“You hacked in?” Jo glanced around nervously, as if expecting the FBI to break down the front door in the next moment. “You can get arrested for that.”
“They’ll have to catch me first.” He turned and they practically bumped noses. For that single moment, time seemed to stop. She could feel his breath on her face. He could see every separate dark blond lash on her eyelids. For a frozen moment, neither of them moved. Bridget and Luke, playing a noisy game of cribbage at the kitchen counter, seemed to fade from the room.
She jerked back, eyes wide with dismay.
“Well, well,” he said, just as startled but quicker to recover.
“Well, well, nothing,” she said. She took what she hoped was an unobtrusive step backward. “I asked you what you were looking at.”
You, he thought. And now that I am, I won’t stop until I get you. But he was a patient man, and there was a time and a place for everything. Not here, not now. But somewhere and soon. “Disappearances,” he said, turning back to the computer.
“Disappearances?” She took a cautious step forward, positioning herself so that she could just barely read the text on the screen over his shoulder, but far enough away to run if she had to. Not that she would, she wasn’t a coward.
“Yeah.”
“What disappearances?”
“Women. Young women. Gone missing. All from the Bristol Bay area.” Unconsciously, she took another step forward, and he smiled to himself when he felt her warmth at his shoulder.
“You mean like Rebecca Hanover?”
“I mean exactly like Rebecca Hanover.” He sat back. The fuzz of her sweater brushed the back of his head. She didn’t notice. He did. “Last night at dinner you were talking about another woman who went missing.”
“Stella Silverthorne.”
“Yeah. Then Wy was talking about the daughter of the postmistress that got killed, what was her name…”
Jo’s reportorial instincts were kicking in, the mental Rolodex whirring, click, stop. “Ruby Nunapitchuk.”
“Yeah.”
“I remember that story. The dad took the kids out hunting, right? Two sons and two daughters?”
“Yeah, and lost one of the daughters.”
“They never found the body.”
“Nope.” He nodded at the screen. “Bill Billington ruled on a presumptive death hearing the following spring. Accidental death due to misadventure. The parents filed an appeal, which was denied.”
“What was the basis of their appeal?”
“You ever talk to a magistrate about presumptive death hearings?”
She shook her head.
“Nobody wants to believe in accidental death. It’s too-it’s too-”
“Accidental?” she suggested.
“Smart-ass,” he said, “but yeah. You lose somebody you love, you want there to be a reason. He can’t have fallen into a glacier, or off a boat, or down a mountain. Death can’t be that random, that irrational, not for a lot of people.”
“Makes sense.”
“Ha, ha. Sit down with Bill sometime, get her to tell you some of the arguments surviving family members have put forward to vacate a judgment of accidental death. They come in two kinds: weird, and weirder. He was pushed into that glacier, he was dumped off that boat, he was tripped down that mountain. He was about to take over the glacier tour company, and the current owner bumped him off. He seduced the boat captain’s daughter, and the captain keelhauled him. The climb leader had designs on his body, and when he wouldn’t put out, cut the rope between them.”
“Sounds like a story.” He shook his head in feigned exasperation at her single-mindedness. She grinned. Their eyes met. The grin faded. “Yes. Well. So you started looking up missing women.”
“Women missing in the Bristol Bay area,” he said. He tilted the chair back, coming solidly up against her, and linked his hands behind his head. She was still for a moment before moving back, but not that much back. His dark hair stood up in a rooster tail from repeated impatient pullings, and he was frowning behind his glasses. “It didn’t hit me until last night, when you were telling us the story about Finn Grant and his lost hunting party, and how one of the women was never found. Interesting, I thought, two women missing in the Bush, same general area, only four years apart. Then I remembered what Wy said about the postmistress’s daughter, and how she was lost eight years ago.”
Jo was skeptical but interested. “Okay, how many of these women missing in the Bristol Bay area have you found?”
He sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees, frowning down at his clasped hands. “Seven. Altogether.”
“Seven?” Her tolerant smile and indulgent tone of voice vanished. One quick step had her back at his shoulder. “Show me.”
He was more troubled by his discovery than he was triumphant at having piqued her interest. “I accessed the missing persons records for the judicial district for the last twenty-five years, which is as far back as they’ve got in the data base. Ruby Nunapitchuk eight years ago, Stella Silverthorne five years ago, Rebecca Hanover four days ago.”
“All women.”
“All young women,” he said. “Rebecca Hanover is thirty-two. Ruby Nunapitchuk was seventeen. Stella Silverthorne was twenty-six.”
“Opal was fifty-six.”
“Yeah, she was the oldest by about twenty years.”
“She might not have looked her age, though,” Jo said slowly. “Wait a minute.” She rolled the chair back with him on it and pulled open the drawer. A pad of yellow sticky notes and a pen later, she shoved both back in.
“Just move me out of your way if I’m in it,” he said, ruffled.
She wasn’t listening, staring instead at the map on Wy’s wall. “Okay,” she said, scribbling. One sticky note with a name and a date went on the map at Nenevok Creek, another at Kagati Lake, a third at Weary River. “All right. Who else?”
“I worked backwards, most recent reported disappearances first. Cheryl Montgomery disappeared right off of Four Lake two years ago. She was an experienced backwoodsman, too, someone you wouldn’t think of getting lost.”
Jo inspected the face smiling up at her from the monitor. “She’s lovely.”
“Yeah. And lost.”
“Okay.” A fourth sticky note at Four Lake. “Who else?”
“In 1992, Brandi-with ani -Whitaker was mushing the Kuskokwim 500. She disappeared along with her whole team. Everybody figured they’d fallen into a lead. There wasn’t much fuss; she didn’t have much family and she wasn’t that good a musher.”
A fifth sticky note went up. “Next?”
“In 1991, Ruby Nunapitchuk. Then back four years, and Kristen Anderson goes missing. Fisherman’s wife, out of Koggiling. She was alone at fish camp. When her husband came to pick her up, she was gone. Salmon on the drying racks, but the fire had been cold for at least a day. Again, there is no hint of foul play in the case file. They had a good reputation in Koggiling. Three kids, sober, well liked.”
A sixth sticky note.
“And then as far back as I’ve been so far, 1986, Paulette Gustafson.”
“Same year as Whitaker?”
“Yeah.”
Then it hit her. “Gustafson?”
“Yeah?”
“As in former state senator Ted Gustafson?”
“Yeah.”
“Wy mentioned him. He’s on her mail route. The diabetic.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t believe she stayed missing for long.”
“She still is, despite what looks like a full-scale search effort from everyone from the Alaska state troopers to the FBI.”
“The FBI?”
He shrugged. “There are references made to them; I haven’t tracked them down yet.”
“What was she doing here?”
“Visiting high school friends. She was a bit of a rounder, it sounds like. She and a group of her old high school buddies drove up to the One Lake campground, had from what all accounts say was one hell of a party, and when everybody woke up three days later to pack up and go home, Paulette Gustafson was missing.”