On Thin Ice

by Debra Lee Brown

  Lauren followed her to the sofa, where they both sat down. Violet lifted a heavy-looking book, a scrapbook, Lauren realized, from a stack of magazines and books jammed in neat stacks under the coffee table.

  “My son is a hard man to understand sometimes.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  Violet shot her a pithy glance. “Here. Have a look.” She handed Lauren the open scrapbook. It was filled with photos and mementos of Seth’s childhood and youth, from infancy to high school graduation.

  Lauren spent time studying each page, asking questions, trying to understand the man from the memories his mother had of the boy. What she learned was that Violet Adams loved her son with both a fierceness and a freedom that awed her.

  Although one thing struck her as strange. There were hardly any pictures of Seth’s father in the scrapbook. Family get-togethers, youth sports, fishing trips with other kids and their dads… Jeremy Adams’s face was conspicuously absent from the photographic record of these events.

  “Seth told me he doesn’t see his father. Do you mind my asking why not?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” Violet said. “Jeremy and I were young, and times were different then. He married me because he had to.”

  Lauren tried to conceal her surprise. “Oh.”

  “The novelty of the situation wore off after a while, and Jeremy wasn’t the kind of man who’d let an Inuit wife and half-breed son stand in the way of his ambition.”

  “I see.”

  “All Seth wanted was for his father to be proud of him, like other fathers were of their sons.” Violet grazed a finger across a photo of Seth in a baseball cap, holding a trophy over his head.

  To love him, Lauren read between the lines. But Jeremy Adams hadn’t loved his son. That was clear from the bittersweet look in Violet’s eyes.

  “Poor boy. He spent a lifetime trying to get his father to notice him.” Violet shook her head. “He’s still trying.”

  “What do you mean, still trying?”

  Violet closed the scrapbook and placed it back under the table between the stack of magazines and books. “This FBI thing. You’ll understand when you know him better.”

  “You know about that? About his…case?”

  The older woman shook her head. “Not the details. Just that if he does a good job, the Bureau will take him back.”

  “Take him back? You mean he actually worked for the FBI? As an agent?”

  “Oh, yes. In Washington, D.C.” Violet said the city’s name as if it were some kind of panacea. “And that did make his father proud—for a while.”

  “I didn’t know that.” She remembered when he told her he’d been to D.C. She’d had no idea at the time that he’d lived there, worked there. Perhaps that’s where he’d been married, too.

  “I think he thinks if he wins the job back, his father will be proud of him again.”

  She looked into the woman’s eyes. “But you don’t think so.”

  “No.”

  Lauren slowly nodded. “That explains a lot.”

  “Good. Then I was right to come here.”

  After thanking her for the sweet rolls, Lauren walked Violet Adams to the kitchen door and waved from the window as she pulled away in an old Bronco.

  A dozen odd references Seth had made over the past ten days made sense to her now. She understood him, his motives, and why the Caribou Island assignment was so important to him.

  I want to think it through first. Make sure I’m right.

  If he brought down the bad guys, he’d win his job back at the Bureau, and possibly another shot at his father’s love. Though his mother didn’t think so, and, from all she’d seen and heard today, neither did Lauren.

  But Seth thought so, and that’s what mattered.

  She stared, unfocused, into the blowing snow outside, and realized Seth would do anything for that chance, anything to crack the case. Lie, seduce a suspect, even tell her he loves her to gain her trust.

  The walk to the village school was mercifully short. Along the way Lauren passed a general store, the post office, town hall, and a tiny white church right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. In the distance she spied a hockey pond, and recalled the photo of a young Seth and his smiling friends.

  On that short walk she thought hard about what Violet Adams had told her about Seth’s father.

  She thought about Seth.

  She’d decided to keep her promise to him and not call Crocker, though her reasons had nothing to do with the FBI’s investigation. She simply wasn’t ready to talk to him yet. She had things to sort out first in her own mind.

  Just minor stuff like her upcoming marriage, her career at Tiger, the uncontrollable feelings she had for a borough cop she’d only met ten days ago, and what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

  “You’re a mess,” she said to herself as she cinched the hood of her jacket tighter and jogged the last block.

  In the past, whenever she was unsure about something, Crocker would always step in and persuade her to make what he liked to call “the smart decision.”

  Crocker could be very persuasive. As could her mother. Both of them, she realized, had had an enormous influence on her life, especially recently. She’d been so busy with her career, a career she wasn’t even sure she wanted.

  Oh, hell. What did she want?

  She burst through the door into the school and stopped dead. A smile curled, unbidden, on her lips as her gaze danced along hallway walls papered with children’s artwork.

  She had the strangest feeling she’d been here before. It was certainly possible. The summer before her father died she’d accompanied him on a field survey along the arctic plain. It had been Hatch Parker’s last.

  They’d stopped here in Kachelik for supplies. She distinctly remembered the village, and now, standing here surrounded by bright Crayola drawings of seals and polar bears, breathing in the familiar scents of construction paper and paste, she remembered the school.

  The hallway was empty, but as she drifted down the corridor, not really sure where she was going, or why, she heard the sounds of children laughing, chalk tapping on blackboards, a teacher reading aloud from a book.

  After Violet left the house, Lauren had thrown on her jacket and boots and had rushed out without thinking, making a beeline for the school. What, exactly, was she going to say to Seth when she found him? What couldn’t wait until he returned?

  She didn’t know. All she knew was that she needed to see him, talk to him, get things straight in her own mind. Find out if his feelings for her were real, or if…

  His voice, clear and confident, drifted down the hallway from the last classroom on her right, causing her breath to catch and her feet to feel like lead weights, pinning her in place to the well-worn linoleum.

  She must be out of her mind.

  A brightly colored flyer tacked to the bulletin board on the wall next to her caught her attention for the barest second, as she worked to get a grip. It was a job posting—teaching assistant, science and math.

  “Okay, let’s see how well you’ve been listening. What do we do in a whiteout?”

  Almost against her will, she was drawn forward by Seth’s voice. Just a few more steps. Edging up to the classroom door, she peeked through the window.

  “Bobby,” Seth said, nodding to a little boy, seven or eight years old, with his hand raised.

  She didn’t hear the child’s answer, so focused was she on the man perched casually on the edge of the teacher’s desk. He looked incredibly relaxed. The children gazed up at him, hanging on every word.

  “That’s right,” Seth said. “We stay inside.” He smiled at the boy who’d answered, and her heart melted.

  She watched him through the glass as he continued to test them. Something about seeing him there at the teacher’s desk, interacting so easily, so naturally with the children, made her feel… It was almost as if…

  The hairs on her nape prickled.

  Of cour
se!

  That’s why the school seemed so familiar to her. She had been here before, perhaps in this very classroom. She’d watched and listened, her attention every bit as focused on the man who’d spoken that day as was the children’s attention now, only their eyes were fixed on Seth.

  The man had been her father.

  The year was 1984, and Lauren was eleven.

  Hatch Parker had been invited to the school that day to give the children an impromptu talk on the local geology. He’d started out on that topic, she remembered, but that wasn’t where he’d finished.

  He’d gone on to tell them about his own career, how he’d grown up poor but had worked his way through college to become a geologist.

  He’d told them that they had the potential to be anything they wanted, that each and every one of them owed it to themselves to find out what it was they did want, and to go after it.

  Go after it.

  Lauren had never forgotten those words, she realized. They’d burned inside her after he died, even after her mother had moved them from Alaska to New York, remarried and changed Lauren’s life so drastically she hardly recognized herself.

  Getting her degree in geology had been her one bout of rebellion, but after that she’d been swept along on a tide—not of her own making, but her mother’s, her stepfather’s, Tiger’s and now Crocker’s. She shook her head, realizing that somewhere along the way, she’d lost herself. What she was. What she wanted.

  It had always been there, just below the surface, vague yet insistent, an intangible feeling of discomfort that had gripped her each time she was pushed further away from herself by those who would shape her into something she was not.

  Briefly, she closed her eyes and felt the sting of tears. She swallowed hard against the emotions boiling up inside her. When she opened them again, the first thing she saw—the only thing she saw—was Seth, staring back at her.

  Go after it, she heard her father say.

  Seth was on his feet, moving toward her, his smile warm, light dancing in his eyes.

  Lauren turned and ran.

  He found her two hours later at the village museum.

  Lauren was sprawled on the floor of an upstairs storage room in the sixties vintage building, surrounded by old rocks and rolled maps with time-yellowed edges.

  In the corner Seth saw an open display case covered in dust, which she’d apparently rifled. She was holding one of the rocks up close to her face, looking at it through a geologist’s hand lens—a tool much like a jeweler’s loupe, but more powerful—that she kept in the pocket of her cardigan.

  “Lauren!” he said, and jogged toward her.

  She looked up, startled. She’d been so focused on what she was doing, she hadn’t heard him come in. “Oh, thank God it’s you! I was just about to come find you. You won’t believe this.”

  “I’ve been looking for you for hours. When I saw you at the school, and you ran, I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know where you’d gone. Don’t you know how worried I’ve been?”

  She grabbed his hand when he reached her. “Sit down. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  He’d never seen her so excited. Well, he had, but in a different way. For an instant he recalled their lovemaking two nights ago. God, he wanted to hold her. He wanted to scoop her up in his arms and just hold her.

  When he saw her standing there outside the classroom door at the school, staring into space, tears glassing her eyes, he hadn’t known what to think. He’d made as hasty an exit as he could without alarming the kids, but by the time he got outside, she was gone.

  “Sit down.” Insistent, she pulled him down beside her. “Look.”

  He took the hand lens she offered him and the rock that she’d been studying. He remembered from his college geology class how to use the low-magnification lens.

  “You’re not going to believe it. I still don’t believe it.”

  He angled his head back so the light from the bare overhead bulb reflected off the rock. “Sandstone, right?” he said, after he’d looked at it. “So what?”

  “So what?” On the floor she smoothed one of the yellowed maps she’d unfurled, and held it in place with a couple more rocks from the display case.

  “This is exactly the same kind of rock as the sample I took from the crate that Salvio snatched from me on the island. Exactly,” she said with emphasis.

  He looked at the rock, but to him it was just a rock. He didn’t get it. “So…?”

  “Remember I told you that rocks like this don’t exist at Caribou Island?”

  “Yeah, I remember. You said the crate of rocks Salvio was hell-bent on keeping secret had to be from somewhere else.”

  She nodded. “Guess where they’re from?”

  He didn’t have to. Already she was poring over the map, her finger tracing lines of topography across what he recognized as the arctic coastline near the Caribou Island site.

  The map was old, hand drawn in India ink with a calligrapher’s pen. His gaze cut to the legend in the right hand corner. “How old is this?”

  “Nineteen forty-seven,” she said absently, still tracing the topography with her finger. “Postwar there were a lot of government-sponsored field surveys in the area. Most of the records are buried somewhere in old files. They weren’t thought to be that important, because at the time no one was looking for oil in Alaska.”

  “And now?”

  “And now—” her finger stopped in the middle of the map, just east of Caribou Island “—no one’s looking for oil here.”

  He stared at the map.

  “Because it’s illegal.” She tapped her finger impatiently on the spot.

  The realization hit him like a slap in the face. “The wildlife refuge!”

  “Bingo,” she said, and snatched the rock from his hand. “Due east of Caribou Island. That’s where this rock is from. And that’s where that box of rocks Salvio confiscated was from, too.”

  “But those were drilling samples, right? From below the surface, from a well.”

  “From the Caribou Island well,” Lauren said, and studied the rock again. “Only no one knows it. No one except Salvio and Walters and that foreign company.”

  His mind worked to process the information, but she didn’t give him time to think it through.

  “That’s why the operation was so far behind schedule. That’s why there was so much sophisticated equipment out there. Equipment that shouldn’t have been there. Oh, God!”

  “What?”

  “Directional equipment! The kind you need to drill a well at an angle. I saw Pinkie and Bulldog moving some of it off the rig one night. At the time, I didn’t recognize it for what it was, but now I know. Now I’m sure of it.”

  Seth had spent his first few days at Caribou Island, before Lauren arrived, getting a feel for the operation and the players. Nothing about the drilling of the well had seemed unusual. But then, Salvio had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure it appeared that way.

  “By the time you arrived, by the time I arrived, everything was normal. Paddy and Jack were drilling the well Tiger had commissioned. A vertical hole, ten thousand feet down, easy as pie.”

  “But before we got there…”

  “Exactly. They’d already drilled another well from the site. A secret well, at an angle from the island, into the wildlife refuge.”

  “A secret illegal well, you mean.” The Feds were going to have a fit when they heard about this. The whole industry would be in an uproar.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t piece it together before now. It all makes sense. The samples, impossibly deep depth measurements flashing on Salvio’s computer—it was all from the other well.”

  Seth made the next logical leap. “It’s the data from that well, the secret well, that’s supposed to be sold.”

  “Exactly. I’d guess rock samples, engineering data, anything Salvio could get his hands on without raising suspicion or leaving a paper trail. Seth, that crate of samples would
have been worth a fortune. More money than you can imagine.”

  “But the wildlife refuge isn’t open to oil exploration or drilling. What possible good could—”

  “It’s not open to drilling yet,” she said. “But it could be. Look at gas prices. Americans are in an uproar.”

  She was right. He knew there was legislation pending that could open wildlife sanctuaries like the one near Caribou Island to oil exploration. If that happened, anyone who knew ahead of time whether or not oil existed below the surface, and where, would have a huge advantage when the government leased the land for drilling. An advantage potentially worth billions of dollars.

  It was a whole new ball game as far as Seth was concerned. In his mind he reopened his original list of suspects.

  Lauren pocketed the rock and gathered up the map as she scrambled to her feet. “I have to go back. I have to get that sample.”

  Jolted from his musings, he said, “What are you talking about?”

  “Caribou Island. I’m going back.”

  “The hell you are.” He followed her out the door and down the stairs into the museum.

  “Everything all right?” the volunteer docent asked as Lauren sidestepped her, making a beeline for the exit.

  “Fine. Thanks, Dottie.” Seth shot the elderly woman a quick smile, slipped out the door behind Lauren and caught her in the icy parking lot.

  She turned, the look on her face telling him she was ready to go to the mattresses on this one. “What?”

  “You’re not serious.” He clamped down on her arm and guided her toward his Jeep.

  “I’m dead serious. And don’t push me around.”

  He loosened his grip, but didn’t let go. Once they were in the vehicle, she said, “That sample may be the only evidence left of what’s happened out there. I’ve got to get it.”

  “Come on, Lauren. If a secret well was drilled from Caribou Island into that wildlife refuge, there’s got to be a paper trail a mile long that will show it. You, better than anyone, know what it takes to drill a well like that—truckloads of drill pipe, wellhead equipment, steel casing, hundreds of pallets of cement and hundreds more of supplies and equipment. You can’t hide the movement or sale of all that stuff.”