“Left is home.” Wy pointed up the Bay. “Right.” That way she could admire the view, and he wouldn’t have to endure the occasionally straight drop off the edge of the road. At least not until they drove back this way to get home.

The road had no shoulders but fortunately very little traffic. Driveways led to everything from log cabins covered in moss to McMansions that looked as if they’d been airlifted in from Orange County. He instructed Wy on the meaning of “dry cabin”. She shuddered. “I lived my first year in Newenham with an outhouse. Don’t ever want to do that again.”

“Never had to, never want to. Ahah.”

“Ahah what?”

He slowed, checked for traffic, and turned left on Baranov Avenue. “Ahah, this is the street Judge DeWinter lives on.”

The surface was dirt and the sides were lined with an impenetrable hedge of alders that in places met overhead to form a tunnel. Roads with names like Shelikov and Rezanov appeared and disappeared along with the houses built on them. At one point the road went down one side of a steep if brief canyon, crossed a one-lane steel bridge with no railings over a dry creek bed, and climbed back up the other side. The landscape opened suddenly on what appeared to be a—yes, it was, a junk yard. There were dozens of cars, a black Ford F-150 with its cab smashed almost flat onto the seat, a gray Impreza with a crumpled hood and four flat tires, an old station wagon with wooden doors, and more of the same. The vehicles, if they could still be called that, were parked haphazardly on both sides of the road, leaving barely enough room for him to creep by. More had been dumped on the side of the road and left long enough to sprout fireweed through the broken windows.

“They better never have a fire at the end of this road,” Wy said.

Liam thought of Chief Rafferty, and wondered if she’d ever been back here. Maybe she should pay it a visit. Maybe someone should tell her she should.

A two-story house with a flat roof and plywood siding stood adjacent to the junk yard. There was a soggy-looking couch next to a tire swing hanging from a deck that protruded from the second story, and an American flag over one window. On that deck stood a skinny guy in a MAGA cap taking a leak. He saw them and waved hello with his penis, creating a sparkly arc that showered the pit bull barking ferociously at them from the yard below.

“Ew,” Wy said.

Liam slid past, just managing not to scrape the paint from the driver side of his pickup or to do a ditch dive off the other side of the road. The road began to incline and about ten yards down the alders closed in again. There were three more driveways off to either side and in half a mile the road ended at a two-story house with an attached garage and a view across Cook Inlet that included all the volcanoes from Douglas to Spurr.