Page 52 of Wind Valley

“I’ll try to contact them when we get to Fairbanks. I wonder how the investigator knew to come to Firelight Ridge?”

“Good question.” Her mood lifted. “My parents could have suggested trying here. If they did, that means the investigator is working for that woman’s lawyer.”

“Did they mention that in the email?”

“No.” Despair sank through her like a stone. She’d been so free…for a brief time. Now it was all crashing down around her. “The Hopper PD probably figured it out. They have all the resources and connections. I was an idiot for thinking I could just disappear.”

He reached for her hand, which was resting on her thigh, and enclosed it in his gloved one. “Hey, I’m glad you tried. There’s probably no other reason you would have come to Firelight Ridge.”

Surprisingly, she felt her lips curve in a smile. “That’s one way to look at it.”

They chose a hotel that Lachlan had stayed at before, the Freshwater Lodge, which catered to Denali visitors in the summer and truckers in the winter. He paid cash and signed in with his name alone, while Maura waited in the car near a side entrance. If luck was on their side, no one would even know she was there. In case there were security cameras, she buried her face in her scarf and tugged her hat all the way down to her eyes.

Good luck ID-ing that, she thought, wishing she could flip a middle finger at whatever camera might be recording.

Once they were inside the room, with the drapes drawn and the deadbolt in place, she nearly collapsed with relief onto the king-size bed. “Look at that giant TV. And that hot shower in there. Mini-fridge. Multiple outlets for charging my phone. An actual cell signal. Wi-Fi.” She let out a long breath, then sat up straight. “Wait. This is weird. I’m actually missing Pinky’s. I want to stoke a fire, like, now. I want to see if there’s a poopsicle in the outhouse. I want to make smoke rings with my breath in the living room.”

Lachlan laughed as he flung himself onto the bed next to her. “Firelight Ridge got to you, didn’t it?”

“I think it might have.”

“It has a way of doing that. Why do you think I keep coming back? jökulhlaups happen around the world, not just here. But there’s something about that place…” A moment later, she heard a soft snore from his side of the bed. She couldn’t blame him, after driving five hours in the dark. But she couldn’t help feeling wistful. There were so many other, better things they could be doing in this bed right now besides sleeping.

Then he rolled over onto his side and set a hand on her hip, and they spent the next hour or so doing a few of those very things.

Although Lachlan wanted her to stay in the hotel while he brought the wolf saliva samples to the lab, Maura knew she’d go crazy if she was stuck inside alone with her thoughts.

“No one knows we’re here. Besides, I feel safer with you than alone. Let’s not forget the saber-toothed tigers,” she told him.

So they went together to the University of Alaska. Spread across a hilltop, the campus was a loose collection of beige concrete buildings punctuated by the gleaming white curves of a structure that made Maura think of a swan nestling in a field of geese.

“That’s the Museum of the North,” Lachlan told her. “It’s worth a visit, someday when we’re not in a crisis.”

She briefly tried to imagine what that would feel like—to amble through a museum with no fear of who might be following her—and felt a longing so intense it left her breathless. Never again would she take for granted the simple pleasures of existence, like…well, simply existing.

In the halls of the Department of Biology and Wildlife, they kept getting stopped by people who wanted to talk to Lachlan. She hung back, trying not to draw attention, which was easy because all anyone wanted to talk about was someone called Victor Canseco and the recent discovery of an ancient virus.

Finally, they found themselves in a spacious research lab, where Lachlan pulled up a chair next to an elaborate-looking microscope. He extracted the baggies with his samples from the small cooler he’d brought along, while she hovered next to him. “Can I help?”

“Not yet. Hang on.” He was fully focused on what he was doing now, prepping the sample on a piece of glass that he then slid under the powerful light of the microscope. He peered into the eyepiece and adjusted the controls. “No sign of any virus or other organism that I can see. Want to take a look?” He pulled his face away and beckoned to Maura.

“Sure, but I wouldn’t know how to spot a virus.”

“You wouldn’t be able to see a virus, they’re too small for this type of microscope. But you’d be able to see damage from a virus. It’s called the cytopathic effect. All of these cells look normal. See for yourself, if you want.”

He cleared the way for her, so she set her eye to the machine and caught her breath at the sight of the weird shapes swimming against the light under the glass. “Those are cells?”

“Yes, and you can see that they are all intact and have similar shapes. They don’t appear to be swollen with excess fluid, or have any vacuoles—clear spaces. The nuclei appear to be intact, with no displacement or fragmentation. Whatever was going on with that wolf, I doubt it was a microbe. I’ll run an antibody test for rabies to make sure.”

She stared at the sample for another long moment, fascinated by the ability to look inside another being’s blood. It was a whole different universe in there. Surely it could tell them something, in its own strange language.

When she let go of the microscope, she saw that Lachlan was dialing someone on his phone. “Hey, it’s me, I’m here at the lab. One theory has now been disproved. There’s no sign of microbial damage in the blood sample we took. I’ll still run the antibody test, of course. But I think we need some new theories.”

He must be calling his buddy, the wolf expert.

Lachlan caught her looking, and put the phone on speaker so she could listen. “Did the wolf you saw have a glazed stare?”

Maura and Lachlan shared a glance. “Not really.”

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