Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (26 page)

“The police were here earlier,” Call said. “They’re aware of the situation. They’ll be keeping an eye out for anything that might look suspicious, either in town or on the roads leading up here.”

“Good.”

“There’s something I’d like you to take care of before your men settle in.” Call turned, motioned for Toby to come out of the kitchen doorway and join them. “This is Toby Jenkins. He’ll be staying in Dawson with his mother until this is over.”

“Wait a minute!” Toby looked at him as if he’d gone insane. “I’m not leaving. I’m staying here!”

“It’s safer for you in town, Toby. If I could send Charity someplace safe I would, but we don’t know exactly what’s going on yet, and for the present I think she’s better off here.”

“But who’s gonna cook for you? Who’ll take care of the place while I’m gone?”

“I’ll do it, Toby,” Charity said gently. “It won’t be for long. Call has a number of people working on this. They’re bound to turn up something very soon.”

“I want to stay. I’m good with a rifle. I might be able to help if something happens.”

“Ross and his men are professionals,” Call said. “They’ll take care of things here. I’ll keep in touch, let you know when it’s safe for you to return.”

Toby grumbled something but didn’t continue to argue. Jim Perkins walked him out to his little house behind the main structure to collect his things, then they set off down the hill, Perkins in the rental car following Toby in his paint-faded, once-red, now rose-colored minivan.

As soon as they were gone, Ross pressed a yellow hand-held radio into Call’s hand and gave one just like it to Charity. “Randy, Jim, and I all carry one of these. You’ll be able to reach us at any time just by pushing this button.” Ross demonstrated the use of the radio for Charity, depressing the key to speak, then releasing it so the other party could answer.

She clipped it onto the waistband of her jeans.

“We’ll take a look around,” Ross said, “get a handle on things up here. Just signal if you need us.”

Call nodded, but his face looked grim.

“I hate this,” Charity said.

“So do I.”

But for now there was nothing else they could do.

It was the following day that Toby sat in the Victory Gardens behind the museum in Dawson City. Work had been suspended on the Lily Rose as soon as the arson was discovered, but he hadn’t expected his job at Call’s to end as well.

“Crummy buttons,” Toby grumbled. Thinking of Charity, he managed to come up with a half-hearted smile.

Maude, Jenny, and Toby had disagreed with her decision to shut down the dredge, but apparently Charity felt it was the right thing to do. Imagining the gold they might have found, Toby had been down in the mouth ever since.

Until this afternoon—when Jenny had driven up in front of his mother’s jewelry shop, The Gold Mine, in Maude’s battered old blue pickup.

Toby rushed out to greet her. “Hey, Jenny!”

“Grama said I could come,” she explained a little shyly though the window of the truck. “I was feeling kind of blue, I guess. I liked working on the Lily Rose. Grama thought maybe you might be able to cheer me up.”

“I’m glad you came.” One of the reasons he’d hated to leave the mountain was Jenny. He knew how much he was going to miss seeing her every day.

Toby opened the door of the pickup. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.” Helping her out of the truck, they headed down the street to The Grubstake. The place was crowded. They bought sandwiches and sodas to go, returned to the pickup, and drove over to the park. The summer weather was perfect—clear, blue skies and a warm, gentle breeze. Up here, everyone made the most of the few short months of heat and sunshine.

There were tourists in the park, milling around the grass. Toby found a place off by themselves and sat down. Maude kept a blanket in the pickup for emergencies and Jenny had spread it open on the grass. As they ate hearty submarine sandwiches, they talked about the fire and who might have set it and about rebuilding the cabin, which both of them wanted to do. Then Toby asked Jenny about her plans for the fall.

“I-I’m not sure yet.”

“What about college? I think the U in Calgary is going to be great. I’m really looking forward to it. Don’t you want to go to school, too?”

“I did. I had the grades and everything. Now I … I don’t know.”

“Have you applied anywhere?”

“No, but my dad says I can go wherever I want. He’s really been great. It’s just that …”

“What?” Toby reached over and took her hand. “What is it, Jenny? You can tell me. You can trust me with anything. Surely you know that by now.”

The muscles in her throat went up and down and her eyes filled with tears. “Something happened a few months back. Since then …” She shook her head, stared off across the grass.

Toby squeezed her hand. “Tell me, Jenny, please.”

She swallowed, turned back at him. “I had an abortion,” she said softly. “A month before I came up here.”

His hand tightened over hers. “Jenny …”

“Jazz Rollins was the father. I thought … I thought we were being careful, but something went wrong and I got pregnant. My dad never found out. He’s ultraconservative. I knew if I told him he would try to talk me out of it and I didn’t want that.”

“So you had the abortion on your own?”

“I knew a girl once who got pregnant. I knew where she had gone to have the pregnancy ended.”

Toby looked at her, trying to read her face. “Are you sorry you didn’t have the baby?”

Jenny bit her lip, shook her head. “I know—for me—what I did was the right thing to do. Jazz wouldn’t marry me and even if he had wanted to, I didn’t want to marry him. By then I knew the kind of person he was, the cruel father he would be. I love children, but I knew I couldn’t take care of a baby—not yet—and the thought of carrying one inside me for all those months then giving it to strangers was even worse than not having it at all.”

She looked up at him and the sadness was there in her face. “You probably think I’m a terrible person.”

Toby reached over and gently captured her shoulders. “I don’t think that at all. I told you before, nothing you could tell me could change the way I feel about you.”

Jenny closed her eyes and leaned toward him and he gathered her into his arms.

“I mean it, Jenny.” He could feel her tears soaking into the front of his tee shirt and it made his chest feel tight.

“It’s just been so hard keeping it all a secret, being afraid of what people would say if they knew.”

Toby eased back to look at her. “You never told anyone?”

She shook her head. “Not until today.”

He drew her close again, felt that funny quiver in his heart. He smoothed tear-damp hair back from her cheek and knew he was falling in love with her. “Bad things happen to all of us, Jenny. That’s just the way life is. We have to put those things behind us.”

She gazed up at him, tears clinging to her thick brown lashes. “I think maybe I love you, Toby.”

He tightened his hold around her and spoke past the lump in his throat. “I think maybe I love you, too, Jenny.” She hung onto him hard, and God, it felt so good.

For an instant he thought of Call and the wife and daughter he had lost. He thought of Charity and wondered if the two of them loved each other and if Call would be able to put the past behind him and look instead to the future. He prayed that they would be safe and that they would catch the men who had tried to kill them.

Then Jenny gazed up at him, her heart in her beautiful green eyes, and his mind turned to his own future, one that might include her. Toby leaned over and very gently kissed her.

Charity rattled around the house, feeling restless and edgy. She was worried about Call. Whoever wanted him dead was persistent. She didn’t think they’d give up until they finished the job—or someone finally stopped them.

Earlier that morning, she had cooked breakfast for Call and Jim Perkins, then put ham, scrambled eggs, and biscuits in the oven for the two men on duty outside. She hadn’t really cooked in years, not since her mother had died and the three Sinclair girls had taken over the job of preparing the family meals.

Out of necessity, she had learned to do a decent job—nothing fancy, just good, hearty meals—and doing it now made her at least feel useful. But she would rather be working on the Lily Rose, seeing what treasure she might find in the stream. And thinking about the fire made her sad.

The cabin was lost. Call had mentioned rebuilding a couple more times, claiming the cost of reconstruction should be his since whoever had set the fire wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been sleeping there that night.

Even if she agreed, they couldn’t begin until they found the man or men who burned it down and she wondered if she shouldn’t just go back to Manhattan.

Thinking about giving up her adventure and leaving in defeat left her even more depressed. She refused to consider that she would also be leaving Call and instead wandered out of the kitchen and into his office.

He was sitting at the keyboard in front of his computer, typing in a message. He hit the “send” button just as she stepped behind him.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“I’m e-mailing Bruce Wilcox at Datatron, sending him a list of companies that manufacture hard disks—the ones most heavily involved in production development and design. I want Datatron to go out over the Net and collect as much information on each of the companies as it can.”

“Legally, you mean.”

“Yeah. You saw what happened with Wild Card when things went further than that.”

“What are you hoping to find?”

“Someone who’s in deep financial trouble, a company that is desperate enough to try to stop Peter Held, MegaTech, and ultimately me—at any cost.”

“Have you heard anything from Held?”

“Not a word. Which makes me wonder what he’s up to.”

“You think maybe he’s involved in this?”

“Maybe. As soon as we figure out where he is, I’m going to find out.” Call drew her down on his lap. “You doing okay?”

She nodded, managed to muster a smile. “I guess so.”

“I get the impression you’re not enthusiastic about being my new roommate.”

Charity wove her arms around his neck. “Actually, that’s the only part of this I
am
enthusiastic about. I love sleeping with you, Call—I freely admit it. I enjoy making love to you.”
I like everything about you. I’m in love with you.
But of course she didn’t say that. God only knew what Call would do if she did.

“I like making love to you, too. And it’s a good thing we both feel that way. Right now, there isn’t a helluva lot else we can do.” So saying, he kissed her. She heard the snap pop on her jeans and a few seconds later the jeans and her panties were lying in a pile at her feet. With one of the security guards asleep in the guest room and the door firmly closed, Call settled her astride him in the chair and they made love there in his office.

It didn’t allay her fears, but it did postpone them for a while.

It was later in the afternoon that Charity returned to the office. With little to keep her occupied and worry constantly nagging her, she focused her mind on her aunt in Seattle and the woman, Rachael Fitzpatrick, who had come to the Klondike in search of gold so many years ago.

Turning on the computer, she pulled up the family tree Call had helped her create on ancestry.com and looked it over. She found Sarah Thankful Baker; Sarah’s mother, Frances Fitzpatrick; and Frances’s younger sister, Rachael.

Rachael.
A woman with the courage to travel thousands of miles to a distant, forbidding land. Times were different now and Charity hadn’t faced the sort of hardships that Rachael must have suffered, yet it had taken no small amount of courage for Charity to come all this way by herself.

She wondered what had happened to Rachael, then thought of Ian Gallagher, the man Rachael had followed to the goldfields, and suddenly wondered what had happened to him. Rachael had returned with a heavy gold nugget, but Aunt Mavis didn’t know what had happened to the man Rachael had loved.

On impulse, Charity typed in his name and a list of people with the same name appeared on the screen. Knowing he had lived in the 1890s near Portland, she eliminated each person on the list by date of birth until she came up empty-handed. None of them were the right age to have lived during the Gold Rush. She searched ships’ registries of the period, hoping she might find either Rachael or Ian’s names, but she had no idea which ship they might have sailed on. Not all the registries were posted and again she came up with nothing.

On a whim, she typed in Chilkoot Trail, going with her hunch that the trail was somehow involved in whatever had occurred. Besides, the odds were fifty-fifty it was the Chilkoot and not the Whitehorse Pass the pair had traveled to Dawson City.

She went through maybe twenty different sites: History of the Chilkoot; the Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site; Reliving the Chilkoot Trail; more than a dozen others. Switching to another search engine, she tried again. Still no mention of Ian.

She thought of the day she had spent on the trail and the eerie sadness she had felt. She thought of her dream and backtracked, typed in
Chilkoot Trail deaths,
and waited.

The list of sites was interesting. She clicked on Explorenorth.com and her eye traveled down the list of subtitles to
Palm Sunday Avalanche.

She remembered reading about it years ago and her pulse kicked up. Any student of the Gold Rush knew about the terrible accident on March 3, 1898, when a wall of snow fifty feet deep buried sixty to a hundred men and women. It had taken four days to dig out the bodies. She knew about the temporary tent morgue at Sheep Camp set up to hold the victims’ frozen corpses.

But she hadn’t thought of it in years and never connected it to her dream.

And she had never seen an actual list of names.

Now there they were, recorded in alphabetical order on a graph made from cemetery headboards in Dyea in 1979 and the April issues of the
Dyea Trail,
the
Alaska Mining Record,
and
The New York Times.

The record was cloudy and the reason was apparent. Many of the victims the four sources named didn’t match. The headboard, for example, read Peter Anderson, but the name was reported as Andrew Anderson in the
Mining Record,
and O. Anderson in the
Times,
and there was no way to tell if they were one and the same or three different people. To make matters worse, some names appeared in one of the records and not the others.

She moved down the alphabetical list and when she reached the names starting with G, her breath caught. No Ian Gallagher was listed, but a headboard in Dyea named an I. Galahad who was listed in the
Record
as Ian Galliher and in the
Times
as I. Gallaghar.

Her adrenaline was flowing. She knew it was he as surely as she knew her own name.

Charity jumped to her feet, eager to tell Call, then turned and slammed into his chest. He caught her against him and for a moment neither of them moved.

“I found him,” she said in a breathy little whisper. “He was killed in the Palm Sunday avalanche.”

He was staring at her mouth. “Who?”

“Ian Gallagher, the gambler Rachael ran off with. Rachael would have been with him. She must have seen it happen.”

Call frowned. “Tell me you aren’t thinking that what happened to her is somehow connected to you.”

Her shoulders sagged, her excitement slowly fading. “I don’t know. The day we hiked the Chilkoot Trail, I felt like I remembered something. I even dreamed about it one night last week.”

“You dreamed about an avalanche?”

She nodded. “It was frightening, and unbelievably sad.”

Call let her go and stepped away. He didn’t say anything more and at the dark look on his face, neither did she. But Charity didn’t believe in coincidences any more than he did, and the dream she’d had must have been amazingly close to what had actually occurred.

She and Rachael were connected in some way—she could feel it. She wondered if she would ever know the truth.

Call listened to Charity puttering around the kitchen. The house felt different since she had moved in, warmer somehow, not so empty.

In the mornings, when he walked into the bathroom and saw her hairbrush on the counter, saw her panties hanging over the shower door, it reminded him what it had felt like to have a woman in the house, how good it had felt to come home from work and know that she would be waiting.

At night, after they made love and Charity curled against him, he could feel her heart beating softly next to his, and a fierce yearning opened up inside him, the feeling so sharp and intense it was almost a physical pain. It reminded him of all that he had once had, all that he would never have again.

As she lay sleeping, he thought how good it felt just to hold her, thought how it might be if she were his wife instead of his lover. Charity wanted children and in the past so had he. Amy was the first, but he and Susan had planned to have more. If things were different, he and Charity could have the family they both wanted.

If
he
were different.

If he weren’t afraid to love again.

But the hollow ache she opened kept yawning wider and he knew it wouldn’t stop hurting until she was gone. Until the reminders she stirred of home and family were buried again, until the ache of longing was stifled once more.

Last night, as she had before, she had mentioned returning to Manhattan. This time he hadn’t tried to dissuade her. As soon as he was sure she would be safe, he would encourage her to go.

Call ignored a sharp pinch in his heart. Turning away, he walked into the bedroom to retrieve the cup of coffee he had forgotten on the bedside table and for a moment his eye strayed to the dresser against the wall. He found himself walking toward it, kneeling to pull open the lowest drawer.

In a small, gold-framed photo in the bottom dresser drawer, Susan’s face smiled up at him. Amy’s baby picture was tucked into the left-hand corner of the frame. Call’s throat closed up. How long would it take before he could look at their pictures and not feel the ache of loss? When would their ghosts finally stop haunting him?

In the other room, he heard Charity calling his name and for an instant he wanted to hold her so badly his hands started shaking. But the ghosts of the past still lingered. Instead he closed the drawer, shutting away the memories and the pain. By the time he reached the kitchen, his mask was back in place.

And his heart closed up once more.

Three days later, Call sat next to Charity at the round walnut table in the corner of his office. Ross Henderson sat across from him, a big, solid man who completely filled up his chair. So far, the security team had turned up almost nothing. Several sets of footprints had been discovered, belonging, in Ross’s estimation, to a man of medium height and slightly heavy build wearing a pair of tennis shoes.

They had followed his tracks across the side of the hill toward the road but the footprints disappeared on a narrow rift of granite and they couldn’t find them again. The same footprints appeared in an area around Charity’s cabin but there wasn’t anything special about them and neither Ross nor the police were hopeful.

The good news was the security cameras were in place outside. Against a wall of the office, a monitor showing pictures of four different areas around the house gave them surveillance twenty-four-seven.

It would be nearly impossible to penetrate the protective barrier they had set up. Still, Call was edgy. He wanted his life back to normal, wanted this over and done. He kept hoping something would break and when he went into his office and pulled up his e-mail, he thought that maybe it had.

As he sat there studying the screen, Charity walked up behind him, lightly rested her hands on his shoulders. She was an affectionate woman, he had discovered. Different from Susan in that way. He found that he liked that in a woman.

“What is it?” she asked.

“E-mail from Bruce Wilcox at Datatron. Remember that list I sent him?”

“Companies you thought most likely to be damaged by MegaTech’s possible discoveries.”

“That’s right. Smaller companies who might be in financial straits or have sunk large amounts into their own development projects. He’s attached the information Datatron retrieved off the Net.”

“You think maybe they found something useful?”

“God, I hope so.” Call clicked the mouse and opened the file. “There were ten companies on my list. Of course, there could be others, but none that fit the criteria.” Call studied the screen. “From what it shows here, three of them lost money last year, but not all that much, two of them have been in the red for the past two years, but appear to be on the upswing.” He sighed. “Looks like most of them are showing a profit or at least breaking even, and a couple are doing extremely well.”

“So you don’t think any one of them is in enough trouble to warrant a personal attack on you and MegaTech.”

He surveyed the screen a moment more, wishing the numbers would somehow change. “No, from what I see here, it doesn’t look that way.”

“What about the development aspect? Maybe someone wants to cut out the competition.”

“Could be. Trech Technologies and Sept Systems are both heavily invested in research programs to increase hard-disk storage, but from what it shows here, they aren’t in over their heads.”