Everything To Prove
Nadia Nichols
What really happened?Libby Wilson needs to find out if her father–the father she never knew–was murdered. He died on the day he was going to marry her mother when the plane he was piloting crashed into an Alaskan lake. It was never found. His business partner, who disapproved of the match, gained the fortune that should have gone to Libby and her mother.Libby has come to Evening Lake to solve the mystery of her father's death. But she can't do it alone. Carson Dodge runs a salvage company, and he's the only one who can help her. Carson is intrigued by Libby's mission…and by Libby herself. Together they have one chance to rewrite history, correct past wrongs and maybe even fall in love.
“Look, I’ll keep searching for the plane, but the very least you could do is tell me what the hell it is I’m looking for.”
For a few moments Libby glared at him. Carson could see that tears were about to spill over and her chin was trembling as she fought for control. Why was it such a big secret?
“You’re looking for bones,” she blurted out abruptly.
“What?”
“BONES!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, the tears finally brimming over. “My father’s bones!”
As soon as she’d said the word father, all the pieces of the puzzle clicked together.
“If we can find just one bone in that wreckage, the DNA will prove my paternity and Frey will never be able to stop us from recovering the plane.” Her eyes were wide, fixed on him, riveting him in his seat. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“I suppose now you’re going to want to charge me more money.”
Carson stared at her, then shook his head. “You have a really high opinion of me, don’t you?” He started the motor. “I’m going to take a quick break. I’ll be back out in an hour.”
“Pick me up at the dock at seven,” she said. “And don’t tell me no. I have way too much at stake for you not to let me help.”
Before he could respond, she started her own outboard and veered around his boat, heading at top speed for the lodge. He muttered, “Yeah, I guess maybe you do at that. Several billion dollars is a pretty big stake.”
Dear Reader,
Deep beneath the icy waters of Alaska’s Evening Lake lies the wreckage of not only a plane, but also three lives: the pilot of the ill-fated craft, the bride he was flying off to meet on their wedding day and their unborn child. Twenty-eight years later, that child, Libby Wilson, is determined to prove her paternity by salvaging the wreckage and recovering her father’s remains. Her journey into the past reveals the secrets of the lake and unlocks long-dormant family mysteries…mysteries that change her life in ways she never imagined.
Every so often, a person’s future is dictated by events long past. The desire to know where we came from and who we are within the context of our family’s past can be a powerful driving force. Deciphering the clues can take us on new, wholly unexpected adventures with amazing outcomes in the here and now. Whether it’s simple genealogical research or more complicated scientific genetic testing, we never know where the search might lead. Perhaps this book will light a spark in you to delve into your own family history. Who knows what secrets (and skeletons) you might discover when you peek into the far corners of the family closet?
Nadia Nichols
P.S. I’d love to hear from you. My e-mail address is nadianichols@aol.com.
Everything to Prove
Nadia Nichols
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To John, for pointing out that the exception proves the rule.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
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
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
FOR THE SIXTH TIME IN LESS THAN Twenty Minutes, Connor Libby knotted his tie then studied his handiwork in the small mirror that hung above the bathroom sink, and for the sixth time it failed to pass muster. If he didn’t hurry up, he was going to be late. He tore it out again and started over. His hands were shaking, which didn’t help matters much. He’d had to borrow the tie from Dan, a green strip of silk with little brightly spotted rainbow trout jumping all over it. It went well enough with his white shirt and dark slacks. Dan was lending him the jacket, too, a fine wool tweed with leather elbow patches. If not for Dan’s help, Connor would be decked out in faded jeans and his favorite red flannel shirt, and would no doubt be a whole lot more comfortable than he was in these fancy duds. But suffering a gentleman’s fate for a few hours was worth it, for Marie.
Marie. Just the thought of her kick-started his heart and made his hands shake even worse. She was as beautiful as an early spring sunrise over the Brooks Range, and in less than three hours she was going to become his wife. He’d met Marie nearly a year ago, when she came to work for him and Dan. The war was over and he’d arrived back at the Alaskan lodge, still trying to make sense out of four years in the air force, the last two spent in Vietnam.
She was a slender, quiet girl and an excellent cook, minding her own business and keeping apart from the others. In her spare time she would read books outside the cabin where the hired help stayed, and Connor’s dog, a three-legged mongrel named HoChi that he’d brought back from Vietnam, liked to hang out with her. He took that as a good sign, since HoChi was by nature and experience a very wary and distrustful dog.
One day he braved it all and dropped onto the wall bench beside her. “What’re you reading?”
She glanced up with those shy, dark eyes, as startled by his boldness as he was. “War and Peace. One of your guests left it behind.”
“Have you figured out which is better?”
She closed the book, a piece of birch bark marking the page. “I do not like war.”
“Me, either. You like to fish?”
“My family is at fish camp right now. If I were there, I would be gutting and splitting and drying dog salmon.”
“And you’d rather clean rooms at the lodge?”
“The money I make here helps my family. My father’s health is not so good. He can no longer do all the things he needs to do. We need a lot of supplies to get through the winter.”
Through quiet conversations, Connor learned that Marie Wilson was an Athapaskan whose family lived on the Koyukyuk River, and in the weeks that followed, the friendship that developed between them became the highlight of his summer. Walks along the river or paddles in the canoe were moments to be savored. Connor was smitten, though he was unsure if Marie felt as strongly about him as he did about her. As the end of the season drew near, he asked Dan for some advice. Dan, whom Connor regarded as more of an uncle than a godfather, was a confirmed bachelor. He didn’t have a high regard for women in general, and disliked native women in particular, hiring them only because help was so hard to get out in the bush. To Dan, the indigenous people were to be tolerated with barely concealed contempt. He believed them to be lazy, incompetent and untrustworthy—a racist attitude that Connor never understood. He smoked his cigar and listened to Connor relate his feelings about Marie, and when Connor asked him what he should do, Dan took his cigar out of his mouth and spat.
“Soon enough, she’ll go back to her village and take up with some young buck,” he said. “She’s a squaw, for God’s sake. Forget about her.”
When the summer was over, Marie returned to her people. The geese flew south, the lake froze up and deep snows filled the long cold darkness. Conner ran a trapline out of the guides’ camp and suffered endless torments thinking about Marie falling in love with some young man from her village. He went to the lodge from time to time when his need for companionship outweighed his desire for solitude and shared a whiskey or two with Dan. He told Dan he planned to marry Marie and bring her back to the lodge to live. Dan never said anything in response, just shook his head and threw back another slug of hooch.
Spring came and filled Connor with a restless yearning as the days lengthened and the sun rose higher in the sky. The ice went out on the lake. The great flocks of geese returned, their long ragged Vs darkening the pale sky. Connor wondered if Marie had missed him during the cold dark winter, and if she would return as promised.
In early June the accountant from New York City had made his annual trip to the lodge before it opened for the season to report that Dan and Connor had done well in all their business ventures, though Connor knew that was all his father’s doing. Ben Libby’s death had made both Connor and Dan Frey very wealthy men, though Connor had little use for money. As long as he had a sound canvas canoe, a couple of fly rods and plenty of food to eat, he was content. But Dan, although he professed no interest in a fancy lifestyle, liked expensive toys. After the accountant had departed, Dan went to Anchorage and bought a de Havilland Beaver, a bright shiny yellow six-passenger plane on pontoons. It was delivered the next day.
“You might as well use those Air Force skills of yours,” he’d told Connor, gesturing to the plane with his cigar. “You can fly our clients to surrounding lakes and charge extra money for doing it.” Dan, who didn’t need to make any money at all and had a flying service at his beck and call, nonetheless liked to emphasize that the plane was not a frivolous extravagance but a sensible business expenditure. Besides, float planes in Alaska were as common as pickup trucks in Montana. Everyone who lived in the bush either owned one or knew someone who did.
The first place Connor had flown was to the tiny village on the Koyukyuk to see Marie, and she was as glad to see him as he was to see her. Her father had died that winter and she’d been running his trapline. Times had been hard and their winter had been lean, but she was glad to see him, and Connor felt hopeful. He spent several days at their cabin, eating stews her mother cooked from the beaver Marie had trapped, helping her tend the sled dogs and mend a broken sled. When he told her he wanted to marry her and bring her to live at the lodge, Marie looked troubled and shook her head.
“My mother would be all alone then.”
“She could live with us,” Connor offered, and Marie had consented.
And so it was arranged, as quickly and as simply as that. After supper that night Connor and Marie walked a long way down the river. He held her hand and kissed her for the first time. He gave her a gold necklace with a pear-cut blue diamond that had belonged to his mother. She gave him her body there beside the river, while the wild geese clamored across the arctic sky.
He remembered her gift as he stood before the mirror, thinking how much more precious it was than a blue diamond on a gold chain, and his seventh knot was as bad as the first. He picked up the jacket and stumbled out of the lodge into a brightness that startled. He left HoChi behind him in the lodge. “You weren’t invited,” he said through the door in response to the dog’s plaintive whine.
Dan was standing down on the dock, smoking a cigar.
“I can’t knot the tie,” Connor said. “My hands are shaking.”
Clenching the cigar in the corner of his mouth, Dan did it for him.
“I guess I can’t get you to change your mind and come,” Connor said.
Dan uttered a grunt of disgust and shook his head. “Hate weddings with a passion,” he said around his cigar. He finished the task and took the cigar out of his mouth. “I’m going to head up to the mouth of the Kandik, camp up there for a week or so. That’ll give you and your bride the run of the place for a few days. It’ll be the last privacy you get all summer. Make the most of it, boy. And good luck.”
Connor shrugged into the jacket and stuck out his hand. Dan clasped it in a firm handshake and slapped his shoulder before heading back up to the lodge. Connor walked out to the end of the dock where the plane was tethered, threw off the lines and climbed aboard. A man only got married once. He guessed he had a right to be nervous. He started the plane’s engine and was about to leave the dock when he spotted HoChi running nimbly down the gangway. Dan must have let him out of the lodge. He opened the plane’s door and HoChi jumped in, immediately hopping into the right-hand seat.
“Okay then, you’ll be the ring bearer,” Conner said, taking the leather thong from around his neck and draping it over HoChi’s head. The simple gold band with their names and wedding date inscribed on it glittered against the dog’s neck. “But remember, best behavior. This is an important day.”
He did a quick preflight while he taxied the Beaver out onto the lake. The weather was good, the lake was calm, and the Brooks Range reared its glorious snow-cloaked majesty against the northern sky. The flight to Marie’s village should take less than forty-five minutes. The wedding would be held there, an Athapaskan celebration officiated over by a missionary priest and followed by a traditional potlatch. Afterward, they’d fly back to the lodge and enjoy a whole week of uninterrupted bliss. Life was good. Connor pushed the throttle up and the plane accelerated through the light chop.
It wouldn’t do to keep his beautiful bride waiting.
SOLLY JOHNSON HAD LIVED out on the land most of his life, like his father and his father’s father, way back to the time when Raven first created the world. He had a wife who lived in the village, a woman who talked too much and made him crazy. He’d given her three sons, the last one two years ago, and left her with her family down on the Yukon while he ran his trapline up in the mountains. He liked it that way. He liked being alone. She raised the boys; he brought home the furs that gave her the things she wanted. He listened to her talk for a few weeks, a month maybe, nonstop, while she mended his clothes and made him a new pair of mukluks, and then he left her again and was glad to do so.
He didn’t like noise, and people were noisy. When he first came here to live in the mountains as a young man, there was no noise. There was just his canoe and his dog team, and the animals in the wilderness. It was quiet then. The only loud noise he heard was the sound of the river breaking up in spring, the thunderstorms in summer and the wild keening roar of the wind through the high mountain passes. And then the whites came. At first they came looking for furs and gold, but they went away when they couldn’t find any gold and all the furs got trapped out. But then a few years later they came back in those noisy flying canoes. They came for the fish they could catch in the rivers and lakes, and the animals they could shoot on the land, and some of them stayed and didn’t go away.
This was the beginning of the bad times.
The place he loved was where he built his cabin, near the mouth of the Yaktektuk, a small river that fed into the lake the whites named Evening but his people had always called Dayhehas. He had lived in this place for most of thirty years now. He was still a strong man, and he still had good strong dogs, but the winters seemed longer now, and the darkness was colder. The quiet places were quiet no more. The skies were full of the flying canoes that brought men to the big log house over on the warm shore.
The white man who lived there was called Dan Frey, and he didn’t like Indians. This much was true. He had been there long enough so Solly knew to keep away. Frey thought Indians stole things. He thought Indians were drunks. He hired them to work at his fancy log house on the lake, but he didn’t like them. Solly heard these things when he went to his wife’s village on the Yukon. He heard how the white man treated his Indian help. When Solly went back to his cabin on the Yaktektuk, he stayed away from the white man’s lodge. But he still came down to the shores of Dayhehas. He still liked to see both faces of the great mountain at the same time, and the way the sunlight sparkled over the big waters when the ice went out and the days got long. He liked to watch the loons when they returned to raise their young, and he liked to watch the moose eat lily roots in the coves. He was at the lake, crouched on his heels at the water’s edge cleaning a pretty good fish, when he heard the flying canoe taking off from the white man’s lodge.
He watched it race along the water, roaring like a hundred of the white man’s snow machines, those noisy stinky things that were taking the place of sled dogs. He watched it lift off the water and skim along just above the surface for a long time, as if trying to decide if it wanted to keep flying or return to the water. Then he watched it climb abruptly toward the sky the way this yellow one always did, and he saw it do something he’d never seen it do before. It climbed straight up, so steep it nearly went over backward before it stopped climbing and hung in place above the sparkling waters. The loud noise stopped and there was sudden quiet, just the lap of the waves against the shore and the brush of wind through the trees.
Then the flying yellow canoe fell out of the sky, tumbling forward and dropping nose first into the lake. Solly saw and heard the great crash of waves as it hit the water. He saw the canoe’s two legs break off and float away. He watched as it settled onto its belly and then sank so quickly that before he could rise to his feet to properly mark the spot the big canoe had vanished. He was still standing there when he saw something bob up from the water between the floating legs and begin swimming to shore. He thought maybe it was the white man, the mean one from the lodge. But as it came closer he saw that the head wasn’t human. It was a short-haired dog like none he’d ever driven before his sledge. The dog came out onto the gravel strand a quarter mile from where Solly stood and he saw that it had only three legs.
Not long after the dog reached shore, Solly heard a boat coming from the lodge. The boat was coming fast. He thought it must be coming to rescue the white man trapped inside the sunken canoe, but he was wrong. The boat circled the two legs that were still floating and Solly saw the driver tie them together. Then the boat sped down the lake toward the outlet, screaming like an angry woman and towing the two big yellow legs behind. The man in the boat had been the mean one, the one called Dan Frey. Dan Frey hadn’t seen the three-legged dog on the gravel strand. He hadn’t seen Solly standing on the shore not a quarter of a mile away from where the flying canoe sank. But this was no surprise. Dan Frey was a white man, and it was well-known among the Athapaskan that white men didn’t see too good.
CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-Eight Years Later
IT WAS THE ARTICLE in Forbes magazine that gave Libby Wilson the sudden impetus to throw all caution to the wind and do what she’d been waiting to do for the past twelve years. She read that article and realized that she had to go back home and make things right. Not five years from now as originally planned, when her bank account would be healthy enough to finance what was certain to be an expensive undertaking. She had to go now. The truth had remained buried for far too long. She knew her mother would object, but her mother could no longer tell her that the past didn’t matter, because it did.
Libby knew exactly how much it mattered. She’d grown up in the same village that her mother had. She’d lived in the same little government-issue house, been shipped out to the same boarding school in Anchorage to attend high school; she’d worn the same clothes, eaten the same foods and felt the same bleak desolation when one of the village kids sniffed too much gasoline and was buried beneath the permafrost. The only difference between the poverty her mother suffered and her own fate had been the color of Libby’s eyes.
The teacher in Anchorage had commented about her eyes. Ms. DeFranco had been young and earnest and from a well-to-do family in New England that believed in helping less fortunate cultures. She had made Libby’s future her personal crusade, which was the only reason Libby ended up going to college back East, being accepted to Tufts medical school and graduating top of her class. Proof positive that sometimes a little bit of racism could work to a minority’s benefit. Her internship was in forensic pathology and her ticket to success had been a reasonably sharp intellect and a pair of the prettiest blue eyes that ever came out of an Athapaskan villager…compliments of a Russian fur trader two generations removed on her mother’s side, and a father she’d never known.
Libby’s internship at Massachusetts General had just recently ended and two months ago she’d been offered a residency, an impressive nod to her potential from such a fine hospital. She might have accepted it and spent the next five years bolstering her bank account and carefully plotting her return to Evening Lake, but that very week Forbes magazine hit the newsstands and a copy ended up on the table in the doctors’ lounge. Idly thumbing through the pages in one of those rare quiet moments that sometimes occur in the middle of an endless shift, Libby had stumbled over that fateful article with all those glossy color pictures and a lengthy feature profiling one of Alaska’s wealthiest and most eccentric residents: the silver-haired and distinguished-looking Daniel Frey.
Libby had taken the magazine back to her apartment and read the article again, and yet again after that, studying the pictures of the massive log lodge, the lake and the man; all the while her blood pressure nudged toward the boiling point. Daniel Frey. Even the man’s name sickened her. She should write a letter to the editors of fancy Forbes magazine about the eccentric billionaire Daniel Frey and tell them the stories her mother had told her. She’d tell them what it had been like to work for the rich white man who hated Indians. What it had been like to be treated with contempt, to be unfairly compensated for long hours worked, to be housed in crowded conditions and poorly fed. What it had been like for her mother to fall in love with Connor Libby, Frey’s godson, only to lose her beloved on her wedding day in a suspicious plane crash. A crash her mother believed Frey had rigged both to keep Connor from bringing an Athapaskan bride back to the lodge and to claim the entire Libby fortune as his own.
She’d tell them what it had been like for her mother to go to Frey after learning she was pregnant with Connor’s child, only to be driven from the property.
“I know how you squaws sleep around,” Frey had said. “That baby could be anyone’s.”
Connor Libby had been mentioned only briefly in the article. Two sentences made reference to the fact that Ben Libby’s only son had been killed in a plane crash shortly after returning from Vietnam…and that Connor’s will had specified that if he died without heirs, Frey would inherit his share of the Libby fortune.
What Libby had to prove was that Connor in fact had had an heir, and she was determined to do just that. She remembered vividly that fateful day in high school biology class when she’d first learned about DNA, and how it could be used to prove a person’s paternity. That knowledge had changed her entire life’s focus, and had even steered her medical studies toward specializing in forensic pathology.
Libby had long been planning to return to Evening Lake, where her father’s plane had crashed, and salvage the wreckage. The only thing that had stopped her from doing it years ago was the large amount of money it would take to find and recover the plane. She’d made inquiries to salvage operators while she was in college, but none of them could be specific as to the costs because each salvage operation was unique. All they could tell her was that it would be expensive.
As a medical student, Libby had worked part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers to help cover the cost of her books and tuition. Scholarships and student loans had covered the rest, but saving any amount of money had been impossible. As an intern, she’d struggled to make ends meet and pay off her school debts. Logically, she should have accepted the residency that had been offered to her and worked until her finances improved, but none of that would matter if she could find just one of Connor Libby’s bones and prove she was his daughter.
The magazine article had become the catalyst, and after Libby had finished reading it for the third time, she’d made her decision. Her mother had told her over and over again, throughout years of listening to Libby rail against the injustices of poverty, that there was no way to prove anything, and it no longer mattered. But it did. It mattered twenty-eight years ago, and it mattered just as much today. And her mother was wrong. There was a way to prove not only her paternity, but what kind of racist Frey really was.
Which was why she turned down the offer of a residency at one of the best hospitals on the Eastern seaboard and was now flying to Alaska. The flight was a long one and gave her time to think about her strategy. What she actually thought about was the fact that she didn’t have a strategy, and had no idea how to start the search for her father’s plane other than by confronting Daniel Frey in person, something she’d always wanted to do but never dared. This strategy was a poor one, given his attitude toward the native people. He’d certainly never admit to any wrongdoings, never admit that it was strange he hadn’t wanted to attend his own godson’s wedding, and equally strange he hadn’t been anywhere in the vicinity of the lodge when the plane crashed.
Her mother had mentioned a warden, Charlie Stuck, who had been kind to her after Connor’s death. He’d taken her in his plane while he searched for her missing fiancé. They’d searched for over a week before declaring him lost and presumed dead. No plane wreckage was ever found, just the two pontoons hung up in the rapids about a half mile down the Evening River, which led searchers to believe that the plane had gone down in the deep waters somewhere near the lake’s outlet. Charlie Stuck had been in his late fifties then, but with any luck he might still be alive. He might remember something helpful, and it was a starting place.
When her flight touched down in Anchorage it was 10:00 p.m. and still broad daylight. Libby rented a car and threw her bags in the backseat. She drove down Highway One to a right-hand fork that took her along Six Mile Creek to a place called Hope. An empty state campground, open for the season but devoid of tourists, offered her the choice of sites overlooking Turnagain Arm. She pitched her tiny tent, ate a can of cold beans sitting on the edge of the bluff then walked a short way in the violet dusk down Gull Rock Trail. She walked until the twilight thickened and jelled, then carefully retraced her way back to her tent site and climbed into her sleeping bag.
An hour later she heard a mysterious noise and crawled out of her tent to watch the ghostly movements of a pod of Beluga whales through the dark waters of Chickaloon Bay. Sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, she listened to them breathe as they surfaced and swam past, and she wondered why it had taken her so long to come back home.
Two hours later she was making coffee on her tiny camp stove, drinking it in the dawn while a cow moose browsed along the water’s edge. She cleaned up the site, packed her gear back into the rental car and returned to Anchorage. Once there, she headed for the regional office of the Department of Fish and Game and had to wait outside for an hour before the first employee showed up, still blinking sleep from his eyes. He introduced himself as Elmer Brown, and appeared surprised to find her waiting on the doorstep. He ushered her into the office and listened to her story while he made a pot of coffee. Libby told him about the plane crash, omitting any mention of her relationship to the pilot or any implications of foul play. She expressed her interest in locating the plane and speaking to the warden who had been involved in the search.
“So, you’re looking for this Charlie Stuck,” Brown concluded.
Libby nodded. “I’m hoping he’s still alive. He was in his fifties then, based out of Fairbanks.”
Brown reached for the phone book and placed a call to the Fairbanks office, briefly describing the circumstances and asking if they could look into their records, then hung up. “They said they’d call back. Coffee?”
“Love a cup, thanks,” Libby said, taking the offered mug. “Assuming the plane is still in the lake, how would one go about finding it?”
“Well, it’d be easier now than it would have been back then, but still, that’s a mighty big lake. Deep, too,” Brown said. “There’s a good salvage outfit not too far from here. They’re expensive, all those outfits are, but Alaska Salvage just about always get what they go after. They’ve hauled a lot of planes and boats out of a lot of deep water. The company is owned by a guy named Dodge. He spent eight years as a Navy special forces combat and demolition diver before starting Alaska Salvage maybe six, eight years ago. Loads of experience, but he nearly bought the farm in a freak diving accident while salvaging that commuter plane that went down in the inlet five weeks back. You probably saw that in the news.”
Libby shook her head. “No. I didn’t.”
Elmer seemed pleased to be able to enlighten her. “He had a new employee on board the salvage vessel, and the kid accidentally started the winch while Dodge was attaching the cable to a piece of wreckage a hundred feet below. He got tangled up in a big jagged piece of plane wreckage. His divers managed to free him and get him to the surface but he was more dead than alive when they brought him up. Spent over a month in the hospital getting put back together. Just got out. He’ll probably never dive again but he still ramrods the outfit and he’d be the one you’d want to talk to. His office isn’t far from here.”
“If he just got out of the hospital, I doubt he’ll be at work.”
“He’ll be at Alaska Salvage. He lives and breathes that place.” Brown wrote the name and phone number on a card, handing it to her just as the phone rang. He picked it up. “Oh?” he said after a long pause. “I see. Okay, I’ll pass that information along. Thanks, Dick.” He hung up and gave her an apologetic shrug. “Well, I’m afraid you’re out of luck when it comes to Charlie Stuck. He died last winter in the old folks’ home, but he had a son, Bob, who still lives in the Fairbanks area. Runs a garage out toward Moose Creek. Might be worth talking to him.”
He scrawled another name on another card, then went through the phone book and wrote the phone number down. “You might also check with the warden service based out of Fairbanks. They keep pretty good files on that stuff. They probably still have Charlie Stuck’s report on that particular search. Good luck.”
THE SUN WAS WELL UP when Libby pulled into the Alaska Salvage parking lot in Spenard. The building was a huge blue Quonset hut with a neatly lettered sign spanning the wide doors and three late-model pickup trucks blocking the entryway. The metallic sound of banging and clanging came from inside. She stepped between the trucks and into the dimness, startled to see several massive pieces of what appeared to have been a large commuter plane scattered all over the floor. Hoses snaked across the concrete, and in a separate alcove she caught the bright flash of welding light.
A side door opened into a small office, and when the man bent over a large nautical chart spread open on the desk glanced up and spied Libby he straightened, lifting his hands from both sides of the map, which immediately snapped back into a tight scroll. He was tall, broad-shouldered and clad in a pair of well-worn coveralls that could have used a good washing. His eyes were blue, his dark hair cropped short, his jaw shadowed with stubble. He looked to be in his mid to late thirties, long on experience but short on sleep. A jagged, raised welt slanted across his forehead and disappeared into his hairline, tracked with the marks of stitches that had been recently removed. Another shorter scar crossed the bridge of his nose, his left cheekbone was seriously abraded, and one hand was wrapped in a wad of bandages that allowed only the fingertips to show. Libby could only imagine what the rest of him looked like if his face had taken that much abuse.
“What can I do for you?” he said in a voice as rough as his appearance.
Libby indicated the wreckage on the concrete floor behind her. “Did you salvage this plane?”
“Most of it,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “Look, lady, if you’re with the press, I have nothing to add to what’s been said, and if you’re a relative of someone who was on the plane, you’ll have to talk to the state police.”
“I’m neither,” Libby said. “You were recommended by Elmer Brown of the Fish and Game Department. He told me Alaska Salvage always got what it went after.”
“Almost always,” he corrected. “That plane behind you crashed in Cook Inlet just after takeoff with six souls aboard. The riptide took some of the wreckage out before we could get to it. My crew’s still looking for the missing pieces.”
“Was anyone killed?”
“There were no survivors.”
Libby glanced back at the pieces of wreckage and wondered who the people had been, and what their last moments had been like. She felt a sudden chill. “Did you…?”
“We don’t recover bodies. The state police dive team was in charge of that. We assist as necessary, of course. Their dive team isn’t nearly as good as mine.”
“What do you do with the wreckage?”
“The FAA likes to look it over, so we lay everything we find out for ’em in here. It’s a convenience for them and they pay us for the privilege. When they’re done with their investigation we’ll sell what we can and scrap the rest. Why? You looking for a grisly souvenir? Something with a little blood on it, maybe? If so, you’re out of luck. I already sold all that stuff off to help pay my medical bills.”
Libby’s chin lifted in response to the hostile sarcasm in his voice. “I’m looking to hire a salvage outfit to find a plane that went down twenty-eight years ago in Evening Lake, just south of the Brooks Range.”
Now that she’d announced her business for being there, he eyed her up and down as if trying to decide if she was worth talking to. “Evening Lake?”
“Yes.”
“Any idea where it crashed?”
“Not exactly. I’m hoping to find out more after I speak with some people.”
“Evening Lake is big. I’ve fished it. Spent a couple weeks camped up there a few years ago. Must be a good three, four hundred feet deep in some places.”
“So I’ve been told,” Libby said, wishing he wouldn’t stare at her quite so brazenly. She decided that he was both crude and rude and any sympathy she’d initially felt for his battered condition evaporated as the heat came up in her cheeks.
“When you’re talking remote salvage operations, you’re talking big bucks.”
“How big?” Libby asked.
“For a salvage operation on Evening Lake…that’d take a crew of at least three people, flying in all that gear and some pretty sophisticated equipment. Just finding the plane could take some time. Once it’s found, purchasing the salvage rights and getting the wreckage to the surface could run you maybe seventy-five, eighty grand. Possibly a lot more.”
“I see.” Libby was staggered by the sum. “What if the plane crashed in shallow water?”
“If it were in shallow water, the initial search party would have spotted it.” He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “I’m assuming there was a search?”
Libby nodded. “But they may have been looking in the wrong location, and if there was a lot of chop on the surface, wouldn’t that have made it difficult to spot anything?”
“Maybe. But over the years a helluva lot of planes have flown in and out of there. If nobody’s reported seeing anything in all that time, I’d have to assume it’s way down there, and if you’re not sure the plane really crashed in the lake, you could be wasting a lot of time and money. Were there any eyewitnesses?”
Libby shook her head. “Not to my knowledge. But the plane was taking off from a lodge, the only one on the lake at that time. They think it went down just after takeoff. The pontoons were found half a mile down the outlet of the lake.”
“Must’ve crashed real close to the mouth of the river, then. The wind blows pretty strong through the pass there and would’ve pushed the pontoons clear to the opposite shore otherwise.”
“That’s what the searchers figured. How do you base your salvage fees?”
“Depends on the size of the plane.”
“It was a de Havilland Beaver. Six-seater.”
“We require a deposit of ten grand up front. You’d pay a straight hourly fee contingent upon the size of the crew and the equipment being used. When we find the wreckage, we’re willing to negotiate fair salvage trades toward payment if the plane is deemed restorable.”
“What shape do you think the plane would be in after all that time?”
“Pretty good, if it was down deep and wasn’t demolished when it hit the water. It’s the ice and salt water that plays hell with wrecks. The plane would probably be in close to the same shape as it was when it crashed.”
“If you found the wreckage in just two hours and raised it the same day, would that be less than ten thousand?”
“The minimum charge for any remote salvage operation is twenty-five grand. The retrieval cost of the last plane we dredged up out of a lake ran three times that amount. If you don’t mind my asking, why is salvaging this plane so important after twenty-eight years?”
“It’s not the plane so much as what it was carrying,” Libby said. “Thank you for your information. It’s been helpful.”
He gave her a keen look and rubbed the stubble on his jaw again. “My name’s Dodge. I own this business. Let me know if you want us to take a look.”
“Thank you,” Libby said, accepting the business card he pulled out of the chest pocket of his coveralls and glancing down at it briefly. Carson Colman Dodge. Fancy name.
She left the Quonset hut in a discouraged mood. Twenty-five thousand dollars was an impossible amount for her to come up with, never mind seventy-five. She had the sinking feeling that she’d made a terrible mistake in giving up the residency at Mass General. But she was here, so she might as well persevere for as long as she could. By 10:00 a.m. Libby was on a flight to Fairbanks, hoping to speak to Charlie Stuck’s son, Bob, about what Charlie might have told him about the incident.
CHAPTER TWO
“MY FATHER NEVER said nothin’ to me about anything,” an overweight and balding Bob Stuck said seven hours later, standing outside the door of his one-bay garage in Moose Creek in the watery spring sunshine. Six rusted trucks cluttered the small yard and another took up the garage. He sported a gold hoop in his left ear, a diamond stud in his right and his hands were black with grease. “He was never home. Always off chasing poachers and fish hogs and women. That was more important to him than raising a son.” He spat as if talking about his father put a bad taste in his mouth.
“Did he have any close friends that you know of? Anyone he might have talked to about that plane crash?” Libby asked.
“Most of ’em are dead now. But Lana’s still alive. She lives over on the Chena. She and Charlie shacked up together about ten years back. She took care of him better than he deserved, cooked for him, cleaned his cabin, washed his clothes and waited up nights till he came home from the bars. Then he had that stroke and the hospital put him in the old folks’ home. She wanted the doctors to let him come back home. She ranted and raved in the hospital, made a big scene, said she could take care of him better than any nursing home.” Bob shook his head. “Yeah, she might remember something. She don’t talk to me, but she might talk to you.” He gave her a baleful stare from red-veined eyes. “You’re Indian, ain’t you?”
LANA PAUL LIVED IN an old cabin sitting on sill logs that had rotted into the riverbank over the years, giving the building a decided tilt toward the water. When Libby parked her rental car next to the dilapidated wreck of an old Ford truck, the cabin door opened and a stout older woman with a bright blue kerchief tied over her head peered out.
“Lana?” Libby said, climbing out of the car. “I’m Libby Wilson. I’d like to talk to you about Charlie Stuck.”
The black eyes glittered with suspicion. “Charlie’s dead. They locked him away in a place full of old people and bad smells and he died.”
“I know that, and I’m sorry. But I want to talk to you about what he did, about his job as a warden. I think he might have known something about my father’s death. My father was Connor Libby. He lived in a lodge on Evening Lake.”
“Charlie might have known something, maybe, but I don’t,” she said, and the door of the old cabin banged shut. Libby stood for a few moments in the drab detritus of mud season, listening to the Chena rush past and wondering why the cabin hadn’t been swept away by floodwaters years ago. She was turning to leave when the door opened and the woman leaned out, giving her a sharp look.
“You got any tobacco?” she said. “I got papers but no tobacco.”
“I can bring you some,” Libby replied.
The woman nodded and the door closed again. Libby drove into Fairbanks and at the big grocery store she bought rolling papers and tobacco. She also bought a cooked rotisserie chicken and a tub of coleslaw from the deli, half a dozen freshly baked biscuits and cookies and two bottles of wine, one red, one white. When she returned to the cabin the door opened immediately and Lana Paul ushered her inside. The interior was surprisingly neat and clean, in stark contrast to the muddy, cluttered yard. Libby set the bag of groceries on the Formica table and took out the contents. “I picked up some food, too, in case you hadn’t eaten supper yet,” she said, handing the foil-wrapped package of tobacco to the woman.
Lana took it from her with gnarled, eager hands. “I remembered something while you were gone,” she said, unwrapping the package. She sat down in an old wooden rocker near the woodstove, which threw a welcome warmth to the room. “I remembered how Charlie talked when he came home from the bars. Sometimes, he would talk about his past.” She was filling a paper with tobacco as she spoke, and rolled it with swift, practiced dexterity. “I remember a story he told me about a boy with eyes like yours and a three-legged dog. They lived on Evening Lake.”
Libby froze in the act of setting the chicken on the table. “That was my father.”
“Charlie told me this story.” Lana reached for a wooden match in an old canning jar on the table and scratched it to life on the top of the woodstove. She lit the thin cigarette and inhaled with an expression of reverent content, smoke wreathing her deeply wrinkled face and sharp eyes. “The boy came home from a place faraway and brought a three-legged dog with him.”
“He came back from the war in Vietnam with a dog he called HoChi,” Libby said, sinking into a chair and staring transfixed at the old woman. “The dog’s hind leg had been blown off by a land mine that killed three soldiers.”
“This boy fell in love with a young girl from a village on the Koyukyuk,” Lana continued.
“My mother,” Libby said, her heart hammering with hope that Lana would say something that would help her find her father.
Lana pushed her feet against the floor and made the old rocker move back and forth as she smoked her cigarette. A floorboard creaked in time to the movement. “They were going to be married, but the boy was killed on his wedding day.”
Libby waited for several long minutes while a big water pot hissed atop the woodstove and the old woman rocked and the warm, delectable aroma of spit-roasted chicken filled the little cabin. “Is that all he said?” she finally asked.
“Charlie was drunk,” Lana mused, rocking. “He was sad. He walked back and forth and said he wished he found the boy’s plane. He said he always wondered about the plane.”
Libby leaned forward in her chair. “What do you think he meant by that?”
Lana shrugged. “I think he wondered why the plane crashed.” She looked toward the food Libby had placed on the table. “Boy, that chicken smells good.”
Libby got up, found two plates in a drain rack on the sideboard and a sharp knife in a kitchen drawer. She carved up the chicken and heaped generous portions onto both plates. She hadn’t eaten anything since the can of cold beans the night before, and she was hungry. She put two biscuits on each plate, divided the coleslaw into two green mounds, then found eating utensils in another drawer and placed them on the table. Lana threw the stub of her cigarette into the woodstove while Libby opened the bottle of red wine and poured two glasses. They sat at the table together and ate in silence. The food was good and the warmth of the woodstove a welcome radiance in the cooling evening. Sagging into the earth and leaning toward the river, the weathered old cabin gave Libby a sense of peace.
The old woman cleaned her plate. She ate deliberately, as if trying to memorize each mouthful of food. She drank her wine and Libby refilled her glass. Lana kept her attention on the meal until it was finished, and then returned to her rocker and rolled another cigarette and lit it as she had the first.
“Charlie said the young girl was very beautiful, and he didn’t know why the old man didn’t like her.”
“The old man? You mean Daniel Frey?”
Lana nodded. “The rich man who lived on the lake and didn’t like Indians.”
Libby gathered up the plates and silverware and carried them to the sink. She poured hot water from the pot on the stove into the dishpan and added a squirt of detergent from the plastic bottle on the sideboard. There was a small window set into the wall above the sink and Libby could look out at the river rushing past as she washed. It made her a little dizzy. When the dishes were done she wiped off the table and draped the dishcloth over the faucet. “Did Charlie ever mention that the young village girl had a child?”
The old woman shook her head, but as Libby was leaving, Lana pushed out of her chair. “Take this with you,” she said, reaching onto a shelf and lifting down an old tattered leather-bound journal. “It belonged to Charlie. He scribbled in it ever since I knew him. It was important to him, but his son don’t want it and it don’t do me no good. I can’t read.”
THERE WERE SEVERAL STORES in Fairbanks that Libby visited after stopping at the warden service’s office to get a copy of Charlie Stuck’s report and before flying to the village the following morning. She bought a pretty dress for her mother, bright with the colors of spring, and outfitted herself for a few weeks in the bush. She had no idea how long it would take for her to accomplish her mission, so she erred on the side of caution with the clothing. Warm long underwear, thick wool socks, serious field boots, a parka that would turn the worst weather, iron-cloth pants, several pairs of warm gloves and a good fleece hat. She packed all of it into a duffel bag in her hotel room near the airport and lastly, before checking out, took one last and very long hot shower, knowing that the amenities in the Alaskan bush wouldn’t be nearly as luxurious as these.
The flight from Fairbanks to Umiak took two hours, giving her time to reread the photocopy of Charlie Stuck’s official statement regarding the search for Connor Libby’s plane. The report was disappointing. It mentioned the daily weather, the specific grid patterns flown, the pontoons found in the Evening River, and concluded with the assumption that the plane had crashed near the outlet in very deep water. No hidden clues and nothing that Libby didn’t already know.
Next, she started on Charlie’s journal. She’d already scanned the dates. The entries began four years after the plane crash, but Libby read every single one, hoping he’d make some reference to the crash and the subsequent search, perhaps reflect some of his own theories on what might have happened in a retrospective entry. It was slow reading because Charlie Stuck had terrible handwriting which deteriorated steadily over time. The entire journal spanned almost twenty years, the entries being very brief. A sentence, maybe two. Sometimes months would pass without an entry. The journal read like a warden’s trophy log.
Caught R. Drew red-handed with twelve over the limit, gave him maximum fine, bastard deserved it.
There were also entries on the state of wildlife.
Moose population down fourth year in a row. Hunters are crying wolf. I’m sure it’s poaching. Wolves and moose have always coexisted. Increasing human population and hunting pressure are new on the scene, and where there are humans, there is poaching. No stopping it.
Libby decided she liked the way Charlie Stuck thought. She pored laboriously over his entries until, finally, she read one that was totally out of context, and the words jumped out at her, causing her to sit up in her seat and bend over the journal.
Two weeks late to Lana’s due to crash landing the plane in a white-out, bending the prop and being stranded until villagers found me south of the Dome, but she asked no questions. She waits the way that girl Marie waited. Still wonder what became of C. Libby but think my instincts are right about D. Frey. Why didn’t he go to the wedding? (This was underlined twice.) I know
Frey had something to do with that crash. Wish I could have found that plane. Wish others would have listened to my theory, but money talks loudest and always has.
Libby read the passage several times, her heartbeat racing, dizzied by the words. Charlie Stuck had believed that Frey had something to do with her father’s death! The rest of the journal revealed nothing relevant to Connor Libby, but that one passage gave her hope that maybe, once the plane was found, others would listen…especially if it could be proved that the crash hadn’t been an accident. Was it possible? Could Frey have deliberately killed her father? Somehow she had to come up with the money to salvage the wreckage!
The commuter flight stopped in Tanana, Ruby and Galena before landing in the Koyukyuk River, dodging several large ice floes and a flock of Canada geese while taxiing to the village dock. Her gear was put out of the plane and for the first time in six years Libby stood in the village of her childhood. Umiak hadn’t changed much. There were a few more houses, a few more junked vehicles, a few more boats drawn up on the gravel bank next to the fish wheels. The place looked bleak and dreary to her, and she felt guilty for feeling that way. This was, after all, where she’d been born. She waited for a few moments, searching for her mother among the faces, some familiar and some not, who had come to see if the plane had brought mail or supplies, but if Umiak hadn’t changed much in her absence, nothing prepared her for her mother’s appearance.
Libby felt a jolt clear to the bottoms of her feet when she saw how Marie had aged. Fear clenched her up inside and her heart raced.
Marie came to a stop at the end of the dock. Her hair had gone almost completely white. She had shrunk. This couldn’t be real. Her mother had always been so strong and vital, the anchoring cornerstone of Libby’s existence, always there for her. Weekly phone conversations had perpetuated the myth that her mother was the same as always, that nothing had changed, yet obviously it had. Libby felt the hot prickle of tears beneath her eyelids.
“Mom?”
Marie spotted her and her eyes lit up. “Libby?” She came toward her and raised her arms to clasp her in a trembling embrace. “Libby. It’s good to see you. I’m so glad you came. How long can you stay?”
Libby hugged her mother gently, kissed the velvet of her cheek, slipped her arm around her mother’s frail shoulders and picked up her duffel. “As long as you want me to. I don’t have to go back to Boston.”
Confused, Marie looked up at her. “But you work there.”
“Not anymore. Come on. Let’s go home. I have a pretty dress to give you, and lots of stories to tell.”
Her mother’s dreary little house was exactly the same. Libby could see that Marie had done nothing with the money Libby had sent her every month. No doubt she had put it all in the bank, saving it just in case times got hard because she didn’t realize that her times were always hard. The furniture was shabby, the linoleum worn almost to the plywood underlayment, the cupboards nearly bare. Libby wanted to rage at her mother one moment, then weep the tears of a heartbroken child the next. While her mother made coffee, she paced the confines of the shoe-box house and looked out the windows as if she were a prisoner. She’d been back less than twenty minutes and already couldn’t wait to escape.
Marie was happy with the brightly colored dress. She went immediately into her room and put it on. She’d lost so much weight the dress hung from her frame and filled Libby with a terrible premonition. “You look beautiful,” Libby said.
They drank cups of instant coffee with lots of sugar and powdered creamer. Libby told her mother about her internship at Mass General and the prestigious residency she’d been offered, and that she’d turned it down.
“Was this residency you were offered like what you were doing before, with the dead bodies?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then I’m glad you didn’t take it. That isn’t what a doctor should be doing. You should be delivering babies and healing people.”
“Forensic pathology is just as important, Mom. I can help solve the mysteries of a person’s death. I can help solve murders. But if it makes you feel better, I know how to deliver babies and heal people, too. And as long as we’re speaking of doctors, who’s at the clinic now?”
“Nobody. We have a doctor who comes in once a month. If there is an emergency we go down to Galena, or to Fairbanks if it’s really bad.”
Libby reached across the table to clasp her mother’s hands. “I want you to fly to Anchorage with me for some tests at the hospital there. You don’t look well. You’ve lost too much weight.”
“The winters are always hard,” Marie said. “Things will get better. They always do.”
“We’ll fly out tomorrow. I’ll make reservations at one of the nicest places on the Seward Peninsula. We’ll do some shopping, stay a couple of nights. Please, Mom. It’ll make me feel a whole lot better.”
“Hospitals are expensive and I don’t need one. Now that you’re home, everything will be okay.”
“Hospitals are sometimes necessary, and besides, I’m a rich doctor now,” Libby said, wishing with all her heart that it was true. She gave her mother’s hands a gentle squeeze then pushed out of her chair and paced to the small window. She wished she was a rich doctor. Wished she could whisk her mother out of this dark and dreary place and give her the bright, sunny house and easy lifestyle she deserved. Wished she could afford to hire Carson Colman Dodge, who was crude and ill-mannered, but talked as if he knew his stuff. He certainly was expensive. Libby could see a small patch of the river between two other box houses. She watched the occasional ice floe drift past. Soon the salmon would start their run, and some of the villagers would move out to their fish camps. “Mom, is Tukey’s fish wheel still up on the Kikitak?”
“No. I think it got washed away by high waters two winters ago. Now that Tukey’s dead, I don’t have anyone to make me a new one, but I sure miss fish camp.”
Libby crossed to her mother and gave her a hug from behind. “Then we’ll go to fish camp, just like the old days. We’ll take the skiff and bring a net and catch enough fish to smoke for the winter. We’ll pick berries when they come ripe and put them up in preserves. But first we’ll go to the hospital in Anchorage. Okay?”
Her mother nodded with reluctance. “Okay.”
“Good. I’ll have Susan radio for the plane to come.”
The fact that her mother relented so easily scared Libby even more. Forget Daniel Frey. Her mother was sick. There was time enough to pay a visit to the man who might have killed her father. She wouldn’t let him kill her mother, too. She could wait a few days more.
THE MEDICAL TESTS TOOK most of the day, and were conducted on such short notice only because Libby, in her four years of medical school and two years of internship, had learned that the squeaky wheel got the grease. She squeaked loudly once in the emergency room, in professional terms that the doctors took note of. When they discovered she was a resident at Mass General, a slight twist of the truth on Libby’s part, they took very good care of Marie and never again mentioned the medical center for Alaskan natives on the northern fringe of the city. At the end of a very tiring day Libby drove her mother to the waterfront resort in Homer, where they shared a room with a balcony overlooking Kachemak Bay, and where Libby sat until 1:00 a.m. listening to the tide rush in across the mud flats. The test results would take some time, though not as long as usual. Libby had stated in no uncertain terms that she expected some answers when she returned the following afternoon.
After breakfast the next morning, Marie and Libby half-heartedly browsed the string of shops in Homer, making small talk and walking arm in arm, then drove slowly back to the city where they checked into a hotel not far from the airport. Leaving her mother to a nap after lunch, Libby returned to the hospital. The staff didn’t keep her waiting long. She was ushered into an office by a young resident who took his glasses off and opened the file on his desk, flipping through the pages as if trying to refresh his memory.
“Your mother has chronic lymphocytic leukemia,” he said with a studious frown. “There’s considerable enlargement of her liver and spleen and she’s moderately anemic. She’s also malnourished, probably because she hasn’t felt much like eating lately. We’d like to start her on an anticancer drug we’ve had good success with. She should feel dramatically better after a couple of treatments, and she can take these drugs at home. She’ll need to have periodic blood tests to monitor the medication levels, but this can be done at the clinic in Galena. That’s close to where she lives, isn’t it?”
Libby heard these words delivered over a dull roaring in her ears. She knew the diagnosis wasn’t a death sentence. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia was very treatable, and many people who had it lived to a ripe old age, yet this was her mother they were discussing, not some stranger in the exam room.
She made arrangements to bring her mother in later that afternoon for the first treatment and to fill the prescriptions she’d need to take with her, then drove aimlessly around the city. She ended up in Spenard, sitting in the rental car which she’d parked in front of Alaska Salvage. “One bone,” she said aloud, staring up at the neatly lettered sign. “One bone, and I can pay Carson Dodge whatever he charges to salvage my father’s plane. I can put my mother in the finest house in Alaska and get her the best medical attention. All I need is some DNA.”
The DNA in a single bone fragment would prove that Connor Libby had been her father, and it would be the kind of proof that Daniel Frey couldn’t deny, no matter how much it would kill him to discover that half of his fortune belonged to a blue-eyed Athapaskan. The icing on the cake would be to somehow prove that Frey had caused Connor Libby’s death by tampering with his plane, but the DNA was a damned good place to start. One step at a time.
Libby got out of the car. There was only one truck parked in front of the Quonset hut doors. She could only hope it belonged to Carson Colman Dodge. She stepped into the dim interior of the hut. The overhead lights were off, but the wreckage of the commuter plane was exactly where it had been two days ago. Everything was quiet and the office door was ajar. She peered inside, convinced that they’d all gone out to lunch, and was startled to see Dodge slumped over the desk, head pillowed in the curve of one arm. She watched him for a few moments, long enough to deduce that he was asleep and not dead, then she rapped her knuckles smartly against the door. “Mr. Dodge?”
He jerked upright and lunged half out of his chair. When he recognized her, he slumped back, unable to completely mask the grimace of pain his sudden movements had triggered. “Lady, let me give you a little advice,” he said in that rough and borderline hostile voice. “Never sneak up on a man that way. It could get you into a lot of trouble.”
“I didn’t sneak,” Libby said. “I walked in, knocked on your door and called out.”
He eased himself in his seat and drew a few careful breaths as if the exercise were a tricky one. He looked even worse than he had on Libby’s first visit, if that were possible. He gestured to the metal chair opposite his desk. “Have a seat.”
Libby sat, glancing over his shoulder at the Playboy calendar pinned to the wall behind him, and felt the heat come into her cheeks before she could drop her eyes. She hadn’t noticed that calendar last time. “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mr. Dodge. I just wanted to ask you a couple more questions.”
He made a small gesture with his bandaged hand. “Fire away.”
“You mentioned that you sometimes took salvage instead of money to cover the cost of a recovery effort.”
“That’s right, but usually that just defrays some of the cost. If you’re talking about the de Havilland, fully restored it might bring three hundred grand. But selling the wreckage of that plane wouldn’t come close to covering your expenses.”
“Actually, Mr. Dodge, I wasn’t talking about the plane.”
Dodge studied her with a cynical expression. “You mentioned in your first visit it was something the plane was carrying.”
Libby nodded. “That’s right.”
“Wait. Don’t tell me.” The faint trace of a wry grin mocked her. “The plane was loaded down with gold dust and nuggets from a secret mother lode, which is why it crashed. You know how many of those I get a year?”
Libby felt her flush deepen. This crude man definitely needed some lessons in business etiquette. “Obviously quite a few, from the way you talk.” She pulled the Forbes magazine from her shoulder bag and laid it on the desk. “But how many of them involve this man?”
Dodge leaned forward and glanced at the glossy pictures for a few moments, his eyes scanning the captions. “Okay,” he said, leaning back and giving her a calculating stare. “So tell me, what does billionaire Daniel Frey have to do with the wrecked plane you’re looking for?”
“His godson was flying the plane when it crashed,” Libby said.
“And what do you have to do with all of this?”
“Frey’s godson was Connor Libby, the son of billionaire Ben Libby, and he was on his way to marry my mother.”
Dodge slouched back in his chair, picked up a pen and tapped it on the desktop, eyes narrowing in thought. “So, let me get this straight. This superrich son of a billionaire crashes the plane into the lake and leaves your mother standing at the altar bereft of both a husband and his considerable fortune. And now, twenty-eight years later, you want to find the wreckage. Your mother must have been expecting a nice wedding gift from her fiancé, and she thinks it’s still in the plane. Is that it?”
Libby leaned forward, her blood up. “Mr. Dodge, I have five thousand dollars in my savings account. I know that’s only half of what you require for a deposit, and I’ll tell you right now that if you don’t find the plane that’s all you’ll ever get. But if you do find the plane, I guarantee I’ll pay your company the full freight. What you stand to make on this job will be in direct proportion to how good you are at what you do.” Libby rose to her feet, tucking the magazine back into her bag. “I’m staying at the Airport Hotel tonight and flying out first thing in the morning. If you should wish to discuss this further, please give me a call.”
She was almost out the door when he said, “Lady, how the hell do you expect me to call when I don’t even know your name?”
WHEN CARSON LIMPED DOWN the dock ramp that night and descended the ladder onto his old wooden cabin cruiser, he was carrying a six-pack of beer and a thick, bloody slab of steak. The two chili dogs he’d eaten on the drive to the marina had taken the edge off his hunger but he was still contemplating the possibility of a real meal. Real as in meat and potatoes. Real as in something that might build his blood back up and return his strength. First, though, he wanted to nurse his bruised ego with a cold beer. It galled him to be puttering around the office while his crew was off on a job. He knew Trig would see that things ran smoothly, and he also knew they needed the work and couldn’t sit around waiting for him to come to the front. Big equipment cost big bucks, and banks liked to get their payments on time. He could’ve gone along with them, could’ve captained his vessel, but he was still so crippled up he knew he’d only be in the way, and worse, his crew would try to make things easy for him. He didn’t want anyone to see him like this. Just climbing down the ladder to his boat had left him weak and out of breath. The doctors said his condition would slowly improve, but they all hedged when pressed for details. Punctured lung, lacerated muscles, abdominal wounds, torn tendons all take time to heal, they said.
No shit.
Carson hated doctors. Hated their rhetoric, their placid, professional expressions and their holier-than-thou condescending attitudes. Hated the fact that they’d saved his life because he hated being beholden to them. Hated having to follow their instructions and forgo salvage diving for some unspecified length of time…maybe even forever. Yes, they’d hinted at that, too. His injuries, the highly paid specialist said in her placid, professional tone, had been severe. No shit times two. It didn’t take eight years of education and a fancy medical degree to figure that one out. He’d lost thirty pounds in those four weeks of hospitalization. He’d also lost his spleen, the use of one of his lungs and the tendons in his left shoulder and wrist, a big chunk of muscle in his left thigh, and almost all of his strength. The guys were all hush-hush about it but he knew they were talking, saying things like, “Old King Cole sure screwed the pooch this time. He’ll probably never dive again.”
Old King Cole… His crew had long since picked up on his mother’s pet name for him and, knowing his dislike for it, used it when they wanted to get his goat.
His crew also called him “the old man.” Maybe he was, to them. They were all young kids, the oldest was Trig at twenty-seven. Was thirty-nine old? It was only one year away from forty, and forty was definitely old. He sure as hell felt old tonight. He never used to notice things like aches and pains and cuts and bruises, and sure as hell he never used to get caught napping at his desk by a pretty young woman. Damn. How humiliating was that?
He crammed the six-pack, less two, into the little propane refrigerator in the galley and then went up on deck, breathless again after climbing the ship’s ladder, and kicked back to enjoy the sunset. If he had the energy he’d take the cabin cruiser out and do a little fishing. Try for a halibut, maybe. Halibut was good eating, fit for a king…even an old and injured one. But he felt too run-down to cast off the lines and fire up the cruiser’s engines. Maybe after a beer or two he’d feel better. Younger. More like his old self.
Old? Whoa. Poor choice of words.
He took a long swallow and gazed out at the looming snowcapped Chugach Mountains, aglow with a clear yellow fire in the late-evening sunlight. He thought about the unexpected visitor he’d had, and the offer she’d made. Libby Wilson had beautiful eyes and was quiet spoken. Didn’t chatter. He liked that about her. Came right out and said what she wanted to say. He’d treated her a little rudely, but she was just too damned pretty. If she’d been ugly he’d have been nicer. Anyway, odds were he’d never see her again. A measly five grand wasn’t even worth gassing up the plane for.
On the other hand, Evening Lake was mighty good fishing at the right time of year, and the right time of year was coming up quick. Still, finding a wrecked plane when one didn’t know exactly where it went down would be time-consuming…not that he couldn’t do it. She had a helluva nerve intimating that he might not be up to the task and that his skills might only be worth five thousand dollars.
What was in the plane that she wanted to get her hands on? Obviously something of value that the pilot had been bringing to Libby Wilson’s mother on her wedding day. Something of great value, considering the girl’s keen interest in recovering the plane. Wedding day… His own experience with such events was shallow at best, a whirlwind courtship with a student he’d met while teaching a dive school in New York City nine years ago, followed by a marriage that began in Las Vegas with a cheap gold ring and ended barely a year later. A bitter year it had been, too, a year of disillusionment, betrayal and hurt that had plagued every moment of their doomed marriage. Brown-eyed Barbara McGee with the sweet, pretty smile that had lured him into such an ugly hell of emotional bondage. Barbara, who loved the nightlife, loved to party and didn’t know how to sit home at night alone when he was off working a salvage job.
Didn’t know how to be faithful.
Lesson learned the hard way. Love is blind, deaf and very, very dumb.
Anyhow, it was pointless to reopen old wounds thinking about his own brief and ill-fated marriage. The wedding scenario Libby Wilson had described was completely different. She was talking billionaire groom on his way to marry his beloved. Flying his own plane to his own wedding. And in that plane he was ferrying proof of his undying love. Jewelry. That had to be it. A big diamond, possibly huge. Maybe an enormous diamond ring and matching necklace, bracelet and, what the hell, a tiara. Daniel Frey’s rich godson could afford to go overboard on his bride. A veritable treasure trove could be sitting on the bottom of Evening Lake inside a de Havilland Beaver that crashed twenty-eight years ago.
Carson eased his bad leg out in front of him and took another swallow of beer. Finding the plane didn’t have to be a full-crew job. He’d need to call Trig after he found the wreckage, but he could search for the plane himself. The search itself wouldn’t be physically difficult, just tedious. He’d work the search pattern using the rubber boat with the side-scanning sonar and GPS and map out the bottom of the lake lane by lane, like mowing a giant lawn. He could do that alone, no sweat. He could pack up his tent, the rubber boat, some supplies and the sonar gear and fly up to Evening Lake. Worst-case scenario, he’d make five grand taking a working vacation and maybe get some good fishing in on the side. A big lake trout or two broiled over the coals would taste pretty good. And what the hell, it sure beat sitting around the office wishing he were out with the boys on the Pacific Explorer, that sleek, beautiful forty-eight-foot dive vessel that was the pride of his salvage operation.
Or wondering why Gracie hadn’t been by. Not since the accident had that sultry, sexy bartender from the pool hall paid him a visit. She, too, was probably convinced he’d never be a whole man again and had sought out greener pastures.
He finished the first beer and cracked open the second. Halfway through it he went below to snag his cell phone. Back on deck, after he’d caught his breath, he called the Airport Hotel and asked to be connected to Libby Wilson’s room.
“Dodge here,” he said when she answered. “I’ve been thinking about your proposal and I have a counter proposal of my own.”
“Go ahead,” she said, cool voiced and calm, as if she’d been expecting his call.
“I’m teaching a deep-diving rescue-and-recovery course at the university this weekend. I can fly up and look the situation over on—” he glanced at his wrist watch “—June 15. That’s a Monday, five days from now.”
“All right.”
“If I like what I see I’ll take the job and play by your terms if we don’t find the plane.”
“And if we do find it?”
“You shell out one hundred and fifty grand minimum, and it could shake out to be more if the salvage costs run high. Odds are I’m going to end up with a huge loss I can’t particularly afford right now. I’ll want the five grand up front, and I’ll want the salvage contract in legalese, signed, sealed and delivered into my hand upon arrival at the lake.”
On her part there was no hesitation whatsoever, which reinforced his theory of huge diamonds. Millions of dollars’ worth of rare and priceless jewels. “Fine,” she said. “Will you be bringing your crew?”
“Until the plane is located, I won’t be needing any crew.”
There was a pause. “No offense intended, Mr. Dodge, but are you sure you’re up to doing this by yourself?”
“I’m up to anything you can throw at me,” Carson responded, inwardly bristling. “Where should I hook up with you?”
“There’s a new fishing lodge almost directly across the lake from Daniel Frey’s place. I believe it’s called the Lodge on Evening Lake. That’s where I’ll be staying. I’ll see you on Monday the fifteenth, Mr. Dodge.”
She hung up before he could, and he stuffed the cell phone into his pocket with a silent curse and finished off his second beer while nursing his twice-bruised ego.
LIBBY REPLACED THE PHONE in its cradle and then sat up in her bed with a surge of panic that centered around a horrible thought. What if Dodge found the wreckage, but her father’s remains couldn’t be found? What if she couldn’t prove her paternity? She’d never be able to come up with the money to pay him off. It would take years. She reached for the phone to call him back and tell him the truth, then paused. She’d led him to believe that the plane held great treasures, and to her it did. But if she told Dodge he was looking for bones, what were the odds he’d take the job? She drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. She had nothing to fear. Her father’s bones wouldn’t have dissolved, and they’d be with the plane.
Wouldn’t they?
She glanced over at her mother. Marie was sleeping. It had been a long day for her, and while the medicine she’d received at the hospital had begun the process of making her feel better, in the interim she was far better off sleeping. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Marie Wilson deserved a whole lot better than that. She deserved to live the way she should have been living for the past twenty-eight years, and would have been if Daniel Frey hadn’t sent her away, denouncing her claim that Connor was the father of her child when he knew Connor loved her and was on his way to marry her.
“I’m going to nail the bastard for what he did, Dad,” Libby said. “I swear to you, I will.”
Dad.
She’d lived with the idea of him all her life, but it had been an elusive idea. Nothing more than a picture on her mother’s bureau. Not one he’d given Marie, but one an employee at Frey’s lodge had stolen and passed to her after his death. That picture had been all Libby had to call Dad, and it was a military picture at that, one he’d sent his own father shortly after getting his wings. A picture of him standing beside his plane at some air base. The plane was a wicked-looking thing. Her father was grinning at the camera. Handsome, dashing. A boy, really, so young and sure of life.
Libby thought it ironic that Connor Libby had survived Vietnam only to die on his wedding day, but she was determined to prove that Frey had something to do with it. Tomorrow she’d fly with her mother back to the village and fill her empty cupboards with food. Then she’d pay a little visit to the eccentric billionaire Daniel Frey, as a guest of the Lodge at Evening Lake, who’d read the wonderful article about him in Forbes magazine. She’d gush. She’d flatter. She’d use all of her feminine wiles to draw him out, to get him to talk about Ben Libby. About Connor. And about the plane crash that had killed her father.
CHAPTER THREE
EARLY SUNDAY MORNING, Libby packed her bag in preparation for the trip to Evening Lake. In the past few days she had done much to improve her mother’s living situation. She’d stocked up on food, had the propane tanks filled, dragged all the rugs out and hung them on the line to beat them clean and let them air. She’d arranged for a home health-care visitor daily who would make sure her mother had a good lunch and took her medications. This would happen on the days Libby was absent. The home health-care worker was a government employee trained as a nurse’s assistant, who lived in the village and looked after the needs of the elderly. Marie, of course, wanted no part of this.
“I can fix my own meals and swallow my own pills. I don’t need any help.”
“Mom, you’re still very weak. Soon, you’ll start to feel much better but I’m going to be gone for a few days. I don’t want to worry about you.”
“You’ve been gone for years to those fancy schools back East and I was just fine. I’ll be fine for a few days more.”
“Please, Mom. You told me you liked Susan. She won’t stay long. Just long enough to make sure you eat at least one good meal a day. You’re too thin. That dress will look a whole lot better on you when you fill out. Besides, if we’re going to fish camp, you have to be strong.”
Marie remained unconvinced. “Where are you going, Libby? You tell me you’re going away for a few days but you don’t tell me where.”
Libby had already resolved to keep as much as possible from her mother. Marie would only get upset, and now was not the time to open Pandora’s box. “I’m going to visit friends. I’ve been away so long and there are so many people I want to see.”
“You’re going to Evening Lake, aren’t you? After all this time you still can’t let it go.” Marie may have been weak from her anemia and sick from the anticancer medication, but her eyes were as piercing as ever and she knew her daughter well.
“Mom, please. Just promise me you’ll let Susan check in on you while I’m gone. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Promise me.”
“I promise I will let Susan in the house if you stay away from Daniel Frey.”
Libby gave her mother an impulsive hug. “Eat your food, take your medicines and don’t worry about me.”
As she climbed aboard the float plane she knew her mother wouldn’t let Susan in the house. Out of sheer stubbornness Marie would make life hell for that poor woman, who had promised Libby to watch her mother closely. “Don’t worry, Marie will be fine,” she assured Libby. “Your mother is one of the toughest ladies I know. Besides, she should start feeling much better soon.” Libby hadn’t a doubt about that, but now she was worried about Susan, who took her job very seriously and hadn’t a clue how ornery Marie could be.
THE FLIGHT TO EVENING LAKE took less than an hour. In all her years of living in the village, of knowing that her father had drowned there, Libby had never been to see it. Had never wanted to see it. Never wanted to put her hand in the water and know that her father’s bones were hidden in the dark cold depths. Even now a part of her dreaded seeing the lake, and as the plane headed north and west she stared out the window with a heart that beat a painful rhythm. Then suddenly the plane skimmed over a ridge and she was looking at a huge body of water shaped like a giant horseshoe, the deep curve on the southernmost end and two parallel arms, divided by perhaps a mile of timbered forest, stretching north. Several small rivers fed the lake along both of the upper arms, and a big river flowed out of it in the curve of the southern shore, the same river where they’d found the plane’s pontoons. She could see it snaking through the spruce and she could just make out the rapids where the pontoons had gotten hung up.
She studied the surface of the lake, but it gave up no secrets. The water looked black and cold near the outlet, while the west arm that stretched toward the glaciers was streaked a thick milky blue in places with glacial silt. There was still some ice in the deeper coves, but most of the lake was open. The plane lost altitude quickly, and soon she could see the buildings. Both lodges were on the southernmost end of the lake, near the outlet but on opposite shores and about half a mile apart. Which was Frey’s? She didn’t know. One lodge appeared much larger than the other, and she supposed this would be the place she was staying.
But she was wrong. The plane landed and taxied to the dock fronting the smaller property. She was greeted by the owner of the lodge, a stout friendly woman in her early forties. “I’m Karen Whitten.” She smiled and extended her hand. “Welcome to the lodge. My husband, Mike, is guiding, but you’ll meet him tonight. I’ll have your bags brought to your cabin. Come on up. You’re just in time for lunch, though most of the guests won’t show up until supper time. Fishing. I swear, you’d think the world turned around fly rods and lake trout.”
Libby followed Karen up the ramp. The main lodge was cozy and small, with four guest rooms, a big kitchen, a vaulted living room with a handsome fieldstone fireplace and a friendly dining room. There were three small guest cabins to one side of the main lodge, and two employee cabins to the other. Karen showed her to her little cabin, complete with a tiny bath and a woodstove for heat. “This is just perfect,” Libby said.
Karen herself served up the lunch, and the two women shared it in the kitchen. “So, are you here to fish?” Karen asked, ladling Portuguese kale soup into big earthenware bowls and setting a fresh loaf of crusty bread and a knife on the table.
“Not exactly,” Libby replied, having carefully thought out her story. “I read an article in Forbes magazine about Daniel Frey, Ben Libby’s partner, and after reading it I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to write something about Ben Libby and all the good things he did with his money to help other people, especially since one of my college scholarships was funded by the Libby Foundation.” Libby paused. “My friends always teased me about that scholarship. They said I got it because of my name, which was a fortunate coincidence. Anyway, who better to talk to about Ben Libby than Daniel Frey? Since I was sick of Boston and it was time for a vacation, I put the three together and here I am.”
“From what I understand, Ben Libby was quite a philanthropist,” Karen said. “I just hope Mr. Frey will talk to you. He’s pretty reclusive. We’ve been here for two years and have yet to meet him. Mike and I have gone over a couple of times, knocked on his door, left a pie once and a loaf of sourdough bread with the employee who answered it. But if he was home either time, he wasn’t entertaining visitors.”
Libby would have inhaled the soup if she’d been alone. She buttered a piece of the crusty bread and took a big bite. The warm yeasty flavor nearly brought tears to her eyes. Marie should be here, eating this food and getting strong. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to hope that he’ll want to give Ben Libby the accolades he deserves. All I can do is go over there and ask. Do you have guides for hire here?”
“Oh, yes. Three, not counting Mike. Joe Boone used to work for Frey and Ben Libby when they first built the lodge. You might want to talk to him, too. He’s out guiding a couple of fishermen now but he’ll be back around supper time.”
After lunch Libby walked down to the dock again and stood looking out over the lake. The wind was blowing just the way Dodge said it would, through that high mountain pass and across the water. It was strong enough to put a pretty good chop on the lake’s surface. She knelt on the edge of the weather-bleached dock and plunged her hand into the icy water. Within seconds her hand ached with the cold. I’m here, Dad, she thought. Right here.
Had he been conscious when the plane went under? Had he struggled to escape as the frigid lake water filled the cabin? Libby pushed to her feet and shoved her hands into her jacket pockets. According to the pilot who had flown her to the lake, all the planes took off up the west arm, heading due north into the wind that came through the pass. They used the west arm because there were no big rocks just beneath the surface, and if they had to crab their takeoff or landing, the terrain was flatter to the east and west, making for a safer climb-out. Her father would have taken off the same way. His plane would have been visible from Frey’s lodge for a long distance, until the west arm curved enough to close it out of sight behind a fringe of dark forest.
She had watched the pilot who delivered her to the lodge take off. His plane had lifted into the air not a quarter mile from the dock, but he’d been flying a turbine engine Cessna 206 with a very powerful motor. The de Havilland would have required a longer takeoff run. Still, that gave her a general idea of where the plane might be.
Sort of. She had exactly twenty-four hours until Dodge arrived to look over the situation and decide if he was taking the job. Twenty-four hours to find out as much as she could about where that plane went down. A lot to do, and not much time.
She studied the lodge across the lake. From a distance, she couldn’t make out exact details, but she could see enough to realize it was quite the place. The Rockefeller clan could have lived quite comfortably in such a log mansion. Being a hermit, Frey must have greatly resented the arrival of Karen and Mike and the construction of their new lodge. That’s probably why he had refused to greet them when they came to introduce themselves.
She wondered if Frey had eaten the pie and the bread Karen and Mike had left behind.
LIBBY RETURNED TO HER little cabin and took a nap, something she hadn’t done in many years and hadn’t intended to do at all, but sitting propped up against the headboard, jotting down the questions she intended to ask Daniel Frey, her eyelids became so heavy that it was impossible for her to resist the rhythmic crash of waves against the shore, the lonely sigh of wind through the spruce, the snap of firewood in the woodstove. She set the notebook aside, slid down until she was lying flat and laced her fingers across her stomach. The next thing she knew she was being roused by the sound of a clanging bell. She sat up, muzzy headed and drugged with languor. Karen had told her that she’d ring the supper bell at exactly 6:00 p.m., and sure enough it was exactly 6:00 p.m. Libby had slept for four solid hours.
The guests were already seated at the table when she arrived. Eight wealthy middle-aged fishermen, temporarily escaping corporate America and their wives and families, leaped out of their seats like jack-in-the-boxes when she stepped into the room. Karen introduced her around, then brought her into the kitchen to meet her husband Mike, a genial forty something Willie Nelson look-alike who was helping her prepare the meal. Karen began bringing forth yet another gastronomic tour de force while Libby pitched in, and the two of them smothered laughter in the kitchen at the expressions on the faces of the eight corporate clubhouse boys.
“Whatever will they do with such a beautiful guest in their midst? It’s too bad you don’t fish,” Karen said. “I’ll introduce you to Joe after supper. He seems to think he can wrangle you an interview with that old hermit, Daniel Frey.”
Conversation during dinner began like spurts of machine-gun fire then rapidly progressed to a nonstop barrage as her fellow dinner guests sought to outboast one another to gain her attentions. Bottles of wine circulated around the table, fueling the frenzy. Each had a story to tell, an important story about themselves. Libby concentrated as best she could, nodding and smiling her appreciation of their intelligence and importance, but she was relieved when the meal was over. She helped Karen clear the table and would have plunged into the task of washing the dishes except that her hostess led her outside onto the porch.
“Joe?” she said as a lean, wiry gray-haired man with a deeply lined and weather-beaten face pushed off the railing. “This is Libby Wilson. She’s staying with us for a few days. Libby, meet Joe Boone. He’s been guiding since he was seventeen years old.”
Joe shook her hand. “Karen tells me you want to talk to Dan Frey. Dan and I go way back. He’s a crotchety old coot, no doubt about that, but I bet I could soften him up for you.”
“That would be great. I’d so appreciate any time at all he could give me. I’m writing an article about Ben Libby and all the philanthropic things he did with his money over the years before he died. I was hoping Mr. Frey could cast a more personal light on the man, having known him for so long. I’m sure you could, too.”
“Oh, no doubt. You busy right now? I could run you over in my boat. This is a good time to catch him. He likes to sit on the porch with his whiskey and cigars. I’ll hook the two of you up, and come pick you up in a hour or so. We can talk then, if you like.”
Libby could hardly believe her luck. “I’ll just grab my notebook and meet you down on the dock,” she said.
SURE ENOUGH, AS THEY approached the opposite shore Libby could see Daniel Frey on the vast covered porch that fronted the log mansion and faced the lake. He watched their approach without moving, sitting in a recliner with a side table at each hand. Libby stayed on the dock while Joe Boone climbed the steps onto the porch. After a few minutes he turned and motioned for her to come up. She drew a steadying breath and climbed the porch steps as Frey rose to his feet.
“Hello,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Daniel Frey.”
All of her life she’d wondered what this moment would be like. She looked at Frey and was amazed that lightning didn’t streak across the wronged heavens. She marveled that the evening could remain so calm in the midst of the emotional tempest that raged within her. She smiled and shook the hand of the man who had robbed her of her identity and may have had something to do with her father’s plane crash. “Libby Wilson. Thank you for seeing me, sir.”
Frey was even more imposing in real life than he’d been depicted in the pages of Forbes magazine. He was a tall, vigorous and handsome eighty-two-year-old man, with the hawklike eyes of a predator. His hair was thick and pure white, brushed back from the weathered, tanned brow. “Please, have a seat,” he invited. It was obvious her name meant nothing to him. “Joe, will you have a glass of whiskey with me?”
“Thanks, but no. Have to guide a couple sports for the evening hatch. I’ll return for Ms. Wilson in about an hour or so, if that’s all right, or if I can’t make it I’ll send another guide along.”
Joe Boone returned to his boat and motored back across the lake. Libby perched on the edge of the matching leather recliner and waited while Frey tried to light his cigar. At length an acrid stench flavored the air and he grunted with satisfaction. “I don’t like people very much,” he said, refilling his shot glass. “Normally I wouldn’t talk to you, but Joe said you wanted to discuss Ben Libby.”
“Yes, sir. I’m writing a story about him. I won a scholarship from the Libby Foundation and that helped pay for my education.”
“LUANNE!”
Frey bellowed so suddenly that Libby jumped in her seat. She heard a little scurrying sound and the screen door of the log mansion opened to reveal a very timid-looking young woman, maybe eighteen or twenty, pretty, dressed in a maid’s uniform that harkened back to the 1950s.
“Yes, Mr. Frey,” she said, advancing with her eyes on the floor.
“We have company. Perhaps you could offer Ms. Wilson something to eat or drink. That’s what I’m paying you for, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Mr. Frey.” The girl glanced questioningly at Libby. “Miss?”
“I’m fine, thank you, Luanne. I just had a wonderful meal at the lodge across the lake.” Libby watched as Luanne rushed back inside. “She must be from one of the native villages?”
“Athapaskan,” Frey said. “They’re all I can get out here. Now, what do you want to know about Ben Libby?”
Libby poised her pen over the notebook. “Everything, I guess. I mean, I already know a lot about how he made his fortune. What I really want to know is what kind of man he was. What he was like. Did he have a sense of humor? Did he like animals? You know. Human interest stuff like that.”
“Sense of humor?” Frey clearly thought this was an odd question.
“Well, maybe you could start by telling me how you met him. How you became partners.”
“We were officers in the navy and we served on the same sub.”
“Wow. I mean, I just can’t imagine being in a submarine under all that water. So, what did the two of you do on the sub?”
“We played cards. Poker. Endless games of poker.” Frey took a sip of his whiskey. “Ben always won. He won at everything. When the torpedo hit, that was the only time I thought he might lose.”
“You were playing poker when a torpedo hit the sub?”
“It flooded the forward compartment. There were two men trapped inside. We could hear them shouting, screaming for help. Everyone else evacuated because our compartment was starting to flood, too, but Ben stuffed his cards inside his shirt and went to rescue the trapped men. He couldn’t do it alone, so I helped him.”
“That was courageous of you.”
“On the contrary, it was quite stupid. Our rescue attempt could have lost the sub. But we were lucky. We got the two trapped men out and managed to seal off the compartment behind us. Afterward Ben showed me his cards. He had a full house. He said that was why he knew he’d make a successful rescue.” Frey barked a humorless laugh. “He was a brave son of a bitch. Smart, too. We survived the war and when we were discharged he asked me if I wanted to go in on a business venture. He told me he’d found some weird patents he wanted to back. He thought they’d be big moneymakers. I had some money saved up so I said, sure, then went home to Maine. Ben took my little wad of savings and in less than two years he’d made me a millionaire.”
“He must have been a genius.”
“He was. I quit my job as a shift supervisor at the paper mill in Rumford, bought a better truck and went to work at a furniture factory making chairs. I’d always wanted to learn how to make furniture. A year later I was discovering that making it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be when Ben calls out of the blue and asks if I want to go on a fishing trip to Alaska.
“I said sure, and this is where we came. He’d been studying maps of Alaska for years but had never been here. We were flown in with all our gear and camped in a tent on this very beach. We fished and explored the country. At the end of the week Ben said he didn’t want to leave, and neither did I. When the plane came to pick us up he told the pilot we’d be staying another week. Then he asked me if I wanted to go in on a fishing camp in this very spot.”
“And you said ‘sure,’” Libby said, scribbling like mad.
Frey barked another laugh. He lifted his glass in a gesture toward the lake and the majestic Brooks range beyond. “By ‘fishing camp’ I thought he meant a little log shack on the shore we could come to for a week or two every summer, but this is what he built.”
“Have you lived here ever since?”
“Pretty much. I spend winters in Hawaii now. It’s warmer.”
“So your initial investment in Ben Libby’s entrepreneurial genius made you a rich man.”
“That’s right.”
“Can you tell me anything about Ben’s wife? The article barely mentions her.”
“Ben fell in love with a German girl he met while on leave. He married her after the war and when the lodge was completed, he brought her here. She was a nervous thing. Pretty, but highstrung. Definitely a city girl, born and bred. She didn’t like living on the edge of nowhere. She was afraid of the dark. Ben thought she’d get used to it, and once the guests started coming she’d be okay. But I knew she wasn’t right for the place. When she heard a wolf howl for the first time she ran inside and cried in fear.”
Frey realized his cigar had gone out and paused to light it again. Libby caught up on her notes and when she smelled the rank odor she glanced up. “What happened to her?”
“She went nuts. Wacko. She left him, finally, and went back to Germany.”
Libby paused and glanced up from the notebook. She’d half expected the omission of Connor Libby. “But wasn’t there a son?”
Frey took another sip of whiskey, puffed on his cigar, gazed out across the lake. “Connor,” he said. “Right after Ben brought her here she got pregnant and insisted that she had to be near a good hospital with good doctors. Ben kept her in Anchorage at this fancy town house he rented until she had the baby, then brought her and the boy back to the lodge.”
“Whatever became of her?”
“About a year after that, she left the boy with Ben and returned to Berlin. Just as well she did. We later learned that she threw herself beneath a train as it pulled into a station.”
“She killed herself?” Not even Marie knew about this. She knew only that Ben’s wife had died. “How awful. She must have felt hopeless even after she returned to the place she loved.”
“She was crazy,” Frey said with a shrug. “I guess that proved it.”
“What became of the boy?”
“Ben raised him, made me the boy’s godfather. When the wife ran off, Ben hired people to manage his money and his properties and pretty much planted himself here. He loved this place.”
“Did the boy like it, too?”
“Connor? This life was all he knew until he went off to college.”
“Did he know about his mother?”
“We told him she’d gone to visit her family in Germany and got sick and died there. He never knew she’d abandoned him.”
“What happened to Connor?”
“He graduated college and about that time the war in Vietnam was getting into high gear so he joined the air force and learned to fly.”
“I remember the article said he was killed in a plane crash. Was that during the war?”
Frey gave Libby the first real stare since she’d arrived. She felt the dark malice in his flat gaze and dropped her eyes to her notebook while he took another sip of whiskey. “No. He survived two tours, got a bunch of medals, served out his enlistment and came back here.”
Libby could sense the gathering tension in Frey as he spoke about Connor. “What did Ben Libby do during the war?” she asked, changing the topic in an attempt to relax him.
“He made another billion dollars on some sophisticated electronics they were putting into the same jets his son was flying. And then he was diagnosed with liver cancer. By the time the war was over, Ben was gone.” Frey finished off his drink. “I still miss him.”
I just bet you do, Libby thought, scribbling furiously. “The article in Forbes stated that Ben divided his estate between you and his son. Did that surprise you?”
“Yes. I thought he’d leave it all to his son.”
“How did Connor feel about that?”
Frey shrugged. “He didn’t give a damn about money. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Ben left me half of the estate, to keep an eye on the business end of things. That, and Connor was my godson.”
“So, what happened to Connor?”
“When he came back from the war he was pretty depressed. Suicidal, I thought. He bought himself a float plane. Pretty plane, bright yellow.”
Libby glanced up again and frowned to mask her outrage that Frey would imply her father had been suicidal, when in fact he’d been in love. “Oh, no. You’re going to tell me that he crashed that plane, aren’t you?”
Frey gave her another flat stare. “How long have you been freelancing?”
“Not that long, actually. I hope you don’t hold that against me, sir.”
Frey relaxed and gave her a thin smile. “No, not at all.” He poured another glass of whiskey. “Connor crashed the plane. He hadn’t had the thing for a month and he crashed it.”
“That’s terrible,” Libby said. “I’m assuming he was an experienced pilot, after all that flying in the war. How did it happen?”
“LUANNE!” Frey belted out for the second time, causing Libby’s heart to skip several beats. She heard the same soft scuffle and the young woman reappeared, eyes downcast. “Where are my medicines?”
“Coming, sir,” Luanne said, retreating.
“No matter how many times I tell her, she always forgets. You can’t train them. I don’t know why I waste my time trying.” Luanne made another appearance, bearing a glass of water and two tiny pills on a small tray, which she left on the table. Frey picked up the two pills, placed them in his mouth, and chased them down with a swallow of water, followed by a bigger swallow of liquor. He puffed on the cigar for a few moments, then gave her another predatorial glance.
“Who’re you writing this story for?”
“Actually, sir, the Libby Foundation asked me to write it.”
Frey grunted and seemed satisfied with her answer. “Ben did a lot of good things. He had people and organizations after him all the time with their hands out. He supported more damn causes and still felt like he wasn’t doing enough.”
“Was his son the same way?”
“Connor didn’t hold a candle to his father.”
“Were you here at the lodge when Connor…crashed the plane?” Libby asked.
“I was fishing up on the Kandik. The first I knew something had happened was when I saw the warden’s plane buzzing up and down the lake.”
“So they think the plane went down in the lake?”
“That’s what they figure. Only thing they found were the two floats hung up about half a mile down the Evening River, just below the big rips.”
“No other wreckage was found? No body was recovered?”
Frey shifted in his seat. His shaggy white brows drew together in a frown. “I thought this article was supposed to be about Ben.”
“Yes, sir, it is, but the fact that he had a wife and child is a great human interest angle. Where do you suppose Connor was going when he took off that day?” Libby asked, fishing for some mention of Connor’s wedding.
“LUANNE!” Frey belted out, startling Libby yet again. For the third time Luanne scuttled out onto the porch, eyes downcast. “Get down on the dock and tell that bastard he’s not welcome here.”
For the first time Libby noticed the canoe that was approaching the dock. “Who is it?”
“That damn Indian guide who works for those flatlanders across the lake. He knows this place is off-limits to him. He tried to sic the Department of Human Services on me last summer for some alleged infractions of human rights. He told them I mistreated my employees, didn’t house them properly or pay them their legal wages and overtime. Overtime, for cripe’s sake. They actually sent someone out from Fairbanks to inspect their living quarters and check my books.” Frey made a sound of disgust. “Overtime! They’re lucky I pay them anything at all.”
Luanne was speaking to the man in the canoe. She turned and walked swiftly back to the porch and stared at Mr. Frey’s slippered feet. “He says he is here to take Ms. Wilson back across. He says Joe Boone is busy guiding two clients and couldn’t come.”
Libby stood, folding her notebook. “Thank you so much for your time, Mr. Frey.”
Frey grunted and picked up his glass of whiskey as Libby started down the steps. She paused at the bottom and glanced back. “Were you surprised that Connor left everything to you in his will?”
Frey shook his head. “He didn’t have anyone else.”
“Did they ever find Connor Libby’s plane?”
“They’ll never find that plane. This lake is bottomless, part of an old volcanic cirque,” Frey said with a shake of his head. “End of story.”
“On the contrary, Mr. Frey,” Libby said. “I haven’t even started writing it yet.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LIBBY WALKED OUT onto the dock to meet the canoe, and the man seated in the stern nodded to her. He was much younger than Joe Boone and stockily built. Black raven’s wing hair was pulled back with a strip of red cloth that hung between his shoulder blades. He wore faded jeans, a red flannel shirt and a green wool cruiser. On his feet were a pair of moose-hide moccasins. “I’m Graham Johnson, one of Mike and Karen’s guides. Karen thought you might prefer a canoe ride this time of evening.”
“She’s right. This is much nicer than a motorboat. Thank you for coming to get me,” Libby said. She knelt in the bow of the canoe and picked up the paddle as he swung around and started along the edge of the lake.
“How did your interview with Daniel Frey go?”
“Okay.” It was a beautiful evening. The wind had died, the lake was calm and reflected the majestic mountains upon its silken surface. “Actually, I didn’t learn anything new. A plane crashed in this lake twenty-eight years ago and I came here to see what Daniel Frey might know about it.” She spoke without turning, and the air was so still that she feared for a moment that Frey might have overheard.
“You’re talking about Connor Libby’s plane?”
“Yes. Do you know anything about the crash?”
“It happened before I was born, but there was a lot of talk in the village about it.”
“What kind of talk?”
“My mother had a cousin who worked here at the time. Frey gave all the hired help the weekend off because Connor was getting married to a native girl from Umiak, who worked at the lodge and had invited them to the wedding. But Daniel Frey didn’t come and never planned to come. So mostly the talk was about why he wouldn’t attend his godson’s wedding.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Everyone thought it was because he didn’t want his godson to marry a native girl. He doesn’t like Indians much. That’s common knowledge. And some thought he didn’t want to be in the plane, either.”
“Because Frey knew it might crash?”
“Maybe.” Graham’s answer was noncommittal.
“Is there anyone else at all who might know something about it, other than Daniel Frey?”
There was a long pause, just the sound of the paddle dipping into the water. “My father, maybe,” Graham said.
Libby felt a jolt of surprise. “Was he living around here at the time?”
The silence stretched her tension to the limit before Graham spoke again. “My father lived out here most of the time, fishing in summer and running a trapline in winter. He only came home maybe once, twice a year. When I was old enough, I spent summers with him. He didn’t talk much, but every once in a while he’d tell me a story. There was one story he liked to tell, to scare me and make me stay close. It was the story of a yellow three-legged dog. He said the dog howled in the night like its heart was broken and wandered like a ghost along the shores of the lake, looking for lost souls. He said if I wandered off into the woods, Windigo would get me. He told me the three-legged dog would carry my soul to the land of the forgotten. When I got older, the people in the village told me that dog belonged to a white man from the lodge, the one who died in the plane crash.”
“Do you think your father would tell me that story?” Libby asked, turning to face him.
A brief pause followed, the length of three paddle strokes. “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.”
“Where does he live now?”
“Where he’s always lived, a few miles up the west arm.”
“Could we go there now? It won’t be dark for another three hours.”
“He might not talk to you. He doesn’t like whites much.”
“I’ll take my chances. I need to learn all I can about that plane crash.” She waited with bated breath for his answer, because his expression wasn’t promising.
“All right,” he finally said. “We’ll trade our canoe for a motorboat and take a trip up.”
KAREN WAS WAITING on the dock when they arrived. “I hope you didn’t mind coming back by canoe,” she said as Libby climbed onto the dock.
“It was wonderful. Thank you for thinking of it.”
“How did your meeting with Mr. Frey go?”
“He was more talkative than I expected.” Libby glanced back to where Graham was already shifting his gear into a motorboat. “Graham is going to take me to talk with his father. He says he might have something to add to the story.”
“How’s Solly doing, Graham?” Karen asked.
“Not so good. He still has a cold, but he won’t see a doctor. Doesn’t trust the white man’s medicine.”
“I’ll pack you some food to bring to him,” Karen said, and Libby accompanied her up to the lodge. “Well, you’ve managed to accomplish two things in less than a day that I’ve been trying to do for several years,” she said wryly while arranging food in a basket in the kitchen. “You’ve met Daniel Frey, and now you’re going to meet Solly Johnson, though I don’t know what light he’ll be able to shed on Ben Libby.”
“Actually, I’m hoping he’ll know something about the plane crash that killed Ben’s son,” Libby explained.
“Ah. Well, it’s possible. And if nothing else, you’ll get a good boat ride with Graham. He’s our best guide. He knows this lake better than any of the others, all the lore and legends, and he knows where the best fishing can be found. Our guests really enjoy being guided by him. They request him more than all the others.”
“Does he have any family other than his father?” Libby asked.
“His mother lives in a village on the Yukon, and I believe he has several brothers and sisters,” Karen replied. “I think he has a soft spot for a certain girl who works for Daniel Frey. Luanne Attla. He’s brought her here a couple of times. She’s a nice girl.”
“Yes, I met her this evening. She has a tough job.”
“I offered to hire her but she seemed determined to stay with Frey. He must pay his help a whole lot better than I can.” Karen handed the basket to Libby and smiled. “Tell Solly he’s welcome here any time. And good luck.”
CARSON WAS TOO TIRED TO EAT after the dive class at the university adjourned late Sunday afternoon. He’d thought the class would’ve been an easy teach and scoffed at the dean’s suggestion that he reschedule it for a time when he was “feeling better.” All he had to do was show some slides and film clips on the AV equipment, talk a while, answer questions, draw some stuff on the blackboard. The students in the class were all experienced. There would be no need for long explanations or simple kid talk. But in retrospect, teaching beginners would have been a helluva lot easier. The way the divers had studied him had put him off. It was as if they were looking for cracks in his armor. Waiting for him to collapse onto the floor. And then, not an hour before the class finally ended, he’d given them what they’d been waiting for. He stumbled into a desk and all fourteen experienced, young and physically fit divers had leaped to their feet as if to catch him before he fell.
Ironic, that he’d been scheduled to teach this class long before his accident, but it was his experience with being rescued that had been the source of multiple questions from the divers, who all feared the same fate. He told them what he could, but mostly he was relating facts that he’d been told by Trig, who’d made the actual rescue. He personally had little recollection of anything at all after the cable had tightened around him and dragged him into the wreckage.
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