Books by Sue Henry

by Henry, Sue

  “Tomorrow, maybe the next day. But let’s get back to all this trouble and the people involved in it.”

  “It all started when Anne showed up, right?”

  “No. I think it started a long time before that.”

  “You mean ten years ago?”

  “Yes. It has something to do with what happened back then, but I think the fires and Tatum’s death are new pieces to an old puzzle. I’m just not seeing what pattern they’ll make when they fit together—the picture on the box. Tell me more about this middle-of-the-night abduction. You think someone’s making a concerted effort to make sure you’re blamed for Mike’s murder—and for the fires, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know I didn’t do any of it. But I can’t prove that to you—with everything you’ve found.”

  “No, I mean why pin it on you?”

  He did have a habit of putting a finger on the primary issues, Jessie thought. It had not occurred to her to wonder just why she had been selected as a patsy—just to resent that she had.

  “You don’t think it was just because I was a handy target?”

  “It would make more sense if there was a better reason than that. Also be easier to figure out a less random selection. I think we should assume a motive and work on uncovering it. I think there is one.”

  “And you believe me—that someone took me out of here?”

  “Well, let’s say it’s a tale I’m not quite convinced you made up. It fits much too well. Stuff that happened earlier bothers me, too. Your hat found conveniently at Mulligan’s. Anne Holman’s disappearance the night of the fire. That gun of yours was fired recently, Jessie. From what I’ve seen, you take good care of your equipment. Why would you keep it around in that condition when it would be so easy to clean? And—it wasn’t here yesterday when I looked for it.”

  “You were here while I was gone?”

  “You told Becker to tell me when you’d be home, and I found Billy working in your shed. Why would you make an appointment with me and skip it—like Tatum did the meeting that he called and missed? That didn’t make sense either, until we found him.

  “Why, again, would you keep that gym bag full of the kind of things that started your fire when it would be so easy to get rid of such an incriminating piece of evidence?”

  “But I did keep it.”

  “I know. And it wasn’t too smart of you. But you didn’t set fire to your cabin, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Who did—or who do you think did? You’ve got a good idea, don’t you? Intuition?”

  Jessie hesitated, unsure of accusing anyone now.

  “Come on, Jessie. Who?”

  “All right. Tatum. I’ve always had an unreasonable suspicion that he started it.”

  “Interesting. Me, too. Do you know why?”

  “No. It’s just speculation—his past history and the connection with Anne. That’s why I didn’t say anything.”

  “Right again. Now, how do we prove it and get you off the hook?”

  Was he being honest? Did he really believe that she had had nothing to do with this unholy tangle? Jessie didn’t know. But she also didn’t care much as long as he would work on it with that in mind.

  She stood in the yard, a little later and watched MacDonald drive away, still a little surprised not to be arrested, but feeling better with an ally—any ally. She did not intend, however, to wait around for him to prove she was innocent. There were a couple of things she needed to do on her own, things she hadn’t mentioned to him, knowing he wouldn’t like what she had in mind. She could tell that, since they’d taken her truck, except for training runs with a team of dogs, he had assumed that she would be at home on Knik Road. She had purposely not disabused him of this notion.

  Relatively early in life, Jessie had decided that depending on other people to solve her problems was not only unwise but likely to compound the problem. Though she could be stubborn, she wasn’t hardheaded; so this was not a rule she never broke, but she thought it over carefully before she did. Though the suggestion had been made—more than once and by more than one person—that she was, at times, too independent, she had given it serious consideration, disagreed, and continued to take care of things that involved her in ways that satisfied her own standards of self-reliant behavior.

  The situation in which she now found herself was no exception, and she meant to take care of parts of it herself, as usual—whether MacDonald liked it or not. That he knew nothing about her plans made no difference. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t disrupt or hinder. She could only hope he would at least try to understand when, once again, she turned up missing.

  22

  WHAT JESSIE MEANT TO DO WAS GO BACK TO THE CABIN in the Little Peters Hills.

  As she and MacDonald had talked, going over what they knew about the situation, she had come to the conclusion that the cabin somehow played a more significant role in what was going on than it seemed. Her acquaintance with the Holmans had started there; Anne had insisted on returning there; and, finally, it was where Jessie had been taken and held, evidently while Mike Tatum was being killed. More than ever, she wanted to find Anne and get some answers. No one in town had been able to find a clue to her whereabouts. Either she had left the state, as she’d promised—but her promises had not been worth much so far—or she might be at the one other place she had visited since showing up at the airport. MacDonald would soon get around to searching that cabin for evidence, if he really wanted to prove Jessie’s innocence, though for the moment he seemed focused on the Tatum murder. Jessie had decided to get there first.

  It would have been easier with her own truck and dog box, but that was now out of the question. Whether MacDonald had not realized its significance or dismissed it, Jessie Arnold was a distance racer, used to running long hours at six to eight miles an hour, and so was her racing team. It might be slow going for some people, but in the long run traveling by dog sled covered ground, as every musher knew. The other advantages to this mode of travel were that it was quiet and required no roads. A musher could cut across country that few mechanical vehicles were equipped to cover—only snowmachines could equal an experienced musher with a good sled and team, which was why they were used to break trail for the distance races. They could go faster, but also were dependent on fuel. Dogs carried their own fuel and could go farther, if slower.

  It was seventy miles by road to Trapper Creek. Traveling as she would in a race, at an estimated seven miles an hour, Jessie knew she could reach the Little Peters Hills—almost the same distance across back country and a little farther to the west than the road—in ten or eleven hours of running. With two short rest periods for her dogs or one long one she could be there by morning. It was a more than reasonable assumption, considering that her best dogs were in top form from continuous training and had recently completed one of the toughest races anywhere, the Yukon Quest. They had also been resting for more than a day and would be ready and eager to get back out on a trail. All she had to do was pack a sled and go, quickly, before she was intercepted by MacDonald, Becker, or anyone they sent to keep an eye on her, as she half expected them to do.

  But first she intended to rearm herself. It would not be smart to go looking where she might run into trouble without some kind of protection. And she knew things about her own living space that no one else did. Her cabin had burned to the ground, but to the ground only.

  Retrieving heavy gloves and a shovel from the shed, Jessie went to the blackened ruin of what had been the front porch of the structure and began to dig away charred rubble from the north corner. Several times she had to lay the shovel down and lift away the remains of burned planks and their supports, but finally she had worked her way down to scorched dirt and revealed the outline of a narrow horizontal metal door and frame, attached to a concrete foundation. When she had cleaned it off enough to open, a short flight of steps lay revealed below, leading down to w
hat had been a sort of root cellar, a storage space under the house, partly for potatoes and some of the vegetables from her summer garden, kept from freezing until well into the fall before the onset of the real winter cold.

  A few other things had also been stored in this space: a large plastic garbage can with a tight lid held flour that she bought in large amounts and used to bake her own bread, some gardening tools put away for the winter, a box or two of old kennel records, other odds and ends that freezing would not damage, and on one back shelf, a rifle that Jessie’s father had given her when she’d moved to Alaska from Minnesota to establish her kennel and take up sled dog racing.

  It was a reliable Winchester Model 70 Pre 64 that he had used for hunting many years before—a bolt-action rifle, now probably worth more than he had originally paid for it. When she had grown old enough, he had taught Jessie to shoot it. Because of its size, it was unhandy for taking along on races, however, and she did not hunt, so she had kept it around only for sentimental reasons—recognizing it as her father’s validation of her abilities. A handgun fit in better with her racing gear and could be carried in a pocket, ready for quick use if she encountered contentious moose on the trail.

  Going down the steps, she found that the water used to extinguish the fire had found its way into the cellar, turning the floor into mud and grime. The space smelled wet and unpleasantly of smoke and soot. Her boxes of records were soaked and filthy, but the flour had remained undamaged inside its plastic container, though one side of that had been slightly distorted by the heat. Several empty glass jars she used for canning had fallen and broken when the box that held them disintegrated in the flood. Jessie stepped carefully over them and lifted the Winchester from its place on the shelf, revealing a clean space where it had rested.

  In the half light of the open door, she unwrapped the waterproof cover and examined it. No water had found its way inside. The rifle, cleaned and well oiled before she had put it away, was in excellent condition. When Alex Jensen had moved into the cabin with her, his shotgun had replaced the rifle on the wall of the living room, and Jessie had moved the rifle to safety in the cellar. Now she was glad, for it would not have otherwise survived the blaze.

  From the shelf, she took a full box of ammunition, which promptly fell apart, scattering the twenty 30.06-caliber cartridges it contained into the mud at her feet. But they’d be usable after she cleaned them, and it took only a minute or two to pick them up and find an unbroken jam jar to contain most of them. The last few she carried in one hand and, taking the rifle and the jar, went back up the steps. In a hurry, she stumbled on the top step and, striving for balance, dropped her handful of shells on the ground outside the door. Hurriedly gathering them up, she put them in the jar with the rest, and took them and the rifle to the tent.

  Returning, she closed the metal cellar door and spread dirt and partially burned timbers back over it, disguising the entrance. There was no reason to leave evidence of its existence and she might have a use for such a hidden space in the future, before her cabin was rebuilt.

  Rebuilt? Was she going to rebuild it? Jessie smiled to herself. Sometime in the last few days, almost without realizing it, she had come to the conclusion that she wanted to do exactly that. Fine. It was something to look forward to and be optimistic about. Deciding when and how this would be accomplished could wait till later.

  It took less than an hour to ready her team for the run back to the Little Peters Hills. Once again selecting the large sled she had used on the trip with Anne, Jessie packed it as if she were starting the Yukon Quest.

  There were similarities. Only one sled was allowed for the length of that race—no replacements allowed. She would have no way of making a replacement in this instance either, so she carefully checked the sled over to be sure it would hold up. There was always the possibility of an accident, however, so she packed materials she might need for repairs and the tool kit she would use if she had to make them.

  Plenty of dog food went in, and the cooker she used to melt snow for water, and for thawing and heating dog dinners. The food she packed for herself was the same high-energy edibles she had grown used to carrying on a racing trail. All of it had been previously prepared and kept frozen in the shed for training runs. A change of warm clothing, an extra parka and heavy mittens, several pairs of wool socks and boot liners, the sleeping bag she used during races, her first-aid kit for dogs and humans, an ax—all went into the sled bag. Last, she added the Winchester, once again wrapped securely against weather and within easy reach from the back of her sled. The brass cartridges, now cleaned of mud, went in with it, loose in a heavy plastic Ziploc bag.

  When everything was packed, Jessie wrote a note and left it locked in the shed for Billy. In it, she told him that she expected to be away for one night, possibly two, gave him instructions on what he should do at the kennel while she was gone, but didn’t reveal her intended destination. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell—even if he didn’t mean to.

  One or two at a time, she brought the best and most experienced of her dogs and harnessed them to the sled. The Darryls One and Two went into their wheel position nearest the brush bow. Ahead of them, two by two, were team dogs, Digger and Wart, Goofy and Bliss, Sunny and Mitts, Lucky and Tux, Sadie and Pete. Twelve of the best dogs in the racing business, Jessie thought, as she inspected them carefully to be sure they were all healthy and without injury.

  Tank went into harness last, alone at the front of the team, undisputed leader, though Jessie was the real alpha of the pack, for she was the final authority. For a minute, she stood on the back of the sled runners watching them yelp and leap against their harnesses, eager to run as usual, keeping the rest of the kennel in an uproar at being left behind. Then she took her foot off the brake, pulled the snow hook, and allowed the sled to slide forward, gaining momentum as the team pulled it rapidly out of the yard.

  “Go, Tank. Get us out of here.”

  In seconds they had vanished down the trail into the trees and the rest of the dogs quieted, disappointed but resigned to staying at home.

  When they had disappeared from sight, Billy Steward stepped out of the trees—where, unseen, he had watched the preparations for this unexpected trip—and stood frowning after her. Contrite and ashamed of his disloyalty in disclosing the secret space in Jessie’s truck, he had worried about it and, determined to be there if she needed someone, had not gone home but had returned to wait and watch from the shelter of the forest.

  At first, he had thought she was only going for another training run. But, as he noticed what she was packing into the sled and saw her harness up only her best dogs, he began to suspect it was something else entirely. Where was she going? Did this have anything to do with her absence of the day before?

  There was no way of finding out, but he did know one thing. It would be a cold day in hell before he told MacDonald—or anyone else—any of Jessie’s business again, even if they arrested him. For now, he would stay where he was and work in the yard. There was a lot to be done—dogs to care for, boxes to clean, straw to replace, equipment to repair. Whatever needed doing, he would do. Maybe, if he worked hard enough, she would forgive his betrayal—if she saw how really sorry he was. Resolute, he went to work.

  All afternoon and into the night, Jessie ran her team, west to the Susitna River, then north toward Mount McKinley and the Little Peters Hills. The temperature dropped as it grew dark, but the sky remained clear and it did not snow. There was no moon, only stars that shimmered coldly overhead, but what remained of the snow on the ground reflected just enough light to be able to see, and she knew where she was going. For the first part of the run through the dark, she used her headlamp only when absolutely necessary, not wanting to give away her presence to anyone in the houses and cabins she passed. As these grew fewer and farther between, then finally disappeared, she turned on the light and left it on.

  About nine o’clock, she stopped and built a fire to feed the dogs and hersel
f. Stretching out in her sleeping bag on top of the sled, she rested for three or four hours, but did not sleep soundly, while the dogs, still in harness, curled into their usual nose-to-tail balls of fur and snoozed, having eaten well and emptied their aluminum pans of water.

  Looking up from where she lay, Jessie watched a wisp or two of northern lights drift across the sky in thin ribbons of pale whitish-green, diaphanous and slow moving. It was a sight she had seen many times, though this was late in the year and they were sometimes stronger and more colorful, but it made her feel at home and more self-confident. Somewhere in the dark on a nearby creek she could hear a trickle of water that had melted out during the day and would soon freeze again on top of the ice it overflowed. A breath of breeze rustled through a spruce and quickly died, allowing her to hear the monotonous purr of a faraway generator providing electricity for someone’s cabin.

  She felt calm and content with her decision, wasted no more time in mental examinations of the confusion of death and fire, guilt and innocence. If there was no one at the cabin, she would rest, then go home. If she found Anne, or anyone else, she would do what she needed to, or could. It seemed simple enough, so she refused to worry about it, though she knew it would probably turn out differently than she imagined. Since she couldn’t anticipate anything with accuracy, she allowed herself to expect nothing, and felt better about it than she had in days.

  She was almost asleep when she thought she heard a goose somewhere in the distance. Instantly awake, she listened carefully and identified the familiar sound a second time. It was too early for a goose to have arrived, but one was surely honking—and in the dark. Must be a very optimistic bird, she thought. There wouldn’t be much for it to eat for quite a while yet. The sound did not repeat itself for a third time, and soon Jessie was as quiet as her dogs, rerunning old trails in her mind.

  As soon as the dogs were rested and she was ready to run, they swept steadily north, dark as shadows with one small light to guide them through the unbroken, snow-covered country, and the rest of the night passed like a dream of swift spirits over haunted ground. When the darkness at last began to fade and a pale, predawn gray filtered into the trackless wilderness, they were close under the western slopes of the Little Peters Hills. Jessie could see that the sky would be clear and that it promised another magnificent sunrise on Mount McKinley. It would have been worth stopping to watch, had she not had another, more important goal in mind.