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Just who ARE the strangers in town?
Meanwhile, back in the Beechcraft, Emmy finds other things to love.
0_o
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Bea's Café, 6:35PM, Cascade. Idaho
They walked into the café and it was packed with many of the people that they all knew, so it turned into a bit of a party where nobody could get anything because Marjorie and Rebecca wouldn't let Craig go for a long while. Rosa and Amelia looked at each other and started serving just to keep everybody at least a little happy.
It took a little while, but Amelia and Rosa noticed a group of strangers sitting in a booth alone, talking to each other as they looked around. What caught their eye was that they seemed to be pretty friendly with each other somehow, and that they were a bit of a mix.
The one who Rosa noticed first was the man with the long black braids in the denim jacket, but she saw the others, the hauntingly beautiful blonde woman and the man, as well as black couple there - which to her mind was just a slightly more unusual sight than the man with the braids, since more than anything, Cascade was home to far more Caucasians than any other type, not that anyone cared particularly.
She didn't care especially; she thought they were all really attractive to her. It was just a little unusual to see three different kinds of people in the same group. She grabbed Amelia when she saw that she had a moment and they walked over to ask.
There was a bit of looking around between them and they came up with a request for a couple of pieces of pie and some more coffee and one tea between them.
"Just passin' through?" Amelia asked in a friendly tone.
They shook their heads, "No, this is where we were headed," one of the men said, "We wanted to get a look at the airfield and maybe talk to whoever runs the post office around here. We've got an idea to maybe set up here for business."
That remark got them Marjorie and Rebecca standing next to the booth and they explained what they had in mind - which both surprised and amazed the pair.
Marjorie explained that their husbands happened to run flight service in and out of town - and that they were sitting in the post office at the moment, though Marjorie said that they were waiting on their better sign from the postal service.
"With Rebecca's man running air mail on one of the main routes, and my husband doing about sixteen other jobs, it can get a little tough to get mail to some of the harder to reach places around here where it's a fair hike to come into town just to get your mail."
"What is a heli-... what you said?" Rebecca asked with a smile.
"My name's Terry Hatchett, Ma'am," the man with the blondish hair smiled, "and these are my associates, Hunter Youngblood, my wife, Molly, and this is Judith Hatchett and her husband, Isaiah."
"You're related?" Marjorie asked in surprise.
"In a way," Isaiah nodded, "Terry's family owned slaves long ago on a plantation. It's not unusual for some of the families to have taken the name of the plantation owner, though that was a long time ago."
He reached into his jacket pocket and handed over a small photograph, "And this is a helicopter."
The two woman looked at it for a moment, "It looks like a big dragonfly," Rebecca smiled.
Terry nodded, "That's a good approximation for what it is, Ma'am.
Like a dragonfly, a helicopter can fly and go nowhere at all, just hovering in place. It can also fly forward and backward if it has to - even sideways. More importantly for what we have in mind, they don't need much space to land and take off in, since - just like a dragonfly, they can land by stopping in midair and then just settling straight down, as long as the ground where they're landing is at least a little level.
At present, we have two helicopters, one like the one in that picture and another one for lighter duty. For the local mail outside of town, maybe your husbands might be interested in us flying the mail, so that they can concentrate on the other things fully. We exist as a business at the moment, but we're looking for a home. Once we're set up, we can offer other services as well, like flying crane service - up to about two hundred and fifty pounds presently. And we'll be expanding that if we find that there's enough demand."
"What do you mean?" Amelia said, immediately apologizing for interrupting.
"Not at all, Miss," Terry smiled, "that's a fair question."
"What Terry meant was that we can carry a load outside of the helicopter hung from slings," Hunter said with a smile and then found himself looking at Rosa, who'd stood there the whole time trying to listen while holding their order.
"Pardon me," she said in an almost normal voice, since she was trying hard, "Here's your order."
They all thanked her, though she missed it as she set everything out.
Amelia nudged her arm afterwards and she signed their thanks to Rosa.
Rosa smiled, "I'm sorry, I'm pretty much deaf. You're very welcome, of course."
She stared then as Hunter began to sign to her and it turned into a short conversation for a moment with Rosa looking very surprised and pleased.
"Hey, where did you pick that up?" Molly asked.
Hunter shrugged, "My aunt was born not being able to hear."
Marjorie wrote out the phone numbers for the two Potter businesses and she also wrote the number for the Café, "If you can't get anybody at these numbers Terry, then you just call me here. One way or the other, Rebecca and I will make it so that you can talk to at least one of them, since they can be hard to catch sometimes."
She smiled then, "I hope you might find a home here, just sayin', I can't think that I've met anyone with such good manners in a long time. Where are you from?"
I'm from Oklahoma," Hunter said, "and my friends are all from Alabama. I just do my best to try to keep up with their manners."
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