From Out Of The Blue

“What about infection? You’re so vulnerable right now. Your immune system is practically nonexistent. Flying on a big commercial plane and breathing all those germs…”

“The doctors wouldn’t have released me from the hospital if my blood counts hadn’t been adequate, but I promise I’ll hold my breath on the plane.”

“Couldn’t you just call this man up and ask him to come to Montana?”

“Sure I could, but how will I meet his friends and family that way? How will I see the way he really lives? How will I know what he’s really like unless I see him in his own world?”

Her mother nodded slowly and sighed. “What do you want me to tell your father?”

Kate gripped the wheel tightly and had to work hard to speak the next words without breaking down. “Tell Dad I love him, and I’ll be home soon.”

THE MOOSEWOOD Road House was gearing up for the summer tourism season, but in early June they were still a few weeks away from being all that busy and, best of all, they were located not ten miles from the place where Mitch worked. Kate made reservations from the airport in Anchorage when their flight arrived. The helpful person at the car rental booth told her that the Moosewood was a small place with a number of cabins scattered along the edge of a river valley overlooking the mountains, and a main lodge with a restaurant and bar on the ground floor. It was a little over two hours’ drive from the airport. While Rosa held the sleeping Hayden in her arms, Kate filled out the rental paperwork, got the directions to the roadhouse, and fifteen minutes later they were on their way.

It was still broad daylight at 11:00 p.m., though by the time they arrived at their lodging, twilight had fallen. They were shown to one of the larger two-bedroom cabins, which had a living room, a fireplace, a full bath and a sleeping loft.

Kate was so exhausted she had trouble mustering an obligatory “Wow” when she stood on the porch and looked toward the snowcapped mountains that appeared to glow across the violet-hued distance.

The employee set their bags inside the cabin door. “You’re looking right at Denali. Believe it or not, you can’t see that mountain most of the time. Big as it is, it’s completely hidden in the clouds, but the past few days have been clear. You folks been here before?”

“I passed through once in the middle of a blizzard.”

“Well, you’re in for a real treat. Enjoy your stay and if you need anything, room service or whatever, just call the front desk. We serve in the restaurant until 1:00 a.m. and we open for breakfast at six.”

Hayden barely woke as Rosa changed him into his pajamas and settled him into the queen-size bed in Kate’s room. “I could sleep with him in my room, señora, so you can get a good rest,” she’d offered, but Kate shook her head.

“That’s okay, Rosa. He’s so tired he won’t twitch all night.”

Neither did she. Even the nightmares left her in peace. A mere five hours later, she woke, feeling refreshed, much better than she had in a long time, and even better than that after taking a long hot shower. The sun was already well up when the room service breakfast was delivered. Kate drank her first cup of strong black coffee standing on the porch and staring across a vast, timbered valley toward that gigantic mountain. “Denali,” she murmured, awed by the sheer magnificence of the famed peak.

While Rosa gave Hayden his morning bath, Kate phoned her mother to tell her they’d arrived safely and to give her the name and number of the Moosewood. Then she paid a visit to the office to ask where the Pike’s Creek Road was. The directions were fairly straightforward. “But it gets pretty rough after the first mile,” the desk clerk cautioned.

“How rough?”

“I wouldn’t drive that rental car in there. The rental agencies don’t like their cars being driven on gravel roads.”

“Is there an airport somewhere out there?”

“I don’t think I’d go so far as to call it an airport. There’s a grass strip on the right-hand side just before the road gets really rough. You’ll see where the road forks to the right. That leads to the landing strip. Wally’s Air Charter flies out of there.”

“Oh? Is it any good?”

The clerk hesitated. “I hear the pilot’s great, but the plane’s a derelict. We usually recommend Polar Express out of Talkeetna.”

Kate considered his advice as she returned to the cabin. Hayden had eaten breakfast with Rosa and was complaining about not being able to watch his favorite TV programs because the cabin didn’t have a TV. Rosa turned a practiced deaf ear. She’d grown up without the “one-eyed monster” as she referred to it. She would take him outside, she told Kate, and show him all the small wonders around their cabin.

“Thank you, Rosa. That sounds better than TV any day,” Kate said. “I’ll be back by dark and maybe a whole lot sooner, depending on how things go. You can order room service or eat in the restaurant when you get hungry, whichever you choose. My mom’s phone number is in my bedside drawer if you should need it.”

“Yes, señora.”

“There are lots of books for guests to read in a bookshelf in the living room of the main lodge.”

Rosa smiled, seeing through Kate’s stall tactics. “We’ll be fine, señora. Good luck.”

Luck was something she’d run out of several months ago, but nevertheless Kate was feeling optimistic as she climbed into the rental car. Maybe it was seeing the way the morning sunlight had illuminated the snowfields on Denali’s peak an hour earlier, but she felt as if today might turn out to be pretty good. Maybe this meeting with Mitchell McCray wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe it’d turn out great.

Maybe her luck was about to change.

Ten minutes later, not quite a mile down the gravel road, she felt the steering wheel pull hard to the right and knew before she stopped that she had a flat tire. She got out and stared at it for a moment, then looked down the rutted gravel track that led toward all the answers she was seeking and felt a growing sense of despair. If this was an omen of what those answers would be, she took it as a bad one.

The second bad omen was when she discovered that the rental car didn’t have a spare, and because she already knew that bad things happened in threes, she figured it was only a matter of time before the hammer fell.

CHAPTER TWO

MITCHELL MCCRAY hated Mondays. For some reason, Monday seemed to be the day most of the emergency calls came in. The groups that had been flown in to base camp a week or two before would almost always have a member in trouble by Monday and be on the radio to the flying service that abandoned them there, asking for assistance. Begging, sometimes in that desperate and disbelieving way, as if the idea of failure had never occurred to them. As if illness or injury or bad weather had never figured in to any of their carefully thought-out plans.

But that wasn’t why he hated Mondays. Mitch hated Mondays because it was written into Wally’s secret code of work ethics: never, ever show up for work on Mondays. And because Wally was the boss, he got away with spending every Monday with Campy, who also had Mondays off and was sexy enough to make any red-blooded man forget that Monday was supposed to be the first day of the work week, not the last day of the weekend.

Therefore, all of Monday’s woes fell on his own shoulders and he never had backup. He also hated Mondays because if there was one day of the week the damn plane malfunctioned it would be on a Monday. Somehow, Wally had infused his own pathetic work ethic into the very rivets of the temperamental flying machine he’d dubbed Babe. What kind of a mechanic/pilot/flying service owner would name a plane after a cartoon pig? Then again, maybe it was a perfect moniker. The old red-and-white Stationair sucked down aviation fuel like a factory-farmed market hog and was about as athletic. It had crash-landed twice, sustained serious structural damage both times and taken additional abuse from several bad hail storms, which was why Wally had been able to buy it so cheap.

Which was also why it was on the ground more often than it was in the air.

In the first two hours of the day, Mitch fielded a radio transmission from a bunch of German climbers who were experiencing second thoughts about one of their companion’s stomach pains. “Ve sinks eet might be heez apindeezeez!” So he assured them he’d be along soon, only to discover, when he tried to fire up Babe, that Wally’s market hog had died at the trough sometime between engine shutdown Sunday night and attempted start-up Monday morning.

Mitch now had to drive all the way into Talkeetna to pick up the part they should have replaced weeks ago, which meant he had to give the German climbers’ rescue over to Polar Express, which meant they’d be the ones to reap the huge gratuity for saving the sick climber from a possibly fatal attack of “apindeezeez” because climbers, especially foreigners, tipped big when they were rescued, which was the only good thing to come out of a Monday.

All of which put him in a very ugly mood when he climbed into his truck and gunned it down the middle of the airstrip toward Pike’s Creek Road, throwing up a rooster tail of gravel and dust and nearly running over Thor, who woke from his fourth boredom nap of the morning just in time to realize he was being left behind. Mitch slammed on the brakes and the big, black wolfish-looking dog leapt effortlessly into the back. He’d ride there all the way to the “big city” and back, yellow eyes staring through the rear sliding window and the windshield, watching intently for moose—a tact that was both his hobby and profession. The brute was good at it, too, especially at night. Whenever he saw one he’d let out a woof that never failed to get the driver’s attention. Thor had saved Mitch’s life many times over. Seeing a dark moose on a dark road in the dark was damn near impossible, and lots of Alaskans had lost their lives because they hadn’t seen it.

He was almost out to the highway when he spotted the little tan-colored sedan with the flat tire. Why the hell anyone would try driving a city car like that on a road like this was beyond him. He slowed down. Who knows? Maybe this was a chance to pick up a few extra bucks and put some gas in the tank. Talkeetna was a long haul if you weren’t a crow, and fuel was damned expensive. He pulled alongside and leaned out his window, sizing up the situation. Rental car. Young slender woman with short dark hair, dressed in blue jeans and a fleece jacket trying to put one of those little scissor jacks under the axle on the opposite side of the car. Couldn’t see what she looked like, but maybe she’d be good-looking enough to turn his day around. A man could always hope.

“Need a hand?” He cut the engine and got out, slamming the truck door behind him. She abandoned her efforts and pushed to her feet to face him as he rounded the front of her car. Recognition struck a hard blow to his solar plexus, stopping him in his tracks. God almighty. K. C. Jones stood in front of him, staring him right in the eye in that proud defiant way, and she was just as dangerously gorgeous as the first time he’d set eyes on her. She’d cut her beautiful long hair, but it was her, all right. He’d thought about her from time to time over the years, more than he liked to think about any woman, but that was because of the way she’d treated him. She was the first woman he’d been intimate with who’d left him without so much as a goodbye.

“I’ll be damned,” he finally managed to say. “You must be one of them fancy naval aviators the government sent north to field-test rental car tires on the Pike’s Creek Road.”

“Hello, Mitch,” she said, cool as the morning. “How are you?”

“Great. You?”

“Fine.”

“Been awhile.”

“Yes, it has.” And then she nodded over his shoulder. “Is that your truck?”

He glanced behind him as if there might be some question. Thor was standing on the diamond-plate toolbox that spanned the bed behind the cab, ears at attention and eyes fixed on K. C. Jones. “No. It belongs to Thor. The dog. But he lets me drive it,” he said, wishing the rust spots weren’t so big and numerous. “Good to see you, by the way. What’s it been, four, five years? What brings you this far north?”

She gave him a small smile. “I had some time off and thought I’d see what Alaska looks like without any snow on it.”

“So it’s just a coincidence that you happened to be driving down this particular road when you got a flat?”