Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (18 page)

She looked up, hope springing into her chest. “You really think so?”

“I sure do. If he was plannin’ on doin’ something like that again, I don’t think he’d have said a word. Those kind never do.”

The hope unfurled.
It wasn’t the same, Charity. She wasn’t you.
Maybe he really did care about her. God, she hoped so.

“The way I see it, Call’s still tryin’ to find his way back from that awful place he’s been. It ain’t been easy for him—no siree. But I think you been a real big help. And I think he cares a whole lot more for you than he’s wantin’ to admit.”

Her heart eased. For the first time in days, Charity felt like smiling. Maude was right. The past didn’t matter. What mattered was where they went from here.

“You’re a good friend, Maude Foote.” Charity untied the leather work-apron she had been wearing over her jeans and tossed it over the porch rail. She pulled the clip from her hair and shook it out, ran her fingers through it.

“You goin’ where I think?”

“He said I could use his computer. I plan to hold him to it.”

Maude chuckled.

Jenny stepped out on the porch and walked up next to her grandmother.

Charity waved at both of them. “See you guys on Monday.”

Maude grinned. Jenny’s pretty mouth edged up in a rare, shy smile, and Charity smiled back, for the first time actually looking forward to the weekend.

Call paced his office. He needed to speak to the law firm in Seattle that was handling the Datatron case before the office closed for the weekend and catch up on his e-mail, but he wasn’t in the mood.

He’d felt better yesterday and the day before when he’d been working outside, off with the salvage crew that went after his plane. With the use of a logging helicopter, they had lifted the Beaver out of the lake in pieces and left it with Bob Wychek at Superior Air West, the local airplane fix-it shop. It would take a while, but sooner or later, Wychek would find the problem that had caused the engine failure.

Call’s mind did an instant replay of the crash and a shudder rippled through him. In the last four years, he had wished himself dead a hundred times, but not this time. This time, Charity had been with him and she had a right to live.

He was thinking about her, wishing they could have parted in a less painful manner, wishing he hadn’t hurt her.

He was wishing he didn’t miss her so damned much when he heard Toby’s voice in the living room, then footsteps approaching his office.

The door was ajar. Charity appeared in the opening, shoved the door open, and stepped inside.

“You said I could use your computer. I’m holding you to it.”

Myriad emotions rolled through him: the powerful sexual attraction he always felt when he saw her, but mostly a staggering relief that she was there.

He cleared his throat. “You want to do some on-line genealogy, right?”

“If I’m going to find out if my theory is correct, that’s what I need to do.”

He took a step toward her; he couldn’t help himself.

“Hold it right there. I’m still not happy about you sleeping with another woman.”

“It was before we ever made love, and I didn’t exactly sleep with her. She gave me, um … she gave me a blow job.”

Charity drilled him with a glare. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot—blow jobs don’t count. Where do you think you are, the oval office?”

He looked away, embarrassed. He couldn’t remember the last time a woman had embarrassed him until Charity had come along.

“I came here to work,” she said. “For a while, at least, I think it’s better if we keep our distance.”

“Okay. Yeah, all right, then.” It was what he wanted, wasn’t it?

Sort of.

“Which one can I use?”

He strode over and flipped a switch on the computer at the far end of the walnut counter. It didn’t take long for the screen to light up. He whirled a small, wheeled office chair over in front of the machine and Charity sat down.

“I have no idea where to start so I guess I’ll just plunge in.” She went on Internet Explorer and Refdesk.com came up, one of her favorite sites. In the Search box, she typed in
genealogy.
“I figure getting an overview is as good a place as any.”

“That’s what I’d do,” he said.

The list the search engine brought up on the screen was substantial: www.genealogy.com; familysearch.org; ancestry.com; genetree.com. Then there were breakdowns by nationality, sites like Irish Genealogy On-line; sites for marriage and birth records, or cemeteries and cemetery records at www.internment.net.

“This isn’t going to be easy,” she said.

“You actually thought it would be?”

“I guess not.” She clicked on a site that read
Genealogy for Beginners
and typed in her grandmother’s name, Pearl Ann Sinclair. A list of names appeared on the screen and Charity sucked in a breath.

“Call! Look at this! There are four different Pearl Ann Sinclairs but this one here’s my grandmother. Her maiden name was Ross before she married.”

He pulled up a wheeled stool and sat down next to her, wishing he wasn’t so glad she was there. “You sure it’s her?”

“Married February 2, 1945, to Richard Charles Sinclair. He was my grandfather. God, this is great.”

Great for her, Call thought, breathing in the floral scent of her shampoo. Not so great for him, since he was beginning to get hard just sitting next to her. He ought to get up, go into the other room, but her excitement was contagious. He was beginning to feel the thrill of the hunt himself.

“I’m calling my dad when I get home. I want to know everything he can remember about our family.”

“Good idea. Why don’t you call him from here? You can use my satellite phone.”

She looked up at him. “It’s pretty expensive, isn’t it?”

He cast her a look. “Trust me, I can afford it. You can use it anytime you want. Consider it a payback for the little side trip you took on my plane.”

She grinned. “Be nice to get something out of it besides a headache. Thanks.”

“By the way, we brought it back to Dawson—the plane, I mean. It took a couple of days but we finally got all the pieces here.”

“That’s great, Call. I hope you can get it fixed—not that I’m in any hurry to go up in the thing again.”

He didn’t really blame her. “The mechanic who’s working on it’s a guy named Bob Wychek. He’s the best there is, and in a place where there’s so much mining, you can always get metal work done. It’ll take a while, but eventually, she’ll be good as new.”

“Think you’ll be able to figure out what happened with the engine?”

“We’ll figure it out. We won’t stop looking until we do.”

Using Call’s satellite phone, Charity called her father at his office on the Boston University campus.

“Charity?” The minute he heard her voice, he went on instant alert. “Is something wrong, honey? You never call me here.”

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad.” She didn’t mention the plane crash. She knew he would worry and she didn’t want that. She would save the details of that particular adventure for when she got back home. “I’m working on a project and I was hoping you might be able to help.”

She told him she was researching her family tree and wanted to know the names of her relatives as far back as he could remember.

“I know a little about them, not all that much.” A little turned out to be his side of the family all the way back to his great great grandfather, Walter Sinclair, who had been born in the 1880s, but on his mother’s side, the Rosses, he knew his ancestors’ names only back as far as his great grandmother, Olga Conrads, born, he recalled, in April of 1902.

“The Sinclairs were Scots, but the Conradses were Norwegian. That’s where you got your fair skin and blond hair.”

“I remember you saying that when I was a kid. What about Mom’s side of the family? There’s Grandma and Grampa Whitcomb, of course.” Her mother’s parents, but they were no longer living. “I don’t remember anyone Mom might have mentioned further back.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about your mother’s side of the family. Your grandmother Whitcomb was a Doakes before she married. Your mom used to kid about being Irish. She thought that was pretty terrific. Tell you what—I’ll get out some of the old photo albums and see what’s written on the back of the pictures. There’s a bunch of old newspaper clippings, too. I’ll send you any information I come up with.”

“Why don’t you e-mail what you can? I’m borrowing a friend’s computer to help with the research. He can relay the message.”

“He?” her dad repeated, picking up on the word.

“My next-door neighbor.” She didn’t say,
my sexy next-door neighbor who is also my off-and-on lover.
“His name’s McCall Hawkins.”

“Why does that name sound familiar?”

Oh, God, she’d forgotten what a news junkie he was. “Long story, Dad.”

“What’s his e-mail address?”

“[email protected],” Call supplied.

She talked to her dad a little longer, briefly catching up on family news: her stepmother Tracy enrolling in night school to finish her master’s degree, and Charity’s sisters, Patience and Hope, both enjoying their summers, Patience working hard on the rodeo project she would start late next spring.

Ending the call, Charity went back to work, digging around the Internet for information on the Sinclairs and Rosses on her dad’s side, the Whitcombs and Doakeses on her mother’s.

For the next two hours, she studied dates and places of marriages, dates and places of births, hoping something interesting might turn up that would link her to the Yukon.

“Any luck?” Call asked, walking up behind her. She could smell his aftershave, something with a hint of pine, and the urge rose up to press her mouth against the side of his neck.

“Nothing so far,” she said, forcing herself to concentrate on the screen. “To inherit memories from someone, I’d have to be a direct descendant. The Gold Rush happened from 1897 to 1900, so my relative would have had to have been born somewhere around 1880 or before to be old enough to have gone. That would make him one of my great-great-grandparents.

Call sat down at his own computer. It didn’t take him long to design a form she could use for her work. He punched the print button and a long sheet of paper rolled out, a family tree with boxes for each set of parents, grandparents, great grandparents, etc. He handed her the paper. “The diagram goes back four generations.”

“I’m the fifth, right?”

“That’s right.”

She looked over the paper, thinking how few of the blanks she could fill in. It was typical of Americans to focus on the present and have little interest in the past. In England, families could trace their heritage back five hundred years.

“I’ll input this into the computer you’re using,” Call said. “You can add information or make changes as you go along.”

“Thanks, that’d be terrific.” A few minutes later, she was typing names into the blocks, putting in her mother and father, grandparents, sisters, aunts, uncles, anyone whose name might appear during her research.

She looked again at the printed sheet of paper. “To be roughly the right age to have made the trip—people, say … fifteen to thirty years old, there are eight sets of great-great-grandparents who qualify as possible memory donors. The bad news is, any family members I know about were born and raised in the East.”

“I guess the trick is to find out if you have any relatives who went west.”

Charity thought of the force that had compelled her to come thousands of miles to live in the wilds of the Yukon. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much she wanted the answer to be that she did.

“So what do you suggest?” Sitting in a cozy red leather booth at Dante’s, a sophisticated locals’ bar in L.A. and one of his favorite hangouts, Tony King talked to his inside man, Stan Grossman, on his cell phone.

“The guy lives out in the middle of nowhere,” Grossman said. “Anything could happen in a place like that.”

“Like a hunting accident, maybe?”

“Maybe, but it’s the wrong time of year. Guy might drown, though. ’Specially a guy who goes off by himself all the time. Lots of lakes around there. Fella could just disappear.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

“I need more time. I need to know his habits, what he does every hour of the day. A thing like this takes planning.”

“Fine, but don’t take too long. Something might break and once it does, everything’s going to get extremely messy.” Tony broke the connection, thinking of Peter Held and wondering what kind of progress the young chemist was making with his research. The fire in the lab had slowed him down but not nearly as much as they’d hoped. If Held discovered the combination that would lead to cheaper disk storage—and Tony knew he was close—he and Gordon were going to be in some very deep shit.

Held was the risk at present. Without him, Hawkins would be back where he was when Frank McGuire had died and it would take him some time to find another replacement.

Tony punched in a different set of numbers. Maybe it was time to make the threat to Held a little more personal. Tony knew just the guy to handle the job.

Saturday and Sunday, Charity spent most of the day pounding away on Call’s computer. For a while, he worked beside her, but he never stayed more than an hour before he shut down his machine and left the house.

She might have felt guilty for intruding on his oh-so-precious privacy if it weren’t for the way he kept looking at her. Whenever he glanced her way, she could see the hunger in his eyes, but there was something more, something deeper. She thought that in some secret part of himself he was glad that she was there.

The weekend days passed swiftly. In the afternoon, they took a break and went hiking up the trails behind Call’s house. In the evenings, she returned to her cabin, still not comfortable with the idea of sleeping with him again.

Not that she didn’t want to. The guy was a flat-out hunk and she was more than half in love with him. Just watching his long, rangy strides as he prowled the house made her want to drag him off to bed. But she had come to realize she wanted more from Call than just sex. She wanted a relationship, at least for as long as she stayed in the Yukon, wanted him to acknowledge he felt something for her beyond mere physical attraction.

On Monday she went to work on the Lily Rose thinking about him. Maude and Jenny arrived right on time, but Buck, usually even more punctual, didn’t show up at all.

“His boy, Tyler, come home from college for the weekend,” Maude said. “Maybe he stayed over or something.”

“Buck was in a foul mood all last week—not that his attitude is ever very good. Still, he seemed worse than usual. I wonder if it had something to do with his son.”

“Tyler’s a handful, I can tell ya. Spoilt rotten. Buck was making good money back when the kid was born and he bought Ty anything he wanted. He’s an even bigger bully than his dad and just as hard on women. He’s been goin’ to college for years, but I don’t think he’s ever gonna graduate. Just goes for the women and the fun.”

Charity looked up the hill, wondering if Buck’s son was the reason he hadn’t appeared. Eventually, they gave up waiting and simply went to work.

It was a long, hot day, the perfect sort to run the dredge, but Buck usually did the heavy lifting and moving so they decided to use the metal detector and do some panning instead. Charity was tired by the time Maude and Jenny left at the end of the workday. She thought of going over to Call’s but he would probably just leave and she couldn’t face his reticence again today.

Instead she sat down to read the new Max Mason novel,
Vengeance at Cascade Park,
that had just arrived, but eventually she grew restless and went outside to feed the squirrels. A little brown-and-white one with a long furry tail was her favorite. She named him Salty and spread unsalted sunflower seeds in front of the tree he lived in.

When he saw them, Salty set up a grateful chatter and scampered round and round the tree trunk. Charity laughed at his antics.

It was getting late, nearly 8:30, when she started back to the house. As she passed the storage shed, she saw that the door stood open. Certain she had closed it after they finished working, she walked over to inspect the latch.

It wasn’t broken, merely unfastened. Stepping inside to check things out, she gasped as a big, dark figure loomed out of the shadows.

“Buck!” Her heart thundered even as she felt a wave of relief. “Good heavens, you scared me half to death.” He moved toward her, stumbled over a wooden bucket, and nearly fell, and she realized he had been drinking. “God, you’re drunk as seven lords.”

“So what if I am,” he slurred. “What’s it to you?”

Charity straightened, not liking his tone. “It isn’t a damned thing to me—as long as you’re not on my property—which, in case you haven’t noticed, you are. You didn’t bother to show up for work. What are you doing here now?”

“I come for my drill. Left it here last Friday.” He held up the drill and stumbled closer and Charity took a step away.

“I think you had better go home.”

His big shaggy head came up. His nose and cheeks were red, his eyes heavy-lidded and bloodshot, his shirt buttoned crooked down the front. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m sick and tired of you tellin’ me what to do. Just like my wife, always naggin’, tryin’ to boss me around. I didn’t put up with it from her and I ain’t puttin’ up with it from you.” He took a threatening step toward her and for the first time, Charity felt a tendril of fear.

She was almost to the door of the shed. She thought about turning around and running flat-out back to the house, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.

Instead, she stood her ground. “If you want to keep your job, Buck, I’d suggest you leave.”

He set the drill down on the workbench. “That right? Well, you can take that job of yours and shove it up your tight little ass.” She hadn’t noticed him getting closer but suddenly he was towering above her.

She swallowed. “Fine, if that’s the way you want it.”

Buck gripped her arms, his big, blunt fingers digging into her skin. “I’ll tell you what I want. The same thing you give Hawkins. That’s all you women are good for.” He shoved her up against the wall, knocking down an old horse collar that clattered on the floor, and real fear streaked through her.

“Let me go, Buck—I’m warning you.”

Buck ignored her. “Just like Betty,” he muttered. “I’ll give you what I gave her.” Charity screamed as he dragged her away from the wall, tripped her with his foot, knocked her down on the floor of the shed, and came down hard on top of her. Pain shot up her spine and the air whooshed out of her lungs.

“Let … go … of me!” She tried to push him off her, but it was like trying to shove a ton of heavy ore. One of his big hands groped her breast, ripping her light blue tee shirt, while the other fumbled with the zipper on her jeans.

Her heart pounded with fear. This wasn’t about sex, she knew. Buck was drunk and angry, furious at the circumstances that forced him into a position he considered beneath him. If Tyler Johnson disliked women as much as his father, perhaps his arrival this weekend had pushed Buck over the edge.

His heavy weight pressed her into the rough plank floor. Charity worked to drag a breath of air into her lungs. “Let … me … go.” She didn’t wait any longer for him to comply, just brought her knee up hard between his legs.

Buck blocked the blow. She struggled, jerked one hand free, and raked her nails down his face, sending him into a fit of violent cursing. She could feel his erection pressing against her thigh and the bile rose in her throat. She felt him tugging on her zipper and started fighting harder, started to scream, though she knew no one could hear.

“Shut up!” Buck warned, slapping her hard across the face. “Goddamn women. You know you want it. All of you do.”

Really frightened now, Charity twisted left, then right, brought her knee up hard a second time, and this time the blow connected. Buck grunted in pain and hissed air through his teeth. “Damn … you …”

A shadow appeared in the doorway. “What the hell …?” Call’s deep voice rang into the shed and an instant later, Buck’s heavy weight jerked upward as Call hoisted the big man back on his feet. “You son of a bitch!”

Call hit him hard, a staggering punch in the stomach that doubled Buck over. Then a sharp blow to the jaw sent him reeling backward. Buck’s eyes went wide as his head cracked hard on an exposed two-by-four and he slid down the rough board wall like a big sack of grain.

Call stood over him, long legs braced apart, fists still clenched, his eyes boring into Buck’s slack face. For an instant, he just stood there. Then he released a shuddering breath, turned, and walked over to help her climb to her feet.