Page 3 of Smoky Lake

“I’m sorry, but I can’t say anything about that at this point. I will need your contact information in case we have more questions.”

Was it normal to be questioned in such a vague manner by a state trooper…after midnight? Maybe only in Firelight Ridge, when the sunset struck gold from the upper slopes and lit the clouds with colors ranging from indigo to copper.

She gave the trooper her cell phone number, with the warning that it often didn’t work here in Firelight Ridge.

“Will you be staying here at the lodge?”

She laughed at that, since the suites here were out of her price range. The only reason she had a room here tonight was that she was the doctor on call. “No, not normally. But the people here will know how to find me. Just ask for Charlie Santa Lucia.”

For some reason, she didn’t want to give the trooper any information about where she was staying, which was with her friend Lila in town. Lila lived in a converted hardware store that had just been linked to a second known murder. It seemed bad luck to invite an Alaska State Trooper anywhere near it.

As he left, he tossed one more question her way. “How are you feeling, Ms. Devi? I hope you didn’t pick up whatever Victor Canseco had.”

“Me? Oh, I’m fine. Everything’s normal.”

Which was an absurd thing to say, she decided as she closed the door firmly behind the trooper. This was Firelight Ridge. Nothing was really “normal.”

2

After a quick brushing of teeth and hair, Ani crawled into the bed Charlie had assigned her in an empty staffer’s room. What an insane day. The trooper was just the cherry on top. Before that, she’d rushed up the mountain with Lila and Molly to help out during a crisis. She’d treated two teenagers and a few guests experiencing anxiety symptoms.

Yup, never a dull day here in the Alaskan wilderness.

Outside the casement window, light still lingered in the sky, even though it must be past one by now. Since they were past solstice, the days would slowly get shorter, by a matter of seconds, then minutes every day. What a wild place this was.

Victor Canseco had said the same thing, she remembered…

* * *

“The wilderness can humble you fast, and that’s a damn good thing. I learned that in the field.” He rattled on at a fast-paced clip. “Question everything— your assumptions, your judgments, the framework through which you, you, see things. Don’t trust anything. Question, then question again.” His pupils were dilated, she noticed. Was he on something?

“Let me tell you something.” He leaned forward, and she eased back, wanted to keep some distance. “We’re not the center of the world the way we think we are. You and I know that more than others.” He’d gestured between the two of them, which she took to mean that they both had brown skin, though inherited from completely different parts of the world. “There are so many more ways to see things, and organize things, and, and, everything’s connected, and…”

He broke into a cough, and she noticed the glassy sheen in his eyes. Fever. No wonder he was ranting on about such abstract topics in response to her simple question about where he was headed.

“Maybe you shouldn’t try to talk,” she’d suggested gently. To emphasize the point, she’d handed him a plastic bottle of water.

At first he stared at it with suspicion, until she’d showed him it had never been opened.

“You’re an angel from goddamn heaven.” He twisted off the cap and swallowed half the water in one gulp. When he handed it back to her, he spilled some on her arm. She waved the bottle off—he could keep it—and dug in her purse for a sanitary wipe.

“I’m a talker, I get it from my mama. I got a friend in town, two friends, they’re twins, twin brothers, not identical. Do you know them?”

She couldn’t think of any twin brothers in Firelight Ridge. “I don’t think so.”

He leaned forward again. “They’re the only ones I trust. A little bit. You got it?”

“Umm…”

“Goddamn, this water tastes good.” He finished the bottle, but instead of tossing it in the trash, he tucked it into his crossbody bag. When he unzipped it, she saw it was stuffed full of paper and Ziploc bags. “Gil,” he said in a low murmur. “Gil. You can trust him. Okay? Give him a kilt and a claymore and he’d be a Highland warrior. Doesn’t hurt him with the women. I remember a time we were hiking out past Smoky Lake and…”

He trailed off, losing his train of thought, and wiped sweat off his forehead.

* * *

Gil.

That was the name Victor had mentioned, the one she hadn’t been able to come up with under the trooper’s hard stare. Maybe he’d mentioned Gil’s brother’s name too, but she couldn’t remember that one at all.

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