Northern Lights

him, hold tight before he strolled away.
    A hundred times since that afternoon, she'd wished she'd given in, given them both that one last contact.
    She wished it now, even as she rode that last memory in the dark.
    She stayed where she was until she heard the knock on the door. Resigned, she got up, switched on lights, ran her hand through the hair that hadn't quite dried from the shower.
    When she opened the door to Nate, he was carrying a tray and had another sitting on the floor outside the door.
    "We need to eat." Maybe he'd hated it when people had pushed food or whatever cure or comfort on him during the worst of his own misery. But it worked, and that was the bottom line.
    "Fine." She gestured toward the bed, the only surface big enough in the room to double as a dining table.Then she bent and hefted the second tray.
    "If you want to be alone after, I can get another room."
    "No point." She sat cross-legged on the bed and, ignoring the salad on her tray, cut into the steak.
    "That one's mine." He switched trays. "They said you went for bloody. I don't."
    "Don't miss a trick, do you? Except you brought up coffee instead of whiskey."
    "You need a bottle, I'll get you one."
    She sighed, cut into the meat. "Bet you would. How'd I end up sharing a steak dinner in Anchorage with a nice guy?"
    "I'm not, particularly. I gave you an hour so you could pull yourself together. I brought you food so you'd keep yourself together while you tell me about your father. I'm sorry, Meg, it's a hard hit. After you talk to me, we're going to have to take this to the detective in charge."
    She cut another bite, forked down into one of the soggy steak fries. "Tell me something. Back where you came from, you were a good cop?"
    "It's about the only thing I was ever good at."
    "You handle murders?"
    "Yeah."
    "I'll talk to whoever's in charge, but I want you looking into this for me."
    "There's not that much I can do."
    "There's always something. I'll pay you."
    He ate contemplatively. "A hard hit," he repeated. "Which is why I'm not going to slap at you for that insult."
    "I don't know that many people who find money insulting. But fine. I want someone I know looking for the son of a bitch who killed my father."
    "You barely know me."
    "I know you're good in bed." She smiled a little. "Okay, a guy can be an asshole and still be a stallion. But I also know that you keep your head under pressure and are dedicated or stupid enough to climb out on a glacier to save a kid you've never met. And you think ahead enough to remember to ask down in the restaurant how Meg likes her steak. My dogs like you. Help me out here, chief."
    He reached out and touched her hair, a little stroke over the damp black. "When's the last time you saw him?"
    "February 1988. February sixth."
    "Do you know where he was going?"
    "He said to pick up some work. Here in Anchorage, I figured, or up in Fairbanks. He and my mother had been fighting about money and a variety of other things. That was typical. He said he'd be gone a couple weeks or so. He never came back."
    "Your mother file a missing person's report?"
    "No." Then her brow creased. "At least I don't think so. We assumed, everyone assumed, he'd just taken a hike. They'd been fighting," she continued, "maybe more than usual. He was restless. Even I could see it. He wasn't the salt of the earth, Nate. He wasn't a responsible sort, though he was always good to me, and we never went without anything important. It wasn't enough for Charlene, and they argued."
    She steadied herself, kept eating because it was there. "He drank, he smoked dope, he gambled when he felt like it, worked when he felt like it and fucked off when he felt like it. I loved him—maybe because of all that. He was thirty-three when he left that afternoon—and using the wisdom of hindsight and maturity, I can see it was freaking him out to be thirty-three. To be the father of a half-grown girl and hooked up with the same woman year after year. Maybe he was at a kind of cross roads, you know? Maybe he decided to take that winter climb as a kind of last idiocy of youth—or maybe he was never coming back anyway. But somebody made the decision for him."
    "He have enemies?"
    "Probably, but nobody I could say would cause him harm. He'd piss people off, but nothing major."
    "What about your stepfather?"
    She gave her salad a couple of pokes with her fork."What about him?"
    "How soon after your father disappeared did Charlene get married? How'd she