“Why not?” Sharon said, bristling. “She was old. She wasn’t dead. Nobody says you have to stop having sex when you hit fifty. Look at Bill Billington and Grandpa Moses.”

Prince had fallen into the way of regarding Bill as more of a contemporary and an ally in the good fight against evildoers, but when Sharon said it out loud, of course it was true. Bill and Moses were both older than God, and couldn’t keep their hands off each other. She readjusted her thinking. “So you think Lydia had a lover.”

Sharon hunched a shoulder. “I don’t know. I probably shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Yes, you should,” Prince said firmly. “Who was he?”

“I don’t know. I went to her house about four months ago, and somebody had sent her this big bouquet of flowers, tulips, lilies, roses; it was gorgeous. You know we don’t have a florist here, so somebody had to have Goldstreaked it down on Alaska Airlines. I thought at first it was one of her kids, but she blushed when I asked her, and said no, a friend had sent them for her birthday. She never did say who, but I got the impression the friend was a guy.” Sharon studied the milky stuff swirling around in her cup, and looked up with a smile. “It was kind of cute, you know? Here she was, seventy-four years old, little old Grandma Lydia, and she’s getting flowers from a guy. Kinda makes you not be afraid of getting old yourself, you know?”

Lola Gamechuk, thin, dark, and careworn, answered the phone six times while she talked to Prince. Five of the calls were from her daughter, Tiffany, who didn’t like her babysitter and wanted Mom to come home right now. The sixth call Lola put through to Andrew Gamechuk, the current president of the Angayuk Native Association and Lola’s cousin. Andrew interrupted his game of one-on-one with a sponge basketball and the hoop mounted on the wall of his office, which Prince had been watching through the open door of his office, to take the call. After a moment he got up and closed the door. Prince looked back at Lola.

“How well did you know Lydia?”

“Not very.”

“You were a member of her book club.”

“I saw her once a month.”

“Never any other time?”

Shrug. “Sometimes in the store.”

“Did you know of anyone who was bothering her, someone who might have held a grudge against her, who might have wanted to hurt her?”

Silent stare.

“Lola,” Prince said, surrounded on every side by Yupik storyknives and finger fans and dance masks and feeling whiter than white, “all I want is to catch the person who did this to Lydia. Did you know that she worked down at Maklak?”

Lola, who had been staring fixedly at her desk, met Prince’s eyes for the first time. Hers were a deep, dark blue, framed in wings of straight black hair that curved gently beneath her jawline. With some sleep and a little animation, Lola Gamechuk could knock the world on its collective ear with that face alone. “Everybody knew that.”

“Did anyone there get mad at her for any reason?”

A long silence. “Maybe.”

Prince tried not to pounce. “Would you know of anyone who maybe had done that?”

A longer silence. “Ray.”

“Ray who?”

Lola looked at her fingers. “Ray Wassillie. Sometimes he drinks too much. Sometimes when he drinks too much he gets mean.”

“Was he mean to Lydia?”

Lola’s face closed up. “I don’t know.”

That was all she was going to say. Prince packed up and left, trying not to look as if she was running away. The Yupik mask mounted on the wall next to the door laughed at her from within a circle of ivory and fur and feathers. She glared at it as she went out, but the grin didn’t change.

“Lola was married to Ray Wassillie for about a century one year,” Charlene told her, unfastening her gun belt and placing it in the second drawer down in her desk. She turned the key in the lock and put the key in her pocket.

“Oh, hell.”

“Don’t be mad at her. He treated her pretty badly. She told us once she never would have left him if he hadn’t hit the baby.”

Prince remembered the phone calls. “Tiffany?”

Charlene nodded. “Tiffany wasn’t even two months old, colicky, cried a lot. Ray came home drunk and lost his temper. I saw the marks. Lola gets back every way she can. Can’t say I blame her much.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah.” Charlene stretched. “Man, it’s windy up top. It was a bitch keeping her on course. My shoulders feel like they’ve been frozen.”

“You catch them? Mamie said you were tailing some hunters going after bear in a closed area.”

Charlene made a disgusted face. “No. I checked all the likely strips but I couldn’t find the plane. I’ll go up again tomorrow, but you know what it’s like. I might as well be on foot, for all the good I can do.” She touched her toes and sat down. “So you want to know about Lydia.”

Charlene and Bill would be her best sources; Prince had known that from the beginning. Bill, as magistrate, would take an impartial, innocent-until-proven-guilty view. Charlene, on the other hand, was a cop. She worked where the human rubber met the road. Cops never took anything on faith, and disbelieved every story that was told them on principle until and unless they could confirm that the story told was fact in all its essentials, and even then remained wary and unconvinced. Cop shops bred skeptics. Skeptics cherished few illusions about human nature, and therefore were seldom disappointed. “Tell me about Lydia,” Diana said.

Charlene linked her hands behind her head and stared at the ceiling for inspiration. “Lydia Tompkins. Seventy-four years old. Widow of Stanley Tompkins Sr. Mother of Betsy, Stan Jr., Jerry and Karen. Born in Newenham, went to school in Newenham, married another Newenhammer. Never went farther than Anchorage when she traveled. So far as I know, never wanted to. Had an excellent relationship with her husband.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Charlene laughed. “I’ll bet. Gets along with her children. Stanley Sr. made a lot of money fishing and, unlike most of his fellow Bay fishermen, invested well and left a tidy sum, evenly divided between all concerned. Lydia could have spent a lot more money than she did. You’ve seen her kitchen.”

“Yes.”

“Right out of 1957, isn’t it? We used to tease her that Mamie Eisenhower was going to come walking out of it one day with a plateful of pork chops. She could have afforded to remodel it once every five years, but she said everything still worked.”

“Was she a miser?”

“No, just frugal. She was very generous with her grandchildren. She was very generous with her friends, come to that. She gave the Literary Ladies Christmas and birthday presents every year.” Charlene nodded to a large painting by Byron Birdsall on the wall. A narrow creek crooked its way between snow-covered banks, leading the eye to Denali, gilt in the setting sun. The creek seemed to shimmer with life and the whole painting radiated an inner glow. “I saw that in Artique one year and came home raving about it.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. She was generous to a fault. Especially to her children.”

“How so?”

“Karen and Jerry regularly run out of money. All they had to do was ask.”

“Did fishermen really used to make that kind of money? The kind of money that would set a whole family up for two generations?”

Charlene gave her a tolerant look. “Given the year you came to Newenham, I suppose it’s hard for you to imagine, but yes, salmon fishermen, especially the seiners, used to make that much money. Some of it was luck but mostly it was experience-experience and good equipment. Stanley Sr. had both. He worked deckhand on his father’s gillnetter from the time he was six, according to Lydia. And that was back when the law said you could only fish under sail.”

“No kidding?” Prince had a brief vision of the bay covered with white sails skimming over a deep blue surface.