Everything To Prove

“Pretty much. I spend winters in Hawaii now. It’s warmer.”

“So your initial investment in Ben Libby’s entrepreneurial genius made you a rich man.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell me anything about Ben’s wife? The article barely mentions her.”

“Ben fell in love with a German girl he met while on leave. He married her after the war and when the lodge was completed, he brought her here. She was a nervous thing. Pretty, but highstrung. Definitely a city girl, born and bred. She didn’t like living on the edge of nowhere. She was afraid of the dark. Ben thought she’d get used to it, and once the guests started coming she’d be okay. But I knew she wasn’t right for the place. When she heard a wolf howl for the first time she ran inside and cried in fear.”

Frey realized his cigar had gone out and paused to light it again. Libby caught up on her notes and when she smelled the rank odor she glanced up. “What happened to her?”

“She went nuts. Wacko. She left him, finally, and went back to Germany.”

Libby paused and glanced up from the notebook. She’d half expected the omission of Connor Libby. “But wasn’t there a son?”

Frey took another sip of whiskey, puffed on his cigar, gazed out across the lake. “Connor,” he said. “Right after Ben brought her here she got pregnant and insisted that she had to be near a good hospital with good doctors. Ben kept her in Anchorage at this fancy town house he rented until she had the baby, then brought her and the boy back to the lodge.”

“Whatever became of her?”

“About a year after that, she left the boy with Ben and returned to Berlin. Just as well she did. We later learned that she threw herself beneath a train as it pulled into a station.”

“She killed herself?” Not even Marie knew about this. She knew only that Ben’s wife had died. “How awful. She must have felt hopeless even after she returned to the place she loved.”

“She was crazy,” Frey said with a shrug. “I guess that proved it.”

“What became of the boy?”

“Ben raised him, made me the boy’s godfather. When the wife ran off, Ben hired people to manage his money and his properties and pretty much planted himself here. He loved this place.”

“Did the boy like it, too?”

“Connor? This life was all he knew until he went off to college.”

“Did he know about his mother?”

“We told him she’d gone to visit her family in Germany and got sick and died there. He never knew she’d abandoned him.”

“What happened to Connor?”

“He graduated college and about that time the war in Vietnam was getting into high gear so he joined the air force and learned to fly.”

“I remember the article said he was killed in a plane crash. Was that during the war?”

Frey gave Libby the first real stare since she’d arrived. She felt the dark malice in his flat gaze and dropped her eyes to her notebook while he took another sip of whiskey. “No. He survived two tours, got a bunch of medals, served out his enlistment and came back here.”

Libby could sense the gathering tension in Frey as he spoke about Connor. “What did Ben Libby do during the war?” she asked, changing the topic in an attempt to relax him.

“He made another billion dollars on some sophisticated electronics they were putting into the same jets his son was flying. And then he was diagnosed with liver cancer. By the time the war was over, Ben was gone.” Frey finished off his drink. “I still miss him.”

I just bet you do, Libby thought, scribbling furiously. “The article in Forbes stated that Ben divided his estate between you and his son. Did that surprise you?”

“Yes. I thought he’d leave it all to his son.”

“How did Connor feel about that?”

Frey shrugged. “He didn’t give a damn about money. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Ben left me half of the estate, to keep an eye on the business end of things. That, and Connor was my godson.”

“So, what happened to Connor?”

“When he came back from the war he was pretty depressed. Suicidal, I thought. He bought himself a float plane. Pretty plane, bright yellow.”

Libby glanced up again and frowned to mask her outrage that Frey would imply her father had been suicidal, when in fact he’d been in love. “Oh, no. You’re going to tell me that he crashed that plane, aren’t you?”

Frey gave her another flat stare. “How long have you been freelancing?”

“Not that long, actually. I hope you don’t hold that against me, sir.”

Frey relaxed and gave her a thin smile. “No, not at all.” He poured another glass of whiskey. “Connor crashed the plane. He hadn’t had the thing for a month and he crashed it.”

“That’s terrible,” Libby said. “I’m assuming he was an experienced pilot, after all that flying in the war. How did it happen?”

“LUANNE!” Frey belted out for the second time, causing Libby’s heart to skip several beats. She heard the same soft scuffle and the young woman reappeared, eyes downcast. “Where are my medicines?”

“Coming, sir,” Luanne said, retreating.

“No matter how many times I tell her, she always forgets. You can’t train them. I don’t know why I waste my time trying.” Luanne made another appearance, bearing a glass of water and two tiny pills on a small tray, which she left on the table. Frey picked up the two pills, placed them in his mouth, and chased them down with a swallow of water, followed by a bigger swallow of liquor. He puffed on the cigar for a few moments, then gave her another predatorial glance.

“Who’re you writing this story for?”

“Actually, sir, the Libby Foundation asked me to write it.”

Frey grunted and seemed satisfied with her answer. “Ben did a lot of good things. He had people and organizations after him all the time with their hands out. He supported more damn causes and still felt like he wasn’t doing enough.”

“Was his son the same way?”

“Connor didn’t hold a candle to his father.”

“Were you here at the lodge when Connor…crashed the plane?” Libby asked.

“I was fishing up on the Kandik. The first I knew something had happened was when I saw the warden’s plane buzzing up and down the lake.”

“So they think the plane went down in the lake?”

“That’s what they figure. Only thing they found were the two floats hung up about half a mile down the Evening River, just below the big rips.”

“No other wreckage was found? No body was recovered?”

Frey shifted in his seat. His shaggy white brows drew together in a frown. “I thought this article was supposed to be about Ben.”