Northern Lights Page 6

  don't be stingy. The school's holding a spaghetti supper a week from Friday, proceeds going to the uniform fund for the hockey team. We got a good chance at making regional champs, so let's put the team in uniforms we can be proud of. They start serving at five. Dinner includes the entree, a salad, a roll and a soft drink. Adults six dollars, children six to twelve, four dollars. Under six eat free."

  She went from there to details about an upcoming movie night being held at Town Hall. Nate listened with half an ear, tried not to obsess about his turn at the mike.

  Then he saw her walk in.

  The red parka, and something about the way she moved told him he was looking at the same woman he'd seen out his window the night before. Her hood was black, and she wore a black watch cap over her hair.

  A lot of black, straight hair.

  Her face seemed very pale against the two strong colors, her cheekbones very high in that black frame. Even across the hall he could see her eyes were blue. A bright, glacial blue.

  She carried a canvas satchel over her shoulder and wore baggy, mannish trousers with scarred black boots.

  Those icy blue eyes zeroed straight to his, held as she strode down the center aisle formed by the folding chairs, then scooted into one beside a whippily built man who looked to be Native.

  They didn't speak, but something told Nate they were—not intimate, not physically—but in tune. She shrugged out of the parka while Deb moved from movie night to announcements about the upcoming hockey game.

  Under the parka was an olive green sweater. Under the sweater, if Nate was any judge, was a tough, athletic little body.

  He was trying to decide if she was pretty. She shouldn't have been— her eyebrows were too straight, her nose a little crooked, her mouth was top-heavy.

  But even as he mentally listed the flaws, something stirred in his belly. Interesting, was all he could think. He'd stayed away from women the last several months, which, given his state of mind, hadn't been a real hardship. But this chilly-looking woman had his juices flowing again.

  She opened the knapsack, took out a brown bag. And to Nate's baffled amusement dipped a hand in and came out with a fistful of popcorn. She munched away, offering some to her seat companion while Deb finished up the announcements.

  While Ed took the lectern, made his comments about the town council and the progress they'd made, the newcomer pulled a silver thermos out of her sack, and poured what looked to be black coffee into its cup.

  Who the hell was she? The daughter of the Native guy? The ages were about right, but there was no family resemblance he could see.

  She didn't flush or flutter when he stared at her, but nibbled her snack, sipped her coffee and stared right back.

  There was applause as Hopp was introduced. With an effort, Nate forced himself to put his head back in the game.

  "I'm not going to waste time politicking up here. We decided to incorporate our town because we want to take care of our own in the tradition of our great state. We voted to build the police station, to form a police department. Now we went through a lot of debating, a lot of hot words on all sides and a lot of good, hard sense, too, on all sides. The upshot was, we voted to bring in a man from Outside, a man with experience and no connection to Lunacy. So he'd be fair, so he'd be smart, so he'd enforce the law without prejudice and with equality. Proved that much today when he slapped cuffs on Jim Mackie for wrestling around with his brother at The Lodge."

  There were some chuckles over that, and the Mackie brothers, faces battered, grinned from their chairs.

  "Fined us, too," Jim called out.

  "And that's two hundred in the town coffers. Way you two carry on, you'll pay for the new fire truck we're wanting by yourselves. Ignatious Burke comes to us from Baltimore, Maryland, where he served on the Baltimore Police Department for eleven years, eight of those years as detective. We're lucky to have somebody with Chief Burke's qualifications looking after us Lunatics. So put your hands together and welcome our new chief of police."

  As they did, Nate thought: Oh, shit, and pushed himself to his feet. He stepped toward the lectern, his mind as blank as a fresh blackboard. And from the crowd, someone called out, "Cheechako."

  There were murmurs, mutters and a rise of voices poised on argument. The irritation that spiked through him carved away the nerves.

  "That's right, I am. Cheechako. An Outsider. Fresh from the Lower 48."

  The murmurs quieted as he scanned the crowd.

  "Most of what I know about Alaska I got out of a guidebook or off the Internet or from movies. I don't know much more about this town except it's damn cold, the Mackie brothers like to pound each other and you've got a view that'll stop a man's heart in his chest. But I know how to be a cop, and that's why I'm here."

  Used to know, he thought. Used to know how. And his palms went damp.

  He was going to fumble—he could feel it—then his gaze met those glacier blue eyes of the woman in red. Her lips curved, just a little, and her eyes stayed on his as she lifted the silver cup to sip.

  He heard himself speak. Maybe it was just to her. "It's my job to protect and serve this town, and that's what I'll do. Maybe you'll resent me, coming from Outside and telling you what you can't do, but we'll all have to get used to it. I'll do my best. You're the ones who'll decide if that's good enough. That's it."

  There was a sprinkling of applause, then it grew. Nate found his gaze locked with the blue-eyed woman's again. His stomach knotted, unknotted, knotted up again as that top-heavy mouth tipped up at one corner in an odd little smile.

  He heard Hopp adjourn the meeting. Several people surged forward to speak to him, and he lost the woman in the crowd. When he caught sight of her again, it was to see the red parka heading out the back doors.

  "Who was that?" He eased back until he could touch Hopp's arm. "The woman who came in late—red parka, black hair, blue eyes."

  "That would be Meg. Meg Galloway. Charlene's girl."

  * * *

  She'd wanted a good look at him, a better look than the one she'd caught the day before when he'd stood in the window looking like the brooding and bitter hero of some gothic novel.

  He was good-looking enough for the part, she decided, but up close he seemed more sad than bitter.

  Too bad really. Bitter was more her style.

  He'd handled himself, she'd give him that. Rolled with the insult— that asshole Bing—said his piece and after a little hitch, moved on.

  She supposed if they had to have a police force poking around Lunacy, they could've done worse.

  Didn't matter to her, as long as he didn't stick his nose in her business.

  Since she was in town, she decided to run a few errands, load up on supplies.

  She saw the Closed sign on The Corner Store, sighed heavily. Then fished her ring of keys out of her bag. She found the one marked CS, then let herself in.

  Grabbing a couple of boxes, she began to work her way through the aisle. Dry cereal, pasta, eggs, canned goods, toilet paper, flour, sugar. She dumped one box on the counter, filled the second.

  She was hauling over a fifty-pound bag of Dog Chow when the door opened, and Nate walked in.

  "They're closed," Meg huffed out as she set the bag on the floor by the counter.

  "So I see."

  "If you see they're closed, what're you doing in here?"

  "Funny. That was my question."

  "Need stuff." She walked behind the counter, picked out a couple of boxes of ammo to add to her box.

  "Figured that, but generally when people who need stuff take it from a closed store it's called stealing."

  "I've heard that." From under the counter she took a large record book, nipped through. "I bet they arrest people for that down the Lower 48."

  "They do. Regularly."

  "You intend to implement that policy here in Lunacy?"

  "I do. Regularly."

  She gave a quick laugh—the fog to Hopp's foghorn—found a pen and be
gan writing in the book. "Well, just let me finish up here, then you can take me in. That'll be three arrests for you today. Gotta be a record."

  He leaned on the counter, noted that she was neatly listing all the items in her two boxes. "Be wasting my time."

  "Yeah, but we got plenty of that around here. Damn, forgot the Murphy's. You mind? Murphy's Oil Soap, right over there."

  "Sure." He walked over, scanned the contents on the shelves and picked up a bottle. "I saw you last night, out my window."

  She wrote down the Murphy's. "I saw you back."

  "You're a bush pilot."

  "I'm a lot of things." Her gaze lifted to his. "That's one of them."

  "What else are you?"

  "Big city cop like you should be able to find that out quick enough."

  "Got some of it. You cook. Got a dog. Probably a couple good-sized dogs. You like your own space. You're honest, at least when it suits you. You like your coffee black and plenty of butter on your popcorn."

  "Not much of a scratch on the surface." She tapped the pen against the book. "You looking to scratch some more, Chief Burke?"

  Direct, he thought. He'd left out direct. So he'd be direct back. "Thinking about it."

  She smiled the way she had in the hall, with the right corner of her mouth lifting before the left. "Charlene jumped you yet?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "I'm wondering if you got Charlene's special welcome to Lunacy last night."

  He wasn't sure which irritated him more, the question or the cool way she watched him as she asked. "No."

  "Not your type?"

  "Not so much, no. And I'm not real comfortable discussing your mother this way."

  "Got sensitivity, do you? Don't worry about it. Everybody knows Charlene likes to rattle the headboard with every good-looking man comes through here. Thing is, I tend to steer clear of her leftovers. But seeing the way it is, for now, maybe I'll give you a chance to scratch."

  She closed the book, replaced it. "Want to give me a hand loading this stuff into the truck?"

  "Sure. But I thought you flew in."

  "Did. A friend and I switched modes of transportation."

  "Okay." He hauled the dog food bag over his shoulder.

  She had a brawny red pickup outside, with a tarp, camping gear, snowshoes and a couple of cans of gas already in the bed. There was a gun rack in the cab, loaded with a shotgun and a rifle.

  "You hunt?" he asked her.

  "Depends on the game." She slapped the gate of the truck bed into place, then just grinned at him. "What the hell are you doing here, Chief Burke?"

  "Nate. And I'll let you know when I figure it out."

  "Fair enough. Maybe I'll see you New Year's Eve. We'll see how we socialize."

  She climbed into the truck, turned the key. Aerosmith blasted out about the same old song and dance, and she pulled into the street. She headed west, where the sun was already sliding behind the peaks, turning them flaming gold while the light went soft with twilight.

  It was three-fifteen in the afternoon.

  Four

  JOURNAL ENTRY • February 14, 1988

  Fucking cold. We're not talking about it, or we'll go crazy, but I'll write about it here. Then I can look back one day—maybe in July, when I'm sitting out with a beer, covered in bug dope and slapping at the sparrow-sized mosquitoes—and staring out at this white bitch.

  I'll know I was here, that I did it. And that beer will taste all the sweeter.

  But right now it's February, and July's a century away. The bitch rules.

  Wind's taking us down to thirty or forty below. Once you're down that far, it doesn't seem like a few degrees one way or another matters. Cold broke one of the lanterns and snapped the zipper on my parka.

  With night lasting sixteen hours, we make and break camp in the dark. Taking a piss becomes an exercise in exhaustion and misery. Still our spirits are holding, for the most part.

  You can't buy this kind of experience. When the cold is like broken glass lacerating your throat, you know you're alive in a way you can only be alive on a mountain. When you risk a moment outside shelter and see the northern lights, so brilliant, so electric that you think you could reach up and grab some of that shimmering green and pull it inside yourself for a charge, you know you don't want to be alive anywhere else.

  Our progress is slow, but we're not giving up on the goal of reaching the summit. We were slowed by avalanche debris. I wondered how many had camped there, under what is now buried and barren, and how soon the mountain will shift or shimmy and bury the snow cave we fought to hack into her.

  We had a short, screaming argument over how to circumvent the debris. I took the lead. We spent what seemed like two lifetimes getting through and around it, but it couldn't have been done any faster, no matter what anyone else thinks. It's a hazardous area, known as Quicksand Pass because the glacier's moving under you. You can't see it, can't feel it, but she's slipping and sliding her way under you. And she can suck you down, because beneath that world of white are crevices just waiting to make themselves your coffin.

  We picked our way up Lonely Ridge, ice axes ringing, frost clinging to our eyelashes, and after battling our way around Satan's Chimney, had lunch on a picnic blanket of untouched snow.

  The sun was a ball of gold ice.

  I risked a few pictures, but was afraid the cold would break the camera.

  There was little grace but plenty of passion in the post-lunch climb. Maybe it was the speed we'd popped for dessert, but we kicked and cursed the mountain and each other. We beat steps into the snow for what seemed like hours, while that golden ball began to sink and turn a vicious, violent orange, that set fire to the snow. Then left us in the killing dark.

  We used our headlamps to give us enough light to chop a tent ledge into the ice. We're camped here, listening to the wind blow like a storm surf through the night, easing our exhaustion with some prime weed and the success of the day.

  We've taken to calling one another by code names from Star Wars. We're now Han, Luke and Darth.

  I'm Luke. We entertained ourselves pretending we were on the ice planet Hoth, on a mission to destroy an Empire stronghold. Of course, that means Darth's working against us, but that adds to the fun.

  Hey, whatever floats your boat.

  We made good progress today, but we're getting jumpy. It felt good to carve my ice ax into No Name's belly, inching my way up her. There was a lot of shouting, insults—motivational at first, then turning on an edge as ice chunks rained down. Darth took some in the face, and cursed me for the next hour.

  For a minute today I thought he was going to lose it and try to bloody my face as I had his. Even now I can feel him stewing about it, boring the occasional dirty look at the back of my head while Han's snoring starts to compete with the wind.

  He'll get over it. We're a team, and each one of us has the others' lives in his hands. So he'll get over it when we start