Northern Lights

by Nora Roberts

  not very pretty and past thirty—has a lot of choices in a place like this, if she's not too picky. I chose Max."

  She smiled into middle distance. "I still would." Then brought herself back. "I wish I could tell you more. Looking back, I guess I can see that Max was troubled. But he always seemed troubled when he worked on one of his books. He'd put them away for months and months at a time, and everything was normal. But as soon as he'd pull one out and start, he'd close in. I was happier when he'd forget the books."

  "Anyone ever make a move on you after you were married?"

  "No. I recall Bing telling me, right in front of Max, that I was selling myself short or cheap or something like that."

  "And?"

  "Nothing. Max made a joke out of it, bought Bing a drink. He wasn't one for confrontations, Nate.

  Went miles out of the way to avoid one, which is one of the reasons, I guess, he didn't make it on a big-city paper. You saw what he did when you brushed him off after you first got here. He went to Hopp. That was his way. He wouldn't have come in here for a showdown with you on his own because he just didn't have the tools for any sort of battle. He never did."

  "Was Max a movie fan?"

  "Just about everyone in Lunacy is. One dependable form of community entertainment. He really loved doing reviews on what we had coming up. Speaking of movie night, I really do want a statement about what happened last night."

  "Peach can give you the report for the log."

  "I'll see her about that, but I think, something like this, we'll want to run more than an item. Otto found him," she began as she started to dig out a notebook.

  "Yes. Give us a couple days on this, Carrie. By then I should have something more cohesive to give you."

  "Do you mean you expect to make an arrest shortly?"

  Nate smiled. "You've got your reporter hat right back on. What I mean is I'll have my notes, statements, the incident report coordinated."

  She rose. "I'm glad my kids weren't there last night. I almost insisted they go, just so they'd get out and do something normal. But they had a couple of friends over for pizza instead. I'll check back with you tomorrow."

  "I was just wondering," he said as he walked her to the door, "was Max a fan of Star Wars?"

  She stared at him. "Where did that come from?"

  "Just a dot I'm trying to connect."

  "He wasn't. Not just that he wasn't a particular fan, which was baffling to me because he loved that sort of thing. Big epic stories with lots of special effects. But he wouldn't watch those. We had a Star Wars marathon on movie night about six, seven years ago. Well, whenever the twentieth anniversary of the original was. He wouldn't go, and the kids were mad to go. I had to take them myself. And write the reviews for the paper, now that I think about it. When the new ones came out, I ended up taking the kids all the way to Anchorage to see them for the first run. He stayed home.

  "What hat did you pull that one out of?"

  "Cop hat." He gave her a little nudge to urge her out. "It's not important. You see Peach about the log item."

  * * *

  Nate timed it so that he walked over to The Lodge when Bing and his crew broke for lunch. He stepped inside as Rose served Bing a beer. His eyes met Bing's over it. He strolled over, nodded casually to the two men on the opposite side of the booth.

  "You boys mind finding another table so Bing and I can have a private conversation?"

  They didn't like it, but they picked up their coffee mugs and moved to the next empty booth.

  "I got lunch coming," Bing began. "And I got a right to eat it without you sitting here spoiling my appetite."

  "See you got that pothole filled in. Thanks, Rose," he said when she brought him his usual coffee.

  "You ready for lunch, chief?"

  "No. Nothing right now. River's holding," he continued to Bing. "Maybe we won't need those sandbags."

  "Maybe we do, maybe we don't."

  "February 1988. Where were you?"

  "How the living fuck do I know?"

  "In 1988, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the Series, the Redskins took the Super Bowl. Cher won an Oscar."

  "Lower 48 crap."

  "And in February, Susan Butcher won her third Iditarod. Hell of a feat for a girl from Boston. Finished in eleven days and just under twelve hours. Maybe that refreshes your memory."

  "It refreshes that I lost two hundred bucks on that race. Damn woman."

  "So, what were you doing a few weeks before you lost the two bills?"

  "A man remembers losing two hundred because of a woman. He don't necessarily remember every time he scratches his ass or takes a piss."

  "You take any trips?"

  "I was coming and going as I damn well pleased then, same as now."

  "Maybe you went down to Anchorage, saw Galloway there."

  "I've been down to Anchorage more times than you can spit. Couple hundred miles doesn't mean anything up here. I might've seen him there a time or two. Seen plenty of people I know there. I do my business and they do theirs."

  "You play hard-ass on this, you'll be the one who pays for it."

  The heat burned into his eyes. "You don't want to go threatening me."

  "You don't want to go stonewalling me." Nate leaned back with his coffee. "You figured you should be the one wearing this badge."

  "Better than some cheechako, one that got his own partner killed. One that woulda washed out if that thin blue line hadn't held him up."

  It seared straight into his gut, but he drank the coffee, held Bing's eyes. "Been doing your homework, I see. But the fact is, I'm wearing the badge. I've got enough right now to take you in, charge you and lock you up for what was done to that dog."

  "I never touched that dog."

  "If I were you, I'd put a little more effort into remembering where I was when Patrick Galloway left town."

  "Why do you want to beat this dead horse, Burke? Make you feel important? Max killed Galloway, and everybody knows it."

  "Then it shouldn't bother you to verify your own whereabouts."

  Rose came over with a slab of meat loaf, a mountain of mashed potatoes and a small sea of gravy. "Anything else I can get for you, Bing?" She set a bowl of snow peas and tiny onions beside the plate.

  Nate saw him struggle, watched him draw himself back. His voice was even, a shade on the gentle side when he answered. "No thanks, Rose."

  "You enjoy that. Chief, just let me know if you want anything."

  "I'm through talking to you," Bing said, and forked up a huge bite of meat loaf.

  "How about some lunchtime small talk, then? What do you think of Star Wars? "

  "Huh?"

  "You know, the movies. Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader."

  "Fucking idiot," Bing mumbled under his breath and scooped up gravy drenched potatoes. "Star Wars, for Christ's sake. Let me eat in peace."

  "Great story, memorable characters. Under all the jazz, it's about destiny—and betrayal."

  "It's about making a killing at the box office and merchandising." Bing waved his fork before he dug in again. "Buncha guys flying around in spaceships, whapping each other with light swords."

  "Sabers. Light sabers. The thing is, it took some time, some sacrifice, some loss, but. . . " He slid out of the booth. "The good guys won. See you around."

  Twenty-Five

  There were eleven seniors in the last-period English lit class. Nine of them were awake. John let the two snoozers catch their late-afternoon catnap while one of the more alert mangled the Bard's words in her reading of Lady Macbeth's "Out, damned spot," scene.

  He had enough on his mind, and supervising the discussion on Macbeth was only a small part of it.

  He'd been leading discussions like this for twenty-five years, since the first time he stepped nervously in front of a classroom of students.

  He'd been only a few years older than those he'd taught back then. And perhaps more innocent and eager than the majority of his students.

&nbs
p; He'd wanted to write great and awesome novels, filled with allegories on the human condition.

  He hadn't wanted to starve in a garret, so he'd taught.

  He'd written, and though the novels were never as great or awesome as he'd hoped, he'd published a few. Without teaching he might not have starved in that garret, but he wouldn't have eaten well.

  He'd felt the demands—and, God help him, the joys—of teaching overwhelming for the intellectual young man who wanted to write great novels. So he'd taken the leap, the brave and foolish leap, and had run to Alaska. There he would experience, he'd live simply, he'd study the human condition in that primitive place, that wide-open isolation it represented to him. He'd write novels about man's courage and tenacity, his follies and his triumphs.

  Then he'd come to Lunacy.

  How could he have known, a young man not yet thirty, the true meaning of obsession? How could he have understood—that bright, idealistic and pathetic young man—that one place, one woman could chain him? Could keep him willingly shackled no matter how they defied and denied his needs?

  He had fallen in love—become obsessed, he was no longer sure there was a difference—the moment he'd seen Charlene. Her beauty was like a golden willow, her voice a siren's song. Her reckless and joyful sexuality. Everything about her enchanted and engulfed him.

  She was another man's woman, the mother of another man's child. But it made no difference. His love, if that's what it was, hadn't been the pure and romantic love of a valorous knight for a lady, but the lustful, sweaty need of a man for a woman.

  Hadn't he convinced himself she would cast Galloway off? He was careless with her. Selfish. Even if he hadn't been blinded by love, John would have seen that. Resented that.

  So he'd stayed and waited. Changed the course of his life and waited.

  After everything he'd done, all his plans, his hopes, he was still waiting.

  His students got younger and younger, and the years died behind him. He could never get back what he'd cast away, what he'd wasted.

  And still, the single thing he wanted would not be his.

  He glanced at the clock, saw another day had gone to dust. Then, catching a movement out of the corner of his eye, saw Nate leaning against the jamb of the open door of his classroom.

  "Your papers on Macbeth are due next Friday," he announced to a chorus of groans. "Kevin, I'll know if Marianne writes it for you. Those of you who're on the yearbook committee, remember there's a meeting tomorrow at three-thirty. Make sure you've arranged transportation home, if necessary. Dismissed."

  There was the general clatter, shuffle, chatter he was so used to he no longer noticed.

  "What is it about high schools," Nate began, "that can make a grown man's palms sweat?"

  "Just because we survived the hell of it once, doesn't mean we can't be thrown back into the pit."

  "Guess that's it."

  "You'd have done well enough, I'd wager," John said, as he packed some papers into his battered briefcase. "You've got the looks, the attitude. Decent enough student, I'd say, did well with the girls. Athletic. What did you letter in?"

  "Track." Nate's lips curved. "Always could run. You?"

  "Your classic nerd. The one that screwed the curve for the rest of the class."

  "That was you? I hated you." With his thumbs hooked in his pockets, Nate strolled in, looked at the notes on the blackboard. "Macbeth, huh? I got Shakespeare okay if somebody else read it. Out loud, I mean, so I could hear the words. This guy killed for a woman, right?"

  "No, for ambition at the urging of a woman. With the seeds for it all planted by three more."

  "He didn't get away with it."

  "He paid, with his honor, with the loss of the woman he loved to madness, with his life."

  "What goes around."

  John nodded, lifted an eyebrow. "Did you drop by to discuss Shakespeare, Nate?"

  "Nope. We're investigating the incident last night. I need to ask you some questions."

  "About Yukon? I was in Town Hall when it happened."

  "What time did you get there?"

  "A few minutes before seven." He glanced over absently as some of the liberated students raced laughing down the hall. "Actually, I'm doing an extracurricular group on Hitchcockian storytelling for the tenth-through twelfth-graders. Gets some of the kids involved, earns them extra credit. A dozen of my students signed up for it."

  "Did you go out between seven and ten?"

  "I went out at intermission, had a smoke, got some of the punch the elementary school committee was selling. Which was more palatable when I doctored it."

  "Where were you sitting?"

  "Toward the back, opposite side from my students. I didn't want to inhibit them or be barraged with questions. I was taking notes on the movies."

  "In the dark?"

  "Yes, that's right. Just a few key points I wanted to make sure to bring forward in discussion. I'd like to help you on this, but I don't see how I can."

  He walked over to lower the blinds on the room's single window. "After Otto came in, after we knew what had happened, I went back to The Lodge. I was upset. We all were. Charlene, Skinny Jim and Big Mike were running the place."

  "Who was there?"

  "Ah, Mitch Dauber and Cliff Treat, Drunk Mike. A couple of hikers." As he spoke, he policed the room, gathering up dropped pencils, crumpled balls of paper, a hair clip.

  "I got a drink. Meg and Otto came in shortly, and after things settled down a little, we played some poker. We were still playing when you got there."

  Nate nodded and put away the notebook he'd pulled out.

  John tossed the paper in the trash, put the other items in a shoe box on his desk. "I don't know anybody who'd do that to a dog. Especially Yukon."

  "Nobody else seems to either." Nate glanced around the classroom. It smelled like chalk, he thought.

  And that teenage perfume of gum, lip gloss and hair gel. "Do