Mountain Angel (Northstar Angels, Book One)

by Suzie O'Connell

  He blinked at Aelissm, startled.

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Back to Seattle. And North Bend.”

  “Ah. I asked if you wanted to stop anywhere else before we head up to campus.”

  “Um… maybe someplace that sells snow boots. Unless you think I won’t need them.”

  “Oh, there’ll be snow up at the cabin until at least early May. I’d recommend them, just for the traction.”

  “Then let’s go find a pair.”

  “The co-op is usually the best place. They might even have a sale going on right now, since it’s getting down to the end of the season.”

  A quick fifteen minutes later, Pat was back in the warm cab of Aelissm’s truck pulling his feet into a cozy pair of snow boots. By the time they reached the University campus, his cold toes had warmed more than enough and he was actually looking forward to stepping back out into the snowy morning. Aelissm pointed out the buildings of the campus that were visible from the main drag, then pulled up to a non-descript looking building across the street. She shut the truck down and they got out.

  “That half is the metals shop and this part is the art shop, complete with everything a glassblower needs,” she explained as she punched a code into the keypad of the art side and opened the door. “I bounce back and forth between the two, but my office is over here.”

  The shop was as clean as he could have imagined. All the tools were stored neatly in their places and the floor was clear of debris. The walls were a dingy, smoke-grayed white, but even with that little bit of smudge and the mottled appearance of the floor, it was tidy and efficiently organized. Aelissm gave him a brief tour, pointing out the furnaces, worktables and student projects. Then she ducked into her office, which was just as neatly organized as the shop. Pat glanced around. There was something about this shop that inspired, something that made him want to pick up one of the blacksmith’s hammers and make art from a hunk of shapeless metal. Not that he could, even if he tried.

  “I can see why you enjoy what you do,” he remarked when Aelissm stepped out of her office. “There’s an appeal to it and when you’re done, you’ve accomplished something.”

  She nodded. “But don’t you feel the same way when you close a case?”

  “I suppose so, but that’s different somehow. It’s more fleeting. Those shelves in Bill’s office will last a long time.”

  With a smile, Aelissm shooed him out of the shop and checked to make sure the door was locked behind them. She seemed like she was in a hurry suddenly and he asked why.

  “I have a date.”

  “A date?”

  “Yup. With a stunning blond woman, a devilishly cute twelve-year-old boy… and a lot of flour.”

  Pat frowned. “You’ve lost me.”

  “June would be the woman I referred to and the boy is Luke, the foster kid who’s staying with her. As to the flour… we’re baking pies for the Northstar potluck tonight. Our pies are quite popular and with the snow, it’ll be a nice activity.”

  Pat cocked his head. Aelissm didn’t really strike him as the homemaker type. Sure, she was probably a good cook—breakfast had been delicious—but he couldn’t picture her really enjoying it like some people did. He assumed that she was more of the type who cooked out of necessity and simply preferred it to taste good. He kept his thoughts on the matter to himself.

  “You didn’t mention that June was fostering a kid. How long has she had him?”

  “About eight months now. I’m surprised you didn’t’ know. Unk made all the arrangements… pulled all the right strings to get Luke here so quickly and without fuss. He’s really come a long way and I guess she’s seriously thinking about adopting him. He’s a good kid.”

  “That’s a helluva task for someone her age. So, baking pies is what we’re rushing back to Northstar for, huh? What about your grandparents? When do I get to meet them?”

  “They won’t be back until this afternoon, but you can bet the first place they’re going to go after they drop off their bags is up to their cabin. Then we’ll all go down to the potluck. And I think, after the potluck, the plan is to come back up to Grandma and Grandpa’s cabin, just the six of us. It’ll be a regular party on the mountainside.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Her answering grin was pure mischief.

  Pat laughed. Aelissm, it was turning out, had a wicked sense of humor to go along with her talent in a typically masculine field. Even Sara, with all her socialite sophistication, hadn’t come close to the multi-faceted layers that were Aelissm Davis. What has Bill gotten me into? Pat wondered idly. Whatever it was, he knew for sure it was going to be one hell of a vacation. Aelissm was the most sassy, startlingly intelligent woman he’d met in a long time. Unbidden and potent, the wish that they’d met before he’d gotten mixed up with Sara whispered through his mind.

  He forced it down and stared out the window of the truck at the white landscape. Yesterday, the hills and valley around Devyn had been brown, and overnight, they had been transformed. No weather changed the world like snow, he thought. Christmas was months past now, but several carols came to mind. What was it about this place––and about this woman––that made him feel so light and free? Why did it seem as though he shouldn’t have a care about anything but enjoying himself? And he hadn’t even been here a full day yet.

  “So, North Bend, huh?” Aelissm asked.

  His train of thought derailed with a series of squeals and bangs and he chuckled. “Yeah. I grew up there. I only moved to Seattle to join the force, and to be honest, I didn’t ever completely adjust. I’m glad Bill talked me into moving over to the sheriff’s department. I’m a detective now and I like the quiet of Kitsap County much better than the bustle Seattle.”

  “I didn’t fully acclimate to Seattle, either,” she replied. “I only went to work on my Masters, and then I met Bryce… oh, I guess it was almost two years ago, now. Wow. He’s been dead almost a year already. Seattle was never me and after that night….”

  Pat frowned at the catch in her voice. He wasn’t sure if she was scared, sad or angry and the expression on her face—a slight frown—was just as uninformative as the tone of her voice. “Bill said you’d moved around a bit.”

  She nodded. “First, I moved from my apartment to another, then back to my parents’ place in Indian Point. And then, six months ago, Adam broke into their house and went through my things while we were all at work and I decided to come here. If he finds me here… where else can I go?”

  Her face paled and he smiled encouragingly. “This is your haven and I won’t let him ruin it.”

  Her elegant lips quirked upward. “Thank you.”

  The rest of the ride to Northstar was silent. They stopped at her grandparents’ just long enough to gather their bags and wait for Pat’s truck to warm up before heading up the valley. The truck Aelissm had driven was her grandparents’; her truck was up at the cabin. Since Pat didn’t have any idea where they were going and wasn’t brave enough to try the unfamiliar roads in the snow, he let Aelissm drive.

  Aelissm turned right on Elkhorn Road and pointed out the little convenience store called Ma Burns’ Country Market. A short while later, she turned right again on another road labeled “Clark Creek”, which curled up and around through a stand of aspen, then snaked through the sagebrush. A hundred or so yards after the road entered the forest of lodgepole pine, Aelissm turned left on another, unmarked road. She told him it was Wellman Creek Road, named for the penniless miner who had partnered up with a doctor to claim the gold and silver mines at the end of the road, near the cabins. His wealthy partner was a man named Dingley, she informed him with a note of pride in her voice. Dingley provided the means and Wellman the labor and know-how.

  The road was rocky in spots, though the snow helped smooth out the ride some and Aelissm navigated it with the ease of someone accustomed to the terrain, turning the wheels just so to miss the larger stones. She appeared oblivious to each bump and lurc
h of the truck. Pat was doubly glad she’s volunteered to drive, because he was free to gaze around at the wild beauty of her home. The meager light seeping through the clouds and flurries reflected off the snow, softly illuminating the forest from below.

  The trees here had stubby branches and hardy, dark green needles. Beneath them, the steep ground was littered with granite boulders ranging from the size of a man’s head to twice the size of his truck. There was very little underbrush, only the occasional sagebrush and the tiny mountain huckleberries that hunched low to the ground for protection. The latter were barely visible above the new snow and Pat only noticed them after Aeli pointed them out. They disappeared entirely a little farther up the mountain.

  The climate was much drier than Washington and the pitch of the land and the rocky ground didn’t allow water to sit and pool, so the wood wasn’t dark and rotting, but sun-silvered and perfect for those frames in Bill’s house. Small stands of white-barked aspen grew here and there amongst the pines. What he found most peculiar wasn’t the stunted huckleberry bushes or the quantity of boulders. It was the scraggly, close-clinging lichen that dotted the trunks of the pines. While it closely resembled the pale green lichen he knew from Washington, it was like nothing he’d ever seen. The stuff was vividly chartreuse, even in the dim, gray light.

  Moments later, he’d forgotten all about it when Aeli slowed the truck to let a band of seven deer wander across the road ahead of them. What a neat place.

  As she drove higher up the winding, rough, backwoods road, Aeli began to talk more. She told a couple stories about riding down the hill on dirt bikes to buy candy and soda at Ma Burns’ and how, one summer when June had come up to the cabin for the Davis family’s annual two-week trip, they’d ridden up to the cabin to discover that the two packages of corn nuts she’d strapped to the rack on the back of her bike had fallen off somewhere. They’d found one not too far down and the other about halfway down the road.

  “But my brother and June thought I’d lost the cookies, too, so we went all the way back down to Ma Burns’.” She laughed and he could feel her fondness for her brother and friend and for the memory. “I forgot to tell them that I hadn’t lost them until we were headed back up. I didn’t know what they were looking for.”

  “I’ll bet they were annoyed.”

  “Yeah, they reminded me about it for the rest of the trip. ‘Have a cookie, Miss Daisy.’ I still hear about it from time to time.”

  Pat chuckled. It sounded like she had some good memories from her childhood to comfort her when things got rough.

  They reached a closed gate and Aelissm stopped to open it and close it behind them. Just as they crested the hill and the road leveled out, a driveway split off to the right and doubled back in a sharp switchback. Aelissm informed him that it was the road up to June’s cabin. About ten yards past that were a couple of sulfurous mine dumps and a decrepit, roofless, one-room cabin. The road, which was much smoother now that it traversed private property, continued up into a small clear cut, at the end of which was a single-story cabin sided with beige metal sheets like were used on most of the roofs he’d seen in Northstar.

  “That’s my grandparents’ cabin,” Aelissm told him as they passed the driveway.

  She followed the road up around a short bend and continued around to the right on the third driveway instead of following the road to the left. She informed him it led to her father’s brother’s cabin and, farther up, what she called the “Old Miner’s Cabin”. As her cabin came into view, he recalled the picture of the cabin that Bill had above his desk. The cabin hadn’t seemed so tall in the photograph. It was a two-story affair and the dark green metal roof reached all the way to the ground. With a fire warming it from the inside and melting the under-layers of snow, the metal probably acted like a slicked waterslide.

  “Home sweet home,” Aeli murmured as she shut his truck down.

  “And what a secluded home it is,” Pat remarked. They sat for a moment, staring at the curl of smoke rising from the chimney.

  “June must have lit a fire for me.”

  “I could get used to this. No one but a few close friends and the squirrels to bother me.”

  “And chipmunks. Don’t forget them.”

  “Of course not. I wouldn’t want to offend them.”

  She laughed softly and invited him in.

  After they grabbed their bags and as many groceries as they could, Aelissm led him through the front door––which was unlocked. For a moment, Pat was alarmed. He took a deep breath and followed her inside, somewhat amused. The girl had been running from an obsessive former friend for almost a year and here she was, leaving her door unlocked.

  The first room was an enclosed porch of sorts with a workbench on the right and, she told him, a tiny bathroom complete with an awesome claw foot tub on the left.

  “We didn’t used to have electricity up here, and let me just say right here and now, we’re still paying to have it,” she informed him. “We didn’t have an indoor bathroom, either. We had a shower box for a while—which is now a tool shed—and an outhouse.”

  Inside the second door was a living room that spread across two-thirds of the ground floor and the first thing he noticed, after the blissful wood-heat, were the matching, rust-orange, fuzzy couches that must have come straight out of the seventies. The living room itself appeared to have been modernized with soft, sand-colored carpet and pale green curtains, though the rest of the furniture—a coffee table in front of the longer couch, an end table beside the shorter couch and two pedestal tables, one beside the front door and the other in front of the snack bar that divided the main floor of the cabin—were well-used, well-loved antiques.

  Pat trailed after Aelissm as she crossed the big room. The remaining third of the first floor was the kitchen. The cupboards above and below the snack bar and a steep spiral staircase separated it from the living room. The dining table sat between the kitchen and the living room. There was a china hutch beside the back door on the right and beside that was the refrigerator. Against the wall to the left of the door was the sink. In the far corner were a woodstove and a newer gas range. Must be propane, he guessed.

  Aelissm told him to drop the groceries on the table and take his bags up to the bedroom he’d be using. He did as he was told and ascended the steep spiral stairs. Immediately at the top was a bedroom a little larger than the kitchen downstairs that contained two queen-sized beds. He dropped his shoulder and let his duffels slide down his arm onto the bed on the far wall, then peeked through the doorway around the corner from the stairs into what appeared to be the master bedroom. It had a single queen-sized bed against the dividing wall and a long dresser on the left wall. Stacked carefully in the rafters were several boxes and he wondered what they contained.

  “Hurry up, Pat! I don’t want to be late for my date!” Aelissm called from downstairs.

  He turned out of the room and headed back downstairs. The way the cabin was set up, even if Adam did find her, he’d have to come through Pat to get to Aelissm. The thought reassured him.

  “All right, I’m coming,” he remarked. Then he noticed the small caliber rifle standing just out of sight from anyone coming up the stairs. Aelissm was a smart woman. And perhaps more scared than she let on.

  Chapter Four

  AFTER THE TWO-HUNDRED-YARD hike from Aelissm’s cabin to June’s through the snowy woods, Pat was grateful for the warmth and good traction of his new snow boots. They had followed a well-worn trail that was clear of the logs and rocks that made the steep terrain treacherous, but it was still slippery. When he and Aelissm finally reached level ground at the end of the old logging road, he had to stop. He prided himself on being fit, but his lungs burned from the exertion. The air at seven thousand feet above sea level was much thinner than he was accustomed to and he decided that if he could run a mile up here, he could run ten in Washington.

  “Come on, old man,” Aelissm remarked. She was breathing a little harder, but she wasn
’t panting. “I thought you were in shape.”

  “I am. At sea level.”

  “It’s not much farther. Just around the bend.”

  Pat straightened and trudged after her through the snow, which was still knee-deep up here on the mountainside. He could feel the cold against his legs and wondered if he should have brought his ski pants. Aelissm was wearing jeans, like he was, and didn’t seem the least bit bothered, but she was used to this. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to push his way through snow this deep. Probably the last time he’d made it up to a ski hill. He scowled briefly. The last time he’d gone skiing had been more than three years ago, with Sara. In the spring, before it had all fallen apart with her. “Fallen apart” was off the mark. Exploded was far more accurate.

  At last, they reached June’s cabin. It was log with a dark green metal roof and was about the same length and width as Aelissm’s, but the utility room was connected on the left side and flush with the back wall. The deck was bigger and complete with a table and chairs that were still covered for winter. When he asked, Aelissm informed him that the bathroom and laundry were in the utility room.

  “June lets me use her washer and dryer,” she added. Without knocking, she opened the kitchen door and slipped inside after stomping the snow from her boots. Pat followed and was greeted with the mouthwatering scents of apples and cinnamon. The kitchen was similar to Aelissm’s, including the woodstove in the right corner, the snack bar dividing the kitchen from the living area and the spiral stairs. The upper floor, however, only spanned two-thirds of the cabin’s length, leaving the living room with a vaulted ceiling and a south-facing wall with windows looking out on the surrounding ridges and the Northstar Valley. There was another woodstove in the southwestern corner of the living room.

  A very attractive blond woman stood at the sink washing apples. She was slightly taller than Aelissm with a lankier build and kind, dusky blue eyes. She smiled broadly at Aelissm and inclined her head to Pat. A small young boy with the same bright golden-blond hair as the woman was rolling out dough on the counter that jutted out from the end of the snack bar. There were two pies, already baked, cooling on the counter beside the sink.