A second later he answered his own question. Why would Gabe McGuire of all people want to make it easy for anyone to come visit?

Mystery solved, he headed back into town with a heart that lightened with every mile. He was already smiling when he turned left on Airport Road, and he was positively grinning when he entered the code to get through the gate onto the field. He drove to Wy’s tie-down and got out. The sun was warm on the back of his neck and he stood there for a moment, enjoying the place, the day, the anticipation of greeting his wife in his best Duke of Marlborough imitation.

Perhaps just to remind him that all joy is conditional and fleeting, his brain brought up the images of Jenny and Charlie, his first wife and their son, both killed by the same drunk driver. That event had begun a downward spiral that had nearly destroyed him mentally and emotionally, and very nearly professionally as well. That spiral had culminated in his being assigned to the post in Newenham, a location so remote and a town so lacking in all the mod cons they couldn’t even keep a city cop on the payroll, never mind a trooper.

But there he had found Wy again. He looked at the image of Jenny’s face in his mind’s eye and saw her smile at him. They had been such good friends, and generous woman that she was she would never have wanted him to live out his life in loneliness and misery. She would have been happy he had found Wy again, and again, he hoped with all his heart that she had never suspected the affair. Jenny had been and always would be the best person he had ever met in his life, and this far on the other side of his loss he knew he was all the better for having had her in it.

It was harder to look at Charlie, even in his own imagination, to see again that soft, tiny bundle of gurgling charm blowing bubbles at him, those tiny fingers grasping his own. Sometimes Liam’s arms actually ached to hold his son again. His heart did ache at the loss and always would.

He heard the distant drone of an airplane and looked up, squinting into the sun.

Five

Monday, September 2, Labor Day

STRETCHING ALMOST TWO HUNDRED MILES from the city of Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska, the vast estuary called Cook Inlet was host to tides second only to those off the Newfoundland Banks, as well as some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Wy crossed the southernmost tip of Kalgin Island and continued on a southeasterly heading, to cross the coast of the Kenai Peninsula at Tikahtnu, a town of a thousand people perched on a bluff divided by a river and its tributarial creek.