“Three?” Wolff said, sitting up. “Is there another child? No, because you have no mother. So …”
“There’s Nadya,” said Sig. “She’s our mother now.”
“Sig, be quiet,” Anna said.
Wolff watched the exchange with amusement.
“Where is she, anyway?” Sig asked Anna. “Didn’t you get anyone to help?”
Anna said nothing but glared at Sig, who suddenly realized the danger of what he was asking.
Wolff clapped his hands.
“No one’s coming to help? And this Nadya, your father’s new woman, she’s run off at the first sign of trouble, has she?”
“No!” said Sig, but Anna was silent.
“Tell him, Anna,” said Sig.
“Stop being so stupid,” Anna hissed, and Sig sat back as if he’d been slapped.
“You can’t blame her,” Wolff said casually. “She’s lost her husband, her only chance of a little money and a good time, yes? She doesn’t want to stick around to put up with you two. Off to find someone else, yes? Only sad thing is she obviously didn’t know that your father is a wealthy man …”
Despite her revulsion at Wolff, Anna couldn’t help her curiosity.
“Father didn’t have money.”
“Oh, don’t you try that with me,” Wolff said. “Because I won’t have you lie to me.”
“I’m not lying,” Anna said.
“He says he had a lot of gold in Nome. He says Father stole it from him.”
“Be quiet, boy!” Wolff snapped. “Your father had the gold, believe me. And he and I had a deal that he would give me half of it. I never got my half. I want it now.”
“Father had no gold,” Anna said. “We left Nome as poor as we are now. Can’t you see with your own eyes? If we’d been rich, do you think we’d have ended up living in this place?”
That seemed to throw Wolff.
“Don’t lie to me,” he said eventually. “Because I don’t like it when people try to make a fool of me.”
He rose and crossed the room toward where they sat. Defensively, Anna got to her feet and stuck out her chin.
Wolff moved up to her, towering over her though she was a tall young woman. He smiled at her and lowered his face to within a few inches of hers.
She blundered into the chair, knocking it over, and Wolff closed in on her, feeling for a lock of her tumbling hair, bringing it toward his mouth, smelling it. Then he kissed it.
Anna flinched and Wolff let her go.
Sig clutched the arms of his chair and stood so suddenly that Wolff spun to meet him.
Before he could blink, the revolver was in Wolff’s hand and aiming at Sig’s heart. The tip of the barrel was resting gently on his chest, digging into the cloth.
“Wait!” cried Anna.
Wolff turned his head lazily toward her.
“No. You listen to me. Both of you. I have to make a decision. Sit back down where you both were. Right now.”
Sig stood, breathing hard, and now a moment had come that somehow he had been waiting years for. Finally, he knew what it felt like to have a loaded gun pointed straight at you.
Anna stole a brief look at Sig, then picked up the fallen chair. They did as they were told and sat down. Sig could not stop staring at Wolff’s revolver. It was much newer than his father’s, but it was unmistakably the same gun, the 44-40, designed for ease of use to take the same ammunition as a Winchester rifle.
“Good,” said Wolff, and he sat back down in his own chair. The Colt stayed dead still in his hand, lined up on the space between Sig and Anna.
“Now, I need to explain something to you. I just have to decide something, but before I do, let me explain.
“I know your father. I knew your father well. I have tracked him for ten years. Followed you all. You had a head start, it’s true. He was a clever man. After your mother died, he told me he was leaving on the last boat. I reminded him about our agreement, and told him I’d be leaving on that last boat too. He knew that anyway.
“And he worked hard. There was about a month to go till that last boat came, and he worked every hour God sent. He even convinced Mr. Salisbury to keep the office open longer, so more miners could make their claims. Mr. Salisbury said what a good worker he was. So he worked and he worked, and the winter came, and the snows came, and just as the first ice started to form, that last boat came, headed for Seattle.
“The night before it sailed, we met in the saloon to conclude our deal. We met upstairs in one of the private rooms. Wouldn’t do to see that much gold changing hands, Einar said. He was right. We had a drink to celebrate. Einar had brought some whisky and we drank. He was very nervous. I guessed it was because he thought he was getting off without me blowing his game wide open. He’d have been in jail for a long time, and you two with no mother. But if I’d done that, I’d never have got my gold. So the deal had worked pretty well.
“We had another drink, and then, all of a sudden, I was sick. Sick as a dog. Your father was pretty good about it. Very nice of him. Gave me another glass of whisky. I sunk it straight off, and then the room started to spin, and I went down on the floor.
“Last thing I heard was your father saying good-bye. Said he had a boat to catch.”
Wolff paused and his eyes flicked back to Sig and Anna, but they hadn’t moved. Wolff’s eyes narrowed.
“Your father was a devious bastard, I’ll say that much for him.” Wolff made it sound like a good and honorable thing.
“Yes. When I woke next morning it was late. I was still bad, really sick, but I made it to the beach to see that boat steam over the horizon. That pig from the Assay, Figges, told me you were aboard.”
Anna looked at Sig, and Sig looked at Anna.
Wolff saw the look and grinned.
“Yes, you know it, but it took me a lot longer to work out exactly what he did. But you may not know how your father had rented the room in the saloon, so I wouldn’t be found till morning.
“Or how, when I went to the doctor on Front Street, he told me I’d been poisoned. Not enough to kill me, just enough to knock me out. Forgot what the name of the stuff was, but the doctor told me it was something used in the testing of gold.
“And then your father’s final trick, which you already know. I waited seven months in that frozen dump for the next boat to Seattle, and I took it, and when I got to Seattle I checked the passenger lists. What did I find? You’d never been on that boat at all. You can tell me now, since we’re old friends. You didn’t take that boat south. What did you do? Take a dog team someplace? East into Canada?”
Anna shook her head, and she felt a small victory her father had won, many years before.
“He’d bought a dog team from the Esquimaux camp. We headed west, to the farthest tip of Alaska. We made it across the ice to an island in the strait. Then we got lucky, and got a ride on a fishing boat heading for Russia.”
Wolff shook his head. He stared at the body under the blanket for a while.
“He took two children across the ice on a dog sled? And you all made it?”
Anna was silent. She held her head a little higher, remembering the flight they’d made, traveling so light; a bundle of blankets, a Bible, a thin, flat box.
“So, you had seven months’ head start, and I was on the other side of the Atlantic, on the other side of America. I guess he thought he’d never see me again. Or maybe he did, because yesterday I wound up in that two-bit little mining town across the lake.
“Before I got caught up in the gold craze, I was a hunter. I know how to track. Some tracks are left in the snow, others in people’s memories, others in record books. It was a different kind of hunting, but I did it in the end. I had to go back to Nome to start off. First thing I did was blow a hole in Figges’s head.”
Wolff paused, obviously remembering the scene. He spat on the floor as though he had a bad taste in his mouth.
“Now and again I’d hear stories of a man and his two children, and then I
began to close in on you, but maybe he’d get wind of me too, and then you’d disappear. I guess he thought he’d lost me forever. Maybe he was tired of running. Whatever. But when I got to this dump, I think Einar knew I was coming.
“He must have had a tip-off. Seen me in the street before I saw him. Asked people to keep an eye out for strangers, perhaps. Because when I went to his office he’d taken all his things, his papers, everything, like he was never coming back. Emptied out his safe. No one had seen him, though I asked all around town.
“Seems he set off home, ready to run again, and then the damn fool falls through the ice and freezes to death.”
He paused.
“Quite a story, isn’t it? But like I said, I am just explaining all this to you so you don’t think I’m stupid. I know about your father, and the gold, and now I want it. Not just half of it. I want it all.”
Sig shifted nervously in his chair. His memories of their journeying were faint, but for Anna, it was different. It made sense now. Why they’d run almost all their lives, and what it was Einar had been running from, what he’d been scared of. It was like hearing the other half of a story that had been hidden from her. All that time, Einar had been waiting for Wolff to track him down.
She swallowed her fear, and suddenly feeling the need for some kind of help, wondered where her mother’s little black book was. Without knowing it she longed for the faith it contained, for the hope it might give, where there was none.
“Do you know the Bible?” she asked Wolff fiercely. “I doubt you do, but there’s a story in there about a man called Job. And how, no matter what bad things happened, he didn’t stop believing in God’s love.”
Wolff raised an eyebrow and leaned closer to Anna.
“What of it, my sweet?”
“Well, Sig and I are like that. It doesn’t matter what you do to us, or what bad things happen. We won’t stop believing in each other. Do you see?”
Wolff sneered at her.
“Is that so? Well, this may surprise you, but I did my time in church too. I know that story, and I know what most people who quote it seem to like to forget. It wasn’t Satan who tortured Job. It was God. God and Satan made a bet, to test him, to see if he would crumble. Lose his faith. And then, without mercy, they piled misery on him, again and again and again. So, if there is a God up there, you can bet your worthless little life he’s not coming to help you.”
Wolff spat again.
“Do. You. See?”
Anna’s face fell, and she stared at the floor, but Sig reached out across the space between them and found her hand.
Wolff cleared his throat.
“So, I have a decision to make, and the decision is this: which one of you do I have to shoot to get the other one to tell me where it is?”
30
Sun Day, night
Always tell the truth.
Never lie, for Satan uses lies against us.
Turn the other cheek.
Be good and peaceful and avoid the path to evil.
Forgive your enemies and pray for them.
These were the things Maria had taught her children, and though Sig had been too small to learn much then, it was the same message Nadya had taught them too.
But Nadya had left them, and no one from town had come to help Anna and Sig. There was no one to turn to.
They sat in their chairs, watching Wolff as he made up his mind, occasionally lifting the tip of the Colt first toward one of them, then the other.
Sig’s mind was a fury, trying to see a way out of it all, searching for any tiny chink in Wolff’s armor, for some clue as to what to say to make it all stop. So many things he had learned. His mother had always taught him to speak the truth and to believe in it as the only path to God, and yet Einar had kept the truth from them for years and landed them in this mess. Only now did they understand why Einar had chosen to live six miles from town, to isolate themselves from other human contact.
“Know everything you can know,” his father used to say, but sickeningly Sig wondered if he had ever really known his father, and if he didn’t know him, how could he love him?
Anna was exhausted, her single thought of her father. Seeing his shape under the blanket rekindled all sorts of awful memories. She was just ten again, seeing her mother lying in a pool of her own blood.
Her doll.
She’d never had another toy since. As she thought about her mother, she remembered the story of Job again, and it brought tears to her eyes as she wondered how her mother could believe in it. How Job had seen his whole life destroyed, and yet had still had faith in the goodness of God.
“Enough!” Wolff said abruptly. He pulled back the hammer on the Colt with his one thumb.
Time slowed to a crawl as Sig had a brief premonition of the future, the very near future. When Wolff moved his forefinger less than a quarter of an inch, that hammer would fall and ignite the primer in the cartridge. The powder would burn, burn so fast as to be an explosion, but all contained inside the tiny brass case of the cartridge, just as Einar had explained all those years ago. He heard his father’s voice once more, as if he were there. Telling him how the metal would expand, to press against the walls of the cylinder, releasing the lead of the bullet, which would begin its spinning journey toward him. Or Anna. Either was equally awful to think about.
Before the bullet struck, that little brass case would have cooled enough and shrunk enough so that next time Wolff loaded the gun, it would slip lightly out of the cylinder.
Wolff spoke slowly.
“I choose you.”
He pointed the gun at Sig.
“Wait!” Sig screamed. “Wait. I’ve thought of something.”
There was just enough conviction in his voice for Wolff to hear him out.
31
Sun Day, night
“Be very careful you don’t play games with me, boy.”
Sig spoke desperately, genuinely, hurriedly.
“I’m not. We don’t know about this gold, I promise we don’t, but if you say father had it then it must be somewhere. And we don’t have it here. We’d know. It’s a tiny place. Supposing Father had put it in the bank? In cash. He had an account at the mining bank. If he had, there’d be papers. We could get them and give the money to you. Just let us go. We’ll give you the money.”
“Sig’s right,” Anna said. “There were papers on the sled when we found him. You said yourself he’d cleaned everything out of his office. He must have been bringing them home. There might be something in those papers.”
“Nonsense,” Wolff growled, and lowered his gaze at Sig again.
“No!” cried Anna. “It’s true. They’re on the ice. His papers. Don’t you want to go and look at least? Then we can give you the gold and you can leave.”
Wolff’s gun hovered like a cobra waiting to strike. The tip of the barrel made circles in the air as Wolff tried to think straight.
“Maybe,” he said eventually. “Maybe you’re right. Where are these papers now? On the ice where you found him?”
“We left them. We didn’t think they mattered. We just wanted to get Father back to the hut. We threw everything else off the sledge and got the dogs to get us back as fast as we could.”
“You left them?”
“I swear we did,” Sig cried. “I swear on my life.”
“So they’re out there?”
“In the snow, on the ice. There’s a leather bag, and a lot of papers. We could go and get them.”
Wolff went to the window. He stared into the dark.
“Yes,” he said. “We could go and get them. But not now. At first light. And if you’re lying to me, boy …”
“I swear it. I swear I’m not lying. On my life.”
“Not on your life,” Wolff said, and now he wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked at Anna where she sat, and once again his eyes devoured the beauty in front of him.
“On hers.”
32
Moon Day, dawn
/> With the passing of the night, there came time. A long, aching, hurting time, cursed and forlorn, in which there was nothing to do but think.
They spent the night sitting on the unforgiving wooden chairs, till their muscles ached and their backs were in agony, yet Wolff had stayed almost motionless on his chair, across the cabin from them. His eyes were slits in the half light from the oil lamp, almost shut, and Sig and Anna had no idea if he could see them, or whether he was asleep. Then, desperate to stretch his aching legs, Sig tried to stand and found the revolver pointing straight at him again.
He sat down hurriedly.
Sig’s mind drifted back, from the day trapped in the cabin with Wolff, to finding Einar on the ice and then farther still, until, unbidden, he found himself looking at the whole of his short life and wondering what any of it meant. All he felt was that same feeling he’d always had, that he was looking for something, whose name he didn’t even know, and yet now, in the dark of the night, and with his father gone to wherever his mother had gone before, with Anna sitting beside him, he suddenly knew its name.
Home.
They tried to whisper to each other a couple of times, trying to say things that it couldn’t hurt for Wolff to hear.
Sig wanted to know about Nadya.
“Has she really gone? Why?”
“I’m so sorry, Sig,” Anna whispered back. “I’m sorry. Listen, Sig. Remember. I’ll never leave you.”
But there was an awful implication in what she said, in the presence of the gun that lay on Wolff’s lap across the room.
They fell silent, and though it came hard, at some point Sig knew he must have slept, even sitting in that chair, for he woke to see Wolff judging the light from the window.
“It’s time to go,” he said.
Anna and Sig looked at each other and stiffly got to their feet, their legs and backs aching.
“Not you,” Wolff said, looking at Anna.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I’m not going to take both of you out on the ice. I don’t like those odds. You’re going to stay here while I take the boy. And I’m sure you can be trusted to stay here. Can’t you?”