She swallowed around the lump that had taken up residence in her throat since she’d first heard those impossible words from Gus’s lawyer: you’re Mr. Henderson’s heir.
The phone had nearly slipped out of her hand. She’d been sure she was hearing things. Or dreaming. Things like this didn’t happen in real life. At least, not to Zoey.
She’d been sixteen when her parents died in a small plane crash just north of the Chugach Mountains. It had been a freak accident, the product of a mountain downdraft. Her dad had been the pilot. Even when faced with the sudden loss of her family, the only thing she’d inherited had been her father’s love of flight. Aviation hadn’t simply been a livelihood for her dad. It had been his passion.
Zoey’s own fascination with flight had started on the very day of her parents’ funeral. She could pinpoint the moment exactly—she’d been sitting in the front pew of the Aurora Community Church, listening as one pilot after another eulogized her father, speaking of his passion for flying and the love he had for the extraordinary beauty of Alaska.
The last of them had been Gus. His words had struck up a symphony of memories in Zoey—being buckled into the backseat of her dad’s Super Cub, looking out the window at spouting whales and sandstone peaks or touching down at some pristine, unspoiled place. As she’d relived one moment after another, she felt closer to her parents. It had been almost as if they were still alive, even though their bodies rested in coffins nearly close enough for her to reach out and touch. After the memorial service, she’d gone home and collapsed on her childhood bed for the last time, and she’d imagined she was soaring through a cloudless winter sky.
It was the only thing that kept her from crying. When her aunt and uncle told her she was to go home with them to Kentucky and leave her beloved Alaska, she’d squeezed her eyes closed and thought about what it would be like to float above the mountains with her arms spread wide and the wind whipping through her hair. Her musings about flight became her refuge.
She knew better than to tell anyone, particularly her aunt and uncle. She was sure it would worry them, and she’d had enough trouble convincing them to let her stay in Aurora to finish out her last year and a half of high school. The members of the church, particularly the pastor and his family, took her in. They were the closest thing to family she had left in Alaska.
And still, she kept her daydreams of flight to herself. It was a secret between her and God. Without a doubt, people would find her sudden fascination with aviation worrisome. Or even morbid, perhaps. But to Zoey, it was her way of remaining her father’s daughter in the days, weeks and years after his passing.
Her inheritance was a passion for the thing he loved most, the thing that ultimately took his life and that of Zoey’s mother. But it was the only thing she had.
Until the reindeer.
“I don’t want to sell them.” Was it what Gus would have wanted? Zoey was sure it wasn’t. But why did he have the reindeer in the first place? And why had he left them to her?
They’d been close. After hearing him speak at the funeral, Zoey had sought him out. Gus seemed to have known exactly what she wanted, because he told her more stories about her father. Things she’d never heard before. Stories that fed her soul in those dark days. Her unconventional friendship with Gus was rooted in mutual grief.
They’d begun meeting for ice cream once a week and kept up the habit even after all Gus’s stories had been told three times over. She’d come to think of him as family. He’d always been there for her, whether she needed consoling when no one asked her to the senior homecoming dance or just needed to know how to change the oil in her car. Once, in a rare moment of sentimentality during one of their many flights together, he’d looked over at her and told her she was like the daughter he’d never had.
But it still wasn’t the same thing. People just didn’t leave things like reindeer farms to their friends. Even close ones.
Why me, Lord? “I want to keep them. All thirty-sometimes-thirty-one of them. Is that crazy?”
Anya propped her feet up, her toes ready and waiting for red polish. “Sort of.”
“Sometimes thirty-one? Have you lost count of your reindeer already?” Clementine grinned.
“Trust me. You don’t want to know.” Zoey closed her eyes and did her best to forget about the reindeer farm.
She made little progress. Even when her foot massage got under way, she was still distracted by thoughts of reindeer chow, moving from her apartment into the cabin on the ranch and what would happen on Friday when she was supposed to deliver the check for the down payment on her airplane. A Super Cub, just like her father’s. She was so close to making her dreams come true. At last.
Perhaps Alec would be open to some sort of payment arrangement. Somehow, she doubted it. He’d been pretty blunt about asking for his money. And though she was loath to admit it, she found him a little intimidating. After her grand speech about how he’d misjudged her, she’d fled. Fled! As if all the reindeer weren’t enough of a handful, she had Alec Wynn’s brooding intensity to contend with.
From the depths of her purse, her cell phone rang. Alec’s chiseled face flashed in her mind, although why she’d want to hear from him was a mystery.
She fished her ringing phone out of her purse with the intention of simply turning the ringer off. But when she saw all the missed-call notifications on the screen, she paused. “I have five missed calls.”
Clementine looked up from the magazine in her lap. “Who from?”
“I’m not sure.” Zoey answered the call before it rolled to voice mail again. “Hello?”
“Is this Zoey Hathaway?” It was a man. He sounded exasperated but polite, which ruled out Alec entirely.
“Yes.” She was hyperaware of everyone’s eyes on her. Clementine, Anya and even the manicurists were all watching her with mounting curiosity. “How can I help you?”
“This is Chuck Baker, out at the airfield.”
Zoey bit her lip. Chuck was the head air-traffic-control officer at the town’s one and only airport, located at the back of the Northern Lights Inn, the heart of Aurora. For years, she’d poured Chuck’s coffee from behind the hotel’s coffee bar. Double espresso in the morning. Decaf in the afternoon. And she’d spoken to him countless times from the cockpit once she’d started her flying lessons.
But he’d never called her before.
“Chuck, hi.” Nerves bounced around in her stomach for reasons she couldn’t quite pinpoint. “What’s up?”
“It seems we’ve got a situation down here at the airport.” The frustration in his tone kicked up a notch.
Zoey gripped the phone tighter. What if there’d been an accident? Lord, please no. Not again. Somewhere in the logical part of her brain, Zoey knew this wasn’t the case. Why would Chuck call her, of all people, if there’d been a tragedy? “A situation? I hope no one is hurt.”
“No one’s hurt. It’s nothing like that. But we’ve had to ground all flights. It’s chaos down here, and if we don’t get things under control you’ll be facing a hefty fine from the FAA.”
Hefty fine?
She blinked. What could she have possibly done to incur a fine? She was in the middle of a foot massage. What might the Federal Aviation Administration have against pedicures? “I don’t understand. Have I done something wrong?”
“Not you, per se.” He released a sigh. “It’s your reindeer.”
Zoey’s panicked gaze darted up to Clementine and Anya. “My reindeer?”
“Yep. There’s a big, fat reindeer parked in the middle of the runway. He won’t budge, and rumor has it he’s yours.”
Palmer.
Oh,