I could try, but I’ll admit that nursing is not among my best skills. Besides, I really wouldn’t mind if Barney kept up the noise for another two or three minutes. I could see a distinctive shape coming up the valley and we could use a little lead time before Earl realized he was up against the wall.
Earl turned the gun on me again. “Yeah, either you shut him up or I will.”
So, okay, nursing it would be.
I dashed over to Barney and tried to reassure him in a low voice while I made a show of looking at the leg wound without really looking at it. His cries quieted to a whimper and then the rush of rotor air and the blast of sound could not be ignored.
With a pilot I didn’t know at the controls and Chief Branson in the passenger seat, one of the glacier-tour ships came roaring in. He found the perfect landing spot, close to the little tableau of people, and set it down. Branson took in the scene at a glance and emerged with his service pistol drawn, aimed squarely at Earl. I had a feeling his shot would be far more accurate, especially when I saw that he’d brought another officer along. My heart leapt when I saw Drake get out of the backseat.
Earl slumped and dropped his gun. Kerby had already distanced himself from his brother-in-law; now Earl raised his hands in surrender. Lillian squared her shoulders and tried to act as if she hadn’t really been here, hoping perhaps the police chief would treat her with mayoral deference.
Drake came to my side. “The FBO heard your radio call and Chief Branson insisted we come. Apparently, he’s been piecing together a case against Earl Thespen for awhile now.”
“I’m fine but Barney’s injured. I don’t think it’s life-threatening but he’s in a lot of pain. Can they get him to the clinic?”
He spoke quickly to the pilot, who got out and together we got Barney into the back seat of the green and white A-Star. I climbed in and helped him stretch across the four back seats and strapped two seatbelts around him.
“Lie as still as you can,” Drake said. “They’ll have you at the clinic in ten minutes.”
I backed out to find that Branson’s officer already had Earl in cuffs. Lillian and Kerby Allen were suddenly all cooperation and Kerby volunteered to fly the prisoner back to town. Chief Branson would ride along to be sure Kerby didn’t pull anything.
Already his officer was directing where each of them would sit. Drake and I found ourselves alone with the JetRanger as Kerby started up his machine. I stepped to the side window where Branson sat.
“I’ll be along in a little while,” I said. “There’s some cargo we need to offload.”
He gave a nod. I opened the cargo hold and took out the first of the boxes Barney had loaded.
“This isn’t the real reason I wanted to stay,” I told Drake as we carried boxes into the cabin. “There’s something else I want to check out. Grab a couple of flashlights.”
He followed me up the narrow trail to the cave where this whole mess had begun.
“I can’t let this summer get away without at least trying to verify one old story,” I said. “We’re this close.”
I had already guessed that Joshua Farmer’s body ended up here as a matter of convenience. He had come up this trail for some reason, probably connected with the Thespens’ allegation that he had stolen their gold, and the cave had made a convenient hiding place for his body. Perhaps he had led someone into the cave—or vice versa—and that was the place where his skull had been bashed with a rock.
Michael Ratcliff had come looking for the gold he believed his great-grandfather had legitimately discovered in the Klondike. I couldn’t be sure how he came to be on this trail but Earl Thespen’s admission about Michael made me believe that Earl had either brought Michael up here himself or had hired a killer. Earl and his father were probably the only two who had ever really known.
Perhaps Earl had explored these hills as a kid; maybe he even knew about the older skeleton and thought of the cave as a perfect hiding place. The longer Michael’s body remained in the cave the more likely the evidence would erode with time. No one in 1975 would have had any idea how easy it would be to prove the relationship of the two sets of bones when they were eventually found.
“Earl might have been in here looking for a far bigger stash of gold than what Mick Thespen ever found. There’s an old legend.” I told him the story of Gus’s Gold as we made our way by flashlight deeper into the cave.
“Earl and Lillian were raised on that story, and with his insatiable need for money I can’t believe he would simply ignore the chance to find such a haul. A hundred pounds of gold—it would be worth a couple million or more by now. Earl probably explored caves all over the place, including this one, until that cabin was built. I’m sure he wasn’t at all happy that his brother-in-law started bringing tourists up here.”
“But he couldn’t very well suggest that Kerby’s crew block off the passages inside the cave, because they would have found the two skeletons. It was better to keep the cave secret.”
“He could have moved them,” I mused as we ducked to enter, “but maybe there wasn’t time. Or maybe even a killer finds some things distasteful.”
We passed the areas where each skeleton was found and edged our way through a narrow spot beyond. Passages branched off in three directions.
“Is this safe?” I asked Drake.
He shined his light around all the surfaces. “It looks natural, as opposed to a mine shaft where people have cut into the rock.”
We pushed onward taking the right-hand opening, mainly because footprints on the ground indicated that it had drawn the most interest already.
“He’s been poking around in here,” I said, showing Drake some fairly fresh chisel marks in a spot where the rock was full of natural indents anyway.
“Yeah, but I don’t see that he found anything.”
I didn’t either.
“Let’s think about this logically, unless you want to spend weeks in this place.” Poor Drake, he’d been walking bent over and was already getting a crick in his neck. I wasn’t too fond of the musty damp of it either.
“You’re right. A man with nothing at his disposal but 1890s technology, a man who has already been on the trail in brutal conditions, whose dogs have died in the effort to haul this gold—he’s not going to lug it an extra mile inside a mountain, right? He’s going to look for a place that’s reasonably convenient to the entrance but hidden from plain view.”
Which probably meant someone else had come upon it a long time ago.
He read my thoughts. “Let’s not give up yet, but we should try to keep things simple.”
We backed out of the tunnel Earl had already been working. Back at the wide spot, a beam of light indicated that the tunnel on the left was too small to walk into, no more than a small den. The middle tunnel was the largest and seemed undisturbed, without a current-day footprint in sight. Or an old footprint either. With no wind, rain or traffic to erase them, even really old prints would show.
I steered Drake back to the small, left-hand tunnel. “Look at these piles of rock. They very well might have fallen here but a few of them seem like they could have been deliberately stacked in position.”
We set our lights on the ground and began moving rocks. I was astounded at how heavy they were—even those the size of a breadbox were a chore for the two of us. Clearly, I had watched too many films with Styrofoam-prop boulders. We got six of the heavy monsters rearranged before I caught a glimpse of something light-colored.
“Look.”
Drake moved one more shoebox-sized rock, which revealed a glimpse of pale tan cloth. I gave a tug but it stayed firmly in place. Smart man, he pulled out his pocket knife and slashed it with an X. The fabric still wouldn’t rip, but between the cuts we could see the distinct glitter. Gold.
My heartbeat quickened. “Oh my god. It’s really here.”
“Well, mother nature didn’t just place it in this spot, wrapped in canvas. Somebody put it here.” Drake reached into the small opening
and what came out was a gold nugget roughly the size of a golf ball.
I tossed another of the rocks aside, joining Drake in the effort, uncovering more of the canvas bag, until something thunked me on the shoulder.
“Hey, careful,” I said.
“What?”
“Tossing those rocks. That hurt.”
“Hon, I didn—” Fine dirt sifted down onto our heads. A deep moan came from somewhere to my right.
“We gotta get out of here!” Sharp stones cut into my knees as I scrambled backward out of the small space.
“Run!” Drake shouted, grabbing my arm and dragging me along at his side.
Behind us, the moan became a rumble and ragged stones skittered across the floor and zipped past us. One flashlight was long gone and the other did little to guide us, bobbing along as we scrambled over the uneven ground and dodged outcroppings that could knock us senseless. My feet skidded several times.
Finally, through the cloud of dirt, a light patch showed ahead where daylight came from the entrance. We reached it and kept on running as dust plumed and rocks bounced out the mouth of the cave.
Chapter 32
A week passed before the nightmares ended. Facing down Earl Thespen and his pistol was nothing compared to the knee-knocking, brain-numbing fear that coursed through me in those final yards before we emerged to freedom. We’d stumbled down to the helicopter and collapsed, lying on our backs on the grass for a good thirty minutes before either of us felt steady enough to stand, another half hour before Drake wanted to take the controls and fly us out of there. That night, there had been survivor sex, a desperate coupling of the animal sort. We’d slept with our limbs entwined; being more than a few inches apart seemed to reinforce the near miss that would have permanently lost us to each other.
Now, I stacked the last of our suitcases beside the front door. Drake had been carefully packing the truck all morning. The JetRanger, with a lot of its gear stowed inside, waited at the airport. We would spend one last night in Berta’s house before hitting the road in the morning, our Alaskan adventure at an end.
Kerby’s business was shut down the day after the arrests; front page headlines about how he had scammed tourists with promises of riches and a contract which guaranteed they would never keep their findings pretty well cooked that golden goose. Just another of Mina’s articles to go national.
Earl would stand trial for first degree murder, a charge Chief Branson felt would stick because he had located a man named Bobby Manning who, in exchange for a lighter sentence, was willing to testify that he had helped Earl hide Michael Ratcliff’s body. Lillian didn’t have much choice about stepping down as mayor once the citizens made enough noise and the borough assembly met and voted her out.
I boxed the groceries we hadn’t used and set it on the kitchen table. I would give Berta the unused cereals, soups and a half-dozen eggs, among other things. I looked toward her house and saw Mina crossing the lawn toward my kitchen door.
“Hey, girl. Big congratulations, I hear?” I gave her a hug as I let her in.
She blushed a little. “Best Investigative Journalism from the Western Newspaper Association, for my story that led to Katherine Ratcliff and the identification of the bones. I think there was a qualifier in there about its being a small-town paper or something.”
“Well, none of us care about that. We’re proud of you.”
“I’m putting out job feelers. Maybe something big-city will come my way.”
“How does Chuey feel about that?”
She wrinkled her mouth a little. “I don’t know. First, I think I have to see whether a job actually comes through.”
She saw the box on the table. “So, you guys are packing up. It’s going to feel a little empty without you here.”
I laughed. “Ten thousand tourists a day, out there prowling your streets. This town won’t feel empty until the season’s over.”
“Yeah but ... I never get attached to them.”
Drake peeked into the kitchen to see if there was anything else ready for the truck.
“Look, you’re busy,” Mina said. “I’ll let you go. Don’t forget, Mom wants you to come to dinner tonight.”
How could we forget? Berta had instructed me to bring the champagne so we could make a big deal of Mina’s journalism prize.
Drake helped me check through the house. I’d kept my toothbrush out for tonight, and of course the dog crate and dishes would be the last thing to load. I came across a large brown padded envelope.
“Oh, that reminds me. A couple of errands before we leave.” I showed him the envelope. “The report to Katherine Ratcliff, along with her grandmother’s diaries and the letters. Even though her brother’s interest in family history wasn’t real, she may want to read these someday.”
“And?—two errands?”
“I thought I would stop by to see Barney. I feel badly that I suspected him for awhile. His family really did get the short end of the stick in everything, it seems.”
“I’ll go along with you.” He whistled to Freckles, who was more than happy to hop into the truck for the short ride to the cabin near the gold rush cemetery.
The Connells lived simply but the little cabin was clean inside and the two kids greeted us politely with only a slight prompt from Sissy. Her hair was still a wild mass of curls but she had it back in a ponytail rather than the attempted glamor-do she’d worn at the fundraiser. Clearly she was much more in her element in jeans and a sweatshirt—as was I.
“He’s in front of the TV,” she said. “Seattle Mariners. He can’t stay away.”
“We won’t stay long,” I assured her, handing over two packages of cookies that I’d swiped from the food box. They seemed more like a gift than the leftovers we were giving to Berta. “How’s he doing?”
“Other than being unemployed again, he’ll be fine.”
“I’m so sorry the investigation led to Kerby’s business getting shut down.” I said.
“Oh, that’s no problem. Barney was always a little uneasy around the Thespens anyway. I guess it’s a thing that goes way back. He’s got a job lined up to drive the little shuttle bus around town, once he can do it without pain from the leg.”
Drake had drifted to the living room and taken a seat on the couch beside Barney’s recliner chair. Both men were intent on the televised baseball game.
“We can’t stay long, Barney,” I said, “but I wanted to thank you so much for being there that day. Not too many friends have ever taken a bullet for me.”
“Well, I won’t go so far as to say it was my pleasure, but I do have a great story now for the kids. It impresses the heck out of my brother’s boys.”
I nudged the back of Drake’s seat. “We better head back.”
Drake stood and reached into his pocket. “Got a little something for you,” he said to Barney. He held out a closed hand.
“Call it a good luck charm, or a token of thanks, or next month’s mortgage if that helps.”
Something dropped into Barney’s open palm. The gold nugget he’d taken from the cave, right before we’d run for our lives. I’d forgotten all about it. Barney stared at the lump and Sissy slapped her hand to her chest with a little cry.
“That was so much the right thing to do,” I said as we pulled out of the Connells’ driveway. “They seem like a family who could use a break.”
I found myself thinking more about that huge cache of gold the next morning as I flew over the rugged peaks east of Skagway. I’d won our coin toss so I was airborne, while Drake and Freckles took the first leg of the return trip to New Mexico by highway.
On all sides of me loomed range after range of snow-topped mountains, blue-purple in the distance. How many of those hills had abandoned mines or caves in them? In how many had someone stashed the fruits of their labor, planning to come back, and how many of those dream-filled men had ever done so? In one small cave in one fairly insignificant mountain, beside a cabin that would disintegrate with time and w
eather, I had been blessed to witness the outcome of only one of those legends. The cache was still there. The story would live on, no doubt, and no one would ever come as close as we had to finding the whole, magnificent treasure.
It was a memory that I knew would stay with me all my days.
Author’s Notes
Alaska, the land of such magnificent natural beauty that it is hard to fathom it all, was long a dream of mine and I went there with an eye for a place where a story could unfold. Skagway caught my eye, and my heart, and two trips there were not nearly enough. But that’s what I had to work with.
So many resources came my way, both during and after my travels. The Skagway Story by Howard Clifford painted many pictures for me of daily life on the streets of the town during and after the gold rush. The visitor center and chamber of commerce provided a bounty of maps and answered questions I didn’t even know I would run into while I was actually on site. (Who knew that over 6,800 abandoned mines exist in Alaska?) The local newspapers helped tremendously with both historical and modern-day facts, as did our friendly and helpful guides (I am so sorry I didn’t get your names).
Despite the research, please keep in mind that this is a work of fiction. Aside from the events and names documented in history, this entire story comes from my imagination. No real modern-day people are mentioned here. The events surrounding the death of Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, the funerals and burials of Smith and of Frank Reid are well documented in history, although there were discrepancies in some of the accounts and I could only choose one of them.
My sense of what Skagway must be like when the tourist season ends is just that—a guess based on my own experience having lived in places that rely heavily on tourism for their livelihood. Any given person you ask may feel differently. In other words, the opinions expressed by the characters in this book are not necessarily those of the author.
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