Chapter 32
Charlie couldn’t letherself think about Nick’s revelation. He had information about her father and he hadn’t shared it with her? He’d dug it up after he left Firelight Ridge the last time, an entire month ago. All this time, during all their conversations about her father, he hadn’t mentioned it. It felt like a betrayal.
And yet—he’d used that information at the perfect moment for maximum benefit to her and her father.
Crap, it was just too confusing for her to handle right now. She shoved it all to the back of her mind to deal with later.
Hardware store. Focus on that. Now that she knew Bulldog and April had lived there, she wanted to see that folder again and sort through those papers.
They found Lila just waking up, wrapped in a fuzzy purple bathrobe and knee-high socks. The smell of coffee brewing mingled with the aroma of aged barrels that always clung to the hardware store.
The sight of her friend made the world feel familiar again. Lila stood on tiptoe to hug Charlie. Ani was nowhere to be seen; she must be out with Molly.
“You’re just waking up? Are you okay?” Charlie murmured in her ear.
“I haven’t been sleeping well. Also, something happened. But I don’t want to tell Nick.”
Charlie turned to Nick and said stiffly, “Can you give us a minute?”
“Sure, I’ll…uh, check on Goldilocks.” He ambled over to the fish tank, while Lila tugged Charlie into her bedroom.
“I met Nick’s daughter,” she whispered. “And I got a strong feeling that something’s not right.”
Charlie rubbed the heel of her hand across her forehead. She trusted Lila’s intuition, no matter how vague, but would Nick? “Any specifics?”
“No. I’m sorry. I told you, I don’t sense things as strongly here. That’s why I was pretty shocked when I got that feeling with Hailey. Will you watch out for her? Promise?”
Charlie thought of Hailey back at the cabin. She had plans with Elias later. He was going to teach her how to handle a knife. Survival skills 101, she called it. Surely she’d be safe with Elias around.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell Nick?”
“He doesn’t know me. He’ll just think I’m imagining things. But it’s up to you,” she added quietly. “If you trust him, I trust him.”
Did she trust Nick? She didn’t know anymore. “Thanks for telling me, Lila. I’ll watch out for Hailey. Do you mind if we look at that old stash of papers I found behind the safe again?”
“Of course not. I love digging up stories from the old days.”
Charlie went into Lila’s bedroom and shifted the safe to the side. The folder was exactly where she’d left it. She brought it into the front room and emptied it onto the rug. As the three of them sorted through papers and photos, Charlie told Lila what they’d learned about Chadwick Tudor aka Bulldog.
“You know, that’s two tragic deaths tied to this hardware store,” Lila said. “Should I be worried?”
“Don’t even say that,” Charlie scolded her as she sorted through scraps of paper and documents. “If you get spooked, you can always stay with me at the lodge.”
“The lodge has bad vibes,” said Lila absentmindedly. She sat cross-legged on the floor to flip through an old photo album.
“Worse than murder?”
“Worse than murder, but I can’t put my finger on it.”
Charlie didn’t like the sound of that. Lila put aside the photo album and grabbed a handful of paperwork.
“Look at this!” Lila said triumphantly as she waved a yellowed document in the air. “This says Chadwick Tudor on it.”
“Oooh, jackpot.” Charlie leaned over to peer at it. “It looks like a will or something. What do you think, Nick?”
Lila angled the faded piece of paper so Nick could see it.
“It looks like it was notarized, but other than that, it’s handwritten.”
“I think they’re a lot more casual out here. Most everything was handwritten,” Lila explained. “Bear showed me his deed for The Fang, it’s in lovely cursive, from back when there was a notary here with really good handwriting.”
Charlie read aloud, filling in the blanks where she couldn’t make out the words. “‘In perpetuity, forthwith from the date of January tenth, nineteen seventy-nine, Chadwick Tudor III and Vasily Pyotr Petrov agree to equally and exclusively share all profits from any subsurface mining of Fire Peak.’ Wow. It’s notarized in the Borough of Fangtooth Gulch in the State of Alaska.”
They were all quiet, digesting that.
“Maybe that’s why Vasily is back,” Nick said slowly. “He wants to mine Fire Peak.”
“I bet April doesn’t want that.” Charlie glanced out the front bay window, but couldn’t catch a glimpse of Fire Peak from here. “This doesn’t say that he can mine it, just that he’d get half the profits. She’s the owner, after all.”
“Well, partially.” They both looked over at Lila, who held another old document. “They agreed to buy it together, April and Chadwick.”
Lila handed the faded piece of paper to Nick, who was closest to her. He scanned it, then read aloud, “April Whitfield and Chadwick Tudor III agree to equally share in the purchase of Fire Peak. Signed and dated, August ninth, nineteen seventy-eight.”
Charlie compared the two documents. “So in August, April and Chadwick decided to buy the property together. And in January, a month before Chadwick died, he and Vasily agreed to share the mining rights. But the property records list April as the owner. Did something change?”
“There could be other documents that are missing.” Nick scratched at the back of his neck. “Probably are, after all this time.”
“Well, according to the Borough of Fangtooth Gulch, April is the owner. That means she has to give the go-ahead for any mining. Good luck with that, Vasily.” Charlie skimmed her hand across the old document. “April keeps a lot to herself, but I know she cares about Fire Peak. She’d never want it to be mined.”
“That could explain the smoke bomb and so forth. Maybe Vasily’s trying to scare her, or threaten her.” Nick rubbed at his shoulder, which must still be sore. “I’d say these guys are very determined.”
“April doesn’t scare easy,” said Charlie. “But if that’s what’s going on, I wish she’d let us help her.”
Lila reached for her glass of water, then froze. “I just thought of something. Do you think these are the only copies of these documents? Maybe that’s why they’ve been trying to get in here. The raccoon! Maybe it was them searching for these papers. Vasily must have known they were there.”
“But why didn’t April take them with her when she moved out? Along with the rest of this shit? It was all packed into a folder, ready to go.” Charlie swept her hand at the scattered pile of papers.
“Maybe it was Bulldog’s folder, not April’s,” Nick suggested. “It either fell behind the safe or he hid it there.”
“Yes!” Charlie clapped her hands together, then grabbed the composition notebook she’d read during her hideout days. “I bet this was Bulldog’s journal. Nick, where’s that photo from Solomon’s camper?”
He found it on his phone and showed her. She compared the handwriting on the photo with that in the notebook.
“It’s the same person,” she said triumphantly, waving his phone in the air. “I knew it! Chadwick, aka Bulldog, wrote all these crazy journals, and he wrote on this photo. That must mean he took the photo, and that man must be Vasily. Now we know who to look for. I can put this photo into an aging program and know exactly what Vasily looks like today.”
“Nice.” Their gazes held, and for a moment she forgot that she was furious with Nick.
They rifled through the rest of the papers, but found nothing else helpful, other than a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad. Symbols were scribbled on it, along with some percentages. Fe was one, Mg, another. Weren’t those from the periodic table of elements? Fe meant iron, Mg magnesium.
She showed it to Nick. “I don’t recognize these other symbols, do you?”
“No, but Solomon might. Let’s talk to him next.”
“Agreed. I think we have enough for now.” Nick got to his feet, still holding the notepaper covered with symbols and the two documents.
Nick turned to Lila. “Is it okay if we take all this?”
“Of course, but be careful.”
His eyebrows lifted at her intense tone. “Sure. You be careful, too. You might want to stay somewhere else for a while.”
She shook her head. “Ani’s here with me, and I have Bear, too. I’ll be fine. It’s you guys I’m worried about. Both of you. All of you.”
They walked back to the rental cabin to pick up Nick’s car for their trip out to Solomon’s place. The atmosphere between them wasn’t nearly as icy as it had been before. Nothing like working on a mystery together, Charlie thought. But that didn’t mean she’d forgiven Nick. She didn’t know what it meant.
“What did Lila mean by ‘all of you,’” he asked her when they were out of earshot of the hardware store.
She bit her lip. Lila had left it up to her whether she told Nick or not. So what was it going to be?
When it came to Hailey, of course she trusted him. “Lila…senses things sometimes. It’s very real, but she doesn’t like people knowing about it.”
“Senses things…” The idea didn’t seem to shock him. “Danger, that kind of thing?”
“Yes. Since she came here, it hasn’t been happening as much. But now it has.”
“The other day in the breakfast bus,” he said sharply. “She saw Hailey and nearly fainted.”
“Yes. She can’t say what it was about, but she picked up on something.”
He launched into a flat-out run toward the cabin.
“It’s not necessarily immediate danger,” she called after him. “It’s broad daylight.”
“It’s almost always broad daylight here. What does that have to do with anything?” he said over his shoulder.
She didn’t want to run, not with her leg wound, but she picked up the pace and reached the cabin a few moments after him.
Hailey was working on a puzzle on the coffee table. She rolled her eyes while Nick set down new rules for her—no one except Elias was allowed in the house. Don’t go out alone. Either he or Elias had to be with her every time she left the house.
Charlie went out to Nick’s Jeep while they hashed that out. A third party didn’t seem helpful, although she would have advised Nick to be more open about the reason for the new rules.
If he’d been more open about what he’d done for her father, she’d appreciate it more.
She did appreciate it. But one thing kept bugging her. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to keep her from doing that job for Hobbs. Was there more to that part of the story?
Still, he’d taken care of the situationwithout her having to get her hands dirty. That was pretty amazing.
Looking a little worse for wear, Nick slid into the driver’s seat about ten minutes later. “I do not have the proper training for this teenager gig,” he growled as he started up the car.
“You’re doing just fine.” She patted his knee, then let her hand linger there for a microsecond before she took it away. “Also, thank you for not laughing off Lila’s abilities.”
He met her gaze, his going dark as the usual electric connection flowed between them. “I don’t know Lila well, but I trust you. Of course I’m going to take it seriously.”
Her heart squeezed. “Thank you.” She waved the slip of paper between her fingers. “Now how about some chemistry lessons?”
“We could probably give those,” he murmured as he steered the car along dusty Pioneer Boulevard.
She couldn’t disagree with that.
Solomon livedin a trailer that had seen better days, maybe sometime in the sixties. Rusty rigs were scattered nearby—old ATVs, snow machines, ancient trucks rotted down to their frames, and pieces of equipment Nick figured were for mining.
They sat around a fire pit where coals smoldered—to keep away the mosquitoes, Solomon explained as he pulled up lawn chairs for them all. This deep in the woods, they were voracious. Poor Charlie already had a bite swelling on her left cheek; he wished he could soothe it with a kiss, but that probably wouldn’t work as well as DEET.
Also, he wasn’t sure where he stood with her anymore.
It turned out that Solomon knew all about the elements listed on the notepaper. He’d been a chemistry teacher before he’d decided to make his fortune in mining.
“These are all what we normally see around here,” he said after scanning the paper. “Iron, magnesium, copper, traces of gold. But this one, I don’t know what this is doing here.” He flicked the piece of paper. “Ain’t no perilium in this area.”
“What’s perilium? I’ve never heard of that.” Nick didn’t remember much from his high school chemistry. There were probably plenty of elements he hadn’t heard of.
“Perilium’s a mineral, kind of like lithium. They’re experimenting with it in batteries for solar systems. It’s safer, doesn’t degrade. It’s good stuff.”
“Is it pretty valuable?”
“Probably. Or it will be. Right now everyone wants lithium, but perilium could be the next big thing.”
Nick caught Charlie’s eye. If this perilium existed around here, that would explain why there was so much interest from outsiders.
“What about Fire Peak? Does it have any perilium?” Charlie asked.
“Can’t say for sure, not having ever done a sample there. Fire Peak was always off-limits to us miners.”
“Why?”
“The Ahtna. It’s one of their sacred spots. That’s why April built the lodge where she did, on a lower slope, not near the peak. Before she dug a single post hole, she met with the Ahtna to get their blessing.”
Nick felt that familiar goose bump feeling that meant he was closing in on something important. “So the miners never went near Fire Peak?”
“Never did. But I never heard about no perilium anywhere around here.”
Nick reached into his pocket and extracted the plastic baggie with the shard from Charlie’s thigh. “Would you have the right equipment to test this and see if it’s perilium?”
Solomon pulled some peepers from his shirt pocket to take a look.
“I don’t have any reagent here, it’s out at my claim. But to me it looks like perilium. It’s one of the softer minerals, and see that silvery-white color? Oh yeah, that’s perilium, all right. Where’d you find it?”
They definitely had the old miner’s interest now.
“In my thigh,” Charlie explained.
“Your thigh? Perilium can be toxic. What was it doing in your thigh?”
“We think it was on the arrow I got shot with.” Charlie went a little pale.
“Did you feel a burning sensation?”
“Yes! It was terrible. It went away as soon as we got this out.” She shot Nick a panicked look. “Am I in trouble?”
“Well, it’s a small amount,” said Solomon. “You’re probably fine. Us miners, we’ve seen it all. Did you ever know Petey Brown?”
Charlie shook her head.
“He accidentally ate some sodium cyanide while panning for gold. He’s not with us anymore, RIP.” He crossed himself. Charlie didn’t look reassured, but at least she didn’t seem to be panicking.
“I was really lightheaded and woozy. Is that because of the perilium?”
“Could be.” He peered at the baggie again. “It’s a trace amount, so you don’t have to worry. If they’d intended to harm you—beyond shooting the arrow—they could have smeared it all over the arrowhead and then you might’ve had some problems.”
In Nick’s opinion, he sounded a little too gleeful about those possibilities. Were miners always so morbid?
“You’ve been really helpful, thanks.” He rose to his feet, ready to move on to the next phase of this investigation. April had some explaining to do.
But Solomon apparently had other ideas.
“Sit back down.”
The old miner pulled a pistol from his belt and pointed it at Nick. Nick didn’t move. He was busy analyzing that gun, which was so ancient it had a pearl inlaid handle and looked like it came from an auction house. What were the chances it actually worked?
Charlie tugged at his hand. “Sit down, Nick. Come on.” She sounded scared for him, and he appreciated that.
Also, an old gun might be even more dangerous than a newer, more accurate one. He sat back on the lawn chair.
“I’m gonna need to know everything about that little piece of magic you have there,” Solomon told them. “I don’t want to shoot you, I like you. But I’m a miner and if there’s perilium around here, I want to know where.”