FIFTEEN

The Gilberts lived in a small white house a few feet from the church. Richard Gilbert opened the door. "Oh." He cast a nervous look over his shoulder. "Trooper Campbell."

"Hello, Mr. Gilbert. I'd like to talk to your wife. Is she in?"

"Well, I, uh, no, she isn't, she's-"

Liam took a not very big chance and said, "I think she is here, sir. I have to talk to her. May I come in?"

"Let him in, Richard," a voice called from the back of the house.

Liam pushed on the door. Richard Gilbert fell back.

"In here, Mr. Campbell." Liam followed the voice into a back bedroom, where he found Becky Gilbert calmly folding clothes into a small suitcase. "I expect you'll want these," she said, and handed him a brown paper grocery bag.

He opened it and looked inside to see a shirt and slacks, both stained with blood. "I was wearing them when I killed him," she said. "Richard insisted on washing the knife. It's in the dish drainer next to the kitchen sink." She went to the dresser and collected some underwear.

Liam judged that the flight risk presented by Becky Gilbert was minimal and went into the kitchen. Sure enough, the dish drainer held a large skinning knife with a yellowing bone handle, still wet from washing. He wrapped it in a paper towel and placed it in the brown paper bag along with the clothes.

Becky met him in the living room, suitcase in hand. He got a good look at her face for the first time.

She had been transformed. He'd seen her at work with her husband, toadying and subservient. He'd seen her submerged in grief at the death of a man he now knew was greatly loved. He'd glimpsed the urgency of a woman on a mission on the way into her daughter's house.

This was a different person altogether from the previous three. She held herself erect, her chin high with pride, and looked Liam straight in the eye in a manner that most women raised in Bush villages did not do. "Let's go."

"All right," Liam said, and opened the door.

"What are you doing?" Richard Gilbert said in a panic.

"Telling the truth," she said.

"But you can't!" Richard Gilbert said in anguish. "What will people say?"

His wife looked at him and replied, "I guess they'll say a mother killed the son of a bitch who hurt her daughter." She paused, and added with a smile, "And they'll be right."

She sat across the desk from Liam, perfectly composed, hair neatly combed, gray knit pantsuit freshly pressed (liam knew a wistful thought for her obvious ironing skills), her words calm and precise.

"When I was very young I had a daughter. The circumstances don't matter, but I gather you have already guessed who her father is, or was."

"Bob DeCreft."

She inclined her head. "Yes. I was traveling with the Ilutuqaq Native Association Board, as a board member." Her chin raised. "I was the youngest person ever elected to the association board. I wanted to keep my seat after I married, but Richard said… well, it doesn't matter what he said. This all happened long before I met him. The board had chartered a plane. Bob was our pilot." She smiled, a wide smile rich with memories. "I was the youngest, so I always got to ride shotgun. My auntie Sada was supposed to be looking out for me, but she would get airsick and take pills to go to sleep." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "We had some fine times in the front of that plane. I'll never forget them."

Liam remembered the first few months he'd flown out to crime scenes with Wy as his pilot. Sometimes her Cub; sometimes, when there was a body to bring back for autopsy, a chartered Cessna. Sometimes four seats, sometimes only two, him sitting behind her as he had today, or yesterday, now. The smell of Ivory soap on her skin, the quick crinkle of flesh at the corners of her eyes when she laughed, the rub of her shoulder against his. It was a long way between places in the Bush, and they'd talked, nonstop it seemed in hindsight, about everything: his cases, her flights, books, music, movies, politics, religion.

It was a hothouse environment, forcing relationships to rapid fruition, with no time-outs to cool down or reconsider. He'd never understood anyone so well or so quickly, and just the memory of it now was so powerful that it took a serious effort to draw himself back to the present, to Newenham and the woman looking over his shoulder with a dreamy smile on her face.

She sighed. "We, well, we were together constantly over a period of three months, flying around the state, talking to legislators and businesspeople and shareholders and boards from other Native regions, finding out how they were managing their ANCSA funds, how they were administering their land grants. We were coming into our share of the ANCSA settlement, and we wanted to do a good job for all the shareholders, not waste the money or give away the lands."

"Like the Anipa Subdivision?"

She bestowed an approving smile on him. "Yes, exactly like that. Native investors funding Native projects with federal backing, built by Native workers for Natives to live in. We were all so charged up and full of purpose. We were like the Blues Brothers."

"I beg your pardon?"

She smiled faintly. "On a mission from God."

"Oh." It had been a long time since Liam had seen the movie, but eventually he got the joke, and returned her smile. "I see."

"And then there was Bob. I saw him almost every day, sat next to him everywhere we flew. He was funny, and nice, and smart-he was a pilot, after all-and the color of my skin and the shape of my eyes weren't the only things he saw about me. I liked him right away. He was twenty years older than I was, but I didn't care." Her smile was rich and warmly reminiscent. "And then I loved him, and he loved me, and for a month we were happy. So very happy." She paused.

"What happened?"

Her smile faded. "Auntie Sada saw what was happening and called my parents. My parents came and took me home."

"And you went?" Liam said involuntarily. It was almost impossible to reconcile this strong, composed woman with the subservient, submissive wife he had seen at the post office, or for that matter with the picture she drew of the idealistic young board member of twenty-two years before.

"Yes," she said soberly. "I went. They were my elders. It wasn't that easy, Mr. Campbell, not in the seventies; it isn't that easy even today to disobey your elders in the village. And Bob was white. That didn't help. They were horrified that I would consider marrying a gussuk, let alone sleep with him. So I went home, hoping that I could change their minds."

"And when you found out about the baby?"

All the life drained from her face, leaving it a mask with nothing alive behind it. "They sent me to Anchorage to have her, and then they took her from me. They wouldn't allow a half-white child to be raised in the Ilutsik home. They took her from me and gave her to the Nanalooks in Newenham, or so I found out later."

Her fists clenched on the arms of the chair. Liam had not cuffed her. It wasn't necessary. Elizabeth Rebecca Ilutsik Gilbert had already committed her murder. She would not kill again.

"I take my commandments seriously, Mr. Campbell, but if I'd known where Laura was and what the Nanalooks were doing to her, you'd have had to arrest me for murder a long time before this."

Liam didn't doubt it for a minute. "Off the record?" he said.

She was curious. "Off the record," she agreed.

"I'd have held your coat."

She smiled at him then, the same wide, warm, transforming smile of before, with an extra dollop of approval added. Liam would have wagged his tail if he'd had one, and for the first time saw the woman Bob DeCreft had been attracted to so many years before. "Thank you."

"How did you come to marry Richard Gilbert?"