Fatal Attractions

by Jeanne Foguth

  She gulped, as she held it up between her forefinger and thumb.

  The corner of Stone’s mouth twitched. He held up a second cylinder of death. “This is a magnum slug. Use this for bear.”

  Ridiculous. “You mean to tell me that I have to get a different type of ammunition for every type of animal I want to scare?”

  He blinked several times then pretended to cough. Damn, she’d obviously put her foot in her mouth – again.

  “That’s not far from the truth,” he said. “Actually, there are different types for what you plan to kill.” Ariel felt the blood drain from her face and her head begin to spin. “There’s also bird-shot, but we didn’t buy any.”

  “I’m sure Mozart will be grateful for that.” Her voice squeaked. Stone had another coughing fit. Why didn’t the man laugh in her face? Then she could demand to know what was so funny. This ammo business was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of. “So what you’re tell me is that I need to know what creatures will be in the woods before I take Tempest hiking. Is that about it?” He blinked. “Should I load my gun with bear-scarers and pray I don’t need to frighten away a rampaging caribou? Or do I have to take a selection of noise-makers and load an assortment when I don’t know what I might need to scare away?”

  Stone rubbed the back of his neck. “My rule is to load for the most lethal thing you’re likely to encounter, and possibly need to bring down.” Peter, but only if he tried to hurt them. “Around here, that’s normally either a bear or moose,” Stone said. “You can use the magnums for either one.”

  “Moose? You’re kidding, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “Bullwinkle seems-”

  “Like a cartoon version of the real animal.”

  “Oh.” She stared at him a moment, then forced herself to focus on learning as much as she could, so looked at the papery cylinder in her hand. “So the green ones are louder.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why would I want to scare away Bullwinkle?” Ariel put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot.

  “Because real moose are damned lethal. Bulls routinely take on the pipeline and cars – they even fight trains. Locomotives are the only ones that are up to the cont-“

  “This is a joke, right?”

  Stone solemnly shook his head. “I'd rather face down a grizzly than a bull moose.” He appeared dead serious.

  Ariel clamped her jaws shut and adjusted the straps of her ever-present book bag, then spent the next ten minutes listening to Stone explain the differences between ammunition, when and how to fire her shotgun. He concluded, “If you have a deranged bear and the first shot doesn’t scare it, fire to kill. Not to wound. Bears don’t die easy and if you wound it, it’ll shred you before it keels over.

  She shuddered. “I get the point. What else do I need to know?”

  He put one foot on a long, low rock, placed her gun on his thigh and pointed. “This is a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun. It’s the hunting model and holds either five magnum slugs or …” He cracked open the gun. By the time Stone finished his detailed definition and demonstration of every nuance of every part of loading, firing and cleaning the weapon, her head was pounding. Suddenly, he plucked the gun from his makeshift lap and thrust it at her. “Here, you load it.”

  Ariel knelt and used the rock as a table. She held her breath as she repeated the sequence. When she finished, she looked up at him. For once he look pleased instead of amused or distrustful.

  “Excellent, you learn fast.”

  “Thank you.”

  His dimples deepened. “Now shoot the target.” He tilted his head toward the vodka ad. She swallowed hard, then stood up. Gingerly, she raised the butt to her shoulder, as he’d showed her. “It’s too heavy to hold like a dead mouse,” he said from behind her. “Use your hands, so you have better control and less chance of dropping it and shooting something painful.” She put the gun on the picnic table, wiped her palms on her jeans, then, before she lost her nerve, she grabbed it in a firm grip and assumed the position. He smiled. Hoping he didn’t notice her shaking knees, she sighted down the barrel. The wretched thing looked ten times longer from this perspective and the magazine page looked a thousand miles away.

  When the photo centered, she gripped the barrel as hard as her hands would allow and slipped her forefinger over the trigger. Gently, she pulled. Nothing happened. She tried harder.

  With a resounding boom, the barrel whipped upward and knocked her off her feet. She was thrown backward against a solid wall. Her breath rushed out and everything dimmed as she slid downward.

  For a long moment, she lay with her eyes closed and listened to a bird shriek. Pain radiated from her right temple and shoulder. She suspected she knew what concussions and pulverized joints felt like.

  A warm minty breeze fanned her face. “Are you alright?” Stone sounded terrified.

  She raised her left hand and touched her forehead. Her fingertip felt sticky. “Let me guess, if the bear doesn’t run away, after the first warning, shotguns are designed to knock us out so we don’t feel it when the beasts rip us limb from limb.”

  “Thank God, you’re okay!” Stone’s sounded nervous. “Damn, you scared me.”

  She opened her left eye and tried to sit upright. “I think I’ll buy some firecrackers and forget guns.”

  He helped her up. “It was my fault. You were holding it wrong and not standing right."

  “I thought I’d copied what you showed me.”

  “Close. I would have corrected your stance, but you pulled the trigger before I –“ He shrugged and looked away from her. “You hit the target.”

  She squinted at the tattered paper. “Wow, I did!”

  Stone placed a supportive arm around her shoulders. “The stock is too long for you. I’ll cut it down an inch or so – that should make it easier to handle. Tomorrow, we’ll try again.”

  “No, not tomorrow.” Ariel carefully shook her aching head.

  “It’ll be okay. I won’t let you get knocked out again. Next time, I’ll help you hold the gun. I’ll only make you do it alone when you feel you’re ready.” He was nearly begging.

  Ariel sighed. “Fine. Tomorrow.” That would be soon enough to finish dealing with her phobia.

  Chapter 17

  Mozart sidestepped back and forth across his perch while Tempest, a thin sheen of perspiration over her forehead, jabbed her way through a tae-kwon-do routine. Across the living room, Ariel pushed the Spanish tutorial into her Walkman then secured the headphones over her ears and gingerly curled up in her favorite inflated chair. Closing her eyes, she found a comfortable position and focused on rolling R’s.

  Suddenly, the headphones were yanked off. Ariel lunged off the chair, landing in a fighting stance. “What the?”

  Her sister laughed. “Aren’t you gonna work out with me?” Tempest danced out of reach.

  “Not tonight.” Before Tempest could argue, Ariel sat back down, then added, “When I fired that dratted gun, I bruised myself from head to toe and came close to giving myself a concussion. I need to rest.”

  “Lazy, lazy, lazy. That arc over your eyebrow looks cool. When do I get to shoot the thing?” She kicked at the imaginary nose of an attacker, who was at least a head taller than her. Mozart squawked and beat his wings, as he always did when Tempest did high kicks.

  Ariel gently fingered her tender brow. “Believe me, you don’t want to.”

  Tempest did two swift jabs followed by a kick about three feet off the floor. “Stone isn’t here to see, so quit acting like a wilting violet.”

  “Are you trying to insinuate that I’m faking being hurt?” Ariel would have shaken some sense into Tempest if it hadn’t seemed like too much of an effort.

  “You need to exercise or you’ll really be stiff tomorrow.”

  “I can’t lift my right arm.”

  Tempest turned to face her, hands on hips. “Since when do minor problems stop you?”

  Ariel unbuttoned her shirt and e
ased it off her right shoulder. Even though she babied the joint, waves of pain shot through her bones.

  “Oooo-ugh! That really looks bad. I’ll get you a cold compress.” Tempest hurried into the kitchen and the freezer door whined open. In a moment, she was back with a bag of frozen corn. “This should do.” Tempest gently laid it over the angry flesh.

  “This does feel better. Thanks.”

  “It’s what Mama would have done.”

  True. It was nice not having to play the nurse roll. “I miss her.”

  Tempest bit her lower lip as she sank to the floor in a classic, cross-legged, yoga pose. “Sometimes I feel like the only things I can count on are you and Mozart.”

  “What about yourself? You have yourself all the time, you only have me part of that time.”

  “Mozart’s around as much as I want.”

  “For now.”

  “Are you back to sending him to Gramma?”

  Ariel wanted this conversation like she wanted another lesson about shotguns. She wet her lips. “We’ve been lucky so far, but what if at some point in the future –“

  “Is this another of your lectures about patterns and running away? Because if it is, I’m tired of running every time you get paranoid. I like it here. I like having Uncle Link, Uncle Stone and the Greeks next door. I like knowing I can play with them. I like knowing there will soon be puppies there. I like –“

  “I like it here, too,” Ariel said. “I don’t mind teaching a couple classes and I feel like I’m being useful, which is something I haven’t felt very often in the last few years. It makes me feel good to see you so happy, too.”

  “But?”

  Across the room, Mozart tilted his head to the side, as if he was interested in the answer, too. Ariel opened her mouth, but all she could think of was her confusion over Stone O’Banyon, a man who obviously had a live-in girlfriend at his home in Valdez, but traveled enough to think he could get away with two relationships. Ariel shut her mouth and shrugged.

  Tempest’s eyes sparked. “Can’t lie about why you like it here, can you? I’ve seen the way you watch Stone. He watches you the very same way when you aren't looking. Know what I think? I think that you’re afraid of getting lovey-dovey close to him because of Father. And I think you’re just using the glimpse of Father as an excuse to run away.”

  Perhaps Tempest was correct. Even the thought of leaving Stone O’Banyon gave a dull ache to her core. There was no way they could have a future, much less a fairytale ending. He was a womanizer, who didn’t even bother to hide it. How many times had he mentioned Dolly with tenderness in his voice and a gleam in his eye? Too many. She had to end any possibility of a relationship before things got even more complicated between them.

  Ariel cleared her throat. “I don’t know when we’ll have to move, or if we will need to. I was just having a conversation. Mozart is over 20 and parrots aren’t immortal, all this moving and changing climates can’t be good for him.” Her skin felt dry to the touch. “I’m really concerned how the low humidity up here affects him.”

  “He’s got a bunch more good years left. He’ll probably outlive me and I intend to live for ages.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Ariel readjusted the thawing corn. “I hope Peter won’t come looking for us, either, but we can’t hide our heads in the sand, like ostriches.”

  Tempest relaxed her cross-legged pose. “So we still have to learn Spanish, don’t we?”

  Ariel nodded. “While we hope we never have to use this plan, if worst comes to worst, at least we’ll have a strategy, so we won’t blindly run. And we’ll learn something new, too. You never know when something will come in handy.” Mozart tucked his head under his emerald wing. “When we came to Fairbanks, I thought it was going to be so great. A wilderness place, yet progressive enough to have a university.”

  “It’s that.”

  “True, but have you noticed how isolated it is?” There’s basically one main road plus a railroad south to Anchorage, and plenty of wild country for ambushes. Then there’s another road heading southeast to the Yukon Territory. Once other roads get out of town, they come to nothing. It wouldn’t take much to catch us.”

  “Maybe instead of learning Spanish, we should get a cute little plane and learn to fly it.”

  “There’s only one airport –“

  “Two. Fort Wainwright has one, and there might be little ones.”

  “How would we get onto the military base?”

  Tempest flushed. “What about the river. We could paddle away.”

  “The Chena flows into the Tanana. It’ll be winter soon and even now, the water is barely above freezing. You couldn’t pay me to paddle my way to freedom for hundreds of miles. For one thing, we’d be stuck on the river and, like every other form of transportation, Peter would only need one simple ambush.” She blinked away the threatening tears. She’d thought Fairbanks sounded so wonderful, but it had turned into a restraint. Probably, ten years from now, they’d only be missing persons in some dusty case file.

  “Fairbanks is a freaking trap,” Tempest concluded. Ariel nodded. She hoped they had the luxury of time to lay the framework for one more escape. Hoped that it would be the last time they ever needed to run for their lives. It was the same hope she had held close for over five years.

  Chapter 18

  Stone trimmed the Cessna’s tabs and followed the pipeline south to Valdez. He settled back and waited for the tensions of the past week to evaporate. Instead, the thrumming of the engine reminded him of Ariel’s low-pitched chuckle.

  Out the windscreen, the sun glinted off the pools of water, which meandered through the river’s mud flats. From two thousand feet above ground level, the mud looked like the same shade of innocuous brown as Ariel’s hair and eyes. He ran a hand over his eyes and blinked. Until meeting Ariel Danner, he’d never been particularly fond of brown, now the shade haunted his dreams.

  Damned but he needed to get to Dolly and spend the weekend working off the confusion and sexual frustration that had built up. Agreeing to teach the woman to use a shotgun had been one of the stupidest things he’d ever done.

  He vowed that this trip, he wouldn’t get distracted by the camaraderie of his pals or the dubious anesthesia of liquor; he’d spend every moment polishing Dolly’s brass and anything else he could think of doing to work off the memory of lemony perfume mixed with wild roses or how good it felt when Ariel's buttocks were hurled against him.

  Strange that he’d never appreciated how damned romantic and isolated the rifle range was. Too bad she’d turned stiff as a board when fate had literally thrown her into him.

  And to think he’d been stupid enough to take her back there a second time, even after he’d realized how alone they were. At least she’d learned to stand properly and handle the shotgun. The one good thing about the exasperating time they’d spent together was that he was certain she had no intention of killing anyone.

  He hoped Windy had found enough information to terminate the last of his suspicions. Perhaps she’d even dig up something, which would stop the obsession. The way Ariel occupied his mind was enough to make him believe that witches, possession and the supernatural existed. By the time he slammed through Linkstone, Inc.’s door like a rampaging bull moose, Stone was focused on demolishing the week’s paperwork so he could get to Dolly and run his hands over her calming contours.

  As the door connected with the coat rack, Mavis jerked in surprise. “Good afternoon, Mr. O’Banyon.” Her tone held reproach and her back – always straight as an arrow – straightened even more as her narrow shoulders squared.

  “Anything urgent?”

  Piercing pale eyes, which were closer to white, then the blue, regarded him from behind bifocals and even her perfectly coifed snow-white chignon seemed to bristle at his abruptness. Guilt surged through him. He gently closed the door and forced his tense muscles to relax. “Apologies, Mavis, I was preoccupied. Athena will whelp soon.” He gave her a broad smil
e. “Can I interest you in a puppy?”

  She loosened up, though her militaristic bearing made it difficult for anyone, who didn’t know her well, to differentiate between her moods. Link didn’t work in their main office enough to gauge her moods, so one of Stone’s amusements over the past decade was watching his partner grovel to Mavis in an effort to win the affection that he’d had for years. “No thank you, Stone.” Something close to a smile touched her lips. “If I wanted something with fur, I'd get a cat. They don’t require constant care or eat furniture.”

  “Dogs make better companions.”

  She steepled her fingers. “I thought you always had people standing in line to pay top dollar for your puppies. Has that changed?”

  Puppies were easier to talk about than the real reason for his temper. “Just thought you might like one as a sort of bonus.” For the first time since Mavis Cardew started working for them over a decade before, she looked flustered. Perhaps he should find her a kitten or gift her with tickets to something a sixtyish widow would enjoy.

  Mavis lowered her gaze, then plucked a stack of pink phone messages from under the crystal-encased gold nugget, which she used as a paperweight. She rifled through them, and selected one. Putting it on top, she handed them to him. “A Peter Baldwyn has been here three times asking for either you or Link.” Her nose delicately wrinkled, as if detecting a foul odor. “He has also phoned no less than eleven times and all but accused me of lying when I told him neither of you were in the office.”

  Stone grabbed slips and stared at the unfamiliar name and number on top. The thing Mavis detested most was phone calls. It was no surprise she was bristling like an enraged porcupine, if the stranger had phoned eleven times. His fingers itched to crumple the message and toss it. “What’s he selling?”

  Her mouth flattened into a thin line. “The man refused to speak with someone as lowly as a mere office manager.” She picked up her letter opener, which was a replica of a very sharp medieval sword.