The owner, Avery, also appeared. He was dark-skinned, with a close-shaved scalp, and piercing black eyes. “Hey Ed, while you’re here,” said Avery, “could you take a peek at our freezer? It’s been on the fritz for the last couple days.”
“Sure,” said Ed.
He wandered off across the lawn, and the jolly fishermen surrounded me. I didn’t recognize them, which meant they were guests who had probably only been here a couple nights.
“How did such a pretty little gal get to be driving such a big boat?” one of them asked.
“My brother was the barger, originally,” I explained. “He built it, welded all of the aluminum. But he hurt his back a couple years ago, and that pretty much put him out of business. He asked if anyone in the family wanted the boat, because if not, he was selling.”
“He gave it to you?” asked another.
“Well, no. I’ve been making payments on it.” Pretty damn big payments, but I almost had it paid off.
“You might just be the littlest captain I ever did see,” one observed, squinting down at me lopsidedly.
‘Captain’ was technically my title, though I’d always thought it sounded a wee bit pretentious. My boat was big, but it wasn’t that big.
Then I realized the squinting guy actually had a black eye. “What happened there?” I asked.
He shrugged, looking sheepish. “Had a sinker fly back and hit me.”
I winced. “Ouch.”
They offered me a beer, which I took to be sociable. Then we got to the fun part: Me subtly interrogating them.
“So what have you guys been up to?” I asked, starting vague.
They told me about the huge salmon they’d been catching. Ugh. Fish: The bane of my existence.
“What about in the evenings?” I asked, batting my eyelashes at them. “What do you guys do with yourselves when you’re not fishing?”
“We drink,” one said, and the others guffawed. “No, really, after our guides leave, we stay here at the lodge, and play cards, and sit around the fire pit. Mostly we drink. Last night we went to the bar.” Standing there talking to them, I learned what they liked to drink, and then their names and occupations, marital statuses, and where they came from. They all held my gaze and seemed like exactly what they were: Cheerful, half-schnockered fishermen. I felt reasonably confident when I struck this bunch off my list.
One of them was rambling on about the monster king he’d caught that afternoon, when Ed started back toward us across the lawn. He had a little smile creasing his beard, and I sort of lost track of the conversation when his eyes were drawn to mine.
“Did you fix it?” I asked when he joined the group.
His eyes were even prettier in the sunshine. Maybe I’d been staring too long, because he glanced away. “Yeah,” he said.
We wished the fishermen happy fishing—and happy drinking—and pulled back out onto the river.
Next, we dropped off the well-drilling pipe. I was sure this stop would be faster than the other two, because Manny was a close-mouthed sort. He spoke mostly in grunts, interspersed with barely-intelligible mumbles, and then only if pressed.
He was a veteran, a short, squat man who did everything with an absolute economy of movement. He didn’t seem to like to move, and he did so only under great duress.
I didn’t even waste breath questioning him. I simply could not imagine him sneaking into my cabin and taking my nugget. Besides, he had a very lucrative business with his well-drilling, at a few thousand bucks a pop, a well every week or so. Manny didn’t need my $100,000 nugget.
But then Annie, who happened to be walking by as Manny handed me a check, caught sight of us and stopped. She was a plump woman in her mid-forties, with a heart-shaped face and big grey eyes. “Hey Ed,” she called. “You think you could help me out with something?”
What was up with this? Was Ed always helping people?
He smiled at her. “Of course.”
She looked relieved. “Follow me? Come along, too, Suzy.” As we walked back to her place through the woods, she explained. “Mikey’s deathly allergic to anything with a stinger,” she said. “And some hornets made a nest under the eaves, right outside our bedroom window. I don’t want him messing with it, because last time he knocked one of those things down, he almost died. And I—” she looked embarrassed “—am afraid of heights… and hornets. I’ve got a ladder set up, but I can’t even make it to the second rung without having a panic attack.”
“It’s no problem,” Ed said. “I’d be happy to take care of them for you.”
“Oh, thank you so much. You have no idea what this means to me,” she began, and then unleashed a torrent of thankfulness that rivaled my speech from this morning. Ed was maybe thinking the same thing, because he slanted me a little smile from behind his beard.
Annie’s place was a pretty basic log cabin back in the woods. The couple didn’t have running water, instead making do with an outhouse, drinking water pumped from the neighbor’s, and sponge baths. The cabin was back in a moist, almost swampy area, and I was immediately struck by all the green. Alaska is a lush, vibrant place in the summer, but the area around their cabin was even greener than most, almost jungle-like, every square inch bursting with life. Instead of landscaping with a lawn and a neat flowerbed or garden, they’d just let everything grow how it would. There were currants and cranberries and the large, angular leaves of devil’s club.
I turned my collar up against the mosquitos as Annie showed us the round hornet’s nest hanging under the eaves. She went and fetched Ed some things, and then used me as a human shield while he knocked the nest down. I tossed him the propane torch, and he burned the hive to dust.
Only after all of the striped, stinging pests were completely done for was Annie willing to approach him. “Thank you so, so much!” she gushed.
I found myself a little irritated by the way she pressed in close to Ed. Her cup size had to be quite a ways into the alphabet, and currently, those very generous breasts were plastered to my employee’s arm.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“Hey, I’ve got something for you,” she said. “I found some more old parts in the woods.” She hurried around the side of the building, and came back with a few rusty metal scraps that looked like they’d come off a piece of heavy machinery a hundred years ago. She deposited them in his arms.
Ed looked the scraps over, turning them in his hands as though they were precious. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you,” Annie said, with a distinctly inviting gleam in her eye. I knew everybody around here, and all of their business, so I knew very well she and her husband fought more than they got along. He was a drunk, and she was promiscuous, and whether there was a causal relationship there, one way or the other, I didn’t know. What I did know was that a couple marriages along the river had been ruined by her persuasive breasts.
I turned myself around before I looked at the reason for my irritation too closely. “Daylight’s wasting,” I called over my shoulder as I headed down the trail. I didn’t give a damn what Ed got up to, I told myself, because I had the hunky blond brothers coming over.
I dug out my phone, and crap, it was already 4:30. There was no way I’d be back by five, what with one stop still to make.
Ed caught up with me, apparently not gonna try for a quickie before our next stop.
I glanced over at him, and down at the steel scraps he was hugging to his chest. “What are those for? Do you run some sort of recycling service, or…?”
His eyes shifted, and I thought I saw a hint of color climb up his cheeks. “Sort of,” he said.
My eyes narrowed. If anyone could smell a secret, I could, and I would bet this man was full of them. I wanted to do some probing, but we were already back to my boat. Ed pushed us off, and we drove to our next stop.
Lane met us down at the beach with a trailer and a couple guys. Lane was a dead ringer for Jessica Rabbit, minus the slutty wardrobe. I was guessing she t
ucked her exaggerated curves into shapeless, pastel plaid so that men wouldn’t stare. And trip, and crash, and generally make fools of themselves.
Ed barely glanced over. He was eyeing the 55 gallon drums of diesel. I thought for sure if he’d lived out here for any length of time, he’d have wrassled at least one 55 gallon drum. But as he tugged on it—ineffectively—I decided, apparently not.
“Here, like this.” I was small, but I knew how to throw my weight around. I wedged my toes on the big barrel’s bottom rim, reached across, and heaved the heavy thing into a tilt. I had just enough weight to do it, and I thought maybe if I hadn’t eaten lunch, I might not have managed it. Balancing it on its rim, I began to roll the 350 lb. drum toward the beach. When I reached the boggy sand, it became too much for me, and I let it thump back to its bottom.
I turned to find that Ed had followed my example. And sometime when my back was turned, he’d lost his button-down shirt. I stared as he coaxed the heavy barrel down off my deck and muscled it up the sandy, much more difficult beach.
Ed was built. He was spare, with not much in the way of extra weight on him. His biceps bulged, and his chest and shoulders stretched his T-shirt in a way I could find no issue with. None at all.
I shook my head. Damn it, I had a date with Helly’s brothers—I looked at my phone again—right now. I shouldn’t be noticing Ed. Not now, not ever.
“Do you mind getting this for a minute?” I asked. “I gotta make a call.”
He nodded, already pulling my barrel into a tilt and coaxing it the rest of the way up the bank to the waiting crew.
I tried calling the brothers, but it went straight to voicemail. Which wasn’t really surprising; service was spotty out here, at best. I called Helly and explained what was going on.
“They already left,” she said. “But they’ll wait for you, I’m sure. You’re hot, and they want to tap that.”
I rolled my eyes. I knew I wasn’t ‘hot’. ‘Cute’, at best.
I signed off, and helped Ed move the last several barrels. We got into a rhythm—I’d take them to the edge of the boat, and he’d take them up the beach. His hands brushed mine, setting up a puzzling reaction in my body.
Helly’s brothers, I told it. You’re interested in Helly’s brothers, so you just save that shit for tonight.
“Ed,” Lane said to him as he delivered the last 55 gallon drum, “do you think you could look at something for me?”
What was this, a river-wide conspiracy?
Ed looked at me. I hesitated, and then shrugged. I was already gonna be late. What was a few more minutes? It’d give me time to talk to Lane.
He broke into a smile, looking as eager to please as a Labrador. “Love to,” he told Lane. This man was unreal. Could anyone possibly be this nice? This was unsustainable, and I was finding it damn suspicious.
Ed fixed their little tractor while I confirmed Lane had a pretty convincing alibi—lodge ownership was more than a full-time gig. For his efforts, Ed received another armful of metal scrap, including a coffee can full of huge nuts and bolts.
Then, and only then, did we start back toward my place. It was almost six in the evening, I’d possibly missed my date, and I was exhausted anyway.
I was just mentally reviewing the laziest sexual positions—a third participant complicated the equation considerably…
When what was left of my cabin came into view.
Chap
ter Three
I had to do a double-take to confirm the cabin was mine, and then I just stared. My mind couldn’t quite comprehend the… shapes I was seeing.
It looked… less than square. And there was something weird about the roof, something poking out of it… Ah, that was a tree. A tree, sticking up out of my roof. And just beyond it, it looked like… another tree lying on what used to be my generator house?
“What the…”
And then I saw them. I saw their two blond heads as they ran toward their boat.
The moment crystallized for me. They had done this. Helly’s brothers, the hellions, the troublemakers, the masters of mayhem, had done this. I’d ignored Helly’s warnings. I’d invited trouble into my life.
Instead of neatly felling that tree, they’d dropped it directly on my cabin. And somehow, they’d taken down a second with it. My cabin was fucked up, and my generator house utterly destroyed.
I closed my eyes, hoping I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing, hoping it was a trick of the light. Praying it would all go away.
But no. When I looked again, it was all the same. It was real.
And the perpetrators were getting away.
I was in shock, but I knew I had two choices. I could pull in to shore, run and assess the damage, and as Helly had predicted, cry. Or I could chase those fleeing bastards down, and make them face the music.
I wasn’t a helpless twelve-year-old girl anymore. And this wasn’t a bike. This was my home.
“Hang on to something,” I growled to Ed. Then I hit the throttle. The engines roared as all three of my 180 horse Yamaha outboards opened up. The bow rose as the massive boat surged forward. It might have been big, but empty, and with that many horses behind it, my barge could move.
The brothers had gotten their boat pointed upstream. I couldn’t even hear the buzz of their motor as they accelerated, casting nervous glances back at me.
If they thought they could escape me with that little 40 horse, they had another think coming. Big, fat outboards roaring, I bore down on them.
“Uh, I don’t think…” Ed started.
“Quiet,” I said. Without looking away from the brothers I was running down, I reached under my console, and pulled out a shotgun. “Hold the wheel,” I barked.
Ed hesitated.
I grabbed his hand, dragged it to the wheel, and then tugged open the door. Wind and noise buffeted me. I jumped down to my deck and ran up to the bow. The wind dragged at the bandana holding my hair back, and finally tore it away. My hair flew free, springing and whipping around my head like Medusa’s snakes.
Ed had adjusted course so we didn’t hit the brothers. Instead, we slid up alongside.
The brothers glanced over at me. The whites of their eyes showed all the way around as they looked down the barrel of my shotgun.
I fired a shot across their bow. They released the throttle, and we lost them as their boat slogged back. Leaning out over my railing, I watched them turn their boat around, and start racing the other direction.
I growled. I had been trying to do this without damaging their boat—it was Helly’s, they were just borrowing it—but… Gotta do whatcha gotta do.
I slung the gun’s strap across my back as I ran to the helm. I shouldered Ed aside, and yanked on the steering wheel, pulling us into a hard turn. The boat tilted. Ed stumbled and hit the wall. His chair skidded sideways across the floor, along with his lunchbox. I held course, my eyes zeroing in on Helly’s brothers as they came into view, once more off my bow.
I was closing on them again when I realized one had pulled off his white T-shirt, and was waving it in the air. Surrendering. They were losing speed, and angling toward shore.
My cabin came into view again—what was left of it—and I dared not even look as I followed them to my dock. My blood pounded hot through my veins.
We nosed up onto the beach harder than was strictly necessary. “Tie us off please,” I said to Ed, as evenly as I could.
He was staring at me, but he nodded.
I slipped out the cabin door, took a few strides toward the bow, and vaulted over the railing. My heels crunched in the wet, sandy gravel. I straightened, assuming a shoot-from-the-hip stance, and advanced on the brothers.
One of them was tying off Helly’s boat, throwing hunted looks my way, while the other sat in a seat watching me approach, his face ashen. I could not believe I’d been planning to sleep with these fuckers. I mean, they were good-looking, yeah, but they were out of control. They needed a keeper, and I wasn’t that person.
“Quiet,” I barked. “Up out of there, now. We’re gonna go look at what you’ve done.”
Zack paled even further, and Rory looked sorry and repentant. I wasn’t buying it.
I dogged their steps past the top half of a birch lying across my garden, all the way around to the back of my cabin. There, my shotgun started to dip as I looked on with disbelief at the wreckage. Yes, that tree I’d wanted them to fell was on my cabin. But it wasn’t just on the cabin, it was in the cabin, as if some colossal force had shoved it several feet through my roof.
And—I looked closer—all of the windows on the back side of the house were out.
I turned my head, looking at the other tree, the one that’d collapsed my generator shack. I could just make out my generator under there, pinned by the birch. Having a tree fall on one’s generator was not a good thing. That was a few thousand dollars of equipment that may very well no longer run, meaning, in the meantime, I had no power. No electricity. No lights, and no running water.
Mimi ran across the yard and pressed against my legs, sounding distraught. I heard Ed’s footsteps scuff behind us, and then his sharp intake of breath.
I swiveled my head around to glare at the brothers. “Explain,” I ordered. My eyes were burning with unshed tears, and I jabbed Zack in the ribs to get him talking.
“We were just trying to take down that cottonwood, exactly how you’d asked us to,” Zack said. “We brought a chainsaw, and we thought maybe we’d just cut it down before you got back.”
“Surprise you,” Rory muttered.
My finger spasmed on the trigger. “Go on,” I rasped.
“So we tied the cottonwood off to that birch. We wanted to make sure it didn’t fall toward your cabin, no matter what happened.”
I looked at the huge cottonwood lying in my house, with its nearly three foot circumference, and then at the birch, barely half its size. I did not comment.
“You can’t make a leaning tree fall in the opposite direction, but you can sort of guide it to one side or the other. So we were going to guide your tree across your back yard here, where there’s nothing. We made the first cut.” Zack swallowed, and looked at Rory.
Two Captains, One Chair: An Alaskan Romantic Comedy Page 4
