Cotton Grass Lodge (20 page)

“No, this is the first time.”

“I’ll talk to Tom about it when he gets here this morning,” Duncan said. “Maybe you should take a four-wheeler back and forth. If you walk up on a moose it could be as bad as a bear.”

“I’m really careful. Don’t worry, besides, Tom keeps a good eye on us.” She turned quickly to her morning duties but a little flush crept up the back of her neck.

About one-thirty in the afternoon, hunger drove Duncan back toward the lodge. He hadn’t stopped for lunch. Lately, Tom was seldom a no-show, so Duncan wondered what had come up to keep him from work. The casual attitude of the lake dwellers was catching. Even more interesting was the fact he wasn’t pissed off. A late employee was simply, a late employee.

“Give her to me!” Alice’s angry voice jarred him to attention. “Don’t you dare! Ever! Touch her when you’re like this. Get out!” Her heated voice rose to a shriek by the end of the sentence.

Duncan moved from walk to trot in an instant. Who the hell could have her upset? When Tom stumbled backward out of the door of the lodge onto the back porch Duncan slowed.

“Alice? Alice, I’m sorry. I wouldn’t ever do anything to…you know I…I’m sorry.”

Alice followed through the door and stared Tom down the steps, in her arms Emily began to cry. Her frightened howls reflected the unusual uproar, and Tom was lucky there was a baby in Alice’s arms, because if she’d had a stick, Duncan was sure, she’d have killed him. Rather than come between the two, he stopped.

“If you drink.” Alice screamed over the wailing baby, “You stay the hell away from us. She will never! Ever! Have to grow up like me.”

Tom backed awkwardly off the last step of the porch and turned. His flushed face twisted in agony, and he flung himself past Duncan without speaking. Walking away as fast as his clumsy legs could carry him.

Duncan went up the steps. The fury on Alice’s face crumpled into the same agony he had seen on Tom’s. The baby put her arms out to Duncan, and he found himself with two bawling females wrapped against his chest.

Because Alice ran such an efficient kitchen, Duncan was able to send her home for the rest of the afternoon. He took a quick shower in the lukewarm water of the sauna and relaxed into being the gracious host, ordinarily, one of his favorite parts of the day.

An uncomfortable knot stayed in the pit of his stomach. There wasn’t much room for personality conflicts in this little community, and Tom and Alice were a real foundation to his success this summer.

After a restless night, Duncan was up early sitting on the porch trying to keep a persistent mosquito out of his coffee. For the last several weeks, it had begun to cool so dealing with bugs was not the norm. Loon calls drifted along the edge of the lake.

A subtle change in colors of the foliage around the lake detained his attention this morning and the cool, dewy air held a tang of melancholy.

Alice and Emily came out of the opening in the brush from the direction of her cabin. She gave a subdued little head bob and then went around the lodge to the back door. When she joined him on the porch, she had exchanged the baby for her own cup of coffee.

“I put Emily down in your bed for a while. She didn’t sleep well. I guess neither of us did.” Alice pulled her feet up onto the big double bent-twig rocker and hunched around her cup. She gazed out across the lake. “I love it here.”

“Does this mean you’re planning to leave?” Duncan sucked in a breath and released it slowly. “I’d really hate it if you did.”

“Oh, no.” Alice turned her sad gaze to rest on his face. “I just wanted you to know so you wouldn’t think what happened yesterday had anything to do with you or—I mean, you drink once in a while, but you don’t get drunk.” Alice looked back at the lake. “My mom was a drunk. and all the dads who came and went were drunks too. I got emancipated at sixteen, and moved out so I wouldn’t have to deal with drunks.”

“Where is your mom now?”

“She died.” Her answer came out with jarring melancholy.

“You were young. That must’ve been hard on you.”

Alice shrugged. “I guess. I worked really hard to take care of myself and keep my grades up, after a couple of years I even started college.”

“Did you graduate?” Duncan asked and instantly hated the question. In the face of this competent and admirable woman, it seemed a shallow thing to ask.

“No, I’m such a cliché. I met my husband at college.” Alice’s eyes started to leak. “Derrick was my fairy tale. He loved me. I wouldn’t live with him if we weren’t married, so he said it didn’t matter what his family thought. They said I wasn’t a good fit. He said I could go back to school when he finished his graduate degree in biology. I worked and helped him.”

Duncan remembered a couple of those girls from his college days. Nice girls, who burned out from trying to compete with the co-eds while working nights and keeping a family together, some even had a kid or two.

Alice gave him a rueful smile. “Last summer was supposed to be a mini-vacation for us. He got a job as a fish counter here at the lake. It was wonderful. I got to read and hike and get to know all these wonderful people.” Alice drawled into the voice of English melodrama. “Then, I was the victim—of a failed birth control device.”

“Oops,” Duncan said, “Let me guess. It was entirely your fault.” He lifted his cup to his lips.

“Yeah.” Alice matched Duncan with a sip of her coffee. “Not only was he angry, but I wouldn’t get an abortion and he said my body was weird, so he wouldn’t touch me. It’s been a year now, and he never touched me. He always had some excuse.”

The morning sun’s low angle slashed into their eyes and distant voices from upstairs drifted through an open window.

“Ack, this cup is cold, and you got more information than you ever wanted about my personal life.” Alice stood with an exaggerated shiver, throwing the dregs of her cup over the rail. “And, I better get in gear or those people upstairs are only gonna get cold crispy-rice for breakfast.”

Duncan waited until the afternoon of the third day before he went to find Tom. He’d gotten so used to working with him. His absence was noticeable. There were a lot of three handed jobs to be done so the days were long and Alice was cranky. Alice was real cranky.

Guests had taken all the four-wheelers on a picnic, so Duncan walked down the edge of the lake on the path meandering in and out of the trees. He hadn’t realized working hard was so different from walking. Stretching his legs felt good.

It was also quiet. Odd thoughts floated across his consciousness. He hadn’t been alone except to sleep for weeks, and the only thing he could think of to make this walk better was Hanna. He wanted to share. The aggravating woman was practical and he wanted her opinion on the situation with Tom and Alice.

A clump of chickadees flitted in and out of sight. Their happy song followed him for a long way.

He could hear the faint echo of a chainsaw across the lake. The nice couple from Fairbanks. They were spending a long weekend getting firewood up. Her father was visiting from Chicago. It amused Duncan how, in his past experience, hotel guests came and went, but guests at Cotton Grass Lodge and the people he met at the lake became personal friends. The mail brought thank you notes for their visits and reservations for next year. He’d never gotten a personal thank you note when he worked at a hotel.

As Duncan got closer to Tom’s cabin, he realized working together didn’t mean really knowing a person. He vowed to change the status quo.

In the shade a nasty swarm of gnats made Duncan pick up his pace, waving his arms and swatting at his ears, he burst out of the brush onto the beach just as a gun went off. His stomach knotted with fear. The raw, open wound of John’s suicide still rankled, punctuated by the rotten smell of a fish carcass at the edge of the lake.

He saw Tom, sitting in a folding lawn chair on his short dock, which consisted of two fifty-five gallon drums cobbled together with plywood and two-by-fours. But it got a man far enough into the lake to drown a worm once in a while, and Tom had a twelve foot skiff tied to it for the occasional trip.

Duncan jogged the twenty-five yards of rough gravel shore. His voice carried ahead of him, “Hey, I’ve heard of shooting fish in a barrel—but, this isn’t going to work.” He got to the end of the dock, “What are you doing?”

Tom flushed and even through the beard and long hair Duncan could see evidence of what could have been tears. Tom wiped his shirt-clad forearm across his nose. “I’m havin’ a funeral.” Tom reached down into the case of liquor sitting beside his chair and hefted out a brand new unopened bottle of Jack Daniels.

A rifle rested across his lap and as he carefully unscrewed the cap from the bottle he started talking. To the bottle. “God, we’ve had some good times. Remember the bar in Dutch Harbor? Ho-ly Shit. I had two women at one time and one of the best fights I’ve ever been in. Damn it was fun.” Tom gently tipped the bottle over and watched the amber liquid fall into the lake. Light slanting through the trees reflected off the huge sparkling drops splashing around the stream of liquor. When the bottle was completely empty Tom shook it to make sure the last drop was gone. He screwed the lid back on the bottle, and muscles bunched across his shoulders as he threw it as far as he could out into the lake.

Still directing his comments toward the bottle he continued. “Right. The bar in Dutch. I got a serious case of the clap, broke my nose, spent two days in jail pukin’ my guts up, and missed my boat. The captain was pissed ’cause he had to hire green crew and he wouldn’t hire me back the next season.” Tom took careful aim at the bobbing bottle and blasted it to smithereens.

Tom yelled out into the lake. “I never been afraid of anything in my life.”

From where he stood at the end of the short dock Duncan asked, “What are you afraid of now?”

Tom turned his ravaged face toward Duncan. “I want Alice. I mighta’ screwed up my chance, but I want Alice. I’m scared this won’t be enough and—what if I can’t live without the booze?”

“Tom. We take life one step at a time and do our best with what we’ve got. You know the score.” Duncan said. “Talk to Alice.”

“Will she talk to me?” Tom said.

“I hope so. She’s been meaner than a snake since you left,” Duncan said. “And I need my hired man back. Tom, I need your help. So—tomorrow?”

Tom looked down into the box. There was a long, quiet hesitation, “I guess so.”

“So—okay—see ya then.”

Tom killed two more bottles before Duncan got out of earshot.

Chapter 21

Fall. Duncan noticed the changes each morning. Colors stepped up the hills in lines of distinct demarcation from green to yellow to red.

Tom came out onto the porch and hesitated in front of the large willow-twig loveseat. “Excuse me,” he said. Frosty looked up from his spot in the middle of the cushions and flattened his stubby ears. The cat moved to one end of the chair as Tom settled into the other. “What’s up for the day, Boss?”

“Don’t call me that.” Duncan was having trouble getting used to seeing Tom with short hair and a neatly trimmed beard. “What’s the smell? The old socks, almost wet dog, but not quite, smell?”

“Mushrooms or cranberries, I can’t ever decide which.” Tom nodded and shrugged. “I was thinking I’d just keep working on the bath house, we’re close to being finished.”

“Before you get to that the bath house, will you look at the red four-wheeler?” Duncan asked. “Someone said it started hard.”

“Okay.” Tom reached out and ran a hand over the cat. “I got something to ask.”

Thing are working so well. Now what?
“Uhh-huh?”

“Alice needs to go into Anchorage to see a lawyer before she signs those divorce papers. I want to go with her. Can you spare us both for a few days? We’d have Jacob check in on you and Edna’s close.”

“Don’t you think I can handle my own lodge?”

“No.” Tom continued to pet the cat.

Duncan heard a burst of laughter from the living room where Alice had been eavesdropping. She stuck her head around the corner of the door. “Of course you can. But I need to do some shopping, Emily has outgrown everything she owns, and winter is coming I need some warmer clothes. My paychecks won’t bounce will they?”

Duncan exhaled in relief. There would be the inevitable change in staff, but not yet. “Yes, you can both go, and if you don't come back, I’ll put a stop pay on all of those checks.” He turned to Tom. “Yours, too.”

One week later, Duncan woke when he smelled coffee. He lay in the cozy burrow of down comforter and reviewed the month. Overall, a success. Nell was gone—still. Tom was sober and working every day, and the guides were talking about the transition from fish to moose and bear. They’d gotten good tips this year. The fish had shown up when they were supposed to but what he knew about hunting you could write on the head of a pin.

The septic system was what got him excited now. The rustic allure of an outhouse had faded rapidly.

Duncan heard the faint drone of an airplane and the soft murmur of Alice answering the call on the radio. It was too early for guests. Duncan recalled the list for the day. There were two propane tanks due. He couldn’t think of another reason the airplane was on his strip.

He dozed again and for just a minute the fabric caressed his naked body, reminding him Hanna would be back from her flight schedule soon.

Hanna, perhaps it was Hanna flying in. Duncan threw the covers off and dressed quickly. There was nothing like a demanding lodge in the middle of nowhere to dampen a raging libido. What was it about her? What was he going to do about her?

Duncan dressed. He stopped in the kitchen for a cup of coffee and detoured to the desk for the schedule book. There had been sharpness in the morning air for the last week. It foretold the end of the season, but he wasn’t willing to give up his morning ritual yet.