Dodge looked at him. Right. So much for promises. “Black and bracing.”

Echo picked the wrong day to emerge from hiding.

Not only had the temperatures soared to nearly the forties, turning the snow to mush, the roads to mud, and the rivers dangerous, but this day, of all days, her dreams turned out to mock her.

“Who are you rooting for?”

The question came from Vic, who handed her a mug of hot cocoa and a basket of greasy fries as Echo sat at the bar of the Midnight Sun Saloon, trying to ignore the broadcast of the annual start of the Iditarod, the famous thousand-mile trek on dogsled from Anchorage, or thereabouts, to Nome, Alaska.

Outside, the sun fell along the backside of the day, still three hours from darkness but low enough for shadows to lurk along the main street of Copper Mountain. The heat wave had brought out the locals and other homesteaders, and around her, the saloon was hopping. The Bowie brothers, all four of them, played foosball in the back, and Goodwin Starr was holding an arm-wrestling contest near the front. The booths were filled with gold miners, climbers, and homesteaders, not to mention local mushers, who’d arrived to watch the flat-screen.

She probably should have headed straight home after filling her grocery order and propane tanks, but her father wanted to order parts for his 1978 Ford pickup, so while he talked with Otto at his shop, she’d headed over to the Midnight Saloon.

She hoped that was all her father was doing. He’d been dry for nearly sixty days now, so maybe it would take.

It might have been better for both of them if they’d stayed home, but she needed to pick up seeds to start under the grow lights. And besides, they were running out of a few staples—flour and sugar, and she’d indulged in a box of Lucky Charms.

Just because.

But with the racers whooping across the television screen, it just dug a trail through her chest.

Once upon a time . . .

“I don’t follow the race,” Echo said to Vic’s question.

Vic wore a Midnight Sun sweatshirt over her bulky body, her thin blond hair tied back. Echo had once seen Vic leap the bar and break up a massive all-bar fight with a baseball bat and her bare hands. A true Alaskan woman, although they came in all sizes and shapes.

Sometimes she wished she was as tough as Vic. A former cop, Vic had come up from the Lower 48 some thirty years earlier and opened up her tiny bar and grill on the road leading into Denali State Park, the last outpost of food and drink before hikers, climbers, and all manner of tourists lost themselves in the last frontier.

Vic was hearty, brave, and tough. Most of all, she knew how to survive.