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“AND GET YOU!”
Amelia screamed and grabbed Tim. Tim, to his everlasting shame, yelled and jumped. Bill spilled the rest of her cocoa and cursed roundly.
Moses fell backward laughing, a deep bellow of a laugh that rolled out of his chest and reverberated off the patchwork ceiling.
“Uncle!” Tim said. “You’re scaring the women.”
“Yeah, like you weren’t peeing your pants afraid,” Amelia said, and patted her chest as if reassuring her heart that everything was all right. “Uncle, you sure know how to tell a story.”
Moses sat up again, still laughing, and stripped the fans from his fingers. “Gotcha,” he said.
“Okay, that’s it,” Bill said, rising to her feet. “Story time’s over. Everybody hit the rack. And as for you, old man.” She leveled a glance at him. He gri
“You’ve got to sleep sometime,” she warned him.
She stoked the stove while Moses turned out the lanterns. A lecherous murmur and a reproving slap came from their bunk, followed by the sound of a long kiss and a rustle of covers as the two elders nestled together like spoons and settled in for the night.
Tim stretched out in his sleeping bag, arranging things so his head was near the head of Amelia’s bunk. He wished he could crawl in with her, but he hadn’t been invited. Besides, he didn’t know how Bill and Moses would feel about it.
The howl of the wind, held in temporary abeyance by Moses’ voice, was back with a vengeance, snarling and snapping, making the trees outside creak and the cabin shudder.
“I’m sure glad I’m not outside in this,” he said unthinkingly.
“Me, too,” Amelia whispered.
“You awake?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
She was silent for a moment. “How come you jumped?”
“What? Oh. You jumped, too. So did Bill.”
“Not then. Before. When he said the story was about the Little Hairy Man.”
“Oh.” Caught in the spell of the old man’s story, he’d forgotten his initial reaction.
He was silent for a long time, so long that she thought he had fallen asleep. “In my village, there was this girl,” he said finally. His head twisted on his pillow and he looked up at the face pressed against the side of the bunk. “She was teaching me Yupik.”
“You didn’t grow up speaking it?”
“My birth mother wouldn’t. She said it was a dead language of a dead people, and if I wanted to get anywhere in life I had to speak English. She spoke only English at home.”
His voice was matter-of-fact, but the undertone of bitterness betrayed him.
“But in school, you had to be fluent in both. So the teacher got a girl from the high school to teach me. She was really nice, so nice. She showed me how to learn. I never knew I could learn anything before her, but I could. She gave me that.”
He stopped.
“Did you learn Yupik?” she said.
“Some. Before she went away.”
“Went away? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knew. One day she just wasn’t there anymore.”
“Did she-how did she leave?”
“Nobody knew,” he repeated.
“Nobody found her?”
“They looked. But nobody found her.” He looked up at her. “Some said it was the Hairy Man. That he came down from the mountains because he was hungry. And he took her.”
They were both silent. “I’m sorry,” she said finally.
“Yeah. Me, too.”
“Her name was Christine,” she heard him say just before she slid into sleep. “She was pretty.”
And then, words so indistinct she might have dreamed them, “She looked like you.”
Newenham, September 6
“I’m willing to try it if you are,” Prince said hopefully.
Liam took one look at the clouds, so low that if he went outside and reached up he thought he might touch them, and said firmly, “I’m not.”
“I’m grounded,” Wy said. “At least until this afternoon.”
Prince pounced. “Why, did you hear something on the forecast? Is it going to clear?”
Wy shook her head, almost amused. “Not likely. There’s a gale warning out for Area 5A. It’ll be moving north.”
Prince stared out at the dark skies with a gloomy expression. The third interrogation of Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak the night before had produced no changes in their story, the result of which was that Prince now wanted very much to talk to Rebecca Hanover. She had shown up at Wy’s house at first light on the off chance that the weather might look better out of Wy’s window than it did from the trooper post. Liam had invited her to stay for breakfast.
“At least it isn’t snowing anymore,” Jo said, refilling coffee mugs all around.
A timer dinged and Bridget opened the oven door. The heavenly aroma of Bisquick coffee cake wafted through the room. Jim and Luke were sitting on the couch with their feet propped on the coffee table, Liam in the armchair. Jo replaced the coffeepot and perched on a stool at the counter next to Wy. Bridget cut the cake into squares and handed the squares around on saucers. For a while the only sounds were the dulcet growlings of Bob Edwards on the radio, the creaking of the house beneath the undiminished onslaught of wind, and grunts of pleasure as the coffee cake went down. Bridget was complimented lavishly all around, and she put her finger in her chin and curtsied in response.
Prince paced restlessly in front of the windows, until Liam said, “Why don’t you go on down to the post?”
“What for?”
He shrugged. “Somebody might call in a triple homicide.”
“Like we could respond in this,” she said, but she picked up her hat.
When the door shut behind her Jim said, “What a hot dog.”
Liam gave a tolerant shrug. “She’s smart and quick and ambitious. All she needs is a little seasoning.”
“She had two different homicides, one a multiple, the first day she got here,” Jo said. “She got her name in the paper and everything.”
“Thanks to you,” Liam said.
Jo refused to curtsy, but she did bow her head in arrogant acceptance of what wasn’t exactly an accolade. “In fact, you both did.”
“Yeah, I was thrilled.”
Jo snorted. “If you didn’t want your name in the paper, you shouldn’t have become a trooper.”
“More coffee, anyone?” Bridget said brightly.
Jo gave Wy a long look. Wy wasn’t talking much, and she noticed that her friend was keeping to the opposite side of whatever part of the room Liam was in. She wondered what had happened out at Nenevok Creek. She noticed Jim looking at Liam and wondering the same thing.
Bridget was still standing in front of her with the coffeepot and a smile. “Sorry,” Jo said, and held out her mug. “Sure, and thanks.”
Wy and Liam had come in separately the night before, and had exchanged perhaps ten words total before Liam went out to his camper for the night. There was no sneaking back in, either, not that there would have to be with Tim out of town. It wasn’t like there hadn’t been plenty of noise already to contend with from the back bedroom, she thought acidly. Not that she hadn’t done her best to put Luke through his paces on the living room couch.
She looked at Luke. She should have known better. Beautiful men, like beautiful women, knew that their faces were their fortune. They didn’t have to do anything but be beautiful. Luke, it must be admitted, was extremely beautiful, but beauty went only so far in bed, and even less far out of bed.
Bridget was beautiful, too, but she was also smart and fu
“That’s not for publication, Jo,” Liam said sternly.
Jo’s fair skin, the bane of her existence, flushed right up to the roots of her hair. “I heard you the first time,” she said between clenched teeth.
He examined her expression for a moment, and then, amazingly, backed down. “I know. I’m sorry, Jo.”