PROLOGUE

Talkeetna, Alaska
October

Charlie Marcus was using a payphone in sight of Deadman's Wall in Talkeetna's historic Fairview Inn. In Talkeetna, everything not new was historic. In fact, he was history in the making. But, being too smart to climb Denali, he'd never be found on Deadman's Wall.

No walls for Charlie Marcus.

That still left some ways to die. Like whatever way Mia had. Francesca's voice had taken on a strident, piercing tone. He held the receiver away from his head as she shouted. "I am not scared! Stop saying I'm scared."

"Of course you are." Glasses banged behind him at the U-shaped bar, where off-season mountaineers from Italy toasted the gift of life, recently returned to them by Marcus Aviation. "Cesca, it's been thirty-two years since you've seen Talkeetna, and the only excuse for that is fear. You're chicken. Scared, scared, fraidy-cat."

"I cannot believe a fifty-four-year-old man is talking to me like this." She was thousands of miles away in Precipice, Colorado, where she practiced midwifery, but Charlie imagined his ex-wife's pale cheeks flushed beneath her auburn hair, maybe going grey. He'd turned grey a few years ago -- second time he'd lost a plane, making his way down the glaciers, off Denali, after two weeks without being found.

She said, "I have no reason to be afraid. You may have forgotten why I left Talkeet -- "

"No, Cesca, I haven't forgotten. I should add seeing your own flesh and blood to the list of things that frighten you."

"That old man does not frighten me! And neither do -- "

"Probably not like the thought of his dying without your seeing him again, but -- "

"He's not dying."

Yes, she sounded worried. Eighty was getting on. "Cesca, you know you should come up here and see about Mia, but the fact is you're scared." One of the Italians tried to hand him a beer, and Charlie shook his head, lifting his unopened Surge. "And I know why you're scared. Growing up with -- "

"Oh, I get to be psychoanalyzed by the man who spent the first sixteen years of his life running cons with his father and the next twelve running away from his own wife and daughter."

"Don't forget the VC."

She ignored that. "One thing's for certain, if I come to Alaska, it will be for Mia -- to learn what happened to Mia -- not to see you. I'd prefer not to come within seeing distance of you."

And blood relatives who weren't dying didn't bear mention.

"Alas." With the toe of his boot, Charlie drew over a steel-leg cushioned stool, but someone had spilt a beer on it. He passed. "A woman like you is rare anywhere, but especially here. Men will queue up to hunt for you and sew your mukluks. You know what women say about finding partners in Alaska. 'The odds are good, but the goods are odd.'"

"I did find a partner in Alaska."

"Ah, Cesca. For those days we gathered berries in Denali, seeing our daughter, Tara, in each other's eyes . . . you can stay with me." He'd told her Talkeetna had changed, that now it was just like the place on "Northern Exposure." It had changed since 1967 - changed plenty. But it was still Talkeetna, launching point for Denali and famous for its annual Moose Dropping Festival. "You're talking to one of the few people in town who doesn't shower at the laundromat. And my house is warm."

That should cinch it. In January of '68, when he'd rescued Francesca from a life of waiting tables in Anchorage and taken her to Hawaii, she'd shown her gratitude by marrying him in the most dire circumstances.

"You'll have to do better, Charlie. I grew up there. Remember?"

"Think running water. Think bathtub. Indoor plumbing. But maybe you could stay at Mia's. To look after the dogs. She's got a big dog-food cooker. You can melt snow for water." Before she could react -- and before he could think too hard about Mia -- he added, "Probably room for another midwife, too. I could fly you to nearby villages for births -- "

"Like you did for Mia?"

A little jealous, Cesca? "Now and again."

Roy Walcott, Jr., Francesca's brother and the son of Talkeetna's oldest surviving bush pilot, entered the bar. Charlie turned his back. The day Roy Walcott Air Service closed its doors Charlie Marcus would declare an annual holiday in honor of the event.

Roy Jr. told the bartender, "Haven't you got some air freshener, Spike? I smell Charlie."

" 'Scuse me, Cesca." Charlie dropped the receiver and strode six yards, making sure the can of Surge had a rough ride. "Well, if it isn't Roy Pilot-Error Walcott, Jr. How's tricks, Roy?" He opened the can.

From her phone in Colorado, Francesca Walcott heard the sound of a table crashing, wood splintering, glass breaking. Someone yelled, "TAKE IT OUTSIDE!"

She heard another explosion.

"YOU'RE PAYING FOR THAT TABLE, BOYS!"

"You've lived too long, Marcus, after you killed my -- "

"MARCUS, FINISH YOUR CALL AND HANG UP MY PHONE! GET OUT OF HERE! YOU CAN KILL EACH OTHER IN THE STREET!"

A crack that was fist on flesh.

This does not attract me, Francesca told herself calmly. Charlie Marcus is a barbarian, and he lives in a place filled with other barbarians. I know this better than anyone. I will eat this house before I return to Talkeetna, Alaska.

CHAPTER ONE

Anchorage International Airport
Sikuvik -- October -- Ice time -- 1999

He wasn't at the gate.

Francesca didn't miss seeing Charlie, but she sure would miss the free lift to Talkeetna. The easy way home, if there was one.

Flight announcements rang in her ears. She scanned the crowds on the concourse, searching in vain. Men with great furry beards. Eskimos and Athabaskans. Business people in suits. Booths and shops sold native art and espresso, natural skin care products and pizza.

She needed to claim her bags first thing. It was six p.m. and dark. The lights of Anchorage had winked yellow and white, reflecting off the water, as the plane banked toward the airport. Anchorage had come a long way. She couldn't conjure up the feelings of three decades before, Charlie popping into the diner where she was waiting tables, sweeping her into his arms . . . and leaving this cold land that had said its last words to Francesca Walcott.

Oil money had changed everything.

Good.

It would have changed Talkeetna and her family, too. Though both of those things were harder to imagine.

Francesca searched for overhead signs, found those directing her to the baggage claim and started in that direction, lugging her heavy tote. She felt like crying, one of those hormonal rushes she'd begun to associate with impending menopause. But maybe it was terror instead. Face it. You knew he wouldn't show. And she'd be returning to Talkeetna alone.

Maybe it was better that way.

On the other hand, it wasn't too late to change her mind and go -- where?

A blind man weaved toward her with an assistance dog -- or one in training. The wolf-like puppy tugged at his leash, dragging his owner behind him, as the poor gentleman tapped with his white cane. Sniffing at passing travelers, the dog circled his master with his leash.

Fortunately, the man carried no luggage.

No luggage.

The flight jacket.

Aviator sunglasses.

She strode toward him. "That is the worst disguise I ever saw. You should be ashamed of yourself, Charlie Marcus."

"Don't blow my cover, Cesca. I couldn't leave him. He's too valuable. Besides, he's Mia's."

"Did they find her?" Hope. Relief. Mia was fine, and she, Francesca, wouldn't have to go to Talkeetna. That meant she would've abandoned most of her possessions and come to Alaska for --

It didn't matter. Mia was safe.

But Charlie shook his head and tapped his cane convincingly as he tried to unwind himself from the leash.

"You're abominable. Impersonating someone with a disability."

"Save the lecture. You have bags? Let's get out of here, before someone notices this ain't no German shepherd. Sorry I can't offer to carry your bags."

Hauling the bulging tote a pace behind and beside him, Francesca noted the changes in her ex- husband. It was years since she'd seen Charlie -- at Tara's wedding to Danny Graine, the start of a marriage that had ended in divorce. Charlie's body seemed lean and trim as ever beneath his blue jeans.

The mustache suited him now that his brown hair had turned grey. They both stood five-ten in their bare feet, but Francesca felt slightly taller. Tall, wide-hipped, ungainly. Fifty had come and gone.

The dog set the pace. Catching up, Francesca said, "I thought Mia's dogs were in Talkeetna." One of the faceless voices who'd phoned after Mia's disappearance had promised to care for them till Francesca's arrival.

"This is a new dog. Cute, isn't he?"

With his brindle coat and uneven mask, he was less that cute. People stared as Charlie dragged him onto the escalator.

Francesca turned from the onlookers. "You take that animal outside the terminal, and I'll collect my bags."

Travelers flattened against the handrail, lifting tote bags clear as the dog raced up and down the moving steps in terror, winding its leash around Charlie.

"Sit," said Charlie. "Stay. Good King."

"King?"

He ignored her, as though she were a callous stranger.

How could she have left Tara to come here? Tara. Francesca practically shuddered as she thought of her grown daughter's plight in Colorado, something neither she nor Tara had shared with Charlie. And why tell him? Over the years, there'd been things about Tara's life that Charlie hadn't seen fit to share with her.

Anyhow, she was here, in part, for Tara. To settle a score. And for Mia. Where are you, Mia?

Mia -- Mia with her sled dogs and her airplane. Mia with her long-legged stride, her winning smile, her way of drawing the line when --

Mia Kammerlander, certified nurse-midwife, had disappeared from Talkeetna a week ago Monday night, a few hours after a birth. She'd gone on a snowmobile, leaving two of her dogs in burlap sacks at the Village Airstrip, ready to load on her Beechcraft for a race in Nome. Five more were staked nearby, and another had run off and come home, alone. Mia had named Francesca as a contact person, in case of emergency, and she'd been contacted -- first by the Alaska State Troopers, via her local sheriff.

Then by Charlie.

They reached the baggage claim. Charlie pulled off his sunglasses, revealing the eyes Tara had inherited -- and a shiner.

As Francesca traced the inside of her cheek with her tongue, he said, "Give me your claim checks, and take the dog outside. What am I looking for? A steamer trunk, a full set of Gucci, and what?"

"Two bags. I don't think that's unreasonable."

"Cesca, Cesca, not so touchy. Just want to make sure my plane will get off the ground."

His plane.

What have I done? Why am I here?

"A duffle bag, black with green straps. And a blue backpack." She handed him her baggage claim tickets and headed for the doors with the husky out in front. The last thing she wanted was to be caught in the airport with this dog.

***

"Make sure he doesn't throw up in my car."

"How am I supposed to do that?" She wanted to throw up on the leather seats of his black Porsche 928 herself. She'd never seen the car before, and it accentuated her own struggles of the last eighteen years. Not that Charlie hadn't helped out with child support. He had. But . . .

I don't want to be here, to be with him, to be having these thoughts, these feelings.

They were leaving the airport. "Where are we going?"

"Friend's house. Hotels in Anchorage are outrageous."

"I thought we were going to Talkeetna." The seat back sloped at forty-five degrees, and the shoulder strap forced her to recline. The relaxed posture was unnatural to her, especially now. "I expected to be there tonight, Charlie." It's only a hundred miles away.

"Surely you want to arrive home during daylight."

"It's not my home. I'll be staying at a hotel out on the Spur Road."

She couldn't imagine a hotel on the Spur Road, but the new lodge had almost a hundred units. After all Charlie's talk about running water.

King wriggled from her lap to climb across Charlie's. "Oh, no, you don't. Hold him, Ces."

The street was snowpacked already, Halloween still days away; the lights of the cars reflected off the slick surface. This is Anchorage? She remembered how it used to be. Everything glossier now, open country replaced by airport hotels. In the airline magazine, she'd seen some of what Prudhoe Bay had bought Anchorage. Performing arts center. Sports arena. A big city hardly twice the size of Grand Junction, Colorado.

Not far from the airport, Charlie turned up a side street and drove to a house at the end, against a forested hillside. The windows were unlit, but Francesca made out the shape of a real estate sign in the darkness. He reached for a garage-door opener over her head and pressed it.

"Is this your friend's car, too?"

"No, but I've been known to allow a trade. Tonight, we stay in the house."

Francesca decided the friend was female. "Whose house is this, Charlie?"

They were in the garage, the door going down. A truck with dog boxes sat in the other bay. No escape. King whined.

Charlie killed the engine, and she remembered his hands. Brown hands, strong hands. He patted the pockets of his jacket, checking for something, then removed the keys from the ignition. "It's Mia's place."

***

Francesca's legs wobbled on the steps from the garage up to the house. "Why did she keep a house in Anchorage?" And why do you have a key?

"Here, King." Charlie filled a food bowl and water dish.

"She wouldn't have come here often, not leaving her dogs."

"It was her ex-husband Chris' place. He left it to her a few months ago -- mainly, I think, because he forgot to change his will. But it's the kind of thing I might do for you someday, Cesca, in the event that you outlive me. No, don't move. I'll bring in your bags."

Francesca remembered when Mia had married -- and divorced, an event casually reported by e-mail. But Francesca had never met Mia's husband. So much she didn't know of this woman, who had served as her apprentice in Colorado so long ago. Since then, they'd corresponded in fits and starts, met twice at midwifery conferences. But between her dogs and her plane and working as a midwife in Talkeetna -- how stunned Francesca was by that choice, Talkeetna -- Mia had been tied to Alaska.

While the dog wolfed its food, Charlie slipped out to the garage. Returning, he set her bags on the linoleum.

Francesca asked, "Why aren't you looking for her?"

Charlie closed the garage door, studied the keys in his hand before placing them on the counter and beginning to lock up for the night. "It's dark. And it snowed the night she was lost and has every day since. But seeing that you brought it up, we'll be leaving early."

Charlie had been searching -- and planned to continue. Impossible to tell how he felt. All along, he'd treated Mia's disappearance more as an intriguing puzzle than the loss of a close friend. Mia was his next door neighbor in Talkeetna.

Charlie had lost many friends.

He followed Francesca, at a distance, as she walked through the house turning on lights. A nice dwelling, presented to sell. The living room contained just a few pieces of furniture, possibly leased, a framed watercolor of a moose among birch trees and a Native American carving of a seal. The bathroom was immaculate.

Wanting, needing to know more about Mia, she opened drawers. A hair dryer. A comb with a few tawny hairs still in it. A fat novel that looked as though it had been read in the bath. Francesca felt a knot form in her throat. She picked up the book. She wanted to take it, to read it, to know what Mia had been reading before --

Missing isn't dead.

But what about when a woman left the Village Airstrip on a snowmobile and didn't come home? There wasn't anywhere to go but lost.

Other drawers yielded nothing, no sign of Mia's belongings -- or her ex-husband's. "You said he left her the house? He's dead?"

"It would have been premature otherwise."

Just a few more hours, Francesca promised herself. Less than twenty-four hours, and she'd be rid of Charlie Marcus. Except that Talkeetna was so small. And he and Mia had been neighbors. And I can't plan on avoiding everyone I don't want to see.

No, she'd come to face people, not to hide.

"You're a million miles away."

The rhythm of his voice touched old chords, chords to accompany simpler melodies, idealistic folk ballads, and finally the blues of rock-and-roll, reaching into the vastness that was knowing. Ending innocence. It was the oldest chords that stirred her. She was years away, and his breath was at her shoulder, and she wanted life so different and wondered that, back then, the beautiful had held hands with the sad.

She'd traded it for edgy contentment.

***

The refrigerator was at least partially stocked. Someone had shot a caribou that fall and given meat to Chris or Mia, or maybe one of them had gotten the animal. The idea of eating red meat made Francesca queasy. It had been so long. She'd eaten a primarily vegetarian diet in Hawaii and Colorado, supplemented with occasional fish or free-range chicken. "Just a little for me, Charlie."

"You'll have to get over that up here, honey, or you're gonna starve. And freeze."

"I've dressed out a bull moose, Charlie Marcus." Her diet wasn't his business. Anyway, this time tomorrow -- no Charlie. "What are the police doing?"

"Well, they're looking." He tossed scraps to King, who sat waiting.

With a vengeance, Francesca sliced some cracked and mushy carrots from the refrigerator. "Have they been here, the police? Have they searched the house?"

"Francesca, there's no evidence of a crime -- or a death. She's missing. They're looking. That's what you do with missing people. Look for them."

"But it sounds so strange. Why would she leave her dogs like that, ready to get on her plane?"

"It looks like one of the dogs got away from her, and she jumped on a snowmobile to go find it." More scraps for King. "There were no tracks anymore, once people realized she was gone. It snowed, and the Village Airstrip isn't exactly hopping this time of year, especially after dark."

Francesca wheeled around. "Have the police questioned you?"

"Careful with that knife, Cesca. Me and every other single male in Talkeetna, and that's most of us, single, I mean. Actually, I was playing basketball that night."

"Have they asked why you have a key to this house?"

His lush eyebrows twitched attractively. "Not with such enthusiasm."

She brandished the knife.

"I told them what I told you. Now, now, Francesca, don't make assumptions. Imagine, after all these years . . ."

"It's your imagination. Tell me what possessed you to send Tara -- "

She dropped the knife. "Tara. I have to call Tara."

"Great. I'd like to say hello, too. I have a bone to pick with her." "Well, don't pick it now. She has enough on her plate." Francesca left the room, and he heard her shut the bedroom door behind her.

Tara had enough on her plate? Just what was on their daughter's plate?

Charlie frowned. A week ago, Tara had called and asked for money for a new car. A lot of money. She'd had a vehicle in mind -- told him the miles. Next he heard, she'd taken the money and gone off to Denver to car-shop. With a man. His daughter's taste in men had never impressed Charlie Marcus.

And Francesca was holding out on him. What was this stuff about "enough on her plate?"

He went into the office, pressed the mute button on the extension there, and lifted the receiver.

"Everything's fine, Mom. We're great."

What was that sound in the background? It sounded like -- oh. Right.

Tara had given him a story for this, too.

Charlie silently replaced the receiver and collided with his ex-wife outside the bedroom door. He caught her by the waist.

With barely a movement, she brushed away his hands. "What were you doing?" Her eyes drifted suspiciously toward the office.

"Trying to find out why our daughter's got a baby in her home."