Northern Exposure

by Debra Lee Brown

  “I need a shower,” he said. “Bad.”

  “Take a cold one.”

  He laughed, and she laughed with him. It was the first time in days they’d found anything to laugh about. It felt good, and reminded her that, once all of this was over, she would have a life again. Her life, whatever she chose to make of it.

  “Be right back,” he said, and brushed a kiss across her forehead. “Watch the steaks.”

  She forgot about the steaks and watched him as he stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower. As if they were a couple, he hadn’t even bothered to shut the bathroom door. The sight of his hard, muscular body and his half-aroused state almost made her change her mind and follow him in.

  But she didn’t. She waited until he’d pulled the curtain and had turned on the water before padding barefoot back into the front room.

  It was late afternoon in New York. Securing the towel around her torso, she picked up the phone, dialed the number she knew by heart. No answer. On a hunch, she dialed another number, and her stomach balled in a knot when the phone on the other end of the line began to ring.

  “H-hello.”

  Wendy almost didn’t recognize the frail voice. “Vivian?” Blake’s wife typically had no idea where her husband was, but it was worth a try. “Vivian, it’s Wendy.”

  “Wendy. Oh, God.”

  “What is it, Viv? Where’s Blake? Is he there? I really need to speak to him.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  Joe appeared in the doorway, naked and dripping wet, wrapping a towel around his hips. The shower was still running. “We’re out of sham—” The look on her face stopped him.

  She dragged her attention back to the call. Vivian was stumbling over her words. “Wait, Viv. Slow down. Where’s Blake?”

  Joe moved to her side, his eyes cool and questioning.

  Vivian’s words registered.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Wendy, what is it?” He gripped her arm, aware a split second before she was that her knees had given out beneath her.

  “It’s Blake.” She dropped the phone, and Joe caught her in his arms. “H-he’s dead.”

  Chapter 14

  “Start over.” Joe eased Wendy onto the sofa.

  She realized she was shivering, and was grateful he’d wrapped her in the flannel bathrobe he’d retrieved from his bedroom. It smelled like him, and she burrowed into it, pulling her bare feet up under her onto the sofa.

  “Tell me everything she said.” Joe sat beside her, his arm sliding naturally around her shoulders, pulling her close. Wendy didn’t resist.

  “Sh-she said Blake had been missing for a-almost three weeks.”

  “And this Vivian, his wife, she was worried.”

  Wendy shook her head. “N-no. He went off all the time without telling her where he was going.”

  “Nice guy.”

  She didn’t refute his sarcasm.

  “Here, drink some of this. You’ll feel better.” He held a steaming coffee cup to her lips. He’d refilled both hers and his with more of the brew Barb had made earlier.

  “Thanks,” she said, and sipped at it, warming her hands on the cup.

  “Then what?”

  “Then the police showed up. Yesterday, if I understood her correctly. She was rambling out of control. Evidently, they’d found Blake’s body in the woods about a mile from the house. Their house,” she explained, “up in Connecticut. Blake kept an apartment in the city, but Vivian and the kids…”

  She couldn’t bear to think about his children. She could never forgive Blake for getting her involved in this mess, but she didn’t wish him dead, either.

  “He was murdered,” Joe said.

  The thought of it made her stomach clench. “Vivian said the police thought it was an accident. That he’d been out hiking and—”

  “You said Barrett wasn’t the hiking type.”

  “He’s not.” She looked at him. “I mean he…wasn’t.” She’d begun to think of Blake in the past tense weeks ago, but only because she’d put him out of her life, not because he was dead. The irony of it chilled her.

  “I’m sorry he’s dead.”

  “You are?” This was the first time Joe had ever expressed anything other than contempt for her former mentor.

  “Damned right, I am. I was looking forward to having a little talk with the son of a bitch about what the hell he thought he was doing involving you in this.”

  “Oh.” She set the coffee cup down. “And how, exactly, were you intending to do that? By phone?”

  “No. I was thinking of going back to New York with you, to get all this settled.”

  She started to argue with him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said over her protests. “All we have now is the film.”

  She got off a few more choice quips, and then it dawned on her. “What did you say?”

  “I said, all we have is the film.”

  Wendy shot to her feet, the memory striking her like lightning. “No! We have more than that. The letter! We have Blake’s letter!”

  “Wait a minute.” He followed her to the phone, where she was already punching in the number to her parents’ house. “You said you threw it away.”

  “I did but—” She finished, waited for the call to connect. “Quick, what day is this?” She knew it was the fourteenth of August. Her photos were due to the magazine on the twenty-first, and she’d been keeping track of the date. “What day of the week, I mean?”

  “I don’t know, Wednesday.” He glanced at the desk calendar to make sure.

  “Mom?” She tried to remember when her parents’ recycling went out. She knew it was picked up twice a month.

  “Wendy? Wendy, we’ve been so worried! The police called here for you and—”

  “Mom, not now. I need a favor.”

  “Wendy, what’s this about?” Joe put his ear to the phone with hers so he could hear their conversation.

  “And this horrible man came here looking for you the morning you left. He was big and had these dark eyes and—”

  “Carson,” Joe whispered.

  “Mom, not now. I need you to do something for me.” She explained that she’d tossed Blake’s unread letter in their recycling bin. She begged her mother to go look for it.

  While they waited, Joe said, “Do they have a fax machine?”

  “No, but there’s one in town at the local photocopy shop. She can fax it to us from there.”

  Her mother came back on the line. “It was crumpled into a little ball, but yes, I think this is it. Wendy?”

  As patiently as her racing heart would allow, she instructed her mother to drive into town and fax them the letter.

  “Well, okay, but I still wish you would tell me—” Her mother was abruptly cut off.

  “Wendy?” At once she recognized the booming baritone of her father’s voice, and he didn’t sound happy.

  “It’s Dad,” she said to Joe, covering the mouthpiece.

  “Here, let me talk to him.” Before she could stop him, Joe wrenched the receiver from her hand.

  She spent the next five minutes glaring at him as he engaged in the kind of man-to-man conversation that men like Joe and her father relished. Only, the conversation was all about her, and it ended with Joe assuring her father that he would take care of her, that he would take care of everything.

  “Happy now?” she said, folding her arms across her chest as he replaced the handset.

  “Yeah. They’re driving into town now. We should have the fax in about twenty minutes.”

  She didn’t know whether to hug him or smack him. The man was simply incapable of letting her deal with anything on her own. She realized that part of the problem was hers. She was overreacting, and had been ever since she’d met him. She was so intent on never letting anyone run her life again, she went off like a rocket each time he tried to help her.

  “Jesus,” Joe said, and glanced out the window at
the smoke spewing from the barbecue.

  She wrinkled her nose at the smell of burning steaks. “Sorry. I guess I forgot about them.”

  Joe’s stomach audibly growled. “That’s okay. I’ve got more in the freezer.” He pulled her to him and kissed her. She let him, inhaling the clean warm scent of his skin. “Why don’t you get dressed. There’re some extra clothes of Cat’s in the spare room. We can do your laundry tonight.”

  “Thanks.” She glanced at the towel still wrapped around his hips and thought fleetingly of what was under it. “You should put something on, too. You’ll catch cold.”

  He watched her as she left the room, the heat in his eyes making it clear to her that the notion wasn’t very likely.

  Just as they were diving in to a repeat performance of grilled steaks, the fax machine hummed to life. Wendy jumped up from the kitchen table so fast she knocked over her glass of milk.

  “Leave it,” Joe said, and followed her into the front room.

  They watched as the pages appeared. Joe had to physically stop himself from ripping them off the machine. This was her letter, he reminded himself, and she’d made it clear that the nightmare she was involved in was her problem, not his, no matter how badly he wanted to solve it for her.

  She’d shot him nasty looks the entire time he was on the phone with her father. Okay, so he might have overstepped his bounds a little, but he cared about her, damn it. What was wrong with that?

  He loved her. He knew that now beyond a doubt, and it was tearing him up inside. He also knew if he told her, she’d bolt like a frightened deer. Hell, she was going to, anyway. Tomorrow, if she had her way.

  “Here it is.” Wendy snatched the pages off the machine and walked blindly to the sofa, her gaze riveted to the print.

  Together, they sank into the cushions and, to Joe’s surprise, she placed the letter in his lap. “I…can’t,” she said. “His handwriting looks so shaky. Will you read it to me?”

  “Sure.” He liked it that she asked him. She snaked her arm through his and snuggled close, and he liked that even more.

  “Okay, here goes. Willa,” he began, and stopped, rattled by the use of her pseudonym. She wasn’t Willa, she was Wendy. His Wendy.

  He glanced at the petite woman next to him who was fighting the urge to cling to him, and wondered what her life had been like in New York. He knew it was nothing like what he’d first envisioned. His year-long fixation on Cat’s death, the fast lifestyle he knew his sister had led, all of that had colored his early impressions of Wendy, but no more.

  In the past eleven days she’d demonstrated nothing but good sense, determination and moxie. The determination was sometimes overkill, but he admired that. Maybe she hadn’t come into her own until recently, but she was there now. She was her own woman, a good woman.

  A woman he wanted in his life.

  Focusing his attention back on the letter, he was struck by the lack of a salutation, polite or otherwise. There was no Dear Willa, just Willa. “You have to know how sorry I am about—”

  “Skip that part. I don’t want to hear his apologies.”

  He scanned the next ten or twelve lines, then had to go to the second page. “Okay, here we go.”

  He read it to her slowly, stumbling over some of the hastily scrawled longhand. She was right. It looked as if Barrett was shaking like a leaf when he wrote it. Glancing back at the first page, he noted the date. Just ten days before Wendy had flown from her parents’ house in Michigan to Alaska. He wondered how long it was after Barrett had written the letter that he’d ended up dead.

  Not long, he suspected, given what was revealed in it. Barrett might have been a great photographer, but he hadn’t been a very good businessman. He’d dug himself a hole trying to finance an expansion of his business. Vivian’s parents had evidently cut him off from dipping further into her inheritance, and the banks wouldn’t touch him, so he was forced to borrow an enormous amount of money from a loan shark. “A mob loan shark,” Joe read.

  “Oh, my God.” Wendy ran her finger over the writing. “I had no idea.”

  The letter explained how Barrett had gotten himself into a jam and couldn’t pay back the loan. To show good faith, that he was “willing to work with them,” Barrett had agreed to set up a clandestine video session with Billy Ehrenberg, to be sold to a “private collector,” one of the mob’s clients.

  Wendy looked at him. “I don’t even want to think about what that means.”

  Joe didn’t want to, either, but kept reading:

  “Billy wasn’t supposed to know he was being taped. When these thugs showed up and he found out, he went crazy. I’d set up my own camera thinking it would be fun to have some pictures for myself. I swear to God, Willa, if I’d known what was going to happen, I would have never—”

  “Stop,” Wendy said. “Don’t read any more.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

  Joe scanned the remaining page of the letter. “There’s nothing here. No mention of what happened next, no mention of the drugs. Nothing, except…

  “You’ve got to return that film. At first I didn’t realize you had it. All this time I thought they had it, but they don’t. What’s on that film implicates them, don’t you see? I know you have it. They know you have it. These men mean business, Willa.”

  “That’s for sure,” she said, and pulled away from him.

  Joe folded the faxed pages and stuffed them into the breast pocket of his shirt. He could guess what was captured on the film from Barrett’s camera, in sequential, time-delayed shots.

  Billy Ehrenberg’s murder.

  “Forget the darkroom idea. We have to turn the film over to law enforcement. Now.”

  “I know.” She rose stiffly from the sofa. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Want to finish your steak before we go?”

  “No, I’ve lost my appetite.” Her face was pale, her movements sluggish.

  Joe knew that the physical exertion of the past ten days, coupled with the emotional strain of Carson’s attack, Barrett’s letter, the film and their rapidly developing relationship was way too much for her to handle all at once. Hell, it was almost too much for him.

  “We’ll get something later in town, then.” Gently he took her arm and led her to the door, grabbing their jackets and his truck keys on the way out.

  Wendy felt numb during the two-and-a-half-hour ride into the town of Retreat.

  She and Joe made small talk, carefully avoiding the topic that was the reason behind their trip. Wendy made him tell her about his college days and his early years with the Department of Fish and Game. She grilled him about his favorite foods, where he’d traveled, the kinds of movies and books he liked—anything to keep her mind occupied.

  Joe settled easily into the exchange of their histories. He asked her about life in New York, what she’d done before moving there, to describe to him what it was like growing up in Michigan’s north woods.

  It was amazing how much they had in common. But then, she’d already known that. You learn a lot about a person spending every day and every night with them, as they had for the past week and a half.

  She felt better by the time they reached town. She realized it was the first time they’d had a conversation that wasn’t incited by a life-threatening situation or some flawed notion about the other’s motives. It was just a normal conversation between two people who were interested in each other. She liked it.

  He liked it, too, if she was reading him right. For the first time since they’d made love four days ago, he’d completely let down his guard with her. He wasn’t trying to manage her, or the situation. He was relaxed, and so was she. Too bad it had to end.

  He steered his pickup off the highway onto the gravel street that was the sleepy center of the town of Retreat. She’d stopped here on her way into the wildlife reserve and remembered the general store and gas pump on the corner, the funky-looking café down the street and the complex of newish buildings crafted of native
stone.

  They housed the post office, the state Department of Fish and Game—where she suspected Barb and Stan worked—and a small outpost of the Alaska State Troopers, which she’d learned had jurisdiction in areas like Retreat that were too small to support a police department.

  “I’d like to show you something before we go in.”

  “What?” she asked, as he continued down the street and out of town.

  “You’ll see.”

  They passed a small graveyard, and she wondered if Joe’s sister was buried there. He didn’t give it a glance as he proceeded up a hill into a small, heavily wooded residential area. When he turned onto a tiny dirt road, she was surprised to see it had a hand-carved street sign. Elkhorn Drive.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To my house.”

  “Your house?”

  He shot her a smile. “Yeah. I built it before Cat died. Finished it but never moved in.”

  Her breath caught as he pulled into the driveway of a dramatic-looking log home, the kind you saw in magazines and dreamed about owning. It was two-story with a stone foundation and fireplace, and a rough-shingled, high-pitched roof. “It’s gorgeous. You had this built?”

  “I didn’t have it built, I built it.”

  She got out of the truck, and by the time she finished gawking at the thick hand-hewn beams supporting the covered porch, he had the front door open.

  “It’s cold inside. The heat’s off, but the electricity should be on. I haven’t been here in a long time.”

  “You built it, you mean, like…with your hands?” Wendy had never seen more beautiful woodwork.

  “Well,” he said, grinning and taking her hand as they crossed the threshold, “I used power tools, of course. I’m not into the Amish thing, no matter how reclusive you think I am. And I had a hell of a lot of help. Stan mostly, and some of the other guys from town.”

  The interior was done all in warm woods, the rooms large and airy. Roughly shaved logs spanned the high, beamed ceilings.

  She opened a door into what she thought was a bathroom. “Oh, is this for storage?”