Down River (10 page)

“I made those several years ago, but I’m pretty busy here. I used to make them not just for money, but to preserve Yup’ik ways, but now I just have other interests. Mitch wanted them on display there, not me…”

Her voice trailed off. She hoped that didn’t sound lame or rude. In a way it was the truth. This woman Mitch had almost married was watching her very closely, out of the corners of her eyes.
Iah,
that was the look of a lawyer, all right.

“Sorry,” Christine blurted, “but I need to talk to Mitch about something for later. The hand-cranked aurora borealis ice cream, our special surprise for all our guests.”

Though Christine had no question about that or anything else for Mitch right now, she forced a little smile and hurried faster before Lisa Vaughn could ask her more questions.

Jonas came back to walk with Lisa shortly after Christine left. “I just wanted to tell you something I hope helps,” he said. “I was in a real bad car wreck when I was eighteen—I wasn’t driving. Anyway, I got banged around pretty good, even with a seat belt on—concussion, brief coma. But what I wanted to tell you is that, even though I recovered—no residual problems—I never could recall the wreck itself, or what led up to it, the few minutes before the car rolled. Hopefully, your memories of that tumble in that monster river will be just like that.”

“Hopefully?”

“Yeah, you don’t want to be reliving that over and over in your mind. Just let it be blanked out—the things surrounding it. Is that the way it is for you, just a blank right before and during your fall?”

A chill snaked up her spine. Jonas was trying to find out how much she could recall? But why? Just sympathy and support? Or was he desperate to know if she’d seen or heard something—someone? Maybe him.

“That’s the way it was at first,” she told him, keeping her eyes on the forest path, hoping he wouldn’t see the lie on her face—lawyers were skilled at psyching such things out. “But I really feel some of it’s coming back to me, bit by bit. I really think I will recall everything.”

“Well, sometimes it’s best to just let tough times stay buried. You know—considering where we’re headed—to let sleeping dogs lie. Can’t wait to see these huskies. In photos they seem to have the bluest eyes. Never had a job interview, so to speak, where the criteria had to do with racing dogs and zip lines and river rafting. What a résumé we’re going to have when we get out of here. I was really nervous about all this at first, but what could possibly happen on a dog sled, especially one on wheels on grass in warm weather?”

He sounded nervous. Very nervous. Either from what lay ahead or what she’d said. “I would have agreed with you a few days ago,” she told him, “but what could happen just standing on an elevated path between a lovely lake and a white-water river, right?”

“Famous last words, you mean?” Jonas said with a forced laugh that showed his white teeth.

Sharp teeth, Lisa thought, as they came into the
clearing where Spike’s property began. Teeth like the beavers cutting down trees or bears ripping apart river salmon. However much Mitch had not told her about Christine, she had to at least find a way to get him alone to tell him about Jonas.

L
isa thought Spike’s Siberian huskies were beautiful. As Mitch had said about the moose that had terrified her at first, they were also majestic—their thick, silvery coat hairs tipped with gray or black, their deep-throated, eager barks. They sounded like howlers, but her feelings toward them were a far cry from hearing the wolves that night in the wilderness. The dogs had perky ears and curled, wagging tails and alert, sky-blue eyes. She could tell how much they wanted to please their master, especially when they saw him pull the three-wheeled sleds out of the storage shed.

“Okay, here’s some info before I hitch four dogs to each of your sleds,” Spike announced as everyone gathered around him at the gate to the dog yard.

Lisa eyed the metal and wooden sleds, mounted on sturdy-looking wheels for the dogs’ summer exercise. “I’ll give some background on mushing and how to handle the teams, because you’ll each—Lisa, Vanessa and Jonas—be getting a chance to control
one of these sleds on a short run thataway,” he said, pointing.

All around them, grass about a half-foot high and white wildflowers blanketed the clearing, blowing like green waves with whitecaps, like river foam. Lisa could picture the dogs rushing into it, pulling her deeper into a whirling current of green and white…She jerked alert. That memory, that vision, had sneaked up on her like it used to. A flashback of being in the river, or of losing Mother and Jani again. Or was she still so exhausted she’d dozed off for a microsecond, falling into the dream that had haunted her for years? Mother’s face through the blurry barrier, her voice calling, calling, “Come with me—come on.” Her mouth open, her eyes wide from behind the glass or water or—

Lisa shook her head to clear it and forced herself to look around at the here and now, to recognize reality. Spike’s log cabin and his dog yard were in a large, oval-shaped clearing on the edge of the forest they had walked through from the lodge. The huskies lived in a miniature fenced-in village, where each dog had one of the small wooden houses set in two neat rows.

Spike had said the dogs slept, ate and played with their neighbors, stealing bones or nipping at ears or tails, but they were always ready to run.
Ready to run.
She could recall Graham saying, “So, are we ready to run?” more than once before a team of Carlisle, Bonner & Associates attorneys went into court on
some huge corporate lawsuit or defamation trial. Not “are we ready to go” or even “ready to rumble,” like Vanessa sometimes said, but
ready to run.

“Here’s the main thing,” Spike told them, stepping up on the back of one of the sets of runners elevated on temporary wheels, as if he were on the witness stand, testifying in court. “It’s easy to feel out of control on a dog sled, but you have to control yourself and the dogs. If you don’t display leadership to them, they won’t bother to obey you. They’re intelligent pack animals, but they need to be led. To their way of thinking, I’m the alpha dog here. Likewise, you need to keep control while you’re each in charge of four of them.”

So, Lisa thought, this activity did make some sense in a race to see who could assume the leadership role of a senior partner. She tried to focus on Spike’s advice. He seemed totally in his element here.

Vanessa asked, “Are their doghouses really warm enough in the brutal winters? You know, animal rights and all that.”

“Sure,” Spike told her. “Just take a look at their coats, even thicker than that in the winter. The breed can withstand temps as low as seventy-six degrees below Fahrenheit. Their cold months are like how Florida feels to you in the winter. Still, I keep lots of straw in the houses, the same houses that give them needed shade in these warm months. Like Mitch and me, these dogs thrive in Alaska.

“The word
musher
can mean the drivers or the
dogs,” Spike went on. “When it’s the dogs, there’s two kinds of mushers, the long-distance ones or the sprint mushers, like mine. They run shorter courses at faster speeds than those in the Iditarod or Yukon Quest races, but these are my kind of dogs.”

“Fast dogs and fast airplanes for Spike Jackson,” Ellie said.

“You got that right, Mrs. Bonner. Okay, just a few instructions, then we’ll try it, maybe get us a little race going, since you’re all here for a race for the senior partner position.”

So, even Spike knew Graham and Mitch’s game plan, Lisa thought. Not as much bonding as competition, at least in this activity.

“You stand back on the runners, see?” he went on, demonstrating. “And you hold on to the handlebow, this piece here. And I do mean hold on for dear life, ’cause the dogs will yank and lunge at first, though it’s a smooth ride—’specially in snow—once they get going. Their towline’s attached here to the front of the sled, see? There’s a foot brake here for slowing or stopping,” he said, demonstrating it, “but you really got to lay into it. The dogs will be harnessed, but there’s no reins.”

“Then how do you steer?” Jonas asked.

“Fortunately, on this run, you don’t have to worry about a lot of commands to your lead dog and team. All you’ve got to know is my dogs follow the command ‘mush!’ to get going and ‘halt!’ to stop. Lots of folks these days use ‘hike!’ for the start, but
that sounds like football to me. I like the old ways. I still use leather towlines ’stead of that new, fancy polyethylene rope, too.”

“But on grass like this,” Vanessa said, “we won’t go too fast, right? I’m as raring to go as these dogs and love the speed of water sports, but a group of dogs pulling all this weight—on wheels—can’t go too fast.”

“Just remember,” Spike told her, “these dogs are bred to run, so once you’re on and moving, don’t try to get off. And, like I said, don’t let go, or you could get throwed.”

Don’t let go
and
keep control.
Lisa clung to Spike’s words of advice. That was the key to sprint racing behind sled dog teams, but it was also the story of her life right now.

Christine hated to admit it, but she was forming a grudging admiration for Lisa Vaughn. First of all, for someone to survive the Wild River was awesome, as if the woman had a supernatural protector way beyond Mitch. While Spike was hitching four dogs to each of the three sleds, Christine poured coffee into cups Spike had set out and just watched the others.

She noted that only Lisa was showing any interest in the dogs themselves right now, and they were the engine that made everything run in a race like this. Vanessa, who looked like she could have stepped out of one of those luxury-goods catalogs Ginger was obsessed with, stayed clear of the excited animals and
sipped her coffee at a distance. Now that was body language to show what she really felt about this opportunity. Jonas had Mr. Bonner taking photos of him with the dogs in the background. Mrs. Bonner and Mitch were talking off to the side as Christine moved closer to Spike.

“They’re great-looking mushers,” she told him. “You take good care of them.”

“Glad you came along. Yeah, they’re tough and feisty, real special. It’s my honor to care for them. I swear, some of them are smarter than I am. I control them only to the extent that we make a good team.”

She had to smile at that. And the warm—even hot—look he gave her was a revelation. His eyes burned into hers, went down her body, then up like a caress before he turned away to bring up the next dog to its place on the towline.
Iah,
but she felt like he’d really touched her. Little butterflies beat in the pit of her belly. It was the closest she had ever felt to him, and yet there was a big dog between them.

“I just had a bad experience with them before,” she tried to explain. “With some huskies that weren’t loved but abused. Since yours are raring to go, I guess I’d better not pet one of them.”

“I’d say pat, instead of pet, but sure you can,” he told her. “You gotta be a bit strong with them or they won’t even feel it. Even in these warm months, their thick coats are like armor.”

His eyes devoured her again. Was he talking about being strong with the dogs or with him? Christine
gave the one he’d just harnessed a good, strong pat on the back.

Clay’s dogs had been howlers and growlers, as if he’d left them behind in the yard to keep her in the house. But this husky wagged his tail and gave her almost a grateful look. She blinked back tears at how good that felt, like she’d connected with this powerful animal. She sucked in a deep breath, held it and let it out. Something sharp and hurtful inside her uncoiled. It was like the armor that had kept her from Spike and Spike from her had a chink in it. But she was still scared of the feeling of trusting him, so she blurted out, “Lisa said the ladies would like to visit Ginger’s place, but I don’t know. I’ll ask her.”

“I know. Suggest to them that they go one at a time,” he said as he brought the next eager dog over to be harnessed. “If they want to place bakery orders to take home when they see her kitchen, she’ll probably say it’s okay. I could stop by her place if she’d rather have me there.”

“Wait till they see it,” Christine said, patting this dog, too. “
Little House on the Prairie
with Neiman Marcus, Gucci and Tiffany catalogs all over. Yeah, for the extra money, I bet she’ll agree.”

“Okay, listen up, you mushers!” Spike called out. “I’m almost done here, then a few more instructions. You’ll be taking your teams in a straight line to the edge of the clearing, so just let them run. See that barrier of straw bales down there by the trees? You should try to stop them with the brake and yelling,
‘Halt! Halt!’ But if they don’t, they’ll stop at the bales. There’s only one little dip in the course, a pretty straight shot, but if you want to walk it first, go ahead, then get back here for ‘on your marks, get set—go!’”

He lowered his voice and looked at Christine again. “You want to try this sometime, just let me know. Or I can put you in the sled and off we go. Well, darn—a poet and I didn’t know it.”

He grinned as he went to get the first dog for the last sled. Christine gave the nearest husky another strong pat, and, smiling, went over to clean up the coffee cups.

Lisa surprised herself. Her insides were doing flip-flops when she didn’t think driving a husky team on a sled—with wheels, no less—would bother her at all. Besides, after being in that
monster river,
as Jonas had called it, she didn’t think anything would scare her again.

Just as when she was assigned to a new case, she’d done her best to assess this situation. She’d examined a sled close up, talked to the dogs, patted them, observed how eager they were to please. She had skipped the coffee, even though Spike had said anyone who wanted to could use the facilities in his log home. Anytime she got keyed up, she felt she had to run to the bathroom, and coffee wouldn’t help.

She had only examined the course to the dip in the blowing grass, though the others were walking the
entire distance. Looking at Jonas and Vanessa ahead of her, she realized she should have gone with them instead of continuing to study the dogs and the sleds, because she wanted to see how comfortable her rivals were together and around her.

It was still a long shot that they were working together against her, but they could have made a pact to reduce the senior partner candidates by one. After all, how many coworkers had tried to sabotage another’s career? She’d had several defamation and discrimination cases based on that sad reality and had won good settlements for her clients, too.

She saw Mitch was finally alone, coming out of Spike’s cabin, and she strode straight toward him. “Mitch, I need to talk to you privately and that’s obviously easier said than done. I don’t mean here—no time.”

“I know. Rather than sneaking off the lodge grounds or whispering in a corner—or sneaking into each other’s rooms—let’s just make the lodge wine cellar our meeting place.”

“I didn’t see a wine cellar on our tour.”

“I never show it, my ultimate sanctuary. The small door in the reading room goes down to it. There’s a light switch at the top of the stairs. An underground room in Alaska is really rare with the permafrost and rock barriers under almost everything, but Uncle John dug it out bit by bit over the years. Close the door behind you and watch the steps going down, but once we’re there, it’s soundproof. Midafternoon,
about three, okay? If someone’s in the reading room so you can’t come down then, we’ll get a Plan B. Here comes Graham, so if you found out anything, save it until then—unless it’s life-and-death.”

You might know he’d put it that way, she thought, annoyed at him again for what he hadn’t told her about Christine’s past.

“One quick thing,” he added, and she turned back. “Before breakfast, I went out and checked the site where you fell in. No telltale footprints since you and I, then Christine and Ginger, were all over the area and my shoving the kayak through obliterated a lot.”

“Ginger was there?”

“She’s the one who spotted the kayak trail from the water and told Christine. She said Ginger picked up the cooler you dropped and gave it back to her. They saw the food being eaten by a wolverine they surprised at his feast. So—site of the crime—nothing helpful.”

“Hey, you two,” Graham greeted them. “With all the time you had wandering in the wilderness, I’m glad you still have things to say to each other. I know there were hard feelings on both sides for a while, and I was hoping this visit would allow you to settle things before you both go back to your own worlds.”

He stood between them, holding one of each of their upper arms so they were facing each other. Lisa had been planning to ask Graham to give her away at their wedding. Their positioning reminded her of that, as if Graham were ready to hand her over to Mitch at the front of the church.

“No, really,” Graham went on, “did you get the past settled while you were gone? You used to be quite a legal team for us.”

“Yes, we did reminisce a bit,” Mitch told him. “Cleared the air, which is clear enough in Alaska anyway.”

“I must apologize again for taking you two off the casino money-laundering case right after you told me you’d been seriously—secretly—dating, but, as I said then, I didn’t mean it as any sort of censure or punishment. You know I was starting to have a concern that some of our clients or their competition were playing too rough, trying to find out how much we’d dug up.”