Six Days from Sitka

By Brad Watkins

After being wrongly accused of murdering his father, Matt Albright drops out of high school and flees his broken life in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, for the only other place he knows-Seattle. What Matt doesn't realize is that his job washing boats at the local marina will lead to his dream trip of helping a multimillionaire, KT, pilot his yacht from Seattle to Sitka, Alaska.

Unfortunately, KT dies from a heart attack just days before reaching Sitka. The question of whether to turn back or continue on is answered in several letters and an unusual necklace Matt finds in a wooden sea chest KT is clutching when he dies. The letters explain that KT intended to deliver the necklace to the gravesite of a lost love.

The remainder of the journey is anything but easy as Matt encounters rough seas, engine trouble, illegal border crossings, and captivity when the crooked sheriff from Bonners Ferry finally catches up with him. Matt eventually makes it to Sitka, only to discover that KT's lost love is not buried in the location mentioned in the letters from the sea chest.

Can Matt muster enough patience and persistence to solve the mystery waiting for him in Sitka?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 16, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595822546

Brad Watkins

Brad Watkins lives in Seattle, Washington where he enjoys exploring the nautical delicacies of Puget Sound in his boat one glacier-swept crevice at a time.

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Copyright © 2006 by Brad Watkins

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-37884-5 (pbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-595-82254-6 (ebk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-37884-6 (pbk)

ISBN-10: 0-595-82254-1 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

Acknowledgments

The public domain works reprinted in this book are listed below. Most of them came from The Oxford Book of the Sea edited by Jonathan Raban and published by Oxford University Press in 1992. The two works marked with an asterisk were found on the web at www.theotherpages.org. I thank Natalie Giboney for her expertise and counsel regarding copyright permissions.

Sea Fever by John Masefield To Sea! To Sea! by Thomas Lovell Beddoes* The Sailor Boy by Lord Tennyson A Grave by Marianne Moore Psalm 170, verse 23–30 from the Holy Bible A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea by Allan Cunningham* Prayers to be used in storms at sea from the Book of Common Prayer

CHAPTER 1

Flight

Matt Albright was just starting to think the day would go without a hitch when he heard a sudden knock at the classroom door. The principal’s knuckles rapping on the large glass pane rattled through Matt’s bones like a pickup truck on a gravel road. From the back of Mr. Johnson’s history class, Matt could see Dr. Merton, the school principal, standing in the hall. Seeing Merton didn’t bother him. That was normal. What made the hair stand up on the back of his neck was seeing Sheriff Bodie standing beside him.

Before the knock, Matt was sitting quietly in the dark at his desk, studying a roadmap with a small flashlight, following I-90 out of Idaho with his index finger. The other students were watching a stupid film about Chilean donkeys or the wheat fields of Zimbabwe or some other equally useless topic. Matt always sat in the back. He was a pretty ordinary-looking teenager, maybe a little on the short and skinny side, and never seen without a ball cap worn backward. Matt wasn’t especially popular, and nobody knew much but rumors about his family. He was a little-known kid in Bonners Ferry, a small Idaho town where strangers did not exist.

Dr. Merton and Sheriff Bodie waited patiently while Mr. Johnson made his way to answer the door. Matt didn’t trust Bodie, and with excellent reasons. In general, Bodie was not a trustworthy-looking man. He had a long ugly scar that angled down the left side of his face, a remnant of his bounty-hunting days. He was known to be ruthless, and evidently one of his customers got a hold of him real good on one occasion. But the stories behind the scars were buried with the bodies of those he hunted down. It was said around Bonners Ferry that Sheriff Bodie always got his man. A while back he’d retired from the fast life of bounty hunting to become the only law officer in Boundary County, Idaho. Of course, the election was an easy victory since nobody dared to run against him. At the sight of him, Matt slumped lower in his seat and tucked the map and flashlight in his backpack.

Mr. Johnson opened the door to greet the two men, but they wanted him to step out into the hall. Matt knew that something serious was about to take place. Johnson was dwarfed by the two taller men as they exchanged customary morning niceties. Although Matt couldn’t hear what the men were saying behind the glass, he could see their facial expressions. He studied their interactions during the conversation with both care and anxiety. Meanwhile, in the background, the narrator of the film was babbling on about rice production in some godforsaken third world country as if everything was okay. From what Matt could tell, at first, Johnson was complaining about the rickety old projector and the principal was nodding in agreement, patting his arm, and promising to buy him a new one as soon as the levy passed.

Then their faces went grim. Bodie shifted his weight and took command of the powwow, resting his thumbs in his heavy leather gun belt. Time to move on to more serious matters. Even though he was terrified, Matt started to plan his next move. He quietly slipped his arms into the straps of his backpack and pulled it on, swung his legs to the side of the desk and scooted to the edge of his seat. The men stopped talking, stared at each other, and then looked directly at Matt. A violent and bloody image flashed through his mind. He was not going to let them pin the murder on him. He was innocent, but he knew who the killer was, and that’s where the danger lay.

When Bodie grabbed the doorknob, it was go time. Matt leapt from his chair and bolted through the door to the supply room, which connected to Mrs. Jenkins’ Home Economics class, where he dashed through thirty screaming girls to the back of the room. He threw open the third-story window, climbed out, grabbed a handhold on the long steel gutter anchored to the bricks and shimmied down it. The pipe stopped on the second floor. Matt dropped to the ground and started running. He sprinted through the shop behind the school to the hoots and hollers of the welding students. Breathing hard, he crossed the muddy football field to the dense woods on the other side.

After he had cleared the first layer of trees, low branches caught his cheeks with stinging blows as he hurried through the forest. He tried to sweep the bigger ones aside, but there wasn’t enough time to catch them all. Sheriff Bodie and his deputy would be close behind, so the task at hand was to reach the river as quickly as possible. He could nurse his wounds later.

He slid down the muddy banks of the Kootenai River through the concealing branches of a massive willow tree. There a beat up aluminum outboard was waiting for him. It was tied to the trunk and poised at a steep angle, ready to shoot down the bank. He jumped in.

The boat used to belong to Jake Withers, one of Matt’s coworkers at the sawmill. The two of them had spent many a summer day fishing the river in that boat until Jake’s hepatitis got the best of him. When Jake realized his fishing days were over, he gave the boat to Matt and died two weeks later.

Matt grabbed a worn camping ax from under the seat and swung it down on the rope, sinking it deeply into the tree, chopping the rope in half, releasing the boat. He let go of the handle and gripped the sides of the boat as it raced down the steep bank, building speed until crashing into the river nose first with a terrific splash.

The boat bucked and kicked as buoyantly as a rodeo bull before finally settling on the water. Enthusiastic yanks on the starter cord brought the motor to life; it coughed at first but then smoothed out. A hard twist on the throttle sent the thing screaming forward, racing across the river in fits and spurts to the protection of the north shore.

Matt didn’t take the time to think about how his actions mimicked those of the town’s founder, E. L. Bonner. During the Gold Rush in the 1860s, Edwin Bonner had started up a ferry service where the Wildhorse Trail crossed the Kootenai River, and got the town named after him. Matt took the same route, and faster at that, but they would not be naming anything after him.

Quickened by spring rains, the river currents had assembled quite a collection of floating logs that had to be avoided. After negotiating a midstream barge, Matt made good progress toward the nearby small town of Moyle Springs on the opposite side.

Thick rows of weeping willows in their undying quest for water migrated to the riverbank, providing wonderful cover for a sixteen-year-old boy who had literally dropped out of high school and was running from the law. Matt maneuvered through a small opening in the overhanging branches and nestled the boat into its makeshift garage. After tying the boat to the trunk, he shut the motor off. Beneath a tarp in the bow was an old dirty suitcase containing the complete inventory of his worldly possessions.

He reached up for a rope that pulled down a branch with a coffee can tied to it. Inside the can was a Ziploc bag containing a white envelope with $356.28 inside. Matt withdrew all of his savings from the Bank of Albright and released the rope.

Matt could hear the wailing sound of Bodie’s dogs as it traveled easily across the water and echoed off the opposite bank as they sniffed every inch of the ground where Matt had loaded the boat only minutes earlier. But now he was safe on the opposite shore. Having eluded the Boundary County Sheriff ’s Department, Matt pulled the tarp over him and drifted off to sleep.

Nightfall on the Kootenai River can be summarized in one word: frogs. They send out their guttural love calls in cacophonous proportions that are impossible to ignore. The sound woke Matt and he sat up, throwing fists in the air, half-dreaming that Sheriff Bodie had found him. Once he realized it was just the frogs, he sat on the wooden seat to get his bearings. A new moon and overcast skies provided ample darkness to cover his movements. The boat slipped out quietly, and he rowed in the dark water for a while, and then finally groped for the pull handle and restarted the tired little motor. Exhaust fumes, oily and thick, briefly churned in the air before disappearing into the concealing darkness. The world itself seemed to vanish on either side of him into a great black void. One wrong move and he would fall off the edge of the Earth forever.

As the motor purred, he aimed the boat back across the river toward the glowing city lights of Bonners Ferry. Not knowing what lay ahead, he grew more nervous as he neared the other side. Twenty deputies might be waiting for him. Matt rummaged under the seat for a battered green flashlight but didn’t turn it on.

Somewhere near the south bank, he turned downstream and made better progress running with the current. Once the town had disappeared around the bend, he turned the throttle to idle and pointed the flashlight into the tree covered banks. He was looking for a sign. He flicked the flashlight on briefly for quick glimpses of light, but he didn’t leave it on for very long out of fear of being found or, worse, shot at. Matt was searching for something, but he didn’t want Sheriff Bodie to find what he was searching for.

Flash. Nothing. Wait.

—pause—

Flash. Nothing. Wait.

The cycle repeated over and over as he floated along, straining his eyes on the riverbank, studying it intensely, with each flash.

Just after a brief flash again landed on nothing, the previously happy engine sputtered and died. Matt groped around in the dark and checked the fuel line and choke valve, but they were okay. When he lifted the gas tank, however, it was not okay. Too light. With a grimace, he heaved the worthless piece of junk over his head and launched the empty gas tank into the black night where it splashed down somewhere off in the distance. Real smart, Matt. How could you be so stupid? You plan an escape and forget to gas up the getaway? Brilliant.

Fortunately, the current was carrying him in the direction he wanted. The quiet night was exaggerated by the stillness of a dead engine, and Matt realized that this was actually quite convenient. What could be more stealthy than floating silently down a river? They would never find him. Matt resumed flashlight surveillance as the boat floated happily along.

Finally, one of the flashes of light hit its intended target and returned a bright red reflection. Time for the oars. He pulled them out of the bilge, secured them in the oarlocks, and with the bow pointed toward the shore, he heaved like mad. Now the current worked against him as he tried to head straight into the bank while being pushed sideways. He rowed faster.

When he finally came ashore, he was drenched in sweat and downstream from the target. It did not occur to him until he had unloaded his gear that he would have to ditch the boat to keep his pursuers from seeing where he had come ashore. He didn’t want to, but the vision of Bodie’s hounds dragging him along was clear in his mind. He held the boat for a moment, thinking about Jake and all the happy summer memories. Man, did they catch the fish in that thing. No time for reminiscing. There were more important matters at hand—like running from the law.

Matt put his foot on the bow and shoved it into the night river. He watched it fade away as the bow pointed into the current and then, like Jake did, disappeared in the dark forever.

Matt put his arms through the straps of the backpack and tiptoed down the slippery bank as the frogs continued their noisy conversations. When he reached his target, he parted the thick branches,