"Nothing Gold Can Stay" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stabenow Dana)

NINE

Nuklunek Bluff, September 2

“Well, hell,” Wy said grumpily. “I wasn’t that late.”

The fishermen at the lodge had been packed and waiting for pickup. She had deposited them in Newenham, refueled and flown straight back to the overgrown strip on the edge of the bluff. She found the camp easily, festooned with tents and a card table and bagged moose and caribou haunches, and congratulated herself on the fact that it was barely half an hour past the time she had said she would be there.

She climbed out and no one was there. She walked to the camp and it appeared deserted. She was confused until she saw the two cases of beer, one empty and the other halfway there.

“Well, hell,” she said again, this time with a long, depressed sigh. Her least favorite thing in the world was flying a drunk. They were prone to airsickness, which did the interior of the plane no good at all and her frame of mind even less. John and Teddy were probably out helling around somewhere under the influence, using each other for target practice or some other damn fool thing.

It was odd, though, and unlike them to leave such a big meat stash unprotected. There was enough here to feed both families until the first salmon hit fresh water.

It was also a first-class bear magnet. She rummaged around in the back of the Cessna for the shotgun. She’d wait until a half hour before dark, that was it. If they didn’t show, she would leave the meat to the mercy of any wandering critter who happened by, two- or four-legged.

She propped her back against a boulder and closed her eyes against the slanting rays of the lowering sun. The rock radiated heat soaked up during the day, and she felt no need for the jacket in the plane.

She thought of last night. The Nunapitchuks had a small cabin out back of the homestead, one with four bunks they used when family showed up to stay for a while. They had given them sleeping bags and pillows with fresh-smelling cases and left them alone. She loved making love to Liam, in a hard, narrow bunk, in the shower, on the bank of the Nushagak River, it didn’t matter, she loved making love to him. She’d read or heard something somewhere, something about when a couple was going through a bad time, the sex helped keep things together until they came out the other end, and that when the relationship was good anyway, it was just the icing on the cake.

That was what it was like with Liam, icing on the cake. She smiled without opening her eyes.

She liked to talk to him, too, about everything and nothing. He kept up most of the time, but sometimes he was way ahead of her, and she liked that too; she didn’t think she could live with someone who wasn’t as smart as she was. She liked him with Tim, friendly, not pushy, letting Tim get to know him at Tim’s own pace. It was important for Tim to learn that all men don’t hit.

She liked it that Liam read recreationally. The does-he-read test was the only test she required the men she allowed into her life to pass. She didn’t care if they were tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, she didn’t care if they were Yupik from Bethel or Hindu from India-or Caucasian from Anchorage-they had to read. She didn’t care what they read, they didn’t even have to read the same things she did (a good thing because she read fiction, mostly, and Liam read non, mostly), but if they didn’t read, they were out.

She’d read out loud to Tim while he lay in the hospital. Half the time she didn’t know if he heard her or not. She read to him anyway, books from her childhood likeLittle House on the Prairie andThe Lost Wagon andNancy and Plum andAnne of Green Gables andThe Lion’s Paw. It was make-believe, but it was what Tim needed, and she read them all to him every minute she could spare. The business suffered some that month.

When he came home with her from the hospital, she had already furnished the second bedroom in her house, empty until then. Just the basics, a bed, a nightstand, a reading lamp, a desk with another lamp, some new clothes in the closet, khakis and T-shirts she’d ordered over the Internet from the Gap. There was also a bookshelf she’d filled with books, the Heinlein juveniles, all fourteen of the Oz books,The Hobbit andThe Lord of the Rings, everything by Gary Paulsen. By then he was reading on his own.

He’d stopped for a time earlier this year, when he’d gotten in with a group of kids who had maximum security written all over their futures, but he’d begun easing away from them after Liam’s arrival, and he’d broken with them entirely after Kerry and Michael Malone had died. He had respected and admired Michael, who played opposite him on the basketball court, and Wy suspected he had been a little in love with Kerry, a pretty cheerleader.

Liam had handled that with Tim, talking to him honestly about what had happened to the two kids, offering intelligent sympathy without ever once resorting to “Bad things happen to good people.”

Liam was good with kids. She’d never seen him with Charlie, the son who had been killed by a drunk driver before he was two, but she’d bet Liam had been great with him, too. He wanted more kids. Well, so did she.

She had to tell him. She could feel something like tears well behind her eyelids and blinked them away.

There was a sudden snapping of twigs and cracking of branches and she shot to her feet, checking that both barrels were loaded and that the safety was off.

It was only Teddy and John. The smell of beer preceded them into camp by a good twenty feet. “Oh hell,” she said, disgusted all over again.

“Let’s go,” John said shortly, brushing by her to head for a caribou haunch hanging from a tree. Teddy barreled after him. Both of them were pale of face and sweating. Both seemed a lot more sober than she had expected. “How much can we take with us?”

“I thought I was flying you out one at a time,” Wy said, standing with the shotgun hanging from the crook of her arm, muzzle down.

He looked at her. “Yeah. Right. Of course. Sorry.” He looked at Teddy. “You go in first.”

“No, you go in first.”

“Goddamn it, Teddy, I said you go in first!”

“And I say you do!”

They went toe to toe, glaring at each other, and it was a moment before Wy, watching stupefied from the sidelines, stepped forward to pull them apart. “Guys. Relax. Toss a coin or something. Whoever gets left behind is only going to get left behind for ninety minutes.”

They continued to glare. Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak had never been known to raise a hand or even a voice to the other. They stood shoulder to shoulder against all comers, but never against themselves. And now here they were fighting over who should go into town first?

Teddy broke the stalemate eventually. “Okay, John.”

Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

“Good,” John said gruffly. “Help me load up.” He caught Teddy’s eye. “It’s okay, Teddy. I’ll be all right.”

“What’s going on?” Wy said.

“Lend me a hand with this line, will you, Wy?” Teddy said.

Old Man Creek, September 2

They ate salmon fresh out of the creek, sticky rice with generous helpings of soy sauce and steamed wild celery, the latter gathered by Amelia, who had finally gotten back out of bed. After dinner they got out the cards and played single-deck pinochle, girls against boys. Bill had to carry Amelia, but Moses told Tim, “Jesus, boy, you think you’re some kind of card shark, don’t you?” Tim, still sore from the second practice of the day-this one had lasted two hours-trumped Bill’s ace of diamonds and shot the moon. Bill sighed and subtracted thirty-three points from their score, which put them at minus ninety-seven. “Another fifty-three points and we can go out the back door,” she told Amelia.

Amelia blinked at her. “What am I doing here?” It was the first time she’d spoken all day.

She didn’t look good, Bill thought, surveying the girl with a critical eye. Her eyes had deep dark shadows beneath them, the natural warm brown of her skin had turned a pasty kind of yellow in between the big blue and purple bruises, and she kept pulling at her hair.

Bill looked at Moses. “Because you’re a damn fool, is why,” he said. “Shuffle the goddamn cards.”

The girl focused on him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Uncle.”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Where’s my husband? I want my husband.”

He looked at her, at the bruises blooming beneath her skin, at the swelling of her eye only now going down. Darren Gearhart had a mean right; short, stiff, packed a lot of power. Amelia wasn’t a pygmy but she wasn’t his equal in size. Moses remembered Joe Gould, the Newenham ambulance’s emergency medical technician, describe a head injury once over a lot of beer at Bill’s bar. Joe had just lost a patient to head trauma suffered when a fight at the small-boat harbor led to a fall between boats. “One of the guys told me you could hear the crack all the way up to the harbormaster’s office when the guy went in. Like breaking an egg.” He went on to explain, with a delivery that became more didactic as the drink in his glass dwindled, that the human brain floated inside the skull like a cork bobbing in the water. When something hit the front of the skull, the brain inside was knocked against the back of the skull, which was why so many blows delivered by fists caused injury to the back of the cerebrum, not the front.

Maybe, Moses thought, maybe I should have run her by the hospital before I packed her onto a plane to get her out here.

He consulted the voices on the subject. They were silent. Figured. Most of the time they wouldn’t shut up. Now, when he was actually looking for insight, they wouldn’t talk.

“I want my husband,” Amelia repeated. Her voice sounded more stubborn than whiny. If that stubborn could be harnessed for her own benefit, she might make it after all.

“No, you don’t,” Moses told Amelia, and snatched up the cards and began to shuffle them himself.

Later, when both kids were in bed and asleep, Bill and Moses moved to the porch. “What are we going to do with her?” she said.

“Come here, woman,” he said. She curled easily into his lap. One of his hands settled naturally on the rise of her hip, the other on the curve of her breast. She sighed a little and wriggled as if to press into both. He gave her a smack on the back. “Be still before I haul you down to the ground and have my way with you.”

“You mean you won’t if I stay still?”

“I will no matter what you do and you know that perfectly well.” He smacked her again, turning it into a caress. “I’m going to keep them isolated and safe for a few days. I’m going to teach them tai chi. I’m going to sweat the evil spirits out of them in the banya.”

“It won’t be enough for Amelia.”

She felt him shrug beneath her cheek. “It’s what I can do.”

“You told her not to marry him, didn’t you?”

“Nope.”

“I was there in the bar, I remember.”

“I didn’t tell her anything. She asked me if she should marry that little prick, and I said her father’s name.”

“That was all?”

“Yep.”

Bill sat up and looked at him. “Maybe you should have tried a little harder.”

He stood up, dumping her without ceremony or apology to the selfsame floor he had been giving serious thought to wrestling her to. “How many times do I have to explain it, Bill? How many times do you have to see it? They come to me for all the answers. They think the voices will speak through me and take them by their goddamn little hands and lead them through the goddamn wilderness. It doesn’t work like that, even if they do listen, which they most of the time don’t.”

She picked herself up to wrap her arms around him from behind. “I know.”

He anchored her arms against his belly with his own. “They talk at me, all the time they talk at me. They tell me what’s going to happen, they tell me flat out. I used to try to tell people what they were saying, but nobody wanted to hear. Nobody does now.”

“A prophet has no honor in his own country,” she said softly into that firm, erect back.

“Shit,” he said. “I can’t remember when I didn’t hear them. This man will abuse you if you marry him, this boy will leave the village forever if you let him leave once, this girl will die drunk beside the road in winter, this man will fall off his boat and drown next summer. At first I thought everyone heard them. When I was ten my Auntie Christine took me to a shaman in New Stoyahuk to ask him to drive the evil spirits from my brain. He told her he could do nothing, that the spirits chose through whom to speak and nothing we could say or do would change that. When I was thirteen she sent me to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. They said I was delusional but functional and sent me home. That’s when I started drinking. When I was seventeen, I got Auntie Christine to sign me into the Air Force. I got posted to the Far East, where I learned to do form. First thing that helped.”

She’d heard bits and pieces of the story, but never before the story from beginning to end. “I stayed there, traveled all over the world, looking for answers in some of the goddamnedest places. Cassandra was cursed with telling the truth and never being believed. I remember the first time I heard that story, I was happy. I wasn’t alone, at least not in myth.

“Then one day, I was about forty-eight, I guess, I went back to Hong Kong to see my sifu, and he told me if I hadn’t found the answers I was looking for that maybe I was looking for them in the wrong places.” He turned around and linked his hands behind her waist. “He was right. Whatever this is, it belongs here, at home, so I came home.” He grinned at her, only a slightly less lecherous grin than before. “And you were my reward.”

She searched his face with uncharacteristically solemn eyes. “What?” he said.

She adjusted his collar. “Why are you telling me this now?”

“I don’t know.” He was silent for a moment. “Yes I do,” he said finally. He jerked his head toward the cabin door. “I was looking at her this evening, wondering how bad hurt she is, wondering if maybe I shouldn’t have taken her by the emergency room before I hauled her out here.” He shifted his shoulders. “I asked the voices.”

“And?”

“And they didn’t say.”

She digested this. “Couldn’t say? Wouldn’t say?”

“I don’t know.” He fidgeted.

“Is this the first time this has happened?”

He thought, and shook his head. “No. But it doesn’t happen all that goddamn often, I can tell you that.”

“You wish they’d leave you alone, and you get nervous when they do.”

He glared at her. “I do not get nervous.”

“And when you get nervous,” she went on inexorably, “you talk too much.”

“Well, excuuuuuuse me,” he said, insulted. “I didn’t know I was boring you.”

She kissed him before he could pull away, putting everything she had into it. His pique was instantly forgotten, his response was immediate and enthusiastic. When they came up for air, breathing hard, he said, “That’s one thing those goddamn voices haven’t interfered with.”

“What?”

“Us.”

She grinned. “Right.” She kissed him again, hands roaming, seeking, finding.

“Gulp,” he said. “Good thing I’m hanging on to something, I’d probably be on my ass about now.”

“That you would, little man.”

They moved to the dock and undressed, savoring the slow shedding of clothes, the slow revelation of flesh, the slow kindling and then culmination of desire. The great thing about being old, Bill thought dreamily, was that you never had to be in a hurry. There was time to linger, time to taste, touch, feel, listen. The hitch in the breath, the murmured laughter, the bittersweet flavor of the drop of sweat that rolled into the hollow of the throat, the quick, shifting arch of the hips, the sly reach of a fingertip, the firm thrust of flesh, and then the well-remembered but always new sensation of falling off the world in a blaze of white-hot glory.

Later they cuddled beneath a sleeping bag Bill fetched from the cabin and watched the moon rise into the sky, taking its time. The flat landscape was drenched with a warm yellow light, and stars began to flicker into being. “Moses?”

“What?” he said, half asleep.

“How’s it going to turn out for them? The kids?”

She felt him come fully awake. “Don’t ask,” he said. “Don’t ask me that. You know better.”

She swallowed. “Bad for both of them? Both, Moses?”

He was silent for a moment. “The voices aren’t always right, Bill. Sometimes people actually see the freight train coming and get off the tracks before it hits them.”

She could hear the tension and the near-despair in his voice, and she let it go, but her heart ached for the two kids in the cabin, and for the man in her arms.

Nenevok Creek, September 2

Fifteen minutes after they had received the call from Alaska Airlines one-three-three, Prince put the Cessna down gently on the dirt airstrip between the three hulking mountains and Liam could breathe again. They followed the path and found the body sprawled half in and half out of the creek, facedown.

It was a man, mid-thirties, hit in the chest at point-blank range with a shotgun. Liam pulled him out of the water but there was nothing he could do; the man was cold and rigor had already set in. The body flopped on its back like a starfish. The blue eyes stared blankly at the sky. Liam tried to close them. They wouldn’t.

He yelled for Prince and she came running up the path, weapon drawn. He waved it away. “He’s long gone.”

They stood looking down at the dead man. “Same guy, you think?”

Liam hid an involuntary smile at the hopeful note in her voice. Prince had had a taste of the headlines on their last case. She’d love another one that put her there, and it was axiomatic in the law enforcement community that multiple murders, serial or mass, got all the best press. “Opal wasn’t killed with a shotgun,” he reminded her. “Did you find the cabin?”

“Yeah, come see.”

It was one room, and crowded with the belongings of two people, one obviously female. “Look,” Prince said, pointing at the counter. The remains of a meal sat there, two bowls of a clear broth with vegetables and chunks of chicken floating in it. “There is coffee in the pot,” Prince said.

“Hot or cold?”

“Lukewarm.”

The bed had been made at some point, and then someone had used the bedspread for a nap-or something more. The comforter was half on the floor and the pillows were dented.

A card table had been set up in the corner closest to the stove. Two Coleman lanterns hung from hooks over the table, and light from one of the four windows shone on it. A ray of sunshine picked up a gold sparkle, a glowing purple, and Liam walked over to find heaps of beads in sizes ranging from a cherry tomato to a grain of sand, shapes ranging from round to flat to oblong to square and everything in between, in colors reaching across the spectrum. One squat, cylindrical glass bead had faceted sides that looked blue until you held it up to the light, when it turned green. A flat, rectangular bead with rounded ends was a yellowish green that looked hideous until Liam saw it worked into a woven shape with other beads. A spill of smaller red beads had fallen to the floor in a splatter of glittering iridescence, ending in a half-empty tube, its plastic cap having rolled beneath the dining table. The beads were arranged in trays and dishes and tiny Ziploc bags. There were spools of thread in varying thicknesses, packets of needles, a coil of silver wire. There was even a miniature anvil with a matching hammer.

“A craftsman,” he said. “Did you find any ID?”

She nodded, and held out a driver’s license. Liam looked at the picture and whistled. “We definitely need to cherchez la femme.” He held out a driver’s license in his turn. “Mark Hanover,” he said.

“Rebecca Hanover,” Prince said. “Chances are, he was the miner, she’s the beader.” Prince pointed at the table. “Think our guy surprised them?”

“I don’t know.” Liam stepped outside the door and yelled at the top of his voice. “Rebecca! Rebecca Hanover! It’s safe to come out! I’m Liam Campbell, a state trooper! It’s safe to come out now!”

He called again at five-minute intervals for fifteen minutes, receiving no answer.

The two troopers followed all the trails they could find, one of which ended at another part of the creek in a narrow stretch of small, smooth rocks, many of them quartz. A flash of color caught Liam’s eye, and he stooped to pick up a stalk of fireweed, neatly severed beneath the last blooms. Three feet away he found a paring knife with a black plastic handle. The flowers were wilting now. He looked for footprints but the gravel wasn’t giving up any answers, and the mud on the path had dried hard.

In the meantime, Prince had fetched a body bag from the plane. “There’s a wheelbarrow next to the cabin.”

They loaded Mark Hanover onto the wheelbarrow. Rigor, helped no doubt by the temperature of the creek, kept the body rigid and inflexible. It kept catching on the limbs of bushes and trees on the side of the path and sliding across the edges of the barrow. Prince was swearing under her breath by the time they reached the plane, and it wasn’t easy loading him into the plane either.

“You shoot,” Liam said. “I’ll draw and bag.”

“Okay,” she said, removing her cap to wipe her brow.

She used up two rolls of thirty-six-exposure film, he filled four pages with drawings and distances. Prince dusted the cabin for prints, something both of them felt was a futile gesture.

“What do you think?” she said, standing in front of the cabin when they had finished. The sun had disappeared behind one of the mountains, all warmth vanishing with it.

Liam had a map of southwest Alaska he’d found in the cabin. He looked at the distance between Kagati Lake and Nenevok Creek. “Nunapitchuk was shot yesterday morning. Our best guess for Hanover is sometime today. That creek water’s going to play hell with a time of death.” She nodded. “Nunapitchuk was shot, we think, with a small-bore handgun, probably a twenty-two. Hanover was shot with a shotgun. Nunapitchuk was alone, Hanover wasn’t.”

“On the other hand,” Prince said, “we have two people shot, maybe within twenty-four hours of each other. Both were shot at point-blank range. No shell casings at either site. It’s the same part of Alaska, although the sites are forty miles apart over some very rough territory, territory even an experienced backwoodsman would be hard pressed to cover in that time.”

Liam nodded. “And where is Rebecca?”

“Good question,” Prince said. “Should one of us stay here and keep yelling for her?”

In answer, Liam yelled, “Rebecca! Rebecca Hanover! This is Liam Campbell, of the Alaska State Troopers! It’s okay to come out! You’re safe now! We’re at the cabin, come on out of the woods!”

There was still no answer.

“Maybe she’s running,” Prince said.

“Maybe,” Liam said, frowning down at the fireweed he still held in his hand.

“Maybe she’s running from us.”

His chest rose and fell on a sigh. “Maybe,” he said.

They waited for an hour, calling her name at intervals, but Rebecca Hanover never came out of the woods.