The Snowflake Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Jamie Carie Masopust

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America

  978-1-4336-6936-1

  Published by B&H Publishing Group

  Nashville, Tennessee

  Dewey Decimal Classification: F

  Subject Heading: ROMANCES GOLD MINES AND MINING—FICTION ADVENTURE FICTION

  Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version. Also quoted: Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

  Carol lyrics for O Come, O Come, Emmanuel found in chapter fourteen can be found at www.carols.org.uk/o_come_come_emmanuel.htm.

  Publisher’s Note: The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 • 13 12 11 10

  To the fathers in my life:

  To my father-in-law, Jerry Masopust. If there was a “Biggest Family Fan” award, I would give it to you! Thank you for all the love and support over the years.

  To my dad, Jim Carie. You read this one when it was a short story and said it was your favorite. You “get” me like no one else. I think our snowflake patterns must be quite similar.

  To my agent, Wes Yoder. Your guidance and care for me is a gift from God for which I am so grateful! This story would not have come to be without you.

  And to my heavenly Father. Words cannot express my love for You, though I try with words. Every story, every poem, every song I write is for You.

  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

  Dear Reader

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  A very special thank-you to my editor, Julee Schwarzburg. It has been such a pleasure working with you and getting to know you. You are all that is warmth and kindness and a brilliant editor besides!

  And to the wonder team at B&H: Julie Gwinn, Karen Ball, Haverly Robbe, Kim Stanford, Diana Lawrence, and the sales team. Your love and support for these stories has blessed me more than I can tell you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart!

  They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on?

  How could we ever get up off our knees?

  How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?

  —JEANETTE WINTERSON, THE PASSION, 1987

  Chapter One

  Alaska 1897

  Be there, be there, be there, be there.

  The words thudded in time with my heartbeat as I let myself into the cold, tiny cabin aboard the steamship. I turned and shut the door with a soft click. Only a few minutes, that’s all I had before my brother would find me missing and come looking for me. Only a few precious minutes alone.

  I rushed over the rocking floor to the side of the lower bunk, knelt down, and reached underneath to pull out my heavy trunk. My fingers shook with fright and cold as I fumbled with the latch and lifted the lid.

  I shoved aside dresses and stockings, a petticoat that had seen better days, and a pair of shabby pink slippers, then dug down to the bottom of the trunk. My fingers crushed around the feel of tulle as tears sprung to my eyes.

  It was still there.

  My heart lurched, as if it had long forgotten this wave of bliss. My eyelids dropped shut as I lifted out the long veil, stood and clutched it to my chest. I stroked the delicate fabric, unable to look at it yet, savoring the blindness that heightened my touch as my fingertips ran along the silken crown at the top, each faux pearl against the lace a seed of delight. A laughing sob leapt from my throat, and I opened my eyes.

  The veil was already two years old. What would happen when I lifted it out and found it yellowed with age?

  I’d first seen it in a dressmaker’s shop window on a windswept, autumn day in San Francisco. I walked inside that shop without thinking what I was doing.

  A woman with gray-and-black streaked hair rushed from a back room, smoothing down her skirts as she stepped into her showroom. She smiled at me, like I could be a paying customer, and I pretended I was.

  “How can I help you, my dear?”

  I stood mute for a moment and then pointed toward the window. “May I”—I swallowed hard and rushed out the rest before my courage failed completely. “May I see that veil?”

  “Of course.” The woman turned to fetch it. She was round in a motherly way that made me feel better somehow. “You must try it on.”

  And I did.

  I let her arrange the tulle, so long that it flowed from my head to the floor behind me. She fussed over the combs in the headpiece, placing them into my thick crown of curls I was forever trying to manage, trying to conceal their full glory. Rich brown hair as to be almost black, curling all the way down my back but never to be seen—always caught up and away into a hat or cap or knitted net that kept it from any temptation of man. It was understood that I would never let it down.

  The woman finished positioning the great white veil on my head, as if it was a normal day’s occurrence, and I supposed for her it was. But I’d never had a day like that. She fluffed up the gauzy poof in the back and then gave a great sigh and stood back, her hands over her wide bosom.

  “It’s perfect.” She beamed, gesturing toward a mirror.

  I turned toward the wavy glass, my stomach seizing and trembling. As my face came into view, my hand, too, lifted to my chest. I blinked but the image didn’t fade; it only grew stronger. Brown, wide-set eyes, round and startled, a thin face, pale against the walnut hue of my hair. The veil was white and stark and beyond beauty. My heart pounded so loud I was sure the woman could hear it. But she only looked at me, over my shoulder in the glass, with a kind smile.

  “It’s lovely on you, dear. When is your wedding?”

  Had the woman spoken? I couldn’t hear beyond the roar of my blood. I stared and blinked at my image in the glass. A bride?

  Never.

  I jerked my gaze away from the glass, unable to see my reflection for another second. My hands clawed at the delicate combs, frantic to free them from my hair.

  “Never,” I whispered, thrusting the delicate piece into the woman’s arms. With tears blinding my eyes, I stumbled from the shop—out into the cold nothingness of my life.

  Weeks passed but I couldn’t forget. Symbol, talisman, covenant, promise . . . hope. It took months of hoarded pennies, lies when questioned about the rise in the cost of flour or milk, and the shattering of my pride to go back to that shop. I knew the woman would look at me with pity in her eyes, but the need to have the veil was greater than any of that. And it was still here in my trunk. Jonah hadn’t found it yet.

  The door swung open and crashed against the wall.

  “Oh!” I turned and faced him, my brother, crushing the veil to my chest. My breath froze as he advanced.

  “Where have you been?” His voice was reed thin with a grasping, clawing undertone that I knew only too well.

  “I was tired.”

  “You’re up to something. What do you have there?”

  He advanced on me. I took a step back and then another until my legs bumped into the room’s narrow bench. “It’s nothing. Please, I was only going to lie down for a little while.”

  Panic rose
in my throat, suffocating me as his eyes went black. His thin arm struck out like a coiled snake and snatched the delicate tulle.

  “No!” I held tight to my precious hope. “Please, it’s nothing of value. Let me keep it. Please, I’ll do anything.”

  “A veil.” Shock lit his eyes, and then he made a low sound that was so hollow, both terrified and angry—an eerie, mad, moaning sound. “Ellie, you can’t leave me. I won’t let you leave me.”

  He tugged harder as his gaze darted around the cabin, as if looking for a place to crawl in and hide. His gaze, suddenly sharp in focus, snapped back to mine. He inhaled. “It’s that man, isn’t it? You’ve been talking to him. I saw you.”

  His grip on the veil tightened as he stepped so close to me our noses nearly touched and his breath came and went in quick gasps across my face.

  “There is no man, Jonah. Please, it’s just a memento. It was mother’s. I keep it to remember her by.” The lies flowed easy and vivid, but I could tell by the trembling of his lips and the rage eating up his eyes that he did not believe me.

  He grasped my wrists in a searing hold. His hands, so seemingly frail and weak, were stronger than a steel trap. The cloth of the veil twisted around my hands and his. With one hand holding one of my wrists against the wall, he jerked my other hand up and out.

  I cried out in pain as the veil made a long ripping sound. My eyes clenched shut as sobs escaped my usually tight throat. “No.” I turned my face away from him toward the wall and wailed.

  Loud footsteps rang across the floor, and then Jonah was wrenched away from me. My eyes blinked open, pools of heartbreak rolling down my cheeks as the man of my dreams held my brother’s arms behind his back.

  I watched, unable to utter a word, as he hissed into Jonah’s ear. “What is the meaning of this? If you ever lay a hand on her again—”

  He didn’t finish the threat, but Jonah’s eyes went blank, dead. He looked like a little boy again. The boy I’d always protected.

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  Buck Lewis shook his head at me. “No one deserves to live like this.”

  “I’m all he has.” My voice was a whisper. Everything in the room went deadly quiet as Buck studied my shattered, pleading eyes.

  An enormous crash interrupted my horror. The ship lurched and tilted as a great splintering, the groaning and cracking of ice, exploded in sound. I fell back against the wall as Jonah used the moment of distraction to slither away from Buck’s hold.

  “Come on!” Buck turned toward the opening in the doorway. “The ship may be damaged. We can’t stay down here.”

  The three of us rushed to the top deck.

  It was true. The steamer was locked in ice, inescapably gripped in the cold fingers of winter. I looked around at the collapsed faces, mirroring misery, the tall and lanky down to the short and stocky, all on the verge of a full-blown panic.

  I wanted to say, “I told you so,” to try and tell Jonah in a hundred different pleading ways before this God-forsaken journey began, but knowing better, knowing it wouldn’t change the next time he got that stubborn, tight-lipped look. I kept my mouth closed. Silly men. Silly dreaming baby-men. Always wanting to conquer, to kill, and then build it up all over again. A tiny laugh bubbled up into my throat as I studied them from the edge of the crowd—hating them, loving them, scoffing and admiring.

  Captain Henry Conrad stood at the bow of the steamer looking smaller than his six feet and 250 pounds, diminished by the simple law that in certain conditions water turns to ice. He gestured at the crumpled map in his hand while the moaning wind whipped red into our cheeks. The men crowded around him, knowing the truth but wanting to hear it explained. Their dreams of riches, for the duration of this Alaskan winter at least, were over.

  Sinclair, a man who wore his father’s idealism on a chubby-cheeked face, cursed a violent streak. “That Yankee in Seattle promised we’d make it. I knew we shouldn’t take a Yankee’s word for it.” He slung his hands into the pockets of a pair of expensive trousers, causing the seam to strain against his backside, and scowled at the broad, whiskered face of the captain.

  “It ain’t anybody’s fault the Yukon River freezes up so early,” put in the tall, lanky Zeke Robbins. “We were straddling the seasons, pushing as far and as fast as we could, and we knew it.” Zeke only needed a stalk of wheat to chew on and a floppy hat to complete the picture of the middle-American farmer.

  “We may as well face it, gents.” The captain intervened before a full-fledged fight could break out. “We’ll be sitting out the winter right here, huddled together on this pile of wood, unable to move an inch until spring thaw.”

  What would that mean to the lone woman of the expedition? Should I be afraid? Would my brother protect me? Or would he only accuse me of self-absorbed romanticism should I voice any hint of my scandalous concern?

  Several voices cried out in stubborn rebellion to the idea of giving up until the clean voice of another quieted them. “As I see it, gentlemen, we have one other choice.”

  They turned in eager silence, necks craning, bodies leaning in, straining for a way out of the certain despair that would engulf them at the end of this meeting. If any man could salvage this mess, it was Buck Lewis, and they all knew it. They’d heard such in bits and pieces of stories that made him out a hero and a legend.

  I studied him. What was it about him that held me so entranced? He had a weathered face, bold with a hint of recklessness, intelligent blue eyes that could cause a lesser man to turn away, a lean-muscled body with reflexes that could save a life, and an easy common sense that made him the voice of reason in turbulent times. The young men idolized him. The older men respected him.

  I had tried, for the first few weeks of this journey anyway, to ignore him.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t feel his presence the moment he neared or didn’t feel as if I knew him every time our gazes locked. Oh no. Everything in me wanted to follow that pantherlike stride as he walked by—with my eyes and my feet and then reach toward him with my hands and my lips. And then he’d spoken to me and all was lost.

  Buck stared each man in the eye. “You should know what you’re in for. If you plan to stay, you’ll be looking into the face of starvation, hoping it doesn’t look back. Hunting parties will go out daily with the threat of sudden blizzards and wild animals to hound your heels. When the food runs out, the unfathomable will start looking pretty. It may come down to the strong surviving, but the means of that survival might not be something you can go to bed with. Might be something you have to wrestle over for the remainder of your days.”

  He paused, scanning their collective gaze, taking stock. “For those who don’t like the sound of that and still want to reach Dawson City before spring, they can trust in dogs and sleds and pray for enough good weather to mush overland.”

  “What are you going to do, Buck?”

  “How many miles to Dawson?”

  “When will the food run out?”

  Buck answered the first question. “I’ll be going to Dawson.” He paused, then continued with a flat slap to his voice. “It won’t be an easy trip. It’s a good two hundred miles. That’s a week’s worth of walking in bitter temperatures with the food running out.”

  “But we’d make it, right, Buck?” A freckle-faced young man from Iowa squinted up at him. Buck could have said the sky was made of cotton candy and this boy would have nodded in agreement.

  Buck gave him a hard look. “I don’t know, but you are welcome to join me and see.”

  A grim contemplation fell on them as each considered the odds.

  Sinclair was the first to speak. “I didn’t come this far to cool my heels all winter on this ice barge. I’m coming with you.”

  Buck nodded, but his eyes said he would rather take a marauding grizzly along. Ronnie Nelson, George McCallister, Adam Walker, and Randy Olsen volunteered, all young and strong and capable.

  “I’ll be going with you.”

  My head jerked
up as my gaze swung toward the familiar voice. Why would my ragged, haunted brother want to take on something so dangerous?

  Buck matched my reaction. “What about your sister? You would leave her on board?”

  Jonah scowled. “She’ll be coming with us.”

  Buck’s gaze found mine on the other side of the crowd, hugging the outskirts. Why did he care when no one ever had? I wasn’t worthy of attention from a man like Buck Lewis, and it was only a matter of time until he figured that out.

  Buck turned back to Jonah. “You explain to her how rough it will be, or I will. Then, if she’s determined, well then, she’ll know.”

  My brother’s face turned stony at the rapid-fire orders, but he nodded. He wouldn’t tell me anything of the sort, but Buck wouldn’t know that I would have already thought out every detail, every possibility for success or failure, and planned for it the best I could.

  It was my job to take care of Jonah, not the other way around.

  As the men scattered into disheartened, muttering groups, Buck watched Jonah grip Ellen’s arm and pull her back toward their cabin. A feeling of fierce protectiveness rose so strong that his muscles leapt to follow them, but he clamped down the urge with gritted teeth and a clinched fist around the rail as a tether. He was on a mission, and Ellen Pierce was not part of the plan. He needed to remember that.

  He turned toward the ice-clogged water and squeezed his eyes shut, but the vision of her was even stronger in the dark. He remembered the first moment he’d seen her on the steamer. She’d been just across the deck, not more than ten feet, then she turned around and looked up at him. She was the kind of woman that stole a man’s breath at first, taking a moment for the shock to wear off and his jumped heart to settle down. But he could have grown used to that. He could have resisted the ethereal depths of her dark eyes that spoke pain and passion in equal measure, but then he went and did a fool thing: He spoke to her.