“Thank you,” I called, even as I started toward their cabin.
I rapped on the screen, and Dotty appeared in the dim interior. She was in a yellow summer dress dotted with rosebuds, her white hair still in curlers. “Suzy! You’re a sight for sore eyes, c’mon in dear. I just made scones. Oh! And I have something for you.” She ushered me inside, and toward a sunny little breakfast nook at the back of the house. “Sit, sit. Tea?”
“Yes, please.”
“You like that blackberry sage, right?” She was already moving toward the kitchen.
“Yes, thank you,” I called.
She bustled into the kitchen, and I heard the click of the stove lighting, the hiss of water in the kettle, and the clink of mugs. She came back out with a plate of triangular white pastries, which she set on the table, and a flat carton of fruit, which she held out to me.
“What’s this?” I asked, taking it from her. I could see perfectly well it was peaches—big, round, fuzzy peaches.
She smiled. “We went to town yesterday evening for a shopping trip to Costco. They had those on sale, and a little table set up offering samples. The one I tried was amazing, almost as good as I remember from back home. Anyway, I bought a flat for myself, and one for you, and a couple more to give out.”
“Thank you, Dotty, this is great. But maybe I should just take a few…”
“No, no,” she said, pushing the box firmly back into my hands. “Cook something nice. I heard Helly’s brothers are staying at your place for a few days.” She tossed a little grin over her shoulder as she disappeared back into the kitchen. The kettle quit whistling, there was the sound of pouring water, and then she reemerged with steaming tea for both of us.
“How did you know?” I asked as she sat across from me. I set my peaches on the empty chair between us.
She smiled, her blue eyes glimmering. “You didn’t think word would get around when they put a tree through your roof?”
“Did Ed—?”
She waved her hand. “No, but… Ed was at your place? Tell me about that.”
I settled in with a grin. If there was a more accomplished gossip on the river than me, it was Dotty. Which meant, she had information I could use. I just had to manage to get more out of her than I put in, while at the same time proving I knew more… It was complicated, and it was a game we played almost every week.
“Ed was helping me on the barge,” I said, “because Jimmie broke his arm.”
Her eyes got wide. “He did? Oh dear. I knew he’d shipped to town, but I thought he was visiting a friend.”
“Nope,” I said, inwardly preening that I knew something she didn’t. “He rolled his four-wheeler.”
“Well, I’ll have to call and see how he’s doing. Do you know what kind of break it was?”
I shook my head, now disappointed I didn’t have any of the juicy details. I hadn’t asked Jimmie questions because I’d been too busy panicking about what I was going to do for help on my barge runs the rest of the season.
“So he didn’t fly out from here?” I asked. There were few places for small planes on wheels to land in these parts, and the 2000’ runway adjoining Dotty and Harv’s back yard was the most popular of them.
She shook her head.
“Has there been anybody unusual in or out in the last week?” I asked. Either my gold nugget had been transported via wheel-plane, float plane, or boated in to the landing. Or it was still here.
“No,” she said. “Just the mail plane. Why do you ask?”
I waved my hand, trying to act casual. “Oh, no reason.”
She snorted.
I drowned my smile in a hearty sip of tea, and then fished out my teabag. “So, Ed,” I said. “What do you know about him?” I knew just asking the question was telling, but I needed any information Dotty had.
She dipped a spoonful of sugar and poured it into her teacup, eyeing me as she stirred it like a lady. “So, Helly’s brothers,” she countered. “What’s going on there?”
Uh-oh, my less-than-full-disclosure was biting me on the ass. I had to give her something. “I invited them over to take down that tree,” I said.
She continued just to look at me.
“I’d been considering… dating them,” I added.
Her lips twitched. “‘Dating’… both of them?”
Shit, my face was turning red. I frickin’ hated when it did that. I prayed for Harv to walk in the door demanding pastries, or a plane to crash outside the window, or just about anything to distract Dotty’s shrewd blue gaze from my telling blush.
A distraction did not come. “Well… yeah,” I admitted.
She held up her hand. “Gimme some skin.”
“What?”
“High-five. Now,” she ordered.
I slapped her arthritic hand.
She chuckled and sipped at her tea. “If I were forty years younger…”
“And unmarried,” I added.
She shrugged, making me choke on my next sip.
“Anyway, none of that’s happening now,” I said after I’d recovered from my coughing fit. “That ship sailed when they broke my cabin.”
Dotty nodded.
“Tell me about Ed.”
“Well, he’s much more likely to fix your cabin than to break it,” she said.
“Dotty…”
She sighed. “All right, all right. Ed. Where would you like me to start?”
“Start with Ralph.”
Her brows shot up. “All right,” she said slowly. “Ralph was living out here before we built our house. He moved here running from the law in Texas—”
I knew this story well. He’d poached some land baron’s steer, and one of his buddies had tattled on him. When he’d first told me, I’d been surprised that one dead cow could drive someone four thousand miles to a place without indoor plumbing. He’d said first, that steers are not ‘cows’, second, he’d been young and dumb, and third, he really didn’t want to go to jail.
But apparently he’d really wanted steak.
“—and he was a fishing guide even before most of the lodges existed. He was a partner in the first, helped open the bar. He did his thing out here for twenty years before he knocked up a guest’s wife.”
“He…?”
She nodded. “Yup. It was a bad scene. She was gorgeous, but she was crazy as hell. She had Ed down in Colorado. She sued for child support. Ralph counter-sued for custody. They settled on an arrangement where Ralph had Ed summers, and his crazy mom had him during the winter.”
See, now this was something Ralph had never told me about. I had no idea why, but in all of our little riverside gossip sessions, he’d never really talked about his son.
“You mean Ed’s been out here since before me?” How on earth could I not have noticed a shy, dark-haired boy with gorgeous eyes?
“Yup. Since the very beginning. Ralph took him everywhere. He used to go fishing with a baby strapped to his chest. His clients loved it.”
I shook my head.
“Ed could clean a fish practically before he learned to walk,” she mused. “Anyway, when he was twelve, his crazy mom decided she didn’t want him after all. Was getting remarried, and thought it’d be easier without a kid in tow. It had to’ve been hard on him.”
My mouth was still hanging open when she continued.
“Ralph had a place in town, too, and he put him the rest of the way through public school. Sometimes Ed was at the house in Anchorage by himself, and when he came back out here those first few years, we didn’t see a lot of him. I think he’s a quiet sort by nature, but when his mom rejected him, he withdrew a little more.
“When he was seventeen, he went to work for your parents, as you probably remember.”
I shrugged, not wanting to explain that I most certainly had not remembered that. No wonder he’d approached Maria and started washing dishes like he worked there. Because he had. Wow.
And, yep, my mind went there: Ed was shy, he was hesitant around
women, and he’d been raised out here, where he hadn’t had much exposure to them.
Oh my god… Could he be a virgin?
Oblivious to my musings, Dotty took another sip of her tea. “He’s a good boy,” she said. “Not quite so much a hell-raiser as his father.”
I snorted at the idea of Ed as any sort of hell-raiser.
Dotty gave me a little smile.
“What about the guides? They been up to anything that you’ve heard?”
Dotty shook her head. “I don’t know much about the guides, except that most of them are dishonest.”
I nodded. “Grasping.”
“Money-hungry. Rob you blind.”
“Worse than car salesmen.”
“Indeed.”
We sat in companionable silence for a few moments. I cleaned up the crumbs on my plate. “Thank you for the scone. It was excellent,” I said.
Dotty was nodding when her husband mowed past the window. “Oh! I almost forgot. I need you to haul something for me.”
“Next trip I’ve got room on is in five days, the twenty-first,” I said. “Depending on what you need moved, of course.”
She smiled wide. “A new lawnmower! My kids got me one of those newfangled riding mowers.”
I nodded. “I think I’ll have room, but I’ll let you know if not. Just have it to the landing by then.”
Looking excited, Dotty jumped to her feet and picked up both our plates. “You still having that party?” she tossed over her shoulder as she took the dishes to the kitchen.
“Yep!” I chugged my tea and picked up my peaches.
She swept back out, wiping her hands on her apron. “Harvey hook you up with your mail?”
“He said he’d have it waiting for me.”
“All right then. You have a good week, Suzy. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she said with a wink.
I returned her smile. “Thank you for the peaches.”
She followed me to the door. “And I don’t know what you’re planning,” she called after me as I started toward the post office, “but you be nice to Ed.”
I waved an acknowledgement, and scooped up the bag of mail on my way by. Before climbing into my boat, I called Helly.
“You off?” I asked without any sort of hello.
“Yep,” she said, unfazed.
“Meet me down at the river, I have your mail.”
“Will do!”
I closed the call, zipped myself into my float coat, and motored to her place. She met me on the beach, hands held out for her mail.
“Back it up,” I said. “I’m visiting. I need to use your internet.”
Her lips quirked as she stepped back, giving me room to jump ashore. “I feel so dirty. So used.”
“You should. I have some idea what you and Gary get up to here day after day, all alone. I’ve heard tell people can hear the orgasmic screams and—I think they said spanking sounds?—clear out on the river. Sound travels real well over water, you know.”
She blushed even as she helped me with my anchor. I pulled her little bundle of mail out of the bag and handed it to her, shucked the float coat, and climbed up onto the back of her four-wheeler. “C’mon,” I said, patting the ripped seat in front of me.
She was leafing through the envelopes. “No packages?”
“Nope.”
“Damn it.” She mounted up and dropped the mail into the wooden box that’d been built onto the front rack.
“You expecting something interesting?” I asked as she started us up the trail to her place.
“Whaddya need internet for?” she countered.
What was it with the people around here? Untrusting, always expecting tit for tat…
“I want to see if anyone’s put my gold nugget on eBay,” I explained.
“Huh. You’d think there’d be some sort of regulations on selling gold nuggets. You said it was worth over a hundred thousand, right? Does it need a certificate of authenticity, or… I dunno, a deed?”
“Ralph didn’t give me anything,” I said. “He said its name was Georgette.”
Helly chortled.
We pulled up to her cabin, and she led the way in through the door.
I was immediately assailed by the sounds of blows, grunts, and the rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire. I looked over and spotted a guy on her couch. He had dark blond hair, and a slim build under lots of black. He was playing some sort of video game, where it appeared he was being very successful at killing things.
I cocked my brow at him.
“J.D.,” Helly said. “My youngest brother.”
Oh. Right. The one who hadn’t said much to me at the barbecue last summer, where I’d seen him last. Helly had later suggested he’d be a much better pick for me than Zack and Rory—more my age, much less of a troublemaker—but I knew that anyone I couldn’t even freaking remember was out of the running. If he was my soulmate, I would have noticed him. Right?
He didn’t even glance up, further solidifying my conclusion that we weren’t meant to be.
I dropped into the cushy office chair at her writing desk, and flipped her laptop open. I minimized the open document there, unfazed by the words that jumped out at me: ‘thrust’, ‘quivering’, ‘sopping’, ‘grunted’.
“So you talked to Dotty, right?” Helly asked. She picked up a bag of Barbecue Lays—a habit she’d picked up from Gary—and tossed one in her mouth. “You learn anything?”
“Did you know Ed grew up here, every summer since he was born?”
Helly dragged a chair over next to me and shook her head as she plopped into it. “I had no idea.”
I brought up the web browser, plugged in ‘eBay’ and waited for the page to load.
“No unusual traffic through the airport?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Did you actually tell her your nugget was missing?”
I huffed out a breath as I typed ‘gold nugget’ into the search field. “No.”
“Do you still think it might have been Ed?” she asked. “Did you learn anything about him on your barge trip?”
I was having difficulty concentrating on her questions and the screen in front of me. “Besides what I told you on the phone? He’s actually got a pretty nice body hidden under those baggy clothes of his.”
Helly’s chair legs thumped back down as she leaned forward. “Re-ally?”
“Tell us more,” J.D. said from the couch.
I glanced over at him, but he hadn’t looked up. His fingers moved madly over the controller as—I swear to god—it looked like he choked a zombie to death with his bare hands. Was that even possible?
“Yeah,” I said.
“So you didn’t find out anything incriminating?” Helly prodded.
“No.” eBay had gold nuggets, but after I sorted them by price, it didn’t seem like any were even close to as big as mine. Now kinda curious, I did a general Google search, ‘gold nugget’.
“Okay,” she said. “So you’re gonna move on, then? Maybe look at the guides?”
“I’m still looking into Ed,” I said. “It may not be my gold nugget, but like you said, I think he’s hiding something.”
“Hold the phone,” said J.D. from the couch. “Gold nugget?”
“Yeah,” said Helly. “Somebody stole hers.”
“How big?” he asked.
I didn’t bother to glance over. My eyes were practically bugging out of my head as I stared at the screen. I was looking at a photo of one of the biggest gold nuggets ever found. I’d always thought Alaska was a big gold state, but Australia (not that it was a state)… Holy fucking god.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Helly’s hands move, showing him.
“Dude,” he said. “And it’s gone?”
Okay, now he was starting to irritate me a bit. “Yup,” I said, stabbing my finger onto the mouse a little harder than necessary. That’s right, my $100,000 nugget was gone. Fucking missing as of two days ago, and I didn’t even have a lead. Not a single
friggin’ one.
“That sucks,” he said. The sounds of zombie death picked up again.
‘Gold nugget Georgette’. Nothing. It’s like my gold nugget never even existed.
But it had. A dying man had put it in my hands, and I’d almost dropped it because it’d weighed a ton.
I made a sound of frustration.
Helly patted my back. “You’ll find it,” she said.
I looked over at her. “You don’t know that.”
She shrugged, her blue eyes earnest as she smiled gently. “I believe in you…”
Awwww. I felt my heart melting.
“…you stubborn wench. As if you’d let some petty thieves make off with what was yours. I believe you’ll tear this place apart until you find it, and I believe you’re gonna find out just exactly what makes Ed tick while you’re at it.”
Well, she’d almost ruined it, but I liked those last sentences too much to be upset with something so small—and incidentally honest—as her calling me a wench. “Helly,” I said. “I love you.”
Her hand came to rest on my shoulder. “I love you, too.”
We stared into each other’s eyes for a moment before the silence from the couch drew my attention. J.D. was staring, his body turned toward us, and his hands braced on the arm of the couch. He was giving us his complete attention at long last.
“Are you two gonna kiss now?” he asked, his voice hoarse, his expression hopeful.
“J.D., that’s disgusting,” Helly informed him. “I’m your sister.”
“Please?” he said.
She reached over, grabbed a banana off the table, and chucked it at him.
Chap
ter Five
Two seconds after I’d cut off my boat engine, the silence was interrupted by a gunshot.
I whipped my head around and glared up toward my cabin. That sound had come from my yard. And the only people in my yard (supposedly) were the blond idiots Helly was unfortunately related to.
I ran up from the dock, hunkering a little lower when I heard another shot. I rounded my cabin, and the brothers came into view.
They were standing in my back yard, pointing up into the trees. Zack held a shotgun at half-mast.
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.
Two Captains, One Chair: An Alaskan Romantic Comedy Page 6
