Better To Rest

Which meant that Newenham had a white mayor, an even whiter chamber of commerce, a mostly white city council, and until a week ago an all-white police department. Every time another family moved out of town, the city coffers suffered and so did city services. It made for a certain amount of resentment in the white population, which manifested itself in surprisingly little racial friction, a thing for which Liam was profoundly thankful.

He wondered how Lydia Tompkins had felt about the situation in which Newenham and so many other towns and villages across the state found themselves. He would have liked to talk to her about it, to have sat at her feet and soaked up as much of the local history as she was prepared to ladle out.

He looked at her chair and pictured her in it, bright-eyed, militant, determined, sturdy, stubborn, resolved. She’d had a good fifteen, twenty, maybe more years in her as she had sat in that chair. Someone had robbed her of those years, and robbed Liam of her acquaintance.

Cops took murder personally. Vengeance was too strong a word, and given the current state of the judicial system you couldn’t really call it justice. Justice would have Liam beaning the killer with a baseball bat in Lydia’s kitchen and then going away to leave him to drown in his own blood.

He went to Prince’s desk and opened Lydia’s calendar, an Alaska Weather calendar. October’s picture was of a night sky with stars showing through an auroral display of green and pink and orange and purple and white.

There was a dentist appointment here, a doctor appointment there, a city council meeting, on the date of which Lydia had written in small, bold print,Take notes about when plow didn’t come! Liam wondered how far out the River Road the city grader was supposed to run.

The lettersSC appeared with some frequency for about three months up until the end of July and then disappeared. Betsy and her family were over for di

Three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, Lydia had a four-hour appointment with the initialsMC. The only other regular entries were on the last Saturday of every month: the lettersBC, a kind of food (Mexican, Thai, Italian), and what looked like titles of novels. He flipped backward through the calendar. July had beenHere on Earth, August had beenThe Red Tent, September had beenThe Poisonwood Bible, and October was to have beenTracks.

He looked up at the clock on the wall. It was seven. He shut down his computer, locked up the post and climbed into the Blazer. There he sat, his hands slack on the steering wheel, and wondered without much interest what was for di

Lights approached the post, flooded the cab, and passed on down the road. He heard a sound and rolled down the window.

The croak of a raven came from the top of one of the three spruce trees clustered together at the side of the post. He tensed, but it was somehow less derisive in tone than he was used to hearing, a series of soft clicks and something else pretty near a croon and maybe even a coo.

He decided to drive out to Lydia’s house on the way home, see what he’d missed that afternoon. Never mind that Lydia’s house lay upriver and Wy’s house down. If it had been his and Wy’s house, he might have gone straight home. If the bed in Wy’s bedroom hadn’t been a twin, he might have gone straight home and straight to bed.

He had proposed the purchase of a larger bed when he had finally moved out of the Jayco trailer parked on her front doorstep and into the actual house. Wy had avoided saying yay or nay and he had feared pressing the issue after John Barton’s job offer. The Jayco trailer was still out there and still available for banishment, and any bed with Wy Chouinard in it was good enough for him, or at least that was the way he had felt at first.

He was suddenly very tired of being on his best behavior, of living his life on sufferance, of forever waiting for Wy to make up her mind. He loved her, didn’t he? And he’d told her so, over and over again, hadn’t he? What the hell else did she want?

This time the raven’s croak was mocking and derisive. He rolled up the window so he didn’t have to listen to it and headed for River Road.

The house was dark when he pulled into the driveway, the narrow windows in their old-fashioned wooden frames presenting a blank and bland appearance to the world. When no one answered his knock he stepped inside. The kitchen was sealed off with crime-scene tape. The living room was much as they’d left it that afternoon.

He walked down the hallway and into the bathroom. It was small and narrow, with shelves on every spare inch of wall and the floor space reduced by clothes hamper, wastebasket, and a freestanding electric chrome towel rack that heated the towels hanging on it. The tub had a rubber-coated wire shelf stretched across it, filled end to end with bath salts, soaps and oils, a loofah, a pumice stone and a manicure set.

One shelf held six different kinds of shampoo and conditioner, bottles and bottles of body lotion and a cut-glass heart full of cotton balls. Another shelf held thirteen kinds of nail polish, from bright red to dark green, and all the accompanying paraphernalia for putting it on and taking it off. Liam hadn’t seen anything like it since he’d lived with Je

A washcloth hung from a dragonfly hook over the sink. A silver porpoise, a green frog with one leg extended behind him, and a bronze twig formed the door and cupboard pulls of the sink cabinet. One drawer was full of exotically scented cakes of soap, another full of spare toothbrushes and small tubes of toothpaste. A third held several prescriptions, an anti-inflammatory, something for pain, and an antibiotic. The anti-inflammatory and the pain pills were three years out of date, the antibiotic only seven months so. Hidden in the back of the drawer beneath an arm splint with Velcro fastenings was a vaginal moisturizer. The box was half-empty of tubes.

Liam shut the drawer again with more haste than finesse. He stood there for a moment, an unaccustomed flush on his cheeks at this unexpected and unwelcome glimpse into Lydia’s personal life. She’d been seventy-four, for crissake. Probably had more to do with comfort than, well, than sexual activity.

Jim Earl’s words came back to him:Wasn’t for lack of trying it wasn’t me.

He couldn’t remember ever being disconcerted by a discovery at a crime scene before. The first casualty of murder was privacy, and in fifteen years of tossing crime scenes he had discovered pretty much everything there was to find out about people, good and bad. He remembered the five men on the short list for the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, and on the basis of what he had found tucked away in every suspect’s house how he would have fingered any of the five except for the man who actually did the kidnapping, raping, torture and murder. He’d come out of that case, one of the first after his probation was up, with the conviction that nothing would ever surprise him again. “You don’t want to know what your neighbors are really up to,” John Dillinger Barton had told him afterward, and truer words were never spoken. For a while, when he walked down a street, he would study the faces passing him and wonder what they had secreted in their basements, behind the headboards of their beds, in the crawl space between ceiling and roof.

Now he stood stock-still, frozen into embarrassed immobility at the prospect of a seventy-four-year-old woman having a sexual relationship.