Chapter 4

Thirty-five miles to the east, Jackie heard the brief call on the radio on the desk in her shop: “Turn point outbound.”

Well, she’d made it that far, Jackie thought, glancing at the clock. About two hours, not bad time either. She wished that Bree would be a little better about keeping her informed of what was happening, but that wasn’t Bree’s way – she was concentrating on what she was doing, and wasn’t a chatterbox anyway, like some young teenager girls often were.

Jackie got up from the plastic cutter and glanced out the window again, and then at the anemometer whose display was near the window. The sky looked good, filled with cumulus, although there was a big open spot of blue sky to the southeast. That didn’t look good at all. She let out a big sigh, then knew she had to fill Bree in on the bad news.

“Roger that,” she replied into the microphone. “Two hours so far, good going.” She took a deep breath and added, “We’ve picked up a breeze, about five to ten out of the southwest and it’s been blowing like that for several minutes. And there’s a big blue hole to the southeast.” She didn’t have to explain what that meant; she was sure Bree knew it – and if Bree didn’t know what it meant, she’d ask.

There was silence on the radio waves for several seconds before Bree replied with a simple, “Roger that.”

The meaning was clear to Jackie, and she was pretty sure it was just as clear to Bree: she was going to be longer getting back, and there was a good chance getting back was going to involve the sailplane coming back on the trailer. It had happened to Jackie before, in circumstances very similar to this, and Bree had heard the story – more than once.

For a moment she pondered what she should say, if she should say anything at all; after all, she didn’t know much about what was happening thirty-five miles away. She raised the microphone to her lips again and said for what it was worth, “Get high and stay high. And keep in touch.”

“Roger that.”

Back in Spearfish Lake, Autumn Trevetheck looked up from the book she was reading. It was a Mercedes Lackey fantasy book, one she’d read six or eight times before, at least. It was a nice day out there, and she wondered what she was doing spending it inside. There wouldn’t be many more like this for sure, what with winter coming on.

But even if she decided to go out somewhere, she really didn’t have much to do but take the book along with her. Maybe she could find a park bench or something, but there would still be nothing much to do but sit and read, and at least it was more comfortable to do it at home.

Maybe, she thought, she could give Bree Gravengood a call. Bree was a classmate, and at times they’d sat in the lunchroom at school and talked about fantasy books, and occasionally other things, but not often. She really couldn’t call Bree a close friend, because Autumn didn’t have any really close friends, despite being a cheerleader.

She was on the varsity cheerleading team this year, and big deal. She’d wound up on varsity only because the beer party had cleaned out the old varsity cheerleaders about as bad as it had the varsity football team. While there were more of the older girls remaining, it was clear the JV cheerleaders had to be merged with the varsity since there wasn’t a JV football team this year either. Some of the older girls resented it, just like they’d resented having some of their varsity football player boyfriends kicked off the team. Several girls had even quit cheer as a result. The resulting tensions were bad enough that Autumn had thought about quitting herself. Certainly none of the remaining girls could be called friends, not even her classmates.

Autumn was a quiet girl, rather intense, and more than a little on the shy side, which is part of why she liked Bree, who pretty well fit the same description. She’d only gotten to know Bree a little in the almost three years that Bree had been in Spearfish Lake, and then mostly in class and in the lunchroom.

But then, Autumn’s mother had never actually encouraged her very much to have friends. The secret was always there, and there was always the fear of revealing it to one of them. That the women of the Trevetheck family were what other people might have called “Wiccan” or “Pagan” was a deep, dark, firmly held secret. Among themselves, they referred to it as “The Old Way,” and it had been passed down from mother to daughter for hundreds if not thousands of years. The secret was something Autumn had grown up with and had to tolerate, although she had no interest in it. But, like many other things in the family, Autumn’s father Mike had to be firmly kept in the dark about it.

But things were changing.

The Trevetheck women and their fellow believers in the extended family were dimly aware that there were other old traditions out there. They didn’t know much about them, since it had been a long time since any of the Old Way women had contacts with different believers . . . at least until Autumn’s older sister Summer realized that her classmate Alan Jahnke was also a believer in the Goddess. Things were a little different in his tradition; it wasn’t restricted to women although the believers there tended to run to women. In the couple months since Summer and Alan had come out to each other, they’d discovered they had a few different practices and traditions, but that a lot was compatible – a lot like a Lutheran and a Methodist would discover they had much in common.

Although Autumn didn’t really care about the Old Way, she was still filled with her mother’s teachings, weird though they may have seemed when she stopped to think about it. Still, it bordered on the near unthinkable that a man could share most of their traditions, and the women of their Circle were having trouble getting their minds around the fact.

In their tradition, keeping their beliefs a secret from Christians was especially important to the women of the Circle. After all, the Christian Bible said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and purist Christians would consider the Old Way believers to be witches – which was probably true, at least to a degree. As far as they knew no Old Way believer had been burned at the stake by a mob of rabid Christians for centuries, but that didn’t mean the practice wouldn’t be taken up again given the chance. Both of them knew Christians they suspected would be glad to do it if they thought they could get away with it.

Alan and the members of his tradition they’d recently met, were a lot more open about their beliefs. They didn’t exactly rent billboards to announce it, but probably a majority of the Old Way believers aware of the connection between Summer and Alan thought they were literally playing with fire. Autumn’s mother Rowan wasn’t exactly sure either way, but hoped things would work out for the best.

But still, the end result was that Autumn was even lonelier than before. For most of her life, Summer, and to a lesser extent their older sister Spring, had been her main friends. Now, with Summer out with Alan every chance she could get, it meant that Autumn had to be alone a lot more than she wanted to be.

It would be nice to have a friend, Autumn sighed as she thought about it, someone who wasn’t all wrapped up in the weird things the women of her family believed and had to keep secret. A boyfriend like Alan would be especially nice, so long as he was relatively normal, not sharing the weird beliefs Summer shared with him. Just a nice, regular boyfriend, one she could hang out with at the Frostee Freeze, not that it was going to be open after this weekend. She’d settle for a girlfriend if it came down to that – someone she could talk about things with, at least so long as they didn’t extend to the family beliefs. Spring had managed that; while not quite as tepid about the Old Way as Autumn was, she’d at least given more than the simple lip service Autumn managed. She was a little more outgoing, if a little bit New Agey about it, but by the time Spring had been Autumn’s age she’d been hanging around with Wyatt Curtis, and finally had wound up going to college with him; it looked like it might be going somewhere.

But Autumn knew she wasn’t as outgoing as Spring, and where a boyfriend was going to come from was beyond her. When you got down to it, she really didn’t want to have a boyfriend all that badly, at least not a serious one. In three more years, she’d be in college, and she wouldn’t have to put up the façade involved with keeping the family secret covered up. In college she could just be a normal kid, and maybe could really become one.

Bree actually looked to be a candidate for someone she could hang around with. While she didn’t know Bree all that well, they at least shared a few common interests. The hangup was that Bree lived a ways out of town, and it would be hard to just get together on a day like today – while it was possible to ride out there on a bicycle, part of it was on a gravel road that would be slow going.

But in a few more months, Autumn would be sixteen and would have a car; both Spring and Summer had gotten one shortly after they’d turned sixteen, and Autumn figured there was one in the works for her, too. That might put a different spin on things, make it a little easier to get out of the house, a little easier to get out of her mother’s sight and constant worrying that somehow Autumn would reveal the secret.

Far to the east of the town of Spearfish Lake, Bree was working the big boomer thermal she’d been in only minutes before. Her fast excursion into the turn point at Warsaw and back out again had only cost her a thousand feet or so, and she was gaining that back rapidly. Though part of her mind was giving attention to flying the 1-26 in the strong updraft, the other part of it was far ahead of her, contemplating the bad news she’d just received on the radio.

While there were worse things that could have happened, this was bad, and she understood why. On a day like today where the sky was filled with the thermal markers of cumulus clouds, an area that lacked them, which sailplane pilots called a “blue hole,” meant there wasn’t any thermal activity going on there. Since Spearfish Lake was a lake, after all, it wasn’t surprising there were no thermals being produced there; the waters of the lake were much cooler than the surrounding land, which meant that any air over it would be sinking. Occasionally, later in the fall and in the early winter before ice formed, the lake waters could be warmer than the surrounding countryside and produce lift, although Bree had only experienced it in Rocinante.

Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal, so long as she stayed well away from the lake. In fact, since on a day like today what went down in the atmosphere pretty well had to go up somewhere else, being a few miles inland could mean good thermal activity. But not with a breeze out of the southwest; it would blow that stable or sinking lake air inland, shutting down thermal activity, or at least limiting it. Spearfish Lake would be upwind of her for nearly half of her trip back.

In other circumstances the fix would have been easy: avoid the sinking air by taking a route further to the north, beyond the effects of the lake air – except she couldn’t do that. To her north lay vast areas of timberland, Clark Plywood or state forest land, interspersed with swamps and small lakes. There were openings in the woods where clear-cutting had taken place, but they didn’t offer many possibilities for landing out in the 1-26, and she hadn’t scouted them in any case. Even her map didn’t go very far that way; she was restricted to a path about ten miles wide if for no more reason than that alone.

Bree wished now that she’d made the decision to try Meeker and return, instead of going to Warsaw, but it was too late for regrets; she was stuck with what she had and had to make do with it, so there was no point in wasting time wishing. Really, she was left with two choices. The safe one was to stay east of Hoselton, burning off the rest of her five hours just dorking around there before landing out someplace, most likely the Warsaw football field parking lot. The other option was to try to make the crossing of the Spearfish River swamp again and hope for rising air somewhere on the far side of it.

The stay-east option may have been the safe one, but she wondered if it was the right one. After all, the forecast had been for light and variable winds out of the northwest, part of the reason she’d chosen the Warsaw turn point in the first place. She couldn’t doubt the existence of the blue hole, but Aunt Jackie’s observation of the wind might have been wrong, it being a local effect rather than for the general area.

In any case, she didn’t have to make the decision right now; it could wait a few minutes. The obvious thing to do was to work this lift up to cloud base, then head for the vicinity of Hoselton hoping to find another thermal to take her back up to this level. If she could find one she stood a good chance of being able to make at least the worst of the crossing, and once past Country Road 919 there were places she might be able to find some lift, even if it wasn’t a big boomer like this one. If she couldn’t find one near Hoselton that would take her high, the decision was made for her – she’d have to stay east.

She was no nearer making a decision when she was right up at cloud base, and then a little. A couple times she brushed through low-hanging puffs of cloud, only for two or three seconds, but though the air was still going up, she couldn’t – neither she nor the little white Schweizer were rated for instrument flying. With a sigh, she turned the nose to the west, resolving to keep her speed down so she could stay as high as possible.

Several minutes later she was near the tiny village of Hoselton, and as luck would have it, she found another thermal – this time not a big boomer, but it took her upward at three to four hundred feet per minute. It was surprisingly close to the Spearfish River swamp, but as she worked the thermal she noticed that she was being set to the northeast a little. That meant, if nothing else, that Aunt Jackie’s observation of the wind direction had been dead on. In only a couple minutes of circling in the updraft she’d worked out what passed for a plan. If this lift could take her as high as the last one – and there was no reason to think it couldn’t – she could go a little north of the direct line across the swamp to hedge her bet against the stable air. There would be less of the swamp itself to cross that way. If she couldn’t find something going up – just about anything – the one honest airstrip between home and Warsaw would lie within reach right on her path. She still really didn’t want to have to land there, although Aunt Jackie once had in the story she told, but there might not be any choice. There had to be lift out there on the far side of the river bottom somewhere!

By the time she reached cloud base again the thermal was dying out, only giving her a hundred feet or so a minute, but she hung on grimly for every inch until she was again brushing the ragged base of the cloud above. By now, she’d made her decision without really thinking about it when the time came: she’d already thought it out.

She leveled the wings once again, kept her speed at the best glide ratio, punched the radio button once again and spoke a simple message: “Hoselton at cloud base, heading west.”

Jackie keyed the microphone and said, “Roger that, and good luck.” Though there’d been little information coming from the sailplane, she could mentally put herself into the cockpit; quite literally, she’d been there and done that – more than once, in fact. She understood the decision Bree had made: go for it. It was a risk, but a reasonable one given the existence of the airstrip.

She couldn’t help but give a little smile as she set the microphone down on the counter. She knew exactly why Bree didn’t want to land at that airstrip; Jackie had been no more enthusiastic about it when she’d had to do it the first time nearly a quarter century ago, and in that same sailplane, although she’d probably been less embarrassed at the result. A little less embarrassed, that is. Maybe it would be good if Bree did have to land there; it might crack through some of the girl’s inhibitions a little. Maybe.

With Bree, there was no telling. One of the irritating things about the girl they’d never really been able to crack through was her reserve, her reluctance to at least understand that people were interested in things that she didn’t care about. When you got down to it, it was a miracle that Bree was interested in flying at all. Someday the kid was going to have to learn that it takes all kinds to make up a world. While Bree was a terrific pilot, especially for her age, she had a mind that was, to be kind about it, focused, although Jackie usually thought of it as downright narrow. It was something she was going to have to overcome, and soon, or her career plans were going to hit a nearly impossible bump in the road.

So an outlanding at the club might not be all bad, and might even do some good. In a very real sense, it had for Jackie; it had been a real steppingstone toward creating a friendship between Mark and her and the couple who had been their closest friends ever since. A lot of unexpected but enduring good had come from that outlanding. Up till then, she and Mark had been pretty isolated from others, more her fault than his, but it had cracked open the doors of friendship and a wider involvement with others, just what Bree needed in her life. Bree might or might not handle the same situation as well, but she needed something besides flying to open up her life. Up till this point, only the flying had worked with her at all.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the slam of a car door. She glanced out the window to see Mark walking toward the office; he’d wanted to be there for the launch, but there were things he had to do at the plywood plant, especially at a time it wasn’t in production. At least this time it had only eaten up part of a Saturday; there had been times it had blown up the whole weekend.

For many years Mark had owned Marlin.com, the local Internet service provider, and the local computer store, Marlin Computer. About the time the girls came to live with them, an offer for the ISP too good to refuse had come along, and after some misgivings, Mark had not refused it. Since the store had pretty much been run by its own staff for some years, Mark hadn’t wanted to try to shoehorn himself back into the business, but he felt he was a little too young to retire and didn’t know what he would do with himself if he did.

Then, like in some old pulp Western with the U.S. Cavalry riding over the hill in the nick of time, an offer had come from Clark Plywood for him to oversee the design and installation of a new computerized warehousing and inventory management system at the plant. Mark had brought the system in well ahead of time and even further under budget, using a couple pieces of technology that weren’t intended for keeping track of warehouses at all. That had led to continuing income for Mark from several other pieces of computerizing the plant’s production system and teaching the operators how to use them. It wasn’t quite a full-time job, but was proving to be an active semi-retirement, which had given him greater opportunities to interact with the girls.

Mark came right into Jackie’s sign shop and asked, “I take it she got going all right?”

“Beautiful launch,” Jackie reported. “I haven’t heard much, you know Bree, but she made the Warsaw turn point in a little over two hours and just called in that she’s headed back from Hoselton. But a breeze came up out of the southwest, and you know what that means.”

“No fooling,” Mark grinned. It had happened to him, too. “That always seems to be the bear trap in the grass when you go that way. You don’t get caught often, but when you do . . .”

“Right,” Jackie grinned. “Maybe you ought to go change your clothes and hook up the trailer.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Mark laughed. “If it looks like she’s going to have to land at the club, her red face will generate enough of a thermal to get her up and away. She’d settle for an inch a minute lift.”

“You’re right,” Jackie laughed with him. “Maybe even less.”

About three miles west of Hoselton, Bree found a weak, diffuse thermal without much of a core and only a hundred feet per minute or so of lift. Though she hadn’t lost much altitude from the last one, it seemed like it took her ages to get back up to cloud base, but she rationalized that any bird in the hand was worth two in the bush when downwind of Spearfish Lake. Finally, brushing the clouds, she decided she’d ridden it all she dared. Again, she turned to the west and started out, sure now that the altitude she had in hand was going to have to last her until she was out of the wind shadow of the lake.

Bree turned to the northwest as far as she dared to try to cross the swamp at as much of an angle as she could. From her perch high above the ground, she could see the rail line, three or four miles to the south, and knew she had about the best course she could manage as she headed westward, the altimeter slowly unwinding as she sank through the flat, still air.

She crept westward at the slow speed that gave the sailplane its best glide ratio. At that speed, and from that altitude, it was hard to tell that she was moving at all. Now that there was time to think a little, she couldn’t help but think about the wind. If it were ten out of the southwest, it was at about a forty-five degree angle to her course, so that would slow her about five miles an hour. At this speed, it would take her at least twenty minutes to get across to the airstrip ahead of her, so the wind was stealing about a mile and a half or two miles of the maximum possible distance she could cover in a glide. Right now the Schweizer was just gliding too, not soaring. Though the sky was a little murky ahead she could see the open spot where she knew the airstrip lay, and it seemed to be sinking in her view ahead a little. That was good; it was visual confirmation that she’d be able to make the airstrip, and maybe have a little altitude to work with when she got there. Not much, but a little.

As she crept westward, the altimeter continued to unwind, without any hint of rising air. Four thousand feet. Three thousand, and it was beginning to be time to think about setting up for a landing if she didn’t find some lift in the next few miles. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, the airstrip got closer. Perhaps the air she was passing through was sinking a little; while she was sure she had the airstrip made, there wasn’t going to be the margin she’d hoped to have. There ought to be some lift out here, any lift – but there was none. All she could do was glide and hope for the best.

She remembered Aunt Jackie telling the story of her landing here. She’d been very low when she finally made it to the airstrip, with only enough altitude to set up for a landing. At the last minute, she’d gotten a little bump that might have been a thermal, possibly coming off the golf course. But by then she’d been so low that she didn’t have enough height to circle even once to try it out; all she could do was to set up for a landing.

Bree was in a little better shape – not much, but a little – when she came up to the place; she was somewhat higher above ground than she’d been when she’d gotten off tow hours before, so she had a couple minutes to find some rising air. Remembering Aunt Jackie’s story, she turned toward the golf course, but things still stayed calm, dead, and there was no lift to be found. A landing was beginning to look pretty likely.

Finally, reluctantly, she knew there was no choice left. Right with the prediction she didn’t know Mark had made, her face began to turn red imagining the awkwardness that was to come. With a sigh she gave up her search and headed for the airstrip, deciding for no good reason to fly a left-hand turn approach like powered airplanes do, instead of the right turns usually used by gliders. Although she hadn’t seen any aircraft in the sky, no one here would be expecting a glider with a red-faced pilot to be dropping in. Why the hell hadn’t she decided to try Meeker instead, she wondered as she crossed the airstrip . . .

. . . and felt a little bump, the first one she’d felt in twenty minutes that seemed like twenty hours.

God! Anything! Almost by habit she rolled the Schweizer toward the bump. Unlike her Aunt Jackie years before, she had just enough altitude to try a circle or two.

Within seconds she’d confirmed it – the thermal wasn’t much, but it was going up. Only a little bit; the variometer needle barely moved, but it moved in the right direction. Desperately, she began scratching at the rising air – it could hardly be dignified by the term “thermal” – to get what she could out of it.

After half a dozen circles she’d barely picked up a hundred feet. It was clear this wasn’t going to be like one of those boomers to the far side of Hoselton. She wasn’t going to be able to ride this one up to cloud base, but maybe, just maybe she could ride it up far enough to sneak away.

At least if it held out at all . . .

A few hundred feet below and to one side of the desperately scratching sailplane, Becca made a wild dive into the sand to get a hand on the ball and bump it to Myleen to keep it in play. Myleen was able to get her hand on the wild pass and dink a dribbler over the net for the point. “Wow, good one!” one of the girls on the far side of the net said as she reached for the ball where it came to rest in the sand.

“Hey, check that out,” Myleen said, pointing into the sky. “What is that, anyway?”

Becca glanced in the general direction of where her friend was pointing, to see the little white sailplane circling low in the sky above the West Turtle Lake Club airstrip. Ohhhh shit, she thought.

It wasn’t fair to say that Becca took no interest in Bree’s flying activities. In fact, she took a good deal of interest in them mostly because Bree was her sister and she’d realized that Bree needed to have a focus in her life, and she was proud that Bree had done so well with her flying. But it was at best a courtesy pride; Becca was about as interested personally in flying as Bree was in volleyball, which is to say approaching the vanishing point. Bree could sit on the sidelines and cheer her sister on, but had no desire to be out on the sand herself. The reverse was also true.

That didn’t keep Becca from realizing that her sister was in trouble if she was trying to keep the sailplane aloft this low over the club. She didn’t understand Bree’s morbid fear of this place, but at least she knew it existed. Bree really had to be sweating this one, she thought.

“Yeah, what is that?” one of the girls on the other side of the net asked. “I don’t hear a motor or anything. What are they doing?”

“That’s a glider,” Becca said offhandedly. “There isn’t any motor.”

“Are you sure?” the girl asked casually. “Are they trying to land, or what?”

“I’d be willing to bet every cent I have on me that they’re not trying to land,” Becca laughed. It was an easy bet to make; she didn’t have any money on her, or anything else except her sunglasses. The West Turtle Lake Club was a nudist resort, after all.

Technically speaking, Becca shouldn’t have been here at all today. She’d come as a guest of Myleen, whose family were members of the club. Becca hadn’t known that until a month or so before, even after having been friends with Myleen for years. It was well past the peak season for the place but people still used it on the weekends, including some of Myleen’s friends from out of town. A month before Myleen had suddenly needed a partner for the club sand court championships. Aunt Jackie had signed a permission slip good for the rest of the year, and Becca and Myleen had kicked butt even though Becca had been considered something of a ringer. Next year, permission wouldn’t matter; she would be eighteen and planned on spending all the time out here she could.

Simply put, the West Turtle Lake Club had the highest level of sand court volleyball play Becca had ever experienced. It had been a terrific challenge, one she’d enjoyed immensely, unclothed or not; it didn’t bother her in the slightest. But she knew it bothered Bree a lot, and thought it tied in with Bree’s desire to keep her true feelings about almost everything concerning herself a secret. Bree had learned with great reluctance to occasionally join the family nude in the hot tub at home, but that was family, and even then it hadn’t been easy. When it came to other people, Bree preferred to stay in the shadows; Becca was pretty sure no one at school knew about Bree’s flying – it might draw attention to her.

“How do you know that?” Myleen asked.

“Easy,” Becca grinned. “The pilot is my little sister. I launched her and that sailplane three hours ago.”

“Bree?” Myleen frowned. She knew Bree, of course; the girl had sat on the sidelines watching at many ball games, usually with a book in her hand. “She’s flying that thing? She’s what? Only fifteen?”

“Fifteen,” Becca admitted. “She’s been doing it for two years. The plan was for her to try to go from home to Warsaw and back today.”

“In a glider?” one of the other girls said, amazement in her voice. “I didn’t know you could do that in a glider! How did you launch her?”

“On a real long rope behind Aunt Jackie’s pickup truck,” Becca smiled. The wonder of it had long been lost on her thanks to familiarity, but it was something strange indeed to everyone else – about as strange as playing volleyball in the nude would have to be to Bree. “That got her up to maybe a thousand feet, about as high as she is now,” she explained. “From there on, it involves finding rising air currents to stay in the air. She’s good at it.”

“I’ll bet,” Myleen shook her head. “How come I never heard about this before?”

“How come I never heard about you being a member here till a month ago?” Becca replied pointedly.

“That’s different,” Myleen shrugged. “I wouldn’t have wanted it to get around school.”

“Neither does she,” Becca shook her head, “and for pretty much the same reason. She doesn’t want to be made fun of over something she enjoys doing.”

“Do you think she’s going to land here?” one of the girls along the sidelines asked.

“I don’t know,” Becca admitted. “But I can tell you this. Bree is about as textile” – she’d hung around the club enough to pick up that term – “as you can get. She’s probably doing everything she can to keep from landing here.” She glanced skyward again; it was hard to tell if Bree was gaining ground, but it didn’t look like she’d lost any, either.

“That’s pretty wild,” one of the girls on the far side of the net said. “But we’re getting close to match point. Let’s get this game over with and then you can watch.”

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