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They’d been in Alaska for decades, so it wasn’t like we could buy them gloves or really warm socks. Clearly, they already had those things.

In the end, we’d decided on spa-type items, luxurious things they might not want to spend the big bucks to have shipped in. Soaps, lotions, fancy teas, shampoo, conditioner, and even some beard conditioner. Two boxes filled with items, one in girly-girl scents and the other in manly-man scents. Davy’s grandmother came off as a badass, but I work with a lot of female badasses who use the girly-stuff when they aren’t working. I mean, not super-strong-scented human things, but lightly scented items designed for shifters.

Davy gave Ethel her gift first, and she seemed genuinely happy with the entire box, and especially the shampoo and conditioner, which told me she recognized the brand. The second box went to Malcolm, and he seemed happy with his box as well. I wasn’t surprised to learn he wasn’t aware there are products made especially for the beard.

The third box was a joint gift, the teas, and they both looked through all the flavors and exclaimed happily over the orange spice, the Earl Grey, and the pu-erh, which surprised me that they knew what it was. We’d hand-selected nearly two dozen, and I’d ended up buying about a dozen of them for myself.

Shopping with Will is an experience. He doesn’t even look at the prices. I’d have opted for something cheaper than the pu-erh, but after seeing their reaction, I’m glad we chose it. Same with the shampoo and conditioner. We chose a medium-cost lotion because we all prefer it for ourselves, but I make my own body oil, and I included some of it, and her scent told me she liked it most of all, once I told her the ingredients. My guess is that she probably makes her own as well, or possibly just uses olive oil or coconut oil, since they have to buy it anyway. Or maybe they used lard or tallow instead of vegetable oil? That probably made more sense.

With the gift giving over, Ethel offered to show me their home’s various systems, and I was more than impressed.

When we stood in front of a nice wall of batteries that stored power from the solar panels, I asked, “Did you wire all of these together?”

“Yes. Only way to be sure it was done right was to do it myself. I didn’t scrimp on the soldering or the electrical tape. We also have a fire suppression system in here specifically designed for a battery fire. We have a regular fire suppression system near the tankless water heater, and all around the fireplace.”

“If you did the work, that brings it down from forty thousand to around twenty-five thousand for the electrical system.”

“Everything’s more expensive in Alaska. However, the solar panels were kits, too, and that made them a lot cheaper. Malcolm built a lumber mill out of an old Chevy truck engine when we first got here, and then built the house with the trees he had to fell to make room for the structure and yard. Our only expense was the gas for the mill, insulation, the hardware like nails and hinges, and we had to buy some roofing materials. We made the bricks for the fireplace. We lived in a tent the three weeks it took us to build the barn, and then we lived in the barn until the house was built. So, overall, our costs are less than you’d think for the whole thing. There were no sinks, showers, or pipes in the original build. Nothing electrical, so no wiring and no fuse box. All that came much, much later.”

“Sweat equity on steroids. Do you ever regret moving out here? Off to yourselves? Or is it still a good thing?”

She shrugged. “We’re healthy enough, but I worry about what happens if one of us has a serious problem. It takes about forty minutes for an air ambulance to get to us, and then at least that long to a small hospital, and a lot longer for one that can handle major surgery. I fell and messed my wrist up bad enough we thought it was broken a few years ago. Turns out it was a really bad sprain, but it basically showed me that we might not survive a heart attack or stroke, this far out.”

I’d seen the background checks Drake Security had done on them, so I knew they were sixty-two and sixty-three. Rather than ask her age, I asked, “Ya’ll built the house over twenty years ago, when you weren’t worried about that kind of thing. What did you do for heat, light, and cooking back then? This system can’t be older than four or five years.”

“Candles, oil lamps, wood stove, and the fireplace. We had a wood burning stove out in the barn while we built the house, and it’s still out there. We had a small one in the kitchen to cook on when it’s too hot for the fireplace, but we moved it to the sauna when we put propane in.”

“You have a sauna?”

She laughed. “It isn’t so unusual up here, and to be honest, the video we did of making it has been one of our biggest moneymakers, barely behind the solar videos. I love being able to get completely warm during the dead of winter, cooked all the way through. We don’t have running water in the winter, so there’s no hot showers.”

“How do you get clean?”

She smiled. “Washcloths work just fine for that. Our ancestors survived without showers and baths in the winter. I bought a crank-powered agitator a while back, so it’s easier to wash clothes. I do that out in the barn, and then we hang them to dry near the fireplace in the living room. We have a clothesline that stretches across the room when we need it, and recoils when we don’t.”

It takes a special kind to survive the winters up here, I supposed, but I had no desire to do so.

Their fireplace is awesome. It’s between the kitchen and the living room, with a huge hearth on the living room side, and flat spots built so you have places to put pots and pans to cook with on the kitchen side. Also, a brick oven on the kitchen side.

“How do you regulate the oven temperature?”

She laughed. “You can get it close by making the fire bigger or smaller, but it’s kind of a crapshoot, which is why we now have the small propane oven. I still cook things like hamburger steak and meatloaf in the original oven, but cakes have to be cooked in the propane oven. I added a temperature gauge for the original one, and sometimes it works out we can cook things that are more finicky about temperature, but…” She shrugged. “If it’s supposed to cook for thirty minutes at three-fifty, and you’re at four-twenty, don’t close the door all the way and then check on it at fifteen minutes and see how much longer it needs. We have a meat thermometer, to make sure we hit the right numbers for the correct length to kill the bad stuff.”

We walked back into the living room, and I noted the men were all looking at the massive fireplace. Clearly, once all those bricks were heated, the room would be several levels above toasty. There was a small fire now, enough to keep the chill off, or maybe to cook with, but it would clearly hold a much larger fire.

“We stayed with a family in the north of China on one of my missions,” I told them. “Their chimney went straight back from the fireplace for about ten feet before it went up and out, and their bed was on top of the horizontal part.”

Malcolm smiled. “Genius.”

And here’s the problem with doing a background check on someone. The next question should be to ask them what they did before they moved to Alaska, but Malcolm had owned a construction firm, and Ethel had managed the books and dealt with making sure everything was ordered and onsite when needed. Clearly, she’d learned some electrical stuff in there somewhere.

“I know you can’t tell us much about your job, but it sounds fascinating,” Ethel said. “We came downstairs to feed you and then never got around to it. Are you hungry? I’m so happy noneof you are vegetarians. I have no idea how we’d have fed you. The stew has moose meat, potatoes, carrots, and onions.”

In minutes, we were seated at the long table, benches on either side, eating a wonderfully hearty stew. I really hoped there was no bear meat in their freezer. How would I handle it if they tried to serve us bear? I had no idea.

Technically, it would probably be fine for me to eat it, but it just seemed too cannibalish.

Davy talked to them about a video he’d watched of them hunting moose, field dressing it, and then smoking the meat.