Driftfeather on the Alaska Seas Read online

  “I never knew him or my mother,” she said simply, taking the focus away from Joe’s obvious ambivalence about the truth. “He just never talked much, especially after Mom died.”

  “That’s why ya got me,” Joe answered, “and now ya got Sal, too. Your father—he was more a brother to me than my own no-g—”

  “Looks like them tacos is ready fer us,” Sal called from a nearby table, stopping Joe from finishing what he had been about to say.

  Swallowing the rest of his beer, Joe slid off his bar stool and Mara did the same.

  “So what ya got goin’ in Juneau?” he asked her, his usual lightheartedness returning.

  “Well, I’ve got a job offer and I’m going to buy a house and—well—try to start over again,” she answered.

  Picking up her plate and extending it for the food server to fill, she suddenly turned to Joe and said, “That’s just a line of bull, Joe. The truth is, I do have a job offer, but I have no idea how I’m going to feel about it when I get there.”

  Joe chuckled. “That’s what I like about you, Mara. You got the heart of the brave.”

  She looked at him before breaking out in a smile of her own.

  “Thanks for noticing,” she said, winking.

  For the next two hours, she sat with Sal and Joe, first eating homemade tacos and then helping to move the tables and chairs so the dancing could begin. By the time Joe had finished whirling her around the floor of the VFW until she felt dizzy, it was close to 9 p.m.

  “Are ya sure ya gotta go, Jane?” Sal said.

  “If I don’t, Sal, you’re never gonna get a chance to dance with your husband.”

  “Well, unless I stop him, he’ll be here till two days from tomorrow,” Sal laughed.

  “I was hoping to see Della on the way out of town—and her mother,” Mara said.

  “Since the shooting, Della pulls all the curtains the minute the light leaves,” Sal answered. “Probably not a good idea to turn up and surprise her.”

  “Is she doing okay?”

  “Joe thinks so, but woman to woman, I think it changed her—made her less trusting, more of a stay-at-home, ya know?”

  Mara bent down and held a paper napkin open with one hand while she carefully wrote on it with a pen she pulled out of her pocket.

  Hi Della,

  I’m just passing through, and I wanted to visit, but Joe and Sal kept me here at the VFW long past a decent hour to come and see you. I hope you’re doing okay and I hope you still have the feather I left for you—the one that Joe gave me that saved my life. I’ll try to see you if ever I’m in Glenallen again. And please tell your mother that Thor still has the medallion she made for him on his collar and I still wear my matching quill bracelet every day.

  Love,

  Mara Benson (used to be Williams—just got divorced—long story)

  Carefully folding the napkin, she handed it to Sal, asking her to please give it to Della the next time she saw her. If she had turned around, she might have seen the young Native woman with one arm in a sling watching her from the kitchen.

  Chapter Four

  Clean Break … Almost

  Glenallen had been pleasantly weird. Seeing Joe and Sal again had brought a sense of calm to Mara’s quest to escape the chaos of the last two years—chaos that had further tangled emotions she had come to Alaska to unravel in the first place.

  Too bad she had missed any opportunity to visit Della. It would have been nice to see her. Hopefully, Della would at least know from the note written on the napkin that she hadn’t forgotten her—as if that were even possible. You don’t forget something like what they had been through.

  When she got to Tok, she checked into a new motel along the highway at the Tok cutoff located at the junction of the Alaska and Glenn Highways. The town was a small but significant crossroads to all comings or goings between Alaska and Canada, and this motel hadn’t been there the last time she had been through.

  That time, she had been staying across town at another motel when the same thug who had raped Erin had shot Della in the parking lot during his murderous attempt to flee Alaska. Thankfully, she wouldn’t have to stay there again. After all that had happened, if there could have been any way to avoid Tok at all, she would have taken it, so the newer motel was her best option under the circumstances.

  After unpacking her clothes, she took out her cell phone and saw that the message box was full. Pulling up the delete prompt, she stopped herself from pushing it, hesitated for several seconds, and then pressed the play messages prompt instead.

  When she got to Juneau she planned to get a new phone and new number anyway, so she might as well let her personal drama finish playing out on this one—right? Besides, as much as she told herself she didn’t care, she wanted to know who, if any, of her old friends was calling.

  Unsurprisingly, the first call was from Sarah and the second from Ellie. After listening for a minute, she pushed fast forward, not wanting to hear the rest of their frantic explanations about how they had known about Erin, but had been powerless to intervene.

  When she lifted her finger to let the playback resume, she was stunned to hear Doug’s voice:

  Mara, the divorce hit me harder than I thought it would. Bringing Erin there was stupid. When I heard about the accident after you left the courthouse …

  A sudden beep cut off Doug’s message. Mercifully, her voice mail was full. Who was Doug trying to kid anyway?

  Stabbing fitfully at the keypad, she finally managed to press delete, and then she pressed it again for good measure to make sure the messages were gone.

  Restless tossing and turning for half the night robbed her of much needed sleep. Would she ever shake loose from the past? She and Doug were divorced and the fact that he had taken up with Erin was what it was and completely out of her control. She should have just taken Thor. Why did any of this matter anymore anyway? But why shouldn’t it? Anyone would feel the same. Finally, giving up on sleep, she took a long hot shower and checked out of the motel.

  A thin white coating of frost covered her windshield, foretelling the coming of winter. Although the sun had not yet risen, she could see a brilliant thin orange line along the horizon that told her it wouldn’t be long before it did.

  Shivering inside her SUV, she waited for it to warm up. While she sat there, she opened the long sealed envelope that Sal had given her as she left the VFW. Sal had told her to wait until she got to Tok to open it, saying it was from Joe. Unbelievably, it contained another feather almost identical to the one he had given her on the ferry over two years ago when they first met, only this time, instead of one red dot being painted on the upper third of the outer edge, there were two. Was it an eagle feather? She wasn’t sure. Joe had scratched his name onto the quill in tiny black letters and listed its origin as “Tok, Alaska.”

  On a scrap of brown paper tucked inside the envelope was a brief handwritten message:

  The worst is closer than you think.

  As your own strength grows,

  mine will begin to fade.

  As before, keep this to protect your future,

  but this time the danger will be from my past.

  Joe Michael

  The note was somber, and it lacked Joe’s rhythmic tone of the past, which alarmed her. She tucked it into her bag and tried not to think of it, all the while knowing that Joe’s words should never be ignored.

  Then, impulsively and purely out of some sense of duty to their long friendship, she called Sarah back, heaving a sigh of relief when a recording said she couldn’t come to the phone right now, and to please leave a message.

  “Sarah, this is Mara,” she began, measuring her words carefully. “I got your messages. I got everyone’s messages …”

  She held back from saying too much, from telling the woman who had long been her best friend about the betrayal, and about how hurt she had been to learn what they all knew. Unlike she had done in the letter she had sent Sarah from Bellingham when she h
ad first left for Alaska, she avoided mentioning that she was off to a new life. This time she would not explain.

  After a long pause, she simply said, “Give B.D. a hug for me,” and hung up.

  She would have to live with not knowing the baby that Sarah had named for both Brad and Doug. In the biggest way, naming the baby represented the depth of the friendship she and Sarah had shared, but it was time to let it go. Somehow deep down she knew that.

  Forcing tears back, she shoved all thoughts of Sarah, the baby, and both of her former husbands into some recess of her mind. A few miles down the road, she stopped at the nearest store and bought a disposable cell phone, slowing to toss the old one into a dumpster on her way out of town.

  No one heard it ring from its resting place in the bottom of the empty giant green receptacle, nor could they hear Sarah’s muffled reply to her message: Mara! I was just changing B.D.’s diaper. I couldn’t get to the phone. Call me back. Please. You’ll always be my best friend. I’ll wait right here …

  Then she drove out of town leaving the last physical remnant of her past behind. For the rest of the trip she would be Jane Brown, just in case one of them decided to put out a missing-person bulletin on her or something.

  In Juneau, she would officially begin her new life. This time, though, that new life would be hers and hers alone.

  Chapter Five

  Juneau Office

  On first impression, the Juneau office of Ocean Research and Preserve in Juneau lacked any of the charm that had first endeared Mara to its Homer counterpart.

  “What was it you said your name was?” an austere-looking woman asked as she peered over horn-rimmed half-glasses that were balanced partway down her nose. “It’d be nice if they told us about transfers before people show up.”

  “It’s Jane—Jane Brown. Please don’t let this take away from your busy day. I’ll contact the home office again and see if I can straighten this all out.”

  Slowly, she slid out the door as the woman, still muttering, sifted through a stack of papers behind her. Things weren’t much better at the hotel where she had made reservations.

  “Sorry, Miss, but we’re filled up for the special session of the legislature. Seems like a lot of folks are pretty interested in having their say this session,” the desk clerk said unapologetically.

  “But my reservation was confirmed …” Mara said, pulling a folded piece of paper out of her purse.

  “See here where it says confirmation only valid until 2 p.m. on the scheduled day of arrival?”

  The clerk pointed impatiently to the fine print at the bottom of the confirmation letter, fussed with some papers for an inordinately long time, then put his pen down with painful slowness, before directing her attention to the clock on the wall behind her.

  “It is now 3:15 p.m.”

  Well, wasn’t he just a specialist in customer nonservice! Why even bother to try to reason with him? Better to spend her time looking for a room. When she failed to find one, she drove to the outskirts of town and parked her camper along a riverbed; tucking back into the brush as far as was possible so as not to be easily seen. In the morning she had an appointment with a realtor. Hopefully, she would find something soon.

  Thankfully, she had filled the camper’s supply tank with propane before getting on the ferry. She used the built-in microwave to heat one of the several frozen bowls of soup she kept in the freezer for times such as this. When she was done, she used half her tank of fresh water to take a long, hot shower before going to bed.

  During the night, a pack of wolves howling off in the distance kept her from restful sleep, their sound seeming to be closer and closer as the night wore on. Once she thought she heard something brush along the camper near morning. Maybe the sound had been a bush moving in the wind or something, but it had frightened her and kept her on edge. When she stepped outside at first light, large, fresh doglike prints in the frost confirmed that the wolves had been all around her.

  When a full day’s search for a house turned up no likely prospects, she returned to the camper and did the same as she had done the night before. The next morning, she found a dump station and emptied her waste tanks. Finding fresh water was a little harder, but she managed to locate a place and filled up the camper holding tanks, before returning to the secluded spot that had become her temporary home.

  When the realtor showed her a two-bedroom bungalow near the waterfront a few days later, it was not exactly what she was looking for, but she took it anyway, paying cash and closing the deal the same afternoon. In a strange twist, it kind of reminded her of Sal’s place, but it wasn’t Sal’s place, it was her own, and for right now it more than suited her needs.

  She slept in it the first night, awakened when she heard the wind howl down the woodstove pipe. Sleeping on the floor in the unheated cabin had shown her that even a sleeping bag good to 10 below was not the comfort she was used to, leaving no doubt that her first priority would be to buy some wood.

  It was a definite plus that the bungalow was second to the last in the long row of homes-on-pilings that reached out to the edge of the harbor—sandwiched in unobtrusively, yet still close to the end, where it should be quieter than near the street.

  She had slept soundly on that first night in spite of the cold, hearing nothing but the gentle lap of the waves under the cabin and the patter of bird feet on the roof once morning arrived. She even saw an eagle sitting on one of the posts that supported the docks, making her thoughts shift momentarily to the comforting conversation she had had with Joe about her father. If she could not enjoy knowing her own father, then Joe Michael was just about as close to a father as she could imagine.

  The boardwalk that held the cabins was wide and extended about six feet beyond the face of the cabins to allow people to access their homes, and even to roll carts or drag sleds carrying their things to their doors.

  A long ramp that rose and fell with the tides led from that boardwalk down to the first grid of docks in the harbor, but access was restricted to homeowners—at least according to the sign posted on the side of the first cabin.

  She could see the harbor out both the front and back windows, and at high tide, as she had already learned, the water came right underneath her cabin, sometimes bringing with it an otter or two floating lazily in the kelp. Out her back window was a view of the backside of an identical row of cabins that sat about thirty feet away on another set of pilings, and held separate access to the harbor.

  There was also a place out on the street to park her truck—her own designated spot with a sign that said, reserved for #5 - B Row next to it. Although it was out of view of her cabin, at least she had the security of knowing it was her own space—and the area was well lit with, according to her realtor, regular security patrols at night.

  The cabin, as did each of them that lined this dock, had a room-sized porch out the back door that was surrounded with decking that stood about four feet high with room at the bottom to allow for water drainage and snow removal. The deck itself was uncovered.

  It had already proven to be a perfect place to have coffee in the mornings. Perhaps something like latticework around the outside might be nice for privacy? No, that would feel too closed in. Tomorrow she would go shopping for a small table and chairs for the porch—one with a large umbrella to keep off the nearly constant rain that Southeast Alaska was known for. Maybe even, in the spring, she would consider having someone extend the roof over the porch—or not—or maybe she would just leave things as they were. For now, this was home, and there would be plenty of time to make it just right.

  By week’s end, just like any of a number of locals she had seen sitting out in the foggy mist, Mara sipped her morning Kona, comfortable in her felt-lined knee-high rubber boots as she propped her feet up on the wooden bench that the previous owner had left on the deck. Nestling inside her favorite wool sweater, she leaned back against the cedar wall of her cabin, obscure, anonymous, and one with the harbor scene.

/>   When she went back inside and shook the drizzle out of her hair, it once again fell into the soft curls that she no longer tried to control—her weather-generated new look, but one that suited her well.

  The drapes that lined the patio door provided all the privacy she needed for those times when she was in the mood for seclusion. Not that that was a bad thing. Being alone had already become an unanticipated guilty pleasure. The deck had plenty of large pots around the edge that she would fill with plants in the summer so she wouldn’t have to use the heavy drapes as often, and could better enjoy the long summer days.

  The cabin had come with a boat slip, too, although it was only large enough to hold a dinghy. She had already added dinghy to her mental wish list, so this time she mentally underlined it, too.

  According to her realtor, an old man, a retired fisherman with a reputation for being as crusty as the bread he liked to make for his neighbors, lived in the cabin next to hers—in the last cabin in her row. She had already seen him coming up the ramp from the docks a few times, or standing alongside the railing smoking a pipe—or sometimes a stogie.

  Impulsively, a few days after moving in, she knocked on his door and introduced herself as his new neighbor, Jane Brown.

  “Well, around here, I’m known as Stu, uh, er, uh—Jane,” he said, emphasizing the name and winking knowingly. “You did say you call yerself Jane, didn’t ya?”

  She contained any reaction to Stu’s codgerly skepticism, nodded a yes and extended her hand to shake Stu’s—a move that apparently deemed her worthy of an invitation for some hot tea and a piece of Stu’s homemade bread.

  “Jest pull up a chair, Jane,” Stu insisted, pointing to a small, round table next to the window that overlooked the harbor. “Best bread you’ll eat around here and might as well share some tea and take the chill outta yer bones.”