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to run. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and sought refuge in work. “I’ve got an early morning flight, I’d better get going.”
    “You said some harsh things to each other in May,” Moses said to her retreating back. “Hurtful things. Especially you.”
    That did it. She spun around, her face furious with anger, shame and guilt. “I handed him my heart and he ate it for lunch. I am not on the dinner menu!”
    Pleased with what she felt was a splendid exit line, she turned to march up the stairs and into her house.
    From behind her she heard Moses’ voice, acerbic and irascible as always. “How about dessert?”
    The slam of the door was his answer.
    The old man sighed and shook his head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”
    He waited for the voices to kick in. For a change, they didn’t. Mostly they were insistent, forceful, regular spiritual bulldozers, determined to make him a legend in his own time.
    He stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked at the beach below, strewn with boulders and tree trunks, the occasional fifty-five-gallon drum, the odd Styrofoam cooler. It wasn’t that far down, but far enough. He could shut the voices up for good. That option had always been open to him, from the time he first heard them when he was twelve and they made him tell his mother that his father was going to kill her. She didn’t listen, of course, no one ever did, but that didn’t make the voices let up any.
    They seldom told him anything straight out, though, and they had a marked tendency to be both insistent and peremptory. Sometimes he wondered if, in seventy-eight years of a very full life, he had perhaps acquired enough wisdom to make his own judgments, his own rulings, his own estimates of what kind of trouble his extended family, stretching from Newenham to Nome, needed his help to get out of.
    Not that anyone ever looked happy when they saw him coming. Foresight, the open eye that looked inward to the future, was more of a curse than a blessing. Uilililik, the Little Hairy Man who snatched up children and took them away, never to be seen again, was more welcome in the villages than he was.
    He thought of Cassandra, and sighed again. Doomed forever to tell the truth, and equally doomed forever to be disbelieved. She’d died young. Lucky for her. He stepped back from the edge of the cliff, from the fifty-foot drop to the vast expanse of southward-moving water. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
    As he walked around the old but well-maintained house set twenty-five feet from the cliff’s edge, he thought about the float plane on a short final for the elongated, freshwater lake that served as Newenham’s seaplane base. Wy had been right; that had definitely been someone not flying their own plane. There was no need to be at full RPMs on final; it didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise and move up the time for an overhaul. Hell, there was no need to be at full RPMs after takeoff, or at least not for long. Once the plane was in the air the pilot should back off on the throttle and the prop pitch. If he didn’t, the mini-sonic booms generated by the tip of the prop exceeding the speed of sound were enough to rattle windowpanes for a mile in every direction. The sound was a dead giveaway that the guy or the gal on the yoke didn’t have to pay to fix his or her own engine. Or had enough money not to care about maintenance costs.
    But this pilot — ah, now, this pilot. Moses smacked his lips and grinned. There had been a gold shield on the pilot-side door, bright with gilt. Wyanet Chouinard might fancy herself content with her life, but she was about to receive a first-class wake-up call. Good.
    Meanwhile, he squinted at the sun. Seven-thirty, he estimated, give or take five minutes. “About time for a beer.”
    He might not be able to drown the voices, but he could and would drown them out, at least for a time.
    · · ·
     
    He heard Charlie crying and sat up to go to him. A