Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (13 page)

He and Sorry had been lucky enough to get a cabin for the night, and a hearty moose stew for dinner as well. The meal was followed by a blueberry cobbler, made with local berries that had been picked and frozen the summer before. At the same table in the lodge dining area, which was just off the kitchen, were two women from Florida who had driven the Top of the World Highway that day on their motorcycles, a fact that made Sorry cranky at first.

“What the fuck was I thinking?” he said. “I let this bozo talk me into leaving my bike in Whitehorse and driving here in that stinkin’ Blazer. He said it would make a good place to sleep, and turns out he fuckin’ don’t want to sleep in it anyway. I should’ve rode my bike.”

Hunter ignored him and asked one of the women what made them want to ride to Alaska.

“It was on our bucket list,” said one, and the other one nodded.

Hunter watched as they grinned at each other and slapped hands in a high five. One had short dark hair flecked with grey, the other was blond with her hair pulled back into a lopsided braid. Neither wore makeup. He guessed that the two women were a couple and wondered if that was partly why Sorenson had suddenly become so grumpy. He was surprised after they’d finished dinner to see his friend accompany the women to their cabin while Hunter was on the porch talking to Yukon Sally about the town of Eagle.

“I followed the love of my life up here almost twenty years ago and it wasn’t long before he stopped being the love of my life and left town. Me, I fell in love with the lifestyle here in Eagle and decided to make it my home.” Yukon Sally was surprisingly tiny – probably just over a hundred pounds – and dressed like the outdoorswoman she was, in jeans, hiking boots and a man’s plaid shirt over an Eagle City souvenir tee shirt.

“Pretty impressive building for a town like this.” Hunter nodded toward the lodge behind them. He’d been surprised when they drove up to the lodge. It hadn’t been here when he’d visited Eagle in the seventies, and he couldn’t imagine there was enough tourist traffic to justify the building costs.

Yukon Sally shrugged. “Our place isn’t as big or as fancy as the ones closer to Fairbanks. Just four guest rooms in the lodge and the three cabins. We can put up a couple of wall tents if we need to accommodate a big group.”

“You get enough business to pay the bills?” he asked.

“You mean, is it just an expensive hobby?”

“I’m sorry. I guess that’s none of my business. It’s a nice place, but I’ve never thought of Eagle as a tourism hotspot.”

She didn’t seem to mind. “My dad would turn over in his grave if he knew what I’d spent my inheritance on.” Her eyes narrowed to slits as she laughed; her laugh was loud for such a small person. “He was horrified when I told him I was going to live here. He spent his whole life in Texas and thought it was the only place in the world worth living in.”

“Get many visitors in the winter?”

“We’re full to overflowing at Yukon Quest time, but otherwise it’s pretty quiet. You can’t get here by road in the winter, you know, and not many tourists travel by dog sled. Just the Questers.” She laughed again and Hunter couldn’t help laughing with her. “Me and my husband live like most everyone else up here in the winter. We close off the rooms in the lodge we don’t use and fire up the big wood stove, hunker down on the coldest days, run the dogs out on the river and check our traps when the weather’s good. Most winters we’ll fly out for a vacation somewhere warm and sunny when the SAD kicks in.”

“Husband? I thought the love of your life ran off.”

“I found a new one. Or he found me.” Another laugh.

Hunter felt a trace of envy. He couldn’t help wondering if the same thing would ever happen to him. An image of Helen Marsh the last time he’d seen her flashed and quickly disappeared from his mind’s eye. He’d had a nice note from her in March, but no phone calls or any indication that he would see her again soon. He hadn’t tried to call her either. He didn’t know if he was ready to be anything but alone, but how would he know when he was?

“You’ve been here before?” Sally’s question brought him back to the here and now.

“In the early seventies,” he told her. “I visited here with a friend.”

“Before my time.” She sniffed a few times and looked in the direction Sorry and the two women had disappeared. “Wood smoke. They must’ve got the campfire going. I guess I’d better go spend some time in the kitchen.”

“Mind if I tag along?” he said. “I wanted to ask you a few questions about the town.”

There wasn’t much she could tell him about Betty Salmon. She said that Goldie always seemed well cared for when she was younger, and now she seemed to be a happy, well-adjusted young woman. “I hope she gets a chance to go Outside,” she said with a frown. “It’s all very well for those of us who have made our own choice to live here in Eagle, but I don’t feel it’s fair that a young person like her never has a chance to experience life outside of a bush town.”

Betty, she told him, seemed to be very distrustful of everyone in Eagle. “I suspect she’d be most at home living all alone out in the bush somewhere and only coming into town for supplies. She’s not real friendly. I think she only moved to Eagle because of Goldie.”

Hunter asked her if she knew anything about Betty’s background. She shook her head, a look that bordered on astonishment on her face. “Nobody does,” she said. “Nobody.” She said it had been a source of gossip and conjecture soon after Betty’s arrival, once the locals realized Betty had no intention of making friends in town. Was she crazy? Was she running from the police? Was she in hiding from an abusive partner? Had she kidnapped the kid?

“But you know, half the people who come to Alaska are running from something in their past, so pretty soon most of the people around here stopped speculating and kind of accepted her just the way she is. She does awesome leather and beadwork. I saw her in town once wearing a beaded caribou skin jacket I’d kill for. I asked her if she’d sell it and she turned me down flat, but I’ve bought a few things from her over the years. Some I’ve kept, others I’ve resold to tourists here at the lodge.” She added thoughtfully, “Betty may be a prickly old recluse, but Goldie is a sweetheart. She’s very protective of her grandmother’s privacy.”

After talking to Sally, he’d wandered over to the campfire. Sorry and the two women from Florida were sitting on logs, passing around a joint. They each had a sweating can of beer nestled in the grass at their feet.

“Want a toke?” asked the blond woman, inhaling as she spoke.

“He doesn’t smoke,” said Sorry.

“I’ll take a beer, though.”

He sat with them for the better part of an hour, finally got tired of the biker stories and the feeling of being an outsider, so he excused himself to go for a walk. Yukon Sally’s was situated on the north side of town, in a wooded area more than half a mile from the river. He wandered down a trail and found himself in a clearing with some old buildings. He recognized it as Fort Egbert, a historic site from gold rush days that he’d visited with Ken on his first trip to Eagle. He recalled that Fort Egbert was where Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had first telegraphed news of his successful crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the north coast of America in 1905. Hunter remembered reading that Amundsen’s journey had taken three years, and reflected on how much the world had changed in the last hundred years. The Concorde could fly around the entire world in less than thirty-six hours.

From the fort he made his way down to the bank of the Yukon River. He sat on a grassy spot on the bank and watched the river below, wondering how long it would take to float downriver from Dawson instead of driving overland. When would the water he’d seen in Dawson this morning be passing by this spot? There were two eagles drifting in silent circles high above the river, and he watched a weather-beaten motorboat with a single occupant fight its way against the current to Eagle City.

His thoughts eventually turned again to the disappearance of whoever the inhabitants of that cabin near Johnson’s Crossing were, and the endless discussions about it he’d had with Ken over the years. Most of the others at the detachment had written the bloody cabin off as a grizzly attack – rare but not unheard of – and if Hunter hadn’t known April, he imagined he’d have done the same. As he’d headed back to Yukon Sally’s, he chided himself for always dwelling on the past, but as much as he tried, he couldn’t envision a future for himself, other than what he was doing now: driving a truck, preferably alone, for a living, and hoping he would soon feel motivated to do something more with his life. By the time he got back to the cabin, Sorry was asleep, surrounded by the smell of beer, marijuana and wood smoke.

As he lay on his bed at Yukon Sally’s staring at the ceiling, he decided he would drive out to the home of Goldie and Betty Salmon before leaving Eagle. He knew he’d regret it the rest of his life if he didn’t do his best to find out if Goldie was April’s daughter, and follow up on this possible chance to solve the mystery behind the bloody cabin near the Teslin River. Betty Salmon might not want to see him, but he had to try.

When Goldie got back to her cabin, her grandmother was just putting two pans of bread dough in the oven of the summer kitchen and Orville was over by the cabin, tinkering with an old bicycle her grandmother had once brought home from the town dump. She gave Gran a quick hug and stood watching the old man from a distance.

“What’s he doing?”

“He says he can fix that bicycle. It’ll be handy for you going to work, save on buying gas for the truck.” Gran started scraping the skin off a carrot. She nodded at a pot that was simmering on the stove. “Fresh rabbit stew tonight. I hope you’re hungry.”

“Nice, Gran.” A good hunting day always put her Gran in a good mood.

“Orville shot it, just up the hill where we got that bear last fall.” The old woman spoke matter-of-factly, but Goldie knew her well enough to recognize a note of satisfaction in her voice, as if she herself were responsible.

Goldie watched her grandmother reach for another carrot – wilted after spending months in the root cellar – then turned and watched Orville bent over the bike. He began whistling an unfamiliar but catchy melody. When she turned back to her Gran, the old woman was trying to conceal a satisfied smile. “I’ll go wash up, then I’ll come help with dinner,” Goldie told her.

On her way home, Goldie had debated how to approach her grandmother about the man at the lodge. She decided she would wait until the time was exactly right, just mention it as an aside as if it weren’t really important. Because, she felt, it was
too
important. This might be her only chance to find out about her mother from someone who had actually known her. How else could she learn more about a woman whose first name she wasn’t sure of, and whose last name she didn’t know, and who her Gran wasn’t willing to talk about?

Maybe now that her grandmother seemed to be a little more open to change, she might finally be ready to talk to Goldie about her mother. Was it time to ask her? Would she agree to see the man who the big blond guy had called Hunter? If Goldie asked at the wrong time, when her grandmother was in the wrong mood, the answer was sure to be no, and once Gran said no to something, she wasn’t likely to change her mind.

When she got back to the outdoor kitchen, Gran told her everything was done. If she wanted to help, she could put plates and cutlery on the table while Gran took down the washing that was drying on the clothesline, she said. Goldie glanced over at the clothesline, and saw some unfamiliar clothing. A man’s clothing. Had Gran been doing Orville’s laundry?

“You did his washing?”

“There was room in the machine,” Gran answered, almost defensively.

Goldie wondered if Orville had helped by catching the clothes Gran fed through the wringer so they wouldn’t fall onto the ground, the way Goldie usually did. The washer was outside, parked beside the gas generator in a little shed built on the back of the cabin.

“That was nice of you, Gran,” she said to her grandmother’s back as she walked away.

Orville did most of the talking over dinner, in his cheerful and pleasant voice. “How was your day at work then, Goldie?” he asked, reaching for a sourdough bun.

Goldie almost mentioned the man who thought she looked like someone named April, but she glanced at her grandmother’s face and lost her nerve. Would her grandmother refuse to talk about something so personal in front of Orville? “Good,” she said instead, and went on to describe her job at the lodge. “So I only work in the summer, when the lodge is busy. Mostly I clean the guest rooms, but I do pretty much anything Sally needs me to do.”

Orville asked her grandmother whether she had ever worked for someone else, and Gran answered, “A long time ago in Dawson, when I was very young.”

“You’re a strong and independent woman, Betty. Your husband was a very lucky man.”

Goldie couldn’t conceal her surprise. What had these two talked about when she wasn’t present? Why had her grandmother, who had always been so secretive about her past, told this man things that even Goldie didn’t know?

Gran looked somber. “I don’t know about that,” was all she said, and Orville just smiled at her.

It was surreal. After years of just the two of them, here was a third person at the table, chatting away as if they were good friends. No one could ever call her grandmother talkative, but she was answering his questions, nodding at his observations, and even cracking a smile now and then, much as she did when she and Goldie were alone.