“Dad, what do you know that the rest of us don’t?”
Her dad laughed and patted her knee, then rose from the couch with a grunt. “Just something to think about, if you want advice from someone who isn’t the old man.”
“I don’t want advice from anyone!” Inga complained as he lumbered off to the kitchen for a coffee refill.
There was the sound of a door closing and water running elsewhere in the house. Luke must be up. Inga made a determined effort to change the subject.
“So how about one of your famous fisherman breakfasts, Dad? Nita brought us some extra food, but we’d run out of a bunch of things at the cabin. I haven’t had real eggs, or breakfast meat that wasn’t in a sandwich, in close to a week.”
“One fisherman breakfast, coming up! We’ll get some proper meat on that boy’s bones yet.”
After a breakfastthat did justice to her father’s reputation as a breakfast-making maestro, Inga took Luke out to explore the town. Before they left the house, Luke grabbed a floppy-brimmed fishing hat off a hook by the door and pulled it down over his ears.
“Really?” Inga asked quietly.
“Taking no chances,” Luke muttered, glancing skyward.
It was a fresh bright day, the wind kicking up off the water. To Inga it felt chillier than the last few days at the cabin, and there were clouds threatening. They had been lucky to have had no rain so far, but it looked like their luck might run out this afternoon. For now, however, it was a beautiful day to explore the town.
She took Luke up her favorite route to the top of the hill, stopping by the roundabout with the gargoyle statue in themiddle, nicknamed “Fred.” Above that, old Mimsy Sanderson waved to Inga from the front door of her flower shop, they dutifully admired her roses while she fed Rogue one of the dog biscuits that she kept on hand for canine visitors.
Luke continued to glance at the sky now and then, but Inga, fully relaxed and comfortable in the safety of her hometown, thought he was being unreasonably paranoid until the sudden thumping of helicopter rotors made her heart accelerate. Ithadto just be a coincidence, tourists or whale-spotters—but when she looked up, she saw a familiar black helicopter fly over, low.
Luke had already stepped back under Ms. Sanderson’s awning, his whole body tense.
“Joyriders!” Ms. Sanderson declared, shaking her fist at the sky. “Someone oughta do something.”
“Have you seen them around before?” Inga asked. She recalled what Nita had said about a low-flying helicopter annoying people in Westerly Cove.
Rogue pressed his head against her leg, as if sensing the tense mood of the humans. Or maybe he, too, recognized the helicopter. Inga felt his body vibrate with a growl.
Ms. Sanderson was happy to complain at great length about the helicopter flying around, blowing the covers off boats, and scaring the seals. Meanwhile, Luke was looking out into the bay, squinting against the bright sun. He touched Inga’s arm.
“Does it look to you like it’s landing on something?”
Inga shaded her eyes against the sun. “Mimsy, do you have a pair of binoculars?”
The old woman brought an incredibly old-fashioned monocular telescope, looking like something that belonged on the deck of a pirate ship. Inga and Luke passed it back and forth. The helicopter was definitely lowering itself to land on the deck of a ship, but the ship was so far out to sea that they could barely make out more than a large shape.
“It actually looks a lot like a marine research ship,” Inga said. For a moment she felt the old wistfulness and regret for that particular road not taken. “We get a few of them in the summer, although this is early in the year for it. Maybe that was a different helicopter?” She said it thoughtlessly, forgetting about Ms. Sanderson, and quickly glanced at Luke. “Than ... the one that’s been flying around, I mean.”
“It wasn’t,” Luke said quietly.
It seemed that nothing more was happening for the moment. Inga returned the old lady’s monocular to her, and they continued their climb up the hill in a much more subdued mood. Inga kept glancing out across the water, where she could still see the distant ship, a speck on the horizon.
“I figured they have some base of operations,” Luke said. “That ship must be it.”
“You know, I bet either of my brothers would be happy to sail out and take a look,” Inga suggested. “My brother Eren and his wife Lucy spend most of their time on the family fishing boat when the weather’s nice enough to take it out, and I’m not sure precisely where they are right now. But if they’re not close enough, I bet Tor can borrow something from one of his friends.”
“I don’t want to get your family involved.”
“They don’t have to be involved. They can just take a look around. I don’t expect anyone will bother them if they don’t get too close.”
“Inga, I absolutely would not gamble your family’s safety on these people not bothering them.”
Inga gripped his arm. “I get it, okay? I don’t want my family in danger either. But if these people keep coming here, then they are going to be our problem sooner or later, all right? I told you my brother has tangled with them in the past. We definitelydon’t want them coming around.” She gave his arm a little shake. “It’s our problem too, Luke. Not just yours.”
Before he could answer, they ran out of road. The incredibly steep road they had been climbing—almost impossible to drive in the winter, as Inga knew firsthand—ended at a large turnaround area, with a few parked vehicles belonging to residents who parked up top and walked down. They were now above the town. The hilltop road ran off to their left and eventually connected to the highway, with a few turnoffs to the town and the lighthouse along the way.
