by Blake Crouch
“Okay, here’s something,” Kalyn said. “Says they’re a small grouping of hills ranging between two and four thousand feet. Oriented east to west. Thirty miles long, ten wide. Two hundred miles north of Denali National Park. Two hundred west of Fairbanks.”
“I’m guessing you can’t drive there,” Will said.
Kalyn had already accessed MapQuest and was executing a search of the area west of Fairbanks.
“Alaska Three goes south to Anchorage. Looks like there are some unpaved roads that head north and west, but none of those come within a hundred and fifty miles of the Wolverines.”
“Hence the floatplane.”
Devlin said, “So this guy is flying women out there, into those hills?”
“Looks that way,” Kalyn said.
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know, baby. Part of me doesn’t want to know.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Will gave Devlin her physical therapy and left her half-asleep in front of the TV. He took the stairs up to the next floor, knocked softly on the door of room 617. Kalyn answered in a tank top and running shorts that accentuated her long-muscled arms and legs.
“Can we talk?” Will asked.
They sat on the king-size bed, everything quiet save for the whisper of the central-heating unit blowing warm air out from under the window. Kalyn’s curls were uncurling and the shower had nearly stripped the black dye from her hair, returning it to her natural brown, now pinned up off her shoulders.
“What are you thinking of doing?” he asked.
“Same thing you are.”
“There’s no telling what we’ll find out there, and Devi’s been through a lot already.”
“I can protect you both,” Kalyn said.
Will smiled. “Aren’t I supposed to say that? You’re challenging my fragile ego.”
“Look, you don’t have to go. Head home if you want.”
“But you’re going to the Wolverine Hills.”
“There’s nothing else for me to do.”
“What if that guy was lying? He was dying, Kalyn. What’d he have to lose?”
“Guess I’ll find out.”
“Or we could call the police now. Let them take it from here.”
“Same sort of folks who never found Rachael to begin with, but accused you of her death? No thanks, Will. I’ve sacrificed too much to hand them the ball on first and goal. Watch them fuck it up.”
Will leaned back against the headboard, glanced toward the window at the lights of downtown Fairbanks.
“Suppose we do find out what happened to my wife. Your sister. Then what? They’ll still be gone. We’ll still be missing them.”
“Won’t it help you move on?”
“I don’t know. Rachael’s been gone five years, but you know, I still remember the night she didn’t come home, and the following day, when everyone came to my house to hold vigil, like it just happened. I feel stuck in that moment.”
“I’m well acquainted with that feeling.”
“What do you want, Kalyn? What do you expect to gain from all this?”
“Peace. I think. And to know exactly what happened to my sister. You don’t understand. Before Lucy disappeared, my life was on this perfect trajectory. I’d made special agent. I was doing well, advancing at the Bureau. Doing exactly what I wanted to do. Making the friends and the connections I wanted to make. I loved my place in the world, but I was also thinking ten years down the road, fifteen. Had it all planned out. Stint with the FBI, then prosecutor. Maybe a run for office. But after Lucy . . .”
“You derailed.”
“Yeah.”
“You can still do anything you want. You know that, right?”
“Actually, I can’t. I was fired from the FBI. A Bureau psychologist wrote terrible things in my file that’ll always be there. ‘Emotionally unstable.’ ‘Clinical depression.’ That part of my life, those dreams . . . they’re dead.” She said it with no emotion, no resentment. For the first time, Will noticed the long blanched lines down Kalyn’s wrists.
He touched them, traced a finger along the scars.
“Last year,” she said, her voice just a whisper, “was rough. I was just so tired, you know? I couldn’t breathe. You ever think about doing something like that?” He nodded. “But you had Devlin.”
“Without her, I don’t know that I’d still be here.”
“You ever feel just . . . broken?”
Will looked up from the bedspread into Kalyn’s eyes, realized he’d never really seen her before. “You’re one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever met,” he said. “That’s the truth.”
Kalyn scooted toward him.
It was a soft and effortless melding of energies, long pent-up electrical currents with someplace finally to go. They came apart breathless and a little stunned, Will’s heart going like mad, the cool smoothness of Kalyn’s leg against his arm practically unbearable and the taste of her humming in the corners of his mouth.
“I can’t do this,” he said, and he climbed off the bed and left the room.
THIRTY-FIVE
The next morning, Will was shaving in the bathroom when Devlin knocked on the door. She walked in, climbed up on the sink, stared at her father, shaving cream smeared across his chin.
“Morning,” Will said, and went back to shaving. “Sleep well?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Too well. I could still use a few more hours.”
Devlin smeared paste on a toothbrush, started brushing her tongue. “What are we doing today?”
“Well, you get to hang out here, do whatever you want.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Kalyn and I are gonna see if we can find someone to fly us into the Wolverine Hills.” Will drew the razor carefully over the curve of his chin.
“And if you find someone to do it?”
“Then we’re gonna go.”
“Without me?”
“Yeah.”
Devlin spit into the sink and slammed her toothbrush down.
Will turned on the tap, rinsed the shaving cream and the severed bristles off the blades.
“Honey, I have no idea what, if anything, we’ll find out there. I’ve already put you in enough danger, and you are way too precious to be dragged—”
“You wouldn’t be dragging me, Dad.”
Will picked up a hand towel, dabbed his face. “It’s just gonna be for a day, Devi.”
She’d gone short of breath, her eyes welling.
“Calm down, baby girl. I want you to—”
“Stop calling me that! I’m not a kid!” Her eyes were burning.
“You’re right. You’re not a kid, but you are sixteen, and I feel rotten enough having brought you along. I’m not making that mistake—”
Devlin wrapped her arms around him, shaking, crying. “Please take me with you. I don’t wanna be left. She’s my mother, you know. I wanna find out what happened just as bad as you.”
“Look at me. No, look at me.” He held his daughter by the arms. “I’m not putting you in danger.”
“You’re all I have, Dad. You know that?”
“Of course I do.”
“So we stay together, no matter what.”
The office for Arctic Skies was tucked into a strip mall along a river that snaked through the middle of Fairbanks. Devlin, Will, and Kalyn walked in at 10:00 A.M.—when the phone book said the business opened—found a man leaning back in a swivel chair, his feet propped up on a desk, smoking a cigar, perusing the Daily News-Miner. The office was small and spare, just a desk, computer, couple of chairs, artificial tree. Framed posters hung on the walls—photos of snowy mountains, grizzly bears catching salmon, the northern lights.
“Buck Young?” Will asked.
The man glanced over the top of his newspaper, blew a puff of smoke out the side of his mouth.
“One and the same.”
He looked trail-worn—red, watery eyes, weathered skin, salt-
and-pepper beard. A Yankees baseball cap that might have been twenty years old rested on a mop of shoulder-length graying hair, unwashed for God knew how long.
Will said, “We’re looking for someone to fly us out to the Wolverine Hills.”
“Wolverines? Really?”
“Yeah. You familiar with the area?”
“Sure. Flew a hunter out there couple years back. Here, ya’ll sit down.”
There were just two chairs on their side of the desk. Devlin sat on the arm of Kalyn’s.
“Anybody live out there?” Will asked.
“Oh no. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more remote piece of country in all of Alaska.”
“So it’s public land?”
“If I recall, some of it’s public-owned, but most belongs to the Athabascan Indians. Look, if you’re paying customers, I’ll fly you anywhere you wanna go. But I have to ask, why the Wolverines? Next to the Brooks Range, McKinley, the Wrangells, they ain’t much to look at. And it’s an awful long flight for such dinky mountains.”
“I’m afraid we have our hearts set on it,” Kalyn said.
Buck swung his boots off the desk and leaned forward in his chair. “What exactly you wanna do out there?”
Will said, “We’d like to spend two nights. Do some camping and hiking.”
“You have gear?”
“No.”
“I can outfit you with everything you’ll need.” Buck took a pocket calculator out of a drawer and began punching in numbers and mumbling to himself. “Four hundred miles round trip. Gear rental for two nights. Three people. Guided? Unguided?”
“Just the three of us.”
“You’re looking at around three thousand.”
Kalyn glanced at Will. He nodded, mouthed “I can cover it,” then turned back to Buck. “We’d like to leave as soon as possible. Today would be ideal.”
They went to meet the bush pilot at 1:00 P.M. at the Chena Marina, a floatplane pond on the outskirts of Fairbanks, found Buck loading supplies into a cargo pod under the fuselage of a high-winged single-engine Cessna 185. The exterior of the Skywagon did not inspire peace of mind, the green-and-yellow design scheme chipped and faded, dents in the amphibious floats.
“I think I’ve got you all set,” Buck said. “There’s supposed to be some weather coming in this evening, so we should get in the air straight away.”
It was a four-seater, with plenty of storage space in back, the interior upholstered in light gray carpeting, the leather seats covered in sheepskin. Devlin begged to sit next to Buck, and she was awarded copilot status. They got themselves buckled in, and soon the engine was firing up, Buck taxiing away from the docks toward the end of the pond, his voice blaring through the headsets that everyone wore: “Should be up about ninety minutes.”
“How fast and high will we go?” Devlin asked.
“Hundred and twenty knots at forty-five hundred feet.”
“Cool.”
They’d reached the far end of the lake.
The three-hundred-horsepower engine wound up, the prop disappeared, and the Cessna accelerated on the water.
Will stared out the window as the shore raced by, the plane skipping across little waves, and he was thinking about their conversation on the drive over from the hotel. He and Kalyn had agreed on the ground rules of this expedition. They were going to look. Not get involved in anything, with anyone. If they found something, they’d wait for Buck to come get them, notify the authorities on their return to Fairbanks. Safety, protecting Devlin—that was their top priority.
The bumps soon turned into smooth forward motion, Buck easing back on the stick, Devlin watching his feet work the rudder pedals.
They soared over the trees. Will swallowed, his ears popping, the pond, the city of Fairbanks falling away beneath him, and he could see at once how small and insignificant it seemed, surrounded on every side by miles and miles of muskeg bogs and untouched boreal forest, marred only by an occasional road and the braids of the Chena and Tanana rivers. He reached forward, patted Devlin’s shoulder, felt Kalyn squeeze his hand.
THIRTY-SIX
For fifteen minutes, they followed the westward track of Alaska 3, climbing steadily toward cruising altitude. That gray thread of pavement hooked south toward Anchorage, but they flew on, due west into the Alaskan bush.
Not even the brown, unpeopled waste of northern Arizona rivaled this level of desolation. No sign of human habitation. Endless spruce forests interspersed with patches of turning paper birch—veins of gold from Will’s vantage point.
They flew over foothills, expanses of high tundra. Buck pointed out herds of caribou and a massive white bulk far to the south—McKinley, highest mountain in North America.
An hour into the flight, Devlin asked, “Are there grizzly bears where we’re going?”
“You bet,” Buck said. “Bears live everywhere out here. And you want to avoid them, especially now. It’s late season and they’re trying to fatten up in advance of hibernation.”
“What about wolves?”
“Plenty of those, too.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Oh, no. You’re lucky if you see one. Also keep an eye out for caribou, moose, fox. One good thing about coming to a little-known place like the Wolverines—the wildlife will be abundant. Hey, I think I see our destination way, way off on the horizon. Samantha, why don’t you take the controls for a little while?”
Will felt nauseous and he had a crushing headache from the noise.
“We’ll be in the Wolverines in just a minute here,” Buck said.
“Could you do a quick flyover?” Kalyn asked. “Just so we can get a sense of the area.”
“Sure.” He pushed the stick and the Cessna dipped earthward, Will’s stomach lifting, Devlin squealing.
“It’s like a roller coaster,” she said.
The plane banked left.
“That’s them?” Kalyn asked.
“There’re your hills.”
They were only a thousand feet above the ground now, and the Wolverines lay beneath them like a succession of low earthen waves. It was undisputedly a minor range, a rippling uplift amid a vast, otherwise-unbroken forest. They could see the whole of the chain in one glimpse—wooded hills rising toward the biggest mountain of the bunch, a four-thousand-foot unnamed peak, most of it above timberline and blanketed in scarlet and yellow from the turning underbrush. A valley cut through the middle of the range, and it was here that they spotted two lakes, one in the middle, one on the eastern edge.
“You could land on either of those lakes?” Kalyn asked.