THEN
In the air-conditioned storage unit, the black-and-white images thrown by the projector had begun with vintage airplanes swooping and looping in a clear sky.
The image had shifted as the camera panned from the sky to the ground, where it focused on a grinning man in a New York Yankees ball cap.
“Talk to us,” came the voice of the person holding the camera.
“That’s Grandpa Jake,” Jana whispered.
“Hey,” the man in the cap said into the camera. “I’m Ray Daley, and we’re at the 1961 Vintage Air Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Above us, David McLean is wowing the crowds in his P-51 Mustang Fighter, showing some of the moves that made him such an amazing pilot when he fought against the Germans only twenty years ago.”
The camera zoomed upward again, showing the shiny wings of a plane with a propeller on the nose. A smoke trail showed where it had just done two loops.
Then the camera went back to Ray Daley. His face, of course, was twenty years older than his face in the photo Jana had shown Webb earlier, but he was still recognizable.
“Hello? Jake Rundell?”
A woman’s voice came from outside the camera’s range. The camera shifted earthward again.
The woman looked like a college girl. Her hair was in a style that Webb remembered from watching Ginger on reruns of Gilligan’s Island.
“Hello, beautiful!” Ray moved into view, putting his arm on the girl’s shoulders and grinning again. “Where you from?”
“Near Nashville, Tennessee,” she answered. Her southern drawl was obvious. “A town called Eagleville.”
“Come all that ways to see some World War Two pilot heroes, have you?” Ray asked. “Well you don’t need to look any further than Jake Rundell and Ray Daley. Stick with us, and we’ll show you a good time at the casinos.”
“That’s exactly why I came all this way,” the young woman said, her face serious. “To see the two of you. And David McLean. My name is Ruby Gavin and I—”
“Jake!” Ray shouted and pointed. “Dave’s plane. He’s in trouble!”
The camera abruptly swung upward to the P-51 Mustang as it did a turning twist, spewing white smoke. The camera stayed on the fighter plane for about ten seconds, long enough to establish that the rolling moves of the plane were part of the show and that there was nothing wrong with the plane.
When the camera swung back to the ground again, Ray Daley was leading the young woman away and had already managed to reach the front row of spectators at the bleachers.
The screen went dark for a moment, but the film reel kept turning. A couple of seconds later, a young girl waved at the camera before jumping off a diving board into a backyard swimming pool.
“That’s my mom,” Jan said above the clatter of the projector.
The rest of the reel took about eight minutes, and showed nothing more than kids having fun at a swimming pool. Then, without warning, the images stopped, and Webb heard the film flap.
He switched on the lights. The take-up reel was still turning, and the end of the film was making the flapping sound. The empty front reel was spinning but slowing down.
“That’s it?” Webb asked.
“Ten minutes,” Jana said. “That’s all you could get on a reel. Want me to play it again?”
Webb shook his head.
“Time,” Webb said, “to open the envelope.”
That’s where he found a bunch of bank cards, with a yellow sticky note saying the cards held $2,000 in Canadian funds. He also found instructions on how to book flights for the open-ended tickets inside. He was to fly to Norman Wells, in the Northwest Territories, by way of Edmonton, with a stop in Yellowknife.
There were also two more letters. One for him from his grandpa. And one from Jake Rundell to Jim Webb.