The Nameless Luna novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Teal

"Who has it?" I said.

"The High seat's investigators took it off the strut at the crash site," Warrick said.

"Elden led them. He told me they'd send the card back when they were done."

"And?"

"And they were done in a week."

Gussie scuffed her boot on the concrete.

"I called a dozen times," she said, much quieter than before. "The last time, a girl at the desk told me to stop calling."

Warrick pulled the tarp back over the wing.

He tucked the corner under the strut carefully.

"Come and eat," he said. "The cook made moose stew. If we don't come, she'll take it personally."

The bunkhouse was one long room with an oil stove in the middle the size of a car engine.

Everybody ate there. Kids on the benches, dogs under them, boots drying in a row along the wall.

I got a bowl and a seat near the stove.

Nobody asked me anything. They just passed the bread.

My room was in the Holloran cabin, at the end of a short hall, across from Gussie's.

Warrick's door was at the other end.

It had a hand-sewn quilt and a window on the strip.

On Monday I started flying.

Mail to the camps up the Koyukuk.

Groceries to a family on a lake with three kids and a goat.

Stove oil to an old couple who met the Otter on the beach with a wheelbarrow.

Every place I landed, people came out to look at me.

They were polite. They said "ma'am."

They said "the pilot" to each other when they thought I couldn't hear.

Gussie rode with me on Tuesday.

She talked the entire flight, about carburetor heat and a boy in Bettles.

She didn't touch the controls once.

When I offered, she put both her hands under her thighs and sat on them.

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