But Colleen was months away from learning those things. For now, she stood at the windows inside the airport, for how long she did not know, unaware that she was waiting for a plane that would never land. The certainty of her father’s death and the possibility of new life were still months away. She saw a passenger jet lift from the runway and soar out over the trees. She watched the airplane flash in the sunlight as it ascended, and she imagined all the passengers aboard it looking out their windows at the receding earth below, while the ghosts of the people they’d left behind floated alongside them, staring into the windows, tapping on the glass, begging not to be forgotten.
Acknowledgments
Writing a book is an incredibly long and solitary process, but I am fortunate to have had so many people encourage me and assist me along the way. I especially want to thank my editor, David Highfill, for helping me find the story, as well as Nat Sobel and Judith Weber for the love and attention they give everything, from my books to my family. I also want to thank Sharyn Rosenblum for bringing her energy and heart to the finish line, and Tessa James for bringing order to the chaos.
Thank you to my incredible students and my colleagues in the English Department at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where writing and literature are not only taught, but valued and sustained. I also want to thank Chancellor Nancy Cable, Vice Chancellor Garikai Campbell, Vice Chancellor Kirk Swenson, and David and Dianne Worley.
My endless gratitude to the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and the Doubletree Hotel at Biltmore Village in Asheville, North Carolina, where so much of this novel was written and revised.
I am fortunate to have an incredible community of family, friends, creatives, musicians, and writers who pushed this book forward in so many ways, and I am so lucky that there are simply too many of them to mention by name. I hope a heartfelt thank-you will suffice.
The best thing about me, as both a writer and a human, is my family. To Mallory, Early, and Juniper, there are no words to express how you sustain my heart and my soul. During the years I worked on this book, we called it “The Mysterious Airplane” because that was how Early and Juniper referred to it. Eventually, they began asking me who flew the airplane, and I did not yet have an answer, so they decided for me: a ghost flew it. That simple supposition changed the course of this novel in profound ways. When it came time to title the book, one day Early sat on my lap and pecked away at the keyboard as I spelled out the titles the girls had in mind:
The Mystery of the Man from the Air Station
The Mystery of the Stormy Coast
The Mystery of the Cat in the Volcano
And finally:
Long Ago People Who Lived Before Us Left a Little Bit of Themselves Behind
and
Many Decades Have Passed and the Human World Is Still Dangerous
Dear Early and Juniper, nothing I have written in these pages is as true as those last two titles. Your mom and I hope to leave something of ourselves behind for you, and we hope to leave it behind in a less dangerous world.
About the Author
WILEY CASH is the New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home, the acclaimed This Dark Road to Mercy, and most recently The Last Ballad. He has won the SIBA Book Award and the Conroy Legacy Award, was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Edgar
Award for Best Novel, and has been nominated for many more. A native of North Carolina, he is the Alumni Author-in-Residence
at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his wife, the photographer Mallory
Cash, and their two daughters.
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