“Welcome home,” Kate said. She was immensely relieved. She didn’t want to have to tell Ruthe that Gal had disappeared. She bent to give the cat a scratch behind the ears and found her fur damp to the touch from Mutt’s ministrations. She looked over at Mutt. “You make a pretty good nurse.”

Mutt gave an elaborate yawn, and cleaned up Gal’s food with a single swipe of her tongue. It was all show, because Kate knew for a fact that Mutt had dined very nicely the day before on the remains of a moose carcass not a mile from the homestead.

She noticed a book she had missed beneath the sofa and bent down to pick it up. Wedged under the couch was a narrow tin box, of the size to hold standard file folders. It was locked. Kate looked for a key in hopes that there might be names and numbers for her to call-not that either Dina or Ruthe had ever referred to having anyone to call in the event of, other than each other. There was a key rack with hooks sprouting from little tin chickadees, with airplane keys, snow machine keys, and truck keys, but no keys to fit the tin box. She set the box to one side, not feeling things were to the point that she had to break into it.

“Hey,” a voice said from the deck.

She looked up, to behold Jim Chopin peering at her through the window. She didn’t notice that the sight of him didn’t cause its usual knee-jerk antipathy. “Hey, yourself.”

He came in. “What are you doing here?”

She waved a hand. “Trying to clean up for when Ruthe gets home.”

He looked at her and forbore from saying what was on both their minds.

“You?” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I wanted to see if I’d remembered to lock the door.”

“There’s no lock.”

He examined the doorknob. “I’ll be damned.”

“Dina didn’t believe in locks in the Bush. Said if she and Ruthe were both away from home and somebody got lost in a blizzard that she wanted them to be able to get in.”

“I don’t know who’d stagger up this mountain in a blizzard, but it’s a nice thought.”

“I caught a couple of guys poking through the rubble.”

His eyes sharpened. “Who?”

She shook her head. “Don’t know them. I ran them off.”

“Get tags?”

She shook her head again. “I don’t think they’ll be back. And I’ll get Bernie to spread the word that I’m looking after the place.”

Which all by itself would be enough to keep the cabin and the surrounding property sacrosanct, Jim thought. At least for a while, at least until they knew if Ruthe would live.

“I hear you got the guy,” she said.

“Yeah. Knife in hand. Blood wasn’t even dry on it. Tests already confirmed Ruthe’s and Dina’s blood on it.”

“That was quick.”

“The governor himself called the crime lab. Love them or hate them, Ruthe and Dina helped make a lot of the history of this state. He ordered the flags to fly at half-staff today.”

In spite of herself, Kate was impressed. “A nice gesture.”

“Yeah, ought to pick him up a few more votes in the next election.” Gal’s head poked up over the back of the chair, and Jim said, “Hey, Gal, you came back! Good girl. Thank god. I couldn’t find her after she took off.”

He told Kate what had happened, and she laughed, surprising both of them. He picked up Gal and sat down with her in his lap, where she immediately curled up, purring and kneading. Mutt padded over and rested her chin on the arm of the chair, and Jim freed a hand to scratch her ears.

Kate sat down and started going through the paperwork again. When next she looked up, Jim had his head against the back of the chair and his eyes closed. Gal was curled into a soft black ball on his lap and Mutt was stretched out on the floor with her head on one of his feet.

It was quite a domestic scene. Kate went back to the paperwork, but her mind was more on the man across from her.

They called him “Chopper Jim” because of his preferred method of transportation, a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, although he flew fixed-wing, too, and was reliable and skilled on both craft.

They also called him “the Father of the Park,” for his equally reliable and skilled seduction of pretty much every available female inside Park boundaries. Although now that Kate thought of it, she couldn’t remember any children whose mothers claimed he had fathered them. A courtesy title, perhaps, and Kate was a little startled when the thought made her smile.

He was originally from California, which figured. He had the same coloring as Ethan, only darker, and he was tall, also like Ethan, but he was much broader in the beam. He looked like a buff Beach Boy, and she’d bet he had spent his entire childhood in the water with a surfboard. What was he doing in Alaska, three thousand miles and one time zone away, with no sand, no surf, and no beach bunnies? It was a question she’d never asked him.

He’d stuck. He’d been posted to the Park the year before she graduated from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, and they had howdied when she spent her vacations in the Park, but they hadn’t really shook until she had quit working as an investigator for the Anchorage district attorney and had come home with attitude to spare and a scar that stretched across her throat almost from ear to ear. Unlike many of the Park rats, he hadn’t treated her as fragile, about to break. Instead, he’d made a move, she had rebuffed it, and that had set the pattern of their relationship-she couldn’t call it friendship, not even after Bering-from then until now.

As a trooper, he had what she thought was a real understanding of the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law, and sometimes, she had to admit, the almost-inspired ability to enforce one without violating the other. That business with Cindy and Ben Bingley two breakups before. And Johnny this fall, when he had sided with the boy-and her-against the boy’s mother and legal guardian, in essence aiding and abetting what could be construed in a court of law as kidnapping.

Emaa had approved of him, in her austere fashion. That alone was enough to guarantee Kate’s antagonism. For the first time, Kate wondered if it had been deliberate. Emaa had been a master manipulator, and while she was alive, Kate had fought a constant rear-guard action to keep her grandmother from taking over her life. Emaa had liked Jack, too. Although Kate had brought Jack home as a fait accompli, already a fixture in her life, and Emaa would have found acceptance more expedient than antagonism. Emaa had been the complete political animal, even in her relationships with family members. A smile curled the corners of Kate’s mouth, and her eyes strayed again to the man sleeping across the table from her.

Not that she would have felt differently about Jim if Emaa had not approved of him. She finished neatening up the paperwork and stacked it in a pile, dividing it by year with file folder separators. The pile was tall enough to teeter. She moved it to a corner, where she leaned it up against a wall and weighted it down with a frayed tome four inches thick, Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. What on earth had the old girls needed with that?

The stove was burning low and she added a couple of logs before going to the kitchen and setting the kettle to boil. She was hungry, and with a glance over her shoulder, she pulled out a couple of cans of cream of tomato soup and a package of saltines. There was butter in the cooler outside, miraculously spared by the attacker, or perhaps just overlooked.

Jim stirred when she set the tray down on the coffee table. “Hey,” he said, yawning. “Guess I fell asleep.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Soup’s on.”

“Be right back.” He gently assisted Gal from his lap and stepped outside. Mutt, with similar intentions, and finding herself on the wrong side of the door, barked once. The door opened and she slipped out.