“We’ve got to recover the bodies.” Charles seemed shaken out of his usual sangfroid.

“They’re dead, Dad.”

There was a spark of anger in Charles’ eyes when he turned to look at his son. “There are three of our own up there, Liam.”

Parts of them might be, Liam thought. “Who were they?”

Charles seemed to pull himself together. “Capt. Terrance Roepke of Minot, South Dakota. First Officer Aloysius”-all three of the men winced-“March of Pasadena, California. Flight Engineer Obadiah Etheridge of Birmingham, Alabama. All U.S. Army Air Corps.”

“What were they doing over the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta in a C-47 on December twentieth, 1941?”

“You ever hear of Lend-Lease?”

“Yes. Sure. Of course. Okay, refresh my memory.”

“It was Roosevelt’s way of funneling equipment and supplies to the Allies before we actually got into the war. The C-47 was a standard piece of Lend-Lease equipment.”

Liam nodded at the wreck. “Where was this one going?”

“Russia.”

Wy’s brow creased. “Weren’t most of those planes ferried through Nome by way of Fairbanks by way of the Alcan?”

“Yes.”

“What was this one doing so far south?”

“I don’t know. Bad weather, instrument failure, extreme cold, any of those things. We’re talking 1941, real seat-of-your-pants flying, especially up here.” Charles looked and sounded a little wistful. “These guys had to be good, or good guessers.”

Liam looked up at the glacier. This crew hadn’t been that good.

Mason, finally having gotten his mouth closed, grabbed Liam’s arm and pointed involuntarily. “Look!”

As they watched, a section of the glacier shuddered and split from the main body of ice. It was so large it seemed to take a long, long time to fall. At about the time the first piece of ice hit the ground, the firstboom! hit their eardrums, followed by a loud, continuous thundering crunch of ice striking bottom and breaking up.

The ghost of the C-47 seemed to ripple. They held their breath, watching, but the plane stayed where it was. “We’ve got to get up there,” Charles said. “We’ve got to get those men out.”

“Sooner or later they’ll come to us, Colonel,” Wy said. At his look she added, “You can’t climb up the face of the glacier for the same reason. You can’t rappel down from the top for the same reason. The whole thing is just too unstable. Really the only thing you can do is wait.” She paused, and then, because she too was a pilot, repeated gently, “They’ll come to us.”

There was a brief silence. “How long?”

Wy shrugged. “It’s a glacier. It’s also October. It’s going to get colder very soon, and it’s going to snow a lot. I’d leave any recovery attempt until next year. Check it out in the spring, see what kind of a snowfall there has been, see how long it will take to melt off. Try to get in sometime between then and when the glacier goes into full calving mode. No guarantees it won’t have, and no guarantees the whole thing won’t slide off the face of the glacier the moment we fly out of here, but at least nobody else gets killed.”

They stood staring at the glacier. After a moment, Wy touched Liam’s arm. “Liam? Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?” Liam became aware of a faint buzzing noise, increasing in volume. It got louder and louder, until he looked over his shoulder at where the trail ended at the edge of the trees to see five four-wheelers burst into the clearing. Their drivers saw the little group and the man in the lead shouted out a warning but it was too late.

“Look out!” Liam said, and picked up Wy around the waist and leaped left. Charles and Mason both jumped right. The vehicles skidded to a halt.

Paul Urbano looked at Liam picking himself out of the blueberry bushes, his uniform smeared with blue stains, and said, “Oh, shit.”

Teddy Engebretsen, John Kvichak, and Kelley MacCormick looked as if they were trying to will themselves into invisibility.

The fifth man, Evan Gray, laughed out loud.

Peering around him, her short cap of blond curls ruffled and adorned with the odd desiccated birch leaf, so did Jo Dunaway.

December 10, 1941

That plane that went in four days ago? They found two of the guys! Both pilots were kilt in the crash but there were two other guys on board and although they were hurt they fixed up some kind of wooden slats they call skis (they use these skis to travel over the snow in Norway, I hear) and strapped them to their knees and feet and crawled out. They only made it three miles but that was enough for them to be seen from the highway and be picked up. The story is it was fifty-eight below. I cant believe they’re alive. Nobody can.

I wonder if Ill ever be abel to tell my son what I did in the war. I cant even tell them at home where I am. Its this big secret that were giving planes to Russia and China. Like March said the other day, theres hundreds of planes going through Nome every day, do the brass think the Germans and the Japs havent notised? He was taking a talley on a tablet and saw I was watching is why he said it. He said if I can keep cownt anybody can.

TWELVE

First on the list of Lydia’s book club members was Bill Billington. As Newenham’s one and only magistrate, she was a walking, talking database on the community and its citizens. She knew who was sleeping with whom, where all the bodies were buried, and if the check really was in the mail or likely to be anytime in the near future.

Besides, Diana Prince had skipped breakfast, and the best lunch going was at Bill’s. She bellied up to the bar a little past one o’clock and grabbed a stool at the end. The lunch crowd was already thinning out, although she didn’t know where everyone was going. Over to the Breeze Inn to play pool, probably. Winter in southwestern Alaska, particularly for the unemployed, could be just one long, cold, dark stretch of boredom and inertia, and after the last two pitiful fishing seasons, there wasn’t a lot of incentive to work on boats or hang gear for the next one.

She wondered where Col. Charles Bradley Campbell was sleeping that night. She wondered if he would find a way to let her know.

“What can I do you for?” Bill said, running the bar rag in Diana’s direction.

“How about a steak sandwich, fries, green salad with bleu cheese on the side? And a diet Coke with a wedge of lime, if you’ve got it. Lemon if you don’t.”

“Coming right up.”

“And talk, when you have a few minutes.”

Bill raised an eyebrow, and went into the kitchen to slap a slab of meat down on the grill. The air was filled with the satisfying sound of charring beef. She made Smokey Pete another vodka martini on the rocks, blended four margaritas for a group of giggling young women who were celebrating the twenty-first birthday of the last of them to become legal, and stuck her head into the office. Moses was dozing on the couch. She pulled a throw over him and closed the door silently behind her. She assembled the steak sandwich, loaded the plate with fries, and delivered it just as Prince was forking up the last of her salad. “What’s up?” she said, pulling her stool opposite Prince’s.

“Liam wants me to ask you about Lydia Tompkins’ book club. Says you were a member.” Prince wiped her hands on a napkin and got out a notebook. “Says you, Lydia, Alta Peterson, Mamie Hagemeister, Charlene Taylor, Sharon Ilutsik and Lola Gamechuck were all members.”

“That’s right.”

“How often did you meet?”

“Once a month.”

“All of you pretty close?”

“Pretty close.”

“Did she mention that she was having trouble with anyone lately, her children, business acquaintances, friends?”

Bill blew out a sigh. “I still can’t believe she’s dead. I would have bet my last dime she would have outlived the youngest of us.”