“You could have changed her mind.”
“Yeah.” He rowed. “Yeah, I suppose I could have. And the fact that I didn’t says something.”
“He’s your father.”
“Yeah. He is that. Did you ever know who yours was?”
A raven croaked suddenly from overhead and Liam started violently, jerking the oars free of the water. Water splashed, catching both him and Wy. The stern of the skiff started to drift. The dock loomed up suddenly out of the fog, materializing into a dark rectangular shape off the starboard bow.
They both saw it at the same time. “There!”
He pulled for shore with short, powerful strokes, and a moment later they were alongside. Liam shipped the oars while Wy fastened the bowline off to a cleat on the dock. She trotted up the dock, Liam right behind her, and they threaded their way up the path that followed the creek. Moments later they emerged into the clearing and there was the cabin. She paused just long enough to grin at him. “I told you we could make it.”
He kissed her. He hadn’t meant to, but he did it anyway. “I’ll never doubt you again.” He added, following her to the door, “I’ll never fly into a storm with you again, either.”
“I swear I hear voices,” they heard someone say, and the door of the cabin opened as they walked up the steps.
Bill stood there, astonished. “What the hell are you two doing here? And how the hell did you get here?”
Newenham, September 6
“Do you think the wind’s slowing down a little?”
“In the last five minutes since you asked, no.”
“Wy’s going to be seriously pissed if you break her computer.”
Jim spared a glance over his shoulder. “Oh, please.”
Jo, pacing restlessly back and forth across the living room of Wy’s house, glared at the back of his head as he sat hunched over the monitor. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Destroying your credit rating.”
She halted. “What?”
He grinned at the screen. “Relax, Dunaway, it was joke.”
Suspiciously, she came to peer over his shoulder. “It better be.” She squinted. “For god’s sake. Isn’t that the state troopers’ database?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get in?”
“Talent, Dunaway, loads and loads of talent.” He scrolled down.
“Liam gave you the password.”
He snorted. “The perfect cop breaking faith with his own force? Give me a break.”
“You hacked in?” Jo glanced around nervously, as if expecting the FBI to break down the front door in the next moment. “You can get arrested for that.”
“They’ll have to catch me first.” He turned and they practically bumped noses. For that single moment, time seemed to stop. She could feel his breath on her face. He could see every separate dark blond lash on her eyelids. For a frozen moment, neither of them moved. Bridget and Luke, playing a noisy game of cribbage at the kitchen counter, seemed to fade from the room.
She jerked back, eyes wide with dismay.
“Well, well,” he said, just as startled but quicker to recover.
“Well, well, nothing,” she said. She took what she hoped was an unobtrusive step backward. “I asked you what you were looking at.”
You, he thought. And now that I am, I won’t stop until I get you. But he was a patient man, and there was a time and a place for everything. Not here, not now. But somewhere and soon. “Disappearances,” he said, turning back to the computer.
“Disappearances?” She took a cautious step forward, positioning herself so that she could just barely read the text on the screen over his shoulder, but far enough away to run if she had to. Not that she would, she wasn’t a coward.
“Yeah.”
“What disappearances?”
“Women. Young women. Gone missing. All from the Bristol Bay area.” Unconsciously, she took another step forward, and he smiled to himself when he felt her warmth at his shoulder.
“You mean like Rebecca Hanover?”
“I mean exactly like Rebecca Hanover.” He sat back. The fuzz of her sweater brushed the back of his head. She didn’t notice. He did. “Last night at dinner you were talking about another woman who went missing.”
“Stella Silverthorne.”
“Yeah. Then Wy was talking about the daughter of the postmistress that got killed, what was her name…”
Jo’s reportorial instincts were kicking in, the mental Rolodex whirring, click, stop. “Ruby Nunapitchuk.”
“Yeah.”
“I remember that story. The dad took the kids out hunting, right? Two sons and two daughters?”
“Yeah, and lost one of the daughters.”
“They never found the body.”
“Nope.” He nodded at the screen. “Bill Billington ruled on a presumptive death hearing the following spring. Accidental death due to misadventure. The parents filed an appeal, which was denied.”
“What was the basis of their appeal?”
“You ever talk to a magistrate about presumptive death hearings?”
She shook her head.
“Nobody wants to believe in accidental death. It’s too-it’s too-”
“Accidental?” she suggested.
“Smart-ass,” he said, “but yeah. You lose somebody you love, you want there to be a reason. He can’t have fallen into a glacier, or off a boat, or down a mountain. Death can’t be that random, that irrational, not for a lot of people.”
“Makes sense.”
“Ha, ha. Sit down with Bill sometime, get her to tell you some of the arguments surviving family members have put forward to vacate a judgment of accidental death. They come in two kinds: weird, and weirder. He was pushed into that glacier, he was dumped off that boat, he was tripped down that mountain. He was about to take over the glacier tour company, and the current owner bumped him off. He seduced the boat captain’s daughter, and the captain keelhauled him. The climb leader had designs on his body, and when he wouldn’t put out, cut the rope between them.”
“Sounds like a story.” He shook his head in feigned exasperation at her single-mindedness. She grinned. Their eyes met. The grin faded. “Yes. Well. So you started looking up missing women.”
“Women missing in the Bristol Bay area,” he said. He tilted the chair back, coming solidly up against her, and linked his hands behind his head. She was still for a moment before moving back, but not that much back. His dark hair stood up in a rooster tail from repeated impatient pullings, and he was frowning behind his glasses. “It didn’t hit me until last night, when you were telling us the story about Finn Grant and his lost hunting party, and how one of the women was never found. Interesting, I thought, two women missing in the Bush, same general area, only four years apart. Then I remembered what Wy said about the postmistress’s daughter, and how she was lost eight years ago.”
Jo was skeptical but interested. “Okay, how many of these women missing in the Bristol Bay area have you found?”
He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, frowning down at his clasped hands. “Seven. Altogether.”
“Seven?” Her tolerant smile and indulgent tone of voice vanished. One quick step had her back at his shoulder. “Show me.”
He was more troubled by his discovery than he was triumphant at having piqued her interest. “I accessed the missing persons records for the judicial district for the last twenty-five years, which is as far back as they’ve got in the data base. Ruby Nunapitchuk eight years ago, Stella Silverthorne five years ago, Rebecca Hanover four days ago.”
“All women.”
“All young women,” he said. “Rebecca Hanover is thirty-two. Ruby Nunapitchuk was seventeen. Stella Silverthorne was twenty-six.”
“Opal was fifty-six.”
“Yeah, she was the oldest by about twenty years.”
“She might not have looked her age, though,” Jo said slowly. “Wait a minute.” She rolled the chair back with him on it and pulled open the drawer. A pad of yellow sticky notes and a pen later, she shoved both back in.