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The Cessna stopped ten feet away. Practically before the prop had slowed, the passenger door opened and a man bailed out. “Bailed” was the right word; he managed to miss the step on the strut entirely and hit the ground walking, rapidly, in the opposite direction.
Liam had exited planes in just that ma
She shook her head and smiled. “That was Mr. Frederick Glanville of the Internal Revenue Service. He went out to Kokwok to perform an audit.”
Liam began to grin. “Let me guess. He’d never flown in a small plane before.”
“Nothing smaller than the 737 that got him to Newenham, would be my guess,” Wy said, nodding. “Plus, Stanley Sacaloff was waiting for him on the other end.”
Liam started to laugh. “He was auditing Stanley Sacaloff?”
“That was his plan. He was pretty tight-lipped when I picked him up this morning, so I don’t know how successful the audit was.”
“Pretty successful,” Liam pointed out, “if Stanley let him walk away from it.” He slid a hand around her neck and kissed her. It started out to be a quick greeting and evolved into something more.
She pulled back with a flush in her cheeks. “Remember the uniform,” she said, trying for casual and not succeeding very well.
“The hell with the uniform.”
She stepped out of reach and tried to frown. “Behave. What are you doing out here, anyway?”
His hands dropped and his smile faded. “I need a ride.”
“Sure. Where to?”
“Nenevok Creek.”
“Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “Did you talk to John and Teddy this morning?”
“Yes. They said all they did was find the body.”
“They didn’t see Rebecca?”
“They say not.”
“She could have been scared. Ru
“Maybe.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I know you’ve known them forever. I know you don’t think they could kill anyone. But Wy, you’ve flown me out to incidents before. You know anyone can do anything, given the right motivation. They were on the scene. They had the weapon. They were drunk. And they have a history of harassing people in the area.”
“But not killing them,” she said quickly, repeating his own argument back to him.
“But not killing them,” he agreed. “Anyway, alive or dead, we’ve got to find the wife. If she’s alive, she’s got to be terrified, maybe lost. I’ve already talked to Search and Rescue out at Chinook Air Force Base. They’ve been quartering the area since dawn.”
“Anything?”
“Nothing, no sign of her, no smoke or flares. No signal of any kind.” He didn’t know how wilderness-savvy Rebecca Hanover was going to be, but even a beader from Anchorage ought to be able to follow a creek downstream. Trouble was, the killer would very probably be right behind her. If he wasn’t locked up in the Newenham jail.
“Any sign she returned to the creek?”
“No smoke from the stack, and she didn’t come out to wave when the plane went over. They told me they made enough noise to make sure she would hear them.”
No more bodies, Wy thought, I don’t want to find any more bodies. “Do you think she’s dead?”
“That would be the most logical assumption,” he admitted.
“But?”
He gave a frustrated shake of his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t like the smell of this. Something about the mine site is itching at me. Something important I saw that didn’t register. I want to go back and find out what it is. Are you available?”
She smiled then, a long, slow, incite-to-riot smile. “I’m always available. I’m just not easy.”
“You’re telling me.”
TWELVE
Wood River Mountains, September 3
She was so tired.
Tired and numb to anything but putting one foot down after the other.
That morning there had been planes flying overhead, and he had kept them both in the rough shelter of spruce boughs he had built the night before. He wouldn’t allow a fire, and she was as cold as she was tired. He had insisted she put on every article of clothing she had, and still she was cold, shivering, teeth chattering, she couldn’t seem to stop them.
It didn’t matter, because none of it seemed real, not from the moment she had heard the shots and come ru
Mark, already dead. Mark, to whom she would now never be able to say she was sorry.
Somewhere deep inside, the pain and the grief stirred once, stilled again. To feel pain, to feel grief, one must think, and she would not allow thought.
She would not think of how he had stood looking at her as seconds passed, then minutes, as she did nothing, said nothing. No protest, no scream for help, she hadn’t tried to run, nothing. He’d told her he was hungry, and she’d made him the lunch she had pla
She didn’t know where they were, except that they were in the mountains, tall ones. He seemed to know where he was going, and she was aware enough to see the sun rise in the east and to see that they were traveling in a southeasterly direction.
They had seen grizzlies feeding on salmon in the creeks they crossed. They had seen moose standing in still ponds, up to their shoulders in water and with their heads submerged as they rooted for forage. They had seen rabbits begi
He carried a backpack, and they ate food cold from cans. They couldn’t risk a fire, he said, not now that they were so close to home. When they got home, he said, he would build her a fire in the stove and she would be warm again. He’d missed her, he said, he’d had no one to cook for him, to clean for him, to put the buttons back on his shirts, to help him tan the hides of the mink and the marten and the beaver he trapped during the winter, to help him dress and butcher the caribou he shot in the fall, to plant the garden in spring. He smiled at her, his odd light-colored eyes serene with happiness.
He waited for an hour after the sound of the plane engines died away before he crawled out of the shelter. He stood at the opening for a long time, listening. She stared at the backs of his knees.
He turned and bent down to hold out his hand to help her to her feet. She came out clumsily, her hair catching on a spruce branch, a lost bead, red as a drop of fresh blood, spilling from her pocket. He brushed the twigs from her jacket and jeans, plucked a spider from her collar, adjusted the straps of her knapsack. He stood looking down at her, smiling. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he said, “and now I’ve found you.” He traced her cheek with a finger and smiled. “And now we can go home.”
She shouldn’t have run off, he had told her reproachfully during the night. She was safest with him, he would protect her, watch over her, and their children. She almost came alive at that, but then he spread her legs and raped her again, and again she went numb.
It was all happening to someone else, anyway. She, Rebecca Hanover, had a husband and a home and a job. She, Rebecca Hanover, lived in Anchorage, and went ice-skating on Westchester Lagoon during the winter, and bicycling on the Coastal Trail in the summer, and took beading lessons at Color Creek Studio, and had coffee with Nina on Saturday mornings at City Market. She, Rebecca Hanover, did not hike through the backwoods, cold and tired and hungry and terrified. She, Rebecca Hanover, was not raped in those woods by a stranger who had murdered her husband.