Winter is falling in the remote town of Benedict, Alaska, and with the cold comes an uninvited guest. The dreaded census man, seemingly innocuous, is an unwelcome presence to those members of this secretive community who would prefer to keep their business to themselves. Meanwhile, thriller writer Beth Rivers has received her own unexpected visitor: her mother. The last Beth heard, Mill Rivers had gone underground in the lower forty-eight, in search of Beth’s kidnapper, and Beth can't help but be a little alarmed at her appearance: If Mill was able to track down her daughter, who knows who else might be able to? Beth doesn't have time to ponder this for long: a battered woman stumbles into the town bar one night, and her husband is found dead the next morning. Suspicions immediately turn to the census man, but when he, too, goes missing, everyone in Benedict—including the police chief—is suspected, and Beth and Mill must work to figure out what really happened. Meanwhile, in the lower forty-eight, another author has disappeared, and the police think Beth’s kidnapper just may be at it again...
Release date:
December 7, 2021
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
288
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I put my fingers to my temples and squeezed my eyes shut.
As the Benedict, Alaska, days had become shorter and the nights longer and darker, the words had been with me. They’d haunted me, awakened me from deep dream-filled sleeps. I’d felt the distraction of them as I worked, gritted my teeth, trying to push them away.
Their continual play through my mind was doing me no good. They weren’t soothing words. They were the stuff of bad times, memories that had taken on a life of their own now and were bubbling up more and more all the time.
Those words weren’t the worst part.
Seven months ago, a man named Travis Walker kidnapped me, took me from my home in St. Louis, and kept me in his van for three days, during which he hurt and tortured me. For a long time, I’d forgotten most of what happened during those seemingly endless days. It was only a few months ago, about the time the police learned his real name, that I started to remember more, including his saying those words. Lots more started to resurface after that. Moments in the van, smells, noises, his voice. Even more of the sickening fear. The countryside passing by as he drove, the road signs—we’d gone all through Missouri.
I thought he’d taken me because of my career as a thriller writer. That he was an unhinged fan of my dark and disturbing books, written under my pseudonym, Elizabeth Fairchild. But those words meant that not only had he known my real name—the name I was now using to hide from him—but that maybe he’d known me for a long time, been aware of my entire family.
My father had disappeared when I was seven, and though my mother, Mill Rivers, had spent most of her life searching for Dad, she was now off the radar, too, after allegedly shooting Walker in the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly.
I’d come to the conclusion that those seven words, along with a few other pieces of evidence, might also mean that Travis Walker had something to do with my father’s disappearance.
They also might mean nothing at all, could have just been part of Walker’s cruel manipulations.
There was even a possibility that the memory was a glitch. Though I was fairly certain my mind was putting things together correctly, there was no guarantee. I could be misremembering. I’d done it before. With my mom on the run and my kidnapper still on the loose, the idea that my mind was playing tricks on me didn’t seem unwarranted.
I’d escaped the van, witnesses saying I flung myself out of it, though I still don’t remember that part. Because of the impact, I’d needed brain surgery to clear a subdural hematoma, but there didn’t appear to be any lingering brain damage. Since I’d also run from the hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, where I was being treated and observed, though, I couldn’t know for sure.
Mostly I just wanted Travis’s voice to leave my head, leave me alone.
Inside my room at the Benedict House, a halfway house for female felons, where I was also living, I stood from my desk chair. I’d been working on notes for my next book, or at least trying to. Most of the time I wrote my novels in a small hunting shed out in the woods that housed the community one-sheet newspaper, the Petition, that I also put together every week—it made a good cover for my real job, since there was only one local who knew who I was: the police chief, Gril Samuels. But inspiration had struck this evening.
Unfortunately, as it waned, Travis Walker’s words had come back full force. Again.
I pulled back the curtain from the room’s window. The view was of an open plot of land that led to the woods; tonight all I saw was darkness. If there was a moon, it was hidden behind thick clouds. Any artificial light from the small downtown businesses didn’t eke its way back here, behind the buildings.
I closed the curtain. I was antsy, not able to think about reading something for pleasure. I’d loaded some old television sitcoms onto my laptop, but the idea of watching something funny made my skin crawl. I needed to do something. Exercise?
Though that would have helped, I decided to opt for some civilization instead. I pulled on a hat, grabbed my coat, and left the room, still double-checking the lock on the door, even after all these months. Actually, triple-checking.
The rest of the Benedict House was quiet. My landlord and the woman who ran it, Viola, was probably in her office or her room. It wasn’t required that we check in with each other as we came and went, but I often let her know what my plans were.
Tonight I just wanted to go.
I slipped on my boots from a pile we left by the front door. These were my newest pair. I’d purchased them from the mercantile two weeks earlier, and I didn’t think I’d worn anything else since.
I glanced down the hallway toward Viola’s rooms, but didn’t hear or see her, or smell anything coming from the kitchen.
We’d had a resident through Christmas, but Ellen had done so well that with a break in the weather, she was flown back to Juneau and then Anchorage to forge a new life. She’d come to the Benedict House a strung-out junkie but left a cleaned-up woman with a goal to succeed. She’d wished to stay longer because she’d ended up enjoying her time at the house, but she hadn’t been allowed to make those sorts of decisions for herself. Viola had heard that she was still on track. We both hoped she’d be okay, and frankly, we missed her, not to mention her bread-baking skills.
I stepped out and into the cold. The ground was covered in snow, hiding the mud that had come earlier in the season. It was frozen solid now, and the crunchy snow wasn’t easy to walk or drive through.
The small downtown was set up in an L-shape. I glanced over to the other leg, seeing that all the businesses had their lights on. CAFÉ, BAR, and MERCANTILE were open. I wasn’t hungry (a rare occurrence since I’d moved to Alaska), but a drink sounded good.
As I hitched up my coat collar, though, I was stopped short by a double glimmer coming toward me from in front of the buildings.
I gasped lightly and zeroed in on the approaching threat.
The shine came from two eyes. I froze in place as my own eyes adjusted to the diluted darkness. There were no streetlights, but the business windows helped take away some of the gloom.
Was it a bear?
A second later, I realized it was too short. A wolf? No, that wasn’t it, either, and I didn’t sense it was on the attack, at any rate.
With relief, I realized it was a dog, one I’d seen from a distance before. A husky, part of one of the local musher’s teams. I hadn’t met the man, who I’d heard was always training for the Iditarod, but I’d seen this particular dog—Gus, I thought his name was—a few times.
“Gus?” I said hesitantly.
He trotted directly to me, sat, and smiled upward.
“Hello,” I said as I patted his head. I laughed. “Aren’t you ferocious?”
Gus’s tail wagged appreciatively.
“Gus?” a voice hailed from the other side of the buildings.
“He’s here,” I called back. “Over by Benedict House.”
I heard the crunch of boots before a man emerged from the shadows. Maybe in his late sixties, he moved well but with a hitch to his quick step. “He’s friendly.”
“I know,” I said as he stopped next to the dog.
“Gus, Gus, Gus.” The man reached for the dog’s collar and gently pulled the animal toward him. He looked up at me. “This is maybe the greatest dog I’ve ever known, but he’s also the smartest and loves to find new ways to escape. I apologize if he bothered you.”
“He didn’t.” I extended my hand. “I’m Beth Rivers.”
With his free hand, we shook. “Elijah Wyatt. I’m not sure how we haven’t met yet. You must not have needed a tow.”
“You’re pretty popular around here. I haven’t needed a tow yet, but maybe someday.”
“I’ve heard of your … your scar.” He smiled sheepishly. “Wow, that was terribly inappropriate. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s hard to miss.”
My hair, now white from the trauma of being kidnapped, had grown out some from the hospital bathroom haircut I’d given myself, but the scar would probably always be obvious. I didn’t care what I looked like as long as it wasn’t brown-haired novelist Elizabeth Fairchild.
It was difficult to see Elijah clearly, and even though I had heard of him, I didn’t think I’d noticed him out and about. I shopped at the mercantile and Tochco’s, our local version of Costco, but if he’d been there at the same time I had, I didn’t remember him.
In the shadows I saw gray hair tufting out under his cap. His wrinkled face was friendly in a Jimmy Stewart way and I immediately got good vibes from him. He seemed like a nice guy.
Of course, he took care of a bunch of sled dogs. How could anyone who cared for a team of dogs not be a good guy? I’d also heard about his operating our one local tow truck—outfitted with a front blade. He voluntarily plowed our two main streets.
“I’m headed over to the bar for a drink. Want to join me?” I said.
This was just the way things were done around Benedict. I wasn’t being flirtatious or asking him on a date. You just formed friendships quickly here.
“Gosh, maybe I’ll stop by later. I need to get Gus back and check on my other dogs, but I’d love to come by if it works out.”
“Sounds good. I would love to meet your other dogs someday.”
Gus laughed. “They’re a ragtag group if ever there was one, but they’re the best. Come over anytime. I’m back behind Tochco’s. The Tochco folks let me use their landline.”
“Thanks, I will.” I’d heard that part, too—that if you needed a tow, you called Tochco’s and somehow Elijah would get the message. Landlines were sparse in Benedict, but not as sparse as cell and internet signals.
As I watched him lead the dog away and out around the buildings, I listened for the sound of a vehicle engine but didn’t hear one. He must have set out on foot the couple of miles from Tochco’s in search of the dog. Traveling such a way wasn’t unheard of out here, but I wondered if I should have offered them a ride home.
I hurried to the path Elijah had taken but couldn’t see him or the dog when I turned the corner. I debated running back to my truck and trying to catch up, but it wasn’t currently snowing. They’d be okay, and Elijah was probably grateful to have a way for Gus to burn off some energy.
Meeting Gus and Elijah had made the haunting mantra disappear for a while—I knew this because it nudged its way back into my head just as I turned around again, heading toward the bar.
“Go away,” I said quietly with gritted teeth as I opened the door.
Maybe something else would distract me.
Two
“No new parolees?” Benny, Viola’s sister and the woman who ran the bar, said. She took her job seriously and not only could she make any drink in the book but was the best listener and secret keeper in town.
“Nope, but it’s not because Viola is in trouble.” I put the celery stalk back into my tall Bloody Mary. I sat up on the stool some so Benny could hear me better. It was noisy and crowded tonight. “They were supposed to send over two women, but they missed the last ferry a couple of weeks ago, so they made other arrangements. No one is mad at Viola anymore. We are one hundred percent sure.”
Viola had gotten into some trouble a few months earlier because she missed some pertinent information about one of the parolees, more often referred to by her as “clients.” Her position as the person who ran the Benedict House had been temporarily jeopardized, but all had been forgiven. Someone in a high position of power had realized that Viola did lots more good than bad. Besides, who else was going to be in charge of the halfway house out in the middle of Nowhere, Alaska?
Once winter set in, the ferry from Juneau was scheduled to run only once a week, if weather conditions permitted. Though it wasn’t currently snowing, I hadn’t heard that trips had been resumed on any sort of regular schedule since the one two weeks earlier.
“Is Viola upset?” Benny frowned.
“She’s not upset, but she’s at a loss. There are plenty of projects she could work on. She keeps talking about winterizing the windows, but she likes to have a client or two. Now she has to redirect her energies.”
Benny nodded. “My sister doesn’t like to redirect, and I know she hates doing the windows.”
I nodded.
The Benedict House was at one time a Russian church. Then it became an inn until it was deemed not quite up to earthquake safety standards to house paying guests. The authorities figured it would work just fine for female criminals, however. Viola somehow knew how to rule with a firm but kind hand. She had been in charge of many parolees over the years, though because of the mistakes she’d made, she had to prove herself once again with Ellen. She’d been told she was back in everybody’s good graces, but you can’t control the weather.
Viola and Benny had run away from a bad family situation in Juneau when they were kids, landing in Benedict. They’d both found their way in this small, primitive community, and they were loved and beloved, treated with quiet respect. I’d come to recognize that the dynamics of the community wouldn’t be in sync if they weren’t here. They made a good difference.
I noticed that Benny kept glancing down at the other end of the bar.
I leaned over and looked. A man sat there, someone I’d never seen before. Middle-aged, he was still wrapped in his winter gear, like I was. Those who’d lived in Benedict for a while might take off their coat when going inside, but those of us who were still getting our Alaska bearings kept wrapped up for a bit.
“Is he new?” I asked, wondering if he’d managed to catch the ferry that Viola’s potential clients had missed.
“Sort of.” She frowned. “He’s the census guy, but he’s been here a couple months.”
“Really? We have a census guy in town? I missed this.”
“We do. I guess our lack of internet access makes us a target for invasive bureaucracy.”
I almost laughed, but I realized soon enough that she wasn’t kidding. “It’s not good he’s here?” I said doubtfully.
The expression on Benny’s face was distinctly distasteful. “We don’t take kindly to such nosiness.” Benny sniffed.
I cocked my head as I processed her words. She was right; this community didn’t like any nosiness, which was one of the reasons I loved it so much.
I understood the importance of the census and the census takers. I knew how community decisions were made because of the survey’s results, how historical records could be useful. But I also knew that the residents of Benedict, Alaska, my new home, didn’t like to be asked many questions, particularly personal ones that might include things like how many people lived in a residence, what their real names and actual ages were, and what folks did for a living. In fact, I was living my own lie, and now, knowing what I knew, I would run the other way if I saw that man coming toward me. With a ping of insight, I realized that I’d lived my lie for so long now that it didn’t really feel like much of a lie until I gave it some thought.
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