The job wasn’t helping much, either. He and Prince had been hard at it for a solid month, responding to a series of burglaries, robberies and assaults aggravated by the rapidly weakening economy. It was the first practical lesson Liam had learned in the practice of law enforcement: It was easy to obey the law when your kids had full bellies. He understood, but it was not comforting to watch the lives of the people under his protection fall apart. Especially while he seemed to be helpless to stop the deterioration of his own.

Newenham, population two thousand, was a fishing town and regional market hub sitting on the eastern edge of Bristol Bay. It was built on a thick deposit of silt and clay washed down by the Nushugak River, and its topography consisted mostly of rolling hills covered with stands of birch and alder and fireweed and spruce clustered around houses with vinyl siding and trailers and mobile homes and log cabins with sod roofs and Quonset huts left over from World War II. There wasn’t a straight street downtown; a series of looping curves wound around that part of Newenham with delusions of grandeur, city and business buildings in all their prefabricated glory and even a town house condominium complex sitting at the edge of the river overlooking the small boat harbor. A forest of masts of varying heights crowded the slips like nursing piglets, their backs to the bay and another bad fishing season. By February only a quarter of their skippers would have filed for bankruptcy, if the town was lucky. Meanwhile, they were all drinking their misery away, and their good sense with it.

Wy could have offered some solace, some counsel, he thought, taking a corner too fast. Instead she had withdrawn behind a façade that was as cool as it was irritating. Anyone would think she didn’t care if he went or stayed. Anyone would think that she was just waiting for him to screw up so she’d have the opportunity to kick him out.