When Ghosts Come Home(90)

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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