There was Kevin, the first person he’d met on the Leap. He was just a kid, but he was obviously a leader to the local teens; he was the one buying the booze. He had a very nasty
streak in him. What could go wrong in Kevin’s future?
Anything or nothing, he had to admit. If he racked his memory, he could recall that he’d known a lot of kids who’d had beer parties in high school. Some of them had become upstanding citizens. Some of them were dead. He decided to leave the question of Kevin open.
Rimae Hoffman. His eyes narrowed. Wickie had a relationship with her, an “arrangement” Al would say, but it clearly didn’t interfere with the employer-employee relationship. Rimae was a tough lady.
Bethica? She kept turning up in the oddest places. He’d seen her at the kegger with Kevin and the others, and what was she doing around Wickie’s cabin last night—looking for her wannabe-Superman foster brother? Did Bethica have something else in her life about to go wrong?
Maybe he was here to prevent Bethica’s baby from turning out like Davey. Was he going to spend the remaining months of Bethica’s pregnancy following her around, making sure she didn’t go drinking with her friends?
He didn’t think so. Leaps didn’t work that way. Of course, it wasn’t a bad way to spend his time while he was waiting to figure out what else to do.
Who else?
Something in Davey’s life, maybe?
He doubted it. Davey was mildly retarded, with an IQ somewhere in the low seventies. On top of that he was emotionally disturbed, belligerent, indifferent to instruction, discipline, or correction. Through no fault of his own, he was probably going to spend the rest of his life pushing a broom around a barroom floor, or something no more challenging. If he wasn’t lucky, he’d spend time in jail for fighting. His chances of addiction to drugs or alcohol were high. His life expectancy was two-thirds that of Wickie Starczynski.
And for the life of him, Sam couldn’t think of anything anyone could do to change what had gone wrong for Davey. Oh, Rimae could put him in a halfway house, arrange for supervised care for the rest of Davey’s life, but for all Sam knew, she’d already made those arrangements. She certainly wasn’t going to welcome any suggestions from him about it.
He sighed and examined the chewed end of the straw. Somewhere, in the lives of one of these people, something was going to go wrong. It was something that could change, something he could make right, something that could make a life better than it would otherwise have been. The wreck?
But how was he supposed to know what that something was all on his own? He was supposed to have an Observer They were a team. He couldn’t do this job by himself. God or Fate or Chance or Whatever had set things up in such a way that he had to work with a partner, and it wasn’t fair for G or F or C to take that partner away from him.
He was feeling extremely sorry for himself, in fact, and be knew it. He was also feeling helpless. And angry.
The paint was dry. Taking a strip of glazing compound, be rolled it between his palms to make a thin rope, set it, installed the glass in the windows, reset the points, and fnished off with more compound, neatly trimmed. There. His father would be proud of him. There was still something he could do right.
He supposed he could call everybody in Snow Owl all together in a room and tell them all to straighten up and fly right—and where did that phrase come from, anyway?— but they’d probably vote to have him put away.
And that wasn’t funny even as a joke.
His nose was itching. He rubbed at it, wondering what was going to happen next. Something had to.
Something rustled in the pile of old leaves and young grass under the trees, and he stood up to get a better look. It rustled again. Not a snake, he thought. Squirrel, maybe, or raccoon ... He walked over to the tree.
A grey face with huge yellow eyes peered up at him worriedly, and he sneezed.
The kitten levitated, bounced off his upper leg, and hit the side of the tree running. She paused at his eye level, her legs embracing the trunk, and stared at him, ears sharply forward, the whiskers around her nose and over her eyes quivering.
Her nose was a dusty pink. Her tongue, stuck out briefly to wash it, was brighter. Sam laughed under his breath, and the kitten tensed, ready to climb higher.
“Hey there,” he said softly. “It isn’t you, is it? There isn’t something I’m supposed to do for you?”
The kitten opened her mouth for a soundless mew. Sam wasn’t sure whether that was agreement or criticism.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Sam went on. “Sometimes animals need things to go right, too.”
This time the kitten was definitely agreeing.
Sam’s nose still itched.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, cautiously raising his hand to rub his nose again without alarming the cat, “that you ’d know where Al is, would you?”
He couldn’t help himself. He sneezed. Whether it was the force of expelled air or general panic, the grey cat leaped away, disappearing into the woods.
Well, it was possible he was here to fix things for the cat, but his medical background ran to humans, and he suspected the kitten wasn’t old enough to need the attention of a veterinarian yet anyway.
He turned to find Rimae standing at the door to the cabin. She was watching him thoughtfully, one hand on her hip, one foot propped up on the step.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked, her
