On Thin Ice

by Debra Lee Brown

  “You’d better go now,” she said, skirting the perimeter of the lab, careful, he noticed, to steer clear of him as she made her way back to her workstation.

  “The second shift’s working, the first shift’s asleep. There’s nobody around, nobody to see me here, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I’m not worried about it. I’m just…” She absently twisted her engagement ring on her finger. That told him everything he needed to know. “I just think you should go.”

  He told himself it was all part of the job to question her. He wasn’t ready to face the idea that maybe he was falling for her. It was an act. A cover. He needed to get close to her in order to collar her, or rule her out as a suspect. That was all. That’s why he needed to know everything about her, and everything about her relationship with her fiancé Crocker Holt.

  At least that’s what he told himself as he ignored her request and slid onto a lab stool five feet from where she was standing, backed against her workstation.

  “Tell me about him,” he said, and nodded again at her ring.

  “Crocker?”

  “That’s his name? Crocker what?”

  “Holt. He’s a—he’s in the business. You might have heard of him.”

  She meant the oil business. And Seth already knew everything public there was to know about him, but she didn’t know that. Besides, he wanted to know more. A lot more.

  He shook his head. “Don’t know him.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t.”

  She didn’t mean it in a disparaging way, though twelve hours ago he might have read it that way anyway. But now, at four in the morning after kissing her in the dark, recalling the feel of her hands on his chest, her hot mouth opening beneath his, he simply shrugged it off.

  “Anyway…” She told him how her mother had introduced her to Crocker when he was still in banking. How he’d come to work at Tiger not long after he started dating Lauren.

  “How convenient.”

  “What do you mean?” Those pretty brows of her arched.

  He shrugged, and she went on, looking mostly at the floor or the steel countertops gleaming in the candlelight—anywhere but at him.

  She told him all about Crocker Holt the financier turned oil company CFO, about Holt’s accomplishments, his success in the business, his future plans. But at no point in her story did she say anything about how she felt about him, or about their upcoming marriage. He was her fiancé, for Christ’s sake, yet her description of him was like something you’d read in a Money magazine article spotlighting the top fifty executives in the country. It was a glowing report, but with no underlying emotion to it.

  For some reason that made Seth smile.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He shook his head.

  She went on, and after a minute absently opened a drawer and pulled out a cloth bag. She dumped the contents onto the counter beside her, and Seth did a double take.

  “Walnuts?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I like them. I keep snacks out here so I don’t have to go into camp every time I get hungry.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Want some?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Thanks.”

  She yanked open an industrial cupboard over the drawer, and her face twisted into a frown. “That’s odd.”

  “What?” He slid off the stool and joined her at the counter.

  “My hammer. It’s missing.”

  “What hammer?” The second the words left his mouth, his gaze fixed on the blank spot on the Peg-Board inside the cabinet where a half-dozen common tools hung on metal hooks. Each tool had a carefully drawn red outline around it, so you’d know where to replace it after you’d used it.

  “My rock hammer. I keep it right there.”

  He stared hard at the red outline on the Peg-Board. It was, of course, identical in shape to the bloody tool he now had stashed in his gear in his room at camp.

  “I must have left it somewhere. Oh, well.” She shrugged and shut the cabinet, then turned her gaze on his. “Seth, about what happened tonight…”

  “Forget about it,” he said, his mind racing. “You were scared, that’s all. It was a dangerous situation.”

  “I don’t want you to think that I—”

  “I don’t think anything. Like I said, forget it.” She held his gaze a moment longer, and he knew she wouldn’t forget it. Neither would he.

  “Thanks for coming with me. For what you did.”

  “Any time.” He shrugged, trying to project a casualness he didn’t feel. His thoughts skimmed over the events of the past three days, recalling who was on shift when, if he’d seen anyone other than Lauren approach the trailer.

  She could be playing him. Staging the little scene with the walnuts and missing hammer for his benefit. But if she was that smart, why would she have tossed a bloody murder weapon into the camp’s Dumpster to begin with? That would be the first place the borough police would look once they saw the body and hightailed it out here.

  “I’ll see you, then,” she said, and walked to the door.

  He followed, sliding into his jacket on the way. “Lock your door after I leave.”

  She met his gaze and absently bit her bottom lip. He’d have given anything to know what she was thinking. “I always do.”

  The frigid air hit him like a Mack truck as he stepped out of the trailer. He sucked it in and felt the dry burn in his lungs. Grabbing the guideline leading back to camp, he turned into the wind.

  Lauren managed a few hours’ sleep despite the howling wind. With communications down, there was no way to transmit her morning geologist’s report back to Tiger Petroleum. All the same, after Seth had left her trailer and before she’d collapsed, exhausted, onto her bed, she’d filled out the paperwork and tossed it onto the pile of unsent transmissions from yesterday and the day before.

  Now, six hours later, restored by two cups of instant coffee she’d brewed on one of the lab’s Bunsen burners, Lauren slid onto the stool in front of her workstation and opened her notebook.

  A crate of rock samples collected from yesterday’s drilling sat on the frozen ground just outside her trailer. She could see them out the window. Barely. Blowing snow skittered violently across the ice. The storm was getting worse.

  She ought to haul the crate inside and take a look at those samples. This close to target depth, she should be paying attention. “Come on, Lauren, snap out of it.”

  The problem was, there was only one thing on her mind this morning, and it wasn’t rock samples—strange or otherwise—or dead toolpushers, slightly off-balance company men, or anything to do with her work at Caribou Island.

  “Seth.”

  She said his name out loud, feeling the sound of it on her tongue, remembering his hands on her body, the smell of him, the way he’d kissed her. The way she’d kissed back.

  What am I doing?

  She shot from the stool, ripped open the trailer door and went for the samples. Five minutes later, her workstation littered with open bags, rocks and mud, she flipped off her microscope and tapped her mechanical pencil against a blank page in her notebook.

  Nothing unusual. Same as yesterday.

  Absently, she traced the outline of her lips with a finger. She wasn’t the same as yesterday, however. And that was the problem.

  Thinking back on her two years with Crocker, she tried to remember a stolen kiss, a look, an afternoon of lovemaking—anything they’d shared that had been as explosive as the few minutes she’d spent in the dark with Seth Adams.

  She couldn’t.

  Besides, there had been no afternoons of lovemaking, had there? And few stolen kisses. Crocker was always too busy. She’d been too busy, too. It simply wasn’t a priority with them, and there was nothing wrong with that. She and Crocker had other things going for them besides passion.

  So why was she having second thoughts?

  How could one reckless moment in the arms of a strange
r shake her confidence in a marriage that had been planned for months? Marriage to a man everyone said was perfect for her. She and Crocker were good together. A match.

  A match with no spark.

  A loud thump jarred Lauren from her thoughts. She slid off the lab stool, dropping her mechanical pencil onto the counter, and noticed her fingers had gone an angry red from gripping the metal so tightly.

  The thumping sounded again. Someone was at the door.

  “Yes?” She cracked it a few inches, feeling the cold air rush in, and peered out at the ski-masked face. Her heart flip-flopped. For a split second she was reminded of every bank robbery movie she’d ever seen.

  “It’s me, ma’am. Bulldog.” The roustabout pushed his hood off and jerked up the ski mask so she could see his face.

  “Oh. I didn’t recognize you without your hard hat.” His name was painted across the front of it, she remembered from the incident on the catwalk yesterday.

  “Yeah, I oughtta be wearin’ it. Salvio’ll skin me alive if he sees me without it.” Everyone wore a hard hat on the job, even to walk across the yard. “Speakin’ a-which, he wants to see you. Now.”

  She wondered when Jack would get around to sending out a posse for her. She’d put off going into camp this morning, and had gone to sleep earlier, half suspecting she’d be jolted awake by the man himself, and in no pretty mood.

  She’d disobeyed his direct order. And while Tiger Petroleum wasn’t the army, an operation like Caribou Island was run by rules every bit as stringent as those applied in the military. Still, she didn’t regret her decision to stay on the island, and no way was she going to apologize.

  “Tell him I’ll be right in,” she said, and waited for the roustabout to go. Bulldog didn’t budge. “So you’re my escort, huh?”

  “Guess I am. Salvio says I’m to bring ya, personal like.”

  “Fine.” She slipped into her survival jacket, snatched her hard hat off a hook on the wall and locked the trailer door behind her on the way out. “Let’s go.”

  It took them forever to make the fifty yards to camp, sliding their gloved hands along the yellow guide rope. Lauren kept her head down and her feet moving. Bulldog glanced back at her every thirty seconds or so, to make sure she was still behind him.

  A few minutes later, standing rigid in Salvio’s office, she could see she’d been right. He wasn’t in a pretty mood. Not by a long shot.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  His gaze burned right through her, and she could tell by the vein pulsing in his forehead and the way he ground his teeth that he was royally pissed off.

  “Frickin’ computers are down for good—” he flashed steely eyes at the blank monitors on his desk “—so we’re drillin’ blind now. The old-fashioned way.”

  She nodded, familiar with the old manual method of calculating their depth.

  “How far to target?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, remembering the rock samples—nondescript shale and silt—she’d looked at a few minutes ago in the lab. “Fifty feet. Eighty maybe. No way to tell at this point.”

  “Well, whenever the hell we get there, I want you finished and outta here on the next chopper. Got it?”

  She held his gaze and didn’t flinch. If he was trying to intimidate her, he was doing a good job, but she’d be damned if she’d let him know that. “Got it.”

  He glanced out the undraped window into the yard where harsh sodium lights shimmered off blowing snow.

  “Is that all?” she said, stunned he didn’t mention the events of last night and her overt insubordination. Jack Salvio lived for the smallest excuse to beat someone over the head.

  “For now.” He didn’t look at her again, and inside she felt a small thrill of victory.

  She turned on her heel and marched out of his office, relief surging through her like adrenaline. Delicious smells from the kitchen made her stomach growl. She checked her watch—11:00 a.m.—as she padded down the hallway in thick wool socks toward the sounds of men eating and talking and telling bawdy jokes.

  The cafeteria tray was in her hand before she noticed him.

  Seth sat alone at one of the big round tables, his black eyes fixed on hers. She gave a nod of acknowledgement, but no smile, and wondered if it was too late to return her tray to the stack and leave.

  It was. Besides, it didn’t matter what had happened last night between them. It was nothing. It meant nothing. She was getting married and that was that. At least that’s what she told herself as she unconsciously loaded her plate with foods she didn’t even like.

  On purpose she chose an empty table across the room from where he sat, and set her key ring and tray on the Formica surface.

  A couple of roughnecks at another table, packed with first-shift crewmen, made some disparaging comments about Seth, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. Pinkie, the roustabout she’d met yesterday on the catwalk, snickered.

  Seth didn’t spare them a glance. It was almost as if he didn’t hear them. He continued to stare at her as he ate, then out of the blue, Pinkie tossed a lewd comment in her direction. Lauren glanced up from her tray in time to see Seth’s face harden to stone, his fork stall in midair.

  She held her breath as he rose stiffly to his feet, a white-knuckled grip on the tray holding his half-eaten meal. Pinkie’s face darkened, his small eyes riveted to Seth as he slowly walked to their table. The conversations and laughter of the other crewmen died as they turned their attention to Seth’s imposing figure.

  Lauren had learned a long time ago to simply ignore the kinds of comments men made about women when they got together in groups. Bars, construction sites, oil field camps—all were typical hotbeds of testosterone and bad judgment.

  She tried to get Seth’s attention, to make it clear he should just let the comment slide. It happened a lot out here, and she was used to it. It happened in town, too, where the ratio of men to women was nearly five to one.

  Sometimes when she and Crocker went out in the evening, incidents like this would occur. Anchorage on a Saturday night was more like a frontier town than a twenty-first-century metropolis. Crocker would tell her to simply ignore the occasional catcall or lewd remark. He did the same, pretending the offender didn’t exist. It was all very civilized.

  But there was nothing civilized in the way Seth loomed over the table of crewmen, his eyes burning holes through a sober-looking Pinkie.

  Lauren waited, her heart in her throat, a little thrill coiling inside her.

  Seth didn’t say a word. He simply stared at the roustabout.

  Finally, when the tension was so thick she thought the whole table would spontaneously combust, Pinkie said, “Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” He shrugged. “Was just a joke.”

  “Yeah, a bad one,” one of the crewmen said, and they all started laughing.

  Everyone except Seth. He continued to stare at Pinkie, unmoving, silent. Pinkie wasn’t laughing anymore.

  Then, just as abruptly as it had started, the incident was over. Seth turned and walked to her table, set his tray down, and parked himself on one of the plastic chairs. She could see that his hands were shaking. His face was still hard, his eyes unreadable.

  She was prepared to tell him that he needn’t have bothered rushing to her defense like that—that it wasn’t worth starting trouble over. That’s what Crocker had said to her on such occasions. It wasn’t worth the trouble. Perhaps what he’d really meant was that she wasn’t worth it.

  “Thank you,” she said, surprising herself.

  Seth’s face softened, his black eyes warming to chestnut. “No problem.”

  They ate in silence. Well, he ate. She spent most of her time wondering what he was thinking, and pushing food around on her plate. Why on earth had she chosen broccoli? She hated broccoli.

  “Not big on vegetables, huh?”

  She put down her fork. “No. I never have been.”

  She only ate them because it was expected—both at home growin
g up after her father died, under the direction of the Fotheringay chef, and now at the endless parade of social functions she attended with Crocker and her mother.

  “I’m more the meat-loaf-and-mashed-potatoes type,” she said. “Simple stuff.”

  He made a funny sound in the back of his throat, and flashed his eyes at her engagement ring. “Yeah. Like the ring and the Porsche.”

  “How did you know about—”

  He nodded at the distinctive logo medallion attached to the leather key ring resting on the table next to her tray.

  “Oh, right.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t my choice. Someone bought it for me.”

  “Your fiancé.” The way he said it irked her.

  “That’s right. My fiancé.” She plucked her fork from the table and started stuffing broccoli florets into her mouth.

  “I suppose you’re going tell me you’d rather have an Explorer or Grand Cherokee, or something like that?”

  She had, in fact, had an Explorer before she and Crocker started dating. One afternoon she’d come out of Tiger’s offices to find it missing from the parking lot. A brand-new silver Porsche Boxter sat in its place, a big red bow tied over the hood. Crocker’s idea of a surprise.

  She put down her fork and stood. “I’ve got to go. So do you, by the look of things.” She flashed her eyes at the other first-shift crewmen who were bussing their trays and starting to wander back down the hall toward the mudroom.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Shift starts at noon.”

  “Once the well’s at target depth, I’ll collect my samples and go.”

  He looked at her, his face hardening again. “Back home to the Porsche and the fiancé.”

  “That’s right.”

  He smiled coldly. “Lucky you.”

  Late that night while the first shift was working and the second still asleep, Lauren defied Jack Salvio’s direct orders and climbed the five flights of metal stairs to the drilling floor of the rig. She paused, her gloved hand on the steel door of the doghouse, and braced herself for what she knew would be an ugly encounter.

  That morning when Salvio had summoned her to his office, she’d known better than to question him again about that crate of mysterious rock samples. But enough was enough. She needed to know where they’d come from, and what he’d done with them.