“And you strangled her.”
“She said such hateful things, things about her mother. Things about how her mother slept around with a hundred men and how I shouldn’t think I was anything special. And then she got into details. Things about how when she was short of cash Lydia was too busy spending money on her men to give her daughter any. How Lydia had written her a check for five thousand and said that was the last of it. Then she started in again on the men, and what she’d seen Lydia and Stan Sr. doing when she was a kid. And there we were, standing in the kitchen of her own mother, the woman I loved.”
The woman you murdered, Liam thought.
“I was trying to rip her tongue out, tell you the truth. There was no bearing it. She had a mouth on her, that girl.” He clasped tough, stringy hands together on the table. “She just wouldn’t shut up. So I shut her up.”
The three men sat in silence. Outside, snow was falling softly in big fat flakes. Snow had a quality of hush like no other, Liam thought, a muting, calming influence. Peace.
“How did you know we flew up to Anchorage last night?”
“What?” Moses said.
Eric looked sheepish. “Oh, hell. I was in the bar when Wy called Bill to come stay with her boy. I figured it’d be easy enough to take a shot at you on the way home. I know the flight path for the approach into the Mad Trapper; I live right under it. I took the skiff across the river and…” He shrugged and dropped his head.
Moses shot to his feet and began slapping Eric’s head, open-palmed slaps with the full force of his arm behind them. “You old fuck! You were shooting at my granddaughter!” He started slapping with both hands. “Get on your feet! Get up! Get up, goddamn it, so I can take a decent shot at you!”
Eric cringed away.
“Goddamn you, Cal, we’ve known each other since high school! What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Moses. Moses. Moses!” Liam came around the table and pulled Moses away. “Knock it off. Just calm down, now.”
Moses backed down, fuming.
Perfect peace, all right.
“You called him Cal,” Liam said.
“It’s his name,” Moses snapped. “Calvin Eric. We called him Silent Cal in school, when we were studying Coolidge.”
TheSC on Lydia’s calendar. Silent Cal.
“Calvin Eric Mollberg, I’m arresting you for the murders of Lydia Tompkins and Karen Tompkins. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney…”
“Sad,” was Wy’s verdict.
“Pitiful,” Liam said. “You know what I hate?”
They were lying in Wy’s bed, the infamous twin-size bed that was too short for Liam on both ends and too narrow for both of them to sleep in side by side. It wasn’t a problem for either of them at the moment, but Wy had a feeling it was right around the corner. “What do you hate?”
“I hate stupidity. I hate incompetence. I hate ignorance, and ineptitude, and all those other words that begin with ‘I’ that denote idiocy. For crissake, Wy. The man’s seventy-five years old, he’s lived a mostly blameless life, he was a good husband, a good father, a goddamn pillar of his community. Now he gets to spend what’s left of his life locked up with a bunch of drug dealers and child molesters and, of course, his fellow murderers. I mean, Jesus! Can you see him in a cell with Gheen?”
She tucked herself more securely into the curve of his body. “I don’t think they’re going to put anybody in with a serial killer, Liam.” Although she had liked Lydia a lot and it wouldn’t have hurt her feelings if the Alaska Department of Corrections in their infinite wisdom had decided that Gheen and Eric Mollberg were destined as cellmates.
“And Lydia. Goddamn it. I liked her. Hell, I think I was halfway in love with her. I told you about her beaning Harvey with the jar of tomatoes, didn’t I?”
“About five times. And they were sun-dried tomatoes.”
“She was a great old gal. She flirted with me. Seventy-four and the juices were still running. And come to find out she’s who she is because she’s a grave robber.”
Wy had known Lydia some, enough that Lydia had offered her a place in the Literary Ladies book club, but Wy’s job kept her in the air so much she would have missed meetings the entire summer. She had declined, but every now and then she’d run into Lydia at the post office and they’d trade titles. “I liked her.”
“Everybody liked her. A lot of people loved her. Some downright lusted after her, even after she was a grandmother, too. Doesn’t mean what she did was right.”
Wy had spent more time in the Bush than Liam had. “Someone would have come along and taken it.”
“Human nature, I know, I-”
“No, Liam.” Wy squinched around until she was facing him, her butt hanging precariously over the edge of the bed. “Nothing ever goes to waste in the Bush. She had a good use for it; she bought her husband a boat. That gold was like the Blazo cans they beat flat into shingles, and the fifty-five-gallon drums they turn into stoves. It was like when a SeaLand cargo ship hits a storm and washes everything overboard and it all floats up on shore. Finder’s keepers. It’s the law of the land.”
“She was saying they should tell at the end. She must have known it was thieving when she did it if it came home to roost sixty years later.”
“You think she’d been agonizing over it all these years, wallowing in her own guilt?”
Liam thought of some of the interviews he and Diana Prince had done. “No.”
“She lived her life, right through up until the end. I think,” Wy said, propping herself up on an elbow, “I think when she heard about the plane being found and the arm and the coin, that maybe she thought it was time, that was all. It wasn’t an attack of conscience.” She tapped his chest. “But Eric Mollberg heard it that way because he was feeling guilty. He was happy to shuffle off the burden of the coins to her in the first place, happy to join the army and go off to war. She was sixteen, Liam. She wasn’t a criminal mastermind; she was just an opportunist, like everyone else who lives in the Alaskan Bush, like everyone needs to be to survive.”
She smiled down at him, and in a lightning move he reversed their positions. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“State your terms.”
“I won’t take the job in Anchorage if you get us a bigger bed.”
She flushed a faint, rosy pink. “Do you mean it, Liam?”
“I emphasize the one word in that sentence that means the most: bigger.”
“I don’t want you to stay in Newenham for me, Liam, or for Tim. I want you to stay here because you want to stay here.”
“Not king-size, that’d be too big, I’d never find you.”
“I mean it, Liam. I don’t want to live my life having to be grateful to you because you stayed with me the second time around.”
“A double isn’t big enough. My feet would be bound to stick out over the edge, and I hate that.”
“I don’t want you to turn down a job you really wanted just because I don’t want to leave Newenham.”
“A queen,” he said, kneeing her legs apart and coming into her. “Now that would be juuuust right.” He kissed her thoroughly.
She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “Are you sure? Are you very, very sure?”
“I am very, very sure.”
Her nose ran when she cried. It was very, very unattractive, and he waited while she fumbled a Kleenex off the nightstand and blew. It was very, very unromantic.
“Liam?”
“What?”
“Will you marry me?”