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shout. Folstad, Alan, Sarah and most of the rest of the crew—with two appalling gaps, screaming holes that could never be filled—turned to stare at me. “I’m nothing like you! We’re nothing alike. We never will be.”
    My legs folded. To save myself from hitting the deck in my vest and boxer shorts, I whipped round to grab the rail. I stared down into the emerald-grey fjord waters, where one Icelandic-knit fingerless glove was drifting away.

Chapter Two
    I set off back to North Kerra alone. I wanted to talk to Alice’s parents. Of course they’d been informed of her death by the police, but I wanted to face them, tell the full story. The Norwegian authorities were inclining to a verdict of accidental death. Misadventure would have put me and PW in the line of fire, but I didn’t want to be out of it. I wanted to look Mr. and Mrs. Maguire in the face and explain my responsibility, my part.
    I didn’t know what I thought this would accomplish, because I’d already stood in Oskar’s mother’s living room and explained my part to her through an interpreter, and she’d only sat and wept. She was a widow, so there’d been no outraged father to make me feel better by beating the crap out of me on the beautifully manicured lawn. Only the Norwegian copper who’d accompanied me seemed to take a kind of pity, pointing out that Oskar had been twice my age and more than capable of making his own decisions. I’d been deaf to him. I hadn’t wanted to be absolved.
    By the time I landed at Wick airport after the rough flight from Stavanger, I was no longer sure what I wanted at all. The brief summer that graced this far northeastern corner of Scotland was over. I stood in the sleet at the bus stop, my rucksack weighing on my shoulders. September scents of leaf mould and cooling earth tugged at deep-laid memories. It was a time for going back to school, for college terms and night classes and ordinary life to resume. I had no place amongst these changes anymore. I’d packed in everything for my last Peace Warrior trip. And I could tell myself whatever I liked about coming home like a good soldier to make a clean breast to the Maguires—the truth was that I had nowhere else to go. There’d been a letter waiting for me at the hostel in Stavanger, a rare hard-copy communication on PW letterhead, asking me not exactly to drop off the map and disappear, but as close to that as manners allowed.
    The bus dropped me at the Kerra road ends after a five-hour westbound ride. North Kerra village occupies a far-flung headland off the 836, the sole road—single-track for much of its length, impassable through snow most winters—that crosses the country’s last bleak mainland reach. I’d tried to sleep out the journey, oblivious to the green-gold alchemy transforming the roadside bracken, the berries on the little hawthorns that produced their jewels in the teeth of the gale. I’d seen it all before, and the ongoing rattle of hail against the bus window had told me all I needed to know about coming home to the ends of the earth in autumn.
    I was the only passenger to get off, and I was in luck—the one-man-band taxi service from Bala, our nearest town, had parked up to lurk in hopes of a fare. I knew Eddie, and in spite of everything, a familiar face was comforting. He was a dour type, and I didn’t take much notice when he left me alone to deal with my rucksack and his old Honda’s rusty door. He gave me a nod, and we set off down the track to Kerra.
    My heart would have had to be stone not to respond to this terrain, sleet-whipped or not. It was tundra country, cut down by the wind to bare bone, but here granite bedrock began to give way to the clean clay and sand of the machair, and I wasn’t too late to catch the year’s final show. The turf was still starred with pale harebells and buttercups. There wasn’t a building in sight, and outside of Kerra village itself, there probably never would be. Here time stopped, and