Desiree was the school's nurse practitioner, and Auntie Balasha's granddaughter. "What does Desiree say?"
Auntie Balasha's lips tightened and she said sternly, "Desiree never talk about patients."
"Auntie."
Auntie Balasha sighed. "Desiree say they don't talk much, but they do talk some. She say this is little bit of good. Maybe better later."
Kate felt a tightness in her chest ease. "Good. That's good, Auntie. I was keeping tabs last winter but this summer I was fishing and then I was working and-" She stopped making excuses. "I'm glad you and Desiree and Auntie Vi are keeping tabs on them." She hesitated. "Do they still refuse to tell their parents about what Louis did to them?"
"They don't tell parents nothing," Auntie Balasha said succinctly.
There were twenty-one kids in the Smith family. Kate wondered if it was harder or easier to keep secrets in a family that size. Easier to hide them in the noise, or harder to hide because of all the noses standing by to sniff them out? She hoped for Chloe and Hannah's sakes that when their parents did find out the girls got all the love and support they needed, but she'd seen the family in action and she doubted it. She had Father Smith pegged as a greedy opportunist, and Mother Smith as someone who had perfected the art of going along. "How about you, Auntie?" she said out loud. "Everything okay?"
"All well."
But Auntie Balasha seemed preoccupied. Kate looked at her, standing there in her homemade calico kuspuk, lavishly trimmed with gaudy gold rickrack and lustrous marten that she had probably trapped and tanned herself. Like all the aunties she was comfortably plump, with long graying hair she kept bundled out of her face, round cheeks a pleasing walnut brown, clad in skin that was by now wrinkled like a walnut, too. She was missing a tooth, and there was a faint scar on her left check, remnants of her marriage. It had ended when he had gone down the boat ramp in Cordova, drunk as a skunk, tripped over his own feet, and drowned in the harbor, leaving her with three children to feed and clothe and shepherd into adulthood. She had succeeded, partly because she'd had the love and support of the extended family of Park rats, and partly because she would have sold herself on the streets of Spenard before she let her children go cold or hungry. What Kate considered most remarkable was that she'd never heard Auntie Balasha whine or complain. She just kept on keeping on, and when her own children were grown and gone like Auntie Joy she had progressed to an enthusiastic and indiscriminate adoption of every stray that wandered across her path, strays like Martin, and Willard, and evidently now Howie, who of course lost no time in exploiting the situation.
That thought roused Kate's protective spirit like nothing else. If Willard and Howie were stealing fuel from Auntie Balasha again, this time she wouldn't just beat Willard to the ground, she would eviscerate him. "What is it, Auntie? Is there a problem? Something I can help you with?"
Auntie Balasha raised her enormous brown eyes, liquid with love and concern. "I worry about you, Katya."
Kate was taken aback. "Worry about me?" She even laughed a little. "Why? I'm fine."
"You live so far out of town." Auntie Balasha gestured vaguely in the general direction of Kate's homestead. "If you get in trouble, who help you? Who come when you call? You should live in town. I live here. Vi live here. Joy, Edna live here. You get in trouble, we help you. We drop by more often, check up on you, see if you okay."
The prospect of the aunties dropping in at any hour of the day or night to check up on her froze the blood in Kate's veins. Trying to speak amiably, she said, "That's a nice thought, Auntie, and I thank you for it, but you know I've got Johnny with me now." Driven to it, she added, "And Jim Chopin stops by now and then."
This artless addition got the skeptical look it deserved. "But you chair of Association now, Katya."
Kate stiffened. "Yes."
Balasha, ignoring the warning signs, carried on. "Position of responsibility. People need to talk to you about something, where you are? Far away! Can't walk there, have to drive truck or snowgo. If shareholders need you, if emergency happens, long time it takes to come get you. You should move to town."
"Auntie," Kate said, "I've got to go, I've got some business down the road. I'll see you later, okay? Mutt. Up."
It came out as more of an order than a request and a startled Mutt scrambled to her feet. Kate climbed on in front of her and pressed the starter. The roar of the engine drowned out Auntie Bal-asha's further remonstrances. Kate smiled tightly, tossed her a cheerful wave, and got the hell out of town.
But not out of Dodge, as it turned out. One step into the Roadhouse she walked slap into Martin Shugak, who smirked at her. "Madam Chair. Got a motion I'd like to run by you. Or do I mean over you?"
She told him what to do with his motion and marched up to the bar, ears burning from the snickering that came from Martin's knot of misfits, malcontents, and misdemeanors in waiting, a group that encouraged Martin to temporarily forget all the ways she could hurt him if she put her mind to it.
"Kate," Bernie said. He'd undoubtedly heard the story, too, but he was a little wiser in the ways of Kate Shugak than Martin was and he refrained from comment. With her usual insouciance Mutt reared up, paws on the bar, and panted at Bernie, who snagged the usual package of beef jerky and tossed it her way. He put a can of Diet 7UP and a glass full of ice in front of Kate and moved down to the end of the bar, where Nick Waterbury sat, arms around what appeared to be not his first beer of the day. She frowned and checked the clock on the wall. Not even three o'clock. Nick was a lot of things but he wasn't a boozer. "Hey, Nick," she said. "How you doing."
"Fine, Kate. No worries." He didn't look up and his dreary voice contradicted his words. "How's Eve?"
"She's fine. We're just fine."
Since they'd lost their daughter Mary two years before at the hands of Louis Deem, who had walked on the charge, Kate doubted the veracity of that statement. "Tell her I'll be out in a couple of days. I'm jonesing for her coffee cake."
"Sure," Nick said. "Whatever."
Now that it seemed safe Bernie slid back down the bar. "How are you holding up?" she said.
He didn't blow her off and he didn't sugarcoat it. "I'm maintaining."
"Just maintaining?"
"It'll do. For now, it'll have to."
"The kids?"
He thought about his answer for a moment or two. "Quieter," he said finally.
"That doesn't sound good."
"It isn't," he said without rancor. He raised a hand, palm up, and let it drop. "But what can we expect. Their mother and brother were murdered last year. And they don't even get to spit in the eye of the asshole who did it."
"At least he's dead," Kate said.
Bernie met her eyes, his own empty of expression. "That he is."
God, it was cold. The frigid air bit through the windshield of the snow machine and all five layers of his clothing with the ferocity of a wolverine biting into flesh, and it felt just that hungry, that angry, and that voracious. He wore a balaclava and a knit cap inside his hood and his face was still cold. Beneath his down parka with the wolf-trimmed hood and a down bib overall guaranteed to twenty below, he wore a Gore-Tex Pro Shell and a pair of ski pants, and beneath them Patagonia Capilene, the ne plus ultra in long underwear. His boots were Sorel Caribous rated to forty below, and inside his winter mitts he wore heated gloves powered by a D battery guaranteed to keep his hands warm for five hours, minimum.
Nevertheless, the only truly warm part of his body was in fact his back, and that was because Van was snuggled against it, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist. "You okay?" he yelled over the noise of the engine.
"Great!" she yelled back. "Isn't it gorgeous?"