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Barred Owl Airport to pick up Sam. It was a short runway, but the Saratoga could handle it.
    She thought about a conventional life—Mathilda would never know how much Kate had wished she could have one. Mathilda had chosen the path she wanted—despite family pressure, she had never married, even when she had had a child. Instead she had fallen in lovewith Ruth, and they had lived together at Cloudlands, the big house on Sachem Hill.
    Kate knew herself in terms of her career and passion for flying. Her personal life was another matter. At thirty-nine, like Mathilda, she had never married. People saw her laughing, driving, flying, and they didn’t realize they were seeing a ghost. No one knew that ghosts could freeze—just like mist or vapor forming lacy crystals on windows in the winter—but Kate’s spirit had turned to ice that day in the basement. It had been November, and the cellar had been damp, but all three of them jammed together, all that body heat, had given her a fever. Despite feeling scalded, Kate had been frozen, and when she had thawed, her life force, every possibility of desire, had trickled out of her.
    She didn’t care about owning a house in Black Hall, about tending an English country garden. She and her sister had been bequeathed many paintings by the Black Hall Impressionists, but unlike Beth, she displayed few. She didn’t think about having a child and sending her to the right schools, the best camp. In her mind, she longed to be touched and held and loved, but her body refused it. Ghosts couldn’t feel.
    Kate had watched Beth and their two best friends—Lulu and Scotty—flirting and dating and talking endlessly about the exquisite torments of love and passion. Kate convinced them she didn’t care about such things. She kept busy trying to outfly all the male pilots she knew, just as Mathilda had done in the war and beyond.
    Beth had been the one to do those other things. She had met Pete when he’d visited the gallery, fallen madly in love and married him at twenty-two, had a perfect daughter. She had taken over the gallery, leaving Kate free to fly. She was great at cultivating wealthy collectors, and she assisted law enforcement agents and insurance investigators on the trail of criminals who had stolen paintings from museums and other galleries. She had become something of an expert in the psychology of art thieves—whether those who made it their careers or one-timers, like their father.
    He had been behind the crime. He had needed money to fund his gambling habit. Beth’s theory was that all thefts and cons were born of insatiable need and that their father’s had been to restore his bank account—as much for the sake of the family as himself. Kate considered that to be bullshit. If he had had any insatiable need, it had been to keep blowing money at the casino and supporting his young mistress. The fact that his wife had died, and that she and his daughters had gone through hell, had been less important than achieving his goal.
    And even after what he did, convicted and locked away for life, Beth was kind to him. She was all good. Through everything, she’d never stopped volunteering—especially at the soup kitchen and homeless shelter. She had been as excellent as anyone on this earth could be. Thinking about her sister, Kate felt her eyes blur with tears. She had to squint hard so she could see the dangerously short runway. She judged the length, determined a steep approach, maintained speed, reduced throttle, and touched down.
    Mathilda would have been proud of her landing, especially through teary eyes. And that made Kate sad, because Mathilda had never felt truly proud of Beth. She had loved her. She and Ruth had enjoyed holidays at the Lathrops’ house, occasionally attended openings at the gallery that Mathilda’s parents had founded. Mathilda had been happy she’d lived to meet Samantha, her great-granddaughter. But she’d always felt Beth had taken the expected