Cold Heart (5 page)

“I'm all right.”

“Is that why you carry your gun around with you?” The Glock lay on the earthen tile, close at hand between them.

Micky refused to follow Damon's eyes to the pistol.

“Is that why you haven't left this house in three weeks?” he said.

“I'll leave when I'm ready.”

“Jim says the police department offered to put you back on limited duty.”

“A desk job.”

“A desk job might be what you need.”

“Don't patronize me.”

“I'm not patronizing. I'm trying to be a friend.”

“If you're my friend, then tell me why you're giving up on yourself.”

“Is this an argument?”

“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Let's argue. Now tell me why you're not working. You used to love your work.”

“I did,” he agreed. “I don't anymore. I need something I can
lock
onto. I just don't have any idea what it might be right now.”

“Why do you want something else?”

“Because a psychologist has to tell the truth. And the truth doesn't set you free. Not anymore. The truth will kill you.”

His face had a hard edge she'd never seen before; his eyes stared out at something in the distance she couldn't see. “I used to think that people cared about one another. Now I don't. Is that explanation enough?”

She laid her hand on his arm. “I care about you. You care
about me. Jim cares about both of us. He loves us. You know that.”

“Yeah. There's Jim.”

“Knock it off,” she said. “You're turning maudlin in your youth.”

“Two cripples,” he said, turning at last to smile at her. “And we can't even heal each other.”

“You need to get back on your horse.”

“So do you.”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“Well,” said Damon, rising. “We sit here talking of horses and Jim does all the work.”

She watched him saunter out to the corral and she wondered what she had missed in the conversation. Damon's wounds seemed as deep as her own but, like her, he didn't want to discuss them. Maybe their friendship was more hindrance than help. They were so accustomed to each other's long silences that neither of them could open up and release their grief in front of the other. And in a strange way, Damon's feelings irritated Micky. They intruded on her pain. How dare he be enduring his own pangs when she was the one who had suffered?

She picked up the Glock and went back into the house as the first raindrops splattered on the patio.

“You got a letter from Damon,” Jim shouted from the hall.

Micky rushed to meet him. Jim wore a cockeyed smile, holding the envelope out at arm's length, teasing.

“Give it to me!”

“Thought you didn't miss him.”

She and Damon had continued their fight that final day and it had gone from hurtful banter to something darker. Something that had never risen between them before. It was as if their feelings for each other were forcing them apart. Damon walked out and she hadn't heard a word from him in six months.

She snatched the letter from Jim's hands and ripped it open.

Micky glanced over the letter at Jim.

“You've been talking to him,” she scolded.

Jim smiled. “He told me not to tell you he'd called.”

“Alaska?”

“Pretty damned cold, I guess.”

“Pretty damned crazy,” said Micky, slipping the letter back into the envelope. She headed back into the house.

Jim followed her. The living room was wide with a highbeamed ceiling. Buttery morning sunlight shone through the windows. Navajo rugs covered the tile floor and wood
furniture gleamed darkly against the stucco walls. Micky dropped into a leather recliner, the letter in her lap.

“You need to do something.” Jim sat on an ottoman at her feet.

“Alaska? What the hell is he doing in Alaska? Analyzing Eskimos?”

“Getting away from other people's problems for a while maybe.”

“You think that's what I need? Alaska's not going to help me.”

He shrugged. “You've moped long enough, girl. Grief is good. In its time. But what you have now isn't grief. It's a sickness.”

“How can you say that?” After all she'd been through? How dare he?

“I can say it because it's true. Because I care about you. And because I'm getting old and I'm not going to be here forever. You can live here as long as you like. You know everything I have is going to you. But you can't hide here. Not anymore, Micky.”

She couldn't believe it. Of all the people in the world that she trusted, Jim, she'd believed, would never betray her.

Now he was kicking her out?

Sending her to some wilderness?

“Alaska? Are you nuts too?”

“You're sick, Micky, and you won't get help. You don't listen to me or to Damon or your friends on the police force. You won't even talk to a doctor. You're always so damned determined you can handle everything. Micky Ascherfeld is too God-a-mighty tough to need help. Maybe you got that from me. If you did, then I'm sorry.”

“I just need a little more time.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Jim, shaking his head. “Listen to yourself. I swear you make me want to slap you.”

She couldn't believe what she was hearing. Jim had never lifted a hand to her, even during the worst of her teenage years.

He rose to his feet. “Damon's going to call. Talk to him. At least do that.”

She nodded, shaken by Jim's seriousness.

But when he stopped in the doorway his face had softened.

“He sounds a lot better than when he left,” he said. “I don't know what magic he found up there. But magic is what you need too.”

“I need more than magic,” she whispered after Jim had gone.

But the idea bubbled in her head all morning.

She had kept her problem to herself after her parents’ murder. Even Wade had not been allowed to intrude on her grief beyond being there to comfort her in the night. Now Wade was gone but nothing had changed except the depth of her despair.

No one could help her before.

No one could help her now.

The phone rang and she waited for Jim to answer it as usual. But after eight rings she picked it up.

“Jim's out of the house,” said Damon.

“You arranged that?”

“Cunning?”

“Machiavellian.” It was like Damon. He had a way of getting what he wanted.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I'm fine.”

“I liked your letter.”

“Come see me.”

“And live in an igloo?”

He laughed. “It's not like that at all. More like Switzerland. Without the assholes running around waking you up with those damned ten-foot horns all the time. Seriously though, Micky, you'd love it here.”

“Freeze my ass off.”

“Nah. It's weird. Not like Texas cold at all. You get used to it fast and you'll love the snow. You wouldn't believe what I've been doing.”

“So tell me.”

“Well, everybody here is holed up for the winter now. But I have been learning to pan for gold.”

“Be serious.”

“I
am
serious. There's an old-timer and a couple of middleaged hippies here who pull the stuff right out of the streams. I've even filed my own claim. Like John Wayne in
North to Alaska.
”

“Unbelievable.”

“I love it here.”

“You sound good.”

“I
am
good.”

“Who's this old-timer?”

“Aaron McRay,” said Damon.

“Like the town?”

“Named after him. He lives way up by himself at the head of Sgagamash Creek. The story is he's spent most of his life poking around looking for a Lost Dutchman mine in the valley here. But you can't get anything out of Aaron. He's a real hermit. Hates everybody. But he's got a cabin for rent.”

“Why does he have two cabins?”

“You'd have to meet the old coot. He moved out of his cabin down by the store and built another one so far up in the canyon light only comes in once a year probably. He doesn't much like people.”

“So you're going to get rich,” she said.

“It isn't about the money,” said Damon.

“So what is it about?”

“It's hard to explain. Like I said, I have my own claim now. That kind of does something to you. Looking for the gold. Finding it.”

She shook her head, smiling. If there was gold on his claim, then God help it. Damon never gave up on anything he set his mind to.

“And Marty and I are working on something,” he said.

“Marty?”

“One of the miners. Marty and Stan. Wild pair.”

“Break a leg,” she said. “Or whatever you're supposed to say to a gold miner.”

“Come up,” he said. “This valley will make you better, Mick. The place is medicine.”

“Maybe.”

“Really?”

“Maybe,” she repeated firmly.

“That other cabin is sitting empty. Just downstream from mine.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Say yes. Just for a visit.”

“Yes. Just for a visit.” She stared at the phone, wondering what had gotten into her. “I need to talk to Jim, though.”

“I'll call again tomorrow.”

By the time she hung up the phone she knew she was going and, in the end, she went.

She climbed onto the plane in Houston with the temperature outside hovering at eighty-five. The weather channel in the airport bar said snow for most of Alaska.

The landing in Anchorage was calm after a perfect flight over the mountains. The city was blanketed in white, surrounded by an ice-blue wilderness that looked as though an entire continent of malcontents could vanish into it and never be heard from again. The gray waters of Cook Inlet wove through the feet of the peaks. Beyond the outskirts of the city, there was little to prove the hand of man had ever touched the land.

When she stepped outside the airport, the below-zero temperature instantly burned her throat and stole her breath away. A friendly check-in agent had told her that there were no roads into McRay or anywhere remotely near it. He directed her to a local flying service, where she met Zeke Rasmussen.

Yes, Zeke told her, he could fly her into McRay. What in the devil's name did she want to do in McRay?

“Visit a friend.”

Zeke laughed. Another crazy from outside.
Outside
, Micky quickly learned, was anywhere but Alaska. The other states— excluding Hawaii, which Alaskans considered more or less a half sister—were referred to condescendingly as the Lower Forty-Eight.

Zeke flew her into McRay in a big twin-engined Cessna. He informed her that the pink glow on the horizon was a snowstorm blowing in. A lot of snow. Micky couldn't understand how there could be much more. The ground below them looked like it would buckle under the weight of the towering drifts. If it snowed again, she was convinced the razor peaks would disappear and the entire state would become one soft white blanket. They roared over the Kuskokwim range, the arctic wind whipping the plane like dust in front of a broom.

Dropping through the high mountain pass, Zeke pointed below at a tiny puff of smoke and said, “That's McRay.”

Beneath the plane, small clearings dotted the thick forest, which grew almost to the edge of the river. Tin roofs and tiny smoking chimneys betrayed the presence of cabins hidden in the woods. Suddenly they were over the impossibly short dirt strip.

But Zeke put the plane down on the runway with only a single bump. They coasted to a halt at the end of the strip and Zeke jumped out while the props were still spinning. He tossed wooden chocks under the wheels and unceremoniously pitched Micky's trunk and backpack onto the ground. Micky tightened the wolf-ruff parka around her face and pulled on her heavy mittens.

“Where's the terminal?”

“The what?” Zeke laughed.

“Where do I go?” she asked. The light was fading and the mountains seemed like something out of the remote, savage past. Zeke glanced anxiously over his shoulder toward the approaching storm.

“Where's your friend?” he shouted, over the plane's engines and the buffeting wind.

“I have no idea!” She stamped her feet, already chilled despite her winter boots.

Zeke nodded toward a track that twisted through the spruce trees at the end of the short runway. “Look for smoke.”

He had to go, he told her. He couldn't get caught in the storm. He had only an hour of daylight left. She watched his plane disappear into the darkening clouds, listening as the wind drowned out the retreating engines.

And just like that, she was alone.

It occurred to her then that she might die here on this landing strip and for all she knew it would be months before anyone found her. Maybe that was the one good thing that she had accomplished with this fool's errand. Maybe she was just going to freeze to death.

Where the hell is Damon?

Tire tracks that seemed too narrow for a Jeep or truck, meandered away into the trees.