Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (2 page)

There’s a land where the mountains are nameless

And the rivers all run God knows where.

There are lives that are erring and aimless

And deaths that just hang by a hair.

There are hardships that nobody reckons

There are valleys unpeopled and still.

There’s a land—how it beckons and beckons

And I want to go back, and I will.

—Robert W. Service

By the time the plane taxied to the gate and the passengers dispersed at the Whitehorse Airport—Canadian time 3:09 P.M.—Charity had been in the air eleven grueling hours. Her neck had a kink the size of a hen egg, her back ached, and her mouth was so dry she couldn’t spit if she had to. God, she hated flying.

She consoled herself with the fact that she had arrived safe and sound. “Cheated death again,” she whispered when the wheels hit the ground and she was still in one piece. The airport just north of town was small but appeared to be well run, or so she thought as she collected the first of her bags off the conveyor belt.

Unfortunately, the second bag—the one with her makeup, toothbrush, vitamins, nail file, and facial cleansers—failed to arrive. Realizing she was the last person left in the baggage claim and the conveyor belt had stopped moving, she wearily trudged over to the counter and began to fill out the necessary forms.

“Be sure to put down where you’ll be staying,” said the clerk behind the counter, a middle-aged woman with thinning, mouse-brown hair and a bored expression. “We’ll get the bag to you as soon as it comes in, eh?”

It was the Canadian “eh?” that made her grin. She was there. She had made it to Whitehorse, first stop in her wilderness adventure. That was all that mattered.

She signed the form, thanked the woman, and made her way out to the front of the building to look for the taxi stand. As she stood at the curb, staring out at the vast expanse of open space around the airport, Charity’s heart slowly sank. If there
were
any regular taxis—maybe not in a town of less than twenty thousand—they had left with the rest of the passengers. Instead, parked at the curb was a battered Buick at least ten years old with a rusted-out tailpipe and oxidized blue paint.

“Need a ride, lady?” The driver spoke to her through the rolled-down window on the passenger side of the car. He had a large, slightly hooked nose, dark skin, and straight black hair. In Manhattan he could have been Puerto Rican, Pakistani, Jamaican, or any of a dozen myriad nationalities. Here it was clear the man was an Indian. First Nation, they called them up here.

My first real Indian.
She barely stopped herself from grinning. “I’m staying at the River View Motel. Can you take me there?”

“Sure. Get in.” No offer to help with her luggage, no opening the door for her.

Charity jerked the handle, hoisted in her black canvas bag, and climbed into the backseat, wincing as one of the springs poked through the cracked blue leather and jabbed into her behind. She shifted, hoped she hadn’t torn her good black slacks. She hadn’t brought that many street clothes along. “The motel’s on the corner of First and—”

“Believe me, lady, I know where it is.” The car roared away from the airport, windows down, the icy, mid-May wind blowing her straight blond hair back over her shoulders.

She had started off this morning with the long, blunt-cut strands pulled up in a neat little twist, a few wispy tendrils stylishly cut to float around her face. But the pins poked into the back of her head as she tried to get comfortable in the narrow airline seat and she finally gave up and pulled them out, letting her hair fall free.

By the time the dilapidated car reached downtown Whitehorse, she looked as if she had been through a Chinook, northern slang for windstorm only not nearly so warm. The driver, a thick-shouldered man wearing a frayed, red-flannel shirt and a worn pair of jeans, took pity and carried her bag into the motel lobby while she dug some of the money she’d exchanged in Vancouver for Canadian currency out of her little Kate Spade purse. The bag was too small for the sort of travel she had undertaken, she had already discovered. She wished she had brought something bigger along.

Something that would have held her now-lost makeup kit and toothbrush.

Charity paid the driver and watched the battered old Buick pull away, then turned to survey her surroundings. As small as it was—a pin dot compared to Manhattan—Whitehorse was the capital of the Yukon Territory. According to the books she had read, the city had been founded during the Klondike Gold Rush when tens of thousands of prospectors journeyed by ship to Skagway, Alaska, then climbed the mountain passes to the headwaters of the Yukon River.

In the downtown area, a lot of the old, original, false-fronted buildings from the late 1800s still lined the street, making it look like something out of a John Wayne movie. The roads were narrow, and boardwalks ran in front of the stores, just as they did back then.

Standing on First across from the wide Yukon River, Charity thought of how many years she had wanted to come here and her throat clogged with emotion. She had told Jeremy she wanted an adventure. She had told that to her colleagues and friends. But only her father and her sisters knew that coming to the Yukon had been a lifelong dream.

Since she was a little girl, Charity had been fascinated by tales of the North. Over the years, she’d watched dozens of black-and-white reruns of
Sergeant Preston of the Yukon
. She’d read Robert Service poems until she knew them by heart, and cried through Jack London’s wilderness stories.

Why that particular moment in history had touched her so profoundly, Charity couldn’t say. Some people dreamed of visiting the Eiffel Tower. Some yearned to see the pyramids of Egypt. Charity wanted to see the snow-capped mountains and deep green forests of the North.

And after years of waiting, at last she was here.

Charity smiled and returned her thoughts to getting settled in. After she checked into the motel, she would find a drugstore, buy herself a toothbrush, then get some sorely needed sleep. She still had more than three hundred miles to travel before she reached her destination, Dawson City. In an isolated place like the Yukon, that could be a very long way.

She was a little nervous about the SUV she had leased. She’d been living in Manhattan for years. She rarely drove, and never anything as big as an Explorer. Still, with any luck at all, she would get there tomorrow.

Charity could hardly wait.

“Welcome to Dawson City, Ms. Sinclair.” The real estate agent’s name was Boomer Smith, a short, bald, heavyset man whose smile seemed permanently fixed on his face.

Smith Realty had been named in
The Wall Street Journal
article and she had found the company afterward on the Internet. Yesterday morning, once her second bag had been found and delivered to her motel and she had picked up her rental car, she had called the office from a gas station along the Klondike Highway—one of the two or three she had seen in the entire three hundred and thirty-five-mile route!

She and Smith had been scheduled to meet at his downtown office on her arrival in Dawson late yesterday afternoon, but the black Ford Explorer began having carburetor problems outside a place called Pelly Crossing, sort of a wide spot in the road, and it had taken several hours for the attendant at Selkirk’s Gas, Bar, and Grocery to fix it.

By the time Charity reached Dawson, her back aching and her eyes burning from so many hours behind the wheel, it was raining. It was dark and cold and all she wanted to do was find a place to sleep. She bought a slice of pizza at a restaurant called The Grubstake and checked into the Eldorado Hotel. It wasn’t until the following morning that she actually got a look at the town.

“Well, what do you think of Dawson City?” Boomer’s words conjured a memory of her first glimpse of town through the windows of her motel room: a gold-rush-era city like something out of a paperback western. Muddy, unpaved streets lined with wood-frame, false-fronted, Old West buildings bordered by weathered, uneven board sidewalks. It was a little like Whitehorse, but smaller, and everything here looked older, as if Dawson had stubbornly endured rather than give in to change.

In fact, the place looked a great deal as it must have a hundred years ago and just thinking about it made Charity smile.

“It’s quite a town,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a city that still had dirt streets.”

“We try to keep things authentic. This town is special, you know. Chock-full of history. This is the way Dawson looked during the Klondike Gold Rush and we try our best to keep it that way.”

He motioned her over to his cluttered oak desk and Charity sat down in a slightly rickety, straight-backed chair. Like most of the town, the office was done in the style of the late 1800s, with oak-paneled walls and hooked rugs, and kerosene lamps sitting around for decoration here and there.

They went through the necessary paperwork, but most of it had already been taken care of through the mail. “I believe I told you on the phone the equipment and furniture was minimal. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what’s still there.”

“Yes, you explained that.”

“Good, then I guess we’re all set. Mrs. Foote should be here any minute. I sent an associate out to her place yesterday after you called to say you wouldn’t be here until today. Maude doesn’t have a phone.”

“I see.” And she was actually beginning to. Coming to Dawson was like stepping back in time a hundred years, and apparently some of the people in the area still lived as they did back then.

“Ah, here she comes now.”

The bell rang above the door as Maude Foote pushed her way in and Charity stood to greet her. She was older than Charity had expected, a woman perhaps in her early seventies, her wrinkles smoothed a little by the extra pounds she carried. She was at least four inches shorter than Charity, who stood five-foot-six, but the woman walked with her back straight and kept her shoulders squared.

“You must be Charity Sinclair.”

“That’s right.” Charity smiled and extended her hand, liking the woman’s straightforward manner. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Foote.”

“Maude’ll do. Been called that round these parts for nigh on fifty years.” Maude looked her up and down, taking in her designer jeans and the sweatshirt with the red-checked collar. “So what makes a city girl like you come all the way from New York to Dawson?”

Charity shrugged as if she wasn’t really sure—which, in fact, she wasn’t. “It’s kind of a long story. Let’s just say I wanted a change of pace. I wanted to get away from the city and experience a different sort of life.”

“It’s different, all right. But you ain’t the first greenhorn to come here lookin’ for gold, and it’s for sure you won’t be the last.”

Boomer Smith had recommended Maude Foote as someone who might be able to help her get started in her mining endeavor. Maude had prospected Dead Horse Creek, where the claim was located, for the last forty years and lived on a piece of property just down the road from the one Charity had purchased.

“Whatever my reasons for coming,” Charity said, “the fact is I’m here. I intend to make the gold claim I purchased pay for itself. The question is, are you interested in helping me?”

Eyes a watery shade of blue took in the straight blond hair Charity had pulled back and secured with a tortoiseshell clip at the nape of her neck, traveled down her jean-clad legs to her brand-new Hi-Tech hiking boots.

“You got ‘city gal’ stamped all over you, but I guess you’ll do. Money you offered is more than fair and I got nothin’ better to do. ’Sides, that claim you bought ain’t never really been worked. We just might find ourselves some gold.”

Charity bit back an urge to whoop out
Yippee!
This whole thing was crazy from beginning to end and yet she had never felt more alive, more sure that in coming on this adventure she had done exactly the right thing.

“Mr. Smith also mentioned a man named Johnson who might be willing to help us. He said you would speak to him for me. Has he agreed to take the job?”

“Buck Johnson owns the property that borders yours to the north. He’s been dredging for gold for twenty-odd years. Early on, he had considerable luck, but not lately. He knows what he’s doin’ and he needs the money. He says he’ll sign on.”

She bit back a grin. “Great. When do we start?”

“I ain’t been out to the Lily Rose since old Mose Flanagan packed up and moved. It’ll probably take some rightin’ to get the place in order. We’d best pick up supplies before we head out of town. Might not get back here for a while.”

At Maude’s instruction, they stopped at the Dawson City General Store to buy groceries, cleaning supplies, and bedding, including sheets, towels, and blankets. They bought a four-place set of dishes, silverware, pots, pans, and utensils. Maude suggested she buy an air mattress till they found out what sort of bed was there—if any. They would pick up whatever else they might need after Charity had seen the cabin and what was inside.

Once the place was livable, they could talk to Buck Johnson, decide what equipment they would need to start the dredging operation.

As they loaded their purchases into the back of the Explorer, Charity found herself grinning. Her adventure had truly begun. She couldn’t wait to see her new home.

McCall Ryan Hawkins paused at the edge of a line of firs at the top of the rise and slung his backpack down on the ground. Below him, Dead Horse Creek looked no bigger than a narrow white ribbon, tumbling over boulders and winding through rocky crevices on its way down the hill.

Call squinted through the binoculars that hung from a strap around his neck. From where he stood on the border of his wooded, two-thousand-acre property not far from King Solomon Dome, he could see old man Flanagan’s dilapidated cabin perched just above the creek.

The place was even more run-down than it was before ol’ Mose left. One of the front-porch steps had a hole punched through it and a shutter tilted down beside the window, creaking in the wind.

Funny how forlorn the place looked. Though Call and ol’ Mose had never gotten along, so much silence seemed odd somehow. The two of them had argued over everything from Mose’s decrepit mule straying onto Call’s property to the noise the old fool’s muffler-less pickup made rattling down the gravel road and the dust he managed to create that filtered through every window in Call’s house. Call had been damned glad to see the old man go.