Ulanie snarled.

Better, in front of all the shareholders at the January meeting.

The slamming of the boardroom door shook the entire building.

Kate looked at Annie. You think she heard anything I said?

Annie smiled and shook her head. Kate?

What?

Are the Grosdidier boys performing abortions in that clinic of theirs? Kate thought back to that morning. If you‘dcome here right away, Matt had said to Phyllis. Not abortions, no, but if you made me guess, I say they have morning-after pills available.

Annie was silent, and Kate was forced to ask the question. You got a problem with it if they are, Annie? Alaska‘s a pro-choice state. We legalized abortion a year before Roe.

I‘m hazy on the relevant law, Annie said. Can EMT-2s do abortions? Licensed MDs only, in a state-approved hospital or facility.

Correct me if I‘m wrong, Annie said, but we got the clinic approved by HHS last year. The argument to do so was in the remote possibility that a surgical procedure was necessary, if for whatever reason we couldn‘t get the patient out of the Park to a hospital. Doc Oc signed off on it.

Doc Oc was Dr. Octavius Francesco Botticelli, an Italian-American transplant who had moved to Ahtna from Philadelphia twenty-five years before. He‘d married a Park rat, opened a clinic, and settled in for the duration. A recognized authority on Alaskan maladies from alcoholism to tuberculosis, he sat on the state medical board and had personally overseen the construction and staffing of the Ahtna General Hospital.

Kate smiled. I remember. He said it was the best-equipped clinic he‘d ever seen, and that he could perform anything in it with the possible exception of open-heart surgery, and he wouldn‘t even rule that out. She shrugged. You know how he talks. He called the boys docs in a box. But he was pretty impressed. He signed off on it the first day and he rammed it through the state medical board in a week. Well, Annie said. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

We should have expected this, Kate said. Or something like it. There are always going to be people like Ulanie, thinking the world has to run on their clock. You can‘t think of everything, Kate.

Emaa could, Kate said.

You‘re not Ekaterina, Annie said, and smiled to take the sting out of her words. Kate stacked the papers in front of her into a loose file. What‘s next, do you think? She gonna go after those abnormal godless homos Keith Gette and Oscar Jimenez? Now that, Annie said, very firm, is seriously not allowed. Their basil makes the best pesto in the world, and I will not have that meddled with.

Good point, Kate said. I wonder if Ulanie‘s into pasta.

Annie saved the minutes, closed her laptop, and sat back to regard it with a thoughtful frown. You were right to challenge her. I don‘t say you couldn‘t have done it with a little more tact, but it had to be done. You had to slap her down, hard.