Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (15 page)

Summer in California was usually warm, perfect golfing weather, even hot in some places. In San Francisco, heavy clouds hung over the city and a damp mist wrapped around the tall, glass-walled structure that was the Global Tower on Market Street.

Gordon Speers was used to the erratic San Francisco weather. He liked the misty air blowing in off the sea, liked the way the early morning sunlight crept through the valleys created by the mountainous streets. It was the only place in the world he would want to live.

“You’re sure no one saw him leaving the area?” Though it was Sunday afternoon, Gordon had come into his office to work for a couple of hours. And he had been looking forward to this particular call. Leaning back in the expensive Eames chair behind his desk, he pressed his leather-cased cell phone more firmly against his ear. “He had no trouble getting in?”

“Are you kidding?” said the voice on the other end of the line—his partner, Anthony King. “People don’t even lock their doors up there. Grossman walked out on the mooring dock wearing a pair of mechanic’s overalls, hooked the device into the fuel line, and walked back out. It actually worked better doing it in Skagway. Harder to make any sort of connection.”

They’d had a man in Dawson for over a week, getting the lay of the land, trying to figure out the best way to get the job done with as little notice as possible. The plane trip was a lucky break. A talkative mechanic, a friend of Hawkins’s in Dawson, knew where he was going and when he was scheduled to return. Tony’s man simply followed on a commercial flight, got the job done, and disappeared out of the area.

“Check your wristwatch,” King said. “By now, Call Hawkins is history.”

Gordon felt a mild sensation of relief. “Let me know when you get confirmation.” He hung up the phone, a private number few people had. His partner, Tony King, was one of them. Gordon was the brains of the company he had founded eighteen years ago, but he wouldn’t be where he was today without Tony.

It was King’s job to work behind the scenes, to use his powerful connections to get things done. And he was ruthless enough to make sure they did.

A week ago, they had made the decision to eliminate a problem that had recently arisen—or perhaps it might be better said, reared its ugly head again. Four years ago, McCall Hawkins had been a powerhouse in the computer industry, CEO of American Dynamics, not to mention his numerous other successful business interests. He was smart, fiercely competitive, and ferociously aggressive. He had power and position and one of his companies was about to stumble onto something that would ultimately destroy Gordon Speers and everything he had worked for.

Everything he expected to gain in the very near future.

Gordon had refused to let that happen. After several offers to purchase the fledgling company were refused, a more permanent solution had been pursued. As it happened, after a very timely and very unfortunate auto accident that took the lives of his wife and daughter, Hawkins retired from the industry and the problem was solved.

Or at least it
had
been.

The bad news was, sometime this year, Call had started working again, making his way back into the computer field, dredging up long-dead projects.

It was a scenario Gordon couldn’t afford to ignore.

He sighed as he shoved back his chair and walked over to the wide glass windows of his office. The fog was rolling in off the bay, beginning to blanket the city. On the street below, cars had begun to pull on their headlights.

Too bad about Hawkins, he thought. Too bad the man had foolishly turned down his offer of employment ten years ago. He could have been a valuable asset to the company.

Now all he would be was food for the insects.

It seemed a terrible waste of talent to Gordon.

Call spread out the blanket he took from his emergency gear and sat down next to Charity to listen for the search plane. Over and over, his mind replayed the moments before the engine had failed, searching for some explanation.

He knew the plane was in top condition. He kept it tuned like a fine Swiss watch; his mechanic was Bob Wychek, one of the best in the North. Eventually the problem would be discovered, even if he had to have the plane dismantled down to a pile of nuts and bolts. Of course, he’d damn near have to do that just to get it out of the lake.

The main thing was he was able to walk away in one piece and so was Charity.

A shudder ran down his spine. Charity could have died. It would have been his fault. He swallowed the dread that threatened to engulf him and looked down to where she slept against his shoulder.

Shock, fear, and the fading adrenalin rush had left her exhausted. Her face and clothes were covered with soot and smudges of grease streaked her hair. Her flannel shirt was torn and a trickle of blood had dried near her temple.

It made his stomach churn to think how close she had come to dying. If they hadn’t spotted the lake when they did … If he hadn’t been able to force the nose between the trees …

Sweat popped out on his forehead and his stomach heaved. For a minute he thought he was going to be sick.

“Call?” Charity straightened away from him. She was looking worriedly into his face and he realized she had been watching him for some time. “Are you all right?”

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. “I’m fine. I just need to move around a little.” He needed to move around a lot, he thought, spotting a game trail and starting in that direction, making his way into the shadows of the forest. He needed to take himself as far from Charity as he could get.

He was starting to care for her, starting to feel the kind of emotional attachment he never wanted to experience again. He couldn’t deal with those sorts of feelings, not now. Maybe never again.

He had to cool things down, had to stay away from her, at least for a while. Long enough to get his head on straight. A little way up the trail, he stopped, still worried about her, not wanting to go so far he couldn’t keep an eye on her.

“Call!” He heard her voice the instant before he heard the whop-whop-whop of the chopper. Running back down the trail, he grabbed a flare gun out of his emergency gear, broke it open, loaded, and fired. The flare arched high into the air. They must have seen it glowing in front of them. Call watched the chopper turn and begin to circle in their direction.

“They see us!” Charity cried excitedly. “They’re coming this way!”

The chopper, a newer model Bell, was equipped with landing pontoons. It hovered for a moment, then began its descent into the lake. The surface of the water rippled under the downdraft. The chopper finally settled onto the water, sending a string of waves up onto the shore, then the whine of the engine died away. A few minutes later, the rotor slowed to a stop above the machine.

The crew launched a yellow rubber raft and Call watched it row toward them.

“What about your beautiful plane?” Charity asked, staring at the mass of twisted red metal lying in a smoking heap at the end of the lake.

Call stared at the plane, thought about the nearly fatal crash, and his chest felt tight. “I’ll send a crew in to dismantle it. It’ll have to be lifted out by chopper, same as us.”

The little boat bumped the shore and a burly man jumped out and hauled it up on the bank. “Will Jonas,” he said, introducing himself. “Everybody on the plane okay?”

“Call Hawkins.” The men shook hands. “Cuts and bruises. The lady hit her head. She might have a slight concussion.”

“I don’t think so,” Charity said. “I don’t feel dizzy or anything.”

Maybe not, Call thought, but he bet she had one helluva headache.

“We’ll have it checked out at the hospital,” Will Jonas said.

Charity backed away from him. “No way, I’m fine—really I am. I’ve just survived a plane crash. My clothes are ruined. I’m covered in greasy soot. I’m not about to be tortured by a bunch of overzealous doctors. I just want to go home.”

Call could see she wasn’t going unless he forced her and he didn’t want to do that. “There’s a clinic in Dawson. I’ll pay for the extra time it’ll take to fly us directly there.” He turned a hard look on Charity. “And I’m taking you in as soon as we get to town.”

She opened her mouth to argue, saw the implacable look on his face and knew he wasn’t going to back down any further than he already had.

“Men,”
she said with a faint lift of her chin, and climbed into the raft.

Call almost smiled.

He wasn’t smiling later, when one of the doctors at the clinic told him she shouldn’t be left alone for at least twenty-four hours.

“It doesn’t appear to be anything serious,” said Dr. Jackson, a young, dark-haired physician who worked alongside his doctor wife. “But with any sort of head injury, someone needs to keep an eye on her for a while.”

Call nodded, but he was thinking about his plan to stay away from her and watching it crumble before his very eyes. He could hardly dump her at Maude’s—not when it was his fault she’d been hurt in the first place.

The thought made his stomach roll again.

In the end, Call took her home with him. Old Mose’s cabin would be cold, since they had been gone for the last two days, and he wasn’t in the mood to sleep on the couch.

“You can stay in the guest room,” he told her, hoping his lack of enthusiasm didn’t show. “You’re not in any shape for bedroom athletics tonight and that’s exactly what will happen if you sleep with me.” They were traveling in the Jeep, less than a mile or so from the house. He’d never had a woman stay there before but there didn’t seem to be any other option.

Charity glanced toward him, where he sat behind the wheel. “Thanks, I appreciate your concern, but I’m going home.”

Call drilled her with a look. “Not a chance. You heard what the doctor said. Someone needs to check on you. You’re staying with me, so you might as well resign yourself.”

She sighed dramatically but didn’t argue, just followed him into the guest room once they reached his house. He showed her the bathroom with its gleaming tile shower and some of her reluctance slid away. In the end, much to his chagrin, he thought she rather enjoyed herself. Toby fussed over her and made her his special chicken-vegetable soup. Afterward she polished off a bowl of chocolate ice cream while Toby kept her company in a chair next to the bed. Call could hear the two of them laughing and it grated on his nerves.

He told himself to ignore them, but the kid stayed so long, Call’s temper began to heat. Standing in the doorway, he watched them playing checkers, his irritation mounting every time Charity laughed at something Toby said.

“Don’t you have some pans to wash or something?” he growled before they had a chance to start another game. Toby gave him an unrepentant grin, winked at Charity, and left the guest room.

“You’ve had a rough day,” Call said, wishing she didn’t look so damn good in the extra-large tee shirt he had loaned her. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

Propped on pillows in the guest room’s comfortable queen-sized bed, Charity seemed to be sizing him up. “I want to ask you a favor.”

Wariness trickled through him. Unless the favor was taking her to bed, he wasn’t interested. “Yeah? What favor is that?”

“You remember what happened on the trail this morning?”

This morning seemed like years ago. “I know what you think happened. You think you remembered something from a hundred years ago.”

“Okay, maybe it’s crazy. But maybe it isn’t. I’ve never understood why I’ve always been so intrigued with this place. Sometimes if I read something or just thought about coming here, it would make me cry. When I was standing on that trail I felt like I remembered being there. I could almost remember something that happened.”

“Something from another life,” he said darkly.

“No. I told you I don’t believe in past lives. I was thinking … maybe those memories belonged to someone in my family, someone directly related to me. A relative of mine who actually came up here back then.”

“You’re saying the memories—if you had them—might be inherited from one of your ancestors. That’s pretty farfetched, don’t you think?”

“Why? Animals inherit instincts. People inherit certain talents—like being a math whiz or a musician. Or take circus families, for instance. You know how they say they’ve got sawdust in their blood? Theatrical families are like that, even cowboys. What if there really is something in their blood? Memories that are inherited from generation to generation, a connection to the past that pulls them in that same direction?”

He cast her an unconvinced glance. “So what’s the favor?”

“I want to find out if someone in my past was one of the people who came to the Yukon in search of gold. If they did, then maybe I was born with some of their memories. Maybe that’s the reason I wanted to come here so badly.”

It was an interesting theory, he had to admit, not that he believed it. “Yeah, well, too bad there isn’t any way to prove it.”

Charity looked up at him with big blue eyes. He noticed the small white bandage on the side of her head and a wave of guilt washed over him.

“Maybe there is a way,” she said. “It’s only a hundred years. If I could track my family back that far, maybe I could find a link to one of the Stampeders who climbed the trail.”

One of his eyebrows went up. “You’re talking about genealogy.”

“Exactly.”

“And the favor is …?”

“I want to use one of your computers.”

“No.”

“Why not? You’ve got three of them. You can’t use them all at once.”

Because that would mean you’d be over here all the time and that is the last thing I want.
His mouth tightened. He couldn’t do this, dammit. He scrambled through a dozen lame excuses, finally settled on one. “I wouldn’t be able to concentrate with you in the room with me.” Now
that
was the truth.

Charity gave him a syrupy smile and replied in a thick Southern accent. “Why, Call, sugar, that is the sweetest thing you have ever said.”