Everything To Prove

Caught R. Drew red-handed with twelve over the limit, gave him maximum fine, bastard deserved it.

There were also entries on the state of wildlife.

Moose population down fourth year in a row. Hunters are crying wolf. I’m sure it’s poaching. Wolves and moose have always coexisted. Increasing human population and hunting pressure are new on the scene, and where there are humans, there is poaching. No stopping it.

Libby decided she liked the way Charlie Stuck thought. She pored laboriously over his entries until, finally, she read one that was totally out of context, and the words jumped out at her, causing her to sit up in her seat and bend over the journal.

Two weeks late to Lana’s due to crash landing the plane in a white-out, bending the prop and being stranded until villagers found me south of the Dome, but she asked no questions. She waits the way that girl Marie waited. Still wonder what became of C. Libby but think my instincts are right about D. Frey. Why didn’t he go to the wedding? (This was underlined twice.) I know

Frey had something to do with that crash. Wish I could have found that plane. Wish others would have listened to my theory, but money talks loudest and always has.

Libby read the passage several times, her heartbeat racing, dizzied by the words. Charlie Stuck had believed that Frey had something to do with her father’s death! The rest of the journal revealed nothing relevant to Connor Libby, but that one passage gave her hope that maybe, once the plane was found, others would listen…especially if it could be proved that the crash hadn’t been an accident. Was it possible? Could Frey have deliberately killed her father? Somehow she had to come up with the money to salvage the wreckage!

The commuter flight stopped in Tanana, Ruby and Galena before landing in the Koyukyuk River, dodging several large ice floes and a flock of Canada geese while taxiing to the village dock. Her gear was put out of the plane and for the first time in six years Libby stood in the village of her childhood. Umiak hadn’t changed much. There were a few more houses, a few more junked vehicles, a few more boats drawn up on the gravel bank next to the fish wheels. The place looked bleak and dreary to her, and she felt guilty for feeling that way. This was, after all, where she’d been born. She waited for a few moments, searching for her mother among the faces, some familiar and some not, who had come to see if the plane had brought mail or supplies, but if Umiak hadn’t changed much in her absence, nothing prepared her for her mother’s appearance.

Libby felt a jolt clear to the bottoms of her feet when she saw how Marie had aged. Fear clenched her up inside and her heart raced.

Marie came to a stop at the end of the dock. Her hair had gone almost completely white. She had shrunk. This couldn’t be real. Her mother had always been so strong and vital, the anchoring cornerstone of Libby’s existence, always there for her. Weekly phone conversations had perpetuated the myth that her mother was the same as always, that nothing had changed, yet obviously it had. Libby felt the hot prickle of tears beneath her eyelids.

“Mom?”

Marie spotted her and her eyes lit up. “Libby?” She came toward her and raised her arms to clasp her in a trembling embrace. “Libby. It’s good to see you. I’m so glad you came. How long can you stay?”

Libby hugged her mother gently, kissed the velvet of her cheek, slipped her arm around her mother’s frail shoulders and picked up her duffel. “As long as you want me to. I don’t have to go back to Boston.”

Confused, Marie looked up at her. “But you work there.”

“Not anymore. Come on. Let’s go home. I have a pretty dress to give you, and lots of stories to tell.”

Her mother’s dreary little house was exactly the same. Libby could see that Marie had done nothing with the money Libby had sent her every month. No doubt she had put it all in the bank, saving it just in case times got hard because she didn’t realize that her times were always hard. The furniture was shabby, the linoleum worn almost to the plywood underlayment, the cupboards nearly bare. Libby wanted to rage at her mother one moment, then weep the tears of a heartbroken child the next. While her mother made coffee, she paced the confines of the shoe-box house and looked out the windows as if she were a prisoner. She’d been back less than twenty minutes and already couldn’t wait to escape.

Marie was happy with the brightly colored dress. She went immediately into her room and put it on. She’d lost so much weight the dress hung from her frame and filled Libby with a terrible premonition. “You look beautiful,” Libby said.

They drank cups of instant coffee with lots of sugar and powdered creamer. Libby told her mother about her internship at Mass General and the prestigious residency she’d been offered, and that she’d turned it down.

“Was this residency you were offered like what you were doing before, with the dead bodies?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m glad you didn’t take it. That isn’t what a doctor should be doing. You should be delivering babies and healing people.”

“Forensic pathology is just as important, Mom. I can help solve the mysteries of a person’s death. I can help solve murders. But if it makes you feel better, I know how to deliver babies and heal people, too. And as long as we’re speaking of doctors, who’s at the clinic now?”

“Nobody. We have a doctor who comes in once a month. If there is an emergency we go down to Galena, or to Fairbanks if it’s really bad.”

Libby reached across the table to clasp her mother’s hands. “I want you to fly to Anchorage with me for some tests at the hospital there. You don’t look well. You’ve lost too much weight.”

“The winters are always hard,” Marie said. “Things will get better. They always do.”

“We’ll fly out tomorrow. I’ll make reservations at one of the nicest places on the Seward Peninsula. We’ll do some shopping, stay a couple of nights. Please, Mom. It’ll make me feel a whole lot better.”

“Hospitals are expensive and I don’t need one. Now that you’re home, everything will be okay.”

“Hospitals are sometimes necessary, and besides, I’m a rich doctor now,” Libby said, wishing with all her heart that it was true. She gave her mother’s hands a gentle squeeze then pushed out of her chair and paced to the small window. She wished she was a rich doctor. Wished she could whisk her mother out of this dark and dreary place and give her the bright, sunny house and easy lifestyle she deserved. Wished she could afford to hire Carson Colman Dodge, who was crude and ill-mannered, but talked as if he knew his stuff. He certainly was expensive. Libby could see a small patch of the river between two other box houses. She watched the occasional ice floe drift past. Soon the salmon would start their run, and some of the villagers would move out to their fish camps. “Mom, is Tukey’s fish wheel still up on the Kikitak?”

“No. I think it got washed away by high waters two winters ago. Now that Tukey’s dead, I don’t have anyone to make me a new one, but I sure miss fish camp.”

Libby crossed to her mother and gave her a hug from behind. “Then we’ll go to fish camp, just like the old days. We’ll take the skiff and bring a net and catch enough fish to smoke for the winter. We’ll pick berries when they come ripe and put them up in preserves. But first we’ll go to the hospital in Anchorage. Okay?”

Her mother nodded with reluctance. “Okay.”

“Good. I’ll have Susan radio for the plane to come.”

The fact that her mother relented so easily scared Libby even more. Forget Daniel Frey. Her mother was sick. There was time enough to pay a visit to the man who might have killed her father. She wouldn’t let him kill her mother, too. She could wait a few days more.

THE MEDICAL TESTS TOOK most of the day, and were conducted on such short notice only because Libby, in her four years of medical school and two years of internship, had learned that the squeaky wheel got the grease. She squeaked loudly once in the emergency room, in professional terms that the doctors took note of. When they discovered she was a resident at Mass General, a slight twist of the truth on Libby’s part, they took very good care of Marie and never again mentioned the medical center for Alaskan natives on the northern fringe of the city. At the end of a very tiring day Libby drove her mother to the waterfront resort in Homer, where they shared a room with a balcony overlooking Kachemak Bay, and where Libby sat until 1:00 a.m. listening to the tide rush in across the mud flats. The test results would take some time, though not as long as usual. Libby had stated in no uncertain terms that she expected some answers when she returned the following afternoon.

After breakfast the next morning, Marie and Libby half-heartedly browsed the string of shops in Homer, making small talk and walking arm in arm, then drove slowly back to the city where they checked into a hotel not far from the airport. Leaving her mother to a nap after lunch, Libby returned to the hospital. The staff didn’t keep her waiting long. She was ushered into an office by a young resident who took his glasses off and opened the file on his desk, flipping through the pages as if trying to refresh his memory.

“Your mother has chronic lymphocytic leukemia,” he said with a studious frown. “There’s considerable enlargement of her liver and spleen and she’s moderately anemic. She’s also malnourished, probably because she hasn’t felt much like eating lately. We’d like to start her on an anticancer drug we’ve had good success with. She should feel dramatically better after a couple of treatments, and she can take these drugs at home. She’ll need to have periodic blood tests to monitor the medication levels, but this can be done at the clinic in Galena. That’s close to where she lives, isn’t it?”

Libby heard these words delivered over a dull roaring in her ears. She knew the diagnosis wasn’t a death sentence. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia was very treatable, and many people who had it lived to a ripe old age, yet this was her mother they were discussing, not some stranger in the exam room.

She made arrangements to bring her mother in later that afternoon for the first treatment and to fill the prescriptions she’d need to take with her, then drove aimlessly around the city. She ended up in Spenard, sitting in the rental car which she’d parked in front of Alaska Salvage. “One bone,” she said aloud, staring up at the neatly lettered sign. “One bone, and I can pay Carson Dodge whatever he charges to salvage my father’s plane. I can put my mother in the finest house in Alaska and get her the best medical attention. All I need is some DNA.”

The DNA in a single bone fragment would prove that Connor Libby had been her father, and it would be the kind of proof that Daniel Frey couldn’t deny, no matter how much it would kill him to discover that half of his fortune belonged to a blue-eyed Athapaskan. The icing on the cake would be to somehow prove that Frey had caused Connor Libby’s death by tampering with his plane, but the DNA was a damned good place to start. One step at a time.

Libby got out of the car. There was only one truck parked in front of the Quonset hut doors. She could only hope it belonged to Carson Colman Dodge. She stepped into the dim interior of the hut. The overhead lights were off, but the wreckage of the commuter plane was exactly where it had been two days ago. Everything was quiet and the office door was ajar. She peered inside, convinced that they’d all gone out to lunch, and was startled to see Dodge slumped over the desk, head pillowed in the curve of one arm. She watched him for a few moments, long enough to deduce that he was asleep and not dead, then she rapped her knuckles smartly against the door. “Mr. Dodge?”

He jerked upright and lunged half out of his chair. When he recognized her, he slumped back, unable to completely mask the grimace of pain his sudden movements had triggered. “Lady, let me give you a little advice,” he said in that rough and borderline hostile voice. “Never sneak up on a man that way. It could get you into a lot of trouble.”

“I didn’t sneak,” Libby said. “I walked in, knocked on your door and called out.”

He eased himself in his seat and drew a few careful breaths as if the exercise were a tricky one. He looked even worse than he had on Libby’s first visit, if that were possible. He gestured to the metal chair opposite his desk. “Have a seat.”

Libby sat, glancing over his shoulder at the Playboy calendar pinned to the wall behind him, and felt the heat come into her cheeks before she could drop her eyes. She hadn’t noticed that calendar last time. “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mr. Dodge. I just wanted to ask you a couple more questions.”

He made a small gesture with his bandaged hand. “Fire away.”

“You mentioned that you sometimes took salvage instead of money to cover the cost of a recovery effort.”

“That’s right, but usually that just defrays some of the cost. If you’re talking about the de Havilland, fully restored it might bring three hundred grand. But selling the wreckage of that plane wouldn’t come close to covering your expenses.”

“Actually, Mr. Dodge, I wasn’t talking about the plane.”

Dodge studied her with a cynical expression. “You mentioned in your first visit it was something the plane was carrying.”

Libby nodded. “That’s right.”

“Wait. Don’t tell me.” The faint trace of a wry grin mocked her. “The plane was loaded down with gold dust and nuggets from a secret mother lode, which is why it crashed. You know how many of those I get a year?”

Libby felt her flush deepen. This crude man definitely needed some lessons in business etiquette. “Obviously quite a few, from the way you talk.” She pulled the Forbes magazine from her shoulder bag and laid it on the desk. “But how many of them involve this man?”

Dodge leaned forward and glanced at the glossy pictures for a few moments, his eyes scanning the captions. “Okay,” he said, leaning back and giving her a calculating stare. “So tell me, what does billionaire Daniel Frey have to do with the wrecked plane you’re looking for?”

“His godson was flying the plane when it crashed,” Libby said.

“And what do you have to do with all of this?”

“Frey’s godson was Connor Libby, the son of billionaire Ben Libby, and he was on his way to marry my mother.”

Dodge slouched back in his chair, picked up a pen and tapped it on the desktop, eyes narrowing in thought. “So, let me get this straight. This superrich son of a billionaire crashes the plane into the lake and leaves your mother standing at the altar bereft of both a husband and his considerable fortune. And now, twenty-eight years later, you want to find the wreckage. Your mother must have been expecting a nice wedding gift from her fiancé, and she thinks it’s still in the plane. Is that it?”

Libby leaned forward, her blood up. “Mr. Dodge, I have five thousand dollars in my savings account. I know that’s only half of what you require for a deposit, and I’ll tell you right now that if you don’t find the plane that’s all you’ll ever get. But if you do find the plane, I guarantee I’ll pay your company the full freight. What you stand to make on this job will be in direct proportion to how good you are at what you do.” Libby rose to her feet, tucking the magazine back into her bag. “I’m staying at the Airport Hotel tonight and flying out first thing in the morning. If you should wish to discuss this further, please give me a call.”

She was almost out the door when he said, “Lady, how the hell do you expect me to call when I don’t even know your name?”

WHEN CARSON LIMPED DOWN the dock ramp that night and descended the ladder onto his old wooden cabin cruiser, he was carrying a six-pack of beer and a thick, bloody slab of steak. The two chili dogs he’d eaten on the drive to the marina had taken the edge off his hunger but he was still contemplating the possibility of a real meal. Real as in meat and potatoes. Real as in something that might build his blood back up and return his strength. First, though, he wanted to nurse his bruised ego with a cold beer. It galled him to be puttering around the office while his crew was off on a job. He knew Trig would see that things ran smoothly, and he also knew they needed the work and couldn’t sit around waiting for him to come to the front. Big equipment cost big bucks, and banks liked to get their payments on time. He could’ve gone along with them, could’ve captained his vessel, but he was still so crippled up he knew he’d only be in the way, and worse, his crew would try to make things easy for him. He didn’t want anyone to see him like this. Just climbing down the ladder to his boat had left him weak and out of breath. The doctors said his condition would slowly improve, but they all hedged when pressed for details. Punctured lung, lacerated muscles, abdominal wounds, torn tendons all take time to heal, they said.

No shit.

Carson hated doctors. Hated their rhetoric, their placid, professional expressions and their holier-than-thou condescending attitudes. Hated the fact that they’d saved his life because he hated being beholden to them. Hated having to follow their instructions and forgo salvage diving for some unspecified length of time…maybe even forever. Yes, they’d hinted at that, too. His injuries, the highly paid specialist said in her placid, professional tone, had been severe. No shit times two. It didn’t take eight years of education and a fancy medical degree to figure that one out. He’d lost thirty pounds in those four weeks of hospitalization. He’d also lost his spleen, the use of one of his lungs and the tendons in his left shoulder and wrist, a big chunk of muscle in his left thigh, and almost all of his strength. The guys were all hush-hush about it but he knew they were talking, saying things like, “Old King Cole sure screwed the pooch this time. He’ll probably never dive again.”

Old King Cole… His crew had long since picked up on his mother’s pet name for him and, knowing his dislike for it, used it when they wanted to get his goat.

His crew also called him “the old man.” Maybe he was, to them. They were all young kids, the oldest was Trig at twenty-seven. Was thirty-nine old? It was only one year away from forty, and forty was definitely old. He sure as hell felt old tonight. He never used to notice things like aches and pains and cuts and bruises, and sure as hell he never used to get caught napping at his desk by a pretty young woman. Damn. How humiliating was that?

He crammed the six-pack, less two, into the little propane refrigerator in the galley and then went up on deck, breathless again after climbing the ship’s ladder, and kicked back to enjoy the sunset. If he had the energy he’d take the cabin cruiser out and do a little fishing. Try for a halibut, maybe. Halibut was good eating, fit for a king…even an old and injured one. But he felt too run-down to cast off the lines and fire up the cruiser’s engines. Maybe after a beer or two he’d feel better. Younger. More like his old self.

Old? Whoa. Poor choice of words.

He took a long swallow and gazed out at the looming snowcapped Chugach Mountains, aglow with a clear yellow fire in the late-evening sunlight. He thought about the unexpected visitor he’d had, and the offer she’d made. Libby Wilson had beautiful eyes and was quiet spoken. Didn’t chatter. He liked that about her. Came right out and said what she wanted to say. He’d treated her a little rudely, but she was just too damned pretty. If she’d been ugly he’d have been nicer. Anyway, odds were he’d never see her again. A measly five grand wasn’t even worth gassing up the plane for.

On the other hand, Evening Lake was mighty good fishing at the right time of year, and the right time of year was coming up quick. Still, finding a wrecked plane when one didn’t know exactly where it went down would be time-consuming…not that he couldn’t do it. She had a helluva nerve intimating that he might not be up to the task and that his skills might only be worth five thousand dollars.

What was in the plane that she wanted to get her hands on? Obviously something of value that the pilot had been bringing to Libby Wilson’s mother on her wedding day. Something of great value, considering the girl’s keen interest in recovering the plane. Wedding day… His own experience with such events was shallow at best, a whirlwind courtship with a student he’d met while teaching a dive school in New York City nine years ago, followed by a marriage that began in Las Vegas with a cheap gold ring and ended barely a year later. A bitter year it had been, too, a year of disillusionment, betrayal and hurt that had plagued every moment of their doomed marriage. Brown-eyed Barbara McGee with the sweet, pretty smile that had lured him into such an ugly hell of emotional bondage. Barbara, who loved the nightlife, loved to party and didn’t know how to sit home at night alone when he was off working a salvage job.

Didn’t know how to be faithful.

Lesson learned the hard way. Love is blind, deaf and very, very dumb.

Anyhow, it was pointless to reopen old wounds thinking about his own brief and ill-fated marriage. The wedding scenario Libby Wilson had described was completely different. She was talking billionaire groom on his way to marry his beloved. Flying his own plane to his own wedding. And in that plane he was ferrying proof of his undying love. Jewelry. That had to be it. A big diamond, possibly huge. Maybe an enormous diamond ring and matching necklace, bracelet and, what the hell, a tiara. Daniel Frey’s rich godson could afford to go overboard on his bride. A veritable treasure trove could be sitting on the bottom of Evening Lake inside a de Havilland Beaver that crashed twenty-eight years ago.

Carson eased his bad leg out in front of him and took another swallow of beer. Finding the plane didn’t have to be a full-crew job. He’d need to call Trig after he found the wreckage, but he could search for the plane himself. The search itself wouldn’t be physically difficult, just tedious. He’d work the search pattern using the rubber boat with the side-scanning sonar and GPS and map out the bottom of the lake lane by lane, like mowing a giant lawn. He could do that alone, no sweat. He could pack up his tent, the rubber boat, some supplies and the sonar gear and fly up to Evening Lake. Worst-case scenario, he’d make five grand taking a working vacation and maybe get some good fishing in on the side. A big lake trout or two broiled over the coals would taste pretty good. And what the hell, it sure beat sitting around the office wishing he were out with the boys on the Pacific Explorer, that sleek, beautiful forty-eight-foot dive vessel that was the pride of his salvage operation.

Or wondering why Gracie hadn’t been by. Not since the accident had that sultry, sexy bartender from the pool hall paid him a visit. She, too, was probably convinced he’d never be a whole man again and had sought out greener pastures.

He finished the first beer and cracked open the second. Halfway through it he went below to snag his cell phone. Back on deck, after he’d caught his breath, he called the Airport Hotel and asked to be connected to Libby Wilson’s room.

“Dodge here,” he said when she answered. “I’ve been thinking about your proposal and I have a counter proposal of my own.”

“Go ahead,” she said, cool voiced and calm, as if she’d been expecting his call.

“I’m teaching a deep-diving rescue-and-recovery course at the university this weekend. I can fly up and look the situation over on—” he glanced at his wrist watch “—June 15. That’s a Monday, five days from now.”

“All right.”

“If I like what I see I’ll take the job and play by your terms if we don’t find the plane.”

“And if we do find it?”

“You shell out one hundred and fifty grand minimum, and it could shake out to be more if the salvage costs run high. Odds are I’m going to end up with a huge loss I can’t particularly afford right now. I’ll want the five grand up front, and I’ll want the salvage contract in legalese, signed, sealed and delivered into my hand upon arrival at the lake.”