“She’s living with Tasha?”
“Yeah, I know, the oldest established permanent floating party in Newenham. But they’re cousins, and Natalie’s pretty much broke. And like I said, she’s still sober.”
“She must go straight into her room and lock the door.” Bill made Moccasin Man another margarita and sent a pitcher of beer over to Moses’ table. The place was in its usual lull between the people-getting-off-work crowd and the people-coming-in-for-their-after-dinner-drink crowd, and she was able to return to Wy in a few moments. “Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” Wy said, startled out of her absorption with beer suds.
“Let Natalie see Tim.”
Wy made a face. “I didn’t really have a choice. The judge ordered visitation. Limited, supervised, but still.”
“Bullshit,” Bill said, speaking with all the authority of the magistrate she was. “You could have run her off. You still could. Why haven’t you, if it’s making the boy so miserable, and you miserable with it?”
Wy drank beer. Bill waited.
“She’s his mother, Bill,” Wy said at last. “She’s got rights.”
“Just because you didn’t give birth to him doesn’t make him any less your son. Crying out loud, Wy, I could tell you stories from now until next year about cases I’ve had before my court, parents aren’t fit to keep a dog, much less a child. She’s one of them.”
“She is when she’s drunk,” Wy agreed. “Maybe if she stays here…”
“What? You going to give him back?”
Wy’s head snapped up, her eyes narrowing.
“I didn’t think so,” Bill said, her voice very dry.
“It was right to let her see him. It was right for him to see her, so that he doesn’t always remember her as the drunken monster who beat him. Damn it, Bill, it was the right thing to do!”
Bill sipped her Coke. “Want another beer?”
Wy looked at the bottom of her now empty glass. “No. I’m just trying to put off going home.”
“Want some takeout?”
Wy brightened. Tim was notoriously susceptible to Bill’s fatburgers and greasy fries. “Make it two, and a double order of fries for Tim.”
Bill raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, all right,” Wy said. “Three.” Not that Liam Campbell deserved any special consideration in the way of meals. Or a roof. A roof it looked like he wouldn’t be under for longer than it took to pack for a move back to Anchorage.
“Hey, big spender.”
Wy looked around and a smile broke out across her face. It was a good smile; it displayed white teeth saved from perfection by overlapping incisors, crinkled the corners of her brown eyes, and seemed somehow to make her bronze-streaked brown hair curl out of its long braid even more than it already did. “Jo!”
The two women hugged. “What are you doing in Newenham?” Wy said. “I can’t believe your editor let you come down again so soon. Is there some story going on around here I don’t know about that theAnchorage News is crying out for copy on?”
“No, I just grabbed a couple of vacation days ’cause I could,” Jo said. She was a chunky blonde with intense green eyes and a short cap of curls. A newspaper reporter with the wit of Dorothy L. Parker and none of the nastiness, she’d been Wy’s closest friend since college and, for a few months, her sister-in-law. “Gary’s back in Anchorage.”
“Is he?”
“Yeah, he came down with me.” Jo didn’t look at Wy when she said this, thanking Bill for the draft beer instead. “Don’t worry; we’re not going to land ourselves on you-we’ve got a room at the Bay View. But we were hoping you’d have time for us.”
“Sure,” Wy said, and managed a smile. “Always time for you, Jo. And you wouldn’t be landing yourselves on me, either one of you. So long as one of you doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor.”
Jo laughed. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
“How about I order up a couple more hamburgers?”
“How about we eat right here and have a steak?”
Wy cocked an eyebrow at Bill, who shouted a cancellation through the pass-through to the kitchen. Dottie, her fry cook, growled an acknowledgment and slammed the burger patties back into the fridge.
“Let me call Tim.” Wy went to the pay phone in the corner and dialed her home number.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Tim.”
“Hi, Wy.”
He had been calling her Mom right up until the first time she’d admitted Natalie to their home. “Jo’s here, and her brother, Gary. We’re going to have dinner at Bill’s. I’ll be there in ten.”
She hung up and turned to Jo, standing just behind her. “Don’t worry; he’ll come. The combination of his favorite auntie and one of Bill’s steaks will offset having to sit next to me.”
Jo followed Wy out to her truck. “What’s the problem with Tim?”
Wy sighed. “It’s not just Tim.”
Jo went very still. “Liam?”
Wy nodded.
Jo bristled. “What’s that prick up to now?”
Wy turned. “Why do you always automatically assume the worst about Liam, Jo?”
“Let’s just say I stand on his record. He’s always beating up on my best friend.”
“He doesn’t beat up on me.”
“Emotionally he sure as hell does.”
Wy was silent. Jo’s fierce loyalty to the people she loved was one of her best qualities. It could also be one of her worst.
“What’s wrong this time? His wife is still dead, isn’t she?” Jo said in sudden suspicion. “He didn’t go and get married again just so the two of you could have another hopeless love affair?”
“No, no, no,” Wy said. “Cut him some slack, Jo, Jesus.”
“He hurt you,” Jo said. “What hurts you, hurts me. When I get hurt, I get pissed off. When I get pissed off, I get even. I’m not square with Liam yet.”
“That why you brought Gary to Newenham with you?”
Jo ignored the question with a dignity that didn’t look quite natural on her pugnacious face. “What’s up, Wy? What’s going on?”
Wy leaned back against the door of the truck. “You know this last case, the serial killer?”
“Hairy Man? Sure. He’s still in jail, so far as I know. It’s been a month. Got to be some kind of record.”
Jo Dunaway’s ideal Supreme Court would have had all the justices named Scalia, but then she was a reporter and had seen firsthand the evil that men do far too often. Had she but known it, Liam’s ideal Supremes would all have been named Rehnquist. Wy thought about making the obvious comment but her courage failed her.
“Anyway,” Jo said, “what’s that got to do with anything?”
“John Barton, Liam’s boss, called. Said Liam had done so well in Newenham that John was promoting him back to sergeant.”
Jo digested this. “Wow. That was quick.”
“It’s partly your fault. You wrote that story with all those quotes making Liam sound like a hero.”
Jo looked at her. “So you’re not just pissed at Liam, you’re pissed at me, too.”
“Shit.” Wy smoothed back the curls that had escaped the braid falling down her back. “I’m not, Jo. Really, I’m not. It’s just that things were… It’s not like we don’t have other issues to deal with, you know? And now we’ve got to deal with this, too.”
“Liam must feel like a yo-yo,” Jo said.
“Yeah, well, apparently you’re only disgraced in the Alaska state troopers so long as you’re not clearing cases. When you are…”
“You’re undisgraced. Back in favor. Back on the fast track,” Jo said in sudden realization. “Okay. Got that. What else?”
“John offered him his old job back.”
“His old job?”
“Uh-huh.”
“His old job, as in, his old job in Anchorage?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh.”
“So you see.”
“I sure do. Where can I buy a gun?”
“Jo.”
“If he dumps you again, Wy, I swear I’ll-”
“He didn’t dump me last time; I dumped him.”