Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (8 page)

"He's sent all the specs," Alma said. "We can go over them in detail on the boat. And he's sent the tickets. We need to head for San Diego next Wednesday if we're going to spend a few days with Lewis's sisters. You and Stasi can come later if you want, but we promised his family we'd visit since we're going through San Diego. Maria has never seen Dora, and Kathy hasn't seen her since she was a newborn."

"I guess Stasi and I will take care of things with the Sheriff and getting the kids off then," Mitch said unhappily.

"We've done the best we could," Alma said. "I don't know what Joey was thinking."

"Yeah." Mitch glanced out the window at the runway and the clouds beyond. "At least Jimmy and Douglas will finish the school year here, with their friends. And next year if they start in Denver it will be at the beginning of the year. Their friends, their house, all their stuff…not just their father."

Alma put her hand on his back. "It's rough. It's really rough. But we do the best we can."

"I know," Mitch said.

D
inner was more subdued than usual, and Lewis found himself hoping the children hadn’t noticed. Mitch’s news couldn’t have come at a worse time, he thought, as he mechanically dried the dishes and stacked them into the cabinets. They’d gotten their first check from Odlum, but most of that had gone to hire replacement pilots from Comanche Air. Paul Rayburn, Comanche’s owner and an old friend, had recommended them highly, and admitted that he’d been expecting to have to lay off a couple of men after a slow spring. Alma had bargained to get Rayburn’s more experienced men, and ended up with a pair of brothers, Ted and Jeff Mulligan, and a scrawny string bean of a kid named Foster. They were lodging in town at the moment, and would move into the house once the rest of them were gone.

“How was the kid?” Mitch asked, slipping through the kitchen door, and Alma glanced over her shoulder.

“You got the boys settled?”

“I told Jimmy he and Douglas could listen to The Shadow,” Mitch answered, “and Stasi’s taken Merilee up to bed.”

The sound of the radio came faintly from the front room as Alma turned off the water in the sink. Lewis hung the dishtowel neatly in its place and nodded as Alma held up the coffeepot. They settled at the kitchen table, and Lewis folded his hands around his cup.

“Tiny’s good. Not at all a hot shot. Not a lot of hours, but he has good instincts. I let him bring the Frontiersman back on his own.” Lewis saw Alma grin at that, and gave a sheepish smile in answer. Of Gilchrist’s planes, the Frontiersman was his baby, and she knew what it meant for him to let someone else take the controls. “I think he’ll be ok.”

“Do they really call him Tiny?” Alma asked.

“Apparently he has a couple of older brothers who are even taller,” Mitch answered.

“He’s not really checked out on a trimotor,” Lewis said, “but I expect they can work around that.”

“He’ll be qualified by the end of the summer,” Alma said. “And that’s a nice bonus for him.”

Lewis took a sip of his cooling coffee, cut half and half with milk at this late hour. It was a nice bonus for Foster, and a break for the Mulligans, no need to worry about layoffs in a summer when work was still hard to come by. It was a huge break for Gilchrist, a chance to make themselves useful to one of the most important men in aviation, and one that came with a free trip to the South Seas, the kind of tourist destination he’d never have been able to afford. Not to mention the chance to see his own family, something he’d expected to have to put off for at least another year. For that matter, it was probably a break for Odlum: Gilchrist Aviation had to be cheaper than some of the larger companies he could have hired. The only people for whom it wasn’t a break at all were the Patterson kids.

“I talked to the sheriff again,” Mitch said, as though he’d read Lewis’s mind. But then, Lewis thought, there wasn’t much else any of them were thinking about right now. “I asked if there was any way we could at least get some of the kids’ clothes back, or their toys, but the landlord’s put a lien on the whole mess. If we’d just taken the stuff with us when we brought them back here, they’d at least have something.”

“We couldn’t have known,” Alma said, but she sounded guilty, too. Lewis put his hand over hers, and he gripped it tightly for a moment. “What is heaven’s name is Pete Palmer thinking?”

“That Joey hasn’t paid rent in God knows how long,” Mitch said. “And he’s got kids of his own to feed.”

Alma shook her head. “It’s still not right.”

“I was thinking,” Mitch said, after a moment. “If you could advance me a couple bucks from my next check — Palmer’s putting the household goods up for auction, maybe I could buy back a few things. Just so they’d have something to take with them to Denver.”

Alma sucked in her breath. “I — let me look at the books, ok? Maybe a dollar or two, but — I can’t promise.”

Mitch nodded. “Sure. I understand. Thanks, Al.” He pushed back his chair, painfully casual. “I’m just going to go check on Stasi.”

“Sure,” Alma answered, her voice just as muted. Lewis waited until the door closed behind Mitch, and rested his hand on her shoulder.

“More coffee?”

She leaned against him, but shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“Ok.” Lewis poured himself another half cup of coffee, stirred in sugar and milk. “Tell me what Odlum sent. I haven’t had a chance to look at anything.”

As he’d hoped, her expression eased a little. “It looks like everything. All the specs, the draft of the manual, even notes from the first test groups.”

“We’re not the first?” Lewis sat up a little straighter. If they weren’t the first — what had the other test pilots found that Odlum didn’t want to accept?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Alma said, “and it’s not like that. Or at least I don’t think it is. The initial test group was military, and they passed it. The only thing they didn’t like was they said they thought it was underpowered for a plane this size. The first group he hired in Honolulu agreed, so Floyd shut down the test and he’s sending us with a couple of replacement engines that he thinks will do the trick.”

“Uh-huh,” Lewis said. What he really wanted to know was why Odlum had hired them, an entirely new team that had to be shipped to the islands along with the new engines, instead of continuing with the team he already had. But Alma needed cheering up, and he didn’t feel any of the prickly worry that he’d learned to recognize as the first warnings of his Sight. There would be time to ask the hard questions later. “Has he got someone already to do the installation?”

“Yes.” Alma nodded. “There’s a company there that Floyd has used before. And the flight engineer who worked with the first team — L. Lauder, whoever he is.”

That was somewhat reassuring. If the engineer was willing to stick around, then there probably wasn’t anything serious wrong with the plane. Maybe Odlum hadn’t liked their work, or maybe they had other jobs lined up; there were a dozen perfectly harmless reasons Odlum might need a new team to do his testing. He folded his hands around his cup again, turning his concentration inward. There was still nothing there, and he smiled at Alma. “Want to take a quick look at the specs before we turn in?”

She smiled back, the lines easing from her forehead, and his heart lifted. “Sure. Let me get the package.”

M
itch went upstairs quietly just in case the girls were actually asleep. It seemed like Stasi had gone up to put them to bed a long time ago. She'd missed the whole discussion downstairs about the steamer and the Mulligans and the plans for while they were away. He eased the door to the small bedroom open.

Dora was asleep in the bed, curled in a little ball against the bedrail, wrapped around her rag doll. Stasi sat in the rocker, Merilee on her lap, legs wrapped around her waist with her head on Stasi's shoulder, the light of the nightlight bathing her in a warm glow. Stasi's eyes were closed, her cheek against the baby's head. Silent tears crept from under her eyelids, making glittering tracks against her cheek, and one glistened on Merilee's hair. Her features were half in shadow, half in light, her lips pursed.

His weight shifted. The floor creaked, and Stasi looked up. "Oh," she whispered. She got up carefully with Merilee. "I was just putting the girls to bed. Dora went right to sleep but Merilee needed to be rocked."

Mitch didn't say anything.

Gently she put Merilee down next to Dora, one quilt over both, two little brown-haired girls, one two and a bit and the other not quite two. Merilee wiggled a little, sprawling with her hand outflung, palm opening.

Stasi tiptoed out of the room and shut the door, standing beside him in the dark hall.

"I'm sorry," Mitch said. There were other things he might say, but he didn't know which was right.
I didn't know it would be so hard for you. I would never want to do anything to hurt you. It's just for a little while.
And so he just put his arms around her.

"I had a little girl," she said.

Her head was inclined. He couldn't see her face. For a moment he didn't realize what she meant.

"Right after the war. I left her at the Protestant Orphan Asylum in Prague." Her voice choked. "She was born in the fall after the White Terror. I couldn't take care of her. I didn't have anywhere to live. I didn't have any money. I didn't even have a roof over my head. I didn’t have any…" She stopped, swallowing.

He held onto her, not saying anything, just holding her as tight as he could, full of words that didn't come.

"I had to give her up for adoption. It was the only way I could keep her safe. I couldn't take care of her." Stasi stopped again, her hand tight against his back. "But she was the most beautiful baby."

Each sob seemed torn out, Stasi who never cried, Stasi who always had a brave face on everything. "She'd be fifteen now. I hope nice things happened to her."

"Stasi. Stasi." There was nothing to do but hold on, to stand like that in the dark hallway, holding on to her.
If I could take it all and make everything perfect for you…

She looked up, her hands tight on the back of his shirt, her voice hard as the bones of the earth. "We are not taking these children to the State Home in Denver. Not while there is breath in my body."

"No," Mitch said. "I see we aren't." His world rearranged itself in a moment, patterns shifting and reforming, a second chance for everyone.

She dropped her face for a moment, mascara all over the shoulder of his shirt.

"We'll petition the judge to make us their permanent guardians. He'll do that. He knows us," he said. A leap of faith, a huge thing, no turning back. "And if Joey doesn't turn up, we'll adopt the whole lot."

"I don't have any idea how to be a good mother."

"I reckon you just do your best," Mitch said. "It can't be any worse than where they are now, with no mother or father at all." His kids. His family. Impossible and unexpected. She'd never said anything about kids or wanting them, but of course she wouldn't. Of course she wouldn't, because it would hurt him, because it would be an accusation, a dishonorable blow since she'd gone into this knowing that he could never father anyone’s child. But…

"We've got to be better than the State Home, don't we?" There was that choke in her voice again. "They wouldn't keep them together. Merilee would go somewhere without her brothers and she'd never know who they were or remember…."

"We'd be lots better than the State Home." His little girl, sleeping on her mother's shoulder. His boys, bumping along in the back of the pickup truck, throwing the ball around the yard and reading
Call of the Wild
…

"Could we really?"

"Yeah." His arms tightened around her again. There was no terrifying plunge they couldn't take together. But it was going to be tricky. It was going to be tight. "We'll have to get a bigger place."

"I do see that we can't have five people over the garage," Stasi said. "Merilee can share with Dora, but the boys can't sleep on the couch forever. I suppose we could rent a house. With actual bedrooms."

"We could rent a house." A house in town, where the kids could walk to school or take the school bus, since there was absolutely no way that five people would fit in the car. Or he'd have to trade cars, sell the Torpedo and get something with more space, but that wouldn't solve the sleeping on the couch problem. And there was one even bigger problem. "Hawaii," Mitch said. "We're supposed to leave next week. It's a lot of money, Stasi. And we're going to need it. You could stay here, but I have to go." It was solid money, good money that couldn't be replaced.

"With you gone for two months?" Stasi looked spooked. "Me, by myself with them for two or three months? With Alma and Lewis gone?"

Or not. "They're taking Dora," Mitch said. "What if we just brought the whole bunch with us? It'll be summer. School will be out. We could bring all three of them with us. It's just eight weeks."

"Take three children to Hawaii? Three children who just lost their father and who have probably never been out of the state of Colorado in their lives, one of them who isn't but two years old?"

"Yep," Mitch said.

She laid her head against his shoulder. "Well then. I don't see what could possibly go wrong."

"Not a thing," Mitch said. "It will all work out."

Chapter Four

T
hey had taken their coffee out onto the hotel’s lanai, the better to continue their discussion of the first two weeks of the dig. They hadn’t found much, and what little they had turned up certainly wasn’t Chinese, but Jerry had to admit that they suggested that anything more interesting would lie a bit to the north of the area they’d staked out so far. He and Radke had argued about it over their dinner, Radke pushing for an immediate shift of emphasis, Jerry holding out to finish analyzing the results from all the trenches before they changed their overall plans.

“We have the time,” he said, for the third time. “And if we do turn up something — interesting — no one will be able to question its provenance if we’ve definitively eliminated all possibility of missionary interference.”