KANE AWOKE WITH A START, THE HAIRS ON THE BACK OF his neck standing upright, his hands groping for a weapon. Then he remembered he didn’t have one. If I’m going to do this for any length of time, he thought, I’m going to have to get over my qualms about guns.

That’s the thing about living in the world. So many problems to deal with. Life in prison was simpler. He was beginning to understand why so many cons did things that got them jugged again.

His eyes scanned the room, finding only darkness in varying shapes and depths. His ears sought sounds and heard only the soughing of his breath and the hammering of his heart. He lay there breathing deeply and waited for his pulse to slow. When he was calmer, he unzipped his sleeping bag, put his bare feet on the hard, cold floor, walked across the room, switched on the lights, and looked around.

The little cabin looked like a cave that bears had been wrestling in. Before turning in, Kane had moved the bed out of sight of the remaining window, shoving a chair and small table haphazardly out of the way. There was a short curtain on that window, but nothing to keep someone from looking in to find a target. He’d searched the cabin for a better covering and, finding none, had settled for stuffing the cushions from the chairs into the window opening. Then he’d wedged the door shut, unrolled his bag, undressed, and crawled in. He lay there thinking about how he’d get out of the cabin if somebody set fire to it. Just when he decided he was too wound-up to fall asleep, he did.

Satisfied that there was no immediate danger, Kane put on a polypropylene union suit and socks and started a fire in the wood stove. Then he walked into the tiny bathroom and stood eyeing the phone-booth-sized metal shower stall. The electric water heater that stood next to it was warm to the touch, so he decided to risk it. He stripped off his clothing, turned on the water, and, clenching his teeth, walked into the stall. He showered in tepid water, toweled off, and got dressed. Only then did he think to look at his watch. It was five-thirty a.m., far too early to do much of anything in the way of detecting.

There was no stove in the kitchen, and no refrigerator, either. Cooking was done on the wood stove, he decided, and there was probably a trapdoor somewhere in the cabin floor over a hole in permafrost that served as a cooler. They haven’t given me the VIP quarters, he thought, and laughed. More likely they figured a guy just out of prison wouldn’t be comfortable in anything fancy.

He rummaged in the single cupboard, found a small pot, and filled it with water. He carried it over, set it on top of the wood stove, and waited. When it started to boil, he rinsed his traveling mug with hot water to warm it up, then poured coffee into a one-cup dripper, set it on the mug, and poured water through it. Just one day in Rejoice, he thought, and I’m already breaking the rules.

He carried the cup into the bathroom and balanced it on the edge of the tiny sink. He filled the sink with water and shaved, maneuvering his face so he could see it in the scrap of mirror, alternating razor strokes with sips of coffee. When he finished, he examined the result. Even without the scar, not much chance of being chosen as Brad Pitt’s stand-in.

He went back into the living room and made himself another cup of coffee. The beans were Guatemalan, bought from an Anchorage roaster, and the brew that resulted was, Kane decided, what they served for breakfast in heaven. Good coffee was one of the things he’d really missed in prison, along with, oh, everything else. He was happy to be able to indulge in small pleasures again.

He sat on the bed and read through his notes, took out a legal-sized tablet and pencil, and began sketching. He put Faith Wright in a box in the middle of the page and started a connections matrix. The problem was, everyone was connected to her somehow, and connected to everyone else for that matter.

He flipped the page over and tried doing the same with himself, to see if he could limit the field of people who might have shot at him. But once he put in the names of the Council of Elders and the people he’d interviewed the day before, he saw that he had the same problem: too many possibilities, too little information. Rejoice had had plenty of warning he would be here, so anyone who didn’t want him to find Faith could have been behind the attack. Especially since all they had to do to find him was look at the map in the community hall.

Of the people he’d talked with, only those away with the basketball teams could be ruled out. And that wasn’t even counting the people at the mine who knew he was here or, for that matter, the “rough element,” who no doubt had heard, especially after his performance in the bar. He couldn’t even be one hundred percent sure that the attempt was connected to his search for Faith.

Faced with nothing but dead ends, his mind slipped off to other matters. He thought about making himself breakfast, but all he had was oatmeal and a few freeze-dried meals. He could do better than that at the cafeteria. But he knew his real reason for going there was the hope he’d see Ruth Hunt again. He thought about her for a while, searching for something not to like.

“Well,” he said to the empty room, “there is the fact she’s married.”

Kane knew he shouldn’t be thinking about the wife of one of his employers in quite the way he was, but decided he just didn’t have the mental discipline to stop. Laurie’s decision to leave had left a vacuum inside him that feelings for Ruth were rushing to fill. He’d tried steeling himself against such feelings, but a few moments standing alone with Ruth in the cabin and his willpower had just run out. Well, he thought, I’ll just have to have the feelings, do this job, and leave without acting on them. I did seven years, I can do this.

He thought for a while about Laurie without, as usual, getting anywhere. Her departure still seemed as random as a lightning strike. He knew that living with him was no day at the beach, but she’d put up with him for so long, and stuck with him all through his prison term, that he’d thought they’d be together forever.

But she was gone from his life and she wasn’t coming back.

He wrenched his thoughts from that channel and began thinking about Rejoice. He supposed its government was something between feudalism and monarchy, with elements of theocracy and the New England town meeting thrown in. Or was that the way to think about it? Maybe it was just its own thing, a community shaped in part by its beliefs, in part by its circumstances. Primitive because its conditions were primitive; fundamentalist because its members’ beliefs were fundamentalist. Still there after forty years because of the stubbornness of those beliefs, compounded by misin-formation about the outside world and a growing economic stake in the area.

Perhaps fragile despite all of that, Kane thought, without the deeper historical roots of other communities dominated by religious belief. One good shock to Rejoice’s belief system, and the members might scatter like ducks that glimpsed the shadow of an eagle. That prospect alone would be enough to make the more devout members want his search to fail. But was their faith strong enough to send someone out into the cold to try to murder him?

Besides, how could anyone know how Rejoice would react to a shock? History showed that belief systems could be tough and durable. Why else were there people clinging to absurd beliefs in creation myths, to outmoded ideas about women, to exclusionary beliefs in their own righteousness? Why else would a couple of hundred people be living out in this difficult country, clinging to the contents of a book of dubious authorship. Was the Bible really God’s word? Was there really a God? Why did that question seem important to him?

These and other thoughts occupied Kane for some time, until hunger and frustration drove him off the bed. He got a folding knife out of his duffel and dug the slugs out of the log wall, weighing each in his hand. He dropped them into his shirt pocket, put on his coat, and let himself out, carrying a flashlight in one hand. He walked through ankle-deep snow to the tree line. Once there, he lined himself up with the cabin, switched on the flashlight, and examined the ground. It took him a few minutes to find where the shooter had stood, using a birch branch as a rest. His flashlight beam lit up the plywood covering the window.

He must not have been a very good shot, Kane thought. With the lights on inside the cabin, it would have been hard to miss from here.

Kane followed the footprints through the trees. They soon came to a well-worn path. He turned toward the town and followed it, but other well-worn paths branched off. No way to tell where the shooter had gone.

He walked back through the trees, keeping his flashlight pointed toward the ground. The shooter must have known the area well, to make his way back without using a light. But otherwise Kane hadn’t learned much from his expedition.

Back at the cabin, Kane made a last pass through the bathroom, then drove to the community building. At six-thirty a.m., it was coming to life. Kane walked into the cafeteria and was served powdered eggs, sausage of indeterminate origin, and powdered orange juice. Every bit as good as prison food, he thought. The only thing that set the breakfast apart were freshly baked biscuits with honey. The biscuits were delicious.

As Kane was eating, more people arrived, most of them nodding to him as they passed. He’d just about finished when Ruth came out of the back, waved, and walked over. When he motioned for her to sit, she shook her head.

“I don’t have time to visit,” she said, “but I wanted to say hello.”

“I appreciate that,” Kane said, “and I do have a question. Is there anyone here who would try to shoot you?”

The woman laughed, confusion in her face.

“You’re kidding, right?” she said.

“Not entirely,” the detective said. “The odds are very high that those bullets were meant for me, but I can’t ignore the possibility, however slight, that you were the target.”

The woman cocked her head to the side and smiled.

“You have the most interesting way of looking at things,” she said. “I can’t imagine that I’ve irritated anyone enough to try to murder me.” She paused. “But I’ll think about it some more and give you a definitive answer over dinner, provided you’d be willing to buy me one.”

It was Kane’s turn to be confused.

“Buy you one?” he said. “I thought everything in Rejoice was free to community members.”

“It is,” the woman said, “but ever since I came here I’ve made it a point to have dinner at the Devil’s Toe Roadhouse every other Friday. I did that before I married and continued after. It’s something of a scandal in the community, I’m happy to say. I’ve come to think it’s my duty to give Rejoice something to gossip about.”

Kane laughed. She was starting to make him feel human again. Feeling human, letting his guard down, had been dangerous for so long that it made him nervous.

“I’ll bet,” he said, following that thought. “Don’t some of the people there make you a little nervous?”

“You don’t know me very well,” she said, “if you think the crowd at the roadhouse would make me nervous.”

So they set a time to meet, and the woman went back to her chores.

Thomas Wright came into the cafeteria just as Kane was finishing his breakfast. He saw the detective and walked over.

“You’re up early,” he said, waving a hand at Kane’s empty plate. “I just heard about the shooting at your cabin. Praise God no one was hurt.”

“Someone must have gotten up early to deliver that news,” Kane said.

“Gossip never sleeps,” Wright said with a smile.

“Can you sit for a minute?” Kane asked.

Wright sat.

“What are you going to do about the shooting?” he asked.

“Well, I’m headed out to see the trooper anyway, so I’ll report it,” Kane said. “Maybe when it’s light enough he’ll come over and look at the crime scene, although what a bunch of tracks in the snow would tell him I don’t know. Anyway, since the shooter missed, I’m far more interested in his reasons than the actual shooting.”

“What do you mean?” Wright asked.

“The fact that someone shot at me makes it more likely that the reason for Faith’s disappearance is something more sinister than her desire to live in the outside world,” Kane said.

The two men sat quietly for a moment.

“I see what you mean.” Thomas Wright said. “Shooting at you seems to represent a pretty serious objection to trying to find her.”

“Yeah,” Kane said, “somebody must think he has a good reason for Faith to stay missing. And I haven’t been here long enough for it to be anything but the job I’m doing. I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking who has hunting rifles in Rejoice.” He pulled a slug from his pocket. “Specifically a .30-caliber or 7.62?”

“I’m afraid not,” Wright said. “I think every home in Rejoice has guns for hunting and for self-defense and defense of the community. We don’t have a police force, you know, and there’s only one trooper for the whole area.”

“That’s what I thought,” Kane said, pocketing the slug. “I’ll turn these over to the trooper, but it’s probably just going through the motions. I’d better get started.”

Kane left Wright sitting at the table and went out to his truck. As he pushed through the doors of the Arctic entryway, he passed Matthew Pinchon, who was headed in.

“I thought you went to Anchorage,” he said.

“I felt like I was coming down with something, so I decided to stay,” the young man said. “The team didn’t really need me. We’ll win this game easily.”

When Kane was well away from Rejoice, he put a Beatles CD in the player and tracked along until he reached “Here Comes the Sun King.”

I may not have the sun, Kane thought, looking at the dark sky, but I have reason to celebrate this morning anyway. Being alive is a good excuse for song.

He drove through the frozen landscape, singing along. The countryside looked as desolate and forbidding as ever, but the music—and the prospect of dinner with Ruth—buoyed his spirits.

Devil’s Toe was still locked up tight, but there was a four-wheel-drive cruiser parked in front of the trooper office, where the lights were on. Kane parked next to the cruiser and walked in.

A young man with close-cropped hair looked up from a computer screen. Kane figured him for about twenty-five, big like all the troopers, wearing the full outfit with his Smokey Bear hat lying on the desk.

“Help you?” he asked in a tone of forced friendliness.

Kane walked over and sat in the chair pulled up next to the desk.

“My name’s Nik Kane,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’ve been hired by the Rejoice Council of Elders to find Faith Wright. I’d appreciate any help you could give me.”

The trooper had started frowning at the sound of Kane’s name.

“You got some ID?” he asked.

Kane took out his wallet, removed his driver’s license, and handed it to the trooper.

“You don’t have a private investigator’s license?” the trooper asked, handing the license back.

“You are new, aren’t you?” Kane said. “Alaska doesn’t issue them.”

The trooper nodded.

“We don’t have truck with private eyes out here in the sticks,” he said. “Now, why should I tell a civilian anything?”

“It’s like this, Trooper”—he looked at the nameplate on the desk—“Slade. I’m here because some law-abiding citizens hired me. I have the blessing of your superiors. I think it would be in your best interests to help me. And of course, I’d be grateful personally.”

The trooper gave Kane a hard look.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ve given this matter all the time and attention it deserves. I’ve got a lot of territory to cover and plenty of crime to deal with, and I’m not giving the departure of a girl who’s old enough to make her own decisions any more attention.”

Kane was surprised by the trooper’s attitude. No cop liked having somebody breathing down his neck on a case, but Slade didn’t seem to think it was a case. Why would he begrudge Kane a chance to make some money and, maybe, find the girl? Unless he was just a kid trying to prove how hard-ass he could be.

“Okay,” he said to the trooper, “but I have a job to do, a job that would be a lot easier with your help.”

“Tough titty,” the trooper said.

“You’re making a mistake,” Kane said. “Who knows, I might be able to teach you a thing or two.”

The trooper leaned toward Kane.

“I’m not interested in learning to get drunk and gun down unarmed civilians,” he said. “All I want from you is to not let the doorknob hit you in the ass on the way out.”

Kane stood up.

“Fine,” he said. “I don’t know why you’re being so stubborn, but I’ll be certain to report your lack of cooperation to your superiors.”

Slade opened his mouth to reply, but the phone intervened. The trooper grabbed the receiver.

“Slade,” he barked, then listened.

“Uh huh,” he said, “uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.”

With the first “uh huh” he sat straight up in the chair. With the second, he rose to his feet. By the fourth, he had his hat on and a key in his hand. He put the receiver down and walked to an upright safe, opened it, and pulled out a shotgun.

“I’d love to keep talking,” he said, locking the safe, “but I’m afraid I have to go. Somebody just stole the mine payroll and killed one of the guards.”