Free Sundown on Top of the World: A Hunter Rayne Highway Mystery by R.E. Donald

had she not scolded Goldie for bringing a young man to the cabin, but Gran was entertaining a stranger she met in town. It was peculiar enough for Goldie that she found herself in the company of an attractive young Outsider, but her grandmother’s uncharacteristic behavior eclipsed even that.
    Betty Salmon had changed. She was becoming unpredictable. The change was sudden, it was drastic, and to Goldie, it was cause for alarm.

– – – – – SIX
     
    According to the hours of service regulations, Hunter shouldn’t have been driving when they arrived in Whitehorse, but he was. Sorry had dozed off in the passenger seat, then retired to the sleeper around midnight and hadn’t yet emerged. Hunter wanted to baby The Blue Knight to help forestall any further deterioration of the U-joint, so he was happy to do the driving himself. The road was good, a few twisty, hilly stretches but for the most part the curves were gentle and the horizon clear and distant. Besides, it was June north of the 60th parallel so it was still dusk around midnight, and the sun had already risen when he pulled into a Petro Canada just south of Whitehorse that looked like it had a machine shop. It was about four-thirty a.m.
    The service station was closed, and the bunk behind him was occupied by his co-driver, so he had no choice but to try and catch some sleep sitting almost upright in the driver’s seat. Usually he could sleep almost anywhere, but not so now. It was partly due to the daylight, and partly because he kept looking out the truck windows at the two lane highway lined with skinny trees, remembering what it was like to live and work in the north. It had been over twenty years since he’d left, and he’d never been back – until now.
    Faces he hadn’t pictured in his mind for many years kept coming, uninvited. The face of the man who’d owned the service station he was parked in; Hunter judged that he’d been over fifty then, could he still be here? The faces of the staff and regulars at the restaurant he and Ken used to frequent in the Edgewater Hotel. Would it still be the same?
    They’d stayed at the Edgewater briefly on their arrival in Whitehorse in 1972 until they’d found a small house to rent on Jarvis Street, a walkable ten or eleven blocks from both the old G-division RCMP building and the Edgewater Hotel, whose bar and grill remained one of their favorite haunts. Not that they didn’t sometimes drive – Hunter had a ‘63 Nova and Ken a ‘65 Rambler – but in the summer especially they enjoyed the walk and the small town feel of Whitehorse, seeing familiar faces on a daily basis, checking out the fresh-faced girls who’d come to town for summer work.
    The traffic was picking up as the sun climbed in the sky. He watched a small convoy of RVs lumber by, then closed his eyes and returned to his reminiscences.
    He pictured the face of one girl in particular, the dark-haired flower child who had been a waitress that first summer at a watering hole called the Sluice Box Pub. Again he saw her waving to him from the window of her VW Beetle, her long hair windblown, a wide smile lighting up her face. April. Did she die in that isolated cabin near the Teslin River? He thought so, but they hadn’t found a body by the time he left the Yukon. Maybe he could hunt up the detectives here, and ask if the case was ever solved.
    He tried to remember the names and faces of his colleagues in G-division, and later M-division. Several he recalled fondly, others not so much. Some of them might still be here, maybe retired, maybe still with the force. How would he feel about seeing them again? He knew they would ask about Ken, although he had no doubt that the news of Ken’s death would have made it to his old detachment. Thinking about Ken still hurt; it hurt a lot. He knew he couldn’t tell any of his old colleagues how he had seen his best friend’s body, and found the suicide note that Ken had written to his wife, but that she had