by Henry, Sue
“Dead?” she called to the inspector.
“Yes.”
She whirled and disappeared so quickly they could not gauge her reaction to his confirmation.
Wilson shouted after her. “Get back to the house, you useless bitch. I told you to stay put and you’ll do what you’re told or answer to me. Goddammit.”
Looking after her, Alex caught glimpses of the red jacket as she ran toward a low log cabin half hidden in the trees. The place was poorly kept and depressingly cluttered with discarded mining equipment, snow machines, and boats, most broken and never repaired. In the open door, another, older, female figure waited to pull her in and slam it shut. Old as he was, Duck Wilson obviously had his family cowed, except, perhaps, this girl.
“Daughter?” he murmured to Delafosse, as Wilson returned to his threatening position on the dock.
“Will’s wife, Cherlyn, poor kid.”
“Now git out of here,” Duck demanded, once again gesturing with the shotgun.
“Where’s Charlie, Duck?” Delafosse tried again. “He was seen with Will.”
“Don’t know nothin’ about him,” Wilson insisted stubbornly.
“I can get a warrant and search this place, if I have to.”
“Like to see you try.”
“We’ll be back, if we don’t find him. Better think about it, if there’s anything you know about Will’s death, and I think you do.”
“Git, I said. Wouldn’t tell you what time it was if I knew, but I don’t know…nothin’.” He reached to lift the rope from the piling with the barrel of the gun and deliberately dropped it in the water rather than toss it back into the boat.
Disgustedly, Delafosse hauled it in, coiling it neatly into place on the deck, where it would certainly freeze and be difficult to handle by the time they reached Dawson. Without another word, he waved a hand at the constable pilot and the idling engine roared to life, pushing them back into the mainstream of the river.
Duck Wilson stood crookedly on the dock, staring his belligerence after them until the bend in the river swept him from sight.
“Bastard,” Delafosse allowed himself, and settled on a bench to wait out the trip back to Dawson.
“He already knew Will was dead,” Jensen commented, a minute later.
“He did.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Charlie, probably.”
“I’d sure like to know where that one is. Talk to him.”
“So would I, but he won’t come walking into the office. I saw him once on the street with Will. Looked a pretty tough case. Maybe a prison buddy.”
“You think there’s another boat, don’t you? The one Hampton says Will and Charlie were in when they blasted a hole in his canoe?”
“Yes. You noticed how he avoided my question? Why? Does he know where it is, or is it missing?”
“Interesting question. Charlie have it, you think?”
“Well, if we could find Charlie, it’s my bet we’d be able to locate the boat. I’d also like to find out who it belongs to. Duck? Will? Did they steal it?”
Jensen gnawed at the edge of his mustache with his lower teeth and watched the bank fly past. Traveling with the current toward Dawson made the trip a much quicker one.
“You know,” he ventured slowly. “I wonder if the Wilson family—and Charlie—might have anything to do with the stolen trucks and RVs. There haven’t been any more of them since this whole thing started. Maybe Will and Charlie switched to stealing boats and gear instead.”
Delafosse thought about it. “Could be, I guess,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time they were involved in theft. Boats wouldn’t make them as much as trucks and would be harder to transport…well, maybe not. Less identifiable, anyway.”
“You going to get that warrant?”
“No. Not for the moment. Think we should let him stew for a while. He’ll have to come into town for Will’s body in a few days anyway. Let him worry about how much we know. I’ll put a patrol on the waterfront while we do a little more digging in that direction.”
Delafosse turned to watch the wake of the boat roiling out behind them. Finding Will’s body bothered him. Something connected him with Russell. That seemed totally unlikely, but they had been killed in the same spot and within hours of each other. Could the subsistence issue have anything to do with it? Had Sean Russell and Wilson somehow been the link? He wasn’t comfortable with that either. Charlie—the kid was the unknown factor in the thing. Hampton? Could Jensen’s reluctance to fasten the killings on him be intuition alone? Or did the fact that he was another American enter into it?
With that thought, he felt immediately guilty. There was absolutely no reason to believe Jensen would unfairly protect a fellow countryman. The trooper was as committed to law and order as he was, whoever the culprit. Oh, hell. They needed more information, obviously.
And there was something disturbing about this case, something that made him frown uneasily at the wrongness of it.
He leaned against the side of the boat and shrugged his collar up closer around his neck. The air smelled like snow, and from the looks of the sky, it was going to be soon. Was there something more at either site on the river that needed checking before it was buried under a white blanket for the winter? He couldn’t think of anything.
What he would really like to be doing was relaxing indoors near a warm wood fire, with, perhaps, a snifter of good brandy and coffee—after a good dinner—without a care or a case to fill his mind. Perhaps with Clair? He remembered the look she had given him that morning, appreciating his handling of Sean Russell. Maybe she wouldn’t say no if he asked her. Maybe he should…Well…maybe after they solved this one…when things quieted down and he could focus on it…keep himself from making some enormous and embarrassing social blunder.
Clair was more than just attractive, with that wonderful cloud of red hair. Smart, too. Had a good sense of balance and humor. He was pleased that Alex liked her. It validated his own taste. He just might…
“Well,” said Jensen, raising an eyebrow, “you ask her yet?”
Chapter Twelve
SEEING DELAFOSSE OFF TO WHITEHORSE and driving his truck back to the hotel alone felt strange to Alex, after several days of the cooperative partnership. He stopped in the lobby, intending to call Hampton rather than climb the stairs.
“Haven’t seen him,” the hotel clerk told Alex, when an empty ringing of the telephone indicated he was not in his room. “If he went out, he didn’t leave his key. But I was up in fourteen fixing a leaky faucet for over half an hour. Just came back down. You could check the bar.”
Alex was turning to do so when the door opened and Jim Hampton walked in, snowflakes in his hair and on the shoulders of his coat, one cheek swelling and a thin line of blood trickling from an eyebrow.
“Hi,” he said, with a rueful grin.
“What the hell happened?” Jensen asked. “Where’ve you been?”
Hampton stopped, startled, and the grin faded from his face.
“I didn’t realize I was under house arrest.”
“No,” Jensen told him. “No, you aren’t. I’m just concerned about that hothead, Sean Russell. Evidently, I have reason to be. At least I assume he may have something to do with your somewhat battered condition.”
Chastened and a little resentful, Hampton nodded. “I only went out for a minute, to the Visitors Center, looking for a map of old Dawson. I thought I’d been careful, but he came out of a pub and caught me coming back.”
“What does he look like?”
“Nowhere close to this bad. I stopped him with one punch that took the air out and left him sitting on the boardwalk. He’ll be sore in the middle, but I didn’t hit him very hard.”
“Any witnesses that he started it? Just in case.”
“Oh, yeah. Half a dozen barflies stood and watched the whole thing. They didn’t cheer, but they didn’t help either.”
“You want to do anything legal about i
t?”
“No. No. Definitely not. He’s got good reason to be unpredictable and upset right now. I’m okay, or will be as soon as I clean up some.”
The refusal seemed a little too enthusiastic to Jensen, whose questioning look brought an embarrassed glance that dropped immediately to monitor ineffectual swipes at Hampton’s bloody shirt. “I probably shouldn’t have hit him, but he had me backed against a wall.”
The clerk, not wanting his floor dripped on, had come out from behind the counter to hand Hampton a couple of tissues, which he immediately held to his face. “Come in here,” he suggested, opening the door to a small lavatory. “I’ve got a first-aid kit. You going to need stitches?”
“Just some disinfectant and a Band-Aid, I think. It’s not really bad, just bleeds like a sucker. Hope Russell’s hand hurts right along with his belly.”
“You finish the journal?” Jensen asked, watching the repair process.
“Nope. Took an unexpected nap. Got them almost to Dawson though. Where’s Tweedledee? Thought you and the inspector were inseparable.”
“Quick run to Whitehorse,” Jensen told him, feeling strangely uneasy giving him the information that Delafosse was out of town.
A rakish Band-Aid plastered over the cut, Hampton turned from the mirror and came out dabbing at the blood that had stained his clothing on the way back to the hotel. It had rinsed off the jacket’s waterproof fabric, but his shirt was now a streaked ruin.
“Any way I could get some clean clothes from my gear at Delafosse’s office?” he asked. “Sure hate to go to dinner in this mess.”
“No reason you shouldn’t. The clothes’re not really evidence. I need to talk to Clair anyway. Let’s go.”
Without going upstairs, they left the hotel and headed through the new snow toward the RCMP office. A thin layer of white was already blanketing everything in sight and was coming down more heavily all the time. As they walked toward the river, then turned west along the main road between it and town, Jensen thought of dogs, sleds, and told Hampton about the overnight trips he was looking forward to this winter. The opposite bank across the wide stretch of the Yukon could hardly be made out behind the veil of falling flakes.
“There’s a graveyard of old paddle wheelers downstream from the ferry dock on the other side of the river,” he said, gesturing in that general direction.
“Steamboats?” Hampton questioned with interest.
Jensen grinned. “Only the largest steamboat graveyard on the Yukon. It’s got five of the grand ladies that used to travel the river in the old days. All of them are gradually disintegrating.”
“Wow. Is it okay to go see them?”
“Sure, but most of them have pretty well fallen apart.” Alex recited the names he had found in a brochure at the hotel earlier. “The Victorian, the Schwatka, the Tyrrell, the Julia B., and the Seattle III. They were all hauled out and put up on ways years ago, when they became obsolete and no one wanted them. They just decay and collapse a little more every season. Parts of them are just piles of broken boards. If you really want to see what they looked like when they were still working, take a tour of the Keno.”
“That the one on the riverbank close to downtown?”
“Right. Last one to run the Yukon, brought down here from dry dock in Whitehorse in 1960 and permanently docked on the riverbank to be restored. It’s not really an old one, built sometime in the twenties, but you can get a pretty good idea how they were put together. The others were built in the late 1890s, during or right after the rush.
“You seen them?” Hampton asked him.
“Just from the river. I’d also like to get a look at the goldfields up around Bonanza Creek. Haven’t seen them either. Del…the inspector says there’s still a big dredge up there—the Yukon Gold Company’s Number Four—out on Claim Seventeen Below Discovery. Closed for the winter now, but it’s been restored and they open it for tourists in the summer. It was the largest wooden-hull, bucketline dredge in North America. Chains with links a yard long. Supposed to be pretty impressive.”
“Seventeen Below Discovery? What’s that mean?” Hampton frowned, puzzled.
“Well, claims at the site where gold is found are traditionally called ‘Discovery.’ The first to stake a new claim gets two, the original and one more by right of discovery. The rest are staked above and below the first, and are called by their numbers away from it: One Above Discovery, One Below Discovery, and so on. The names were, of course, shortened to Four Above, Ten Below, like that, depending on how far away they were. The dredge is on Seventeen Below.”
“How far from Dawson are they?”
“Not far if you’re driving. But back during the rush it was a three-hour walk to Discovery Claim. Long way if you’re carrying everything you need on your back.”
“How big were the claims?”
“They measured five hundred feet along the creek bank and drove in four-foot stakes with the name of the miner and claim number. They usually ran a hundred feet from the creek.”
“That’s a good size.”
“Yeah, but they staked them in a hurry and some were pretty rough. When they were surveyed later, some were long, some short, and scraps and wedges showed up between some of them and were claimed by others who hovered like vultures while the survey was made. One fraction was only three inches wide, and they called the greedy owner ‘Three-Inch White’ for the rest of his life.”
Hampton chuckled as they climbed the steps to the door of the office. Jensen went to talk to Clair, while a constable helped Hampton find the bag that contained his clothes, in the evidence storage room. He quickly changed shirts, discarded the blood-soaked one into a wastebasket, and collected a change of under-and outerwear to take back to the hotel.
“Well,” said Jensen, when Hampton joined him at his desk, “you look spiffy enough. Let’s go find some dinner. Clair’s coming along to introduce me to the curator at the museum on the way. She thinks he may be able to answer a couple of my questions.”
They waited at the door until Clair came out of the back room, pulling on her coat, then walked out into whirling flakes of snow, now falling like feathers through the early dark.
“O-oh.” Clair raised her face to catch a flake on her tongue. “First big ones of the year. Pretty early. We don’t usually get this until October.”
As they turned off Front onto Church Street, Alex bent to scoop up a handful of snow, which he quickly molded into a snowball and tossed at the back of Hampton’s head. For a minute or two, the resulting barrage between the two was fairly spectacular, but quickly resolved into a game of skill in hitting power poles that lasted until they reached the museum.
Hampton was suitably impressed with the well-kept Neoclassical Revival building, which was two stories tall, occupied most of a city block, and was painted two attractive shades of gray. It had, Clair explained, been constructed in 1901 as the grand federal Old Territorial Administration Building, and had been turned into a museum in the sixties. “Has the largest collection in the Yukon,” she told them proudly. “You should look for a map here, Jim. Fewer injuries involved. It’s also a place to look for the names in that journal. They have a great archive of people who were here during the gold rush. The curator won’t have time tonight, but he could help you tomorrow.”
“Hey, that would be great.”
The museum was closed for the season, but Clair led them around to a side door and pounded on it. Through its panes of glass, they watched a figure pop out of an office halfway down a long hallway inside and hurry along to open it for them.
Robert Fitzgerald was a small man with an unruly mop of fuzzy gray hair that stuck out from the sides of his head. The top was bald and shone dully under the light over the door as he stuck his head out.
“Come in. Come on in,” he said, peering over a pair of reading glasses. Obviously, he was pleased that someone needed his assistance and expertise.
Clair introduced the three of them, then suggested that,
rather than waiting, she and Hampton go on to claim a table for dinner while Jensen asked his questions.
“You won’t be long and I’m ready for a sit-down,” she smiled. “How about you, Jim?”
“Well…considering that I lost my afternoon snack…” He grinned sheepishly at Jensen. “It was as good a reason to deck someone as any. A competition-sized cinnamon roll that he batted out of my hand and into the street.” He followed Clair back through the door into a whirl of snow. “See you later.”
“Come back tomorrow, Mr. Hampton,” the curator called after him. “I’m sure we can find you a suitable map.”
Jensen followed Fitzgerald to his office and sat down on the straight chair the curator offered with a casual wave. The office was remarkably neat, not the clutter he had anticipated from the manager of a museum. He was almost disappointed, as he had imagined it full of artifacts and piled with paper. Chiding himself for prejudgment, he watched as the curator pulled open a drawer and removed a file with a self-satisfied flourish.
“Wilson, you want? Oswald? I know that one all right. One of the few from the gold rush who stayed around afterward. Yes, his family’s still here. Bad bunch, then and now, but part of the history.”
He sat down and opened the file between them on his desk. Along with a handful of papers, it contained a photograph of several men on what was obviously a mining claim. They were posed around a sluice box with water running through it, holding shovels and picks, as if they were working.
“Here,” he said, pointing to a large man with a full dark beard and a wide-brimmed hat shoved back on his head. Four of the five miners pictured smiled at the photographer, but Wilson’s expression was more of a glare. “Oswald Wilson. From the records, people around him tended to disappear. Guy he came with went missing the next spring, 1898.”
“So Oswald and Duck Wilson are related?”
“Duck…real name’s Samuel, but…”
“Yeah, I heard the story about his nickname.”