and fishing this country for as long as either of them could remember. Both of them loved to backpack, canoe, and cross-country ski.
But Call, a year older than Zach, had been young back then, and he had been restless, curious about life in the city. The lure of his mother’s American family in San Francisco had drawn him to the States. He’d spent four years at Berkeley, where he had roomed with a boy named Richie Gill. Call and Richie had become fast friends, both of them interested in sports and the fascinating world of computers. Eventually, they’d become partners in a successful software game that had made them both rich.
Call had entered the world of business and loved it. By the time he had sold his first company and accepted the position as President and CEO of American Dynamics, he was working sixteen hours a day, so immersed in the financial empire he was building he didn’t have time for anything else.
Not even his family.
As it always did, the memory sent pain ripping through him like a ragged shard of glass. It eased as he forced the thoughts away. He never dwelled on the past anymore. He’d spent four long years trying to forget it.
“Toby!” he shouted as he crossed the polished wood floor in the living room. “Toby, are you in here?”
The younger man appeared through the doorway of the kitchen. “I’m right here, sir. I thought I’d make us a couple ham sandwiches for lunch.” Toby Jenkins had just turned nineteen, a good-looking, red-haired kid, tall and lanky, with a slender, wiry frame.
His mother lived in Dawson, ran one of the small jewelry shops in town that catered to the tourist trade. Six months ago, Toby had heard through the grapevine that Call was looking for a handyman, someone to do odd jobs for him out on Dead Horse Creek. For the first three years, Call had taken care of the place himself, but he was busier now and he needed the help. Toby lived in a small, one-bedroom cabin Call had remodeled and furnished up on the hill, far enough away so he could maintain his privacy, yet close enough so Toby could take care of the chores around the house.
“I’m not hungry,” Call said. “Wrap it up and I’ll eat it later.”
Toby frowned. “You skipped breakfast. You gotta eat something.”
Call made an unpleasant sound in his throat. The kid could be a real mother hen at times. Call figured Toby saw him as some kind of father figure, since he’d never had a dad of his own and didn’t even know who the guy was. Call had been a father once. He never intended to travel that painful road again.
“Like I said—just wrap it up. I’ll get around to it sooner or later.”
Toby ducked back into the kitchen and Call paused for a moment in front of the big rock fireplace in the living room. The house wasn’t fancy, just two bedrooms and a couple of baths, but there was a modern kitchen with the latest appliances, and the L-shaped living-dining area was nicely furnished with a comfortable, dark-brown leather sofa and chairs and accented with nineteenth-century antiques.
He’d added the metal-roofed building that housed his office and a three-car garage a little over a year ago, the first small step, as he saw it, on the road back to life.
Still, he wasn’t ready to give up his solitary world completely and he certainly didn’t want it breached by a woman, especially not one who spelled trouble like Charity Sinclair.
“Sonofabitch,” he grumbled again, and wondered just exactly what he could do to get rid of her.
It was noon by the time Charity and Maude left for town, late afternoon by the time they returned, but Charity had found a local plumbing company to deal with the bathroom, and a roofer had agreed to do the necessary roof repairs. They’d bought a few supplies, including bags of pellets for the stove.
On one of the side streets, she had spotted an antiques store that also carried used furniture. She bought a full-size mattress and box springs that appeared to be in good condition and would fit the old iron bed, and a small sofa and chair she could decorate with the olive green dust cover she had found at the general store.
All in all, it was a good day’s work, but she hadn’t gotten home till almost dark and again she went to bed exhausted, too tired even to finish the Max Mason adventure novel, Island of Doom, that she had been reading.
Tomorrow she and Maude would finish cleaning the house and the day after that, she hoped to meet Buck Johnson and begin discussing the equipment they would need to start up the dredging operation. She wondered how many more grueling trips to Dawson she would have to endure before they actually got started.
They washed windows and scrubbed bathroom cupboards the following day, then gave the furniture another coat of paint.
“We been lucky,” Maude said as she stuck the paintbrush into a can filled with thinner. “We get a lot of rain this time of year. Need to get the paint dry and this stuff back in the house before the next storm blows in.”
As Maude predicted, clouds began to gather the morning of the following day. The older woman arrived just in time to help her move the furniture back inside the house before the sky opened up like a floodgate and rain fell in sheets so thick she couldn’t see the creek.
It was Thursday. The workmen she had hired in Dawson had a couple of jobs to finish and weren’t scheduled to arrive until the first of the week. As Charity had feared, the roof began to leak. A stream of water dripped over the woodstove in the kitchen, sending up a hiss of steam as each drop sputtered against the hot black metal.
A leak sprang up over the john in the bathroom, which didn’t really matter, since it was still clogged up and totally useless anyway. The outhouse, she had discovered, was bad enough in pleasant weather. In the rain it was nearly unbearable. The roof above the little wooden building leaked even worse than the one over the house. She was soaked and freezing by the time she finished and got back inside the cabin.
Maude drove to her own house down the hill and came back with rain gear, the loan of which Charity accepted with gratitude and a mental note to buy herself some the next time she was in Dawson. It was hard to imagine putting on a heavy yellow slicker every time she had to relieve herself, but hey, stuff happened.
You wanted an adventure, she reminded herself. She thought of her favorite action hero, Max Mason, who traveled the world fighting evil, survived under the very worst conditions, and never complained. Compared to what Max went through, living up here was a stroll in the park.
Besides, next week, once the repairs were made, things were bound to get better.
Unfortunately, on Saturday, Buck Johnson showed up and she began to wonder if they ever really would.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Johnson,” she said with a welcoming smile. “I’m really looking forward to working with you.”
“I never worked for a woman,” he grumbled. “Maude didn’t tell me the new owner was a female.”
Charity straightened a little and was glad she hadn’t offered to shake his hand. She came from Manhattan, after all, a city where Johnson’s Planet-of-the-Apes attitude was mostly a thing of the past. “I can’t see why that should matter, Mr. Johnson. I’m here to work this claim. You have experience in that regard. I’d like to employ you. That is all that matters.”
Johnson grumbled something she couldn’t hear. He was a big man, mid-forties, thick through the chest and shoulders, with black hair slightly graying
