Her parents were expecting her for Sunday dinner at six. If she didn’t show up, they’d worry. Given her history, they’d worry all of ten minutes before calling out a search party. Dogs, snowmobiles, helicopters, men on snowshoes with flashlights. They’d all join in the hunt. Not one would be a stranger. And not one wouldn’t be just a little pissed at her for taking them out on a chilly March night.
It was galling. She’d rather spend the night in the woods. She could make a little fire, boil snow if she couldn’t find a stream, survive quite nicely until daylight. With the clouds pushing out, the temperature would drop overnight. Not that she minded—the cold nights and above-freezing days of early March made the sap run. Her current predicament notwithstanding, Penelope was an accomplished hiker. She wouldn’t freeze.
Maple-sugaring season was what had ostensibly brought her onto Sinclair land in the first place. A tiny corner of their vast tract of central New Hampshire wilderness abutted the ten acres she’d inherited from her grandfather, and she’d wanted a few more maples to tap. So she’d set off for an hour survey, with anorak, gloves, a hip pack of water, a Granny Smith apple and two Nutri-Grain bars. One thing had led to another—through a clearing, up a hill, over a stone wall, across a stream—and pretty soon she was sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere.
All because she didn’t pay attention. She’d spotted a woodpecker fluttering among the hemlock, an osprey nest high in a tall half-dead pine, followed the sound of a waterfall newly formed by the melting snow, thought about tea and warm scones with her cousin Harriet tomorrow afternoon, when she would return from ferrying two businessmen to Portland, Maine. Provided her father let her carry passengers. He didn’t like the way she’d been flying lately. A wandering mind was a dangerous thing on foot in the wilds of northern New England, but in the air, it could be fatal.
Which, Penelope decided, didn’t bear thinking about while she was lost in the woods with dusk encroaching.
She had hoped to find something on top of the hill to orient her. A view of the lake, a stream, a stone wall, smoke curling from the chimney of a nearby house, something. But below her was just another steep, narrow, dry ravine. There were no landmarks. No promise of a way out. She had to go down this hill and up the next and just keep hoping for the best.
“I need another Nutri-Grain bar,” she said aloud in the stillness and silence that seemed to envelope her. But she’d consumed her last one an hour and several over-hill-and-over-dales ago.
She blinked back fatigue and the eye strain that came with hours on snow-covered hills without sunglasses. She hadn’t brought a compass, either. Or her wilderness medical kit. If she tripped and fell, she’d just have to lie there until someone found her. She’d tried following her trail in the snow, but it wasn’t good snow for tracks, and the two times she did pick up her trail, she found herself back where she’d started. So she’d given up, figuring that even if she could follow her tracks, there were five hours worth of them. They wouldn’t exactly provide the shortest, most straightforward route home. And she figured she had no more than ninety minutes of daylight left.
She was doomed. A search party was inevitable.
The sun poked through gray clouds that had been hanging over the lakes region for three days and were due to move out tonight. Everyone’s mood seemed to have suffered because of them, including her own. Heading into the woods by herself had seemed like a damned good idea five hours ago.
She scooted to the edge of her boulder and looked at the steep, tree-covered, rock-strewn hill. The going certainly wasn’t getting any easier. It was a north-facing hill, still encased in snow and ice, with small patches of wet, slippery leaves where the snow and ice had melted in circles around trees and rocks. She was sweating from temperatures in the upper forties, exertion, frustration. She’d worn none of her specially designed hiking clothes, just jeans and an anorak over a red plaid flannel shirt she’d been maple sugaring in since she was seventeen.
“Might as well get on with it,” she muttered, the silence and stillness almost eerie.
She lowered herself off her boulder, and her foot slipped on a patch of wet, brown leaves. She caught herself before going down on her butt, her heart rate jumping at the close call. A broken ankle and hypothermia were just what she needed. She scooped up a handful of snow and stuffed it down her back. It melted instantly on her overheated skin, cooling her, soothing her. There were worse things than having her parents call out another search party on her. She just needed to stay focused and make their job as short and simple as possible.
She wished she’d brought her cell phone. Flares. Even a book of matches would be welcome.
The sun glinted off something down the steep hillside, drawing her eye to her right. Her heart skipped. Now what? She edged down a few steps, trying to get a better view through the pine, hemlock and naked birches and oak. She squinted, wondering if the sun had just caught a rock with a lot of mica at the right angle.
No, there was something there.
Penelope took another couple of steps to her right. The snow was wet and slippery on the steep hillside, and getting a good purchase in her day hikers wasn’t that easy. She grabbed the thin trunk of a birch for balance and leaned over as far as she could for a better look.
Metal for sure, a lot of it, in a compact heap amidst the tumble of rocks and half a dozen pine trees. In summer, ferns and brush would leaf out and make the pile even harder to spot. If not for the sun striking a bit of metal at just the right moment, Penelope would have gone past it even at the end of winter with the landscape at its starkest.
And for the sun to glint off it, it wasn’t completely rusted, and that meant it was aluminum.
She held her breath. No.
The frame of Frannie Beaudine and Colt Sinclair’s Piper Cub J-3 was aluminum tubing. Its fabric covering would have rotted away by now, forty-five years after it had disappeared in the skies above Cold Spring, New Hampshire, last seen by a half-dozen locals out on the clear, chilly night. Penelope wouldn’t expect to find much more than a crumpled heap of struts and trusses, rusted engine, bits of wing and tail assembly, whatever hadn’t succumbed to the crash and decades of exposure to the harsh weather of northern New England.
But she hadn’t expected to find Colt and Frannie’s plane here. According to her own pet theory, they’d faked a crash in New Hampshire and made it to Canada. Whether they’d crashed there or were living happily ever after was open to question.
Except it wasn’t anymore. This had to be Colt and Frannie’s long-missing Piper Cub. Penelope suddenly shivered as she stared at the wreckage. What else could it be?
A leap of the imagination, brought on by fatigue, low blood sugar, her own fascination with the ill-fated flight of the two lovers. Even as a kid, she would wander the woods with one eye searching for a downed Piper Cub. Later, she’d started collecting information—newspaper and magazine articles on the weeks-long search, headed by Willard Sinclair himself, then articles on the Sinclair Collection and Frannie’s role in pulling it together, turning it into a magnificent, coherent whole instead of a mishmash of stuff generations of Sinclairs had picked up on their various expeditions. In the past year, Penelope had started interviewing local residents who remembered Frannie Beaudine as a little girl and a young woman, who had known the Sinclairs from their years of mountain climbing, fishing, hunting and boating in the lakes region. The men were all Dartmouth alumni. Colt was barely a year out of Dartmouth when he disappeared.
The intensive, exhaustive search for the missing plane had turned up nothing, not one clue beyond the separate, positive sightings of it in the sky over Cold Spring. It was possible it wasn’t Colt’s Piper Cub J-3—but who else’s could it have been? When the news came out of New