Bill laughed. “Karen would consider it advertising.”
Prince sighed. “Okay. What about her friends? What about the ladies who lunch?”
“The Literary Ladies,” Bill said.
“Sorry. The Literary Ladies. Stand by one.” Bill made a round of the house. The girls in the booth were getting very giggly, and so was their designated driver. Bill served up a round of sodas and forced a jumbo order of nachos on them. She came back and settled in across from Prince.
“The Literary Ladies were formed in 1988, November, I think.” She smiled at a memory. “First book we read was Toni Morrison’sBeloved, because it won the Pulitzer that year. Scared the shit out of everyone, and nearly busted up the group right there. One woman never did come back-what was her name, Margaret, Melody something? Anyway, we never saw her again. I haven’t seen her since, as a matter of fact, so she must have moved away.”
Prince was more interested in the current members, and said so, with emphasis.
“All right, all right. There’s me. There was Lydia, of course. There’s Alta Peterson, who owns and minds the hotel. There’s Mamie Hagemeister, you know her, and there’s Charlene Taylor and you know her, too. They’re all originals, except for Charlene, who joined when she was posted to Newenham, back in, oh, 1992, I guess. Sharon and Lola are newcomers, the youngsters in the group. Sharon joined when she was still in high school, and about two years later brought Lola in. Sharon does hair down at the Prime Cut and Lola works in the cannery in the summer and answers the phone for the Angayuk Native Association in the winter.”
“You’re all pretty close?”
“Pretty close,” Bill said cautiously.
“You don’t seem sure.”
“Close for getting together only once a month,” Bill said.
“Any disagreements?”
Bill raised one eyebrow, but Prince refused to back down. “Of course we fight. Lola married the wrong man, we told her so, and she stopped coming for the duration of her marriage, about thirteen months, I think it was. Charlene arrested Sharon’s cousin Richard for fishing inside the markers up Kulukak River, and Sharon stopped speaking to Charlene until I found him guilty, and then she stopped speaking to me instead. Alta was pissed at Sharon because Sharon gave Alta a punk-rock haircut without permission, and she stopped speaking to her until it grew out.”
“Anybody ever get mad at Lydia?”
“Nope. Not that I remember. Well.”
“What?”
“She used to tell raunchy stories that embarrassed the hell out of Sharon and Lola.”
“Raunchy stories?”
“Yeah, I think she liked giving them the needle. Especially the younger ones. Hell, if half the stuff she said about her and Stan Sr. was true, she wasn’t even bragging.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Bill grinned. “One time, when the kids were off on a basketball trip to Anchorage, Stan Sr. borrowed a pair of handcuffs off Martin Gleason-a city cop here, before your time-stripped Lydia butt-naked and kept her chained to their bed for twenty-four hours, during which he invited five guys over to play poker in the kitchen. He visited her between hands, with the other guys thinking he was using the john. She said after the second time all he had to do was walk into the room for her to come. Lola just about died.”
“Jesus.” Prince remembered Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, a short, plump, bright-eyed woman who had most definitely achieved elder status, and tried to reconcile that picture with the sexual dynamo Bill was describing.
“Yeah. I want to be Lydia when I grow up.” Bill paused. “It must have about killed her when Stan Sr. died.”
“So you never had any disagreements with her yourself?”
“Oh, hell, yes. You can’t be even once-a-month friends for over twenty years and not fight. Not if the friendship is real. I told her she was spoiling Karen and she was mad at me for, oh, about five minutes, I think it was. But Lydia could never stay mad at anyone for long.”
Bill sighed. “I should be angry at who killed her. I should be breathing fire and smoke up one road and down another, as far as roads go in this town, until I sniff out the bastard and annihilate him. But all I can think of is that I’ve lost a friend, and all I can feel is tired.”
It was the closest Prince had ever heard Bill come to admitting to human weakness, and she didn’t know quite what to say in response. She fell back on formula. “You can’t think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt her?”
Bill shook her head.
“Can you give me directions to Lola’s house? I can track down everyone else.”
“Okay.” Bill drew Prince’s notebook to her and began to write.
Alta Peterson, owner and proprietor of the Bay View Inn, Newenham’s only hotel, was long-limbed and lean in the best Scandinavian style of construction, and wore tiny little round glasses through which she was peering at a copy ofGirl with a Pearl Earring. The book was propped in her lap. Her feet were propped on the check-in counter. She wore a lime-green sweater over a pair of polyester slacks the color of Welch’s grape juice, and an orange chiffon scarf in an artistic knot at her throat.
Prince narrowed her eyes against the glare and cleared her throat.
“Diana. What can I do for you?” Alta did not leap to her feet. This was Newenham. It was October. Jo and Gary Dunaway and Special Agent James G. Mason were the only three customers she had at present, and she wasn’t expecting Diana to bring her any more.
“You hear about Lydia Tompkins?”
“Yes.”
“I’m talking to everyone who knew her.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Bill Billington tells me you were a member of Lydia’s book club.”
“Yes.”
“You were good friends?”
“Yes.”
“Before she died, did she say she was having trouble with anyone? Anybody threatening her, anything like that?”
“For what reason?”
“I don’t know; I was kind of hoping you could tell me.”
Alta closed the book, marking her spot with one forefinger, but she didn’t pull her feet off the counter. “Lydia Tompkins was a good and true friend of mine from the time my husband first brought me to Newenham. If anyone had threatened her and I had heard about it, I would have sought them out and kicked their behind. What’s more, I would have had to stand in line to do it.”
“She had a lot of friends?”
“She didn’t have anything but friends.”
“You remember her talking about any problems she might have had with her children?”
“No.”
Alta had elevated the monosyllablic response to an art form. “Well, if you remember anything-”
“If I do.” Alta opened her book again.
Prince took the hint and left.
Mamie Hagemeister was Alta Peterson’s polar opposite in temperament. She burst into tears at her desk at the local jail and had to be ministered to with Kleenex and a can of Coke from the machine down the hall. “She was the greatest gal,” Mamie said, blowing her nose. “One time I was sick with the flu, really sick, and she came and got my kids and kept them for three days so I could sleep. She did things like that for everybody. And she did things in the community, too. She taught Yupik at the grade school, and ran the fund-raising drive for the new fire truck, and donated time down at Maklak Center. She had an uncle who was a drunk.” With a rare flash of pragmatism, she added, “Everybody in Newenham has an uncle who’s a drunk. But Lydia did something about it.” Dissolving once again into tears, she said, “I just don’t know who would do such an awful thing. Everybody loved Lydia.”
Prince’s ears pricked up at the news that Lydia had volunteered at the small clinic attached to the tiny hospital that treated drug and alcohol abusers. Users were notoriously unstable people, quick to take offense and slow to take responsibility, with a tendency to hit first when they were high and apologize later when they were sober and about to be jailed for the third time. There was a possibility that Lydia had offended someone and that it had resulted in a confrontation in her home. Counselors in the big city had unlisted phone numbers and had mail sent to a box at the post office. In small towns like Newenham, it just wasn’t that hard to find someone.