Forest of Shadows (10 page)

“Jess, honey, I’ll be in my study if you need me.” 

She gave him a zombie-like nod. 

He checked the thermostat by the stairs. Thank God for central air. The neighborhood, now filled to capacity with kids freed from the bonds of school for the summer, was quiet. The birds were even too hot to chirp. 

He carried his paper and coffee into his study and fired up the computer. He was able to scan the baseball box scores while the Dell clicked and ticked its way to life. The Mets had won in Atlanta and the Yankees were pummeled by the Indians. 

“Things are looking up already.”

Opening his email, he went to a folder marked SHIDA. In it were the five emails that he had traded back and forth with Judas Graves as well as the completed questionnaire that he used as a standard preliminary tool for cases he considered worthy of further review. He read them each over for the umpteenth time, then went to his Inbox to see if anything new had come in. This was his personal email, so it wasn’t bogged down like the mailboxes he had linked to the
fearnone.com
website. Just a couple of pieces of junk mail, a message from Jack about meeting him and some of the people they used to work with for drinks on Saturday night and a trio of less than hysterical jokes forwarded by Eve from her office. 

Sipping his coffee, John jumped onto the internet and went to a weather site. He tried to look up the current temperature in Shida but the town wasn’t found in the database. He opened another internet window and found a site that had a pretty detailed map of Alaska. He tried a couple of nearby cities and hit pay dirt with Talkeetna, an oddly named place in the interior region, north of Anchorage and south of Mount McKinley. The forecasters were calling for partly sunny skies with a high of sixty-seven degrees, dipping down into the mid-forties overnight. 

John looked out his window at the leaves of the elm tree. They hung limply from their branches, as unmoving as a painting. 

“Wish they’d send some of that mild weather this way.”

It was almost eleven o’clock. Time for his anti-anxiety medication. He took half the usual dose and downed it with the dregs of his coffee. There’d been a time when he counted the minutes until pill time. Now he dreaded it. He had to keep reminding himself that he was on the road to independence from meds. Times like now, when he was feeling strong, calm, it was easy to think
I don’t need these. I should just chuck them all down the toilet.
But he knew there were moments, lurking unseen throughout the day,that would turn his world upside down and make him wish he’d doubled up on his dose. 

“Daddy, can Allison come over to play?”

Jessica was standing half-dressed in the doorway. Her shirt was in her hands. 

“Sure. You guys going to play in the yard?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. It’s kinda hot.”

John laughed. “You can say that again. Let me know if you are so I can watch you.”

“Oh Dad.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll stay in the kitchen, out of sight.”

“Fine.” She moped down the hall, her shoulders drooping melodramatically. 

When Allison arrived, John set the sprinkler up in the back yard and the two girls spent the better part of an hour running around and over it. It only took a few minutes in the yard to convince him that he was better off indoors. 

While he watched them, he decided to call Eve at work. 

“Hello, this is Eve Powers.”

“I’d like to purchase a bride from your catalogue,” he said in a pretty good Indian accent.

“What’s the matter, can’t get a lady on your own?”

“Well, my friend, I have this goiter on the side of my face that some people find slightly off-putting.” 

Eve laughed hard at that one. 

John asked how her day was going and she talked about her latest project. He could tell that she was holding something back. She hated her job and he knew it. He also knew that she tried very hard not to complain around him.

“I was actually calling for more than just trying out my latest sub-par accent.”

“Oh?”

“I wanted to ask, do you have any vacation time left?”

“Only about two weeks,” she said facetiously. Two weeks was her vacation allotment for the year. 

“You think you could take some time off soon?”

She hesitated. “How much time are we talking about?”

“Two, three days tops.”

He could almost hear the gears turning in her head. He grinned. 

“Sure, I guess I could. How come?”

Now here was the bomb. It had only been a thought until now. Once he said it out loud, there was no going back. 

“I need to take a trip, the sooner the better. I’d ask my father to watch Jess but a couple of days and nights is too much for him. I was wondering if you could take her in. If you want, you and Liam could even stay here.”

There was a slight clack as Eve shifted the phone to her other ear and banged it into her earring. “Did I hear you right? You’re going to take a trip?”

“Yep.”

He knew she wanted to add,
but you never go anywhere.

“It’s kind of a business trip, believe it or not. Turns out, I really can’t do everything I need from my home office. So, you think you could swing it?”

His heart was beating double time. He was nervous about the trip, nervous about her response. 

Eve sighed into the phone. 

“Of course I could. I’d watch Jessica any time. I’m just shocked, you know.”

“Me too,” John chuckled. 

“May I ask where you’re headed off to?”

“You’re not going to believe it.”

“Try me.”

“Alaska.”

Chapter Fourteen

Alaska

“It’s an interesting proposal, Mr. Backman. This is the most prestigious piece of property in all of Shida.”

“Kind of like the crown jewel,” John said and smiled. 

The real estate agent, Mary Longfeather, was young but had a hard look about her. She sat back and closed her eyes for a moment. Her walnut skin crinkled around her eyes as she concentrated. 

John had been given the grand tour of the house, a whale of a modern log cabin that looked fit to be in a magazine. All it needed was some heavy wood furniture and a fire in the hearth to complete the picture of perfection. A city boy all his life, John was instantly enthralled not just by the house but by the entire countryside. This was a side of nature he’d only read about or glimpsed on his trips to Bear Mountain in upstate New York. Nothing could prepare him for this. Shida was a town shrouded by trees taller than Bronx apartment buildings with occasional paths plowed out and small, weathered houses carved into the clearings. 

“It seems to me that it’s a one-of-a-kind house.”

“Yes.” Her tone was leery, waiting for the
but. 

“I would guess you haven’t had many queries since it went on the market.”

John had spoken to Judas Graves several times before his flight. Judas sounded a bit on the flaky side, what with all the
dudes
and the occasional
far out
man
, but he did seem to know the town. If he was nothing else, John was thorough. He’d researched all he could on Shida, which wasn’t a whole heck of a lot. Thankfully, Eve had a friend with the California tourism board who agreed to contact an acquaintance in the Alaska Travel Bureau. Shida was a small town in the sense that it had a sparse population, last estimate around five hundred and eleven, though the amount of acreage within the town limits could easily house hundreds of thousands. He was happy to learn that he could take the scenic George Parks Highway to Shida should he drive on his return instead of taking the terrifyingly tiny air-taxi he took for the sake of saving time. Originally created as a mining town, it was now a collection of people who got by on odd jobs, hunting, working on the pipeline and some mining. Hardly the kind of place where someone would come to purchase a million-dollar home. 

Mary Longfeather smiled and said, “We have had a few people look at the house.”

She was lying. Anyone could see it. 

During the course of their handful of email discussions, Judas had warned him that he wouldn’t receive a warm reception on account of his skin color. He was partially right. True, Mary Longfeather’s eyes nearly popped out of her head when he walked in and she was pretty curt with him, at first. Once he told her he was interested in their finest house, she softened. Prejudice took a back seat to money almost every time. 

“Then I hope their interest doesn’t prevent my offer from being considered. As I said earlier, I’m looking for inspiration and relative quiet.”

“Have you written any books that I might know?”

His cover was that he was an author looking for a quiet place in the wilderness to write his next novel. Money wasn’t an issue. He needed a place to charge his mind and spirit and Alaska had always been a point of interest for him. Hiking was a growing passion of his and Shida looked to be about as perfect a place to commune with nature as he could find. 

“This will be my first. I was a script doctor for the past ten years and I think it’s time I did something on my own where I can actually get full credit for the work.”

Mary had no idea what a script doctor was but didn’t want to look ignorant in front of him by asking.

“Oh. It must be exciting, starting a whole new venture.”

“To say the least,” he said and uncrossed his legs. 

The real estate office was quiet. Just the two of them. No ringing phones or faxes. 

“I’ll need to review this with my partner.”

“Of course. That’s completely understandable.”

Mary Longfeather reached into her drawer and dropped a yellow legal pad on her desk. She asked him for some general information: current address, phone, etc. He noticed that she didn’t ask where he would be staying, probably because there was only one place in town—a squat, three story brick building that held hints of being a flop house in the early days of Shida. Now it was a sort of inn with a general store taking up the bottom floor.

“And how much did you say you were looking to rent the house for?” 

“I didn’t, yet. If you were looking to make some money by renting it until you find a buyer, what figure would you consider as a monthly fee?”

“Since your offer is out of the blue, I can’t say right now. I’d really need to take some time and make a proper evaluation.”

Time was the one thing he did not want to waste. Even coming this far took a lot of courage on his part. He wanted to keep the wheels turning before his own mind sabotaged him. 

Either she was truly flustered and couldn’t come up with a rental figure or she was feeling him out, seeing how much he’d be willing to part with. In a perfect world, she would have blurted out something in the range of fair market value and it would be done. He’d have to drop the hammer. 

“How about fifteen thousand a month? That’s around what we’ve paid for summer vacations on the Vineyard and this house seems similar.”

Mary’s face went flush and she almost dropped her pen. 

John sat back on the creaky old mattress in his Spartan room. His suitcase was propped against the wall, next to the dresser. A mirror hung over the dresser and there was a chair by the window. He was afraid that the chair would splinter into millions pieces if he even thought of sitting in it. The bedside table had a lamp and rotary phone. None of the drawers in either the table or dresser contained a Bible, not that he was in need of one. 

He’d tried to use his cell phone when he first got back to the room but quickly realized he had a better chance of sprouting a second set of arms than finding a cell signal. The adrenaline that had sustained him throughout the entire trip was rapidly wearing off and his head felt heavy, so he took a power nap. 

Thirty minutes later, he was up and feeling refreshed. He went down the hall to the communal bathroom to pee and splash some water on his face, then checked his watch and realized he was supposed to meet Judas Graves at the diner. He’d passed it on the way into town and hoped he wasn’t going to have to eat moose burgers. He changed into a new shirt, pulled on his new hiking boots, closed the door without a lock, and headed out to Cheryl’s Diner. 

All heads turned when he walked into the diner. Conversation for the most part stopped and he was given the once over by two dozen pairs of eyes. John tried not to let the stares get to him. He silently thanked Judas for his early warning. It was like something out of a movie. Even the cook stopped working the grill to pop his head out and ogle the stranger. 

“Can I help you?” A pretty waitress with a bad dye job addressed him from behind the counter. Thankfully, some people had resumed talking, though in hushed tones. A family of four in the booth to his right stared at him like he was a carnival freak. The young boy, no more than five, broke out in a smile and waved at him with his index finger.