Page 48 of Thunder Pass

That was why she’d had a stomachache, she realized now. Always anxious. So anxious.

She uttered the sounds she remembered out loud, then adjusted them because they weren’t quite right.

“That’s it?” Gunnar asked.

She nodded. “As best as I can recall.”

He looked at the results on his phone. “Norwegian.”

Norwegian. Norwegian? Why on earth would Luke be speaking Norwegian to a strange man in their kitchen? “Play some more Norwegian. Like some curse words. I always thought Luke was cursing when he talked to the cows and horses.”

He found some Norwegian cursing. Some of it sounded familiar, but not all of it.

“Has Luke ever said anything about Norway?” he asked her. “Is it possible that he’s from there?”

“I don’t remember ever hearing the word ‘Norway.’ But I suppose anything is possible.” She shrugged helplessly. “But wouldn’t he have an accent if he was from Norway?”

“I’ve met a few Norwegians and none of them ever had much of an accent. “They sound British, if anything. Some of them sounded just like Americans. They learn English very early on there.”

This was all so strange, so surreal. “Is Chilkoot a Norwegian name?”

“Definitely not.” He performed another search on his phone, then read aloud. “‘Chilkoot comes from the Tlinkit, from the Chilkoot Trail, which was a passageway into the Wrangells that only they knew about until they decided it would be in their best interest to share it with Westerners for trading purposes.’ I bet Luke and Naomi adopted that name because it sounds Alaskan, so it made them seem like locals. They’re scammers, right? Didn’t it turn out that they were wanted in other states for fraud and so forth?”

She winced at the reminder. “I think those charges were dropped, but you’re right. In Firelight Ridge, no one cares what name you use. And they always treated it like a clan name rather than a family name. People who came to live with us would call themselves Chilkoots too. It’s like…”

“The Crips and the Bloods. The Sharks and the Jets.”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but she nodded anyway, since clearly he understood what she meant. “I wonder what their real name is? What my name is?” She gave a quick gasp. “Am I Norwegian too?”

Gunnar cocked his head at her. “I dated a Norwegian girl one summer, and she told me that I look Norwegian to her. She was surprised when I said I was just plain old American.”

“Maybe you’re Norwegian too. Where does the name Amundsen come from?”

“I don’t know. Dad never said anything about where we come from. He said his parents were both dead, and I don’t remember anything about any brothers or sisters either. It was always just us.”

“And Bridget?”

“Yeah, his first marriage and my half-sister, he talked about them, but I hardly saw Bridget at all. She’s a little older, and they lived in Seattle, and…” He scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck. “Fuck it. I’m going to Google my dad.”

His search for Anthony Amundsen turned up nothing useful whatsoever, unless his father doubled as a taxidermist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which, at this point, they couldn’t dismiss as a possibility. “Why does my father have to be such a damn mystery?”

“Is it because he was in the Special Forces?” Ruth wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but maybe you had to be very secretive to do that job.

“The hell if I know.” He tossed the phone back on the dashboard. “Even if Luke has some connection to Norway, so what? That doesn’t even tell us anything.”

Ruth felt the frustration rising from him like steam. “Maybe we’ve learned all we can here in Anchorage. Maybe we should get home.”

“It feels like giving in.”

“It isn’t. We have a mission, remember? Kelly asked us to find out who’s hanging out at the compound. After that we could go to Thunder Pass and look for your dad’s cabin.”

His face lit up. Gunnar, she realized, was someone who needed a concrete course of action—a quest. “Let’s do it.” He started the truck, which gave a roar as if it was just as thrilled to have a plan as Gunnar.

“Before we head back, can we make one more quick stop at the correctional center?” she asked. She had her own quest, after all.

At the Hiland Correctional Center, Gunnar waited in the truck, looking up facts about Norway, while she went in to see Naomi again. She had the drill down by now, and no longer felt that she needed an emotional bodyguard.

“You’re back,” Naomi said flatly, showing no emotion other than wariness. “Where’s your boyfriend?”

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