Northern Lights

by Nora Roberts

  running around. Something like that gets whispered about enough, people might start to believe it. It's bad for business. The tourists aren't going to come here if they think they could get murdered in their beds."

  "Cissy?" he called with his eyes still on Charlene's. "Can I get another cup of coffee here? Is that what it comes down to, Charlene? It comes down to money. To your profit-and-loss statement."

  "We've got to make a living here. We've got—"

  She broke off as Cissy set another mug on the table, filled it with coffee. "You need anything else, Nate?"

  "No, thanks."

  "We do a lot of business here over the summer. We've got to if we don't want to live on the PFD all winter, and winter's long. I've got to be practical, Nate. Pat's gone. Max killed him. I'm not letting myself hold that against Carrie. I wanted to, but I'm not letting myself. She's lost her man, too. But Max killed Pat. God knows why, but he' did."

  She picked up her coffee again, sipped it while she gazed out the dark window. "Pat took him up there, some wild hair, I expect. Max looking for a story or article or some shit, and Pat figuring he could have an adventure and make a few dollars. The mountain can make you crazy. That's what happened."

  When he said nothing, she touched a hand to his. "I've thought about it, like you asked me to. And I remember that Max didn't come in here for damn near a month that winter. Maybe more. Back then, this was the only place for miles in any direction you could get a hot meal, and he was a regular. I used to wait on him almost every night. But he didn't come in."

  Absently, she reached over, broke a small chunk off Nate's dinner roll. "He called in orders a few times," she said as she nibbled on bread. "We didn't do deliveries, still don't, but Karl, he was soft-hearted. He ran the food over to the paper himself. He told me Max looked sick and a little crazy. I didn't pay any attention. I was brooding over Pat and busy trying to make ends meet. But you told me to think back, and I did, and I remember that."

  "All right."

  "You aren't paying attention to me."

  "I heard everything you said." He met her eyes. "Who else didn't come in much that February?"

  She let out an impatient breath. "I don't know, Nate. I only thought about Max because he's dead. And because I was remembering, all of a sudden, that Carrie and I both got married that summer. The summer after Pat was gone. That's what made me think of it."

  "Okay. Now think about people who are still alive."

  "I think about you." She laughed, waved a hand. "Oh, don't get all tight-assed. A woman's got a right to think about a good-looking man."

  "Not when he's in love with her daughter."

  "Love?" She began to drum her fingers on the table. "Well, you are just out for all sorts of trouble, aren't you? Taking on the town council so everybody's looking at you sideways, getting Ed and Hopp all pissed off, now talking about loving Meg. She hasn't kept a man more than a month since she figured out what to do with one."

  "I guess that means I hold the current record."

  "She'll chomp a piece out of your heart then spit it right in your face."

  "My heart, my face. Why does it bother you, Charlene?"

  "I've got bigger needs than she does. Bigger, stronger needs." Her earrings spun and glinted when she tossed her head. "Meg doesn't need anything or anyone. She never did. She made it clear a long time ago she didn't need me. She'll make it clear soon enough that she doesn't need you."

  "That may be. Or it may end up I make her happy. Maybe that's what bothers you. The idea she might end up happy, and you can't quite get there."

  His hand snaked out, gripped her wrist before she could hurl the coffee in his face. "Think again," he said quietly. "A scene's going to embarrass you a lot more than me."

  She jumped violently out of the booth and stalked across the room, up the stairs.

  For the second time that day, Nate heard the bullet shot of a slammed door.

  And in its echo, he finished his dinner.

  * * *

  He drove out to Meg's, hoping his blood would cool and his brain clear by the time he got there. The gloom of the past few days had lifted, leaving brilliant stars in a black-glass sky. A slice of moon rode over the trees, and a shimmery fog slithered low to the ground. Bare branches on the trees, Nate noticed. The snow was still thick on the ground, but the branches had shaken off the snow.

  A part of the road was still flooded so he had to ease his way around the barricade and through the foot of standing water.

  He heard a wolf call, lonely and insistent. It might be hunting, he thought, for food. For a mate. When it killed, it killed for purpose. Not for greed, not for sport.

  When it mated, he'd read, it mated for life.

  The sound died off as he drove through the night.

  He could see the smoke rise from Meg's chimney, hear the soar of her music. Lenny Kravitz this time, he thought. Rocking on mists of doom and fields of pain.

  He parked behind her, then just sat. He wanted this, he realized, wanted it maybe more than he should. To come home. To deal with the day, then shake it off and come home to music and light, to a woman.

  The woman.

  Hearth and home, Meg had said. Well, she'd nailed him. So if he ended up with that chunk of his heart spat in his face, he had no one to blame but himself.

  She opened the door as he walked up, and the dogs rushed out to dance around him. "Hi. Wondered if you'd find your way to my door tonight." She cocked her head. "You look a little rough around the edges, chief. What've you been up to?"

  "Winning friends, influencing people."

  "Well, come on inside, cutie, have a drink, and tell me about it."

  "Don't mind if I do."

  LIGHT

  Is it so small a thing To have enjoy'd the sun, To have lived light in the spring, To have loved, to have thought, to have done;

  To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes. . . ?

  - MATTHEW ARNOLD

  We burn daylight.

  - WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Twenty-Six

  "Chief." peach offered him a sticky bun and a cup of coffee almost before he got in the door.

  "You know, you keep baking these things, I'm not going to be able to sit in my desk chair."

  "It'd take more than a few sticky buns to pork up that cute little behind. Besides, it's a bribe. I need to ask if I can take an extra hour for lunch tomorrow. I'm on the May Day planning committee. We're going to meet tomorrow and try to finish coordinating the parade."

  "Parade?"

  "May Day parade, Nate. It's on your calendar and not that far off."

  May, he thought. He'd played with the dogs a bit that morning in Meg's yard. In snow up to the tops of his boots. "That'd be May first?"

  "Come hell or high water, and we've had the parade in both. School band marches. The Natives wear their traditional dress and play traditional instruments. All the sports teams are in it, and Dolly Manners's dance classes. More people who live here participate in it than watch it, but we get tourists and Outside folk come in from all over."

  She fussed with the vase of plastic daffodils on her counter. "It's a good time, and the past couple years we've done some advertising. We did even more this year, drumming up media interest and whatnot. Charlene puts it on The Lodge's web page and does package deals. And Hopp pushed and got us included in the events page of a couple of magazines."

  "No kidding. Pretty hot stuff."

  "Well, it is. It's a full-day event. We have a bonfire and more music that night. Weather's too bad, we move that to The Lodge."

  "You have a bonfire in The Lodge."

  She punched his arm playfully. "Just the music."

  "Take whatever time you need."

  Big parade, Nate thought. Bookings at The Lodge, meals served, customers in The Corner Store, browsing the local artists and craftsmen's work. More money, more business at the bank, the gas station. More business period.

  That could be c
ut considerably by too much talk of murder.

  He glanced over when Otto came in. "Isn't it your day off?"

  "Yeah."

  Nate could see something in his eye, but played it light. "You come by for the sticky buns?"

  "No." Otto held out a manila envelope. "I wrote up where I was, what I was doing and so forth in February of '88. On the night Max died, and when Yukon got killed. Thought it'd be better all around if I put it down before you had to ask me."

  "Why don't you come back to my office?"

  "Don't need to. I got no problem with this." He puffed out his cheeks. "A little problem, maybe, but less doing it like this than having you ask. I don't have much of an alibi for any of the three situations, but I wrote it down."

  Nate set down the bun to take the envelope. "I appreciate it, Otto."

  "Well. I'm going fishing."

  He left, passing Peter on the way out.

  "Hell," Nate muttered.

  "You're in a tight spot." Peach gave him a little rub on the arm. "You've got to do what you've got to do, even if it means hurting feelings and getting danders up."

  "You're not wrong."

  "Um." Peter looked back and forth between them. "Something wrong with Otto?"

  "I hope not."

  Peter started to follow up, but Peach gave a quick shake of her head. "Well, the reason I'm late is my uncle came by this morning. He wanted to tell me there's a guy squatting north of town by Hopeless Creek. There's an old cabin there. It looks like he's moved in. Nobody'd care much except my uncle thinks he may have broken into his work shed, and my aunt says there's food missing from the cache."

  He grabbed a sticky bun, bit in. "He—my uncle—went by to check it out this morning before he came to see me, and he says the guy came out with a shotgun and ordered him off his property. Since he had my cousin Mary with him—taking her into school—he didn't hang around to reason with the guy."

  "All right. We'll go reason with him." Nate set his untouched coffee and Otto's envelope on the counter. Then went to the weapon cabinet and got two shotguns and ammo. "Just in case reason doesn't work,"

  he told Peter.

  The sun was bright and hard. It seemed impossible that only a few weeks before, he'd have made this trip in the dark. The river wound beside the road, cold blue, forming a keen edge of color against the snow that still lined its banks. The mountains stood, clear as monuments carved in glass, against the sky.

  He saw an eagle perched on a mile marker post, like a golden guard to the forest behind him.

  "How long's this cabin been empty?"

  "Nobody's lived in it, officially, as long as I can remember. It's rundown and built too close to the creek so it floods out every spring. Hikers might use it for a night now and then, and ah, kids might use it for . . . you know. Chimney's still standing, so it'll hold a fire. Smokes something awful though."

  "Meaning you've used it for . . . you know."

  Even as he smiled, color edged Peter's cheekbones. "Maybe once or twice. What I heard was a couple of cheechakos built it way back. Going to live off the land, pan the creek for gold. Figured they'd get by on subsistence, and after a year start collecting their PFD. Didn't know squat. One of them froze to death, the other went crazy with cabin fever. Maybe ate some of the dead guy."

  "Lovely."

  "Probably just bullshit. But it adds to it when you're taking a girl there."

  "Yeah, pretty romantic stuff."

  "You want to turn off up there." Peter pointed. "It's a little rough going."

  After about three yards bumping and grinding his way along the narrow, snow-packed rut, Nate decided Peter was the master of understatement.

  The trees were thick and smote out the sun, so it was like driving through a tunnel paved by sadistic ice demons.

  He rolled his tongue back, so it wouldn't get in the way of his teeth when they snapped together, and muscled the wheel.

  He wouldn't have called it a clearing. The dilapidated square of logs hunched in a hacked-out square of trash willows and spindly evergreen on the icy bank of the spit of creek. It huddled there in the shadows, one window boarded, the other crisscrossed with duct tape. A sagging length of porch sat over a few stacked cinder blocks.

  A filthy Lexus four-wheel-drive with California tags stood in front. "Call Peach, have her run those tags, Peter."

  While Peter used the radio, Nate debated. There was smoke puffing sluggishly out of the tilted chimney. And a dead mammal of some sort hung nastily over a post by the door.

  Nate unsnapped his weapon but left it holstered as he eased out of the car.

  "That's far enough!" The cabin door swung open.

  In the dimness Nate could see the man and the shotgun.

  "I'm Chief Burke, Lunacy Police. I'm going to ask you to lower that weapon."

  "I don't care who you say you are or what you say you want. I'm onto your tricks, you alien bastards.

  I'm not going back up there."

  Aliens, Nate thought. Perfect. "The alien forces in this sector have been defeated. You're safe here now, but I need you to lower your weapon."

  "So you say." But he eased out another foot. "How do I know you're not one of them?"

  Early thirties, Nate estimated. Five-ten, a hundred and fifty. Brown hair. Wild eyes, color undetermined. "I have my ID, stamped and certified after testing. You lower that weapon so I can approach, I'll show it to you."

  "ID?" He looked confused now, and the shotgun lowered an inch.

  "Underground Earth Forces certified." Nate tried a sober nod. "Can't be too careful these days."

  "They bleed blue, you know. I got two of them the last time they took me."

  "Two?" Nate lifted his eyebrows as if duly impressed, and watched the gun lower another inch.