Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (14 page)

An hour into the climb, Call stopped and turned to look back at her. “Seen enough?”

“I-I was hoping we could go on a little farther.” It was obvious he wanted to go home, but something was nagging her, teasing the back of her mind, a feathery impression just out of reach.

Call turned and simply started walking again, making the hike look easy. So far, it hadn’t been bad. With the exception of a steep climb over a couple of bluffs, much of the trail was flat. The tough spots lay ahead.

They kept on moving, passing a Japanese tourist with a digital camera around his neck. He chattered something in Japanese that she couldn’t understand and gave them a friendly smile, which Charity returned. Call merely nodded. At a place called Finnigan’s Point, he stopped again.

“We’ve been hiking for nearly two hours. We aren’t equipped to spend the night, Charity, and like I said, even if we were, we’d need a permit.”

Charity could read his impatience in the set of his jaw, but her mind was somewhere else, someplace farther away. He said something more, but his voice sounded distant, like a bee buzzing next to her ear. Instead, her mind was focused on the images that had started crowding into her head.

“What is it?” Call asked, his words finally reaching her. “Your face is pale. Are you sick?”

She looked up at him and realized her heart was pounding. “I remember this place. I can see it in my mind—the view out over the valley … the glacier on the mountain behind us. I can’t believe it, but I do.”

“That isn’t surprising. You said yourself you’ve read everything you could find on the Gold Rush.”

“Yes, but this is different. I remember the trail up ahead, how steep and rocky it is.” She frowned, trying hard to recall. “It’s not exactly the same, though. In my mind it’s all covered with snow.”

Call’s gaze followed hers up the trail. “You’ve seen photos like that. You saw one last night behind the bar in the Miner’s Saloon.”

Charity bit her lip. “I know I did, but this isn’t the same. It sounds crazy, but I remember something that happened here. Something bad, I think. Someone was hurt or … or maybe they died. It’s there in my mind. I can almost remember but not quite. It’s like a name on the tip of my tongue.”

She turned toward the path climbing upward. “It wasn’t here, though. It was farther along the trail, up toward the summit.”

He saw that she was frowning, reached out and squeezed her hand. “Listen to me. You’re remembering something you read. There’s no way it could be more than that. It’s no secret that people died on the Chilkoot Trail, a lot more than one. But you can’t be remembering something that happened before you were born.”

She sighed as the vague memory faded. She wished she could call it back, see it clearly in her mind, but even the wispy threads no longer remained.

“You’re right. I must have read it.” But she didn’t believe she had and she could see by his frown that Call knew she wasn’t convinced.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s time we started down. We’ve still got a long flight home once we get back to Skagway.”

Falling in behind him, she let him set the pace for the hike back down the mountain to the trailhead. All the way there she thought about the memory that had almost popped into her head, a feeling of icy cold and a shadowy sensation of grief.

As far back as she could recall, she’d been fascinated with tales of the North. It was a place that seemed familiar though it was thousands of miles away. Coming here felt … right somehow. As if she were connected in some way. There was something there in her mind, she was sure of it, lurking in the shadows, just beneath the surface.

Whatever it is, it’s the reason I came here, the reason I had to come.
If only she could find out what it was.

They reached the trailhead and made their way back to the car. She had just settled into the passenger seat when the cell phone in her purse set up a muffled ringing. Charity turned and grabbed her bag off the backseat where she had left it and fished out her phone, praying it wasn’t Jeremy Hauser calling again.

“Hi, Charity, it’s Toby,” said the voice on the end of the line and she worked to hide her relief. When she glanced at Call she saw that he was frowning and wondered if he was thinking of Jeremy, too.

“Hi, Toby,” she said and saw a faint relaxation in Call’s features.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Toby said. “I tried reaching Call but half the time he leaves his phone in the plane or doesn’t turn it on. I found your number in his office. Is he there?”

“He’s right here, Toby.” She handed over the phone and Call pressed it against his ear. With the car still sitting in the parking lot, Call spoke to Toby, nodding once or twice at whatever the younger man said.

“Phone Wilcox back,” Call instructed. “Tell him I’ll be in touch as soon as we get home. And relax. One thing I’ve learned—in business, there’s always some kind of emergency. It’s rarely catastrophic.” He ended the conversation, reached down and cranked the key in the ignition.

“Problems?” she asked as the engine sparked, then started to purr.

“Bruce Wilcox phoned, my VP at Datatron. I guess the Feds showed up at his house this morning.”

Charity arched a brow. “Sounds serious.”

“Apparently the two new whiz kids I hired as programmers pierced the firewall on a couple of big companies. I’ll have to deal with it, but whether it happens today or tomorrow won’t make any difference.”

She watched him casually wheel the car up onto the road. “I take it that isn’t what you would have done in the past.”

Call’s gaze met hers. “No, it wasn’t what I would have done in the past.”

The little DeHavilland Beaver lifted out of the bay that afternoon. It was a different journey home from the one that had brought them to Skagway.

All morning, Call had been edgy and tense.
It’s Datatron,
she told herself, but had trouble making herself believe it. Whatever it was, he sat in the cockpit, stiff and reserved, his jaw hard, the muscles in his shoulders rigid. Or maybe he was thinking of the conversation they’d had on the trail. After all, she was more than half convinced she had remembered something that happened a century ago.

Sitting next to him as the plane buzzed through the mountains over rugged White Pass Trail, she studied his profile, the way his mouth looked harder than it had on their journey southward.

In silence, he guided the aircraft through the craggy, forbidding peaks between Southern Alaska and the Yukon. Beneath them, the White Pass and Yukon Railway wound through the narrow gorge that led to the goldfields, a refurbished, narrow-gauge railroad built originally in 1899. The train, which ended the struggle up the grueling Chilkoot Trail, chugged today over hundred-foot trestles and looked frightening even from the air.

Thoughts of the Chilkoot sent a rush of adrenalin through her. Could it really have been a memory? She certainly felt as if it had been.

She cast a glance at Call and his brilliant blue eyes collided with hers, watchful and a little wary.

“You don’t really believe you remembered something from a hundred years ago.”

Embarrassment washed through her, making her cheeks go pink. Part of her wanted to say no, that couldn’t possibly have happened. She wanted to erase the cool, disbelieving look on his face. But lying just wasn’t in her nature.

“I don’t know. It felt like a memory, something I’d experienced a long time ago. There was snow all around—an avalanche, maybe—and I felt this terrible crushing sort of sadness, as if something really bad had happened.”

He eyed her skeptically. “What else?”

“What else? Are you kidding? It was just a flash. I can’t believe I remembered anything at all.”

“Even if there was some kind of accident or something, it couldn’t be a memory. It happened before you were born.”

He was right, of course. But if she closed her eyes she could still see the endless white of mountains covered in snow, feel the overwhelming sense of grief. There had to be some explanation.

They flew along in silence for a while. She had brought a novel along, but the views were different heading north and she didn’t want to miss anything.

Instead, she allowed her eyes to feast on the harshly magnificent, unforgiving terrain that spread out for miles around them. Call pointed to a ridge off to the east, swooped down in that direction, and she spotted a herd of caribou migrating single file up a narrow trail along the side of a hill.

“They’re beautiful,” she said over the noise in the cockpit. “I’ve never seen a caribou before.”

She smiled at him; then a series of popping, sputtering sounds distracted her and she noticed Call was no longer looking at the animals. Instead, he was frowning, staring at the dials in front of the controls, and the engine wasn’t humming along smoothly as it had been. The roar of the motor was breaking up, interspersed with moments of silence, kind of a sick, sporadic coughing.

Her pulse took a violent leap and her heart started thrumming. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“Looks like there’s a problem with the fuel intake.”

An instant later, the engine fell utterly silent and her heart sank like a stone. “Oh, God.”

“The fuel gauge shows full but the engine’s not getting any gas.” He looked over, must have noticed the chalky color of her face.

“We’re going to be all right,” he said firmly, trying to restart the engine, switching fuel tanks and trying again. “This thing lands on water, remember? There are lots of lakes up here. We just have to find one.”

She gave him a shaky nod, turned to look out the window, began a frantic search of the ground below. Ground that was getting closer every second.

It was quiet in the cockpit. Too quiet. Nothing but the whistle of wind over the wings and the rustle of paper as Call spread open the map he yanked from between the seats.

“H-how much time do we have?”

Call continued scanning the map, searching for a lake in the surrounding area. “We’re losing altitude at about four hundred feet a minute. We were flying roughly five thousand feet above the ground when the engine shut down.”

“Okay … so that would mean …?”

“That means we’ve got about ten minutes before we’re down.”

Ten minutes. Oh, God.
When you were about to crash to your death, ten minutes seemed less than a heartbeat. As she searched the forest below, praying for an opening that exposed a river or lake big enough to land in, they were the longest minutes of her life.

Call tossed the map aside and altered their course, aiming the plane a little to the east. “There’s a small lake at the edge of the foothills west of Yukon Crossing. We’ll set her down there.”

Charity continued to study the ground, her nails biting into her palms.

“Sonofabitch.”

Charity’s head snapped up. A puff of smoke curled out of the engine and flames erupted in its wake, licking up from the area around the propeller, blowing backward, over the nose toward the windshield.

“The engine’s on fire,” she said dumbly, as if he couldn’t see that for himself. An instant later, thick black smoke began to roll up from under the instrument panel. “What … what do we do?”

“There’s a fire extinguisher behind my seat. Can you reach it?”

She grabbed it with shaking hands, hauled it into her lap. “What now?”

“Nothing yet. Just put it down by your feet.”

He sounded calm and that helped control the panic crawling through her. She could hear him on the radio, sending out a Mayday and relaying their current position. When a voice crackled to life on the other end of the line, she tossed a look toward heaven and said a silent thank-you that at least someone had heard them.

“Roger that, N94DB. We’re tracking you, Hawkins.”

“We’re going to set down about twenty miles west of Yukon Crossing.” He gave the coordinates of the lake.

“Roger that. We’ll get there as quickly as we can.”

The smoke in the cockpit grew more and more dense and Charity started coughing. She opened the window as Call had done and gulped in a breath of clean air.

“Just hang on a little while longer,” he said. “We aren’t that far from the lake. I need you to help me spot it.”

He was turning the plane again, dropping down a little faster, worried the fire was going to get worse. Miles of forest rushed past, tall pine trees so close together a man could barely walk between them.

“See anything?”

Her heart was racing. They were going to go into the trees and if they did—
don’t even think it.
“Not yet.”

“Keep looking.”

She strained to see through the black haze pouring up from beneath the dash, making her eyes tear up and her nose run. A dozen thoughts crowded her head. She wished she’d had time to tell her family how much she loved them. She wished she could see them one more time.

“Anything yet?”

They were only a couple of hundred feet off the ground. “No. Nothing. Yes! There it is! I can see it in that clearing, just a little bit to the east.”

“Damn, it’s more like a duck pond than a lake. This is going to be close.”

She looked over at him, saw the tension, the concentration in his features. “Is there anything I can do?”

He must have heard the quiver in her voice because his own voice softened. “You’re doing great, honey. Just hang on tight and be ready to get out as fast as you can once we stop moving.”

She nodded, though she knew he couldn’t see her through the black haze in the cabin. The lake rushed toward them. The bad news was she could already see the other end and they weren’t even on the water. The tops of the trees slapped against the fuselage just before they shot out over the tiny lake.

“Brace yourself.”

She did the best she could, closed her eyes and offered a little prayer. The plane slowed, seemed to hover for an instant, then started skimming across the surface of the water. Even at the reduced speed, she could see there wasn’t going to be enough room for them to make it.

“Put your head down!”

She ducked as the big pontoons shot up onto the bank at the far side of the lake. The wings caught between two trees and ripped away with a metallic shriek. The body of the plane slid through the narrow opening, then the nose crashed into a granite boulder and Charity slammed forward in her seat. Fire shot up from the engine. The world seemed to blur and something hard banged into the side of her head. Then everything went black.

Charity’s head was pounding. She must have been out for at least a couple of minutes. When her eyes cracked open, she was in Call’s arms and he was running, carrying her away from the plane. A little way into the forest, he ducked behind a pine tree and carefully lowered her to the damp, black earth.

“Are you all right?” he asked and she could hear the worry in his voice.

“I’m … I’m okay.” He swallowed, touched her cheek, then turned and started running back toward the plane.

Her stomach knotted. Using the tree for support, she levered herself to her feet, terrified the plane would explode and after surviving the crash, Call would still be killed. She watched him reach into the cockpit, pull out the fire extinguisher, then start shooting it into the flames licking out of the engine.

His shirt was torn, his face streaked with soot, but he seemed to be making progress. Reaching back into the plane, he pulled out a second extinguisher, shot some of the white foam under the dash, then returned to work on the engine.

As he set the empty canister aside, grabbed the canvas bag that held his emergency gear, and started walking toward her, Charity’s knees went weak and she sagged against the trunk of the tree.

Call dropped the bag at her feet. When he saw the bloodless color of her face and noticed how hard she was shaking, he reached out for her, drew her gently into his arms.

“It’s all right, baby, it’s over. You’re safe now. Everything’s going to be fine.” She could feel his heartbeat, his pulse racing nearly as fast as her own.

She swallowed, fought back tears of relief. “Will they … will they be able to find us?”

“They know where we are. They’ll send a search plane or a chopper. I’ve got flares in my emergency gear.”

She nodded, pressed herself tighter against him, felt his arms tighten in return. “Call?”

He eased back a little, cradled her cheek in one of his big, tanned hands. “What is it, baby?”

“I think I’m going to cry but I don’t want you to think I’m a sissy.”

He smoothed back her hair, looped it over her ear. “I won’t think you’re a sissy. You were great up there. Terrific. I wouldn’t want to crash my plane with anyone else.”

She did start crying then and Call just held her, letting her cry against his shoulder. His wool shirt felt rough and warm beneath her cheek and the smell of smoke seeped up from the fabric. It felt good just to be standing there in the circle of his arms.

She cried herself out in a couple of minutes, sniffed a little, and wiped her eyes on the tail of his shirt. “Thanks for the shoulder.”

“Considering I’m the guy who got you here, it’s the least I could do.”

She managed a wobbly smile. “You were great, Call. I think you saved our lives.”

He shrugged, looked a little embarrassed. “I just did what I’ve been taught to do.”

She didn’t argue, but she thought that under the same circumstances someone else might not have done half so good a job.

And less than half wouldn’t have been nearly enough.