“You’re sketching something through that telescope,” she answered.  “Looks like no airplane I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes, and it’s a poor sketch,” Winston confessed.

“May I?”  She put on a  warm smile.  “My job is hurry up and wait, so during waits I make drawings…folks on the East Coast pay money for them.  Not a lot, but my brother sells them in his gallery.”

“Travis, do we have time?” Winston asked. 

Travis nodded.  “Ma’am, please do  not bump anything, but there’s a focusing screw.”

Winston and Travis watched while Melanie drew. 

“I’ll need a straight-edge,” she finally announced, “to bring out the lines better, because that thing is a bunch of boxes, not round like a blimp. I expect the local paper will pay for a copy.”

“For sure,” Travis said.  “Dad has breakfast most days with the editor, who is mightily displeased the Phoenix papers scooped his reporting on the Heath.”

“And I’d appreciate a copy also,” Winston announced.  “Grandpa — Radnor Cooper, he’s the Sheriff — put me in charge of investigating all the people who died, and catching the guilty parties who killed them.”

“Thank you for letting me make a sketch,” Melanie said. “Back to work for me.”

“Looks like what I saw,” Travis said,  “but a much better drawing than I could’ve done.  Now the fun part.”  He spent some time fiddling with the pointing screws, then wrote down a pair of numbers.  Winston wrote down the same pair.

“Off to the other edge of town,” Travis finally  announced.  “Then I get to do some spherical trig.  Wait, you said what your Harvard degree was.  You can check my work…if I write it out clearly.”

“Sounds good to me,” Winston agreed.  “Except, we get the car back, it’s close to one, so I propose lunch at the Trinity House Cafe, that being where gramps, ummh, Sheriff Winston, covers my meals.  That’s good, because I’m not actually paid.  I’m working off a loan he made to me.”

“I need to stop at the office, return the theodolite and car keys, and tell my kid sister to come along,” Travis said. “She always arrives first, gets to leave last for lunch, never complains.”