“Hounded any bereaved fathers lately?”
“Ha ha,” Jo said, very carefully.
“I’m supposed to tell you to make yourself at home,” Jim said, waving a hand, “so make yourself at home. There’s beer in the fridge. We’ve got Tim’s room. You get the couch.”
“So I’ve been told.” She tried hard to keep the edge from her voice, but Luke Prior looked at her with his eyebrows raised. They were very nice eyebrows, to go with his very nice eyes, and it was only a bonus that he was at least ten inches taller and twenty pounds lighter than Jim Wiley. “Luke, this is Jim Wiley. Jim, this is Luke Prior.”
The two men sized each other up. One looked like a surly teddy bear. The other looked like a Greek god. “Good to meet you, Jim,” Luke said, extending a hand.
“Yeah, sure,” Jim said, clasping it briefly. There was a noise at the door onto the deck and he looked around. “Oh, and this is Bridget from Ireland. Luke Prior.”
Bridget smiled and came forward with her hand extended. “It’s Bridget Callahan, Luke.”
Luke’s very nice eyes had widened upon catching sight of Bridget, and he took her hand and bent his head over it in appreciation of her manifest charms. “I’m delighted to meet you, Bridget.”
The two of them were surveyed with varying degrees of mixed feeling by the other two people in the room. On one hand, Luke was poaching on Jim’s preserve. On the other hand, he was meanly delighted that Jo’s honey couldn’t keep his hands off other women. Jo, who on the now rapidly fading chance he might be a keeper had brought Luke to Newenham so Wy could vet him for her, felt much the same.
Jo remembered first that they were guests in this home and avoided open warfare by opening the refrigerator and peering inside. “Where’s Wy? You want something to drink, Luke?”
“Actually, I’m starving,” Luke said. “Anything in there to eat?”
“There’s leftover roast from last night,” Bridget said, bustling around the counter and all but elbowing Jo out of the way, who, truth be told, was no help in the kitchen and happy to step aside.
Jo rescued a couple of Coronas and handed one to Luke. She followed Jim out onto the deck, perched on the edge of the bluff that fell fifty feet to the bank of the river below. The sun was shining but there was a nip in the air that brought color to her cheeks, and a sharp breeze that ruffled her short blond curls. Clouds were forming low on the southeastern horizon, dark with purpose. Storm coming, she thought. Beneath the clouds the Nushagak flowed gray with silt into Bristol Bay, swiftly, as if in a hurry to finish the business of summer before winter set in and froze it into a winter highway for snow machines.
Jim wasted no time in going on the attack. “What’s Luke do?”
“He’s a business consultant.”
Jo could hear Jim as if he’d spoken the words out loud.Now there’s a perfect title for somebody who’s never held down a real job. She said, “Where’s Wy? You didn’t say.”
“I didn’t get a chance, and flying, where else?”
“Flying where, and with whom?”
He sneered at thewhom and made sure she saw it. “To Nenevok Creek, with Liam,” he said, and was irritated when Jo snapped to attention.
“That the guy they found shot on his gold claim?”
“Jesus,” Jim muttered, “don’t you ever stop being a reporter?”
“No,” she shot back, “don’t you ever stop being an asshole?”
A murmur of voices was heard from the kitchen, a low laugh from Bridget. Jim looked over his shoulder, and Jo turned to see that Luke was helping Bridget make sandwiches. “They’re getting along,” Jim said.
“Aren’t they, though,” Jo said, staring at him.
“What?” he said.
“I didn’t break that story, Jim,” she said in a level voice.
“Yeah, right,” he said.
“I didn’t break that story, Jim.”
“Save it, Jo. You’ve made a career out of breaking stories, the nastier the better. I understand; this was a particularly juicy one, young trooper on the fast track up, loses both wife and son in one tragic accident, goes off the deep end, falls asleep on the job and five people wind up dead in Denali. How could you resist?”
The louder his voice got, the softer she spoke. “I didn’t break that story, Jim.”
“Bullshit. It came out under your byline.”
She put the beer down. “You know the three rules Edna Buchanan gives a cub reporter? One, never trust an editor. Two, never trust an editor. Three, never trust an editor.”
He wanted to say, Who the hell is Edna Buchanan? but he couldn’t bring himself to be that petty. “So you’re saying it’s all your editor’s fault.”
“No. I’m saying, Never trust an editor. I did, so, in fact, it was my fault.”
He was acutely aware that she had not apologized, and understood that she had no intention of doing so. “So, what’re you looking for, peace?”
“That’s pushing it, given our history. How about a truce, for the duration of our visit? Wy’s my best friend, Liam’s yours, we’re sharing their hospitality. They probably won’t invite us back if we leave blood on the floor.”
“Probably not.”
Something in the tone of his voice alerted her. “What?”
He met her eyes, his stern expression sitting oddly on his usually happy-go-lucky face. “Is she going to tell him?”
Her face went very still. “Tell him what?”
He snorted. “Yeah, right.” He went to the door, and said curtly over his shoulder, “If she doesn’t, I will.”
“Jim.”
His name cracked like a whip, and he turned around, ready to do battle, all thoughts of truce gone.
“You don’t know everything there is to tell. Sometimes it’s better just to keep your mouth shut. It isn’t our business, after all.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“The hell it is,” she fired back. “You’re not in love with Wy.”
“Liam is, and anything to do with Liam is my business.”
“His love life isn’t,” she said. “And he would be the first to tell you so.”
He really hated it when she was right. He really hated it when he was wrong about anything, but he really, really hated it when he was wrong and Jo Dunaway was right.
She interpreted his expression correctly, and very carefully refrained from any retaliatory expression of triumph. “So, you’ll sit on it.”
“I’ll sit on it,” he said grudgingly, and added with a glare, “Not forever. But for now.”
It was the best she could do. The rest was up to Wy. “All right.”
“Hey,” Luke said from the doorway. “Luncheon is served. Anybody hungry?”
Sunshine Valley, September 3
Home, he was home again, and Elaine had come home with him, was with him, again. That first night was like heaven on earth, renewing her acquaintance with the snug little cabin tucked away at the head of the creek. Hand-hewn logs, sanded to a smooth finish inside and gleaming warmly from years of lovingly applied polish. A high-peaked roof with a loft beneath twin skylights, a large, square bed piled high with soft sheets and a down comforter. A stove with a stained glass door, behind which a banked fire glowed. Two chairs drawn up at either side, hand-hewn like the rest of the furniture from the same logs that built the house, sanded smooth and piled high with cushions in nubby fabrics and muted colors. The simple dining table, a slab of wood lathed and sanded to show the grain of the wood swooping and swirling across the perfectly flat surface, so level a marble dropped upon it would roll to a stop before it fell off the edge.
Outside, a thick stand of spruce and cottonwood crowded the eaves, so that fifty, even twenty feet away the logs, unfinished, unoiled and allowed to fade to a silvery gray, shimmered and shifted between the restless boughs like an illusion, an oasis trembling at the edge of a subarctic dream. From the air, the cabin, nestled between two overlapping ridges in the eastern foothills of the Wood River Mountains, was virtually invisible.