“This paper says she has to,” Natalie Gosuk insisted.

“Yes,” Prince said. “It does. Limited, supervised visitation. It means you can see him but you can’t take him out of the house and you can’t see him alone.”

The woman’s eyes shifted. “They told me.”

“Call us if you have any trouble.”

The door closed behind her with a soft sigh. Prince looked at Liam. “Domestic disputes,” she said with loathing. “God, how I hate them. Give me an old-fashioned ax murder any day.” He remained silent. “Whose kid was she talking about, do you know? Who’s the ‘she’ in ‘she won’t let me see him’?”

Liam looked at Prince. “Go on down to the jail and give Art and Dave a talking-to and turn them loose.”

“We could leave them where they are until their twenty-four is up.” Suspects had to be released after twenty-four hours if no arrest warrant had been sworn out against them.

He pointed a finger at her. “Better.” He stood and reached for his hat. “I’ve got a few errands to run. I’ll take lunch and then come back and relieve you for yours.” He paused at the door and grinned at her. “Monthly report’s due today.” She groaned, and he added, “Hey, I’m the corporal, you’re the trooper. Low man does the paperwork.”

The answering smile on her face faded as soon as the door closed behind him, and Prince was left to wonder what had produced the lines of strain around her boss’s eyes, lines that hadn’t been there when he first walked in the door.