She pointed beneath a row of gauges that meant nothing to Liam, and he saw a knob with four settings: Right, Left, Both, Off. It was set at Off. He stared at it in puzzled silence for a moment. "Where's the On?"

"What?"

"If there's an Off, there ought to be an On."

Seemed simple enough to Liam, but Wy shook her head. "Magnetos are little generators, their own power source. There are two of them, and they're always on. This isn't really an on-off switch, like a"--she cast about for a comparison to something he might understand--"like a light switch. It's a kill switch. Either their power is available to the engine, one or the other or both of them, or it isn't."

"And according to this switch, power from this one wasn't when Mr. ..."

"DeCreft."

"When Mr. DeCreft pulled the prop through."

"No. But it must have been, or--" She stopped, and added, almost against her will, "I don't get it."

"Get what?"

"Th." She waved a hand, inclusive of the deceased, the Super Cub, the dash. "Bob was even more careful than I am. He never would have pulled the prop through with the mag on."

Liam regarded the knob in frowning silence. "How old was DeCreft?"

"Sixty-five."

"Sixty-five?" He raised an eyebrow and looked at her, something it was getting easier to do.

"Sixty-five going on thirty," she said. "He passed his flight physical every year, including this one."

Liam let that pass, too. The Cub contained two green headphones with voice-activated microphones attached, one hanging from a hook over each seat, and two expensive-looking handheld radios sitting on the backseat, as if carelessly tossed there on the way out of the plane. He looked back at the dash, stooping to examine the switch more closely. "Hey. What's this?"

"What?" She peered around him and reached between him and the doorjamb to slap his hand as it stretched toward the dash. "Don't touch anything."

Again his skin burned where it had grazed hers. Their bodies had been forced very close together in the open doorway of the little plane. He took a deep breath and said, pointing from a safe distance, "What's that wire?"

"What wire?"

"That wire coming from out of the bottom of the dash."

"What?" All self-consciousness gone, she elbowed him aside and bent down, breast against the forward seat, nose inches from the bottom of the dash. Her braid slid forward to fall between the seat and the right-side door, and he resisted an impulse to pull it back. "What the hell?" She reached out, and it was his turn to reach over her and slap her hand aside, leaning against her back as he did so. She jumped. So did he. His voice was gruff. "What is it? What's wrong?"

There was a brief silence, just long enough for him to imagine everything she wasn't saying. "The p-lead's off."