Page 84 of From Air

“She sent them to me last night too. I had to rub one off just to get to sleep.”

I shake my head. “You’re a sick son of a bitch.”

He shoots me a self-satisfied grin over his shoulder. “I’m an only child.”

I pull my phone out of my pocket when it vibrates while heading back to the ready room.

Jaymes: Don’t die today unless u specify in your will that u owe me $30

Gary plucks my phone from my hands. “Todd says you’re rapturous today.”

I snatch my phone back from him. “Rapturousisn’t in Todd’s vocabulary.”

“He might have said perky.”

“I’m perky every day.”

“Jamie, huh? Why does she think you might die?”

“No idea.”

“Tell her you have more lives than a cat.”

“Let’s get serious. We have a job to do,” I manage to say with a straight face while collecting my gear.

Gary chuckles. “Yeah, but not a serious one.”

Eight men and four women load up for the trip to McCall.

Chapter Twenty-Six

JAYMES

A bear killed Dwight Keane’s wife.

He chased the bear but lost the hunt.

Until ... he burned down thirty-two thousand acres of wildland to avenge his wife’s death. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be heroic. Dare I say romantic?

It’s been years, and Dwight still talks about that bear—it’s all he talks about. The doctors believe he’s on track to spend the rest of his life in a California mental hospital. He’s been released four times and recommitted each time.

“Dwight, it’s vanilla yogurt and strawberries.” My finger taps his gray fiberglass tray before running across the peeling surface of his dusty laminated desk. “Your favorite.” I open his yellowed curtains the rest of the way. Light floods the room, illuminating the unmade single bed crammed into the corner of the dinky bare-walled space. The room reeks of bleachandurine. Today, the pungent urine wins with a full-on olfactory assault. Sometimes, Dwight enjoys marking his territory.

Beneath his bushy black-and-gray eyebrows, Dwight’s vacant gaze points out the window overlooking a courtyard of weathered flagstonewalking paths, decaying flower gardens, and a basketball court at the far end, with a few patients milling around. His full head of mostly gray hair, with a little dark brown still clinging to youth, could use a trim. It covers his ears in a style reminiscent of something from the seventies.

Some days he’s Mr. Chatty. And some days, he doesn’t have much to say. Instead, he narrows his brown eyes a fraction, like they are right now—pinpoints of concentration. When he’s not focused on things that trigger memories of the bear chase, I find him poring over books about bears.

“Claire said you were waiting on me. Why don’t you try some yogurt before it gets warm?” I drag a green vinyl upholstered chair next to him at a ninety-degree angle in the hope that he decides to focus on me.

After an eternity, he blinks, and his arm twitches.

I rest my hand over it and sit with him for a few minutes. Dwight relaxes with me because he occasionally thinks I’m his family. It assuages his anxiety.

“I heard you joined a book club.”

He responds with a blink.

“Do you like working in the gardens?”

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