Everything To Prove. Nadia Nichols
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good fish, when he heard the flying canoe taking off from the white man’s lodge.
He watched it race along the water, roaring like a hundred of the white man’s snow machines, those noisy stinky things that were taking the place of sled dogs. He watched it lift off the water and skim along just above the surface for a long time, as if trying to decide if it wanted to keep flying or return to the water. Then he watched it climb abruptly toward the sky the way this yellow one always did, and he saw it do something he’d never seen it do before. It climbed straight up, so steep it nearly went over backward before it stopped climbing and hung in place above the sparkling waters. The loud noise stopped and there was sudden quiet, just the lap of the waves against the shore and the brush of wind through the trees.
Then the flying yellow canoe fell out of the sky, tumbling forward and dropping nose first into the lake. Solly saw and heard the great crash of waves as it hit the water. He saw the canoe’s two legs break off and float away. He watched as it settled onto its belly and then sank so quickly that before he could rise to his feet to properly mark the spot the big canoe had vanished. He was still standing there when he saw something bob up from the water between the floating legs and begin swimming to shore. He thought maybe it was the white man, the mean one from the lodge. But as it came closer he saw that the head wasn’t human. It was a short-haired dog like none he’d ever driven before his sledge. The dog came out onto the gravel strand a quarter mile from where Solly stood and he saw that it had only three legs.
Not long after the dog reached shore, Solly heard a boat coming from the lodge. The boat was coming fast. He thought it must be coming to rescue the white man trapped inside the sunken canoe, but he was wrong. The boat circled the two legs that were still floating and Solly saw the driver tie them together. Then the boat sped down the lake toward the outlet, screaming like an angry woman and towing the two big yellow legs behind. The man in the boat had been the mean one, the one called Dan Frey. Dan Frey hadn’t seen the three-legged dog on the gravel strand. He hadn’t seen Solly standing on the shore not a quarter of a mile away from where the flying canoe sank. But this was no surprise. Dan Frey was a white man, and it was well-known among the Athapaskan that white men didn’t see too good.
CHAPTER ONE
Twenty-Eight Years Later
IT WAS THE ARTICLE in Forbes magazine that gave Libby Wilson the sudden impetus to throw all caution to the wind and do what she’d been waiting to do for the past twelve years. She read that article and realized that she had to go back home and make things right. Not five years from now as originally planned, when her bank account would be healthy enough to finance what was certain to be an expensive undertaking. She had to go now. The truth had remained buried for far too long. She knew her mother would object, but her mother could no longer tell her that the past didn’t matter, because it did.
Libby knew exactly how much it mattered. She’d grown up in the same village that her mother had. She’d lived in the same little government-issue house, been shipped out to the same boarding school in Anchorage to attend high school; she’d worn the same clothes, eaten the same foods and felt the same bleak desolation when one of the village kids sniffed too much gasoline and was buried beneath the permafrost. The only difference between the poverty her mother suffered and her own fate had been the color of Libby’s eyes.
The teacher in Anchorage had commented about her eyes. Ms. DeFranco had been young and earnest and from a well-to-do family in New England that believed in helping less fortunate cultures. She had made Libby’s future her personal crusade, which was the only reason Libby ended up going to college back East, being accepted to Tufts medical school and graduating top of her class. Proof positive that sometimes a little bit of racism could work to a minority’s benefit. Her internship was in forensic pathology and her ticket to success had been a reasonably sharp intellect and a pair of the prettiest blue eyes that ever came out of an Athapaskan villager…compliments of a Russian fur trader two generations removed on her mother’s side, and a father she’d never known.
Libby’s internship at Massachusetts General had just recently ended and two months ago she’d been offered a residency, an impressive nod to her potential from such a fine hospital. She might have accepted it and spent the next five years bolstering her bank account and carefully plotting her return to Evening Lake, but that very week Forbes magazine hit the newsstands and a copy ended up on the table in the doctors’ lounge. Idly thumbing through the pages in one of those rare quiet moments that sometimes occur in the middle of an endless shift, Libby had stumbled over that fateful article with all those glossy color pictures and a lengthy feature profiling one of Alaska’s wealthiest and most eccentric residents: the silver-haired and distinguished-looking Daniel Frey.
Libby had taken the magazine back to her apartment and read the article again, and yet again after that, studying the pictures of the massive log lodge, the lake and the man; all the while her blood pressure nudged toward the boiling point. Daniel Frey. Even the man’s name sickened her. She should write a letter to the editors of fancy Forbes magazine about the eccentric billionaire Daniel Frey and tell them the stories her mother had told her. She’d tell them what it had been like to work for the rich white man who hated Indians. What it had been like to be treated with contempt, to be unfairly compensated for long hours worked, to be housed in crowded conditions and poorly fed. What it had been like for her mother to fall in love with Connor Libby, Frey’s godson, only to lose her beloved on her wedding day in a suspicious plane crash. A crash her mother believed Frey had rigged both to keep Connor from bringing an Athapaskan bride back to the lodge and to claim the entire Libby fortune as his own.
She’d tell them what it had been like for her mother to go to Frey after learning she was pregnant with Connor’s child, only to be driven from the property.
“I know how you squaws sleep around,” Frey had said. “That baby could be anyone’s.”
Connor Libby had been mentioned only briefly in the article. Two sentences made reference to the fact that Ben Libby’s only son had been killed in a plane crash shortly after returning from Vietnam…and that Connor’s will had specified that if he died without heirs, Frey would inherit his share of the Libby fortune.
What Libby had to prove was that Connor in fact had had an heir, and she was determined to do just that. She remembered vividly that fateful day in high school biology class when she’d first learned about DNA, and how it could be used to prove a person’s paternity. That knowledge had changed her entire life’s focus, and had even steered her medical studies toward specializing in forensic pathology.
Libby had long been planning to return to Evening Lake, where her father’s plane had crashed, and salvage the wreckage. The only thing that had stopped her from doing it years ago was the large amount of money it would take to find and recover the plane. She’d made inquiries to salvage operators while she was in college, but none of them could be specific as to the costs because each salvage operation was unique. All they could tell her was that it would be expensive.
As a medical student, Libby had worked part-time during the school year and full-time in the summers to help cover the cost of her books and tuition. Scholarships and student loans had covered the rest, but saving any amount of money had been impossible. As an intern, she’d struggled to make ends meet and pay off her school debts. Logically, she should have accepted the residency that had been offered to her and worked until her finances improved, but none of that would matter if she could find just one of Connor Libby’s bones and prove she was his daughter.
The magazine article had become the catalyst, and after Libby had finished reading it for the third time, she’d made her decision. Her mother had told her over and over again, throughout years of listening to Libby rail against the injustices of poverty, that there was no way to prove anything, and it no longer mattered. But it did. It mattered twenty-eight years ago, and it mattered just as much today. And her mother was wrong. There was a way to prove not only her paternity, but what kind of racist Frey really was.
Which was why she turned down the offer of a residency at one of the best hospitals on the Eastern seaboard and was now flying to Alaska. The flight was a long one and gave her time to think about her strategy. What she actually thought