Everything To Prove. Nadia Nichols

of humor?” Frey clearly thought this was an odd question.

      “Well, maybe you could start by telling me how you met him. How you became partners.”

      “We were officers in the navy and we served on the same sub.”

      “Wow. I mean, I just can’t imagine being in a submarine under all that water. So, what did the two of you do on the sub?”

      “We played cards. Poker. Endless games of poker.” Frey took a sip of his whiskey. “Ben always won. He won at everything. When the torpedo hit, that was the only time I thought he might lose.”

      “You were playing poker when a torpedo hit the sub?”

      “It flooded the forward compartment. There were two men trapped inside. We could hear them shouting, screaming for help. Everyone else evacuated because our compartment was starting to flood, too, but Ben stuffed his cards inside his shirt and went to rescue the trapped men. He couldn’t do it alone, so I helped him.”

      “That was courageous of you.”

      “On the contrary, it was quite stupid. Our rescue attempt could have lost the sub. But we were lucky. We got the two trapped men out and managed to seal off the compartment behind us. Afterward Ben showed me his cards. He had a full house. He said that was why he knew he’d make a successful rescue.” Frey barked a humorless laugh. “He was a brave son of a bitch. Smart, too. We survived the war and when we were discharged he asked me if I wanted to go in on a business venture. He told me he’d found some weird patents he wanted to back. He thought they’d be big moneymakers. I had some money saved up so I said, sure, then went home to Maine. Ben took my little wad of savings and in less than two years he’d made me a millionaire.”

      “He must have been a genius.”

      “He was. I quit my job as a shift supervisor at the paper mill in Rumford, bought a better truck and went to work at a furniture factory making chairs. I’d always wanted to learn how to make furniture. A year later I was discovering that making it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be when Ben calls out of the blue and asks if I want to go on a fishing trip to Alaska.

      “I said sure, and this is where we came. He’d been studying maps of Alaska for years but had never been here. We were flown in with all our gear and camped in a tent on this very beach. We fished and explored the country. At the end of the week Ben said he didn’t want to leave, and neither did I. When the plane came to pick us up he told the pilot we’d be staying another week. Then he asked me if I wanted to go in on a fishing camp in this very spot.”

      “And you said ‘sure,’” Libby said, scribbling like mad.

      Frey barked another laugh. He lifted his glass in a gesture toward the lake and the majestic Brooks range beyond. “By ‘fishing camp’ I thought he meant a little log shack on the shore we could come to for a week or two every summer, but this is what he built.”

      “Have you lived here ever since?”

      “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