you know," Nick said. "It's in God's hands now, I'm afraid."
"I do know that," she said, "but I want to stay."
"All right, Laurel." He brushed at her hair gently with the palm of his hand. "It's such a pretty name. You deserve it."
She glanced up at him and smiled. "Thank you."
"We have a dinner date - you haven't forgotten, have you?"
"No," she said, still smiling. "I haven't and I won't."
He bent down and brushed a kiss lightly across her mouth. "Good," he said. "Neither will I."
He went forward and she pressed her fingers lightly against her mouth, as if to hold his kiss there, where it belonged. Dinner with Nick Hopewell - a dark, mysterious stranger. Maybe with candles and a good bottle of wine. More kisses afterward - real kisses. It all seemed like something which might happen in one of the Harlequin romances she sometimes read. So what? They were pleasant stories, full of sweet and harmless dreams. It didn't hurt to dream a little, did it?
Of course not. But why did she feel the dream was so unlikely to come true?
She unbuckled her own seatbelt, crossed the aisle, and put her hand on the girl's forehead. The hectic heat she had felt before was gone; Dinah's skin was now waxy-cool.
I think she's going, Rudy had said shortly before they started their headlong take-off charge. Now the words recurred to Laurel and rang in her head with sickening validity. Dinah was taking air in shallow sips, her chest barely rising and falling beneath the strap which cinched the tablecloth pad tight over her wound.
Laurel brushed the girl's hair off her forehead with infinite tenderness and thought of that strange moment in the restaurant, when Dinah had reached out and grasped the cuff of Nick's jeans. Don't you kill him... we need him.
Did you save us, Dinah? Did you do something to Mr Toomy that saved us? Did you make him somehow trade his life for ours?
She thought that perhaps something like that had happened... and reflected that, if it was true, this little girl, blind and badly wounded, had made a dreadful decision inside her darkness.
She leaned forward and kissed each of Dinah's cool, closed lids. "Hold on," she whispered. "Please hold on, Dinah."
6
Bethany turned to Albert, grasped both of his hands in hers, and asked: "What happens if the fuel goes bad?"
Albert looked at her seriously and kindly. "You know the answer to that, Bethany."
"You can call me Beth, if you want."
"Okay."
She fumbled out her cigarettes, looked up at the NO SMOKING light, and put them away again. "Yeah," she said. "I know. We crash. End of story. And do you know what?"
He shook his head, smiling a little.
"If we can't find that hole again, I hope Captain Engle won't even try to land the plane. I hope he just picks out a nice high mountain and crashes us into the top of it. Did you see what happened to that crazy guy? I don't want that to happen to me."
She shuddered, and Albert put an arm around her. She looked up at him frankly. "Would you like to kiss me?"
"Yes," Albert said.
"Well, you better go ahead, then. The later it gets, the later it gets."
Albert went ahead. It was only the third time in his life that the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi had kissed a girl, and it was great. He could spend the whole trip back in a lip-lock with this girl and never worry about a thing.
"Thank you," she said, and put her head on his shoulder. "I needed that." "Well, if you need it again, just ask," Albert said. She looked up at him, amused. "Do you need me to ask, Albert?" "I reckon not," drawled The Arizona Jew, and went back to work.
7
Nick had stopped on his way to the cockpit to speak to Bob Jenkins - an extremely nasty idea had occurred to him, and he wanted to ask the writer about it.
"Do you think there could be any of those things up here?"
Bob thought it over for a moment. "Judging from what we saw back at Bangor, I would think not. But it's hard to tell, isn't it? In a thing like this, all bets are off."
"Yes. I suppose so. All bets are off." Nick thought this over for a moment. "What about this time-rip of yours? Would you like to give odds on us finding it again?"