Snowbound (12 page)

Will and Devlin stood shivering outside the coffee shop, preferring the cold of the Alaskan night to the earnest warbling of the guitarist inside. At last, a black Suburban pulled into the parking lot, Kalyn grinning at them through what remained of the driver’s side window—tinted jags of glass.

She got out, and Will and Devlin walked over, embraced her.

“I’m so sorry,” Will whispered in her ear.

“Hey.” Kalyn framed his face with her hands. “I’m all right. Let it go.”

“What happened to you?”

“Let’s swap stories later. Right now, I want you to follow me. I have to ditch this car. It’s full of glass and blood.”

• • •

Will followed the Suburban for several miles through the heart of Fairbanks, coming at last to a Safeway. Kalyn parked in a far corner, spent five minutes wiping everything down—the steering wheel, doors, gearshift—anyplace she might have left fingerprints or sweat, skin cells or hair.

Then she climbed into the front passenger seat beside Will, said, “I’ve got a room at the Best Western. Head back the way we came.”

As Will pulled onto the Alaska Highway, Kalyn noticed the remains of the computer on the floorboard. She lifted a piece of the shattered keyboard, turned it over in her hand.

“That happened this morning outside of Whitehorse, Yukon,” Will said. “A moose was standing in the middle of the highway. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting him, and the computer launched into the dashboard. We were trying to track Jonathan’s truck at the coffee shop when you called.”

“It was my fault,” Devlin said. “I was talking to Dad to keep him awake. I should have been holding on to the computer tighter than I was.”

Kalyn glanced into the backseat, reached out for Devlin’s hand. “Not your fault, baby,” she said. “Some things—they just happen. Nothing we can do.”

“So what happened to you?” Devlin asked.

“Jonathan turned me over to three men this afternoon at a warehouse, somewhere in Fairbanks. They drove me out into the countryside, to this lake. I was able to get away.”

By the way she said it, Will knew. “You mean you killed them.”

“Yeah.”

“Three men? How?”

“They made a mistake. Cuffed my hands in front of me instead of behind my back. If they’d done that, it would’ve made it impossible for me to do what I did. Or at least much more difficult. Also, they underestimated what I was capable of.”

“Who were they?”

“I’ve been trying to work that out. Seemed like muscle for organized crime.”

“There’s an Alaskan mob?”

“Probably an offshoot of an Anchorage syndicate. Turn up here.”

Will took the next exit onto S. Cushman, saw motel, hotel, and restaurant signs glowing in the distance.

“They were definitely delivering me to someone,” Kalyn said. “While I was dealing with them, a floatplane landed on the lake, came up to the pier. This man got out, saw that something had obviously gone wrong, and hauled ass out of there.”

“You find out where he was going?”

“I questioned one of the men before he died, but the only piece of information I got was a place called the Wolverine Hills. You heard of it?”

“No.”

“Me, neither. Hey, there’s the Best Western.”

As Will pulled into the hotel’s driveway, Devlin said, “Dad, your backpack’s buzzing.”

Will and Kalyn looked at each other, said, “Javier” at the same time.

“Hand it up here, Dev,” Will said, and then to Kalyn: “Jesus, how long’s it been since we put his wife and son in that mall?”

“Five days.”

He pulled into a parking space. “Five?”

“I know. Long time, but they had plenty of food and water. I’d anticipated this possibility, Will. It’s why I left some books in there, extra flashlights. What number is the caller ID showing?”

Will glanced at the BlackBerry. “Same as before.” He pressed TALK, then SPEAKER. “Hello?”

“It’s been three days since your meeting with Jonathan. I have not interfered. You will tell me where my family is now?”

Kalyn snatched the BlackBerry out of Will’s hand.

“Hi, Javier. Really sorry we haven’t gotten back to you yet, but it’s been a crazy few days. I’m sure you understand.”

“No, I do—”

“Well, look, here’s the thing. As it turns out, I’m not going to tell you where Misty and Raphael are, because it wouldn’t matter. I killed them both last Saturday.”

Kalyn pressed
END
and immediately began to dial again.

Will said, “What are you—”

She waved him off, then waited through several rings before a voice answered.

“Yes, I’d like to report something. There’s a woman and a boy locked up in one of the dressing rooms in the children’s department of Belk… . That burned-out mall in Scottsdale … Desert Gardens Shopping Center … No, that’s all the information I have… . No, you can’t have my name.”

She ended the call and opened her door as the BlackBerry vibrated again.

Will said, “Come on, Kalyn—”

“Guess who’s calling back.” She powered off the BlackBerry, put it in her pocket.

“Are you crazy, Kalyn?”

She stood grinning by the open door.

Will turned off the engine, and he and Devlin opened their doors, got out.

“Too far,” he said as they walked toward the entrance. “Telling a man, even a bad one, you killed his wife and son? Too far.”

Kalyn stopped under the entrance overhang and faced him. “Why?”

“There’s a line.”

“Where?”

“Separates us from people like—”

“Fuck him, Will. Let that piece of shit taste what it feels like to lose your family.”

• • •

They showered at the hotel, then went out and bought new clothes at a Kmart to replace the filthy, road-shabby apparel they’d worn since Idaho. At a nearby steak house, they had supper, and after days of living on convenience-store food, they splurged and ate like gluttons, just glad to be together again, relishing the company, filling one another in on every detail of their respective journeys from Boise to Fairbanks.

They returned to the hotel, Will as tired as he’d ever been.

While waiting for the elevator, Kalyn spotted the unoccupied business center.

“No, let’s look in the morning,” Will said. “I’m worthless now.”

“Come on, only take a minute.”

They gathered around the computer, Kalyn at the keyboard, Will and Devlin looking over her shoulder.

She pulled up the Google home page and typed “Wolverine Hills” and “Alaska” into the query box.

The search results were unimpressive, not a single Web site devoted to the Wolverine Hills, and they were mentioned just two times in passing: under a place-name listing titled “Minor Ranges of the Alaskan Interior” and in a three-year-old forum posting—an outdoorsman inquiring if anyone had ever hunted caribou in the Wolverines.

“Okay, here’s something,” Kalyn said. “Says they’re a small grouping of hills ranging between two and four thousand feet. oriented east to west. Thirty miles long, ten wide. Two hundred miles north of Denali National Park. Two hundred west of Fairbanks.”

“I’m guessing you can’t drive there,” Will said.

Kalyn had already accessed MapQuest and was executing a search of the area west of Fairbanks.

“Alaska Three goes south to Anchorage. Looks like there are some unpaved roads that head north and west, but none of those come within a hundred and fifty miles of the Wolverines.”

“Hence the floatplane.”

Devlin said, “So this guy is flying women out there, into those hills?”

“Looks that way,” Kalyn said.

“Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know, baby. Part of me doesn’t want to know.”

Will gave Devlin her physical therapy and left her half-asleep in front of the TV. He took the stairs up to the next floor, knocked softly on the door of room 617. Kalyn answered in a tank top and running shorts that accentuated her long-muscled arms and legs.

“Can we talk?” Will asked.

They sat on the king-size bed, everything quiet save for the whisper of the central-heating unit blowing warm air out from under the window. Kalyn’s curls were uncurling and the shower had nearly stripped the black dye from her hair, returning it to her natural brown, now pinned up off her shoulders.

“What are you thinking of doing?” he asked.

“Same thing you are.”

“There’s no telling what we’ll find out there, and Devi’s been through a lot already.”

“I can protect you both,” Kalyn said.

Will smiled. “Aren’t I supposed to say that? You’re challenging my fragile ego.”

“Look, you don’t have to go. Head home if you want.”

“But you’re going to the Wolverine Hills.”

“There’s nothing else for me to do.”

“What if that guy was lying? He was dying, Kalyn. What’d he have to lose?”

“Guess I’ll find out.”

“Or we could call the police now. Let them take it from here.”

“Same sort of folks who never found Rachael to begin with, but accused you of her death? No thanks, Will. I’ve sacrificed too much to hand them the ball on first and goal. Watch them fuck it up.”

Will leaned back against the headboard, glanced toward the window at the lights of downtown Fairbanks.

“Suppose we do find out what happened to my wife. Your sister. Then what? They’ll still be gone. We’ll still be missing them.”

“Won’t it help you move on?”

“I don’t know. Rachael’s been gone five years, but you know, I still remember the night she didn’t come home, and the following day, when everyone came to my house to hold vigil, like it just happened. I feel stuck in that moment.”

“I’m well acquainted with that feeling.”

“What do you want, Kalyn? What do you expect to gain from all this?”

“Peace. I think. And to know exactly what happened to my sister. You don’t understand. Before Lucy disappeared, my life was on this perfect trajectory. I’d made special agent. I was doing well, advancing at the Bureau. Doing exactly what I wanted to do. Making the friends and the connections I wanted to make. I loved my place in the world, but I was also thinking ten years down the road, fifteen. Had it all planned out. Stint with the FBI, then prosecutor. Maybe a run for office. But after Lucy …”

“You derailed.”

“Yeah.”

“You can still do anything you want. You know that, right?”

“Actually, I can’t. I was fired from the FBI. A Bureau psychologist wrote terrible things in my file that’ll always be there. ‘emotionally unstable.’ ‘Clinical depression.’ That part of my life, those dreams … they’re dead.” She said it with no emotion, no resentment. For the first time, Will noticed the long blanched lines down Kalyn’s wrists.

He touched them, traced a finger along the scars.

“Last year,” she said, her voice just a whisper, “was rough. I was just so tired, you know? I couldn’t breathe. You ever think about doing something like that?” He nodded. “But you had Devlin.”

“Without her, I don’t know that I’d still be here.”

“You ever feel just … broken?”

Will looked up from the bedspread into Kalyn’s eyes, realized he’d never really seen her before. “You’re one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met,” he said. “That’s the truth.”

Kalyn scooted toward him.

It was a soft and effortless melding of energies, long pent-up electrical currents with someplace finally to go. They came apart breathless and a little stunned, Will’s heart going like mad, the cool smoothness of Kalyn’s leg against his arm practically unbearable and the taste of her humming in the corners of his mouth.

“I can’t do this,” he said, and he climbed off the bed and left the room.

The next morning, Will was shaving in the bathroom when Devlin knocked on the door. She walked in, climbed up on the sink, stared at her father, shaving cream smeared across his chin.

“Morning,” Will said, and went back to shaving. “Sleep well?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Too well. I could still use a few more hours.”

Devlin smeared paste on a toothbrush, started brushing her tongue. “What are we doing today?”

“Well, you get to hang out here, do whatever you want.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Kalyn and I are gonna see if we can find someone to fly us into the Wolverine Hills.” Will drew the razor carefully over the curve of his chin.

“And if you find someone to do it?”

“Then we’re gonna go.”

“Without me?”

“Yeah.”

Devlin spit into the sink and slammed her toothbrush down.

Will turned on the tap, rinsed the shaving cream and the severed bristles off the blades.

“Honey, I have no idea what, if anything, we’ll find out there. I’ve already put you in enough danger, and you are way too precious to be dragged—”

“You wouldn’t be dragging me, Dad.”

Will picked up a hand towel, dabbed his face. “It’s just gonna be for a day, Devi.”

She’d gone short of breath, her eyes welling.

“Calm down, baby girl. I want you to—”

“Stop calling me that! I’m not a kid!” Her eyes were burning.

“You’re right. You’re not a kid, but you are sixteen, and I feel rotten enough having brought you along. I’m not making that mistake—”

Devlin wrapped her arms around him, shaking, crying. “Please take me with you. I don’t wanna be left. She’s
my
mother, you know. I wanna find out what happened just as bad as you.”

“Look at me. No, look at me.” He held his daughter by the arms. “I’m not putting you in danger.”

“You’re all I have, Dad. You know that?”

“Of course I do.”

“So we stay together, no matter what.”

• • •

The office for Arctic Skies was tucked into a strip mall along a river that snaked through the middle of Fairbanks. Devlin, Will, and Kalyn walked in at 10:00
A.M.
—when the phone book said the business opened—found a man leaning back in a swivel chair, his feet propped up on a desk, smoking a cigar, perusing the
Daily News-Miner
. The office was small and spare, just a desk, computer, couple of chairs, artificial tree. Framed posters hung on the walls—photos of snowy mountains, grizzly bears catching salmon, the northern lights.

“Buck Young?” Will asked.

The man glanced over the top of his newspaper, blew a puff of smoke out the side of his mouth.

“One and the same.”

He looked trail-worn—red, watery eyes, weathered skin, salt-and-pepper beard. A Yankees baseball cap that might have been twenty years old rested on a mop of shoulder-length graying hair, unwashed for God knew how long.

Will said, “We’re looking for someone to fly us out to the Wolverine Hills.”

“Wolverines? Really?”

“Yeah. You familiar with the area?”

“Sure. Flew a hunter out there couple years back. Here, ya’ll sit down.”

There were just two chairs on their side of the desk. Devlin sat on the arm of Kalyn’s.

“Anybody live out there?” Will asked.

“Oh no. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more remote piece of country in all of Alaska.”

“So it’s public land?”

“If I recall, some of it’s public-owned, but most belongs to the Athabascan Indians. Look, if you’re paying customers, I’ll fly you anywhere you wanna go. But I have to ask, why the Wolverines? Next to the Brooks Range,

McKinley, the Wrangells, they ain’t much to look at. And it’s an awful long flight for such dinky mountains.”

“I’m afraid we have our hearts set on it,” Kalyn said.

Buck swung his boots off the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “What exactly you wanna do out there?”

Will said, “We’d like to spend two nights. Do some camping and hiking.”

“You have gear?”

“No.”

“I can outfit you with everything you’ll need.” Buck took a pocket calculator out of a drawer and began punching in numbers and mumbling to himself. “Four hundred miles round trip. Gear rental for two nights. Three people. Guided? Unguided?”

“Just the three of us.”

“You’re looking at around three thousand.”

Kalyn glanced at Will. He nodded, mouthed “I can cover it,” then turned back to Buck. “We’d like to leave as soon as possible. Today would be ideal.”

• • •

They went to meet the bush pilot at 1:00
P.M.
at the Chena Marina, a floatplane pond on the outskirts of Fairbanks, found Buck loading supplies into a cargo pod under the fuselage of a high-winged single-engine Cessna 185. The exterior of the Skywagon did not inspire peace of mind, the green-and-yellow design scheme chipped and faded, dents in the amphibious floats.

“I think I’ve got you all set,” Buck said. “There’s supposed to be some weather coming in this evening, so we should get in the air straight away.”

It was a four-seater, with plenty of storage space in back, the interior upholstered in light gray carpeting, the leather seats covered in sheepskin. Devlin begged to sit next to Buck, and she was awarded copilot status. They got themselves buckled in, and soon the engine was firing up, Buck taxiing away from the docks toward the end of the pond, his voice blaring through the headsets that everyone wore: “Should be up about ninety minutes.”

“How fast and high will we go?” Devlin asked.

“Hundred and twenty knots at forty-five hundred feet.”

“Cool.”

They’d reached the far end of the lake.

The three-hundred-horsepower engine wound up, the prop disappeared, and the Cessna accelerated on the water.

Will stared out the window as the shore raced by, the plane skipping across little waves, and he was thinking about their conversation on the drive over from the hotel. He and Kalyn had agreed on the ground rules of this expedition. They were going to look. Not get involved in anything, with anyone. If they found something, they’d wait for Buck to come get them, notify the authorities on their return to Fairbanks. Safety, protecting Devlin—that was their top priority.

The bumps soon turned into smooth forward motion, Buck easing back on the stick, Devlin watching his feet work the rudder pedals.

They soared over the trees. Will swallowed, his ears popping, the pond, the city of Fairbanks falling away beneath him, and he could see at once how small and insignificant it seemed, surrounded on every side by miles and miles of muskeg bogs and untouched boreal forest, marred only by an occasional road and the braids of the Chena and Tanana rivers. He reached forward, patted Devlin’s shoulder, felt Kalyn squeeze his hand.