William Krueger - Heaven's keep

Stephen pointed to the monitor. “You think there’s any hope in that?”

“When my father died, I was thirteen,” Cork said. “I was sitting at his bedside. Your grandmother was there, too. We watched him go. The doctors who attended him never gave us any hope. Because they were so sure, I didn’t even pray that he wouldn’t die. I just let him go. And you know what? I’ve always regretted that I didn’t pray my heart out trying to keep him with us. I wonder to this day if it might have made a difference.”

“What? Like a miracle or something?”

“Yeah. A miracle or something. Look, Stephen, nobody really knows what’s happened out there.”

Stephen said quietly, “I do.”

“Oh? How do you know?”

“Because I dreamed it,” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

The light from the monitor lit Stephen’s face, giving his skin a harsh, unnatural sheen. For several seconds he didn’t speak, and his lips were pressed into a thin, glowing line. “There was this dream I used to have when I was a kid, I mean really little. I was in a big yellow room and Mom was there but way on the other side. I was scared. I think maybe there was something or somebody else in there with us. I don’t remember that part so well. What I remember is that I tried to run to Mom but she disappeared through a door and the door slammed shut when I tried to follow her. The door was white like ice. I pounded on it but it wouldn’t open. I screamed for her to come back.”

“Did she?”

“I always woke up then. You or Mom heard me crying and came in and the dream was over.”

“You used to have a lot of nightmares,” Cork said.

“I had this one a bunch of times. It stopped and I pretty much forgot about it. Until today. Dad, it had to be about this, right? I mean, it is this. Only why did I have it so long ago when I couldn’t do anything about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there something I could’ve done to… I don’t know… stop it? Is there something I should do now? I don’t understand.”

Tears gathered along the rims of Stephen’s eyes. Anything still unbroken in Cork’s heart shattered, and he reached out to his son, but Stephen shrank away.

“I want to understand,” he pleaded.

“Why don’t we talk to Henry Meloux?” Cork said. “He’s the only man I know who understands dreams.”

“Henry,” Stephen said, and the dim light of hope came into his eyes.

“Not tonight though. It’s late. First thing tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Stephen said with a nod.

They sat for a while, silence and the distance of their great fear between them.

“Feel like joining the rest of us?” Cork finally said.

“Yeah, I guess.” Stephen turned off the computer and followed his father out of the room.

Downstairs, the faces of the others were turned to the television screen.

“Dad,” Jenny said, “check this out.”

Cork stood behind the sofa and watched the CNN report. A small, energetic woman with black hair and dark, angry eyes stood talking with another woman, a reporter. She wore a leather vest over a western shirt. When she gestured, which was often, silver bracelets flashed on her wrists. She stood in front of a tan brick building that was bright in the sun and surrounded by an apron of snow. She squinted in the sunlight and spoke into the microphone the reporter held toward her.

“Do you think,” she said, “that if this had been a plane full of white politicians these people would have waited so long to begin searching for them? But it was full of Indians, so who cares?”

“Who is she?” Cork asked.

“The wife of one of the men who was on the plane with Jo,” Rose said.

“Our own people have taken up the search. And we will find them,” the woman said emphatically.

A caption appeared under the picture on the screen: “Ellyn Grant, wife of Edgar Little Bear, a passenger on the plane missing in the Wyoming Rockies.”

The reporter, a blonde in a long, expensive-looking shearling coat, asked, “I understand one of the Arapaho has had a vision that may indicate where the plane came down.”

“Will Pope,” Ellyn Grant replied. “Our pilot is looking in the area Will’s vision guided us to, a place called Baby’s Cradle. We’ve asked for help, but so far the authorities out here have given us nothing.”

“Would you comment on the allegation that the pilot of the plane had been drinking the night before the flight?”

“I don’t know anything about that. Right now, all I care about is finding the plane and my husband.”

The segment that followed dealt with the charter pilot, Clinton Bodine, who’d allegedly been drinking the night before. A reporter in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, where Bodine lived and operated his charter service, told viewers that he’d obtained information indicating the pilot was a recovering alcoholic. Accompanying the report were pictures of the hangar at the regional airport that he used for his small enterprise. There was a brief statement by one of the officials at the airport who said he’d known Bodine a long time and he was surprised to hear about the drinking allegation. There were shots of the pilot’s home and of his wife, a young woman holding the hand of a small boy, hurrying from her car to the front door to avoid reporters.

Mal said, “Why do I think that if they could they’d follow her into the bathroom?”

“Brace yourselves,” Cork said. “Our turn may come.”

Day Three, Missing 43 Hours

Another tragedy developed overnight, but this one didn’t involve the O’Connors.

Cork slept on the sofa again, keeping company with the television and CNN in a drowsy, sometimes disoriented, way. Partly this was because it allowed him to monitor the news, but it was also because he couldn’t sleep in the bed he shared with Jo. It felt too empty and he felt too alone. At 5:00 A.M. he roused himself, made some coffee, and stepped onto the front porch to breathe in fresh air and check the weather. The storm that hit the Rockies had slid south and east through Colorado and Nebraska and Iowa and had missed Minnesota entirely. The sky was black and clear and frosted with stars.

He was about to enter the third day since Jo’s plane had gone missing. Cork wasn’t praying anymore that they’d made it to some godforsaken airstrip. He was praying that wherever the plane came down it had remained in once piece. And he was praying that, when the search began again that morning, the plane would be quickly found.

He returned to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee, stared at the wall clock, where the rapid sweep of the second hand was torture to him, and then headed back to the sofa.

CNN had come alive with coverage of a story breaking in Kansas. Outside a town called Prestman, population 1,571, a standoff had developed between law enforcement and a religious sect led by a man named Gunther Hargrove. Hargrove and his followers, a group estimated at around sixty people that included a number of children, had leased an abandoned farm several miles outside the isolated prairie town. Hargrove hadn’t kept up with the rent, and a sheriff’s deputy had gone with the property owner to execute a lawful eviction order. During the confrontation that followed, Hargrove’s people had shot the property owner and taken the deputy hostage. Now the farm, which the sect had turned into a compound, was surrounded by law enforcement personnel. Hargrove claimed that enough explosives had been planted about the compound to blow western Kansas off the map. The situation was extremely tense, and a resolution wasn’t anywhere in sight. From a cable news perspective, it was a perfect story, and in a way, it was helpful to Cork. It sent the missing plane full of Indians to the bottom of the network interest list. Cork hoped that as a result the media vultures who might have descended on Aurora to hound him and his family would be drawn to Kansas instead.