Squinting harder, he studied the tank, realizing some kind of strange layer of scum floated across the surface. Staring harder, he realized it was not scum but the residents of the tank—all the fish were lying belly-up at the top of the tank.
"Weird. Something's wrong inside. Lauralie could be in trouble inside." He imagined saving the damsel in distress and being lauded a hero in the papers—a not-uncommon fantasy since childhood.
He got a whiff of the strange odor again. The cold air seemed to heighten the odor one moment, mask it the next, but there it came again, teasing his nostrils. Then it came to him. Gas! Natural gas!
"There's a gas leak inside!"
He snatched his key chain and his radio off his hip, calling it in. As he hailed help, he found the key he needed, a master for every house in the Colony for emergency use only. This qualified.
Jake Everly came on the radio as he inserted the key.
"Jake! That you?"
"Mikeeee! Wha's up, kid? Wha's your lo—"
"I'm at 1638 Willow...I mean, Will-o'-the-Wisp, and we've got a-a-a gas leak here, Jake."
"Possible leak?"
"A leak, Jake—the real thing!"
"A gas leak? In the Colony? No way!"
"I'm telling you, I can smell it through the g'damn door! I'm going in!"
"No, Mike! If you can smell it through the fuckin' door, then it's too dangerous to go burstin' in 'cause if you do—"
Jake, at command headquarters for Colony Security, heard the massive explosion occurring at Mike's end. "Stupid kid! Stupid, stupid damned kid! Oh, fuckin' jeeze! Man-oh-freakin'-man!"
Jake could not hold back his tears. He stopped the tape that had recorded the conversation, and immediately got on the phone with 911, giving the address and the nature of the emergency.
Jake next called his boss to inform him of the explosion. "Christ," said his boss, "someone's got to get over there to rep us, Jake. You do it, Jake. Get your deputies in to cover the phones and the radio, and get yourself over there. I'm on my way! How the hell'd this happen? How the hell'd a gas explosion occur in the Colony in the Glade, Jake? Whose fuckin' house blew up?"
"The Sangers', a Mr. and Mrs. with a daughter visiting. Mike met the girl, sir, and—"
"They called Mike to the location?"
"Mike Wdson's dead, sir. That's all I know."
"Was he answering a call?"
"Awful, just awful!"
"What'd he go to the location for, Jake?"
"He was screwin' around, Dave!"
"Screwin' around?"
"Flirting with the girl there, the daughter. He went over to ask her out, and next thing I know he's shouting something about a gas leak, that he could smell it through the door, and he disregarded my orders and burst in, and-and- and—"
"Get hold of yourself, Jake! Don't have a coronary on me. Do we know if the family was inside? Do you know if the blast affected any surrounding structures?"
"No...don't know, but I felt the vibrations from here."
"Mike rushed in to help people inside. He died trying to save life, doing his duty, Jake, you got that? Get over to the site and be a rep for Colony Security. I'm on my way!"
When Jake arrived at the Sanger home, fire trucks were battling the blaze, and a Houston Natural Gas truck pulled up, followed by a taxicab from which emerged Mr. and Mrs. Paul Sanger, the look of shock and horror unmistakable.
Jake, knowing the couple by sight, stepped up to them and told them what he knew of how Mike Wilson tried to save their daughter, dying in the effort.
"Meredyth! Oh, my God! Meredyth's in there!" screamed Caroline Sanger.
"Mike said her name was Lauralie," Jake said to Paul Sanger, who was busy now holding onto his wife, pinning her to the cab to keep her from running into the inferno.
The cab driver leaned across his hood, staring at the activity of the firemen and watching the blaze. Scar-faced, scratching a three-day-old beard, the cabbie snatched his unlit cigar from his lips and said, "Looks like a g'damn Texas tornado went through here."
"Who the hell is Lauralie?" Paul Sanger asked Jake Everly.
"The girl staying at your place... said she was your daughter! Mike opened the... Maybe I ought not to say any more."
Paul Sanger got on his cell phone and dialed for Meredyth. When she picked up, he breathed again. "Thank God, Mere, it's you! I've got your mother here. She needs to hear your voice, Mere. Talk to her... ask about her trip." Paul pushed the phone on his wife, Caroline. "It's Mere! She's safe, honey! She's all right."
Caroline took the phone, relief the size of a tidal wave washing over her, yet she could not control her tears as she repeatedly called out Meredyth's name and said, "Sweet-heart, we love you so much, Mere. How much you'll never know."
"You're safely home from Paris," Meredyth replied from Lucas Stonecoat's bedside in the hospital. "I've got one hell of a story to tell you guys, Mother."
"And we've got one hell of a story to tell you. It's the house...all gone." She continued to cry.
"Mom, are you all right? What's happened? Are those sirens I hear?"
Her father got back on. "We'll be staying out at the ranch house, sweetheart. Your can reach us there. Think you could come out tonight, Mere? We really need to see you in the flesh and catch up. And by the way, do you know anyone by the name of—"
"Why aren't you going to the Colony home? What's happened there, Dad?"
"It's been reduced to rubble, apparently an explosion....Don't tell her I told you so, but"—he whispered now—"Mom appears to have left the gas on the entire time we were gone, and some poor schlep with Colony Security did a piss-poor job of checking it out. Opened the door and died of the blast. Whole damn house is in flames, pieces of it on our neighbor's roof.”
“Oh, my dear God, Dad! Are you and Mom—”
“We're fine! It blew, they're telling us, about twenty minutes ago. Had we not been delayed at baggage..."
Meredyth felt a creeping finger trace the nape of her neck and run along her spine—Lauralie's icy touch extending from the grave. Her fingerprints were all over this attempt to murder Paul and Caroline Sanger, to leave Meredyth without her parents. It was to have been Lauralie's final blow, and it nearly came to fruition.
"Before you go out to the ranch, Dad, you need to meet me at County General where—"
"We don't need medical attention, dear! We're shaken up, of course. Who wouldn't be. It's a shock, but we really don't need medical—"
"You don't understand, Dad. I'm stuck here at the hospital, but I need to talk to you guys before you go out to the ranch. So much to catch you up on, Dad.”
“You're in the hospital?"
"Hospital?" Again her mother's crying erupted, commingling with the sound of fire trucks coming over the line. "No, not me. Dad. It's Lucas! He's—”
“That detective you used to date?”
“He's in a coma, fighting for his life, Dad, and it's all my fault, and he may die, and I-I can't leave him, Dad. I love him."
"We're on our way, baby. Stay on the line."
"...saved my life, Dad, and he's in a coma. I can't leave him. I need you guys."
She heard him shouting for the cabbie to get them to County General. In a moment, her father was on the line again. "We're coming straight there, Mere, honey. Don't you worry."
Meredyth was crying into the phone now. "I'm afraid he's going to die. All because of a sick woman who stalked us to the ranch...and because I couldn't get to him in time."
"Stalked you?"
"Yes."
"An old girlfriend of Stonecoat's?"
"No, it wasn't like that."
"That one from the reservation? Her name wouldn't be Lauralie, would it?"
"Well...yes, I mean no...but how'd you get her name?"
"Seems she got into the house saying she was our daughter!"
"No wonder Mom was in tears."
"They told us our daughter might be in the rubble of the house! The way it's
shaping up, a Colony Security fellow named Mike was interested in our daughter—Lauralie from out of towns—and came sniffing around. No pun intended."
"An unintended result," she muttered, pacing Lucas's small comer of the critical care unit. People checking on his vital signs every fifteen minutes. No windows, no light save for the artificial dim glow of soft blue that made the place look the perdition it was.
"The security fellow was just a kid, a year outta high school. Got more than he bargained for. Sounds like this Lauralie came onto him, and he went looking to close the deal on a date or some such thing."
I don't want to know his name or any more details about anyone she harmed in her mad obsession to harm me, she thought. "No more about it now, Dad. I can't take any more."
"Sure, baby...sure. Good news is they think she's dead in the rubble out here at the house."
"She is dead, but her body's in the HPD morgue, Dad. I killed her, Dad, out at the ranch house...I killed her. Now, please, come to me."
"My God, baby. We're on our way, Mere. Hold on there."
EPILOGUE
Dawson, Alaska, five months later
LUCAS SAT STIFFLY against the Aurora Nights Inn bed, his bandaged body still making the occasional complaint—a sudden lightning attack of pain about his ribs, like a knife jab. The painkillers hardly touched it, and so he had begun to self-medicate with the old herbal solution— peyote. The room had filled with the smoke and tangy odor.
Meredyth breezed in from outside, a rattling ice bucket in her hands. She poured him wine to go with sliced cheese. After chilling the wine and handing it to him, she toasted with her own plastic cup. 'To roughing it. From Skagway to Dawson at last."
'To this trip's not finishing me off," he grumpily responded.
"You're getting stronger every day, Lucas. Come on!" She yanked at him, and he gasped at the jolt of pain it caused in his upper torso. "Sorry, but the lights are running wild again tonight. You were right about them getting better as the week goes by. You've got to come out and see, Lucas. They're beautiful. Alaska is beautiful."
"You're beautiful, especially when you're happy."
She pulled at him, and he froze up a moment, fighting down the pain. "All right, but let me get up under my own steam and in my own good time."
"But you're missing the show." She rushed to the window and tried to see all that was possible from there. "There're chairs on the roof tonight for the viewing. Come on! You promised, remember?"
"I promised to bring you to Alaska to—"
"And you have!"
"—to see the northern lights a-runnin' wild. I didn't say I'd be sitting on the roof of a hotel with a moon pie in one hand and a plastic cup filled with wine in another."
She kissed and held him. "God, when I think how close I came to losing you, I could just... just..."
"Don't, don't!" he warned. "No more tears. You promised, remember?"
Lucas recalled nothing of his time in a coma or in critical care, but he recalled hearing her voice. "Gotta live. Gotta make plans...go to Alaska, remember? We've got a lotta living to do. Stay with me. Draw on your inner wolf, damn you! Come back to me."
He recalled seeing his grandfather before he had gone into the coma, the kind and gentle medicine man holding his palms open to Lucas in the universal gesture of welcoming. It had been while Meredyth had held him in her arms there at the cabin home on Lake Madera.
When he came out of the coma, Meredyth was there, her head lying over him where she sat alongside his bed, having fallen asleep, her hand around his. He ran his fingers through her hair, and dry-throated, he muttered her name and added, "Wanna see...the lights... with you."
She came awake, her eyes filling with happiness and tears. She grabbed him about the neck and hugged, and she called for the doctors. He'd had a full recovery, but he had a lot of healing yet to do. She had argued it was too soon for him to travel, but he'd stubbornly refused to listen, telling her it was their reward for surviving.
During his two-month-long stay in the hospital, she came daily, and each day she told him more and more about the final moments leading up to Lauralie Blodgett's death, and the details that Chang and Nielsen had learned from the crime scenes and how Lauralie had dispatched her various final victims. She told him about the near murder of her parents, and the death of the young security guard whose worst crime had been gullibility and a too affable nature thai led him to suspect nothing untoward about the vampire girl he had literally opened the door to. Lauralie had booby-trapped the house, somehow learning of the day Paul and Caroline Sanger were due home. Regardless of her fate, death or arrest, execution or incarceration, Lauralie Blodgett had meant to leave Meredyth Sanger with no one.
Once Lucas had been brought up to date, and after a parade of visitors had come and gone (the Tebos, Jana North, Captain Lincoln, Chang, Nielsen, Stan Kelton, and others), Stonecoat told Meredyth, "I gotta go to Manitoba with Maurice Remo, and from there we, that is you and I, we could zip over to Alaska to see the northern lights together."
"Forget about Manitoba. Jana North's going to Manitoba with Remo. It's all been taken care of. Lincoln's footing the bill. They'll get that creep Lyle Eaton for you."
"There're some things a man's got to do himself, Mere."
"You're in no shape, Lucas, to go anywhere right now, and Lyle Eaton's time is up in a week. You have no choice."
"Remo's not even a cop anymore. I mean, he's not on the force."
"Lincoln's made him a special deputy of some sort. It's all worked out with the Canadian government."
Maurice Remo had been standing just outside and had overheard the exchange. He had then stepped in and assured Lucas that he and the lovely Detective North could handle the Eaton matter just fine. "Been a long time since I've been on a trip with a beautiful cop," Remo had finished.
Now here they were in Alaska and Lucas meant to enjoy himself, despite the fact the pain felt like ripping stitches. "Throw me my shirt, baby."
Meredyth did so. "Can I help?"
"Sure."
She buttoned him up, hefted his coat to him, and put her own over her shoulders. Holding onto one another, they made their way out and down the hallway to the stairs going up to the roof. In the crisp night air, couples all around them stared up at the purple, blue, green, and snow-white swirling mix of glittering colors against the black night sky.
The northern lights looked like the work of God at play. Lucas settled into a chair with Meredyth holding his arm, delighting in the carefree, gentle, and nimble dancing lights. The fairy lights created an array of emotions in Meredyth and Lucas, who again felt the power of nature in these shooting excursions of feathery, weightless, buoyant beams. The iridescent glow of interstellar particles pirouetted and changed into a life form of tint, shade, blush, color, and effect. The aurora borealis was a living thing.
"Sight like this gives you faith in God and nature," he whispered, his tone signaling his reverence for the lights.
"It's like some force has captured the light and shadow that plays at all hours over the Grand Canyon," she replied.
He paused to kiss her. She pulled away. "Hey, I wanna see the show."
"Be my guest."
"I am, remember? You're paying."
He held tight to her hand and enjoyed the child in her as the enchanted little girl came out, delighting in the ballet of the heavens overhead. A kind of mystic swirl of lunar wind and particles swept down and around them, a kind of sparkling fog. For a time, it enveloped them.
"Ever give any thought to retiring from the force, Lucas?"
"And do what? Sit on my thumbs?"
"You love the horses and the ranch. You could run the place."
"What as? Your hired hand? Besides, your parents are staying there now."
“Their house'll be ready soon."
"I don't know, babe."
"What about turning the place into a real stud farm. You know a lot about raising horses, and there's money to be made."<
br />
"You talking about putting me out to pasture?"
"It hadn't occurred to me, but maybe it's worth a thought."
"Not likely. I'm a tracker, Mere, a detective."
She gnashed her teeth. "Stubborn Cherokee wolf. You'd be in charge, running the place as my husband!"
He pulled his eyes from the light show and stared into her eyes, seeing the Auroras reflected there. He pulled her into his lap. "I thought you'd never ask."
"Is that a yes?
He laughed. "Was that a proposal?"
"Call it what you will."
"I'll let you know when we get back from Alaska."
She punched him. "Damn you!"
He shrugged. "Come on, we both know it's a test, this trip. If we can survive one another roughing it from Skag- way to Dawson...then perhaps we can survive marriage to one another."
"You're awful."
"Awful good."
Meredyth returned her gaze to the concert of lights overhead, the firmament's toast to cheer and merriment and future bliss. She wanted to reach up and capture it, bottle it, take it home to Texas, where she might take it out whenever she wanted to look at it, like a snow scene in a bubble.
"Why can't life always be this giddy and carefree?" she asked, while thinking, Will living with Lucas be like trying to grab onto the ethereal northern lights? It can't be done, not even if I could bottle the energy and hold tightly onto him.
But what if I lightened up? she asked herself. What if I stopped trying to psychoanalyze Lucas, accept him with respect and love, as I did when I feared his leaving me forever? Then I could hold onto him in a sense. He was after all Lucas Stonecoat, a brethren to the Cherokee Wolf Clan, a hunter by nature and spirit with a long and proud tradition, going back to the ancestor who wore the first stone coat, a warrior who had killed a conquistador in battle for the stone-hard metal jacket he wore.
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