Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery (15 page)

Hunter found out from Yukon Sally’s young nephew where the girl and her grandmother lived. It wasn’t hard to find, given there weren’t many roads in Eagle, so it wasn’t even possible to take the wrong one.

“Her grandmother’s not real friendly,” said the young man, “but Goldie’s easy to talk to.”

Hunter pulled in beside two vintage pickup trucks, one of which was a brown and cream colored Ford with Yukon plates. He did a double take, but told himself it would be too much of a coincidence to run across the person of interest Bart was looking for here.

The girl named Goldie and an older woman, presumably her grandmother, were watching him walk toward them, the girl on her feet, the woman seated at a plank table in an outdoor kitchen. A dog – possibly a Malamute – approached cautiously and sniffed at his ankles. He must have passed the sniff test, as the dog turned around twice and, with a low grunt, dropped into a slight depression in the dirt.

“You found us,” said Goldie. “Gran, this is that man I was telling you about, the one from the lodge.”

“You must be Betty Salmon.” Hunter entered the kitchen and extended his hand to the grey-haired woman seated at the table. Her hair was pulled back into a long braid. The woman hesitated, then put a limp hand into his before pulling it away again. The skin on her hand was rough and dry. “My name is Hunter Rayne. Please excuse me for interrupting your breakfast.”

“Coffee?” said the girl. “I think there’s some left.”

“That would be nice. Thank you.” Hunter hoped that him sharing their table would help to put the older woman at ease. She appeared to be in her late sixties, maybe older, thin and muscular, with an appealing albeit stern face that had obviously spent many years in the sun and wind. “You’ve got a nice little hideaway here.” He nodded at the garden on the south side of the house. “Making the most of the long days, I see. What grows well for you here?” He thanked Goldie as she set down a tin mug half full of black coffee. He saw an open tin of evaporated milk and opted to drink it black.

Betty Salmon seemed to warm up a little during several minutes of small talk, but he could see it wouldn’t be easy to get a smile out of her. She spoke with the minimal inflection typical of northern natives, a low, nearly monotone pitch with a distinct and abrupt ending to each word.

Since talking to Goldie, he had debated what the best approach would be. Sometimes it helped to mention his association with the RCMP, and sometimes it didn’t. Not everybody felt comfortable with the police. For some reason – perhaps her guarded expression – he felt the woman would be more likely to talk to a harmless Cheechako than a former cop.

“I was telling your granddaughter that years ago, while I was living in Whitehorse, I met a young woman named April. Goldie here is the spitting image of her and I just had to find out if they were related.” When she didn’t respond, he continued, “Goldie said she doesn’t know much about her mother, but she thought her name might have been April. Could it possibly be the same April I knew from Whitehorse?”

Hunter sensed that Goldie beside him was holding her breath. There was no response, so he continued. “Her last name was Corbett, and she had driven up here from Michigan in a Volkswagen Beetle with flowers painted on it, sort of a hippie car.”

Betty bit her lip and looked away, then took a deep breath and nodded.

“That’s her?”

She nodded again. “April Corbett,” she whispered.

“April Corbett.” Goldie echoed her grandmother’s whisper, then louder, “My mother’s name is April Corbett.”

“Yes,” said Betty. “I only knew your mother, never your father.”

“What happened to her, Gran? Where is she?”

“I don’t know, child. I told you. I just don’t know.”

Hunter sipped at his coffee and hoped he could find out more just by listening. When he realized it wasn’t going to happen, he said, “Where did you meet April, Betty? Last time I saw her was in the summer of 1972 in Whitehorse, but I’d heard she went to stay with a fellow around Johnson’s Crossing.”

There was the hint of a sad smile on Betty’s face as she kept her eyes on Goldie.

“Gran? Where did you meet my mother? Where did she go? Did she tell you anything about my father?”

Hunter could feel the girl’s desperation and briefly regretted creating what was obviously a very painful situation for both of the women. He reminded himself that, as a homicide investigator, he’d had to ask much tougher questions than these when interviewing family members of murder victims. “When did you last see April? It must have been after 1972. When I knew her, she didn’t have a daughter.” Or had she? He had to admit she may not have wanted him – or anyone in Whitehorse – to know.

“I was born in 1973.” Goldie turned to Hunter. “On the first day of the year.”

Betty shook her head.

“I wasn’t?”

“I don’t know your real birthday, but it was early that winter, weeks before the shortest day. After you started school, you wanted to know when your birthday was. I picked January first because I thought the first day of the year would be lucky for you.”

“No birth certificate?” asked Hunter. “She’d have needed one to start school.”

“They let her start school in Eagle without one. I never had a birth certificate myself. I told them that her mother had taken it, and I was trying to get a copy, then everyone forgot.”

“Did her mother really have it?”

“How could she? Goldie was born in the bush.” Again that sad smile at Goldie. “Did you ever wonder why I’ve never left Eagle? Outside you need government papers.”

“Tell me more about my mother.”

The older woman took a deep breath. “It will be hard for you to hear, child.”

“Please, Gran. I have to know.”

“I was living in that cabin not far from Hootalinqua. You know,” she said to Goldie, “the one we call the snowshoe cabin. It’s upriver in Canada, north of Lake Laberge. I was down at the river getting water – it was before freeze-up – and I heard a woman’s voice cry out. She was calling ‘Help me, please, help me’. I put in my canoe, and I let it drift with the current until I came to where she was. She was huddled against a spruce tree beside the river, shivering and crying, with a tiny baby – you, child – under her coat.

“She had big purple bruises on her face, one eye swollen almost shut, and a lip like a balloon. She started to cry when she saw me. She said she didn’t think anyone would hear her, and she thought she would die there, and her baby with her. She said she was trying to reach Whitehorse, but she had taken a canoe down the Teslin River from somewhere near Johnson’s Crossing. I don’t know how she survived. It’s an easy river, but it must have taken her days. And it wasn’t taking her anywhere near Whitehorse. When she saw she’d reached the Yukon River, she knew she was done for. She was cold and dead tired and had nothing left to eat. She would have died. You would have died, if I hadn’t come for water just when she cried out.”

Betty Salmon took another deep breath before continuing. Hunter didn’t move, trying not to distract her from her story, afraid she would change her mind.

“You look so much like her, that when I see her bruised face in my mind, it turns into you.” She reached for Goldie, and the young woman grasped her hand in both of hers and squeezed it. Both women now had tears spilling down their cheeks.

“With what strength she had left, she helped me get my canoe upriver to where the trail to my cabin was. First I carried the baby – you – to the cabin and wrapped you in a blanket. You were very cold and weak, but strong enough to cry like a lost pup.” This brought a rare smile from Betty. “Then I helped your mother up the trail. She had a sack of her things tied around her middle, and I took it from her and tied it around myself. She couldn’t walk without my help, but I got her to the cabin. I stripped her down, and tucked her in beside you. She had bruises everywhere.” She shook her head, as if to shake the image out of her mind. “You tried to suck on her but she had run out of milk, so you began to cry again. I fed the fire to heat the cabin, gave her warm tea and soup, just a little at a time, and by night time she was able to feed you again.” Her voice cracked as she said, “You were so tiny, but such a fighter even then.”

Hunter was surprised that this woman, who appeared tough as an old boot on the surface, showed so much emotion in relating this story. “You saved their lives,” he said. She was right. The fact that this young woman, Goldie, was here today depended on Betty being at the river at exactly the right time. Not for the first time, he reflected that a ‘mere’ coincidence was anything but ‘mere’. He’d seen many supposed coincidences create major triumphs, or sometimes tragedies. Hunter wouldn’t call himself a religious man, but he often had a gut feeling that something, or someone, god-like had a hand in creating such events.

He knew he could have rushed the conversation, gotten into interrogation mode and asked where April Corbett had gone and when. In spite of his strong desire to find out what had happened to April, he was beginning to feel like a voyeur. What these two women were experiencing was intensely personal as well as highly emotional; there was no urgency to him finding out, and he didn’t belong here at this moment. What Betty Salmon had to say could very well be relevant to the cold case from the bloody cabin on the Teslin River, but it was almost twenty-five years ago and another day would make no difference. He would wait until Goldie had gone to work at the lodge, and return to speak with Betty alone.

He stood, and the two women looked at him, surprised, almost as if they had forgotten he was there. “May I come see you again later?” He addressed his question to the older woman. She nodded almost imperceptibly, her face without expression. He smiled gently, nodded his thanks and walked away.

Betty felt wrung out. She had kept the secret of Goldie’s mother, and their arrival in her life, for so long, it had been like dredging gold nuggets from the rocky river bottom to bring those memories back to the surface. Yet now she felt strangely peaceful. She had always known that this day would come. She had promised herself to tell Goldie the story before she – Betty – was no longer able. She was relieved that it was over, but had to ask herself if the spirits had sent the man from the lodge to make it happen because it would soon be that time, because soon Betty would no longer be able to tell the story. That thought did not disturb her peace. Maybe it was time.

Goldie had listened intently, holding Betty’s hand in both of her own young hands, their smooth skin a contrast to Betty’s veined and wrinkled skin, the slender perfect fingers so unlike her knobby, crooked, arthritic ones. She didn’t ask any questions until the end, when she asked about the photograph she’d found in the book of poetry. Betty had never read the book. Her evenings were spent on useful things like beadwork and sewing. But that book had been important enough to Goldie’s mother that the poor girl had kept it with her even as she struggled along the banks of the Yukon, trying to save her baby.

Betty rose silently and went to the cabin where she pulled up a board in the floor near her bed. There, wrapped in old newspaper, she had hidden the book and the photograph April had left for her so many years ago. A mother bear and her baby. It was somehow not right that the note on the back was from a mother who was abandoning her baby, something a mother bear would never do. Any mother who would abandon her baby had no right to expect that baby back. Betty felt a pang of guilt. What wasn’t in the book was a letter, with a return address of Seaside, Oregon, postmarked in the spring of 1974.

As much as she tried to pretend it had never existed, she could still remember the way her gut twisted when she first picked the letter up at General Delivery in Carmacks. Goldie, then about eighteen months old, had been snug in a carrier strapped to her back. Betty felt the baby’s little fingers playing with her long braid. She had taken the letter back to her cabin, afraid to open and read it. That evening, watching little Goldie sitting on the bed, playing with a rabbit skin doll Betty had sewn for her, she’d grabbed the letter and opened the door of the stove, prepared to throw it in unopened. Instead she hid it beneath the cabin floor. She had never read it.

“This was your mother’s,” she said, handing the book to Goldie, who stood up as she approached.

Goldie held the book with both hands, as though she were afraid it would break if she dropped it. “Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass,” she read aloud.

Betty nodded. “She would read it from time to time. The picture’s inside.”

Goldie sank slowly back to the bench and opened the book, almost reverently, to look for the picture.

A good mother doesn’t leave her baby, Betty thought again. “I’ve got more planting to do,” she said as she walked away. She still wasn’t sure if she was sorry she’d shared information about April with Goldie. She still had secrets, and she always would.

She picked up a wooden box of garden tools from the lean-to beside the house and was about to go into the cabin for the old biscuit tin that held her collection of seeds when she saw Orville emerge from the shadows of the tree-lined trail. He motioned to her to come closer.

“Was that the man asking questions about Goldie’s mother? Is he with the police?” There was an intensity in his eyes that seemed out of keeping with the nonchalance of his voice. She realized he must have been watching them from the shelter of the woods.