Once More with Feeling (26 page)

“Exactly what would Laura be doing up there?” Julie asked.

“Working side by side with Dr. Cameron P. Woodward of the biology department of Tyler University.”

‘Tyler?” Julie repeated, “Right here on Long Island?”

“One and the same. The name of his research project-— are you ready?—is ‘The Mystery of Motherhood in Sculpin Fish.’ Does that sound intriguing or what?”

“Thanks,” said Laura, “but I think I’ll wait for the movie.”

“No, listen. The number of eggs produced by female sculpin, a fascinating freshwater fish that dwells at the bottom of lakes—’’

Julie rolled her eyes. “I think I’ll even skip the movie.”

“What’s wrong with fish?” Claire protested. “Some of my best meals have been fish.”

“But Alaska?” Laura said doubtfully. “Isn’t it ... cold?”

“Not in the summer. At least according to this.” Claire paused a moment to check the bible of her newfound field of expertise. “We’re talking fifties, sixties, occasional drizzle. . . . Besides, think about how beautiful Alaska must be. You’ve seen the calendars. And the back issues of
National Geographic.
And what about
White Fang?
Picture all those magnificent mountains and lakes and fields of wildflowers....”

Sitting in Claire’s living room back in March, high on the sweet spring air and the even sweeter cheap wine, Laura had fallen in love with the fantasyland vision of Alaska that Claire had conjured up. She’d also been taken with a brand-new image of herself. This version of Laura Briggs did not spend her days conjuring up the trials and tribulations of fictional others while sitting safely at a computer. Nor was she someone who considered watching two reruns of
Mary Tyler Moore
back-to-back almost more excitement than she could handle.

The Laura Briggs she saw that night grabbed life by the shoulders, looked it straight in the eye, and demanded, “Lead on!” She trekked through the wilderness, a mess kit in her backpack and a hiking song in her heart. She was at one with nature, a daughter of the earth, a friend to the animals, a part of a wonderful ecosystem that even made room for poisonous plants and slithery iguanas....

Now, as she stood in the airport dressed like the centerfold for
Field and Stream,
the song in Laura’s heart was more of a dirge. And the idea of being surrounded by any more nature than the plastic ferns decorating the back wall of the airport bar seemed positively ominous.

“I can change my mind, can’t I?” she asked meekly.

“Nonsense.” Claire grabbed her arm and began dragging her toward the gates. “Everything is set. The check you sent to World Watch has cleared. Evan’s tucked away at sleep-away camp, learning vital survival skills like how to make an ice-cream-stick birdhouse. Your flight leaves in less than an hour. The wheels are in motion, Laura. The Earth’s future rests in your hands—”

Laura whimpered. “If I hurry, I bet I can still book one of those Alaskan cruises that feature shuffleboard and blocks of ice sculpted into swans....”

Claire gave her a firm push right below her Eddie Bauer tag. “Have a great time, kid.”

“Don’t forget to take lots of pictures,” Julie called after her. ‘Try to get something besides snow.”

“I thought you were my friends!”

Laura’s desperate words were lost. A SWAT team of security guards had already surrounded her, urging her through the metal detector as her carry-on bag was X-rayed. There was no going back.

Like it or not, the new Laura Briggs was about to embark on her great adventure.

* * * *

Laura had fallen into that lethargic, semiconscious state that can only be reached at thirty thousand feet above-ground when she suddenly became aware that the floor was falling out from under her. At least that was her initial impression. Snapping back into consciousness, she realized that the plane was simply descending.

Part of her longed to stay right where she was, strapped safely into a comfortable seat on an airplane. How pleasant it was up here, far from anything that even vaguely resembled real life. It was a relief, being tucked in with a pillow, a soft blue blanket, and the current issues of a dozen magazines. Stubbornly she closed her eyes again, not yet ready to face whatever was waiting for her on the other side of her lids.

And then she heard the man behind her gasp. “Look! There it is! I must have seen this a dozen times, yet every time I do, I feel like a little kid on Christmas morning.”

With a testimonial like that, Laura couldn’t help being curious. She forced her eyes open. Looking out the plane window, she, too, gasped.

Far below, underneath a curtain of clouds parting dramatically, she saw rugged, untamed landscape, unmarked by any signs of humanity. Craggy, forbidding mountains reached upward, their gray stone surfaces pushing out from the snow draped over them. Magnificent glaciers, slicing their way through whatever obstacles dared get in their way, lurked ominously between the sky-scraping peaks that were dwarfed in comparison. Cut into the rocky terrain were spiky inlets, the water murky and dark.

“Snow,” Laura breathed. “It’s
June.”

As the plane descended farther she was relieved to see green. Large stretches of it, in fact, interspersed with what looked like hundreds of tiny lakes. Lush growths of trees lined the peninsulas that stretched lazily across the sea. The sun glinted off the water in little bursts of light.

“It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?” the man behind her asked, poking his head between the seats.

“There are no people,” Laura mumbled.

“That’s the point.”

It wasn’t until she stood up that she realized how tired she was. The flight from New York had consisted of three separate legs. Stopovers in both Chicago and Seattle, all that deplaning and replaning ... In total, she’d been in transit close to a full twelve hours. The joints in her legs weren’t about to let her forget it. While over the intercom the pilot cheerfully informed them that the time was four hours earlier than on the East Coast, Laura’s body insisted it wasn’t dinnertime, but bedtime.

Zombielike, she moved through the airport, her tote bag slung over her shoulder as she retrieved her luggage. “There’s no place like home,” she muttered over and over, not quite able to believe any of this was really happening. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed to keep from clicking her heels together.

She lugged her two heavy suitcases to the exit, speculating that all this could turn out to be nothing more than a cruel joke. Perhaps there would be no one to meet her. Maybe she was destined to spend the rest of her days here at the Anchorage airport, waiting....

And then she caught sight of her contact. He was leaning against a column, holding up a piece of brown cardboard with
BRIGGS
scrawled across the front in black crayon.

“Oh,
boy.” She swallowed hard.

If she hadn’t known he was authentic, she would have concluded he’d been sent over from central casting. Grizzly Adams, right here in Anchorage Airport, waiting to pick up the greenhorn from the lower forty-eight.

It wasn’t even the way he was dressed. The plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots were pretty much the local uniform, she surmised. What gave him the look of the missing link on the evolutionary scale was the impressive amount of hair above his shoulders. A full dark beard, bushy eyebrows shading intense brown eyes, and a wild growth on his head, as thick and coarse as fur. If this man wasn’t Yukon Jack, he was certainly doing a darned good imitation.

Laura experienced a repeat of the dreadful sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach she’d had at the airport in New York. Struggling to keep from panicking, she reminded herself that she was no longer a little girl being forced to fend for herself in a world of plastic lanyards and “Kum-Ba-Ya.” She was a full-fledged adult, with traveler’s checks, a Visa card . . . and a plane ticket home.

Besides, she told herself, maybe he’s just some guy from the local taxi company. There’s no reason to assume this man is Dr. Woodward. Surely this . . . this
being
couldn’t be my host, my guide, my only link to survival out here in a place so undeveloped they probably don’t even have Coke.

“Laura Briggs?” he asked as she approached.

“That’s me.” She smiled bravely.

Her smile wasn’t returned. “I’m Cameron Woodward.”

“Hello. I’m pleased to—”

“Is all this luggage yours?”

Laura raised her chin in the air, one of her favorite defensive gestures. “I
am
going to be here a full two weeks.”

“What have you got in here?”

“Enough clothes for the entire trip, including an extra pair of hiking shoes,” she answered, the impatience in her voice only thinly masked. “Also six paperbacks, a hair dryer, and a jar of peanut butter in case it turns out moose burgers don’t agree with me.”

Dr. Woodward shrugged. “I carry all my personal gear in this backpack.”

Laura couldn’t tell if she was only imagining the disapproval she heard in his voice.

She decided to reserve judgment, at least until she reached the parking lot. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally be on solid ground. That flight from New York took forever.” Laura nearly had to run to keep up with Dr. Woodward as he strode out of the airport. Not even the bulging knapsack on his back and her two heavy suitcases slowed him down.

His response was a noncommittal grunt. Laura, however, struggled to keep up her cheerful chatter.

“I’m exhausted. Oh, sure, I tried to sleep on the plane, but it turned out I was flying with the Vienna Boys Choir. Well, not really; what I mean is, there was a bunch of overly energetic pubescent boys on the flight out of Seattle. They talked nonstop, as if they couldn’t quite believe their voices were finally changing. Anyway, I didn’t get much of a rest. What I’m really looking forward to is a nice hot shower and a good night’s sleep—”

“Sleep? Shower?” Dr. Woodward stopped in his tracks. He turned to face her, his eyes burning into hers so piercingly that for a moment Laura wondered if the devil himself had taken to leading World Watch projects.

“Don’t people in Alaska sleep or shower?” Although she was only joking, as she said the words the feeling that she could well be speaking the truth descended over Laura like a chill.

“Not if they were sent here by World Watch. At least, not yet.”

“Explain.”

“I guess no one told you.”

“No one told me
what?”

“We’re driving straight through tonight.”

“Wait a minute.” To punctuate her words, Laura stopped, put down her tote bag, and folded her arms across her chest. “Who’s
we
—and where are
we
driving tonight?”

“We is you and me. And we’re driving straight to the Kenai Peninsula.”

“Which is ... where?”

“About eight hours away.”

“Eight
hours?”

“It’s only seven o’clock,” Dr. Woodward informed her with annoying calmness.

“Hold on. It’s seven o’clock to people
here,
people who were still wrapped up in caribou fur, dreaming about kayaking, while I was hovering over Chicago with two rubber eggs and a quart of nitric acid disguised as coffee in my stomach. To
me,
it’s eleven
P
.
M
.!”

“You’ll be better off getting used to our time right away. If you have to, you can sleep in the truck.”

‘Truck,” Laura repeated. “You’re telling me I’m about to spend eight hours in a truck.”

“You probably won’t want to, though. Sleep, I mean. Around here, the sun only sets for two hours in June. Between midnight and two, it’s dark. Otherwise,” he said, gesturing toward the sun, “this is Alaska’s version of nighttime.

“Besides,” Dr. Woodward went on, “we’ve got to get down to the Kenai as soon as we can. We’ve got a long day in the canoes ahead of us tomorrow.”

“Canoes?”

“That’s right. Wolf Lake is three miles long, and it’s going to take the full two weeks to set traps all along the shore. I’m anxious to get a good start, so I figure we’ll be out most of the day.”

Laura opened her mouth to protest. But before she had a chance, Dr. Woodward flashed her a smile.

“Welcome to World Watch,” he said pleasantly. “We hope you enjoy your stay.”

* * * *

“Rise and shine! We’re there.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Laura dragged herself out of a deep sleep and tried to remember where she was. Even before she opened her eyes, a complicated mixture of emotions—including anxiety, dread, self-doubt, and more than a little fear—descended upon her.

When she did open her eyes, she let out a shriek.

Two large, brown, soulful eyes were staring directly into hers. Between them was a long, furry snout, with a moist nose at the end. At the moment that nose was covering the window that separated
her
from
it
with clouds of moisture. As two rabbit-sized ears flicked at her it let out a bellow.

Before she had a chance to follow up her initial reaction with an appropriate comment like “Get that thing away from me,” a hand she recognized as human grabbed the moose gently around the neck.

“Come on now, Mabel. Get away from that car,” a female voice scolded softly. “You gave the lady a real start.”

I must be dreaming, thought Laura. I’m still asleep. It’s the only possible explanation.

But as the panic growing inside catapulted her into full consciousness, she realized she wasn’t dreaming at all. She was curled up in the front seat of a Jeep that probably dated back to the Middle Ages, its shredded vinyl covers ineffectually held together by silver bands of duct tape. Her right cheek smarted where it had been dented by the metal pull tab of the zipper on the nylon sleeping bag she’d been clinging to as tenaciously as Christopher Robin hung on to Pooh.

Through the window, she watched Dr. Woodward take fishnets, buckets, and an assortment of metal contraptions that looked like instruments of torture down off the car roof. She blinked, trying to digest the fact that all around her was nature untamed, manifested largely in the form of a veil of mosquitoes that surrounded the Jeep. They’d stopped at the end of a dirt road. Beyond, as far as the half-closed eye could see, was nothing but forest. And of course, there was the moose standing outside the Jeep, peering at Laura as if she were the oddity.