On Tuesday, Mikel called headquarters from a pay phone in town, hoping Ed, his contact, had something for him on Rachel Hill. He had little doubt she was who she claimed to be, but it’d be good if the agency confirmed the fact.
“What do you mean you hit a snag?” he demanded after a moment.
After listening some more, he said, “A gap in her records? What does that mean?”
“Maybe nothing,” Ed told him. “I’m keeping on it. Call back in a week, give or take a few days.”
Mikel thought about this as he returned to the farm, finally deciding not to let it bother him since the researcher didn’t seem to think it was important. But he did make up his mind to try again to get Sonia alone so he could straighten her out about his relationship with Rachel. He found her on the porch with Aino, both of them seated on the swing.
“My Mary was a sweet woman,” Aino was saying. “Never raised her voice to me, unlike someone I could mention.”
“That might have been fine for Mary,” Sonia told him, “but I never had any ambition to be called sweet. I’ve always felt that if I don’t speak my mind, who’ll do it for me? Just because you were married to a quiet woman is no reason to expect the rest of us to keep our mouths shut. In any case, you’re a stubborn man who needs prodding.”
“Danged if I mean to let some mouthy female run my life.”
“I’m trying to help you, not run your life,” Sonia said. At that point she looked around and saw Mikel. “There you are,” she exclaimed. Nodding toward the backyard, she added, “Rachel needs help airing out the tent.”
Mikel left the porch to join Rachel. Once they had the tent under control, she asked, “Do you have a sleeping bag with you? If not, we have an extra.”
“Always keep one in the trunk. Never know when it might come in handy.”
“Good. How about a backpack?”
“Wouldn’t be without one. I take it this’ll be a fairly easy hike on a marked trail tomorrow.”
She nodded.
“That tent looks like it sleeps two,” he said.
Frowning, she said, “Not on this overnight trip.”
“What if it rains?”
“It won’t. But if it did, one of the girls could share it with me and you could use her one-man tent. Are you worried about sleeping in the open?”
“Wouldn’t be my first time.” Although he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a camper, all the agents had to complete a course in wilderness survival, so he wasn’t exactly a novice. Of course, he hadn’t brought any of his special gear to the U.P. with him, but who’d need that on an easy hike on a marked trail?
Since the walk along the lake, Rachel had treated him with a you-might-be-a-friend-but-don’t-get-too-close casualness. He supposed her attitude was just as well, even if he’d prefer a tad more intimacy. Better yet, a lot more. Which he wasn’t likely to get on a hike with five Girl Scouts—that was all who were able to come. They were good kids and he liked them, but when what he really wanted was to be alone with Rachel, even one Scout was too many.
He tried, but found it impossible, to take Sonia aside before it was time to retire to the cottage for the night. The explanation would have to wait until he got back from the camp-out. As he settled into bed, remembering Rachel’s rundown of the wild critters one might encounter up here, he decided to take along his gun, just in case. No one would notice it tucked away in his shoulder holster.
Using a van lent to Rachel by one of the girl’s family, the five Scouts plus Mikel and Rachel reached the point of departure for the hike well before noon. Once the van was parked everyone collected their gear and scrambled out. Rachel did a final check to make sure nothing was forgotten.
“Okay, gang, backpacks secure and comfortable?” she asked. “Everybody got their whistles? Good. I’ll take the lead, the five of you will follow with Mikel as rear guard.”
“In case a wild animal sneaks up on us?” Delia asked.
Mikel was about to reassure her when he realized, by the giggles, that Delia was joking. Apparently these girls didn’t take the possibility seriously. And they were probably right. Most wild critters were smart enough to keep as far away from humans as possible.
“Well, we could meet a porcupine,” Beth said. “Nothing scares them.”
“So we let him have the right of way,” Rachel said. “Everyone clear on that?”
They were.
“What don’t we do on the trail?” Rachel asked.
“Stray off,” Carol said.
“Good. What else?”
“We don’t eat,” Laurie said.
“Right. Food might attract a bear.”
“No litter,” Beth said.
“Or tripping over stuff ’cause we aren’t paying attention,” Amy added.
“I’m beginning to think I’ve got the smartest Scout troop in the country,” Rachel told them.
“We don’t dig up any plants ’cause we’re on a state park trail.” Delia smiled at Mikel. “If we’d brought a tree, though, we could plant it.”
“Good thinking,” he told her.
When they set off, Mikel noticed that Delia had shuffled herself around so she was the last one in the line of Scouts, making him realize she wanted to be next to him. For some reason this made him feel as good as when he’d finished a case successfully.
He wasn’t sure he was entirely happy about this—what was happening to his Nemesis persona?
Noise wasn’t a no-no on the trail, he discovered. The Scouts sang, chattered and generally let every creature in the woods know they were coming. Other than a chipmunk streaking across the trail and into the safety of a decaying log, Mikel didn’t see any other critters.
When they reached the campsite Rachel had chosen, everybody threw off their backpacks. Mikel saw it was no more than a small clearing in the otherwise dense woods.
“Can we eat now?” Beth asked.
“Not until the tents are up,” Rachel told her. “We’ll put them over there near that grove of pines so we’ll be off the trail.” She pointed. Then, looking at Mikel, she warned, “No fair helping anyone—they have badges to earn.”
He watched the girls, all of whom seemed to know what they were doing. But then, he already knew Rachel would be good at anything she undertook—teaching included. He glanced at her and their gazes locked for a moment until she blinked and looked away.
He took a deep breath and let it out, wondering what he was going to do about Rachel. She’d moved into his head, crowding out thoughts of what he should be doing instead of wanting to be with her. Covertly watching her, he didn’t realize at first that Delia was trying to get his attention. He walked over to where she’d set up her tent.
Delia pointed to the pine grove. “She went in there.”
“Who? What are you talking about?”
Glancing at Rachel, who was some distance away, Delia lowered her voice to a near whisper. “Laurie told me yesterday she was going to sneak into the woods and use her compass to get back to the camp just to prove she could. And she did.”
“Maybe she just had to use the facilities,” he pointed out.
“No, Rachel makes us go in pairs for that. Laurie’s my friend but she likes to show off. I’m scared she might get lost and I don’t want to tell Rachel on her ’cause then Laurie’ll be in trouble. Can you go after her?”
Looking into Delia’s trusting blue eyes, he nodded. It’d only take him a few minutes to find Laurie and haul her back to camp. Taking care not to be obvious, he sauntered toward the pines and slipped among the trees. Not until he was well into the woods did it occur to him that he didn’t have a compass, something he’d always relied on in the agency tests. He shrugged. The camp wasn’t far, surely he couldn’t miss finding it again. Just in case, he tried to spot landmarks but, unfortunately, all the trees looked pretty much alike.
Pulling his all-purpose utility tool from his pocket—something he always carried—he used the knife part to carve a blaze into the trunk of one of the trees.
Okay, so you can find your way back here if you keep marking trees as you go on, he told himself. The problem is, can you be sure of the way back from here?
A shriek from somewhere up ahead froze him in place. Laurie! What had happened to her? He automatically touched his shoulder holster.
“Where are you?” he called, hoping she’d be able to respond.
The high-pitched blast of a whistle answered him and he followed the sound until he finally caught sight of the yellow neckerchief all the girls wore.
“Laurie?”
“Here I am.” Her words came out between sobs. He found her huddled against a pine trunk, crying.
“What happened?” he demanded.
She pointed up at a nearby cedar. “He climbed up there.”
He looked but could see nothing through the foliage. “Who or what did?”
“The porcupine.” She scrabbled in a pocket and came up with a wrinkled tissue, using it to wipe her eyes. “I didn’t see him in time and—look.” She thrust out one leg and he saw what were unmistakably quills stuck into her jeans at thigh level.
“It hurts,” she wailed.
“Hold still,” he ordered, flipping out the pliers part of the tool. He knelt on one knee. “It’ll hurt worse for a little bit,” he warned, “and then you’ll feel better. There’s no more than about five quills here so you got off pretty easy, considering. If you feel like it, you can scream when I pull them out.”
Keeping up a running commentary to distract her, he began to extract the quills one by one. Laurie flinched and whimpered while he worked, but didn’t cry out.
“Got ’em all,” he said when he was through. “When we get back to camp Rachel will put antiseptic on them and you’ll be okay. Think you can walk?”
She nodded.
“One little problem remains,” he said. “Did you, by any chance, look at your compass before you left camp so you know what direction we should take?”
“I dropped it when the porcupine swiped me,” she confessed.
“Where?”
“There, I think.”
After searching, Mikel finally came up with the shiny aluminum compass. “We’ll look at it together and you can tell me in which direction camp is.”
“West. It’s west.”
He took her hand, and in what seemed no time at all, they reached the pine grove near the camp and soon came out among the tents.
“Thank heaven you found her!” Rachel cried. “We heard the whistle and then Delia told me what was going on. When I found out you’d gone after her, I decided to wait rather than make a search myself.”
Her trust in him warmed his heart, but he covered it by saying, “Because I always get my man—or in this case, girl?”
“It was awful,” Laurie said, beginning to cry again. “Mikel had to pull five porcupine quills out of my leg and it really, really hurt. I wish I hadn’t gone off alone.”
Mikel put his hand on her shoulder. “Laurie was brave about it all. And here’s my confession—if she hadn’t looked at her compass before leaving camp, so she knew how to get back, we’d be out there yet blowing her whistle and waiting to be rescued. Because, you see, I went off without a compass. Never a good idea.”
Rachel, impressed by his admission that he, like Laurie, had made a mistake, also noticed how Laurie’s tears had stopped when he called her brave. What a great guy he was. “Come with me into my tent,” she ordered Laurie. “We’ll get some antiseptic on that leg.”
When she and Laurie emerged, the other girls were gathered around Mikel, who, from the sound of their laughter, was evidently telling them a funny story.
Later, after the cookout, Mikel supervised the burying of the scraps of leftover food at a good distance from the camp, causing much amusement by instructing every one of the cleanup crew to check their compasses because otherwise he’d surely get lost again.
He was so different from the man she’d at first believed him to be, Rachel told herself. She would never have imagined the tough P.I. with the green hunter’s eyes could care about her girls, their feelings as well as their welfare. No wonder Delia was suffering from an acute case of hero worship. Laurie probably would be, too, now. She couldn’t blame them.
In the twilight, as they donned light jackets against the cool of the evening and began to gather around the campfire, Delia came up to Rachel and whispered something. Rachel bent to hear. “Carol says she heard her mother tell her father that Mikel kissed you on the beach,” Delia confided. “Did he?”
Rachel sighed and tried to choose her words carefully, but wound up admitting, “Yes, he did.”
“Are you going to marry him?”
Poor Delia, she probably wanted Mikel to wait until she got old enough so he could marry her. “No, we aren’t going to marry,” she assured the girl. “We’re just friends.”
Delia eyed her doubtfully, but then Rachel saw her notice how the other girls had begun to gather around Mikel. Delia immediately rushed over and made certain she got to sit next to him at the fire.
Then it was time for tales and songs and, eventually, bed. Once the girls were snug in their tents and quiet, Rachel came back to the fire and to Mikel, who was standing there staring into the flames. “I haven’t had a chance to tell you how wonderfully you handled the porcupine episode,” she said. “I had no idea Laurie would go off like that.”
“Laurie was no more foolish than I,” he said. “I hope you didn’t scold her too much.”
“No need. She learned a lesson without scolding.”
“So did I,” he said ruefully. “Not good to go around thinking you’re infallible.”
She smiled, looking into his eyes. “I’m glad you came on the hike.”
He took her hands in his. “So am I.”
What she wanted to do was sway toward him, into his arms, where he’d kiss her until the world went away and left them alone together. But they weren’t alone. She pulled away. “It’s time I crawled into my sleeping bag,” she told him.
“I’ll walk you home.”
Since her tent was only a few yards away, it made no sense, but, wanting to prolong the moment, she said nothing. Side by side they walked to where her tent nestled among those of the girls. When they reached it, he took her arm and led her around to the back of the tent.
“I wouldn’t want your Scouts to go home with tales of their fearless leader kissing the rear guard,” he said.
“Carol has already told Delia about us on the beach. Delia wanted to know if we were getting married. I told her no, but I’m not sure she believed me. I think she intends to marry you herself.”
“She’s a cute kid. I hate to disappoint her, but marriage is definitely not my line.”
“Nor mine.”
He tipped up her chin with his forefinger. “Why not?”
“I don’t care to discuss my reasons.”
His lips came closer and closer, until she felt the caress of his warm breath and he murmured, “Tell me you don’t want me to kiss you good-night.”
“No,” she whispered, unsure whether she meant no, she didn’t want him to, or no, she wasn’t going to tell him anything of the sort.
Whatever she meant, he kissed her, anyway, and a thrill shot through her. She leaned into his embrace, sliding her hands under his open jacket. Bemused by this kiss, at first she didn’t realize what was under one of her hands. Leather? When it finally occurred to her she must be touching a shoulder holster, she flung herself away from him.
“A gun!” she cried. “You’re carrying a gun!” She turned and fled around her tent and dived through the opening, pulling the flap closed. Crouched on her sleeping bag, she hugged herself, shuddering, fighting off the terror of the past.
Mikel stared after her in bewilderment. There was no mistaking her fright—his gun had given her a case of the blue devils. Just as, he remembered, his speaking of a gun had seriously troubled her once before. As he walked away from her tent toward the fire, he puzzled over her extreme reaction. Though she didn’t know what he actually did for a living, she did believe he was a P.I., so the fact that he owned a gun shouldn’t have been a surprise. What was it, then?
What had happened to Rachel in the past that even the bare mention of a gun frightened her? She lived in an area of the country where hunting was common. He suspected most of the men in Ojibway owned rifles and shotguns for hunting. Perhaps even Aino did.
He could ask Aino about Rachel’s gun phobia. And, when he finally cornered Sonia and told her the truth about why he’d come to the U.P., he’d find out from her if she thought Aino was well enough to be asked the other questions that needed answering, about Leo and the missing Renee.
His obsession with Rachel was scattering his wits. He had to come to terms with it and get back to work on his mission. If she ever let him make love with her, that might do the trick, might rid him of this consuming need.
He wasn’t looking for any long-term involvement with a woman. How could he after Yolanda had shattered his belief in any woman’s honesty? True, Rachel did seem honest, but so had Yolanda. What he needed from Rachel was only a temporary coming together; it had to be that and no more.
Mikel sat down on his sleeping bag by the fire and stared into the dwindling flames as if they held the answers he needed.