Everything To Prove

She glanced up with those shy, dark eyes, as startled by his boldness as he was. “War and Peace. One of your guests left it behind.”

“Have you figured out which is better?”

She closed the book, a piece of birch bark marking the page. “I do not like war.”

“Me, either. You like to fish?”

“My family is at fish camp right now. If I were there, I would be gutting and splitting and drying dog salmon.”

“And you’d rather clean rooms at the lodge?”

“The money I make here helps my family. My father’s health is not so good. He can no longer do all the things he needs to do. We need a lot of supplies to get through the winter.”

Through quiet conversations, Connor learned that Marie Wilson was an Athapaskan whose family lived on the Koyukyuk River, and in the weeks that followed, the friendship that developed between them became the highlight of his summer. Walks along the river or paddles in the canoe were moments to be savored. Connor was smitten, though he was unsure if Marie felt as strongly about him as he did about her. As the end of the season drew near, he asked Dan for some advice. Dan, whom Connor regarded as more of an uncle than a godfather, was a confirmed bachelor. He didn’t have a high regard for women in general, and disliked native women in particular, hiring them only because help was so hard to get out in the bush. To Dan, the indigenous people were to be tolerated with barely concealed contempt. He believed them to be lazy, incompetent and untrustworthy—a racist attitude that Connor never understood. He smoked his cigar and listened to Connor relate his feelings about Marie, and when Connor asked him what he should do, Dan took his cigar out of his mouth and spat.

“Soon enough, she’ll go back to her village and take up with some young buck,” he said. “She’s a squaw, for God’s sake. Forget about her.”

When the summer was over, Marie returned to her people. The geese flew south, the lake froze up and deep snows filled the long cold darkness. Conner ran a trapline out of the guides’ camp and suffered endless torments thinking about Marie falling in love with some young man from her village. He went to the lodge from time to time when his need for companionship outweighed his desire for solitude and shared a whiskey or two with Dan. He told Dan he planned to marry Marie and bring her back to the lodge to live. Dan never said anything in response, just shook his head and threw back another slug of hooch.

Spring came and filled Connor with a restless yearning as the days lengthened and the sun rose higher in the sky. The ice went out on the lake. The great flocks of geese returned, their long ragged Vs darkening the pale sky. Connor wondered if Marie had missed him during the cold dark winter, and if she would return as promised.

In early June the accountant from New York City had made his annual trip to the lodge before it opened for the season to report that Dan and Connor had done well in all their business ventures, though Connor knew that was all his father’s doing. Ben Libby’s death had made both Connor and Dan Frey very wealthy men, though Connor had little use for money. As long as he had a sound canvas canoe, a couple of fly rods and plenty of food to eat, he was content. But Dan, although he professed no interest in a fancy lifestyle, liked expensive toys. After the accountant had departed, Dan went to Anchorage and bought a de Havilland Beaver, a bright shiny yellow six-passenger plane on pontoons. It was delivered the next day.

“You might as well use those Air Force skills of yours,” he’d told Connor, gesturing to the plane with his cigar. “You can fly our clients to surrounding lakes and charge extra money for doing it.” Dan, who didn’t need to make any money at all and had a flying service at his beck and call, nonetheless liked to emphasize that the plane was not a frivolous extravagance but a sensible business expenditure. Besides, float planes in Alaska were as common as pickup trucks in Montana. Everyone who lived in the bush either owned one or knew someone who did.

The first place Connor had flown was to the tiny village on the Koyukyuk to see Marie, and she was as glad to see him as he was to see her. Her father had died that winter and she’d been running his trapline. Times had been hard and their winter had been lean, but she was glad to see him, and Connor felt hopeful. He spent several days at their cabin, eating stews her mother cooked from the beaver Marie had trapped, helping her tend the sled dogs and mend a broken sled. When he told her he wanted to marry her and bring her to live at the lodge, Marie looked troubled and shook her head.

“My mother would be all alone then.”

“She could live with us,” Connor offered, and Marie had consented.

And so it was arranged, as quickly and as simply as that. After supper that night Connor and Marie walked a long way down the river. He held her hand and kissed her for the first time. He gave her a gold necklace with a pear-cut blue diamond that had belonged to his mother. She gave him her body there beside the river, while the wild geese clamored across the arctic sky.

He remembered her gift as he stood before the mirror, thinking how much more precious it was than a blue diamond on a gold chain, and his seventh knot was as bad as the first. He picked up the jacket and stumbled out of the lodge into a brightness that startled. He left HoChi behind him in the lodge. “You weren’t invited,” he said through the door in response to the dog’s plaintive whine.

Dan was standing down on the dock, smoking a cigar.

“I can’t knot the tie,” Connor said. “My hands are shaking.”

Clenching the cigar in the corner of his mouth, Dan did it for him.

“I guess I can’t get you to change your mind and come,” Connor said.

Dan uttered a grunt of disgust and shook his head. “Hate weddings with a passion,” he said around his cigar. He finished the task and took the cigar out of his mouth. “I’m going to head up to the mouth of the Kandik, camp up there for a week or so. That’ll give you and your bride the run of the place for a few days. It’ll be the last privacy you get all summer. Make the most of it, boy. And good luck.”

Connor shrugged into the jacket and stuck out his hand. Dan clasped it in a firm handshake and slapped his shoulder before heading back up to the lodge. Connor walked out to the end of the dock where the plane was tethered, threw off the lines and climbed aboard. A man only got married once. He guessed he had a right to be nervous. He started the plane’s engine and was about to leave the dock when he spotted HoChi running nimbly down the gangway. Dan must have let him out of the lodge. He opened the plane’s door and HoChi jumped in, immediately hopping into the right-hand seat.

“Okay then, you’ll be the ring bearer,” Conner said, taking the leather thong from around his neck and draping it over HoChi’s head. The simple gold band with their names and wedding date inscribed on it glittered against the dog’s neck. “But remember, best behavior. This is an important day.”

He did a quick preflight while he taxied the Beaver out onto the lake. The weather was good, the lake was calm, and the Brooks Range reared its glorious snow-cloaked majesty against the northern sky. The flight to Marie’s village should take less than forty-five minutes. The wedding would be held there, an Athapaskan celebration officiated over by a missionary priest and followed by a traditional potlatch. Afterward, they’d fly back to the lodge and enjoy a whole week of uninterrupted bliss. Life was good. Connor pushed the throttle up and the plane accelerated through the light chop.

It wouldn’t do to keep his beautiful bride waiting.

SOLLY JOHNSON HAD LIVED out on the land most of his life, like his father and his father’s father, way back to the time when Raven first created the world. He had a wife who lived in the village, a woman who talked too much and made him crazy. He’d given her three sons, the last one two years ago, and left her with her family down on the Yukon while he ran his trapline up in the mountains. He liked it that way. He liked being alone. She raised the boys; he brought home the furs that gave her the things she wanted. He listened to her talk for a few weeks, a month maybe, nonstop, while she mended his clothes and made him a new pair of mukluks, and then he left her again and was glad to do so.

He didn’t like noise, and people were noisy. When he first came here to live in the mountains as a young man, there was no noise. There was just his canoe and his dog team, and the animals in the wilderness. It was quiet then. The only loud noise he heard was the sound of the river breaking up in spring, the thunderstorms in summer and the wild keening roar of the wind through the high mountain passes. And then the whites came. At first they came looking for furs and gold, but they went away when they couldn’t find any gold and all the furs got trapped out. But then a few years later they came back in those noisy flying canoes. They came for the fish they could catch in the rivers and lakes, and the animals they could shoot on the land, and some of them stayed and didn’t go away.

This was the beginning of the bad times.

The place he loved was where he built his cabin, near the mouth of the Yaktektuk, a small river that fed into the lake the whites named Evening but his people had always called Dayhehas. He had lived in this place for most of thirty years now. He was still a strong man, and he still had good strong dogs, but the winters seemed longer now, and the darkness was colder. The quiet places were quiet no more. The skies were full of the flying canoes that brought men to the big log house over on the warm shore.

The white man who lived there was called Dan Frey, and he didn’t like Indians. This much was true. He had been there long enough so Solly knew to keep away. Frey thought Indians stole things. He thought Indians were drunks. He hired them to work at his fancy log house on the lake, but he didn’t like them. Solly heard these things when he went to his wife’s village on the Yukon. He heard how the white man treated his Indian help. When Solly went back to his cabin on the Yaktektuk, he stayed away from the white man’s lodge. But he still came down to the shores of Dayhehas. He still liked to see both faces of the great mountain at the same time, and the way the sunlight sparkled over the big waters when the ice went out and the days got long. He liked to watch the loons when they returned to raise their young, and he liked to watch the moose eat lily roots in the coves. He was at the lake, crouched on his heels at the water’s edge cleaning a pretty good fish, when he heard the flying canoe taking off from the white man’s lodge.

He watched it race along the water, roaring like a hundred of the white man’s snow machines, those noisy stinky things that were taking the place of sled dogs. He watched it lift off the water and skim along just above the surface for a long time, as if trying to decide if it wanted to keep flying or return to the water. Then he watched it climb abruptly toward the sky the way this yellow one always did, and he saw it do something he’d never seen it do before. It climbed straight up, so steep it nearly went over backward before it stopped climbing and hung in place above the sparkling waters. The loud noise stopped and there was sudden quiet, just the lap of the waves against the shore and the brush of wind through the trees.

Then the flying yellow canoe fell out of the sky, tumbling forward and dropping nose first into the lake. Solly saw and heard the great crash of waves as it hit the water. He saw the canoe’s two legs break off and float away. He watched as it settled onto its belly and then sank so quickly that before he could rise to his feet to properly mark the spot the big canoe had vanished. He was still standing there when he saw something bob up from the water between the floating legs and begin swimming to shore. He thought maybe it was the white man, the mean one from the lodge. But as it came closer he saw that the head wasn’t human. It was a short-haired dog like none he’d ever driven before his sledge. The dog came out onto the gravel strand a quarter mile from where Solly stood and he saw that it had only three legs.

Not long after the dog reached shore, Solly heard a boat coming from the lodge. The boat was coming fast. He thought it must be coming to rescue the white man trapped inside the sunken canoe, but he was wrong. The boat circled the two legs that were still floating and Solly saw the driver tie them together. Then the boat sped down the lake toward the outlet, screaming like an angry woman and towing the two big yellow legs behind. The man in the boat had been the mean one, the one called Dan Frey. Dan Frey hadn’t seen the three-legged dog on the gravel strand. He hadn’t seen Solly standing on the shore not a quarter of a mile away from where the flying canoe sank. But this was no surprise. Dan Frey was a white man, and it was well-known among the Athapaskan that white men didn’t see too good.

CHAPTER ONE

Twenty-Eight Years Later

IT WAS THE ARTICLE in Forbes magazine that gave Libby Wilson the sudden impetus to throw all caution to the wind and do what she’d been waiting to do for the past twelve years. She read that article and realized that she had to go back home and make things right. Not five years from now as originally planned, when her bank account would be healthy enough to finance what was certain to be an expensive undertaking. She had to go now. The truth had remained buried for far too long. She knew her mother would object, but her mother could no longer tell her that the past didn’t matter, because it did.

Libby knew exactly how much it mattered. She’d grown up in the same village that her mother had. She’d lived in the same little government-issue house, been shipped out to the same boarding school in Anchorage to attend high school; she’d worn the same clothes, eaten the same foods and felt the same bleak desolation when one of the village kids sniffed too much gasoline and was buried beneath the permafrost. The only difference between the poverty her mother suffered and her own fate had been the color of Libby’s eyes.

The teacher in Anchorage had commented about her eyes. Ms. DeFranco had been young and earnest and from a well-to-do family in New England that believed in helping less fortunate cultures. She had made Libby’s future her personal crusade, which was the only reason Libby ended up going to college back East, being accepted to Tufts medical school and graduating top of her class. Proof positive that sometimes a little bit of racism could work to a minority’s benefit. Her internship was in forensic pathology and her ticket to success had been a reasonably sharp intellect and a pair of the prettiest blue eyes that ever came out of an Athapaskan villager…compliments of a Russian fur trader two generations removed on her mother’s side, and a father she’d never known.

Libby’s internship at Massachusetts General had just recently ended and two months ago she’d been offered a residency, an impressive nod to her potential from such a fine hospital. She might have accepted it and spent the next five years bolstering her bank account and carefully plotting her return to Evening Lake, but that very week Forbes magazine hit the newsstands and a copy ended up on the table in the doctors’ lounge. Idly thumbing through the pages in one of those rare quiet moments that sometimes occur in the middle of an endless shift, Libby had stumbled over that fateful article with all those glossy color pictures and a lengthy feature profiling one of Alaska’s wealthiest and most eccentric residents: the silver-haired and distinguished-looking Daniel Frey.

Libby had taken the magazine back to her apartment and read the article again, and yet again after that, studying the pictures of the massive log lodge, the lake and the man; all the while her blood pressure nudged toward the boiling point. Daniel Frey. Even the man’s name sickened her. She should write a letter to the editors of fancy Forbes magazine about the eccentric billionaire Daniel Frey and tell them the stories her mother had told her. She’d tell them what it had been like to work for the rich white man who hated Indians. What it had been like to be treated with contempt, to be unfairly compensated for long hours worked, to be housed in crowded conditions and poorly fed. What it had been like for her mother to fall in love with Connor Libby, Frey’s godson, only to lose her beloved on her wedding day in a suspicious plane crash. A crash her mother believed Frey had rigged both to keep Connor from bringing an Athapaskan bride back to the lodge and to claim the entire Libby fortune as his own.

She’d tell them what it had been like for her mother to go to Frey after learning she was pregnant with Connor’s child, only to be driven from the property.

“I know how you squaws sleep around,” Frey had said. “That baby could be anyone’s.”

Connor Libby had been mentioned only briefly in the article. Two sentences made reference to the fact that Ben Libby’s only son had been killed in a plane crash shortly after returning from Vietnam…and that Connor’s will had specified that if he died without heirs, Frey would inherit his share of the Libby fortune.

What Libby had to prove was that Connor in fact had had an heir, and she was determined to do just that. She remembered vividly that fateful day in high school biology class when she’d first learned about DNA, and how it could be used to prove a person’s paternity. That knowledge had changed her entire life’s focus, and had even steered her medical studies toward specializing in forensic pathology.

Libby had long been planning to return to Evening Lake, where her father’s plane had crashed, and salvage the wreckage. The only thing that had stopped her from doing it years ago was the large amount of money it would take to find and recover the plane. She’d made inquiries to salvage operators while she was in college, but none of them could be specific as to the costs because each salvage operation was unique. All they could tell her was that it would be expensive.

As a medical student, Libby had worked part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers to help cover the cost of her books and tuition. Scholarships and student loans had covered the rest, but saving any amount of money had been impossible. As an intern, she’d struggled to make ends meet and pay off her school debts. Logically, she should have accepted the residency that had been offered to her and worked until her finances improved, but none of that would matter if she could find just one of Connor Libby’s bones and prove she was his daughter.

The magazine article had become the catalyst, and after Libby had finished reading it for the third time, she’d made her decision. Her mother had told her over and over again, throughout years of listening to Libby rail against the injustices of poverty, that there was no way to prove anything, and it no longer mattered. But it did. It mattered twenty-eight years ago, and it mattered just as much today. And her mother was wrong. There was a way to prove not only her paternity, but what kind of racist Frey really was.

Which was why she turned down the offer of a residency at one of the best hospitals on the Eastern seaboard and was now flying to Alaska. The flight was a long one and gave her time to think about her strategy. What she actually thought about was the fact that she didn’t have a strategy, and had no idea how to start the search for her father’s plane other than by confronting Daniel Frey in person, something she’d always wanted to do but never dared. This strategy was a poor one, given his attitude toward the native people. He’d certainly never admit to any wrongdoings, never admit that it was strange he hadn’t wanted to attend his own godson’s wedding, and equally strange he hadn’t been anywhere in the vicinity of the lodge when the plane crashed.