“Chris!” Bridie called from the kitchen. “Come and see this.”

Reindeer herd. Belugas. I thought I knew Alaska. Grampa Thor brought me up here to learn. “What’s a beluga?”

But the Raffsky girls had propelled her into the kitchen under their own power—a kitchen that was modern, metallic and pastel as a Ladies’ Home Journal double-page ad.

“Just throw your eye over that, would you,” Bridie said. Her gesture, as she indicated a mammoth cake—a Mount McKinley of a cake—amounted to a formal introduction. Iced in pink, with chocolate arabesques and pink flutings, it bore a message on its massive bosom. Welcome Thor and Christine. “There wasn’t room for another name,” Nancy explained, apologetically to Bridie. “We’ll bake another cake tomorrow, just for you.”

“Tomorrow! There’s food enough right here this minute to last fifty people a week. A turkey in the oven the size of an ox. You must have every room filled and everybody coming for dinner.”

“Roomers! We don’t cook for roomers. They eat at Lena’s Lunch down the beach, this is a dinner party for our friends to meet you,” Elinor said.

“I call that lovely. Isn’t that lovely, Christine! Who all’s coming, now?”

“The reindeer herder,” Chris began, blithely, “and two Princeton men and their wives—–”

“And Doctor Kramer from the hospital,” Nancy now added. She had opened the oven door and was basting the turkey. “And Mrs. Hoagland the Visiting Nurse, and Father Gilhooley—–”

“We know about him, don’t we, Bridie?” Chris said.

“—and Ross Guildenstern if he gets back in time but I don’t think so, and Bob Shelikov’s up from Klawock—–”

Now her recital of the guest list was muffled by a sudden whirring and clanking. Elinor had turned a knob.

“What’s that?” Bridie yelled.

“Electric dishwasher!” Elinor shouted. “That’s why we didn’t hear you when you came, it was going. Would you like a cup of tea or coffee now, dinner isn’t until six. And a piece of cake.” Then, as Bridie cast a look at the towering confection in the corner. “Not that one. That’s for dessert with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce. Though maybe if I cut you a little bit of a slice now, from the side …”

“I’ll wait,” Bridie decided.

Nancy seemed the more practical of the two. “Did somebody tell you where your rooms are, and everything? Mama never bothers. Sometimes people take a room and come back and find out somebody else is in it. You know which is your bathroom?”

“Not really!” Chris said. “Not our own—–!”

Nancy giggled. “No, Papa wasn’t that wild, anyway. But there’s one for the men and one for the women, and a separate john besides. Papa said he was going to have the most up-to-date place in the Arctic Circle.”

“He sure got it,” Bridie said. She peered into a pink-tiled and porcelain bathroom. “When your pa used to come to Baranof every year he used to tell me about you two girls, and Norman, and then he’d go on about how he was going to build everything up-to-date, and all of you were going to college. I knew he’d done like he planned, but I never dreamed it would be like this. Did you, Chris?”