Swiveling to the computer once more, he scrolled through the crash stories, seeking the thirty or more photographs of passengers, hoping hers would be among them. It was not.
Judging by Dewey’s description, the woman who had written this note and the woman in the cemetery — whom Blick had called Rose—were the same person. If this Rose was truly Dr. Rose Marie Tucker of Manassas, Virginia — which couldn’t be confirmed without a photo — then she had indeed been aboard Flight 353.
And had survived.
Reluctantly, Joe returned to the two largest accident-scene photographs. The first was the eerie shot with the stormy sky, the scorched-black trees, the debris pulverized and twisted into surreal sculpture, where the NTSB investigators, faceless in biohazard suits and hoods, seemed to drift like praying monks or like ominous spirits in a cold and flameless chamber in some forgotten level of Hell. The second was an aerial shot revealing wreckage so shattered and so widely strewn that the term “catastrophic accident” was a woefully inadequate description.
No one could have survived this disaster.
Yet Rose Tucker, if she was the same Rose Tucker who had boarded the plane that night, had evidently not only survived but walked away under her own power. Without serious injury. She had not been scarred or crippled.
Impossible. Dropping four miles in the clutch of planetary gravity, four long miles, accelerating unchecked into hard earth and rock, the 747 had not just smashed but splattered like an egg thrown at a brick wall, and then exploded, and then tumbled in seething furies of flame. To escape unmarked from the God-rattled ruins of Gomorrah, to step as unburnt as Shadrach from the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, to arise like Lazarus after four days in the grave, would have been less miraculous than to walk away untouched from the fall of Flight 353.
If he genuinely believed it was impossible, however, his mind would not have been roiled with anger and anxiety, with a strange awe, and with urgent curiosity. In him was a crazy yearning to embrace incredibilities, walk with wonder.
He called directory assistance in Manassas, seeking a telephone number for Dr. Rose Marie Tucker. He expected to be told that there was no such listing or that her service had been disconnected. After all, officially she was dead.
Instead, he was given a number.
She could not have walked away from the crash and gone home and picked up her life without causing a sensation. Besides, dangerous people were hunting her. They would have found her if she had ever returned to Manassas.
Perhaps family still lived in the house. For whatever reasons, they might have kept the phone in her name.
Joe punched in the number.
The call was answered on the second ring. “Yes?”
“Is this the Tucker residence?” Joe asked.
The voice was that of a man, crisp and without a regional accent: “Yes, it is.”
“Could I speak to Dr. Tucker, please?”
“Who’s calling?”
Intuition advised Joe to guard his own name. “Wally Blick.”
“Excuse me. Who?”
“Wallace Blick.”
The man at the other end of the line was silent. Then: “What is this in regard to?” His voice had barely changed, but a new alertness colored it, a shade of wariness.
Sensing that he had been too clever for his own good, Joe put down the phone.
He blotted his palms on his jeans again.
A reporter, passing behind Joe, reviewing the scribblings on a note pad as he went, greeted him without looking up: “Yo, Randy.”
Consulting the typewritten message from Rose, Joe called the Los Angeles number that she had provided.
On the fifth ring, a woman answered. “Hello?”
“Could I speak to Rose Tucker, please?”
“Nobody here by that name,” she said in an accent out of the deep South. “You got yourself a wrong number.”
In spite of what she’d said, she didn’t hang up.
“She gave me this number herself,” Joe persisted.
“Sugar, let me guess — this was a lady you met at a party. She was just makin’ nice to get you out of her hair.”
“I don’t think she’d do that.”
“Oh, don’t mean you’re ugly, honey,” she said in a voice that brought to mind magnolia blossoms and mint juleps and humid nights heavy with the scent of jasmine. “Just means you weren’t the lady’s type. Happens to the best.”
“My name’s Joe Carpenter.”
“Nice name. Good solid name.”
“What’s your name?”
Teasingly, she said, “What kind of name do I sound like?”
“Sound like?”
“Maybe an Octavia or a Juliette?”
“More like a Demi.”
“Like in Demi Moore the movie star?” she said disbelievingly.
“You have that sexy, smoky quality in your voice.”
“Honey, my voice is pure grits and collard greens.”
“Under the grits and collard greens, there’s smoke.”
She had a wonderful fulsome laugh. “Mister Joe Carpenter, middle name ‘Slick.’ Okay, I like Demi.”
“Listen, Demi, I’d sure like to talk to Rose.”
“Forget this old Rose person. Don’t you pine away for her, Joe, not after she gives you a fake number. Big sea, lots of fish.”
Joe was certain that this woman knew Rose and that she had been expecting him to call. Considering the viciousness of the enemies pursuing the enigmatic Dr. Tucker, however, Demi’s circumspection was understandable.
She said, “What do you look like when you’re bein’ honest with yourself, sugar?”
“Six feet tall, brown hair, gray eyes.”
“Handsome?”
“Just presentable.”
“How old are you, Presentable Joe?”
“Older than you. Thirty-seven.”
“You have a sweet voice. You ever go on blind dates?”
Demi was going to set up a meeting, after all.
He said, “Blind dates? Nothing against them.”
“So how about with sexy-smoky little me?” she suggested with a laugh.
“Sure. When?”
“You free tomorrow evenin’?”
“I was hoping sooner.”
“Don’t be so eager, Presentable Joe. Takes time to set these things up right, so there’s a chance it’ll work, so no one gets hurt, so there’s no broken hearts.”
By Joe’s interpretation, Demi was telling him that she was going to make damned sure the meeting was put together carefully, that the site needed to be scouted and secured in order for Rose’s safety to be guaranteed. And maybe she couldn’t get in touch with Rose with less than a twenty-four-hour notice.
“Besides, sugar, a girl starts to wonder why you’re so pitiful desperate if you’re really presentable.”
“All right. Where tomorrow evening?”
“I’m goin’ to give you the address of a gourmet coffee shop in Westwood. We’ll meet out front at six, go in and have a cup, see do we like each other. If I think you really are presentable and you think I’m as sexy-smoky as my voice…why, then it could be a shinin’ night of golden memories. You have a pen and paper?”
“Yes,” he said, and he wrote down the name and address of the coffee shop as she gave it to him.
“Now do me one favor, sugar. You have a paper there with this phone number on. Tear it to bitty pieces and flush it down a john.” When Joe hesitated, Demi said, “Won’t be no good ever again, anyway,” and she hung up.
The three typed sentences would not prove that Dr. Tucker had survived Flight 353 or that something about the crash was not kosher. He could have composed them himself. Dr. Tucker’s name was typed as well, so there was no evidentiary signature.
Nevertheless, he was loath to dispose of the message. Although it would never prove anything to anyone else, it made these fantastic events seem more real to him.