Although… nobody said it was a rule you ever had to stop having sex. He certainly couldn’t think of a day when he would want to. Why should Lydia have been any different? He’d read somewhere that a lot of women became more comfortable with sex after menopause, after the possibility of bearing a child had passed. While men could father children into senility.
As it did often, but never often enough, the memory of Charlie came back to him. Charlie and his bright blue eyes and his red cheeks and his fat little fists and his dimpled legs kicking madly in the air and his gurgling laughter and his wounded cry when someone had the gall to put him down in his crib when it wasn’t his idea to be left there at all, uh-uh, and he said so, loud and clear. His son. Jenny’s son. Taken from him by a drunk driver before his second year.
If Liam had been climbing the golden staircase up till then, it was all downhill from there. He’d stopped feeling, had stopped caring, had just stopped, period, until one day it was just too much trouble to respond to a call and five people had frozen to death in Denali Park.
And then he had come to Newenham and found Wy again, and suddenly breathing out and breathing in were not quite the effort they had been the moment before. Was it only six months ago? The beginning of May, spring in the Alaska Bush. A time of renewal that had spread open its arms and included him in its embrace.
Or so it had seemed.
He wandered through the house, hat in hand. There were photographs everywhere, including the bathroom, pictures of family, children mostly, baby pictures, school pictures, snapshots of the family gathered around a Christmas tree, looking for Easter eggs in the alders in the backyard, on the deck of a seiner named theDaisy Rose, on the bank of the river with the house visible at the top of the cliff. He recognized the children, tracing their faces back in time to rosy-cheeked babies wrapped in the same soft white afghan. There was a picture of a teenage Lydia on a beach, posing with twenty or so others her age in a shot that smelled of Senior Skip Day. Some of the faces looked familiar to Liam, although he couldn’t quite place any of them. A tall, painfully thin boy had an arm draped around her shoulder and was laughing down at her. It wasn’t the man in the family photographs. She looked straight into the camera with a wide, joyous smile that in no way belied the determined set to her jaw. She had looked very like that when she had marched into the post, all flags flying.
Her bedroom was ruffled and bowed within an inch of its life, and he wondered if she’d had it redecorated when her husband died. The curtains, comforter, pillow shams and padded headboard were trimmed in eyelet lace, and there was a vanity with a tiny stool padded in white velvet sitting before it. Dozens of bottles of scent in weird and varied shapes lined up in front of a mirror with an elaborate gilt frame, and the Kleenex box was hidden by a porcelain cover with hummingbirds painted on it. “I am a female, female,” Liam said, and then tried to remember where the line came from. Oh, yeah.Flower Drum Song. Jenny and her musicals.
The other two bedrooms had the lingering resonance of adolescence, try as Lydia had to transform them into a guest room and an office. The guest room held a queen-size bed and a dresser, which were nearly crowded out by a pile of stuffed bears, a large cardboard box of basketballs and a shelf full of well-thumbed picture books, including the entire Dr. Seuss oeuvre. The office walls had been reserved for graduation pictures, four of them, eight-by-elevens in gilt frames, mortarboards tilted to the correct angle, tassels hanging on the correct side, Betsy slimmer and serious and dignified, Stan bluff and hearty like his father, Jerry thin to the point of emaciation and anxious about what was going to happen to him now, Karen giving the photographer an up-from-under look that said plainly,Know what it would be even more fun to do?
For all her froufrou taste, Lydia had been a neat creature. Her bills were filed by utility name in the top drawer of a two-drawer filing cabinet. The bottom drawer held tax returns going back thirty years. Liam opened the most recent one and raised an eyebrow. Stanley Tompkins Sr., unlike many of his Bristol Bay contemporaries, must have saved his money from the years when the Bristol Bay salmon runs were the largest in the world. His widow had been very well-off, although you’d never have known it. On the evidence feminine to the core, still, Lydia wasn’t the diamonds-and-champagne type.
Like the kitchen, the office was dated but functional. An old Smith-Corona electric hummed pleasantly into life when Liam pushed the switch. The office telephone was a heavy black desktop model with a rotary dial. There was no computer, no fax machine, no scanner, no printer. No answering machine. His heart warmed to her even more. Heaven, to Liam, was anywhere without an answering machine. He hated that little blinking red light that signaled messages waiting.
He went back to her bedroom, not because he wanted to search it further but because of all the rooms in the house it seemed the most hers. He was afraid he would collapse the vanity stool if he sat on it, so he perched, gingerly at first, on the edge of her bed. “Tell me what you know, Lydia,” he murmured. “Who did this to you, and why?”
He thought of fetching paper and pencil from the office to lay out one of his grids, with Lydia in a box at the center and arrows pointing to possible suspects, but he couldn’t summon up the necessary energy. He was suddenly so tired. He didn’t think Lydia would mind if he closed his eyes for a few minutes.
He dreamed, dark dreams. John Dillinger Barton, disappointment and disapproval on his face. Charlie in the morgue, so tiny, so helpless, so white and cold and broken beyond repair. Jenny, day after day, month after month, quiet and abnormally still in her hospital bed, eyelids closed, face immobile except for what seemed like a tiny smile at the corners of her lips. Jim uncomfortable in a suit and a tie, standing next to an open grave.
Wy. She had the most marvelous mouth, lush, full-lipped. She didn’t wear lipstick; a man didn’t have to worry about getting all smeared up. He’d wanted to kiss her the first time he saw her, and only managed to keep his hands off her because, first, he was married and a father and, second, she was his pilot, en route to a crime scene.
It turned out she was just as attracted to him, and it hadn’t been long before they’d both begun behaving very badly indeed, culminating in a long weekend in Anchorage, at the end of which she had broken it off and disappeared. He’d gone back to Charlie and Jenny knowing she was right, knowing that they were doing the right thing, knowing, too, that the sun didn’t shine the same way it had before he had met her. He had tried for contentment. He hoped Jenny had never known, but the experienced philanderers he heard talking in the locker room at the club said wives always knew. God, he hoped she hadn’t.
Wy would creep into his mind unbidden and unwelcome, once when he was making love to Jenny and doing his damnedest to do his best by her. Jenny came and then he did and all he could think of was Wy and her mouth and her hair and her arms and the way she made him feel.
He could almost imagine her there now, her teeth nipping at his jaw, her hands deft on his belt, that lush red mouth nibbling at his own. He was hard in an instant. He pushed up into her hand and she made a low, purring sound. Her breast was covered; with an impatient sound he nudged the fabric aside, fumbled for the snap on her bra and sighed his relief when her breast snugged into his hand. He turned his mouth in to her kiss. She sucked his tongue into her mouth, and his pants were no longer big enough to contain him, he could hardly breathe, he ripped at his zipper.