Murder at five finger light by Sue Henry Page A

which was attractively appointed with hanging lamps and plants. A wide decorative wallpaper strip with an amusing collection of roly-poly chefs topped a wainscot along one wall and she could hear real cooks, roly-poly or not, making a busy clatter in the kitchen. Glad she had forgone the pizza in favor of the Northern Lights, she thanked the waitress who delivered her drink, then turned to appraise the marina below, which was crowded with the power- and sailboats of private owners, local and transient.
    The tide was out and the access ramp formed an acute angle with the dock that was designed to float up and down on its pilings. Though there was a soft hint of light in one or two of the boats and the area seemed mostly deserted at this late hour, movement on a large powerboat caught her attention. As she watched, two men, one with a duffel bag over one shoulder, left the boat and hiked along to the ramp, which they were forced to climb slowly and carefully considering its low-tide steepness. When they stopped at the top under an overhead light he set the duffel down and she could see that he was dressed in tan work pants and a faded green sweatshirt under a black slicker. From his graying hair, he looked older than his companion, perhaps in his fifties. Back turned, silhouetted against the pool of light, the other seemed to be dressed in waterproof coat and pants, but she couldn’t see his face. They exchanged a few words and then separated. As they disappeared into different parts of a parking lot, she wondered where they had been in such bad weather, but supposed it was possible they had spent the day working on the craft and hadn’t left the harbor at all.
    “That was quick,” she started to say, turning with a smile, aware of someone approaching her table. But the smile faded into surprise, when she found, not the waitress she anticipated, but the young woman she had noticed on the plane from Juneau that afternoon and again in the Harbor Bar.
    “Hello,” the woman said quietly, with a nervous, hollow sort of smile. “Would you mind if I joined you for dinner?”
    When Jessie didn’t say no, she slid quickly onto the bench on the other side of the table. Her hair, once again dark and shoulder-length, Jessie could now see was a wig that she must have put back on in the Harbor Bar. Her face was thin, eyes a greenish blue with lashes heavily darkened with too much mascara that gummed them together in clumps.
    “Thanks,” the young woman said, reaching across the table to offer a hand that Jessie automatically took, noticing that the nails were chewed raggedly short. “I’m Karen. Karen—ah—Emerson. And I appreciate the company.”
    “It’s okay,” Jessie told her, still confused. “We came in on the same plane. I’m Jessie Arnold.”
    There was no flash of recognition at the mention of her name, which told Jessie that Karen was either a stranger to Alaska or not a sled dog racing fan.
    “You were in the bar a little while ago,” Karen said.
    Jessie remembered the sound of footsteps behind her in Sing Lee Alley and decided she had not been imagining them. “Did you follow me from there?”
    “Yes,” Karen admitted, “I did. Sorry. I wanted to see where you were going. You might live here and be headed home. But you don’t, do you? You’re just passing through, like me, right?”
    It seemed unusual criteria for selecting a dinner companion to Jessie, but perhaps not. In a town as small and friendly as Petersburg, such a request for company from a local could have elicited an offer of residential hospitality. This woman seemed to be seeking contact of a less personal nature, the kind that could be assumed in the neutral territory of a restaurant. As Jessie watched, Karen glanced nervously over her shoulder toward a woman who had come in and gone directly to the pickup counter. Why is impersonal company important? she wondered. Why me?
    “I am passing through,” she answered the question, “sort of.