But none of that was present. Their mutual regard was precisely what one might expect from good friends. Nothing more, nothing less.
Again and again, she listened to their final conversation, recorded during the approach to Sky Harbor:
“Thanks, Markis.”
“For what?”
“For getting us back. I know we put some pressure on you to continue the mission.”
“It’s okay. It’s what I would have expected.”
They were on the night side of Greenway. The space station looked like a lighted Christmas ornament. Its twin tails were also illuminated, one reaching toward Lark, the other dipping into the clouds.
“As always, Markis, it was nice to spend time with you.”
Kim shook her head. The remark was artificial; the voice contained all the passion of a cauliflower.
“You too, Emily. But I guess we’ll be back at it in a couple of weeks.”
“I hope so. I’m getting tired coming home empty all the time.”
The station grew larger in the screens and then the Hunter was approaching one of the docks. People were visible in the operational sections and a spacesuited technician waited for them with an umbilical. There was a slight bump as the ship came to rest. A bank of console lights blinked furiously before settling on amber.
“Time to go home,” said Kane. They unbuckled and left the pilot’s room, Emily leading the way. If they said anything else to each other, it was lost.
Solly had come out of his bedroom during the last minutes. He was wrapped in a muted yellow robe. “So now,” he said, “Kane stays with the ship for a few hours to take care of the paperwork. Then he goes down to Terminal City and checks into a hotel. Tripley flies home. Yoshi and your sister flag down a cab, tell it to take them to the Royal Palms, but they don’t arrive.”
“That’s the scenario.”
“But we think Yoshi somehow or other got to the Severin Valley. Which probably means Emily was there too.”
“Probably.”
“Okay.” It was still dark outside. “If we’re going to go looking tomorrow, we’d better get some rest.”
They used the network to rent diving gear and a collapsible boat from the Rent-All Emporium, and a flyer from Air Service. Then they went down to a late breakfast. The flyer, with the equipment inside, was waiting for them when they finished.
Kim tied the gold sensor to an input jack, through which it would interface with the onboard tracking systems, displaying results on an auxiliary screen.
At a few minutes after noon they lifted off the roof of the Gateway and turned south toward Severin. The day was cold and cloudless.
“How’d it happen,” Solly asked as they flew through bright skies, “that both Kane and Tripley lived in the same small town?”
“Tripley didn’t live there,” Kim said. “Severin was a tourist spot, and he vacationed there. He also used it as a retreat during the off-season. He liked the solitude.
“Kane moved there in 559, when he inherited a villa from a relative who’d admired his war exploits. He was already beginning to make a name for himself as an artist, and he decided it would be an ideal place to work. The town only had a thousand or so people then, so it’s no surprise that the two eventually met. When Tripley went looking for someone to pilot Hunter, Kane was at hand.”
Mount Hope dominated a group of peaks to the southwest. They were coming down the Severin, flying low, barely a thousand meters off the ground. This stretch of the river wasn’t navigable: it descended toward the dam through a series of cataracts. On either side, thick forest advanced to the water’s edge. They saw an occasional farmhouse, inevitably dilapidated. The landscape was deep in snow.
Kim watched a freight train moving west. It was gliding just over the treetops, and the trees reacted to its passing in the manner of a bow wave, parting in front, closing behind. It was headed toward the Culbertson Tunnel, which would take it through the solid wall of mountains. The tunnel wasn’t visible from her angle, but she saw the train begin to slow down as it made its approach.
She hadn’t been able to give the flyer the exact coordinates of Tripley’s villa, so she switched to manual as they glided out over Remorse. The lake was a sheet of glass.
Solly activated the sensor. The display gave them groups of configuration data, blanked, and then went green. Negative return.
Ahead, Tripley’s villa sat on its lonely hilltop.
The place felt as if it were pinched off from the real world, like a black hole, a singularity where the laws of physics were slightly warped. Where footprints vanished.
They descended to treetop level and moved in directly over the roof. The display remained green.
The utility building showed nothing.
She circled the immediate area, keying off the villa. Most of the old Tripley property was new-growth forest and heavy underbrush. Its fences were down, and a group of spruce trees on the east side looked dead.
Next she extended the search several kilometers west, flying a Crosshatch pattern, scanning as far as the ridge that had protected the town on the night of the explosion. She checked along the summit, surveyed the far slope and the woods beyond until the ground got rocky.
Using the map, she came back and flew over the town. The center of Severin Village was in the water. She went down until the treads got wet. The display remained green.
“You didn’t really think the killer would hide her near city hall, did you?” asked Solly.
“If he was a maniac,” she said, “who knows what he might have done?”
A killer would have been likely to throw the body into the lake, which had been much smaller then; or into the river. Or he might have buried her north of town, in ground that was now at the bottom of Remorse. In either case, she’d still be in the water. So Kim flew systematically over the lake surface, marking off squares until, after an hour and a half, they’d covered it all.
That eliminated, Kim thought, the most likely places.
She took them east along the southern shoreline. Almost immediately the screen began to blink. “Got something,” said Solly. The rate varied back and forth as she jockeyed through the sky.
Down there.
Just woods. “I see an iron fence,” said Kim.
“And some headstones.” They were overgrown by thick brush, hidden by trees.
And a pair of wrought iron gates.
“Cemetery,” said Solly. He got a fix on the hit so they wouldn’t lose it when they moved out of the scanner’s range.
Kim set down in a glade about a hundred meters away. There was a short argument about who would go and who stay. “It’s my party,” she insisted.
Solly shrugged. “Keep talking to me.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
She sealed her jacket, climbed down from the flyer, and plunged into the woods. The day was cold and hard and very still. Snow crackled underfoot.
She wasted no time getting lost and had to double back. Solly’s line of sight provided shortest distance to the target, but did not allow for fences, thick shrubbery, creeks, or other obstacles. On her second try she found the gates. An arch was inscribed with the words JOURNEY’S END.
“These people weren’t much for subtlety,” she told Solly.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll explain later.”
“Okay. Are you inside?”
“Yes. Give me a bearing.”
Solly checked the map he’d made and compared it with her position. “To your right, about sixty degrees.”
There were a lot of headstones, and the cemetery was overgrown. She headed off in the indicated direction.
“Good,” said Solly. “Keep straight.”
She glanced at the markers as she went by. Some were two centuries old.
“You got it,” said Solly. “You should be right on top of it.”
She was looking up at a stone angel. “Nothing here except a grave,” she said. “Old one. Husband and wife. Both buried at the beginning of the last century.”