Nothing Gold Can Stay

FOUR

Nenevok Creek, September 1

Rebecca Hanover was a reluctant gold miner.

“I like to knit,” she had told her friend Nina in Anchorage in April. “I like to bead and quilt and cross-stitch.”

“You can do all those things at the mine.”

“Yes, but I like to do all those things in front of a roaring fire in a stone fireplace with an episode ofBuffy the Vampire Slayer on the television. I like getting up during the commercials and going to a bathroom that has a flush toilet.”

“Ah. Then it isn’t beading you like, it’s indoor plumbing.”

Rebecca refused to be diverted. “I like meeting you for coffee and canella at City Market on Saturday mornings.” She raised her cup and gestured at the large room full of loud cheerful voices and the mingled aromas of Kaladi Brothers coffee, Italian sausage sandwiches and spicy sesame chicken. In the parking lot cars were idling, waiting for an empty space. “I like people. I like eavesdropping on their conversations. Like that guy?” She pointed with her chin. “He’s a superior court judge, and that isn’t his wife. Before you got here they were planning a weekend in Seattle, until he remembered that was the weekend of his anniversary. She hasn’t spoken to him since.”

Nina shifted in her chair and managed a covert, over-the-shoulder look. “Isn’t that Shelby Arvidson, the anchor on Channel 6?”

“Yes, it is, and you’ll notice, she’s still here.”

“Your point being?”

“The weekend may still be on, anniversary or no. And you see the couple in the corner? The dark woman in the red T-shirt with the tall blond guy?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s Lois Barcott.”

“The defense lawyer?”

“Yeah. And that’s Harry Arner, the district attorney. I bet they’re cutting a deal on the Baldridge case.”

“I love having a friend who’s a legal secretary,” Nina said. “Who’s Baldridge?”

“Used to be a banker, accused of embezzlement and fraud. He made nine million dollars in unsecured loans to people who turned out to be close personal friends of his.”

Nina did her best to look shocked. “Goodness me.”

“The bank went under. The trouble is the state has a lousy case, no witnesses and a lot of boring paperwork. I bet Arner holds out for dismissal of all charges. But, like I was saying.”

“Rebecca. I thought you told me Mark was really excited about this placer mine you’d bought.”

“He bought it,” Rebecca said, an edge to her voice.

“Ah.” Nina examined the coffee in her cup with close attention.

“Without even asking me if I wanted to spend the whole summer out there, he goes and buys a gold mine. God, Nina, I don’t even know where it is.”

“Did he say?”

“West of Anchorage, north of Bristol Bay.”

“That takes in a lot of territory. Is there a town nearby?”

Rebecca gave her head a gloomy shake, her fine blond hair escaping its ponytail to fall into wisps around a face that had been described variously as an angel’s (her mother), Hayley Mills’ (her father), Grace Kelly’s (Nina, enviously), and “fucking drop-dead gorgeous” (Mark). Her figure had been described as “a little too plump, dear” (her mother), “healthy” (her father), “stacked” (Nina, enviously), “built like a brick shit-house” (Dale, her roommate before she married Mark) and “it’s like Christmas every time I unwrap you” (Mark, although he hadn’t said that in months).

“I like going to two movies on a rainy Sunday afternoon,” Rebecca said. “I like biking the Coastal Trail, and hiking Near Point. I especially like it that there is a hot shower and a soft bed at the end of a day of biking and hiking.” She raised her cup ceilingward. “I like lights that turn on with the flip of a switch.”

“There’s no electricity? How do you get the gold out?”

“How should I know? By gold pan, I guess.”

“I thought they only painted on gold pans these days.”

“Me, too, but Mark brought home half a dozen yesterday. Plastic ones. They’re green or black, so they show the gold more, and the bottom of the pans are riffled, you know, little ridges? So the gold falls down between them and is trapped when you rinse the dirt out. Because it’s lighter.”

“Lighter than what?”

“The gold.”

“Oh. Sounds like you know something about it.”

“I don’t have a choice. It’s all he talks about anymore.”

There was a short silence. “You want a refill?”

“Sure. Heavy on the half-and-half. Which I also have to give up. No cows in the Bush, I bet.”

Nina returned with full cups the color of café au lait, and Rebecca accepted hers with the air of one who was determined to savor every drop as if it were her last.

“Rebecca, you don’t have to go,” Nina said. “Just say no.”

Rebecca sighed. “He’s been working double shifts all winter to save up for time off this summer. He’s got nine weeks coming, plus his regular two weeks off, plus the week he won at the Christmas party. Twelve weeks in all. He’ll be out there the whole summer, Nina.”

“Let him be.”

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought of it herself. “I can’t.”

“What about your job?”

“He wants me to quit.”

“Rebecca. You love being a legal secretary, and you love your boss.”

“Yes,” Rebecca said mournfully, thinking of the bright, bustling office on the seventh floor of 710 K Street. “I do.”

“He can’t ask you to do that.”

“He’s my husband,” Rebecca said. She tried to smile. “Forsaking all others, and all that. You know.”

Nina, who had never been married, didn’t know, but she was that good and rare friend who listened without judging and so she sipped her coffee and smiled. “You know what’s wrong with Mark?”

“What?”

“He’s too good in the sack,” Nina said, and grinned.

Rebecca rose to Nina’s obvious expectations and made an elaborate show of bristling. “And you would know this-how?”

Nina toasted her. “Only by reputation, girlfriend. Only by reputation.”

They laughed and changed the subject.

And now here Rebecca was, five months later, waking up in a one-room shack deep in a canyon somewhere in the Wood River Mountains, part of the southwestern curve of the Alaska Range. The mine sat on a creek in a deep, narrow crevice formed between three mountains four, five and six thousand feet in height. The sun could have been up till midnight but Rebecca couldn’t swear to it; the only time the mining camp got direct sunlight was between the hours of ten and two. It might as well be December. There was even snow packed into various hollows on the north-facing slopes of the peaks.

It had not been a fun summer. Not only was there no electricity, there was no running water, and the plumbing consisted of a teetery outhouse with bear hair stuck to the outside where the local grizzlies had come to scratch. With the advent of salmon up Nenevok Creek, the bears had come for more than scratching their backs. And if there weren’t bears, there were moose, mama moose with babies and attitude. One day a porcupine had wandered into the outhouse and frightened her outside. Mark had come running at the sound of her shrieks and roared with laughter at the sight of her hobbling around with her pants down around her ankles.

Mark had bought her a.357, which nearly knocked her flat the first time she’d shot it, and she wore it faithfully whenever she stepped out the door, but guns made her nervous and she preferred to remain inside, beading and knitting by the soft glow of the kerosene lamp. Mark had gotten a little tight-lipped when she had run out of kerosene for the second time, but that nice woman pilot with Nushagak Air Taxi had dropped off two five-gallon cans on a trip from Newenham to the fishing lodge at Outuchiwenet Mountain. The three Danish fly fishermen on board had taken one look at Rebecca and tried to persuade the pilot to leave them there, too. They spoke little English, but Rebecca, starved for conversation in any language, had been reluctant to let them go.

The pilot had also brought in a bundle of magazines,Newsweek s andTime s andSmithsonian s andCosmopolitan s, and Rebecca had been moved nearly to tears. The pilot, a leggy woman in jeans with dark blond hair stuffed carelessly through the back of a Chevron baseball cap, could not quite conceal her sympathy. Rebecca, who had her pride, pulled herself together enough to express her thanks, wished the fishermen luck and helped push the tail of the plane around, yet another skill she had acquired this summer. The Cessna blew dust into her eyes as the engines revved up for takeoff, but she stood where she was, watching as it barely cleared the birch trees at the end of the rudimentary little airstrip with the uphill grade and the surface made of rocks rubbed smooth from a hundred years of tumbling in Nenevok Creek. The engine roared a protest in the thin mountain air as the pilot hauled on the yoke and the plane slipped through the minuscule space between Mounts Pistok and Atshichlut. Rebecca had tears in her eyes from more than the dust.

And now here it was, September 1, a Wednesday. On September 6, Labor Day by the calendar but Christmas, New Year’s and her birthday all rolled into one for Rebecca, Nushagak Air Taxi was scheduled to fly into the Nenevok Creek airstrip and pick up Mark and Rebecca and fly them back to Newenham, where they would board an Alaska Airlines 737 (until this summer the smallest plane Rebecca had been on). In a little over an hour, they would land in Anchorage. Nina was meeting them, with orders to have in hand at the gate a grande cup of the day from Kaladi Brothers, with half-and-half and a packet of Equal already stirred in. Rebecca could almost taste it, and looked up from the watchband she was beading for her grandmother to the calendar on the wall, as if by doing so she could make the days, the hours, the minutes go faster. Dinner at Villa Nova, she thought, or maybe Simon’s, or Yamato Ya, or Thai Kitchen. She was so sick of salmon. She was a good cook, but there were only so many ways to prepare fish, and she had tried them all.

Maybe a trip to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, she thought, examining her palette and selecting a number 11 seed bead in lime green. Rain or shine, the fair was always crowded over the Labor Day weekend, kids standing in line for their last Octopus ride before school started, serious, tight-lipped women examining the crafts building for blue ribbons, cowboys roping calves in the arena, lumbermen rolling logs in the pond, Roscoe’s Skyline Restaurant selling the best barbecued ribs this side of Texas on the Red Path. But no, Roscoe had forsaken the fair for the Sears Mall, and for that matter, Labor Day was the last day of the fair, wasn’t it? She used to know these things. Fine, they could stop at Roscoe’s at the Sears Mall on the way home. Rebecca’s mouth watered at the thought.

No more washing dishes in cold creek water, of filtering drinking water for both sand and beaver fever. Rebecca thought of the Amana Heavy Duty Washer, with its Extra Large Capacity and Seven Cycles, and of the Amana Heavy Duty Dryer with Nine Cycles residing in the laundry room of their home on the Hillside. No more scrubbing of clothes in the tin washtub. No more spit baths in that same washtub. No more listening to Mark complain because his jeans never dried on the line strung between the cabin and the toolshed. How were they supposed to dry without sun? It wasn’t her fault he’d chosen to buy a gold claim stuck down a hole.

No more picking lettuce out of the garden, instead of buying it already picked-and washed-from City Market, like a civilized human being. She could look for a new job, a real job in a downtown office with a computer and a modem and a telephone and copy and fax machines, in an office with no mosquitoes or black flies, where she could go down to M.A.’s hot dog stand at the corner of Fourth and G and have a Polish Special on a sunny summer day, and to the Snow City Cafe for a salad sampler on a crisp winter day.

She had never felt so isolated, so abandoned, so alone.

She looked at her palette, a paper plate with piles of beads, seed, square, frosted, tubular, in shades of green and purple and gold.

“Say it,” she said out loud. “So bored.” She looked at the piece in her hand, which had begun to curve eastward around the vintage German teardrop, and threaded a faceted garnet onto her needle. A little splash of color in this otherwise otherworldly piece, something to draw the eye but not enough to overpower the whole. Yes, she thought. Alone, lonely, but most of all, bored.

Mark, on the other hand, was thriving. He’d pulled nineteen ounces of gold out of the creek, once he had identified a deposit and had worked out how to pan it. Rebecca thought of his salary as a BP geologist, working one week on and one week off the North Slope oil fields, and one evening took pencil in hand to figure out the dollar value of Mark’s take. Gold had been selling for two hundred fifty-four dollars an ounce when they left Anchorage in June. Nineteen times two hundred fifty-four equaled four thousand eight hundred and twenty-six dollars. The mine and the surrounding five acres had cost them twenty thousand dollars, which didn’t include state permits and fees, supplies and transportation, or the house sitter’s fee. Mark’s salary was one hundred and fourteen thousand a year, which would be cut by nearly a third because of all his time off this summer. Paid vacation time only covered three weeks.

She looked back down at her work, and sighed. One good thing to come out of this summer, she’d filled her Christmas list. A woven bead necklace for Mom, a sweater for Dad, sweatshirts with beaded designs for her niece and nephews, beaded Christmas ornaments for friends, all were done and already neatly packed away in the single box that contained her personal belongings, all that she had brought in and all she was taking out.

Mark, on the other hand, had not even begun to pack. Every available inch of space was littered with his clothes and geology books and gold pans and pickaxes and pry bars and what seemed to be hundreds of rock samples. The shack was too small for this much clutter, but Rebecca had soon given up on trying to keep Mark’s gear in order. She kept the cooking area clean because they had to eat, but she left Mark’s stuff strictly alone. He didn’t complain, at least out loud.

She heard his step on the path to the cabin and looked up when the door opened. “You’re early,” she said. “I haven’t even started lunch.”

“I know. No, it’s okay,” he said when she put her work to one side and began to rise. “I wanted to talk to you.”

His face was grave and her heart skipped a beat. “What about? Is something wrong?” Had Nushagak Air Taxi somehow left a message that through some unavoidable mix-up they wouldn’t be picked up on Monday?

He pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her, leaning forward to place his hands on her knees.

She looked at him and some part of her thrilled yet again to his dark good looks, the thick black hair curling against his collar, the dark eyes, the firm-lipped mouth. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow, his legs long and well muscled. Naked, he looked like a god. They had made love standing in front of a mirror once, and she still marveled at the memory, dark and light, masculine and feminine, strength and softness. It remained her best orgasm to date.

He took the piece from her hands and examined it. “What’s this?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What do you call the method again?”

“Bead weaving.”

“Right, right. Pretty, whatever it is.”

She removed it from his hands, square hands with strong fingers and neatly clipped nails, permanently grimed now after three months of grubbing in the dirt. “You didn’t quit work early to come in and talk about my beading. What’s up?”

“Besides me?” His hands traced a firm path up her hips, urging her legs apart. It melted her, as it always did. He knelt between her legs to suck at the pulse in her throat, nibble on her earlobe, bite her nipples through the knit fabric of her T-shirt.

He raised his head and kissed her, long and slow, flirting with his tongue and his teeth. She dropped her beadwork and reached for his zipper.

He pulled back and framed her face in his hands to smile down at her. In a low, husky voice, he murmured, “What would you say if I told you I wanted to quit my job, and for us to stay out here year-round?”

Newenham, September 1

The hopelessly drunk, the terminally idiotic and the criminally inclined had for a change taken the rest of the day off, and Liam was home by five-thirty and gloriously off duty, as Prince was on call for the evening. “Tim?” he said when he stepped in the door. “Wy?”

No answer. He went out on the bluff between the house and the river and stood post for fourteen minutes, until his thighs decided enough was enough, and then went through all thirty movements of the form three times. It was thirty now instead of sixty-four, Moses had informed him a week earlier, because Liam had learned enough not to have to break each movement down into each of its component parts, and had given him a whole new set of names to memorize. Liam was fully conversant with the statutes describing assault in its various degrees, and had kept his hands in horse stance instead of fastening them around Moses’ neck.

Doing form wasn’t enough to soothe his conscience-Bill’s “social worker” remark still rankled-but he showered and changed into jeans and unpacked the bag of groceries he’d bought on the way home. Dinner for two, with wine, no less. She couldn’t be mad at him if he made her beef Stroganoff washed down with cabernet sauvignon, could she? The cabernet had cost more than all the rest of the ingredients put together.

He cut up the beef and put it into a frying pan to brown, adding a dollop of the wine for the hell of it. He poured out a glass of Glenmorangie for himself and broke into the bag of egg noodles. He was filling the pot with water when the phone rang.

“Yeah?” he said, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear.

Prince’s voice said, “We’ve got a body down at Kagati Lake, sir.”

He put down the noodles and turned off the burner. “Where?”

“Kagati Lake, a hundred or so miles north of here.”

Something about the name niggled at the back of his mind. He carried the walk-around phone into the living room, where the one wall that didn’t have a window had a map of the Bristol Bay area taped to it. He found Newenham and followed the river up. “I don’t see it.”

“North and west. North of the lakes,” she said, and he moved his finger to the left, encountering the mail route Wy had penciled in, asterisks marking the stops. He traced it up the map, Four Lakes, Warehouse Mountain, Weary River, the names some people hung on some places. Russell-he stopped.

The route ended at Kagati Lake.

Prince had taken the floats off the Cessna and put the wheels back on the week before in anticipation of freeze-up, and they were in the air forty-five minutes later. “You sure she said she wasn’t hurt?”

“I’m sure,” Prince said patiently. “She found the body, is all.”

On either side Newenham airport fell rapidly away from them and Liam’s stomach gave its usual takeoff flip-flop. “She’s going to kill me,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

He hadn’t meant to be heard, but the headset was a good one and Prince turned her head to stare. “Why would she be mad at you?”

The plane hit a pocket of dead air and dropped fifty feet. Liam grabbed for the edges of his seat. “Because she’s done nothing but find dead bodies since I came to town.”

“That’s not your fault.”

He forgot his terror long enough to send Prince a pitying glance. “You’ve never had a permanent relationship, have you, Prince? A serious one?”

Defensive now, she shook her head. “Still-”

“Still nothing,” Liam said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s my fault or not. It will be by the time I get there.”

He stared resolutely ahead, trying to ignore the thousand feet of space between himself and Mother Earth.

Prince mumbled something he couldn’t hear. “What?”

“Nothing,” Prince said, and tossed Liam the FAA’s Airport/Facility Directory. He opened it, and found the airport sketch for Kagati Lake. “It’s a gravel strip, two thousand forty-five feet long, fifty-five wide.”

“Elevation?”

“Eight hundred eight feet.”

“Light?”

Liam squinted down at the page. “Says it’s unimproved. That mean no lights?”

“If there were lights it would say.” Prince tapped the dial of a gauge on the control panel. The needle didn’t move. “We’d better hustle if we’re going to beat the sun.”

It hadn’t registered with Liam until this moment that the sun was in the act of setting. There wasn’t any snow yet, piled into neat, defining berms along the sides, so it could be hard to spot an unfamiliar runway in the dark. “How long?”

“We’ve got a little bit of a tailwind,” Prince said. “I’d say about an hour.”

Liam thought of Wy, alone on the ground in Kagati Lake but for the doubtful company of a corpse. “Can we push it?”

Prince grinned beneath mirrored aviator lenses that made her look like one of the extras inTop Gun. “What the hell, the state’s buying.”

She kept the throttle all the way out and they raised Kagati Lake in fifty-nine minutes. It was still light enough to see 68 Kilo parked at the west end of the strip, near a large sprawling building that looked as if it had begun its long life as a one-room log cabin, and then had skipped the split-level phase entirely to metamorphose into something that was a cross between a plantation house and a barn. The roof was variously shingled, tarpapered and capped with sheets of corrugated plastic.

Wy emerged from beneath the wing of 68 Kilo and looked up. Prince waggled her wings. Wy didn’t wave back.

“See?” Liam muttered.

The 180, which even Liam had to admit was a well-mannered beast, set down smoothly, jounced once in and out of a pothole, recovered neatly and rolled to a stop.

As always, Liam was first out. Wy was waiting for him.

“I don’t want to find any more dead bodies,” she said.

“I know,” he said.

“I never used to find dead bodies.”

“I know.”

“I never, ever found a single dead body before this year.”

“I know.”

“No more dead bodies,” she said. She was very definite. “Of any kind. Nobody I know, nobody I don’t know. Not next to the fuel pump at the Newenham airport, not in the middle of the ruins of an abandoned village, and especially not at a Bush post office where I’m delivering the U.S. mail.”

“Okay,” Liam said.

“Good,” she said. “So long as we’re clear.”

“Perfectly,” he said.

“I mean it,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He could feel Prince beginning to get restive, and he said, “Tell me what happened, Wy.”

“What happened?” she said. “What happened is I’m on my mail run, I’m landing at my last stop on the route, I start unloading the mail, and when Opal doesn’t come out to carry it inside I go in looking for her.” She swallowed. “And I found her.”

“Did you know her?” Prince said.

“Of course I knew her,” Wy snapped. “I knew her like I know everybody on my mail route. She was the postmistress, I talked to her once or twice a week, weather permitting.”

“What did you say her name was?” Prince got out her notebook.

“Opal. Opal Nunapitchuk. Oh god.” There were a couple of benches arranged around a lovely little copse of plants, shrubs and trees native to Alaska, evidence of someone’s inspiration and loving care, and Wy went over and sat down hard on one of them. “Oh god,” she repeated, and bent over to put her head between her knees.

“She in the house?”

Wy nodded without looking up.

“Better take a look,” Liam said to Prince, and led the way up the path.

Opal Nunapitchuk lay sprawled on her back behind the counter that fenced in the corner of the room to the left of the door. Her eyes were wide open, her head at an odd angle because of the cramped quarters of the space behind the counter. Her left shoulder was shattered, a mess of white splinters of bone and congealed blood.

He looked at her face first, something he had trained himself to do from his first crime scene. He wanted to imprint the face of the victim in his memory, be able to call it up at need. He wanted the face of the victim right there as he gathered evidence, as he interviewed witnesses, as he swore out an arrest warrant, as he arrested a suspect, as he conducted the interrogation, as he testified in court. He made sure that the victim was always with him.

His first impression was how young she seemed, clear brown skin tanned from a summer in the sun, a long fall of shining black hair, a slim, muscular build that looked as if it had been vigorously active in life. There were creases in the corners of her eyes, laugh lines at the corners of her mouth, the telltale crepe beneath her jaw. Not so young, then, but a very attractive woman. Rape? No, she was still fully dressed, her jeans belted tightly around a slim waist. He looked at the wound. It seemed high, as if the shooter’s aim had been off. Or she had pushed it off.

“Not a body shot,” Liam said, more to himself than to Prince, but she picked up on it.

“Not aiming to kill, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

Prince stooped and raised the body slightly to peer beneath. “Entrance wound. She was shot from behind.”

“Bullet spun her around.”

“Yeah.” She stood up. “Guy pulls the gun, what, going for the cash?” She looked in a few of the half-open drawers. “Aha.” She pulled out a rectangular aluminum box and opened the lid to show him. It was divided into sections for bills and change, and it was empty.

“She turns to run… behind the counter?” he added doubtfully.

“For a weapon?” Prince said. She reached beneath the counter. “There are clips here, I’d say for a rifle.”

“But no rifle?”

“No.”

“He probably took that, too.”

“So, she turns to go for the rifle, he shoots, she spins around, falls. He takes the cash and the rifle and leaves.”

“From the look of the wound, I’ll bet the slug ricocheted off a bone,” he said. “It could be anywhere.” Bullets frequently had minds of their own once they impacted their target and Liam placed no dependence on their being able to find this one. Which didn’t mean they wouldn’t look.

A series of large V-shaped shelves took up the corner from floor to ceiling, the top half divided into square, open-ended boxes, some with mail in them, some not. The bottom half was divided into drawers, and the two were bisected by a narrow counter, also V-shaped.

“She hit her head on the way down,” Prince said, pointing at a dark brown smudge on the edge of the counter.

“Twice,” Liam said, looking at another smudge on the second drawer down. They checked and found blood matted in Opal’s hair.

Envelopes, letter size, business size, nine-by-thirteen manilas and priority mail, were scattered across the floor, the shelves they had fallen from teetering dangerously at the edge of the desk they sat on. At least she went down fighting, they both thought.

Liam prodded Opal’s arm. “Rigor’s coming on.” He looked at his watch. “It’s going on seven o’clock.” He looked up. “What would you say the temperature was in this room?”

“Fifty-five, maybe.”

“Outside?”

“Temperature at Newenham airport was fifty-four when we left.”

“But this is farther north, and higher up. The walls are pretty thick, not many windows. Probably didn’t get above sixty-five all day in here.”

“Sounds about right.”

“So, she died ten, maybe twelve hours ago, you think?”

Prince shrugged. “M.E. will tell us more.”

“Yeah, but I want to know how much of a head start the son of a bitch has on us, and we’re going to miss the last jet to Anchorage by the time we get the body back to Newenham, which means it’ll be two, three days before the M.E. has a time of death.”

“Not smelling much yet.”

“No. Which could mean she hasn’t been here that long, or that it never warms up in here.” He looked back down at the body. “Robbery, you think?”

Prince spotted a group of pictures sitting on a table, and went over to look. The dead woman was in several, surrounded by what looked like husband and children, and more than one with the house they were standing in in the background. “Could be. This is probably her home, too. We don’t know what’s missing.” She pushed back her cap to scratch above her ear, resettled the cap. “If this were Anchorage, I’d say someone was making a hit on people’s Social Security checks. But way out here… well, I don’t see some thug hiking five hundred miles through the Bush to coldcock some old woman for her hundred-and-fifty-dollar Social Security check.”

“Yeah. We’ll have to find out how many were due to this post office today, how many people collect it hereabouts.”

“Goody.” Prince paused. “You think it was someone she knew?”

“Usually is.” Liam stood up and looked around. “And this would be an awfully big house to live in alone.”

It was a large, rectangular room, furnished with couches and recliners and dominated by a fireplace made of rock that boasted its own spit. Alaskan memorabilia was piled in every corner there wasn’t a bookshelf, including a Japanese glass float with the net still on that looked a foot and a half in diameter. There were black-and-white pictures of tall, thin men in leather jackets and hats with chin straps standing in front of open-cockpit biplanes, interspersed with paintings in oil and watercolor, some good, some bad, and a small one of a cache on stilts in winter that could have been an original Sydney Lawrence. Considering how much Lawrence traveled around Alaska, and considering how often he painted for booze, the possibility was not at all unlikely. If that was the case, why would the robber leave something so valuable behind? Liam was fuzzy on the valuation of art, but even a small painting by Lawrence had to be worth two or three thousand dollars, and this one was a very portable size.

There was a window next to the painting and through it Liam could see a thermometer fixed to the eaves of the house. It read fifty-one degrees. That was warm for the north side of a house, which meant it might have been a lot warmer in Kagati Lake than he had originally thought. Warm temperatures delayed rigor, so Opal Nunapitchuk could have been dead longer than ten to twelve hours, which only put more time between the killer and the scene.

He looked at the table standing next to the dark green recliner. It was a slab of burlwood, sanded, polished and finished with a coat of Verathane. A trick of the fading evening sun reflected off the glass on one of the watercolor paintings and landed on the table, which was covered with a fine layer of dust, except where something sort of square had been sitting until very recently.

Scattered around the room were three other tables, one hutch and the mantelpiece. All of them needed dusting, and all of them were missing objects that had heretofore kept at least the area beneath them clean. “Prince?”

A flash went off behind him. “Sir?”

“Light a lamp if you can find one, would you? It’s getting too dark to see.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And get pictures of all the tabletops and the mantelpiece.”

“Fingerprints?”

“I didn’t see any. But dust everything anyway. Start with the counter and the cash box.”

He heard the sound of an engine, no, two, outside. They paused, idling, and he heard Wy’s voice. He went swiftly to the door and in the dusk saw a man on a four-wheeler with two Blazo boxes strapped on behind with bungee cords. He looked to be in his late fifties, early sixties, maybe, a burly man with thick dark hair streaked silver that hung raggedly below his ears, and dark, narrow eyes nearly hidden in a mass of wrinkles that began in the middle of his forehead and cascaded down into laugh lines bracketing both eyes and mouth. He saw Liam over Wy’s shoulder, and Liam stepped forward.

“What’s going on?” the man said, his smile fading as he took in Liam’s uniform. He looked from Liam to Wy, who couldn’t meet his eyes and looked ashamed of it. He killed the engine and dismounted. “Where’s Opal?”

“Who are you, sir?” Liam said.

“This is Leonard Nunapitchuk,” Wy said. “Opal’s husband.”

Liam removed his hat and took a deep breath. “Mr. Nunapitchuk, there is no easy way to say this. Ms. Chouinard flew in this afternoon to deliver the mail, and she found your wife.”

Leonard Nunapitchuk’s skin paled beneath its ruddy tan. “Is she hurt? Opal? Opal!” He stepped forward, only to halt when Liam held up a hand.

“I’m afraid she’s dead, Mr. Nunapitchuk. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Leonard Nunapitchuk stared at him without comprehension. “Opal is dead?”

“Yes.”

“No.” Opal’s husband shook his head decidedly. “No, she isn’t. I was just here, last weekend. We were all here.” He waved a hand, and Liam looked beyond him, across the airstrip where the trees parted for a path. The moon had risen as the sun had set and painted a stepstone path of silver across the ripples of Kagati Lake. The breeze paused, and in the momentary lull Liam heard the murmur of voices, punctuated by a laugh.

There was a sudden shaft of light from the open door of the house as Prince lit the large Aladdin lantern sitting on the hutch next to the door, and Liam looked at Leonard Nunapitchuk, who was about five feet four inches tall and whose belly was just barely restrained by a wide, worn leather belt. There was a hunting knife in a stained leather sheath hanging from the belt. He had a rifle, a Remington.30-30, it looked like, hanging over his shoulder.

His clothes, a fatigue jacket over a cotton shirt in faded blue plaid and jeans, were grubby. His boots were shiny with fish scales. He smelled like woodsmoke, sweat and salmon, like Moses did when he came back from Old Man Creek.

It looked like fish camp had been a success and that Leonard wanted to tell his wife all about it. “Opal? Opal, where are you?”

“Sir,” Liam said, and something in the single, forceful syllable got through the way nothing else had before.

Realization came hard to Leonard Nunapitchuk’s eyes, but it came, followed by shock and the awful need to know, to see, to make sure there hadn’t been some dreadful mistake, because of course there must have been some mistake, this couldn’t be happening, not to him. Liam had seen the reaction before, and he stepped to one side so that Leonard could go through the door.

Prince looked around from lighting the Coleman lantern hanging from a bracket next to the kitchen door and saw Leonard. “Sir, I-”

Liam held up a hand and she stopped.

Leonard saw Opal in the same moment, and a terrible groan ripped out of his chest. “No,” he said. “No, Opal, no.” He dropped to his knees. “Opal. My Opal.”

He was weeping now, and when he dropped forward to crawl toward her Liam had to restrain him. “I’m sorry, sir. You can’t touch her yet.”

“She’s my wife!”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Nunapitchuk wrapped his arms around his body and rocked back and forth on his knees. “Opal. Why? Why, why why why?”

Liam heard voices, and Wy’s voice responding. Before he could turn, Nunapitchuk was on his feet. “The children can’t see this, they can’t see this.” He ran his sleeve across his face and went outside, Liam following.

There were five more people in the yard, two young men no taller or slimmer than their father and their wives, one a young woman who looked like Opal must have thirty years before, with a plump baby perched on her hip doing his best to snag a dragonfly as it buzzed past. His mother caught him just before he took flight after it.

All of them stared at Liam, at Leonard. It was obvious by their shocked faces that Wy had told them of Opal’s death. He knew a faint guilt that she should have assumed this burden, but it was very faint, and he adjusted the duck-billed hat with the seal of the Alaska State Troopers on it and stepped forward to put the necessary questions to the bereaved.

Down the shingly scaur he plunged, in search of his Elaine. Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of his Astolat. She had left him before, his wandering love, but never for long, and she was always glad when he found her again, glad to return to her chamber up a tower to the east.

Long years had they lived there, and would abide together there again soon. He missed her presence during the day and her warmth during the night. She knew so little at first, but he taught her, and taught her well, so that she kept his shield and tended his wounds with skill and love.

He wished that like Lancelot he had a diamond to give his Elaine for her loyalty, her faithfulness. He trusted her as he trusted no other, to tend his hearth, his clothes, his home, to cook his meals, to warm his bed, to stand beside him summer and winter, his companion, his lover, his friend. She surrounded him with grace and beauty.

Yes, a diamond to give.

He quickened his step over a fallen log and ducked beneath a low-hanging branch. A ptarmigan exploded out of the brush, catching him by surprise. He unshouldered his shotgun. Ptarmigan was good eating. Elaine baked them in a butter-wine sauce that turned brown in the oven, crisping the skin of the birds and marinating the flesh with a flavor that was at once sweet and sour. When they had it, Elaine would mix in a little evaporated milk to turn it into a cream sauce, and serve it over flat noodles.

Elaine. Elaine the fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine, the lily maid of Astolat. His lady, his love, his queen. Children together, teenagers together, married the day after high school graduation. There had never been anyone else for him or for her.

They didn’t need anyone else, he told her when she had come back from the doctor with the news that they could never have children of their own. They had each other, and their cabin in the wilderness. They ran their trapline in the winter, planted their garden in the summer, lived life the way it ought to be lived, day by day, year by year, seeing the seasons in and out together.

In winter the wolves might howl, but they had stout log walls and a thick door between them and the hungry pack. The temperatures might drop to forty below zero, but they had six cords of wood stacked in a pile beneath its own shelter, and thick parkas and mukluks Elaine had made from furs gathered from their own trapline. They had a cache filled with moose and caribou and ptarmigan and goose and salmon and berries, a root cellar beneath the house filled with carrots and potatoes, and a pantry filled with canned goods, so they’d never go hungry.

In summer, they had fourteen hours of daylight and never wasted a moment of it, working all day, loving all night. He closed his eyes for a moment to revel in the deep delight the thought brought him. Elaine, gazing up at him with serious brown eyes, dark hair falling back from her smooth skin, mouth open a little to catch her breath, her hands resting lightly on his shoulders, her heels digging into the base of his spine, reaching for the sun, the moon and the stars. He gave them all to her, and she gave them back again.

He had promises to keep, and miles to go before he slept. He abandoned the too-heavy jade by the side of the creek, adjusting the lighter pack on his shoulders as he headed south by ways known only to the wild things of forest and stream. What other treasures would he find to lay at her feet?

Elaine, my Elaine. I’m coming home, my lady, my love, my queen. How will you reward me this time, my own, my lady, my love?