It thudded onto the ground ten feet in front of Ted. She painted a lazy eight in the sky while he fetched it and checked the contents. She’d included a box of sugar-free chocolates, his favorite ballast, and he waved his thanks. She waggled her wings in reply and zagged north, following the river to another river community, Kokwok, this one with a bigger strip, where she deposited a relieved Mr. Glanville along with Kokwok’s mailbag.
Between Warehouse Mountain and Kemuk she buzzed the mining camp on Nenevok Creek and dropped another bundle of magazines neatly in front of the shack, but no one had come out before she had to pull up and get out of the way of any one of three mountains that were trying to snag the Cessna by the wing. It had been a long summer for the miner’s wife, and Wy could still remember the forlorn look on her face the last time Wy had dropped off a load of freight. But they would be coming out, along with the rangers, the following weekend. Wy bet the wife was counting the seconds.
Next stop Rainbow, where Pete Cole had left the mail to be picked up in a bag leaning against a stump at the end of the strip, surely a violation of the Postal Code, but who was going to tell? Certainly not her, and she had no intention of remonstrating with Pete, either. Pete didn’t like visitors, women or engine noise, in that order and without discrimination. How he’d managed to become postmaster for Rainbow remained a mystery, considering he sorted the mail in the little shack he’d constructed at the extreme edge of his property for that purpose, and left the door unlocked so that no one would come up to the cabin bothering him for the mail. Probably Rainbow wasn’t on the postal inspector’s regular route. She traded the outgoing mailbag for the incoming one and was in the air in ten minutes.
Weary River next, in and out in twenty minutes, then a flyover of Russell, where she just missed putting the mailbag onto Devon Russell’s roof. Devon shook a friendly fist at her, and Wy ran up and back on the prop pitch in reply. It would have to be the Super Cub next Wednesday, when the mail had to be picked up as well as dropped off.
Then the longest hop, north by northwest fifty miles to Kagati Lake. Half an hour on the ground and she could head for home. She checked her airspeed and then her watch, and grinned. She’d be back in Newenham by five o’clock.
Banker’s hours.
Liam drove to work in a distracted frame of mind, mostly because he’d left his mind at home. Living with Wy did that to him. Or not living with Wy, or whatever the hell it was they were doing.
Take the books. They were all over the house. There was a copy ofHarry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the bathroom, which she and Tim were reading simultaneously, different-colored sticky notes marking each other’s places.The Human Factor by David Beattie sat on the kitchen counter, a book that after the first careless perusal Liam never picked up again, as it dealt with the hazards of planes and the flying of. On the coffee table in the living room sat a beat-up British paperback edition ofRound the Bend, a book that in spite of also being about flying Liam liked very much, possibly because the narrator was a mechanic and a good one and worked very hard to see that the planes he worked on never broke in the air. Liam was convinced that every plane he was on was going to break in the air.
In the bedroom there wereEthan Frome, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, andPersuasion, from evidence of bookmarks being read simultaneously.
Liam read a lot, too, mostly history and poetry, but he’d never had books stacked back to back all going at once the way Wy did. He was pretty sure she had kept every book she’d ever read, too; there were bookcases in every room of the house including the bathroom, all flavors, essays by Carl Sagan, historical romances by Thomas B. Costain, the entire Oz collection.
He’d found her weeping one day the previous week, huddled over a much-thumbed copy of a mystery, one of a series. In this one the heroine’s lover had died. She took it as a personal affront-“I can’t believe she did that! How could she do that?”-and threw the book across the room, only to retrieve it a moment later and force him to listen to her read the death scene out loud. He was amazed at how involved she became in the story, and a little amused, but he was afraid that if he made some smart remark the next time she’d throw the book at him, so he kept his mouth shut.
It was something else to know about her, something they hadn’t gotten around to sharing in that brief time they had had together three years before, something he could add to his growing store of information. He wanted to know everything about her, every single thing, from the way her toes curled when he bit the sole of her foot to the way she played air mandolin with John Hiatt, to the way she mothered Tim, the adopted son in the room down the hall.
A green Chevy Suburban pulled out suddenly from a side street and wavered from center line to shoulder, put on a brief spurt of speed, slowed down, speeded up again.
Well, hell. Liam hit the lights and the siren.
The Suburban put on another burst of speed and, just about the time he thought he might have a Hollywood car chase on his hands, screeched over to the side of the road and slammed on the brakes, skidding another four feet in the loose gravel before coming to a halt somewhat perpendicular to the line of traffic.
Liam got out of the Blazer. The driver got out of the Suburban. “Stay in your vehicle, ma’am,” Liam said, but she ignored him, walking toward him with a step as straight as the course she had been driving.
He sighed. But this day had begun with such promise, he thought, struggling to master a reminiscent grin when the woman reached him. The smell of alcohol got to him first.
She stopped four feet away, glaring at him and weaving a little on her feet. This time he had no trouble holding back a smile. “Amelia, did you have breakfast at the Breeze Inn again?”
“Damn right,” she said, blinking rapidly, as if trying and failing to focus. “I can do anything I wanna, I’m the councilman’s wife.”
“Yes, you are,” Liam said, taking her by one arm.
She pulled free. “You know which councilman?” she said belligerently.
“Yes,” he said, taking her arm again.
“That’s Councilman Darren Gearhart,” she said. “H-a-r-t.Noe. ”
“Yes,” he said. This time she followed him to the passenger door of the Blazer.
“I’m his wife,” she said as he sat her down. She leaned back against the headrest and fell asleep as easily and instantly as a child.
“Amelia, Amelia, Amelia,” he said. “What the hell am I going to do with you?”
The letter of the law required that he take her into custody.
So he took her to Bill.
TWO
Kagati Lake, September 1
Opal Nunapitchuk was a happy woman. Fifty-six years old, with three children and eight grandchildren, she was the postmistress of the tiny (population thirty-four in summer) village of Kagati Lake. A corner of her living room, furnished with a wooden counter polished smooth by forty years of elbows and a cubbyholed shelf fixed to the wall, was devoted to the getting and sending of letters, magazine subscriptions, bank statements, utility bills, Mother’s Day cards and birthday and Christmas packages between the citizens of Kagati Lake and the outside world, and to the upholding of the generally fine standards of the United States Postal Service. People could sneer all they wanted to, but in Opal’s opinion the best federal service her taxes provided was the post office and priority mail (delivery guaranteed in two days for three dollars and twenty cents). She loved being the bearer of good tidings, and she was ready with Russian tea and Yupik sympathy when the tidings were bad. She was a thoroughly round peg in a thoroughly round hole and she knew it.