“My grandfather, David McLean, was a pilot in the same squadron as your father,” Webb began. “There were four of them, good friends. You probably have the same photo as Jake Rundell.”
“Jake Rundell,” she said. “David McLean. Ray Daley. And my daddy.”
“You went to an air show in Las Vegas,” Webb said. “You wanted to ask my grandfather and Jake Rundell and Ray Daley if they knew anything at all about your father.”
“I did,” she said. “Ray Daley spent hours with me, talking about my father. He promised he’d do what he could. But I never heard from him.”
Webb remembered the young woman on the movie screen in Arizona. Then, as now, there was a sadness in her eyes that was impossible to miss.
“Ray Daley loved to gamble,” Webb said. All of what he was about to tell Ruby had been waiting for him in a letter at the lawyer’s office on his return from Norman Wells. “He wasn’t good at it. Trouble was, he had a habit of pretending his name was Harlowe Gavin. They looked a lot alike, and he’d gotten away with it many times. Your father and Ray were sent to the Arctic to fly in and out of Alaska during the building of the Canol Road, and Ray kept gambling at the work camps, using your father’s name. He gambled with the wrong set of men, and they paid someone in the camp to make an example of Ray. Except the person they sent went to the real Harlowe Gavin, took him up the trail, away from one of the work sites, and—”
Webb couldn’t say the words.
“Took my daddy’s life,” Ruby Gavin finished for him.
“With his own knife, a knife my grandfather had given him when their air force careers took them on different paths.”
When Webb thought of the lonely pile of rocks and of a man buried there for sixty years and the little girl waiting for her daddy to come home to this small town, he had to turn his head and blink away tears before continuing.
“Ray knew they’d kill him next if they found out what happened. He took your father’s paycheck too, and signed up for a flight to Whitehorse, pretending to be your dad. The work camp had thousands of military and thousands of workers, and it was easy to take advantage of the confusion. He cashed in the paycheck and bought a train ticket under your father’s name, and made sure people knew he got on the train. He jumped off just as it was leaving, and made his way back to the camp. And when the army went looking for your father, they tracked down where the paycheck had been cashed.”
“But you weren’t born for fifty years after that,” Ruby said. “You show up out of nowhere and tell me this. I want to believe it so badly. But I don’t know who you are.”
“A good man’s grandson. Ray Daley lived with his secret for a long time, but in the end, he had to tell someone before he died. A few months back, on his deathbed, he made a phone call to Jake Rundell and confessed.”
“I should have heard about it from Jake then,” she said. “Not you.”
“Jake didn’t want to believe Ray. The four of them had all been so close. Ray was old and not everything he said made sense.”
“Alzheimer’s?” Ruby Gavin asked.
Webb nodded. “Jake wasn’t going to go to the authorities and damage Ray’s reputation unless he was convinced it had happened the way Ray said it had. He called my grandfather for advice. They decided to send someone for proof. Me.”
“You. All the way to the Arctic?”
“My grandfather had his reasons.”
“I’d like to thank your grandfather,” Ruby said.
“He was the kind of guy who didn’t need thanks,” Webb said.
“Didn’t?”
“I miss him,” Webb said. He wanted to go now. He couldn’t bear the sorrow he was feeling for this woman. He couldn’t bear his own sorrow. He stood.
“I expect you’ll hear something official from the police,” Webb said. “My grandfather’s lawyer, he made an arrangement. He wasn’t going to release any information to the police until I had a chance to come down here first and tell you myself.”
“Makes me want to start dancing,” Ruby said. “I’m calling everyone I know. Harlowe Gavin didn’t run out on his family.”
She pointed at the Methodist church. “We’re going to have his funeral right there. If you’re not shy with that guitar, maybe you can play a song for him.”
Webb was about to say he’d be gone by then, but he made the mistake of looking directly at Ruby and seeing a little girl instead of an old woman.
“Sure,” Webb said. “I might have a song or two for him.”