Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “Once we dock, you might want to give this guy a call,” I said, handing the dog-eared card over to Naomi. “Ralph’s a friend of mine, and he’s very good.”

  “Is he expensive?”

  “Yes, but he’s also well worth it. I’m sure you and he will be able to work something out.”

  Naomi stood up then. “Where are you going?” I asked. “Back to your cabin?”

  She shook her head. “Not tonight. After everything that’s happened, I just can’t face Virginia and Sharon. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be tough enough, but not tonight.”

  “Where are you going to sleep then?”

  “Like I said, I’ll hang out in one of the lounges.”

  “No, you won’t,” I told her. “That’s silly. Why don’t you sleep here? You can have the bed. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  Naomi tried to object to this arrangement, but she didn’t stand a chance. After all, I worked my way through college selling door-to-door for Fuller Brush. I know how to overcome objections. When she finally said yes, I flagged down my room attendant and laid hands on an extra blanket, a few extra pillows, and a roll-away bed. Sleeping on the paper-thin mattress of a roll-away cot wasn’t how I had envisioned spending nights aboard the Starfire Breeze. But that was hardly surprising. Nothing about this cruise was working out the way I expected.

  13

  WHEN I LAY DOWN on the cot, it wasn’t with much hope of sleeping. Naomi hadn’t undressed, and neither did I. For one thing, I fully expected that Todd Bowman would come knocking at the door any minute and wake us both up.

  Lying in the dark, I became more aware of the ship’s up-and-down movement in the water. I also noticed that, since the previous night, I hadn’t bothered to put my wristlets back on. To my amazement and relief, I no longer seemed to need them.

  “Are you asleep?” Naomi inquired from across the room.

  “No.”

  “Me neither. You must think really badly of me. It’s not just what I did to get pregnant, but what I did afterward. I thought Gary and I would be bringing the baby into a stable, loving home. I didn’t expect that our marriage would blow up in our faces. I never meant to ask Harrison for help, and I didn’t ask, either. Not really. It’s just that when he offered, I didn’t have the strength to turn him down. Gary never was worth much when it came to supporting the family. He loved to gamble way more than he liked paying the bills. Harrison offered me a lifeline; I took it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I take it?”

  “No. Why did he offer?”

  “I don’t know. All he said was he wanted to make sure Missy was taken care of. That she was his responsibility as much as she was mine.”

  “Does Melissa know any of this?”

  “No.”

  I tried to square this view of Harrison Featherman’s selfless generosity with the guy who had charged onto the dance floor with the express purpose of bitching out his ex-wife. Not that Margaret hadn’t deserved bitching out. Still, staging that kind of confrontation in public showed less-than-gentlemanly behavior on Harrison’s part. For that matter, so did screwing around behind his wife’s back.

  “But I wasn’t blackmailing him, Beau. That may be how it’ll look to everybody else, but that isn’t what was going on.”

  “Nobody’s judging you,” I said.

  “That’s not true. You were,” she said. “So was Margaret, and the same goes for Sharon and Virginia. They judged me without my even telling them about the money. I’m sure other people will think the same thing, especially if and when Todd Bowman gets around to arresting me for Margaret’s murder.”

  “He hasn’t done that yet, and he may not. Murder is damned hard to prove, especially if there isn’t a body,” I told her. “The evidence would all be circumstantial, and that doesn’t go very far when a homicide is involved. You’ll just have to take things one step at a time. One step and one day,” I added.

  After that, Naomi subsided into silence, and so did I—silence but not sleep. Here I was again, making the same mistakes I had made once before. Not that I was in love with Naomi Pepper—not even close. But still, I was involved with her. I had taken her in despite the very real possibility that she was the prime suspect in a murder investigation. At least when I fell for Anne Corley, I had no idea she might be a suspect.

  With Naomi Pepper, I wasn’t the least bit sure she wasn’t a viable one.

  Finally, I fell asleep. Some time later, I dreamed about Anne Corley. That’s not surprising. It happens fairly often. What was different about this dream was that she was on board the Starfire Breeze and seated at the same table in the Crystal Dining Room along with the rest of us—with Margaret Featherman and Naomi, Sharon Carson and Virginia Metz. Marc Alley was nowhere to be found. It was just me and those five women. As usual, Margaret Featherman was running the show.

  “What is it that makes men so stupid?” she asked.

  “That’s simple,” Anne Corley told her. “All you have to do is lead them around by the balls, and they forget they have a brain.”

  I tried to say something in my own defense, but it was useless. Anne’s stinging remark was greeted by such gales of gleeful laughter that it was impossible for me to be heard. The laughter seemed to go on forever. They were all still hooting and giggling when I finally managed to escape by waking myself up.

  By then, it was five o’clock in the morning. The Starfire Breeze was docking in Skagway, and my back hurt like hell. I never have been any good on roll-away beds or on hide-a-beds. They all have metal cross-support bars that hit me right in the lower ribs. Feeling as if somebody had been punching me with his fists, I got up, let myself out of the room, and went upstairs to the computer lounge. There I used my key card and one of the ship’s computers to log onto the Internet and send Ralph Ames an E-mail.

  Whenever Naomi Pepper managed to get in touch with him, I wanted Ralph to have some idea of what was going on. That was only fair. Friends don’t blindside friends—not if they can help it.

  By the time I finished with the computer, it was still too early for the dining rooms to be open for breakfast, so I went upstairs to the buffet. Naturally Lars Jenssen was already there.

  “You’re up bright and early,” he said when I put down my coffee cup and pulled out a chair at his table.

  “How’re things?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Last night was rough duty,” he said. “Being around Mike was just like having one of them—what is it they call them again, when it’s like you’re living in what you lived in before?”

  “You mean a flashback?”

  He nodded. “That’s it. A flashback. Geez! I can’t help feeling sorry for Lucy. I feel sorry for both of them.”

  Beverly showed up just then. “Are you going to the train dressed like that?” she asked. “Your clothes look like they’ve been slept in.”

  I wasn’t about to tell my grandmother the real reason behind my messy state. Having to sleep in my clothes because there was a strange woman in my bed wasn’t something I wanted to explain to my octogenarian grandmother.

  “I’m not a very good packer,” I said, and let it go at that.

  By eight-thirty that morning, it was pouring-down rain. In a bedraggled little group we made our way from the Starfire Breeze across the dock to where a White Pass and Yukon excursion train stood waiting to take on passengers. Lars led the way, taking Mike Conyers by the elbow and covering both their heads with a huge umbrella provided compliments of the cruise ship’s stewards, who were stationed at the top of the gangplank. The crewmen alternated between swiping key cards and offering disembarking passengers the use of loaner bumbershoots.

  The women—Beverly and the two Wakefield “girls”—clustered around Lucy Conyers in a tight, clucking little group. All of them were muffled in long coats that would have served them well in a Siberian blizzard, but not one of them had accepted one of the proffered umbrellas. Instead, to a woman, they walked through the rain wearing identica
l rain caps—those ugly little fold-up jobs that elderly women are forever producing out of the depths of their purses. To me they resembled a group of nuns who had traded in old-fashioned wimples for clear-plastic headgear. The rain caps may have protected their beauty-shop hairdos from the downpour, but they seemed to offer scant protection from the cold.

  Looking out for stragglers, I brought up the rear. Being your basic cool, macho dude and a Seattleite to boot, I didn’t stoop to carrying an umbrella. As far as coats were concerned, I figured a slightly damp tweed jacket would keep me warm enough in what I envisioned as an uneventful excursion in an overheated train car.

  Knowing what I did about Mike Conyers and remembering what Lars had told me about his first wife constantly looking backward, I wasn’t at all surprised when Lars headed for the last car on the train. Count on Lars to be considerate. If Mike Conyers was determined to see where he had been, then riding in the last car would make looking back that much easier.

  As we stood in line waiting to board, I noticed Marc Alley hurrying past with a group of passengers headed for cars closer to the front of the train. I nodded in his direction, but he didn’t acknowledge or return my greeting. He seemed to be caught up in a conversation with the medical reporter I had seen him with several days earlier. I wondered at the time if he really was that fully involved in conversation, or if he had ignored me on purpose as part of a deliberate slight.

  Once aboard the train, it took no time at all for the group to settle in. The women whipped off their rain hats, shook off the moisture, and stowed them back in their individual purses. Then, before the train even left the platform, they took from those same purses a cornucopia of edible delights—apples, bananas, pears, sweet rolls, and muffins—that had been liberated from the morning’s breakfast buffet and brought along to ward off starvation.

  The bounty of what Beverly termed our “forenoon coffee” resembled the New Testament parable of the loaves and fishes. It turned out there was more than enough food to go around. Several people in the car who weren’t in our own group to begin with joined in the impromptu feast. And, in the absence of a miracle, I suspect they must have brought along supplies of their own.

  For a change, I had the good sense to keep any sarcastic comments to myself. For one thing, they were feeding me. For another, every passenger in the car except me had lived through the Great Depression. All of them had probably experienced some degree of hardship back then. A few may well have endured times when they had no idea where their next meal was coming from. If that kind of powerfully imprinted memory had resulted in their raiding the Starfire Breeze’s buffet line, then it was a defense mechanism best not questioned or criticized. When Beverly handed me a bruised, overripe banana, I accepted it meekly and ate it the same way.

  As the train eased through town, I got a kick out of the fleet of tourist buses. They looked like refugees from 1920s and 1930s national parks.

  “That’s where the museum is,” Lars explained, pointing. “That’s where they have the display of what the gold rushers had to bring along with them. Wait till you see it,” he added. “We’ll run over there this afternoon, after the girls are back on board the ship. You won’t mind going, will you?”

  It wasn’t the first thing on my list, but I did my best to muster some sincere-sounding enthusiasm. “Sure thing, Lars,” I said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  As we headed out of Skagway, the rain was so thick there wasn’t much to see. That’s about the time Lars Jenssen started spinning yarns, and everyone else in the car leaned forward to listen. I suppose all those years of entertaining his fellow fishermen in the fleet had added to Lars’ gift of gab, but I suspect he was simply a natural-born storyteller to begin with. He started off with tales about the building of the White Pass railway itself. As the train moved higher up the mountain, the rain lifted slightly, leaving the mountainsides draped in blankets of cloud and the canyons lost in drifting banks of fog. Then, as the sun started burning through, Lars pointed out a faint path that seemed to climb straight up a perpendicular cliff that was so wet and shiny it looked like it was made of glass.

  “See that?” he asked. “That’s the Chilkoot Trail. Before they built the railroad, that was the only way to get to Lake Bennett from Skagway. My dad’s older cousin, Olaf, was a gold rusher, and that’s the way he and his buddies went over the mountain. Partway up they came across a young fellow who’d been beaten up and robbed. Somebody’d stolen his packhorse and the thousand pounds of supplies each prospector had to bring along. The young fella had been hurt and was bleeding pretty good, except when Olaf went to help him, it turned out he wasn’t a he at all.”

  “A woman gold rusher?” Claire Wakefield exclaimed. “I never heard about any of those.”

  Lars nodded. “Her name was Erika, and she hailed from northern Minnesota. Seems her twin brother, Erik, had planned to go to Alaska, but when he was killed in a threshing accident, she took his papers, dressed herself in his duds, and went in his place. It might have worked fine if she hadn’t fallen in with a bad bunch in Skagway. Halfway up the mountain, they beat her up, took her stuff, and left her to die. And she would have, too, if Olaf and his bunch hadn’t happened across her when they did.

  “They patched her up and took her with them. Almost to White Pass, Olaf knew that if the Canadian Mounties saw that the group was short one set of supplies, they’d send one person back down the mountain. So Olaf made arrangements to meet up with the group at Lake Bennett before they rafted down the Yukon. Then he took off on his own and entered Canada illegally.”

  “Did he make it?” somebody asked when Lars paused briefly. The questioner turned out to be a man who hadn’t been part of our group originally but who had been drawn in by both the food and the storytelling.

  “Ya, sure,” Lars said.

  “What happened, then? Did your cousin strike it rich?”

  “Rich enough,” Lars answered. “And he married Erika, of course.”

  “Why ‘of course’?” Florence Wakefield asked huffily. “Some women get along perfectly fine without getting married,” she added.

  “They did all right together,” Lars told her. “Went back to Minnesota and bought a farm in what’s now pretty near downtown Minneapolis. Their kids made a ton of money when they sold it years later. The last I heard, one of their great-great-grandsons was serving in the state legislature. For all I know, maybe he’s governor by now.”

  “Good for him,” Claire said. “In fact, good for the whole family.”

  As if for emphasis, watery sunshine now burst through the cloud cover, leaving the surrounding cliffs awash in blinding glare. Here and there through the mist we caught sight of more traces of that fabled Chilkoot Trail. Seeing it zigzag its way up the mountainside, it was impossible not to be impressed by the brave if foolhardy men and women who had followed it and their dreams in an often fatal and usually unsuccessful search for gold.

  As the sun came out, Lars seemed to run out of steam. When that happened, Mike Conyers grew increasingly restless. Up until then, he had sat patiently enough, listening quietly, as Lars regaled the group. Now, though, it was clear he had reached the end of his limited attention span. For a while Lars and Lucy both attempted to keep him occupied and in his seat, but then he broke into a low, keening wail—an eerie howl that was somehow reminiscent of the wolflike sound effects in one of my favorite childhood programs, “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and His Wonder Dog, King.”

  “Mike wants to go outside,” Lucy explained. “He wants to stand on the back.”

  There was a small observation deck on the very back of the train. There was also a sign posted on the door that said NO PASSENGERS ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. Unfortunately, Mike Conyers had moved beyond the ability either to read or mind a posted sign. He reminded me of a grocery-cart-imprisoned two-year-old whose mother has just told him he can’t have a candy bar. The more Lucy said no, the louder Mike wailed. Finally, shaking her head in exasperation, Lucy
stood up and retrieved both their coats.

  “I’ll take him out,” she said. “Otherwise, it’ll only get worse.”

  Lars came to her rescue. “No, no,” he said. “I understand what’s going on. You stay in here and keep warm. I’ll be glad to go outside with him.”

  With a grateful nod, Lucy helped her husband on with his coat, then she returned to her seat, while Lars took Mike by the elbow and guided him out onto the balcony. I expected that alarms would sound somewhere in the train the moment the forbidden door was opened. I waited for an irate conductor to come flying through the car and order Mike and Lars back inside. None of that happened. There was no alarm, no conductor came, and no one objected to the fact that Lars Jenssen and Mike Conyers were doing something that was supposedly expressly prohibited.

  With Lars outside, there was no one to continue giving a blow-by-blow description of the building of the railroad. I remembered that Lars had said there was a tunnel somewhere on the track, but during the better part of two hours, despite the incredibly steep grade, we had yet to pass through it. There were occasions when the switchbacks were so tight that we could see the front of the train rounding a curve long before the back of the train ever reached it. Down in the steep ravines far below us, where dregs of fog still drifted here and there, we sometimes caught sight of waterfalls sending torrents of water hundreds of feet off rockbound cliffs. It was spectacularly beautiful—breathtakingly beautiful. Despite my natural reserve and my cop’s detached if not blasé attitude, I was becoming more and more impressed.

  Then, just as we neared the top of the grade, the door at the far end of our car swished open, and Marc Alley came marching down the aisle. I nodded to him, thinking that perhaps he had come looking for me in order to bury the hatchet. No such luck. With an oversized camera bobbing around his neck, Marc hurried right past me and out onto the back of the train, where Lars and Mike Conyers stood leaning against the rail. No alarms sounded when he went out, either.