Northern Lights

more."
    After the pot was on a burner, she gave the sauce a little stir, then came back to finish the salad. "They're okay. Snooty, highbrowed, not the sort of people I'd hang out with, or who'd want me hanging around for long. But they were decent to me. They gave me money, which has to earn them some points."
    Reaching for the bottle, she topped off her glass, held it up, eyebrows raised to Nate.
    "No, I'm good."
    "It was enough money for me to put a down payment on my plane and this place, so I owe them."
    She paused to sip her wine contemplatively. "I don't think they're going to fight Charlene and insist on dragging him back east. She wants to think so, because she likes to hate them. Just like they enjoy disregarding her. That way they can all make more out of my father than he was."
    She got out plates, passed them off to Nate for the table. "Is staying quiet an interrogation technique?"
    "It can be. It can also be called listening."
    "There's only one person I know—well, that I'm willing to spend appreciable time with—who listens like you. That's Jacob. It's a good, strong quality. My father would listen to me, sometimes. But you could see him start to drift if it went on too long to suit him. He'd sit it out, but he wasn't hearing you. Jacob always heard me.
    "Anyway," she said after a huffed-out sigh. "Patrick Galloway. He was an inconsiderate bastard. I loved him, and he was never really inconsiderate to me. But he was to his family, who, whatever their faults, didn't deserve to have their son take off without a word before his eighteenth birthday. And he was to Charlene, leaving her to earn most of the coin and take care of the bulk of the messy stuff.
    "I think she probably loved him, which was—maybe is—her cross to bear. I don't know if he loved her."
    She pulled a clear glass container of rotini out of a cabinet, dumped some into the boiling water, continued to speak while she adjusted the heat and stirred.
    "And I don't think he'd have stuck it out with us if someone hadn't killed him before he'd had a chance to take off anyway. But now I can't know, and he never got the chance to make his choice. That's what counts. What counts is someone ended him. So that's my focus on this. Not where he ends up being put in the ground."
    "Sensible."
    "I'm not a sensible woman, Burke. I'm a selfish one. You'll figure that out for yourself soon enough." She got a plastic container out of the fridge, shook it, then drizzled the contents over the salad. "There's a baguette in that drawer there. Fresh from this morning."
    He opened the drawer, found the bread. "I didn't know you'd been into town."
    "I haven't. I took a couple days off to burrow." After unwrapping the bread, she cut a few thick slabs. "Baking's one of the things I do when I'm burrowing, which prevents it from becoming wallowing."
    "You bake bread." He sniffed at it. "I've never known anybody who bakes bread. Or flies a plane. Or can fix a snowmobile engine."
    "As I said, a woman of strange and varied talents. I'll show you some more of them after dinner. In bed. Top off the wine, will you? We're about ready here."
     
     
    MAYBE IT WAS THE ATMOSPHERE, maybe it was the woman, but he couldn't remember a more relaxed meal.
    She'd said she wasn't sensible, but he saw good, clear sense in the way she lived, took care of her home. In how she dealt with shock and grief, even anger.
    Jacob had said she was strong. Nate was beginning to believe she was the strongest person he'd ever met.
    And the most comfortable with herself.
    She asked about his day. It took him a while to get his rhythm there. He'd been so accustomed through his marriage to leaving the job outside.
    But she wanted to hear about it, to comment, to gossip, to laugh.
    Still, under the ease he felt with her, was a frisson of excitement, anticipation, that sexual buzz that heated his blood whenever he was around her.
    He wanted to get his hands in her hair, to get his teeth on the nape that shorter length exposed. He could think of that, imagine that, have his belly tighten even as he felt the weight of the day slide off his shoulders.
    At one point, she stretched out, laying her feet in his lap as she leaned back to drink more wine. And his mouth went dry, his mind fuzzy.
    "I used to shoplift." She tossed a chunk of bread to each dog and immediately made him think of how such an action would have caused his own mother to freak.
    And how much he liked watching the dogs field the bread,