Alaskan Woman

By Peggy Hanchar

Coop Harrison spent three years in a POW camp, before returning to the states. Now he has one goal and that’s to find and kill the man who was responsible for his capture by the enemy. But when Coop finds someone has already done the job for him, there’s nothing left him to do but protect his enemy’s wife from a deadly killer.

Winter in Alaska is no place for a woman alone, but Mackenzie is determined to find her husband’s killer and hold onto their homestead. When Coop hires on as her handyman, she’s too grateful to question him closely until she finds out his reason for coming to Alaska. Is he the man who killed Bobby Lee? Suddenly she fears for her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peggy Hanchar
• Release date: May 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310417351

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Alaskan Woman

Peggy Hanchar

© Peggy Hanchar 2016

all rights reserved

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter One

Billy Lee Brody was dead.

Murder, his wife thought.

Suicide, the coroner said.

So MacKenzie Brody did her best to believe the verdict, although, she knew in her heart it was wrong. Either way, he was just as dead, and she was stranded on a rustic homestead in Alaska.

She stood on the front porch of her log cabin and looked at the leaden sky where a flock of geese winged their way north, their formation a dark wedge against the pale gray horizon. Spring lay on the edge of the land, as tantalizing as a fresh, young whore down at Finn’s tavern. Mac, as she was more commonly called, gazed at the distant slopes, and the smudged line of trees to the distant span of Kanchemak Bay lying miles below, as sullen and petulant as a wayward child. The land was ready for spring, and so was she.

Soon, it would be a year since Bobby Lee’s body had been found. Two years since they’d come to Alaska, His great plan had lasted less than a year and had already failed by the time he died. She hadn’t known what to do when he was gone. All her expectations had died and she hadn’t the courage to dream, again. So she’d stayed, out of inertia more than anything and she’d managed to make it through the winter on her own. Many had thought she wouldn’t. Hell, she’d thought so, too, but she had, and she felt a visceral thrill of triumph. It hadn’t been easy. She thought of the long nights, lonely and infinitely frightening in their isolation, when the wind sobbed around the corners of the cabin like souls risen from the grave, and above it all, the howls of some ferocious, wild creature alone in the frigid darkness, its cries echoing her own fears.

Sometimes, Mac lay beneath her covers, as if frozen in place and wondered why she was still here, why she hadn’t left as everyone had expected her to, why she hadn’t fled back to the comforts of an easier past life. Slowly, over those long winter nights, she’d figured out something about herself. When she’d moved to Alaska, she hadn’t been running away from her old life the way Bobby Lee had been, she’d been running toward her future and whatever it held.

She had married Bobby Lee as soon as he returned from Afghanistan, partly at his insistence and partly because she sensed his need for love and stability. He’d been a hell-raiser in his early years and anyone who met him when he came back from the service might have thought him the same, but she’d known he wasn’t. A lot of men returned home wounded in their spirits. Only later did she realize how foolish she’d been to believe she could help him. Their marriage hadn’t been enough to save him. So he’d died alone in the cold darkness of Alaska, alone like that animal that haunted her nights.

Somehow, she’d found the strength deep inside herself to go on, and she’d found she’d come to love Alaska and the strong independent people who’d settled here. She could always go home to Virginia, to the gentle rolling hills and large old farmhouses that held laughter and security. It hadn’t been enough for her before, not after the baby died. She feared it wouldn’t be now, either. She shouldn’t have had a baby right away, but they’d been careless. Bobby Lee was impetuous and impatient—too impatient to bother with a condom. Although, she hadn’t known it when she walked down the aisle, she already carried his child. She brushed away the memory.

So here she was in Alaska, vowing to stay despite the dangers. She wouldn’t be driven out, not by the nay-sayers, not by the dangers and not without a fight to save her homestead and to find her husband’s murderer.

They’d come to Alaska, Bobby Lee and her, looking for a new beginning. Their marriage, imperfect at best, had been shattered by the death of their baby. She refused to think of it any other way. To think its name or its age was to remember its sweetness, the joy of mothering. To remember baby smells and baby skin, petal soft against her lips would bring an anguish too intense to survive. She couldn’t allow herself to think of those things. She would surely go mad. The baby had been a precious gift, given then taken away, and she’d come here reluctantly, to a land as unrelenting and implacably ruthless as her memories. She’d come because Bobby Lee wanted her to, and she’d thought, hoped it would change things between them, while inside, she’d known it wouldn’t.

What they were as a couple, what they had been was finished long before the baby was taken from them. They’d been too cowardly to accept its end, so they’d come to the land of the midnight sun and hidden their unhappiness in the wonder of new discoveries until even those could no longer hide the devastation of a marriage gone wrong. Then Bobby Lee had disappeared. His body had been found, ravaged by wild animals with a bullet hole in his head.

Murder, she’d thought.

Suicide, the coroner had said.

She’d sat through the proceedings like a stone, and when it was over, she’d returned to their homestead and grieved over everything that had gone wrong with their lives. She’d had offers for the homestead, way below what they’d paid for it, but she’d turned them down. Predators circling a wounded prey or simply newcomers looking for the best deal to make their money last longer. It didn’t matter. She needed to hang on to this last shred of the bright promises she and Bobby Lee had tried to fulfill.

And she was stubborn. She wouldn’t let them drive her out, whoever them was. She belonged here as much as anyone. She’d left a part of herself buried out there in the permafrost on a lonely hill in an Alaskan cemetery. She couldn’t leave now. Who would be here to mourn Bobby Lee? She’d left her baby back in Virginia, beside her mother in a small country graveyard, but here, Bobby Lee had no one. She owed him that, at least, since she’d long ago lost the ability to love him. And she wanted his murderer caught. Bobby Lee deserved that, too.

The geese honked above her, a wild exaltation of freedom she had never felt, and she envied them. She didn’t know why. She was free to go, if she wanted. She could fly away as unerringly as the geese seeking a better place, but she knew there was no better place for her. She was destined to drag her failures along behind her like a penance that would follow her all her life. Perhaps that was the reason she’d settled on the notion of finding the person who had taken Bobby Lee’s life. Maybe then, she’d be free of the regret that claimed her.

A wet nose touched her hand, and she curled her fingers around the head of the young German shepherd Bobby Lee had brought home one day and named Fang. A careless, ferocious misnomer for a surprisingly gentle creature, but Bobby Lee had insisted. He’d been proud of the beautiful animal for a week or two, feeding it, brushing it, petting it, then he’d lost interest, and Mac had been the one to care for it and train it. The dog followed her everywhere, patient and loyal, sensing her moods, obeying her commands, comforting her in the long empty days and nights. She wasn’t sure she could have pulled through the winter if not for Fang. She’d thought of changing his name, but he answered to it, and she didn’t want to confuse him. Besides, if she could answer to Mac, he could answer to his misbegotten moniker. The names made them sound strong and invincible, and if they were misleading, no one needed to know but Fang and her.

The shepherd whimpered, and she scratched his ears.

It’s okay, fella, she said affectionately. Let’s go to town and get supplies. I need to pay some bills so they don’t cut off the lights. She laughed at her own wit, something she’d noticed a lot of people did up here. There wasn’t anyone around to enjoy her humor so she’d best laugh at it herself. The joke was that no one could shut off her lights, she ran everything on a generator.

Fang wasn’t paying any attention to her questionable humor. He’d left her to run toward the stand of woods that came down closest to the cabin, then drawing to an abrupt halt, his neck hair ruffed up. He barked a few times, sharp and ferocious, unlike his normal, placid self. There must be a bear out there somewhere, Mac thought. They usually came out of hibernation about now, hungry and mean as the devil. She picked up her shotgun, which she’d left at the corner of the porch.

Come on, Fang, she called and the shepherd barked a few more times and trotted back to her. Come on, boy, she opened the door of the two-year-old, bronze-colored, double cab Ram pick-up truck with all the bells and whistles and climbed behind the wheel. They hadn’t been able to afford this brand new over-sized, over-priced truck, but Bobby Lee had been like a kid when he saw it. He’d insisted they’d need a truck like this for Alaska, and maybe he’d been right. She didn’t know anymore, but she’d seen plenty of smaller-sized, older trucks that could have worked just as well. Anyway, she’d given in to using part of their house money, and they’d bought a place more remote than she’d really wanted just because it was cheaper, and they could afford it. But Bobby Lee had his big, honking truck.

She’d thought about selling the truck now that he was gone, but she doubted she’d get a good price. The market was definitely limited up here. Besides it would be like selling a part of Bobby Lee’s dream. He’d loved this truck, and, it had seemed to her, he deserved it after serving his country in Afghanistan. He’d come back a different man than the one who’d gone away. She’d always felt like she had to make up for the things that had gone wrong in his life.

She shook aside her thoughts and turned the key. Winters were hard on people and vehicles up here so she was happy to hear the motor roar to life. Maybe buying a brand new truck hadn’t been such a bad decision after all.

Homer was a typical small village at the end of Sterling Highway on Kachemak Bay twenty miles away from the homestead. Well loved by tourists in the warm months with its breathtaking views and good fishing, it was abandoned when the thermometer began to drop, and the deep Alaskan winters settled in. Plain-fronted shops and cafes, were straightforward, with no pretensions. The dress shop window boasted mannequins dressed in the most recent fashions from Anchorage surrounded by folded stacks of practical garments more suited to bush country, jeans, hiking boots and plaid flannel shirts. The hardware/feed and seed store displayed new catalogs, ropes, canning equipment among other things, and a shiny new ten-foot wide rototiller with four sets of double blades, among other things. She paused, looking at it, considering. It would make her job easier and take half the time than the plow and disc, she used behind the tractor last year. She didn’t have the extra money. She considered selling her plow horses, but they wouldn’t bring much. She’d have to learn to make do with what she had.

She was going to add cattle to her homestead this year. It would give her a better food source and some income. She’d suggested it to Bobby Lee, but he hadn’t wanted to deal with tending cows. He’d had visions of providing meat for their freezer by hunting and fishing. The fact that he wasn’t an experienced hunter or fisherman hadn’t deterred him. Mac had added to their food supplies with her fishing and her garden. The past winter’s food stores had been especially thin, and often Fang and she had existed on flour pancakes and boiled soup. She’d become an expert bread maker. Fortunately, an article she’d written about life for a woman alone in Alaska had sold to a women’s magazine, and she’d been able to use the four-wheel drive on the truck to get to Atz’s store and buy food supplies. For awhile, she and Fang had reveled in meat-filled stews, jam on her bread and sugar in her coffee before she’d remembered to be frugal. Since then, she’d sold several more articles and some of her photography work to travel magazines. Alaska was the final frontier, and everyone wanted to know about it. The notion it was a land belonging only to the Eskimos and greedy oil companies was slowly being dispelled.

Miz Brody, a voice greeted her when she entered the feed store. Morton Kerr looked up from stacking sacks of grain. What can I do for you?

Hello, Mort. I need some supplies, Mac stated the obvious and pulled out a