SEVEN

Kagati Lake was covered with a foot of crusty snow, but someone had plowed enough of the strip for Wy to put the Cessna down. Leonard Nunapitchuk was there to help her unload the supplies for the little sundries store his wife, Opal, had started in their living room when she got the bid for postmistress.

“Good to see you, Leonard. How you been?”

However hard she tried to make it sound like a casual question, it wasn’t one and they both knew it. His wife had fallen victim to the serial killer Liam had apprehended the month before. Still, Leonard wasn’t a whiner. “Oh, muddling along.”

“And the kids?”

His expression lightened a little, and he nodded upslope, where his three remaining children had built their homes and brought their spouses. “Fine.” His eyes, nearly hidden in the mass of wrinkles surrounding them, narrowed with what might have been a smile. “I’ll be a grandfather come spring.”

“That’s great news, Leonard.”

“Yeah. If it’s a girl, Sarah says they’re going to call her Opal.”

“Opal would be happy to hear that.”

“Yeah,” he said again. “I just wish-” He stopped himself and said in a bright voice, “It’s too cold to stand around out here jawing.”

Wy followed his lead, emptying out the back of the plane and reinstalling the seats that she had folded and stored. “Dusty and his wife are making a Costco run into town,” she said in answer to Leonard’s inquiring look.

“Who’s minding the kids?”

“They’re bringing them.”

Leonard looked at the plane, which seated six, and back at Wy.

“They’re all under eight. She’ll hold the baby and I’ll buckle the two smallest kids in one seat. I just hope nobody throws up. I hate people puking in my planes.”

“Can’t say I blame you.” He loaded his boxes onto a handcart and waved good-bye. She watched him push it up the trail and disappear into the brush that hid the rambling log house from the airstrip. It was a big house. It had to feel pretty lonely after his wife’s death. She wished she had time to follow him up, accept a cup of coffee, play some cribbage.

But she had to get back to town, and Tim. And Liam.

Before she could go very far down that road the Moore gang arrived. She got them sandwiched in and they were in the air fifteen minutes later. The most she could do was circle Leonard’s house and run up and back on the prop pitch. He’d hear the enginewah-wah and know she was saying good-bye.

On the way back to Newenham she took a short detour to fly low and as slow as the Cessna would allow over Ted Gustafson’s place at Akamanuk. A tall, spare, grizzled Scandinavian bachelor homesteader, Ted was also diabetic and dependent on the regular supply of insulin Wy delivered at three-week intervals. He came outside when he heard the engine and waved a reassuring hand. Everything okay there. She waggled the wings and climbed back to five hundred feet.

They landed in Newenham a little before five, just in time for the Moores to catch the last Anchorage-bound flight of the day. Wy noticed a body bag being loaded into the cargo hold, and wondered who had died, and if it had been a death Liam had had to respond to, and if so, what time he would be home. It was her turn to cook, and Jo and Gary both had been invited. She decided on macaroni and cheese with onions and garlic, her mother’s specialty and a dish that could easily be made larger by the addition of another vegetable on the side. She snugged down the Cessna, checked the Cub’s tie-down lines, and headed for Eagle to lay in supplies.

Jo and Gary were already at her house, engaging Tim in a fierce battle of cutthroat pinochle. “I can’t believe you shot the moon!” he was saying when she walked in.

Jo gathered up cards with a complacent air. “Yes, well, like I always say, cutthroat is not for the faint of heart.”

“Only the hard of head,” Gary chimed in, so opportunely that it could only have been something he had said and she had heard many times before.

Jo aimed a halfhearted cuff at the side of his head and shuffled the cards in an alarmingly professional manner, fanning them, flipping them, and dealing them out again in a blur. Tim was trying hard not to look impressed and failing. “Could you, like, maybe, teach me how to do that?”

“Like, maybe, I could.”

Gary looked up and saw Wy, and flashed a warm, intimate grin. “Hey, girl.”

“Hey, Gary.”

Tim observed this exchange through narrowed eyes.

“Back on the ground, fly girl?” Jo said. “Just in time to pour another round. You have your uses.”

“You’re welcome,” Wy said dryly, and got three Coronas from the refrigerator.

“Did you get any Coke at the store?” Tim said.

“How many have you had already today?”

He looked annoyed. “I don’t know.”

“At school?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“One at lunch, one every break, did you stop off at Eagle and pick one up after school?”

“I don’t know!”

She kept her voice soft and even. “We talked about this, Tim. There’s too much sugar in those things, more than six teaspoons a can. They’ll rot your teeth, make you fat, give you diabetes like Ted.”

“I don’t care.” At least he wasn’t yelling anymore.

“I do. And what I say goes.” She pulled a can out of one of the bags. “How about a diet Coke?”

“They don’t have the kick. And they’re too sweet.”

“I’ll squeeze a lemon into it.”

“Great.”

“You in?” Jo said, giving his handful of cards a pointed look. “It’s your bid.”

He examined his cards, and eyed the kitty with a suspicious expression. “I guess I’ll open.”

“Pass,” Gary said promptly.

“Pass,” Jo said promptly. “Going, going, gone for the bargain-basement bid of fifteen.”

“Oh, man,” Tim said, “I can’t believe you dumped it on me again. I’m going out the back door for sure.” He reached for the glass Wy had set next to him and took a drink. “Okay, okay, what have we got?” When he overturned the jack of hearts that filled out the run in his hand, he whooped in triumph, to accompanying moans from Jo and Gary.

It proved to be the last hand of the game, as Jo won on points and tonight’s rules said you didn’t have to take the bid to win. Tim vanished into his bedroom and the latest Bon Jovi CD. At least he went in for real rock and roll instead of Ice-T and the Backstreet Boys. Parents, Wy was learning, had by virtue of their job description much cause to be grateful for small favors.

The toilet flushed and Gary came into the kitchen. “You got any tools?”

Wy looked at him and he held up a hand. “Sorry. Stupid question. You got any non-FAA-approved tools?”

“There’s a toolbox in the closet next to the front door. Why?”

“You’ve got a leak in your bathroom.”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it; I can fix it. You got any scraps of Sheetrock around?”

“Sheetrock?”

“Never mind, I’ll take a look, see what you’ve got.”

“Gary-”

“Don’t bother,” Jo said, taking a stool at the counter. “You know what he’s like when he gets in fix-it mode. Where’s Liam?”

“He didn’t call?”

Jo pointed at the message machine. The red light wasn’t blinking.

“Oh.” Wy put water on to boil for the macaroni, and got cheddar and parmesan out of the refrigerator. “Jo-”

“You want me to go and you want me to take Gary with me.”

“Well…”

“No.” Jo gave her a sunny smile. “For one thing, I can’t leave; I’m on a story.”

“What story? You said you were here on a family visit yesterday.”

“That was before somebody rolled a severed human arm with a gold coin clenched in its fist out into the middle of Bill’s dance floor.” She gave Wy an expectant look. “Come on, give.”

Wy was reluctant. “I don’t know. I think it’s part of an ongoing investigation.”

Jo made a face. “All right, all right, I promise not to use anything until Liam gives me the okay. What did you find up on that glacier?”