“What?” Wy said, horrified. “No! Never!”

“God, you were right about that Puritan streak,” Jo said, disgusted. “Sometimes I think you're not even human. Saint Wyanet, your strength is as the strength of ten because your heart is pure.”

“Fuck you, Dunaway!”

“Backatcha and times two, Chouinard!” Jo stepped up to go nose to nose. In your face was her specialty, and where she scored most of her best stories. “Jenny and Charlie were killed by a drunk driver. Liam is single, and has somehow managed to find you again.” Her brows snapped together. “Are you afraid that it wasn't real after all?” she said with sudden suspicion. “Are you afraid that what you could have with Liam won't measure up to what you did have?”

“Oh for crissake,” Wy exploded, “don't say ‘what we had’ like I was Streisand and he was Redford. ‘What we had’ amounted to twenty-three flights into the Bush, four days in Anchorage and a thousand dollars in phone bills. It wasn't like we ran away to Paris together or something.”

Jo's smile was sly. “What?” Wy said, on the defensive. She knew that smile.

“Twenty-three flights, huh?” Jo said smugly. “Pretty specific number. Interesting that you remember it so exactly.”

Wy blushed again. The hell with this. She went to the bureau and picked up her hairbrush, yanking it ruthlessly through her shower-tangled curls. “So,” she said in an artificially bright voice. “What are you doing in town, anyway?”

Jo weighed Wy's determination to change the subject, found it inflexible, decided she'd said enough and dropped the subject of Liam. For the moment. “Following up on a story.”

“Oh yeah? What one?”

“I can't say right now.”

Jo's voice was sober, and Wy put down the brush. “Why not?”

Jo saw Wy's expression and made an obvious effort to lighten up. “Because it has to do with government shenanigans at high levels,” she said teasingly. “My specialty.”

“What, theNewsis looking for another Pulitzer?” Wy said, falling in with the new mood. One reason they'd been friends for as long as they had was because they respected each other's boundaries. Another was that they could get mad at each other, secure in the knowledge that neither was going anywhere, no matter how heated-or personal-the debate became.

Jo shook her head. “I'm on my own on this one. A source contacted me with the story. I'm here to talk to him in person.”

Wy's brow creased. “It isn't about the killings, is it?”

“Killings?” Jo's eyes narrowed. “What killings?”

Wy hesitated, but there wasn't any point in not telling her. Like Liam, she was well aware of the efficiency of the Bush telegraph. “Seven people were killed in a boat fire in Kulukak. It might not have been an accident. Not to mention which, I found a-”

“Seven people?” Jo vaulted off the bed. “Jesus! Are you serious?”

“No, Jo, I made it up. Plus I myself just happened to-”

“And not an accident? You mean murdered?”

“Liam thinks so, and by the way, I-”

“Is Liam the investigating officer? Where's your phone? Kitchen, right?” Jo shot out of the room and down the hall, where Wy heard her badgering Tim for the phone. Sighing, she sat on her chaste, full-size bed and put on her socks. One body wasn't much by comparison to seven, she supposed. Still, stumbling across murder victims wasn't something she did on a regular basis. Once every three months was about her average.

She remembered Bob DeCreft, the occupant of the last body she'd stumbled across, and chastised herself, although Bob, the crusty old coot, would have been the first to laugh. She wondered how Laura Nanalook, Bob's daughter, was doing on her own in Anchorage. Well, she hoped. If anyone deserved a break, it was Laura.

Liam. His face rose unbidden before her eyes and she thought of Jo's words. Was it true? Was she so afraid that an actual relationship with Liam would pale in comparison to their affair? She winced away from the idea. She'd never thought of herself as a coward. She flew in Alaska for a living, didn't she? She'd taken on the raising of a twelve-year-old boy with a lot of nasty relatives, hadn't she? She'd returned to Newenham, hadn't she, risking contact with her birth family?

The first time she'd seen Liam he'd been just another uniform. Then, seated next to each other in her plane, on their way to a stabbing northwest of Glenallen, she'd noticed his hands gripping the sides of his seat. His knuckles were white and his face was the same color. Here was this big, tall, strong, good-looking man, an officer of the court, an enforcer of the law. Why did she suddenly feel the need to help him fight his fear? They'd talked about books that day. She'd been reading Barbara Tuchman'sA Distant Mirrorfor the second time, and they'd compared notes on the calamitous fourteenth century, arguing Tuchman's comparison of that century to this.

By the time they landed in Mentasta Lake they were old friends. How could anything be that simple? Nothing else ever in her life had been up to then.

She followed Jo into the kitchen, and found her talking rapidly into the phone as Tim set the table. He folded paper napkins and placed them beneath the flatware, a frown of concentration on his face. He performed the simple task the way he did every household chore, as if getting it wrong meant expulsion from Eden. Compared to what Tim had come from, a place where he'd been beaten regularly and the last time nearly to death, her home probably did seem like heaven on earth.

He stepped back from the table and surveyed it, reaching out to move a glass an inch to the left. He turned and saw Wy watching, and a faint color crept up into his cheeks.

She hugged him, ignoring the momentary stiffening in his body. He had yet to become accustomed to casual physical affection. For that matter, she was just now learning it herself, but she was determined that Tim, by the time he was eighteen and ready to go to college, would know how to give and receive a hug, and mean it.

Jo hung up the phone. “Where does Liam live?”

“The last time I checked, he was still sleeping in his office,” Wy lied with determined unconcern.

“He's bunking on a boat down at the harbor,” Tim volunteered.

Jo pounced. “Which one?”

Tim was startled at the ferocity of Jo's interest. “Uh, er, theDawn P,I think.”

Wy stared. “How do you know that?”

She cursed herself for not moderating her tone of voice, because he was immediately defensive. “I remember because it's named after this girl I go to school with.” As they spoke, he flushed a deep, vivid red.

Wy gaped, and Jo grinned. “Is she pretty?” Jo said.

Tim hunched a shoulder, and shot Wy a sidelong glance. “She's okay, I guess,” he mumbled. The lid on the pot on the stove gave a clatter and with the air of one rescued from the deck of theTitanicjust before the stern went under he leapt gladly around the counter and pulled it off the burner.

The sausage was a little charred, but Wy liked her sausage crisp. They ate in silence for a few moments. “Who was that on the phone, if it wasn't Liam?” Wy said.

Jo took a bite of sausage and washed it down with a long swallow of Killian's. Jo must have brought some with her, because Wy didn't drink beer. She stole a covert look at Tim. A strand of sauerkraut had latched on to the front of his Nike Town T-shirt; other than that, he looked reassuringly substance-free. Girls to booze in one night, she thought gloomily. Somebody was going to have to talk to Tim about birth control, THE TALK every parent dreaded, and she had a pretty good idea who that someone should be. She remembered THE TALK she'd had with her adoptive parents, two schoolteachers only slightly more uptight than Queen Victoria. Certainly she could do better than that, but she surveyed Tim with disfavor on general principles anyway. Whose bright idea had it been to adopt this kid, again?