“I’ve got everything assembled,” she offered, clamping down on an unwelcome surge of defensiveness. “What I didn’t already have I bought yesterday in town, there shouldn’t be anything to prevent us from leaving tomorrow.”
Luke nodded absently, rubbing his jaw as he surveyed the items neatly grouped on the floor. “Let’s hope not.” He didn’t seem to notice the shift in Joey’s posture as she stiffened, before she could summon up an appropriate retort, he added, “I’ll check through that later.”
He swung around and, with that uncanny swiftness of movement, joined Joey by the bed to look down over her shoulder at the maps. He studied them silently for a long moment while Joey grimly ignored the radiant heat from the body inches away from her own. Instead, she focused on the maps and smoothed out the wrinkles with nervous strokes of her palm.
“This is the general map,” she said at last, eager to break the silence. “These areas”—she indicated the red circles marked in several places throughout the map—”were the locations I determined most likely for the site of the crash.” Her voice didn’t quite catch on the words. “I knew the approximate area where they went down. Their last radio message broke up toward the end, but their description of the landscape narrowed it down. I know they were near a sizable mountain, and other landmarks they’d been passing over when they had to alter course; over the summer I’ve checked these other sites.”
“And found nothing.” Luke leaned on one of the posts of the bed canopy and traced over the map with a finger. “Didn’t the authorities investigate this when it happened years ago?”
His voice, cool as it was, held no hint of challenge, and Joey felt herself relaxing as much as his nearness allowed. “Oh, yes, they tried. Unfortunately, it was during a late spring snowstorm, and it was some time before they were able to begin the search. ” A trace of bitterness crept into her words. “They told me their resources were stretched too thin to allow much time for one small downed plane. They made a few attempts, but once they decided it wasn’t going to be easy, they more or less gave up.”
“Twelve years ago. That was a bad year.”
Joey looked up at him, his face a blank as he searched old memories. “There were many accidents that year.” All at once he came back to himself, and his eyes deliberately avoided hers to rest on the maps again. “They found nothing at all?”
“Nothing. Even they didn’t know exactly where the plane went down—the places they searched are the same ones I’ve considered, though I was able to eliminate some areas”
She swallowed and concentrated on facts as cold and hard as glacier ice. “They believed that the place might have been covered by an avalanche after the crash, which would have made finding it almost impossible until the spring thaw. By then they had more important business.”
There was a profound quiet broken only by Luke’s deep, measured breathing and her own, fast with suppressed emotion. She sensed something from Luke that had nothing to do with cold facts and everything to do with unreasonable emotion,;for an instant she tensed in expectation of his touch. Then the moment passed, and Luke’s words were as even and cool as before.
“If it went down under an avalanche, the plane could be anywhere—the wreckage could be wedged into a crevice or covered with a rockslide. You could have missed it at one of these other sites—and it may not be here, either.” His finger marked the final location, the one she needed him to find.
“I know that.” Hearing the steadiness of her own voice, Joey knew she had passed the crisis point. “But that doesn’t change anything, I have to try.”
For the first time Luke’s eyes met hers. They were unreadable, but there was a flicker of that old intensity.
“There are some needs that drive animals beyond the limits that mere survival demands,” he said softly. “Human beings are no different.”
His gaze dropped away, and Joey was left with the obscurely comforting feeling that Luke had tried to tell her that, in some way, he understood her compulsion. The thought almost warmed her, she wrapped up the feeling and hid it away with the others.