Down River (25 page)

“Ellie!” she shouted and shook her shoulder feebly with one icy hand.

Ellie opened her eyes and groaned.

“Ellie, it’s Lisa. Tell me why you tried to kill me. Tell me, and I’ll pull you out of here.”

“Too late. Can’t tell. Don’t tell Claire.”

“I’m going to leave you here so I can tell everyone the truth. Claire is going to know how Graham managed the casino case scam to avoid being caught. She
will be haunted by the scandal, the stigma, and by your murder of an innocent person and your own suicide. Believe me, I know.”

“Too bad about Ginger, but—blackmailing me. For more money, because of what she saw.”

“She saw you push me in the river?”

She barely nodded. “Graham had nothing to do with it.”

“You mean
you
were behind the money laundering, then got caught or blackmailed by the bad boys who run such things?”

Lisa’s teeth were chattering. She had to really struggle to enunciate. They were both shaking, and Ellie was turning blue and was bleeding from her chest and mouth, maybe from where she’d slammed into the steering wheel. But Lisa had to know. If Graham was not the spider, was Ellie? She decided to try something else. She was pretty sure she couldn’t free Ellie’s trapped leg and that this plane was going to be ripped away and thrust over the falls. Soon.

“Ellie, do you want to die?”

“Have to. It went wrong. Just a push—sorry. I had a headache. Graham dropped me off. I changed your note, went after you. Wanted you to think it was Spike, drown you.”

“And drown Christine?”

“She—in the way. Like Ginger.”

“When you took off, did you think I had drowned?”

Again, she barely nodded. “But when I flew over
the lodge roof—saw your shadow under plane. And everyone saw you—the sheriff there, so I had to die.”

She wanted to slam the woman against the trembling wall, but she played her last card. “Ellie, we’re both going to die, be swept over the falls. Who was behind the casino case money scheme?”

Ellie coughed up blood. “Merritt.”

Merit what? Lisa thought, then realized what she must have said.

“Merritt?” Lisa demanded. “Your brother, Senator Carlise, was behind all that?”

“So proud of him, going far. Needed money, pay to play…Graham didn’t know. You and Mitch last year—I had you bugged, followed. For Merritt, proud of him, going far, my own blood, going far…”

Ellie shuddered; Lisa, too. No, the entire plane was shifting. Lisa tried once more to free Ellie, but she’d gone limp. Going far, she’d said. Going far…

Lisa exploded out of the cockpit with sudden energy she didn’t know she had. As on the day Ginger died, she clung to the top of the plane, just above the water, lifted herself up toward the roof to reach for a rocky ledge where the fuselage was wedged.

She held to the solid strength of the rock, of her memories of Mitch as the plane seemed to lunge downriver with a crunching roar.

E
ven after Spike’s plane took off, Christine stood on the shore, horrified at what she’d seen. At first she’d been thrilled to see Lisa had not drowned, that she was hanging on to one of the pontoons of the plane. But when she’d seen her friend dangling with her legs thrashing, she screamed so loudly that she’d drowned out the snarl of the plane’s engine.

She fell to her knees at the edge of the lake, sobbing. She hadn’t cried when she’d shot Clay or when she’d been arrested, not even when his family and her people had turned their backs on her. She’d been devastated to think that Spike was trying to harm them with his plane.

But now she knew better. The man she’d come to love after she had sworn never to trust another man, after being helped by Mitch, would not have done that, no matter how distraught he’d been over Ginger’s death. No, that had been Mrs. Bonner flying that plane, because she hated Lisa for taking Mitch from her own daughter. That must be it. The raven
who was very clever but very crooked in this story was a woman who had seemed the best of generosity and graciousness.

Christine’s tears mingled with the water of the lake where she knelt with her face in her hands. But she lifted her head as she heard the sound of the plane again. Could it be coming back? Had Mrs. Bonner not known Lisa was beneath it at first and was now going to put her gently down?

Christine wiped her weak-woman tears away and waded out into the water, looking up. No plane where she prayed it would be. No, it was a boat flying over the lake and a man with flame-red hair was in it.

Spike! Spike, searching for her. She screamed and waved, waded back to shore and ran along the bank in his direction, scattering a group of ptarmigan with their strange cries, but her shouting Spike’s name drowned them out.

He headed straight for her. How could she ever have thought it was Spike in the plane?

The prow of the boat crunched into the shore. He was one big stride out of the boat when she threw herself into his arms and held tight.

“Lisa,” she choked out. “Did you see her—flying?”

“It can’t end well,” he said, his voice breaking, too, as he picked her up, dripping wet, and carried her to the boat. He sat down on the front seat with her in his arms across his lap and held her so tight she almost couldn’t breathe.

“It has to—all that they’ve been through,” she said, her lips moving against the warm flesh of his neck.

“Us, too. I’m sorry I was so mad at her.”

“Was it Mrs. Bonner who took your plane?”

“Yes. She must have killed Ginger. But no one’s going to take you away from me.”

“We have to go help Mitch,” she said, lifting her head from his solid shoulder. “He’s helped both of us—and if she’s gone…”

“I know. Let’s go.”

He kissed her hard and set her down, then scrambled out to shove them off the shore.

It seemed an eternity as Lisa clung to a narrow ledge just above the reach of the river. She knew now who had tried to kill her and why. She was the expendable one of the two of them who had worked on the casino case, before Ellie and her contacts—maybe not Graham—had sabotaged it. Mitch was off in Alaska, but when Graham told her that Lisa might rise to become the next senior partner and they were going to the lodge, Ellie must have panicked. She’d laid plans to take advantage of any chance to make Lisa’s death look like an accident. Lisa recalled that she had even known that police were scarce in this area. And Ellie knew all about Lisa’s traumatic past, which she had played on.

Ellie must have feared that, after Lisa spent time reminiscing with Mitch, they might discover and blow the whistle on Ellie’s beloved brother’s scheme.
Ellie still might have wanted Mitch for her daughter and heir, so she asked Graham to try to get him back to Florida, even part-time, to set up that. After two tragedies—Lisa’s and Ginger’s deaths—Ellie may have figured Mitch would want to get away from the lodge. Graham’s part in all this, Lisa wasn’t sure, but he must have repeatedly asked them about the casino case because Ellie had urged him to be sure there were no bad feelings from Mitch and Lisa.

No bad feelings! Kind, refined Ellie was a murderer, clever but crooked!

Even as time passed, Lisa did not doubt Mitch would come for her on the river again. She took to turning her head upstream, looking for a kayak, though how he’d put in to help her here she did not know. Though she was trembling from the trauma and the cold, she held on, feeling strangely safer and much more at peace than she could ever remember.

This time, the rushing water had somehow washed away her guilt and pain over the loss of her mother and sister, a baptism, a blessing. But poor Claire Bonner. Poor Graham when all this broke, however much he knew of Ellie’s desperate plotting.

But Lisa had survived, and was determined to yet. Another thing that kept her going was the desire to expose Merritt Carlisle, the real spider in the casino case. It would hardly be news that another person in power, a politician, had lied and “payed to play,” as Ellie had put it. He’d needed a lot of money for that, laundered money.

And Lisa held on tight because, when all this was over, she was going to finally have time to settle things with the man she had never stopped loving and still wanted very much.

At last, when the sun slanted into the gorge almost enough to reach her and when the muscles of her legs began to cramp so that she could hardly stand and thought she might have to ride the river again, she heard a welcome sound, one that challenged the crashing rapids: the
whap, whap, whap
of a helicopter. But she couldn’t see it, couldn’t lean back or look up or move from her frozen position to lift her arms in the
V
that meant “Pick me up! Help me!”

The chopper hovered and soon a wire basket bumped its way down the rugged rock face near her. Carefully, she turned her head. Mitch! Mitch’s face lit up through his tears, Mitch’s arms outstretched, coming closer, grabbing her and hauling her in. Now she could cling to him, her own rock through everything.

“We saw the plane at the bottom of the falls!” he told her, shouting over the mingled sounds of river and the rotors. “But I told them, come back upriver! You didn’t live through all that to be lost this time, not now that we’ve found each other again!”

She could only nod as they were lifted skyward over the Wild River and the land she’d learned to love.

F
lashes popped in their faces as Mitch and Lisa left the Broward County courthouse in Fort Lauderdale. They had been through five days of grueling testimony against disgraced former senator Merritt Carlisle. The trial had also tarnished Graham Bonner, who had refused to let his daughter attend, so she wouldn’t have her new law career tainted by the scandal. Lisa had longed to write Claire Bonner a note, urging her not to let her mother’s desperate deeds and suicide ruin her life, but she knew it would not be accepted from the woman who had brought her family down.

Mitch pulled Lisa through the crowd of reporters into his lawyer’s car and told the hired driver, “Take us down to A1A by the beach and drop us off near Sunrise, will you?”

“You sure? It’s a raw, windy day, Mr. Braxton. It’ll be deserted.”

“Suits us. Besides,” he said with a grin at Lisa, “I need to toughen the lady up with weather like that—
myself, too, after how long this trial has taken. We’re heading home to Alaska soon.” He loosened his tie. He’d had to buy an expensive suit for this, since he’d given all his old ones away, but he’d used it for their wedding, too.

If he expected Lisa to protest that they were hardly dressed for the beach with a February cold front coming through, he was mistaken. She just grinned, took off both her black pumps and jammed them in her briefcase. “Hey,” she said with a little laugh, “to a Talkeetna mountain woman who swims Alaskan rivers for weekly exercise, a blustery day on a Florida beach will be a walk in the park.”

“Thank God this is all over,” Mitch told her as he gave his briefcase a quick kick. “I hate missing one long winter night of the aurora borealis.”

“I’m considering following in the tradition of some of our lodge’s Japanese guests who are hoping for a very fortunate child to be conceived under those lights,” Lisa said with a grin.

They had been married for three months, a fact that had been dredged out at the trial as if the two star witnesses against the venerable former state senator and his brace of expensive lawyers were in collusion to smear his name somehow. But the Carlisles, Merritt and Ellie, had managed to do that well enough themselves.

“I’ve had a fourth call to join another law firm here,” Mitch told her.

“That means I still have two more offers than you,”
she told him, with a quick poke in his ribs. “But I’m committed to a higher calling, namely, baking to help Christine with the food for our guests and taking over the ziplining in the spring. When I open up a law office in Talkeetna, it’ll have to be worked around those things, but family and friends come first.”

“Not to mention running the lodge, once Christine moves in with Spike.”

They shared another silent smile, as they had so many times these last seven months. No way, now that they were back together, would they allow testifying in the courtroom here or in Anchorage about Ginger’s death get them down. Christine had even found the strength to sit in that Alaska courtroom with Spike. They would be married this spring.

And Mitch’s brother had attended Mitch and Lisa’s wedding in Fort Lauderdale with his wife and kids and had promised to visit the lodge next summer, so there were miracles enough to go around.

The wind buffeted them as they got out of the hired car, waved it away and walked down the wide, deserted beach. Sand blew against their bare feet and Lisa tasted salt on her lips already from the frothing waves. But she felt so ecstatic she could have walked on the wild surf. Carrying their briefcases in their outer hands, they held hands and walked along the shore of the ocean an entire continent away from where they wanted to be.

“It took me a while to get something made,” he told her, releasing her hand and digging in his brief
case. “I wanted to give it to you here since this is about where I gave you the other one.”

“A wolfish look that day you first saw me playing volleyball here?” she teased. “Our first kiss?”

A cold wave washed in and swirled at their feet, but neither of them moved, despite the fact it soaked Mitch’s trousers and slopped up her legs to wet her skirt.

“No, it’s this, Mrs. Braxton,” he said as he produced a heavy gold bracelet. “Last time I gave you a bracelet before the ring, so this time we just reversed it.” He jammed his briefcase under one arm and moved to fasten the bracelet around her wrist.

At first she thought he had replicated the seagull bracelet she’d lost in the river the day the plane crashed, for she could see this had birds on it with outstretched wings. But she saw these were Alaska’s state bird, the ptarmigan, and with feathered feet.

She blinked back tears as he closed the clasp. Yes, now that all the pain was past, she could live a rich, full life with Mitch and a family of their own in their blessed, beautiful Alaska home.