This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2025 by Quaker Village Books, LLC

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ISBN-13: 9781662532511 (digital)

Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

Cover image: © Altaf Shah, © Joern Siegroth, © sakchai vongsasiripat / Getty

The Day It Happened

Atall woman with powerful legs was biking alone in the flatlands east of Lake Champlain, thirty or so miles north of Burlington. The vista was the closest thing Vermont had to big sky country, a land of milk and honey. Plains of dairy farms in a topography otherwise known for wooded hills and foliage that turned phantasmagoric in autumn. It was the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and already the leaves were starting their slow-motion death throes.

She was in cycling shoes that clipped into the pedals of a racing bike, riding fast along a stretch of farmland five miles east of the lake. A little before noon, she looked up from the pavement—black and deep and so fresh it oozed the aroma of sulfur—and saw two skydivers. A tiny grin formed at the edge of her lips, a smile born of the simple idea of two human beings in space: their existence in the cloudless air and the quiet serenity of descent. She stopped on the road’s slender shoulder to watch, pulling off her sunglasses and squinting up at them. She’d seen the plane a few minutes earlier as it was making its jump run, and she knew the old farm that now housed the small skydiving business from her childhood. She’d heard it had been sold a few years ago, but the new owners were running it pretty much the same way as the old ones. Still called it Green Mountain Rip Cords. She’d been riding past it forever. It was, essentially, a couple of Cessnas, a C-182 that was red and white and a 206 that was blue and white. She could spot the different aircraft from a distance. The fact was, she knew lots of aircraft from a distance. This was the 206, and so, as she’d expected, eventually two skydivers had emerged. That was usually what happened when she spotted the blue aircraft: multiple jumpers exited. It was the bigger plane. Seated six. She and her husband had jumped here on their first wedding anniversary and then a second time five years ago, because they were each turning thirty and had come to Vermont to visit her parents.

The skydivers seemed to know what they were doing, their chutes billowing out against the cerulean sky. They understood terminal velocity and how to toggle. Were gliding, drifting on the currents like hawks and savoring the slow glide back to earth. Their canopies were open, and there was so little wind that whoever was piloting them could move the risers and steer their chutes precisely into the drop zone: the long, flat, empty meadow about a quarter mile down the road from where she had stopped.

In the field nearest her, a hulking green forage harvester was cutting a great swath through the corn, its engine a monotonous rumble. Beside it was a farm truck, the spout from the chopper spewing corn like a fire hose into the back of the other vehicle. The farmers were coming toward her, the rolling head of the harvester thirty feet wide, the blades spindling effortlessly, easily, through the corn, the plants in rows six and seven feet tall. The tassels moved like an old man’s thinning hair in the gentle breeze.

She took a swallow from her water bottle and returned it to the cage on the bicycle’s down tube, planning to resume her ride in a moment toward Lake Champlain.

But then one of the two skydivers started to waft beyond the drop zone, and she began to pay closer attention. She anticipated the parachutist would correct course. But, no, that wasn’t happening, which left her perplexed. Watching more intently, she felt the first ping of alarm. Perhaps she had inflated dramatically the skydivers’ capabilities; maybe the pair hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing. One of the parachutists was actually angling toward the corn chopper and the farm truck.

She thought about how when you were biking, if you stared at a crack or a crevice paralleling the road’s shoulder or a shard of broken glass on the white line, you were likely to hit it and puncture a tire. If you were cascading down a steep hill at thirty or forty miles an hour, the wipeout could be cataclysmic. Riding a bike, in that regard, was a lot like riding a horse: The wheels would follow your eyes, and so you kept your eyes wide and took everything in. Gentle eyes. That was the term equestrians used. Well, maybe this skydiver was a novice and couldn’t stop staring at the harvester in the cornfield, and that was the reason why the parachute was heading in that direction. Inexperience and panic, the deadliest combination there was.

But would Green Mountain Rip Cords allow a pair of rookies each to jump solo? Untethered? She doubted it. She didn’t know the new owners, but one had to assume they were as competent and responsible as the old ones.

Which meant this was more likely than not a conscious choice on the part of the drifter, and so her alarm began morphing into dread, because she thought she knew what was going to happen. It didn’t seem possible, but it was. It was happening before her very eyes. One of them was going to land right in front of the harvester.

She dropped her bike in the weeds along the shoulder and started trying to wave at the farmer driving the corn chopper, but he was just finishing the cut toward her and driving away. So was the farm truck that mirrored the harvester like a synchronized swimmer. Meanwhile, one of the skydivers continued to veer toward it. Floating, maybe, but it still seemed to her that this word suggested a leisurely coast and the parachutist had little control. Her instincts—which, in her experience, were excellent, but far from infallible—told her this skydiver was steering, the parachute low enough now that she could see the way the individual’s arms were moving the handles.

She crossed the country road, empty of cars in both directions, and ran across the cut section of the field as best she could in her cycling shoes, though she knew in her heart that she couldn’t overtake the machine or the truck. She knew also that the farmers couldn’t hear her screaming. But she had to try.

Meanwhile, the skydivers continued to fall. Slowly, gracefully, inexorably.

She waved her hands in the air, she pointed at the great farm machine, but either its driver didn’t see her or didn’t understand the urgency. She hoped that a witness to the madness would deter its inevitability, but if she had learned one thing in Afghanistan and then at the Pentagon, it was this: Never underestimate the human capability to make the worst decision imaginable. And killing yourself by being shredded by a harvester? That was one hell of an awful way to die—for you, because of the agony, and for someone else, because you were bringing that other human being down with you. Whether the farmer would view what was about to happen as a horrific accident or a suicide he was sucked into didn’t matter: You couldn’t unsee a person caught in a cutting bar, a revolving reel of metal teeth that would turn a once-breathing soul into unrecognizable roadkill. Chopped meat, gelatinous and raw.

Still, she shrieked. She yelled with all her might, blistering her larynx, but the skydiver timed it perfectly, ensuring there would be not one witness to the death but four: that poor son of a bitch driving the chopper, the truck driver, the other parachutist, and herself. The great farm machine turned to the right and so did the parachutist, and she saw the body ground beneath the header, the spray red against the green of the metal and the brown of the earth. She thought she heard the splintering crack of the helmet’s shell, but that wasn’t possible, she told herself, not with the engine running and not at this distance. A rock, maybe, shooting into the blades.

Or, yes, her imagination.

And it was then, as the harvester stopped and the truck stopped and the farmers jumped down from their vehicles to see what they already knew—they had just witnessed a human being slivered—her heart sank with one of those intuitive leaps that are inexplicable but real. She’d seen what IEDs could do at the Syrian border and she’d seen what mortars could accomplish in Afghanistan, but she’d never seen anything like this.

She pulled her phone from one of her cycling jersey’s back pockets and dialed 9-1-1. “My name is Ceci Fitzgerald,” she began, her voice steady as she told the dispatcher what had just occurred. On some level, she was aware that she was either the best person to have accidentally witnessed this tragedy or the worst.

The Night Before

Pete Hamilton sat in a wooden chair at the pumpkin pine table in his father’s kitchen, holding the cardboard box with his father’s ashes in his lap. The top was off, and he pondered the slag and small briquettes that, three days ago, had been his sixty-five-year-old dad. They were in a clear plastic bag sealed shut with the same sort of wire tie that adorned loaves of fresh bread at the bakery.

His older brother, Leo, was pacing like a caged wolf in the living room, chain-smoking and chatting with typical animation to some friend of his from work, his AirPods in so Pete was hearing only his brother’s complaints about deadlines and some idiot taskmaster of a boss. His Marlboro was like a baton when he was angry. And, since as long as Pete could remember, his older brother had always been angry. Their late mother would tease Leo, trying to calm him (and sometimes it worked), telling him he’d been born with a chip on his shoulder the size of Camel’s Hump. (“Yes, Leo, I do mean the mountain,” she’d say, as if clarification really were necessary.)

Now Pete stood, passed his brother, and went to the small office off the kitchen—what had been a pantry—where his parents had kept the farm paperwork and any papers that mattered. Here was the business behind all that corn and all those cows. Leo had been clear since their father had gotten sick that as soon as the old man died and the farm was theirs, the two of them were selling it. Pete had pushed back, but until he had come home in August to be with their father in his final days, his resistance had been half-hearted. He and his brother had both gotten as far from the farm as they could as soon as they were old enough to escape northern Vermont. And, back then, escape was the word that they used. Leo had enlisted in the army, winding up with the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell in Kentucky. He’d told the recruiter he’d grown up next to a civilian skydiving operation and even jumped a couple of times in high school, and though he hadn’t become an honest-to-God paratrooper with the 101st, it seemed to Pete that his brother had learned a hell of a lot as an engineering support tech.

Meanwhile, Pete had gone to New York City, hoping to be the next Anaïs Mitchell or Noah Kahan: a Vermonter with a guitar who made it big. It had been ten years, and still he hadn’t even begun to carve out a viable career as a musician: Most of his income still came from waiting tables at Food Coma, a trendy SoHo restaurant that had become a staple of the influencer crowd and that he could commute to via subway from his studio apartment in Queens. Pete honestly had no idea if he could run the farm, but he had been rethinking the plan more and more the last weeks of their father’s life—and especially now that the man was dead and the farm was theirs.

In the office, Pete switched on the light and found the contract with the real estate agent. Sometimes, you could sell one farm to a neighboring farm, but the farm next door had sold out years ago to the folks who had started the original skydiving business. So Leo wanted to bring on an agent, even if that meant losing 5 percent of the sale, fully expecting they’d find a buyer fast: either someone who’d keep the farm going or a real estate developer who’d build bunches of meadow mansions. When Pete looked up from the contract, he saw that Leo had followed him and was peering at him from the doorway.

“I am signing that tomorrow afternoon,” he said, his face largely hidden in the half shadow.

“Leo,” Pete began, but Leo held out his arm, his palm upright and flat as if he were a cop halting traffic.

“I’m on the phone,” he snapped, annoyed, and returned to the kitchen. “No, no,” he was saying. “I was just reminding Pete this farm is history. It’s over.”

But Pete remained less sure of that. Leo himself had actually returned to Vermont to work years ago, and though he insisted there was no way he’d join Pete on the farm, the whole idea that his older brother had come back here made the notion of his own capitulation to fate—the idea that he’d never be a professional musician—seem less like a failure.

A decade ago, Leo had parlayed his experience with the 101st into an entry-level engineering job with Macomber Aircraft and Aerospace Systems. MAAS was, far and away, the largest employer in northwest Vermont, rivaling in size even the massive hospital complex thirty or so miles to the south in Burlington. The defense contractor had paid for more education for Leo, and these days he was working on hybrid-electric propulsion for regional jets. (The company, of course, was much better known for such high-tech weaponry as missile defense and missile guidance systems.) It seemed to Pete that MAAS was a dreamlike ending for a cranky kid like Leo who’d grown up on a dairy farm.

Sometimes, Pete had to admit, it seemed almost too good to be true: In Leo’s first years at MAAS, Pete would tease his older brother, asking him what he really did, but it was clear that Leo took umbrage. It was as if his kid brother didn’t believe he was smart enough to be an engineer. Once, years ago on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving when Pete was home visiting, Leo had insisted on bringing Pete into the offices. He had a big computer in a small cubicle. That was where Leo worked nine to five. Still, Pete was impressed. And while Leo spent most of his days in that cubicle, on occasion he did travel to aircraft factories in Brazil and Canada, as well as to ones in South Carolina and Washington state.

Pete sighed, histrionic and raw. Somehow, he had to convince Leo to give him a chance to buy him out—buy his half—over time. And it would be a long time because it was a big farm: over a thousand dairy cows and nine farmhands, some full-time and some part-time. (It embarrassed Pete that he’d been back here nearly three weeks, caring for his father with the hospice nurses as the older man finished his days in a hospital bed in the living room, and still he had to check the payroll sheets to remember who was full-time and who wasn’t.) But he could figure it out. Maybe it was time to stop hooking up with whomever was nearby on Tinder and write a wistful song about it that no one—not even Pete himself—would think was very good when he unveiled it in the small bars in Brooklyn or the East Village that gave him mic time.

He put the real estate contract back on top of the desk and saw a manila folder on which their father had scribbled with a black Sharpie the single word, Will. It was empty, and Pete sat back in the chair annoyed. Clearly, his brother had taken it out.

Tomorrow, he and Leo were going to sprinkle their father’s ashes over one of the farm’s sprawling cornfields, the one next door to that little skydiving operation. As a teenager, Pete had jumped there with his older brother. It wasn’t cheap, but the previous owners had been friends with their parents and let them skydive there pretty much at cost. There had even been two summers, before their mother got sick, when the owners had worked with their family on a tourism tie-in: Milk some cows, pet some sheep, feed a goat at the Hamilton farm, and then jump from an airplane. Then drive into St. Albans or Burlington for some craft beer brewed by Vermonters.

But then their mother had fallen ill, and what was, in essence, the family petting zoo vanished. Their father focused on the dairy business, which was—even those summers when they’d invited flatlanders and leaf peepers into the operation—easily 99 percent of their income.

And now their father was gone, too, and so it was just Leo and Pete.

And it was really the employees who ran the farm these days, especially Chuck, who was fifty and change. Twelve years older than Leo and fifteen years older than Pete. Tomorrow, it would be Chuck driving the harvester while Pete and Leo would each sprinkle half their father’s ashes from the sky. Chuck had loved their old man like a brother (Why did that expression mean something, Pete wondered, given how he and Leo could barely tolerate each other?) and wanted to be part of the ceremony. But even tethered to Leo or Pete, he was clear: There was no way on God’s green earth he was going to try skydiving. So the ritual was set: The boys would rain their father’s ashes down onto the earth he had loved, and Chuck would—as he harvested the corn—spin them into the soil.

The new owners of Green Mountain Rip Cords weren’t giving the Hamiltons the sort of deal Leo wanted, but he’d still agreed—if reluctantly and with his usual air of grievance. There wasn’t supposed to be much wind tomorrow morning, but the little there was would be coming from New York state, which was perfect. The drop zone was just west of the cornfield. They’d sprinkle the ashes as they fell, and they’d blow east onto the Hamilton land, and their grief at their father’s death might be transformed into transcendence.

The Day It Happened

She saw that the young man who was driving the farm truck got to the cutting bar first, even before the fellow driving the chopper. She saw him peering in and then reaching in, using both hands, and for the briefest of seconds, her mind reeling at the mere possibility, Ceci feared that the skydiver hadn’t died instantly. Was he still alive even now, his body in pieces as it bled out? She recalled a moment in Syria, an IED, and how just before she had gotten to the smoldering Humvee, toppled onto its side like a shot elephant, a lieutenant had stood on the vehicle’s door and raised his M17, aiming it through the broken glass, and then holstered it again, shaking his head. He confessed to her later that he’d been about to put the driver out of his misery—or was, at least, considering it—but then the soldier had passed on his own and the lieutenant hadn’t had to make that call.

Only when she reached the chopper was it clear that the skydiver was dead.

“I was watching the ashes in the sky. Then, suddenly, he was in my windshield, right in front of me,” the older guy who’d been driving the machine was saying to her now, his voice frantic and scared. A minute ago, he’d been squatting in the field like a catcher, staring into the cutting bar at the front of the machine. “I couldn’t stop in time. I’d lost him in the sky,” he went on. “I knew where his brother was. He was sprinkling the ashes, but not right over my head.”

“He was over the drop zone,” she said. “The brother.”

“Yeah. I looked up and saw Leo, and I just guessed Pete was with him. I mean, I was steering. I had to be looking at the corn too . . .”

He was wearing a long-sleeve canvas work shirt, despite the Labor Day weekend heat. Ceci rubbed his biceps and shoulder through the fabric. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He shook his head, murmuring, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“You knew them. You said they were brothers and this one”—she gestured awkwardly toward the front of the harvester—“was named Pete?”

And Chuck told her all about the plan, explaining how Pete and Leo were amateur skydivers and sprinkling their dad’s ashes.

Ceci motioned at the young guy who’d been driving the farm truck. She couldn’t decide if he was a teenager or in his early twenties. His hair was as yellow as corn silk, and it waterfalled like a rock star’s to his shoulders. His phone was against his ear, and his skin was ashen, the blood having drained from his face as fast as water released suddenly from a clogged sink. “What’s his name?” she asked.

“That’s Stepan. Goes by Stevie now. Joined us late spring. Kid’s a refugee from Ukraine. He and his dad fought the Russians in 2022, but when his dad was killed, he and his mom came here,” Chuck answered. Then he called over to the young man, “Stevie, you okay?”

He ended his call and walked over to them, shaking his head in disbelief.

“I called 9-1-1,” Stevie said, the Ukrainian accent as prominent as if it were a Southern drawl. Or, at least, what Ceci supposed was a Ukrainian accent. It sounded Russian, though it seemed to resonate a little higher up in the chest. For all she knew, however, it was Romanian. Or Moldovan. Accents were never her specialty.

“I did too,” said Ceci.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Pete was struggling so bad,” he murmured.

“Struggling?” she asked, her mind toggling back to her idea this was a suicide and Stevie had meant that the dead man had been sad enough to steer himself under a corn chopper. “He was that depressed?”

He looked at her like she wasn’t listening. “Depressed? No! He was . . . it was like he was fighting against wind.”

She took this in. The wind shouldn’t have been a factor because there wasn’t much. Barely a breeze. If this hadn’t been suicide, it had to have been spectacular incompetence. And yet, they’d told her that this Pete had jumped before. Multiple times.

“I wasn’t scared for him at first,” Stevie was saying. “I figured, that’s going to be a big drag: He’s going to land in the corn and he’s going to have to trudge back to the landing site, lugging his parachute with him. But then . . .”

“But then?” Ceci pressed him when he stopped.

“He was fighting to get where he was supposed to. I don’t know much about skydiving, but look where the farm is. Pete was trying to steer away from the chopper. I started honking like a crazy person, but Chuck couldn’t hear me. And the guy in the sky? He just panicked! Freaked out!”

The older man pointed at his left ear. “Most of us are pretty deaf in the left ear from looking behind us when we’re on tractors and so on. And with that engine, well, I never heard Stevie’s horn. Never. I just . . .”

“So, neither of you believe he killed himself; neither of you thinks this was a suicide.” She framed it as a statement, not a question.

“Pete Hamilton? God, no! His dad and I used to joke that he was the definition of an optimist. Thought he was going to be a singer until pretty recently,” said Chuck.

“What happened recently?”

“He came home to see his dad through to the end. Help him pass. And he talked to me a couple times while Walt was dying—Walt’s their dad—about maybe coming back and running the farm. Which is also a sign of serious optimism. I mean, it is not—and I repeat, not—easy to run a dairy farm these days. Being a songwriter is probably no ticket to pretty girls and ten-dollar cappuccinos, either, but it’s more likely you’ll get both than having your boots covered with mud and manure while trying to make sense of the latest milk prices.”

In the distance, they heard sirens. Ceci supposed the state troopers would arrive before the ambulance, since the ambulance was coming from the hospital in St. Albans. But it didn’t matter. There really wouldn’t be work for any of them or any of the local first responders who turned out. The real job that loomed was going to demand the medical examiner.

The Night Before

Pete returned to the kitchen and watched his brother end his phone call with the work pal and slide his phone into a rear pocket of his jeans. Leo stood by the stove and folded his arms across his chest.

“Everything okay?” Pete asked him.

Leo nodded and patted his own ass. “You know, I always feel like a little bitch with my phone sticking out of my back pants pocket. Like I’m a teenage girl with a thing for Ed Sheeran,” he said, and Pete knew this was, on some level, an older sibling flicking his fingers into a younger brother’s bruise, because Pete definitely wasn’t Ed Sheeran. “But I’m never going to put my phone in a front pocket, because I don’t want it anywhere near my junk. You just don’t know what that nonionizing radiation really does on a cellular level, and you sure as shit can’t trust the National Cancer Institute. Exhibit A? The box of our dad’s ashes we got right there on the kitchen table.”

Pete looked down at them. “You know, I’d be more receptive to selling the farm if Chuck could afford to buy it.”

“Well, he can’t. And you, little brother, can’t afford to buy out my half. We’ve been through this and through this and through this. I am selling, and you ain’t buying. So move on. We’re selling. It’s over. Gets listed Monday morning before lunch. Then you get back to Queens and your music.”

“Where’s Dad’s will?” Pete asked.

“Dad’s will?”

“Uh-huh. It’s not in the folder.”

“God, little brother, just because we—we—are dumping this dumpster fire doesn’t mean I’m doing something behind your back. I am a goddamn open book.”

“Why is this all so urgent? Do you need money?”

Leo folded his arms again, his eyebrows steepling. “Do I need money?” he asked, his voice slow and deep.

“Yes. Is . . .”

“Is . . . what?”

“Is something going on in your life you’re not telling me?”

Leo shook his head, and he did it in a way that made Pete think his older brother was trying to convey disappointment in him. Without responding, Leo turned and went to the office, but he was there only seconds. When he returned, he dropped their father’s will onto the table. “Here,” he said. “You know it as well as I do. Nothing changed.”

“I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything,” Pete said. He sounded more sheepish than he actually felt.

“Yeah, you did. But you know what also hasn’t changed? I am still the executor. Me. I make the decisions, and since you can’t buy me out, we’re getting rid of this place as fast as possible.”

Leo peered at the box of ashes. “Guy gave his life for fucking cows and fucking milk. What a waste,” he said. “You don’t want that, Pete. Trust me, you don’t. Think of the pile of money you’ll get when this place is no longer ours.”

“Dad was happy.”

“Dad was exhausted. It’s an exhausting life. And I am about to confess something.”

Pete waited.

“I fucking hate milk.”

The Day It Happened

Ceci had about as many regrets as any thirty-five-year-old woman, but her stint in the National Guard wasn’t one of them. Her parents, both Vermonters, had drilled into her as a child the importance of service before setting off seriously into adulthood. That had meant the Peace Corps for her mother in the 1980s and a posting in Peru, and the Vermont National Guard for her father, which had led to a stint in the Persian Gulf with Vermont’s 131st Engineer Company. Arguably, she had drawn a shorter straw than even her father, with deployments battling the Taliban and ISIS. Both of her parents had wound up working at colleges in Burlington, her mother in personnel and her father in development.

In any case, now Ceci and her husband, a lawyer with the DOJ, were comfortably settled in McLean, Virginia, and even discussing seriously the idea of children.

The first trooper on the scene was a woman a little older than Ceci who introduced herself as Sergeant Richter. She was short and built strong, and she held her sunglasses in her teeth when she peered into the cutting bar. The lines of the chute were twisted in the blades, and the chute itself was wrapped amid the wheels. There were bits of cloth and shards from the helmet.

“What do you do, Ms. Fitzgerald?” the trooper asked, all business, when she returned to where Ceci was standing a dozen or so yards away.

“I work in the Pentagon. I’m an analyst,” she added, not so much trying to curry favor as show that she respected what this woman did. Good police work, after all, was analysis.

“What kind of analyst?”

“Intelligence.”

“Meaning?”

“Counterterrorism threats. I help make sense of what’s real and what isn’t.”

“Is there a Vermont threat I should know about?”

“Meaning, why am I here?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m visiting my parents. That’s all. I grew up near here. Forty minutes by bike. I was riding out to the lake when it happened.”

“Okay. Tell me what you witnessed,” the sergeant said, her eyes burrowing into Ceci. “Please.”

Overhead, Ceci saw a pair of turkey vultures circling. She was impressed with their acuity.

“Ms. Fitzgerald?” the sergeant pressed.

Ceci brought her gaze from the birds to the trooper and told her what she had seen, confessing that she and her husband were adrenaline junkies and had gone skydiving a dozen times in their lives, including right here. Over the trooper’s shoulder, she saw the surviving brother—the other parachutist—talking to Chuck and Stevie, and it looked like the two men were trying to console him. But he seemed too angry to comfort. He was pawing at the ground with his boots like a bull, stomping his feet in frustration. She’d seen people react to death in myriad ways, and this sort of anger wasn’t uncommon in a war zone. But on a beautiful late-summer day in Vermont? This was not how she would have expected to see grief manifest. She’d have to learn more about this dude.

“So you thought the victim was trying to kill himself?” Richter asked.

“At first, yes. Crossed my mind.”

“If you want to kill yourself skydiving, why not just not open your chute? Don’t pull the rip cord or whatever?”

“You could do that.”

“Or just take your chute off?”

“You could do that too. But maybe he wanted it to look like an accident.”

“Got it.”

“But I don’t believe that anymore.”

“No?”

Ceci shook her head. “According to those gentlemen over there, the victim wasn’t depressed. Also, he wasn’t inexperienced. So I don’t understand how he could have wound up so far from the drop zone and directly in front of the harvester.”

“Well, I’m not a skydiver. That young fellow over there—the Ukrainian who was driving the truck—believes the victim panicked. Saw the chopper and just lost his cool. That’s what he told you, that’s what he told me. That jibe with what you saw?”

“Sort of. Maybe. The kid said he was battling the wind. I mean, steering lines are pretty blunt instruments. And he might have been flustered as he was descending. Scared. But I didn’t know the victim and I’m not sure what to think now.”

The trooper took this in. “You said you’ve jumped here.”

“I have. Recreationally.” She was not about to add, though she could have, that she had also managed a half dozen drone drops in Afghanistan, where the drone would drop weapons and communications gear via parachute to the Afghan army fighting the Taliban.

“So do you know the pilots? Or the owners?”

“When I jumped here, the pilots were the owners. But they sold the business a few years ago. I don’t know who owns it now.”

Richter looked out at the hangar to the west, on the far side of the grass strip where the planes took off and landed. The pilot had returned now but hadn’t come over yet. Ceci supposed it was possible it had only dawned on him that something horrific had occurred when he realized that the sirens he’d heard were converging on the two-lane road beside the cornfield.

“You mind sticking around a few more minutes?” Richter asked her.

“Not at all.”

The trooper nodded and returned to the farmers and the surviving brother. Ceci saw an ambulance pulling into the field as far as it could, and then two EMTs racing over to the hulking machine. As they neared it, Chuck and Stevie had to physically restrain the victim’s brother, who was trying to beat the EMTs there.

“Leave it alone!” the guy was yelling at them. “Leave my goddamn brother alone!”

The Night Before

Pete didn’t honestly believe that he did too much weed. But some nights, the idea crossed his mind. Now that he didn’t have to risk his singing voice by smoking it—thank you, gummies—he knew he was likely ingesting more THC than ever. And the last three weeks, sitting around the house he grew up in, feeding his father small spoonfuls of the blueberry ice cream he loved, changing his diaper, and rolling him over in bed, he was stoned pretty much 24-7. His brother popped in every other day or so to check in on the old man, and Leo’s presence was always a bit of a buzzkill. (Or, to be precise, it was a buzzkill atop a plane crash, since Leo and Pete were together only because they were the principal actors in their father’s deathwatch.) Leo didn’t drink—once upon a time he’d been a beer man but had gone cold turkey years ago—and didn’t approve of cannabis. He didn’t disapprove . . . but he thought the idea of edibles was, to use his words, “kind of the micro-dick approach to getting high. If you want to get high, fucking smoke a joint like a man.”

Now, Pete’s phone telling him it was just after midnight, he woke up still a little buzzed from the gummy he’d swallowed before bed. He was in his childhood bedroom, and Leo, since they were jumping tomorrow morning, had stayed overnight and was in his. Their parents’ room was empty and the hospital bed that had been in the living room was gone.

He thought again of his father’s will and his suspicions when it hadn’t been in the folder. It was, arguably, paranoia that had led him to reread it before going to bed. But it hadn’t changed. His father hadn’t revised it, either of his own volition or because Leo had encouraged him to. Still, something was going on. Pete was sure of it.

His bedroom window was open, and he heard crickets singing. He heard the coo of the barred owl he saw once in a while in the massive shagbark that loomed like a sentinel in their otherwise-treeless yard. He shook his head like a wet dog, trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain.

He climbed from bed and stood at the screen, staring at the stars. One of the things he’d discovered he loved about Vermont this past month was the night sky. Unlike in Queens, when the evening was moonless here, you really could see the stars and understand why the ancients viewed them as connect-the-dot images. And when there was a moon, it lit up the world like a searchlight. Moreover, sound carried across the flatlands in ways it never did in the city.

Such as right now.

He couldn’t make out the words, but somewhere he could hear the gentle thrum of voices. Two, maybe three. He might have said it was a car radio, but there was no car passing by.

Ah, but there, in the distance, at the skydiving business, he saw the lights were on in the hangar, the door wide open. When he’d been a Boy Scout, he used binoculars to study birds for a merit badge, and they were still in his top dresser drawer. He retrieved them now and studied the hangar. Sure enough, there were two people there, though he couldn’t make out who. The guy who owned it was likely one of them. If Pete had to speculate, he’d guess the pilot was getting ready for tomorrow’s flight. He was glad it was a late-morning jump if their pilot was still awake.

But then the thought came to him: Might that be Leo with the pilot? Couldn’t be. Shouldn’t be. But . . . maybe? He went to his brother’s bedroom and knocked on the door. There was a long moment of quiet, and then, from the other side of the wood, he heard movement and the door was opening. “What’s up?” Leo asked, rubbing at his eyes as if he were a little boy.

And Pete started to tell him that he’d seen lights on at the hangar, but he began to fear that he really was doing too much weed and becoming a cannabis-addled paranoid. So instead he said, “I thought I heard something and was afraid you couldn’t sleep too.”

“You having trouble sleeping?”

“I guess, a little.”

“Makes sense. We got a shit ton going on.”

Pete nodded. “I’m, um, sorry about earlier.”

“No sweat. I’m good.”

“I just think I could make a life here.”

“You’re a musician, man. I’m telling you, I got your back. The sale of this place will give you the cushion you need to make the music you want.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

“Yeah, we will,” Leo agreed, his voice uncharacteristically avuncular. “Hey, if you can’t fall back to sleep, wake me. Deal?”

Pete was moved. “I’ll be okay,” he said. Then he went back to his bed and turned on the Sounds of the Seashore meditation app on his phone, the surf, the waves, an endless loop that played all night long. He hoped to get another six hours of shut-eye before the sun started to pour in through the thin shades on the windows on the eastern side of the bedroom.

The Day It Happened

And now there was a small crowd, and Ceci and the sergeant were the only women. There was the farmer and the Ukrainian kid who’d been driving the truck, the victim’s brother—who was losing his mind, it seemed, practically wanting to rend his garments as if a jumpsuit were a biblical robe—two EMTs, the pilot, and a couple of volunteer first responders who realized there was literally nothing they needed to do. They didn’t even need to detour or direct traffic, because the accident scene was so far from the road.

Ceci went to the pilot, a tall, thin guy roughly her age, and introduced herself. He said his name was Jamie, and while she could tell that he prided himself on usually having ice in his veins—she knew the type—he clearly was rattled. He’d been checking and rechecking his phone, running his hand through his hair as if his fingers were the teeth of a comb. He’d been wearing aviators when he’d arrived but had taken them off when he, too, had peered into the cutting bar. Now the glasses were tucked into the collar of his black T-shirt, and she was struck by his green eyes and a nose that may once have been aquiline but at some point had lost a battle with a baseball or a fist.

“You ever have a client kill himself?” she asked him.

He gave her a nervous, sidelong glance. Then he said, “Nope. But a guy I know who has a business like mine in Iowa did. Skydiver who died was an expert. Knew exactly what he was doing. Never opened his chute and landed squarely in the middle of the drop zone. Bones became powder, the guy told me.”

He was trying to suggest he was okay. Taking this disaster in stride. He wasn’t. He was only pretending he wasn’t devastated.

“What about an accidental death?” she asked. “That ever happen?”

Now he pulled the glasses from his collar and put them back on. He stared at her through them. “You planning to sue me?” he asked. “You have some relationship to Pete Hamilton I don’t know about?”

“No. And I don’t plan to sue you.”

“Just curious?”

“Yup.”

“Look, they tell me that Hamilton was experienced. Not some newbie. It seemed to me he knew exactly what he was doing. There wasn’t much wind, but things happen. No guarantees in life. Maybe there was a gust. Just because the air seemed calm when we took off doesn’t mean there wasn’t”—and here he sliced through the air with his right arm—“a big whoosh. A sudden whoosh.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“That’s what you think happened?”

“I have no other explanation.”

“That young guy,” she said, pointing at Stevie. “He and I both thought Pete was struggling to control his descent.”

“There you go. Wind shear. Or panic.”

“Maybe. Or, maybe, defective gear. Maybe the steering toggles were broken.”

“They weren’t.”

“You’re positive?”

Jamie nodded, still staring down at her through his shades. “We know what we’re doing. Sounds like you might have gone skydiving once or twice. True?”

“More times than that,” she said, answering him but evasive. Her hunch was growing more solid. If this wasn’t an accident, then whoever had killed Pete would have had an excellent alibi, if one of the witnesses hadn’t been—just by chance—someone like her. And it wasn’t because she had jumped from planes herself.

“Three times?” he asked, his tone derisive.

She didn’t respond. Instead she asked him, “You have any military background? Air force or navy, maybe?”

“Shit, no,” he replied, and she was surprised. She believed him, but if he didn’t have a military background, then her suspicions might have been off target. But then he added, “Just a recreational pilot who worked for a while at Macomber Aerospace.”

“The defense contractor.”

“Yup. Why do you ask?”

“Lot of pilots learn to fly in the service,” she said simply.

“Nah, there’s more to it than that. I can hear it in your voice. You said your name was Ceci. What do you do, Ceci? You a reporter? Lawyer who likes to chase ambulances?”

The turkey vultures had landed atop the cutting bar. One of the EMTs took his ball cap and started waving it wildly at them, but they held their ground a long moment before finally lifting off. Still, they didn’t fly away; they continued to circle and watch, waiting for a moment to see how deeply they could get inside the cutter.

“I work in the Pentagon,” she replied.

“Well, now. Did not have that on my bingo card.”

She pointed at the surviving brother. “What was he like when you were getting ready this morning? Before you took off?”

“Leo? He seemed fine. I don’t really know him. Met him for the first time when he came by the other day to schedule the jump. Gather he’s a Macomber Aerospace guy too. Told me his dad was dying—actively dying—and he and his brother wanted to sprinkle the ashes from the sky when the time came. Rain them down on the farm. Cool idea, I thought. I knew his old man, of course. Got to know Pete, too, the last month. Very nice guy. He . . .”

“He what?”

“Just . . . I mean, what a loss. Anyway, Leo came here again the day their dad passed.”

He pointed over at the surviving brother. Leo was kneeling in the dirt on one knee, staring at the harvester, a deep scowl on his face, while Sergeant Richter and one of the EMTs were standing over him, preventing him from approaching the machine. The man looked disgusted. She thanked the pilot for talking to her and walked over to him.

The Day It Happened

Around eleven fifteen in the morning, the pilot showed them their gear on the dirt floor in the hangar—a pop-up barn with a canvas roof. “That pile is yours, Pete,” Jamie said, pointing, “and you take that chute, Leo.” Then he turned and climbed into the plane.

But Leo, ever the contrarian, grabbed Pete’s because it was at his feet. He didn’t care—the packs were identical. And soon they were off, rumbling along the grass.

The Cessna’s engine was never as noisy as you expected when the propellers first started to spin, and there was always, in Pete’s experience, a brief moment when you wondered if the damn thing would choke. It was almost like trying to start a recalcitrant clunker of a car, the way it would hem and haw and sound like it was struggling, but then the blades would start spinning fast and there it was, the loud whir everyone knew and expected from a small plane. The buzz of a giant mosquito. Pete had one clear plastic bag of ashes, Leo the other, and the charcoal looked especially dark against the white of the summer gloves the company included in their rental gear. They’d already undone the twist ties since their descent wouldn’t be all that long.

“Man,” Leo shouted as the plane begin to climb west toward the lake, “that release form always creeps me out. Even now. Dad would fucking hate it if we killed our goddamn selves doing this.”

“He asked us to do it,” Pete shouted back, reminding him. The helmet made it even harder to hear, and he wondered if all his time playing music in bars would make him deaf before he was fifty.

“I know,” Leo agreed. “Well, what the hell. Maybe we can charge an extra grand or two for the property because the soil’s been fertilized with our dad’s DNA: a guy who won Vermont Farm of the Year not once, but twice.”

“He was proud of that honor. But I have a feeling DNA doesn’t survive cremation.”

“No, probably doesn’t.”

“But it does survive lava. They found some in the corpses at Pompeii.”

“Are you shitting me?”

“I shit you not,” said Pete, and he looked out at New York state as the plane continued its ascent, looping out over the water. High above their little plane, north over Quebec, were the brushstrokes of feathery white cirrus clouds, elegant against the cobalt backdrop of the sky. “Jamie—the pilot—was working pretty late last night,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Middle of the night, I woke up. Peered out my window and saw lights on in the hangar. Two guys were inside.”

For a brief moment, Leo looked alarmed. But then he rolled his eyes and said, his tone nonchalant, “Well, he seemed chipper enough this morning. Not too sleepy to fly a plane over the lake and back.”

“I hope not.”

His brother chuckled. “Well, I wouldn’t worry. It’s you and me who have the parachutes if some kind of shit goes down,” he yelled. And already the plane was banking and they were starting east, and Jamie hollered back at them to get ready because soon it would be time.

“All set?” Leo asked.

Pete nodded and cradled the bag with his father’s ashes. And then, moments later, he was in free fall, holding tight to the plastic, breathing against the air that came at him like a fan, time slowing down, Vermont—a valley here between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks, the western half of the plains the watery remnant of the Champlain Sea, an aquatic world that once cast its waves from Ontario to New Hampshire—below him. He saw the Champlain Islands in one direction, Mount Mansfield in the other. Overhead was only the sun. He felt the exhilaration, the rush, and he and his brother gave each other a wave, separating as they plummeted downward, and then, as if they were a diving team in formation, pulled their chutes at roughly the same moment, and Pete felt the braking in his shoulders and back as his chute popped open, and suddenly he was in shade. A second before, he had been squinting through his sunglasses against the bright sky and the late-summer sun.

For long seconds that stretched into a minute, he stared at the earth, the checkerboard of cornfields, some of which he hoped next year would—somehow—be his. Yes, he’d keep the farm. He’d work this out with Leo. He’d find a way. He saw Chuck and Stevie below him in the harvester and the truck, moving methodically eastward, and now that he was wafting serenely beneath the canopy, he could hear the vehicles even up here. Up here. The two words struck him. Icarus. He’d write a song about this moment.

Pete Hamilton, the troubadour farmer.

One never knew.

He and his brother were far apart now, but he saw the ashes snaking into the wind from beneath Leo’s parachute, and they reminded him of a murder of crows in the winter.

A murder of crows. That, too, could be a song.

Then he remembered why he was here. In the sky.

He looked down at the bag and murmured softly, “I love you, Dad. I love you so much,” and opened it, and the remnants floated briefly beside him before disappearing. He wished he hadn’t done it all at once, but he had, and there was no changing that now. So he grabbed the toggles to the steering lines, planning to direct himself to the drop zone, and pulled down with his left hand.

And nothing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

The Day It Happened

My name’s Ceci Fitzgerald,” she said to Leo. “I am so sorry about your brother.” His eyes were darting over her shoulder, pinballing between the corn chopper and the sergeant, who’d now been joined by two more stateys. The medical examiner was heading north from Burlington but hadn’t arrived yet.

“You an off-duty cop?” he asked her, motioning at her cycling jersey and bike shorts.

“No. But I saw you and Pete as you were descending. I was over there on the road, watching you two. I’ve done a little skydiving.”

“What a mess. What a goddamn mess. We were just doing what our old man wanted. Sprinkling his ashes. I mean, what the fuck? What the goddamn fuck?” he muttered, his tone at once exasperated and shocked. She didn’t believe his sincerity was genuine—she felt what her gut was telling her—and yet his incredulity and grief seemed so real. Could the guy really be that good an actor? Not likely. She reminded herself that the level of psychopathy necessary to kill your brother had to be high, and perhaps that was how he was able to give such authenticity to his performance. After all, brothers killed brothers all the time. It was, yes, biblical. Still, his angst had her checking her skepticism and wariness. As she’d told him, she wasn’t a cop. She was an analyst. But she had experience as a skydiver and she had experience dropping cargo by chute in Afghanistan. She knew the technology.

“The pilot says he thinks it was a wind shear, that’s what happened,” she said, answering his question even though she knew it was rhetorical.

“I guess. But seriously? Never seen anything like that.”

Sergeant Richter had already spoken to him briefly and found out where he worked and what he did. It tracked with what Ceci had grown confident had really occurred. As she expected, when she tried to pry a little deeper into his time in the army, he grew evasive.

“You told the sergeant you were at Fort Campbell,” she said.

“So?”

“Our backgrounds are closer than you think.”

His eyes narrowed. “I kinda doubt that, lady.”

“I worked on drone drops in Afghanistan. Munitions, medicine, food.”

“Pilot?” he asked. He didn’t seem threatened. Merely curious.

“No. Logistics. But I was fluent on JPADS,” she said. That was the shorthand they used: Joint Precision Air Drop Systems.

He nodded. “Yeah, me too. I didn’t fly drones either. Never even left Kentucky. I was lucky, I guess.”

“I don’t think it was bad luck I went to Afghanistan. I saw worse in Syria.”

“Oh, God, Syria and Afghanistan? That ain’t good luck at all.”

“I’m here. Still standing.”

“Well, yeah. But still,” he said. “It couldn’t have been pleasant.”

His fury seemed to have quelled, and now he seemed more tired than wary. She had hoped when he saw they had some commonality, he might fold. But there was absolutely no panic in his face or his body language, no acknowledgment that she understood the same technologies that he did—and the fact that he’d used an air drop system to kill his brother. An airborne guidance unit that linked the cargo dangling from a parachute to a receiver on the ground. When set on automatic, you didn’t need a remote pilot to steer the cargo to the landing area: It would be drawn there on its own, rather like the tractor beams they had all watched on Star Trek reruns.

And she’d seen Leo reach into the cutting bar after the accident: He hadn’t been checking to see if, by some miracle, his brother had survived. He was retrieving the receiver and the transmitter. If she could get the sergeant to search him right now, they very likely would find them in his jumpsuit.

He started walking away.

“Leo?” she said.

He stopped and turned. “Lady, I don’t know you. And just because we both know drones and canopies doesn’t mean I want to talk to you about my brother. I’m sorry. But this is kind of a shitstorm I need to process with people I care about and who care about me, thank you very much.” Then he continued on his way to where Chuck was standing, the older farmer now rendered mute, utterly stunned by the horror of Pete’s death.

So she retreated too. She’d tell Sergeant Richter and the other troopers what she knew, and see if they would—if they legally could—search Leo Hamilton before he left the cornfield.

The Day It Happened

She had been certain, absolutely positive, not a doubt in her mind.

The stateys had asked Leo if they could search him and he hadn’t resisted. He’d looked at Ceci with only minor vexation crossing his face, aware that she was the instigator behind this indignity, and told the troopers he was happy to strip naked if that’s what they wanted. She’d instructed the troopers on what to look for, what the receiver or transmitter might look like. But they’d discovered neither tech piece on him. They’d discovered nothing on him at all.

So, it seemed, she was mistaken. At least it appeared that way.

But, maybe, they’d find one or the other when they were exhuming the fragments and flesh from the cutting bar and beneath the harvester. And yet she doubted it. She had begun to doubt herself.

Here she’d been thinking since she had witnessed the accident that once in a while there was random justice in this world, and she had been on this road this Saturday morning because she alone could explain what had happened and someone would not get away with murder—with using the wind or a wind shear as an alibi. And, these days, preventing someone from getting away with murder seemed like a win of tectonic proportions. But once more, unfairness and grievance were the arc of the Earth, the planet most days spinning only toward meanness, cruelty, and stupidity.

Now her faith in herself looked only like arrogance. Presumption. Not the first time and probably not the last. It seemed that it really might have been bad luck, a toxic combination of panic and wind. The dead skydiver had indeed freaked out. And so she apologized to Leo Hamilton and Sergeant Richter, admitting she had been wrong, and walked back to the two-lane road. She picked up her bike and pedaled toward her parents’ house. She’d tell them what she’d witnessed and call her husband in northern Virginia, sharing the nightmare with him too. Suddenly, she was very tired, the scope of the tragedy making her legs feel heavier than she could ever remember.

Epilogue

Leo was standing no more than two dozen yards from the harvester, and he knew that everyone present, even the first responders, had watched the troopers search him. It was humiliating, but the worst part was the idea that Chuck, his father’s closest friend at the end, might have thought for even a brief moment that he was capable of killing Pete. Sure, the love between them often was swamped by sibling rivalries and the reality that, pure and simple, they’d grown apart. They wanted different things, and his kid brother—with all his ne’er-do-well daydreams of being a musician—would never have been able to manage the dairy farm. And he would have been miserable. But Leo sure as hell wasn’t capable of fratricide—and certainly not over whether to keep or sell a herd of cows and acres and acres of corn. Shit, who would do that? He would never have murdered Pete. He wasn’t like that. He didn’t kill people—at least not on purpose. That wasn’t part of the job description.

One dude had died on his watch, but it wasn’t his fault.

Years ago, Army Counterintelligence had parlayed his personal history into a new career and made it a part of his cover: He was to be another dude from rural America powered by an amorphous blob of self-righteous, unschooled anger. He’d been recruited back at Fort Campbell when they’d heard how good he was with the new technologies, and how, as a Vermonter, he’d be a natural at Macomber Aerospace. He’d be a part of the black ops that were occasionally present at defense contractors to see whether there’d been Russian or Chinese infiltration. There he’d proven to be a whiz at getting in and out of hotel meeting rooms and trade show conferences, and planting GPS trackers and all manner of audio and video bugs in restaurants and rental cars. One time, his covert work had gotten a foreign agent expelled; another time, he’d surreptitiously gotten one arrested.

The problem now—and this was what had him both grieving and confused—was the fact that he had switched chutes with Pete back in the hangar. The pilot had told Pete to take one and Leo the other. But the chute he’d offered to Pete had been right at Leo’s feet, and a chute was a chute, and so Leo had taken the one nearest him. Hadn’t thought twice about it, was just being a curmudgeonly older brother. It was what he did, both who he was and what he was supposed to be.

Which meant two things: The pilot was in on this.

And Pete wasn’t the target. He himself was.

Leo looked over at Chuck, because a few minutes ago Chuck had been talking to Stevie—the Ukrainian who’d arrived at the farm in the spring. Now the older man was a solitary figure of shoulder-hunching sadness, an aging farmer alone with his hands in his pockets. Leo gazed carefully around the field, and there was no sign of the young guy from Kyiv. He’d vanished.

Which was when Leo knew.

No one was going to see Stevie again. The kid had gotten to the cutting bar even before he had. Jumped out of the truck like a lemur and been at the front of the chopper within seconds of Chuck shutting down the engine.

Leo understood that sometimes you played a long game. The refugee had been here roughly four months. Arrived soon after Dad had gotten the diagnosis. So not that long really, not that long at all. And coming here as an immigrant from Ukraine? Horseshit. Guy was no more Ukrainian than I am, Leo thought. Dude was Russian, and Leo understood this was supposed to be payback for the accidental death of the MAAS engineer who’d died in an ice fishing disaster last winter on Lake Champlain. Leo had evidence the guy was FSB. Sometimes, the Russians just tried to hack into US companies, and sometimes they dropped in a mole. The plan had been to trap the agent out on the ice and arrest him there. After all, whether you were the FBI or Army Counterintelligence, you didn’t whack people—you arrested them.

But instead of surrendering, the Russian had tried to kill himself and the officers he saw approaching by blowing up the miniature shanty he’d towed onto the ice. He’d planned to send them all to the bottom of the lake. But the surface of Champlain was frozen solid, and while the explosion shot cracks beneath the feet of the half dozen Americans and sent them retreating to the shore on their bellies like snakes, only the shanty had been swallowed beneath the ice and only the mole had drowned.

God, Leo thought, he really had screwed the pooch this summer. He’d made sure the agents at Fort Meade had done a background check on this Stevie when his dad had said he had a Ukrainian refugee coming to the farm. He himself had even met the kid’s “mom” in St. Albans. Seemed real. Checked out. Well, now his own little brother was collateral damage, and his sibling’s blood was on his hands. Maybe he hadn’t liked Pete as a friend, but he sure had loved him as a brother. That was the main reason he hadn’t wanted him to have the farm: The guy would have been way better off with all the dough he’d have gotten from his half of the sale. He could have lived his life in New York, writing his music, and maybe worried a little bit less. Taken a few less shifts at that restaurant and written a few more songs.

Still, what did he know? Maybe he should have let him—and the irony of the pun caused him to wince—buy the farm.

He swore softly. Pete really was gone, and never could he apologize for all his years of being a prize dick. Maybe later he might allow himself a couple of beers and a solitary cry. But maybe not. Black ops guys weren’t supposed to drink.

Which brought him back to work: Who knew what the hell classified intel Stevie might have gotten at MAAS, given the Hamilton family’s proximity to the company’s headquarters?

And worst of all—at least from the perspective of his future with Army Counterintelligence and as a human being who hoped to continue walking the earth—his cover clearly was blown. He had no idea what his bosses would do about that. New identity? New job? God, the paperwork and debriefings that loomed alone might kill him, a fatal litany of meetings upon meetings.

He thought of the cyclist. The woman who claimed she worked at the Pentagon. Ceci Fitzgerald. She definitely was going to merit a second look.

He sighed extravagantly. He was disgusted. Furious. He wondered how much the pilot knew, but he doubted Jamie was ever going to volunteer whatever he had. Probably Stevie—or whatever the fuck his real name was—had gotten something on him from the dude’s time at Macomber.

And so, Leo figured, he’d deal with him—him and the Russian dipshit—another time. He could play a long game, too, and eventually he’d find him. Not a single doubt in his mind.

First, however, he had to sign the contract with the real estate agent and unload a thousand cows and nearly two thousand acres.

Oh, and bury his brother. He sure as shit wasn’t going to cremate him and sprinkle his ashes from a goddamn airplane.

About the Author

Photo © 2021 Victoria Blewer

Chris Bohjalian is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books, including The Jackal’s Mistress, The Lioness, Hour of the Witch, Midwives (an Oprah’s Book Club selection), and The Flight Attendant, which became an Emmy-winning television series. His Amazon short story Slot Machine Fever Dreams, published in the Obsession collection, was a finalist for the 2024 ITW Thriller Award, and the collection was an Audie Award finalist. He lives in Vermont and can be found at http://chrisbohjalian.com.