The Stranger (17 page)

She tried again several times to no avail.

I pointed to the red flashing icon. “What does this mean?”

“We’re out of gas?” Ally cursed. “Impossible! I know we had to circle several times before we landed, but we fueled up before we took off!”

The leaden clouds were drifting in and the first flurries of snow danced in the wind. We could’ve radioed for help, but by the time someone came to get us, it would be too late. The weather would be too bad to fly and the hearing would be over.

“I can’t believe it.” Ally groaned. “I’ve never miscalculated my fuel before. Talk about horrible timing.”

“At least you’re not in the air.”

Anya’s observation gave me the shivers.

“Dammit.” Ally turned to me. “All the other airplanes are gone from the lake. Why is it always feast or famine? What are we going to do?”

“Do you have a truck?” I asked Anya.

“It’s parked fifteen miles away by the gravel road,” she said. “In summer I get to it on my ATV. In winter, I go by snow machine.”

Some days, Alaska was one humongous, cumbersome chore.

I opened the door and, jar in hand, clambered out of the Cessna. “Come on, people.” I started up the hill. “Which will be faster, the ATV or the snow machine?”

“It’ll have to be the ATV.” Anya led us to the shed. “The snow machine is out of gas and the snow is not very deep. One problem.” Anya threw open the door of the shed, to show a small single-rider Kawasaki. “We might be able to fit two of us on there, but not three.”

The world conspired against me.

“You go with Anya,” I said to Ally.

Ally shook her head, whipping her ponytail in the air. “I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”

“She needs to travel to Anchorage in order to testify,” I said. “If you don’t leave right now, the weather will turn bad and we’ll all be stuck here. You need to go with Anya on the ATV, get her truck, and drive to your family’s hangar, wherever that is. Once there, you’ll get another plane or a helicopter to take you to Anchorage. It’s the only way Anya will make it on time.”

“But I don’t want to leave you behind,” Ally said. “Besides, Seth won’t like it. He’ll kill me.”

“Then let’s make sure he’s free to kill you, and me, if he wishes.” I herded her to the ATV. “If Anya gets to the hearing, he’s sure to go free.”

“You go,” Ally said. “I’ll stay.”

“You’re the Erickson,” I said. “They’ll give you an airplane, not me or Anya. And who’s going to pilot that plane if no pilots are about?”

Ally let out a disgusted groan.

“She’s right.” Anya straddled the ATV, dug the key out of her designer bag, and turned the machine on. “If we leave now, we’ve got a chance. Come on, Ally. Get on.”

“Dammit.” Ally hesitated. “You need to stay put, Summer. Don’t go anywhere. Okay?”

“Where the heck am I going to go?” Not to the outhouse, that was for sure. I planned to run to the cabin, pee in a bucket, and stay inside for good. No bears for me. Or moose. No, thank you.

“Don’t move from this location.” Ally put on her knit hat. “If it starts snowing, make a fire. Can you make a fire?”

I’d never tried. “Sure, yes, get going.”

“Don’t burn down my house.” Anya waggled a gloved finger in the air. “And don’t make a mess either.”

“Will do.”

“I’ll come get you as soon as I can,” Ally said, stuffing her hands in her gloves. “If the weather gets really bad, it may be a day or two.”

“There’s food in the pantry,” Anya said, “and pickled fish in the cellar.”

Great. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Here.” Anya pulled something from her purse and offered it to me.

“A handgun?” I’d never held a gun before and I didn’t think it was a good idea to start today. As clumsy as I was, the chances of me shooting my nose off were way too high. How come everyone in Alaska carried guns everywhere?

“Do you even know how to shoot?” Ally said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I won’t need it.”

“All you have to do is take off the safety, like this.” Anya demonstrated. “Cock the weapon, point and shoot. Got it?”

“Got it.” I tucked the thing in my jacket pocket. “Please, just...go!”

Anya revved the engine. Ally squeezed in behind Anya. I handed her the jar of pickled fish.

“Don’t drop it,” I said.

“I won’t.” She flashed me a crooked smile and waved. “Be back in a cinch.”

Anya pushed the throttle and off they went, bouncing over the rough terrain. As soon as I lost sight of them, I made for the cabin and closed the door behind me. I also barred it for good measure. There were no door chains on Anya’s house. I’d never dealt with door bars before. I tied them down with some nylon ropes I found under the sink, then crossed my fingers hoping that if I fell asleep, I’d be a klutz at unraveling them in my sleep.

I hung my jacket on the rack and picked up a book from Anya’s shelf,
Athabaskan Tales from Alaska
. I said a little prayer that the weather would hold off, that Anya and Ally would make it on time, and that Seth would be all right. Then I settled on the couch for the wait, however long it was going to be.

Chapter Thirteen

I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up on the couch to the sound of the wind rattling the shutters. The weak, whitish light announced that it was late afternoon and the snow had begun falling. In contrast, a dark figure leaned over me. A quiet click echoed in the cabin and the cold barrel of a gun pressed against my forehead. The blood chilled in my veins.

“Who are you?” My voice sounded calm and collected, even though I was anything but. “What do you want?”

“Get up,” the man said.

I got up from the couch slowly. My senses kicked in. Was this man a burglar, looking for money, food or gear? Was he a rapist or psychopath?

I forced myself to function. “Why are you here?”

“Be quiet,” he said. “Just do what I say. Are you armed?”

I leveled a defiant gaze at him. “Why would I tell you if I were?”

“Don’t play games with me.” He tapped his gun’s muzzle against my belly. “Spread ’em.”

I inched my feet aside and raised my arms. He patted me down, running his hands up my legs and squeezing my breasts with unnecessary harshness.

“Nice.” He leered. “Too bad I can’t use you, but this one’s strictly about the job.”

The job?

The picture of my punctured brake lines walloped my mind. I’d never given much credit to Seth’s concerns about an assassination attempt, mostly because I could think of no possible reason why someone would want to kill me. Until now. I forced myself to pay attention.

The man facing me was average in every way, early fifties, fit, brown eyes, clean-shaven, hawkish nose, and a neutral accent. He wore a beanie, a black jacket, and dark snow pants, similar to the attire of the thug from the grainy clip that Seth had showed me. The shiver that prickled my spine resonated in my body like a fire alarm. My gut turned to ice.

“Who put you up to this?” I said.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” He sneered. “Get your coat.”

“My coat?” I glanced out the window. “Are you crazy? It’s snowing.”

“Shut up and do what I say.”

“But—”

He barked. “Just do it!”

His breath gusted over my face. I imagined a rotten caribou carcass stunk less. I gulped, but I had trouble swallowing. I moved slowly toward the coat stand, keeping my eyes on him. I made a slow show of putting on my coat.

“How did you know where to find me?” I said. “Did you follow me here?”

“I watch the news,” he said. “Following you was the easy part.”

So he’d known about Seth’s troubles. Seth had been right. I’d been safe and out of reach while at his house. But with Seth out of the way and me out and about, I’d become easy prey. The thug had followed me to Star Lake, perhaps in one of the airplanes we saw on the lake. I decided to take a chance.

“Look, if somebody is paying you to do this, I can do better.”

“Doubt it,” he said. “You’ve got next to nothing to your name. I did my homework.”

The tone. The look. The research. This man was indeed a professional.

Had he disabled Ally’s Cessna in order to force our party to split up and strand me in this isolated place? Of course. He’d tampered with my rental car. It made perfect sense that he’d messed with the plane as well. Not only was he a hired killer, he was a competent hired killer, who did his research and planned carefully. And he’d been paid to kill me. Why?

I had no clue, but one thing was for sure: from where I stood, things weren’t looking good.

I bolted down the hallway, fumbling with my front pocket. I pulled on the zipper, but it jammed. The damn thing wouldn’t budge. The man caught up with me and slammed me against the wall. The pictures of Anya’s seven sons fell and the frames shattered on the floor.

“Don’t.” He held me against the wall. “I don’t want any unnecessary bruising.”

“For me or for you?” I slammed my knee between his legs.

The man crumpled on the ground. I ran, but I had to slow down to untie the rope on the door bar.
Hurry!
I glanced behind me. He came after me, face set with fury, eyes watering with fresh pain. I undid the last knot, hurled the two-by-four at him and sprinted out of the cabin, running into the beginnings of a blizzard, still fumbling with my jacket’s stubborn zipper.

He tackled me. I fought back, but he was too strong. With a punch to the midriff, he knocked the breath out of me. Hard to fight back without air in the lungs. I squirmed on the deck like a fish out of the water.

“Be still.” He held me down while he tied my hands behind my back with the zip ties he pulled out of his pocket. “You were supposed to be a soft target.”

He didn’t know me if he thought I’d be a soft target. I might’ve told him that if I could, but it was hard to speak when you couldn’t breathe.

He grabbed me by the collar and dragged me down the path toward the lake. By then, the sun had set and fast-moving clouds obscured the light of a shy moon. The chilling air didn’t make it any easier to inhale. The wind hauled a mournful warning to my ears.

I wrestled with the ties around my hands, trying to make some sense out of his actions. If he was going to kill me anyway, why take the trouble of putting on my coat and dragging me out of the house? Why didn’t he just shoot me instead?

He didn’t want my death to look like a murder. That’s why he didn’t want any bruising. It also explained why he hadn’t raped, strangled, or shot me in the cabin. Whoever had paid him to kill me wanted my death to look like an accident.

One moment I was onshore, the next moment I landed face-first in the lake. The sting of the icy water startled whatever little breath I had left in me. The water was so cold that it hurt. I kicked. I struggled. I tried to wiggle my hands out of the cuffs. I resisted with all I had.

But the man held me down in the water. Star Lake flowed into my nose and mouth and, like a cascade, poured down my throat. Bright lights exploded before my eyes. My senses started to ebb. My body began to lose strength. My mind went into a dreamlike state.

I was drowning. Like my mother. She’d drowned too. She’d walked into the ocean in her sleep and sunk to the bottom. A liquid version of her face materialized before me as the water gushed down my gullet, weighed down my stomach and clogged my lungs.

“Fight, Summer!” she said. “Fight! Don’t let it happen again. Not again!”

Not again?

An image formed in my mind, the details of a little girl’s purple-walled bedroom—my bedroom at my family’s Fountain Way apartment. I realized I was seeing the room through my little girl’s eyes. A whiff of fresh paint tickled my nostrils as I got up from the bed. We had moved in just days earlier. The sounds of an argument came from the living room.

I peeked out from behind the door and saw my mother, standing against the far wall, facing a man who had his back to me. A third voice came from somewhere to my right, a deep voice whose owner I couldn’t see from where I stood.

“You had to do it,” the man said. “You had to poke your damn nose in other people’s business and push the envelope. You leave me no choice.”

“Wait!” My mother’s lips made a sound I couldn’t hear. “Please, don’t do this.”

“Too late,” the man said. “Finish this.”

The click of a door closing announced that the first person had left. My mother’s attention focused on the other man in the room.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “Please. I won’t say anything, I promise!”

“It’s as good as done,” the man replied. “Shame I’ll be vacating my nice digs by the end of the night.”

My heart faltered as my mother’s assailant stalked my mother across the living room. It was him! The same man who was drowning me now, younger back then, but easily recognizable.

“Summer!” My mother’s eyes widened with terror when she spotted me behind the door. “Get back to your room. Lock the door!”

“A locked door won’t stop me.” The man blocked the way between me and my mother. “The girl’s seen me. She’s got to go too.”

“No, please,” my mother begged. “She sleepwalks, just like I do. She won’t remember a thing in the morning.”

“Is that so?” The man’s dark eyes gleamed with a new idea. “In that case, I’ll let her live. But you’ve got to come with me. No fuss. No crying or screaming. If you come with me right now, I’ll spare the whelp.”

“How do I know you won’t come back here and hurt my daughter?” my mother said.

The man showed her the key in his hands then pitched it out the balcony, sixteen stories down. “The little sleepwalker doesn’t need to die today.”

“Go back to your bed, sweetie,” my mother said on a sob. “Go on. Mommy loves you.”

My feet obeyed my mother’s voice, but I could feel her fear seeping into my soul. She must have known she was going to die that night.

“I didn’t want to leave you,” my mother’s voice whispered in my mind. “I wasn’t chasing a dream that day. Somebody was chasing me.”

“Who?” I mumbled underwater. “Who?”

And I knew. Whoever wanted me to die had built my death to mimic my mother’s.
Another sleepwalking disaster
, I could almost hear the coroner’s verdict. Another careless parasomniac who ventured too far. A dream chaser who chased her life away.

But mine was not an accidental drowning. It was murder. As my mother’s face flickered in and out of focus, I realized what she was trying to tell me. Had she been murdered too?

“Wake up, Summer!” My mother’s voice startled me. “Don’t let him win. Fight him!”

The vision dissolved in my mind. I was back, struggling under the water and much closer to drowning. I ran out of oxygen. My body went into a state of biological desperation. I heard my mom’s quiet good-byes smothered beneath the sea as surely as I heard my muffled shrieks echoing in the lake’s dark waters. I was the last thought in her mind before she died.

I forced myself into alertness. My stomach hurt, loaded with too much water. My lungs weighted me down. I was no match for the thug holding me underwater. My mind sputtered a number of options, but only one seemed to make sense.

I stopped fighting. I gave in to both my attacker’s brute force and the water. I looked up and, under a fleeting ray of moonlight, watched the last string of bubbles deserting my body. It seemed like forever. Eventually, the pressure on my back eased. The zip ties were suddenly gone from my wrists. I floated listlessly in the water as my assailant cast me off into the lake.

I dug into my jacket and ripped off the zipper. I thrust my hand in the pocket. Anya’s quick lesson replayed in my head.
Click
. I turned in the water, dug my heels in the mud, cocked the gun, pointed and shot.

The shot blasted my ears and jerked my arm. I wheezed, a terrible aspiration of air that collided with the water ruling my lungs. The man staggered in knee-high water and turned, face frozen in surprise. I shot again. His arms flailed in the air. He fell in the water, dragged himself to shore and crept out of the lake. I shot until I couldn’t see him anymore and no more bullets came out of the gun. Then I dragged myself out of the lake.

I knew I had to run. I just couldn’t. I was shaking too hard. He could return any minute, but I just lay on the shore, retching torrents of foul-tasting water. The gun was stuck in my grip. Shivers rattled my body. The cold burned, inside and out.

I had to get indoors. Back to the cabin. Build a fire. But it seemed so far away. I couldn’t move. The snow fell all around me. The cold iced my bones and froze my muscles. All I could do was close my eyes and shiver some more.

A grunt shocked me out of senselessness. A hot, slimy slap warmed the side of my face. A dank stench startled me. I opened my eyes. Liquid brown eyes stared at me.

“Get up.” The huge bear spoke with my mother’s voice. “You’re going to die, unless you get up.”

I was hallucinating. I had to be. The old bear would surely maul me if he found me. The creature’s lips never moved and yet the sound echoing in my head came from it. Oh, yeah, and my mother was gone and dead. Drowned. Murdered? Absurd. This bear-mother combination was hilarious. A hysterical giggle bubbled in the back of my throat. My frozen mind was a hoot.

“Summer Silva,” the bear said in my mother’s sternest tone. “Move. Crawl if you have to. They will not succeed.”

They?

“You will not die tonight,” my mother said. “Follow me.”

The bear’s paws rustled softly on the new snow. It took a few steps, then sat on its hind legs at the trailhead as if it was a big, ratty dog, waiting for me.

“Coward,” the bear said, this time in my father’s voice. “I didn’t defy a dictator, cling to a raft for three days in the Florida Straits and fight off sharks for you to die in Alaska.”

“Daddy?”

“All those years without a life,” he said. “And now that you have a shot at one, you’re giving up?”

What did he mean?

“You’re wasting time,” my father said. “You’re squandering opportunity. You’re wasting the one good thing you’ve found in Alaska.”

“My life was fine before I came here,” I mumbled through numb lips.

“But was it really?” my father said. “Every night you set up the door chain, locked in your fears and locked out your future. Is that the life you want?”

No, but I hadn’t been able to trust anyone...until Seth.

“Get up,” the bear said in my mother’s voice. “Survival is the best revenge. Claim your life. You like him. You crave him. You love him.”

How could I love someone who I had just met?

“Because you trust him,” my mother said. “Him, you can trust.”

Could I?

I’d stayed in his house. I’d slept in his bed, next to him, all these nights. I trusted him already and he, he’d proven my trust right.

“He’ll be sad,” my mother said. “He’ll burn inside all over again.”

I didn’t want that for Seth. No more suffering for him.

I tried to get up, but my legs refused to move. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Try,” my mother said.

“I can’t!”

“Can I eat your liver then?” the bear said in a low rumbling voice. “I really like liver. I ate a human not long ago. The meat was bland but the liver was yummy. Should I start now?”