Aurora's Gold

by K. J. Gillenwater

  Ben was not unattractive. He was built like a tank. On an evolutionary level, he fit the ideal: strong, tall, fit. But that wasn’t an excuse for me to act stupid. I needed to straighten out my head before I went back upstairs.

  I plunked down the basket and loaded Ben’s clothes into the empty dryer. Thirty minutes should do it. I turned the dial and then took a seat on the folding chair someone had been kind enough to leave behind. A year ago, I used to sit on the washer and lean against the wall while waiting for my laundry to wash and dry. Someone must’ve gotten sick of that routine and sacrificed a chair for the public good.

  My phone vibrated in my back pocket. Texts from Stella.

  Can I come over? Matt at work. Lonely.

  I knew it was more likely she was annoyed at the third wheel living in their apartment: Matt’s sister, Alisha. Everything was so expensive in Nome—gas, heat, electricity, food. A lot of times friends and family shared the same cramped living quarters to make ends meet.

  I thought about my guest upstairs. Not sure how I could explain that to Stella. I mulled over my answer. But then again, maybe Stella was exactly what I needed. I responded:

  Sure. Bring pizza?

  Stella answered:

  You provide the beer?

  I’d just purchased a couple of six packs yesterday so I could keep the dredge stocked for the end-of-the-day reward.

  I texted a thumbs up symbol and typed:

  See you in 30.

  She could find out I had an extra guest when she got here. I had solved my uncomfortable situation in minutes.

  *

  The dryer shut off. I scooped up Ben’s dry clothes, put them in the hamper, and headed back upstairs.

  Unfortunately, Stella was already knocking on my door. Before I could shout out from below, the door opened, and Ben let her in. Not without a moment of hesitation, of course, and some conversation I couldn’t hear from my position.

  I hurried up the stairs. No one had noticed me. I bumped into the door with my body, my hands full. “Could you let me in?” I shouted.

  The door opened.

  “So it’s a double date then?” Ben greeted me dressed in my father’s robe once more.

  His cheeks were ruddy from the heat and steam of the bath.

  “Glad to see you’re doing better.” I pushed my way in.

  Stella rummaged in my fridge. A pizza box sat on the counter.

  I held the laundry hamper out. “Here, why don’t you put your clothes on?”

  Ben felt the warm shirt and smiled. “Ah, thanks a million.” As Ben headed into my father’s bedroom to change, he said, “I hope you brought pepperoni.”

  Stella turned and gave me a sharp look. “Why didn’t you tell me Ben was over here?” she hissed.

  I opened the pizza box—garlic chicken. Hope Ben didn’t mind. I picked up a slice, suddenly starving. “Because I knew you wouldn’t come.”

  “How do you know? You didn’t even give me a chance.” She sipped a beer and grabbed her own slice. “Care to explain how your new diver…”

  “…And suspected murderer,” I whispered.

  Stella nodded emphatically, “Yes, and suspected murderer, ended up half-naked in your apartment?”

  “I wasn’t half-naked.” Ben reappeared dressed in his regular clothes.

  For a split second I felt something like disappointment wash over me.

  “I was all naked.” He winked.

  Stella blushed and gave me an even sharper look.

  “He used my bathtub, Stel. For heaven’s sake.” I popped open a beer and handed it to Ben. “You have to be cautious around Stella, she will take your word for truth and, before you know it, Nome will be full of all kinds of scandalous gossip.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Ben took the beer and peered in the pizza box. “Chicken does not belong on a pizza.” He pulled a face but took a slice anyway.

  “So is anyone going to explain anything to me?” Stella’s frustration was obvious. “Or I will make up something that you won’t like?”

  “I fell in the drink.” Ben chomped down his first slice of pizza. “Actually, this isn’t bad.”

  I picked up the story. “Ben fell off the dock, and I rescued him.”

  “Well, there was a little more to it than that.” Ben gave me a sideways glance.

  “Long story short, we both ended up in the water. Ben’s got a long ride home, so I suggested he come here to warm up, get dry. That sort of thing.”

  Stella didn’t seem too convinced. “Uh huh.”

  I wondered what Ben had told her at the door when he’d answered.

  Although I knew Stella was likely erring on the side of caution when it came to Ben, he seemed to be winning her over with charm. I didn’t even know this side of him existed until now. I liked it.

  “And I’ll be on my way shortly. Don’t want to get in the way of a Girls’ Night.” He grabbed another slice. “I just need a ride back to my ATV at the docks…”

  “I can take you,” I offered. For some reason I didn’t want Stella driving him back. Both of them in a car alone for a few minutes? She might slip up and say something. Why I was so afraid of him finding out what we knew, I don’t know. But maybe deep down I wanted to keep our relationship drama free. Letting him know what we’d found online? Well, until I knew more, what would be the point? It could all be a mistake. It could be something less terrible than the story implied. Or it could be worse. My conscience kicked in that worry.

  Stella wouldn’t look at me. Her silent judgment settled on me like a heavy blanket. Smothering. Stella had only briefly met Ben. She didn’t know him like I did. I didn’t really need her to tell me how to view him. I could figure it out for myself. But her attitude stung a little bit, I had to admit. I wanted her approval, but I knew she wasn’t going to give it to me so easily.

  “Great.” Ben plunked down on the couch with his drink and what remained of pizza slice number two.

  My mind returned to a half an hour earlier when Ben had been prone on the couch, and I’d kissed him. I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help it.

  Ben’s gaze locked with mine. His blue eyes blazing.

  I knew he was thinking about the same thing.

  I shivered.

  For a brief moment I wished Stella away. I could’ve had that. I could’ve turned her down earlier and told her I was tired, busy, whatever. But I didn’t. I’d agreed to her idea because I knew what I was capable of, the mistakes I could make, the easy slide from one relationship into another. Kyle hadn’t been my first and only boyfriend. There had been others. Stella knew. Stella had watched it all play out in real time, had been my shoulder to cry on when things had gone wrong, had scolded me—kindly—when I’d made the wrong move.

  Part of me wanted Ben all to myself. I knew I’d stepped into dangerous waters. I ran the risk of destroying a good working relationship for my own carnal interests. But I needed to figure out how to live my life without Stella saving me. My choices. My life. My mistakes to make.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Twenty minutes later Ben and I were in my dad’s truck driving to the docks. My heart was a-flutter; my nerves were on edge.

  “Look, I’m not stupid,” Ben said.

  I kept my eyes on the road. “Oh?”

  “Stella didn’t show up out of the blue. You asked her to come over.” He tapped his fingers on the arm rest. “I didn’t realize I made you so nervous.”

  “I wasn’t nervous.”

  “Is that so?” He chuckled. “You practically shoved me into the tub fully clothed and then ran out of there after you kissed me.”

  “I did not.” My hackles went up. He made me sound like a love sick school girl.

  “That’s okay. I get it,” Ben admitted. “Hard enough to be Buck Darling’s daughter around here, I’ve noticed; you don’t need rumors running around town. I don’t blame you. I’ve had my own experiences with ignorant people spreading stories.”

&nbs
p; I wanted to dig further on this topic, but didn’t want to rock the boat. I stashed away his statement for later. “Nome is a strange place. Not only is it a small town, but it’s a small town full of a lot of roughness. My dad knew it when I first moved up here. But you don’t need to worry about me. I’ve dealt with these bozos for years. If they don’t believe in my abilities now, they never will. Rumors or no.” I took a deep breath and went for it. I could be an adult. “Look, I will admit, there is some odd attraction between us. But it’s just the work. Nothing more.” I needed to explain it away. Find a reason for it to be there. “It’s a very intimate relationship between tender and diver. How do you think I ended up with Kyle? And that was a big mistake. It’s really better if we keep things professional, don’t you think?”

  “I never wanted things to be anything else but professional.” He cracked his knuckles. “You were the one that kissed me.”

  That got my pot boiling. But I needed to remain calm, the business owner with her head on straight. Not a messed up chick who needed a man to save her. “It was a mistake on my part. There, does that make you happy?”

  “Sure. I never said what happened made me unhappy.”

  I wanted to rant in frustration. Calm down, Rory, it wasn’t worth the aggravation. He wanted to push my buttons and make the most of an embarrassing moment of weakness. “Right.” I turned into the dock parking lot. “Here we are.”

  “Great. Thanks for the help.”

  “No problem. It’s the least I could do.” Before he got out of the truck I added, “Same time tomorrow?”

  He nodded and then headed to his ATV.

  Before I could return home and put this day behind me, my phone rang.

  “Ms. Darling, I’m calling from the ICU at Alaska Regional Hospital,” a nurse said. “Your father is alert and ready to talk to you, if you’re available.”

  “Yes, yes, I am. Please put him on.” I put the truck in park. My stomach filled with butterflies. “Dad? Is that you?” I briefly closed my eyes. I wanted so badly to hear his voice, to know that he was okay.

  “Rory?” Buck’s voice was raspy and quiet. Not the booming tenor I knew.

  “Yes, it’s Rory.” I didn’t know how much he remembered, how disoriented he would be. I knew the sedation plus the heart attack and its after effects might make him seem a bit muddled in his thoughts. “How are you, Dad?”

  “Tired.”

  I smiled. “I’ll bet.” The sound of his voice steadied me.

  “These nurses…” He coughed. “They’ll be the devil of me. Never give me a moment’s peace.”

  I imagined something like a Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Stark white uniform. Stern. Coolly pretty. The unfeeling tyrant of the ICU, roaming the halls at night in her starched white uniform to make his life miserable. “You relax. They just want to make sure you’re okay.”

  “Are you coming soon, Rory?”

  My heart ached at the sadness I detected in the request. “Oh, I can’t right now. You know it’s dredging season.” Who knew if he even had an idea what time of year it was or that he was in Anchorage, and I was in Nome.

  “Right. Right.” His voice rasped.

  I watched as Ben’s ATV disappeared. “I’ve got a great, new diver, though.” Maybe that would settle his mind knowing I’d found good help in his absence.

  “Oh? That’s good.” He drifted off for a moment. I could hear his breathing on the other end.

  “Dad? Are you still there?”

  “Don’t let him take the map,” Buck said, his voice sharp as a stainless steel pin.

  “The map?” My mind blanked. “You mean the GPS?” He had been religious about keeping our GPS history a secret from anyone outside the ‘circle.’ The circle used to include Nate until last summer. Now the ‘circle’ was only Dad and me.

  “The map, the map.” Buck’s voice grew insistent. “You don’t want to lose it.”

  “I won’t, Dad.” I had no idea what he was talking about. It must be nonsense. The drugs talking. “No one’s going to take the map,” I placated him.

  “That’s good, Rory. Keep it locked up.” His voice grew fainter and fainter. “Keep it locked.”

  My curiosity piqued. “Locked where?”

  “In the box.” He coughed. “We’re gonna get that mother lode I promised you.

  Before I could ask him anymore, a nurse got on the line. “I think your father needs some rest now. The doctor will call you to let you know more about when surgery can be scheduled.”

  “Oh, great. Okay, thanks.” The voice on the other end of the line had already hung up.

  I turned over in my mind the box my father had mentioned. What could he mean? I didn’t remember any locked box he kept at the apartment. And there weren’t a lot of places to hide things in the few rooms we had. No secret compartments. No space under the floorboards. No safety deposit boxes with secret keys stashed in bus lockers like they always had in the movies.

  He’d sounded tired but lucid. My gut told me he wasn’t making it up—the idea of a map to a big gold find in a locked box. Before I’d appeared in Nome, my father had worked on his dredge for years without a GPS system. In the 90s such a thing had been expensive and out of reach for two young guys scrambling to get together the cash for a dredge. A GPS would’ve been something only the big boats had. Men with investors and such.

  So a map wouldn’t be unusual for my father to have stashed somewhere. Maybe his heart attack had jumbled his memories around. Maybe he’d remembered a time long past. But he’d never mentioned a map before when we’d dreamed of finding gold nuggets as big as shotgun shells.

  I drove back into town, mulling over my father’s words. On a whim, I turned toward Kyle’s place. Not only had he’d disappeared before I’d gotten a chance to thank him for helping save my diver, I wanted to ask him about the idea of a map.

  The fact our relationship had frayed since our break up didn’t sit well with me. And most of that was my fault for laying the blame for my father’s accident at his feet. But, at the time, he hadn’t defended his actions, so I assumed my thoughts about what had transpired on the dredge that day had been pretty accurate. Now that I’d had my experience with the air compressor conking out, I viewed the accident through new eyes.

  I’d overslept that day. The three of us had been working the dredge with a routine like clockwork. Up at 5:30, on the dredge by six, back at the docks by five. Over and over and over. Sure, some days the weather kept us in, but without fail it was a threesome that went out and a threesome that returned.

  The weather forecast had looked grim. Too windy. We hadn’t planned to go out. But, for some reason, Buck woke up early and noticed the weather had shifted. The winds had stilled. He’d left me asleep in the apartment and had decided to head out with Kyle for reasons I might never know.

  Kyle had tended, and my father had dived. While he worked below, the air line blew apart. A crack had formed in the tubing and gone unnoticed. Buck had been down pretty deep and, before he could make it to the surface, the strain had given him a massive heart attack.

  As tender, it had been Kyle’s job to check the equipment. So to me, that had been strike one against him. Strike two had been the delay in calling for help. Kyle didn’t make the call for a good fifteen minutes. Fifteen precious minutes my father went without medical assistance.

  I made the turn on Kyle’s street. Flying the white truce flag might be the best solution to keep some of my personal dirt a secret. He’d reached out today. I might as well test the waters.

  Luckily, the lights were on in his Quonset hut. I wanted to resolve the situation so the tension would go away. I needed to get past my negative feelings. I couldn’t go back in time and change anything about the accident, but now I understood now that sometimes things can go wrong, and no one is to blame.

  Kyle answered his door after a couple of knocks. His automatic smile went stiff at the sight of me. “Oh. What’re you doing here, Ror
y?”

  “I wanted to stop by and thank you for helping out on the docks earlier. That was really nice of you.”

  He shrugged and shifted his weight from one foot to another. “It was the right thing to do.”

  “Well, half the guys there didn’t bother.” I paused and screwed up my courage. “Do you mind if I come in for a minute?” I thought briefly about Stella back at my apartment. But I doubted she’d mind a short delay.

  “I guess.” He opened the door more widely and tucked his hands in his pockets.

  I followed him inside.

  His place still felt like home. I’d spent the better part of a year living here. Although the lighting sucked and the place constantly smelled like motor oil and rotting seaweed, I missed it.

  “Well?” Kyle sat in a kitchen chair with a ripped seat cushion and propped his feet on a plastic crate. “What’s on your mind?”

  It would’ve been easy for me to slip right back into our old roles. Kyle, the hard working yet quiet dredge tender and diver. Me, the dredge owner’s daughter, mouthy and stubborn. We had made quite a pair. Some said we were mismatched. In public, we didn’t seem very affectionate—that wasn’t really Kyle’s style. He also didn’t express himself very much. Most of the time I had no idea where his mind was.

  “I don’t like the way things ended between us. I wanted to apologize for getting so upset with you after the accident.” It took everything in me to say those words, but most of my anger had burned off in the last few days. “It could’ve happened to anyone.” I wasn’t so sure I believed that entirely, but if I wanted to make things right with Kyle, the words needed to be said.

  He nodded. “How’s your old man doing?”

  “Not great, but the doc says he should pull through.”