by Sue Henry
“Hi,” Jessie told them both, laughing as they all three gave Jim semitolerant glances. “Coming to the island with us?”
They shook their heads and Anna answered, “Unfortunately, we’re headed home on today’s plane. But we’ve been out there since Saturday, so we don’t feel too deprived. It’s a terrific place.”
“Is this your first trip?” Becky asked.
“It is. And I’m really looking forward to it.”
“You’ll love it. Be sure to look for the resident eagle. She has a baby this year.”
“I’ll do that,” Jessie assured her. “When does your plane leave?”
“Not until almost four o’clock, so we’re shopping Petersburg first.”
“Maybe you can leave your bags in the Harbor Master’s office,” Jim suggested. “When you’re ready to head for the airport, there’s a phone here to call a cab.”
“Here,” said Jessie, digging Connie’s crumpled card from a pocket. “Call this number. The driver’s a hoot and the cab not to be believed. You’ll like her and owe it to yourselves to have a laugh on the way to the airport.”
When the pair had given Jim thank-you hugs and left their luggage, they vanished, waving a last goodbye before turning the corner of Nordic Drive in search of gift shops. Jim picked up both boxes of groceries at once. “Let’s get your stuff on the boat. My roofing materials should be along anytime now. Where’s your friend? And have you seen Curt anywhere?”
Not wanting to get into the whole story, Jessie was explaining simply that Karen might not be coming, but could show up, when she was interrupted by a husky voice from behind her.
“Hey you—keeper of the light. Need a hand with that stuff?”
“Curt! There you are.” Jim put the boxes back down and reached to shake hands with the newcomer. “Good to see you! I was just wondering if I was going to have to track you down at the Harbor Bar. Oh, this is Jessie Arnold. Jessie—Curt Johnson.”
“Naw. Did that last night.”
He offered a hand to Jessie with a nod. His thick fingers felt rough with callus that she recognized from people she knew in the building trades—carpenters, mechanics.
If he hadn’t been carrying a duffel over his shoulder, she wouldn’t have remembered this older man as one of the pair she had seen the evening before. “I think I saw you and another man come off the dock by the Northern Lights last night, yes? I was having dinner there by the window around eight o’clock.”
“Nope,” he denied firmly, frowning and shaking his head. “Not me. I was in the bar, like I said.”
Jessie didn’t remember seeing him there, but supposed he could have come in after she left. Odd! The two men had been some distance away and it had been dark. Still, she was almost sure it was the same person and wondered, if so, why he would deny it.
Must be mistaken, she told herself, turning to pick up her own duffel.
Daypack over her shoulder, Jessie carried the duffel and the smaller box that held the lager and whiskey the length of the dock to where Beal’s twenty-five-foot Seawolf powerboat was tied up in the last slip. There, they stowed everything inside the pilothouse and went back to wait for a delivery van to arrive from a local building materials supplier. This soon appeared and the driver assisted Jim and Curt in loading rolls of roofing and the other supplies he would need to install it.
As the van drove away, Jim turned to Jessie. “Let’s go grab some lunch before we leave. My stomach’s gonna be howling before we get back to Five Finger.”
“How long will it take?”
“A little over an hour with this load.”
Still thinking Karen might show up, Jessie suggested that they go for food, while she waited. “She won’t know where I am, or which boat is yours, if I leave, and she doesn’t know you.”
But by the time Jim and Curt returned with a sack full of burgers and fries, there had still been no sign of Karen.
On hearing it, Jim frowned. “Really shouldn’t wait around much longer,” he said. “I need to get back to the island just after high tide, so we can off-load more easily and get the boat secured so it doesn’t beat itself up on the rocks if the wind comes up. We should really get going.”
“Then let’s do that,” Jessie told him, making up her mind. “Karen’ll be fine on her own. Maybe she changed her mind and just didn’t want to say so. Let’s go.”
Nevertheless, as Beal pulled the boat out of its slip, with Curt next to him in the front of the boat, and headed into the Petersburg harbor, Jessie stood in the rear and scanned each dock that they passed, thinking she might see her overnight roommate on one of them. As each slid past empty of Karen, she felt both uneasy, as if she were abandoning someone who might need her help, and disappointed in Karen for leaving with no explanation for her absence. She might have worried that the woman’s stalker had caught up with her if Connie had not told her that Karen had picked up her suitcase from the hotel.
Hoping it was just a case of bad manners, she knew that she was also not totally unhappy to be relieved of the other woman’s problems, though she sympathized with her situation. Her fears had called up old memories and feelings on which Jessie would rather have kept a tight lid. Alex crossed her mind, and she wondered fleetingly if her past experience played a larger part than she had realized in her relationship with him. Refusing to examine that idea in detail, at Jim’s request she opened the sack, handed him and Curt their share, then settled down to her first, and very welcome, hot food of the day—still closely watching the shoreline east of the docks that they were slowly passing at the harbor cruising speed limit.
Which was how, below a large two-story house set back from the water, she noticed the redheaded figure on the shore wildly waving a green-and-brown scarf to attract attention.
“Stop, Jim,” she called, standing up to wave and let Karen know she had been seen. “That’s Karen. Can we pick her up?”
Beal cut the speed of the Seawolf to idle and looked toward shore in the direction Jessie was pointing.
“What the hell’s she doing clear down there?” he asked. “It’s at least a mile out of town.”
“I don’t know, but she clearly wants us to collect her. She’s in some trouble, Jim, and it may be important that we do, if you think we can.”
He agreed, swung the bow shoreward, and took the boat in, cutting power and coasting as close as possible to a shore of rounded stones of all sizes. As they came in he turned the wheel over to Curt to hold steady and came to the stern with a boat hook to fend them off if necessary. As they bumped and grated gently aground, leaving a space of about six feet, Karen grabbed her suitcase and waded in up to her knees, running shoes and all. Reaching the boat, she heaved the case up to Jessie and clung to the side, trying to figure out how to get herself aboard.
“Wait,” said Beal, and used the boat hook to pole the craft around so she could reach the stern, which was lower and allowed her to push off and hoist herself onto it on her stomach. With help from Jessie, she swung her dripping feet inboard and stood up.
“Thanks,” she managed, breathless, as they both watched her pant to regain her wind. Recovering enough to speak, she nodded to Beal. “You gotta be Jim, the lighthouse man.”
“I am. And the guy inside is Curt, but I’ll introduce you later,” he told her before hurrying back to the controls. “I’ll get us headed out again.”
His glance, as he passed Jessie, told her he would expect a few answers at first opportunity and she knew she wanted answers of her own. Turning back to Karen, she was surprised to find her staring toward the front of the boat with an odd frown of concern.
“What?”
Karen swung back toward her and lost the frown.
“Nothing. You just didn’t tell me there’d be anyone else along.”
“Does it matter? You don’t know him, do you?”
“No. Not at all.”
Jessie let it go. Then, over the roar of the diesel engine and rush of water as the boat cut thro
ugh it, she questioned Karen, who proceeded to strip off her soaked shoes and socks and wring out the lower legs of her jeans.
“What happened? Why did you leave the dock? I came back and you weren’t there. Did you find my note?”
“Note? No. I didn’t go back there. What happened was that I saw him, Jessie. I stood up to see if you were coming back and he was right there—talking to some guy on a forklift by that fish place with his back turned to me. So I ducked down and waited till he left, but I didn’t see which way he went, so I couldn’t come looking for you. I just got out of there.” She paused to open her suitcase in search of dry socks and began to pull them on her cold feet. “He was so close and looking for me in town, Jessie. I was very careful—went straight back to the hotel and got my bag. Then I walked—in the opposite direction I thought he’d be looking—east, out of town on the residential streets above the beach. Well, it’s rocks, so I guess technically it’s not really beach—but the shore above where you found me anyway. All I could do was hope I’d see you in the boat and could wave so you’d see me. And that’s what happened—right?”
She stopped and gave Jessie a long look.
It all made sense. So why, Jessie wondered, did she feel there was something that didn’t add up about Karen’s account of her disappearance? And why did she feel that her own response was being closely assessed and that there was something almost sly in the way the woman waited for acceptance?
“Is there anything to eat?” Karen asked suddenly. “I’m starving.”
Reaching, Jessie offered her the uneaten half of her hamburger and fries. “You can finish this. It’s cold, but it’s edible and I’m not poison,” she apologized, knowing she wouldn’t finish it herself.
Her appetite had completely deserted her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AS JIM BEAL HAD ESTIMATED, THE RUN TO FIVE FINGER Lighthouse took just over an hour. Though scattered clouds continued to float overhead, the afternoon had turned warm and sunny and, to Jessie’s satisfaction, the sea was calm.
The snow-covered peaks of the Coast Mountains, bright in the sunshine, dominated the skyline to the east with their immeasurable, permanent ice fields and the great fingers of flowing ice that extended from them in glaciers, filling and carving out valleys in the process. Where the mountains reached the sea they were lower, more rounded, and without snow, but thickly covered with billions of evergreens. These slopes dropped so abruptly straight down that they gave the impression that the bulk of them was hidden under water and any boat on the surface hung suspended in liquid space over a profound abyss.
Leaving Karen to finish her lunch, Jessie stepped into the pilothouse with Jim and Curt to see what was coming up ahead of the boat, but was soon sidetracked.
As they passed the marker at the end of the Petersburg harbor, Jim, once again in control, swung the Seawolf north into the lower end of Frederick Sound and increased their speed to twenty-five knots. Curt had taken the second seat at the front and ignored her presence as he followed their progress on Beal’s nautical chart. Taking a look over his shoulder, Jessie identified two small islands approaching on the left as the Sukoi Islets. The name sounded Japanese to her, but Jim explained that it was a Russian word for dry and that there had been fox farms on both isles in the early days of the twentieth century, but no potable water.
“There’s a historical atlas in that rack,” he told her, pointing. “It’s a wealth of information, if you want to know the background of almost anything around here. There were fox farms by the dozen up and down the Inside Passage back then.”
The large spiral-bound book, Exploring Alaska & British Columbia—approximately a foot wide and a foot and a half long—had been authored by a Stephen Hilson thirty years earlier. Sitting down at the dinette table she found reminiscent of one in a motor home, she opened the atlas to a page that showed Frederick Sound and noticed that “Not to be used for navigation” was printed on each page of the charts that had been outdated when the book was published, evidence that the meeting of land and sea was constantly changing and not to be taken for granted.
Examining the two huge pages spread before her, Jessie located Petersburg and the Sukoi Islets, with a notation that confirmed Jim’s information on the fox farms. What represented water was printed in blue. Notations filled much of the empty space that was land, printed in dark brown on a tan background. Reading a few of those close to the islets, she found an interesting mix of information, from where Point Agassiz got its name—“Naturalist Louis Agassiz was an instructor at Harvard University during the mid-1800s”—to the “Reported site of the sinking of a three-masted Russian gunboat” in Thomas Bay. There were mentions of John Muir, black bear and salmon streams, waterfowl nesting grounds, a bay named for Admiral David Farragut, “old Indian settlements” discovered by Captain Vancouver’s men in 1869, and “March 7, 1924—Ole Haynes and his companions shoot and kill alleged fox poacher Billy Gray in his tent.”
“Hey!” she said to Beal. “This is fascinating. Where did you get it? Alex would love it. I wish we’d had a copy when we did the Ton of Gold Run.”
“I’d looked for a copy of the original 1976 publication for years, but never found one, so I snapped this up when it was republished in 1997,” he told her. “I think it’s still available, if you want one. It’s expensive, but worth every cent in fascinating reading.”
Looking farther north on the chart to where Frederick Sound joined Stephens Passage, she located “The Five Fingers,” the tiny islands where the lighthouse now stood. They lay directly east of another pair of islands, “The Brothers,” and just below those was one tiny island simply called “Round Rock” that was designated as a “Sea Lion hauling grounds.” Jessie smiled, picturing what it must look like.
“Your lighthouse island is practically nonexistent on this, Jim—a mere dot on the map. You have any sea lions?”
“Yeah, but small has its advantages. It’s hard to get lost on three acres, even if it is in a huge amount of water. It’s twenty miles to the nearest island to the south, but Cape Fanshaw is just over five to the east of us. The Brothers are pretty close—maybe twice that far. Still, on a clear day you can see for fifty miles up Stephens Passage and at least that far down Frederick Sound from up in the tower. We do have one old sea lion who swims around the island almost every day like he’s checking things out, but . . .”
Attention caught elsewhere, he reached for a pair of binoculars that hung close at hand and examined the waters ahead of the boat before turning to Jessie with a grin.
“Whales,” he told her. “Looks like three, and they’re pretty close. You can read the atlas at the lighthouse. Better go out, if you want a good look at these.”
The boat was moving into the widest area of Frederick Sound and Jessie could see that he was right; it was a huge amount of water. Following his advice, she went out onto the stern of the boat and leaned over one side to see around the left side of the pilothouse.
“What is it?” Karen asked from where she perched on the flat cover of a stowage locker built into the side of the boat that served double duty as a seat. She had been sitting there, staring out at the mountains with a thoughtful expression, while Jessie was in the pilothouse with Beal.
“Whales,” Jessie told her without turning. “Just ahead.”
At first there was nothing to indicate their presence. Then, about the length of a city block away, there was a disturbance in the water as the rounded back of a humpback broke the surface, coming up for air, and slowly the characteristic dorsal fin that makes the whale look humpbacked and gives it its name came into view. A cloud of spray erupted as it blew, and Jessie knew that, though it couldn’t be heard over the boat’s engine, it would be accompanied by a whoosh sound. In the quiet air the spray hung like mist, and before it drifted away on the breath of a gentle breeze, she could see a hint of rainbow where the sunshine hit it just right. The enormous mammal blew once again; then as it continued to roll forward, the giant
flukes of its tail rose completely out of the water and slowly slid beneath the surface as the animal departed into the depths. As it vanished beneath the sound’s gentle swells a second, slightly smaller whale repeated the maneuver, but disappeared without exposing its flukes.
“Awesome,” said Karen, who had come to stand beside Jessie to see.
Though they waited and watched until the stretch of ocean where they had seen the humpbacks rise lay far behind them, the whales did not appear again.
“Can’t you just imagine them sliding silently through the water like submarines?” Karen asked.
Jessie nodded, still gazing back in the direction the whales had surfaced. “They aren’t always silent and I’d love to hear them sing. I’ve heard recordings collected by researchers who put down hydrophones. But I read somewhere that if you’re in the water nearby you can hear them pretty well because water is such a good sound transmitter. They don’t sing much in Alaska, though, mostly in Hawaii, where they go in the winter.”
Karen went back to her seat on the stowage locker, but Jessie stayed where she was, leaning on the rail to watch the colors change as a broad patch of cloud drifted across the sun, casting a shadow over the boat and the sea on which it traveled. Uncountable shades of watery hues and reflections turned to a steely gray that lacked the earlier impression of depth. Sunlight fell through a few thin openings in the cloud cover in concentrated beams to cast bright patches on the surface of the water so glaring they were hard to look at without squinting. Cloud shadows moved over the rounded hills of the large islands between the sound and the Pacific Ocean, the dense green tree cover once again reminding Jessie of soft fur or velvet, separated from the water by a thin line of tan beach, or, in some places, dark rock.
