Catch Me if Yukon Read online

  “Of course I’m not.” She flashed a perky smile. “Really, Emily, I can hardly contain myself. I’m absolutely having the time of my life. I don’t think I’ve had this much fun since I color-coded your father’s sock drawer.”

  Which must have been a real knee-slapper considering the only socks Dad owned were black.

  Leaving Mom to stand guard over the ship’s most accessible life-saving apparatus, I went in search of Etienne to enlist his assistance in helping me round up the group for lunch. The advertised meal consisted of turkey wraps, chips, and fresh fruit, but for an additional twenty bucks, we could order a platter of Alaskan king crab legs, complete with stainless steel lobster cracker, moist towelettes, and bandages.

  Unfortunately, my guys are spectacularly bad when it comes to wrestling with seafood that looks like the creature from the Predator movies. Removing husks from ears of sweet corn? Yes. Dissecting the legs of spiny crustaceans? Not so much.

  Fear of shellfish is another of the consequences of being landlocked.

  Not seeing Etienne at the port rail among the impenetrable wall of whale watchers, I poked my head inside the nearby observation cabin with its indoor seating and huge viewing windows to find the room deserted. That left only the main deck galley and bow to search.

  Circling around the rows of passenger chairs that were bolted down mid-deck, I noticed Thor Thorsen’s wife, Florence, sitting by herself, bundled up in a hoodie and tinkering with her cell phone. As physically unremarkable as Thor was impressive, she reminded me of everyone’s favorite pair of slippers—plain, devoid of decoration, and a bit frayed around the edges, but blessed with the ability to soothe the sorest of feet. She was schlepping a jumble of camera lens cases that were skewed across the width of her chest. She was so entangled in straps and nylon webbing that I hoped she didn’t get snagged on some out-of-the-way hook and accidentally strangle herself.

  She waved when she saw me. “Are you looking for Etienne?”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “You bet. Goldie was starting to feel a little queasy, so he and Margi escorted her down to the galley a few minutes ago. This is her first time on the ocean, and if she felt as bad as she looked, I bet it’ll be her last. I would’ve taken her myself, but I didn’t want to leave Thor high and dry without his equipment.”

  Florence was always looking to help someone. She’d received numerous citations from practically every organization in Windsor City for her leadership and outstanding community service. She had founded her own chapter of the Daughters of Norway, which many of my regulars belonged to. Word around town was that Thor often took advantage of her generous spirit, but if today was any example, she seemed perfectly content sitting by herself, lugging all his photographic equipment while he enjoyed the sights.

  I eyed the straps and cases hugging her body. “Is that stuff heavy?”

  “Heavy, no. Cumbersome, yes.”

  I was tempted to ask why big, broad-shouldered Thor couldn’t carry his own camera equipment, but I figured that was none of my business. “Have you seen the whales yet?”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t look like anyone at the rail is too keen on giving up their spot, so I’ll wait and see Thor’s photos when we get back home. It’ll be just like being there.”

  Yeah, why go through the hassle of paying a lot of money to see something firsthand when you could wait until it was over and see it vicariously from the comfort of your own sofa?

  She waved her cell phone at me, her face a question mark. “I know the boat is equipped with satellite internet, but do you think it’s working? I mean, I sent a couple of text messages to Lorraine Iversen back home and I thought they went through, but I haven’t heard back from her yet, which is really unusual because she’s as compulsive as I am about answering texts immediately.”

  “She’s probably juggling a million medical issues at the moment, so I wouldn’t worry too much. She got a lot dumped on her plate in the last few days.” Lorraine’s mother had broken her hip the day before our flight, so she’d had to cancel her reservation, leaving her husband, Ennis, to make the trip without her. “Give her time. Hospitals aren’t known for having the best cell service. Too much concrete and steel.”

  “You’re probably right. But still.” She frowned at her phone. “It’s just so unlike her. I mean, she’s my best friend. I’d like to know what’s happening so I can give her a little emotional support.”

  “Talk to Ennis. He might have an update that’ll help ease your mind.”

  She nodded. “Sure. I…I just can’t shake the feeling that something terrible—” Leaving the thought unfinished, she turned her cell phone off and stuffed it into the pocket of her hoodie. “Shutting the thing off might help, right? Sometimes I think it’d be better for everyone’s peace of mind if the cell phone went the way of the dinosaur.”

  Closing her eyes, she inhaled a deep breath, then let it out slowly, as if she were in the cool-down stage of an exercise program. “There.” She opened her eyes and forced a smile. “I feel better already.”

  But she didn’t look better.

  She looked as if she were carrying the weight of the world on her narrow shoulders…and the strain was about to crush her.

  two

  “Of course there’s a cure for seasickness.” Margi Swanson sat opposite Goldie Kristiansen in one of the galley’s long booths, tapping into the decades of medical expertise she’d gleaned as a nurse at the Winsdor City Clinic. “Get off the boat.”

  Goldie groaned as she propped her elbows on the table and braced her forehead against the heels of her palms. She was a living legend at our community playhouse, having appeared in stage productions for decades, so she had the theatrical chops to turn any situation into a dramatic affair. “That’s it?”

  Margi scratched her head. “Uhh…I think it helps to be outside in the fresh air…as long as you don’t block Thor’s view and get yelled at. And looking at the horizon is supposed to be better than staring at something right in front of you.” She shrugged. “Truth is, we don’t get much call at the clinic for treating seasickness. It’s one of the perks of being landlocked.”

  “Would you like me to escort you back up to the observation deck so you can test out the ‘staring at the horizon’ theory, Mrs. Kristiansen?” Etienne sat beside her, his voice calm, his French/German/Italian accent soothing, his presence reassuring. He’d already given her a motion sickness pill, but at this point I wasn’t sure it would do much good.

  “Give me a minute, would you?” Sliding her elbows off the table, she eased her spine against the seat back and sat motionless, as if she were performing an invisible body scan. “I might be feeling a smidge better.”

  “Terrific!” I enthused.

  “But just in case it’s a false alarm, would one of you find Grover for me? I should probably draw a map showing him where all my secret hiding places are.” She heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I have cash stashed all over the house. It’s my personal crusade against his edict that no amount of money should ever be allowed to simply sit around not earning interest. He advocates saving money rather than spending it.”

  Goldie was in her early sixties and still a real looker. Red hair cut in a stylish bob. Glowing complexion. Lipstick that always matched her nail polish. Curvaceous figure that she dressed in the latest fashion trends. Chunky costume jewelry that hung from her ears, bedecked her fingers and wrists, and sat prettily at her throat. Her features were finely shaped and perfectly proportioned, giving her the kind of countenance that, years ago, might have attracted a New York model agency or Hollywood talent scout if she’d been living anywhere other than a small town in the middle of Iowa. I’d heard rumors that her good looks were a result of a nose job, facial nips and tucks, and spectacularly expensive mineral foundation, but I preferred to believe her comeliness was simply a result of great genetics.

  �
��Okay,” she wheezed, giving her head a determined bob. “I’m ready to go outside again.” Hesitating, she pressed a bejeweled hand to her cheek and winced. “How bad do I look?”

  “Bernice looks worse,” Margi said helpfully. “And she’s not even seasick.”

  “Thank you for that—I think,” deadpanned Goldie. She regarded Etienne with doe eyes. “All right, handsome, it’s you and me. Are we ready to give this cockamamie theory a trial run?”

  “Just in case my theory collapses,” said Margi as she slapped something onto the table and shoved it toward Goldie. “Air sickness bag. I sneaked a few off the plane with me. And don’t forget this.” She glided a mini bottle of sanitizer at her. “You might need that afterward. It’s the new summer scent that was specifically created to celebrate Iowa’s farm economy. Pork Sorbet.”

  As Etienne and Goldie made their way toward the exit, the loudspeaker crackled with the captain’s excited whoop. “Breach!”

  I fired a look out the viewing window just in time to see forty tons of whale flesh catapulting itself into the air right off the rail. Fins flapping, tail flopping, it smacked back into the surf in a kind of modified backflip, landing with a resounding SPLAAAT that rained torrents of foamy spray over the deck and onto the windows.

  “Whoa!” cried Margi. “What do you bet a few folks just got soaked?”

  I stared at the seawater dripping down the windowpane. “I’m afraid you might be right.” I just hoped one of them wasn’t Bernice.

  It wasn’t.

  It was Mom.

  She bustled into the galley for lunch with her salt-and-pepper hair plastered to her head and her jacket sporting wet patches that were bigger than the continents on a map of the world. Spying me at the end of a table that had just filled up with seven of our tour guests, she paused on her way by.

  “I have no idea where your father is, so I’ve decided to eat without him.”

  “Woman power,” applauded one of my tablemates, fisting her hand in the air.

  “Did you want to dry off before you eat, Mom? There’s a hot-air hand dryer in the ladies’ room. You could stand in front of it for a few minutes.”

  “Already did that.” She tucked a strand of sopping hair behind her ear. “I’m not really that wet now.”

  I looked her up and down. “You’re drenched.”

  “I can hardly notice.” She leaned in toward me, giddy with relief. “Aren’t we lucky we survived the dangerous part of the trip? All that’s left is the glacier, and it probably hasn’t moved in a thousand years, so…no threat there.”

  “Unless we get rammed by one of them icebergs,” taunted my grandmother.

  Mom shot a look her way. “What?”

  “Iceberg,” I jumped in, holding up my turkey wrap and pointing to the filling. “Lettuce. It’s unusually crisp. You’ll love it.”

  “Oh. Well, enjoy your lunch, everyone. And, Mother”—she fixed Nana with a piercing look—“meet me on the upper deck when you finish. I’ve arranged a surprise for you.”

  Nana gave a little suck on her uppers as Mom hurried away. “I don’t know what that mother of yours has got cooked up, Emily, but I don’t want no part of it. Dang. I might have to spend the rest of the trip holed up in the potty.”

  “That could be difficult,” said Tilly. “It’s only a one-seater. There’ll be a line.”

  “What if it’s a good surprise?” asked George.

  Nana gawked at him. “Margaret don’t do good surprises. She’s only got two kinds: dumb and dumber.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He bobbed his head. “Maybe there’s another restroom aboard with more than one seat.”

  George Farkas had been sweet on Nana ever since she’d crossed the border from Minnesota to Iowa after Grampa Sippel died. The attraction was mutual, despite the many obstacles they faced. She was Catholic; he was Lutheran. She was a lottery-winning multi-millionaire; he was middle-class. She was related to my mother; he wasn’t.

  “Not to direct the conversation away from family dynamics,” interjected Ennis Iversen, “but did any of you know that Alaska has its own version of the Bermuda Triangle?”

  Ennis, a professor of folklore and mythology at a small liberal arts college north of Windsor City, could best be described as a rumpled soul in dire need of pants that weren’t baggy and shirts that needed pressing. With graying hair that he wore in a ponytail at his nape and an earlobe pierced with a gold stud, he looked more like a rabid fan of the Grateful Dead than a hardcore academic. His intelligence seemed at odds with his appearance, yet he appeared neither impressed by the former nor bothered by the latter. He was a born storyteller, blessed with a naturally deep basso that others could acquire by indulging in years of heavy drinking and chain-smoking or by answering to the name James Earl Jones.

  “Alaska has a Bermuda Triangle?” I repeated. “For real?”

  “The area forms a kind of obtuse triangle from Juneau in the south”—he drew an imaginary line on the table—“to Barrow in the north, to Anchorage in the center of the state. And just like the Bermuda Triangle, the region is steeped in mystery. Planes vanish without a trace. Hikers go missing. Tourists and longtime residents disappear, never to be seen again.”

  “Where’s the Yukon?” Nana asked abruptly as she studied his invisible map.

  “It’s off the map, Mrs. Sippel. In Canada.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “It forms Alaska’s eastern border.”

  “So you mean we’re not gonna be seein’ them fellas what dress like Sergeant Preston in them red jackets and funny pants?”

  “Not unless our bus driver gets us hopelessly lost.”

  “Oh.” She pushed out her bottom lip. “That’s disappointin’.”

  “If I may,” Tilly piped up. “Alaska is over twice the size of Texas, and it remains sparsely developed because of hostile terrain, dense forests, raging rivers, and impassable mountain ranges.” In her capacity as a professor of anthropology, she’d traveled the world, schmoozed with witch doctors, published dozens of monographs on tribal culture, and probably forgotten more stuff than the rest of us had learned in the first place. “I’m more likely to believe that terrain plays a more significant role in disappearances than any hypothetical Bermuda Triangle theory.”

  “I’m not going to deny the adverse nature of Alaska’s terrain,” Ennis conceded, “but neither can I ignore a host of other glaring facts. Alaska has the smallest population of all fifty states, but it ranks number one among number of disappearances. For every one thousand people, four go missing, which is twice the national average. So you might ask, what’s happening in Alaska that causes so many people to disappear?”

  “I’m sure we’ve read many of the same articles,” Tilly rebutted. “Many people move to Alaska with the express purpose of disappearing. Runaways. Women trying to escape abusive spouses. Men hoping to escape the law. People abandoning underwater mortgages and ditching dead-end jobs to start over again.”

  “Agreed.” Ennis nodded. “But not everyone who pulls up roots in the lower forty-eight wants to disappear, yet they vanish anyway. Why is that?”

  “Sinkholes?” offered Nana.

  “Alien abduction?” tossed out Orphie Arnesen.

  Orphie Arnesen and her husband, Al, owned a modest split-level house in a tree-lined, middle-class neighborhood in Windsor City. But it was no secret that Orphie entertained thoughts of moving into an antebellum McMansion one day, where she could gloat over her stunning Greek pillars, her acres of weedless lawn, and her meteoric rise in social status, with all its ensuing celebrity. She wasn’t unhappy with her present lot in life; she simply imagined things would be better if the lot were bigger.

  She was touring Alaska without Al because she’d managed to convince him that if he left Windsor City for more than a day, the entire political structure of the town would
collapse in his absence. Orphie was nothing if not convinced of her husband’s prospects for greatness.

  “The FBI is called in to handle alien abduction cases, aren’t they?” Orphie continued. “Did you know that my Al actually has to work with the FBI sometimes? City council presidents are often called upon to perform far meatier tasks than gaveling sessions to order.”

  “Like what?” taunted Bernice. “Calling in the pizza orders for those stupid meetings of his?” She let out a derisive snort. “Listen to the bunch of you. Sinkholes. Alien abductions. Pfffft. I’ll tell you why folks are disappearing.” She looked up and down the table, her eyes narrowing to slits. “Government takeover. They’re sending in the IRS to kidnap people and whisk ’em off to black ops sites in other countries.”

  “For making math errors on their taxes?” questioned Tilly. “That’s absurd.”

  George scratched his jaw. “Maybe with postal rates as high as they are, it’s cheaper to fly a fella to a foreign prison than mail him an amended tax return form.”

  “Plane fare’s probably cheaper than them fancy birthday cards what they’re sellin’ now,” huffed Nana. “I never seen prices so high. And then you gotta fork out extra postage to mail the thing.”

  Despite her millions, Nana continued to practice a low-key spending style that included coupon-cutting, weekly visits to the Dollar Store, and two-buck Tuesdays at the theater…with free popcorn.

  “Half-wits,” scoffed Bernice. “Do you ever think to turn on cable news to find out what’s actually happening in the world?”

  We all watched cable news. We simply avoided the channels that Bernice watched.

  “Revisiting my original question as to why people in Alaska disappear,” Ennis broke in, “there are facts and there are theories. On the fact side, there’s an Anchorage baker who’s serving 461 years in prison for the serial murders of as many as forty-nine women in the early ’80s.”

  “Four hundred sixty-one years?” parroted Orphie. “Where are they getting their life expectancy tables from? The Old Testament?”