Torchlight

by Lisa T. Bergren

  I hope that this letter at the end of each book will help you see a little more into my life and know that I deeply appreciate your support. May you always seek his torchlight in the darkness.

  Every blessing,

  Write to me via my Web site!

  www.LisaTawnBergren.com

  or the old-fashioned way:

  c/o WaterBrook Press

  12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200

  Colorado Springs, CO 80921

  If you enjoyed TORCHLIGHT, be sure to look for other books in the Full Circle series, available at your local bookstore. Following are excerpts from two of those books:

  PATHWAYS and CHOSEN.

  Pathways

  CHAPTER ONE

  Come on, Bryn. Come out in the canoe with me. You haven’t been out of this cabin for two days. And it’s summer. You can study later.”

  “No thanks, Dad,” she said, turning her back to him and trying to concentrate on her anatomy textbook. The longer she could bury herself in her studies, the faster this trip would be over.

  She heard her father, Peter Bailey, walk to the front window. “Come on, honey,” he said, a slight begging tone to his voice. “The rain’s let up. We haven’t even been over to the Pierces’ to say hello.”

  Thoughts of Eli Pierce flashed through her mind. People thought that Californians were snobbish. Eli wouldn’t give her the time if he had the last watch on earth. They’d played together when she was at Summit Lake with her dad the year she was ten, but when she’d arrived over her fifteenth summer, the guy had avoided her like a bad case of barnacles on a barge. Sure he was handsome, but Bryn had better things to do than get snubbed by a small-town jerk. “I’m just fine where I am,” Bryn said.

  “Suit yourself,” he said. She could hear the shrug of defeat in his voice.

  She wondered what her dad saw in this place. It took hours to fly to Anchorage from Southern California, and a couple more to drive to Talkeetna. Then they had to take still another hour to get the floatplane loaded with their gear and fly in to Summit Lake. Bryn heard the door shut behind her father.

  All day to get here. She turned over and looked at the two-room log cabin, built by her father twenty years before. Her eyes floated over the hand-hewn logs and white, crumbling chinking. She lay in the bedroom in back, which held a bunk bed on either side. The front room was reserved for a tiny kitchenette and sitting area. It was dark, with no electricity, and it smelled musty, like an old basement blanket at her Grampa Bruce’s in Boston. Bryn had to read by the light of a kerosene lamp when it rained during the day. No wonder her dad hadn’t been able to get Bryn’s mother, Nell, to come all these years.

  She closed her eyes as the hollow, scraping sound of her father dragging the canoe off the rocks and into the water reached her ears. She wished she were home working a summer internship at the hospital, heading to the beach, catching a movie with friends—anywhere but here. In two years she would be twenty-two, a graduate from college with a degree in premed. And she would finally tell her father that their days at Summit Lake together were to be no more. She would, after all, be an adult, no longer compelled to please her dad, despite her own desires. He’d have to accept that.

  A pang of loss pierced her heart and she frowned, then sighed. Probably guilt pangs. The guy just wanted some quality time with his daughter. She could at least make the most of this trip with him. Appease him, share with him, make the proverbial memory together. Dutiful daughters did such things all the time.

  Bryn tossed aside her textbook and shoved her feet into shoes, hurrying to catch him before he was too far out. Bumping her head on the top bunk, she grimaced. “Dad, wait!” she called, hoping he would hear her from outside. She rubbed the top of her head and rushed out to the front room, then out to the lakeside where her father was already nearly fifty feet out. “Dad, wait! I changed my mind!”

  Her father turned and flashed her a white-toothed grin. He was dark and handsome—Bryn’s roommate, Ashley, referred to him as “the sexiest man alive,” which always made Bryn’s skin crawl. No matter how others saw him, he was still just Dad to Bryn.

  “Oh good, Bryn Bear,” he responded, using her childhood nickname. “I was already missing you.” The warmth and welcome in his eyes made her glad for her decision. It seemed his eyes were too often full of sorrow and longing these days, although she couldn’t think of a reason for such emotions.

  Bryn turned and ducked her head in the cabin door, grabbing her parka from the hook inside. Summers in Alaska were notorious for turning suddenly cold, so she always kept the warm coat at hand. She walked back to the shoreline, pulling her long hair out and into a quick knot. Her hair was the same color as her father’s—Indian black, Peter called it—and they shared the same dark olive skin. Her nose was his too, straight and too long. But her eyes were her mother’s—wide and a bit tipped up in the corners. Smoky brown, a boyfriend once told her. “Just like the rest of you,” he had whispered. “Smoky.”

  He was long gone. She had seen to that. Keeping a straight-A average at the University of California at Irvine was no small deal, and he had been in the way, always wanting to party and go out rather than study. But she wanted to graduate and go on to Harvard, at the top of her class all the way. It took discipline and concentration to accomplish that. And vision. No man was going to get in the way.

  The canoe crunched to shore again. “Push us off, Bryn Bear.”

  “Okay,” she said, wrinkling her nose a bit when her boots got wet and the cold lake water seeped through her socks and to her toes. While they glided backward, Bryn balanced on the bow, then carefully climbed in.

  “There’s a jacket and paddle beneath the seat,” Peter said from behind her.

  “Thought I was goin’ on a ride,” she tossed back.

  “If you ride, you paddle,” her dad responded. “Can’t make an Alaskan out of you if you sit up there like a Newport Beach priss.”

  She pulled out the life jacket, pausing to flick off a rather large spider, then put it on and reached for the paddle. Just then a bald eagle swooped low, his long wings spread wide, almost touching the surface as his thick talons clutched a trout from the waters across the lake. “Wow!” Bryn said.

  “Isn’t it something here?” Peter replied. “I never get tired of seeing things like that. If only your mother would share it with me …” His voice trailed away, as if the admission were too painful to tell his daughter.

  “You always wanted to live here, didn’t you, Dad?”

  “Summers anyway. Your mother wouldn’t hear of it. Wouldn’t even come and see it.” There was a shiver of anger in his tone, frustration, as well as pain.

  “It is a bit … isolated,” Bryn said, wondering why she felt compelled to defend her mother. She considered her father’s words as she dug her paddle into the water. She had to admit that it felt good to be out on the lake, out from the dank little cabin.

  “The solitude is part of what I love,” Peter said, finally breaking the silence. “The first day Jed brought me here, I knew it would be a part of my life forever.”

  Bryn looked about them at the small, shallow lake, edged here and there by thick, swampy areas full of reeds, with thick-treed snow-covered mountains that shot up on all three sides. A river fed into Summit from the mountain streams to the south. “This place is wild,” she said, shivering. “Mom would not like it.”

  He was quiet for a moment, paddling. “I know. There’s something about being here—it’s so … primary, basic. Not your mother’s style at all. Reminds a person of who he is and who he wants to be.” He dug in his paddle again, and Bryn remained silent, waiting for him to go on. “Jedidiah said to me once, ‘The bush teaches a man about what he wants and what he needs, and the difference between them.’ Every time I come here, I remember. And I leave rededicated to discovering it in Newport, too.”

  Bryn’s mind flew from this thin-aired, low-maintenance hideaway to their rather ostentatious home in Newport. Her moth
er had made a career out of volunteering with the Junior League and decorating their home with only the finest furnishings and accessories. “How did you and Mom ever get together?” She looked over her shoulder to see his rueful smile.

  “We were more alike once. In college, I thought …” His words drained away like the water off of his paddle. “At some point, your mother changed. I changed.” He halted, as if trying not to say too much.

  “She’s been pretty mean lately,” Bryn said, digging her paddle into the water again. “Are you two okay? I mean, your marriage and everything?”

  He was silent for a long moment. “Sure, Bryn. We’re fine.”

  Bryn licked her lips and kept paddling, searching the approaching shore for the Pierces’ cabin. The sounds of sharp axes cutting through soft wood carried across the lake, as they had since morning, and she caught sight of Eli and his father as they stood around an old, dying tree. Built the same year as the Baileys’, the Pierces’ cabin had been completed first, then Jedidiah and Peter had moved on to finish the Bailey abode. All in one summer. “We were young then,” her father would say wistfully. But there was something in his eyes, in the way he held his shoulders slightly back, as if still proud of the accomplishment, that made her ask him to tell the story again and again.

  Peter Bailey had met up with Jedidiah Pierce, born and raised in Alaska, in the summer of ’62, backpacking through Europe. In Germany, the pair had stayed at a youth hostel overnight and went out the next day to try the locals’ fabled Gewürztraminer. Frequently wineries set up tents along the road, and the duo stopped at the first one they saw. It was only much later that they learned they had crashed a wedding party, and the father of the bride had them tossed out.

  From then on, the men were like blood brothers, and Jed, having spotted the pristine site on a hike years before, brought his new friend to Summit Lake the following summer. Both purchased several acres from Ben White, who owned much of the land surrounding the water. Ben was an older man who had been living alone on Summit since 1953, when he was discharged from the army. His home was at the northern tip of the lake. No one else owned land on the lake or lived in the small mountain valley.

  “There she is,” Peter said from behind Bryn. “I’m always amazed that I can’t see their place from the water until I’m nearly on top of it.”

  Deep in the shadows, the cabin did blend wonderfully with the trees, hidden behind a copse of alder and white spruce.

  Jedidiah stood up with his son, ax in hand, panting. They had been working on felling an old-growth, rotten spruce that threatened their roof in the next winter storm. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip and took a step closer, grinning. “I knew that must be Peter Bailey who flew in,” he said. “And he’s got Bryn with him. Man, what a beauty!”

  Eli met his father’s knowing eyes.

  “She was always like catnip and you the tomcat,” Jed said in gentle warning. “Watch yourself.”

  “I don’t think she’s interested, Dad. The girl couldn’t even manage to say hello last time I saw her.”

  “She was a kid then. Now you’re adults. And that makes your dance a little more dangerous.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Eli asked crossly.

  “Can’t you see it? Trust a father’s intuition then. Just watch your step, Son. Listen to the Spirit’s lead,” he said, looking upward into the sunlight filtering through the dense alder and spruce boughs. He slammed his ax into the tree trunk and left Eli’s side to greet his old friend.

  After a moment, Eli began to follow. As he walked down the path, he tried to get a covert look at Bryn. When he saw her grin up at his father on the bank, it made him pause and almost trip. The girl, who had been a fox at fifteen, had grown into a classic Greek goddess, with long, lithe limbs and dark, swinging hair—an uncommon grace in every movement. And when she smiled, sweet heaven, it made his heart hurt and sail back to the year he was sixteen. The year she wouldn’t even speak to him. Too good for him, he had supposed. Their childhood friendship plainly dissolved.

  Forcing himself to leave the cover of the trees, he approached his father, keeping his eyes on Peter Bailey, not risking a fall on his face in front of Bryn. Eli shook Peter’s hand firmly, noticed the look of admiration in the man’s eyes, his glance down to his daughter. And then Eli had to. Had to turn and look at her, greet her. Like an adult, just when he felt a keening teen shyness he hadn’t encountered in years.

  Eli reached up for his grandfather’s airman’s cap and pulled it off his head, slipping it under one armpit. He forced himself to smile and look into her eyes—the color of a beaver’s tail in water. “Hi, Bryn,” he managed.

  “Eli,” she said with another smile and a short nod. “Your dad roped you into a trip to Summit too, huh?”

  “Every summer,” he said, wondering at her words. Roped? This place was heaven on earth. The kind magazine crews scouted for catalog shoots. Thoreau would have died a happy man after he’d seen a place like this. He glanced out at the honey glaze on the water, the deep forest green of the mountains, the snow at the peaks that was almost lavender. “What’s it been, four, five years?”

  “Five years,” she said, confirming what he already knew. “Dad can only make it two years between visits here. Every five years is right on track for me. I mean, it’s pretty. rustic … ”

  “Ah, I get it,” Jedidiah said, giving her a warm hug. “Californian would rather be at the beach? You’re a sight, Bryn. Pretty as a statefair queen. You must be proud, Peter.”

  “Couldn’t be prouder. And she’s smart as a whip too.”

  “Dad—,” Bryn tried, obviously embarrassed.

  “Straight A’s, at the University of California.”

  “Dad—”

  “So focused on her studies she won’t even look at the guys,” he said, punching Eli on the shoulder.

  “Dad!”

  “What?” Peter asked innocently.

  Bryn sighed and passed her father, shaking her head. “Dad still thinks I’m a deaf teenager,” she said under her breath to Eli, “so that he has license to say anything that passes through his head. Sorry.”

  “No problem,” he said, watching her go by, catching the scent of vanilla and green apples. Her shampoo? A lotion? She sat down on a chair on the porch and looked out at the lake.

  “My boy has his pilot’s license,” Jedidiah said to Peter, clearly not wanting to be one-upped. “Has his sights set on his own operation out of Talkeetna.”

  “Great,” Peter said in wistful admiration, as if he wished he were the one starting a company in Alaska. He clapped Eli on the shoulder. “That your de Havilland?”

  Eli looked past him to the old, restored Beaver on shore, knowing full well that it was the only plane in sight. “She’s mine.”

  “A beaut!” Peter said. “I would’ve had you fly us in had I known you were looking for work. Your operation will be all floatplanes?”

  “Floatplane, in the singular form,” Eli said, following his father and Peter up the path to the cabin. “Maybe someday I’ll have one outfitted with skis, take the tourists to land on the glaciers, up around Denali, that sort of thing.”

  “Talkeetna’s hopping. Must be twice as many people in town this summer as compared to ten years ago,” Peter said, as if hoping he was wrong.

  “Yeah,” Jedidiah said. “Have a seat, everyone. I’ll get some coffee on.” Through the open doorway, over his shoulder he said, “Princess Cruises bring busloads of tourists into town now. You should see them, walking through, completely oblivious to the locals trying to keep on with everyday life. It’s as if they think they own the place. And the trash they leave behind!”

  “You know what they say,” Eli interjected. All eyes turned to him. “An environmentalist is someone who already has their own cabin.”

  Peter laughed. “That’s a good one. It’s true.” He looked back out to the lake. “I never want Summit to be discovered, changed. This is our place. Ours.” He almost
whispered the last word, and Bryn studied her father as if confused. She clearly was not as enamored with the pristine Alaskan valley as were their fathers or Eli. But the way she leaned back against the Adirondack chair, her hair falling out of its knot like a curling oil slick along the Kenai peninsula … She looked as if she belonged there. At Summit Lake. In Alaska. Whether she knew it or not.

  “Where’s Meryl?” Peter asked as Jedidiah came out, a tray of coffee mugs in hand.

  “She’s taking this summer off. Said us boys needed some man time.” He smiled and offered the tray to each before setting it on the porch floor. “Truth be told, I kind of like our reunions after a little time apart.” There was a twinkle in his eyes. “So how long you stay-in’?” he asked, directing the question to Peter.

  “A month, if I can keep her here that long,” Peter said, nodding at his daughter.

  She paused for a telling couple of seconds. “I think I can last.” She paused, obviously thinking. “You know, Dad, a porch like this would help a lot.” Bryn looked around at the overhang that extended from the roof. “Allow us to be outside more. Keep us from getting cabin fever.”

  Peter nodded, looking around at it too, walking over to touch a post as if already doing measurements in his head. “Been a while since we’ve made any improvements to the old place.”

  “I could bring you some supplies,” Eli offered. “Headin’ out tomorrow.”

  “We could harvest the poles and crossbeams ourselves,” Peter said, throwing Bryn a cocked brow of challenge. “I think the boards for the roof would have to be flown in,” he allowed, gratefully accepting a refill from Jedidiah. “Not as young as I once was.”