Under the Alaskan Ice Read online

  Meg just rolled her eyes and went into her bedroom for her afternoon break. She missed Chip since he was back in school after Thanksgiving vacation, but she didn’t need him asking her why, why? He would probably really bug her since she was putting some of the many old pictures of Ryan away for a while. Her dear husband stared at her from numerous photo frames she should dust more often.

  But then she came upon the plastic envelope of newspaper clippings she had saved. She stared at Ryan’s obit through the shiny Ziploc bag. She’d kept cuttings from the Juneau and Anchorage newspapers: photos of Caribou Lake and the cliff above it, which Ryan had flown into in the mist and fog. She didn’t read any of the articles again, but the headline FALLS LAKE BUSH PILOT LOSES LIFE IN CRASH INTO CARIBOU CLIFF shouted at her again.

  She shoved the packet of articles on the top shelf of her closet and stacked the framed photos carefully in a snap-top plastic box to go under her bed. She’d save the articles for Chip when he was older and rotate the family photos, keep the ones out that had the three of them together. But for the first time since Ryan had been gone, she could let go just enough to store him away with many memories.

  After all, she didn’t want to be a hoarder like Mr. Getz, at least according to the rare few who had been to his cabin in the woods on the far side of the lake. She’d heard he had built a series of rooms out the back of the previously one-room place.

  She sighed, wondering how Bryce and his team were doing at the now familiar dive site. Even Bill Getz seemed interested in what he’d heard about the crash. He probably wondered if something sunken could be added to his collection.

  * * *

  The huge underwater strobe lights illumined the darkness but made shifting shadows seem to lunge at Bryce. The silty lake water didn’t help. Ordinary deep water dives, no problem. Dark depths, no sweat. But there was something too damn creepy about this wreck.

  He and Nate used hand motions to position and move the two lights. Nate operated the video camera and Bryce his trusty still shot camera. Now that they could maneuver with the pilot’s body gone, they took photos of the cockpit, then moved deeper down into the tilted plane. Repeatedly, Bryce touched the deep end of the dive rope he kept near to be sure it was taut. It was.

  He visualized the accident—if it was that and not some sort of sabotage—as he had numerous times these last few days. According to Meg and Chip, the plane had hit through the ice at about a forty-five degree angle, but he could see it had twisted in the current, then settled more tail-down. For the first time, he noted that there was some serious structural damage—a jagged, four-foot-square hole—on the interior undercarriage near the tail. Could anything from the payload have fallen out or been washed away? Spills from this small cargo hold could have happened in the jolt when it hit the ice and then went underwater.

  He noted a metal box with handles and motioned Nate to come closer. Strapped down with a canvas belt, it sat on top of an identical box. Finally, answers! He’d use the lift bags and help from above to get them to the surface intact. He’d promised the Big Man that any evidence they recovered would remain under wraps until it could be delivered to his team for analysis. The chain of custody of evidence was already at risk now that state troopers were involved. If some sort of espionage was going on here, the fewer who knew, the better.

  While Nate was moving the lights and filming the boxes and loose cargo from every angle, Bryce swam closer to the break in the fuselage. The plane was at enough of an angle that it didn’t sit exactly on the lake bed, which meant something could have fallen out onto the black bottom.

  In the flickering, shifting lights Nate held, Bryce moved his fins firmly but slowly so as not to stir up the bottom more than it already was as he swam down headfirst through the opening. Like monstrous teeth, ice fringed the jagged mouth of the hole. He knew he should wait for Nate and his lights, but he’d let him finish his task. Bryce’s handheld light and the more wan one on his head would do.

  The depth, the cold down here, staying too long could screw up clear thinking, and he wanted this strange mission to be a success with no more casualties. He was doing this for Steve now too, praying he’d pull through.

  He decided not to exit the fuselage but just shine his light out. Recon of the adjacent area would be for their next dive, maybe with three divers. He’d bring Keith down with them next time. He liked his self-confidence, whereas Bob Morrow seemed almost tentative. He’d always prided himself at being able to size people up fast. Which was why it had hurt so bad when his engagement had blown up. It was years ago. Maybe they were both too young. He’d thought she was solid and steady, but...

  Damn, his mind was drifting as his light beam glinted on something shiny. Metal? Coins? He waited until the swirl of bottom silt settled. Could the pilot have been running laundered money? But for whom in the midst of this winter wilderness? If he had meant to land here rather than crash, why here? Could he have had a criminal record and be moving contraband or stolen goods? Fingerprints or DNA might have to provide the answers.

  Bryce extended his gloved hand to pick up one of the pieces—of something. His gloves were iced and slippery, and the temps down here were getting to him in his fingers, toes, even his limbs. He dropped the small metal thing, and it spun back into the bottom sand and silt.

  He noted there were several shiny objects besides that one. Not coins, but...gold jewelry. He fanned the silt away and picked it up again, bringing it close to his mask. He was trembling from staying down so long, but he steadied his hand and focused his light full on it. If the pilot had been carrying stolen jewelry, from where and why?

  Definitely an old piece, so maybe the other half-buried items here were too. As he lifted this piece of jewelry higher, coils of attached gold links rose from the lake bed.

  He squinted through his dive mask at it. A woman’s locket, fairly large. In clumsy, two-handed motions, he popped it open and saw coils of something like woven thread under glass inside. He snapped it closed and brushed it off again. On enamel was the painting of a crying woman’s face in the midst of filigree swirls of gold. And—damn—he must be losing it in these cold, dark depths, because the weeping woman looked like Meg.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next morning, Bryce and his dive team were ready to head out again. But, he told Meg, they had decided to wait for decent daylight.

  “What about those big boxes you hauled in?” she asked.

  “Locked in my room, which is why I told Suze I don’t want it cleaned again. I won’t open them. State troopers are coming to pick them up and guard them until they can be flown east—soon.”

  A bit later he stopped Meg as she bustled back and forth from the breakfast table to the kitchen. “Do you have a safe here?” he asked.

  “Sure, and guests use it sometimes, but it’s not big enough for those boxes.”

  “I just have an envelope with a couple of items I’d like to have stored there for today, maybe longer.”

  “I’ll lock it up for you. Bring it into the office—the next door beyond the room where I was making the candy yesterday.”

  “I do know where that is,” he told her, his voice warm. He produced a flimsy but bulging letter-sized envelope from the inside of his jacket pocket and followed her down the hall and into the office. Mostly, it was Suze’s domain, but Meg knew where everything was and the safe’s combination.

  “No looking, now, while I dial the combination,” she teased him.

  “Can’t help looking but won’t touch—at least right now.”

  “Do you want a stronger envelope? We have larger, clasped ones in the supply cabinet,” she said as she turned and reached for it.

  The question couldn’t have been better timed as he held out the envelope and the weight of its contents pulled apart the weak seal. A single item fell to the floor, one connected to a fancy neck chain.

  “Oh, sorry,
” she said and bent to help him pick it up when he made a dive for it. “Old jewelry. It looks familiar.”

  “How so? It’s kind of weird. This locket has sewing thread woven in a pattern inside it,” he said, scooping it up. “And a painting of a woman—she reminded me of you—but she’s crying.”

  “Can I see?” she asked.

  “I haven’t even let the team see it.”

  “It’s from the wreck?”

  He nodded as he opened his hand hiding the locket. She studied the woman crying with boughs of a weeping willow tree leaning over her. “It does kind of look like me,” she admitted.

  “Well, now that you’ve seen that much...” He pressed a little latch to pop the gold lid. “See, there’s black thread woven inside.”

  “Bryce, I guess you don’t know much about old Victorian-era mourning jewelry to commemorate a loved one’s death, do you?”

  “What? This woman’s mourning someone?”

  “No doubt she’s grieving the death of the person whose hair is woven inside. Suze and I have a couple of similar pieces in this safe our grandmother left us—from her grandmother, going clear back to the American Civil War. I’ll show you ours. Not only tresses from the deceased person were often included but—if it was a mourning memento of a child or an unmarried woman—it might have teeth from the deceased that look like ivory. I know that sounds gross, but that was the custom for grieving the death of someone deeply loved and lost.”

  She studied his expression. Surprise, then a big frown. He leaned against the corner of the desk and raked his fingers across the back of his neck.

  “You’re like a gift in more ways than one,” he said. “Yes, I’d like to hear more, see what jewelry you have, later, though. I’ll show you what I retrieved from the sunken plane yesterday. But like we teased once before, you cannot let on you’re helping with this mystery or—”

  “Or you’d have to do away with me and then just put a snippet of my hair in a piece of memorial jewelry—ha. You could say, ‘I knew her once—nice girl. Liked my kisses but had to look up the word kismet when I first said it to her.’”

  “You’re amazing,” he said with a sigh.

  Meg’s heart beat faster. The feeling was mutual.

  * * *

  Bryce figured he had an hour before he and the dive team would set off for Falls Lake again. He’d overheard Meg tell Suze in the hall that she had some information that could help him.

  “I’ll finish the cleanup later. If you don’t need the office right now, can he and I use it? I don’t want to go to his room.”

  That got his attention. He scratched his neck again where his cold water dive suit had not had a good seal. He needed to put more protective silicone cream on it, but it was hard to reach the entire area just right. He’d look silly asking one of his new team to rub some on there.

  “I’m out of breath just hearing that,” he overheard Suze tell Meg. “Sure, go ahead. I’ll knock and ask permission before I come in.”

  “It isn’t anything you think.”

  “Aha,” Suze said. “You don’t know what I think.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Bryce grimaced, then grinned over that. It made him miss his back-and-forth with his brother. He stepped away from the door to wait for Meg, already pulling out his pieces of jewelry from the brown clasped envelope she’d given him to replace the flimsy one.

  “Coast clear?” he asked when she joined him and they went back in the office.

  “She said fine. Believe me, she could tell you as much as I can. We weren’t even aware Grandma had these pieces. Suze and I were shocked to find an old tortoiseshell jewelry box Grandma had left here with some beautiful but strange things in it. Leaving us the lodge was generous and amazing enough. Most of what I know about Victorian mourning jewelry I learned from a woman who owns an antique jewelry store in Anchorage when I went to get information on our pieces.”

  “You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.”

  “You had better stick to business and not teasing, Incident Commander Saylor, or I shall have to report you to the Big Man.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “Don’t even kid about that. Okay, thanks for a verbal slap in the face. Please share anything else you know about your grandmother’s legacy and the airplane jewelry. More pieces may be out there. I’m grateful for your help. Guess you’re still on the team.”

  * * *

  “I see now that this fine line painting doesn’t really look like me,” Meg observed, picking up the locket of the weeping woman again and studying it closely. “Just that she’s blonde.”

  “And pretty. Oval face. Blue eyes,” he said, scratching at his neck. She wondered if that’s what he did when he was nervous.

  “She’s in mourning for someone she lost,” she said, her voice quiet. “I would guess that this is her beloved’s hair woven here for her to remember him. Of course, they did have photography then, so she no doubt had pictures of him too, but this sort of jewelry was traditional. I think my source—Melissa McKee—said the practice started back in the Georgian era.”

  But she was thinking of the photos of Ryan she’d been storing away. Times changed but maybe people didn’t, caught in perpetual grief over the loss of someone they had loved. She realized she did not want to be that way, not forever, not anymore.

  “Okay,” she said, shaking off the icy pall coming over her, “let’s see your other pieces.”

  He laid them out carefully on the corner of the desk. Then the two of them huddled close. “I did wash them off last night. I wasn’t sure about that, but I wanted to study them before I talk with my boss next. He’s not available again until late tonight. Other business.”

  “So he has to answer to someone too?” she asked. “His wife? Some politician? Someone even bigger than the Big Man, maybe at the FBI or Homeland Security or something like that?”

  “Don’t go on a fishing expedition because you never know what’s under the surface. So, do you think these pieces are all antique mourning jewelry?”

  “Yes, and here’s one with what I’m sure are human teeth. Ugh, can’t stand to think of that. See here, this tiny one with the angel drooped over the tombstone etched right on the teeth. Like I said, some of this probably predates the Civil War era. Could it be that pilot was smuggling rare and expensive jewelry? Like maybe he robbed a home, jewelry store or museum? I’d be glad to look online for any such reports.”

  “If you have time, thanks. Any info like that would be valuable.”

  “It’s a good thing we’re going to lock all these pieces up, with Bill Getz loose around here. I won’t mention a thing, not even to Suze for now. Oh, look, this other piece you found has words etched on the back.”

  She tilted it and raised it toward the window light. Heads close, they squinted at the scripted words—a name. Meg leaned away and opened the middle desk drawer to reach for a magnifying glass.

  “Two words,” she said, moving the glass over the piece. “Varina Howell. What a pretty and unusual first name. It’s a long shot, but maybe I could trace that name too, like through a genealogy website.”

  “Meg, I can’t expect you to spend a lot of time on this, but anything you can do will help. You have helped already, more than you know.”

  “Kismet that I recognized what these pieces were.”

  He nodded. Their faces were close. He scratched at his neck again.

  “Do you have a rash from diving?”

  “In a way. The seal at the neck of my suit rubs, and I need to put some protective silicone cream on as a barrier.”

  “And it’s a bad angle to put it on yourself.”

  His intense gaze snagged hers. “I’m really going to owe you. A night on the town—not in Falls Lake but Anchorage, since I do want to go back to see how Steve and his family are doing. If I can get away from this as
signment.”

  “Then we’d better get that rash taken care of, and another person could obviously do a better job than you’re doing with that cream. Let me lock all this away, and I’ll put some on you. By the way, I eat so much salmon and other fish here that I’d be an expensive date. I would order a filet mignon.”

  “I’m good for it. I just hope I can be good for you—like you are for me.”

  Like naughty kids, they jumped apart when a knock sounded on the door. Darn, she thought. He had been absolutely ready to kiss her again.

  “Commander, you want us to gas up the snowmobiles?” a voice came through the door.

  Bryce got up and opened it. “Right away. We leave in fifteen minutes. Meet out in front.”

  “Roger that,” she heard the guy say. Were they all former navy men or pilots?

  “But,” Bryce said, turning back toward her at the door, “that gives me time to get a neck rub. I’ll suit up and get the cream if you still have time. Then it’s off to the frozen lake again when I was just starting to warm up.”

  She laughed as he ducked out. She was pretty sure she didn’t even blush this time.

  * * *

  “I can get it on my wrists and ankles for a good seal and water barrier, but not my neck,” he told her, sounding almost as nervous as she felt.

  She rubbed the cream carefully but thoroughly onto the skin of Bryce’s warm neck. He almost purred, moving his head up or down when she told him to.

  “Forget making candy kisses,” he whispered. “You could go into business with neck rubs—for me.”

  She was getting almost dizzy as she watched the circles of smooth white cream disappear into him. She felt the rhythmic motion of her hands on his warm, tanned skin.

  This ritual he must do each time he dived made her remember sending a loved one off to work in the sky. How much she’d missed the little moments that were really so big, the daily rituals, the small talk, teasing and inside jokes—the closeness. But with that came risk and possible loss, so giving in, loving and wanting someone was a huge gamble, one she was still not sure she was willing to make.