Sharing Spaces. Nadia Nichols
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The admiral would try to break the trail on snowshoes, but he couldn’t keep ahead of the team. The leaders would run up on the tails of his shoes and he’d pitch head first into the snow. So he recruited me as his trail breaker, but my trapping career spanned less than a day. I tell you what, it’s not easy getting out of deep snow when you fall facefirst into it. A couple of times I was sure I was going to suffocate.”
“Did my grandfather ever catch anything?”
“Pneumonia, after one particularly grueling night out. Then he ran into some folks who were touring on snowmobiles. They asked if they could have a ride on the dogsled, so the admiral gave them a ride. They gave him a couple of hundred bucks for his efforts, and that was the end of his trapping adventures. He sold the traps, advertised dogsled rides at the airport and in some local stores at Goose Bay and pretty soon the phone began to ring. That’s why he kept the dogs.” Jack paused with a faint grin. “Well, that’s not the entire reason. He kept them because he came to love them, and believe it or not, that brutish pack felt the same way about him.”
Senna tried to picture the admiral mushing a team of huskies down an arctic trail, clad in mukluks and a fur parka, but she couldn’t. Nor could she imagine him stroking the head of a dog with genuine affection. It was as if Jack were talking about a complete stranger. She was beginning to realize just how little she knew about her own grandfather. “Are there any pictures?”
Jack paused. “Goody has some, I think, and I have a few. Mostly fishing pictures, a few winter shots of the dog teams. The pictures your grandfather took were of wildlife. Wolves, in particular. He was fascinated by them. But if you want mushing pictures, you’ll have to dig through his papers. The admiral must have stashed some here, somewhere, probably in his desk. That’s where he kept all the important stuff. He did his writing there, too.”
“Writing?” Yet another surprise.
“He kept a journal,” Jack said, concentrating on his stitching. “He wrote in long hand into a spiral notebook every night.”
Senna imagined that the entries would be terse and to the point. Rained today. Worked on chimney. Beans for supper. That sort of thing. Still, maybe she’d get lucky. Maybe he’d bared his soul and explained why the heck he’d named her as his executor. She would read his journal when she found it, every last word. But what was she supposed to do with all his personal belongings, his clothes, the pictures on the walls. Have a yard sale? That seemed so callous, so unfeeling. Maybe an open house would be a better idea, inviting all the admiral’s friends to choose what they might want after Jack had taken what he wanted. She should, after all, give her grandfather’s business partner and closest friend first dibs.
Odd that the admiral hadn’t left anything to Jack. He could have given him his half of the business and made Senna’s job much easier, but all he’d written in his will, in neat, black ink, were two sentences. The first sentence stated, To my granddaughter, Senna McCallum, I leave all my worldly goods for her to dispose of as she sees fit. And the second; To my business partner and friend, John William Hanson, I bequeath memories of many good times shared, and hopes for even better times in the future.
How odd that he would trust her to dispose of his worldly goods as she saw fit. The admiral hadn’t thought anything she’d done to be “fit” in her entire life. As Senna pondered the relative whose blood ran through her veins, a bitter memory surfaced, one that illustrated the relationship she and her grandfather had shared. Tim had accompanied her to her father’s funeral. They’d only just begun dating and he was sweet to be so supportive during that terrible time, but her grandfather hadn’t missed the opportunity to take her aside during the family gathering held afterward at her mother’s house. “I certainly hope you’re not planning to marry that one,” he’d said in his stern and judgmental way.
“He was kind of religious about it,” Jack said, startling her back to the present.
“About what?” Senna asked.
“Writing in his journal. He’d spend an hour or so at that desk every night.” Jack had stopped stitching the harness as he spoke and was gazing across the room at the admiral’s desk as if he were seeing the old man sitting there, writing, or pacing in front of the window, smoking his pipe. “He never said much about his life, and I never asked, but I have a feeling it’s all there, in that journal.”
Senna straightened, glanced over at the massive old desk, and moved toward it. There were three deep drawers on either side and she opened the top left hand one, spying a book, but not a spiral notebook. She lifted the leather-bound ledger, embossed with gold lettering across the front: Wolf River Lodge, with a logo of a howling wolf engraved beneath it. She laid the ledger on the desk and opened it. It was a reservation book for the fishing lodge. She flipped through the empty pages until she reached the month of June and then she paused. From the last week in June on, there were names written into six of the spaces for each and every day.
She turned the pages into July and August, swiftly scanning the names, the phone numbers jotted next to them, the addresses scribbled below. People from all over the United States. People from England and France and Germany. One party from Australia was booked for three weeks solid. The bookings petered out in September, and then from November on there were occasional reservations. She supposed that was for the dogsledding, but she wasn’t sure. She closed the book and stood with her hand atop it for a moment, then picked it up and moved to where Jack worked on the harnesses.
“You said the lodge wasn’t ready yet?”
He glanced up, saw that she held the reservation book, and shook his head. “Not quite, but the majority of the work is done, there’s just a bunch of small stuff left, and about a ton of supplies to be flown in.”
“Some of these guests are scheduled to arrive just two weeks from now….”
“I know.” A look of pride crossed his face. “We’re practically booked for the summer.”
“Now that the admiral’s dead, how’s that going to work, exactly?”
“I’ll get the hired help in there right away to get the lodge ready, get the rest of the provisions flown in, find another fishing guide or two, and give ’er hell all summer long. At least, that’s the plan.”
“What if you’re not ready in time?”
“We will be.”
“Are all these reservations pretty firm?”
“They’ve all paid a deposit, and the deadline’s past for them to cancel. Don’t worry, they’ll show.”
“How much of a deposit did they pay?” Senna asked.
“Half of their stay. A lot of money.” He paused again as if considering his words carefully. “Actually, it’s a damn good thing nobody canceled, because we used all of those advance deposits to finish building the lodge.”
“I see,” she said, standing and cradling the leather reservation book against her chest. “So there is absolutely no buffer in the bank account?”
“No. Matter of fact, the business account is dead empty. The admiral’s life insurance will no doubt cover his cremation fees and legal expenses and some of his medical bills, and maybe it’ll help a lot more than that, but I had to borrow money for the wake. Goody said I could pay her back at the end of the summer.”
“Assuming you go ahead with the start-up, what were you planning to buy the food with, and how are you going to pay the help for the three weeks until the first guests depart and settle up for the balance of what they owe when they do?” Senna asked, steeling herself for the answer.
He hesitated, then jabbed the needle into the webbing again. “I was kind of hoping you’d help out,” he said, talking to the harness to avoid meeting her eyes. “I mean, we’re business partners now, for better or for worse.”
“It’s definitely for worse, and very temporary.” Senna walked back to the desk, returned the ledger to the top drawer and drew a deep breath. She wondered how she was going to juggle