"Daniel's retired, sort of. Used to be a heavy-duty mechanic; he's got an IBEW pension. Nowadays he amuses himself with hunting, fishing, and some wheeling and dealing around the Bay. He's got a piece of property out at the airport-he's trying to sell it to one of the local fishermen."
"And his daughter?"
"Jo's a reporter for the Daily News. She just came along for the ride, and for the chance to visit with me."
Liam got his first good look at her, and blinked. Wy was wearing an apron. At least he thought that was what it was-he'd never seen her wearing one before. If he wasn't mistaken, there was lace around the hem.
"I'm just cooking dinner. Would you like some? I tried to get Dan and Jo to stay but they had to catch a plane."
He opened his mouth and his stomach growled, loud enough to be heard over the strains of Constance Demby floating in from elsewhere in the house. Constance Demby was one of his favorite composers, and he had given a CD of hers to Wy. If he wasn't mistaken, the particular cut playing just now was "Oceans Without Shores."
"Well," Wy said, bright and chipper, "I guess you're hungry." She gave a hostessy little laugh that sounded so unlike her he almost asked what was wrong.
Instead, he followed her through to the kitchen. It was a large room that took up the whole south side of the house. The south-facing wall was almost all window. A door opened out onto a large deck that faced the mouth of the Nushagak River where it flowed into Bristol Bay.
The broad expanse of grayish brown water, more than a mile across, moved steadily, powerfully, inexorably south between low bluffs thickly encrusted with trees and brush. Here, the current had swept a stand of spruce trees growing too close to the edge for comfort out to sea. There, it had carved out a backwater and lined a sand beach in a perfect crescent shape with a tidy row of driftwood bleached white by water and time. Farther down, where freshwater met salt, a dozen little estuaries nourished tall stands of marsh grass and dozens of species of wildfowl, from the elegant Canada geese to widgeons with calls like rubber duck squeeze toys to the long-legged, long-billed lesser yellowlegs. An immature eagle, as yet uncertain of the newfound power of his great wings, landed for a breather in a nesting area and was instantly dive-bombed by a flock of furious seagulls. A male merganser, red of neck and of temper, chased off a rival for the affections of the female merganser at his side. A large salmon jumped free of the current and smacked back into the water again with a large, loud splash that echoed clearly up to the top of the bluff and through the open windows of the house perched there.
The sun was still well up above the southwestern horizon, pouring an unceasing flow of golden light over them all. That same sunlight gilded the interior of Wy's house, and Liam tore his eyes away from the incredible view and took stock of his more immediate surroundings. There was a dining room table big enough to seat eight on the left and the kitchen on the right, the two separated by a counter and passthrough. Wy pulled out a stool and he sat down and accepted the glass she handed to him. One sip, and he knew the buttery-smooth slide of twentyyear-old Glenmorangie, which retailed for something like eighty bucks a bottle in Anchorage. God knew how much the stuff cost in the Bush, and Wy didn't drink hard liquor. He picked up the bottle and looked at the label. It was about two-thirds full, the same as the bottle at Bill's. Had she bought it from Bill to serve especially to him? That was how Moses had known what he drank, he realized with a rush of something like relief. There. He always appreciated a nice, rational explanation for the oddities of life.
A little voice whispered that the explanation might not be quite that easy in the long run, but he banished it at once and took another sip. "Nice," he said, putting down the glass. He didn't want anything about this night to be clouded in his memory. "How did you know I was coming?"
She was stirring something in a boiling pot. "What? Oh. Bill called. Said you were on your way."
"Where's Tim?"
Her face darkened. "In his room." She managed a smile. "He'd better be studying for his civics exam, or I won't just ground him until the next century, I'll ground him for life."
Liam studied the golden brown liquid in his glass. "We've got some catching up to do."
He felt rather than saw her pause. "Yes," she said, her voice a little breathless but determined enough for all that. "Yes, we do."
"You first," they said together. Their eyes met and they both broke into laughter. It was nervous laughter, but nevertheless it sounded good to Liam. It must have to Wy, too, because when the phone rang she said, "Shoot!"
"Let the machine pick up," Liam suggested. Phone and machine were sitting on the kitchen counter.
She hesitated, hand hovering. "No," she said, and gave him a rueful smile. "Might be work." She picked up the receiver. "Hello? Oh." Her face changed. "Just a minute." She held the receiver to her chest. "Liam, I'm sorry. This is kind of personal. Would you mind?"
He did, big time, but it wouldn't do to say so, or at least not yet.
He wandered into the living room, listening to the sound of her voice as he inspected the furnishings.
"Harry, I sent you a copy of the police report, and a copy of the statement made by the doctor who examined him when I brought him home with me. Plus Mrs. Kapotak's statement. You know what he's been through. He can't go back there. He won't go back there, and even if he would I wouldn't let him."
The living room was smaller than the kitchen and dining room. One small window looked out on a stand of birch and alder. There was a blue denim couch and two armchairs, shabby but comfortable. The beige carpet was worn but scrupulously clean. A do-it-yourself bookshelf stood against one wall, filled to overflowing with paperbacks, some history, some mystery, some both, and an eclectic mixture of nonfiction: The Home Book of Taxidermy. The 1998 Federal Aviation Regulations and Aeronautical Information Manual. The Gun Digest and The Shooter's Bible, The Handbook of Knots and Splices, The Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants, Bears of the World, a Yupik-English dictionary.
Liam pulled this last out and thumbed through it. "Ik'ikika" was defined as an exclamation meaning "so much" or "so many" or "so big." So much or so many or so big what? Liam wondered. Probably salmon, he decided, and replaced the dictionary on the shelf. Every other word of Native Alaskan he'd ever run across-Athabascan, Eyak, or Yupik-seemed to relate to salmon in some way. If it was Inupiaq now, he'd figure maybe it would modify snow. He'd heard the Inupiaq had fifty different words for snow.
An entertainment center held a small television and a component stereo system. The videotape collection was not genre-specific, either, including as it did The Little Mermaid, How to Steal a Million, Casablanca, Ruthless People, The Hospital, Little Shop of Horrors, and Aliens. The CD'S ranged from the Beach Boys to the Indigo Girls. He felt a pang at the knowledge that Jenny and Wy had had something in common.
There were four CD'S by the Neville Brothers and a dozen by Jimmy Buffett. Wy must have been hanging out at Bill's and been converted. There was the CD by Constance Demby, another by Louis Gottschalk, other albums he recognized as gifts from him. He was surprised she hadn't tossed them, and glad.
He himself hadn't been able to throw away anything she had given him, not the copies of her favorite books, not the picture of the moose triplets she'd taken during a charter into Denali, not even the Don Henley tape she'd made for him, which like to melt his eardrums the first and only time he'd played it.
Wy's voice sharpened. "Harry, what judge in his right mind is going to send a twelve-yearold boy back to his mother after what she did to him?"
There was a neat stack of magazines on the coffee table. Liam riffled through them and found a catalogue for Sparky's Pilot Shop. He thumbed through it. Everything you ever needed if you drove a plane. Sparky's F7C, a flight computer that would plot your course, file your flight plan, chart your location, predict your destination, divine your arrival time, and sugar your coffee, all for $69.95. There were videotapes: The Wonderful World of Floats, The Art of Formation Flying, Taming the Taildragger. There were SicSacs for sale, just what they sounded like, and Little Johns, also just what they sounded like. There was a Mile High Pin (specify gold or silver) that Liam couldn't figure out. What was so special about getting to 5,280 feet in an airplane? Ten thousand jets did it every day.