Chapter Two

 

 

KARL woke to the comforting, steady sound of the ocean. The storm had cleared, and the other bunk lay empty. He rubbed his eyes and lurched upright. Then he swung his feet to the floor and leaned forward on his knees before he could nestle back down. A few minutes after five, the sky barely light, and his thoughts had slowed to an unwilling crawl.

He hated mornings.

He squinted into the hallway, hit the head, and got dressed in the half-light of his room. If it weren’t for the assembly of tidily unpacked belongings, he’d be convinced Farnsworth—Dan, he thought unbidden, he liked Dan better—was a figment of his imagination.

They hadn’t seen much of each other after his hasty retreat to shower. Karl returned to a quiet room. Then he dressed and went to finish his day’s tasks and ended his evening having dinner with Scobey and Lang. There was no sign of Dan, who was apparently getting the grand tour of the station. Karl went to bed and fell asleep before Dan got back, and uncharacteristically, he didn’t hear anything after that.

His gaze dragged over the headline pinned to the bulletin board, and he frowned. It served as a reminder for him, and he wondered why Dan had stared at it so intently the day before.

The station buzzed with activity, and he avoided eye contact or greetings as he slunk down the hall to the mess. He could make coffee in his room, but why bother. Someone would have a pot on, and he wasn’t picky. Cup filled, he snagged a banana, steered himself to the back table, and slowly started to come online as he downed both.

The week’s duty roster was updated on the huge whiteboard on the opposite wall. He wasn’t on for another several hours, same as Farnsworth. Jameson saw fit to pair them for the week. A good call even if he was reluctant to admit it. They had to get to know each other to work together. Didn’t mean they had to be friends.

Karl washed his coffee cup and neatly avoided thinking about Dan.

“So, scared off the newb already, eh?”

Karl stacked the cup on the dish drainer and turned to lean against the counter. “What?”

Jenkins grinned, all smartassed and toothy, because he just looked like a smartass with his sharp, dark widow’s peak and deep-set eyes. And he was being one. “Worth.”

“Worth?”

“Yeah, Farnsworth. You see him? I don’t.”

“Okay, and?” Karl eyed the cup, still dripping water in the rack. He flipped it to his palm and got a refill.

“Well, he hied off an hour ago. We all figured, yanno.”

Karl drank half his coffee and said, through an exasperated exhale, “No, I don’t know.” He scowled at Jenkins and made a go-on motion. “Where’d he hie off to?”

“He ran to town—and I mean just that.”

Heber crossed to the kitchenette from the doorway and readied mint tea in his ever-present travel mug. He’d always looked about twelve to Karl—tall, corn-fed, blond, and blue-eyed, an aw-shucks appearance that masked his steely determination and expertise to keep everyone under his care alive.

“God, Jenks, you’re such a jackass. You know Radin doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together yet.” Heber nodded at Karl. “Worth was up and at ’em over an hour ago and asked for the best route into town. I told him, and then next we know, he’s out the door and jogging. I called after him that if he wanted a ride I’d be off duty in time, but he waved and just kept going.”

“Ah. I can’t take credit for that.” Karl’s fingers twitched, itchy with the imagined pull of snagging his keys and taking off after. “Thanks.”

“Just looking out for your health.” Heber checked his watch. “But in three hours, I’m no longer medic in charge, so don’t look to me for help.”

Karl snorted and drained his coffee.

“What do you think of our new hotshot swimmer?” Jenkins wasn’t kidding anymore.

“Probably better than you, but that’s not really saying a lot. We’ll see.” Karl washed the cup again and shared a grin with Heber. “Catch you guys later.”

Heber lifted his tea, and Jenkins muttered something that didn’t sound like a polite goodbye. Without examining why, Karl decided to go after Dan.

Town was several miles from the station. Not an impossible distance by any means, but more than he would run. They might as well start getting to know each other. Meeting in town would make for a good icebreaker. Olive branch? Whatever.

In moments he had his keys, a towel, and two hoodies, and his chicken scratch on the sign-out. A chilling wind tried to push him back inside, so he paused in the small vestibule, pulled on one of the hoodies, and charged out with purpose.

Karl kept his ancient Jeep parked at the far end of the lot on an incline—made it easier to get going. He pumped the gas, popped the clutch, and cranked the engine. He repeated the process, and it fired up, loudly at first. Then it settled into its timing, and he eased off the clutch and got rolling.

It took longer than he anticipated to catch up to Dan, and he sweated the long moments thinking he’d gone off-road or fallen into the water or something. But, no. He steered around a fishhook bend and spotted Dan. His bright orange T-shirt stood out against the ocean mist and gray.

He slowed down and leaned over to unroll the window. “Going my way?”

Dan had maneuvered to the farthest edge of the narrow road, and Karl startled him.

“Sorry—c’mon, get in.”

Dan stared at him, and then recognition fired and won out over surprise. “Nah. I’m good, thanks.”

Karl kept pace. “Better if you just let me give you a lift. You’ve gone several miles, and it’s gonna rain. Last of the system that brought yesterday’s storm will whip through here, oh….” He peered past Dan over the water. “In about twenty minutes.”

“I mean it. I’m good.”

“Cold rain. Exposed to the heartless north Pacific—raging seas, wind, rain.” Karl yanked the Jeep to a stop and threw the towel out the window. His aim was true, and it wrapped around Dan’s head. “Just come on.”

Dan seemed to huff. Karl couldn’t be sure with the muffling effect of the towel, but then Dan’s shoulders sagged, and he climbed into the Jeep. He dried his matted hair and damp arms. Dan’s shorts had crawled up into his crotch, and Karl couldn’t keep from staring when Dan peeled his shirt off.

Their eyes met, and Karl held up a hoodie. “Uh, I brought this for you.”

“Thanks. You didn’t….” Dan stopped and shook his head. He put the hoodie on—it fit a bit tightly across the chest—and folded the towel over his bare legs.

Karl was still staring. He licked his lips, forced his gaze back to the road, and jammed the car into gear. “If you want it closed, you actually have to crank the window. Dry socks in the glove compartment.”

Dan didn’t respond, and they drove in silence, but after a few minutes he snapped the glove compartment open and changed his socks. Then he let out a little sigh of satisfaction that twinged every one of Karl’s nerves.

“Feel good?” he asked and then rolled his eyes. Dumb question. Dumb thickened voice. Dumb. “Take care of your feet, and they’ll take care of the rest.”

Dan smirked at the stock phrase they all heard over and over in service. “It does feel good. Thanks again.”

He smiled, and Karl saw the reluctance behind it and tried not to let that bother him. He saw more than nerves—a sadness, something lost about Dan’s expression. He hated that he noticed and the pang it caused in his heart. The nagging suspicion from last night returned, but he didn’t know what to be wary about.

Dan fiddled with a strip of worn paper, and something metallic flashed. He held the paper in his palm and went still. Unhappiness hung on him like a mantle.

Karl sighed. Vulnerability was catnip to him, as if he needed more to lock away and ignore about this kid. If he wasn’t careful, he’d get lost in it.

“Did you always want to be a Coastie?”

“Hmm?” Dan closed his fist around the paper and shoved both hands in the hoodie pockets. When he looked up, his eyes were clouded with questions and maybe a memory.

“I’m asking about your origin story. Small talk, you know?”

“Oh—oh. Yeah, more or less. For a while I thought I’d go pro surfing.” Dan shrugged. “I’m good, but not pro good. I’m one of those who swam before I walked and grew up on the coast with… someone who pushed me.”

“Into the job?”

The corner of Dan’s mouth lifted. “Kind of. It just felt natural to do. I’m a better swimmer than a surfer, and I love the thrill and challenge of the rescue. So here I am.”

Dan’s answer left a lot unspoken but Karl let it be.

“I grew up around here.”

“Yeah?” Dan’s voice warmed with interest, and he looked all around them at the beautiful, forbidding landscape.

Karl could almost hear his thoughts as Dan imagined what that childhood was like. Overall it was good, and Karl had no complaints about where he ended up.

“Yeah. Not many of us Alaskan-born Alaskans around. You’re lucky, kid—soak it up while you’re here.”

“You gonna show me the ropes?”

“Or if you give me trouble, tie you up in ’em.” Karl downshifted and swallowed when Dan turned to him, pupils tightening in focus.

They settled into an uneasy quiet. Heat spread from Karl’s groin to his chest, weakened his arms, and jumbled his thoughts.

“Well, here we are.” His voice cracked with relief as they passed the battered sign that welcomed them to town. “Is there somewhere particular I can drop you?”

“Anywhere is fine.” Dan’s arm jerked in the hoodie pocket, but he didn’t withdraw it. “I just wanted to get a look at Eider. Show myself around.”

Karl kept going into the center of town and pulled into EiderUp, the post office/small grocery/Army-surplus store. “This is almost the sum total of Eider, but have at.” He twisted to face Dan and propped his arm on the steering wheel. He could tell Dan didn’t want further company, but he wouldn’t leave Dan there, especially with afternoon duty looming. “I’ll meet you here in about an hour.”

“You don’t—”

“I will. Ropes, remember?”

Color dusted Dan’s cheeks, and Karl blinked, shifted forward, and killed the engine.

Dan slid from the Jeep and stood in the door. He wouldn’t meet Karl’s eyes as he fiddled in the hoodie pocket, and Karl pictured the strip of paper. He would have to keep the kid from ever joining in the poker nights at the station.

Then the rain he’d predicted began to patter on the cloth roof.

“Okay. I’ll be here.” Dan put his hood up, slammed the door shut, and walked away.

Karl listened to the rain and kept himself from watching Dan. He got a coffee at the everything store, caught up on the gossip, and sat reading in the Jeep. He mostly stared at the paper without comprehending the words, wondering what Dan was hiding and what he had really come to town to find.

 

 

DAN hunched into his shoulders and pulled the hoodie collar up over his nose. It smelled nice—fresh and spicy, like the room he stayed in. Like Karl.

He grunted and moved to stand under the eaves of the corner building. Getting a ride here and back to the station gave him a lot more time, and he was grateful for that and for the hoodie and the dry socks too. He watched Karl duck into the post office and hated how much he could like Karl, given the chance.

Dan checked his watch compass to get his bearings and started to jog west out of town.

Eider wasn’t much more than a clump of humanity stuck to a crossroads, and soon he was out of town and running past larger, spread-out, overgrown lots with camper shells attached to trailers, log homes, and a few A-frames. At the bottom of a hill, he found the springhouse alongside the road, and turned north and climbed a graded road.

He passed the cabin and had run a quarter mile to a dead end before he realized it. Dan slowed, looped back, and searched for the entrance. Eventually the curled-up ends of plywood jutting through the dying weeds at the road’s edge caught his eye, and beyond that, something like the shape of a house was covered in bramble and ivy.

The plywood bridged a metal culvert drain and led to a narrow pathway. Dan picked past a thorny patch, toed at the blunt front porch to be sure it was solid, and then tried the key in the padlocked door. It didn’t fit. Shock jittered up his arms, and he stepped back. He scanned the cabin, returned to the road to look it up and down, and checked his coordinates.

It was the right place. It had to be.

Dan considered his options and threaded past the thorns and climbed onto the porch again. He reared back and kicked the door in. The padlock stayed locked but the spongy doorframe ripped away. Dense, putrid air assaulted him—animal stink and wood rot and something chemical—and he gagged. He stood on the porch to get his breath back, pulled the hoodie up over his nose, and then went inside.

I have a cabin in the woods. You’d love it here.

Dan heard Axe’s voice and circled the inside. They hadn’t talked to each other much after Axe left home, and even less once Axe got to Alaska, but the cabin rated high enough for Axe to mention early on. He’d sent Dan the coordinates and told him to check it out on satellite, bragging about the view and nearby river and seeing bears and wolves from the back porch. This dingy and squalid place wasn’t what Dan imagined.

Had Axe bought it in this condition but never got the chance to fix it up? Could it have fallen into disrepair in the weeks since Axe’s death? Was that how Axe chose to live? Dan didn’t know. Anything seemed possible here in the wilderness.

He thumbed the phone flashlight on and swept the room but ignored the scurrying noises. Nothing leaped out at him beyond how desolate it was. He walked the entire cabin in a search pattern, bouncing here and there on floorboards, but he didn’t find anything hidden under them. The log walls were solid, and the single line of cabinets were empty and had no false bottoms or compartments he could discern.

Dan opened the back door and closed it again. About ten feet from the cabin, the mountainside dropped away, and between it were only more thick and nasty brambles.

He searched under the porch, found nothing, and then did his best to walk around and check the sides of the cabin. One side was nearly walled off by an ugly plant with shiny red and brown leaves that he decided looked poisonous, and the other held a stone chimney he hadn’t seen from inside. It had come away from the wall and leaned precariously back. The hole it created was boarded up, and the roof was patched with corrugated plastic.

None of the stones wobbled or wanted to dislodge, but the chimney acted like it might want to, so he patted around the base and got nothing but muddy knees and dirty hands.

Dan huffed in frustration and snatched the piece of paper from his pocket.

If you ever get way up here to see your dumb big brother, you’ll need this.

The cryptic words and the key they’d been wrapped around were all he had to go on—that and their conversation about the cabin. Dan was sure the two should go together.

Dan idolized Axe growing up. He was ten years older and always so strong and fast and cool. Axe had a different dad, and neither dad had stuck around. With a disinterested mother, Axe was Dan’s whole life. He taught him to swim and surf and as much about growing into a man as a teenager could. But ten years became a chasm between them when they were ten and twenty years old, and Axe had gone into the Coast Guard. He’d been gone from Dan’s life ever since.

Dan had followed again and joined the Coast Guard the day he graduated high school. But he wanted it for himself as much as to tag along after his brother. He loved the water and swimming, the thrill of a rescue. Building a career and his future on that just made sense. He worked his tail off to earn top marks and rank in everything, and served his first stint in Cali with his sights set on Hawaii.

He gave that up when Axe was presumed dead. Getting stationed in Alaska was easy, as it wasn’t exactly a sought-after position, but that’s where easy ended. Finding more questions than answers only slowed his investigation, but it wouldn’t put him off.

Dan had to know what had happened, and he couldn’t accept that such a strong veteran swimmer as Axe would go down without a trace on a routine mission. Axe hadn’t gotten lost at sea, or it wasn’t that simple. They might have drifted apart over the years, but some things brothers simply knew.

Climbing into the gap between the chimney and the wall was a terrible idea, so of course he shinnied right up there.

More nothing. Not under the slimy plastic roofing, not in the woodpecker holes drilled in dense lines all over the wood siding. He changed his handhold to turn and climb back down and had to lean heavily against the wall. He sensed the fall before it actually happened.

Wood groaned and then splintered, and Dan flailed. He landed on his back, hard, breath knocked out of him and darkness closing in around him. He sucked wind and tried to push away the weight of the wall that pinned him down. But it was too heavy, too tight.

The darkness crept closer and made him weak. He shut his eyes, just for a minute to get his strength again, but he came to again when something else crashed alongside him.

He imagined what would happen if the rock chimney gave way and followed the wall. Then he pictured himself falling through the weakened floor and getting tetanus or a broken leg and lying there to rot with everything else.

Dan caught his breath and managed to loosen one leg from the wall piled on top of him. He drew his knee up, planted his foot on the boards, and heaved. Then he scrabbled backward as quickly as he could. The boards lifted enough for him to get free and crashed back down inches from trapping him again. Bright spots dotted his vision, and he coughed up caustic dust that burned his throat and lungs.

He staggered onto the porch and then got clear of the yard, too dazed to be pissed or upset. He didn’t look at his watch. He just put his head down and ran.

Karl’s battered Jeep was in front of the store, and Karl waited in the driver seat.

Dan had no explanation to give, so he didn’t try to come up with a bad excuse. “Sorry.”

Karl checked his watch. “We’ll just get back in time.”

“I went farther than I meant to, and it took me longer than expected.” Dan spread his hands. “Everyone warned me distances were harder to gauge out here, but I hadn’t realized just how much.”

“Did you fall in the proverbial well?” Karl surveyed Dan with a careful eye and ran a light finger across Dan’s knee.

Dan tingled all over, and he looked down because Karl hadn’t let go. Karl clucked his tongue and leaned forward, close and warm, and when Dan turned his head, their noses brushed. They blinked—too close, too warm—and Karl exhaled and then reached under Dan’s seat.

He could only sit there stupidly as Karl opened the first aid kit and dealt with a cut on Dan’s knee he hadn’t noticed until Karl pointed it out. Karl smoothed a bandage down and gently palmed Dan’s knee, hot but gentle, and then he poked and prodded to check for other injuries.

“Brambles caught me.” Dan’s voice was a thread, and he tried not to wrench his knee from Karl’s hand. It would look weird and would hurt. He told himself that the burn of Karl’s touch was wooziness from running too far and too hard.

The chemical odor was still in his nose, and he pinched it. Dan leaned back against the headrest, turned to bury his face in the hoodie, and dragged in the fresh, spicy scent that lingered in the fabric.

Karl hummed noncommittally and pushed a cold, wet bottle into Dan’s hand. He screwed it open and drank the water down.

“Thanks. And thanks for waiting.”

“Of course.” Karl packed the first aid kit, put it away in the back foot well, and studied Dan a minute more. “Have Gent look you over when we get back. Okay?”

Dan nodded.

Karl cranked the Jeep, reversed, mashed the clutch, and they jerked forward. If Karl was interested in why Dan would run to town and then get lost for what felt like hours, he didn’t show it. He didn’t recriminate or ask about anything. He didn’t even make small talk. Dan was annoyed that he missed it.

If that had been Axe waiting on him, his butt would be tanned and his ears blistered.

Several miles from town, Dan broke the silence. “We should probably trade numbers?”

“Good idea if there were reliable cell coverage out here.” Karl shifted, dug in a pocket, and handed Dan his phone. “Still a good idea. Here.”

“It’s not locked?”

“Why bother?”

Dan shrugged. “Fair.” He added his number to Karl’s contacts and sent a quick text to himself. True to Karl’s observation, the message failed. He would resend it at the station.

“I got you a sandwich at the post office.” Karl motioned to the white paper bag between the seats and smiled, but he didn’t look over. “The postmaster slaps together a mean club.”

Dan gazed at the empty water bottle and wished he had a bit more to swallow the shame that filled his chest. For some damn reason, the tears that hadn’t come at the disappointing wreck of Axe’s cabin welled up and threatened to spill over. He cracked his window and turned his face into the wind.

A low wail rose in the distance ahead of them. Dan’s pulse sped, and his muscles bunched in anticipation. He looked at Karl, who nodded at him and floored the gas. The Jeep spit gravel and was loose in the curve but held on to the road.

The SAR alarm.