Free Snow Angel by Jamie Carie

eyes and began gathering supplies. Had Henry really struck the mother lode? It seemed impossible that he’d had such luck. Like Margaret said, he had probably done something bad, terrible even, to gain possession of that nugget. But maybe, just maybe, something had finally gone their way.
    They packed up that morning and started west, Henry muttering about a dirt trail head that he had marked with a large rock. Three long, exhausting days later they came to the new claim. Elizabeth could not believe what her sight told her. Under an overhanging cliff, there was a vein of gold showing on the surface of the rock that trailed in a glittering path from their feet to higher than Henry’s head with no end in sight. It promised to be a fortune.
    She hadn’t been fooled though. A person didn’t stake a claim on a spot that had already been mined as this one had, especially if gold was showing on the surface. Only an idiot would part with a claim like that—or a dead man.
    Margaret must have thought the same, for she accused Henry of murdering a man to jump the claim. Henry had at first denied it, for days stuck to his story and then, in a sobbing, drunk fit, admitted to the deed. What Elizabeth overheard later that night had sent the first real, chilling fear for her life coursing through her entire body. Husband and wife had talked at length of how they would blame the murder on Elizabeth and concocted an elaborate story to support their claim. She’d known then that she had to escape. They would never share the wealth with her anyway. She forced herself to see the truth—that they would use her, use what little strength she had to help dig out the gold, and then horde it for themselves and blame the murder on her.
    In the end, she heard that a man’s body was found downstream from the claim. The body had a bullet hole in it, and some men had recognized the miner. They were looking for the killer. All she knew at the time was that Henry had suddenly become nervous. The end had finally come. Elizabeth had to get away from the Dunnings and whatever law would eventually catch up to them. That’s when she’d escaped. The man and woman had been so distracted by the gold that it had been easy.
    At seventeen years old she had crept away in the middle of the night and joined a family going to Northern California, telling them her parents had been taken by typhoid. It was a common enough occurrence and they hadn’t questioned her.
    Reaching California, Elizabeth had finally broken out on her own. She’d mined here and there for as long as the gold lasted, alternately panning and sewing for a living. Then she’d gradually worked her way to Seattle and the edge of the continent. After settling into a meager existence as a seamstress, she’d met Ross and learned that the Dunnings were looking for her. The knowledge terrified her, wearing grooves of fear into her mind. What if they were still trying to convince the law that she was responsible for the murder? Miners hung men for stealing, much less killing. It wouldn’t matter that she was a woman, either. Both Henry and Margaret were experts at lying and swindling. If they had made it look like she’d done it, then her only chance was to get as far away as possible. And she could never see Ross again. What he had done to her … no, she couldn’t think of that.
    Then, in the middle of July, just before her twentieth birthday, her salvation came. Word of gold in the Yukon Territory of Canada reached Seattle. Gold was waiting, hidden in the streambeds of a place so vast, so treacherous, so forbidding that she could lose herself. Something told her, in the pit of her stomach, that she would find what she was looking for here, in this icy wilderness laden with streams of gold.
    * * *
    January 5, 1884
    Dear Mrs. Rhodes,

    I apologize for the length between letters. I have not given up hope, but thus far I have found no other clues