Chapter 18
On Charlie’snext day off, she hitched a ride into town with the chef, Big Eddie, who liked to spend his days off drinking at The Fang. Eddie used to be a pro football player. A broken neck had ended his career, so he’d turned to his other passion, cooking.
He’d been cooking for a group of hunters when he first came to Alaska. Firelight Ridge had soothed his traumatized soul, or so he liked to croon over a sad banjo riff after the day’s shift was done.
Charlie loved hearing people’s stories about what brought them to Alaska. That made her think of the mysterious Bulldog. Had he come with April, or had they met here? The article hadn’t used the word “murder,” but they clearly thought something was suspicious, or why would they be asking for more information?
“Eddie, have you ever heard of someone named Bulldog?”
“I used to play with a tight end called Bulldog.”
“I mean, here. Locally. He lived here back in the seventies.”
“No, but I’m the wrong guy to ask. I only came here five years ago, and I’m always at that stove.”
“Who would know?”
“April knows everyone. Solomon, Pinky, Scooter, any of the old guys who hang out at The Fang. That was some crazy-ass shit the other day,” he added as his Toyota Tundra took the winding curves at twice the speed Charlie would have preferred. He had a titanium rod in his neck; she didn’t.
“Sure was. I’m glad April upgraded our sprinkler system.”
The day after the smoke bomb, a helicopter had delivered a technician who’d installed a system so expensive that all the staffers were still buzzing about it.
“Think she’s being paranoid?” Big Eddie asked.
“I don’t know. Did you see anything suspicious that day?”
“Maybe.”
She waited, gripping the edge of the passenger seat, while he navigated a hairpin curve.
“I went out back to dump a pot of pasta water over the basil. It’s been looking thirsty. I saw a couple coming up the back side, by the generators.”
“Guests aren’t allowed back there.”
“That’s what I told them. The girl smiled and said ‘sorry,’ Said they were interested in off-grid systems so they were checking out our generator.”
“What did they look like?”
“Dressed nice. Athleisure style. The high-tech stuff made in labs. She had an accent, don’t know where from.”
Charlie’s stomach lurched as he yanked the wheel to avoid a small creature scurrying across the road.
“I don’t know if it was suspicious, but nobody ever goes back by those generators,” he added.
That was a very good point. Most guests came for the views, for the way Fire Peak seemed to catch the sunset on its triangular point and light up the sky with it. Who would care about some run-of-the-mill generators in a shingled lean-to?
“You should tell that cop about it,” said Big Eddie.
“You mean Nick? He’s not a cop.”
“Close enough.”
“How is he ‘close enough’? You’re either a cop or you’re not a cop. There’s no ‘cop-ish’ category.”
“He seems cop-ish to me. Take it from a Black guy.”
Turned out, Big Eddie wasn’t the only one in town who held that view. Everywhere she went, people wanted to know about the smoke bomb incident, and all the conversations included Nick.
“So lucky there was a policeman who just happened to be having dinner,” said Kathy at the general store, where Charlie stopped in to pick up some tampons. “Imagine if he hadn’t been there. The entire place could have burned down. This is why I keep telling everyone we need an official fire station.”
“It was just smoke,” Charlie clarified as she dug out a handful of cash. “And he’s not a policeman.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Kathy said wisely. As always, the tiny Filipino store owner wore a black puffer vest and bright pink lipstick.
“Yes, but the fire was inside the…never mind. I don’t know how it worked, but Nick is definitely not a police officer.”
“Then why did he help me figure out who was breaking into my storage shed?” Kathy took her ten-dollar bill and tucked it into the register.
“Who was breaking into your shed?”
“That’s confidential police business.” Kathy wagged a finger as she gave Charlie her change. “No Wi-Fi today?”
“No, I’m good, I don’t need any overpriced internet access today.” Charlie grabbed her tampons off the counter and tucked them into her bag.
“Nick gets free Wi-Fi for solving my crime,” Kathy called after her.
Charlie rolled her eyes. Nick Perini had apparently deluded the entire town into thinking he was a legitimate crime-solving detective type.
As the general store’s screen door swung closed behind her, she remembered that she’d intended to call her father today. She never seemed to find time up at the lodge, so she set aside time on her day off.
The Fang sometimes had working Wi-Fi. Plus, she could say hi to Lila.
She headed that direction, slipping on her sunglasses against the brilliant June sunshine. Would she ever get tired of the way the summer days stretched one into the other, barely dipping into twilight in between? Maybe she could come back here next summer, then the summer after that. Why not, especially if both Lila and Molly were here?
The sound of a throat being cleared brought her up short just outside the Caribou Grill. She found herself face to face with Gunnar, the Viking stud-muffin auto mechanic. He wore mechanic’s overalls over…well, nothing, as far as she could tell. Muscles bulged in every direction. Even the grease marks on his skin seemed artfully placed to emphasize his physique.
Sadly, Gunnar was frowning at her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were running from the police?”
“Excuse me?”
“That day you showed up in Molly’s BMW. You were running from the law.”
Charlie lost the last bit of her patience. “Nick is not the law! He’s just a guy. He’s not a police officer, not then and not now.”
Gunnar just shook his head at her. “Then why did he get hired to set up a security system at the airstrip?”
“I don’t know. Why does the airstrip need a security system? Did something happen?”
“New planes have been showing up, with pilots no one knows. That’s all. Couple of the long-timers got together and decided to install a camera.”
“Well, Nick can certainly handle that. But he’s not a cop, and I wasn’t running from the law, and anyway, where’s your outlaw spirit?”
New planes showing up…that was interesting. That might be worth mentioning to not-a-cop Nick.
By the time she got to The Fang, she’d lost count of the jobs Nick had apparently taken on since he’d arrived with his daughter. The man was booked and busy. He’d probably done nothing with the smoke bomb case, which meant she could gloat over how much more information she’d gathered than he had.
Smiling at that prospect, she slid onto a stool at the bar. Lila was busy pouring Martha her usual glass of sherry. As soon as she was done, she came over to Charlie to say hi.
Charlie saw right away that something was bothering Lila. “Uh oh, what’s happened?”
“It’s Ani.”
Instantly, Charlie forgot everything except her closest friend. She adored both Molly and Lila, but she and Ani were especially close because they both still lived in Indiana. In a way, the two of them were opposites. Ani had stayed in Barlow, married soon after high school, devoted herself to her husband and their dreams of having a family. Charlie had done none of that. But she still adored Ani. “What happened?”
“She filed for divorce.”
Charlie sucked in a breath, since she’d been waiting for something like this for a long time. They all had, all of Ani’s friends who loved her and had watched her marriage crumble into misery. “How is she?”
“I don’t know. I told her she should come back here so we could spoil her, but I didn’t hear back.” Lila set a glass of her favorite gin-and-lime in front of her. “I’m worried about her. This is such a huge change in her life. You should try to talk her into coming out.”
Charlie traced a pattern on the bar top, pulling her finger through a stray drop of water. “That won’t work. On the plane back to Indiana, the last time we came here, we had a fight. I told her she should kick John out. She told me she had to do it her way and that I had some nerve talking about relationships given my forever-single status. We barely said goodbye.”
Charlie sipped her drink, noting that it was mostly lime and soda, a subtle message from Lila that it was too early to be drinking on a Sunday. Point taken.
“That’s two reasons for her to come here, then,” said Lila cheerfully. “So we can spoil her and so you can make up.”
Charlie laughed at her ever-optimistic friend. “The sunshine bomb strikes again.”
At the word “bomb,” Lila’s smile shifted. “I heard about what happened at the lodge. That must have been scary. And Nick was such a hero, throwing his jacket over the flames like that.”
Charlie sighed and gave up on correcting the record. This story was taking on a life of its own. It wouldn’t be the first wildly exaggerated Firelight Ridge legend. “Who do you think threw that thing?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Maybe you sensed something or someone.”
Lila tucked a flyaway strand of her white hair behind her ear. Charlie noticed strands of silver tinsel woven here and there. Nice touch. Lila had very creative ways of playing with her hair. White was such an easy color to work with. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”
“Sometimes it works that way.”
“It doesn’t work that way on demand. Besides, it’s different here. Something about the mountains makes things more quiet in there.” Lila tapped her temple. “My theory is that it’s due to the mineral makeup of this area.”
“What’s the mineral makeup?”
“Well, there used to be a copper mine, so there must be copper. There’s some gold, enough for panning. I believe there might be high levels of manganese too. I haven’t researched it, it’s just a theory.”
Charlie tried to hide her skepticism. Why would minerals under the surface affect Lila’s intuition?
“You’re skeptical.”
Apparently Lila hadn’t lost all her intuition.
“A little,” Charlie admitted. “It seems far-fetched.”
Lila propped her elbows on the bar. “Think about it. Every mineral has a different magnetic frequency, right? Maybe some frequencies interfere with whatever it is I pick up on. I mean, as far as I know there’s no official scientific explanation for my weirdness.”
“What weirdness?” Bear appeared behind Lila, a case of liquor resting comfortably on one shoulder. The man was built like a brick shithouse. Charlie didn’t even know what that meant, but the phrase popped into her mind every time she saw Bear. He was just a huge guy who towered over everyone else. She would have been attracted to him, but she went for more verbal guys, ones she could banter with. More like…everyone’s favorite heroic smoke-bomb smotherer.
Besides, she’d caught that glint in his eye when he looked at Lila.
“Oh, my uh, you know, the hair,” Lila stammered as she turned to help him unload the case. “It turned white overnight.” She shot a pleading glance at Charlie. Message received. Lila didn’t want Bear knowing about her intuitive abilities.
“It was really strange,” Charlie chimed in. “We had a slumber party for her birthday, right before we were all headed off in different directions after high school. We stayed up all night dancing like lunatics, watching movies, laughing, crying, and when we woke up the next morning, boom.” She snapped her fingers. “Lila’s hair was pure white. It really suits her, though, doesn’t it?”
Bear grunted and pulled a bottle from the case.
Maybe that was his version of a compliment. Or just his version of a grunt, who knew?
“Bear, have you ever heard of someone named Bulldog?”
Bear’s face shuttered. Interesting. Generally speaking, Bear didn’t talk much anyway. But his reaction was still noteworthy.
She tried something else. “Have you noticed any unusual people in the bar lately? Like, a couple with high-tech outdoor gear?”
He cocked his huge head to one side. “People come, they drink, they leave. That’s all I know.”
“Sometimes they fight,” Charlie pointed out.
“Then I make them leave.”
It took a special person to maintain control in a wild west outpost like The Fang; obviously Bear could handle it.
Charlie gave up. She had more important things to take care of today anyway. “How’s your Wi-Fi working today?”
“I got two whole bars right outside the back door,” Lila told her. “It was a Wi-Fi miracle.”
Other people had heard about the miracle too, and a small cluster of communication-starved residents were clustered outside the screen door of The Fang. Charlie put her earbuds in so she didn’t have to listen to anyone else’s conversation. As she waited for her father to answer the phone in his hospital room, she tilted her head back and let the sunshine kiss her face. The sweet warmth of it sent honey through her veins. What was this weird feeling? A kind of relaxation, an ease from tension. For the first time in years, she wasn’t calling her father in prison. He was in a safe place, surrounded by people taking care of him.
Her father didn’t answer, but eventually a nurse picked up. “Hi Charlie.”
“Hi, how is he?”
“He’s with his brother. They went down to the cafeteria.”
A chill rippled through Charlie’s veins. Maybe she’d misheard. Maybe she meant “lawyer.” “I’m sorry, did you say he’s with his brother? What…when did he get there?”
“I’m not here to keep track of his social life. You should ask him.”
“Yes. You’re right. I’ll do that. Thank you.” Numbly, Charlie ended the call.
Her father didn’t have a brother.
A brother would have been a wonderful thing for her father to have all these years, but he was an only child, just as “only” as she was.
So who the hell had showed up at her father’s hospital and pretended to be his brother? And why?
Should she get on a plane right now and go find out what was going on?
Her phone buzzed with an incoming call. She’d been so wrapped up in her worry that she nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was her father.
“Listen, bunny.” He was panting, his breathing ragged. “Someone from Hobbs just came to see me. They want to talk to you, but I refused to help them. I’d rather go back to prison than let them have anything to do with you.”
She hadn’t heard him so upset in a long time. This couldn’t be good for his emphysema. “Take a breath, Dad. What exactly did he say?”
“He said Hobbs dropped their objection to my release, and that I should be grateful for that. All they want in exchange is for me to set up a meeting with you. But I won’t. Don’t do it, Charlie. Promise me. Promise you’ll have nothing to do with them.”