by Karen Harper
Back at Bryce’s house, she told him, “I can’t get used to how quiet it is. Time for just the two of us, no Chip, no lodge guests, no Suze, no responsibilities—not even dogs.”
Settled on the couch in front of a lovely fire he’d made, he tried to shake everything else off too. But it was hard to forget that other fire that had killed Getz and incinerated his hoard of treasures. Treasures—like the historic treasure they sought, and the treasured moments and memories they were building together.
He poured them goblets of chardonnay. They clinked the crystal rims, sipped and looked into each other’s eyes. He asked his Alexa for some slow dance music and pulled her up into his arms when the old Sinatra tune “Fly Me to the Moon” began.
Tight together, they swayed, turned a bit. It seemed they fitted together well this way, and he longed for another way. Patience, he told himself. If they didn’t sit down again and chat, he’d move too fast, make love to her standing right here, so he broke their embrace and tugged her toward the couch again.
“I saw online while you were packing up for Chip and changing your clothes that there may be a burst of aurora borealis tonight,” he said. “Heavenly fireworks to remember on this night. I want to make love to you and spend the night together. I want you to consider marrying me. I want you, my sweetheart. I supposed it’s fast on earth time, but we’re not running on that, are we? We found each other late and in a shocking way, but we can make up for that on our time.”
Wide-eyed, she nodded. “I want us to try. I do love you—how you treat me, how good you are with Chip. Let’s drink to that.”
“Forever,” he whispered as they clinked the rims of their goblets.
After a few sips, he took her glass from her unresisting hand and set it down by his on the glass coffee table. He reached for her, and she came into his embrace willingly, even eagerly. Whatever had happened in his life, the crises, the near misses, his love of diving deep and flying high—this was the very best thing.
* * *
Meg watched as Bryce tamped the fire down a bit and put the screen in front of the hearth. Leaving their goblets on the coffee table, holding hands, they went down the hallway toward the bedrooms. His was at the end of the hall, an eternity away, she thought. She was floating and did not feel her feet on the floor.
He did not turn on the bedroom light, but left the hall light on, which threw a pale golden shaft across his bed. A king-sized bed for a single man? Tonight she would help to fill it, and maybe ever after—if she could find a way to leave Suze, to move Chip, and to help Bryce survive this all-consuming case of his—of theirs.
They kept kissing, kissing. Caressing. Despite the chill in the room, she felt flushed as they shed their clothes and climbed in under the covers he ripped back.
She was suddenly afraid, but then not. This was Bryce, and she loved him, trusted him. Just as she had loved and trusted Ryan. Loving Bryce now didn’t diminish the love she’d had for her husband. This was something new, and while new could be strange and even a little scary, there was something about Bryce that felt comforting and familiar. She felt as though she’d known him for much longer, as though they fit well together because they’d somehow been made to do so. Yes, being with Bryce was new and scary and thrilling, but it also felt incredibly right.
Hands, lips, even his tongue whispered promises along her skin. She held on to him, dazed, ecstatic. She felt needy and so hot she kicked the covers off and met him halfway, touching, stroking.
He fumbled in his bedside drawer—he was prepared for this—then tugged her under him. Again she was ready, trusting, but so eager she didn’t know herself.
They came together beautifully, perfectly. She cried out at the wonder of it.
“Too fast?” he spoke at last.
“No—fine. More than fine.”
“You are that. So perfect. Perfect fit—us.”
She spiraled up, up. Flying. Not afraid. The view, the feeling, the sky and this man, so awesome.
He collapsed beside her, panting. She lay tight to his side.
“Look,” he gasped, pointing, and she saw what he meant.
The curtained window of his room with its dark, lofty view had turned greenish gold. At first, she thought of the night they’d been close to making love at Alex’s house and that screaming, bright-light helicopter descended. Not here! Not again!
But no. She saw what he meant, remembered what he had said before about the gift—the good luck—of perhaps seeing the aurora borealis together tonight.
A random thing right now, a special thing, a gift and blessing.
He dragged a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around both of them as they went to the window and he pulled the curtains even wider open. The glow poured in to shimmer everything to life. Luminous, unearthly colors pulsated, pale green gold, dark blue with streaks of upward light. It was as if they were standing under shimmering water.
“Good luck for us,” he whispered, holding her close.
“I’ve seen it before, but never like this.”
“And I’ve never been in love—really in love before. Meg, the truth is, in the time I’ve known you, I’ve quickly found it impossible to imagine my life without you. What do you think about the idea of getting married again?”
Her stomach fluttered with butterflies. “Married...to you? Are you asking?”
He smiled. “I am. Will you marry me, Meg?”
She surprised herself by her lack of hesitation. “Absolutely.” This wasn’t moving on—this was moving forward. With Bryce. It’s what Ryan would have wanted. For her to be happy.
He leaned forward and kissed her softly before he spoke. “Now, let’s get back in bed and watch this light together. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask Chip if he’d be okay with us getting married.”
“If soccer’s in the deal, he’ll probably say yes.”
He laughed. She did too. They hurried back to bed and reveled in the glory of the lights and of their love.
* * *
“Me and Mark talked really late, after his mom turned the lights out,” Chip told them the next midmorning when they picked him up and said goodbye to the Ralstons for now. “Then his mom said it was late and stop fooling around, because he had school coming up even if I didn’t.”
Meg and Bryce’s eyes met before he looked back at the road as they drove into town again, this time to show Chip the Last Chance Mining Museum and where the Mount Roberts Tramway began.
“So why is this place called ‘the last chance’?” Chip asked when they parked at the museum.
Bryce told him, “The men panning for gold could run out of money—or good weather—before problems came along. But some of them stayed on, desperate to make their fortunes. Some did get rich, most didn’t.”
“I’d like to be rich someday,” the boy told them as they went inside. “But I’d rather be good at soccer.”
“If you’re good enough at soccer someday,” Bryce said, “that might mean being rich.”
The three of them went through the displays, which included a lot about mining for gold without a stream and metal pan. Later, they’d stopped for hamburgers when Bryce’s cell phone rang.
Meg saw him punch the screen and frown at it.
“Email coming in from the Big Man,” he said. “More than one. Yes, I think it’s what I’ve been waiting for at last.”
Chip piped up, “Does it mean we have to leave? And who’s the Big Man?”
“My boss. Just a nickname. Yeah, let’s finish up here and head on back to the house.”
His intense gaze met Meg’s. His eyebrows nearly met as he frowned. For some reason, fear stabbed her. That this precious time might be over. That Bryce would go away, be called to Washington, the NTSB office at Anchorage, at the least. That he would be in danger again and she couldn’t help him or go with him. That she might lose him.
She feared the light of the glowing aurora she’d been living in right now would turn into a single shooting star and disappear.
* * *
She got Chip in bed, listening to his tales of being with his new friend Mark. Surely it would be good for her boy to have more friends here than he did around the lodge or even at school since he immediately rode the school bus out of town after classes.
Finally, he wound down. “I do miss the dogs, though,” he admitted. “But if we live here someday, one of them could come too or we could get a new one—if they just had puppies, but you said they got fixed and can’t.”
“Go to sleep, honey. We’ll talk about all that tomorrow.”
She wondered if Bryce would still ask Chip if he could marry her, or had business slammed back in now and that would have to wait?
She left Chip’s door ajar in case he called her, but went to Bryce’s office, where he was staring at his laptop and printing what looked like reproductions of grainy photographs.
“Old pictures were in the boxes in Lloyd’s plane?” she asked, seeing one emerging from the printer.
She moved closer to Bryce and looked over his shoulder at the screen.
“Those boxes in Lloyd’s plane had a lot more jewelry,” he said. “And some old papers—a manifest in shaky handwriting of what Jefferson Davis and his troops carried. But the reproductions of some of these photos are not of that era, not tintypes or anything like that. Much more modern. That’s what I’m printing now. And they seem to be Alaskan scenes. Could Lloyd have added these photos to what was already in the boxes? I’m hoping that seeing these printouts will be better than on this small laptop screen.”
“Should I not be here for this?”
He turned to look at her. “You’ve been with me all the way. And if these shots that look like they could be taken in Alaska—or hell, Russia, for all I know—are Witlow’s, maybe you’ll recognize something you’ve seen that I don’t know. Let’s spread them out on the couch since my desk is a mess. Sorry to have this ruin our last night here, but I’m convinced we’ll make up for it, once this is over.”
But he said that matter-of-factly. Not teasing, not with intensity. All business now, obsessed with the puzzle of the treasure again. He was on his knees by the couch, laying them out.
She kneeled beside him, scrutinizing one picture, then the next. Some were aerial views, but some were taken from ground level of a small cabin in a vast expanse of grassland and then several of the small building in the snow. Now where had she seen a cabin like that before, one with two huge caribou racks nailed over the front door?
“This is slightly above the tree line, way up somewhere,” she told him. “Look, there’s the shadow on the snow of the person who took the picture. It looks like someone in a parka with a big hood, someone with a small sled loaded with goods—with something.”
“Right,” he said, nodding.
“No clue where it is, of course. Either vast expanses of grass or snow, snow, snow. Oh, here’s one with some geographics in it, that might help us identify where it was taken,” she said, reaching for another printout as Bryce leaned closer.
She held it up to study it. If she had not been kneeling, she would have fallen to the floor.
She couldn’t believe her eyes. She—she knew this place, the distinctive height and angle of this mountain, its sheer rock face without clinging snow and ice in this shot.
Granted, she’d seen this scene just once and not in the dead of winter, but she was sure. She had vowed she would never be there again, but this was it for sure, including the small, elongated frozen lake where Carter had landed his plane. The distant herd of animals. The—the mountain itself.
“Meg. Sweetheart?” came a voice from a distance, as if it were being ripped away by the howling wind.
Her hands started to tremble so hard that the paper rattled. Bryce put an arm around her waist.
“This is the Caribou Mountain and lake area,” she said, her voice not her own. She slammed the paper down on the couch and stabbed it with one finger. “It’s about sixty miles northwest of Falls Lake. I only saw it once but I even remember that cabin at a distance and the skinny lake. And that is Caribou Cliff,” she said, slamming the piece of paper with her fist. “Which killed Ryan.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Bryce held Meg on his lap until she stopped shaking.
“I can’t believe it, but I know that place,” she told him.
“You were there once, before or after he died? And you just flew past it? How can you be so sure? Or were pictures in the newspapers when his crash was covered?”
“Yes, it was in the papers, but I was nearly comatose—wouldn’t look at any of it, asked Suze to keep it all away. But then, later, about three months, I decided I had to see it, just once and that would be it. I guess I wanted closure, but it didn’t really work. Anyway, I asked Carter Jones, an old friend of Ryan’s, to take me up there to see where he’d died. I—I didn’t even tell Suze and for sure not Chip. I can’t believe it. What are the odds he’d have pictures of this place? What does this mean?”
He held her tighter. She was still trembling, but her voice became more steady as she talked.
“Maybe nothing. Maybe something,” Bryce said. “I don’t normally believe in coincidences, but sometimes that’s all it is.”
He could call it a coincidence—to Meg, it felt like fate.
“So you had Carter fly past the site?” Bryce asked.
“Yes, but we decided to land at that little lake you can see at the edge of a couple of the photos. It was a nice day. I sat in the back, not the copilot’s seat. Out the side window I saw it all. The lake didn’t allow a long water runway. We landed on it, got out and trekked maybe a quarter mile to the cliff where Ryan’s plane—where he had hit the solid rock face in the fog or storm.”
She sat up straighter, pulling away from Bryce’s embrace, fumbling for a tissue in her pocket. She blew her nose, then sighed so hard she nearly slid off his knees.
“You don’t have to tell me more if you don’t want to—or can’t,” he said, steadying her with a hand on her back. “If you didn’t tell anyone else...that was a private time for you. It’s okay.”
“But the thing is, we discovered there were little caves in the rock at ground level, maybe going in ten to fifteen feet where the ice or wind must have eroded—carved them out years ago. So I left a little lantern I’d brought with me, a special one, lit—though, of course, it must have gone out quickly. That entry to that cavern led clear around to another entrance. But the other thing is, besides the fact those little caverns might make good hiding places, we could see a little cabin, the one in a couple of the photos. But we didn’t go near it.”
As if all business now, she slid off his lap to her knees again and riffled through the papers on the couch. “Here, this one and this. See the cabin?” she asked, thrusting them at him. “Of course, it could be one of numerous hunter cabins, even an old prospector’s place. But it—or those caverns—could be a great place for someone to hide a cache of—of whatever.”
“And with all these photos of it here, it could have been Lloyd Witlow’s cabin, or at least one he used. But your point is, used for what?”
“Used for another piece to the puzzle, for all we know right now. When we were in Lloyd’s house briefly that day, we focused on the photo and inscription of him with Rina, but there was that other photo on the wall of a small cabin with caribou racks—maybe this cabin! It meant something special to him—it might have been his getaway—his secret storehouse.”
“Another long shot, but that’s all we’ve had. I’ll fly there. If you can tell me exactly where it is, where to find that little hidden lake—and then those caves. I’ll take Rafe.”
Still with papers in her hands, she turned to him.
“I should go too.”
“Sweetheart, you can’t want to face that place again. I can’t risk that for you.”
“You’re risking yourself and Rafe. You’ll need someone in the copilot seat to help you navigate, spot that cabin or lake in that vast snowfield. It was in the summer when I saw it, but I can help. I can sit in the copilot seat. I haven’t wanted to—just couldn’t, but I’m ready. If I’m with you.”
“I still say you’ve done enough. And just because Witlow had some of the jewelry outside of the boxes and more inside his plane doesn’t mean he siphoned some off for himself—or for Rina.”
“That’s it!” she said. “He could have been in the boxes and was hiding some of it for himself. Or he felt the mayor, or Melissa and her husband—or even Rina and Todd—were not leveling with him. Like maybe whoever is behind this was holding back, just using Lloyd and poor Getz too. And then got rid of them when they took some of the priceless goods or became some sort of liability, threatening to expose the treasure.”
“I’m still not sure about the plane being sabotaged. The way you and Chip described its lame duck landing, the problem could have also been malfunction or novice pilot error. You could be right about your theory, but not about going with me. As I said, you can’t risk that and I can’t either. I’m drawing the line here. Absolutely not.”
* * *
The next day at the lodge, even as Meg packed her duffel bag with food and a warm change of clothes, they still argued.
“See,” she said as he ended the call to the Big Man, “he thinks I’d be invaluable. He thinks I should go.” She turned to Bryce, hand on her hip. “Even if you get the exact coordinates in those mountains and land the plane on that small frozen lake, you should not search for the caves or the cabin alone. You need a guide—someone who’s been there before. Great that Rafe agreed to stay with the plane to guard it, so you wouldn’t be trapped there if someone was around and tried to sabotage it. Chip’s back in school tomorrow, so he won’t be fussing that we’re gone.