by Henry, Sue
Books by Sue Henry
About the Author
Alaska Series
—1 *Murder on the Iditarod Trail (1996)
—2 Termination Dust (1996)
—3 Sleeping Lady (1997)
—4 *Death Takes Passage (1998)
—5 *Deadfall (1999)
—6 Murder on the Yukon Quest (2000)
—7 Beneath the Ashes (2001)
—8 Dead North (2002)
—9 Cold Company (2003)
—10 Death Trap (2004)
About the Author
SUE HENRY won the Macavity and Anthony awards for Murder on the Iditarod Trail. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
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Alaska Series
—1 *Murder on the Iditarod Trail (1996)
—2 Termination Dust (1996)
TERMINATION DUST. Copyright © 1995 by Sue Henry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Microsoft Reader February 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-136875-2
In memory of the thousands, wise and foolish, who, against enormous odds, toiled and trudged their way into the Klondike in 1897, where many died in the desperate winter that followed, when food could not be had for any amount of the gold they scraped from the depths of the iron-hard ground.
And for my brother, John, and his wife, Sue, for their unflagging encouragement and support.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to the following people, who assisted in the research and writing of this book:
Alice Abbott, Becky Lundquist, Phoebe Czikra and the Friday Night Adoption Society, for patience, proofreading, encouragement, and a most essential sense of humor.
The Alaska State Troopers, Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, and the Yukon Royal Canadian Mounted Police, for generous technical assistance.
The Yukon Archives, Whitehorse, Yukon, for records and research on the Klondike Gold Rush.
The Lousaac Library, Alaska Collection, for research assistance on the Klondike Gold Rush.
James E. O’Malley, M.D., for assistance in understanding the implications and care of cold injuries, particularly frostbite.
Lieutenant Richard J. Tyler, a victim of severe frostbite on Mount McKinley in 1994, for the courage to share. My gratitude and best wishes.
Vanessa Summers for her wonderful maps.
Flo Foster and The Roadhouse, Whitehorse, Yukon, for bluegrass, enthusiasm, and shelter from the storm.
Charlotte Masarik for her cheerful company on the long drive to Skagway, Dawson, over the Top of the World, and back to Anchorage. Thanks, Thelma.
David Highfill, formerly of Avon Books, for faith and friendship.
Though the author has tried to make the story as accurate as possible, there are a few scenes in which artistic license has been taken with locations and the activities of law enforcement agencies to allow the story to proceed smoothly. For this presumption, and for any other discrepancy or error, the author takes full responsibility. All characters and events portrayed are fictional and bear no relationship to actual persons.
Map
IN THE DARK ON THE ICE OF THE FROZEN river, small white crystals of snow swirled so thickly that it was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction, let alone either bank of the Yukon. The colder the temperature, the smaller and harder moisture solidifies into dry, icy pellets. At over thirty below zero, these were so fine they flew abrasively on the wind and flowed across the ice like sand.
The early January night of 1898 was not one for traveling, rather for seeking shelter…any shelter. But in a blizzard on the upper Yukon, twenty miles north of the gold-rush city of Dawson, gray shadow among shadows, a lone figure moved on the river ice. One lurching step after another, it staggered against the wind that threatened to blow it over, hesitating to draw breath between efforts, but always stubbornly, hypnotically taking one more step, as it had done for hours.
A thick beard defined the figure as male, though this was so packed with snow its color was indiscernible. Ice, frozen from the moisture of his breathing, rimed it around the mouth and coated the mustache above it. A beaver hat came down low to the eyebrows, leaving only the nose and part of the cheeks exposed. Frost clung to the lashes of his eyes, narrowed to slits and circled darkly with fatigue in a face already gaunt from hunger. When he blinked, they sometimes froze shut and he would swipe at them with the back of the beaver mittens that sheathed his hands and arms to the elbow. A tattered, gray wool blanket was draped over his angular frame and knotted clumsily at the waist, covering the shoulders of a knee-length parka, hand-stitched of wolf pelts, fur to the inside.
Boots over heavy wool socks covered feet he knew were still under him but could not feel. They had been numb for a long time, as had his hands and fingers. The exposed flesh of his cheeks exhibited the characteristic dead white of frostbite.
He had started this trek with a tiny amount of dried meat, now long since consumed a shred at a time. A bottle of water inside his coat had frozen despite his body heat. Snow, tongued from what collected on his mittens, melted into an unsatisfying hint of dampness and filled his mouth with a constant reminder of cruel thirst.
Earlier, he had towed a small sled packed lightly with personal gear. It lay where he had abandoned it when it became more than he could manage, perhaps five miles back. Simply dropping its rope, he had stumbled away without looking. Someone might find it. In clear weather a few freighters infrequently ran the river ice with their precious strings of dogs and heavy sleds. This night no musher would consider taking such a chance.
Many miles still lay between this man and the only possible shelter, and he would never reach it. Vaguely he knew that his journey was now measured in feet, not miles. Resigned, he concerned himself only with the next step and his ability to take it. He had known when he left Dawson that reaching the gold camp of Forty Mile alone was an impossibility, that he would almost surely die on the way.
It was his only option. Here, in the cold and storm of the wilderness, he would eventually lie down alone and go to sleep, perhaps momentarily imagining he was warm, if the tales were true. Here he would be able to die his own death, not that intended for him by his enemies. It would be less heinous than a crushed skull or being buried alive, which he suspected would have been his fate—as it had been Ned’s.
His great despair was that his family might never know what had become of him. Fear had made him reluctant to tell anyone of his departure. Secretly, carrying little, he had slipped away into the cover of the storm that obscured his trail.
With utmost caution, he had secreted the gold in the safest place he could think of, hoping they would assume he had taken it with him. But only a few nuggets were contained in a leather pouch in one deep coat pocket. In another, a tin held a carefully wrapped, waterproof packet holding the photograph of a woman and two small children in a narrow journal filled with his writing.
The next step forward became a stagger for balance on his wooden feet. Another, and he lost the battle to remain upright and sank to his knees in a spot where the wind had swept the thick ice almost clear of snow. Raising his head to look downriver, he suddenly saw a cabin with smoke rising from the chimney in the utterly straight line
of totally still and windless weather. It sat solidly on the ice in midstream. There was the glimmer of light from a window. The wind blew snow into his eyes and the hallucination vanished. But for a moment he had seen and yearned toward it, thought for an instant he was saved after all. Now, once again he was conscious of the dark and the fierce cold. He was incredibly tired and sleepy. It was so hard to think.
Covering his face with his mitts to shut out the flying white, he leaned forward until his elbows rested on his knees, shutting his eyes. Rest for a minute. Only a minute.
No. Not here. Off the ice, on the bank. He had a personal horror of dying on the ice, which would melt in the spring and drop his decomposing body into the turbulent thaw, tumbling it apart among the ice blocks of breakup, rendering it unrecognizable even as a corpse, burying his bones in the silt of the riverbed. On solid ground he could sleep undisturbed. There was a slim chance his body might be found, someone know who he had been. He didn’t suppose it was truly important, but it mattered to him. So, once again, he began the attempt to struggle back to his feet.
Twice, when almost vertical, he slipped and collapsed into an untidy heap. There was a sharp pain in one knee, where it had slammed into the ice. But he could crawl, so he did, slowly, for long minutes, until he reached the snow-covered right bank. Floundering up it through the drifts and around a leafless stand of frozen willow, he at last found a level, somewhat sheltered spot.
There he lay down, pulled the blanket loose and over his face to keep out the snow, and was still. It was good to let go and rest, and it did seem warmer. The injured leg twitched stiffly. There was an ache in his neck, but he couldn’t rouse himself to move. He dozed for a little, then semi-awareness returned.
He thought of his wife and shaped her name, Polly, at which his dry, chapped lips cracked and oozed blood that froze in his beard, though he did not know it. “Sorry…Polly.”
They have murdered me, he told her in his mind. Sure as if they’d shot me. Ned, too. Bastards. What a long way to come for this. A thread of remembered anger floated through his thoughts and away.
He recalled her ironing his clothes in the kitchen of their small house and seemed to smell the hot starch of a clean shirt on the board as she smoothed the collar. Usually she ironed the sheets as well and you could smell both the freshness of the outdoors from the clothesline and the slight scent of the woodstove on them. He shrugged deeper into his soft featherbed, enjoying that smell. It must be Saturday, for he could feel a clean nightshirt and his hair felt cool and damp from a bath. Drowsily, he was aware of his mother’s strong hands gently tucking the blanket up around his shoulders, smoothing the hair from his forehead.
Then it all drifted into comforting darkness and, as he slept, he was not hungry, was not cold—was not aware when a pair of wolves trotting up the river paused, sniffed, and listened carefully before slowly following his track across the ice and up the bank.
Chapter One
LATE-AFTERNOON SHADOWS REACHED LIKE fingers from the black spruce along the shore, darkening the smooth waters of a wide bend in the Yukon River. Undisturbed by rapids at this particular point, north of Dawson, Yukon Territory, the surface reflected a swirl of colors from surrounding evergreen, autumn-bronzed birch, and the faded-blue, pre-sunset sky. The raucous cry of a jay knifed through the air, turning the head of a bald eagle perched on a dead limb, waiting, patiently, silent, for a squirrel to emerge from its nearby hole. A dragonfly darted in Zs over the surface of the water, well above the reach of any ambitious fish.
A small, rhythmic splashing drew the eagle’s attention once again from its objective, this time upriver of the south to north curve of dark water. Out of the shadows and into a last remaining streak of sunlight floated a red canoe with a single passenger, drifting with the current.
Raising a hand, the paddler shaded his eyes from the late glare of the sun, sighting ahead to make out the narrow line of a thin sandbar coming into view on the right. Protected by the bar was a bit of flat, pebble-strewn beach that looked just wide enough for a campsite. A trickle of a stream ran over it into the river, complaining quietly to the unevenness of its bed.
A strong, expert pull on the paddle corrected the direction of the canoe and sent it gliding toward the rind of beach. When the bottom grated gently on small stones, the canoeist did not move for a minute, but laid the paddle across the gunwales and leaned forward on his braced arms, assessing this choice. Judging it acceptable, he rose, stepped out, and carefully lifted the craft far enough from the river so there was no chance of its floating away without him.
Removing a floppy-brimmed hat and clasping a wrist behind his head with the opposite hand, Jim Hampton stretched to relieve the tension in his strong, muscular shoulders and arms, then ran a hand through the sand-colored waves of his hair and yawned. Pleasantly tired, he was pleased with his progress and appreciative of the wilderness he was discovering. It had been a good day of travel on this unfamiliar river.
Just under six feet tall, he was fit and even-featured, though his hair was beginning to recede slightly from his temples and a few gray strands silvered it. This secretly satisfied him, for through most of his thirties he had been embarrassed to appear younger than he really was. With the slight widening of his forehead and touch of gray, he knew he looked more his age and that it was not unbecoming. Even the creases developing around his eyes were not unwelcome, for they hinted at laughter and hours of looking over the glare of sun-bright waters.
Canoeing the headwaters of the Yukon River, gold-rush country, was a thing he had wanted to do for years. Working construction in the Denver area left him little extra time during the summer season, but this year he had taken it anyway. Late in August he had loaded the canoe in his truck and driven the long road north to Whitehorse. There he had left the canoe, driven three hundred and twenty-seven miles to Dawson, parked the truck, and caught a return ride with a trucker. Then for a week he had paddled the winding course of the river and the lakes it passed through, back to the famous gold-rush community.
When he learned that only two more days would take him as far as the Forty-Mile River and the termination of a scrap of road at the old settlement of Clinton Creek, he couldn’t resist seeing more of country with which he was rapidly falling in love. Arranging to be picked up there by a Dawson resident who knew the area, he extended his trip. Though it was late in the season, the Top of the World Highway would be open until it snowed, usually later in September or even early October. It ran over a pass as high as four thousand feet along a crest of the mountains between Alaska and the Yukon Territory, and the spectacular scenery alone would be worth the effort.
This night he was exceptionally glad he had yielded to impulse. The day had been gloriously sunny with a cool reminder of fall in the air, and the Yukon had changed character with the influx of several rivers and streams that broadened and added a deep feeling of power to its heavy waters. Though it was nowhere near the mighty, mile-wide Yukon it would become by the time it neared the coast of Alaska on its fifteen-hundred-mile run, it had already gained authority and the spirit of a major waterway.
Half a day in the town of Dawson, with its gold-rush atmosphere, gambling casinos, and dance-hall girls, had been amusing and interesting historically. It had also allowed him to add a few fresh groceries to his supplies, but it was good to be back on the river. He loved being alone on a new river more than any activity he could imagine. In the previous ten years he had been on many in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, but in this first trip on northern waters he found deep satisfaction from his own pleasure in it.
Swinging around to look back toward the river, he was just in time to watch the eagle launch itself in a deadly silent dive that ended with the faint shrill of the squirrel; dinner, deftly caught and clutched in razor talons as the raptor glided away into the trees. Turning back to the canoe, Hampton began to unload his gear. With little more than an hour of daylight left, he knew he would have to work steadily to
have his camp organized as he wanted it and firewood collected before dark. His own dinner would be appreciated, though he had no intention of catching it.
With a little steel wool, twigs and dry grass for kindling, and a few splinters of driftwood, he quickly lit a small fire in a circle of rounded river rocks. Carefully feeding it until it was burning reliably, he dipped a kettle of water from the stream to balance over the blaze before he left the small beach to find more wood on the bank above it.
Most of the upward slope near the stream was crowded with yellowing willow. He scrambled through it, across a flat space and on into the larger trees beyond, where the grass thinned and he easily picked up an armload of good-sized deadwood. Carrying this and dragging a limb too long and awkward to lift, but good meat for his hand ax, he went back through the willow to the bank, where he deposited the collection and headed for a second load.
Taking a slightly different route through the willow this time, he was almost to the trees when he stumbled over something, lurched, and wound up on his hands and knees in a small open space. Curious, he looked to see what had felled him. Under his right shin was a dark, somewhat less than natural-looking object about the size but not the shape of his hat. Standing up, he brushed himself off and, squatting on his heels, reached for it.
It was hardened and uneven, stiff as leather that has been wet and dry numerous times. Looking more closely in the fading light, he frowned. It was leather…an old boot. A very old boot. Something rattled in the foot as he turned it over. Pulling on one side, he tried to straighten and open the cuff, which had doubled over and dried rigidly against the foot. It cracked and a large chunk came away in his hand, along with a knobby piece of something yellowish-white. Looking closely, he was startled to find he was holding a bone. Completely dry, fleshless and clean, it was some kind of knucklebone the size of the end joint of his thumb. Slowly, he upended the boot, so the torn hole in the ancient leather faced down, and out fell a small, pale heap of additional bones. Staring at them, contemplating their various shapes, he knew that he was looking at the complete bones of a human foot and ankle. Whoever had owned the boot had died wearing it.