Cold Company

by Sue Henry

  “Here’s Wasilla, see? It and old Knik—over here—were originally Tanaina Athabascan settlements. When the Klondike Gold Rush was going on, around 1898, over three thousand miners flocked into this area.”

  “That’s a lot of people.”

  “Right, and some were already here. They all needed supplies and equipment, so west of here, at the end of what’s now Knik Road—down there to the left, at the mouth of Cottonwood Creek—a village grew up to support them. The arm of Cook Inlet was deep enough so that ships could deliver passengers and freight.”

  “You know a lot of history,” Bonnie commented.

  “Well, you sort of pick it up when you live in the same place for a while.”

  “Did any of the miners get rich?”

  “Not really. Most of them left in less than a year. But some of them settled in the valley and used money they made in the local mines to support their homesteads. They built cabins and barns and cleared some of the land. In 1915 they were allowed to record the homesteads, when the government decided to build a railroad through the valley. This map shows some of the original ones.”

  Jessie moved the oldest map to the top of the pile and pointed out a few homesteads blocked in along the Goose Bay Knik Road, as it had been called back then. The names of the homesteaders were written into the blocks: Moffet, Rising, Roescher, Donovan, Crocker.

  “See this one? Anderson?” She laid a finger on one of the blocks on the north side of the road. “My place is part of his original homestead.”

  It was not the name of the man from whom she had purchased the property. Through the years, many of the original homesteads, some as large as 320 acres, had been sold more than once; almost all had been subdivided and were now completely different in configuration and size.

  “After he did the required clearing and building on his land, Anderson evidently sold to a miner named James O’Dell.” She took a page from another pile that showed a record of the sale and listed a cabin and a shed as structures on the property.

  “Is that the old man?”

  “I don’t know,” Jessie told her, reaching for a tissue to blow her nose, which had started to run as she drank the hot peppermint tea. “It’s not the name of the man who sold it to me, but it’s familiar for some reason. I was just going to try and find out.”

  Frustrated now, she got up and went to the portable file box in which, as she replaced them, she was keeping all her important records. Somewhere in the mix, she half remembered, there was a note she had written to remind herself to check again on the duplicate deed she had still not received. Thumbing through the slim assortment of files, she found the note and was glad to see it included a phone number, which she used.

  “When will it be mailed,” she asked a woman on the other end of the line a few minutes later. “Next week for sure? Okay, I’ll expect it. But can you do me a favor? I need the name of the person who sold me the property. Can you give me that much now at least?”

  There was a long wait, during which Jessie stared out the window at the gray day and noticed that the rain had stopped for the moment. Would the weather slow the curing of the concrete—another delay? She hoped not.

  “Yes, I’m still here. Daryl O’Dell Mitchell? O’Dell? You’re sure it’s O’Dell? Yes, thank you.”

  So there was a connection between Daryl O’Dell Mitchell, from whom she had purchased the property, and the miner James O’Dell, who had bought it from Anderson. The miner had to have been old enough in 1932 to own land, which would make him at least in his twenties. If Timmons was right and the old man’s body they had found was buried twenty to twenty-five years ago—say, twenty—he would have been fifty. But John Timmons had said “old.” Fifty wasn’t what Jessie considered old. He must have been older when he bought the land. Adding twenty years to his age would make him forty when he bought it, seventy when he died and was buried. That made more sense. He could have been older—or slightly younger. His son could have been…

  The computations and variables made her realize that her head ached. Perhaps the body wasn’t that of O’Dell at all. If not, who was it?

  She looked up to find Bonnie Russell watching her closely and waiting patiently for her to complete her thoughts.

  “The man who sold this place to me was named Daryl O’Dell Mitchell,” she told her. “So there’s some kind of connection, I think. But I’m feeling too awful to figure it out today.”

  “You look like you could use a nap,” Bonnie told her firmly, getting up to take her cup to the sink in the galley. “I’ll get out of your way. Could I bring you anything—juice, cold medicine?”

  Jessie smiled weakly up at her guest. Sharing her search for the old man’s identity with Bonnie Russell had eliminated the awkwardness, and she realized she was feeling much more comfortable with her. Still, she was grateful that the question of the missing sister had not come up. The woman’s reticence must have been learned through hard years of waiting that had taught her some difficult things about patience and time. Bonnie was likable. Why did that surprise her? She realized suddenly that what she was afraid of wasn’t Bonnie but her own aversion to revisit the appalling parts of her early life. But that aversion had been instrumental in creating her own strong sense of independence, hadn’t it?

  “No, thanks,” she told her, returning to the question. “I think I have everything I need.”

  Donning her damp coat, Bonnie left, with the hope that Jessie would feel better soon.

  Rubbing her eyes with the back of her hands, Jessie gave up and decided it was time for a nap. Washing down a couple of aspirin with the last of her now-cold tea, she left the maps and papers on the table and retreated to her bed in the back of the motor home. Soon she was snoozing more restfully than at any time the previous night, with no idea that sometime quite soon she would have another unexpected, unsettling, and unidentified visitor.

  11

  IT WAS A WARM DAY AND JESSIE LEFT THE DOOR OPEN, with the screen door shut to keep out the ever-present mosquitoes. A day off had banished most of her cold, and she had felt well enough this morning to take a team of her dogs for an early run. On her return, however, she decided to do some necessary yard work, rather than take out another. Halfway up a ladder, she was replacing the hinges on the door of her equipment shed, a job she had been putting off for too long, when she heard the telephone ring in the motor home.

  Sprinting across the yard, she caught it on the fifth ring.

  “Arnold Kennels.”

  She was pleased to recognize Lynn Ehlers’s voice in her ear.

  “Hey, Jessie. I was about to give up. How’s it going?”

  “Fine.” She sat down, tossing her leather work gloves onto the table. “I was outside watching the concrete dry. But it’s pretty boring, so I was balanced on a ladder, repairing my shed door.”

  “When will you start with the log part?”

  “Logs coming late tomorrow,” Jessie told him, reaching across absentmindedly to run her fingers up and down the smooth glass of the vase in which the second rose had arrived. “The crew’s going to be here any minute to take the forms off. Then we’ll paint sealer on. When it’s dry—a couple of hours—they’ll put on blue insulation and fill in the dirt around the walls. Tomorrow I’ll help put sill seal on top of the walls and they’ll lay the floor. The next morning we can start raising logs, starting with the half logs that hold the rest in place.”

  “I hear that satisfied grin on your face,” Lynn told her. “How about taking time off for dinner with me tonight, after you’re through? Nothing as fancy as the pasta you fed me the other night, but pizza, maybe—and a couple of games of pool?”

  The invitation was tempting. It seemed to Jessie that lately she had spent all her time at home, either involved in construction or waiting for it or working with her dogs. An evening out would be a welcome break.

  “I could be up for that,” she said, her grin widening. “But it’d have to be seven or eight, I think.”
r />   “Terrific. Why don’t you give me a call when you’re done and I’ll come pick you up.”

  “I could meet you in town.”

  “Naw. No sense in both of us driving.”

  He gave her his phone number and was gone.

  She sat for a minute, looking at the two roses on the table; suddenly seeing them in relation to the phone call. Could Lynn be responsible for them? He was just as possible as anyone else she had considered, including Alex Jensen—probably more so. Ehlers had, after all, voiced an interest in her during the race in February and could be following up now. It seemed an odd idea, but she didn’t know him well enough yet to judge.

  Damned if I’ll ask him, she told herself, and went back out to finish the hinges before Vic Prentice and his gang of four arrived.

  They pulled in just as she was tightening the last screw. Carrying the ladder into the shed, she greeted them and went back into the motor home for a sweatshirt. As she stood pulling it on in the galley, J.B. stuck his head in the door.

  “Hey, Jessie. Got a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure. Come on in. Mugs’re on the counter.”

  He poured himself a cup and waved the pot at her with a grin.

  “No, thanks. Already had mine.”

  “Say,” he said, sliding the pot back on the warmer. “Think you might like to get some dinner or see a movie tonight when we’re through?”

  Though she liked J.B. well enough as a working partner, Jessie had no interest in dating him. His offer made for a sticky situation, however, since he would be around for some time to come as part of the crew working on her cabin. Still, she didn’t want to encourage him and have future invitations with which to contend.

  For a moment she looked at him, thinking fast, before she answered with a smile. “Sorry, J.B. I’ve already got plans—with a guy I’m pretty fond of.” It was true, if a little exaggerated.

  “Good enough.” He grinned and shrugged. “Can’t fault a guy for asking.”

  “Not at all. Thanks anyway.”

  Gulping his coffee, he was out the door and gone, leaving her to hope he wouldn’t be a problem later.

  It never rains, but it pours, she said to herself, going out after him to join the crew.

  Over twenty miles away, near the end of the Knik River Road, a car familiar to the scattered residents who lived along it was parked in a pull-off and locked. A local, turning his jeep into the curving quarter-mile driveway that led up to his house, noticed it, not for the first time, and frowned in concern as he continued uphill. Parking his Cherokee, he carried a sack of groceries into the kitchen through the back door.

  “She’s at it again,” he told his wife, setting the sack on the counter next to the refrigerator.

  “You see her?”

  “Just the car. But she’s down there, like she was last fall.”

  His wife turned and glanced in the direction of the river with a sympathetic expression.

  “She’ll never find that girl. It’s been too long—twenty years. If there was anything, the police would have found it a long time ago.”

  Picking up a pair of binoculars from the windowsill, she went across the room to look down on the riverbank that was just visible through the trees far below.

  “Well, you never know,” he said, still frowning. “The river changes every year. This year it’s washing out a new channel on this side. Hasn’t done that in a while.”

  Still looking through the binoculars, his wife carefully examined what parts of the flats she could see, but they were empty. Just as she was about to give up and go back to the salad she had been making, a lone figure came into view, slowly walking upriver a few feet from the rushing torrent of water.

  “You see her?” the husband asked.

  “Yeah, she’s there all right.” Lowering the binoculars, the woman stared down at the figure she could barely make out without magnification and shook her head. “It’s so sad. I don’t know what I’d do, if it were me, but I don’t think I’d still be searching down there. Gives me the creeps just watching her. What if she actually found something?”

  It did not give Bonnie Russell the creeps. This walk was familiar and strangely comforting in a way, for there along the river, where she had been many times before, she felt closer to her missing sister. Though the river was high and would rise higher before the glacial dam above it broke and allowed the waters of Lake George to cascade in a flood down the valley, it was only water. The sound of its rushing burble was a calming, peaceful background music, accented with birdsongs and the soft wind through the birch and spruce that grew thickly upon the banks.

  Bonnie had long ago come to the realization that she would probably never know where her sister’s body lay, never be able to bury her properly. But somehow this natural setting had come to feel more acceptable than a grave to her, though that was a different frame of mind from that with which she had started this quest. Here, next to the lively river, below the tall peaks of the Chugach Range, it was restful and lovely, a place in which she imagined Brenda could be at peace. Maybe it would be all right to leave her here, as she had left a memorial stone to mark an empty rectangle of ground in an Anchorage cemetery. Each year she took flowers to that stone, on Brenda’s birthday and on the day she disappeared, not knowing the day she died.

  Soon, she thought. Soon she should stop coming here to walk through an area she knew as well as she knew the way through that cemetery—each twist and turn recognizable, each bank and stream familiar, each change in the patterns noted and examined. It was almost time to move on. This obsession had destroyed her marriage, driven away a husband who did not understand and was unwilling to try. “You don’t even know I’m here anymore,” he had told her. “I might as well not be.”

  She smiled, remembering ruefully that she had stared at him with nothing to say that could matter.

  A Steller’s jay flew out of the woods ahead of her and perched on a leaning fence post that someone had abandoned years before. Cocking its black-crested head, the bird watched her unhurried approach. She stopped beside a heavy log that the river had carried along and deposited on the sandy bank sometime in the past. Sitting down on it, she watched as the bird with its bright sapphire feathers watched her.

  “Shameless beggar,” she named it, with a smile, “I have nothing you’d want to eat.”

  As if it understood, the jay flipped its blue tail and flew away across the widening water of the river. Bonnie watched it disappear into the trees on the far side. She had walked there too, in the early years, when she was still determined and angry. There was no road, but she had hiked up along the river as far as she could go to search, knowing that in the small plane he had flown, Hansen could have hidden a victim there as easily as on this side. She had thought it might be more likely but had found nothing.

  “Where are you, Jo-Jo?” she said softly, using her sister’s pet name. “Will you understand and forgive me if I give up? Little sister—baby sister—would you ever stop looking for me?”

  A sudden movement farther up the bank caught her eye. Sitting very still, she watched a red fox trot confidently out of the trees onto the sand and gravel of a bar the river had left unclaimed. By a large rock, it paused to sniff at something on the ground behind the stone. Hesitantly, it reached out one paw to whatever it had found, raised and licked at the foot, then began to scratch the ground. Crouching, half hidden behind the rock, it seemed to be eating something. What had it found? A dead salmon, probably. But did foxes eat fish?

  She stood up, curious, and at the motion, swift as a shadow, the fox was gone, melting into the closest grove of birch as if it had never been there at all, carrying something she couldn’t see clearly in its mouth. The only sign of its passing would be a set of delicate footprints in the sand of the riverbank, if she cared to look. She was more interested in what the animal had found and began to walk toward the rock.

  I’ll look, she thought, one more time. Then I’ll go home. And I don’t th
ink I’ll be back here again anytime soon.

  When Bonnie was halfway between the rock and the log on which she had been sitting, she could see the tracks of the fox: small indentations, coming to and going from whatever it had found on the riverbank. A small bit of bright yellow came into view on the river side of the large rock, and she slowed her progress, apprehension and horror rising in her chest. When she was close enough to see around the stone, she stopped dead, mouth open, eyes wide, staring in disbelief at what lay on the ground beyond.

  The body of a woman with long blond hair covering her face was spread-eagled, facedown in the sand, her left arm extended as if she were reaching for the water that rushed by a few yards away. Her hair was matted and damp, sand clinging to its strands as if she had rolled on the ground. One strap of the yellow tank top that fit her torso tightly was off the shoulder, partway down her right arm. That hand was hidden under the body, but her arm was covered in blood, dried brown, from a dark bullet hole in her shoulder. The back of the tank top was widely stained the same color from another bullet wound, this one to the torso, just below her shoulder blade.

  The dead woman wore tight black pants and a pair of high-heeled strap-sandals, one of which had twisted off her foot, for it lay as if it had dangled from the ankle strap as she tried to run. The bottom of that foot was caked with clotted sand and blood. She had evidently stepped on something sharp after the shoe came off.

  For a horrified, untenable few seconds, Bonnie Russell’s mind all but stopped working. She was consumed with the idea that she had found the sister she had searched for so long. Then, slowly, reason took over. It couldn’t be so. Brenda had been dead for twenty years; this woman, a matter of hours, possibly days.

  Slowly she became aware of a scent on the breeze coming toward her from the direction of the woman who lay in the sand. It was a sickening, sweet smell that combined with the already decaying odor of the body itself, filling Bonnie’s nostrils and making her stomach lurch—the scent of roses.