some hot chocolate and forget about it. This is just dumb.”
Nicky held up his right hand. “No, it’s all right,” he said to Ashley when she began to argue that Nicky should be able to tell things the way he wanted to. “Jack’s right. See, that’s the part I need you guys to understand.” His voice became suddenly slow, deliberate, and in an odd way everything around them seemed to hush. Even a black-billed magpie that had been fluttering at the top of a spruce stopped its strident cawing. “There are…things…about me…you need to leave alone. Not that I don’t want to tell you, but it’s not safe for you to know.”
Snorting, Jack said, “Oh, come on, get real. You’re in Alaska. Nobody’s going to find you up here. Mom and Dad said so.”
“I’m not talking about me.” He cocked his fingers as if he were holding a gun, and pointed at the snowman. He pretended to shoot, then blew at the tip of his finger as if clearing smoke from a gun barrel. “I’m talking about you two.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack scoffed. “Somebody’s gonna come all the way up here to shoot us. Who? A terrorist?”
Nicky’s eyes narrowed, and he breathed quickly once or twice, sending vapor into the cold air. Jack could almost see the wheels turning inside his head as he thought things over. Suddenly he said, “I can’t really break my oath of secrecy, but we’ll play a guessing game. About my dad, right? I’ll give you a clue, and you have to figure it out.” His eyes were still narrowed, but now they had a glint in them.
“A game,” Jack said. “OK. Go.”
“Here’s the clue,” Nicky announced. “Charlie is alive.”
“Who’s Charlie?” Ashley asked.
“That’s the clue. You have to guess.” Nicky set the little snowman in the center of the table and pretended to shoot it, using his finger as a gun.
“Is the snowman Charlie?” Jack wanted to know.
“No. The snowman is dead. Charlie is the clue. Charlie. Is. Alive.” As Nicky bit off each word, Ashley looked toward Jack and shrugged.
Jack swept his gaze around the snowy landscape. “I got it,” he said. “Charlie is the magpie up there in the tree. It’s still alive.”
Nicky shook his head. “You guys are so dense. Charlie’s no one. Charlie is just a word. OK, I’ll give you another clue. Can icicles attack?”
“Huh?” What kind of clue was that? Jack strained his imagination to come up with some solution to the puzzle, because he couldn’t let Nicky beat him in this little brain game. He no longer cared whether it would reveal anything about Nicky’s father; it was just that he needed to win, to silence that superior tone in Nicky’s voice. Two clues, he told himself. Charlie is alive. Can icicles attack? “Well,” he muttered, “each sentence has three words.”
Ashley grew excited and added, “And the three words start with the same letters.”
“C-I-A!” Jack yelled. “Your dad’s with the CIA.”
Nicky leaped forward, slamming his hand over Jack’s mouth. “Keep it quiet,” he hissed. “Keep it quiet.”
CHAPTER THREE
Jack looked out the window of the plane and let the scenery wash thoughts of Nicky out of his mind. Beneath him was the frozen Toklat River, a winding, silver-white braid lacing through mountains that looked like sleeping dragons. Having traced the thin spider vein of the Toklat along his map, he knew it would flow out of the Alaska Range to join the Kantishna River, which would eventually flow into the Tanana River then to the mighty Yukon, which emptied into the Bering Sea. But the scene below couldn’t be translated by the ink scribbles on his map; this park was too immense, too beautiful, too vast. At six million acres, Denali National Park and Preserve covered three times the area of Yellowstone, and here there were no highways threaded with bumper-to-bumper traffic; no miles of walkway crisscrossing the forest like scattered pick-up sticks.
The wilderness beneath him was an untouched pattern of tundra and kettle ponds and spruce forests. His mother had told him that parts of this landscape had never felt the tread of a human foot, and that knowledge made Jack glad. In a way it took the edge off the uneasiness he’d been feeling about Nicky.
Ever since Nicky had pointed his finger to pretend-shoot the snowman, Jack’s distrust of him had grown. Saying that he couldn’t tell Jack and Ashley about his life or they’d be in danger—how phony it all sounded! Of course the version Nicky told did tie in a little bit with what Jack’s parents had said—that up in Alaska they were “thousands of miles away from any kind of danger.” And yet he had to be faking it. Vows of silence? That stuff about the CIA? What was that all about? Jack wished his folks would just tell the whole story straight up so he could figure out what was going on. Instead, he was forced to make sense from whatever scraps of information he could stitch together, a line here and a bit there, like tiny patches on a quilt.
Pressing his forehead against the small window, he felt the plane’s vibration run straight through his skull and into his jaw. In an odd way it felt good because something else was bothering him. He wasn’t quite sure how to put words onto it. Maybe if the throb of the engine filled his head, he wouldn’t have to think.
He watched the mountains unroll below in a rhythm of peaks and valleys, the tops of them treeless and bare, the valleys empty sugar bowls of snow. From his books he knew that the summer would bring wildflower carpets and willow thickets that hid 37 species of mammals. Concentrate on those, he commanded his brain. Instead, his mind kept flashing back to Nicky, and he realized what else was gnawing at him. It was Ashley. When they’d sat at the picnic table, her wide-set eyes had watched Nicky’s every move in a way he’d never seen before. Jack didn’t like it. He didn’t like the way her face lit up when Nicky talked about his life. He especially didn’t like the way she swallowed Nicky’s every word, gulping down his story like a baby bird. Yeah, exactly like a baby bird. In his mind he hatched a picture of her with a beak-mouth opened wide as Nicky fed her one fantasy after another.
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