by Maddy Hunter
Copyright Information
Catch Me If Yukon: A Passport to Peril Mystery © 2019 by Maddy Hunter.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First e-book edition © 2018
E-book ISBN: 9780738755588
Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover illustration by Anne Wertheim
Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hunter, Maddy, author.
Title: Catch me if Yukon : a passport to Peril mystery / Maddy Hunter.
Description: First Edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Midnight Ink, [2019] |
Series: A passport to Peril mystery ; #12.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029963 (print) | LCCN 2018031956 (ebook) | ISBN
9780738755588 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738753973 (alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Tour guides (Persons)—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.U5944 (ebook) | LCC PS3608.U5944 C38 2018 (print)
| DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029963
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Manufactured in the United States of America
To the scores of fans who crowded onto the tour bus
with the Iowa gang as they travelled the globe. Thank you.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to extend a special thank you to Orphie Shellum for allowing me to hijack her siblings’ names for the characters who appear in this latest installment of the Passport series. Her sisters have such unique names, I wish I could have used them all.
Thank you to the Converse family for inviting us to participate in their Alaskan adventure with them. There are no finer traveling companions.
Thank you to my editors Amy Glaser and Becky Zins, who are simply stellar at what they do.
Thank you to Christina Boys of CEB Editorial Services who, back in 2001, gave a group of Iowa seniors and one hapless tour escort a chance to travel the world. Couldn’t have done it without you. You’re the best.
Lastly, thank you to Brian, who has been my constant, dependable, and tireless companion on this other adventure called life. I love you more!
one
“Thar she blows!” shouted Dick Teig in an effort to channel the spirit of Melville’s infamous Captain Ahab.
Gliding through the waves in slow motion, plagued by flocks of screeching gulls, the humpback spewed a column of spray into the air to the excited oohs and aahs of the hundred-plus guests aboard the whale watching tour boat Kenai Adventurer.
“Oh, wow,” enthused Dick, a roly-poly retiree whose head was the size of an orbiting planet. He stood mesmerized at the starboard rail where the rest of us were shoehorned together, gawking into the water below, angling our cell phones left and right to avoid shooting video of each other’s heads.
“This footage is going straight to YouTube,” hooted Dick Stolee, who, as the group’s tallest member, enjoyed the luxury of having the best unobstructed view. “You wanna bet this baby’s going viral. The likes are gonna pile up faster than pancakes at a church breakfast.”
“Didn’t no one tell you?” my grandmother asked from farther down the rail. “We’re not doin’ YouTube no more. We found a new website what links to real global news agencies with real bylines, so we’re sendin’ our stuff there instead.”
“We decided that for folks who’ve been doing this as long as we have, it was time to leave the ranks of YouTube behind and graduate to a more professional platform,” explained Nana’s longtime love interest, George Farkas.
Nana nodded. “It’s our best chance to join the big leagues before we die.”
“How come nobody told me?” complained Dick Stolee as the whale arched its back and, with a muted whoooosh, sluiced downward into the ocean’s depths, its fluked tail rising out of the water in an aquatic salute that made it appear more like a member of a synchronized swim team than a mammal whose massive bulk tipped the scales at a modest forty tons.
“We took a vote on it,” ninety-something-year-old Osmond Chelsvig recalled. “At the gluten-free luncheon at the senior center last week. Weren’t you there?” Osmond had been a member of my hometown’s election board for longer than most people had been alive.
“He was in the little boys’ room,” droned Dick’s wife, Grace. “His doctor just upped the dosage of his water pill.”
“I can’t see a doggone thing,” bellyached Bernice Zwerg in her ex-smoker’s rasp from somewhere behind us. “Time for you rail hogs to stop being so selfish. Get out of the way. I can’t see through you. I left my x-ray vision back on the bus.”
I cranked my head around to find her standing behind Dick Stolee, where the only thing she had a breathtaking view of was the back of his jacket. Shuffling backward, I grasped her arm and dragged her through the horde of onlookers to position her in front of me. “How’s that?”
She peered over the rail. “Where’s Moby Dick?”
“Submerged.”
“So how long do I have to stand here before he flashes us again?”
“Don’t know. I don’t think whales run on timers.”
I’m Emily Andrew-Miceli. With my former Swiss police inspector husband, Etienne, I own and operate Destinations Travel out of Windsor City, Iowa, a town of about 19,000 with new housing developments popping up all over the place. We cater to a subset of tech-savvy seniors who’ve marked “world travel” as the first item on their bucket lists, and we’re proud to have a stable of twelve regulars from Windsor City who keep the agency in the black—eight fairly normal adults, one chronic complainer, two Dicks, and my eighth-grade-educated, computer-whiz, lottery-winning, martial-arts-trained grandmother, Marion Sippel, fondly referred to as Nana.
Filling up the remaining seats on our twelve-day Alaskan odyssey are seven Windsor City locals who are the founding members of a “Norwegian only” book club that boasts the jaw-dropping distinction of having been in existence for over forty years. Their reading list isn’t limited to Norwegian books, but club hopefuls have to verify their authentic Norwegian ancestry to join. Three of our regular guests—Luci
lle Rasmussen, Helen Teig, and Grace Stolee—have belonged to the group for a couple of decades, so it was their recommendation that convinced the other club members to sign up for our tour.
Luckily, the girls must have forgotten to mention the unfortunate number of deaths we’d experienced on our previous excursions. Memory loss among the senior set does have its benefits.
Our boat was hovering close to the rock-ribbed shore of Aialik Bay in the Kenai Fjords National Park, a long inlet flanked by a spine of jagged mountains, towering evergreens that seemed to sprout up from the bedrock, and distant peaks frosted with powder-white snow. The sky was cobalt blue, without a trace of clouds. The sun was so blindingly bright that I needed to squint behind my sunglasses to avoid burning my retinas from the reflections off the water, which made picture-taking a challenge since I couldn’t see what was on my display screen. I could be taking breathtaking close-ups of Dick Teig’s thumb for all I knew.
“Humpbacks can swim up to twenty-five miles an hour if they get the urge,” our captain announced in a subdued voice over the loudspeaker. I guess he didn’t want to startle the eighty-thousand-pound behemoth that was lurking somewhere beneath our boat. “But most of the time they keep it between eight and ten, which is what I commonly refer to as cruising speed.”
“I wonder how fast Moby Dick was swimming when he bit off Captain Ahab’s leg?” pondered Helen Teig, whose carefully penciled-on eyebrows could be obliterated by one inadvertent swipe of her hand.
Bernice choked on a guffaw as she glanced at Helen. “You do realize Moby Dick wasn’t real, right?”
“Moby Dick wasn’t a humpback,” offered Tilly Hovick in her former professor’s voice. “He was a sperm whale. So you really can’t compare.”
“I wonder what kind of whale swallowed Geppetto?” asked Margi Swanson as she squirted out a stream of hand sanitizer to create a small germ-free zone on the rail.
“Probably the same kind that swallowed Jonah,” theorized Lucille Rasmussen. “The kind that spits you back out.”
“Sounds like some kind of involuntary gag reflex to me,” mused Helen.
Bernice shook her head. “Morons.”
The captain’s voice broke out over the loudspeaker again. “Looks like a pod is making its way toward us. And a big one is coming up with his mouth open like a giant fishnet. Six or seven humpbacks. Starboard quarter.” Then, in an obvious tease, “All of you can swim, right?”
“Are we on the correct side?” asked Alice Tjarks as she visored her hands over her eyes to scan the water.
“We’re on the right side,” George spoke up.
“But what if the right side is the wrong side?” panicked Dick Stolee.
“Then we’ll miss everything,” fretted Dick Teig. “C’mon, guys. Other side of the boat!”
“But this is the right side,” I objected as they stampeded across the deck to the opposite side, deserting their plum positions at the rail.
One of the advantages of living in a landlocked state is that residents aren’t forced to learn unnecessary terms like starboard and port.
I switched my phone to video and aimed it in the general direction of the humpbacks as they glided together in their own version of a maritime flash mob, geysering water through their blowholes before slithering downward in their languid, balletic dives.
“Hey, Emily, did you hear about the whale watching boat that sank in calm seas off the coast of Juneau last year?” asked book clubber Thor Thorsen as he bulldozed into the space relinquished by the gang. His camera whirred frenetically as he squeezed off a number of shots using a telephoto lens that was as long as my arm. “All the passengers got rescued, but the boat apparently went down like a rock. Don’t know if they ever figured out what caused it to sink, but it makes you wonder if these tour boat companies sometimes underestimate the marine life around here.”
My stomach bubbled disagreeably at his comment. Like I needed to hear that.
Thor Thorsen was an impressive physical specimen. Tall and broad-shouldered, he had permanently ruddy cheeks and blond hair that was only slightly threaded with gray. His face was more intriguing than it was handsome—his wide-spaced eyes and flattened features making him look as if he had never recovered from an untimely collision with a closed door. He owned a luxury car dealership in town, but he’d recently turned the managerial duties over to his son so he could devote more time to retirement travel and his newfound hobbies, which appeared to be wildlife photography and promoting heartburn.
“Humpbacks aren’t usually known for their destructive tendencies,” countered Grover Kristiansen as he slid closer to me, his voice both tentative and monotone. A small-boned man attired in fatigue-green polar fleece and a wide-brimmed hat with a chin cord, he looked more like an aging Boy Scout than a former salesman for a small business. “In fact, near Monterey, California, a group of whale watchers witnessed a pair of humpbacks trying to rescue a baby gray whale from a pod of orcas, and gray whales don’t even belong to the same genus.”
“Is that right?” Thor muttered with disinterest as he squeezed off a dozen more shots.
“There’s also documentation that humpbacks have rescued Antarctic seals that were under attack from orcas,” Grover continued with rising enthusiasm, “and seals aren’t even the same species! Scientists think the whales display a higher order of thinking and feeling, just like the great apes, elephants, and humans. And that’s because humpbacks have specialized spindle cells in their brains that—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Thor cut him off. “You can keep talking, but I’ve stopped listening. Tell you anything?”
Grover stiffened at the slight but refused to be cowed. “It verifies that you have a very short attention span. You should work on that, Thor. Maybe it’ll help you recommend an actual novel to the book club rather than selected articles from Reader’s Digest.”
“Two more pods headed our way on the port side,” announced the captain. “This is kind of unprecedented, so we’re going to idle right here for a while longer so you can soak it up.”
“This guy better know what he’s doing,” grumbled Thor as he quickly abandoned the rail to charge across the deck, followed by Grover, who chased behind him like a puppy. It was then that I noticed the woman standing beside the deck’s orange life buoy station, eyes wide, a terrified expression on her little moon face.
“Mom?” I was apparently trying to suppress the fact that my parents were accompanying us on this tour, but with good reason. Mom’s overprotective attitude in dealing with Nana was so over the top that I usually wore myself out running interference between them, which negatively affected my duties to the other guests—not the most efficient business model.
Mom waved stiffly as I walked the few steps to join her.
“Are you sure you want to stand this far back, Mom? You can’t see anything.”
“Of course I can see things, Em.” She bobbed her head toward the shoreline. “Trees. Rocks. Water. The backs of passengers’ heads.”
“Have you seen the whales?”
“Oh, I imagine everyone on the boat has seen the whales.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You haven’t gotten close enough to the rail to see them, have you?”
“No, but don’t concern yourself with me. I’m having a wonderful time.”
In the daily routine of life, Mom will usually choose martyrdom over simple fixes. I used to think her preference had something to do with her being Catholic and reading The Giant Book of Saints one too many times as a child. But I’ve come to realize that it’s probably a genetic defect that originated with Nana’s Scottish MacCool forebears, who always went out of their way to sacrifice their lives to avenge whatever minor slight had ruffled their kilts that day.
She switched her attention to the life buoy ring beside her. “I know you’re not familiar with maritime devices, Emily, but would you have any idea
how a person would go about detaching this thing if the boat started to sink?”
“The boat isn’t going to sink, Mom. The tour company wouldn’t still be in business if the whales went rogue and destroyed their boats on a regular basis.”
“Of course not.” She studied the orange ring with an analytical eye. “It’s probably too small to fit around your grandmother anyway.” She glanced left and right before lowering her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know what she’s been eating lately, but if she doesn’t stop, all her elastic waistbands are going to need extenders. So”—she resumed her normal volume—“a life jacket would be much better. At least they’re adjustable. Maybe the crew can spare a couple.”
In addition to being obsessively preoccupied with Nana, Mom was obsessively preoccupied with order. Her idea of nirvana was to be hired as a member of a FEMA team that was tasked with re-alphabetizing the canned goods and magazine sections of grocery stores after major earthquakes, or—even better—very large book repositories, like the Library of Congress.
“I honestly don’t think you need to take any extra precautions today, Mom. We’re on a roll.” I swept my hand skyward. “Glorious weather. Calm seas. Trust me, there’s no way we’re going to sink.” Given my rather lengthy track record of being wrong about almost everything, I hated to speak in absolutes, but this time I knew I was right.
I hoped.
I checked my watch. “They should be serving lunch pretty soon, Mom. You wanna head down to the galley and find a seat before it gets too crowded?”
She trailed her fingers over the life preserver slowly, affectionately, as if it were a tiny ball of fur named Cottontail. “Will you promise that if something happens to me, you’ll stop by the house to visit your father at least twice a week so he can practice talking to another human being? I’m afraid he might forget how otherwise. And watch your grandmother’s diet. She has a nasty habit of bingeing on maraschino cherries.”
“Mom, you’re on vacation. This is supposed to be fun. So stop with the Grim Reaper references, will you? You’re not facing imminent death.”