Midnight Sun. Kat Martin
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Midnight Sun - Kat Martin страница 3
Charity grinned as she thought of the exciting journey she was about to undertake, and set the second suitcase beside the front door.
CHAPTER TWO
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