'Looks like we got another Chinook coming this way, below horizon.'

'Let's remind 'em we're out here,' Lucy said, switching to a different frequency again. 'Chinook over Warrenton, helicopter niner-one-niner Delta Alpha, you up this push? We're at your three o'clock, two miles northbound, one thousand feet.'

'We see you, Delta Alpha,' answered the twin rotor Army helicopter named for an Indian tribe. 'Have a good'n.'

My niece double-clicked the transmit switch. Her calm, low voice seemed unfamiliar to me as it radiated through space and bounced off the antennae of strangers. I continued to eavesdrop and, as soon as I could, butted in.

'What's this about wind and cold?' I asked, staring at the back of Lucy's head.

'Twenty, gusting to twenty-five out of the west,' she sounded in my headset. 'And gonna get worse. You guys doing all right back there?'

'We're fine,' I said as I thought of Carrie's deranged letter again.

Lucy flew in blue ATF fatigues, a pair of Cebe sunglasses blacking out her eyes. She had grown her hair, and it gracefully curled to her shoulders and reminded me of red jarrah wood, polished and exotic, and nothing like my own short silver-blond strands. I imagined her light touch on the collective and cyclic as she worked anti-torque pedals to keep the helicopter in trim.

She had taken to flying like everything else she had ever tried. She had gotten her private and commercial ratings in the minimum required hours and next got her certificated flight instructor rating simply because it gave her joy to pass on her gifts to others.

I needed no announcement that we were reaching the end of our flight as we skimmed over woods littered with felled trees scattered haphazardly like Lincoln Logs. Dirt trails and lanes wound narrowly, and on the other side of gentle hills, gray clouds got vertical as they turned into vague columns of tired smoke left by an inferno that had killed. Kenneth Sparkes's farm was a shocking black pit, a scorched earth of smoldering carnage.