Bill sipped her Coke. “Want another beer?”

Wy looked at the bottom of her now empty glass. “No. I’m just trying to put off going home.”

“Want some takeout?”

Wy brightened. Tim was notoriously susceptible to Bill’s fatburgers and greasy fries. “Make it two, and a double order of fries for Tim.”

Bill raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, all right,” Wy said. “Three.” Not that Liam Campbell deserved any special consideration in the way of meals. Or a roof. A roof it looked like he wouldn’t be under for longer than it took to pack for a move back to Anchorage.

“Hey, big spender.”

Wy looked around and a smile broke out across her face. It was a good smile; it displayed white teeth saved from perfection by overlapping incisors, crinkled the corners of her brown eyes, and seemed somehow to make her bronze-streaked brown hair curl out of its long braid even more than it already did. “Jo!”

The two women hugged. “What are you doing in Newenham?” Wy said. “I can’t believe your editor let you come down again so soon. Is there some story going on around here I don’t know about that theAnchorage News is crying out for copy on?”

“No, I just grabbed a couple of vacation days ’cause I could,” Jo said. She was a chunky blonde with intense green eyes and a short cap of curls. A newspaper reporter with the wit of Dorothy L. Parker and none of the nastiness, she’d been Wy’s closest friend since college and, for a few months, her sister-in-law. “Gary’s back in Anchorage.”

“Is he?”

“Yeah, he came down with me.” Jo didn’t look at Wy when she said this, thanking Bill for the draft beer instead. “Don’t worry; we’re not going to land ourselves on you-we’ve got a room at the Bay View. But we were hoping you’d have time for us.”

“Sure,” Wy said, and managed a smile. “Always time for you, Jo. And you wouldn’t be landing yourselves on me, either one of you. So long as one of you doesn’t mind sleeping on the floor.”