down where you’ll be staying,” said the clerk behind the counter, a middle-aged woman with thinning, mouse-brown hair and a bored expression. “We’ll get the bag to you as soon as it comes in, eh?”
It was the Canadian “eh?” that made her grin. She was there. She had made it to Whitehorse, first stop in her wilderness adventure. That was all that mattered.
She signed the form, thanked the woman, and made her way out to the front of the building to look for the taxi stand. As she stood at the curb, staring out at the vast expanse of open space around the airport, Charity’s heart slowly sank. If there were any regular taxis—maybe not in a town of less than twenty thousand—they had left with the rest of the passengers. Instead, parked at the curb was a battered Buick at least ten years old with a rusted-out tailpipe and oxidized blue paint.
“Need a ride, lady?” The driver spoke to her through the rolled-down window on the passenger side of the car. He had a large, slightly hooked nose, dark skin, and straight black hair. In Manhattan he could have been Puerto Rican, Pakistani, Jamaican, or any of a dozen myriad nationalities. Here it was clear the man was an Indian. First Nation, they called them up here.
My first real Indian. She barely stopped herself from grinning. “I’m staying at the River View Motel. Can you take me there?”
“Sure. Get in.” No offer to help with her luggage, no opening the door for her.
Charity jerked the handle, hoisted in her black canvas bag, and climbed into the backseat, wincing as one of the springs poked through the cracked blue leather and jabbed into her behind. She shifted, hoped she hadn’t torn her good black slacks. She hadn’t brought that many street clothes along. “The motel’s on the corner of First and—”
“Believe me, lady, I know where it is.” The car roared away from the airport, windows down, the icy, mid-May wind blowing her straight blond hair back over her shoulders.
She had started off this morning with the long, blunt-cut strands pulled up in a neat little twist, a few wispy tendrils stylishly cut to float around her face. But the pins poked into the back of her head as she tried to get comfortable in the narrow airline seat and she finally gave up and pulled them out, letting her hair fall free.
By the time the dilapidated car reached downtown Whitehorse, she looked as if she had been through a Chinook, northern slang for windstorm only not nearly so warm. The driver, a thick-shouldered man wearing a frayed, red-flannel shirt and a worn pair of jeans, took pity and carried her bag into the motel lobby while she dug some of the money she’d exchanged in Vancouver for Canadian currency out of her little Kate Spade purse. The bag was too small for the sort of travel she had undertaken, she had already discovered. She wished she had brought something bigger along.
Something that would have held her now-lost makeup kit and toothbrush.
Charity paid the driver and watched the battered old Buick pull away, then turned to survey her surroundings. As small as it was—a pin dot compared to Manhattan—Whitehorse was the capital of the Yukon Territory. According to the books she had read, the city had been founded during the Klondike Gold Rush when tens of thousands of prospectors journeyed by ship to Skagway, Alaska, then climbed the mountain passes to the headwaters of the Yukon River.
In the downtown area, a lot of the old, original, false-fronted buildings from the late 1800s still lined the street, making it look like something out of a John Wayne movie. The roads were narrow, and boardwalks ran in front of the stores, just as they did back then.
Standing on First across from the wide Yukon River, Charity thought of how many years she had wanted to come here and her throat clogged with emotion. She had told Jeremy she wanted an adventure. She had told that to her colleagues and friends. But only her father and her sisters knew that coming to the Yukon had been a lifelong dream.
Since she was a little girl, Charity had been fascinated by tales of the North. Over the years, she’d watched dozens of black-and-white reruns of Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. She’d read Robert Service poems until she knew them by heart, and cried through Jack London’s wilderness stories.
Why that particular moment in history had touched her so profoundly, Charity couldn’t say. Some people dreamed of visiting the Eiffel Tower. Some yearned to see the pyramids of Egypt. Charity wanted to see the snow-capped mountains and deep green forests of the North.
And after years of waiting, at last she was here.
Charity smiled and returned her thoughts to getting settled in. After she checked into the motel, she would find a drugstore, buy herself a toothbrush, then get some sorely needed sleep. She still had more than three hundred miles to travel before she reached her destination, Dawson City. In an isolated place like the Yukon, that could be a very long way.
She was a little nervous about the SUV she had leased. She’d been living in Manhattan for years. She rarely drove, and never anything as big as an Explorer. Still, with any luck at all, she would get there tomorrow.
Charity could hardly wait.
“Welcome to Dawson City, Ms. Sinclair.” The real estate agent’s name was Boomer Smith, a short, bald, heavyset man whose smile seemed permanently fixed on his face.
Smith Realty had been named in The Wall Street Journal article and she had found the company afterward on the Internet. Yesterday morning, once her second bag had been found and delivered to her motel and she had picked up her rental car, she had called the office from a gas station along the Klondike Highway—one of the two or three she had seen in the entire three hundred and thirty-five-mile route!
She and Smith had been scheduled to meet at his downtown office on her arrival in Dawson late yesterday afternoon, but the black Ford Explorer began having carburetor problems outside a place called Pelly Crossing, sort of a wide spot in the road, and it had taken several hours for the attendant at Selkirk’s Gas, Bar, and Grocery to fix it.
By the time Charity reached Dawson, her back aching and her eyes burning from so many hours behind the wheel, it was raining. It was dark and cold and all she wanted to do was find a place to sleep. She bought a slice of pizza at a restaurant called The Grubstake and checked into the Eldorado Hotel. It wasn’t until the following morning that she actually got a look at the town.
“Well, what do you think of Dawson City?” Boomer’s words conjured a memory of her first glimpse of town through the windows of her motel room: a gold-rush-era city like something out of a paperback western. Muddy, unpaved streets lined with wood-frame, false-fronted, Old West buildings bordered by weathered, uneven board sidewalks. It was a little like Whitehorse, but smaller, and everything here looked older, as if Dawson had stubbornly endured rather than give in to change.
In fact, the place looked a great deal as it must have a hundred years ago and just thinking about it made Charity smile.
“It’s quite a town,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a city that still had dirt streets.”
“We try to keep things authentic. This town is special, you know. Chock-full of history. This is the way Dawson looked during the Klondike Gold Rush and we try our best to keep it that way.”
He motioned her over to his cluttered oak desk and Charity sat down in a slightly rickety, straight-backed chair. Like most of the town, the office was done in the style of the late 1800s, with oak-paneled walls and hooked rugs, and kerosene lamps sitting around for decoration here and there.
They went through the necessary paperwork, but most of it had already been taken care of through the mail. “I believe I told you on the phone the equipment and furniture was minimal. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what’s still there.”
“Yes, you explained that.”
“Good, then I guess we’re all set. Mrs. Foote should be here any minute. I sent an associate out to her place yesterday after you called to say you wouldn’t be here until today. Maude doesn’t have a phone.”
“I see.” And she was actually beginning to. Coming to Dawson was like stepping