Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (3 page)

She and Tessa had been sitting on a log in the woods not far from the Eagle school, sharing a cigarette that Tessa had stolen from the glove box in her uncle’s truck. It was the final year of school, and both of them dreamed of going outside to college, doing some travelling and seeing the world, but neither of them knew how they were going to pay for it.

“What’d you eat, way off in the bush alone like that? Long way to buy groceries, wasn’t it?”

“A lot of salmon, smoked mostly. Caribou and moose meat. Two or three old guys in the area – hunters and trappers – used to stop by and sleep by the stove once in a while; they’d usually give Gran some of the meat from what they’d killed or trapped. Gran had enough dogs to pull a sled then, so sometimes we would make a trip to Carmacks on the frozen river in the winter. Gran fished and trapped and hunted herself, too. I was helping her skin animals when I was just a few years old. She would sell some of the furs, but all the caribou and moose hides she would tan and then sew stuff.”

“Like what stuff?”

“Little purses. Moccasins. Vests and jackets sometimes. A guy would meet her in Carmacks in the spring and buy all the stuff, then she’d have cash to buy supplies and we’d go back to the bush.”

“How come she didn’t have a husband? She doesn’t like men, or what?”

Goldie shrugged. “She was married before I came into the picture.”

“She must have been if she’s your Gran. What happened to your mom?”

“Died, I guess.”

“You guess? You don’t know?”

“Gran always said, ‘Best you don’t know now, child’ and promised to tell me when I grew up.”

“How old is grown up? Like, you’re not old enough now?”

“Now she says she’ll tell me before she dies.”

“I wouldn’t put up with that.” Tessa crushed the cigarette butt against the heel of her boot, then spat on it before burying it under the dirt. “Make her tell you.”

“How? Twist her arm behind her back? Threaten her with a rifle? How do you make a granny tell you something she doesn’t want you to know?”

They had both laughed, it sounded so absurd.

Goldie entered the lodge’s laundry room, thinking about Tessa. They had been close friends at that time, told each other everything and could almost read each other’s minds. Living upriver in the Yukon Territory, Goldie’s only companions had been Gran and her dogs. On Gran’s orders, she barely spoke to the occasional visitors – the smelly, bewhiskered trappers or hunters – that showed up at the cabin, since Gran somehow never let her be alone with them and would often give her a quiet chore to do when they were around. So becoming friends with Tessa had been precious to her, akin to a first love. They exchanged whispers before class, passed furtive notes during school hours, and found secret places to sit and talk during breaks and after school. Then school was over and Gran kept Goldie busy all summer: fishing, bringing home firewood, helping with the tanning, cutting and sewing of skins, tending to the dogs or chickens and working in the vegetable garden. She only saw Tessa once or twice that last summer, and that’s when Tessa announced she had a boyfriend.

Her old friend now had two children and lived with her husband, Sam, in a two bedroom house in Eagle Village. She and Tessa didn’t have much to talk about when they ran into each other at the post office. College was never mentioned, nor was travelling. It was usually just, “How’re the kids?” and “How’s your gran?” and “Friggin’ cold today, isn’t it?” Funny how people could grow apart. Maybe if Goldie had a husband and children, they would have more in common and be close friends again. But if living here with Gran was a cage, having a husband and children here would be like a prison, a life sentence. Goldie shivered at the thought, then opened the clothes dryer to check if the bed sheets for Yukon Sally’s ‘Caribou Cabin’ were dry.

– – – – – THREE

New Westminster, BC - June 1997

Hunter was scrubbing at dried white and grey seagull shit, splattered like Rorschach inkblots on the hood of his navy blue Freightliner, when he heard his dispatcher yell across the yard at him from an open door on the loading dock. With the back of his hand, he wiped the sweat from under his brows, but not in time to keep it from stinging his eyes as he raised his head. It was early afternoon on an unusually hot day in June and he was washing his truck in full sun behind the Watson Transportation warehouse.

“Get in here!” Elspeth Watson had a very loud voice, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. “Now!” she bellowed over her shoulder as she walked back into the warehouse, out of Hunter’s sight.

He sighed and tossed the torn tee shirt he was using as a rag into a plastic bucket beside the Freightliner’s front tire. He turned on the hose, rinsed off his hands and splashed cold water on his face, then ran his wet hands over his hair to get it back off his forehead before heading around the building to El’s office in the front. She was on the phone when he walked in the door. There was an oscillating fan on the front counter, so he stopped it from turning and aimed it straight at his face and neck while he waited for her to finish the call.

“I’ve got a load for you tonight,” she said as she slammed down the receiver. “Good one.”

“Tonight? You told me this morning I was leaving for San Jose tomorrow morning.” He tried to remember if he had a clean pair of jeans, and hoped he’d have time to do his laundry before the pickup.

“That’s not your fuckin’ fan, it’s mine. Turn it loose, would you.”

Hunter frowned. “The load? Tell me about the load and I’ll give your fan back.” The breeze on his face was a relief from the afternoon heat and he was loathe to give it up.

El growled and raised a sheet of paper off her desk. “Pays good. Good weight. Good client. Could be the start of something profitable, you know what I mean?” She raised her eyebrows and nodded, as if waiting for him to agree.

“What’s the catch?”

She cleared her throat. “Alaska,” she said.

Hunter moved closer to the fan. The Alaska Highway was hard on trucks. Hard on trucks and on truck drivers.

“Haven’t you got anyone else for that run?”

“Like I said, Hunter, this client could be a money maker. I need an experienced, reliable driver with a reliable truck. You’re not only reliable, you’re the most respectable looking driver I’ve got. Besides, you told me once that you used to live up there. You’ll know your way around.”

“What is it? The load?”

“Some kind of mining machinery. Guess there’s still gold up there.” El raised her eyebrows again, her mouth frozen in a hopeful little smile.

It had been over twenty years since Hunter had been north of the 60th parallel. He didn’t think of those days often, but when he did, he felt real affection for the Yukon and a cautious nostalgia for the time he’d spent there in his first years with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. How would it feel to go back? he wondered. It might be a mistake. “Where in Alaska?”

El’s smile widened. “He said it was somewhere around Fairbanks. You know the area?”

“Yes, I know Fairbanks.” He had done a lot of exploring during his years in the Yukon. Those were the days – the early 70s – when ‘going for a drive’ was still a common form of recreation. The best drives were those that he and a fellow RCMP rookie took together. He and Ken Marsh had been through the depot in Regina together – the Mounties’ boot camp – and became close friends. Some of the ‘drives’ up north lasted for days. Whitehorse to Dawson was over 300 miles, Dawson to Fairbanks was almost 400 miles, Whitehorse to Skagway a mere 100 miles or so. And there weren’t a whole lot of towns in between, just miles of unpaved road, trees stunted by the long cold winters, limitless wild vistas fashioned out of earth, rock and water that took your breath away and were sparsely inhabited by tough, sometimes dangerous creatures, both animal and human.

“You’ll take it?” asked El.

Hunter took a deep breath and gazed out the front window toward the street. The air above the asphalt shimmered in the heat. The north had been good to him. He had been young and strong and they felt they would live forever, he and Ken. The north must have changed in the past twenty-five years, and he wondered how much. He’d like to see it again, and now was as good a time as any.

He nodded.

“Good man,” said El. “Go home and pack, and be back here by four thirty.”

“You betcha,” he said, and headed out the door.

“Wait,” she hollered. “Wait, you shithead.”

He turned and glared at her. She was half way out of her chair, glaring back at him.

“Please,” she said, with a phony smile that lasted less than a second.  “Release the fuckin’ fan.”

Hunter knocked on the front door of the house he lived in, on a residential slope below Grouse Mountain in North Vancouver. He rented a suite in the basement – a modest but comfortable one-bedroom suite with a bachelor’s kitchen and back door entrance – from a retired medical doctor named Gord Young. Gord was a widower, and shared the upstairs with his bachelor brother, John, who spent most of the summer at Eagle Bay on Shuswap Lake. Hunter had seen his landlord’s Siamese cat sunning itself in the backyard so he knew Gord was home.

The old man opened the door and invited Hunter in. He was barefoot and wearing baggy denim shorts and a white tee shirt with blue bicycles silhouetted across the chest.

“Can’t stay,” said Hunter. “Just wanted to let you know I’ll be out on the road again for a couple of weeks, if you could bring in my mail.”

“Where are you off to now? Back to California?”

“Heading north this time. Through B.C. and up the Alaska highway, then across the Yukon into Alaska.”

The old man raised his eyebrows above the rims of his glasses. Hunter noticed a fingerprint smudge on one lens. “That’ll be quite the trip. You used to live there, didn’t you?”

“Back in the seventies. It was a wild place then, with wild people. Be interesting to see how it’s changed.”

The old man nodded thoughtfully. “You were one of the wild ones? You must’ve changed since then yourself. I’m sure it will look different through older and wiser eyes.”

“Older, for sure. But wiser?” Hunter smiled at his landlord, then turned and walked to his car.  He threw his duffle bag on the back seat.

“Have a safe trip,” said the landlord, waving from the doorway.

Hunter thought about what Gord had said as he headed east on the Upper Levels highway. The midday traffic was light, scattered with summer travelers in motor homes and pickup trucks with campers. Was he so different now, from the idealistic young police constable who’d moved to the Yukon? There he’d met the girl who would become his wife. He’d left the Yukon, married, raised two daughters – although his ex-wife Christine would dispute how much he’d contributed to their raising – worked in investigations with the RCMP and become a seasoned homicide investigator, been through a painful divorce and lost his best friend to suicide. Yes, he had to be different now.

The traffic bottlenecked briefly at the Second Narrows Bridge, and as he inched forward, it occurred to him that the idealistic young police constable he used to be would never have believed that he would one day walk away from his dream career in law enforcement to become a long haul trucker. It was the solitude of the job that had appealed to him, the solitude and simplicity of life on the road, something that his wounded psyche had craved then, when he resigned from the force, and still needed now, some five years later.

A young girl in a VW Cabriolet cut him off, then turned and smiled sheepishly at him when traffic brought them both to an immediate stop. She had a bouncy blond pony tail, and reminded him of his youngest daughter, Lesley, who hoped to one day join the RCMP herself. He truly wished she wouldn’t – it was a hard road for a young man to travel, and no doubt even harder for a girl – but at the same time, he was proud of her choice, and it touched him deeply that she wanted to follow in his footsteps.

He reminded himself to call and let her and her sister know he would be away again, for a couple of weeks at least. Summer in the north. Everyone should experience it at least once in their life. Would Lesley be free to go with him? Would it be wise to even ask her? There was always the risk that she would fall in love with the North and want to stay, like other young girls with adventurous spirits had done before her.

Unbidden, he saw in his mind’s eye the image of just such a young woman he’d known briefly during his first year in Whitehorse. He saw her waving to him with a cheerful smile from behind the wheel of a 1964 Volkswagen bug, strands of her dark hair blowing around her face. The bug was a dull white, with hand-painted pink and yellow daisies on each side. The memory was tinged with grief, and accompanied by a sense of unfinished business. She had disappeared – presumed dead, although there was no way to know for sure. He had never wanted to accept that such a vibrant spirit had been extinguished, so he had looked for her as long as he was in the North, and even after.

He decided not to call his daughters until he was on the road.

“You cannot just quit a job because it’s boring to you, mon cher. You have two young children. They need clothing and shoes, and they want things like their friends have. You promised we would save up to buy a house – our own house. I don’t want to live every month worrying if we can pay just the rent. Daniel!” Simone Beliveau Sorenson stamped her foot. “Are you hearing me?”

Dan Sorenson couldn’t help admiring his wife’s pretty foot, which was right in his line of vision given his head was bowed and his eyes were trained on the scuffed linoleum of the kitchen floor. She should have been a ballet dancer, the way she moved. Her toes were perfect, her toenails a hot pink, the skin of her foot smooth and tanned, bare except for a delicate leather sandal. “I’m sorry, Mo,” he mumbled.

“You are always sorry.”

Sorenson wondered briefly if she was referring to his nickname, but decided Mo wasn’t in a joking mood. Her voice, which normally reminded him of a sweet French melody, was as unmusical as he’d ever heard it.

“I’m sorry doesn’t pay the bills, you know.” She turned away and crossed her arms over her chest, her shoulders stiff. She was looking out the kitchen window at the back yard, where Bruno and little Sasha took turns chasing each other with water pistols while Doobie the Doberman kept trying to catch the spray in his mouth.

Sorry felt like a real shit, as he did every time he lost a job.

Mo turned to face him again. “Go ask your boss to give you back the job.”

Sorry looked up at her, then dropped his eyes to the floor again, where a fly was exploring a crumb of cheese that Doobie had somehow missed. “I can’t.” He had hoped this wouldn’t come out. “He yelled at me because I didn’t give him notice so I gave him the finger.” The look on her face made him tell the whole truth. “And I took off the company hat and pretended to wipe my ass with it and he told me to fuck off and never come back.”

“Daniel!”

The look on her face made him take a step backwards. He’d never seen her eyes flash like that before.

“I think I could learn something from your boss,” she said. “Fuck off and never come back!”

Sorry almost gasped. He’d never heard her talk like that either. “Mo… I…”

She turned away again and stomped – gracefully, as always – out of the kitchen into the yard, slamming the door behind her. Through the window, Sorry saw the two kids stop their playing, startled. “What happened, Maman?” asked Bruno.

Sorry was about to follow her out when he heard her answer.

“Daddy is going away for awhile. He has some thinking to do.”

“Can’t Daddy think at home?”

“No, Bruno. It seems that he can’t.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Away.”

“For how long?”

Sorry saw her shrug.

“Will he be back for my birthday?” Sasha would be eight – Sorry did a quick calculation – in about three weeks.

“Maybe,” said Mo, and Sorry’s mouth fell open.

He was shocked. Shocked and confused. Mo had never been angry like this with him before. She couldn’t mean it, could she? Was she kicking him out? How could she do that? Yes, he’d screwed up yet again, but she loved him, didn’t she? She was his woman. He had even married her.

Sorry took a few deep breaths, debating whether to go out after her. He knew if he did something stupid, like maybe roughed her up, he would lose her and the kids forever. But she was his woman.
His woman.
He wasn’t a ‘yes, dear’ type of guy, and besides, he’d already said he was sorry. He began to think about what his biker buddies would say if they saw him crawling to her. Worse yet, if they knew he’d gone crawling back to his old boss.

“Fuck it,” he said aloud, but not too loud. Then, “Fuck it!” loud enough that he saw her shoulders stiffen again. Then, “I’m outa here, bitch,” and he turned on his heel and headed for the garage. He grabbed some clean clothes from the laundry room as he passed by, and stuffed them in a canvas duffle bag that he hurriedly strapped behind the seat of his Harley.