stay with you while I take Graham back to the lodge and maybe consult with the sheriff about this."
"Not yet!" she insisted. "Once we get Sheriff Moran involved, there's no going back. Everyone will be questioned, maybe accused, and just lie or clam up and we can't prove anything yet. You saw how Gus reacted to the sheriff's interrogation."
"Yeah, up close and personal. I had to go into Bear Bones last night before he broke up a bar. So, can you sleep? I'm going to call Christine from your room phone, then sit right here until she arrives. When I can get you out of here, Spike, Christine or I will be with you 24/7 until we get to the bottom of this. And I'll hold off on the sheriff--for a little while longer."
"Mitch, thank you. As awful as some of this has been, at least we patched up our past differences a bit."
"Enough to manage the present, but what about a future?" Again, he lifted his hand from her shoulder to stroke her face with the backs of his fingers. "Sweetheart, Graham says you're still in the running for senior partner, and he wants to fly you back to Lauderdale so he can really take care of you."
"Past time for Lisa to get some sleep now," a nurse said as she bustled into the room. "I told your friend out in the hall one visitor was enough right now."
"Out in the hall, maybe trying to listen?" Lisa whispered. "Mitch, I--"
He put two fingers over her lips. "Thanks for coming back into my life, to remind me what I've missed, what I've screwed up. Despite how I handled things last year, I still love you, Lisa," he whispered.
She sucked in a breath. Her sight blurred with tears, making two Mitches bending closer, two nurses hovering. It was the first time in days--years--that, looking through any sort of wavering water, she had been blessed and not cursed.
He kissed her cheek, then her lips, and stood. "Her skin feels almost normal again," he told the nurse, who was pretending not to look.
"Then," she said with a little smile, "that's a better test she'll be fine than all the other ones we've run. If her heartbeat's a bit erratic, I'll tell the doctor I know why."
Lisa swam up, up from heavy sleep. Before she even opened her eyes, she remembered where she was. Really remembered, without slipping back into the nightmares of fighting the rushing current, of drowning...or of losing her mother and sister...of losing Mitch. Above her head she saw not roiling white water, but a calm white ceiling with pock-marked patterns in it. Yes, she knew where she was and what she had to do. Get better. Return to the lodge. And drag some monster she once thought she could trust out of his or her hiding place into the light.
She started when Christine's face popped up over her.
"Good, you are awake," she said and patted her arm. "Mitch will be back soon and tomorrow, they say, maybe you can go home from the hospital. But where is home now, right?"
"Thanks for staying with me. How's Spike?"
"More than ever convinced that someone meant to hurt Ginger."
"I'm just hoping she wasn't murdered because of what she saw the day I was pushed in the river."
"If she saw something that evil and didn't come forward with it right away, then she had her own reasons, her own part in what happened to her. Lisa," Christine said, sitting in a chair where she must have been waiting at her bedside, "I have something for you. It is something more than belief you did not harm yourself, something more than good wishes for you and Mitch, because I see how much he needs you--like I know now I need Spike."
Lisa nodded. She had come to admire this strong woman she had at first mistrusted. It was just the opposite of how she'd shifted her feelings toward her law firm colleagues.
Christine reached for something on the floor. Paper rustled, then she held up one of the Yup'ik dolls from the shelf in the lodge library. It was the worn one, the young girl with a half-woven basket in her hand, the one Christine had confided had been given to her mother to replace a lost sister.
"For you," Christine said, putting the doll with its fur parka and carved wooden face into her hand on the bed. "To help you have only good memories of those you