Not much snow, but what there is, is packed down. No big ruts, either. Curious. For an abandoned strip."

"Maybe hunters use it."

He shook his head. "Fishermen, maybe. Island's too small to support anything worth packing out."

The Cessna had rolled out to a stop twenty feet from a tumbledown assortment of shacks, most of them minus their roof and some missing a wall or two. Kicking through the debris, they found nothing of interest beyond a tattered, water-soaked cover of Life magazine featuring Betty Grable's legs, and a half-buried metal tank with a pump handle mounted on the outside. Jack tried the pump and to their surprise it worked smoothly. A few cranks and fluid gushed out of the spout, to melt and puddle in the snow on the ground. The smell of gasoline struck sharply at their nostrils.

"Av gas," Jack said.

"How do you know?"

"It's green," he said, pointing to the puddle beneath the spout. "Aviation gas is green. Plain old gas gas, like you put in your car, is clear."

"Oh. Right." Kate stared at the widening puddle, her eyebrows drawing together.

"Besides," Jack was saying, "what else kind of gas would you expect to find right next to an airstrip? I wonder how long it's been sitting here? Twenty, thirty years, you think? Might have been here since the war." Catching sight of her puzzled expression, he said, "What?"

"I don't know," she said slowly, still staring at the puddle of green gas. "There's something about av gas I remember from when I was a kid, but. . ." She shook her head and smiled at him. "At two o'clock this morning I'll probably sit bolt upright in bed and shout it out."

"Not if you're in the sack with me, you won't," he told her.

"Whatever you say." She grinned at him. "Come on.

Let's walk down to the beach."

It was Jack who found it, or rather fell through the roof of it. He'd been wandering behind her, through the tall rye grass poking up through the thin layer of crusted snow, enjoying the sun and the salt breeze and the sound of the surf, when the previously solid ground beneath his feet gave way and suddenly he was sliding through the turf and into an empty space beneath.

"Hey," he said. The turf engulfed his legs and started up his butt to nibble at his waist and he raised his voice.

"Hey? Hey! Hey, Kate! Kate! Help! Help!"

He kicked out with his legs, trying to find purchase, something to brace himself against, and immediately slid in up to his chest. His hands scrabbled around and grasped at the grass, anything to keep him from sliding even farther into what his naturally strong sense of optimism assured him was probably a bubbling pit of volcanic lava. If it came to that, he suffered from a lifelong case of acrophobia, and would have preferred a pit of lava to an empty, endless abyss.