Wy looked at Liam, away.
“Yeah,” he said. “We looked for a grave.”
Prince thought. “How about the creek?”
He pulled his cap from his head and whacked it against his leg. “I followed it downstream as far as I could. It’s too low this time of year for anything the size of a body to float down it.”
“Pretty big lake it ends in.”
“Yeah. We should do a flyover on the way back, just in case SAR missed her.”
“Always supposing she’s a floater. She could have got wedged in a downed tree, something like that.”
“Yeah.” He put his cap back on. “We’re going to need confessions if we want to clear this case.”
“Yes. And we’d better get a move on if we want to get back to Newenham today. Storm coming in. Big low moving up out of the Bering. The Weather Service has small-craft advisories out. They’re talking an early freeze, maybe even snow.”
Liam looked at the sky. The morning had started out sunny, but a bank of clouds, thick and low, was creeping up on the sun. There was a bite in the stiff little breeze whipping across the airstrip, too. Still, “Snow before Labor Day?”
She shrugged. “Hey. It’s Alaska. Worse, it’s Bristol Bay.”
Wy nosed the Cub into the prevailing wind and tied it down against her return with a new throttle cable. The Cessna was in the air ten minutes later, and Prince got on the radio to let the world know that Liam and Wy were found and well. Neither of the rescuees looked especially happy about it, but their friends took up the slack. “So, home again, home again, jiggety-jig,” she said, hanging up the mike.
“Just step on it,” Liam said. From the backseat Wy said nothing.
“Stepping on it,” Prince said, and did.
Newenham, September 4
Jim, who like most ham operators knew somebody everywhere he went, had rustled up a truck, a Chevy Scottsdale, brown and tan but mostly rust, with brand-new outside rearview mirrors and tires, and a Jesus fish eating a Darwin fish glued to the tailgate.
Jo pointed at the decal. “Do you suppose the Christians know that that decal only shows Darwin in action? Bigger fish eats littler fish?”
“I don’t think Christians waste much time thinking,” Jim said, climbing in behind the wheel.
“I beg to differ,” Bridget said tartly. “We Christians are thinking all the time. Mostly we’re thinking sad thoughts about our non-Christian brothers and sisters who are going straight to hell when they die.”
Luke laughed.
So did Jim. “My mistake.”
Honors about even, the journey to Bill’s was accomplished in dignified silence. “Little nip in the air,” Jim said, holding the door for Bridget. He looked toward the southwest. “Storm coming in, looks like.”
Bridget tucked her arm in his. “Good day for a hot toddy next to a roaring fireplace.”
The south and west horizon were filling up with a rapidly advancing wall of dark clouds. “Hope they don’t get caught out in that,” Jo said.
“Looks nasty,” Luke agreed. His hand was warm on her shoulder. She saw Jim looking at it and the hand became somehow heavier.
One-thirty on a Saturday afternoon, and it was after fishing season and before hunting season really began. Just enough reason for the party to get started early, and it had. Kelly McCormick and Larry Jacobson had drawn up chairs next to a booth filled with three giggling young women. Jim Earl, the mayor of Newenham, and four of the five sitting members of the town council were deciding city business at another. The jukebox was playing “Fruitcakes,” and although no one was skating naked through the crosswalk-yet-Jimmy Buffet would have felt right at home.
They grabbed the last booth and settled in, only to have Dottie bellow from behind the bar, “You want something, get your butts up here and get it! Not you,” she said to Molly Shuravaloff.
“But Dottie-”
“Don’t you ‘but Dottie’ me, girl, you’re lucky I let you step inside the door. You ought to be home being a comfort to your mother in her old age.”
“She’s forty-seven, Dottie!”
“Whatever.”
Molly sulked back to her booth, where Mac McCormick put an arm around her waist and offered her a surreptitious sip from his beer.
They conferred, and Luke and Bridget went up to the bar to order, returning with hot buttered rums all around. Luke sipped and closed his eyes. “God, what’s in this?”
Jo tasted and choked at the resultant wave of heat that seemed to envelop her sinuses. “Besides a fifth of rum?”
“Brown sugar,” Jim said.
“And powdered sugar,” Bridget said.
“Ice cream?” Luke said.
Jo, still gasping for air, croaked, “Butter. And rum. A whole lot of rum.”
The second sip went down better and faster than the first, and when Dottie shouted that their burgers were ready, it was time for a refill. By then everyone had a pleasant glow, marred only somewhat when a burly man came in the door and saw them. He whipped off gold-framed aviator sunglasses to reveal dark, frowning eyes in a blunt-featured face. Tiny blood vessels turned his nose and his cheeks a deep, angry red. His hands were big-knuckled and scarred, dangling at the end of arms too bulky with muscle to hang straight. He shouldered his way across the floor with an impatient, slightly bowlegged stride, taking no notice of the lesser mortals in his path. He looked, on approach, like a cross between George Patton and King Kong, with a luxuriant mustache that sported evidence of past meals.
Jo saw him first. “Finn,” she said.
He looked at Jim from beneath the brim of a cap advertising the Reno Air Show. “Your people still up?”
“And you are?” Jim said.
“Finn Grant,” Jo told him, and to Finn said, “They’re on their way home.”
“Storm coming in,” he said to Jim. “I don’t want to have to run no patrol out after pilots who don’t know how to come in out of the rain.”
“Finn is a member of the Civil Air Patrol,” Jo told Luke and Bridget. “He’s made a career out of not finding people who have gotten themselves lost in the Bush.”
Finn’s face darkened to the color of the clouds in the sky outside. “Fuck you, Dunaway,” he said, and stamped to the bar.
Jim looked at Jo. “My, my, you just endear yourself to everyone who comes down the pike, don’t you? What did you do, break the story that his girlfriend is sleeping with his uncle?”
Jo fluttered her eyelashes. “You do say the sweetest things, Mr. Wiley, suh.”
The aroma wafting up from the cheeseburgers became too much to resist and they tucked in. Plates polished clean down to the shine, a third toddy seemed like something even Jim and Jo could agree on, and Luke went to fetch them. Bridget said, “What was Mr. Finn so upset about, Jo? Is Jim right? Did you write a story about him?”
Jo, in that state of well-being that always follows the ingestion of equal amounts of alcohol, salt and deep-fryer fat, said with an expansive wave, “Finn Grant’s the name, losing clients is his game.”
Jim had to grin. Luke returned with the drinks and Bridget demanded further explanation. Jo fortified herself with a sip, burning her tongue in the process, and launched into what was one of her favorite stories. “Dagfinn Grant is a pilot, the owner and operator of a nice little air taxi service right here in Newenham. He’s quite the businessman: a member of the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club, an old hunting buddy of ex-governor Hickfield, and he’s been a guide since Alaska was a territory.
“Anyway, he makes his living flying people in and out of the Bush. He takes them into the Four Lakes for fishing and the foothills of the Alaska Range for hunting. He flies them up to the Togiak Peaks for that roughneck climbing people do, you know, the ones who actually enjoy hanging from a ridge by their fingernails while they dangle over a one-thousand-foot abyss.”
“Or say they do,” Luke said, grinning.