Chapter 12
12
The snowmobile that Gunnar had lent him was an Arctic Cat ZR 8000, with a long seat that could hold two people. It could theoretically go as fast as a hundred and fifty miles per hour, though Lachlan stuck to a moderate speed, which was still pretty damn fast when you were flying across the snow with the wind in your face.
Lachlan loved it.
While he usually liked to take his time and study things carefully—being a scientist and all—when it came to anything snow-related, he was a speed demon.
“Tell me if I’m going too fast,” he hollered to Maura. Her blue cashmere scarf was flying behind her and the nip of the cold wind brought bright color to her cheeks.
“I love it!” she shouted back. “How fast can this thing go?”
“You really want to find out?”
“Yes!”
He opened the throttle as far as it would go and they practically hydro-planed across the open snow field. Behind him, Maura whooped with excitement. The roar of the engine drowned out all the other sounds, other than the howl of the wind rushing past them. The world became nothing but the blur of up ahead, snow spray flying past them, and the blue, blue sky overhead.
He was shouting along with Maura, just a wordless “whoooo-hoo,” until a splatter of snow hit his face below his helmet, and he closed his mouth around the melting flakes. So alive. He felt as if they were dancing with it, all of it—the cold, the snow, the wind. Someone to play with, they rejoiced.
Having Maura snuggled behind him made it all the better. When he dared to take his eyes off the terrain ahead and look behind him, he caught a glimpse of her enraptured face, her sheer glee. This was another Maura, he thought, a part of her that hid behind her wary caution.
Sometimes you just needed to go fast with the wind in your hair to see things clearly.
He wanted Maura. And now that he knew the man on her phone’s lock screen was her best friend, and gay, she wasn’t as unavailable as he’d thought. But what about all those barriers she put up? He’d have to win her trust one way or another, and then maybe they could fly together even without a snowmobile.
Close to the edge of the clearing, he spotted the tracks of another snowmobile, crusted over into solid sparkling ice. He throttled down and veered that direction, causing Maura to grab onto his leg.
Not that he’d planned it that way, but he didn’t mind it, either.
“Tracks,” he explained as he steered toward them.
“Right,” she sighed. “Back to work. Can we go snowmobiling again sometime?”
He smiled to himself. Level one, unlocked. “Sure, anytime. You can explore a lot of territory on a snowmobile. Mine’s in the shop, which is why I have Gunnar’s. It should be fixed soon.”
“Sign me up for that.” Her blue eyes seemed to have captured twin stars in their depths. Lucky him, that he’d helped bring her this joy.
He slowed down even further so he could look more closely at the tracks. “Look, I see blood drops.” The blood had been crystallized by the cold into tiny rubies. “This must have been him.”
“Good work. I wasn’t paying attention to anything except how fast we were going.”
“Don’t tell Gil. He hates it when I drive too fast.” He turned the handlebars to steer the snowmobile alongside the frosted tracks left by the skis, scanning for anything else the man might have dropped besides his blood.
“That’s funny, I would have thought he’d be the reckless one.”
“Oh, I’m not reckless. My brain is very good at calculating exactly what rate of speed will maximize the fun without increasing the risk to an unacceptable degree.” He shot her a sidelong glance, then grinned. “And yes, that’s exactly what I told my parents the first time I got a ticket for speeding.”
She let out a hoot of laughter. “Did it work?”
“Absolutely not. Strangely, the judge didn’t believe me either. It’s true, though. I’ve never had an accident. My brain does the calculations without me even thinking about it. If I hadn’t been obsessed with the natural world, I probably would have become a race car driver.”
He could feel the warmth of her body leaning closer to him, peering, like him, at the tracks. “I think you might be the most interesting friend I’ve ever had,” she said.
The word “friend” felt like a splash of cold water waking him up. Despite their moment of connection racing against the wind, nothing fundamental had changed between them.
“What’s that?” He pointed at something dark lodged in the snow a few feet from the ski tracks.
“A rock? Wolf poop? What does wolf poop even look like? Is it like dog poop?”
“It might be wolf scat. We’ll know as soon as we stop.” He slowed way down as they closed in on the dark object.
“Why?”
“Because wolf scat has a very strong and very terrible smell. It usually contains more bone fragments and hair than dog feces does.”
“Lovely.” She pulled a face, but leaned forward as they reached it. “I don’t think that’s any kind of animal poop.”
“Nope,” he said curtly. No animal had been responsible for this. It was human all the way.
It was a grenade.
Live? He couldn’t tell. But he wasn’t going to take a chance.
“Don’t move, please,” he said in the softest, most level voice possible. “Light breaths. Stay still.”
He didn’t know if she’d recognized the object or not, but she did as he said without asking for an explanation.
Slowly, he took out his phone and snapped a photo of the grenade, then another, zooming in as tight as possible.
Then he carefully pushed the button to put the snowmobile in reverse and slowly, ever so slowly, backed away until they were a comfortable distance away from it.
“Was that a…” she asked.
“Grenade. Yes. I think so. Impressive that it didn’t sink down through the snow, but I guess the surface has just enough crust.” He took another shot, wide enough to show the surroundings and make it possible to triangulate the grenade’s exact location. He didn’t trust the GPS on his phone to be accurate enough with the iffy service out here.
“So the man dropped it while he was running from the wolf, but it didn’t go off?”
“That would be my theory. It’s probably not able to go off unless someone pulls the fuse pin, but I don’t want to risk it.”
“Because you’re not reckless.”
“Right. Gil would know all about this. I say we take these photos to him and let him decide how to handle it.”
She looked back over her shoulder at the tracks extending into the distance. “You don’t want to keep following the tracks?”
“The Chilkoots have a lot of kids running around. I wouldn’t want one of them to run into that thing. Personally, I think that’s more important than satisfying our curiosity about the wolf bite. But what do you say? We’re in this together.”
She seemed to appreciate that. After a few moments of thought, she nodded. “I have three Chilkoot kids in my class. You’re right, their safety is more important. Anyway, we know more about that man now than we knew before. He must be in the military, right?”
Lachlan switched out of reverse, turned the snowmobile around and gave it some gas. This time, he didn’t go fast because he wanted to keep a careful eye on the snow. What would have happened if they had run over the grenade? Probably nothing. But if they’d somehow dislodged the pin… He shuddered at the thought.
“Not necessarily. I think grenades can be used for demolition purposes, too.”
“But why would someone have one out here? Or more than one? Maybe they had a whole bagful, but only dropped one.”
“All good questions. I don’t know any of the answers. Did Elias say anything about where the wolf bite victim was staying, or where he might be now?”
“No, nothing. I doubt he knows, but we can check.”
They decided to drive back to Firelight Ridge, with a quick stop at the Chilkoots’ to alert them that there was a stray grenade on their property.
And then something else occurred to Lachlan. What if it actually belonged to the Chilkoots? “Maybe we should go straight to Gil,” he told her. “The Chilkoots have an interesting history around explosives.”
“Fine, but I definitely want to hear that story.”
When they reached the truck, the Chilkoots who had been working at the hoop house had left, which made their decision to go back to Firelight Ridge even easier. “They really don’t like strangers popping in,” he explained as they loaded the snowmobile back onto the trailer. “And they have the firepower to back that up. At least they used to. I know things have changed, but I’m not sure how much.”
“Oh, it’s definitely story time. I need all the back history here.” Maura loved stories, he’d learned. Pinky’s stories, Solomon’s stories, legends from the Ahtna, tall tales from the mining days, drunken yarns at The Fang.
He finished securing the Arctic Cat and they both climbed into the cab of his truck. On the dash rested a folded piece of paper.
“Was that here before?” Maura asked.
“Definitely not.”
She picked it up and scanned it. “Wow, this handwriting is terrible. I can barely read it.” She squinted and read each word, one by one, as she deciphered it. “The man ur looking for made a misteak. Hes gon. Don’t come back.”