Aurora's Gold

by K. J. Gillenwater

  Ben had offered up his place as a refuge until my apartment was cleared. Luckily, he’d been in town to check his mail and said he’d come pick me up. The idea of spending a few days alone with Ben wherever he lived didn’t bother me.

  The receptionist sitting behind the check-in desk kept glancing up. I should’ve been gone an hour ago.

  As the clock ticked closer to noon, I crossed and uncrossed my legs. I would’ve paced in the small waiting area, but Nurse Kathy had warned me to take it easy. Rest up. Not do too much.

  I picked up my phone to text Stella as a back-up plan.

  Ben drove up on his ATV.

  I looked heavenward and let out a sigh of relief. Finally. I wanted to get out of here and leave the attack behind me.

  He climbed off, removed his helmet and his shook out his shaggy head of hair.

  My stomach fluttered.

  With masculine grace he entered the building.

  “You ready?” Ben asked.

  “Let’s go.”

  Ben took my bag. “Do you have a jacket?”

  I shook my head.

  “You can wear mine.”

  When we exited the building, he stuffed my bag of supplies into one of the compartments over the back wheels and shrugged out of his leather jacket.

  “Thanks.” I put it on. It was warm from his body heat and smelled of peppermint and sweat.

  He handed me an extra helmet, which I put on gingerly over my bandaged head.

  “Get on.” Ben revved the engine of his ATV.

  Even though his Polaris had been built for one, there was enough room on the seat for two in a pinch.

  I hesitated. Not that I was afraid of riding on an ATV. I’d done it for half of my life. No self-respecting Alaskan would balk at getting on an ATV and riding off into the wilderness. I hesitated because everything in my soul told me to get on that machine. It scared me how much I wanted to be close to Ben. The Beast. A potential murderer. What was wrong with me? Was I as psycho as my mother? Seeking out difficult, impossible men in order to destroy any chance I had at a normal relationship?

  I exed the thought out of my mind.

  I am not my mother. I am not my mother. I am not my mother.

  I zipped up the jacket and climbed on behind Ben. I snaked my arms around his taut midsection and found I liked it. Liked it too much. I leaned my head into his back and turned off the flashing red warning signs popping up in my brain. I didn’t care anymore.

  Wasn’t this why I asked him to take me in rather than my best friend? Didn’t I want this deep down? The closeness? The excuse to be alone with him? Where no one could find me?

  Ben drove us out of town, turned off the main road, and headed out into the tundra. My hair whipped around the edges of my helmet, and the sound of the engine filled my ears, blocking out any other sounds. The drone soothed me. Let me drift off into another place. I’d almost died last night. I had the stitches to prove it. How ironic I sought out the help of one possibly violent man to save me from another.

  The bleak tundra landscape whizzed past. Mile after mile of empty, rolling hills of brownish green vegetation dotted with mushy spots and mud puddles. Taller mountains, the Kigluiak range, sat on the horizon. Distant. Mysterious. Daunting.

  Ben kicked into a lower gear and turned us toward a slope sprinkled with low shrubs. The ground was more solid here. Rockier. The ATV’s engine churned hard to carry two bodies up and over the ridge. As we came down on the other side, my torso melded into Ben’s back, and I gripped him even more tightly. And I liked it. The feeling of closeness. The warmth. The hardness of him.

  We were far away from town. No one could see me. No one could judge me. Kyle could go to hell, as far as I was concerned. So could my sister. Stella may have thought Ben was attractive the first time she’d met him, but the news she’d discovered had turned her off. She would’ve been the first to scold me over my choices. My best friend in the world, and I didn’t want to hear it.

  We were about twenty miles from town when Ben turned off the barely maintained trail into the brush. Although there were ATV tracks ahead, I knew Ben was likely the only ATV which had come this way. My stomach dropped. Reality set in. I’d chosen to come out in the middle of nowhere, where no one could find me, with spotty cell service on the back of an ATV. The only way out was the way in: with Ben’s help. I’d put my safety in his hands. I hoped that choice wouldn’t come back to haunt me.

  A few tundra-stunted pines appeared. With the harshness of the weather in Nome, trees were a rarity. Most couldn’t survive the brutal winter weather nor thrive in the odd, tundra soil, which froze in winter to a solid, ice-threaded mass many feet below the surface and turned into a swampy mush in the spring. However, further out from town, I knew some spots existed where trees managed to flourish. Pilgrim Hot Springs, likely a good 30 or 40 miles from where we were, thrived as a subarctic oasis with pine trees, cottonwood, and balsam poplars. Completely out of place in the bleak northern Alaska landscape. The hot springs had created a warm spot that defied the bitter cold and allowed for a lush landscape. I’d never been to the hot springs, but my father had described them to me.

  Ben veered left down a narrow trail into a grove of stubby pines. The edges of a man-made structure appeared through the branches, small and dark.

  “We’re here.” Ben announced. He turned the key.

  The silence surrounded us.

  In front of me stood an old miner’s cabin. Stacks of logs made up the main walls. The roof appeared to be tin. The windows were old single pane glass in wood frames with chipped white paint.

  “You come way out here every night?” I stayed on the ATV, uncertain. I imagined the 5 am mornings at the dock when I’d been frustrated when Ben had been ten minutes late. My earlier annoyance embarrassed me. I hadn’t had a full understanding of Ben’s situation. I’d assumed he stayed in town or at least close to town. Out here a whole different world existed. Rugged. Isolated.

  “Yep.” Ben unloaded my bag and slung it over one shoulder. “Come on inside. It’s getting cold out here.”

  I shivered in the leather jacket and my Levi’s. Although the sun hovered well above the horizon in a cloudless sky, a definite cold wind blew through the trees. A change of weather would arrive in the next twelve hours or so. “How did you find this place?” For some reason the cabin seemed familiar.

  “It belonged to my grandpa. He used to be a bush pilot up here—years ago now.”

  The pictures on Ben’s Facebook page. This was the cabin. For some reason the recognition calmed me.

  I mined my brain for any old codger I remembered from my childhood. I didn’t know if ‘years ago’ was before my time. There’d been a few off-the-grid ‘mountain men’ who’d show up in town come spring. But my memories were so cloudy, I wouldn’t be able to recall if I’d met Ben’s grandpa or not.

  “Did he build this himself?” I took in the hand-hewn logs. They were small in diameter for a log cabin, but I supposed raw logs were hard to come by up here. A homesteader made do with what he could get his hands on in this part of the world.

  Ben held open the door. “Yep. Before I was born. My dad barely remembered this place. He and my grandma moved to Idaho when he was still in grade school.”

  My heart raced. I don’t know why. Ben only wanted to give me a safe place to stay while I waited out the police tracking down Nate.

  I stepped inside. The small space had been filled with animal heads, furs, a beat-up leather couch and arm chair and a gun rack. Of course. Standard issue in Nome—well, in any home in Alaska, to be honest. To the left a long plank of wood acted as the kitchen countertop with a small, propane-fueled refrigerator, a gas stove with two burners, and a sink with a hand pump serving as the faucet. Despite the lack of space, a dish drying rack held a few dishes and pieces of silverware, and the counter was spotless and uncluttered. Two doorways on the back wall revealed a bathroom and a bedroom.

  My gaze traveled back to the arm chai
r. The same chair pictured on Facebook with the older man sitting in it—Ben’s grandpa. “So you never visited before this summer?”

  Ben set my bag next to the couch. I supposed I had been absentmindedly assigned to it for tonight’s sleeping arrangements. “I’d always wanted to visit. But I didn’t make it before…” His blue-eyed gaze grew dark.

  I wasn’t sure how he did that. Brightest blue one moment, dark as night the next.

  “I’m sorry.” A lump appeared in my throat. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s okay. You want some coffee?” Ben approached the small stove and a pot that sat on it. “All I’ve got is instant.”

  I nodded.

  He worked the pump handle at the sink until a slow trickle of water ran out. It grew stronger the more he pumped. He filled the pot and then lit the stove. Flames heated it. While we waited for the water to boil, Ben leaned against the counter. “My grandpa died last summer. Parkinson’s. Wasn’t pretty. He hadn’t been able to live out here in over ten years. Hit him pretty hard being in the nursing home in Nampa.”

  “That’s in Idaho, right?” I played stupid. He didn’t need to know I’d already looked up Nampa on the map online, even zoomed in at the street level to see the apartment listed as Ben’s last known address.

  “Yeah. Near Boise.”

  “Parkinson’s. That’s rough.”

  His gaze remained black. “Especially for a man like Grandpa. Capable. Independent. Stubborn as hell.” He ran a hand through his recently trimmed beard.

  Ben filled the cabin with his presence. All muscles and wild hair. His shoulders almost too broad to fit through the handmade doorframe. Intimidating at first. But in the moment, remembering his grandfather, a gentleness appeared I hadn’t seen before. Maybe the boy within the man shining through.

  “Sounds like someone else I know,” I said softly.

  His eyes locked onto mine. The heat in his gaze caught me off guard.

  “The water’s ready,” I said. Steam rose from the small pan.

  He turned to tend to the boiling water.

  I breathed a small sigh of relief. What were we playing at here? Why did I feel the need to push it with Ben? The police had told me to stay with a friend for a few days. That was it. Until they could locate Nate, that was the safest thing to do. Ben had only obliged me because I had nowhere else to go.

  I could’ve asked Kyle. He probably would’ve let me stay at his place. But I knew why I didn’t ask him. I also knew why I didn’t beg Stella to let me cram into her already crammed apartment. I could have. She would’ve let me do it. But instead, I had wanted this to happen. I had wanted Ben to step up. I had thrown myself on the tracks in front of a speeding train. Maybe because I liked the risk of it all. Maybe because I wanted to know more about the mysterious Ben. What woman in her right mind would’ve gotten on an ATV and ridden out in the middle of nowhere with Benjamin Abel, suspected murderer?

  Only a woman with a serious lack of self-preservation.

  Ben dug into a wooden crate that served as a cabinet on a shelf above the sink. “You like it black, right?” He spooned crystals of instant coffee into two chipped mugs.

  “Yes, black.”

  “You want a shot of whiskey in it? I’m sure my grandpa kept a steady supply around here.” Ben scrounged in the crate. Nothing. He tipped up the armchair. Nothing. His head just about hit the ceiling near the outside walls as he patrolled the room. He reached inside the mouth of a mounted bear head. “Ah ha!” He pulled out a bottle of Kentucky Bourbon.

  Nurse Kathy had warned me away from alcohol. Not a good combo with the pain meds I’d been given.

  I nodded.

  He poured.

  I drank.

  After a few minutes the alcohol helped loosen tightly held questions from my mind. “They told me at the hospital that you were the one who dropped me off.”

  “You don’t remember?” He frowned.

  “I remember coming home, but that’s about it.” My body floated comfortably. The whiskey had done the trick and taken the edge off my nerves. I repeated over and over again in my head the path I took from the truck, up the stairs, to the door. A spike of fear and then blackness.

  “Well,” he began slowly. “I wanted to apologize—about the argument we had. I’d headed out to my cabin, and something told me to set things right. I have trouble sleeping sometimes. And I’ve learned not to let things fester. Festering only makes things worse.” His brows drew together as if the words had triggered a bad memory. “When I got to your place I could see from the street your door was wide open, the lights on bright. Could sense right away something was off.”

  “Someone broke into my apartment.”

  He nodded. “I saw your truck there on the street, but didn’t see you. My first thought was Nate had come back, done something worse.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “No. Whoever had broken in was long gone. When I got to the top of the stairs you were lying in a heap. The blood…” His face grew ashen.

  For a tough military guy he sure got freaked out pretty easily over a little bit of blood. My mind whispered, murderer. I banished the thought to the back of my brain.

  “Hey, I’m okay. See?” I showed him my bandaged head.

  “When I saw you on the ground…” He shook his head. “I just acted. Your truck keys were there on the doormat. I scooped you up and took you to the hospital.”

  For a fleeting moment I wished I’d been wide awake for that moment. “I suppose I should thank you. Who knows how long I would’ve been lying there if you hadn’t come along.”

  “Anyone would’ve done the same.”

  I thought about my neighbors. “Not so sure about that.” I shared the second story with an elderly woman who lived in the apartment next to me. She’d never said one word to my dad or me in all the time we’d lived there.

  “I’m glad you’re all right.” Ben’s blue gaze burned with intensity.

  I kept eye contact with him, though I felt exposed and vulnerable. I wanted to stop talking, to put a finger over his lips, climb into his lap and kiss him. Pick up where we left off the other night. I was ready to set aside my worries and act on instinct alone. Raw, animal instinct. “Why didn’t you stick around to make sure for yourself?”

  He looked away. The moment cooled.

  I set my mug of spiked coffee on side table. I’d had enough. My self-control had been weakened. Not good.

  “Let’s just say me and the cops don’t exactly get along.” Ben’s voice grew brittle.

  That was a pretty casual way of telling someone you’d had a few brushes with the law. Not something an upstanding veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces would say. “Well, you’re going to have to talk to them. They need your fingerprints. And they’ll want your story. It might help them figure out who did this.”

  “You know as well as I do it was Nate.”

  “We might know that, but the police need to prove it.” I kicked myself for not reporting the incident with Nate behind the apartments the other night. I might have avoided the mess altogether. “Giving your side of the story and your fingerprints will help with that. Until then, Nate roams free.”

  “I’ll think about it.” He’d picked up a small chunk of wood from the same table where I’d set my mug and took out a pocket knife. He absentmindedly shaved off bits and pieces, which fell on the rough-hewn floorboards.

  “What do you mean, you’ll think about it?” Maybe what I felt for Ben was only one-sided. I’d thought at the gas station he’d indicated otherwise, but perhaps my negative reaction had turned him off. “You need to help me on this, Ben. What do you think is going to happen when you won’t talk to them? Don’t you think that will look a little suspicious?”

  He let go of a breath of air he’d been holding. “Look, I’m the one that brought you in. Why would the police think I’d be the one that hurt you?” He sliced off a perfect three-inch curl of wood. An owl took shape in his hands.


  “I don’t know. I’m just saying, why avoid talking to them and draw more attention to yourself? They want to ask you a few questions and get your fingerprints. Unless there’s a reason you don’t want to give them your fingerprints.” I pushed it a little too far with that comment. Surely he’d guess what I’d found out about him. It wasn’t as if he was unaware of the Internet or the news story written about him. He had to know that with a little bit of curiosity and digging I, or someone else, might find out more about him.

  “I got it. I hear you.” His voice went up a notch or two. He dug into the owl’s face to carve out a beak.

  “Ben, why won’t you talk to me?” I curled my legs under me. “I know there’s something you’re not telling me.” I might as well go for it. I knew too much, it was sure to slip out at the wrong time.

  “Just drop it, please.”

  “How am I supposed to do that when we’re stuck out here in this itsy bitsy cabin?” The alcohol had loosened more than my mouth, my emotions were raw and exposed. “Why won’t you explain it to me?”

  “I’m not sure why my life is any business of yours.” He dug harder into the owl, making tiny little cuts all over its body. Feathers. “I didn’t ask you about your mother. Seems you’ve got a story you don’t want to share either.”

  I shot him a look. My mother was a topic I avoided, but if that’s what it took to get to the truth, I could give him the short-and-sweet version. “She abandoned me, if you need to know. Pretended for twelve years that Henry was my dad, until she told me the truth. Then she split. Haven’t seen her since. There, happy?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know. That’s awful.”

  I wanted the sympathy to roll off my back. I’d never wanted it or needed it, but hearing those words soothed me. I feigned interest in my coffee mug. “If there’s something you don’t want the police finding out about you, don’t you think I have a right to know at this point?” I couldn’t stop the freight train now. It had already left the station. “You’re my employee. You’re tangled up in the mess I found myself in. When you chose to keep working for me, saving my life, making me fall for you…”