CHAPTER TWO
Elara
I didn’t like to fly in normal commercial airplanes. I sure as hell wasn’t enjoying being in the little four-seater plane that had picked me up in Anchorage. How my father had managed to talked me in to flying to his sister’s house in Alaska, was still a mystery.
Aunt Minnie had been nearly twenty years older than my father. She’d been born when my grandmother was sixteen. Grammy later married a tourist who caught her fancy, moved to Oregon and had my father. Aunt Minnie stayed behind in that frozen hell. My father barely talked to his sister. Aunt Minnie refused to leave Alaska despite our many attempts to ask her to move. My father said his sister felt she had some duty to stay in that small town and be a nurse. He never understood it. I never understood it, either, but she was family and I respected her choice.
I'd be off this plane in less than an hour, I kept telling myself. We hit turbulence. I shrieked as my head hit the ceiling of the plane. Why did I ever accept the plane ticket? Because I couldn't, in good consciousness, let the house pass out of the family without seeing it at least once. I felt I owed my ancestors that. I felt I owed Aunt Minnie that.
I needed to see where my family had spent a good portion of the past hundred years; maybe collect her photos to add to my father's collection. And that was all. It was meant to be a vacation for me. But a small town in Alaska? I would have preferred to trade the plane tickets in for tickets to somewhere warm. Like Hawaii. Or Las Vegas.
The plane bounced again, and I clutched the arm of the chair, my knuckles turning white. A tiny part of my brain was calculating if I could live in the cold and snow so I didn't have to get back on the plane. I didn't know if I could do it.
I'd watched all the reality shows with the miners, the fishermen, the truckers, and the people that lived off the land—homesteaders I think they were called. I'd hoped to everything holy that those shows were fake, but the more snow I saw, the more my hopes were dashed. A tiny piece of me wished to be back during the gold rush days. I could have been a saloon dancer like Lola Montez. Just for a day. I liked modern amenities too much to go much longer than a day. Well, maybe a few more days in the past wouldn't be bad if it wasn't so cold.
The small plane dipped again. My stomach churned. I didn't know how much I could take.
“We will be landing shortly, miss. Please buckle up.”
I hadn’t heard sweeter words in the last twenty-four hours.
Someone had been nice enough to take my aunt’s truck to the airport and leave the keys with the one customer service girl. She’d given me directions on how to navigate to the house. I must have been too tired to hold my facial expressions, because when she said, “turn left at the giant carved salmon,” she followed it up with, “just trust me.”
The girl hadn't been lying. I turned left at the giant carved salmon and drove less than a half block before the façade of the town turned to trees and the house appeared, standing tall on the patch of land my ancestors had claimed from the wilderness.
House was a relative term. Complex or compound was a better description. But both of those words conjured thoughts of cults and directed my brain down a path that led me back to work. I was supposed to be forgetting about work. I promised my father I wouldn't dwell on work while I was gone. Even thousands of miles away and safe, it was hard not think of those bone scraping sounds and muffled screams from the other end of the phone. Goosebumps prickled along my skin as my heart began to race.
No.
I had to stop it.
I wouldn't let those thoughts come rushing back. The police had gotten the killer that night. But then, in transport, the suspect had escaped and killed the officers. There was no way the killer was in Alaska. No way that horrible individual was in that tiny little town my aunt had lived her entire life in.
My father told me the worst I could expect to encounter in town was a moose licking the windows while I ate breakfast.
And bears. But the bears should be hibernating.
Focus, Elara. Focus.
It would have been easier to focus on a warm beach with a cute, golden skinned god handing me a drink in a coconut. But, alas, the closest I was going to get to white sand would be the white frozen stuff that was everywhere.
And I do mean everywhere.
There wouldn't be bears at the beach.
I cranked the heater in the old truck and rubbed my eyes.
Cordova, Alaska would be my residence for the week, I had to find a way to get through it. Maybe I'd just spend the week in town at the Inn my cousin had told me about.
I turned my attention back to Aunt Minnie’s place.
The main building of the complex was tucked against the mountain, cocooned in trees. The a-frame peaks on the main structure stretched out like welcoming arms. I saw a few little outbuildings and prayed one was not an outhouse.
Aunt Minnie had been gone six months, but someone had been taking care of the place. Nothing was left carelessly out. The driveway had been kept had been plowed since the last snow. Even the porch and small awning had been carefully cleaned of the ever-present white nuisance. There were tire tracks from some heavy vehicle, but I had no way to determine how long ago someone had been at the house.
I drove to the porch, sliding in the slickness of the white mess. I tossed my suitcase inside the front door after fumbling with the keys. I wasn't ready yet. I needed food. I needed alcohol. And maybe, just maybe, I’d get lucky and someone in town would have a hot tub.