forgot I was holding it! And who the hell are you to tell me what I can do?”
“Just a passing stranger who feels as if she’s fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. What is it with you people? Is there something in the water? In the air? Or were you all sent here by a mental hospital that had had enough?”
“Hey, you don’t have to be insulting!”
“Why not? I’ve been accused of things by people I don’t know, roped into buying supplies I don’t need, and yelled at by a mad woman waving a hammer.”
“I’m not mad!”
“No, but you are furious,” drawled a deep voice.
Hannah spun about and found herself looking into the exceedingly handsome face of Bill Anstin. In that instant, she totally forgot Edna. “Bill Anstin!” she said, feeling a little amazed. “I was at the rail when you won the World Series of Poker.”
He smiled, a wide, winning smile. No wonder his nickname in the poker world was Handsome Anstin. His looks were too good to be true. Unfortunately, he seemed to know it.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, giving her the kind of once-over that always made her skin crawl. “You must be that pilot who blew away our game last night. Sticks, isn’t it?”
“Umm, no. Hannah Lamont.” She shook his hand, wishing she didn’t feel impressed in spite of herself. Luck might have won him the World Series, but he was still a winner. He still owned the coveted bracelet—which, she noticed, he was wearing.
“Hi, Edna,” Anstin said to the volcanologist. “Come down from the mountain for the storm?”
Edna gave a short nod. “Time to hole up. I also need to get some more people out here. I think the mountain is starting to get active again.”
“Well, nobody’s going to get in here till after the storm.”
“I know that. But I still need to make some calls.” Edna looked at Anstin as if she wished he’d drop from the face of the earth.
Anstin gave Hannah another once-over. “Buy you a drink, Sticks?”
“No, thanks. I’ve got to get back to my plane.”
“Maybe you’ll come play at the casino when the storm has passed. I can give you some tips on your game.”
“Thanks. Nice meeting you.”
Anstin strolled away looking as if he owned the place. Edna sidled up beside Hannah. “Look out for that guy. He never tells the truth when a lie will do. I swear, he lives life on a bluff.”
Hannah nodded. “He seems…oily.”
“Greasy. Globs and globs of emotional grease.”
Hannah looked at her. “Are you really worried about the volcano?”
Edna shrugged. “Prediction is pretty much a guessing game. I need a team out here.”
Hannah hesitated. “This is not making me happy.”
Edna shrugged. “It’s thrilling the heck out of me. But I’m a volcanologist. We’re not wimps.”
Hannah chose to ignore the insult. “What if it erupts during the storm?”
“Then….” Edna shrugged again. “How much trouble we’ll be in depends on the kind of eruption. I mean, this mountain is sometimes explosive, like Mount St. Helens, and sometimes more like the volcanoes in Hawaii…just slow lava flows. You can outwalk those if you need to. But honestly?”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think anything’s going to happen immediately.”
“Thank God. I like excitement, but not that kind.”
“You better not like the Buck kind of excitement either,” Edna said, frowning at her in a way that suggested to Hannah the hammer had not been in Edna’s hands by accident. She took a step back.
Edna left, tossing one more warning glare over her shoulder.
Craig looked at the pallet of supplies when he pulled up in his Jeep a few seconds later. “Are you planning on moving in?”
“It’s hurricane stuff.” Hannah felt embarrassed. “Horace said we’d need it.”
“Oh.” Craig looked dubiously at it. “Buck already has supplies. And he has a couple of cisterns to catch rain water. The town never ran water up to the airport. It was too far.”
Hannah now felt supremely annoyed. “I’m going to go back in and strangle Horace. Wait for me, will you?”
Craig reached out and touched Hannah’s arm. “Don’t do that. We’ll take the stuff up with us. Whatever we don’t use, we can get Horace to take back for credit. Other folks will probably need it after the storm.”
And that’s how Hannah came to be loading a bunch of food, water and paper products onto Craig’s Jeep, muttering under her breath at the lunatics on this island.
“What did you think of Edna?” Craig asked as they drove back up the winding mountain road.
“After she got past wanting to kill me, she merely made me nervous.”
“She’s a weird one, all right. She’s a fruitcake who’s been trying to say for the last five years that the mountain shows signs of erupting. So far the thing hasn’t even vented steam. And Buck hates her.”
“Buck hates everyone.”
“No, he doesn’t. But Edna keeps coming on to him and he’s tired of it.”
Hannah cocked her eye his way. “Doesn’t he like women?”
“Not since his divorce.”
“That explains a lot. What happened?”
“I’m sworn to silence,” Craig said, drawing his thumb and forefinger across his lips as if zipping them. “But get a couple of extra beers in him sometime and he’ll probably tell you.”
Hannah didn’t like the sound of that. “Does he drink a lot?”
“Actually, no. But once in a while…well, sometimes a guy has to howl at the moon.”
BACK AT THE HANGAR, relieved—or so he told himself—to have everyone out of his hair, Buck waded through the schematics of the fuel system for Hannah’s jet and soon had some ideas of what might have gone wrong. There were things even the best mechanic might not spot before they happened, especially if he was working on a plane for the first time, and if maintenance logs had been, well, doctored.
He suspected Hannah had been taken for a ride on this particular plane, insofar as whether routine maintenance had been properly and completely performed all along. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had cut a corner. She was damn lucky not to have ditched.
Of
