Fire and ice (21 page)

"Works for me."

They walked into the kitchen in time to hear Wy say into the phone, "Oh, like this phone call didn't cost me a hundred and fifty bucks! Look, Harry, I'll get you the goddamn money just as soon as I get paid myself! Okay?"

She slammed down the receiver and turned to see Liam and Tim standing in the doorway watching her. "Oh hello," she said, bright smile newly polished and back in place. "Ready for some dinner?"

When Liam looked at Tim, he saw the sullen look had descended again like a cloud.

The Constance Demby CD ended. Bon Jovi's Keeping the Faith blared out in its place. In spite of himself Liam winced, and they both saw it. Even Tim laughed, and it eased the tension.

"Feed me," Liam said, and they both recognized the line from Little Shop of Horrors and laughed some more. It got them to the table in something approaching amity, and Wy served up a kind of pork sparerib stew with pea pods in a delicious sauce. When Liam asked what went into the sauce, all Wy would say is, "Secret Filipino ingredient," and it wasn't till he helped clear the table and saw the empty can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup in the garbage that he realized what it was.

"When did you learn to cook?" he asked her as she ran the sink full of hot water and soap.

"My college roommate's dad was Filipino, and a chef. I went home with her a couple of times, and Freddy would cook for us." She closed her eyes in remembered ecstasy. "Adobo, sweet and sour spareribs, long rice, bagoong. Anybody who likes to eat should have a Freddy Quijance in their life, just once."

Tim had vanished back into his room, and the sound of a thumping bass could be heard in the distance. It made Liam cringe, but it wasn't as bad as some of the car stereos he had heard driving by his house in Glenallen, so he held his peace. Wasn't his house, anyway.

Yet.

Which reminded him. "That couch of yours fold out, Wy?" he said, stirring half-and-half into his coffee. She'd even remembered that, he thought with a secret smile.

She looked up. "Why?"

"I haven't had time to look for a place."

"Where did you sleep last night?"

"In the desk chair in the troopers' office."

"Oh. Ugh." She hesitated. He waited, enjoying the play of emotion across her face. "No," she said finally.

"No, it doesn't fold out, or no, I can't sleep on it?"

"Both."

"Why not?"

"Tim," she said.

"I'm not asking to share your bed," he pointed out.

Yet.

She shook her head. "No, Liam," she said firmly. "I'm sorry, but you'll have to find another place to sleep. There's a hotel across from city hall. I know the night clerk; I could give her a call."

He wasn't going to push it, not until he was more sure of his ground. "That's okay, I'll figure something out." But that didn't mean he wasn't going to do his level best to change the situation. He reached for her hand. Her fingers curled naturally around his. Encouraged, he raised them to his lips. Her skin was warm, and he felt her pulse skip a beat. He looked up and smiled at her as he turned his mouth into her palm and nuzzled it.

"Liam." Her voice was unsteady.

He touched his tongue to the center of her palm, tracing the lines he found there. The mound at the base of her thumb was plump and tantalizing. He bit it, gently, and heard her breath catch.

"Liam!" Her free hand flashed up around his neck and pulled his face to hers. She nipped at his lower lip, ran her tongue over his teeth. He found himself on his feet, reaching out to drag her across the counter.

"Don't mind me," a voice said, and they looked up to find Tim standing in the doorway, the line of his mouth set and vulnerable.

"Tim!" Wy said, and then didn't seem to be able to think of anything else to say. She pulled free of Liam and slid to her feet. There was nothing she could do to hide the brightness of her eyes or the flush in her cheeks.

Liam didn't say anything, meeting the challenge in Tim's eyes with calm recognition and, he hoped, no answering challenge. He needed badly to rearrange the fit of his jeans, but considered it diplomatic to refrain for the moment.

"I just wanted a Coke," Tim said, and walked around Wy to the refrigerator.

By the time he was back in his room, Liam's heartbeat had slowed down to something approaching normality. Wy smoothed back her hair with a trembling hand. Liam's was a little steadier when he reached for his mug, but not much. "This is a nice house. I looked in the paper; I didn't see much for sale or for rent. How did you luck into here?"

Watching him warily, as if she was determined to thwart any effort he made to pick up where they had left off, she said, "It came with the business."

"The air taxi?"

She nodded. "The owner wanted to retire, and he put the business up for sale. One plane, a Cessna 180, the two tie-downs, a lease on a hangar, this house, and the goodwill. That, plus the Cub, is what there is of the Nushagak Air Taxi Service."

"How did you hear that it was up for sale?"

"Bob DeCreft told me."

"You knew him before?"

She nodded again. "You know how it is with Bush pilots. If you don't know them, you've heard of them."

"Which was it with the two of you?" He saw her look and sighed. "Come on, Wy. You've been close enough to the business to know how it works. I have to ask."

She held his gaze for a moment, and then looked away. "Yeah, I know how it works." She sipped at her coffee, put down the mug, and looked at him squarely. "I've known Bob DeCreft since I was a kid."

Liam did not greet this news with overt joy. He didn't want her to be so well acquainted with the victim of what might have been murder.

"You know I come from Newenham originally, more or less," she said, raising her eyebrows. He nodded. "Well, Bob was a Bush pilot, and he flew in and out of Bristol Bay on a lot of different charters, some government-related, some ANCSA'-RELATED, some both. He knew my parents, and he'd spend the night." She paused. "One day he was supposed to fly the local Native association board into Togiak or somewhere, only the weather was socked in there. So he took me up instead." She smiled, her eyes looking over his shoulder at a fond memory. "He had a Skywagon in those days, with dual controls. He let me fly her. I was hooked. From that day on, I didn't want to do anything but fly."

"How old were you?"

"Sixteen."

"But you went to college."

She shrugged, the glow fading. "It was what my parents wanted. I figured I'd do what they wanted, and then I'd do what I wanted."

"How did they take it?"

Her smile was wry. "They didn't like it much, but they got over it. They helped me buy the air taxi."

"Must have cost a bundle."

She nodded. "Pretty much. I'm in hock up to my eyebrows. It was worth it, though."

To get away from me? The question hung between them, unsaid, but she flushed a rich red in spite of it. "I didn't mean that."

He didn't say anything, and in an obvious attempt to shift the focus, she said, "And you? What have you been up to?"

Her interest was as false as her question. "Come on, Wy, you knew I was coming. Didn't you? That's why you weren't surprised when I got off the plane."

Her eyes slid away. She didn't reply. He sighed. "Yeah, well, after the mess up at Denali, Barton transferred me here."

"I didn't hear much about that, I ..." "I on purpose didn't listen," he thought she was going to say. Instead she said, "I would have thought you would want to stay in Glenallen, no matter what, and then ..." Her voice trailed off.

"And then I could see Jenny every weekend," he agreed evenly. "It wasn't up to me. John transferred me after my demotion came through, and that was that." He could have added that Barton had transferred him to Newenham because Wy was there, because their relationship had not been the secret romance they had always been confident of, but he didn't.

Her voice was low, and she wasn't looking at him. "How is she?"

"The same."

"How often are you going to get back to see her?"

"At least once a month." He studied the coffee in his mug. "We took her off the respirator."

He heard the sharp intake of her breath. "I didn't know that."

"She's fed through a tube, Wy," he said. He stated it as a fact, not a horror or a tragedy. He'd had too much time to become accustomed to his wife's physical and mental state; it no longer held any terror or disgust for him. "She wears diapers. She's home with her parents, and they've got money, so she's got twenty-four-hour care." He closed his eyes. "Do you know how long Karen Ann Quinlan lasted after they disconnected her life support?"

Her voice was infinitely gentle, infinitely sorrowful. "No."

"Nine years." He opened his eyes and tried for a smile. From her wince, he knew that he hadn't quite made it. "Nine years and change."

"Liam, I am so sorry. So very sorry."

"Yeah. Me too." He rose to his feet and took his mug over to stand in front of the window, staring unseeingly out at the vast expanse of river, roiling and tumbling and gray with glacial silt, driving forcefully for the Bay and points south. Soon it would be filled with salmon, king and silver and sockeye and humpy and dog, all driving just as purposefully upstream, fighting the current to return home to the stream in which they were spawned, there to spawn in their turn and die.

"It's different here," he said. "Hard to get used to not having mountains to bang your nose against."

"I know. The Wood Mountains start at Icky, though. It's only forty miles up the road. The blink of an eye if you fly."

"The blink of an eye," he echoed. "You know something, Wy? It constantly amazes me just how fast a life can turn to shit. I was the golden boy: straight A's straight through school, graduated college magna cum laude, I was first in my class at the Academy, I made sergeant before any of my classmates and before a lot of prior graduates, John Barton handpicked me to lead the Petersham task force, which got me headlines all the way Outside, I was headed straight up the ladder and I knew it and so did everyone else. To top everything off, just the icing on the cake, I married me a rich, beautiful, loving wife. Nothing could stop me, nothing could touch me, I had the world by the tail."

He turned to look at Wy. "And then, in the blink of an eye, I didn't."

She stared at him, stricken.

"They busted me down to trooper," he said. "Just before they transferred me here."

She said slowly, "That's what you meant yesterday, when Corcoran called you sergeant and you said no, just trooper."

"Yes."

"What happened, Liam?"

He shook his head. "Doesn't matter. Buck stopped on my desk. Barton was right to do it." He gave her a twisted grin. "So here I am, in Newenham, a trooper again, starting all over at the bottom of the ladder. My wife is in a coma four hundred miles away, and the woman I love--"

"Don't, Liam."

"The woman I love," he repeated firmly, "is up to her eyebrows in a murder." He laughed, because there wasn't anything else to do, except maybe get drunk. "Just when you thought it was safe to come back to life."

He walked back to the counter and sat across from her. "How did you come by the boy?"

She thought about that for a minute, as if she were deciding how much it was safe to tell him. He held on to his temper, and waited. "It was my first week here," she said finally, looking toward the back of the house and dropping her voice instinctively. "I flew into Ualik with the mail that morning. Jeff--Jeff Webster, he's the guy who sold the business to me--Jeff rode shotgun with me for a month before he'd let me loose in his plane on his routes. Anyway, Jeff walked me through the procedure, getting all the right signatures from the postmaster, that kind of thing, and then he went off to say good-bye to a friend of his. I went back to the airstrip to repack the plane."

She looked at him. "Have you ever been to Ualik?" Liam shook his head. "Ever been to any of the western Bush villages?"

Liam shook his head again. "I've been pretty much an urban cowboy all my professional life." He paused, and added, "Or as urban as it gets in Alaska."

She nodded. "I didn't think so. It's different out here, Liam. It's different in Ualik."

"Different how?"

"Well, for starters it's a Yupik village, about six hundred people, and for the most part good people. But, like most Bush villages, the worm in its apple is booze."

"They're not dry, then?"

"They've been dry," Wy said grimly, "and they've been damp, and they've been wet, sometimes all three at once. Right now they're wet again."

"Let me guess," Liam said. "The local liquor store owner petitioned for a vote when all the families were at fish camp last August."

"The August before."

"Figures." He shook his head. "God, you'd think every village in this state would look at Barrow and see what happened there when they went dry. The first month--the first month, Wy--there was something like an eighty percent drop in alcoholrelated instances of child abuse, wife beating, and assault."