Johnny grimaced. "I've been talking to Dan O'Brien, and he says those kinds of jobs are almost always government. He says they're hard to come by, and that they don't pay very well, and you don't get to pick where you work."
"Do you have to make a lot of money?" Jim said.
Johnny looked uncertain. "I thought that was what everybody wanted."
"Do what you love," Jim said. "The money will come."
Johnny was unconvinced, but he let the subject slide for now.
He looked over at Kate. She'd finished and now sat frowning at her empty bowl.
"Something wrong with the stew?" Jim said.
"What?" She came to herself with a start. "No. No, it was great." She saw his eyebrow go up and said with forced warmth, "It was terrific. You can make that again any old time."
"What, then?"
Kate's spoon clattered into her bowl. "She didn't say hi to Annie."
Jim exchanged a glance with Johnny. "Who didn't?"
"Talia Macleod. When Harvey brought her into the board meeting. She glad-handed everyone on the board, called us all by name, knew something personal about each and every one of us. But she didn't even say hi to Annie."
"She's hired a caretaker for the mine site," Johnny said.
"Who?" Jim said.
Johnny looked at Kate with some caution. "Howie Katelnikof." Jim paused in the act of running his finger around the edge of his bowl. "You're kidding," he and Kate said at the same time. "That's what I said," Johnny said.
"Who the hell told her that putting Howie on the payroll was a good idea?" Jim said. "Didn't she ask around first, get some names?"
Kate got up and headed for her coat and boots. "Where you going?" Jim said.
"To see Mandy," Kate said.
Mandy Baker's place was down the road toward Niniltna, at the end of a rutted track a little narrower than a pickup. It was a rambling, ramshackle collection of buildings that had once housed a wilderness lodge whose original owner had bankrupted himself in a failed attempt to attract big game hunters, most of whom were already clients of Demetri Totemoff's. The lodge was threatened on all sides by a dense forest of willow, black and white spruce, black cottonwood, and white paper birch, which had been allowed to grow unhindered save for half a dozen trails the width of a dogsled. The trees on the south side closest to the house had been trimmed to stumps and were used as posts to restrain Mandy's dogs from heading to Nome on their own. When Kate pulled up in the clearing, they set up a collective howl that could have been heard from the moon.
Kate winced and put her fingers in her ears. Mutt trotted out into the middle of the pack, sat down, raised her nose, and gave one loud, minatory bark, showing a little teeth while she was at it. There was an instantaneous silence, and Mutt stared around her with narrowed yellow eyes, just to make sure the point had been taken. It had.
"Man, I wish they'd do that for me," said a voice from the door, and Kate looked up to see Mandy standing in it.
"Why do you mush dogs if their howling drives you crazy?" Kate said, threading her way through the pack.
"Why do you think I took up mushing?" Mandy said. "They don't howl when they're hitched up and running."
"There's a problem with that reasoning but I'm just going to let it go," Kate said. She paused on the doorstep. "You doing some late culling? Doesn't seem to be quite the teeming mass of caninity that it usually is."
"Caninity?" Mandy said.
"Caninity," Kate said. "If Shakespeare can make up words so can I."
"Coffee?" Mandy said, standing back and holding the door wide.
"Sure." Kate shed parka and boots and went inside.
The door opened into a large room that served Mandy as kitchen, dining room, living room, and harness shed. There was an enormous old-fashioned woodstove in one corner with a fireplace in the corner opposite, and a higgledy-piggledy jumble of tables, chairs, couches, refrigerator-freezers, sinks, counters, and cupboards in between. On this dark, cold October night the room glowed with the muted light of half a dozen Coleman lanterns, hissing gently from hooks screwed into overhead beams. Mandy preferred them to electric light and had never installed a generator. Pots and pans, traps and ganglines hung from more hooks, making the entire area a hazard to navigation.
Mandy was a tall, rangy woman with a face full of good, strong bones, hair cut a la Prince Valiant, and a latent twinkle in her gray eyes. The scion of a wealthy Bostonian family, she had abandoned crinoline petticoats and charity balls for down parkas and dog mushing as soon as she was of legal age. This had distressed her proper, conservative family no end, although her parents had come around after an eventful visit to the Park three years before. Since then, relations had been cordial, punctuated frequently by care packages featuring L.L.Bean, a telling switch from the usual Neiman Marcus.
"Chick around?" Kate said, accepting a steaming mug and adding a generous helping of canned milk.
She looked up in time to see the twinkle vanish. "Not lately."
Kate groaned. "Not again."
Mandy sat opposite and added three spoonfuls of sugar to her own mug. "To tell the truth, I don't know. I suppose it's possible he's not on a bender. All I know is he went to Anchorage last week to visit his mom, and I haven't heard from him since."
Chick was Chick Noyukpuk, Mandy's lover and mushing mentor. He was also a chronic alcoholic. A short, rotund little man with a cheerful disposition when sober, when drunk he turned maudlin and suicidal. Mandy had bought her first dogs from him. Then he had had his own kennel. Then he had been a world champion distance musher in his own right, earning the nickname the Billiken Bullet, much beloved of sports reporters for his evenhanded way with a bar tab. Now, he worked for Mandy, overseeing the breeding and training of the teams and as a tactical advisor on the trail, with the result that Mandy had been finishing in the money since her third Iditarod.
"His mom okay?" Kate said.
"She's in assisted living. She's pretty much all there mentally, she just needs help with the physical stuff. He's a good son, he goes in a lot. He just doesn't usually stay this long without calling. Unless he's on a bender."
"Um." Kate, knowing sympathy would be unwelcome, didn't offer any. "I met a friend of yours today."
"Oh, yeah? Who?"
"Woman by the name of Talia Macleod."
Mandy's face lit with pleasure. "Talia? No kidding? What's she doing in the Park?"
Kate told her.
"Not a bad gig," Mandy said. "An outfit like Global Harvest would pay for a face like that to put on a project this size. Lay a lot of Alaskan hackles, too, her being a local hero and all. And she is very smart and very personable."
Kate, about to refute this, recognized the justice of it in time. "Yes, she is," she said ruefully.
"How'd you meet her?"
Kate described that morning's board meeting, and when Mandy stopped laughing, she said, wiping tears away, "I would have paid real money for a ticket to that show."
Kate could smile about it, too. Now. "I'd have been all right if they hadn't sandbagged me with being chairman. Probably. Anyway. Is this Macleod the real deal, Mandy? Or is she just bought and paid for?"
"A little of both, probably," Mandy said thoughtfully. She looked at Kate. "The thing you have to understand, Kate, is that no one in her position makes any money to speak of. She's not Brett Favre or Kevin Garnett."
Kate recognized neither name but she understood what Mandy was saying. "That's hard to believe. She's got all kinds of endorsements, doesn't she?"
"Sure, in Alaska. But Outside, or internationally?" Mandy shook her head. "As attractive and as personable as she is, she is a biathloner. She skis and shoots and skis. It doesn't make for riveting television, so it's not gonna be what sells Nikes. My guess is she took this job for the paycheck."
"That's what she said. But she talks like a true believer."
Mandy raised an eyebrow. "That's what they're paying her for. She's got a good heart, Kate."