His eyes widened. He smiled, a long, slow, sweet smile.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
She called Gary the next day before her first flight. “Gary? It’s Wy.”
His voice warmed. “Hey, girl.”
“Jo sent you home, huh?”
“Yeah, she said it would be best.” He paused. “And it was. Wasn’t it?”
“It was.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You’re part of my college days, Gary. You’re part of my youth. I’ll always care. I’ll see you at-”
“Don’t,” he said, and hung up.
“-Thanksgiving at your folks’ house,” she said to a dial tone. She replaced the phone gently in its cradle. She’d hurt him, and she knew it, but her future was here.
With Liam, and Tim, and Bill, and Moses. She smiled.
Moses was sitting on a stool at Bill’s. Bill was nowhere to be found. “Arraigning Eric,” Moses said.
“I’m sorry, uncle,” she said. “I know he was a friend of yours.”
“This one I never saw coming,” he said, and tossed off the rest of his beer. “Who says there’s no god?”
“Come to dinner tonight. Bring Bill.”
“I’m sorry,” he said suddenly.
“Why? What for?”
“For being your grandfather. For making you who you are. I’m sorry as hell. A man like me has no business scattering his seed around.”
She was hurt, though she tried not to show it. “Come to dinner tonight. You and Bill. A family dinner.”
His face was creased with weariness, and for the first time in her eyes he was showing his age. His smile, when it came, was lacking its usual malice. “You sure you don’t want to keep your distance?”
“I’m sure.” She sounded surer than she felt, but he was her grandfather, he’d owned up to it at last, and she wasn’t going to let him draw back. She might not have that much time left to learn from him.
“I’m good for a while yet,” he said, and laughed his rich, knowing laugh when he saw the expression on her face.
They went back up to the crash site two days later, after the snow stopped falling, to watch Charles’ crew pick at the remains. There was an open fracture of the tibia before the morning was out, and in the first fifteen minutes after lunch a dislocated shoulder and a near miss with a calving chunk of ice. The crew chief flatly refused to put his men back to work after that. His men were in complete agreement.
“I could probably court-martial the lot of you,” Charles said.
“You probably could, sir,” the man agreed. “But at least we’d all still be alive while we were locked up in the brig.”
Charles sighed. “Pack up your gear and head back to base.”
Liam, listening in the background, stepped forward when the men moved off, carrying a stretcher. “So we’ll never know who the spy was, or if there even was one. Or who was carrying the gold, or why.”
“Short of a written confession discovered under a rock up on that glacier, miraculously intact after all these years, no.”
“The general won’t be pleased.”
Charles removed the aviator’s cap that looked so well on his head and smoothed down his hair with the same hand. “Ah, hell. Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.”
They laughed together.
Wy, picking her way over a fractured slab of ice, which was now covered with a foot of snow, heard the sound and smiled to herself. Campbellpere et fils seemed to be getting along better. Good.
Something prickled at the base of her neck and she shivered. The temperature was dropping, or so it seemed. Her feet carried her forward, a little too close to the face of the glacier for Liam’s comfort. “Wy, don’t get so close to that damn thing!”
She didn’t hear him, the prickling at the base of her neck driving her on. She waded through snow to another slab of ice and peered into a dark blue hollow.
“Wy!” Liam was coming up behind her. “Wy, come on, get back.”
He stopped beside her. “What are you looking at?” When she didn’t reply, he bent over and looked. “What’s that?”
He reached inside the hollow. It was narrow and very deep, and he had to stretch to find anything. It was a tight fit, too tight. He stood up and pulled his arm out of his parka and reached inside the hollow again. This time his hands closed over it, a book, short and wide, maroon in color and embossed with very faint gold letters. The flash of the letters was what he had seen, winking up at him from inside the hollow.
“ ‘The Standard Pilot Logbook,’ ” he read out loud.
He opened it up carefully, afraid it would fall apart in his hands. The pages were damp but the writing on them was still legible. “Sgt. Obadiah Etheridge, pilot navigator, U.S. Army Air Corps,” he read, followed by a serial number and an address in Birmingham, Alabama.
He turned the page.
Thanksgiving, 1941
Turkey and stuffing in the mess. It was awful. The cook runs a laundry in Memphis Tennessee in civilian life. He says he told them that when he signed up and doesnt know how he got assigned to be a cook. Typical army situation normal all fucked up.
“That’s one of our guys,” Charles said, coming to stand at Liam’s shoulder. He looked at Wy, standing mute before them. Her face looked bleached of color, and her expression was strained.
So was Liam’s. “How the hell did you know it was there?”
December 20, 1941
Im writing this in the air. We took off in the dark but then its dark all the damn time up here. It was so cold the fuel wouldnt ignite at first and for awhile I dint think we were going to make it up. I saw Roepke come out of the old mans office before we took off. March was watching too. Wonder what thats about he said to me. I dont care I just want to do the job and get back.
Captain Ross had to have his lower lip cut away because of frostbite.
I wonder if I could transfer to a base closer to home. If I told the old man about Helen losing the baby maybe hed okay it. Maybe not, because theyre expecting the Japs to invade any minute now and theyre bringing more men in all the time. Everybodys coming north nobodys going south. I have to do my duty. We got us a real war now.
Its okay though, after this trip Ill have some more money to send her and shell be okay for awhile.
I hope shes okay. Helen, I love you. I wish you were here. The northern lights are all over the sky all different colors red and white and green you wouldnt believe how beautiful.
Have to take a bearing now.
Dana Stabenow
