“Trust me, playing possum only gets a person in trouble,” he said, knowing damn well she was awake. He picked up the bag of cheese curls and stuffed them in the pack basket. “Been snooping, have you? And eating my stash?”
“You ate my lunch,” she shot back, as she snuggled deeper into his suit. “What time is it?”
He picked up the candy wrappers and threw them in the basket. “Time to dig out the satellite phone and let Greylen know you won’t be back by sunset. The last thing I want are your uncles and cousins coming out to search for us.”
She still didn’t move. “You call him. He won’t lecture you.”
“No, he’ll just be waiting on my doorstep with a shotgun.”
“Daddy prefers a sword,” she mumbled.
Jack straightened with the pot in his hand. “A sword?”
Megan cracked open one eye, and one corner of her mouth lifted in a lopsided grin. “He’s pretty good with it, too. I’ve seen him cut a four-inch sapling clean through in one stroke.”
“What’s he doing with a sword?”
“It belonged to his father. All my uncles and cousins have swords,” she added, finally rolling onto her back and opening both eyes—likely to better gauge his reaction. “They’re very skilled with them, too. They clean up at the highland games down on the coast every summer.”
Not wanting to disappoint her, Jack looked stricken. “Damn, and I left my bow and arrows in Medicine Lake. They wouldn’t come after a defenseless man, would they?”
She finally sat up, stretching her arms over her head with a yawn. “That depends on whether or not I get home in one piece.”
“Hit the bushes, then. We’re leaving in ten minutes,” he told her, plucking the blanket from her lap and folding it.
She stood up with a little giggle and sauntered toward the bushes. “Gù Brath’s number is programmed into the phone. You might stand a chance if Mom answers. If Daddy does, you better have a good story ready.”
“Are you nuts? I’m not lying to your father.”
She stopped and looked back, arching one delicate brow. “It’s your funeral.”
“I’m telling him our trip is taking longer than we thought because of the baby, and that I didn’t realize how out of shape you’ve let yourself get.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Did you find the deer yard?”
Jack bent down to hide his grin and continued packing up camp. “I found a herd of thirty or forty of them holed up about three miles due north.” He stopped to look at her. “They seemed healthy. They certainly had plenty of feed. I did come across a yearling moose carcass, though. It looked to me like a mountain lion brought it down.”
She had just started into the bushes, but swung back around to face him. “A mountain lion? You’re sure? There’s never been a documented sighting of one around here that I know of.”
“It was definitely a large-cat kill.”
Her face beamed. “Do you know what this means?”
“That you were smart to bring your gun?”
“It means that if I can confirm a mountain lion is living in the area, they can’t build a resort here.”
“Do you think the developers will be as happy with this news as you are?”
“Of course not. But that’s why the state requires a study. That way the developers won’t put too much money into a project before they find out they can’t build.”
“And if the developers send someone out here to quietly shoot the cat, will that make their little problem go away?”
“Not if I’ve already documented it. All I have to prove is that this area has had a mountain lion living here recently. It will then be designated a large-cat habitat, and all development will be banned.”
He waved her away. “We can discuss this later. We’re burning daylight.”
She didn’t move but frowned instead. “You said three miles north. You couldn’t have covered that much ground in the time you were gone.”
“Actually, I zigzagged a lot. I really traveled a total of eight miles.”
She eyed him dubiously. “In three hours? That would mean you went…” She calculated in her head and then glared at him. “Nobody can do that on snowshoes.”
“He can if he thinks a hungry cat is dogging his trail. That kill was over a week old. Will you get going? I’m hungry, and I can’t wait to get home and slap a TV dinner in the microwave.”
Jack gave a silent chuckle when she stomped off into the bushes. He pulled his revolver from the back of his waist and stashed it in his tank bag, then walked over to Megan’s sled and rummaged around in her saddlebag for the phone.
“Greylen,” he said when the sword-wielding laird answered. “This is Jack. I just want to let you know that we’re still at the north end of the lake. We should be back home in three or four hours.”
“What happened? Did ye have sled trouble? Where’s Megan? I’d like to speak with her.”
“She’s in the bushes at the moment. You have seven daughters. Surely you remember what it was like traveling the backcountry with a pregnant woman.”
There was a pause on the line, then a soft laugh. “Aye, I remember. So what delayed ye, other than bathroom breaks?”
“A detour down an unmarked trail,” Jack told him. “And a couple of naps. The weather’s been good, and Megan is thoroughly enjoying herself. I think she’s missed being out in the field. She’ll call you as soon as she gets home.”
“Take your time traveling back, and don’t overrun your headlights. The deer and moose like to use the trails at night.”
“We’ll be careful. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Chief.”
Jack hit the disconnect button with a chuckle. Apparently Greylen wasn’t acknowledging they were on a first-name basis. But if Jack was going to run the MacKeage gauntlet, he would do it as an equal. Highlanders had nothing on Cree warriors.
“Was my father very mad?” Megan asked, emerging from the bushes, a bit winded and pink faced.
“Would you be worried if he was?”
“No,” she said with a laugh. “He’s all bluster. At least with us girls,” she clarified. “I’ve decided to come back up here tomorrow or the next day. If I can document a mountain lion in the area, it will shut down the study before it’s even begun.”
“And you’ll be out of a job.”
“That’s the way this business goes.”
“Megan, did you notice anything…oh, I don’t know, anything strange when we were on the tundra? Did you see any sign that there might be oil under that section?”
“Oil? You mean like bubbling tar pits that swallow up woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers?”
Jack shook his head seriously. “I’ve been thinking about Mark Collins’s connection to Billy Wellington, Billy’s connection to your study, and your connection to Collins by way of this job. Honestly, don’t you find it odd that the common factor here is Collins?”
“It’s what he does, Jack. Mark is in the consulting business, and he hires biologists for studies all over the world. Why are you so convinced there’s something fishy going on?”
“Because a man was murdered.”
She sat down on her sled and looked up at him. “Okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s say Mark was involved in that man’s death. What has it got to do with me?”
Jack sat down on his own sled, which was parked beside hers. “This is just a theory. Call it a hunch if you want, but I think Collins was hired by someone—an energy company, maybe—to make sure your study didn’t expose the fact that there’s oil or natural gas under that area of tundra. So Collins put Billy Wellington on the study to keep an eye on things.”
“But that implies Billy might have killed that man.”
Jack shook his head. “There would be too much money involved to trust something like that to a kid. And Billy was really shaken by that guy’s death. I think he told Collins that the government worker had discovered something, and Collins sent someone more expe
rienced to deal with the problem.”
“That still doesn’t connect anything to me.”
“Unless you discovered the same thing the government worker did.”
“But what? I didn’t see anything that pointed to oil.”
“What about that dead arctic fox you found, and those half-eaten ptarmigans? Did you ever find out what killed them?”
“No. I took DNA samples, but I gave the carcasses to—” Her eyes widened. “To the government worker! He was supposed to send them to Ottawa.” She stood up. “And remember that dead snowy owl I found three days earlier? I gave him that carcass, too.”
“Did he send them out?”
“No. He was waiting for the supply plane to arrive.” She sat down again, stunned. “My God, do you think those dead animals are the link?” she whispered. “Could that man have been killed because of what had killed them?”
Jack took her hands in his. “It’s a good possibility, if those birds ingested oil, and the fox and owl ate them and also died. It’s also possible that Collins wants those DNA samples you took.”
“But why wait four months to try to get them from me?”
“You’ve been surrounded by a small army since you’ve been home, and Gù Brath is a veritable fortress. I suspect Collins did send someone to Pine Creek, but when he realized he wasn’t going to get your samples by stealing them, he decided to simply hire you to get close enough to find them.”
“I—I suppose that makes sense. Except that I found the job on the Internet. How could he know I’d even be looking?”
“I suspect the job was posted just to make it look legitimate. Chances are if you hadn’t seen it, you would have gotten a letter from Collins soon. Then, when you checked it out, you would have believed him because the job had been posted long before he contacted you.”
She pulled her hands free and stood up. “Then we need to get going. I want to get home and find those samples.”
“Where are they?”
“In my mother’s lab. I stashed my trunk there when I came home, and forgot about it.”
Jack felt like he was finally making progress. He kicked snow on the fire to put out the last of the dying embers. “First thing tomorrow, you find those samples and bring them to me at the police station.”
“But they need to go to a lab.”
“I’ll get them to one.” He strapped the basket on the back of her sled, then looked around to make sure they had everything. “I have connections in the Canadian government. This isn’t an academic problem, Megan. It’s a government one.”
Jack would swear he heard her mutter something about a nerd as she climbed onto her sled and pulled on her helmet.
“Wait!” he shouted as she reached to start her engine. “Which trail are we taking back?”
She flipped up her visor, then pointed west toward the lake. “The one we’re on should continue to the ITS trail that runs down the east side of Pine Lake.”
“Are you sure, or just pretty sure?”
She just flipped down her visor, started her sled, and shot off down the trail. Jack waited until the snow dust had settled enough for him to see, then followed.
It was dark by the time they broke out of the forest and onto the lake—not the ITS trail. Jack’s gut tightened; he did not want to travel the lake in the dark. He pulled up beside Megan, who had stopped and shut off her sled.
“I have no idea where the ITS trail is,” she told him. “I don’t know how we could have missed it.”
Jack unzipped his tank bag and dug out his map. “We’re going to have to find it, because we’re not traveling the lake at night.”
“I bet we’re just a few miles north of where we should be, and I’m pretty sure there’s a club trail that runs the length of the lake,” she offered. “We just have to find it, follow it south until we pick up the ITS trail, and we’ll have a straight shot home.”
Jack walked to the front of his sled, bent down in the beam of the headlight, and studied the map. “It’s a lot more than a few miles to the ITS trail,” he told her when she walked up beside him. “More like ten or twelve. See,” he said, pointing out where they were. “This trail brought us out here, and the ITS takes a sharp eastern turn way down there.”
He stepped back for the headlights to illuminate the area in front of them, and saw sled marks splaying out in all directions. “We should go back the way we came.”
“But that will take all night.”
“It’s better than taking a cold swim.” He folded the map and turned her to face him. “I don’t like traveling on ice at night.”
“We’ll be on the club trail, for crying out loud. The local club will have marked it with small trees. They check it almost daily and set it well away from any dangerous spots. I vote we take the lake. Ten measly miles, Jack. And we’ve had subfreezing temperatures for nearly two months.” She reached out and laid her hand on his chest. “Are you forgetting that I grew up here? I know this lake like the back of my hand.”
He didn’t point out that she’d gotten them lost twice today, since he suddenly realized this conversation was no longer about getting home. It was a test to see if he was capable of trusting her. And how could he persuade her to trust him again if he didn’t do the same?
Dammit to hell. “Okay,” he growled. “We’ll take the lake. But I lead.”
Her grin slashed broad in the headlights. Megan patted his chest and practically skipped back to her sled. “Not a problem, Jack. Better your taking a cold swim than me. Don’t worry, I’ll throw you a rope if you fall through the ice.”
Jack climbed on his sled, headed toward the well-marked trail a couple of hundred yards out from shore, and set a comfortable pace down the lake. Megan stayed behind him for exactly ten minutes. Then she pulled up beside him and matched his pace for about a mile, gave him a cheerful wave, and zoomed ahead.
Jack sighed.
They traveled another four miles, and Megan had just shot through a narrow cutting in a peninsula when the…thing appeared in the beam of her headlights. Jack didn’t know who was more surprised—him, Megan, or it.
About the size of a small horse, the startled animal dropped whatever it had been eating, reared up on its hind legs, and let out a bloodcurdling roar just as—holy hell, those were wings on its back!
Realizing it was impossible for her to stop in time, Jack watched in horror as Megan veered to the right to avoid hitting it. The beast lashed at her sled with its tail as if trying to slap her away, and flapped its massive wings in an attempt to get airborne.
Jack gave his sled full throttle, shot over the peninsula, and aimed directly for it.
The—honest to God, it looked like a damn dragon!—swung around at his approach, gave another deafening roar, and charged toward him. Jack waited until the very last second before turning to the right, barely dodging its lashing tail. He wasn’t able to avoid the wildly flapping wings though, and was nearly unseated when one of them slammed into his helmet.
He immediately swung his sled in a circle back toward the beast. Thick, rolling smoke started to billow around him as his snowmobile slowed down, plowing into heavy, sucking slush. The sled ground to a halt, and Jack barely ducked in time when the beast suddenly appeared through the cloud of smoke, flying directly over his head with another bloodcurdling roar.
He turned the key and tore off his helmet, jumped off the sled, and immediately sank up to his knees in slush. The sudden, stark silence was broken only by the soft, rhythmic woosh of the dragon’s wings as it flew into the darkness.
Several of the threads suddenly knit together. The slime at the break-ins. The bloodcurdling scream. That…that prehistoric throwback was what had flown off over the lake that night!
Jack finally tore his gaze away from the disappearing beast and looked around to see if Megan was just as awestruck as he was.
Only he couldn’t see her anywhere. Not even her headlights.
Nor could he hear her sled’s engine.
Dammit, she’d literally vanished into thin air!
“Help! Jack, help!”
Cold dread tightened his stomach. She’d broken through the ice!
“I’m coming, Megan!” he shouted, unzipping his saddlebag and grabbing a rope before running toward the sound of her splashing. He was forced to slow down as he approached the black pool of water, the slush sucking at his boots like quicksand. “I’m here, Megan!” he called to her. “Float on your back! Try to get your helmet off!”
He could barely see where she was struggling in the water. He heard her sputtering and coughing as she slapped to stay afloat. The ice beneath him suddenly started to sag, and Jack stopped dead in his tracks.
“You’re okay. Don’t panic. Try to bring your feet up and float on your back,” he called out, uncoiling the rope. “I’m going to toss you a line. Don’t try to catch it, just float there and I’ll throw it across your chest.”
“My suit is dragging me down!”
“No, it’s not! It’s got enough trapped air to float you. Now, get ready for me to throw the rope. Megan! Are you listening to me!”
“I’m sinking!”
“No, you’re not!” Jack dropped to his hands and knees and crawled closer. The moment he felt the ice start to buckle he stopped again, though there was still a good twenty feet between him and the pool of dark, frigid water. He inched back several feet, knowing that his getting wet wasn’t going to help Megan. “Kick your feet to bring yourself closer to the edge of the ice,” he commanded. “I’m throwing the rope. Wait until I tell you to grab it.”
He tossed the rope at the blob in the middle of the pool. “Grab it, Megan. Pull off your gloves if you have to.”
He could make her out struggling in the water, and then she finally said, “I’ve got it! Pull me out!”
“Not yet. Wrap it around your waist a couple of times. You won’t be able to hold it tight enough.”
He watched her struggle some more while he slowly inched closer on his belly to distribute his weight.
“Okay. Pull me out!”
Secrets of the Highlander Page 15