"Hello!" the crowd shouted back.

"We're here today to honor the memory of one of our own. You know who I mean."

"Dina!" they answered with one voice.

"That's right, Dina Willner. She died a week ago yesterday, and we'll miss her. But we'll never forget her. And this is why."

Kate primed the pump by telling the story of Dina teaching her to rappel. She told it well, keeping it light and at her own expense, and everyone laughed.

She was followed to the microphone by Mac Devlin, who glowered out at the crowd from beneath wiry red brows and growled, "God knows, Dina and me hardly ever agreed on nothing. She was a greenie from the word go, and I think the best thing you can do with a tree is cut it down and make something out of it somebody can eat off of or sit down on. But"—he fixed the crowd with a gimlet eye— "she weren't no stealth greenie. What she was and what she believed was right out front for everybody to see, and she fought clean. I won't go so far as to say I'll miss her, but I respected her." He added gruffly, "And she was a good friend to everyone in the Park, whether you agreed with her or not. My house burned down and she was first to step forward and offer me a place to stay until I got rebuilt. She was a good friend to the Park," he repeated. "Nobody can say better than that."

Kate eased from the stage as Auntie Vi followed Mac. "Alaka, that Dina," Auntie Vi said, and everyone laughed just from the expression on her animated face. "I remember that time of ANCSA and we all go to Washington, D.C., when Dina gets into a fight with the secretary of the interior. Ayapu, she thinks she's Muhammad Ali, that girl—"

Kate moved over to lean against the wall. "Here," Jim said, handing her a plate. "Eat."

Kate's stomach was still growling and the plate was heaped with all manner of good things, so she took it, but she managed to get her mouth so full that her "Thanks" was barely audible.

"You know that lockbox you beaned me with?" He watched her as he said the words. One of the minor annoyances with being hung up on someone with brown skin was she might be blushing and you'd never know it. "It had some interesting paperwork in it."

"Oh?" Kate said, her voice uncompromising in the extreme.

"Private paperwork."

"What kind?"

He looked down at her, mostly because he was almost two feet taller than she was. "Did you know Dina had been married?"