Charlene Taylor was in the air, tracking down a rumor of a group of hunters going for bear in an area the Fish and Game had closed to hunting the month before. Prince moved on to Prime Cut, Newenham’s lone beauty salon, located in the minimall that housed the Eagle grocery store. Sharon Ilutsik was blow-drying Jimmy Barnes’ hair. Jimmy Barnes, a rotund, bouncy little man and Newenham’s harbormaster, greeted Prince with some embarrassment and was out of the chair a second later. Sharon sighed a little over his tip, and then he came bustling back in, even redder of face, to mumble an apology and shove a couple of bills her way. She brightened and accompanied Prince to the espresso stand next door to order a double skinny latte with vanilla flavoring. Prince managed not to gag and got a cup of coffee, added cream and sugar with a lavish hand, and they sat down at one of two faux-wrought-iron tables.
“Lydia Tompkins,” Sharon said. “Yeah, we were friends. I usually only saw her once a month, at book club, except when she came in for a haircut. You could use one, by the way,” she said, giving Prince a critical once-over. “You’re getting a little shaggy around the ears and the back of your head.”
Prince ran a hand through her short, dark curls. “I’ll make an appointment after we’re done here. When did you last see Lydia?”
“At the last book club. Saturday before last.”
“Did she seem upset about anything? Anything at all, it doesn’t matter how unimportant it seems to you.”
“No. Although-”
“What?”
“Her daughter showed up about halfway through the evening. I remember because we were right in the middle of sitting down to dinner and Lydia ran her off. Karen was not best pleased.” Sharon sipped her latte. “But then Karen is never best pleased by much, unless it’s a man and he’s about to take his pants off.”
“That’s a little harsh.”
“Harsh but true,” Sharon said cheerfully. “Karen defines herself by the men she sleeps with. I swear the girl has notches on her bedpost. It’s probably posts, plural, by now.”
“Like her mother.”
“Lydia didn’t sleep around,” Sharon said sharply. “She and her husband had plenty of fun, and she liked to tease us with stories about it, but she wasn’t at all like Karen. She was a one-man woman.” She paused. “At least, she was while Stan Sr. was alive.”
Prince stared. Mrs. Lydia Tompkins, plump, seventy-four, mother of four, grandmother of two, brainer of muggers with jars of sun-dried tomatoes, was doing the nasty with somebody?I want to be Lydia when I grow up, Bill had said. So, suddenly, did Prince. “You mean she took a lover?”
“Why not?” Sharon said, bristling. “She was old. She wasn’t dead. Nobody says you have to stop having sex when you hit fifty. Look at Bill Billington and Grandpa Moses.”
Prince had fallen into the way of regarding Bill as more of a contemporary and an ally in the good fight against evildoers, but when Sharon said it out loud, of course it was true. Bill and Moses were both older than God, and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She readjusted her thinking. “So you think Lydia had a lover.”
Sharon hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Yes, you should,” Prince said firmly. “Who was he?”
“I don’t know. I went to her house about four months ago, and somebody had sent her this big bouquet of flowers, tulips, lilies, roses; it was gorgeous. You know we don’t have a florist here, so somebody had to have Goldstreaked it down on Alaska Airlines. I thought at first it was one of her kids, but she blushed when I asked her, and said no, a friend had sent them for her birthday. She never did say who, but I got the impression the friend was a guy.” Sharon studied the milky stuff swirling around in her cup, and looked up with a smile. “It was kind of cute, you know? Here she was, seventy-four years old, little old Grandma Lydia, and she’s getting flowers from a guy. Kinda makes you not be afraid of getting old yourself, you know?”
Lola Gamechuk, thin, dark, and careworn, answered the phone six times while she talked to Prince. Five of the calls were from her daughter, Tiffany, who didn’t like her babysitter and wanted Mom to come home right now. The sixth call Lola put through to Andrew Gamechuk, the current president of the Angayuk Native Association and Lola’s cousin. Andrew interrupted his game of one-on-one with a sponge basketball and the hoop mounted on the wall of his office, which Prince had been watching through the open door of his office, to take the call. After a moment he got up and closed the door. Prince looked back at Lola.
“How well did you know Lydia?”
“Not very.”
“You were a member of her book club.”
“I saw her once a month.”
“Never any other time?”
Shrug. “Sometimes in the store.”
“Did you know of anyone who was bothering her, someone who might have held a grudge against her, who might have wanted to hurt her?”
Silent stare.
“Lola,” Prince said, surrounded on every side by Yupik storyknives and finger fans and dance masks and feeling whiter than white, “all I want is to catch the person who did this to Lydia. Did you know that she worked down at Maklak?”
Lola, who had been staring fixedly at her desk, met Prince’s eyes for the first time. Hers were a deep, dark blue, framed in wings of straight black hair that curved gently beneath her jawline. With some sleep and a little animation, Lola Gamechuk could knock the world on its collective ear with that face alone. “Everybody knew that.”
“Did anyone there get mad at her for any reason?”
A long silence. “Maybe.”
Prince tried not to pounce. “Would you know of anyone who maybe had done that?”
A longer silence. “Ray.”
“Ray who?”
Lola looked at her fingers. “Ray Wassillie. Sometimes he drinks too much. Sometimes when he drinks too much he gets mean.”
“Was he mean to Lydia?”
Lola’s face closed up. “I don’t know.”
That was all she was going to say. Prince packed up and left, trying not to look as if she was running away. The Yupik mask mounted on the wall next to the door laughed at her from within a circle of ivory and fur and feathers. She glared at it as she went out, but the grin didn’t change.
“Lola was married to Ray Wassillie for about a century one year,” Charlene told her, unfastening her gun belt and placing it in the second drawer down in her desk. She turned the key in the lock and put the key in her pocket.
“Oh, hell.”
“Don’t be mad at her. He treated her pretty badly. She told us once she never would have left him if he hadn’t hit the baby.”
Prince remembered the phone calls. “Tiffany?”
Charlene nodded. “Tiffany wasn’t even two months old, colicky, cried a lot. Ray came home drunk and lost his temper. I saw the marks. Lola gets back every way she can. Can’t say I blame her much.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.” Charlene stretched. “Man, it’s windy up top. It was a bitch keeping her on course. My shoulders feel like they’ve been frozen.”
“You catch them? Mamie said you were tailing some hunters going after bear in a closed area.”
Charlene made a disgusted face. “No. I checked all the likely strips but I couldn’t find the plane. I’ll go up again tomorrow, but you know what it’s like. I might as well be on foot, for all the good I can do.” She touched her toes and sat down. “So you want to know about Lydia.”