Midnight Sun (Sinclair Sisters) (4 page)

He’d added the metal-roofed building that housed his office and a three-car garage a little over a year ago, the first small step, as he saw it, on the road back to life.

Still, he wasn’t ready to give up his solitary world completely and he certainly didn’t want it breached by a woman, especially not one who spelled trouble like Charity Sinclair.

“Sonofabitch,” he grumbled again, and wondered just exactly what he could do to get rid of her.

It was noon by the time Charity and Maude left for town, late afternoon by the time they returned, but Charity had found a local plumbing company to deal with the bathroom, and a roofer had agreed to do the necessary roof repairs. They’d bought a few supplies, including bags of pellets for the stove.

On one of the side streets, she had spotted an antiques store that also carried used furniture. She bought a full-size mattress and box springs that appeared to be in good condition and would fit the old iron bed, and a small sofa and chair she could decorate with the olive green dust cover she had found at the general store.

All in all, it was a good day’s work, but she hadn’t gotten home till almost dark and again she went to bed exhausted, too tired even to finish the Max Mason adventure novel,
Island of Doom,
that she had been reading.

Tomorrow she and Maude would finish cleaning the house and the day after that, she hoped to meet Buck Johnson and begin discussing the equipment they would need to start up the dredging operation. She wondered how many more grueling trips to Dawson she would have to endure before they actually got started.

They washed windows and scrubbed bathroom cupboards the following day, then gave the furniture another coat of paint.

“We been lucky,” Maude said as she stuck the paintbrush into a can filled with thinner. “We get a lot of rain this time of year. Need to get the paint dry and this stuff back in the house before the next storm blows in.”

As Maude predicted, clouds began to gather the morning of the following day. The older woman arrived just in time to help her move the furniture back inside the house before the sky opened up like a floodgate and rain fell in sheets so thick she couldn’t see the creek.

It was Thursday. The workmen she had hired in Dawson had a couple of jobs to finish and weren’t scheduled to arrive until the first of the week. As Charity had feared, the roof began to leak. A stream of water dripped over the woodstove in the kitchen, sending up a hiss of steam as each drop sputtered against the hot black metal.

A leak sprang up over the john in the bathroom, which didn’t really matter, since it was still clogged up and totally useless anyway. The outhouse, she had discovered, was bad enough in pleasant weather. In the rain it was nearly unbearable. The roof above the little wooden building leaked even worse than the one over the house. She was soaked and freezing by the time she finished and got back inside the cabin.

Maude drove to her own house down the hill and came back with rain gear, the loan of which Charity accepted with gratitude and a mental note to buy herself some the next time she was in Dawson. It was hard to imagine putting on a heavy yellow slicker every time she had to relieve herself, but hey, stuff happened.

You wanted an adventure,
she reminded herself. She thought of her favorite action hero, Max Mason, who traveled the world fighting evil, survived under the very worst conditions, and never complained. Compared to what Max went through, living up here was a stroll in the park.

Besides, next week, once the repairs were made, things were bound to get better.

Unfortunately, on Saturday, Buck Johnson showed up and she began to wonder if they ever really would.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Johnson,” she said with a welcoming smile. “I’m really looking forward to working with you.”

“I never worked for a woman,” he grumbled. “Maude didn’t tell me the new owner was a female.”

Charity straightened a little and was glad she hadn’t offered to shake his hand. She came from Manhattan, after all, a city where Johnson’s Planet-of-the-Apes attitude was mostly a thing of the past. “I can’t see why that should matter, Mr. Johnson. I’m here to work this claim. You have experience in that regard. I’d like to employ you. That is all that matters.”

Johnson grumbled something she couldn’t hear. He was a big man, mid-forties, thick through the chest and shoulders, with black hair slightly graying at the temples. His forehead was wide, his nose a little too broad, and she wondered if it had been broken.

“Well, Mr. Johnson, do you want the job or not?”

“I got a kid in city college down in Whitehorse. I need the money.”

“Is that a yes?”

He nodded as if he couldn’t quite force out the word. “You might as well call me Buck.”

“Fine … Buck.” She didn’t give him her first name as she had intended. With Buck Johnson’s attitude toward women, she needed him to accept that she was the boss. She hoped that in time they would come to a better understanding. “The first thing I’d like you to do is take a look at the equipment out in the shed. There isn’t all that much, but some of it may be useful.”

He nodded. “I’d better get to it, then.” Slamming his battered old felt hat back on his head, he turned to leave—glad, it seemed, to escape outside.

As he closed the front door, Charity watched Maude saunter out of the kitchen.

“I figured you’d best deal with Buck on your own. Better he knows who he’s workin’ for right from the giddy-up.”

“Why didn’t you tell him I was a woman?”

A droopy, gray-brown eyebrow went up. “You really gotta ask?”

Charity almost smiled. “No, I guess I don’t.”

“We might be able to find someone else, but it’ll take time and with the claim bein’ so far from town, you’d have to come up with some kind of living quarters. Buck’s awful handy, living’ just up the road. I figure he’ll come round in time.”

“I hope so.”

“He knows what he’s doin’. He’s been at it more’n twenty years.”

She sighed. “I guess that’s the most important thing.”

Buck returned a little while later. The rain had turned into a fine, cold mist that clung to his flannel shirt and beaded on his ratty brown-felt hat.

“Old Mose never really worked the Lily Rose,” he said, accepting the seat she offered at the now-green kitchen table. She had drawn a leaf pattern in red paint on the top and done the same to the backs of the chairs. She smiled to think her first handyman endeavor had turned out pretty well, considering.

“He owned a couple of other claims,” Buck continued, “one farther up Dead Horse Creek and another over on Bonanza Creek. He spent most of his time working those.”

“Paid off pretty well for him, too,” Maude put in.

“From what I read,” Charity said, “since the Lily Rose hasn’t been worked, we’ll have a better chance of finding gold.”

“Oh, we’ll find some, all right,” Buck agreed. “Can’t hardly stick a pan in the water in these parts without turning up some color. Question is, how much will we find?”

A good question. She hoped it was at least enough to return the money she had invested. “I guess we can’t know that until we get started. What exactly are we going to need?”

“Like you said, there wasn’t much out in the shed—leastwise, nothing much useful. Times have changed. Equipment’s got a lot better in the last few years. Even gold pans aren’t the same as they was when I first started. The good ones are made of plastic now and the best of those is green. Shows the color better. We’ll need a few of them to start.”

“What else?”

“That old skip loader out there still works, after a fashion. Needs a little tuning, but I can handle that. We’ll need a dredge—that’s the most important thing—one with plenty of power but still portable enough to move up and down the creek. I can build us a sluice box. We’ll need wire mesh, stuff for a riffle board, and a two-or three-horse engine for vibration.”

“All right, what else?”

“We’ll need picks and shovels. A good metal detector would sure come in handy.”

She flicked a glance at Maude. “Will we be able to get all that in Dawson?” She hoped they didn’t have to go all the way to Whitehorse or order it from somewhere even farther away.

“There’s a place on the outskirts of town,” Maude said. “D. K. Prospecting Supplies. They’ll have everything we need.”

“Mining is still big business up here,” Buck put in. “And there’s still plenty of gold. All you have to do is find it.”

She felt an inward thrill and a smile bloomed over her lips. “Then that’s what we’re going to do.”

Buck took a look at her salon-trimmed hair and the dab of makeup she couldn’t resist, and apparently wasn’t convinced.

“Monday,” she said to Maude, ignoring him, “once the workmen arrive to repair the roof and the plumbers come to fix the bathroom, Buck and I will head off to D. K. Prospecting to buy the equipment we need.”

Buck made no comment, but his jaw looked tight. Charity figured he didn’t like the idea of people in town finding out he was working for a woman.

Too bad, Bucko,
she thought. Hadn’t the guy ever heard of women’s lib? Well, it was time he stopped living in the past and accepted the idea that she was the one who’d be signing his paycheck.

Monday arrived. They waited all day but the workmen never showed up. Not until late Tuesday morning. Maude said they worked on Klondike time. She said Charity might as well get used to it.

“Just the way things is done up here. Nobody hurries much. Too many other things to do.”

“You mean like go camping or fishing,” Charity grumbled, beginning to get the idea.

“Or canoein’ maybe, or packin’ back into the woods. Sun comes out, they’re bound to find somethin’ better to do than work.”

Fortunately, Tuesday was overcast and drizzly. Charity breathed a sigh of relief when the Jed’s Plumbing truck rolled up the road. An hour later, three men from Moss and Son’s roofing arrived and set to work.

The plumbing snake was grinding away, the roofers pounding shingles when Charity caught sight of a dark-haired man striding toward her down the path along the creek. This time she knew who it was and though she pretended not to notice his long, angry strides, some evil little part of her couldn’t wait for him to get there.

As he neared the cabin, Call spotted Charity Sinclair where she stood at the near end of the cabin. She was watching the men on the roof, her head tilted back, hair hanging down to the middle of her back, a few wisps framing her face. The long shiny strands were a bright yellow-gold, exactly the color of a nugget he had once found in the creek.

She turned as he got closer and pasted a phony-looking smile on her face. “Well, Mr. Hawkins. How nice of you to come over for another neighborly chat.”

“This isn’t a neighborly chat, sweetheart, and you know it. What the hell is happening over here? I thought I told you I liked peace and quiet.”

“Yes, I believe you did. Unfortunately for you, I like being able to use my bathroom for something other than a place to hang wet towels and I prefer to cook my meals without rainwater dripping into my food.”

He’d seen her walking back and forth to the outhouse in her rain slicker. He’d wondered if she’d ever even seen one before. He glanced up at the sagging cabin roof. He figured it would start leaking sooner or later.

“That bad, huh?” He tried to keep the satisfaction out of his voice, but he could see by her pinched expression she had heard it.

“Let’s just say Mr. Flanagan had good reason to move.”

“How long till they finish the repairs?”

“Since the men seem to be working on ‘Klondike time,’ I have no idea. I guess it depends on whether or not the sun comes out.”

He ignored a flicker of amusement, clamped down on his jaw instead. “Well, the sooner they get done, the better. All that hammering is driving me crazy.”

Her smile remained frozen in place. “Maude tells me you own quite a lot of property along the creek. Perhaps you should think of relocating your house someplace farther back in the woods.”

Actually, he had thought of building deeper in the forest, but he liked looking down on the water. Besides, there was a limit to solitude, even for him. At least here he’d see a car on the road once in a while. Maude Foote stopped by on occasion, and he’d had Mose to argue with.

It seemed he would have fresh battles to fight with Charity Sinclair.

“I like my house right where it is,” he said, then changed tactics and added, “How much do you want for your property?”

Surprise widened those clear green eyes. She was wearing a red cotton turtleneck and he could see she had nice breasts. Her fancy jeans were filled out as well as he remembered, better maybe. Round behind, tiny waist, legs just the right length for the rest of her. His loins began to fill. It happened so rarely he took an unconscious step backward. Jesus, he couldn’t believe it.

“My property isn’t for sale,” she said, distracting him, thank God.

“I’ll double whatever you paid for it. You can buy a bigger piece of property somewhere else.”

“I don’t want a bigger piece of property. The Lily Rose belongs to me and I intend to keep it.”

“I’ll give you three times what you paid.”

Her lips flattened out. Before, he noticed, they’d been full and very nicely curved. “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Hawkins. The Lily Rose is a mining claim. I intend to work that claim, as I have every right to do. You can offer me ten times the price I paid—a hundred. It wouldn’t make a whit of difference. I’m staying, Mr. Hawkins, whether you like it or not. If anyone’s going to move, it’ll have to be you!”

He drilled her with a glare and saw her tense a little at the forbidding look on his face. “You aren’t telling me you intend to set up a dredging operation on this property?” Anger softened his voice, making the unspoken threat all the more intimidating. Four years ago, his employees had cowered at that menacing tone but Charity didn’t back down.

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you. That’s what Mose Flanagan intended to do—he just never got around to it.”