15 Legends Can Be Murder Read online

  “Charlie, that could be private family stuff that belongs to Roberta.”

  He was right, although clearly she didn’t care enough to keep it at her house. But I should ask her before I delved in too deeply. I should.

  I tucked the box under my arm while Drake re-secured the doors, commenting that he thought he could move enough of the junk around to get his truck inside. The sun had dipped below the hills and, true to Chuey’s prediction, the chill in the air intensified. We scooted inside, and while Drake started a small fire in the fireplace I made the bed in the larger of the two bedrooms. Luckily, I had brought plenty of blankets.

  The crackling flames felt good as we curled up together on the little couch, and I soon dozed. About the time we could have thrown on another log, Drake got up to close the fire screen.

  “You look tired.” Taking my hand, he led me to the bedroom. He was right—this was way past my normal bedtime and it had been a very long day. I snuggled next to him under the covers. The mattress was wonderful and I didn’t know another thing until the sun rose—at 2:57 a.m. I groaned and rolled over. We must get some room-darkening curtains right away.

  When I awoke the second time it was nearly six and I actually felt refreshed. I brushed my teeth but couldn’t find my shampoo, so I pulled on yesterday’s clothes and resolved to finish unpacking later this morning.

  In the kitchen I rummaged through my small stash of provisions and came up with instant coffee and some sugar packets swiped from various restaurants along the journey. One of the lower cupboards gave me a tea kettle and the water from the tap tasted icy and clean. I filled the kettle and set it on a burner, wondering whether any of the cereal bars remained from our pantry in New Mexico. Sadly, the box contained only one, which I dutifully broke in two to share. A grocery trip would be another must—soon.

  Drake appeared at the kitchen door, looking far fresher than I. He’d showered and shaved, and when I showed him the scanty breakfast offering he even offered to take me out again. On top of that, he said he would take Freckles for a walk while I showered. Okay, I’ll admit that I needed one desperately. I used his shampoo and even managed to find clean clothes before my sweethearts returned.

  Two blocks from our new little home we found a café with the perky name of Tootie’s Place, which looked like the spot to be in the mornings. The smells of coffee and bacon wafted out the open door, and most of the tables were full. I spotted Mina at the counter where we were to place orders; she was dressed in layers of outdoor clothing and sturdy boots.

  “Hey, Charlie!” She greeted me as if we’d known each other for ages, and turned to introduce me to her companions—Zack, Ross and Marta—all similarly dressed. “We’re heading out to do the Icy Lake Trail today. Wanna come along?”

  I couldn’t admit to her that nothing about an icy lake or a trail sounded all that appealing to me, so I pleaded work and unpacking and such, leaving her with the impression that, otherwise, I would have loved to come.

  “They seem nice,” Drake said, as we grabbed a table after the others had left the café. “You sure you didn’t want to go?”

  I caught the gleam in his eye. He knows that my outdoor scenery fix is best done from the seat of a nice, warm helicopter.

  “So, we meet with Kerby this morning to get our assignment. I think he said something about today’s group being a family of three—mom, dad and a son.”

  I felt my plan to start nesting begin to fall apart. He recognized the look of dismay.

  “We can’t keep eating in restaurants every meal,” I said, with a tilt of my head toward the prices on the overhead menu. “We’ll spend the whole summer working and still not take home any money. A grocery trip is a must, so shall I do it this morning or we can both do it this afternoon?”

  He’s used to my bottom-line attitude; some of my accounting background is starting to rub off on him. Plus, he feels about shopping the way I feel about hiking to an icy lake.

  “Drop me off to report for duty with Kerby, you get things settled at the house. Come back out to the heliport by, say, ten o’clock and we’ll be ready.”

  By the time we finished breakfast, the schedule gave me less than two hours but it wasn’t as if I had a long commute to work or anything. Still, it wasn’t that I was really needed in order for Drake to fly three people to a cabin in the mountains. I grumbled to myself a little, but realized that this was really a training flight for me. I would be on my own with future flights, and I needed to know the situation. I dropped Drake off near the FBO building, made as quick a trip through the grocery market as is possible in an unfamiliar store, got home, stared longingly at my suitcase full of rumpled clothing but left it for later.

  Once the food was put away, I headed back to the airport, a routine that wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I found Drake and another man in a pilot briefing room, standing in front of an aviation sectional map pinned to the wall.

  Kerby Allen was about sixty, with salt-and-pepper hair, sideburns a touch long by today’s standards, and the kind of sincere brown eyes that meant he was probably really good at selling things. His handshake was warm and his manner professional. Drake had told me Allen had been an Army pilot toward the end of the Vietnam war, which gave him high marks among other pilots. That was no easy assignment, over there. Not to mention that he’d survived a bunch of years flying this rugged Alaskan terrain.

  “We want this to be the kind of adventure experience that folks will go home and tell their neighbors about, they’ll give glowing reviews on our website, they’ll rave it up on Facebook and Twitter,” Kerby said as we settled around a conference table near the wall map. “In the old days, men left home and family behind and came up here to look for gold in the Yukon. The desire for riches—that thing they call gold fever—it’s powerful and strong. It still is. We haven’t lost that yearning for adventure, it’s just that today we basically fall into two camps—those who get their ‘adventure’ from a cruise ship, TV or video game, and those who hire a Sherpa to climb Everest. Short-term fun or a real risk of dying.

  “Here at Gold Trail Adventures I want to provide all of the real life experience, but minimal danger. That’s why our clients have a way to contact us—the satellite phones—but they’ll be living out at our cabins without electricity or Internet. It’s a great way for families to bond. Plus, there’s the very real chance for them to actually discover and take home some gold. Each of the properties has a running stream for panning, and several of them have nearby caves or mineshafts to explore. My men have shored up the old mines and we’ve blocked off tributaries and secondary tunnels where someone could get into trouble. We don’t tell them, but we’ve seeded the sites with enough real gold to get them started. Then they get excited and have a blast just getting in there and going for it.”

  I got the feeling some of this came straight from the sales brochure.

  “Last summer the gold adventure was so successful that I was flying almost non-stop. It’s why I decided to add a second ship, yours, this year.”

  The fact that he had two helicopters working was reassuring. One of us would be backup for the other, in the event of mechanical problems or simply needing some time off. I still wasn’t sure that a seven-day-a-week, four-month contract wouldn’t wear our butts out completely.

  “So,” Kerby said. “Here are your coordinates for the first flight, and the family should be arriving soon. Barney’s your contact this time, already waiting up at the cabin. He’ll do the orientation with the clients and then you’ll fly him back here.”

  It all sounded so very organized; of course, assuming that nothing can go wrong is usually the precursor for exactly that.

  Drake and I walked out to the flight line. He had started the pre-flight inspection on our ship, so we completed the few remaining tasks and were just considering a cup of hot chocolate when a car pulled to a stop at the FBO’s front door.

  Out stepped a family of three, all dressed in Gorsuch or some other upscale clothie
r’s idea of what gold-panners in Alaska would wear. Clearly, none of them had ever donned a pair of pac boots in their lives. I watched in amazement as they pulled three gargantuan duffles from the back of the vehicle. All of this gear would have to be weighed; an aircraft, any aircraft, can only hold so much and a helicopter is especially sensitive to the restrictions. We cannot manage the monster luggage airlines allow.

  Luckily, Kerby Allen was there to meet them at the door and he introduced us. I caught the surname—Mikowski—but the rest went by in a blur. Kerby eyed the heavy luggage and instructed the passengers to bring their things inside. As each bag went on the scale, I was surprised to see that only one was overweight. A laptop computer had to be pulled out. Joe Mikowski grumbled, but Kerby explained that there would be no Internet service at their cabin and he might as well leave the device locked away safely at the office. The wife gave her husband a look and opened her son’s bag, where she found some kind of video game. She added that to the computer that was staying behind.

  “But, Mom ...” the boy whined.

  “Chandler, we all agreed. We’re doing this adventure to spend time together, not to go off in our separate corners and play with electronics.” Her eyes were on her husband as she said it.

  I was doing my best to think ahead to the flight itself. Drake would be at the controls for this one, but soon I would be taking other groups out on my own. Those mountains were steep, rugged, and topped with snow. I couldn’t let my attention waver.

  Drake and Kerby stowed the passengers’ bags, alongside our own survival gear. I’d already received the reminder about how something as simple as a faulty fuel pump could result in having to spend a night out on a mountainside until help could come. And that was the best-case scenario. A crash landing didn’t even bear thinking about.

  In ten minutes the bags were secure in the cargo compartment and the Mikowski family was belted into the three back seats of the JetRanger. Drake and I were up front and I watched carefully as he programmed coordinates for the destination cabin into the GPS. That done, he gave a quick safety briefing over the intercom headsets—simple things like don’t open the doors while the aircraft is in flight. I pictured the look on Junior Mikowski’s face as his mother had taken his video game away and thought the reminder was well timed. The father seemed pretty subdued, considering he was heading out on the adventure of a lifetime, for which I was sure they had paid big bucks.

  A few last checklist items and Drake pulled pitch and we rose above the airstrip, the other helicopters and planes growing smaller as we gained altitude. I watched as he made course adjustments, tracking the headings shown on the GPS. He flipped an intercom switch so that only I would hear his voice.

  “We’re only about ten minutes from the cabin if we fly a straight line but we’re supposed to give a little bit of a tour too. The extra waypoints I programmed will take us over a glacier and a long waterfall, and after we’ve circled those we’ll come around.”

  I couldn’t complain—there must not be one ugly thing in this whole state, I decided as we spent thirty minutes flying what amounted to a large circle, with snowy peaks lined up in ranks as far into the distance as we could see. I had the sectional map on my lap, following along, and I spotted the trail where Mina and her friends were even now hiking to their lunch-spot destination. Soon, with Mount Clifford as a landmark, Drake sighted the cabin and began making a descent into a tiny green valley. Amazing how fast you can cover territory by air; reaching this cabin by trails from town probably would have taken hours.

  Brilliant green grass showed in contrast to the mountains that rose all around us. A narrow stream ran out of the hills, flowing toward the larger river we’d flown over, joining with it to eventually reach the sea behind us. A man in dark pants and red plaid jacket stepped into sight and began waving. His thick beard and the fur-lined trapper hat gave him a real mountain-man appearance. He pointed toward some orange cones set up on the ground, our landing zone, and Drake positioned the JetRanger into the wind and set her gently down precisely in the middle of the demarcated area.

  The red-coated man approached as Drake let the rotor blades spool down, introducing himself as Barney, the Gold Trail Adventures event coordinator.

  “I’ll be about twenty, thirty minutes giving the orientation,” he told Drake through the pilot-side open door. “You and your wife can get out and walk around with us, if you want, or just wait here. Kerby did tell you I’ll be flying back with you?”

  He asked the question as if the idea of staying behind with the Mikowskis was scarier than dealing with a grizzly.

  Drake nodded and we climbed out. It took a few minutes to get everyone out of their seatbelts and to unload their gear.

  “The cabin is fully stocked with food, fuel and plenty of warm bedding,” Barney was saying to the husband and wife. Young Chandler had immediately zipped away to the stream and was on his knees, dipping an arm into water that had to be only a degree or two warmer than an ice cube.

  Barney picked up two of the duffle bags and I grabbed the third, curious to see what the ‘adventure’ living conditions would be like.

  The cabin looked surprisingly comfortable. A main room held a modern woodstove with a handy stack of split logs nearby. The chairs and couch looked like the nice, soft kind you’d want to sink into and a full bookcase solidified the idea that I could be one happy camper here. A small kitchen filled one end of the room, and Barney was giving Mrs. Mikowski a quick primer on the use of the propane stove and refrigerator.

  He waved in the direction of the two bedrooms, then led everyone to a sort of service porch-slash-storage room.

  “Put your garbage in this sealed metal bin,” he said with a firm look on his face, “and never, never leave any food outside around the cabin. Not a cooler, not a half-eaten sandwich, not a candy bar. Once the bears smell anything edible, you’ll have ’em prowling around and they can take that front screen door off with one paw.”

  I might have imagined that both Mikowskis went a little pale. The missus glanced out toward the stream to be sure Chandler was still in sight.

  “Now here’s your satellite phone,” Barney was saying. “We fully charged it at the office but you got no way to recharge it out here. It’s for emergencies only. The numbers are right here on this label on the back. If you get on it and start gabbing away, you’ll run it down and then you’ll have no way to reach us. You know, for when that bear shows up.”

  Mrs. Mikowski reached for the phone and tucked it under her arm. I wondered at the wisdom of mentioning the bears again, but maybe Barney’s experience showed that people don’t follow instructions unless you give them a scary reason to.

  He went through a little Q&A with the guests, reassuring them that everything they needed was right here, pointing out the supplies and how to light the woodstove. Neither of the adults seemed to have much clue and I wondered how soon before they would decide they’d had enough adventure and be calling for their ride home.

  As it turned out, that happened a lot sooner than even I could have guessed. By eight a.m. on day two, Kerby Allen was calling Drake’s cell phone, interrupting what would have been our first great sex in the state of Alaska.

  “That family of three that you delivered to Cabin One?” he said. “They’ll need a ride back. Oh, and you’ll be taking the police chief up there with you. Looks like they’ve found a dead body.”

  Chapter 3

  Every thought in the world went through my head. Did Kerby say they’d found a dead body? Or was one of our intrepid adventurers now deceased? I was pretty sure he said found. I held onto that thought while I threw on some clothes and brushed my teeth. I couldn’t stand to think of someone we’d delivered to that remote spot, now mangled by a bear, drowned in the creek, or whatever else might befall a city slicker in the wilderness. Was this such a great idea after all?

  But by the time we arrived at the heliport, Drake had talked reason to me. Surely Kerby would have sounded a lot m
ore stricken if he’d just lost a client, not to mention the negative publicity this would cause. And he had said the family would need a ride back. I took a deep breath as we walked into the office.

  A uniformed policeman approached—tall, clean-shaven, gray-haired, going a little soft around the middle.

  “Drake Langston? I’m Chief Sam Branson.” He held out a hand, and Drake introduced me, throwing in the fact that I’m a partner in a private investigation firm back home. Sometimes that gets a little uncomfortable; law enforcement types don’t usually want anyone else mucking about in their cases. But Branson only gave a nod.

  “Kerby already took off,” Branson said. “We should get there as soon as we can. Before anything gets moved.”

  Drake was already leading the way to the JetRanger, so I tagged along and helped Chief Branson into the front seat, untangling the shoulder harnesses for him before climbing in and buckling myself into the back. Drake finished a quick pre-flight inspection and joined us. As he’d told me the previous day, flying directly there we sighted the cabin within ten minutes.

  Kerby Allen’s own red and white A-Star sat on the ground, rotors unmoving, and a few people milled about. As we set down, I was surprised to see that one of them was Mina Gengler. I approached her and saw that she was scribbling furiously on a notepad.

  “Hey, Charlie! Didn’t know you’d be here,” she said. “How about this thing? Most exciting story of the year. Probably the decade! I can’t think of the last time someone found a skeleton around here. Well, one not inside a crashed airplane.”

  My expression probably went blank as I processed all that. How often did they find skeletons inside old plane crashes, I wondered. But that, of course, wasn’t the real story today.

  My attention was drawn to a hubbub on the front porch of the cabin, where Rhonda Mikowski was fluttering about and jabbering like her Chatty Cathy string had become jammed.