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What used to be the storefront of the hardware store was now the living room. Its cozy twin armchairs offered a view of Pioneer Boulevard and everyone coming and going. Tempting, but Molly decided the best thing she could do was let Lila have the space to herself.
She’d go see Bear, she decided, and offer herself up as a replacement for Lila. It had been a while, but she’d bartended her way through law school. It would come back to her. She definitely remembered the part about showing some cleavage for better tips.
At The Fang, she found Bear in the kitchen prep area behind the bar, stirring a massive pot of chili. He quirked a dark eyebrow at her in greeting.
“Lila’s feeling under the weather and needs to call in sick. If you need a fill-in, I can do it. I tended bar all the way through law school. I can muddle up a mojito like nobody’s business.”
“Can you work a tap? That’s all it really takes here,” he said dryly. “But no need. I’ll cover.”
“Are you sure? Seems like you might, I don’t know, scare away the customers.”
His big body shook with laughter. “That would take an actual bear, and probably not even that.”
Bear reached one long arm to the refrigerator—so old it had rounded corners and gave off a constant loud hum—and flicked open the door. He extracted a Tupperware container and handed it to Molly.
“Chicken soup. Family recipe, never fails. It’s for Lila.”
She was so touched that she didn’t tell him that Lila wasn’t suffering from a virus or anything else that could be helped by soup. “Thank you. That’s really sweet of you.”
“Need her back asap,” he growled and turned back to his pot of chili.
On her way out the door, she turned back. “Did you hear about Daniel, the plow truck driver?”
“Ayup.” He didn’t look up from his chili. “Good man. Bad choices.”
Bad choices? That made it sound as if Daniel had somehow brought his accidental death by avalanche on himself. Maybe he had, if he’d driven down the wrong road at the wrong time, or failed to pay attention to the warning sounds. But somehow Molly got the impression that wasn’t what Bear meant.
14
Deciding she needed to be fully prepared for tonight’s dinner, Molly took her phone to the general store and asked for the Wi-Fi password along with her purchase of insanely high-priced orange juice for Lila.
“How’s she feeling?” asked the same Filipino woman who’d been at the register the last time. Molly wondered if she just worked all the time, and guessed that she probably did, to save on labor costs.
“Lila? I guess word gets around.”
“She’s a good one.” She shot Molly a sidelong glance that seemed to imply that Molly had not yet earned such affection, and likely never would.
“She sure is. I’m Molly, by the way. I’m an old friend of Lila’s.” Maybe that would win her some points, or some extra WiFi time.
“Kathy. Wi-Fi password is ‘stayoffmyWifi.’” She slid a scrap of paper across the counter, with exactly that written on it. “You have one half hour, no more. You can sit over there.”
Kathy gestured at a straight-backed chair wedged next to the freezer. Clearly she wasn’t trying to make anyone comfortable while they used the Wi-Fi.
Molly had grown up doing her homework in the bathroom at night, where she’d sit on the seat and use the tank as a desk. She could handle discomfort.
“Thirty minutes. Should we synchronize our watches?”
Feeling proud when she won a smile from the empress of the general store, Molly settled into the chair and pulled her iPad from her bag.
Her first search on the name Chilkoot told her about the famous Chilkoot Trail, which connected Alaska and British Columbia and enabled Gold Rush stampeders to reach Alaska. It had been a trading route closely guarded by the native Tlingit, but they’d eventually allowed others to use it.
So Chilkoot was a Tlingit name, although now it brought to mind images from the Gold Rush. Luke Chilkoot certainly hadn’t looked Tlingit. He looked like a grizzled gray-haired man with roots in Scotland or maybe Kentucky. A white man, in other words. Had the family adopted the name Chilkoot for their own reasons, or had they come here from that part of the world? This was Ahtna territory, not Tlingit.
She kept looking, doing searches for the Chilkoot family, Chilkoot clan, Luke Chilkoot, Ruth Chilkoot, and anything else she could think of.
The only reference she found was from a personal blog called “WanderWorld,” in which a young woman from Oregon posted about her hitchhiking adventures around the world. She’d stopped in Firelight Ridge for a bluegrass festival that took place every year in July. One group in particular had caught her attention.
So weird, she posted. I tried to record a video of them performing and some creep came up to me and told me to delete it. I asked why and he said because the Chilkoots don’t believe in social media. I said, it exists whether they believe in it or not. This guy literally grabbed my phone out of my hand and deleted the video. Then he scrolled through all my pics and deleted everything I’d taken from the whole show. Rude! I said I was going to report him to the police and he just laughed at me.
