Page 17 of Smoky Lake

He reached into the plane and pulled out a small Igloo cooler. “Fresh smoked salmon, straight from Snow River. Gotta make sure you don’t starve out here.”

“Wow, thank you.” She took the cooler, then reached up to touch her cheek to his. “You’re a good brother,” she murmured.

She found his slight flush adorable. Didn’t he know that Molly’s friends were thrilled that she’d finally fallen in love?

Her friends had tried hard with John—they really had. But she’d always known they didn’t quite trust him.

Sighing at that depressing thought, she slung her tote bag over her shoulder and picked up the cooler. Then she gave another long sigh as she surveyed the stairs that laddered up the slope. Those steps were steep, nearly vertical. Stairs were always a special challenge for her leg.

One step at a time, that was all there was to it. As the floatplane cruised toward the center of the lake, she grabbed onto the railing with one hand and headed up the steep hillside.

She’d only gone a few steps when she heard the clatter of footsteps and a deep voice. “Give those to me,” Gil said gruffly.

She looked up into forest-dark eyes and felt a punch deep in her stomach. “Thanks. And hello to you, too.”

He merely grunted at that, and grabbed her bags. Then the annoying man took the stairs two at a time.

Climbing the stairs was much easier without the weight of the bags, but even so, she was a little breathless when she reached the top. Or maybe it was the stunning view that accomplished that—shifting layers of clouds and treetops, mist drifting in and out of spruce trees, water shining below, the eerie presence of the Korch Glacier a surreal hulk beyond the forests.

Gil opened the door of a simple glassed-in structure filled with light and air. It smelled faintly of lemon, as if it had been freshly cleaned. As soon as she walked through it, a sense of peace came over her. Which was, quite frankly, the last thing she’d expected. She was smack in the middle of an emergency, after all.

But at least it wasn’t the five-alarm emergency that was her marriage, her divorce, her mess of a life. It was someone else’s emergency, and, selfishly, she found that to be a nice break.

“So what changed your mind?” Gil asked as he poured her a glass of water from a Berkey next to the sink. “Last we met, you were headed back to your friends and your regular life.“

“Actually, my regular life is thousands of miles away.” She thought about that, and corrected herself. “And also over.”

His eyebrows lifted.

“But that’s not important right now. I came to warn you that the military guys are searching for you around town.”

He studied her so closely that she wondered if she had dirt on her face from the floatplane. It felt strange to be scrutinized like this. Not even John had looked at her so thoroughly. Sometimes it had felt, with John, as if she was simply filling in the spot in his life where “wife” should be.

“You must have gone to Blackbear,” he finally said.

“Yes. I looked at a map and knew there was no possible way I could get here other than by floatplane. No one in Firelight Ridge owns one of those. Sam and I flew to Blackbear and borrowed a seaplane.”

“When you decide to do something, you do it thoroughly.”

“Oh yes, you should have seen me try to?—”

She broke off, horrified and astounded that she’d nearly told this virtual stranger about her efforts to get pregnant. Something about the close attention he was giving her went right to her head.

Even now, he waited patiently for her to continue. Instead, she scrambled for a change of subject.

“It wasn’t just to warn you. I found something in my pocket. I think Victor must have slipped it to me. It mentions you by name.” She pulled the scrap of notepaper from her pocket and spread it out on the long birchwood table that took up the center of the room.

He pulled out two stools from under the table and gestured for her to sit. She did so gratefully while he studied the note.

“Do you have any idea what he means?” she asked.

He shook his head, still frowning at the words. “Not a clue. Ice castles in the sky…could that mean the glacier?” He gestured out the front picture window, where Ani could see the icy face of the glacier at the edge of the view.

“Ooh, that’s good. I like that. So it’s a poem about a glacier? What about the bells, though? Does the glacier ever sound like a bell?”

“I suppose it could, if you find a crevasse and make it echo. Seems a stretch. None of the rest of it applies to glaciers. Everything red and dead? Nothing’s red in a glacier. The way my brother explained it, the red light gets absorbed by the ice and only the blue light is visible.”

“But if someone was murdered on the glacier…there would be red and dead.”

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