by Henry, Sue
Becker drove in shortly thereafter. “Hey, Jessie. How’re you doing?”
“Not too bad, Phil. Cas?”
“Wailing over the loss of his plane when I left. Getting grumpy, which means he’s better.”
“I can’t imagine him grumpy.”
“Well, he is. Ask Linda. Threatened to throw a bowl of Jell-O at me. Listen, Jessie. I apologize for yelling at you yesterday, though I meant most of it. I need to ask for your help now.”
“With what?”
He removed his hat, rubbed his head, and frowned, narrowing his eyes. “It still could have been just a coincidence when that other plane came up under you out of nowhere.”
Jessie frowned and started to disagree.
“No, wait a minute. It’s also possible that it was a purposeful thing, as you’ve speculated. If it was—well, I’ve been thinking about what you asked yesterday—you remember—about how that pilot could have known you guys would be flying upriver?”
“Yeah?”
“I checked with our people, and no one mentioned it to anyone outside the office. That leaves anyone Caswell might have told or who could have read his flight plan. He says he only told Linda, and she didn’t tell anyone. No one asked to read the flight plan, so I think we can count that out. The only people left are the ones here, where we talked about it, or whomever you might have told. Right?”
She thought about it and tentatively agreed. “Okay.”
“So. Got any ideas?”
The possibility that the plane crash might involve one of the building crew was daunting. Jessie turned her head to look across the yard at all five—no, six, counting Hank Peterson—busy one way or another, putting the two-by-twelves into place. But one, or all, might have heard the flight up the Knik River being planned the day before.
Without hesitation, she mentally crossed Peterson and Prentice off the list, knowing both of them too well to imagine them as bad guys. Unless…Could they have said something to someone else? Bill, J.B., Dell, and Stevie she only knew from their work on the cabin. Who they were otherwise, she had no idea. Now, looking at them though new eyes, she found she could be suspicious of any one of them. It was frightening and unsettling that distrust could creep in so easily.
She turned back to Becker, who had pulled the bench over next to the deck chair Lynn had brought for her to sit outside in, plunked himself down, and waited for an answer.
“Honestly, Phil, I haven’t a clue. It just couldn’t be Vic or Hank, unless one of them said something inadvertently to someone else—which is possible, of course. The rest are all new to me. I don’t really know any of them, but none of them strikes me as—ah—malicious?”
“But you wouldn’t rule them out?”
“I couldn’t. But I wouldn’t even begin to make guesses unless I knew a lot more about each of them.”
“Do you remember anyone in particular listening to our conversation?”
“It was a busy day. They were all back and forth, using the equipment and materials, just like always. I wasn’t paying any attention.”
He nodded. “Well, I hoped maybe—but I wasn’t paying attention either, so why would you? What I’d like you to do is think about each of them carefully and keep an eye out for anything—well, interesting, shall we say? I’m going to see what I can dig up on them individually.”
“Why don’t you ask Vic? He hired them. He must know something about them.”
“True,” Becker replied. “I’ll do just that.”
Jessie frowned as she watched him walk across the yard and call up to Prentice, who was on the roof. The idea of watching and assessing other people this way set her teeth on edge. Previously, she had felt comfortable and safe with the working crew. Now she couldn’t help wondering about each of them. It was depressing—like being a snitch of some kind. She remembered the obnoxious newspaper reporter and how she had felt about his demands. This felt vaguely similar, though she couldn’t quite catch hold of how they fit together. Prying into other people’s business, she supposed.
Prentice climbed down and the two men walked away from the job, where they could talk without being overheard. As Jessie watched, everyone but Dell paused to see them go before they went back to work. J.B. shrugged at something Stevie said, then began to warble songs from Showboat. Hank climbed down and went for more lumber. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Her head and shoulder were aching again, but she knew that not all of it had to do with the injuries she had sustained. Getting up, she went inside to take the first pain pill of the day and find something to take her mind off the chore Becker had set for her. Later. She would think about it later. First she would take the nap the pill would probably induce, then she would pay attention when the crew came off the roof. There was always some friendly banter when they were ready to quit for the day.
She woke to find that they had all gone home and she had missed them. Ehlers was making spaghetti for dinner. Her headache was gone and she was ravenous.
“Here,” he said, handing her a bowl of salad. “Start on this. The rest will take ten minutes.”
“I love you!” she told him, all but snatching it out of his hand.
“Wow! And I got to be this old without realizing that spaghetti is all it takes? You’d better wait and see if the finished product lives up to your expectations.”
She had been about to tell him of Becker’s speculations, but they fled her mind as she concentrated on food—and the warm feeling that his smile and sense of humor gave her.
It could wait, after all. Couldn’t it?
25
LATE IN THE DAY, WHEN THE SUN HAD DROPPED BEHIND the western mountains and cast the valley into evening, far up the Knik River, almost under the glacier, an all but invisible man slipped warily through the edge of the trees. Dressed in dark clothing, he carried a day pack over one shoulder containing a bottle of water and a couple of sandwiches to last a few hours, should another wait be necessary. A holstered handgun hung on his belt, hidden under his black jacket. Slowly, cautiously assessing what lay ahead of him, he moved upriver, staying off the sandy banks and bars to make no tracks, crossing streams with extreme care not to leave evidence of his passing, following a route familiar from several trips here in previous weeks.
Remembering a female duck he had startled into flight on another such evening, and the flock of ducklings that had scattered in panic, he made a wide circle into a grove of birch to avoid the nest, which was hidden in the tall grass beside a stream. A hundred and fifty yards from its delta at the river’s edge, the stream cut into the soil and ran more than a foot below the ground surface through roots and loam. This forced him to leap across two feet of water stained the color of tea from the fallen leaves and decaying plant matter through which it had passed on its way to the river. Landing with a soft thump, he crouched and listened attentively for any response that might tell him he had attracted attention.
He was especially vigilant for, though past explorations had been unrewarding, soon after leaving his vehicle in the brush beside a little-used track at the end of the road this night, he had heard the sound of a plane engine. Shielded in the trees, he had seen the aircraft pass overhead and angle down toward a landing somewhere farther upriver. Now he intended to find it and its pilot—to see if what he suspected was fact and, if possible, to right an old wrong.
When nothing gave him reason to think his leap across the stream had been heard, he moved on a few yards, a mere shadow in the darkest part of the woods, then returned to the edge of the trees where he had a better view of the riverbank. It would have been easier to disguise the sound of his travel through this wild area during the day, when the trees were full of birdsongs and the hum of bees in the wildflowers. Chartered planes brought tourists to gaze upon the grandeur of the Chugach Mountains and the sweeping curves of the glacier, and the sound of their engines would have covered the footfalls of a dozen hikers.
Except for the continual music of water run
ning, falling, trickling, it was very still in the half-light of extended twilight. Every dry leaf crushed underfoot, every snap of twig or scratch of thorn against fabric, every pebble that rolled was amplified in the evening silence.
A few steps farther some nocturnal animal fled ahead of him, rustling the grass—a mouse, maybe, or something larger, possibly a squirrel foraging late. No, not a squirrel, for the small rustle moved away into the trees but did not climb. Judging by the swiftness of its retreat, it was probably a fox. He had seen foxes twice on these evening trips up the river; dainty, smart, and neat of foot—smart buggers, foxes. They knew their territory, were quick and agile, and gone in a flash of burnished bronze. Once, when he was a boy, he had seen one dancing on hind legs in playful pursuit of insects drifting in a ray of sunlight that shone into a clearing. On a winter snowshoe trip, he had watched a fox hunting—listening carefully to locate a mouse that moved beneath the crust of the snow, then leaping high to pounce with all four feet together and snap it up for lunch. Foxes had an appealing sense of humor. He grinned at the memory.
When the rustling stopped, the dark figure moved again, circling a tangle of brush that forced him back into the woods for perhaps twenty yards near a rocky point, where another stream flowed down the steep slope of Mount Palmer. Careful not to roll any loose rocks down the hill, he negotiated the stones of the point and for the first time caught sight of a flashlight beam moving intermittently at the other end of a thin curve of riverbank.
It had grown too dark to see who was holding the light. He would have to go closer. As he left the security of the rocks and stepped into the darkness under another stand of trees, he mistook a flat stone for solid ground. It tipped and made a sharp sound as it shifted against another stone, and a skittering pebble made several small ticks in falling. On the riverbank, the motion abruptly stopped and the light disappeared—switched off, quickly covered, or thrust into a pocket. There was a long moment of listening silence before the light reappeared, wavered, and stopped, as if whoever held it had laid it down to have the use of both hands. A silhouette passed in front of the narrow beam of light and vanished.
The man in the trees waited without moving for perhaps ten minutes, watching, blending with the rest of the darkness. Then, cautiously, he started on, feeling with every step to be sure of his footing before shifting his weight from one foot to the other, moving so slowly he was hardly distinguishable, a shade among the shadows though which he passed.
When he was halfway between the point and the now stationary light, he could make out the shape of the plane he had seen earlier against the evening light reflected from the river. It was parked on a long sandbar, separated from the curve of the bank by a ribbon of water, perhaps three feet wide. Part of the foot of the glacier had now come into view, glowing eerily pale beyond and above the plane and dark water. The peaks of the mountains to the east had begun to glow as the moon, about to rise behind them, revealing their shape against the sky. A handful of stars glittered overhead, two reflected in the quiet strip of water that lay between the plane and the curve of the shore.
Without warning, the next step dropped his foot into a swampy hole and threw him forward, off balance, groping for support. When he was forced to take another step to keep from falling, his boot hit the unseen water with a splash, and he wound up clinging to a birch sapling. Hundreds of new leaves rustled against each other with a sigh that in the still air would divulge his presence and location to anyone who cared to listen.
Someone did care. Having left the flashlight as a decoy, someone had crept silently to wait and watch from a motionless and undetectable position behind the shelter of a tree. The first rifle shot came out of the dark and struck the man in the water just below the left shoulder, spinning him around to face the shooter and driving him to his knees. Against the reflected light of the river and glacier he was a clear silhouette—an easy target.
It was impossible to see where the second shot hit him, but the shooter was satisfied to see the body crumple into the swampy pool.
The last thing the man in the water saw was the flash of the rifle. The last thing he heard was its report. By the time its echoes stopped resounding from the hills, he was already beginning to grow as cold as the water in which he lay.
26
ONE MEMBER OF THE CREW ARRIVED EARLY THE NEXT morning and gave the door of the Winnebago a sharp rap just as the coffeemaker inside was gurgling its last.
Jessie, who had once again drained the hot water tank for a shower that loosened her stiffness and eased the aches of her bruises while Lynn made breakfast, opened it to find Stevie, grinning up at her like a supplicant urchin, thermal cup in hand.
“Got coffee?”
“Sure. Come on in.”
Cup filled, Stevie perched on the edge of the sofa, inhaled the steam from the fragrant brew, sighed, and sipped with evident satisfaction.
“I bring the bagels and Dell usually makes coffee for us both. I get my heart started when I swing by to pick him up. But he wasn’t there this morning, so I’m brain dead. Thanks.”
“Where was he?”
“Don’t know. He didn’t leave a note. It’s not the first time, but I haven’t asked questions. Maybe he’s got a girlfriend.” Though her voice was matter-of-fact, she looked a little bleak and Jessie wondered, not for the first time, if Stevie might be interested in Dell.
“You want some breakfast?”
“No, thanks. Coffee’s fine. I’ll just take this outside and leave you guys to…”
“Oh, sit down and have some bacon, eggs, and hash browns,” Jessie told her, hastily filling a plate and shoving it in her direction, much to Lynn’s consternation—he had cooked for two, not three. “There’s plenty. And there’ll be toast in a minute, won’t there, Lynn?”
“Uh—sure.” He reached for two more eggs to fry, wondering why Jessie was being so insistent.
“Well, okay,” Stevie agreed cheerfully. “If there’s enough. A real breakfast! Wow! Can’t tell you how sick and tired I am of instant cereal and stuff you shove in a toaster oven.”
Jessie’s invitation had to do with Becker’s request that she learn what she could about the members of the crew. Seeing this as an opportunity for a conversation she wouldn’t have to instigate, she slid in beside Stevie at the table, effectively pinning her against the wall, and accepted the plate Lynn handed her with the rest of the first batch of eggs.
“How’re you feeling?” Stevie asked, sprinkling hot sauce on her eggs.
“A lot better, thanks,” Jessie said.
She tried to think of how to swing the conversation in the direction she wanted it to go, decided to meet the challenge head-on, and, since Stevie was already on the subject, simply asked what she wanted to know.
“You knew we were going up the river, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Bill mentioned it before you guys took off. Bet you never expected to have to make a hard landing on the glacier, though. That must have been a shocker. You were lucky to be sitting in back, from what I hear.”
“I sure was.”
Lynn, having fried two more eggs, sat down across the table from them with his own plate, giving Jessie a questioning look.
She ignored him and continued her exchange with Stevie. “How’d you guys find out we’d crashed?”
“Oh, we heard from everybody. J.B. told us when he came back from a dentist appointment in town, and Hank brought the news from that bar they’re building down the road. Then Bill went after a load of plywood and saw the rescue helicopter pick up that trooper.”
“Becker. So you, Dell, and Vic were the only ones here when it happened?”
“Not Vic. He’d gone to one of his other projects—in Palmer. He’s got a crew replacing a roof off Evergreen, near the airport. People sort of came and went all afternoon. We didn’t get much done.”
So four out of six had been away from the building site when the other plane forced Caswell down on the glacier, leaving only Ste
vie and Dell to vouch for each other. And how valid was that, with Stevie sweet on Dell? But two of those absent, Hank and Vic, were people she had crossed off her mental list already. Jessie decided it was time to change the subject.
“So how’d you get into the construction game, Stevie? Is it hard for a woman?”
“My dad was a carpenter, and he taught me and my two brothers a lot. They gave up on it early, but I liked it, so I went ahead and got my working papers through an apprenticeship program. The work isn’t as hard for a woman to get into as it used to be. I’m as good as most guys, so they can’t complain much, but you run into a chauvinist good ole boy now and then. I just ignore ’em. Working ’em into the ground is the best revenge.” She grinned at the thought.
“Bet you can do that, too,” Lynn commented, smiling back at her as he considered the wiry strength and knowledge of building technique she had exhibited in her work on Jessie’s cabin.
“Yeah,” she told him confidently, “I usually can.”
“Where’re you from?” Jessie asked.
“Oregon. Oswego, just outside Portland.”
Oregon? Interesting, Jessie thought. Daryl Mitchell had also been in Oregon.
“How’d you get to Alaska?”
“Hired on to build a new lodge at Denali last summer. Then Vic offered to put me on permanent, so I stayed. I like it here. More opportunity and higher pay.”
“Lot colder than Oregon,” Lynn observed.
“Lot drier, too. Besides, only an idiot stays outside in the middle of the winter. You two mushers excepted, of course.”
“Sometimes I think we are idiots,” he admitted.
Jessie nodded. “A lot of people think so.”
As Stevie wiped the last egg yolk from her plate with a piece of toast, Vic Prentice knocked on the door for a coffee refill, which Jessie rose to pour for him. Snatching up her hat and safety glasses from the sofa, Stevie escaped from her place at the table and followed him out the door, calling a thank-you over her shoulder as she went.
