Under The Midnight Sun

by Marilyn Cunningham

  At his feet the rocky shore blended almost imperceptibly with the icy sea. Behind him the land stretched monotonously, broken only occasionally by hillocks of low arctic shrubs. Half a mile away the village stood out darkly against the lighter tundra.

  Aside from that, nothing indicated habitation; only a small shed about two hundred feet away broke the featureless landscape. He couldn’t think of a better place to talk without being overheard.

  But talking didn’t seem half as urgent as kissing the lovely woman who stood beside him. Kissing her, holding her warm body, feeling her breasts against his chest with nothing between them. The desire was nearly overpowering. Forcing the thought away, he cleared his suddenly dry throat.

  “Someone knew that Charlie intended to meet you,” he said. “Did anyone overhear you when you talked to him this afternoon?

  “I don’t think so. Pasco and Wilson popped up often, but they weren’t in the bar when I talked to Charlie. I don’t think there was anyone else in the bar except the waitress.” She hesitated, remembering.

  “Yes? What about the waitress?”

  “The woman tending bar was also the waitress. She brought my sandwich just as Charlie left. Or I thought she did. Actually, I have no idea how long she was standing there.”

  “So, you could have been overheard, or Charlie could have talked to someone. I suppose anyone could have known about the meeting.”

  “Maybe we could ask a casual question or two at the bar—”

  “Hasn’t the obvious occurred to you?” His tone was sharper than he meant it to be because he couldn’t erase a feeling of guilt. By allowing Malinche to pursue this, he was implicated in Charlie’s death. “Any time you start asking around, someone winds up dead. Innocent people.”

  His assessment stung. “Are you suggesting we forget about it? Let whoever killed my brother—and now Charlie—get away with it?”

  He sighed. “I might be inclined to do just that. We’re in way over our heads here. Netta seems like a nice woman. I’d hate for her to wind up dead just for talking to us. How do you weigh it? Keep nosing around and put more people in danger?” He was talking to himself as much as to Malinche. “Or do we just forget about Dimitri and accept the official version of his death? Which means the murderer goes unpunished.” And still free to find us and silence us for good, he thought.

  “Netta wanted to help. And you know very well if we don’t do something, no one will,” she said stubbornly.

  “Yes, and I believe someone else knows that, too.” He shrugged. “I doubt the choice is ours any longer—hasn’t been for quite a while. We could stop investigating, but how do we convince whoever is on our tail that we’ve stopped? We can hardly put an ad in the paper saying, ‘I give up—you can forget about us now.’”

  Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. He probably could give up. His boss wanted him to cut and run, and he suspected if he washed his hands of the matter and went back to Anchorage he would be shipped out where he couldn’t cause any more trouble.

  But trouble to whom? What anonymous person was pulling his strings, had threatened his life? He was a man who minded his own business, but he had been pushed too far.

  Brian had never considered himself hero material. He was a firm believer in the old adage: He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.

  But he couldn’t leave Malinche to face things alone. Not now.

  It could be that dragon, although he couldn’t understand why it would pose a threat to anyone. It was like dozens of others Dimitri had made. He’d scrutinized it time and again and had seen nothing unusual. Or maybe she had picked up some information she didn’t know she had. Whoever was trailing them would assume she had told him everything she knew. There seemed to be nothing to do but forge ahead. He just wished he knew what to do.

  He had another reason for wishing he were not involved. But there was more than one danger. Malinche was growing on him, becoming necessary to him He couldn’t look at her without wanting her. This terrible, aching yearning, this longing to hold her, to kiss her, to feel her silky hair falling over his chest as it had done not so long ago in the cave, must be perfectly visible on his face. And every glance at her told him they were still from two different worlds.

  She shivered, and he was immediately concerned. She had been sheltered all her life, shielded from storms. She was doing well, all things considered, but she was delicate, vulnerable. She should be cossetted, protected.

  But not by me, he reminded himself. She had a Daddy for that.

  “Let’s get back to the hotel,” he said. “There’s nothing more we can do here. Maybe after a good night’s sleep, something will occur to us.”

  He knew what would occur to him. Making love to her in a regular bed would be heaven.

  A heaven he would pay for later.

  “I keep thinking if we just keep trying we’ll come up with a clue,” she said. “It must be the letter.”

  They turned and walked back toward the village. Malinche kept slightly ahead. When they got back to the hotel, he was going to insist that she be more careful. He was going to ignore her stubborn resistance to suggestions, and see that she did as she was told. It might have been her as well as Charlie who “met with an accident.” He would stick close by—certainly no hardship…

  He glanced at the shed as they walked by it, absently, merely noting it was there.

  Something shimmered in his subconscious, a faint, illusive uneasiness, but there seemed to be no reason for it. They were completely isolated. Nothing near them but the old abandoned shed, used for storing worn-out kayaks, leftover oil drums. There was no way he could have seen a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye—

  A volcano exploded in his head. He staggered. Pain shattered him, fragmented him. He felt himself falling into a kaleidoscope of flames and fury.

  He tried to fight it off, to climb back up, but the pain intensified. Then he was falling into an endless chasm of darkness.

  Then nothing.

  Chapter Ten

  Unaware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, Malinche grasped Brian’s shoulders and tried to turn him onto his back. He lay sprawled facedown on the ice. She saw with sickening clarity that his fair hair was matted with blood.

  Was he dead? He couldn’t be, he just couldn’t!

  Moving him terrified her. Any movement might start the blood flowing, but she had to see his face. She had to know if he still lived.

  She couldn’t turn him with the pack on is shoulders. She had to get it off, a seemingly impossible task in her panicked condition. Calm down, she ordered herself. She’d be no help to anyone this way. And she had to hurry; her fingers were becoming more numb by the second.

  Finally, she located the buckles and unclasped them. Choking back a sob, she pulled the pack clear of his body. Now she could turn him. Pushing and pulling against his inert weight, she managed to position him so that she could see his face.

  Her heart froze in her chest. She struggled against dizziness that threatened to envelop her. He was terribly pale, a translucent unnatural paleness, and his eyes remained shut. His lips were a cold faint blue, his mouth slightly open. If he lived it was by a thin thread.

  Leaning over, she put her ear to his mouth. His breath came faintly, but it was there. Relief nearly swept her back into the darkness from which she had just emerged. Her weakness was quickly gone, replaced by grim determination. He was alive now, although future prospects didn’t look good for either of them.

  Ever since she had regained consciousness a few minutes ago, she had resolutely kept her eyes and her thoughts only on Brian. It was the only way to control her panic. How they came to be on an ice sheet out in the open water, she had no idea, but that was certainly where they were.

  She shook him again, more forcefully It might cause the blood to flow again, but he couldn’t just lie there, waiting to freeze to death. She wouldn’t allow him to leave her alone!

  Nothing. No respons
e at all. She gave up and covered her face with her hands. Hunched over on the ice, she tried to shield herself from the wind that poked and twisted at her back, seeking a way through her down parka. Even though she was warmly dressed and the sun still circled above the horizon, she was cold.

  There had to be a way out of this mess. Brian had to move…

  As though she willed it, a low moan escaped his mouth. She stared at his face, hope mingling with trepidation. He still hadn’t opened his eyes, but he seemed to be regaining consciousness. His gloved hand dug into the ice, as though searching for something.

  She grasped his hand and squeezed tightly. “Brian! Brian! Wake up! Please, wake up!”

  He groaned again, and his eyes slowly opened.

  With a cry, she knelt and cradled his head on her knees. He stared up at her, bewildered.

  “Malinche?”

  “Yes, it’s me. Are you all right?”

  He tried to smile, but it was a weak effort. “All right? It doesn’t feel much like it. What happened?”

  “We’ll talk in a minute. Can you sit up?”

  He struggled to a sitting position, rubbing his head. “I feel like I came out on the losing end of a fight with a grizzly. What happened?” Still rubbing his head, he glanced away from her and stiffened. “And where the hell are we?”

  Malinche gazed across the ice-choked water, which she had been trying not to do ever since she regained consciousness on this miserable floating chunk of ice. As far as she could determine, they were well offshore; all around her ice floes churned and rocked, performing a mad ballet. The noise was horrendous as ice ground against ice, sometimes breaking in the process, sometimes slipping away to leave chasms of ice blue water between.

  “Where are we?” she repeated in a small voice. “How about between the devil and the deep blue sea.”

  “Very funny,” he growled. He started to struggle to his feet, but the chunk of ice swayed precariously and he sank back down. “Are you all right?”

  “I suppose so. I came to before you did, and I don’t have a headache. But I don’t have a clue as to how we got here.”

  He shook his head. “Let’s try to reconstruct it. The last thing I remember, I was walking away from the shore toward the village. You were slightly in front—that’s all I remember.”

  “We were walking by an old shed,” she said. “I heard something—a thud, a grunt—and I turned Just as something hit me over the head. I didn’t know a thing until I woke up. You were lying there on the ice—you were so still.” She swallowed, remembering her fear. “I thought you were dead.”

  And I was scared to death. Not just because I might be alone on a chunk of ice floating God knows where, but scared that you might be gone. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.

  “Well, I’m not dead.” He rubbed his head, then scanned the blood clinging to his fingers. “So, somebody hit us over the head. How could I have been so stupid? I was so careful to get away from everybody so no one would overhear us, and I walked right by that shed—where anyone could be hiding.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. It seemed to be abandoned—”

  “And I thought I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I should have moved quicker—”

  “There was nothing you could have done. There’s no reason to berate yourself. But what did he accomplish by marooning us out here?”

  Brian gazed out over the sea, a sinking feeling in his chest. The surface of the water was heaving and tossing with chunks of ice for as far as he could see. The pattern appeared random, but he knew it wasn’t. A light wind combined with the tide to push the ice in one direction. Horrified, he saw that although individual chunks spun and turned, the field of broken ice was drifting out into the open sea—including the island they were on

  He didn’t want to alarm Malinche, but she was no fool; she undoubtedly recognized the danger. “I think that whoever has been on our trail thinks he’s found a way of getting rid of us permanently.”

  “Maybe he has.”

  She looked so very small huddled into her parka, and his heart ached for her. He would get her out of this situation; he had to. “This is no time to give up. We’ll think of something.”

  He glanced around their floating ice pad. It was discouragingly small—not over twenty by fifteen feet. Any collision might break it in two. As it was, it felt unstable, rocking and jolting as though it might capsize any minute.

  He reached for his blue canvas pack, lying in stark contrast against the white. “At least he left my backpack. I wonder why he did that?”

  “Maybe it was just too cumbersome to get off. He had to work fast to knock us both out and carry us out on this ice.”

  “He probably had a boat or a snowmobile stashed in that shed,” Brian said. “He must be getting desperate. It took a lot of nerve to bring us out into this ice field.”

  “Brian—are we going to die?” Malinche whispered.

  Her words galvanized him. He would get her out of this, he swore he would.

  He didn’t see exactly how, though. The ice chunk they were on would only last so long. It could capsize any minute. If it somehow managed to remain intact, it would continue its drift into the open water. Somehow they had to get off it and onto a larger chunk. It would at least buy them time.

  Simple to say; it seemed impossible to do. He surveyed the chasm between them and the nearest stable ice sheet. The distance was well over twenty feet—no way could they jump it. Tiny particles of ice floated in the black water like frosty stars in a black night sky. Trying to swim across would mean immediate death from freezing. And if the ice sheet came closer, the risk was even greater. The behemoth might slide right over their small chunk and demolish it—along with them.

  There was one chance, a small one, but it was all he could think of. Anything was better than just sitting here waiting.

  He unzipped his backpack and took out a geologist’s hatchet. A small roll of light nylon cord came from another pocket. Quickly, he tied the cord to the hatchet.

  “You do come prepared,” Malinche said. “Were you ever a Boy Scout? And what on earth do you intend to do with that?”

  At least she could still joke. He grinned, trying to appear confident and in charge. His plan had one chance in a thousand of success. “No, I was never a Boy Scout, but they would take away my geologist’s license if I ever went anywhere without a hatchet and a rope.”

  He had better hurry. Malinche’s face was pinched with cold and she was shivering. Although she was warmly dressed, her clothes couldn’t keep out the bitter cold forever. Although he was used to weather extremes, he felt it, too, the numbness that slowed his reflexes, stiffened his joints.

  She struggled to her feet, swaying to keep her balance, as the ice chunk dipped with the current. “Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it. This floating ice cube isn’t going to last much longer.”

  As though to lend credence to her words, a chunk broke off a corner and plunged into the water, sending icy spray upward. Worse still, the chasm between their ice and the largest ice sheet was steadily widening as they drifted farther out to sea.

  He couldn’t wait. He stood, bracing his legs, and hurled the hatchet at the nearest large ice sheet.

  It plunged into the water, only a few feet from the target. Swearing, he pulled the rope back and retrieved the hatchet. He had to make it in his next two or three tries. The cold and his injury combined to sap his strength.

  Again he braced himself and threw the hatchet. It was closer this time, grazing the shelf of ice, but not close enough. It fell into the sea.

  He pulled it back and stood for a moment, gathering his strength. Malinche stood silently beside him. If strength of will could help him, he knew she was assisting him with every throw. If they didn’t drift any farther, if the large ice sheet remained stable, if—

  He wondered how much blood he had lost before the cold congealed the flow. Enough to make him weak in the kne
es, at least. He took a deep breath, summoning all his determination. If he didn’t make it this time he doubted he would have the strength to try again

  He drew back his arm and hurled the hatchet with all of his power and some reserve he didn’t know he had. So much depended on this; it had to catch. He closed his eyes, willing the hatchet to find its target.

  “You did it, you did it!”

  At Malinche’s shout, he opened his eyes. The hatchet was buried in the immense ice sheet.

  Relief washed over him in a wave so strong his legs nearly buckled. They had a chance. Just a chance, but it was better than nothing.

  Tentatively, he tugged at the nylon cord. The hatchet remained buried in the ice. He pulled harder; it didn’t budge.

  “What now?”

  “Now we try to pull ourselves over to that ice sheet.” He dug his heels into the ice and wrapped the cord around his arm. Malinche grabbed the line and braced her boots in the ice.

  “Pull!”

  They pulled on the line, every muscle straining, as they tried to close the distance between themselves and the larger ice sheet.

  “It’s not moving! Pull!”

  “I am!” Malinche gasped.

  The line remained taut, but nothing moved. A few minutes later, they collapsed on the ice, exhausted. The distance between the two ice sheets remained the same.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Malinche said.

  Inside, Brian agreed, but they were still alive. There was hope. “We’re not as bad off as we were,” he replied. “We can’t pull ourselves closer—but we’re not drifting farther away, either. We’ve gained some time.”

  “If this chunk doesn’t break up.”

  “If it does, we’ll use the cord to pull ourselves over to the other sheet.”

  She gave him a half smile, showing her gratitude that he was trying to keep up her spirits even if he was insulting her intelligence. Immersion in that icy water wasn’t an option, and they both knew it. Even if they made it across they would freeze in a few minutes, dying of exposure.