Eric Mollberg’s small, neat house perched on the extreme edge of the bank of the Nushugak River, where it looked as if it was of two minds, either to take flight or to topple down the cliff. It had a yard full of outbuildings, and a power line looped its way down the driveway between poles. A snow machine sat next to Eric’s dirty white pickup, which Liam recognized on sight from having pulled it over half a dozen times since he’d come to Newenham. Next to the pickup was a small drifter on a trailer. The name of the drifter was theMary M.
A red Nissan longbed with a white canopy was parked in back of the boat. “Shit,” Liam said, and parked in back of Eric’s truck.
“It’s open,” he heard Moses yell when he knocked, and he went in.
The kitchen had that thin layer of grime and that faint odor of fried everything associated with many men who live alone. That said, the dishes weren’t piled too high in the sink and Liam wasn’t afraid to take the seat opposite Eric, who sat nursing a mug in his gnarled hands. “Eric,” he said.
“Liam,” Eric Mollberg said without looking up.
Liam nodded to Moses. “What’s up?”
“You still got that gold piece?”
“Turned it over to the air force.”
“There was a bunch more where that came from.”
“I was getting there.”
“I figured. That’s why I came out here.”
They both turned to look at Eric, who seemed to shrink visibly in his chair. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said, his voice quavering.
Liam stifled a sigh. The annals of criminal investigation were riddled with pleas of “I didn’t mean to do it.” If everyone who hadn’t meant to do it hadn’t actually done it, law-enforcement agencies all over the world could go to half-strength and no one would ever notice the difference. He got out his notebook, in which he rarely wrote a word but which worked remarkably well to fascinate and intimidate suspects. “Can you tell us about it, Eric?”
He was in love with her, with Lydia, madly, passionately, crazily in love. So were most of the junior and senior men at Newenham High School. Might have been because there were five guys for every one girl. Might have been because she was just so damned pretty. Lydia Akiachak was the belle of Newenham High School, and she had picked him. She’d picked him to take her to the Christmas dance at the high school, and after the dance she hadn’t said no when he suggested driving out River Road to watch the northern lights. There was a place where they went to park, and somebody had been out to the end of it that morning and told him that the snow was packed down enough to make it there. He didn’t care if they never made it back.
So there they were, and just about the time things were getting interesting they saw the fireball. They drove back into town and told the first pilot they found, Bob DeCreft, who was two days away from leaving after he’d joined up. Bob went up to take a look, and when he got back told them the wreckage was right on the top of Bear Glacier but that it was about to slide into a crevasse, and that there was nothing they could do. But Lydia, she was that kind of girl, she wanted to check for survivors, even though Bob told her there couldn’t be any out of that wreck. What about parachutes? she said. What if there’s somebody hung up on the edge of the mountain, just waiting for us to come get them?
So they went. Bob said they were nuts and he refused to go with them, but he loaned her his bibs and boots and they drove straight from the airstrip to Icky and then up the trail to the little airstrip the CCCers had put in the summer of ’38, back when they were surveying the refuge. It wasn’t a long hike after that, and what with all the lights it was bright as day out so they couldn’t get lost. The glacier wasn’t that hard to climb, maybe because the snow was piled so high along the sides and it was firm enough not to go through when they walked on it.
They got to the wreckage about five in the morning, by his watch. Some of it was still smoking. A lot of it had already slid into the crevasse, the edge melted by the heat of the pieces of the plane. There were some body parts on the snow, and a headless body sitting in the front part of the plane. The smell was awful. They were both horrified, and in a hurry to get away from it, when she stumbled over a charred leather bag. It was heavy, and she hurt her foot. It made him curious, so he opened it. And that was when they found the coins.
“There were hundreds of them,” Eric said, a faraway look in his eyes. “Gold coins, sewn into individual pockets in long strips folded over on each other. It was like… treasure. We’d found it; it was ours.”
So they’d hauled the coins down the glacier and back to Newenham. Eric was all for selling them for the weight of the gold; it would be easy enough in Alaska. Lydia knew something about coins, though, and she made him wait while she wrote letters and waited for replies. It took most of six months, by which time the Japanese had invaded Attu and Kiska, and Alaska was really and truly at war. He joined the army and left Lydia and the gold coins behind. When he got back, four years later, she had married Stanley Tompkins the month after Eric had left, and already had one kid.
“I always wondered about Betsy,” Eric said. He gave Moses a covert look. “I made it my business to look up her birthday. The time was about right. I figured then, I owed it to Lydia to leave her and the coins alone. And then I met Mary, and I did good for myself and for her, and, well, I didn’t think about those damn coins anymore.”
You were just married and starting a family, Liam thought. The entire world was recovering from the war. Sure, you didn’t think about the coins.
“The years went by, good years,” Eric said. “And then Mary died. And my life was over.”
Or that’s what he’d thought, until Lydia came knocking at his door three months after they’d put Mary into the ground. Stan Sr. had been dead four years by then, of course. She was lonely, she said. She knew he was, too. Seemed foolish to be lonely when they lived right down the road from each other, and had known each other for so long, and at one time so well.
For four months everything was wonderful. The overwhelming ache of loneliness receded, and Lydia astonished Eric by showing him that he was still interested in sex. They left Newenham separately and met in Anchorage for the Fourth of July holiday; she stowed away on theMary M. and they motored down to Chichagof Cape and back one sunny July week; they went over to Egegik to his grandmother’s fish camp and skinny-dipped in the lagoon like they were kids again. It was a halcyon four months.
And then he had to go and ruin things by proposing. She wouldn’t marry him. She didn’t want to marry again, not after Stan.
That was when he realized that Lydia really had loved Stan, that she had most probably never loved him. That was when he realized that Betsy probably was Stan’s child, after all. That was when he realized that Lydia hadn’t waited even a month after he’d joined up before she slept with another man.
He still loved her, but sneaking around, as fun as it had been in the beginning, didn’t look attractive in the long term. Marriage or nothing, he said. Nothing, she said.
“That was when you went on the toot,” Moses said. “We all thought it was some kind of delayed reaction from Mary dying.”
Drunk seemed to be the easiest way to get through it, so Eric did his best to drink the town dry. Even that wasn’t enough.
Then they found the wreck of the C-47. And the arm. And the gold coin. The memory of the night the plane had crashed and he and Lydia had hiked up the glacier returned full-force. He’d forgotten it, until he saw the coin.
He went to her house and told her. Maybe we should tell, she said. No, he said. He was a town councilman, a city father; he had the respect of everyone in Newenham. You did until you fell down a bottle, she said. He slapped her. She slapped him back, and called him names. He grabbed her and shook her, and she fought and pulled away and tripped and fell against the counter. He was just trying to calm her down, trying to talk some sense into her. And then she was dead.