Midnight come again Read Online Free PDF

seen her since before Christmas," Mandy said. "I went over to invite her for Christmas dinner.

    She wasn't there."

    "Did it look like she'd been there recently?"

    The musher spread her hands, worried down to the elegant bones of her Boston Brahmin face. "You know what a neatnik she is. It's hard to tell sometimes if anybody's ever lived there." Chick put his hands on his roomie's shoulders and squeezed. His eyes met Jim's. He gave a tiny jerk of his head.

    "Yeah, I know what you mean," Jim said, and drained his mug. "Thanks for the coffee, Mandy." He got to his feet and donned his cap. "I better get a move on."

    "Jim?" He paused at the door, looking back over his shoulder.
    Unconsciously repeating Dinah's admonition, Mandy said, "Find her." "I will," he said, although they were talking Kate Shugak here. If Kate Shugak wanted to be lost nobody was ever going to find her, and they both knew it.
    Still, Mandy added, "And Jim? When you do, kick her butt for me, good and hard."

    He touched the brim of his hat and gave his first real smile of the day.

    "My pleasure." The sound of the door closing behind him was lost in the howling that ensued when he stepped outside. There were tens and maybe hundreds of dogs chained to tree stumps across a couple of acres of yard, all of them yapping in a cacophony that would have drowned out even Bobby Clark. He threaded a careful path through the pack and walked back up the trail to where the truck was parked in the pulloff. He opened the door and sat sideways on the seat, arms folded across his chest, watching a squirrel stuff her face with spruce cone seeds, the individual petals of the cone raining down in a tiny shower of debris, her cheeks pouched out like an overstuffed purse. She was an efficient if messy eater.

    There was a rustle in the branch above, and they both looked up to see a magpie fold his black-and-white wings, the branch bouncing lightly beneath his weight. The squirrel dropped the cone and scampered up the branch to the trunk, up the trunk to a higher branch and leaped to the next tree. The magpie gave a grating squawk, and swaggered down to take the squirrel's place. It was loaded with pinecones bursting with seed, the reason the squirrel had chosen it.

    "Greedy guts," Jim said.
    The magpie paid him no mind. He was an even messier eater than the squirrel.

    A few minutes later Chick came trotting up. "Let's talk quick," he said.

    "She thinks I'm in the outhouse."

    "You know something?"

    "Just that I saw Kate after Mandy did," Chick said. His face was round as a melon and as brown as a walnut, with dark hair flopping into his narrow brown eyes.
    Kate had hair like that, a thick, shining fall as black as an October night in the Arctic before the first snow. "When did you see her?"
    "The second of January. You know Kate lets us run teams across her property?" Jim nodded. "So I was on a training run and I dropped in.

    What with everything that happened last year, we've been keeping a closer eye on her than usual. You know." Jim nodded again. "Well, she was there."

    "Was she packing to go somewhere?"

    "I don't think so." Chick paused.

    "What? Tell me, Chick."
    "She didn't invite me in," Chick said. He didn't like saying it, didn't like acknowledging the fact that Kate Shugak was in such bad shape she couldn't even keep to the rule of Bush hospitality, especially in January.

    Jim took his hat off and studied the trooper insignia with care. "Chick, were you sober by the time she moved back from Anchorage? After she killed that baby raper and quit the D. A.'s office?"

    Chick frowned, unoffended by the reference to his chronic alcoholism.

    What was, was. "Yeah."

    "You remember what she was like then?"

    Chick did, and he didn't like it. The frown deepened. "Yeah."
    "Was she better or worse than that this January?" Chick thought.
    "Worse," he said finally. Their eyes met. "A lot worse.

    That's why I didn't tell Mandy I'd stopped by." His shoulders gave an uneasy