Dodge pulled out his phone and listened to the voice mail left by the unknown caller. “Hello. This is Sissy Oolanie from Alaska Regional. I thought you’d like an update on the woman you brought in.” She left her number.

He checked his watch. Still six hours of daylight. Plenty of time to get home and get to Echo’s place.

Fine. Heading back upstairs, he tried to call Echo, but her phone went to voice mail. Yeah, it bugged him.

He found the second-floor nurses’ station and gave his name, asking for Sissy. She was the nurse on call, a middle-aged Native woman who brought him down the hall to a woman’s room.

“She’s out of danger with her hypothermia, but she hasn’t woken yet, and we don’t know why. We thought if she heard a familiar voice . . .”

“I don’t know who she is. I just found her.”

Sissy looked at her notes. “It says here to contact you in case of emergency.”

“I didn’t want her to be without anyone.”

Nurse Oolanie gave him a smile. “Okay. Do you want to see her? Maybe you’d recognize her?”

He doubted it, but maybe. She led him into the room.

She looked better, of course. Less pale, her blond hair swept back from her face. She was pretty, early thirties, maybe five three, and caught in a deep, exhausted slumber, the covers pulled up around her. She wasn’t hooked up to a breathing machine, just an IV in her arm.

“The doctor ordered an MRI. She might have had a traumatic brain injury—we just don’t know. She should have woken up by now.”

“If she does, and you haven’t located next of kin, let me know.” Then Dodge headed out to his chopper, hopped in, and headed home.

The sun had fled to the backside of the day by the time he set down at Sky King Ranch, darkness quickly seeping over the land. He got out, and his father met him, coming out of the house. The wind had whipped up, the edge of a cold chill headed down from the mountains. Dodge turned up his collar.

“Hey!” he shouted over the wind.

“How’d it go?” his father asked as they headed to the Quonset and retrieved the ground-handling wheels.

His dad grabbed one, Dodge the other, and they brought them back out to the chopper. “Good. Nola had her baby. A boy.” He attached the wheel to the skids, then walked over as his father was trying to fit the wheel assembly into the notch. He missed, then finally wiggled the assembly in.

Weird. It was starting to seem like his father might be losing his touch.

Then again, he was working one-handed.