After a while, people stopped looking. If the plane turned up, it turned up. Most believed if it was in New Hampshire at all, it was at the bottom of a deep part of one of its many lakes. Sections of Winnipesaukee, a clear, glacial lake, were ninety feet deep—nobody could see that far down. If the plane was ever to be found, whether in water or on land, it would have to be by accident.
In the forty-five years since Colt and Frannie had disappeared, not one Sinclair had set foot in Cold Spring.
Except for Harriet, of course. Penelope grimaced in anticipation of her cousin’s reaction to what she’d just found. But Harriet was another matter. Penelope couldn’t concentrate on scoping out plane wreckage, finding her way out of the wilderness and the oddities of Harriet Chestnut.
She squinted at the heap of metal. It was unquestionably a plane. Anyone in New Hampshire would be thinking just what she was thinking—this was the spot where Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine had gone down.
From her position, Penelope couldn’t make an educated guess about what had happened to the plane, why or how it had crashed into the steep hillside. She imagined the Piper Cub coming in low on that dark night, in trouble, possibly clipping trees before slamming into the hill. Colt and Frannie saying their goodbyes, guessing their fate. Penelope wasn’t a romantic, but the image of the two young lovers plunging to their deaths brought tears to her eyes.
Her pulse pounded in her ears, and she didn’t move as she absorbed the impact of what she had stumbled upon. To get to the wreckage, she would have to climb over icy rocks and big boulders, fallen trees and limbs, patches of slippery leaves covered in thin, clear ice and rough, snow-covered, nearly vertical ground. It would take time she didn’t have, and it would involve risks she didn’t need to take. Given that Frannie and Colt’s plane had lain here for forty-five years without being discovered, Penelope didn’t like the odds of what would happen to her if she fell and couldn’t get up again.
Not that anyone in Cold Spring would appreciate her reining herself in. Being lost in the woods at dusk was enough for them to assume she was back to her old tricks, taking unnecessary risks, not thinking, not considering who might have to strap on snowshoes to come fetch her on a cold, dark night.
She frowned, preferring not to think about past transgressions. She was thirty, after all, not twelve. She hadn’t been this lost in years.
Naked deciduous trees stood outlined in sharp relief against the gray sky, every twig sharp and clear and black. Soon pinks and lavenders would streak across the horizon, and they’d seem so bright and vibrant against the grays and whites of the late winter landscape.
Darkness would fall rapidly, and the temperature would plummet.
She had to get back. Tearing her gaze from the wreckage, she crawled over another boulder, then carefully made her way through young trees and stick-like brush, through more wet, dense sugar snow—not the light and fluffy snow of January—to the bottom of the steep, narrow ravine. There was no stream, there were no trails, no stone walls, no hunter’s lookouts—there was no reason for anyone to have stumbled on the wreckage in the past forty or so years.
Colt and Frannie’s bodies.
Penelope came to a sudden halt, imagining the skeletal remains of the two lovers above her on the hill. This wasn’t merely the solution to a forty-five-year-old mystery. It was a tragedy. Two people had died up there.
She shook off the morbid thought and started up the opposite hill, her legs aching, her stomach begging for a Nutri-Grain bar. She needed home, food, water and rest. Then she’d figure out what to do about Colt and Frannie and their Piper Cub.
A twig—something—snapped, and she stopped. Went still. Listened.
Had she heard anything? A squirrel, birds prancing in the branches of a nearby tree? She couldn’t be sure.
“You’re tired.”
Her voice seemed to go nowhere in the quiet, still, late afternoon air. Maybe she’d heard a deer or a moose, even a bear venturing out of hibernation.
Yep. Best to get on home.
Her water-soaked socks squished inside her day hikers. No blisters yet. She was lucky. She hadn’t bothered with boots or snowshoes, never imagining she’d end up lost. A little lost was one thing. That she could manage. But she was a lot lost.
Then, there in front of her, at her feet, was a melting trail of footprints. Not moose or deer or even bear, but human prints. And not her own. They were big. Probably male. She pivoted and stared toward the opposite hill, unable to make out the wreckage from her position. The snow, the gray rocks, the gray trees, the gray sky. The heap of plane tubing was gone, as if it had been a mirage.
The footprints ran down the hill to the left of the way she’d come, weaving among maple and oak and hemlock, even, unhurried. They had to be relatively fresh prints. The warm temperatures had barely melted them, and the last snow had been just two days ago, four inches that freshened the landscape and heartened the skiers who loved to see March stay a lion for as long as possible.
But who could have ventured out here, possibly have seen the wreckage and not mentioned it?
“Bubba Johns.”
Of course. He would have no interest in a lost plane.
Penelope could feel some of the tension ease out of her. She wasn’t afraid of Bubba. He was the town hermit, a recluse who had a shanty on the edge of Sinclair land—technically on Sinclair land, but no one had made an issue of it in the twenty years since he’d set up housekeeping there.
“Bubba!” she called, her voice dying in the ravine. There was no echo. “Bubba, it’s me, Penelope Chestnut!”
She could almost feel his ancient, some said crazy, eyes on her, a frosty gray that went with his unkempt white beard and scraggly white hair, his tall, rangy body. Sinclairs or no Sinclairs, it was Bubba who owned these hills and had for years. Penelope’s parents had warned her as a child to stay off Sinclair land, not because she was trespassing, but because she might run into Bubba Johns. But at ten years of age, she’d found herself out in the hills, exploring on her own, pretending, fantasizing, not realizing until it was nearly dark that she was lost. Bubba had materialized out of nowhere and silently led her home. She had been terrified, and her active imagination had conjured up images of Little Red Riding Hood meeting up with the big bad wolf. She half expected Bubba to drop her over a cliff or toss her onto a fire even as she’d followed him home, chattering at him as if she’d known him all her life. Without ever speaking, he’d left her at the end of her parents’ driveway and disappeared, not waiting for thanks or an invitation for coffee and cake. Her parents hadn’t seemed too sure they should believe their only daughter’s story about the silent hermit who’d seen her home.
Bubba Johns was as much a part of the landscape as the moose, deer, hawks and chipmunks, and like everyone else in Cold Spring, Penelope left him to his chosen life of isolation and solitude.
She turned and continued on her way, feeling the sun sinking in the west even as the sky melted into a pink so deep and dark and beautiful it made her want to lie on the snow and stare at it. But she kept walking, her head spinning, her legs leaden, her mind full of thoughts of Colt Sinclair and Frannie Beaudine buried in their twisted metal grave and Bubba Johns out there in the gathering darkness, waiting, perhaps, to see if once again he needed to lead her home.
Wyatt Sinclair gave up on sleep and kicked off his blanket sometime before dawn. He didn’t know the exact time because Madge, his ex-lover, had insisted on removing the clock radio from his nightstand. It was bad chi, she’d said. Apparently he was a walking time bomb of bad chi. That was spooky enough, but then she did his astrological charts using some computer program. She’d plugged in the date, time and place of his birth, and out popped stuff that had compelled her to pack up.
“I have to move out,” she’d told him, whipping things into her suitcase. “There’s just too much negative energy around you. You’re—well, to be very straightforward with you, Wyatt, you’re