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“Elaine.”
I’ll be back shortly.
She spun around.
He stood at the opposite edge of the clearing, fifty feet away.
He shook his head sorrowfully. “I told you not to go outside. Didn’t I tell you that?”
She couldn’t speak.
“I told you you could do anything you wanted, anything at all, so long as you kept on the inside of the door.”
Her tongue felt swollen in her mouth.
He sighed. “What am I going to do with you?”
He sounded for all the world like an overindulgent parent faced with the dilemma of a spoiled child.
“Come here,” he said.
He had almost reached her when she realized she was still holding the bottle of Windex. She raised it and squirted him in the face. He yelled and clawed at his eyes.
She turned and ran.
Nenevok Creek, September 4
The Cessna touched down smoothly, jolting only a very little on the gravel surface of the airstrip, and rolled to a halt just short of the Cub parked at the end. Liam was standing to one side. Prince cut the engine and opened the door. “Good to see you’re all right.”
“Good to be all right.”
“What happened?” This as Wy came down the path.
“Throttle cable broke on approach.”
“Jesus,” Prince said. “That’s a new one on me.”
“Me, too.”
Trooper poise was quickly replaced by pilot curiosity. “What’d you do?”
“Pulled the carb heat, trimmed the nose. Cut the engine on final.”
“A deadstick landing.”
“Yeah.” Wy said it laconically, like she did deadstick landings every day and twice on Sundays.
“Impressive,” Prince said, trying not to sound grudging. Nothing that exciting had ever happened to her in the air. “So, you spent the night up at the cabin.”
Something fizzled in the air between Liam and Wy, some emotion to which Prince was not privy. It seemed there had been trouble in paradise the night before. It wasn’t anything she was going to get into if she could help it. “I can take you both out in the Cessna.”
“I’ll stay with my plane,” Wy said.
“Like hell,” Liam said.
“You can’t,” Prince said.
“Why not?” Wy said to Prince.
“You’ve got a problem back in Newenham.”
“What?”
“You know that boy you adopted?”
Wy’s eyes widened and she came the rest of the way down the path in four quick strides. “Is Tim all right? Has something happened to him?”
“Far as I know he’s fine. His mother isn’t.”
Wy’s lips tightened. “I’m his mother.”
“His birth mother, then,” Prince said. “She’s got a court order allowing her to see him. Limited, supervised visitation. She can’t be alone with him, but she can see him.” She looked at Liam. He met her eyes without expression. She looked back at Wy. “For the moment, the boy is out of town. Up at a fish camp on the Nushagak, I hear tell from the friends you’ve got staying at your house.”
Wy nodded. “Yes,” she said through suddenly stiff lips.
Prince looked at Liam. “You find anything more out here?”
Liam shook his head. “I don’t know.” He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag.
Prince took it and held it up to the light. It held half a dozen round green beads. “So?”
“They’re jade, I think,” he said.
“So?” she repeated.
“So a bunch of jade was stolen from the post office on Kagati Lake. A clock, animal carvings, bookends.”
“A necklace?”
“They didn’t say, and I didn’t know enough to ask.”
Prince thought it over. “There were a bunch of beads inside the cabin, weren’t there?”
“Yeah.”
“And some stuff, some bracelets, barrettes, like that, made out of beads.”
“Yes.”
“So this could have been part of Rebecca Hanover’s supply.”
“Could have been.”
“Something to tell you, too,” she said.
“What?”
“The Crime Lab called. The splatter pattern on Kvichak’s Winchester matches the splatter pattern on Mark Hanover’s chest.”
She handed back the plastic bag, and he pocketed it. “That’s that, then.”
“Looks like.”
“No shell casings, though, no other real physical evidence.”
“No. No sign of the wife?”
“No.” He sighed. “We followed everything that even remotely resembles a trail for at least a mile this time. We yelled every hour for her all night. No answer. Nothing.”
“Did you look for a grave?”
Wy looked at Liam, away.
“Yeah,” he said. “We looked for a grave.”
Prince thought. “How about the creek?”
He pulled his cap from his head and whacked it against his leg. “I followed it downstream as far as I could. It’s too low this time of year for anything the size of a body to float down it.”
“Pretty big lake it ends in.”
“Yeah. We should do a flyover on the way back, just in case SAR missed her.”
“Always supposing she’s a floater. She could have got wedged in a downed tree, something like that.”
“Yeah.” He put his cap back on. “We’re going to need confessions if we want to clear this case.”
“Yes. And we’d better get a move on if we want to get back to Newenham today. Storm coming in. Big low moving up out of the Bering. The Weather Service has small-craft advisories out. They’re talking an early freeze, maybe even snow.”
Liam looked at the sky. The morning had started out su
She shrugged. “Hey. It’s Alaska. Worse, it’s Bristol Bay.”
Wy nosed the Cub into the prevailing wind and tied it down against her return with a new throttle cable. The Cessna was in the air ten minutes later, and Prince got on the radio to let the world know that Liam and Wy were found and well. Neither of the rescuees looked especially happy about it, but their friends took up the slack. “So, home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” she said, hanging up the mike.
“Just step on it,” Liam said. From the backseat Wy said nothing.
“Stepping on it,” Prince said, and did.
Newenham, September 4
Jim, who like most ham operators knew somebody everywhere he went, had rustled up a truck, a Chevy Scottsdale, brown and tan but mostly rust, with brand-new outside rearview mirrors and tires, and a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish glued to the tailgate.
Jo pointed at the decal. “Do you suppose the Christians know that that decal only shows Darwin in action? Bigger fish eats littler fish?”
“I don’t think Christians waste much time thinking,” Jim said, climbing in behind the wheel.
“I beg to differ,” Bridget said tartly. “We Christians are thinking all the time. Mostly we’re thinking sad thoughts about our non-Christian brothers and sisters who are going straight to hell when they die.”
Luke laughed.
So did Jim. “My mistake.”
Honors about even, the journey to Bill’s was accomplished in dignified silence. “Little nip in the air,” Jim said, holding the door for Bridget. He looked toward the southwest. “Storm coming in, looks like.”
Bridget tucked her arm in his. “Good day for a hot toddy next to a roaring fireplace.”
The south and west horizon were filling up with a rapidly advancing wall of dark clouds. “Hope they don’t get caught out in that,” Jo said.
“Looks nasty,” Luke agreed. His hand was warm on her shoulder. She saw Jim looking at it and the hand became somehow heavier.
One-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, and it was after fishing season and before hunting season really began. Just enough reason for the party to get started early, and it had. Kelly McCormick and Larry Jacobson had drawn up chairs next to a booth filled with three giggling young women. Jim Earl, the mayor of Newenham, and four of the five sitting members of the town council were deciding city business at another. The jukebox was playing “Fruitcakes,” and although no one was skating naked through the crosswalk-yet-Jimmy Buffet would have felt right at home.