Carson tugged the brim of his cap lower. Damn, but this woman rubbed him in all the wrong ways. “I said I’d find the plane.”
“You told me you could only give me one week. You’ve spent two days out here and you’ve only covered a fraction of the lake’s outlet!” she said with a frustrated gesture of her arm.
“Working a search pattern takes time,” he said, bristling at her criticism. “With one person, it takes twice as long. You have to steer the boat and watch the monitor at the same time. You can’t go as fast or you might miss something. The towfish sonar I’m using has a shorter range than a lower frequency sonar would and I have to work a tighter pattern because of that.”
“Then I’ll help you look. I’ll drive the boat or watch the screen, I’ll do whatever you tell me to do. We can bring lights and work at night, after supper. It hardly gets dark this time of year, it wouldn’t be that hard for us to work straight through if we have to. Pick me up on the dock after supper. I’ll help you look!”
Carson stared as his warning bells began to ring. She was so tightly strung she appeared on the verge of bursting into tears, and moody, emotional women had always made him very uncomfortable. He hadn’t figured Libby Wilson to be the moody, emotional type. “No way,” he said with a curt head shake, knowing that if she were aboard he’d be more distracted than ever. Even as he spoke he could see the tears shining in her eyes. She was about to cut loose and get hysterical. He held up a placating hand, hoping to calm the irrational storm. “Now listen…”
“No, you listen!” she interrupted. “You took me up on my offer of five thousand dollars and you told me you’d play by my rules. That was before you got here. It was only after you arrived that you changed your story and said you could only give me one week! If you had no intentions of doing the job in the first place, you should have said so, right up-front, instead of stringing me along like that!”
She was so mad she was hanging half out of the boat to confront him. If she leaned forward any farther, she’d be in the lake. So, Carson realized, would he. His blood pressure had hit an all-time high. “I told you I’d find the goddam plane, and I will!” he thundered. “I haven’t gone back on my word! I have never gone back on my word!”
“What if you haven’t found it by the end of the week? What then? You’ll take Frey up on his offer, won’t you, because it’s a whole helluva lot better than mine!”
“What if Frey kills the salvage rights to the plane? If he gets the state to designate the crash site as some kind of monument to Ben Libby’s son, which he has the power and influence to do, we won’t be able to bring the wreckage up.”
“He’ll never be able to do that. I can guarantee you.”
“How in hell can you guarantee something like that?”
“Just find the wreckage and let me worry about the rest!”
“Look, I’ll keep searching for the plane, but the very least you could do is tell me what the hell it is I’m looking for.”
For a few moments she glared at him, sparks shooting from her eyes and shoulders heaving around ragged breaths. Carson could see that the tears were about to spill over and her chin was trembling as she fought for control. She’d told Frey everything. Why the hell was she so reluctant to tell him? Why was it such a big secret?
“You’re not looking for jewels. You’re looking for bones,” she blurted out abruptly, as if speaking the words aloud pained her.
Carson shook his head, perplexed. Had he heard her correctly? “What am I looking for?”
“Bones!” she shouted as if he were deaf, the tears finally brimming over. “My father’s bones!”
The words hung in the air, arcing back and forth between them, electric and shocking. Carson could only sit in silence as he assimilated this overload of information. As soon as she’d spoken the word father, all the pieces of the puzzle had clicked together.
Of course. He should have guessed. She was about twenty-eight years old. She had blue eyes, was of native descent and her name was Libby. He’d already wondered about the strange coincidence of the name. He should have guessed the rest long ago, but he’d been too fixated on finding that planeload of fist-sized diamonds.
“If we can find just one bone in that wreckage, the DNA will prove my paternity and Frey will never be able to stop us from recovering the plane.” Her eyes were wide, fixed on him, riveting him in his seat. The silence stretched out again. “Well?”
“Well, what?” he said dumbly.
“I suppose now you’re going to want to charge me more money.”
Carson stared at her for a moment and then shook his head. She really thought that he was in this just for the money. And why shouldn’t she? He’d given her no reason to believe otherwise. Yet the truth was, he was already hooked. He’d help her out even if she couldn’t pay the retainer fee. Hell, he already was. “You have a really high opinion of me, don’t you?” He started the motor. “Tell you what. I’m going to take a quick break, gas the boat up and grab something to eat. I’ll be back out in an hour.”
“Pick me up at the dock at seven, Mr. Dodge,” she said. “And don’t tell me no. I have way too much at stake for you not to let me help.”
Before he could respond, she started her own outboard and veered around his boat, heading at top speed for the lodge where she was staying. He watched after her for a few moments, rocking in the bigger boat’s wake, then muttered, “Yeah, I guess maybe you do at that. Several billion dollars is a pretty big stake.”
CHAPTER NINE
LIBBY HARDLY HEARD the conversation that went around the supper table that night as she helped Karen serve up the meal. She was scarcely aware of what it was she was serving. At one point, in the sanctity of that wonderful kitchen, Karen touched her arm and brought her to a halt.
“Are you all right?” she said.
Libby nodded. “Fine.” Then, noting Karen’s genuine concern, she forced a smile. “Really, I’m fine. It’s been a long day, that’s all. And I was hoping to talk to Graham about Mr. Frey, but he’d gone back to Solly’s place.”
“Why don’t you get some rest? I can handle the rest of this, no problem. Go lie down and get a good night’s sleep. Things will look better in the morning.”
For an awful moment, Libby thought she was going to burst into tears at Karen’s kindness. She blinked hard and swallowed around the lump in her throat. “Actually, I think it’s better if I keep busy,” she said. “And Karen? Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For being who you are, and being in this place, right here and right now. If it weren’t for you, I think I’d drown in all the darkness.”
Karen gave her an impulsive hug. “You’ve certainly been a great help to me. And if you need anything at all…”
Libby hugged her back. “Thanks for everything. After we finish up with supper I’m going out on the lake to help Carson look for the plane.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Libby wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands. “Actually, I was hoping I could bring another basket of food with me. I have a feeling he hasn’t been eating all that well, except for what he’s gotten from you.”
“You got it, kiddo,” Karen said, squeezing her hand.
CARSON STOOD ON THE SHORE at his campsite, gazing out toward the mountains, eating another piece of white bread straight out of the bag and pondering all the implications of Libby Wilson being Connor’s daughter. No wonder Frey was offering a big kill fee. He stood to lose half of his fortune. But he was an old man. What difference did it make at this stage of his life? Why wouldn’t he want to right all the wrongs before he died?
Were there wrongs to be righted?
Had Frey known about Libby’s mother being pregnant?
He took another bite of bread and watched a loon fishing a hundred yards offshore. Going down into the deep. Coming up, swimming parallel to the shoreline, going down again. Over and over. All day long. A loon’s life.
; Not so very different from a man’s, come right down to it. It was all about survival. Catching the fish, cooking it, basic stuff.
Simple.
But not always easy. Sometimes there were just no fish to be found. Sometimes the loon went hungry, as did the man. Carson stared at the last fragment of bread in his hand. He was getting too philosophical, which meant he needed to get busy. Get back to work. Find the plane. He flung the bread out onto the waters. It would feed a fish better than it would feed him.
Goddammit.
Libby Wilson would be a billionaire if he found that plane for her. Not only would she be beautiful, she’d be megarich, and few combinations could be any worse than that when it came to a woman.
She was waiting on the dock when he got back out onto the lake. Standing there like an eager little girl, clasping a hamper in front of her and anxiously awaiting his arrival. Would’ve painted a pretty picture except for the fact that she wasn’t a little girl and this wasn’t an innocent evening jaunt on the lake.
“I brought something for you to eat while I drive the boat,” she said as he pulled up to the dock.
“What makes you think I’d let you drive the boat?” he said, more gruffly than he should have, probably, being as she might soon become a very wealthy young woman.
“Because I’m a good boat driver, and you’re far more experienced at reading that computer screen,” she said, handing him the hamper and climbing aboard. It was awkward, maneuvering out of the stern and letting her take his place. His awkwardness instantly plunged him back into a dark place. He sat where he could watch the monitor and tried to squelch his bad mood by opening the hamper. He was ravenous.
“Okay,” she said, settling into his seat and backing the boat away from the dock. “I’ll take us down to where you were, and you tell me where to go from there.”
Inside the hamper were three thick roast beef sandwiches. They were made with homemade bread, of course, and he knew they’d be good. This was the stuff he needed to build back his strength. Slices of white bread just didn’t cut it. “Right,” he said.
“I figure we can work until midnight. That’ll let us get four hours of sleep before the dawn.”
“Right,” he repeated, selecting and unwrapping one of the sandwiches.
“That’ll give us four more hours of search time per night.”
“Right.” He wrapped both hands around the thick slabs of beef and bread, feeling his mouth start to water.
“But what if the plane didn’t go down near the outlet?”
“Huh?” He tore his attention away from the sandwich.
“When you fly your plane out of here, how are you planning to take off?” she asked, giving him a pointed stare.
“Same way the other pilots did. Into the wind and up the west arm.”
“Supposing my father did the same. Supposing he made a fairly routine takeoff in the Beaver. Where would that put the plane when it lifted off?”
Carson looked down the west arm. “Maybe a quarter, a third of a mile out from Frey’s lodge, depending on how much the plane was carrying.”
“Suppose he was hauling a lot of supplies. It makes sense that he would be providing most of the food and drink for the wedding reception. Marie’s family was and still is dirt-poor. So where would that put him? Anywhere near us? Anywhere near where you’ve been searching? Anywhere near where Frey told everyone the plane must have gone down? Frey, who doesn’t want that wreckage disturbed?”
Their eyes met and held. Carson felt his ego sink even deeper into that dark abyss. “If the plane was heavily loaded, the pilot would need to throttle up to the max on his takeoff run. The pontoons exert a lot of drag on the surface of the water, and it takes a lot of rpm’s to overcome that drag. The de Havilland’s engine is a 450 horsepower Pratt & Whitney R985 Wasp Junior. Big beautiful radial motor, perfectly capable of the job, but the takeoff at full throttle carrying a heavy load would heat the motor up, so the pilot, as soon as the pontoons cleared the water, would throttle back to cool the engine off. He’d execute a slow climb, maybe, depending on weather conditions. On a good day the west arm is perfect for a long skim above the surface of the lake to let the engine cool down before going for any real altitude.”
Libby cut the boat’s motor abruptly and they drifted along in silence while she gazed up the west arm with a thoughtful expression. “So basically you’ve been searching the wrong area for two whole days,” she mused aloud. “We’re way off base, by at least a half mile. We need to start up beyond where your plane is tethered. Up beyond the point.”
Carson glanced over his shoulder toward Frey’s lodge, wondering if the old man was watching, and sure enough he was sitting on the porch, as was the norm this time of evening. He wondered what Frey and Libby had discussed that afternoon, what had made her drive that damn aluminum boat away from Frey’s dock as though she were being pursued by demons. He wondered if an old man in his eighties could pose a threat to a determined twenty-eight-year-old woman.
“Yeah,” he said, looking back at her. “I think we need to start a new search grid up beyond the point. And I also think you’d better steer clear of Frey.”
“Don’t worry,” she said grimly, restarting the motor and turning the boat around. “I’ve had my last conversation with that man. I believe he somehow caused that plane to crash, and he knows when the wreckage is found I’m going to prove that to the world.”
THREE HOURS LATER, LIBBY was fighting to stay awake. It had been an endless and emotional day, exhausting in every way. She could only imagine how tough it was for Carson to keep going, but he never said anything about quitting, just gave succinct hand signals for her to navigate by and kept his eyes on the screen. Earlier, she’d asked him what he’d see if they passed near or over the wreckage.
“The side-scanning sonar profiles the lake bottom directly below us and about a hundred feet to either side. It sends sound pulses down and receives echoes back in fractions of a second. This sonar is high frequency, which gives us better resolution,” he’d said, indicating with his finger objects on the screen that were obviously large rocks, “but less range, which in this instance isn’t so good. If we were searching for a drowning victim, we’d want this setup. Searching for a downed plane we could use a much lower frequency scanner with a far wider range, but as it turns out that scanner is on the Pacific Explorer right now. I had to bring what was at the shop, which is the towfish we used to recover the victims of that commuter plane crash.”
“I thought you said you didn’t dive for bodies.”
“Normally we don’t, but with the riptides in that inlet, time was of the essence. We did what we had to do to recover the victims as quickly as possible. So anyway, with this high resolution imagery, when we find the plane we’re going to get a great picture of whatever there is to see. Trouble is, that might not be a whole lot after twenty-eight years.”
“Why? The plane won’t have rusted away.”
“When the plane crashed it would have hit the water nose first because the engine is so heavy, and it would have sunk the same way, but the wings would probably have kept it level and upright when it bottomed out, assuming it wasn’t already flipped over when it hit, which would be unlikely. That plane is as steady and stable as they come. After twenty-eight years of silt and sediment settling out, the plane could be pretty well buried so what we’d probably see is just the tail section of the plane, sticking up from the lake bottom.”
“Do you think the plane was airborne when it crashed?”
“Absolutely. If it weren’t, the pilot could’ve just aborted the takeoff.”
“If you were going to sabotage a plane and cause it to crash, how would you go about doing that?”
He flashed her an odd look before continuing. “There are a bunch of ways, I guess. I never thought about it much. But whatever happened to that plane, it had to have happened suddenly. Most crashes occur during takeoffs and landings, usually they’re related to changes in throt
tle settings, but by all accounts Connor Libby was an experienced pilot. If he’d run into any engine trouble shortly after takeoff, he’d have had plenty of room to set the plane back down. So I’m thinking even if the engine cut out completely, he could easily have made an emergency landing on the lake. If he’d lost his engine over the land, he’d have had to put down on the taiga, and they’d have found the wreckage there, but the pontoons turned up in the river. So that puts the plane somewhere in this lake.”
“But how did it get there? What did Frey do to make it crash?”
Carson shrugged. “Plant a bomb in the box of champagne, maybe?” He shot her another brief glance. “Why would he want the plane to crash? Why do you think Frey was involved?”
“Because Connor Libby was on his way to marry my mother and bring her back to live at the lodge. I believe Frey would have done anything to prevent that from happening because of his unwillingness to share the Libby fortune with an Athapaskan. The warden in charge of the search believed this, too. I read his journal. He thought the plane had been tampered with.”
That was the last of their conversation. The hours dragged on and the sun hovered ever lower, swelling in size as it did, and at ten-thirty finally melted into a golden glow behind the mountains. The wind through the pass gradually died off and the surface of the lake turned a smooth molten violet, reflecting the poignant beauty of the arctic sunset. A loon gave a wild territorial call that echoed hauntingly in the thickening twilight. Libby followed Carson’s hand signals as he studied the GPS and the sonar screen and struggled to keep her eyes open. The monotonous drone of the boat’s engine and the gentle lap of waves against the rubber hull soothed her the way riding in a car lulls a newborn baby.
“Coffee?”
The word came out of nowhere and startled her awake. She blinked. “What?”
“We have to put ashore to refuel. There should be some coffee left in that thermos you dropped off this morning.”
“Isn’t it midnight yet?” Libby said.
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