Page 6 of Untamed Coast

The burly bartender flipped a page of his Harlequin.

Marco picked up his phone. Still no signal. His Coke was tepid, the bottle barely cool to the touch.

“Ever damn day, back and forth to the mines,” Barfly continued as if he’d never stopped talking. “Little wooden rowboat. Imagine usin a rowboat in them waters? Guy musta been nuts.” He signaled for another round.

The bartender rolled his eyes, grabbed the bottle with one hand, and poured another shot without putting down his book.

“I got it,” Marco threw down a ten to pick up the man’s tab. “Keep the change.”

“Thanks, buddy.” The man drained the shot and closed his watery eyes, clearly savoring the burn of the bourbon down his throat. He leaned uncomfortably close to Marco, his breath thick with booze. “If yer out there, keep an eye out for Joe’s ol radio shack. Island ain’t on any map, but the shack’s still there—fallin down a bit, jus up from that sparkly beach—red metal roof.”

Raindrops pelted the rubber hood of Marco’s jacket as he stood on the boardwalk attempting to catch a weak Wi-Fi signal on his cell phone. The vinyl banner announcing the upcoming fishing derby slapped loudly against the siding of the library. He wiped his phone screen on his pants. It took several tries to get a connection, and the wet touch screen kept ignoring his taps.

The only internet in Pelican was a slow satellite setup at the public library, which was run by volunteers and open for only a few hours a couple days a week. It was currently closed.

He moved closer to the library window under the eave and dried the screen with his shirt. A small poster in the window announced the Graduating Class of 2017—two kids, a boy and a girl. So much for senior prom.

He googled “Radioville” first.

If the barfly had been right, Radioville was the best clue he had to search for the missing woman. One website listed it as a “Temperature Monitoring Station” used to track climate data. It showed that the station’s first measurement was May 1936, so probably when this Baxter guy was there, and the most recent measurement was October 1950. It had been offline for almost seventy years. But the site listed the latitude and longitude. That was a starting point.

He pasted the coordinates into the marine navigation app on his phone. It pointed to what looked like a tiny rock in a large group of islands.

Whatever made that a good place for Radioville probably also made it a good place to base his search for the source of the radio distress call. No doubt this Baxter guy would have surveyed radio reception in the area and found the terrain favored this spot.

The barfly had also said that three different women had gone overboard in a relatively short time. Marco found that odd. There weren’t that many vessels except fishing boats that operated in the remote area, and he assumed most of the crew were men.

He googled “woman overboard Chichagof” and, sure enough, found several news stories about the two previous missing women. They had both disappeared off fishing boats in the general area off the coast of Chichagof. After major search and rescue operations, neither woman had been found. That part wasn’t surprising. Alaskan waters were unforgiving. Someone falling overboard would survive a few hours at the most before hypothermia overcame them and they drowned. If your own boat couldn’t recover you when you went over, you didn’t stand much of a chance.

The radio call he’d heard gave him hope that this one, at least, could be saved.

Radio Flyer rocked gently in her berth. The wind had begun to subside, and the glitter barely stirred in the bottom of the snow globe perched at the helm.

Marco called the Coast Guard again.

“Radio Flyer, we have a note here about your report,” the Coast Guard radio operator said. “A woman was reported missing this morning from a fishing vessel offshore. No indication of what you heard, or of anyone making a rescue.”

If she’d been rescued, the Coast Guard would know, right? But she also sounded like she’d been close enough to shore to identify a red metal roof in the dark. That meant there was a solid chance she’d made it to land.

“Did the woman who went missing have survival gear on her?” Marco asked. “A radio?”

“Nossir, no report of that,” the operator replied. “Captain—her husband—thinks she might have gone out on deck late at night and been washed overboard by a wave or something. Didn’t notice her missing until early this morning. Seas were heavy last night.”

“Thanks,” Marco replied. “I’ll report if I hear anything else. Radio Flyer standing by one-six.”

The SSB radio continued with steady static. Maybe her walkie-talkie battery had died? Maybe she’d given up? Maybe the man he heard had rescued her?

Marco looked through his reference books while he waited and listened, passing the time searching for more about Radioville. None of the modern maps or guides he carried on the boat made any mention of it.

On a hunch, he pulled a forty-year-old 1976 historical and nautical atlas out of the chart drawer. It wasn’t a proper marine chart, but it included maps and numerous points of interest and historical anecdotes.

On the page that showed the west coast of Chichagof, there was a small banner insert that said “Radioville—In the 1930s, a solo radio operator here provided the only communication link between the mining operations on Chichagof and the rest of the world.”

Pay dirt.

The banner was near a group of ten or twenty small islands in a cluster, and near that cluster was the rock that the coordinates on the climate website had identified. There was a line from the banner that ended near a blob on the chart, but no particular island was indicated as Radioville.

The Coast Guard wasn’t buying Marco’s theory that the missing woman was on land, so he’d have to find her himself. He wasn’t sure how long someone could survive in her situation, but he needed to get to her soon. With no shelter, water, or food, she’d have a tough time.