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Books by Sue Henry Page 64

by Henry, Sue


  Dog booties are made of a variety of materials—fleece, Cordura, and nylon pack cloth—and protect the feet of the dogs from sharp ice and snow, providing insulation for feet that are extremely vulnerable and can easily become sore or damaged, with cracks in the pads, chafing, or blisters. Used in combination with foot creams or ointments, the booties help to keep the dogs’ feet as clean and dry as possible. They must fit well, must not be too tight or have too much excess material flapping to accumulate snow and ice. Velcro strips fasten them around the dogs’ legs and some dogs who do not care for wearing them quickly become experts at stripping them off with their teeth. Since foot care is vital to the success of any racer, hundreds of booties are used—and lost—in any distance race.

  Jessie welcomed Ryan’s company. It reminded pleasantly of miles they had run together in past Iditarods. He had always been an easy friend with whom to travel, because he didn’t talk his head off, gave her personal space, and respected her abilities as a musher, lacking the women-are-less-able nonsense that a few male mushers still occasionally exhibited. For another hour they ran together until pulling off the trail to give their dogs a snack, then spent a little time by the fire he built to make coffee, as they caught up on each other’s lives.

  “You lost your head and got married, I hear,” Jessie teased as she tossed him one of her Snickers bars to go with his coffee. “Poor baby. Bachelor days all gone now.”

  “Okay—okay. You can give me grief, but I should have done it years ago. I was too damned focused on this.” He gestured toward his team and sled. “It kind of takes you over—addiction—obsession—whatever. Gets in the way of some other important things, you know. Life isn’t all dogs and trails to somewhere.”

  She nodded slowly. “I know. You’re preaching to the choir, Jim.”

  “I understand you’ve still got a good thing going with that trooper we met the year of my moose disaster.”

  Jessie took a sip of coffee and bit her lip before answering.

  “Yes…well.”

  Ryan gave her a quick questioning look. “Not a good thing?”

  When she hesitated, considering, he backpedaled. “Hey, I’m just being nosy. Ignore me, okay?”

  “That’s all right, Jim. I don’t mind—I just don’t really know how to explain it.”

  Telling him about Alex’s father’s death and the extended trip to Idaho gave her a chance to examine out loud some of the things she had been feeling and thinking.

  “There’s something uncomfortable about it right now. We’re off our usual wavelength.”

  “Well, he’s pretty concerned about some other things, right?”

  “Right, but it’s more than that, and we both know it. We just haven’t talked about it. Whatever. We’ll work it out when he comes back, I think. How’s married life treating you?”

  “Good—very good. Better than that, really. It’s great. Anne is…”

  As she listened to him share his positive feelings about his new wife and the contentment of their wedded state, Jessie found herself comparing it to her own relationship and finding that what she and Alex had between them was similar in honesty, trust, and respect, mixed with a warm affection and sense of humor. Though Alex had never crowded her intentionally, she knew he would be happier if she agreed to a wedding. Wasn’t it traditionally supposed to be the man who was reluctant? What made her so disinclined? Was her hesitation responsible for what felt out of key between them?

  “…so I just keep her in a box in the closet and feed her angleworms once a week,” Jim continued in a serious tone.

  “You what?”

  “You were nodding at the right places, but I didn’t think you were really listening.” He grinned. “Gotcha.”

  They ran on, through an area that had been burned several years before and was full of stumps and a tangle of timber. Thankfully it was short, only ten or fifteen minutes of ugly trail that soon came out onto a slough of willows and alder. Then they were back onto the Yukon, where there were large cracks and steps in the ice.

  In some places the river water had frozen solidly to the bank, but there was a drop onto ice that had broken loose and fallen, to refreeze on a lower level. As Tank led the dogs carefully down this step, Jessie watched closely and halted the team quickly when Bliss slipped and fell into a dangerous crack between the two levels that the others had successfully jumped across. Hauling Bliss out uninjured, she drove the rest slowly and carefully over the hazard and several more that followed. Having crossed similar obstacles in training, the dogs all did well, but Jessie was not sorry to leave this section behind her and proceed on smoother ice.

  Nine of the front-runners in the race reached McCabe Creek between noon and two-thirty on Tuesday, having run just over forty miles from Carmacks with no long rest stops. Jessie and Jim Ryan pulled in at a quarter to four, happy to find themselves in tenth and eleventh positions for the moment. After a reasonable stay, they set out together for Pelly Crossing, thirty-five miles away, planning an extended rest there for both humans and dogs.

  Crossing the highway in the lead, Jessie was pleased as her team trotted steadily along beside it for a ways before following the race markers off onto a trapline. Soon she stopped to shift the position of two of her dogs, only to hear Ryan swearing as, passing her, his team hit a patch of overflow that sent his sled sliding wildly to knock into a tree with a teeth-jarring thump. A small frozen lake gave them a quick break before more of the same, and more of Ryan’s curses, but the trail then smoothed out along with his temper.

  Pelly Crossing had been added to the race route as a checkpoint for the 1996 Yukon Quest and the people of the small community had worked hard and successfully to make their section of the trail the best of the run. It was wide and even, with the foliage trimmed back, giving the grateful racers a pleasant and stressless trip to the tall bluff that told them they were only three short miles from the checkpoint.

  The next 250 miles, from Pelly to Dawson, would be the longest of any section of the Yukon Quest, and would include two formidable climbs; one over the 3,550-foot Eureka Dome, the other up King Solomon’s Dome, at 3,800 feet, the highest point in the race, just before reaching Dawson City. They both knew it would be wise to start for Dawson in good shape, with well-rested, well-fed, and energized teams.

  Jim Ryan checked in first and drove off to find a good space to settle his team. As Jessie finished going through the routine examination of required equipment and food with the checkpoint official, she noticed an impatient Jake Leland waiting to speak to her. He said nothing until she had driven clear of the checkpoint area to allow the next musher to pull in, but followed close beside her with long strides and a worried look on his face. Fifty yards from the checkpoint, Jessie stopped the team, punched in the snow hook, and turned to see what was wrong.

  Jake looked ten years older than when she had seen him in Carmacks, tired and tormented.

  “What’s up, Jake? Still no word on Debbie? She must have—”

  “Jessie, please—I need your help. Someone’s got her.”

  “Got her?”

  “Taken her—kidnapped her—snatched her right off the trail.”

  Confused, Jessie frowned and shook her head, thinking she’d misunderstood.

  “You must be mistaken, Jake. She’s just late and…you’re worried. It’s harder to wait for mushers, especially rookies, than to run yourself. She’ll be—”

  He huffed impatience, scowled, and didn’t let her finish, frustration drawing deep lines in his forehead as he waved a gloved hand to erase her words.

  “You’re not listening. I said someone’s taken her.”

  Jessie was listening now. This was not the calm, take-things-as-they-come, confident, handle-anything dog musher she had known for years. She had never seen Jake Leland so distracted or incensed. There was both rage and fear in his voice.

  She held up one mittened hand to slow him down. “Whoa. How can you know that?”

  He nodded,
recognizing that he had her complete attention. “Okay, here’s the deal. She never made it to Carmacks. Left Braeburn an hour after you did, with two teams between and the next one forty minutes behind. No one passed her after that. She didn’t stop at the cabin on Mandana Lake, went right through, though the volunteer there thinks he might have seen her going down onto the lake. He said you were sleeping out back.”

  Jessie agreed, remembering the tiny crowded cabin.

  “I must have been, the timing’s right, but he said she hadn’t come through. I asked him.”

  “Yeah, well…all he remembered was someone’s back and the description fit, even if he didn’t get a good look or a name. I waited hours longer than it should have taken her to get to Carmacks. She didn’t come in.”

  “But, Jake, she’s got to be there somewhere. Where the hell…? Someone must have seen—”

  He went on, ignoring her comment, the words pouring out in a torrent of concern and growing anger.

  “I asked everyone. Nobody’d seen her. When I decided that nobody in Carmacks knew where she was, I borrowed a snowmachine and ran the trail all the way back to Braeburn, turned around, and ran back again. She wasn’t there. But halfway back, on Mandana Lake—you know, the last one of the Chain of Lakes—I found a place where a single sled seemed to have stopped and the driver thrashed around it in the snow some, then drove away from there, off to the east. There were snowmachine tracks, too; looked like it had passed the sled on the trail and circled around after it. I tried to follow the sled track, but it went off the lake into the trees and some more snowmachine tracks covered it over, went back and forth across the sled track until it was impossible to find.”

  “But why would she take off away from the marked trail, Jake? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I don’t know. The snowmachine might have scared her. She ran into one a while back and hates them.”

  “She told me about it.”

  “That’s possible, but she’s not the kind to panic. It might not even have been her sled. But it was the only thing I found that was a possibility. It was a clean, clear track of just one sled and team. Went in a straight line across the lake surface and disappeared. I drove circles for half an hour, but couldn’t locate it again. I was about to go ask one of the pilots to search—”

  “But that doesn’t tell you she’s been grabbed by anyone,” Jessie interjected. “She may just be lost. It happens.”

  “Well, you can’t tell from looking at the track just how fast the team was going. If someone on a snowmachine was chasing her, she might have been going flat-out, trying to get away from it. It was totally confusing and I was hoping she was just lost—until I got back here and the checker handed me this.”

  He held out a sheet with a few words on plain white paper that had originally been folded and sealed into an envelope with Leland’s name on it.

  Jessie stripped off her mittens and took it to read. The words had been printed in large square capital letters with a black ballpoint pen.

  LELAND. WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER. IF YOU WANT HER BACK IN ONE PIECE KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT AND DON’T DO ANYTHING STUPID. DON’T TELL ANYONE BUT JESSIE ARNOLD—ESPECIALLY THE POLICE. WE WANT $100,000. YOU’VE GOT MORE THAN TWO DAYS TO GET IT. YOU’LL HEAR FROM US AFTER ARNOLD GETS INTO DAWSON ON FRIDAY. BE SMART AND DO WHAT YOU’RE TOLD OR ELSE.

  “Jesus, Jake. Who gave this to the checker?”

  “He says he found it on his clipboard. Didn’t see who put it there.”

  “Why would they want you to tell me?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you might have some ideas.”

  She shook her head, stunned, as she stared at the message in her hand, then up at him, speechless, trying to take it in. Debbie. This note meant Debbie, the young woman she had met, shared tea with, and liked, was in trouble. Who…? And why me? she wondered. Leland held out a hand for the paper and folded it back into the envelope before he put it carefully into an interior pocket of his jacket.

  “Don’t let that get away from you, Jake, and don’t handle it any more than you have to. A forensics lab might be able to get something from it.”

  “Dammit, Jessie. They said no police. I’m not about to do anything stupid, as they said. Someone left the thing. They may still be here watching—me—you—whatever.”

  “I meant later, Jake—later. And you’re right, of course. With the highway running through here it could be anybody—someone passing through—handler, race people, spectators—someone connected with the race—vet, official, the checker who says someone left that note, even a musher. Dozens of people coming and going, and two hundred and fifty or three hundred people who live here. And there is an RCMP unit, I think.”

  “No. I won’t do that. Jessie, why Debbie? What the hell am I going to tell her mom? Jill wasn’t real hot on her running the Quest this year to begin with. She’s going to have—”

  “Hey, Jake. Don’t start—okay? Better concentrate on what you can come up with—not what you can’t change. It’s not your fault.”

  “You wanna tell that to Jill?”

  “Nope. But…what’re you going to do? What are we going to do? I’m obviously involved somehow, from what that note says.”

  “What can I do? Try to round up a hundred thousand dollars somewhere—I hope. I’m going to hate the phone call home that I’ve got to make.”

  “While I go to Dawson?”

  “Yes. You’ve got to get to Dawson, Jessie. They said they wouldn’t contact me until after you get to Dawson. So you’ve got to get there. The sooner, the better. I can’t stand this.”

  9

  “And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.”

  —Jack London, “The Law of Club and Fang”

  AS SHE PARKED HER DOGS AND SLED IN THE FENCED AREA reserved for teams in Pelly Crossing and, almost on automatic pilot, went about the chores of taking care of them, Jessie wondered how and where Jake Leland intended to collect $100,000 in two days, and if she could stand the anxiety she was feeling for the time it would take to get to Dawson City.

  If the kidnappers were watching him, they were probably also watching her. She found herself taking careful glances at the people she saw, assessing them as possible threats or conspirators. Suddenly she felt completely alone and isolated, knowing she trusted no one, and that there were a lot of people involved with and following this race that she did not know.

  Who were these kidnappers? How many of them were there? From the “we” and “us” in the note there was obviously more than one, or that was the desired impression. How could they be identified? How dangerous were they? There was a lot of wilderness country out there for any musher to disappear into. If it could happen to Debbie, it could happen to Jessie as well.

  It frightened and incensed her to feel observed, a feeling that took her back to the preceding fall, when she had been the object of a stalker who, for a while, had made her life a misery. She knew the events surrounding that situation had forever changed her perspective on the people she knew, or met, and had taken for granted; had stolen not only her personal space and time, but her sense of trust in the world around her, which still made her angry and resentful. Now it all came flooding back again, for herself and for Debbie. Where was the girl, and more important, how was she? How were her captors, whoever they were, treating her? Knowing what she had faced herself, Jessie felt she could anticipate or guess some of what the girl would be going through—the offense and insult, the fear.

  Was there anything that could be done other than just go on to Dawson, leaving Leland to collect the cash? More than anything Jessie could imagine, she wished Alex were there with suggestions, not still in Idaho. But there was Cas, his partner in
solving many crimes in the past. Could he help? The letter had been very specific: “If you want her back in one piece keep your mouth shut…. Don’t tell anyone…especially the police.” Cas was definitely one of those Jake had been warned against telling. But would they know he was an Alaska State Trooper, or think of him as a part of her support crew? Was it worth the risk? If the kidnappers were Alaskan, they might know of his law enforcement connection, but Canadians might not. Which were they—or could they be both? She knew that if she told Cas what was going on, it would be impossible to keep him from doing something—asking questions, doing his job—even though this was not his country or jurisdiction.

  Concentrating hard on the problem, she didn’t hear the approach of the veterinarian who had come to check her dogs. She jumped and gulped air as though she had had an electric shock when he said hello and laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to put you off.”

  It was a moment before Jessie could catch her breath to speak.

  “That’s okay. I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Your pups doing okay? Anything you’d like me to look at, besides the usual?”

  “Oh…ah…yes,” she said, distractedly. “Ah…Bliss…she seemed to be favoring her right shoulder…after some of the rubble on the river.”

  “Right. No problem. Which one’s Bliss?”

  As he proceeded to go through his routine checks and to examine the dog in question, Jessie looked after him with a frown. There was something about the way he spoke, clearly western Canadian, that made her stop and realize that it was apparent, not only from his accent but from the words he used, that he was not Alaskan. “Didn’t mean to put you off.” An Alaskan—an American—would probably have said, didn’t mean to scare you, or didn’t mean to startle you. Not didn’t mean to put you off. It was a small thing, but small things sometimes mattered more than large ones.

  Was there anything in the note to let them know the nationality of its author? She tried to think, but couldn’t remember the exact phrasing. Hurriedly putting on more snow to melt for later use, she left the vet at his job and went to find Jake Leland to have another look at the note.

 

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