Nothing Gold Can Stay Read online

  Weary River next, in and out in twenty minutes, then a flyover of Russell, where she just missed putting the mailbag onto Devon Russell’s roof. Devon shook a friendly fist at her, and Wy ran up and back on the prop pitch in reply. It would have to be the Super Cub next Wednesday, when the mail had to be picked up as well as dropped off.

  Then the longest hop, north by northwest fifty miles to Kagati Lake. Half an hour on the ground and she could head for home. She checked her airspeed and then her watch, and grinned. She’d be back in Newenham by five o’clock.

  Banker’s hours.

  Liam drove to work in a distracted frame of mind, mostly because he’d left his mind at home. Living with Wy did that to him. Or not living with Wy, or whatever the hell it was they were doing.

  Take the books. They were all over the house. There was a copy ofHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the bathroom, which she and Tim were reading simultaneously, different-colored sticky notes marking each other’s places.The Human Factor by David Beattie sat on the kitchen counter, a book that after the first careless perusal Liam never picked up again, as it dealt with the hazards of planes and the flying of. On the coffee table in the living room sat a beat-up British paperback edition ofRound the Bend, a book that in spite of also being about flying Liam liked very much, possibly because the narrator was a mechanic and a good one and worked very hard to see that the planes he worked on never broke in the air. Liam was convinced that every plane he was on was going to break in the air.

  In the bedroom there wereEthan Frome, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, andPersuasion, from evidence of bookmarks being read simultaneously.

  Liam read a lot, too, mostly history and poetry, but he’d never had books stacked back to back all going at once the way Wy did. He was pretty sure she had kept every book she’d ever read, too; there were bookcases in every room of the house including the bathroom, all flavors, essays by Carl Sagan, historical romances by Thomas B. Costain, the entire Oz collection.

  He’d found her weeping one day the previous week, huddled over a much-thumbed copy of a mystery, one of a series. In this one the heroine’s lover had died. She took it as a personal affront-“I can’t believe she did that! How could she do that?”-and threw the book across the room, only to retrieve it a moment later and force him to listen to her read the death scene out loud. He was amazed at how involved she became in the story, and a little amused, but he was afraid that if he made some smart remark the next time she’d throw the book at him, so he kept his mouth shut.

  It was something else to know about her, something they hadn’t gotten around to sharing in that brief time they had had together three years before, something he could add to his growing store of information. He wanted to know everything about her, every single thing, from the way her toes curled when he bit the sole of her foot to the way she played air mandolin with John Hiatt, to the way she mothered Tim, the adopted son in the room down the hall.

  A green Chevy Suburban pulled out suddenly from a side street and wavered from center line to shoulder, put on a brief spurt of speed, slowed down, speeded up again.

  Well, hell. Liam hit the lights and the siren.

  The Suburban put on another burst of speed and, just about the time he thought he might have a Hollywood car chase on his hands, screeched over to the side of the road and slammed on the brakes, skidding another four feet in the loose gravel before coming to a halt somewhat perpendicular to the line of traffic.

  Liam got out of the Blazer. The driver got out of the Suburban. “Stay in your vehicle, ma’am,” Liam said, but she ignored him, walking toward him with a step as straight as the course she had been driving.

  He sighed. But this day had begun with such promise, he thought, struggling to master a reminiscent grin when the woman reached him. The smell of alcohol got to him first.

  She stopped four feet away, glaring at him and weaving a little on her feet. This time he had no trouble holding back a smile. “Amelia, did you have breakfast at the Breeze Inn again?”

  “Damn right,” she said, blinking rapidly, as if trying and failing to focus. “I can do anything I wanna, I’m the councilman’s wife.”

  “Yes, you are,” Liam said, taking her by one arm.

  She pulled free. “You know which councilman?” she said belligerently.

  “Yes,” he said, taking her arm again.

  “That’s Councilman Darren Gearhart,” she said. “H-a-r-t.Noe. ”

  “Yes,” he said. This time she followed him to the passenger door of the Blazer.

  “I’m his wife,” she said as he sat her down. She leaned back against the headrest and fell asleep as easily and instantly as a child.

  “Amelia, Amelia, Amelia,” he said. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”

  The letter of the law required that he take her into custody.

  So he took her to Bill.

  TWO

  Kagati Lake, September 1

  Opal Nunapitchuk was a happy woman. Fifty-six years old, with three children and eight grandchildren, she was the postmistress of the tiny (population thirty-four in summer) village of Kagati Lake. A corner of her living room, furnished with a wooden counter polished smooth by forty years of elbows and a cubbyholed shelf fixed to the wall, was devoted to the getting and sending of letters, magazine subscriptions, bank statements, utility bills, Mother’s Day cards and birthday and Christmas packages between the citizens of Kagati Lake and the outside world, and to the upholding of the generally fine standards of the United States Postal Service. People could sneer all they wanted to, but in Opal’s opinion the best federal service her taxes provided was the post office and priority mail (delivery guaranteed in two days for three dollars and twenty cents). She loved being the bearer of good tidings, and she was ready with Russian tea and Yupik sympathy when the tidings were bad. She was a thoroughly round peg in a thoroughly round hole and she knew it.

  The residents of Kagati Lake, like those of any small Bush village, relied almost entirely on the United States Postal Service to keep them in touch with their friends and families and, indeed, with the rest of the nation and the world itself. Frequently it supplied more than that, in ways the Inspector General of the Postal Service had never dreamed. Mark Pestrikoff had engaged himself to be married and, deciding a one-room plywood and tarpaper shack might not put his best foot forward with his new bride, had flown into Anchorage, bought the makings for a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house and mailed it home. He didn’t have time for the Nushagak River to thaw, he’d told Opal, and postage was cheaper than freight anyway. Construction on the house had lasted longer than the marriage. Mark was still working on the former. Opal had just yesterday taken shipment of two five-gallon buckets of Sheetrock mud, C.O.D., and they sat on Opal’s porch, tagged and waiting for Mark to pick them up.

  Dave Aragon called his orders into Johnson Tire by radio, and in due course tires appeared at the post office, studded snow tires for winter driving and street tires for summer, although the only road in Kagati Lake was the ten-mile stretch between the lake and the dump, and it was neither paved nor maintained during the winter, so Dave didn’t really need the snow tires. Hell, he didn’t really need the truck, as the village sat right on the lake. People got around in boats during the summer and on snow machines during the winter. Half the people in Kagati Lake had no driver’s license.

  And of course groceries came in by air. You could always tell when someone had made a Costco run to Anchorage by the way boxes of Campbell’s soup and pilot bread flooded in, always with the General Mail Facility’s postmark on them. Opal spared a sympathetic thought for the people at the post office at Anchorage International Airport. They were people who earned their paychecks. She’d heard that on April 15 they dedicated employees full-time to standing on the road leading into the post office just to accept income tax filings. After that, she started staying open late on April 15 herself, so she wouldn’t feel like a slacker.

  Opal s
prayed Pledge on the counter and paused for a moment to admire the flex of muscle in her upper arm. Not many women her age could display a muscle that firm, an upper arm that toned. No sagging, no spare flesh, just a smooth covering of muscle and bone. She flexed once more, shook her shining cap of hair into place and swept the dustcloth over the counter. It had been made of burlwood from a gnarled old spruce felled on Josh Demske’s homestead, and hand-hewn by her father into the counter she sold stamps over today. She was proud of the workmanship, and of the family history embodied in the dark brown sheen of the wood.

  Her living room was filled with mementos of family and friends, most of them Alaskan in origin and some very valuable. There was the pair of ivory tusks carved with walrus heads and polished to a high gloss, yellowing now with age. A nugget of gold out of Kagati Creek, a rough lump the size of her youngest grandchild’s fist. A series of Yupik, Aleut and Inupiat masks, wonderfully carved and adorned with beads and feathers, human spirits laughing out of animal eyes. There was an upright, glass-fronted case filled with old rifles, too; one of which was said to have been brought north by Wyatt Earp when he took the marshal’s job in Nome. A mustard-yellow upright piano, ivory keys worn to the touch, occupied the place of honor in one corner.

  Of all her children, her daughter Pearl was the nearest to her heart, and the most accomplished on the piano. She was with the rest of the family at fish camp now, and would not be home for long before going Outside to school. Opal sighed, sad and worried at once. She and Leonard had done their best; home schooling with an insistence of a B or better average, a firm grounding in the Methodist faith. Each of the children could skin a beaver, roast a moose heart, kill a bear, reduce the trajectory of a bullet fired from a.30-06 rifle to mathematical formula, even allowing for drift. They could bake bread, grow potatoes, keep a radio schedule, perform CPR, read. Opal just didn’t know how many of those skills would prove useful to Pearl Outside. The boys had chosen to remain home and take up the subsistence lifestyle of their parents, fishing, hunting, trapping. Andy and Joe had married girls from Koliganek and Newenham, respectively, although Newenham was an awfully big city compared to Kagati Lake and Opal and Leonard worried over how Sarah would settle in. Both boys had built homes north of their parents’ homestead, proving up on their state land in three years instead of the required seven. She was proud of them both, although she tried not to show it too much. She didn’t want the boys to get swelled heads.

  She tried not to think of Ruby, her second daughter and fourth child, and as always, she failed. So she was glad when the door to the living room opened. She looked up. “Come on, you know the mail plane won’t be here until eleven, I-oh.”

  A man she had never seen before stood in the doorway, short, stocky, dressed in faded blue jeans and a dark blue windbreaker. A red bandanna was tied round his forehead in a failed attempt to discipline a tremendous bush of dirty grayish blond hair that repeated itself in tufts curling out from the neck of his shirt and the cuffs of his sleeves. He carried a dark blue interior frame pack, fabric stained and worn at the seams with long use, with a shot gun in a sheath fastened to the back.

  Opal was used to waiting on hermits, as this area of the Bush supported more than its share, and she smiled, teeth very white in her tanned and healthy face. “Hi there,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  He looked around the room slowly and carefully, missing nothing, and suddenly the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

  “Nice place you’ve got here.” His voice was rough, almost rusty-sounding, as if he didn’t talk much and wasn’t used to it when he did.

  “Thanks,” she said, watching him. “My father built it. Felled the logs, finished them, built the place from the ground up.”

  “He the collector?” The man walked over to the nugget, sitting in a place of honor on a little table of its own.

  It was nothing a hundred other people hadn’t done over the years, but all at once Opal was realizing that she was all alone in the house, and pretty much alone in the village, as most people were at fish camp, waiting for the last salmon of the season to make it this far north. Her husband and children weren’t due back until the weekend. “Yes. What can I help you with? Did you want to check general delivery for mail? I’ll need to see some identification.”

  He touched the nugget with one forefinger, moved on to a hair clasp made from ivory and baleen in the shape of a whale. “No, you won’t have to do that.” He swung his pack down from his shoulders and pulled out a pistol. He didn’t aim it at her, or even in her general direction, let it hang at the end of his arm, dangling at his side.

  “You have to come with me,” he said, and smiled at her.

  Newenham, September 1

  Bill’s Bar and Grill was one of those prefabricated buildings common in the Alaskan Bush, housing post offices, ranger stations, grocery stores, trooper posts and not a few private homes. The roof was always tin, the siding always plastic in blue or green or brown, the front porch always cedar that weathered gray in a year. Insulation was problematic at best, as during winter the metal siding contracted and shrank from doors and window frames alike, resulting in enormous heating bills. In summer, windows had the occasional alarming habit of bursting unexpectedly from their frames, and doors either wouldn’t open in the first place or wouldn’t close again if they did.

  September was a good time for the prefabs, neither too cold nor too hot. Bill’s had a chipper, almost cheerful air. The front porch was swept, the windows clean, the neon beer signs glowing and the last of the nasturtiums bursting into bloom next to the porch. Liam escorted Amelia Gearhart up the stairs and in the door. Bill was washing glasses behind the bar. “Oh hell,” she said when she saw them coming. She was over sixty, silver of hair, blue of eye and zaftig. She knew it, too, and today had chosen to accent her manifest charms with blue jeans cinched in at the waist by a woven leather belt and a tight pink T-shirt which purported to advertise last May’s Jazz Festival in New Orleans but which really was advertising Bill.

  Moses Alakuyak sat at the bar. Too tall for a Yupik, eyes too Asian for a white, he was a mongrel and gloried in it. “Ever see a purebred dog, missy?” he’d been heard to tell some poor tourist who had wandered in off the Newenham street. “Nervous, stupid, half the time got them some epilepsy or hip problems or some other goddamn thing. Always barking, always jumping on you or whoever else is in range, can’t trust them around kids or anybody else, either. Give me a good old Heinz 57 mutt every time for smarts and good manners.” He’d glared down at the hapless tourist. “Same goes for people. Mongrel horde, my ass. We’ll inherit the earth, not the goddamn meek.”

  The tourist had murmured something soothing and drifted slowly but surely out the door. Anyone in Newenham could have told her she was in no danger; Mount Moses in full eruption was a common sight, worthy of attention and respect, but it was never necessary to get the women and children off the streets.

  “Married five months,” Moses said, looking at Amelia, “and now she’s drinking her breakfast.” He said something in Yupik that sounded less than complimentary. Amelia wasn’t too drunk to understand, and colored to the roots of her hair.

  “Knock it off, Moses,” Bill said. She looked at Liam. “What do you want to do, Liam?”

  He sighed and looked around the bar. It was empty except for them, but it was going on ten-thirty and it wouldn’t be long before the lunch crowd showed. “Hell, Bill, I don’t know. This is the third time this week.”

  “Want to swear out an arrest warrant?”

  An arrest warrant. State of Alaska, plaintiff, versus Amelia Gearhart, defendant. To any peace officer or other authorized person, you are commanded to arrest the defendant and bring the defendant before the nearest available judicial officer without unnecessary delay to answer to a complaint/information/indictment charging the defendant with violation of Alaska Statute 28.35.030, driving a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol. If Liam requested one, Bill would
sign it; hell, she wouldn’t even have to take Liam’s oath, Amelia was her own worst prosecution witness. The criminal process would begin, he would arrest Amelia, Bill would set bail and order Amelia to court, and she would be charged, arraigned, tried, convicted and sentenced. DWI was a Class A misdemeanor and carried a mandatory sentence and fine. More important, she would have a record, and penalties escalated for repeat offenders.

  He looked at her. She was just a kid, seventeen years old, a devout Moravian who had dropped out of school to marry without her parents’ approval. Her husband saw no reason for marriage to interfere with his previous lifestyle, which had included the determined chasing of skirts as far up the Nushagak as Butch Mountain. He spent more time in the bag than out of it and never refused a fight, and Liam knew it was only a matter of time before he had to pick up Darren on his own DWI. He’d won election to the city council by standing rounds for the regulars at Bill’s and the Breeze for a week straight before the voters went to the polls, and had thus far spent most of his time in office trying to change the local ordinance governing bar closing hours, at present set at two a.m., to five a.m.

  Amelia stumbled in place, and her hair fell back from one cheek. Moses’ lips tightened into a thin line, and Liam stretched out a hand to raise Amelia’s chin, revealing a bruise high up on her left cheek. “Did Darren hit you, Amelia?” he said.