straying onto Call’s property to the noise the old fool’s muffler-less pickup made rattling down the gravel road and the dust he managed to create that filtered through every window in Call’s house. Call had been damned glad to see the old man go.
And yet in some bizarre way, he missed him.
At least he’d had someone to argue with.
Call shook his head, thinking the climb down from the summit must have slightly addled his brain.
Turning away from the view of the cabin, he hoisted his backpack onto his shoulders, whistled for Smoke, the big part-wolf, part-husky dog he’d adopted as a pup, and started off down the trail, heading back from his overnight trek to the house he had built along the creek.
It had been more than four years since Call had returned to the Yukon, seeking the solitude of the forest, searching for a quiet place where he could forget the past and put his life back in order. As he walked along the trail, images of those days threatened to creep in, but he firmly pushed them away, consigning them to the part of his brain where they could no longer hurt him.
He didn’t like to think of the past, to remember what had sent him into his self-inflicted exile four years ago, and so he kept walking, his strides lengthening as if he could leave the painful memories behind with every step he took down the hill.
He spotted the tall rock chimney marking his home on the creek and almost missed the two specs moving farther down the mountain that signaled a pair of unfamiliar cars coming up the road. Being an hour out of Dawson on a bumpy dirt lane and only a few sparse inhabitants along Dead Horse Creek, visitors were uncommon.
As usual, Call felt a trickle of irritation that his privacy was about to be disturbed, even for the short time it took for the cars to rumble past.
He wondered who they were and where they were going.
He wondered what the hell they were doing on Dead Horse Creek.
After making the turn off Hunker Road, Charity followed Maude’s ancient blue pickup along a winding gravel lane that followed the creek. They stopped once, at the little cabin where Maude apparently lived, so the older woman could retrieve a pair of work gloves she had forgotten.
“No sense buying new ones when I already got these,” she said, having declined the pair Charity had offered to purchase for her at the general store.
“How much farther?” Charity asked as she watched the older woman’s peculiar ambling gait, sort of like a sailor crossing the deck of a ship, only there wasn’t any water.
“Not much. Just around the next couple of curves and up the hill a piece.”
Just around the next couple of curves turned out to be a couple of miles, each one dragging at the slow pace they were forced to travel on the narrow, muddy road. Anticipation had her squirming in her seat. She felt like a little kid on her first trip to Disney World, so eager to get there, unable to quite imagine what it would be like once she did.
As the SUV rolled on, dropping into one pothole after another, she thanked God she had rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle. A regular car simply wouldn’t be able to make it. She sighed as they crawled past another bend in the road.
At least I’ve got time to get a good look at the country, she thought, glancing off toward the rocky hills covered with a mixture of pine, fir, and alder. The entire area was mountainous, each peak dusted with a brilliant white layer of mid-spring snow.
It was spectacularly beautiful and worth the entire trip just to see it. Charity grinned to think that for the next six months she would be living in this wild, scenic place.
They rounded another curve and the pickup’s red taillights went on in front of her. Charity had noticed earlier that one of the bulbs was out. She glanced toward the stream they had been following, out across a rickety-looking wooden bridge, and spotted a small log cabin situated among the pine trees at the edge of the creek.
The Lily Rose. A little thrill shot through her. Never mind that the bridge looked like it might collapse at any moment. It could be fixed easily enough. She still had money to make the needed repairs.
Maude drove over the bridge as if it were perfectly safe, so Charity closed her eyes, summoned her courage, and pretended it really was. She clattered to the opposite side and released the breath she had been holding. Parking the Ford next to the cabin, she set the emergency brake and climbed out of the car.
The breath she took of fresh Klondike air was cold and clean and smelled of the pine trees that grew on the hill behind the cabin. She could hear the rush of water over the boulders in the creek as she walked toward the house.
She paused at the bottom of the steps leading up to the covered porch. The cabin was made of logs, as the advertisement had said, but the wood shingle roof was sagging and a broken board made it hard to climb the front-porch stairs.
“Needs a little work,” Maude said—the understatement of the year. The house was a shambles, Charity discovered with a sinking heart as she opened the door and walked in. It was hard not to feel a rush of disappointment.
“A cozy, one-bedroom cabin on a wild, rushing stream,” she quoted from the advertisement. “Well, the stream is wild and rushing, and I can see the convenient kitchen from here.” Two steps to the right of the door, just at the end of the living room, such as it was.
“It ain’t as bad as it seems,” Maude said firmly. Reaching into the pocket of her plaid flannel shirt, she pulled out a short-stemmed pipe and stuck it between her teeth. “Just needs a little work, is all.”
More than a little, Charity thought glumly, watching Maude chew on the end of the unlit pipe and imagining the small inheritance her grandfather had left her shrinking by the minute. “The place needs just about everything.”
“Stove works real good.” Maude pointed to the big, black woodstove in the kitchen. “And the water’s piped in from the well and stored in that big tank behind the house. You don’t have to carry it up from the creek.” She turned the handle on the faucet over the sink to demonstrate and it sputtered dirty brown water out of its nozzle. “Ain’t been used in a while. Take a minute to start runnin’ clean.”
Charity’s stomach knotted. They wandered past a small, round table and four rickety kitchen chairs that had been painted white and now were a peeling, dismal gray, and stepped into the living room, ducking cobwebs here and there. The rustic rock fireplace was exactly that, but the smooth, round river stones were covered with a layer of thick, black soot and ashes spilled over the hearth onto the wood-planked floor.
“Roof might need some work, but the place is sturdy—I can tell ya that. When Mose moved in, he fixed it up real good.”
He must have. It looked as if it had been sitting there for the last hundred years, which she now believed it might actually have been.
“Fireplace looks real purty on a cold winter night, but the real heat comes from that little pellet stove in the corner. It’ll get hot enough to run you outta here.”
Well, at least she’d be warm. They wandered into the single bedroom, which was furnished with an old iron bed with sagging box springs but no mattress, a rickety wooden dresser, and two homemade bedside tables. As the ad had boasted, there was indeed a bathroom with indoor plumbing—a claw foot tub with a makeshift shower above it, a sink, and tank-overhead, flush toilet.
