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disloyalty. It was progress. Her father had always been for progress. At least she thought so, being as how he'd died when she was seven, and while she had many memories of her father, that wasn't necessarily one of them.
     
    A freezer. What would Emaa have said?
     
    Kate hoped her grandmother would have hated it. She hoped Emaa would have said disapprovingly, "A cache was good enough for your father, Katya, and it was good enough for me." But even though she hoped it, she wouldn't have bet on it since Emaa's house had been the first one in the village wired for electricity.
     
    She laughed suddenly.
     
    "What?" Johnny said.
     
    "Just promise me you'll never become a professional againster," Kate told him.
     
    He gaped at her. "A what?"
     
    "Never mind," she said, and they pulled into the schoolyard.
     
    They emerged an hour later with a fistful of papers, which Kate immediately consigned to the glove compartment. "Or a school administrator," she said, and they drove to Auntie Vi's and knocked on the kitchen door.
     
    Auntie Vi opened the door and promptly closed it again.
     
    Kate sighed. "Auntie, open up. I promise not to cook anything or wash anything or fix anything." She eyed the porch roof. "Or take a paintbrush to your soffits," she said in a much lower voice.
     
    The door opened again. "What you here for, then?"
     
    Kate nodded at Johnny, duffle in hand. "I need a place to park the kid for a week or so."
     
    An arm reached out, snagged Johnny by the collar, and hauled him into the house. The door closed firmly behind him.
     
    "Thanks, Auntie," Kate said to the door.
     
    Mutt was already in Johnny's seat when Kate got back to the truck. "At least you still love me," Kate told her.
     
    "Woof," Mutt said consolingly, and Kate drove to the airstrip. George was gone, and so was the Cessna. Okay, it was another twenty miles to the Roadhouse. When she walked in, Bernie hid the bar rag.
     
    "It's okay," Kate said, "I'm looking for information, not Mr. Clean."
     
    "And no more counselors. I'm not sharing with anybody else how I feel. Is that clear?"
     
    "It’s clear."
     
    "I don't want to hear any more about that goddamn house, either," he said menacingly, or as menacing as Bernie Koslowski, the mildest of the race of mild-mannered ex-hippie draft dodger-saloonkeeper-basketball coaches could get. "We built it. You're living in it. Deal with it."
     
    Kate patted the air with her hands. "I come in peace for all bear kind."
     
    He examined her suspiciously, and when she made no sudden moves toward the push broom, he relaxed, sort of. "Bear kind?"
     
    "Has Kurt Pletnikoff been in lately?"
     
    Bernie shrugged. "As much as anyone during fishing season."
     
    "Has he been keeping out-of-town company?"
     
    "Come on, Kate," he said. "You know I don't like to gossip about my customers behind their backs."
     
    "I promise you, Bernie," she said, "you're going to have a lot more customers of the federal kind if you don't help me now. And they won't be as polite and refined as I am."
     
    He snorted. "More business for the bar."
     
    "Not from the locals, if Kurt continues to decimate the bear population."
     
    "Who says he is?"
     
    "No one," Kate admitted. "But according to Jim Chopin, there are degallbladdered bear carcasses all over the Park. And we all know what that means."
     
    Bernie would rather by far be on Kurt Pletnikoff's bad side than Kate's. She never forgot and she never forgave, and she was related to half of his customers and had in one way or another helped out most of the other half. Besides, Kurt s tab was at five hundred and counting, and Bernie wasn't in the business of loaning money. "Kurt was in here a week ago."
     
    "Alone?"
     
    "He had company, looked to be of the Asian persuasion. One man, late fifties, I'd say. He had plenty of hair, but it was all gray." Bernie smoothed back a nonexistent hairline that ended in a long gray ponytail tied back with a strip of leather.
     
    "You know