Flying Home

“Oh, man,” she whispered, shoving her cell back into the pocket of her jacket.

“What?” Gage asked.

“Phone’s dead, totally dead and I don’t suppose you can jump out in midair and get my duffel bag out of storage?”

He barked a short laugh at that. “No, I’m not jumping out, but as a matter of fact, I can get to the luggage area over the backseats. But no one is getting out of their restraints until we’re totally in the clear from this storm.” He touched the screen twice, then turned to her. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re agreeing that you’re crazy, too?”

“We’re both going back when we should have stayed at the airport. You knew there was a storm, but you thought you could outrun it, and I knew they’d get me on a plane at ten o’clock in the morning, and I chose to flag you down instead. We both wanted to get to Wolf Lake badly enough to risk all this.”

“Whoa, no. I’m going now because I have business meetings and I didn’t have time to cool my heels in Pueblo. I really thought, from what I was told, that the storm was far enough away and on course to sweep to the east, not southwest.” He scrubbed a hand across his face. “If I’d known, I would have stayed put, cancelled this trip and rescheduled the meetings.”

“You weren’t going home for your family?”

“It’s mostly business, but I do need to see my brother and my parents. I couldn’t get away at Christmas, and things are changing on the old homestead, so I decided to combine a business trip with a visit to the family.”

She’d heard about Adam Carson leaving with the woman he’d met at the inn in town. Something about heading to Chicago and they still weren’t back, so Adam obviously wasn’t the brother he was going to visit. “Jackson?” she asked as she leaned her head against the chair’s high backrest and watched him closely.

“Yes, Jack.”

When Gage didn’t say any more, she thought again of the mention of business in his explanation. He was going back for business? She hadn’t heard about any major construction going on, except for something about a hotel or something.

“You have business there?” she asked, thankful that the ride was fairly smooth at the moment.

He exhaled. “Yeah.”

That was that; he didn’t elaborate at all. “I would guess that since you didn’t know about your bulletin board assignment until the last minute, that your business has to be on a grander scale than something in primary colors.”

He chuckled again, a comfortable sound, despite the constant roar of the wind. “Every client is as important as any other.”

“That’s your motto?” she asked as he turned to her, smiling, that single dimple showing up again.

“Maybe it should be,” he said before he averted his gaze to look at the screens again. “So, what’s waiting for you when you get back to Wolf Lake?”

Her stomach knotted. “My kids,” she said simply.

“Your kids?”

“Yes, and I promised I’d be back tonight, before they went home.”

He looked confused. “I thought you said you weren’t married.”

“I’m not. They’re the kids at The Family Center. I told them that I would be back today. I made a calendar and put it up. Today is circled and they’re watching for me. “I can’t let them down. They’ve had too much disappointment in their lives already.”

“So that’s what’s so urgent that you had to hitchhike to get back on time?”

She almost said an automatic, “Yes, that’s why,” but something else hit her out of the blue. Something she realized she’d known all along, but hadn’t acknowledged. She simply wanted to get home as soon as possible. She needed to get back where she felt she belonged. “Partly,” she conceded, but didn’t elaborate.

“I suspect they’d be just fine if you hadn’t found a way to get back,” he said, but his tone had become almost distracted. “Kids are adaptable.”

The tension in her grew even more. “Maybe. If they hadn’t been thrown into lives that they either don’t fully understand or can’t cope with, maybe things would be different.”

“Maybe they need to learn to cope,” he said, tapping the screen right in front of him. She’d thought he was talking to keep her distracted, to make sure she didn’t freak out, but his almost absentminded comment bothered her.

“Tell them that they need to suck it up and get over it?”

The edge in her voice finally caught his attention. “No, that’s not what I’m saying,” he countered. “I just meant—”

“Your reason for going to Wolf Lake is valid, and mine isn’t?”

He held up a palm toward her. “Okay, okay, this has gotten off track. Let’s get back to what I meant, not what you heard.”

That made her snort. “Oh, a case of ‘what are you going to believe, me or your lying ears?’ Is that it?”

He stared at her, and then burst out laughing. She watched him, finally finding the humor in what she’d said, but she didn’t laugh. The best she could do was offer an apology. “Peace?”

“Yes,” he said, and she felt the plane turn slightly to her left, dipping into the snow streaked grayness around them.

“What are you doing? I thought we were managing to get toward the edges of this storm?”

“We are,” he said, but without a lot of conviction in his voice.

“Then why are you looking concerned?” she prodded as the plane dipped even more. “Come on, you can tell me. I won’t get upset, just tell me the plain, honest truth.”

He hesitated, which didn’t bode well for what he was going to say if he did what she asked. She braced herself and the howling wind was almost drowning out the sound of the motors. “Okay, we should be breaking out of this, at least, we should have broken out of it by now, but we haven’t, and the mountains are there, far too close. So, I have to maneuver a bit, and it might make the plane roll.”

“Roll?” She envisioned going head over heels in the plane as it did a giant loop in the sky.

“Shouldn’t have said that. I mean I’m going to have to angle more than normal, and you might feel a shifting of center. But I have to do it.”

“Okay, okay, I can understand that,” she said quickly. “Sure, that makes sense. Go ahead and do it.”

Gage cast her a glance and said, “Thank you, I will.” Then he focused his full attention on the controls.

Things seemed to be just what he said, that dipping, then leveling, then dipping again, mostly on his side, then she heard a muttered oath under his breath. He pressed something on his earpiece.

“What’s happening?” she asked, but he wasn’t talking to her.

He was back on the radio, speaking rapidly, but this time she could tell he was trying to make a connection. He said his call letters over and over again, waited, then tapped the screen several times before he started to talk again. A mishmash of unintelligible words to her. He must have made contact, but as far as she could tell, none of what he was saying was good.

When she thought he was finished trying the radio, she asked, “How bad is it?”

He shook his head as if to silence her, then he was speaking into the radio again. “Roger, roger!” He had made contact, listened, then shook his head. “Negative on that.” He listened as he fought to keep the plane level again. “The edge?” he asked. “Temps dropped, too low.”

Merry turned from him, wishing he was smiling now and enjoying this, despite how much that had annoyed her earlier. He was grim, intent on the words coming into his ears from the headset and the readings on the panel.

CHAPTER FOUR

GAGE FELT RESISTANCE in the controls that had little to do with the fierce wind and the snow sticking to the windows. He could see the temperature outside had dropped twenty degrees in less than a minute, and he knew what was happening. He switched radio channels to one he hoped to never see on any gages in a plane he was flying, 121.5 MHz—the international aeronautical emergency frequency.