Cold Heart (6 page)

She squared her shoulders and scooped up her backpack. There was nothing she could do about the trunk. She glanced up at the mountains already buried in cloud and started hiking.

Thirty yards into the trees a growling noise caught her attention and she froze. The Glock was stored away in the pack. But Zeke had informed her that the pistol was pretty much worthless where she was going, anyway. Nothing smaller than a.357 magnum had any chance of stopping a bear.

The Honda four-wheeler cleared the cusp of the hill before
she realized that what she was hearing wasn't in the least bearlike. It didn't dawn on her until later that no self-respecting, hibernating bear would be stupid enough to be out on a frigid day like this. The little vehicle looked like a cross between a motorcycle and a riding lawn mower but it bounced down the rough trail with the confidence of a mountain goat. The driver was going so fast that he couldn't stop and wheeled around Micky, coming to a halt facing back up the trail. Micky had a bewildered expression on her face when the driver flipped back his parka hood and offered a gloved hand. Micky reached across the handlebars and felt a small but powerful grip. She stared into the face and was surprised to discover the driver was a woman.

“Rita Cabel,” said the driver, in a voice like steel wool. She had thick gray hair and bright blue eyes. Micky guessed her age at fifty but she might have been ten years older. When she climbed off the four-wheeler and tossed Micky's pack into the rear basket, she seemed closer to thirty. She moved with the easy grace of a younger woman.

“Get on,” said Rita. “Unless you want to stay out here and freeze to death. Damon mentioned you'd be coming. I knew he'd forget.”

“He forgot me?”

Rita laughed. “You must know how he gets if he's onto something. He and Marty cooked up some scheme to boil water in barrels and heat the ground around their claims by driving pipes into the ground and running steam through them.”

Micky gave the woman a baffled look.

“They're digging up gravel that way so they can have it ready to run through the sluices when the creek thaws in the spring,” said Rita.

Rita drove Micky up to the cabin Damon had rented for her from Aaron McRay. The place was small but tidy. Rita's husband, Clive, had a fire going in the stove and coffee in the pot. Rita educated Micky in the intricacies of wood heat and how to tuck pieces of old blankets on all the windowsills and under the doors to keep as much of the draft out as possible. Then Rita and Clive said their good-byes with the promise of a tour of the town the next day.

Micky locked the door behind them with the simple sliding latch. She listened to the giant hands of the wind, clawing
at the eaves, trying to rip the roof off the cabin. She stared out into darkness so black that it was like being inside the middle of a giant squid and she shivered.

But the cabin was snug, the kerosene lamplight reassuring, and the roof didn't sound as though it had any intention of losing its battle with the wind. She climbed up into the loft and found that the old feather bed, though smelling of dust, was clean and quite comfortable.

She dug out the Glock, checked the chamber, and placed it beside her on the bed.

And she wondered, yawning, just how much farther from anything she could possibly be. She fell asleep thinking of Wade.

All the lanterns in the cabin burned brightly throughout that long arctic night.

M
ICKY LEANED OVER THE
rough-hewn table that was the centerpiece of her log cabin, concentration furrowing her brow. She wore heavy gloves. The custom-made soldering iron, even with its thick ash handle, was hot and she'd been burned before. She molded the lead strip around the irregular-shaped pieces of glass, delicately fitting the soft metal into the space between the panes and stopping to slip in a piece of local quartz, polished by hand.

Her trademark.

The piece had been commissioned by a buyer in Anchorage. Micky wasn't expected to turn out an exact replica of what the owner wanted—an overhead view of salmon spawning—but an artist's rendition, and that was what the owner was getting.

She put the finishing touches to her soldering and studied the shards of glass remaining on the table. Several were cut to fit but never used. Others lay farther from her hand, different shades and variations of the swirling interior colors, uncut, in case she chose to replace one of the pieces. One lay by itself, exiled. Its hue and the distinct coloration had been exactly what she wanted.

It irritated her that she had not been paying attention when she cut it.

Usually a piece of glass broke along the fault lines created with the scribe or allowed itself to be nibbled with her special cutting pliers. But sometimes, for myriad reasons—pressure of the tool, inconsistent force from her hands, or just the unpredictable obstinacy of an inanimate object—the glass would not break cleanly. Instead, it fractured through the layer of glass itself, creating microthin, jagged edges that were sharper than razors.

She called pieces like that scalpel glass.

She'd recut it and use it somewhere else.

The spring light through her windows was perfect for stained-glass work. In early May the sun hung over the Kuskokwim Mountains like a light peeking over the top of a miner's helmet, shining golden onto her table. Although at this time of year the sun came up officially sometime after five in the morning and didn't set until ten at night, the high, snowcapped mountains on three sides bathed McRay in almost perpetual twilight.

In the bush, the light and the weather were king.

Although spring was capable of flooding the narrow valley with verdant life, it was just as likely to bury it under a sudden snow squall or flood the plains below with weeks of torrential rain that turned the wide, placid, Kuskokwim River into a snarling deluge of ferocious power. Snow could bury the mountains in a night and then the next day the sun and warm Chinook winds could melt it all. Or send it roaring downhill in deadly destructive avalanches that ripped gaping wounds in the forest.

Outside, jays screeched at the ravens, fighting over the leavings of last night's dinner. Micky knew she shouldn't be throwing food so close to the cabin. But the birds were so thick this time of year that they'd clean up every scrap before a grizzly could get wind of it. Besides, the big bruisers were just starting to come out.

There was a scratching cry as one of the birds chased another away from its food, and then silence.

It was as though the entire world had taken a deep breath.

She rested both hands on the table and waited for the birds to begin squabbling again.

It had taken her a long time to become accustomed to the
silence in McRay. There was a world of difference between hearing the traffic outside your bedroom window and listening to the low soughing of a night wind under your eave. Of being accustomed to the wail of sirens and hearing nothing more for hours on end than a willow ptarmigan flapping through the brush.

Was it even quieter than usual?

It was four years since Houston. The temperature range was an average of sixty degrees lower and the population was a few million less.

But it was the quiet that had taken the most getting used to.

Micky finished fitting the stone and set the iron back down in the coals of the woodstove. The window was finished. Of course there were always areas to improve. She would keep retouching and polishing forever if she didn't force herself to say enough. Over the past weeks she had removed and replaced dozens of pieces of glass, searching for just the right balance of color and light. Chasing the perfection she saw only in her head.

But Cary at the Mendenhall Gallery was getting antsy. Clive Cabel had stopped by yesterday with a phone message from her. The gallery owner wanted the piece on the next mail plane and that would be coming in around five o'clock. But occasionally Rich was early.

She walked around the table, studying the stained-glass window.

It wasn't perfect.

But they never were.

She could almost see something good in the piece.

Something magical.

If she removed this piece of glass and replaced that one. If she reshaped that corner. If she made the work less a depiction of fish and more a study of light and shade…

She pulled her hand away.

She glanced at the crate in the corner and made up her mind. Time to pack it up.

You can't hold on to your babies forever.

By the time she had the window safely stored in the wooden crate it was almost lunchtime and her stomach was starting to grumble. She pulled a can of milk down from the
shelf over the woodstove and poured a bowl of granola. She opened a can of butter—one of those odd, long-shelf-life foodstuffs that bush villagers accepted as standard fare— smeared a generous helping on the biscuits left over from last night's dinner, and carried the meal over to the table, pulling up a three-legged stool.

Her cabin was comfortable, with one large living area downstairs and an open sleeping loft above, without being too big for her to take care of. When she moved in, it had three large fixed windows and she had spent much of her first summer creating and installing three more stained-glass ones. The window in the loft opened to allow cross ventilation between it and the front and rear doors. The doors themselves were massive affairs with black, hand-wrought iron hinges and locks and hand-carved spruce planks with X-braced interiors.

She glanced around the cabin and thought of Houston.

Has it really been four years already?

McRay was home to her now. It seemed as though she had stepped out of Zeke's plane that day and found not a strange, unfamiliar land, but a refuge.

Outside, the jays were screaming their heads off again.

D
AWN
G
LORIANUS STARED AT
their wet clothing, laid out on grass still brown from winter. The clearing on this side of their cabin was covered with a patchwork lawn. Her mother insisted that the washing smelled better if it dried that way rather than on a line.

Snow circled the spruce trees around the cabin where the bases of the big conifers were shaded from the sun. The temperature was barely in the fifties. But it was warm enough for Dawn's mother, Terry, to decide that it was time for spring cleaning. Every item of winter gear, every blanket, every pair of long johns, every sock was washed clean by hand in the big galvanized tub that doubled as their bath.

Terry knelt over the frothy water, sliding a sheet up and down the washboard, her shoulders heaving. Dawn glanced at the handkerchief in her own right hand. Terry had finished washing it but Dawn didn't know where to put it yet. And she was more concerned with her mother's anger. When Terry got in one her moods, there was no sense talking to her. Dawn knew that she had incited Terry's wrath even if Dawn didn't think it was her fault.

Dawn hated McRay.

In McRay, people lived like animals. They did dumb things like washing their clothes in a tub. Stupid things, like
putting them on the lawn to dry. Even though the temperature would drop to freezing the second the sun dipped over the mountains. Even though the clothes would all be frozen solid in the morning, anyway. In McRay you got your schooling through the mail. And if you ever had any notion of meeting a boy, you could just forget it.

Dawn didn't know much about how her counterparts lived, Outside. But she was pretty sure from her voluminous reading that they met people of the opposite sex, had things called dates, and did other wonderful things that she was still two long years away from getting to experience.

As soon as she turned eighteen, on that very day, McRay, Alaska, would be history.

But all Dawn had said, this time, was that she was old enough to fly into Anchorage by herself. She didn't need to be chaperoned on a yearly shopping trip. She could stay with her pen pal, Judith.

That was all Terry needed to hear. She blew up. Just as Dawn was afraid that she would.

But for Terry a blowup wasn't like a temper tantrum for the normal parent. Terry didn't scream or throw things. She didn't stomp around their cabin and slap her hands against her sides or sit and slowly heat up like a tea kettle.

Terry
cleaned.

She swept the floor until bristles snapped off the broom.

Then she mopped.

She slopped scalding water onto the bare floorboards and swung the mop like it was a hockey stick until soap suds clung to the walls.

She pulled every plate and pot out of the cupboards and dusted them
and
the cabinets.

She polished the inside of their two windows until Dawn was sure she'd wipe the glass right out of the frames. Then she went outside and scrubbed the other side of the windows.

And then she started washing clothes.

She hauled bucket after bucket up from the North Fork, heating them over the glowing woodstove that made it too uncomfortable to stay inside the cabin. She kept two buckets heating on the stove as she beat piece after piece of clothing and linens to death against the washboard.

But Dawn knew that Terry was cooling off now. Pretty soon the spring inside her that was all wound up would wind down, and then she'd be able to talk almost like a normal human being again.

Terry wiped her forehead with the damp sleeve of her calico shirt. Her shoulders sagged. When she dropped back onto her haunches and rested her hands on the tub, Dawn approached her quietly.

“I'm sorry, Mom,” she said.

Terry turned slowly and looked up into her daughter's dark eyes. Dawn stood motionless under her mother's inspection. There was love on Terry's face.

Love.

Anguish.

Fear.

And something else.

Something too terrifying for Dawn to want to try to understand.

Terry stood and wiped her hands on her jeans. They were chapped, worn hands. But the fingers were long and delicate. She was still a beautiful woman and Dawn had inherited her good looks from both sides of the family. A winning smile and lanky build from her father. High cheekbones and dark hair from her mother.