Page 89 of Sergeant's Christmas Siege

Except she couldn’t deny that she liked knowing she was in Alaska Force territory now. That when Templeton nodded to her mother, then melted off into the dark, he wasn’t abandoning her. He was calling in reinforcements.

“How did you know where to find me?” Kate asked briskly as she led her mother down the cold street toward the Water’s Edge Café. Which was lit up and open for business, just as Templeton had said. She had clearly been too annoyed at him to see it on the way up.

“If it was a secret that there was a body in your plane, they probably should have kept it out of the papers,” Tracy replied.

“Since when do you read the papers?” Kate walked next to her mother, but not too close. She didn’t thinkTracy would take a swing at her, but you never could tell. “I would have thought you’d object to them on philosophical grounds. Heaven forbid you get current cultural ideas implanted into your brain.”

Tracy sniffed. “I keep telling you. Things change.”

When they arrived at the café, they weren’t the only ones there. Caradine—dressed in head-to-toe black, complete with thick black eye makeup, in case anyone was tempted to mistake her for an elf—scowled at them when they walked inside.

“Christmas prices,” she said without preamble. “No bargaining or bartering.”

“Is that double the usual?” Kate asked.

Caradine smirked as she swiped at her forehead briskly enough to make her dark ponytail bounce. “It’s whatever I say it is. Based entirely on how annoying you are.”

“Then I’ll be certain to be as annoying as possible,” Kate told her, because she was apparently irreverent now. “As a Christmas present.”

Caradine didn’t actually sneer, though Kate had never met another person who could give the impression of sneering without actually doing it. She stomped away, and Kate waved a hand toward the nearest empty table. Tracy took a seat.

Kate looked around the café. In one corner there were what looked like two couples, each with small babies—though the longer Kate looked, the less she could tell which configuration of couples was together, and whose baby was whose. There was a weathered old man sitting alone, but he was engaged in conversation with the rowdy table to his left. Kate recognized the harbormaster at another table. And a couple of other faces at yet another table that struck her as familiar, but they were hardy-looking men in outdoor gear, so she assumed they were local fishermen she might have seen in passing on the docks.

That made her mother and her the only tourists. Theonly outsiders, and given that Kate had been an outsider her whole life, no matter where she went, she couldn’t think of a single good reason for that to sit on her the way it did tonight. This wasn’t her home, no matter how comfortable she felt here.

“Don’t bother ordering anything,” she told her mother. “You’ll get what she gives you.”

Tracy sniffed again, but she didn’t argue. And Kate settled across from her, shrugging out of her coat to hang it on the back of her chair.

And she wasn’t surprised that her mother did nothing but stare back at her, silently. Because, really, what was there to say?

“How is your father?” Tracy asked. Also not surprising as an opening gambit. “You said you saw him.”

“He’s older.” Kate studied her mother’s face, looking for cracks. Clues. “Did he send you here?”

“I haven’t seen your father for years.”

“Yet, last I checked, you were still married to him.”

Tracy moved a bony shoulder. “Too much paperwork.”

Kate wanted to pepper her mother with questions, but that urge came from the daughter in her. Not the trained cop. So instead, she waited. Caradine stormed over and slammed down water glasses between them. Then a basket of bread.

Tracy made a production out of taking a thick slice, then buttering it as if she’d never seen either dairy or bread before.

The door to the café opened, and Bethan walked in. She looked dressed for a winter hike, not a battle, with her hair down. As if she were a regular person.

When she looked past Kate like they’d never met, Kate understood she was the reinforcements. Kate watched as Bethan and Caradine exchanged a total of three syllables, then Bethan took a table for herself.

And the fact that she was here made Kate feel a little lighter.

Almost as if wine and pasta in a cabin mattered after all.

“I told you five minutes, but now you have a whole dinner,” Kate said when Caradine came out with big plates for them, heaped high with prime rib, roasted potatoes, and roasted brussels sprouts. “Use it wisely. Why are you here?”

Tracy picked up her fork and pushed a roasted potato around on her plate. “I know you won’t believe this, but I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“You’re right. I don’t believe it. And if I was inclined to think you had that kind of sentimentality in you, the fact that it’s bubbling up now? On the fifteenth anniversary of the night I escaped you?” She shook her head. “I think we both know that’s not who you are.”

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