North Dakota Weddings (2 page)

“What is he? The keymaster?” He clamped his lips tight to keep from spewing what Tom could take back to Peter. It wasn’t Tom’s fault. That was some way for Peter to treat him though. He had no right. “Well, did you tell him I forgot my telescope?”

“He said you need a vacation and he would kick you out if he had to.” Tom’s grin was teasing. “If you ask me, you do look kind of pale, could use some sun.”

“It’s hard to get ultraviolet radiation when you’re hidden away like a Morlock.” Vance grinned, hoping to disarm Tom.

The security guard smiled back. “Morlock, sir?”

“You know, from H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine.”

Tom gave him a funny look.

“You see there’s this guy who invents…” What was he doing besides wasting time? “Oh forget it.”

Tom laughed.

“Let me finish packing. There’s no need for you to wait.”

Tom stiffened. “Just doing my job, Mr. Young. You don’t want me to get fired, do you?”

“Not at all.” Peter wanted Vance to be at his best when he returned, but in order to do that, he had to actually leave. If only he could shake the sense that Peter
needed
him gone.

Peter had enticed him from his job in Texas with talk of a classified government contract and the promise of promotion to vice president of…something. Vance knew data mining and thought it would be stellarific to have a shot at stopping the bad guys. Like a simple Boolean equation, the answer was obvious and he hadn’t thought twice about saying yes. Working for Peter, he’d labored for months on the software to find specific patterns in data to identify terrorist activities.

It had been like a dream come true, except Vance was miserable and should write the entire experience off as a loss. At twenty-seven, he thought he knew what he wanted. But North Dakota winters weren’t to his liking. Dad had warned him, telling him that sometimes a person thought he knew what he wanted and when he got it, discovered how wrong he was.

Telescope packed, Vance walked with Tom to the elevators. They discussed the weather on the way down. Once in the foyer, Vance left Tom and strode to the revolving door.

“You dropped something.”

Vance turned to see Tom standing there, holding out a small disk.

Vance searched his memory. “I didn’t—”

“Must have fallen out of your pocket.”

Vance mechanically reached for the small storage media. “Thanks.”

Tom held on to the memory card for a second longer than necessary while he stared at Vance. Then the security guard nodded and returned to his station.

Vance examined the disk. It wasn’t his. But then again, at two in the morning maybe it was.

He should have waited until morning to leave, but he was packed and ready to go, anxious to get away. Later, after three and a half hours of driving through the early morning along lonely dark highways and county roads, Vance was all the more bleary-eyed. The sooner he found his uncle’s house the faster he could sleep for a few days.

An unpleasant thought occurred to him. What if his uncle’s house was completely vacant of furniture and amenities? How could he have overlooked that possibility? In that case he’d have to stay in a hotel and make a quick decision on the house. Then he could go to Cancun ahead of schedule.

He came to a small town named Herndon. His uncle’s house was somewhere nearby. According to Vance’s GPS all he had to do was drive through the town and go another five miles, take a left on a side road for another two. As the sky lightened, his spirits rose and so did his hopes of finding the place.

Vance pulled on to a paved road in the middle of a wheat field that seemed to go nowhere, and then turned onto a gravel road, which ended up at a tall chain-link gate. He climbed out of his car. The fence surrounded a large area that included a metal building and…Was that a helicopter pad? Even though he was sleep-deprived, the sun brought a dawning with it that hit him like a bomb.

He was standing at an old missile site—a product of the Cold War.

“You’ve got to be kidding.” His words spoken to no one seemed to magnify the seclusion.

What was going on? There had to be some mistake.

A padlock secured the gate. There was one way to find out if he was at the right place. He found the keys he’d been given to his uncle’s property. To his disappointment, one of them looked like it belonged to a padlock. Warily, he inserted it.

The lock opened.

Stellarific
.

A
ndi Nielsen hit the brakes of her old rusty Dodge pickup. The vehicle ground to a standstill a mere inch from the gated entrance to Vance Erickson’s property.

“Um, sis, when are you going to get those fixed?” Her teenage sister, Elisa, gripped the door handle with white knuckles.

“Good gravy. You know we can’t afford that right now.” Andi jumped out of Dad’s old truck. If there was one thing she hated it was squealing old brakes.

Could things get any worse? She’d secured a contract with Vance Erickson months ago to renovate an old decommissioned launch control facility into a lavish home. But he’d died just before they were to begin work on the next section. The major portion of her fee wasn’t due until she’d completed the entire project, and there was no chance of that now. This job should have kept her busy for a long time.

She’d been outbid on everything else. Either that or people were listening to talk from subcontractors who wouldn’t work for a woman, and in this small town in North Dakota, there were plenty of men who thought taking orders from a woman was demeaning.

From those who didn’t care, she had other problems like quality work for the right price. She refused to use subs that cut corners with cheap materials.

Finishing the missile site would go a long way toward giving her construction company respect in the community. With respect would come the referrals she desperately needed. Sure, people remembered her contractor father, but he died a few years ago. His daughter had to prove she had the nails for the business—and at only twenty-one, she had some large shoes to fill.

Oh Daddy…

She kicked the tire, then pulled the keys to the missile launch control facility from her bag. She’d never returned them. No one had shown up to claim them either. She grabbed a flashlight from behind the seat.

“Um, Andi. I don’t know about this.” Elisa clipped at a nail, then stuck the clippers she always carried into her back pocket. “Mr. Erickson is dead now. You can’t just waltz in there. You got no right.”

Andi glowered at Elisa, wanting to ask what she knew about it, if anything. Elisa had gone out of her way to cause Andi more than her share of trouble. “Look, this is all I have left.”

She might not ever finish renovations or see the money, but at least she could look for what her grandfather had stashed inside years before when he’d worked at the missile site. Stomping over to the gate, she jangled the keys, searching for the right one.

Before Andi found the key, Elisa shoved the gate open. “You still think that letter you found means something, like it’s a treasure map?”

Andi stared at the chain-link fence. “Hey, I could swear I locked—”

“You’re not listening. But what’s new?”

“I heard you. Yes, I think it’s worth a look.” In fact, Andi believed it could be the very reason Mr. E had hired her.

Elisa stepped through the gate. “I should have stayed in bed.”

“Wait a minute. I need to make sure it’s safe.”

“From what?”

Andi swallowed her frustration with her sister, wishing it were a school day and not a Saturday so she could have peace from the constant arguing. After pushing through the gate, she walked up the short drive and cautiously to the right side of the only building Mr. E had left standing on the site. Most of it had burned last year, but they’d managed to salvage part of it.

“You mean who.”

Elisa followed Andi and stood next to her. “Huh?”

“Someone’s here. I don’t recognize the vehicle,” Andi said.

“Nice. A brand-spanking-new red Jetta.” Sarcasm dripped from Elisa. “It’s probably someone who’ll want those keys back.”

“Whoever it is, I need to look around.”

If only one last time.

This is crazy
. Vance had taken the access stairs rather than risk the elevator, but now that he’d gone down several flights, descending a good fifty feet underground, he wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision. Did the stairs go anywhere? He’d assumed they did considering there wasn’t much left of the building above ground. Most of that had been destroyed except a small section that appeared to house the entrance to the underground…what…dwelling? Had his uncle actually lived here?

Difficult to believe, that’s what he’d been told, though he’d missed the part where someone had referred to nuclear bombs and launch facilities, either that or he’d had a random access memory leak. Or had that information been purposefully left out? Either way, he’d committed to getting this off his smartphone reminders list.

What must Uncle Vance—his namesake—have been thinking to give this to him? Had he known of his nephew’s aversion to closed places? No way. Vance wasn’t sure his mother even knew. In his estimate, by the time he stepped in front of what looked like a blast door, he’d descended another twenty feet for a total of seventy. The door appeared to be part of the elevator shaft.

To his right was a tunnel. He strolled through the long cylinder and stopped at a convex blast door, shaped like the exterior of a sphere. Another one? He chuckled to calm himself. That and to let the bears know someone was coming. It was best to alert rather than startle. Boy Scouts 101. This would have been a great field trip when he was a kid. As it was, he felt like he was in a science fiction movie.

The door read S
TAND
C
LEAR OF
B
LAST
D
OOR
. C
AUTION
. D
O
N
OT
S
PIN
W
HEEL
. T
URN
W
HEEL
A
PPROXIMATELY
T
HREE
T
URNS TO
O
PEN OR
C
LOSE
.

He touched the wheel, then paused, feeling the sweat trickle down his back. The surroundings were getting to him. He tugged his shirt collar, even though it was loose to begin with. The site had been decommissioned years ago, he reassured himself, or else he would never have been allowed into the facility. Air Force guards would have been everywhere. Vance took a couple of deep breaths, surprised the air wasn’t stale, but rather smelled like vanilla air freshener.

Would he be able to open the door? Shoving aside his growing anxiety, he turned the wheel three times and pulled. The door swung open. Vance fully expected to be required to offer his identity at this juncture. But to whom, he didn’t know. He held his breath and stepped into a room. Lights automatically flickered on.

Sweet fractured motherboards!
He stood in what looked like the decadent inside of a mansion, rather than the sterile drabness he’d expected.

He stepped down into a large open room that housed, among other things, a beautiful modern kitchen with granite counters and stainless steel appliances.

Suddenly, his stomach grumbled. He hoped the fridge was loaded, but that was probably asking too much. Opposite the kitchen was a living area, sufficient for a gathering of at least twenty people, along with comfortable furniture and a large screen television.

Jazzy, but no windows. He wouldn’t be able to look at the stars. Sure it was spacious, but he didn’t know if he could tolerate the sense of confinement.

“Why couldn’t this have been above ground?”

“Because it was used to house the launch control center of a nuclear missile site,” a woman’s voice answered for him. “It’s called Ground Zero.”

Startled, Vance swung around to see…

…the gorgeous blond from the picture in his office. She stood there, one hand behind her back. Her blond hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, but it was her.

Vance rubbed his eyes. The light must be doing something to him. Or his anxiety from being boxed in was giving him hallucinations. Thank goodness it wasn’t a complete phobia, or maybe he’d see her standing next to a red Lamborghini, too. He was already tired before he’d started the trip, now he was dreaming.