Perfect storm, p.1
Perfect Storm, page 1
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One
“Beth Rivers, you are under arrest for the murder of Travis Walker. Walker. Walker.” Gril’s voice trailed off into echoes.
I tried to protest, but my throat wouldn’t let me. The truth was the truth, after all. My denial died with a dry croak.
And then I awoke, sitting straight up and gasping for air before realizing I didn’t need to work to breathe. I wasn’t being choked by either the truth or lies. I was surrounded by more fresh and clean air than I’d ever been before. My fist loosened as I held it at the bottom of my throat. I was fine. I hadn’t been arrested.
I hadn’t killed Travis Walker. Yet.
The tent door flung open.
Tex looked at me, the almost ever-present glow of the low-hanging August sun glimmering off a few threads of gray in his beard. “You okay?”
“Did I scream?”
Tex squinted. “More like gasped loudly.”
“Bad dream. I was being arrested for killing Travis.”
Tex nodded. There were no new words to add to the ones he’d already used to attempt to assuage my fears, no matter how they presented themselves. I hadn’t been having many nightmares, but I’d had plenty of moments of debilitating anxiety.
He was there. He’d make sure nothing happened to me. I was going to be fine. Travis wasn’t going to get to me before my friends and family—Tex, Gril, Viola, Orin, Donner, my parents, maybe even Ruke—got to him first. And that list didn’t even take into consideration all the lower forty-eight people who were losing sleep to catch him before he caught me.
We were all on the lookout for the man who’d kidnapped me and kept me in his van for three days just over a year earlier. He’d already been caught once, arrested, and put behind bars, and we’d all been sure he’d never see freedom again. We’d been wrong.
Until that initial arrest, I’d escaped to Benedict, Alaska, where I didn’t think I could ever be found—and where I’d surprisingly discovered more of a home than any place I’d known before.
However, apparently, I hadn’t hidden nearly as well as I’d thought. Though she was now missing, my mother had found me. My father, who’d left us when I was seven, also found me. When Travis had first been caught, my story became top news in the country—for a few minutes, at least. Everyone knew I was in Benedict, Alaska. Most of the world couldn’t have cared less, but according to a note Travis left behind in his recent escape, finding and killing me was all he wanted to do.
I could have run again. I could have found another place to hide. But, along with the fact that running hadn’t done much to keep me hidden in this big world, I didn’t want to go anywhere else.
I loved Benedict, Alaska. As my time in this place had gone on, I’d vacillated between wanting to return to St. Louis one day or staying in Benedict, until it became clear that I probably should go somewhere else for my safety. It took that moment, that provoking threat of “it’s time to hide again,” for me to know I didn’t want to.
But I also knew I couldn’t stay put, wait in my room at the Benedict House, for Travis to come get me. Well, I supposed I could, but there were other options.
It was over a meeting with the most important people in my life, only one of whom I’d met before moving to Benedict, that options had been discussed, decisions had been made. They’d all become my family, in ways I’d never experienced before—better, more caring ways.
My father had been at the meeting, too, but he would be the first to admit that his departure from my life when I was seven might have knocked him out of any sort of blood-family-being-the-best-family distinction.
I’d been with him on his boat, along with Tex, when I’d received the call that Travis had escaped custody in Missouri. We’d been looking at the glaciers in the bay, and, boy, what a sight they’d been. We’d just watched one calve, break off a piece into the water—a stunning sight and rife with noisy groans. It was a good moment. It had been a beautiful day.
The primitive world of Benedict did not allow for widespread cell phone or internet coverage. Pockets of service could be found at the library and the airport, or at Orin the librarian’s house, but that day on my father’s boat, I learned a new quirk about Benedict: National Geographic ships were often scattered around the surrounding waters and apparently had their own cell towers.
You might think you’re getting away from it all on the water, but if your phone picks up on one of those towers, it could disturb your peaceful journey. That day it had been a call from Detective Majors in St. Louis to tell me that Travis had escaped and wanted me dead. The message couldn’t have been any more disturbing to that wonderful boating experience.
Though I didn’t have the whole story yet, it seemed like Travis had picked up on a brief instant of opportunity, a moment when the officer who’d been guiding him toward a prison transport van set for the Missouri State Penitentiary was somehow distracted. What that distraction had been was still a mystery. I’d spent plenty of paranoid moments wondering if the officer had been in on the escape or if someone else had been there to somehow intervene. I had enough to worry about, though, so I’d tried to put those questions on a back burner.
According to what Detective Majors told me, the officer claimed he had turned away from Travis to relieve his sick stomach—for no more than “maybe fifteen seconds”—when Travis, his ankles and wrists chained, somehow disappeared into the nearby woods.
A subsequent search of the area turned up nothing, but inside Travis’s cell was his threatening note to me. The circumstances led most people to think that Travis’s escape hadn’t truly been chance. Maybe he’d had some help in those woods. The officer was sticking by his story, though, and there was no evidence to contradict him, so it was all just uncertain speculation.
In yet another strange twist to an already bizarre situation, for at least a few minutes, both my father and mother had been considered potential accomplices to the escape.
My father, who’d once been associated with Walker, had been in Alaska during the escape, so he was ruled out quickly. My mother, on the other hand, had been and still was MIA. As strange as it might sound to most everyone else, her helping Travis escape wasn’t completely ridiculous. Those of us who knew her could see her doing as much just so she might hurt or kill him herself.
Though no evidence had been found to corroborate that she’d been involved, I still wondered. Travis was out there, his threat to find me most likely real, and anyone who wanted to know where I’d gone was only one small internet search away from finding me and my story. If my mother or someone else hadn’t killed him already, he was surely on his way. It’s odd to hope for a parent to commit a heinous crime, but I’d had moments of fantasizing that she’d gotten away with killing Travis. That was only a dream, though, because no matter how awful he was, her killing him would put her behind bars, and it wasn’t worth it.
The afternoon after I’d received the phone call from Detective Majors, my Alaska family had gathered around a dining table at the Benedict House, the old hotel that was run by Viola and had been turned into a halfway house, as well as the place I’d acquired a room.
The police chief, Gril, had been there, joining us from a fishing vacation he’d been enjoying. Tex and Orin were there as well as Donner, the park ranger who assisted Gril in a legal capacity; my father, Eddy; and Viola, the only one with a gun holstered at her waist.
“I can protect you,” Viola had said as she patted the gun.
She could.
“I don’t want to put everyone in danger. That’s not fair,” I said.
At once the rest of them shrugged off my concerns.
They were a tough bunch, forged by the harsh Alaskan climate. They all had large doses of grit, had probably been born with it. I’d been working to acquire my own helping of the same, but I had a ways to go.
“You could just come stay with us in Brayn,” Tex had offered. “We wouldn’t tell a soul.”
I shook my head. “No, Brayn’s a small community. I would hate for someone to give me up and then put not only you and your mother in danger’s way, but the girls, too.”
Tex frowned and nodded. He couldn’t argue with that. His two little girls would always come first.
“Stay with me,” Orin offered.
“Or us.” Gril nodded toward Eddy.
Eddy had been living with Gril, in a spare room that “needed using anyway.”
“They all have a point, Beth,” Viola said. “This community will keep you hidden. You can trust everyone around here.”
They would all protect me to the best of their abilities, but I didn’t want to say yes to any of the pr
I didn’t want to hide.
I didn’t want to run.
But I had to do something.
Finally, I looked at Tex. “A while ago, you promised to take me camping.”
Tex nodded. “Of course.”
“It’s still not too cold. Could your mom watch the girls for a couple weeks?” I asked.
“She can watch them as long as is needed,” he said.
I’d said, “I don’t quite understand why this makes sense, but let’s go camping. We can take some time to think about all the other options and try to figure out what I should do next, that is, if Travis isn’t caught soon.”
Tex had nodded and everyone else had joined in. “Let’s do it.”
A day and a half later, Tex and I set out, weighed down by backpacks full of supplies, mine made even heavier with the guilt of taking Tex out of his normal routine. I knew he had everything covered, but I sure was asking a lot of the people I cared about most.
However, he knew how to camp, had done so all his life. What was huge preparation for me was routine for him.
I was in good enough shape to keep up with him. Tex had taught me some things about living in this wild world. I’d been working out, but I had never once in my life camped anywhere. I’d quit Girl Scouts when my mother thought the craft projects my troop leader doled out were a “ridiculous waste of time”—she’d aired her opinion one week before my troop was set to camp, and that had been that. No more Girl Scouts for me.
She hadn’t cared. Mill, my mother, had wanted to check out a lead on where my father might have gone anyway—another dead end in the long string of them. When I’d only recently found out he’d been in Mexico the whole time, those journeys with Mill had transformed into things of nostalgia.
On that particular trip, we broke a back door window of a small cute house in the woods. No one had been there, thankfully, and as with almost every other lead we explored, there was no sign of my father ever having been inside it.
Before he’d disappeared, he’d sold cleaning products door-to-door. At first it was a legitimate job, but then it turned into a cover as he got deeper and deeper into the local drug trade—which was when Travis Walker became one of his business associates.
Eddy had tried to explain it all to me, how working with Walker had seemed mostly harmless at first. He’d shrugged and said it had been a great way to make money, so he’d found ways to justify his behavior.
He’d also said that Travis Walker had turned out to be such bad news that there came a point when my father knew he had to leave town, or he would be headed for prison. And, as long as he stuck around, he knew my mother and I would also be in the range of Travis’s dangerous tentacles. He thought he’d done the right thing, no matter how wrong “up and leaving” might be.
And then he’d just lived in Mexico and, though I still didn’t want to hear all the details, seemed to have enjoyed his new stage of life.
No matter what he’d said, I still hadn’t bought into any notion that he’d done something noble by running away. However, I was beginning to forgive and enjoy my time with him. And now, just when we were starting to find some common ground, Walker had escaped, disrupting everything.
Tex and I had made our way out of town the day before and were about eight miles into the woods, with the goal of staying at an old cabin about seven miles farther. The cabin was positioned so perfectly that sunsets could be witnessed nightly, even if the sun currently set after nine P.M. It sounded idyllic, though Tex reminded me that modern amenities wouldn’t be included.
We hadn’t come upon any civilization since we’d left Benedict behind. I’d seen lots of greenery and cold water trickling down streams or moving fast down rivers. We’d discovered small patches of snow that would never melt because they were in the shade. They would be covered up by more snow when it started to fall again in the winter. It was cold out here, but movement kept us warm enough during the day, and thick down-stuffed sleeping bags did the job at night.
Tex had come up with the idea of spending some time at the cabin, a place that Travis Walker couldn’t have possibly heard of. Few Alaskans knew of its existence. Tex had said that there was no indication anyone else had discovered it whenever he’d ventured to it over the last few years.
Though the first day had gone fine, the nightmare had rattled me, and I was sore all over, although I’d never admit it. A thin bedroll had been the only thing in between the warm sleeping bag and the cold hard ground. I didn’t love camping yet, but I knew I needed to find a way to make it work. I’d always been fairly flexible, but this adventure was certainly packed with more challenges than I’d ever taken on. As Tex reminded me, being trapped in Travis’s van for three days was probably worse than a little camping getaway.
* * *
“Hungry?” Tex asked after I shook off the remnants of the dream.
The scents of bacon and eggs wafted into the tent. “Starving. You’ve already cooked? You should have gotten me up.”
“You were pretty tired.”
“I cannot deny that.” I stretched and rolled both shoulders.
“It takes a week or so to get used to all of it. You won’t be as sore then, nor as tired.” He smiled—I could see crinkles next to his eyes and some movement of his beard. “You might not believe me today, but you’ll actually start to crave the hiking as well as sleeping on the ground.”
I squinted my eyes. “I do not think I will ever crave sleeping on the ground.”
He shrugged his big shoulders. “I guess we’ll see.”
I got myself out of the sleeping bag and grabbed my toothbrush. Tex waited patiently and then helped me out of the tent.
“You even made biscuits?” I said as I noticed the pan.
“And gravy.”
“I really do think we might be soulmates. You are an amazing cook and I love to eat,” I said.
Tex laughed. “I could have told you that a long time ago. The soulmates part.”
I once read a woman’s story that said, I never really dated. I met my husband and we just stayed together, got married, had kids eventually, but there wasn’t much buildup to any of it. It all just kind of happened.
That was similar to me and Tex. I’d dated some but never seriously. Then Tex and I met and have just been together since. We might get married, we might not, but I do feel a sense of permanence with him. He’s told me he feels the same.
And here we were.
We loaded our plates with food and dug in. I ate as if I hadn’t had a meal in weeks, but the night before we’d had a dinner of fresh salmon and morel mushrooms. Tex had rounded up both things quickly, the salmon with a fishing line wrapped around a big wooden spool.
I had enjoyed Tex’s lessons on which mushrooms were okay to eat and which could kill a person a mere few seconds after ingesting.
I admit it had occurred to me that we should pick some of the poisonous mushrooms and use them on Travis Walker if he appeared. I had murder, or at least self-defense, on my mind.
Tex assured me that the plans for Walker would be swifter than any mushroom’s black magic.
I hadn’t been included in any sort of meeting where such plans had been discussed, and I felt left out. I’d asked him to tell me the plans, but he’d only shrugged and said he would, eventually. I hadn’t argued.
It wasn’t that I didn’t think I should be included, but something in me was having a hard time accepting everything that had happened, and I didn’t mind trusting everyone else’s plan and their timing on sharing it with me.
I could only take one moment at a time.
For now, I ate as much as I could, and then a little more. All this fresh air, combined with our hiking through the wild, had taken my appetite to a whole new level.
I didn’t mind the size up in my jeans since moving to Benedict at all—at least part of that was muscle. Trudging through the woods, the tundra, required smart clothing choices, good shoes, and sometimes the agility to run from something that wanted to eat you. Muscles helped.
I had gained a physical strength I hadn’t ever felt before, and I liked it.
After eating, we cleaned up and broke camp. I was slow and uncoordinated at first, but the tent poles soon became less mysterious, and I picked up the packing pace, though I was still slower than Tex.
