They had been half right. Lawson had been at an age when he believed that he was bound to do well if he worked hard enough, but the depression had made nonsense of his intentions. For a while, he had flown fish trap patrol for the canneries, and when that had dried up, he had turned to less reputable charters. Reporters didn’t come on glory hops these days, so he ferried men out to the mines instead, sometimes serving as a kind of unofficial recruiter, going to beer parlors and cigar stores and asking the owners to point out customers whose pockets were empty.
Then there were the really bad jobs. Once he had flown three prostitutes to a shack on floats that was towed from one mine to another. The youngest had been no more than sixteen. Another profitable charter, if it was available, was flying a dead body home, which was guaranteed to pay both ways. One time he had retrieved a fisherman who had been decapitated when his scarf was caught in a turning shaft. He had carried the head back in a hatbox.
Lawson blinked away the memory. He still had to fix the cabane strut that held the wing to the fuselage. With some difficulty, he managed to straighten it out, using an old axe handle as a splint, which he bound securely with more wire. When he was done, he removed the propeller and wrapped it up, along with the broken tip. All the while, he kept a mental tally of the cost of the repairs, which would more than swallow up whatever he had hoped to earn from the Russells.
He ate half of his fudge bar and smoked a cigarette before heading back for the cabin, the propeller tucked under one arm. In his other hand, he carried his combination gun, which he had retrieved from under his seat in the cockpit. It was what the locals called a game getter, with both rifled and shotgun barrels, and holding it made him feel marginally less helpless.
Lawson knew that there was no way that his partners would cover the cost of fixing the plane. He hadn’t taken a salary in years. Instead, they paid him with stock in the company, which was effectively worthless. To survive, he dug clams and occasionally lived off his emergency rations. He had always accepted that he was on his own, but he didn’t know how much longer he would last. There always came a time when the world was done feeding you, and then you were ready for the trap house, the floor falling from beneath your feet when you least expected it.
A stiff wind was blowing, making it hard for sound to travel. There was no sign of Cora or her husband. Lawson went into the warehouse, where he set his gun on the chopping block and unwrapped the propeller. It would be best, he saw, to make a pattern of the broken tip, which would allow him to figure out where to cut down the other blade. He didn’t have a pencil or paper, but then he remembered the notes that Cora had spread across the table in the next building.
He left the warehouse and entered the cabin, which was empty. There were a few unused sheets of notepaper and a pencil by the window, along with a pile of other documents. Lawson was picking up a blank page when his eye was caught by a newspaper clipping at the top. It was an article from the Washington Daily News, dated earlier that year, and it carried Sam Russell’s byline.
Lawson looked at it for a long moment. He knew that he needed Russell and his wife more than they needed him. If he got them out of here in one piece, he might be able to make one last try for their business. And the best way to win them over was to figure out what they really wanted.
Going to the door, he bolted it. Then he sat down at the table and began to look at the papers more carefully, hoping that they would tell him something more about the couple he had flown to the middle of nowhere.
The first few clippings were all accounts of the silent city, taken from periodicals like the New York Tribune and the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. There were pages torn from books by Miner Bruce and Alexander Badlam, and a thick volume by a writer named Charles Fort. Then came several scientific papers, one by Oliver Heaviside, another by J.J. Thomson, and a third with the translated title “Simplified Deduction of the Field and the Forces of an Electron Moving in Any Given Way.” Lawson tried to read it and quickly gave up.
But the other articles were easier to understand. So was the final item that he found, buried under the rest of the material. It was Russell’s wallet. Lawson had already invaded the man’s privacy in other ways, so it seemed like only a small step from there to looking inside. Taking out all the bills, he rifled through the stack. There were at least three hundred dollars.
Lawson was tempted. He didn’t think that he could take all of it, but peeling off a few twenties didn’t seem unreasonable, if only as compensation for the plane. In the end, it was the memory of Russell’s strangely old eyes that decided him. Russell was the kind of man, he reflected, who would keep track of what he carried. And perhaps there would be better ways to get at the money.
He stuffed the bills into the wallet again. Taking out the broken tip of the propeller, he traced it carefully on the page, then put the pencil back where it had been lying on the table. His best hope was to cut down the other tip so that it matched. There was no balancing machine between here and Juneau, so he had to eyeball it as close as he could and hope that it would get him off the ground.
It was growing dark by the time Cora returned. Lawson had put a pot of rice on the fire, and he was smoothing down the rough edges of the broken tip as he waited for it to finish cooking. Earlier, he had gone outside and looked toward the mountain range to the northwest, but he had seen nothing unusual in the sky.
Lawson glanced up as the door opened. Cora seemed exhausted, her hair loose around her face, and he was suddenly reminded of his dream from the night before. “No luck, I take it?”
She shook her head. Collapsing into a chair, she accepted a cup of broth, and when the rice was ready, she ate a bowl of it without speaking. Lawson saw that she was holding herself together, but he still chose his next words with care. “If he doesn’t get back tonight, I can come with you tomorrow, as soon as I get the propeller back on the plane. He’s probably just lost in the woods.”
“Sam’s not lost,” Cora said tonelessly. “All he had to do to find his way back was follow the shoreline north. If he didn’t come back here, it’s because something happened to him.”
“We aren’t going to find him in the dark. If he doesn’t turn up, we can take the plane to Juneau and come back with a real search party. If I can get us off the water, we’ll make it to town. And if not—”
Lawson stopped. Looking into her face, he saw real fear there. Even if Russell came back, she might not want anything to do with Alaska again, and this was the best chance he would ever have to convince her otherwise.
He broke what was left of the fudge bar in two and offered her the larger piece. After a beat, she took it. Lawson chewed on his own half for a minute before speaking again. “I wanted to ask you something.”
Cora glanced at him warily. They were seated close to the barrel stove. “What?”
“I want to know what you’re really doing here. Your husband gave me his version, but I don’t think that he came all this way to prove that some old sourdough saw a mirage.” Lawson fed a chunk of wood into the fire. “I’ve seen strange things over the ice. All pilots have. There’s nothing unusual in that.”
Cora seemed to weigh her words. “This isn’t an ordinary mirage. It’s what they call a Fata Morgana. I’ll show you.”