Strangers

shoulder.
        Ginger was kneeling at his other side. "Dom, are you all right?"
        With their support, he got up from the snow. "The memory block is going, crumbling." He turned his face up toward the sky again, hoping that the white snowy day would flash away, as before, and be replaced by a dark summer night, hoping that the recollections would continue to pour forth. Nothing. Wind gusted. Snow lashed his face. The others were watching him. He said, "I remembered jets, military fighter craft… two at first, swooping by a couple of hundred feet above…. and then a third one so low that it almost took the roof off the diner."
        "Jets!" Marcie said.
        Everyone looked at her in surprise, even Dom, for it was the first word - other than "moon" - that she had spoken since dinner the previous night. She was in her mother's arms, bundled against the weather. She had turned her small face to the sky. In response to what Dom had said, she seemed to be searching the stormy heavens for some sign of the longdeparted jets of a summer lost.
        "Jets," Ernie said, looking up as well. "I don't… recall.
        "Jets! Jets!" Marcie reached up with one hand toward the heavens.
        Dom realized that he was doing the same thing, although with both hands, as if he could reach up beyond the blinding snow of time-present, into the hot clear night of time-past, and pull the memory down into view. But he could not bring it back, no matter how hard he strained.
        The others were not able to recall what he described, and in a moment their tremulous expectation turned to frustration again.
        Marcie lowered her face. She put a thumb in her mouth and sucked earnestly on it. Her gaze had turned inward again.
        "Come on," Jack said. "We've got to get the hell out of here."
        They hurried toward the motel, to dress and arm themselves for the journeys and battles ahead of them. Reluctantly, with the smell of July heat still in his nose, with the roar of jet engines still echoing in his bones, Dom Corvaisis followed.

PART III
        

    Night on   Thunder Hill
        
    Courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy lift us above the simple beasts and define humanity.
    - THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS
        

    By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned; By strangers honored, and by strangers mourned.
    - ALEXANDER POPE
        

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    SIX
        

    Tuesday Night, January 14
        

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    1.
        

    Strife
        
        Father Stefan Wycazik flew Delta from Chicago to Salt Lake City, then caught a feeder flight into the Elko County Airport. He landed after snow had begun to fall but before the rapidly dropping visibility and the oncoming false dusk of the storm had curtailed air traffic.
        In the small terminal, he went to a public phone, looked up the number of the Tranquility Motel, and dialed it. He got nothing, not even a ring. The line hissed emptily. He tried again with no success.
        When he sought help from an operator, she was also unable to ring the number. "I'm sorry, sir, there seems to be trouble with the line."
        Taking that as very bad news, Father Wycazik said, "Trouble? What trouble? What's wrong?"
        "Well, sir, I suppose the storm. We're getting really gusty wind."
        But Stefan was not as certain as she was. The storm had hardly begun. He could not believe telephone lines had already succumbed to the first tentative gusts, which he had experienced on his way into the terminal. The isolation of the Tranquility was an ominous development, more likely to be the handiwork of men than of the impending blizzard.
        He placed a call to St. Bette's rectory in Chicago, and Father Gerrano answered on the second ring. "Michael, I've arrived safely in Elko. But I haven't gotten Brendan. Their phone isn't working."
        "Yes," Michael Gerrano said, "I know."
        "You know? How could you possibly know?"
        "Just minutes ago," Michael said, "I received a call from a man who refused to identify himself but who said he was a friend of this Ginger Weiss, one of those people out there with Brendan. He said she called him this morning and asked him to dig up some information for her. He found what she wanted, but he couldn't get through to the Tranquility. She'd apparently foreseen that problem, so she'd given him our number and the number of friends of hers in Boston, told him to tell us what