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Fifteen

"Where should we go?" Fred asked. "It's been a while since I've been foraging for food at this hour."

"All the Dumpsters usually are spoken for by this hour," Rose said. "But the Trattoria Mitchelli is open late and it's fairly quiet. Also, the garlic bread sticks are good if you're peckish."

"Peckish? Like an ostrich. Wanna split a pizza?"

"Now that you mention it, Paula did call before I could pop my Lean Cuisine dinner in the microwave. If you spend more hours on your feet, that means you've burned more calories and can pig out, right?"

"Hey, lady, watch it with that pig stuff," he said.

They exited the building together, out into a soft, chill drizzle that smelled of salt and was not unpleasantly cold. Overhead gulls wheeled and cried, and amid the occasional rush of tires on wet pavement, Rose heard the ferry whistle's deep tone far out on the Sound. Soft fog blanketed the Sound and muffled the mountains, swallowing the very tops of the tallest buildings.

The courthouse was only a short distance from Pioneer Square and as they walked past the brick pedestrian court-yards of the square, they saw benches filled with sleeping bodies, an occasional insomniac pigeon foraging on the ground beneath the trees. The round balls of the streetlights reflected back from the slick streets and sidewalks in long white streaks of light.

The totem pole in the little triangular park at the entrance to the square stood watch on a long line of benches, each with its sleepers, some with nothing but what they wore, some guarding hoards of trashy treasures in bags and shopping carts.

They walked in comfortable silence, hushed not so much from lack of anything to say as from the feeling that they were invading a vast, open-air bedroom. Once inside the darkened restaurant where soft lighting and the clink of glasses were enough to put Rose to sleep, conversation came more naturally.

Fred guided her to her seat with his hand light against the small of her back, a gesture she found more sexy than sexist. Before she had time to wonder about it and how nervous she ought to be after not having had a date in a long time, he said, "Funny, I think this is the first time I've been out for coffee socially since Heather and I broke up."

"George and Patrick and I brought Judy here for her termination party," Rose told him.

"Judy's gone?"

"Yeah, there's just the three of us and Bitsy Hager. You've already had the pleasure, I take it, from what you said over the phone."

"Well, indirectly. Catch me up, will you?"

She did, telling him about all the changes at the clinic since he'd left.

He gave a soft whistle. "Sounds pretty awful."

"It is. It's hard for us and it's brutal for the clients. We could sure use someone like you now."

"You could?"

"Of course we could. You were great with the clients, a great help to all of us."

His mouth quirked in a wry expression and his fingers played with the globe of the candle on their table. "Thanks. I was pretty clueless when I started."

"Nobody would ever have known from the way you acted."

He looked up from the candle, into her eyes. "I just watched what you did and followed suit." He shrugged.

"That's very flattering but it's also bull," she said. "I watched you before you even met me."

"Oh, you did, did you?"

"Yes, I did, and you were damned good. You always acted like you really gave a damn."

"I do," he said, still giving her the same kind of long, intent, listening look a counselor might give a client he was trying to understand. "So, you told me what the clinic's been up to, Rosie. How about you? What've you been doing?"

"Whoo boy, let's save that, shall we?" she said, thinking of the weirdness of the last couple of days. "I've mostly just worked, gone home, swamped out the house, petted the cats, and come back to work. You?"

"Got my master's in criminal justice and socioanthropology, quit my job with you guys to join the force just about the time Heather dumped me for an investment banker. I've been learning the ropes and earning my spurs, if you'll pardon the cowboy metaphors, ever since."

She gave him her own version of the patient, listening stare. He cooperatively allowed himself to be drawn out. He told her about his childhood, living in the bush in Alaska with a high school teacher father and a mother who had her doctorate in philosophy. "They never exactly treated me as if I was a child, more like I was their trapping partner or something. I got more discipline from our lead dog than I did from my mom. But it was a great way to grow up. When I was ten years old, they were killed in a bush plane accident on a trip to Fairbanks. I would have been with them but I had a bad earache and so I'd stayed with some Native friends."

Rose leaned forward and covered his hand with hers. "Jesus, Fred, what a terrible thing to happen."

"It just about killed me," he said, his eyes darting quickly to hers, then away, and his voice dropping. "I couldn't believe they were dead. I kept thinking they'd come back, and I wasn't about to let anybody make me leave. I had been driving dogs for a couple of years then by myself. Mom had started me with them from the time I was five. I'd known most of them since they were puppies and I was a baby. I hitched them up and we went looking for my parents. I loaded extra dog food, but it wasn't enough. Once we got started I couldn't seem to stop and I drove them on and on, down the frozen river, thinking that any time we'd see the plane, or see my folks snowshoeing over the next ridge, maybe hurt, but not dead, not both of them."

He shrugged and tried to smile to diminish the intensity of the memory, but the twist of his mouth and the raising of his brows didn't lighten his expression in the least."Lucky for me I had dogs instead of a snow machine. Dogs have more sense. The first time there wasn't food enough to go around they whined and howled that eerie yip-howl that malemutes have instead of a bark and went on strike. That brought me to my senses a little.

"I was maybe, I don't know, three days away from our cabin, and there was nobody else around. I had my Dad's rifle with me—Mom didn't like guns, in fact, she was a vegetarian most of the time, although she couldn't afford to be if Dad had killed a moose and the canned and frozen goods were running low at the village store between drops. She had a little garden and canned some in the summer, but the growing season is very short. Dad got her to carry a rifle on the sled, though, in case a moose or bear attacked the team. She'd shoot in defense of the dogs—or me—if not herself. So anyhow, I started hunting for food for the dogs, who were, of course, scaring away game for miles around with their howling.

"They weren't like the dogs in Jack London stories. These guys were spoiled pets, against the advice of all of our Native friends, and they were no more used to missing meals than I was. But like I said their howling scared the game, and the river was frozen too thick for me to be able to saw through the ice. I started snowshoeing away from them, out of range of their howls, so maybe I could find us a moose or a caribou. It was dumb, I know.

"I should have turned them. They'd have gone back, and it wasn't too hard to stay on course when you're running the sled on the river, like I was. Also, if I'd just stayed there, it was likely that somebody else with dogs or a snow machine or even a bush plane would have spotted me sooner or later. But I couldn't stay there.

"Before I had been sure I'd see my parents, and that kept me going. Now I was determined to get a meal for those dogs, so Mom wouldn't come back and think I'd been mistreating them. It had been pretty cold when I started. I hadn't minded too much because I was dressed plenty warm. But the weather suddenly began warming up and I got too hot and started peeling layers. I knew better, but I was in a funny state of mind then, kind of numb anyway.

"I didn't mean to discard my hat and mittens, but when they dropped out of my pocket I didn't pick them up. I peeled out of my snowsuit too, and I didn't want it to slow me down, so I hung it on a tree branch and just went on wearing jeans, long johns, two sweaters and my parka and mukluks. Then, of course, it started to snow. Heavy."

Rose said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

He held up his hands. The tips of the fingers were, she saw now, slightly discolored, whitish. "I was wandering around in circles, my hands stuck in my pockets, snow freezing to my face and hair as it came down. It sounds funny to say it, but I didn't mind. The ice on the outside matched the ice I felt inside, empty, hollow, abandoned and lonely as I'd never been in all the times I'd spent alone in our cabin while my folks went about their business back then. I stopped walking, forgot about the dogs, forgot about frostbite, didn't care anymore about my survival training. I wished to die or to see my parents, I didn't care which, but the way I felt then was just unbearable."

Rose swallowed hard and squeezed his hand.

"I would have died if it hadn't been for a woman who was passing by just then. At first I thought I had died and she was an angel, because her hair was white and iced up and flew like frozen ribbons around the edges of her parka's ruff, which was made from silver fox. She drove a team of malemutes and a sled piled with furs, and she tucked me into it. I felt even more strongly then that she was some kind of supernatural being, because I was so cold I couldn't even feel her touch.

"I wasn't so out of it, however, that I'd forgotten about the dogs. If this was heavenly rescue, then I didn't think a decent angel would let poor faithful dogs suffer for my neglect, and if it was human rescue, by a dog driver herself, she'd understand. I made her understand, through gestures and muffled shouts, that the team was down on the river. She nodded and drove in the direction I thought I had come from. My snowsuit marked the way and a short time later, her dogs began howling, catching the scent on the wind, and then my dogs began howling in response.

"The dogs jumped and made their 'woowoo' sound and licked at me as if I'd been gone weeks rather than hours, but I didn't have much energy for them. Then the woman did something I've never seen anyone do before. She righted my sled, knelt down and spoke to my leader, and then drove me on her own sled while my dogs calmly trotted along beside or behind her. She didn't take me back to the village. She took me to a cabin I never even knew was there. She didn't try to talk to me, or comfort me, but let me sit there in her cabin, and just watched to make sure that I never left except to feed my dogs. Sometimes we'd play games together, cards or dominos, but silently. I was in no mood for talking and I guess she knew it. I didn't want a stranger. I wanted my own folks. I guess she sensed that and just didn't force herself on me.

"Then one day there was a knock at the door and there stood my uncle Fred, the one I was named for, on snow-shoes, in a State Trooper's parka, but looking so much like my father that I was hugging him before I realized it wasn't him. It was okay, though. He held me and talked to me in a voice very much like my father's and I started crying, outside the cabin, crying so hard the tears and snot turned to ice on my face and my eyes stuck together. Then my insides began to hurt, burning . . .it's hard to describe except to say that it was a lot like the way my hands had hurt as they began thawing. We went inside and my uncle stayed the night there, but the woman was gone when we went into the cabin, and when I looked outdoors again, her team was gone too."

He let out a long sigh. "To make a very long story slightly shorter, we took the team back into the village and called for a bush plane. It picked us up and took us back to my uncle's and I lived with him and Aunt Karen, who was a social worker, like you, until I decided to come outside and go to school. By that time it was okay to be away from my own. And hell, Uncle Fred and Aunt Karen had a slew of foster kids. Uncle Fred always told me he didn't know what they'd do without me because I'd been brought up to be pretty self-sufficient. I could drive the team, make a fire, hunt game and fish, when I was in my right mind at least, and had even helped build additions on the cabin. They always made me feel like they were the lucky ones to get me, and I played big brother to all the other foster kids. Rosie, my uncle and aunt couldn't have and never tried to replace my parents, but I really grew to love them, and I wanted to be as much like them as I could. So that kind of explains my interest in both police and social work, I guess."

"Fred . . ."

"Yes?"

"You never found out who the woman was, did you?"

He shrugged. "Maybe I was right the first time. Maybe she was my guardian angel."

"Or your fairy godmother?"

He grinned. "Could be."

"You know, I have a friend you really should meet.""I'd like to meet a lot of your friends, Rosie," he said, reversing their hands so that he was squeezing hers.

But when she opened her mouth to tell him about Felicity, his beeper went off. "Damn. Gotta call in. Excuse me a minute."

She sighed and leaned back in the chair. The emotions his story, his eyes on hers, his touch, had sent tumbling through her were so turbulent she felt lightheaded. On the one hand, she didn't know whether she wanted to soul-kiss him or run from him, and on the other hand, she felt like she'd known him all her life and she had never been so comfortable having a personal conversation with a straight, unmarried, uninvolved male who actually seemed—no, was—interested in her. Maybe he'd tell her pretty soon he was HIV positive or only liked to do it with dogs or had actually become a Catholic monk; maybe she'd find out he told the same story to every woman he met (though he didn't have the demeanor of a womanizer from her experience, and she had had an unfortunate amount of experience back in her late teens and early twenties). But—she kind of didn't think so. She was terrified and filled with wonder at the same time.

He came back a short time later. "I need to go back in. The secretary at Clarke Academy definitely identified the letter as the one she saw and is pretty sure it was Hunter behind the goggles. But Rose, I . . ." He reached out and cupped her cheek in one hand and she covered it with hers.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "Me too." They exchanged a long look, then put on their coats and went back out into the cool, soft drizzle.

"Can I drop you somewhere?"

"No, I'll come back up to the station with you. There's a call I want to make."

While he returned to his desk and phone, she put in a call to Patrick—still no answer, so she resigned herself to sleeping on the call cot at the department—then, on impulse, dialed Fortunate Finery's number. Linden had always had her calls at the shop forwarded to her house, lest she miss a sale, since customers had the unfortunate habit of turning up sometimes on slow days only after business hours were over, during lunch, or before the shop opened. As Rose hoped, Felicity had continued the practice.

"Felicity Fortune here," the throaty Brit-tinged voice said.

"Felicity, it's Rose. I'm calling from the King County Courthouse. Tonight a friend of mine and I attempted to interview a murder suspect who behaved as if he thought he was a toad. Now, I know you said you don't punish people and"—she held her hand cupped over her mouth and the phone so no one except Felicity could hear her or read her lips—"you don't use any undue magic, but have you turned anyone into a toad lately, by any chance?"

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