Yesterday Island (Alaska Adventure Romance Book 6)

by Renee Hart

  Table of Contents

  Yesterday Island

  Description

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  About The Author

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  Yesterday Island

  An Alaska Adventure Romance Novella

  RENEE HART

  Copyright © 2016 by Renee Hart

  All rights reserved, worldwide.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any printed or electronic form.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Description

  After all of Kat's friends and siblings were married, they made it their job to find her a husband. Then her company had to lay her off along with a third of the workforce.

  Kat needed to find work far away from her meddling friends and family. She found a teaching position at a grade school on Yesterday Island, a small island in the Bering Strait.

  In a story that weaves the past with the present, Kat is taken under the wing of the local peace officer. He introduces her to a new friend who opens the door to learning about two young people from the past and how their story affected the present day lives of the people on Yesterday Island.

  Chapter One

  Kat looked around the drab room and sighed. Like it or not, this was going to be her home for the next nine months. The nondescript color of the walls matched the floor and most of the furnishings. The one bright spot in the room was her pile of suitcases stacked in the corner. She rested her eyes upon them for a moment as she thought about the reasons for such a drastic move.

  There was no denying that five weddings in the last three years had pushed her to make some kind of change. Two of the brides were her younger twin sisters and they’d opted for a double wedding to save their father some money.

  The other three brides were the mainstay of her circle of friends from high school. One by one, they’d said their vows and slipped into another kind of life that didn’t lend itself to crashing on each other’s couches and middle of the night calls for no reason beyond the need to talk to someone.

  Kat was the last among her friends to find someone willing to make that kind of commitment. It turned out that most of the men she’d dated were less interested in commitments than her. She could remember the long, late night conversations where her friends had vowed to remain single forever, or at least as long as possible. Eventually they were all forced them to eat those vows, leaving her as the sole survivor on the behalf of freedom from marriage.

  Her friends and family saw her “freedom” as a cause to be taken up and they all turned into yentas. Every dinner invitation was suspect as she found herself face to face with strange men chosen by distant relatives and their various workplaces. She pushed back against these efforts by showing up in sweats or making lame excuses, but her friends were relentless.

  The final blow to her freedom came when the company she considered herself committed to for the long haul was forced to lay off more than a third of the workforce after a hostile takeover.

  Kat was only a junior member on the editing staff and was near the top of the list of those axed. It didn’t matter that she’d given nearly ten years of her life to building her reputation there. The new owners weren’t interested in reputations. They were looking for a quick return on their investment. Out with the old and in with the new was their motto.

  With little savings and a weak job market, Kat was faced with the prospect of having to move back home with her parents. The thought of giving up her apartment for her old room was too depressing to think about and Kat decided to search the internet to find some kind of alternative lifestyle to fill in this employment gap.

  Her childhood dream was to be a teacher. That was replaced by a college dream of becoming a writer. Since college, her only writing was limited to the editing work she’d done on the job. With that job out of the picture, Kat figured it might be worth exploring the earlier dream of being a teacher. However, she didn’t want the usual kind of job at a nearby school. With her friends determined to find her a husband, she wanted to get as far away from them and her family as possible.

  She pored over job listings for faraway countries on the internet where opportunities were presented in glowing terms. The idea of moving to the other side of the globe looked great on a computer screen. Being a practical young woman, she wasn’t ready to take that big of a leap of faith, however, and she narrowed her search to Alaska.

  She found plenty of interesting postings for teachers in the native villages. The place that really captured her imagination was a small island that lay in the Bering Strait called Yesterday Isle. The past was where her heart longed to stay.

  She applied for the job and much to her surprise, her application was accepted without so much as an interview. She found herself with an expected date of arrival in Alaska post haste.

  Flying to Anchorage wasn’t all that different from flying to any other large city in the U.S. Kat arrived in the middle of the night, so her first impression wasn’t very impressive at all. The next day, she was scheduled to meet up with the rest of the teachers to complete their journey to the island. Her whirlwind decision to change her life was in full hurricane mode at this point and she’d barely caught her breath after saying good-bye to the old one.

  After a few hours of sleep at a cheap motel, Kat felt as chipper as a block of wood. Her breakfast meeting of her fellow colleagues gave her little time to determine anything about them. It was only clear that she was the newbie and had no idea of what she had taken on with this job. It had also come out that the reason she’d been given the job was because no one else had applied and they needed to fill the position immediately. This news did little to inspire her to feel confident about her own skills.

  There was little time to take in more than a few passing views of mountains and trees before their group was loaded into a small plane to fly to Nome. From there, the small group would be transported to the island on a ferry, and that was heavily dependent on the weather conditions. Kat struggled to keep track of her bags and cases as things were poked and pushed into the most unlikely places.

  Space was clearly limited on the small plane. The other three passengers were accustomed to the cramped conditions and made every effort to stow things in a way to make themselves a bit more comfortable. Kat realized that inexperience had left her sharing seating space with a large case of spaghetti and her heavy tote bag. Looking around at the others, she wondered if her discomfort was deliberate, but found no one hogging an excess of room.

  “Here, let me move that this way a little more,” the young man sitting behind her said over her shoulder. “Then, you can put your tote on top of the case. At least you’ll be able to walk when we arrive in Nome,” he laughed.

  “Thanks,” she tossed back as the two of them wrestled the case more towards the center.

  “My name’s Jim, by the way,”
he added as if she’d somehow forgotten their earlier meeting.

  “Kat.”

  “Ah, yes. And that was Kat with a “K”, if I remember correctly,” Jim said.

  “Correct.”

  “And what is it that has Kat with a “K” running away to Yesterday Isle,” he asked by way of conversation, “if you don’t mind me asking, that is?”

  “What makes you think I’m running away,” Kat asked.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he added. “It’s just a feeling.”

  “Leave her alone, Jim,” the young woman sitting across from them said bluntly. “She’s not your type.”

  “Oh? And what type would that be, Marissa,” Jim sneered.

  The glance that passed between the two of them made it clear to Kat there was a history here and it hadn’t ended all that well from the looks of things. The chill in the air put an end to the conversation, which was fine with Kat as the pilot revved up the engines for take-off. The noise level inside the plane left little chance for intelligible conversation anyway. Kat double-checked her seat belt and then laughed to herself. The belt wasn’t going to make much of a difference if they crashed. The packages and baggage crammed inside the plane would kill them all no matter how they stayed in their seats. She choked down the regrets rising up inside of her and turned to look out the window. There was no room in this whirlwind for turning back, she thought to herself as her stomach twisted. I’m just going to have to make the best of this.

  ***

  Iliana wiped her muddy hands on the front of her tunic and laughed when Ulriq did the same. She knew her mother would be angry at the state of her clothes, but Papa never cared. He always said children should get dirty when they played or they weren’t having any fun. Her mother would just grumble until Papa would sweep her into his arms and kiss her complaints away. The two of them never stayed angry for very long. Their love was too important to be squandered on petty squabbles.

  The two children ran to the top of the bluff and crouched down behind the rocks to spy on the men below. The boat men were busy loading large bundles of furs and hides onto the longboats and both Iliana and Ulriq knew exactly what that meant to them. Their short time together was about to end and Iliana would leave with her parents back across the narrow strait into the land that lay beyond the dark water.

  They were silent as they watched the activity below. Nothing either of them could say would make any difference to the situation. It was the same every year. In the silence, their hands sought each other and they gripped the other tightly as if somehow they could hold on to this moment forever.

  “Iliana,” Ulriq said as he turned to lean his back against the rock, “promise me you will come back again next year.”

  “You know that even if I promised you, there’s nothing I can do to make my father return. He only comes for the hides and furs. He doesn’t care about anything else.”

  “That’s not true,” Ulriq retorted. “I know he loves you and if you begged him, he might come for that reason.”

  Iliana laughed as she jumped up and ran away from the bluff.

  “You’d do better to ask him to promise,” she called back over her shoulder. “He loves you too!”

  Ulriq chased after her and the two of them ran and ran until their breath would no longer come and they flopped to the ground and lay there panting. They both knew the island wasn’t big enough for them to run far enough to stop the inevitable. It was the same every year when Iliana’s father would bring his family to the island to trade with the People for the hides and furs they gathered.

  The two children would play together every moment they could steal away from the grown-ups. Neither of them could remember a time before they’d been a part of each other’s lives and they couldn’t imagine a time would come that would tear them apart.

  Even Ulriq was too young to realize that each year the hunts were bringing in less and less skins and the trading connection was growing weak. He only knew that each winter, his tribe would go out for longer and longer hunts as the animals pushed back against the demands placed upon them. The People were always careful to maintain respect for the hunt, but the ever-growing demand for hides and skins from the Russian traders pushed them to take more animals every year.

  Ulriq’s father was the leader of the tribe and he tried to remind the people each year of their connection to the island and the animals that shared the land. Many of the people cared less and less for their heritage and more for the fancy things the Russian traders gave to them. The growing resentment in the village against Ulriq’s father was becoming apparent, even to the boy, and he feared what he didn’t understand.

  Soon, the sound came of their parents calling for them and they bowed their heads to hide the tears gathering in their eyes. Gently, Iliana reached out a dirty hand to trace the tear rolling down Ulriq’s cheek. Angrily, he pushed it away and turned his face from her.

  “Don’t worry, Ulriq,” Iliana spoke from behind him. “Someday, we’ll grow up and get married and we won’t ever have to be apart. That I can promise you.”

  Ulriq seized those words from the air and gathered them into his heart. He would cling to them like a lifeline in the coming days while she was far away in a distant land. The two of them were too young to realize all that stood between them and a promise. It was unheard of for a Russian princess to marry a commoner, even if he was the leader’s only son. A world of difference was an obstacle even beyond the reach of their love.

  Chapter Two

  Kat clung to the rail of the ferry as the wretched seas tossed the boat to and fro without any concern for her lack of sea legs. She groaned as the remains of that morning’s breakfast found its way overboard and sank to her knees on the filthy deck. She’d been warned the trip would be rough, but her understanding of “rough” fell far short of reality. Traveling in a cramped plane was far better than being tossed across these relentless waves, she thought with a groan of dismay. Leave it to her to pick the one island in the world without an airstrip.

  The other teachers were sitting in the makeshift lounge making important decisions about the new school year while she struggled on deck. She knew her input wouldn’t make much difference in their planning anyway. They were all returning for their second or third years here on the island. That made them the senior staff. She would get whatever position and classroom they chose not to have for themselves. It didn’t seem quite fair, but it was the way the system worked.

  Her vantage point from the deck gave her the privilege of being the first to see Yesterday Isle as it rose up from the waves. She stared at the barren, rocky expanse looking for something, anything to catch her eye, but nothing stood out. She didn’t see any trees or plants or even any sign of human occupation. The village must be on the other side of the island, she thought to herself.

  Suddenly, she was aware of a presence at her elbow and turned to catch sight of a quiet man with dark hair watching her. She scrambled to her feet as he began to speak.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I was just wondering if you were okay,” he said gently. “My name’s Officer John Thompson, by the way. I serve as the peace officer in the village. My friends all call me J.T.”

  “Oh, hello. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Kat and I’m supposed to be here to teach. Unfortunately, today I’m in the role of a student. I didn’t know riding in a boat could be so…difficult.”

  “Ah, a landlubber I presume,” J.T. said with a grim laugh. “I’d like to say don’t worry, it’s not always like this, but that’d be a lie and you’d soon figure it out for yourself.”

  “I appreciate your honesty. I have to admit that I put far more thought into the teaching part and very little into the challenges of getting here,” Kat said with a weak grimace.

  “Well, the good news is we’re almost here as this is Yesterday Isle, well, the east side of it. You won’t see the village until we round this point over to the south. The bad news is we’ll have to get into
the sea rafts to get to the shore. There aren’t any docks or piers for us to land.”

  Kat looked at him with fear in her eyes and he resisted the urge to laugh. She clearly wasn’t enjoying this voyage and he hurried to try and distract her.

  “If you watch carefully, you will see Tomorrow Island here to the west. You’re looking across the International Date Line. The two islands are only 2.4 miles apart at their closest point, but Tomorrow Island is 21 hours ahead of us, time zone wise, hence the name, Tomorrow. That island is the easternmost part of Russia. However, that doesn’t make Yesterday Isle the westernmost part of the U.S. The Aleutians hold the distinction of being the westernmost and easternmost points in Alaska and by default the U.S.”

  “Well, aren’t you just a fountain of knowledge,” Marissa giggled as she slipped her arm into the crook of J.T.’s elbow. “I see you’ve met the new teacher. It looks like you’re doing a pretty good job of impressing her with your tour guide act.”

  J.T. looked uncomfortable as he disengaged his arm from Marissa’s grasp and took a step backwards.

  “I see you’ve decided to come back for another year,” he said a bit stiffly. “I had the impression you were considering other options….”

  The unspoken question hung in the air between the three of them. Marissa turned to look out over the rail making it clear she wasn’t going to answer. Jim and the other male teacher chose that moment to make their appearance on deck. Kat was embarrassed as she struggled to remember the man’s name. It was clear he was Inuit and the strangeness of his name escaped her efforts to remember it.

  J.T. smiled broadly at the sight of his old friend and greeted him warmly as Jim joined the two women at the rail. J.T. and the Inuit man walked off together, leaving the three of them standing at the rail in silence.

  The sudden appearance of a helicopter drew their eyes upward. Kat could clearly make out someone with a camera taking pictures. They watched it fly over the village and disappear from sight at the far end.