As if she’d heard him his phone buzzed with an incoming text from Wy, in which she ETA’d him that she was about ninety minutes out, followed by two emojis, a heart and a flame. His heart skipped a beat, because of course it did. Liam Campbell was that greatest of all clichés, a man truly, madly, deeply in love with his wife, and he didn’t care who knew it. What’s more, he was loved just as much in return, and he didn’t care who knew that, either. He could feel his swagger coming on just climbing into the truck and he was positively cocky turning the key. Even if he was laughing at himself just a little bit as he did so. Ninety long minutes, he thought, as the engine idled. How far up the bay had Erik said his dig was?

A shadow passed between him and the sun and he almost felt rather than heard the susurration of wings. He looked up. It was only an eagle, wing tips feathering the air, white head and tail almost erased against the pale blue of the sky. The likeness to Blue Jay Jefferson was even more pronounced. Not a raven, though, so all was well.

He put Brad Paisley on the speakers, turned up the volume, and drove back across the causeway that separated the lake and the tidal estuary, where he turned right on the road that led east out of town. Imaginatively named East Bay Road, he noticed. In spite of there being a hundred times the number of road miles and five times the population of Newenham, he had the feeling it wasn’t going to be all that difficult to find his way around Blewestown and environs.

Near to town, the road was paved with large shoulders, a center turn lane and, if his eyes did not deceive him, an actual bike trail, on both sides no less. About five miles out it intersected with another road that led back around to the airport, named, in another excess of creativity, Airport Road. After that the road devolved into a narrow corridor of mixed residential and business, with the trees crowding in on both sides, especially thicket after thicket of alder and a lot of dead or dying evergreens. The spruce bark beetle was still single-mindedly pursuing its determination to eat every last spruce tree in North America, made manifest here by stand after stand of spruces that had died and turned from deep, dense green to dull, tattered brown. East Bay Road was one lightning strike away from a raging forest fire that could wipe out everything from here to town, and Liam wondered why the dead trees weren’t being cleared. He rounded a corner and saw a crew with a cherry picker taking down one such stand as he passed by, a tall, once-proud tree crashing down in a small cloud of dead needles shaken loose by the impact.

He watched his odometer and at about twenty miles out, after a deep dive into a ravine carved by a small creek crossed by a very old wooden bridge and a switchbacked climb up the other side, he found a driveway on the right. The street sign had been knocked into the ditch but he could make out the letters. Glacier View. He looked across the Bay, where an enormous glacier, all swirling white and blue and gray and black ridges, curved down between two mountains to preen over its reflection in the still water beneath. Glacier view, indeed.