15 Legends Can Be Murder

by Connie Shelton

  “Wind’s supposed to let up tomorrow,” the clerk said when Michael asked her to cut the tags off the coat so he could wear it now. “Should get nice after that. Be glad you’re here in June. Later on, the mosquitos show up.”

  Shit, maybe his idea of staying on was dumb. He’d better just find the gold and get the hell back out of here.

  He lucked out on a room, taking the clerk’s recommendation of a bedroom sublet from some guy who worked for one of the tour companies. It was three blocks off the main drag rather than one of the places all the tourists were eyeing. Even so, once he was in the single room at the back of the house—view of an alley with weird trash cans that had locking lids—he sat on the bed and counted his money.

  There wasn’t a whole lot left of Katherine’s tuition. If he ate toast for breakfast and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner he could get by until the end of the week that he’d paid for. He jammed the bills into his wallet and refused to think about it—that was too much like his sister, planning ahead all the time. He pulled the phone book from the nightstand beside the bed and looked up the names on his list.

  Joshua had said his landlady’s name was McIlhaney, and Michael found some of those. A few calls netted him the information that one branch of them was running a little hotel here. He wished he’d known that; he was practically family, after all, could have probably gotten a deal on the room.

  He dialed the number, asked to speak to the owner and after a little hedging by some idiot young female clerk got through to someone named Bessie McIlhaney. He told his story and got a blank silence for a good half-minute.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you, son. There was tens of thousands of hopeful stampeders who came through this city in the heyday. Nobody actually kept track of them.”

  He stammered out a thanks and hung up. Hm. This might not be quite so automatic as he’d thought.

  Farther down in his list of notes was a name of someone his grandmother Isabelle had contacted, back in the 1940s, a Mrs. Manicot. He found a number and dialed that one. To his delight, she invited him over and gave directions to her house.

  “You said your grandmother contacted me?” Gertrude Manicot said as she ushered him into a small living room.

  The house was average, filled up with big furniture—leather couches that seemed like they would go better in a huge room rather than this little one. The woman was attractive though. She was probably a few years older than him, which was okay—guys said those ladies in their mid-thirties could be pretty hot—wearing tight brown corduroy jeans and a shirt with just the right amount of buttons undone. She had her dark hair in a ponytail and the first thing she did was offer him a cigarette.

  She was watching him, waiting for a response to her question.

  “Oh. Yeah, I’m doing some genealogy work and came across your name in a letter.” He hoped he sounded more coherent than he felt; he’d never gotten that nap he wanted, back at the airport. “I had the impression you’d be a lot older.”

  That was a stupid thing to say but she took it the right way, laughing and sending him a flirtatious little wink. She indicated one of the couches and he sat down.

  “She would have talked to my mother. Her name was Gertrude, which mine is—legally—although I can’t stand that. I go by Gert, sometimes Geegee.”

  He noticed that she sat on the same couch, and not all the way at the end of it, rather than one of the chairs. When she leaned toward the coffee table to flick the ash off her cigarette, an enticing amount of cleavage showed.

  “Your last name’s the same too,” he said. “So, you’re not married?”

  Again, that laugh. “Nope, not me.” She let it go at that and the silence drew out a little too long.

  “Ah. Well. The information—”

  She stubbed out the cigarette and stood up. “Let’s see what we have.”

  She walked to a shelf beside the woodstove and picked up a shoebox, bringing it back to the couch—where he swore she sat even closer—and opening the lid. The box was stuffed with white index cards and he supposed there was some system to it all. She ran her fingers over the cards—long, tapered fingers, he noticed, done with a polish that Candy would have probably called Orange Flame or something like that. The thought of the girlfriend back home dampened his enthusiasm a little.

  “Mother started this filing system,” Geegee said. “Made cards for each missing stampeder that someone asked about, so yours would be filed under Farmer.”

  She pulled out a single card and showed it to him. Neat block lettering, somewhat feminine. Contact: Letter. Date: 1947. Interested party: Isabelle Farmer. Relationship: daughter. A Notes section indicated that the woman said Joshua Farmer had come to Skagway to get to the Klondike. Last contact with family: July, 1898.

  Mike copied it all down, although he didn’t have a clue what he would do with this. He’d really been hoping to run into someone who actually knew his great-grandfather, someone who knew about Joshua’s gold and might have been privy to where he’d hidden it. It occurred to him that any such person would have to be in their nineties by now.

  “I hope that’s helpful,” Geegee said, replacing the card in the box, shifting position as she set the box on the coffee table so that her hip brushed against his leg.

  When she turned to look at him, her face was very close to his. Her breath was warm and smelled pleasantly of menthol tobacco and an undertone of some musky perfume.

  “Um, yeah.” His breathing came rapidly now. “Really helpful.”

  Chapter 27

  I woke up a little groggy the next morning. Too many glasses of wine and too much of the rich hors d’oeuvres that seem a part of every fancy gathering. Drake was on the phone with Kerby Allen when I walked into the kitchen, a hand outstretched for my coffee mug.

  “Okay, will do,” he said. “We got it.”

  He turned to me with a kiss before pouring me a cup of caffeine.

  “We have flights, I gather?”

  “We do. Kerby and Lillian are heading for some conference of mayors in Anchorage, so we’re to take both ships and resupply Cabins Two and Three.”

  I gave an absent nod. Shouldn’t be too difficult; we could do it early and be back in time for lunch together and then maybe take the afternoon off to just have a little fun. I voiced that idea and got wholehearted agreement from him. Poor hubby, between the amount of flying we were doing and the hours I’d spent with Mina going through old documents, we’d not had much pure relaxation as a couple.

  Since resupply runs didn’t carry any particular time schedule, we took our time with showers and stopped at Tootie’s for our favorite breakfast before heading to the airport. The JetRanger and the A-Star sat side-by-side on the tarmac. We checked in with the dispatcher and filed flight plans, then verified with Chuey that the supplies for our guests had already been loaded onto each aircraft. He consulted a page on a clipboard.

  “JetRanger goes to Cabin Two, A-Star to Cabin Three.”

  Out on the tarmac again, Drake slipped into his flight jacket. “You have a preference which ship you fly?”

  Normally, I took the JetRanger since I was more familiar with it, but it wouldn’t hurt me to log more hours in the A-Star. I pointed toward it and he headed for our ship. We each did our customary pre-flight routine, even though Chuey had said that Kerby checked both craft before he left.

  “See you in an hour or so,” Drake called out as he closed the door.

  Ever the gentleman, he waited while I went through my start-up steps and motioned with his palm for me to go first. What a sweetheart. I blew him a kiss and lifted off. He remained in radio contact and said he was watching my rear—something the guys back in the office were probably having a hoot over—until he had to change heading toward his own destination.

  Without passengers to entertain, my flight was a fairly easy one. I kept the Skagway River in sight, then picked up the Klondike Highway, cruising along with steep, snow-capped mountains on either side of me
until I broke out into the open meadows and spotted Cabin Three.

  Two kids raced out to greet me and I brought the A-Star to a hover, making sure they would stay back before I touched ground. They bounced on the balls of their feet until their mom and another woman—I vaguely remembered that the two were sisters—came out. They kept an arm on each kid’s shoulder until the rotors had quit spinning.

  “Hey,” I said, “you guys having a great time out here?”

  “We are,” said one of the women. “The kids have found some gold dust, we’ve hiked all over these hills, and Crystal and I are ready for a resupply of wine ...”

  I laughed along with her. In addition to the wine, their supply list had included gummy bears and a sugared cereal, which ought to have those kids bouncing around even higher than they were at the moment. We offloaded boxes that included toilet paper, clean sheets and batteries. There was a cooler full of produce and some frozen salmon. The fresh bounty, along with one of those picture-perfect days, almost made me want to stay out here with them.

  After asking if there was anything else they needed and making sure everything was functioning well in the cabin, I said I would get out of their way. They stood on their little porch, like a scene from The Waltons, waving and calling out as I lifted off.

  I took my time returning. Drake’s turnaround time was about an hour and if I could stretch out my own flight I wouldn’t have to sit around the airport too long before he came in. On the other hand, in aviation, time is money and every minute in the air was ticking away in dollars, something I had to be aware of even though I wasn’t flying our ship. I increased airspeed and radioed my final approach as I spotted the gold rush cemetery below.

  Two cruise ships were in port this morning, so the other operator who ran helicopter tours up to the glaciers looked pretty busy. I held back, hovering over the inlet until two of their aircraft cleared the pads.

  Setting the A-Star cleanly on its spot, I saw that Chuey was standing in the wide doorway to the hangar, staring at me. I gave a little wave and went into my shutdown procedure. When I looked up again he was gone.

  Things went eerily quiet as I walked into the FBO. Earl Thespen was there and gave me a long stare. Surely he already knew about Kerby’s and Lillian’s plans for the day. Chuey brushed past him and rushed toward me, his face white, and I knew something was terribly wrong.

  “It’s Drake?” I said, my voice coming out in a croak.

  He nodded. “Ray says he’s getting an ELT signal.”

  “I didn’t hear anyone trying to raise him on the radio,” I said, grasping for answers.

  “They’re trying that now.”

  “What about the satellite phone?”

  “Tried it. No response.”

  My mind went blank for a few seconds, then kicked into high gear. I rushed into the control room to see where the signal was coming from.

  Ray looked up from a screen, his expression solemn.

  “Can you tell if it was set off manually or automatically?” I asked.

  “Not yet, FAA hasn’t given me that data, if they know it.”

  If it was set off manually, then Drake had activated the beacon; he was probably okay. The transmitter went off automatically when an aircraft went into water or crashed. I felt my breakfast rise.

  “I’ve put SAR on alert.”

  That didn’t help my peace of mind at this moment. I’d been on enough Search and Rescue operations to know that response time could vary from minutes to hours. I had flown that route to Cabin Two—the terrain was extremely steep and completely unforgiving to a small aircraft.

  “I’m going out there to look,” I said. “Chuey, refuel the A-Star for me.”

  “Charlie—”

  I spun on Ray, ready for argument. A dot showed on his computer screen, flashing.

  “I’ve got GPS coordinates for you,” he said.

  I wrote them down. “Keep trying the radio and let me see your satellite phone again,” I said. I dialed the corresponding one that we carried in the JetRanger. Still no answer.

  It doesn’t mean anything, I told myself. The equipment might be damaged. Maybe he had a hard landing. People survive those all the time. Maybe he discovered neither the radio nor phone would work, there’s an emergency of some kind with the people at the cabin, he needs medical help for them and figured this would grab someone’s attention ... All this rushed through my head as I dashed back out to the A-Star, discarding most of those scenarios the moment I’d thought of them. Setting off your ELT was serious business—it put authorities on alert worldwide and wasn’t something you did just because you couldn’t make contact. Drake would try a lot of other things before he set all that in motion.

  Which left the probability of a crash.

  Chuey finished pumping fuel from the truck, unclipped the anti-static line, and started to get into the cab.

  “I want to go with you,” he said. “I’ll grab a toolbox.”

  I tamped down my impatience. I wanted to leave now, but what he said made sense. It never hurt to have a second pair of eyes to watch the ground and, as Drake had chided me on many occasions, never ever head out without some tools handy.

  Emotion threatened to well up inside me but I forced myself to think in small steps, with the goal that we would come upon Drake, safe and sound, and our million-dollar aircraft with the huge bank loan would also be in one piece. I had the rotors turning by the time Chuey came out, staggering under the weight of the red toolbox in his hand. Thank goodness—prepared for anything.

  I programmed the GPS with the numbers Ray had given me and, after getting a priority clearance and building some altitude by going upriver, we cleared the surrounding peaks and faced two imposing ranges between ourselves and our destination.

  “It’ll be okay, Charlie,” Chuey said. But his voice came over the headset so quietly that I got the feeling he was saying it as much to reassure himself as for my benefit.

  I nodded but kept my eyes on the instruments. I couldn’t help but think that the JetRanger was the one I normally flew. Had we followed that pattern I would have been the one on the way to Cabin Two and it could be me down there in the trees somewhere.

  Stop it! I gave myself a stern little lecture. Anything can happen to any pilot. But I had to wonder, would I have been able to react correctly? Drake had so many more years experience than I did—and we didn’t know yet whether he’d made the right choices either.

  I had to steer away from that line of thinking or I would go crazy. I made it happen by talking to Chuey.

  “We’re within a mile or so,” I told him with an eye toward the clouds that were building by the minute. “Start looking, try to see anything shiny. The blue or white of our paint scheme should show up against all the green down there.”

  The words sounded more certain than they really were. There were easily ten million trees below us, not to mention deadly high peaks covered in snow where a white aircraft would vanish into nothing more than a dent in the landscape. As always, flying over this vast wilderness made me feel microscopically tiny.

  We narrowed the gap to our destination by another half mile.

  “I don’t see anything yet,” Chuey said.

  “Keep looking. We’ll find him.”

  Another quarter mile. The cabin sat in a half-mile-wide clearing with an easy northbound approach. If he’d gotten close to that, we should see him. My gaze darted between the GPS readout, the other instruments and the ground.

  “Anything?”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  I circled the place on the ground where the GPS said the JetRanger should be. I could do this all day, if necessary. Well, at least until we got to that point-of-no-return mark where we had barely enough fuel to return to the airport.

  “Anything yet?” I asked.

  Chuey shook his head. I brought the A-Star to a hover and gave my stomach a moment to settle. The worst thing of all is to stare at the ground while the aircraft circles. It�
�s like a prescription for puking. We both took deep breaths and I reached over to push my window open a little way.

  “I’m giving it another pass,” I said.

  On the theory that flying circles in the opposite direction would help unwind my shaky inner-ear situation, I decided to do that. It doesn’t really work that way, but at this point I needed something to concentrate on other than the possibility that I might have lost Drake.

  Marriage to a pilot always means there’s the chance that a morning kiss and have-a-nice-day might be the last. I know that. I can’t focus on it.

  “Charlie! I caught a flash of something.” Chuey gripped at my forearm, pointing out the front window.

  I pulled back and came to a hover.

  “Where? Point to it again.”

  He looked a little confused. “I took my eyes off the ground. Let me see ...”

  This time I caught it, a flash of light right in my eyes. I nearly cried for joy.

  Drake always carried a signal mirror as part of his emergency gear. As the little light winked on and off I knew he was sending it.

  I maneuvered toward the light, slowly, desperately trying not to lose sight of it. We cleared some high trees and came over a tiny clearing, and there was the JetRanger. I stared at the space in disbelief, amazed that Drake had been able to land it in such a tight space. There was barely enough clearance for the rotor blades. He stood near the nose of the aircraft.

  There was no way I could bring the A-Star down beside it, but I saw another open space about five hundred yards away. I flashed the landing light toward Drake to acknowledge that we’d seen him, then headed for the other place. I locked down the cyclic and collective and left the rotors turning, flinging off my harness and running toward where I’d last seen him.