“About four miles,” she said. “Why don’t I teach you, too? Make it a family affair? If you understand it, if you can control it, it won’t frighten you as much.”
“Do you have any idea how fast this river runs?”
She sighed. “No. Why?”
He rested the oars to check his watch. “We went into the water twenty minutes ago. I’m trying to figure when we’ll make the fish camp.”
“It’s the first dock on the north shore of the river after Portage Creek.”
The wind roared overhead and snatched the words from her mouth so that he could barely hear them. “So we hug the right bank and hope we bump into it.”
“Yeah.”
Hopeless, he thought, and as if to underline the thought, there was a gust of wind so hard it spun the skiff around like a top. Wy was thrown against the side and lost her grip on the bailer, which went over the side. “Are you okay?” Liam said when they stopped spinning.
“Yeah,” she said, straightening. “I lost the bailer.”
“I saw.” He looked around, eyes tearing from the wind. They seemed to be in the center of the river, no bank, no trees to guide them. “Which way is downstream?”
She looked left, right. “I don’t know.”
It was so dark and the surface was so choppy that it was impossible to tell which way the current was going, and the wind was blowing so hard that it negated the current anyway.
Then there was a brief, tantalizing lull in the wind and he heard a sound, a creaking branch, or maybe the k-kk-kkrak of a raven.
What the hell. He rowed toward it. Trees, shaken roughly in a giant’s hand, loomed up out of the darkness. He put the starboard side parallel to them and began to row again.
Liam bent his head and rowed into the wind and the darkness. Push, lift, swing forward, dip, push. Push, push hard, push the water under them, behind them, away, away, along the wide Nushagak. Didn’t quite have the ring of the Missouri, he thought dimly. Push, lift, swing, dip, push. His shoulders were aching, his arms numb. If only he could row with his legs, his tai chi-conditioned legs. His thighs were like iron, his calves like steel. From the waist down he’d never been in such good shape.
A high chair bolted to the thwart. Like a dentist’s chair, only not as heavy. Stirrups on the oar handles. Sit in the chair, put your feet in the stirrups and push, lift, swing, dip, push. If he got out of this alive, he’d patent the son of a bitch.
“Liam?” Wy’s voice came to him from far away. “Liam?”
He realized she was standing stock-still, her head cocked as if she were listening. The oars came up and he paused, trying to hear what she did. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing,” she said, and he could hear the tired smile in her voice. “Nothing at all.”
It took him a minute to comprehend what she meant. Sometime, somehow the wind had died down completely. Stopped, as if someone had thrown a switch. The surface of the river had smoothed out, hardly any chop left.
“What happened?” he said, dazed.
“It stopped,” she said, sounding as punchy as he felt. “It stopped.”
One minute later, as if in compensation, they floated into a gloomy soup of fog. It parted grudgingly before them and closed in again greedily behind them as they passed through it, and Liam had the sensation of being swallowed alive. He knew a sudden sympathy for Jonah. Water sloshed at his feet.
Moisture condensed on their faces and hands in tiny droplets. They couldn’t see ten feet in any direction. Liam kept them as close to the bank as he dared. The riverbank undulated in curving S’s, flirting with sandbanks, opening suddenly into the mouths of creeks-the wrong creek, time after time. They heard the sound of an occasional fish jump, the lost cry of a goose, the rustle of brush as something moved through a thicket. No croaking of ravens, though.
“I feel like Charon,” Liam said, his voice hushed.
Her laugh was forced. “Where is Cerberus?”
“That was him before. The wind. Sounded like a three-headed dog howling to me.”
This time her laugh wasn’t quite as forced. “Now that you mention it…”
He could barely see her through the mists that curled between them, a ghostly outline in the bow. To keep her talking, he said, maybe at random, maybe not, “Do you remember your mother?”
“Not much.”
“Was your father around?”
“No.” There was a brief silence. “I don’t remember him at all.”
“Lucky,” he said, thinking of his own father.
Her voice came gently out of the night and the fog. “He’s not that bad, Liam.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.” She didn’t know what he knew about his father and what Colonel Charles Campbell would do, had done, for promotion. She didn’t know why he had made her fly him out to that archaeological dig south of Newenham and west of Chinook Air Force Base when his father had left this summer. Wy had met Charles twice. She didn’t know him the way he did.
“You named your son for him,” her disembodied voice reminded him.
“That was Jenny’s idea.”
“You could have changed her mind.”
“Yeah.” He rowed. “Yeah, I suppose I could have. And the fact that I didn’t says something.”
“He’s your father.”
“Yeah. He is that. Did you ever know who yours was?”
A raven croaked suddenly from overhead and Liam started violently, jerking the oars free of the water. Water splashed, catching both him and Wy. The stern of the skiff started to drift. The dock loomed up suddenly out of the fog, materializing into a dark rectangular shape off the starboard bow.
They both saw it at the same time. “There!”
He pulled for shore with short, powerful strokes, and a moment later they were alongside. Liam shipped the oars while Wy fastened the bowline off to a cleat on the dock. She trotted up the dock, Liam right behind her, and they threaded their way up the path that followed the creek. Moments later they emerged into the clearing and there was the cabin. She paused just long enough to grin at him. “I told you we could make it.”
He kissed her. He hadn’t meant to, but he did it anyway. “I’ll never doubt you again.” He added, following her to the door, “I’ll never fly into a storm with you again, either.”
“I swear I hear voices,” they heard someone say, and the door of the cabin opened as they walked up the steps.
Bill stood there, astonished. “What the hell are you two doing here? And how the hell did you get here?”
Newenham, September 6
“Do you think the wind’s slowing down a little?”
“In the last five minutes since you asked, no.”
“Wy’s going to be seriously pissed if you break her computer.”
Jim spared a glance over his shoulder. “Oh, please.”
Jo, pacing restlessly back and forth across the living room of Wy’s house, glared at the back of his head as he sat hunched over the monitor. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Destroying your credit rating.”
She halted. “What?”
He grinned at the screen. “Relax, Dunaway, it was joke.”
Suspiciously, she came to peer over his shoulder. “It better be.” She squinted. “For god’s sake. Isn’t that the state troopers’ database?”
“Yes.”
“How did you get in?”
“Talent, Dunaway, loads and loads of talent.” He scrolled down.
“Liam gave you the password.”
He snorted. “The perfect cop breaking faith with his own force? Give me a break.”