Northern Lights

rose into a sky that held the light for fourteen hours a day, clung relentlessly to winter.
    Nate parked, led the dogs to the run. They gave him pitiful looks, their tails sinking between their legs as they trudged inside.
    "I know, I know, it sucks." He crouched, sticking his fingers through the chain link so they could be licked. "Let me catch the bad guy, then your mom won't worry so much, and you can stay home and play."
    They whined when he walked away and gave him a bellyful of guilt.
    He went in through the lobby and tracked down Charlene in her office.
    "I hired three college students for the summer." She gave her computer a pat. "I'm going to need them with the bookings we've got."
    "That's good."
    "Local guides always take on a few, too. The place'll be hopping with pretty college boys by June." There was a glitter in her eyes as she said it, but to Nate, it looked more like defiance than anticipation.
    "That'll keep us all busy. Charlene . . ." He closed the door. "I'm going to ask you something, and you're not going to like it."
    "Since when has that stopped you?"
    No way to be delicate, he decided. "Who's the first person you slept with after Galloway left?"
    "I don't kiss and tell, Nate. If you'd ever taken me up on it, you'd know that."
    "This isn't gossip, Charlene, and it isn't a game. Does it matter to you who killed Pat Galloway?"
    "Of course, it does. Do you know how hard it is to plan his funeral, knowing he's still in some morgue and not knowing exactly when I can bring him home? I ask Bing every other day when he thinks the ground'll be soft enough to dig. To dig my Pat's grave."
    She snatched two tissues out of the box on her desk, sniffled into them.
    "When my mother buried my father," Nate said, "she walked around the house like a ghost for a month. Longer, I guess. She did everything she had to do—like you are, but you couldn't reach her. You couldn't touch her. She went away somewhere. I was never able to reach her again."
    Charlene blinked at tears, lowered the tissues. "That's so sad."
    "You haven't done that. You haven't let it make a ghost out of you. Now I'm asking you to help me. Who moved on you, Charlene?"
    "Who didn't? I was young and fine to look at. You should've seen me back then."
    Something stirred, he reached out to grab the tail of it, when she exploded.
    "And I was alone! I didn't know he was dead. If I'd known, I wouldn't have been so quick to . . . I was hurt and I was mad, and when the men came swarming around, why shouldn't I have taken my pick? Taken lots of picks?"
    "There's no blame here."
    "I slept with John first." Her shoulder jerked, and she tossed the tissue into her pink wastebasket. "I knew he had a crush on me, and he was so sweet about it. Attentive," she said, wistfully now. "So I went to him. But not only him. I filled up on it. I broke hearts and I broke up marriages. And I didn't care."
    She steadied herself and, for once, looked quiet, almost thoughtful. "Nobody killed Pat because of me. Or if they did, they wasted their time. Because I never cared about any of them. I never gave them anything I didn't take back. He isn't dead because of me. If he is, I swear, I don't think I can live with it."
    "He's not dead because of you." He walked around her, behind her, and laid his hands on her shoulders to rub gently. "He's not."
    She lifted a hand, closed it over his. "I kept waiting for him to come back. For him to see I wasn't pining for him—and want me again. I swear to God, Nate, I think I waited for that until you and Meg went up there. Until you found him, I was waiting for him."
    "He would've come back." He tightened his grip when she shook her head. "You get to know the victim when you do what I do. You get inside them and understand them better, a lot of the time better than people who knew them living. He'd have come back."
    "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me," she said after a moment. "Especially somebody who's not trying to get in my pants."
    He gave her shoulders a pat, then took the earring out of his pocket. "Do you recognize this?"
    "Hmm." She sniffled again, flicked her finger over her lashes to dry them. "It's sort of pretty, but I don't know, male. Not my kind of thing. I like splashier."
    "Could it have been Pat's?"
    "Pat's? No, he didn't have anything like that. No crosses. He didn't go for religious symbols."
    "Have you ever seen it before?"
    "I don't think so. Wouldn't remember if I had, I guess. It's not much of a