Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (24 page)

She had sat for a while on the bank, chewing on a piece of moose jerky, watching the river. Dawson was about a hundred miles by river from Eagle. She had gone only about a quarter of the way, maybe less. It could take her a week and the rest of her supplies to get to Dawson, if she and Hootie were able to make their way following the river without any major obstacles. Once at Dawson, she would have no other choice than to beg a ride.

She tore off another piece of jerky with her teeth and chewed it slowly, considering her options. Had the spirits misled her, or had she misinterpreted their messages? Had what she considered their messages been nothing more than her own ill-considered impulses? She couldn’t – or refused to – believe that she’d made such a stupid mistake, but there was no doubt that her mission was next to impossible. How would she be able to walk the seventy or eighty miles through wilderness to reach the ferry to Dawson City? Once there, she would have to ask a stranger for a ride to Carmacks, or maybe to the side of the highway just north of Lake Laberge, then walk again from there to the site of the old cabin near Hootalinqua. Was the cabin even there after some twenty years? If it was, was it uninhabited and would she be able to pry up the old board to find the tin that contained the letter?

Those questions were almost insignificant compared to the central question. Would she survive such a journey at her age? Since moving to Eagle, her excursions on foot had never lasted more than a day or two. Lately, two hours of splitting firewood tired her out. Her arthritis gave her trouble after a day in the garden, let alone a week of dodging tree limbs and scrambling over rocks and windfall. Why had the spirits misled her so? Was she being guided, not to retrieve the letter so Goldie could find her mother, but instead to free Goldie from the burden of caring for her aging Gran? Was she now on a journey to join her Gwich’in mother and their ancestors?

“No!” she cried aloud.

Hootie, who had been lying in a sunny patch on the beach, leapt to his feet and began to growl, unsure of what had alarmed his master but prepared to defend her.

“We’re not running back home with our tails curled under our asses, Hootie,” Betty said. “I may be old, but I’m not helpless. I’ve survived this land for over seventy years, and I’m still strong and in good health. This land, this river, they may be wild and rough, but unlike the men I’ve known, they’ve been fair with me. If the spirits have other plans for me and I’m meant to die on this journey, so be it. I’ll fight to survive like I’ve always fought, right to my last breath.”

Hootie was at her side, his tail wagging his approval. She knew he would give his life for her. She laid a hand on his head and massaged it with her knobby fingers. “You agree, don’t you, ol’ boy? One more big adventure for us both, eh?”

She sorted through the supplies in the boat, choosing only the most critical – an aluminum pot, a good knife, her tin plate and a few utensils, all of the food she’d brought for herself and Hootie, her bedroll and matches, a change of clothes, her rifle and some fishing gear – and fashioned two packs out of rope and a canvas tarp torn in strips and squares, a double one for Hootie and a backpack for herself. She unscrewed the motor, which weighed almost as much as she did, and with difficulty hoisted it off the back of the boat, then half dragged it ten feet across the rocky beach to maneuver it under a bush. She nodded with satisfaction, waited to get her breath back, then managed to flip the boat over on top of the empty jerry cans and the remaining supplies.

She secured Hootie’s pack, one strap around his neck, the other around his ribcage, then hoisted her own on her back. She shrugged her shoulders once or twice to adjust the pack, happy to find it comfortable, or at least not terribly uncomfortable. Picking up her rifle, she smiled at Hootie and gave him a few sound pats on the rump. “Ready, my friend?”

Hootie wagged his tail, and the two of them set off briskly upriver, along the stony beach.

“If you lose him, you better find him again. Or don’t come back.” Bart pointed a stern finger at Hunter’s face and then turned to the constable who was accompanying Hunter and Orville in the search for Betty Salmon. “That goes for you, too.”

“Don’t you worry, Sergeant,” said Orville. “I wouldn’t dream of making life difficult for these two fine men.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at Hunter, and he shook his head.

Hunter got the message. Orville had recognized him as his fellow prisoner in the Whitehorse jail.

“Besides, if I ran off, you’d only hunt me down again. Don’t you Mounties always get your man?” The twinkle in the old man’s eyes made Hunter smile.

Bart had sent Goldie back home with her young friend Mark. “If your grandmother makes it back to your cabin in Eagle, you’ll have to let us know right away,” he told her. Mark promised that he and his Jeep would be at Goldie’s disposal.

Bart told Hunter that his initial reluctance to involve the RCMP in a search for Betty Salmon had disappeared after talking to her granddaughter. “It was the RCMP’s failure to locate April Corbett that set this potential tragedy in motion, beginning way back when. I can’t just shrug this off as an old woman’s foolishness and leave her to her fate.”

He’d assigned a man from the detachment to accompany Hunter and Orville in their search for Betty Salmon. Although Search and Rescue was consulted, it was decided that sending an RCMP constable was the unavoidable choice, given that a prisoner in custody was included in the search party. They were driving up to Dawson City overnight in one of the detachment’s Suburbans, where they would be given an eighteen foot flat-bottom RCMP boat to take downriver. “I’m told she’ll cooperate with you and Orville,” Bart told Hunter. “Her granddaughter says if we send searchers to find her without you, she’s likely to hide from them, or at a minimum, refuse to go with them.”

“I’m glad you didn’t say ‘rescue’ her,” Orville commented. “I’ve known a few old bush women like Betty over the years. In spite of her age, she’s probably as capable of navigating the Yukon land and rivers on her own as any of you gentlemen might be. Nevertheless, I am as concerned – probably more concerned – for the good woman’s welfare as any of you, and I would be proud to assist in locating her and making sure she gets home safely.” He said that Betty had described the locations of her old cabins to him, and he was pretty sure he could find them, or what remained of them.

“I’ve seen her boat. There’s no way she could even make it upriver to Dawson with that motor. It’s a fifteen or twenty horsepower Evinrude. When we head downriver from Dawson, we’ll be running with the current so should be able to make good time without using much fuel. I doubt that she even made it to the Fortymile so we can go full throttle over half the distance to Eagle before we need to look for any sign of her boat, or the good woman herself.”

“And if we don’t see her along the river?” said Hunter.

“If she can hear our boat, I have no doubt that she’ll be watching us, but I don’t expect we’ll see her unless she wants us to. You and I will have to take turns calling her name, so she knows it’s us.” He paused, eyes downcast. “If we don’t see any sign of her before we reach Eagle, well, I don’t want to consider that possibility.”

As they loaded gear and provisions into the RCMP Suburban, Hunter looked at the sky. “At least the weather’s good,” he said. The sky was blue, with a few benign-looking clouds along the horizon.

The constable assigned to accompany them, a sturdy round-faced man named Serge Boudreau, peered over at Hunter while he finished loading their gear into the back of the Suburban. “You didn’t hear the forecast?”

Both Hunter and Orville turned to him. “No. Why?” Hunter asked.

“They say there’s rain headed inland. It may be windy, wet and cold by the time we launch the boat at Dawson tomorrow morning.”

They planned to drive the three hundred and something miles from Whitehorse to Dawson, then head downstream on the Yukon River toward the Alaska border. The river trip from Dawson to Eagle was about a hundred miles. Hunter sat in the back seat of the RCMP Suburban with Orville while Constable Boudreau drove. The constable had his elbow resting on the door frame, the window rolled down. Hunter could hear the loud hum of the tires, and felt confident that anything he and Orville said would not be overheard. He intended to bring up their first meeting, but the old man beat him to it.

“So you were a plant,” said Orville.

“Are you surprised?”

“You were very convincing, although I did think your haircut was rather fine for someone who had been living in the bush. Are you disappointed that I didn’t confess?”

“Not at all. Sergeant Sam didn’t expect a confession from you. He hoped you would tell me who your friend was, the fellow at your table.”

Orville shook his head. “I couldn’t do that.”

“You don’t have to tell me his name. Just tell me, hypothetically, what kind of relationship would a man have to have with you to make you willing to let him to get away with murder?”

Orville turned to look at Hunter. He frowned but said nothing.

“Can’t be good for a man’s soul,” Hunter continued, looking away. “Getting away with murder, I mean.”

After a long moment of silence, “I must admit I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Orville.

“If I had a son,” said Hunter, “or a nephew, for example, and he committed a serious crime, I supposed I’d have to think long and hard about turning him in. I wouldn’t want him to hate me for it.” He leaned back against the seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “On the other hand, I would be disappointed if a young man I cared for wasn’t prepared to take responsibility for what he’d done. You’d think committing a murder and not owning up to it would eat away at a man if he had any kind of conscience, make him unhappy in the long run. Wouldn’t you say so?”

Orville’s fingers were stroking his beard, as if he was deep in thought, but he didn’t respond.

Hunter continued. “I can see a young man getting angry enough to hurt someone, do something on impulse that he’d never in a million years do if he’d had time to think about it. Heat of passion, they call it. If a young man, say, turned himself in, the courts might go easier on him. I’ve seen second degree murder pled down to manslaughter and a reduced sentence in situations like that.”

“You have?” Orville was still stroking his beard. “I suppose you would, being a Mountie.” He cocked his head to one side and said, “You’re the fellow who came to see Betty in Eagle, aren’t you? Why? Were you looking for me then?”

Hunter shook his head. “Back in 1972, I was involved in a cold case that included the disappearance of April Corbett, Goldie’s mother.”

“So you went to Eagle to see Goldie?”

“No. We had no idea April ever had a child. I went to Eagle – uh, off duty, you might say – and saw a girl who looked just like April Corbett did in 1972.” He shot Orville a wry smile. “Coincidence at play.”

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous. Einstein said that, but I don’t think he believed it.”

“And you don’t believe it either.”

The old man shrugged. “If I knew for sure there was a god, I might believe it. On some level, almost everything unplanned could be called a coincidence. Is it a coincidence that you and I are sitting here talking right now?”

“It’s certainly not something I expected to happen when I drove into town this morning.” Whether or not Orville had done it intentionally, the conversation had shifted away from the Collins murder, so Hunter tried a different tack. “I’d like to know what would make a mother abandon her baby. The instinctive love of a parent for a child is as powerful as it gets. It amazed me the first time I held each of my two daughters.” He tried to ignore the pang of guilt this admission brought, guilt over the failure of his marriage and how little time he had managed to spend with his daughters since. “Do you have children?”

Orville looked out the window. Hunter could see his shoulders rise and fall with a huge sigh. A moment later the old man turned back toward Hunter and nodded gently. “I’m very attached to the son of a woman I lived with for many years. She was a single mother – a Southern Tutchone from Aishihik Lake – who was swept off her feet by some idealistic back-to-the-land hippie. He fathered her child, then decided he’d had enough fun playing Indian and moved back to Toronto without leaving a forwarding address. She’d had a hard life – much like Betty – and I had great respect for her.” He paused, his jaw working, eyes looking straight ahead but appearing not to see. “Her son began to call me his father.” Orville sighed again. “She died when the young man was only twelve. Cancer. She knew she was dying, and made me promise to watch out for him. I was happy to; he truly was like a son to me. He lived with me until a few years ago.”

They both paused to watch as Constable Boudreau accelerated the Suburban past a slow and dusty motorhome. The motorhome driver’s hands were at ten and two, and his full attention was focused on the road ahead. He looked older than Orville.

“He’s a good boy, but a little hot headed. And understandably bitter about the way his father deserted his mother and him, as if they were toys he’d grown tired of. I think that has made him resentful toward any non-native who tries to take advantage of him.”

“Like Collins?”

Orville’s moustache twitched, but he didn’t elaborate. His expression was hard to read. Wistful? Reflective? Amused? Amused at Hunter’s clumsy attempt to get information about his dark haired companion?