“Why did you leave him?”
“He hit me,” Bill said matter-of-factly. She measured the oatmeal, added more because she hated soupy oatmeal, shook some salt into it, stirred both into the raisins.
Amelia’s breath sucked in. “He hit you?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Somebody actually hit you?”
The mixed note of disbelief and awe in Amelia’s voice made Bill grin out the window. “Yeah.”
“What did you do?”
“I told you. I left him.”
“After the first time?”
“Yeah. You only get one shot at me.”
A brief silence. “I let my husband hit me again and again and again.”
Bill sighed. She covered the pot and set it on the stove. She turned and leaned back against the counter and folded her arms. “What are you going to do about it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You told Moses you weren’t going back to your husband. Did you mean it?”
“I meant it.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, then. You’ve taken action. You’ve made a decision. Stick to it.”
Amelia looked at her. “You don’t think I will.”
Bill shook her head, let out a breath. “Amelia, I don’t know you well enough to say what you will or you won’t do. I will say that I’ve seen a lot of women in your position, and that I’ve seen a lot of women take it and take it and take it. I’ve even seen a few men in that kind of situation. It’s never pretty. But it wouldn’t happen if the person letting it happen didn’t get something out of it.”
“I didn’t get anything out of it except hurt.”
Bill raised her eyebrows.
“I didn’t want to get hurt! I didn’t like it!”
Bill shrugged. “Then don’t go back.” She unfolded her arms and stood straight. “Understand one thing, Amelia. Whatever happened to you in your marriage, whatever happened to you before that”-Amelia went white beneath her newly acquired tan-“none of that matters a good goddamn. It’s what you do now that counts. It’s what you do tomorrow. It’s your life. Moses has given you a breather. What happens when we leave here is up to you.”
“I know that.”
“Good.” Bill peered through the window. The woodshed was around back and she couldn’t see the menfolk, but she heard Moses curse and Tim’s laughing oath and was satisfied.
“Why do you want to go to New Orleans?”
“What?”
Bill turned to see Amelia pointing at the Frommer’s guide to New Orleans lying open on the bunk. “Oh. Why? Why not? Best music, best food in this hemisphere. Who wouldn’t want to go?”
“What’s it like there?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been.”
“When are you going?”
“I don’t know. Sometime. Have to get free of the bar.”
“Dottie’s taking care of the bar right now,” Amelia pointed out.
Bill turned, half laughing, half exasperated. “What’s going on? You want to come?”
Amelia’s eyes lit up. “Sure!”
Bill shrugged. “Okay. Start saving your money for a ticket.”
“Oh.” The light in the girl’s eyes faded. “I don’t have a job.”
“Get one.”
A silence. “Yeah,” Amelia said slowly. “I could do that.”
A rustle of clothing told Bill that the girl was getting dressed. “One more thing.”
“What?”
Bill turned to meet her eyes. “Don’t hurt that boy out there. Not any more than you have to, anyway.”
The girl flushed. “I won’t.”
“Good.”
“Bill-?”
“What?”
“We saw you,” the girl said in a low voice. “You and uncle. On the porch. When we were coming back from the pond.” She sneaked a look through her hair and saw that Bill looked more amused than appalled.
“You did, did you? That must have been an eyeful.”
“I-we-”
“Never mind,” Bill said. “I can guess.” She turned. “It was okay?”
Amelia blushed a deep vivid red this time. “Yes.” She hesitated.
“Go ahead. Tell. Ask. Whatever you need to know.”
“We-well, we did it twice.”
“Ah, to be a teenager again,” Bill murmured.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“It was okay,” Amelia said, the wondering tone back in her voice. “It didn’t even hurt. And the second time… it even feltgood. ”
“It’s supposed to.”
“It is?”
“Yes,” Bill said firmly.
“Oh.”
“Amelia.”
The girl raised her head from contemplation of her clasped hands.
“You’re seventeen, you’ve been to school, you know all the dangers. Hell, you have to know about the STD problems in the Bush, especially AIDS.”
The girl nodded.
“Be careful, okay? Just be careful.”
Amelia stood up, very solemn. “I promise, Bill,” she said, as if she were taking an oath. “I promise I will be careful.”
“I checked your day pack,” Bill said.
Amelia ducked her head, her face flushing. “I thought maybe you did.”
“I notice your prescription runs out this month.”
“I have more at home.” Amelia paused. “My husband doesn’t want kids.”
Bill nodded. “Do you?”
“Yes. Someday. Not now.” The response was automatic, and Bill watched the girl listen to herself say the words. “Maybe,” she said slowly. “I don’t really know that I do want to have kids.”
Bill nodded, as if Amelia had confirmed some inner conclusion. “We have choices about that nowadays. Get the prescription refilled.”
“I will,” Amelia said, still with that look of surprise. “I will,” she said again, more firmly.
There was a noise at the door and Amelia looked alarmed. “Don’t worry,” Bill said, grinning. “This was strictly girl talk.”
Amelia looked relieved.
The door opened and a third woman fell into the room.
At first they couldn’t tell she was a woman, she was so covered in snow and frost and mud. Leaves and twigs were caught in hair so lank and matted they couldn’t tell what color it was. Her blue jeans were soaked through. She was wearing tennis shoes, one of which was missing, and the white anklet on that foot was torn and the flesh beneath bleeding. Her shirt was ripped at the left shoulder, the same with the T-shirt under it, revealing a long tear of flesh, reaching from the top of the shoulder to halfway down the back. A flap of skin hung loose, to show the shoulder bone gleaming whitely.
They were caught motionless in shock. The woman looked up at them and opened her mouth. Her voice was the merest croak of sound. “Help.”
She tried to say more, but couldn’t. “Help,” she said again, and lay her head down on the floor and closed her eyes.
TWENTY
Portage Creek, September 6
The strain of holding the plane more or less level was beginning to tell in her arms and legs. The pedals pushed hard against the soles of her feet, the yoke pulled steadily against the grip of her hands, and she was constantly on the alert, constantly adjusting her limbs to meet the demands the weather was putting on the exterior surfaces of the aircraft.
She risked a look at Liam. He was staring straight ahead with a grim expression. His blue eyes were narrowed, as if in concentration, as if by concentrating on the control panel he could by sheer effort of will make the plane fly straight and true. His knuckles were white where his hands were knotted on the edge of his seat.
She’d taken the Cessna. Heavier plane, more power. Faster, too, although that didn’t seem to matter much. The wind was gusting thirty to thirty-five knots out of the southeast, and the Cessna was being continually buffeted
from the right, which meant she continually had to correct for drift.
She glanced down at the GPS, and thanked whatever the gods might be for it. The digital readout recorded their progress. She’d logged in the latitude and longitude of their destination, and it would tell her exactly and precisely when they had arrived, a good thing since they sure as hell weren’t going to see it very far ahead.
So it wasn’t like they were forced into dead reckoning, although the weather on the outside of the cabin made it feel like it. Torn wisps of fog kept the ceiling at a hundred feet. She was maintaining an altitude of fifty feet and even then she wasn’t always sure which way was up. The snow on the ground merged with the clouds and the fog to form a sphere of white all around them. She didn’t look up from the instrument panel. She was afraid to, afraid she would lose all sense of where the earth was, and fly straight into it.
She couldn’t do that. Tim was at fish camp. So was Moses. So were Bill and Amelia, for that matter.
She was following the river in hopes that she would spot the fish camp dock. If she could just locate the cabin, she could buzz it, open the window, yell a warning. Tim, be careful, she thought. Watch your back. Look out for yourself.
They’d only found each other two years ago. Two years filled with joy and laughter, rage and tears. Two years of getting used to sharing her home with an adolescent boy, the equivalent of one gigantic nerve ending rubbing up against the world. She was doing a good job, she was sure she was, but she’d only had him two years. He had just turned thirteen, and she wanted him for another five, she wanted to care for him until it was time for him to go out into the world. She wanted to give him a chance, the same chance her adoptive parents had given her when they rescued her from her birth parents. What was the point of returning to Newenham to live if she couldn’t help out her own?
And she loved him. Tim, oh Tim, please, please be all right. Please let whoever this crazy killer is miss the fish camp. Please let him be lost and stumbling around a hundred miles from here, or on his way to Acapulco. Please let this goddamn fog lift.
The marine forecast for Area 6 had been less than encouraging. A storm warning, south winds at fifty knots, seas at twenty-two feet, rain. The low was a hundred miles north of Dutch Harbor and moving up the Alaska Peninsula. Oh joy.
Oh fog. Oh fucking fog. She was flying blind but for the digital readout mounted to the control panel. She watched it more than she looked through the windshield because the view through the windshield never changed, fog and more goddamn fucking fog. The little green numbers ticked off steadily, one at a time, reassuring her that she was on course and nearing the location she had punched in, that she was maintaining her altitude, that her ground speed was a hundred and five. She believed the readout. She believed it implicitly. Her faith was committed, fervent, and necessary. She might even buy stock in Geo Star. If they got out of this alive. Which of course they would, because she believed.
The minutes inched by a second at a time, with more minutes stretching ahead.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly.
It took him a minute to respond, she suspected because he was too terrified to open his mouth, afraid that the physical act of speech might somehow affect the motion of the aircraft and send them plummeting down. “What for?”
“For not telling you sooner.”
He did look at her then. “Jesus, Wy. That’s not why I’m pissed.”
A strong gust blew the tail around to the left. Wy corrected the attitude of the plane automatically. “Then why are you?”
“Because you didn’t trust me enough to understand.”
“It wasn’t that.” She risked looking away from the GPA for a moment to meet his eyes. “Liam, think about it. We haven’t known each other that long, we’ve been together even less than that. I-”
“I know all I need to know,” he said.
“Evidently not.”
A gust of wind shook the craft. Liam set his teeth and stared out into the whirling white maelstrom. “So you’ve been married before. So what?”
“If that’s how you feel, why the attitude?” she demanded.
“It was Gary, wasn’t it? Jo’s brother? The guy I met on the river last month?”
“Yes.”
He thought of the good-looking man, of his proprietary air around Wy that had so irritated Liam. “The divorce wasn’t his idea, was it?”
“No.”
“He’d still be married to you if he could be.”
Her capable hands adjusted the throttle, fine-tuned the prop pitch. The Cessna seemed to respond, their passage through the vortex smooth out an infinitesimal amount. “I don’t know. Probably.” She risked another glance. “But. You will notice that he is not. Things end. We move on.”
“You’re starting to sound like Moses,” he muttered.
“I was pregnant,” she told him suddenly.
“What?” He stared at her. “What did you say?”
He is thinking about something other than a fiery plane crash now, she thought with a flash of grim amusement. “I was pregnant, that’s the only reason Gary and I got married. I liked him, I loved Jo’s whole family, but I had plans for what I wanted to do with my life, and they sure as hell didn’t include marriage and children, not then. But I got pregnant, and I made the mistake of telling my parents, and they insisted on marriage. So did his. Pretty traditional people, both sets of parents.”
“What happened?”
The plane hit an updraft and they were borne irresistibly upward, a hundred feet in a snap of the fingers, magic. She coaxed the plane back to fifty feet, then wiped her palms on her jeans, one at a time, and tried to put her hands back on the yoke with something less than the grip of a dead man. Liam, she noticed, was looking at her instead of monitoring the altimeter. She wasn’t sure he’d even noticed the updraft.
“I lost the baby,” she said. “In the beginning of the sixth month.” She took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out, one slow molecule at a time. “They let it rot inside me. Just rot away, into nothingness, nonbeing. My belly got smaller and smaller. And then it was gone.”
His eyes were stricken. He tried to say something, failed, had to start over. “God, I’m sorry, Wy.”
“The marriage, such as it was, didn’t last much longer. Gary didn’t fight me on it.”
“But he’s always there, waiting,” Liam guessed, and smiled humorlessly when he saw the acknowledgment in her eyes. “Smart, good-looking guy like that. Why didn’t you stay with him?”
“Because I was more in love with his family than I was with him, and after the baby died I realized that. It was a girl.”
“What?”
“The baby. It was a girl. They told me after one of the tests.”
He was instantly overwhelmed by the vision of a tiny Wy, all dark blond hair and big gray eyes and dimples. “Goddamn it,” he said. “Goddamn it, Wy.”
Her voice was strained. “Afterward the doctor talked to me. He said something went wrong.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “He used a lot of medical terminology, but what he said was, I couldn’t have any more children.” She turned to meet his eyes. “Not ever, Liam. No babies out of this belly. Not ever.”
They stared at each other.
The GPS beeped, loud enough to be heard over the wind buffeting the plane, and they both jumped. Wy looked down and saw the coordinates of the Portage Creek airstrip flashing on the digital readout. She peered through the windshield. Nothing but fog. She checked the altimeter. Fifty feet, sixty feet, fifty-five feet, she couldn’t maintain a steady fifty in this wind.
The GPS stopped beeping. They’d overshot the strip. Climb and bank or just bank? Fifty feet in the air in winds gusting to forty was not the place to indulge in turns, however gentle, and however flat the terrain. She increased power and pulled back on the yoke. The wind slammed into the side of the plane and the tail crabbed around, but they climbed to a hundred feet. �
�Hold on,” she said, unnecessarily because Liam would have been holding on with his teeth if he could have, and put the plane into a full-power left turn.
The rudder fought her for every degree of turn. The wind howled its delight, slapped the underside of the right wing with all its force, the right wing came up and for a moment Wy thought the Cessna was going into a snap roll. She increased power, kept her stranglehold on the yoke and her feet firm on the rudder pedals, and prayed that the rudder wouldn’t rip off. The wind had them by the scruff of the neck and they were being shaken and tossed and jostled and jarred and jolted all over the place, their seat belts and a minimal amount of centrifugal force the only things keeping them in their seats.
They hit another updraft, a small one but strong enough to jerk the plane up five feet. Liam’s head banged against the window with the sudden movement. “Jesus Christ, Wy! This is gonna tear her apart!”
“Don’t worry! She’ll hold together!” You heard me, baby, she thought. Hold together.
The Cessna came around, slowly, screaming in every seam and rivet, but she came around. This time Wy didn’t screw around, she took it down to the deck, twenty feet off the ground, flying every foot of the way, hopping the tops of trees, fighting her way around torn wisps of fog, straining her eyes in search of eighteen hundred feet of gravel strip, thirty feet wide with spruce and birch and alder and cottonwoods crowding the sides and one end ending in the Nushagak River.
It appeared suddenly out of the mist, so like an apparition and so much what she wanted to see that for a moment she doubted it.
“There!” Liam yelled.
“I see it,” she said, and went in for a full-power approach.
The first time the wind blew so hard and so steadily down the airstrip that the Cessna had too much lift to land.
“I can’t get her down at full power,” she shouted to Liam. “We have to go around.”
“Do what you have to,” he said. “Never mind me, just get us down.”
She risked a look at him and saw that his face was white but determined. He looked like he thought he might die, but that there was nothing he could do about it.
“We’re fine,” she said.
“I know.” Nothing he could do but trust her.
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