by Edie Claire
If you’d asked him a week ago, he’d have told a different story. Glacier bears, he would have insisted, were certain to exist somewhere, whether a human saw them or not. But a woman who didn’t play head games? A beautiful, kind woman who was open and frank and uncomplicated and who meant exactly what she freakin’ said? No way. Such women were the stuff of fantasy, like mermaids or unicorns.
And to think the little town of Gustavus had a glacier bear and a unicorn!
Thane Buchanan was a very, very happy man.
“So, have you ever lived anywhere else besides Maine? And here, of course?” he asked as they picked their way slowly along another meadow path, pausing frequently to pluck a ripe raspberry or blueberry. Mei Lin didn’t answer for a moment, and when he turned to look at her he was surprised to see her face clouding over. A few seconds ago she’d looked as jolly as he did.
“Texas,” she said finally, pronouncing the word as if it were a disease. “I didn’t care for it much, but then I never got out of Dallas. I might have liked the rural parts better.”
Thane considered letting the subject drop. She appeared to be avoiding something unpleasant, and he usually let sleeping dogs lie, particularly when they were female. But Mei Lin was different, and he wanted whatever was between them to be different, too. Open, honest, and down to earth. He was so horribly weary of walking on eggshells!
He stopped moving, reached out a hand, and smoothed a stray lock of her hair behind an adorably cute little ear. “What didn’t you like about Dallas?”
She hesitated, but only for an instant. Her expression remained grim, but her deep brown eyes looked up at him with an affection that weakened his knees. “It was my first big move away from home, and pretty much nothing went right,” she said soberly. “I’d just broken up with my fiancé, which was a good thing. But I made some serious mistakes. I had trouble at work and I dated some real jerks. If I had to sum up the experience in one word, I’d go with ‘soul-sucking.’”
“Sounds like it,” he agreed softly. She hadn’t given much detail, but that was all right. He was certain that as they grew closer — which he definitely intended to make happen — she wouldn’t shrink from sharing whatever was important to her. For now, he just wanted to comfort her, as she had comforted him when he spoke of his father’s murder. So he did.
When they parted this time, Mei Lin’s beautiful dark eyes were shiny with tears. “You’re good at that,” she quipped.
He chuckled warmly. “So are you.”
“I’ve always been a hugger,” she said with a smile. “My mother used to worry because when they first adopted me, I would assault complete strangers at the playground.”
Thane laughed. Then a long-buried memory swamped him. “You know, I think I had the same problem. I have this vague, preschoolish memory of my mother telling me, more than once, ‘that girl doesn’t want to marry you, honey. Now let her go!’ God only knows what that was all about.”
Mei Lin cracked up. She had an amazing, merry laugh that rang with an overtone of kindness. It made him want to hug her all over again. Among other things.
“I bet you got that from your dad,” she surmised. “Or is your mom a hugger, too?”
“Good God, no,” Thane chuckled, hard-pressed to imagine such a thing. His mother had always been remote. She didn’t even hug Doug, at least not in public. “Definitely from my dad. When we were little and he came home from work, he’d always give us giant bear hugs.” The familiar pang of loss stabbed at him, but his good mood transformed it into bittersweetness.
“Again with the bears!” Mei Lin said playfully. “Well, I can’t knock it. You clearly learned from the best. Did he have a booming laugh like yours, too?”
Thane’s heart thumped in his chest. He couldn’t remember a single woman he’d ever dated who’d asked him dip squat about his father. Come to think of it, his male friends didn’t either. It was understandable, particularly if people knew about the murder, to think Thane that wouldn’t want to talk about his father. But he did.
“I wouldn’t call it ‘booming,’” he began, stepping around behind Mei Lin on the pretense of picking a berry. He preferred for her to lead. That way he could watch her hips sway. “I’m not built like him. I take after my grandfather on my mother’s side — we’re the big guys. My dad was built more like Jason. Tall, but lean.”
“I see. And was your mom’s dad also obsessed with glacier bears?” Mei Lin teased.
Thane laughed. “No, the only thing Grandpa Joe’s ever been obsessed with is banking. The bear obsession is strictly a Buchanan thing. My grandpa Buck was a huge outdoorsman — spent his whole life around Juneau. And his dad,” Thane raised his voice dramatically, “is the one who started the whole thing when he spied a real live glacier bear up in Yakutat.”
Mei Lin’s steps slowed. He moved where he could see her face, worried that all his family talk was beginning to bore her. She didn’t look bored, but she did look pensive. “Yakutat?” she repeated, her gaze fixed on a point in the distance.
Thane looked where she was looking, but saw nothing noteworthy. “Yep,” he answered. “You know it? It’s a little fishing village on the strip of coast between Glacier Bay and Cordova.”
“I’ve heard of it. Do a lot of people see glacier bears there?” she asked. Her voice was strangely thin.
“Not a lot,” Thane replied. “But they have as high a concentration as anywhere. That’s where we’d go camping in the summers to look for one… my dad and my grandpa and Jason and me.” He counted those trips among the best times of his life, and he would have been happy to talk more about them, but there was definitely something wrong with Mei Lin. The bloom of color in her perfectly shaped cheeks had all but disappeared. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. She turned back to the trail and started walking again.
“No, you’re not,” he argued, determined to keep the honesty thing going. “What is it? What did I say?”
She stopped then and turned to face him. Her dark eyes searched his face. She seemed bewildered. After a long moment, she answered. “It’s just that your stories about your family and being a kid here remind me so much of stories somebody else was telling me. It’s uncanny, really. But maybe not so uncanny as it seems. I mean, I suppose a lot of people who grow up around here, or even visit the area often like you did, must have family stories about camping and looking for glacier bears. Right?”
Thane’s eyebrows rose. What an odd thing to spook her! “Well, sure. Camping out, learning to hunt and fish, those things are all normal rites of passage. And anyone local would know the glacier bear lore.”
Her color returned. “Of course,” she agreed, smiling again. They continued talking about families and siblings, laughing easily as they compared the dynamics of two-girl versus two-boy households and debated the influence of birth order on personality. Thane was having a perfectly delightful time — and assumed she was as well — until for no discernable reason her sparkling eyes widened and turned glassy.
Thane stopped his mouth. What the hell had he said this time? He’d been talking about the first place he could remember living, the apartment in Seattle where he and his brother had shared a tiny room with a view of the Space Needle. He’d mentioned how he could remember not wanting to move to the suburbs, because he’d overheard his dad lamenting about how it would mean a longer commute to the hospital and less time at home. What Thane could not understand was why his dad’s ultimate capitulation (after Margot had bribed them all with the promise of a golden retriever puppy) should make Mei Lin look like Thane had struck her.
“Your dad,” she asked with a quiver in her voice. “You said he was a surgeon?”
Thane studied her, confused. “I can’t remember saying that, but yes, he was. Why do you ask?”
She didn’t answer him. She looked as though he were torturing her. Her lips moved slightly as if she wanted to speak, but she couldn’t seem to form any words. He
reached out and put his hands lightly on her upper arms. “Mei Lin,” he said gently. “What is it? What am I missing here?”
The sound of a trumpet erupted loudly from somewhere behind him, making both of them jump. “I’m sorry,” he said, collecting himself. “I didn’t even know you could get a signal out here. That must be Dave…” A blue-gray bear cub scampered across his mind. “I don’t think he would call unless it was—”
“Answer it!” Mei Lin insisted, smiling at him now.
Her good mood seemed to have been restored, but Thane could swear that her eyes lacked their earlier sparkle. He shrugged off his pack and pulled out the phone. He’d assigned Dave’s number the fanfare ringtone in expectation of good news on the job front. Potentially, this could be even better. “Yo! Dave?”
“It’s your lucky day, my boy!” his mentor’s voice rang out cheerfully. “I just followed spoor from a sow and two cubs for nearly half a mile, from Smith’s place straight up the creek bank. Lost them after they took off across a meadow and onto a gravel track. But guess what? That gravel track was an old park road. They’ve moved onto the reserve!”
Thane whooped so loudly he flushed several birds out of the nearby trees. He might have been embarrassed, but seeing Mei Lin’s face brighten, he had no regrets. “Where can I meet you?” he asked eagerly. “Just tell me where the closest place I can drive to is and I’ll—” Suddenly realizing he had no car, he cast a hopeful glance at Mei Lin.
His expression, whatever it was, made her crack up laughing. “Of course I’ll drive you!” she answered without being asked.
Thane got the information he needed from Dave. Then he hung up his phone, dropped it on the ground, and swept the most exciting woman in Alaska up into his arms.
***
Mei Lin tossed aside her car keys, unfastened her fanny pack, and sat down at Elsie’s desk. She booted up her laptop and stared at the screen as it flickered to life. In her haste to get back to her computer she had nearly clipped a moose calf with her fender, and she felt terrible. Her heart was still hammering from the fright, but she suspected it would be hammering anyway.
The similarities were too glaring to ignore. Stanley had sons he wouldn’t admit to having and he had spent the past twenty years overseas. He was a surgeon who told stories about glacier bears to his children after hearing them from his father and his father before him, and all the men in the family had gone camping together at Yakutat. Thane had a surgeon father he hadn’t seen in twenty years, as well as a brother, grandfather, and great-grandfather who were obsessed with glacier bears and had gone camping at Yakutat.
It could all be coincidence, yes. But Mei Lin couldn’t stop thinking about the men’s eyes: those striking, two-toned gray-blue eyes. By itself, such a resemblance would mean nothing. But with everything else combined…
She quickly navigated to the search screen. She had to know the truth. She was looking at two halves of a whole that fit perfectly together, except for one whopping contradiction: a dead man. Thane was absolutely convinced that his father had been murdered. His mother must have told him so. But why? Why on earth would any mother make up such a horrible story?
Mei Lin’s fingers trembled over the keyboard. Chicago Tribune archives. She hit the enter key and waited again.
The situation was truly uncanny. Either the two men’s stories bore an amazing resemblance to each other for no particular reason, or she had just run into a long-separated father and son who had simultaneously appeared in a random small Alaskan town where neither had any pre-existing ties.
Neither scenario was believable.
The screen changed. Mei Lin tapped on the obvious search hit and waited again. Perhaps it wasn’t all that crazy. What if the latter coincidence wasn’t as great as it seemed? If her hunch was correct, it would mean that Stanley had grown up in Juneau. If he’d come back to the U.S. looking for someplace to die, why shouldn’t he return to his boyhood home? If he didn’t want to be recognized, for whatever reason, he might not want to return to Juneau itself. But he could easily hide out at an isolated cabin in a nearby town.
The Chicago Tribune archive search page popped up, and she immediately began typing. Buchanan. Surgeon. Kidnap. She hit the enter key.
No, the second coincidence wasn’t all that incredible. What was more difficult to imagine was why Thane’s mother would have lied. How could any woman do such a thing to her own sons? Especially when it was clear — even twenty years later — how very much at least one of them had loved his father?
The search engine spit back its answer. Mei Lin expected either no hits, or several. She got several, all written within a week of each other. She held her breath and started reading. When she’d finished every word, she slumped back in her chair, dazed.
Thane’s mother hadn’t lied. His father was abducted from outside a hotel in Chicago while attending a medical conference. Several witnesses had watched as the surgeon was surrounded by three men on a curb and then bundled into the back seat of a car. For two days, the local news reported no updates. On the fourth morning after the abduction, a new story made headlines. Two long-wanted criminals had been arrested and another shot and killed following a police raid at a suburban home. Another wanted man, a suspect in multiple murder cases, was already in critical condition at the time of the raid from a previous gunshot wound; he did not survive transport to the hospital. The missing surgeon had been found at the scene. It was presumed that he had been abducted in order to treat the wounded man, but unfortunately, he himself received multiple gunshot wounds during the raid. The surgeon was transported to the hospital in critical condition and, according to the next day’s paper, died overnight. Whether the fatal shots were delivered by the kidnappers or the police was under investigation. Some days later, a generous obituary was published, listing Stanley George Buchanan as a board-certified trauma surgeon from Seattle who left behind a wife and two sons.
Stanley Buchanan. He hadn’t changed his first name. Only his last.
Mei Lin sat and stared at nothing for a very long time. Why? Why would Stanley do it? Why would he pretend to be dead and then take off to another country? He must have had help from the hospital… or someone. Perhaps law enforcement itself. The article didn’t say so explicitly, but it was clear that the criminals were mobsters. She could understand if Stanley had gone into some kind of witness protection program, but seeing as how dead men couldn’t testify in court, that made no sense. And surely no sanctioned witness protection program would tell a spouse and children that their loved one was dead!
No, Stanley must have done this on his own. Somehow, some way, he had left that hospital unbeknownst to his family and started his life all over again. But why? Was he truly even injured? Or was the whole kidnapping scheme merely part of the ruse?
She frowned to herself, unable to believe it. Stanley cared about his sons, she had no doubt of that. Perhaps he had been trying to protect them. Had he not freaked out when he realized that he’d babbled about sons in the delirium of his fever? He had probably been denying their existence for decades. Yet he had mentioned them offhandedly again when he’d gotten excited about the bear. In a way Mei Lin took pride in that particular lapse, since it spoke to his level of comfort with her. She had promised to keep anything her patients told her in confidence, and clearly he had believed her. Of course, he had no reason to think that she would uncover his true identity. He couldn’t possibly predict that one of his sons would—
Thane! Mei Lin’s insides twisted into knots. The poor guy had been mourning his father all this time! But he had been deceived. Cruelly deceived. And Stanley’s wife… why, she had remarried! Was her second union even legal?
Mei Lin stood up from her chair and paced. She was confused. But she was also angry. Remembering how Thane had spoken of his father with such admiration… the way his eyes had moistened at the mere mention of the man… the pointlessness of his pain made her feel physically sick. She wanted to scream and lash out at som
eone, and the obvious candidate was Stanley. Yet a part of her refused to believe her own leading theory. How could the man she knew cause that kind of pain to his wife and sons? She could not imagine it. There had to be some explanation. A reasonable explanation.
Good lord, girl… I’m scum of the earth!
Stanley’s voice echoed in her head, mocking her. He had a guilty conscience. She knew that. But what exactly did he feel guilty about? Who the hell was Angela?
Just let me die.
Mei Lin let out a shriek of frustration. Then she shut off her computer and grabbed up her pack.
Only Stanley himself knew why he had done such a horrible thing.
And he was damn well going to tell her.
Chapter 21
Margot stood at the window of her home in Port McNeill, looking out over the hillside to the waters of Broughton Strait. She dearly loved this cozy house with its floor-to-ceiling picture window in the living room. The basement her husband puttered in might be a cluttered mess, but the formal living room was her domain. Here she could stand and gaze out at the same stretch of cool, gray-blue water she’d been staring at most of her life. She found comfort in the sameness of it, even as the town in which she’d been born and raised changed all too quickly around her. Here, in her clean and orderly living room with her dependable view, she could convince herself that everything would be fine. At least most of the time.
She heard Doug’s footsteps on the carpet behind her, and in a few seconds his strong, heavy arms wrapped around her waist. He gave her a comforting squeeze, and she melted into him.