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will travel to the orphanage if I receive word that your daughter may be there.
    You mentioned dark brown hair and eyes? Would you happen to have a photograph of her?

    Sincerely yours,
    Jeremiah Hoglesby
    Private Detective for Hire

Three
    Alaskan blizzards were anything but predictable. Sudden starts appeared out of a clear, blue sky, catching off-guard folks going about their lives fishing or hunting or just walking across the street in town to catch the local gossip at the trading post. Other storms stole in, pretty like and soft with glittering flakes of a million shapes and sizes, only to turn nasty with deep cold and swirling winds that tore the roofs off houses and blew ice down chimneys. And then there were the times a storm started, sputtered and stopped, only to start again and blow for days, making the townspeople wonder if the wind knew its own mind. But always it seemed a living thing, alive and brutal and capable of most anything.
    Elizabeth had experienced a few blizzards in her lifetime; she was not totally unprepared for Alaska. And yet, something was different here. Nature reigned in Alaska, winter its king, not satisfied to borrow a climate for a few weeks or months of the year. No, here it ruled with a wildness that existed only in the lands of the Arctic Circle, and this recent wildness seemed somehow directed at her. The storm outside haunted her, invading her dreams, dogging her with its desolate moans,making her curl in a tight ball at night and cling to the edge of the narrow sofa with her arms pressed hard up over her ears. Like a mother who knows the subtle variations of her infant’s cries, Elizabeth grew to know the wind. Sad and then angry, mournful and then vengeful—extremes of intensity, much like her emotions these past days, tripping between peaceful serenity and restless unease, being trapped in this cabin with this strange-wonderful man. It lingered, this storm, not caring that it confined her in this loving place that made her want to run, run with the power and speed and flight of such wind. Would it ever end?
    At dawn of the fifth morning the storm stopped just as suddenly as it had started, leaving behind more snow than Elizabeth had ever seen and a kind of quiet that left an odd roar in her ears, making her wonder if something was wrong with her hearing. The cabin had been nearly buried in drifts, keeping Noah, a man who seemed afraid of nothing, busy for days shoveling a path between them and the animals in the barn, taking care of all their needs.
    Elizabeth lay on the sofa, slowly surfacing from sleep, looking around the bright room, hearing faint sounds of water splashing. She felt anxious but didn’t know why, her mind scrambling for a foothold. Sitting up, she looked about the room. There he was, at the dressing table beside the bed, shaving, his movements sure and steady, his stance strong. As soon as she saw his lathered reflection in the small, round mirror hanging beside his bed, the fear dissipated, as if her equilibrium had been righted.
    After a moment, the realization that he was the reason for her sudden calm sank in through the layers of comfortable denial. A deep unease settled in her stomach. She had allowedherself to become dependent on this man. She’d relaxed her guard and let him mean something to her. Sinking quietly back down into the warm covers, she sternly lectured herself, replaying in her mind the faces and ways humankind had failed her—thinking of Ross Brandon, then Margaret and Henry Dunning, then back further, face after face, until she saw the wraithlike image of her own mother, an image she never let herself see. She forced herself to recognize that here in this cabin, with this man, was a new kind of threat, one that could destroy her far more thoroughly than the others. She had to get away from him before she never wanted to leave.
    With new determination, she sat up on the sofa and tested her feet. They were much better, though