Spoils of the dead Page 5

  She dropped down to fly low and slow at a hundred feet above the strip, and even on this clear, calm day there were thermals enough to raise a few bumps. It would be an interesting approach in real weather. A couple of kids ran out of their houses and waved furiously. She waggled her wings and was up and over the ridge to the east, which revealed a much longer, narrower body of water forcing its way far more deeply into the Kenai Mountains. According to the chart this was called Mussel Bay, Wy assumed for the obvious reason, with a small town perched on its northeast shore.

  Kapilat was a comparatively substantial community of three hundred people, with a summer population that filled the vacation homes built on pilings along the opposite shore, some of which harbored pretensions of McMansion status. The mountains rose around the narrow bay in four-, five-, and six-thousand-foot knife-edged peaks clad in an omnipresent layer of ice and snow that grew or receded with the season. Above the head of the bay their snowmelt emptied every summer into a small river whose flow had over the millennia carved a cramped chasm with multiple narrow falls alternating with gravel beds created by the moraines of retreating glaciers.

  Wy banked left and turned back down the bay, coming down to a hundred feet to take a look at the airstrip. Like all the other strips on this side of the Bay it was unattended and unpaved, two thousand feet carved out of the side of a foothill with a salt water slough paralleling it. There was no traffic so she dropped down for a touch and go. As in Chuwawet the thermals made themselves felt, but the surface was well-maintained and there were half a dozen hangars, which she would bet belonged to the McMansion owners on the other side of Mussel Bay. She lifted off gently at the other end and banked left over a road on a dike that divided the slough from another slough that debouched into the Bay proper. She climbed back up to a thousand feet and debated her course. There was much more of the south shore to explore, the chart showing multiple tiny coves and narrow bays and shallow lagoons.

  But across the Bay, Liam waited. Across the Bay was Blewestown, a community of ten thousand people spread along the Sterling Highway from Cook’s Point to the Wolverine River delta that formed the easternmost end of the bay. Blewestown’s primary reason for being was the aforementioned four-mile gravel spit, a spit that had been washed clean by the tidal wave that followed hard on the heels of the ’64 quake and was therefore, so to speak, open for business. From the sale of Alaska to the US in 1876 to 1960, Westerners had been trying to make a living in and around Blewestown without much success. There was gold, but nothing to compare to the Klondike or Nome. Fox farms and cattle ranches came in with fanfare and failed in obscurity.

  The biography of the town’s namesake had made for an entertaining read. George Blewes had been the third lieutenant on HMS Endeavour when Captain Cook sailed into the now eponymous Cook Inlet. In 1896 his descendant, Albert Owen Blewes, of whom report held that he never walked a straight line where a crooked one was available to him, began his career in his native land with multiple petty thefts while he was still at school. Returned forthwith to his appalled parents, he continued with the selling of legal documents proprietary to the London solicitor to whom he was apprenticed, embezzlement of the shipping firm where he was later, albeit briefly, employed, and an illegitimate child. This last had evidently been the proverbial straw, as immediately thereafter his family handed him a one-way ticket to New York and did not wave their tear-stained handkerchiefs from the shore as he sailed from Southampton, off to make his fortune in the New World. Wy wondered what had happened to the child.

  In New York City, Blewes spent his first year in America leasing land in Wyoming to which he held no title. Fortuitously for Blewes, right about then gold was discovered in the Yukon and like all good confidence men of that day Albert yielded to its siren song and lit out for the territory of Alaska, by all accounts one step ahead of the bloodhounds. In Dawson City, sticking to what worked for him, he made a fair bit of money leasing gold prospects he did not own. As was his invariable habit, he beat feet out of Dawson one step ahead of the law, arrived in Nome to spend just enough time for Wyatt Earp to issue him a blue ticket south, and rode Alaska Steam down and around the west coast to the Kenai Peninsula, where in 1910 he was put forcibly ashore in Chungasqak Bay for nonpayment of gambling debts. Later he claimed that the voice of his lauded ancestor had called out to him from the very shores.

  Always a charmer, as grifters invariably are, he managed to raise enough of a stake to buy most of the land at the head of the spit and much of the spit itself, after which he created a real estate prospectus filled with beautiful pictures and exclamatory phrases like “Thick stands of virgin timber as far as the eye can see!” and “Land so fertile it will support any crop!” He talked himself aboard the next Alaska Steam ship bound for Seattle and took a train back to New York City where, against the better judgment of all the people who remembered him from his last visit, he sold everything he held even partial title to in Blewestown and much that he didn’t. The only thing he left behind was his name on the town, because certainly he never saw it again.

  For the next hundred years the prospectors and fox farmers and the cattle ranchers came and went, while the fishermen came and some of them stayed, but Blewestown remained the Bay’s stepchild, no more than a fuel stop for the steamships who put into the one dock, where the tracks of the little railroad which began in the coal seams of the bluffs ended.

  And then in 1960 the highway was built, and the 1964 earthquake destroyed the infrastructure of Kapilat, and Blewestown’s fortunes began to rise in almost exact proportion to the falling fortunes of the communities across the Bay. The Blewestown Chamber of Commerce website listed a dozen halibut charters, almost thirty restaurants, and over a hundred bed-and-breakfasts, attesting to its place as a tourist destination for locals and Outsiders alike. There was a thriving arts community, including painters, potters, and a musical population big enough to support a chamber orchestra, a jazz band, several rock bands, at least a dozen folk music groups, and an annual music festival that brought musicians in from all over the state and all over the country. A local luthier hosted workshops in building stringed instruments to apprentices from all over the world. There was a fifty-bed hospital and half a dozen clinics, four dentists, three veterinarians, and—Wy counted—two coffee roasters and six coffee shops if you included the drive-throughs. There was even a Starbucks. In the local Safeway, but still. For someone coming from a town of two thousand with no road, this was big-city living with style.

  Along with tourism and the arts, Blewestown was the market town for the Bay, where everyone came to buy food, building supplies, and get their hair cut. The mirror image, in fact, of Kapilat sixty years before. There had to be some feelings about that locally.

  Wy saw the humpback cow and calf she’d heard the chatter about. They were swimming a lazy circle, until they passed into water cast into the shade by the mountain next to it. With a sigh she left them behind and set a course for the tip of the Spit.

  It was a twelve-minute flight from Kapilat to Blewestown, following the string of islands off the south shore before turning left to catch the tip of the Spit and follow it inland. A drilling platform sat on three legs halfway up the Bay. At this distance it looked only parked, not in operation.

  The Blewestown airport (so dignified because it had an intermittent ATC presence and was paved) was seven thousand feet long. Under “Obstructions” the AOPA directory warned of moose and seagulls. Since birds were the bane of every Alaskan pilot Wy kept her head on a swivel. She saw a bald eagle and a five-member flock of sandhill cranes but no seagulls and thankfully no moose during her descent.

  The airport consisted of a commercial hangar on the north edge, deserted at present because the latest in a string of fly-by-night commercial carriers had filed for Chapter 11 and stopped regularly scheduled service between Blewestown and Anchorage from one day to the next. A distance down the apron was an FBO, a fixed base operator, servicing privately owned aircraft. Tod
ay it had a small jet parked next to it, a Gulfstream, she thought.

  The south edge was lined with private hangars and two that belonged to two air taxi services, which made absolutely no sense, as people flying in from the south shore communities would then need transportation to go all the way around the airport to catch a flight to Anchorage. It probably had to do with the federal dollars used to build all US airports. Nonsense in Alaska always came back to the requirements placed on the spending of federal dollars there.

  There was also a seaplane base on a shallow lake that paralleled the runway, host to several flightseeing services. That much she saw before 68 Kilo kissed the tarmac of Blewestown Airport’s in a runway paint job. She let the craft run out of steam with only a gentle application of the brakes—there was plenty of room, after all—and when 68 Kilo had slowed down to a walking pace kicked the rudder over to turn around and go find her man.

  She saw him instantly. She always did. He was standing next to a brand shiny new pickup truck parked next to 78 Zulu. It said something of her besotted state that she didn’t spare a glance for the Super Cub.

  She couldn’t just see Liam’s smile from a thousand feet away, she could feel it. She always could. She made her way sedately to the tie-down and swung the tail around. She shut off the engine and the prop slowed and stopped. He caught the door in his hand as she opened it. “Hey.”

  She returned his smile with one of her own that seemed to light her face from within. Did he look like that when he looked at her? He pulled her down from the aircraft and onto the tarmac and at long, long last into his arms.

  “Hey backatcha,” she said, sounding breathless, her face turned up to his.

  He looked at her for a long moment, his hands on her waist, her full, lush body firm against his, his own body already reacting because ’twas ever thus. “I missed you.”

  Her eyes roamed over him, hungry for every detail. The thick brown hair that gleamed with reddish lights fell over eyes so dark a blue they were like the sea at twilight. His nose was arrogant, his chin obstinate, his carriage commanding. He was tall and broad-shouldered and long-legged and drew the world’s attention just by moving through it.

  And he was smart, and funny, and kind. He was her lover and her best friend and her warm oasis in the indifferent desert that would be life without him. She could see his pulse beating in his throat and touched her fingers to it. “‘I am to see to it that I do not lose you.’”

  “What?” he said, deafened by the look in her eyes.

  “Nothing. Just me channeling my inner Whitman. I missed you, too, Liam. Every day.” She stood on her tiptoes, deliberately rubbing her body against his, and murmured against his mouth, “And every night.”

  With a will of their own his hands slid down over her ass and pulled her in tight against him and he forgot the world until someone gave a loud wolf whistle and someone else yelled, “Get a room!”

  He pulled back to see that she was flushed and laughing. Neither of them cared enough to look around to see who was making fun of them. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  “Does it have a bed?”

  “Clean sheets and everything.”

  She stood on tiptoe and nipped at his bottom lip. “Take me there.”

  Six

  Tuesday, September 3

  HE WOKE EARLY AS HE ALMOST ALWAYS did, no matter how active the day—or night—before had been. In spite of the unfamiliar surroundings he knew immediately where he was and who was sleeping next to him. He turned to look at her, a graceful sprawl of woman, face down, a tumble of bronze hair, brown eyes closed. One arm tucked beneath her pillow revealed a plump curve of breast, right knee raised—he couldn’t help himself and he didn’t even try, raising his head to look at the dark mystery that upraised knee revealed. He did more than look. He positively gloated over all of the richness that was his to rediscover, exploit, debauch. He rolled up on his elbow to place a soft kiss at the base of her spine and was rewarded with a long, sensuous moan. He was already hard but that sound, man. Everything stood even more to attention.

  “I can’t,” she said, voice muffled. “I’m dead. I am officially dead.” She glared at him through her hair. “Killed dead by you, specifically.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and knelt behind her, lifting her to her knees.

  “Liam.”

  “Uh-huh.” He slid one hand down her belly and between her legs.

  “Liam.”

  “I’m starving,” she said.

  “We did miss dinner,” he said.

  Explaining to each other why meant breakfast was even later. They ate it in bed. “Is Barton going to be pissed because you weren’t in the office by eight?”

  He licked the marmalade from her fingers. “I’m not officially on duty until Monday.” He kissed her, enjoying the flavors of butter and orange and toast. And Wy. She was glowing. He didn’t doubt that he was, too, and wouldn’t have had a problem exhibiting that glow before anyone passing by. Preferably with his clothes on, but still.

  “Yeah, but I know you. And I wish I didn’t know him.”

  “What about you? What are your plans for the day?”

  “I could just stay in bed. God knows I’ve earned it.”

  He laughed down deep in his throat.

  She kissed him, stopping the laugh. He was perfectly willing to shove the plates to the floor and push her back down on the sheets. It was a good look on her.

  She laughed and slipped away from him. “My plans are to do form, shower, get dressed, and explore this new place you’ve dragged me to.”

  He caught her hand. “Dragged?”

  Her expression softened. She leaned down to kiss him. “Joke. Not a very good one, evidently.”

  He was still wary. “Sure?”

  She nuzzled his nose. “Too much bad history in Newenham. I was glad to leave it in the rear view. Pretty sure Tim felt the same.”

  There was more to it than that and they both knew it, but she wanted him to let it go, so he did. “You picking up your new car today?”

  “It’s twelve years old with 103,000 miles on it. Not exactly new.”

  “What did the shop say?”

  “The guy said everything under the hood is good to go. Says there’s a few parking lot dings and a chip in the windshield, but that’s all cosmetic.” She shrugged. “And, you know. It’s a Subaru. It’ll go until it drops.”

  “About every third car I’ve seen on the road here is a Subaru,” he said. “Usually a Forester.”

  “It is the state car.”

  “True.”

  They did form together on the deck, Liam watching her for cues because she’d been at it a lot longer than he had. They went through the thirty-two movements three times and as they straightened into Conclusion a bird called from the stretch of yard in front of them. Liam lost concentration and with it his balance. He put out a quick foot before he fell on his face and looked toward the call. Two sandhill cranes were stalking around like they owned the place. With their long legs and necks they looked like ungainly relics of the Jurassic Age. Which they were, as were all birds. But they weren’t ravens, so there was that.

  They admired their new view over a second cup of coffee. The house was one story, a rectangle thirty feet wide by fifty feet long. The long side stood twenty feet back from the edge of the tall bluff that overlooked all of Blewestown, the Bay, the glaciers, and the Kenai Mountains. On a clear day if they looked right they could probably see Kodiak.

  Inside the house was an open floor plan, a large central room including kitchen, dining and living room. The master suite was on the left and two more bedrooms with a bathroom between were on the right. An arctic entryway faced the driveway with a guest bath just inside the door. A wooden deck ran the length of the house on the bluff side. The floors were wood laminate over radiant heat and the ceilings were vaulted. Wy got out her phone and pulled up the calculator app. “This house is almost exactly four times as big as my house in Newenham.”
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  “It is a little palatial,” Liam said, thinking about all the places he’d lived in Newenham. He’d slept in his office for way too long, moved from there to a boat in the small boat harbor that was literally sinking out from under him, and from there to a Jayco pop-up camper in Wy’s driveway. Wy finally showed mercy and let him move in, and while her bed was only full size she was in it so no complaints. Here the bed was a California king, and also had Wy in it. He hoped he wasn’t looking too smug. He was certainly feeling it.

  “Not palatial. Just roomier. But homey. I like the living room furniture. Squashy.” She kissed him. “It’s not often that the reality is better than the pictures on Zillow.”

  “True.” He savored the kiss. “You know, there’s no real reason for us to leave the house at all today—”

  His phone went off. The ringtone was Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Everything He Needs.” He looked up to see Wy making a kissy face at him. She must have changed it when he was in the shower.

  He looked down at the screen and sighed. And of course it was Barton. Not a day went by that wasn’t made better by a phone call from his boss.

  Wy saw the name on Liam’s phone and prudently moved herself out of the blast zone.

  “Hello, John,” he said, holding the phone at arm’s length.