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  GLACIER BLOOMING

  Copyright © 2018 by Edie Claire

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

  Dedication

  For the scientists who developed Aimovig.™ After a year of chronic migraine, it’s really nice to have my brain back.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks go out to Gustavus’s own Katherine Hocker, who agreed to take me on a birdwatching hike only to spend all morning sitting in her car in the rain answering such questions as “Do bears ever break into freezers on people’s porches? Why did that moose have a collar on? How can you possibly stay sane in the dark all winter?” — all of which she answered with sporting good cheer. I do hope that I have managed to capture some semblance of the spirit of this special place in these pages. (By the way, if you’re selling real estate near the Nagoonberry Trail, call me.) Thanks also go out to Jan Barber, MSN, for answering all my nursing-related questions, and to Kathy Ke, MD, who generously attempted to help me understand how a character with Mei Lin’s background might experience the world. Rest assured, any factual mistakes in this book are my own errors and not theirs.

  Prologue

  Chicago, Illinois, Twenty Years Ago

  Margot drew in a ragged breath as she faced the man in the hospital bed. He looked pale and miserable, both of which could be expected after emergency surgery to remove multiple bullets from his chest and shoulder. He was hooked up to a half dozen tubes and wires that were in turn hooked up to an assortment of blinking, beeping machines. But at least he was finally conscious. They needed to talk.

  “I won’t go with you,” she announced, fighting to sound firm despite the obvious tremor in her voice. She had no wish to be cruel, but under the circumstances, she was running short on sympathy. He had gotten them all into this mess, and as usual he was leaving her to get them out of it. And she would. She would do what was best for their sons, because the boys were all that mattered. Their father’s feelings weren’t something she could afford to consider anymore. “I won’t do it,” she repeated without the tremor. “Because it isn’t fair. To me or to the boys.”

  “Margot,” he answered in a voice that was disturbingly weak. “Please. I love our sons.”

  She pursed her lips in determination. He would not sway her, dammit! “I know you do, Stan. But you don’t love me. You can’t even pretend anymore. You think that doesn’t matter?”

  He winced, squirmed on the mattress, then winced even more. She knew he had to be in pain, despite the narcotics he was receiving. Watching him suffer made her horrible task that much more horrible. “Margot,” he rasped desperately. “Please. This isn’t about us! We have to protect the boys.”

  How dare he! “It wasn’t me who put them in danger in the first place!” she erupted, surprised at the unleashing of her anger. Yelling at a man in a hospital bed was despicable, but her simmering fury was difficult to contain. “This is your mess, Stan! Yours. And I won’t let you ruin our sons’ lives with it!”

  Her voice cracked on the last words, and she fought hard not to cry. Never in a million years could she have foreseen such an outrageous end to the fairy tale of her youth. She’d been a starry-eyed idiot, a newly graduated hospital pharmacist who’d left her rural home in British Columbia to work in the hip and bustling USA. She’d wanted excitement and passion and she had found more than she’d ever wanted of both. Her chosen prince, a dashing trauma surgeon, had fallen for her charms at first sight, and the whirlwind courtship that followed had left her giddy with girlish ecstasy. It had also left her pregnant. And though the couple had married and had a second child, nothing after “I do” had been at all as she’d imagined.

  “You don’t understand,” he pleaded, his striking pale-blue eyes attempting their usual bewitching. “Once we’re all out of danger, you can blame me until the day I die. But all that matters now is keeping the boys safe. Whether we proceed with the divorce or not, the two of them will still be targets. That’s how these people work, Margot. They go after your vulnerability.”

  His patronizing insulted her. “Oh, I do understand,” she replied coolly. “Better than you think. All this has given you the perfect opportunity to play the big hero, hasn’t it? And we both know how much you do love that! But this time, Stan, you’re going to put your boys before yourself. Do you hear me? You don’t have to give these people a reason to retaliate! All you have to do is keep your mouth shut, and I can take the boys back to Canada with me, safe and sound. And you can go wherever the hell you want.”

  His eyes widened with alarm. “It’s not that simple,” he insisted. “They’re not going to leave me alone just because I promise not to say anything! They’re not going to stop until I’m dead, Margot. And if they can’t find me, they’ll go after you or the boys to force me out of hiding. They’d find you all in Port McNeill in a heartbeat!”

  Hot anger flared within her. The best solution for the boys was obvious, but he couldn’t see it. His mind could only conceive of scenarios in which he played the starring role. “Have you thought for one second about how this grand scheme of yours would affect our sons?” she shot back. “Have you even considered their needs, their futures? If we run away with you, they lose everything! Their home, their school, all their friends, even their own identities! They would have to change their names and lie to people about their background. They could never even see their own grandparents again! Have you thought about that? My parents? Yours? Summers in Juneau, holidays on Vancouver Island? This is our boys’ whole world we’re talking about!”

  He stared back at her helplessly, his face wracked with pain. “Of course I’ve thought of that. But there’s nothing else we can do,” he pleaded. “The three of you won’t be safe unless you go with me. They’ll never believe I’m not a threat!”

  Stupid, idiot man! “Not as long as you’re alive, no.”

  His pale eyes flooded with sudden understanding. And fear.

  “If you’d died on that operating table,” she said slowly, “the boys and I would be fine. Isn’t that true?”

  He made no response.

  “You think I don’t understand the situation, but you’re wrong,” she continued, calming her voice. She had his full attention now. “I understand perfectly. Two lovely gentlemen laid out all the options for me a little while ago. The fact is, no matter what kind of deal you make with the authorities, you can’t take our boys with you without my consent. And I will not consent. I won’t do that to them. They can have you and me both, living together in a miserable alliance in some faraway place with fake identities — in which case they lose every other thing they’ve ever cared about. Or they can keep every person, place, and thing that they love… except you.”

  A film of fluid obscured his eyes. He blinked, but it didn’t help. A single tear rolled down each cheek and dripped onto his pillow.

  His obvious grief shook her. Damn him for making this so hard! He did love his sons. And they were crazy about him, too, God help her. But like everything else in Stanley’s life, he kept his children in a distinct mental compartment, to be taken out and played with when convenient. She occupied a similar box herself, although the hinges on its lid had grown rusty from disuse. They had never been the family she had longed for, and now they never could be.

  “You don’t have to testify against these people in court,” she continued. “If you tell the authoriti
es everything you know, even off the record, they’ve agreed to falsify a death certificate and set you up with a new identity. Everything about your condition has been held in strictest confidence since you arrived at this hospital; the only people who know that you survived the surgery are the staff, the authorities, and me. So when you’re well enough, you can slip out of here and go wherever you want. Alone.”

  Tears continued to roll down his cheeks. Margot’s own eyes flooded when she realized that one of his arms was immobilized and he seemed too weak to lift the other. He couldn’t wipe away his own tears! “The boys would…” he began. But he couldn’t finish.

  Margot’s composure crumbled. She had loved this man once — loved him with an all-consuming passion that had made her throw good sense to the wind. She loved him still, in a pitying, sentimental sort of way. But the passion had died a long time ago, and she knew that he had never loved her. They were so different in temperament, so divergent in values. If not for the pregnancy, they would never have married. She would have seen through him in time.

  She pulled a tissue from her purse and wiped his cheeks, then did the same to her own. She took another ragged breath and spoke to him more gently. “Everyone will have to believe that you died of your injuries, including the boys. We can’t trust them not to let something slip; they’re too young. I know this will be hard on them. They do love you, Stan. But they’ll need to grieve either way. Because whether you’re still breathing or not, you can’t be a part of their lives anymore. You just can’t.”

  Not after this, she left unsaid. There was no need to heap additional guilt on him. He’d had enough to answer for even before this particular jaunt to Chicago had exploded in violence. She knew that neither the flying bullets nor the nightmare now ensuing was strictly his fault, but she had worried too many hours, lost too much sleep, and put the boys to bed alone too many nights to divorce this watershed event from everything else he had put her through.

  “Can I see them again?” he begged. “One more time?”

  She tensed and shook her head. Could he possibly make this any harder? “They’ll be told you died in surgery,” she explained. “The official story needs to be that you never regained consciousness after the shooting. You understand why.”

  His eyes closed as he nodded. His wounded body trembled, and Margot felt his pain. His chest and shoulder might burn and throb, but nothing could touch the agony of losing a child. As small a part of his life as the boys had been, she knew he would miss them desperately. Always.

  “I’m sorry, Stan,” she said sincerely. “I really am. If I could wave a magic wand and make all this go away without anyone’s getting hurt, I would. But for their sake, this is the best I can do. I’ll always do what’s best for them. You know I will.”

  He gave another slight nod, and as she looked down at the closed eyes in his pale face she was overcome with emotion. This would all be so much easier if she could hate him. She could hate him for pretending to be something he wasn’t, for roping her into his realm before she understood, before the naive girl she had been could see the demons that drove him. But she couldn’t hate him. Every once in a while, he’d been a damned good father.

  She leaned down and kissed him tenderly on the forehead. “Goodbye, Stan,” she whispered.

  His eyes flew open, but she found her own unwilling to meet them. She turned away and walked out of the room.

  Chapter 1

  Southeastern Alaska, Present Day

  Mei Lin shut the door of the house, turned, took two steps toward the Subaru Forester that was parked in the gravel driveway, stopped short, and shrieked.

  Approximately seven hundred pounds of adult female moose was standing by the driver’s side of the car. The shaggy, gangly beast swung its elongated nose toward the interloper and gave the human what could only be described as a bored, derisive look. Then the cow lowered her head and returned to munching on the bushes.

  “Oh, please!” Mei Lin begged in a whisper as she slowly backed up again. “The GusMart’s going to close!”

  The moose did not appear to care. Her giant brown lips continued to strip the tender green leaves from their stems. Her lower and upper jaws slid sideways as she chomped and chewed. She had to splay her front feet to reach down to the bushes, which made her look comically awkward even without the gaudy red plastic collar that ringed her thick neck.

  “Number Twenty-Two,” Mei Lin mumbled as she reached the relative safety of the doorway. “It figures.”

  In the tiny town of Gustavus, Alaska, which occupied the flatlands at the tip of a coastal peninsula roughly 45 miles west of Juneau, one could run into a full-grown wandering moose any day, at any time. It was also not unusual to run into one wearing a GPS collar, since the movements of the local herd were being tracked as part of a research study by the state Department of Fish and Game. What was unfortunate for Mei Lin was that this particular moose, known to locals because she was one of the few that spent her summers in town as well as her winters, was less shy of people than she should be. Not only did Twenty-Two have a penchant for cultivated flowers and gardens, she also had the annoying habit of parking herself in the human spaces that harbored them and not budging again until she was damn good and ready.

  Seeing the humor in her situation, Mei Lin grinned, pivoted, and reached for the doorknob. Then she caught herself, and her smile faded. Sharing such escapades with her employer had become second nature to her. But Elsie Dunn was no longer resting behind the giant picture window in the master bedroom upstairs, admiring her sweeping view of the Salmon River and the cold waters of Icy Strait in the distance. Elsie’s funeral had been three days ago.

  Mei Lin struggled to overcome another bruising wave of sadness. If Elsie were alive, she would certainly tell her young caregiver to knock off the melancholy and move on. The ninety-one-year-old’s peaceful death had come at the end of a long battle with heart disease, and the only surprising thing about her passing was that it hadn’t happened sooner. Mei Lin had served as Elsie’s live-in nurse for the last seven months, and she knew better than anyone how much of a miracle it was that the frail old woman had survived through the spring, much less halfway through summer. But knowing that didn’t make Elsie’s home — a spacious, modern two-story with large windows and decks for year-round wildlife watching — seem any less empty now. Mei Lin might have started out as hired help, but over the long, dark winter, she had come to love her patient as a dear friend.

  Now, she missed her terribly.

  Mei Lin leaned back against the house and glanced at her watch. The moose had moved a few steps, but she was still grazing within six feet of the driver’s side of Elsie’s Subaru. It was Saturday, and the GusMart would be open only another fifteen minutes, after which it would close until Monday morning. You couldn’t buy groceries anywhere in Gustavus on a Sunday, with the exception of whatever premium-priced delicacies Lesley and Kate had in stock at the Cafe Herbivore, and Mei Lin was out of milk, yogurt, and granola. Besides which, she had a serious craving for chocolate.

  “Please move, moose!” she exclaimed in frustration.

  The cow did not acknowledge her existence.

  Mei Lin resolved to wait it out. She’d had plenty worse problems, after all. One year ago, she had been broiling in the July heat of Dallas, Texas, living in a poorly air-conditioned tin can of an apartment with three other nurses, eating reheated frozen entrees and sleeping on an air mattress. The only wildlife she saw between her high-rise apartment and the medical complex where she worked were garbage-eating pigeons and swarming blackbirds. The state did have other wildlife, of course, but being both broke and without a car made accessing such wonders difficult. If you’d stopped her then and told her that one year in the future she would be carrying bear spray in her purse and cursing at a moose in the driveway, she would have laughed out loud.

  Mei Lin had never considered herself “adventurous.” At the tender age of two and a half she had been adopted as an orphan f
rom the Chinese province of Gansu and brought halfway around the world to Maine, where she had bonded quickly with her new parents and older sister and had learned a second language within months. But as daring and dramatic as all that sounded, she had zero memory of any of it. In her perspective, she was a timid hometown girl who until recently had spent her entire life within a fifteen-mile radius of Portland, Maine. It had taken all the guts she could gather to leave the only home she’d ever known and move down to Texas two years ago. And look how that had turned out!

  The moose raised her head. She seemed to catch an interesting scent on the breeze. Without another glance at her human observer, she swung her giant nose toward the river and ambled off across the meadow.

  “Thank you!” Mei Lin praised, creeping slowly around the back of the Subaru as the moose moved away. She slipped into the driver’s seat and shut the door. The animal, which had stopped again thirty yards distant to munch on another cluster of bushes, twitched her oblong ears in response to the noise, then went back to eating.

  Mei Lin started up the car and backed out. She still had ten minutes. She could make it.

  Barring uncooperative moose or deep winter snowdrifts, it didn’t take long to get anywhere from anywhere in Gustavus. The town of just under five hundred people consisted of two main roads that connected the town center with its airport and ferry dock, and — ten miles through the woods to the northwest — with the lodge and visitor’s center of Glacier Bay National Park. The flat plain on which the town was built had an interesting geologic history, having been covered by glacier floodwaters only 150 years ago. Everything Mei Lin could see now — both the dark, moss-covered forests and the fields full of wildflowers — had regrown only after the ice and water had receded up into the bay.

  Mei Lin rolled down her window to enjoy the sensation of the cool, moist air rushing past her cheeks. After a year and a half of inhaling the smelly haze of urban Dallas, she couldn’t seem to get enough of the pure stuff. She glanced to the northeast and smiled. The weather was clear enough today to see the snow-covered Chilkat Mountains in the distance. Since they were frequently obscured by fog, she relished every peek.