“At least it isn’t snowing anymore,” Jo said, refilling coffee mugs all around.
A timer dinged and Bridget opened the oven door. The heavenly aroma of Bisquick coffee cake wafted through the room. Jim and Luke were sitting on the couch with their feet propped on the coffee table, Liam in the armchair. Jo replaced the coffeepot and perched on a stool at the counter next to Wy. Bridget cut the cake into squares and handed the squares around on saucers. For a while the only sounds were the dulcet growlings of Bob Edwards on the radio, the creaking of the house beneath the undiminished onslaught of wind, and grunts of pleasure as the coffee cake went down. Bridget was complimented lavishly all around, and she put her finger in her chin and curtsied in response.
Prince paced restlessly in front of the windows, until Liam said, “Why don’t you go on down to the post?”
“What for?”
He shrugged. “Somebody might call in a triple homicide.”
“Like we could respond in this,” she said, but she picked up her hat.
When the door shut behind her Jim said, “What a hot dog.”
Liam gave a tolerant shrug. “She’s smart and quick and ambitious. All she needs is a little seasoning.”
“She had two different homicides, one a multiple, the first day she got here,” Jo said. “She got her name in the paper and everything.”
“Thanks to you,” Liam said.
Jo refused to curtsy, but she did bow her head in arrogant acceptance of what wasn’t exactly an accolade. “In fact, you both did.”
“Yeah, I was thrilled.”
Jo snorted. “If you didn’t want your name in the paper, you shouldn’t have become a trooper.”
“More coffee, anyone?” Bridget said brightly.
Jo gave Wy a long look. Wy wasn’t talking much, and she noticed that her friend was keeping to the opposite side of whatever part of the room Liam was in. She wondered what had happened out at Nenevok Creek. She noticed Jim looking at Liam and wondering the same thing.
Bridget was still standing in front of her with the coffeepot and a smile. “Sorry,” Jo said, and held out her mug. “Sure, and thanks.”
Wy and Liam had come in separately the night before, and had exchanged perhaps ten words total before Liam went out to his camper for the night. There was no sneaking back in, either, not that there would have to be with Tim out of town. It wasn’t like there hadn’t been plenty of noise already to contend with from the back bedroom, she thought acidly. Not that she hadn’t done her best to put Luke through his paces on the living room couch.
She looked at Luke. She should have known better. Beautiful men, like beautiful women, knew that their faces were their fortune. They didn’t have to do anything but be beautiful. Luke, it must be admitted, was extremely beautiful, but beauty went only so far in bed, and even less far out of bed.
Bridget was beautiful, too, but she was also smart and funny. Jo hated to admit it, but Jim’s taste in the opposite sex might be better than her own. “So you think Rebecca Hanover killed her husband and ran off because she didn’t like being stuck out in the Bush for three months?” she said out loud.
“That’s not for publication, Jo,” Liam said sternly.
Jo’s fair skin, the bane of her existence, flushed right up to the roots of her hair. “I heard you the first time,” she said between clenched teeth.
He examined her expression for a moment, and then, amazingly, backed down. “I know. I’m sorry, Jo.”
She managed a brief nod, and to salvage her pride added, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t write about it. But I won’t use anything you tell us here today without your say-so.” She looked at Wy, who was glaring at Liam.
“I know,” Liam said again.
“I thought Woodward and Bernstein used two sources for every story,” Jim said.
Jo appreciated the effort he was making to lighten the air. “They did.”
“You don’t?”
She matched his effort. “Not if the first source is a state trooper with twelve years on the job and a reputation for upholding truth, justice and the American way.”
There was a round of nervous laughter. Everybody looked at Liam, who sighed. “Yeah, okay.” He looked at Wy, who was studiously examining her coffee mug. His lips tightened.
“From the beginning,” Jo prompted him. She didn’t know what was going on there, but she was willing to act like the lightning rod for the time being.
Liam didn’t strike. Instead, he told the story simply, beginning with the Mayday intercepted by the Alaska Airlines flight deck crew and his and Prince’s arrival at the scene. He put together the case against Engebretsen and Kvichak in clipped, disinterested terms, including their passionate denials.
“I never met anyone who was arrested who ever was guilty of anything,” Jo observed.
“Yeah. I know.”
Liam’s smile was thin and strained, and Wy tried not to feel guilty. What else could I do? she thought. He had to know. Maybe he’s right, I should have told him sooner, but it’s only five months since I saw him again, only a month that we’ve been together.
She thought back to the afternoon at the mining camp. I love you, Wy, Liam had said, and so she had told him, then and there, and he, at first disbelieving and then enraged, had stalked up to the cabin in a huff, ostensibly to search for evidence to help solve the mystery of Mark Hanover’s murder but really, she knew full well, to put her far enough out of reach that he wouldn’t be tempted to deck her.
She didn’t blame him, but she wouldn’t fall into the trap of blaming herself, either, not a second time. Shit happens. You can’t let it define you, you can’t let it define the rest of your life. She hadn’t, and she wouldn’t let him do so, either.
Jo’s voice recalled her to the present. “But you still don’t like them for it.”
The trooper shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right. Why’d they call in the Mayday? According to Wy the Hanovers weren’t due to be picked up until Labor Day. If they did it, they could have left the body lying where it was, ready for the nearest grizzly to wander out of the woods and eat the evidence.”
“In that case, where’s Rebecca?” Jo said.
Labor Day, Wy thought, and remembered the last time she’d delivered supplies to Nenevok Creek. Three fishermen getting restive as she fought the cargo netting and the bungee cords. Rebecca watching with a wistful expression on her face, arms cradling the stack of magazines Wy had brought in for her. Mark Hanover coming up the path and-oh. “Oh hell,” Wy said.
Everyone looked at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said sheepishly. “I totally forgot.”
“What?” Liam said.
“The fishermen were in a hurry to get to the lodge and I was humping it to get the plane unloaded and we’d hit an air pocket on the way in and the cargo had shifted a little in flight, you know, just enough to wedge itself into-”
“Wy,” Liam said. “What did you forget?”
Wy took a deep breath. “The last time I made a supply run into Nenevok Creek, Mark Hanover pulled me to one side and said they might need another order of supplies, a big one this time. Like I said, my passengers were in a hurry and I wasn’t paying much attention. I told him to get me a list and he said he would and we took off.”
There was a brief, electric silence.
“You only just remembered this now?” Liam said.
“I’m sorry,” Wy said helplessly. I’ve had other things on my mind, she thought, and knew by the shift of expression on his face that he had seen that thought reflected in her eyes.
“A big order of supplies,” Jo said, her eyes bright, her nose all but twitching. “At the end of the summer? Nobody orders supplies at the end of the summer. You’re just inviting the bears in, leaving a bunch of food sitting around your cabin.”
“Unless,” Liam said.
“Unless,” Jim said, “you’re ordering up enough to see you through the winter in that cabin.”