Under a sky gray-white with lowering mist to the west and drear with gunmetal thunderheads to the east, the day seemed to carry a heavy freight of dire portents. The flesh prickled on the nape of Joe’s neck, and he began to feel as exposed as a red bull’s-eye target on a shooting range.
When a Chevy sedan approached from the south and Joe saw three men in it, he moved casually around to the passenger’s side of the rental car, using it for cover in the event that they opened fire on him. They passed without glancing in his direction.
A minute later, Barbara Christman arrived in an emerald-green Ford Explorer. She smelled faintly of bleach and soap, and he suspected she had been doing the laundry when he’d rung her bell.
As they headed south from the grade school, Joe said, “Ms. Christman, I’m wondering — where have you seen a photograph of me?”
“Never have,” she said. “And call me Barbara.”
“So, Barbara…when you opened your door a bit ago, how did you know who I was?”
“Hasn’t been a stranger at my door in ages. Anyway, last night when you called back and I didn’t answer, you let it ring more than thirty times.”
“Forty.”
“Even a persistent man would have given up after twenty. When it kept ringing and ringing, I knew you were more than persistent. Driven. I knew you’d come soon.”
She was about fifty, dressed in Rockports, faded jeans, and a periwinkle-blue chambray shirt. Her thick white hair looked as if it had been cut by a good barber rather than styled by a beautician. Well tanned, with a broad face as open and inviting as a golden field of Kansas wheat, she appeared honest and trustworthy. Her stare was direct, and Joe liked her for the aura of efficiency that she projected and for the crisp self-assurance in her voice.
“Who are you afraid of, Barbara?”
“Don’t know who they are.”
“I’m going to get the answer somewhere,” he warned.
“What I’m telling you is the truth, Joe. Never have known who they are. But they pulled strings I never thought could be pulled.”
“To control the results of a Safety Board investigation?”
“The Board still has integrity, I think. But these people…they were able to make some evidence disappear.”
“What evidence?”
Braking to a halt at a red traffic signal, she said, “What finally made you suspicious, Joe, after all this time? What about the story didn’t ring true?”
“It all rang true — until I met the sole survivor.”
She stared blankly at him, as though he had spoken in a foreign language of which she had no slightest knowledge.
“Rose Tucker,” he said.
There seemed to be no deception in her hazel eyes but genuine puzzlement in her voice when she said, “Who’s she?”
“She was aboard Flight 353. Yesterday she visited the graves of my wife and daughters while I was there.”
“Impossible. No one survived. No one could have survived.”
“She was on the passenger manifest.”
Speechless, Barbara stared at him.
He said, “And some dangerous people are hunting for her — and now for me. Maybe the same people who made that evidence disappear.”
A car horn blared behind them. The traffic signal had changed to green.
While she drove, Barbara reached to the dashboard controls and lowered the fan speed of the air conditioning, as though chilled. “No one could have survived,” she insisted. “This was not your usual hit-and-skip crash, where there’s a greater or lesser chance of any survivors depending on the angle of impact and lots of other factors. This was straight down, head-in, catastrophic.”
“Head-in? I always thought it tumbled, broke apart.”
“Didn’t you read any newspaper accounts?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t. I just imagined…”
“Not a hit-and-skip, like most,” she repeated. “Almost straight into the ground. Sort of similar to Hopewell, September ’94. A USAir 737 went down in Hopewell Township, on its way to Pittsburgh, and was just…obliterated. Being aboard Flight 353 would have been…I’m sorry, Joe, but it would have been like standing in the middle of a bomb blast. A big bomb blast.”
“There were some remains they were never able to identify.”
“So little left to identify. The aftermath of something like this…it’s more gruesome than you can imagine, Joe. Worse than you want to know, believe me.”
He recalled the small caskets in which his family’s remains had been conveyed to him, and the strength of the memory compressed his heart into a small stone.
Eventually, when he could speak again, he said, “My point is that there were a number of passengers for whom the pathologists were unable to find any remains. People who just…ceased to exist in an instant. Disappeared.”
“A large majority of them,” she said, turning onto State Highway 115 and heading south under a sky as hard as an iron kettle.
“Maybe this Rose Tucker didn’t just…didn’t just disintegrate on impact like the others. Maybe she disappeared because she walked away from the scene.”
“Walked?”
“The woman I met wasn’t disfigured or crippled. She appeared to have come through it without a scar.”
Adamantly shaking her head, Barbara said, “She’s lying to you, Joe. Flat out lying. She wasn’t on that plane. She’s playing some sort of sick game.”
“I believe her.”
“Why?”
“Because of things I’ve seen.”
“What things?”
“I don’t think I should tell you. Knowing…that might put you as deep in the hole as I am. I don’t want to endanger you any more than I have to. Just by coming here, I might be causing you trouble.”
After a silence, she said, “You must have seen something pretty extraordinary to make you believe in a survivor.”
“Stranger than you can imagine.”
“Still…I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Good. That’s safer.”
They had driven out of Colorado Springs, through suburbs, into an area of ranches, traveling into increasingly rural territory. To the east, high plains dwindled into an arid flatness. To the west, the land rose gradually through fields and woods toward foothills half screened by gray mist.
He said, “You’re not just driving aimlessly, are you?”
“If you want to fully understand what I’m going to tell you, it’ll help to see.” She glanced away from the road, and her concern for him was evident in her kind eyes. “Do you think you can handle it, Joe?”
“We’re going…there.”
“Yes. If you can handle it.”
Joe closed his eyes and strove to suppress a welling anxiety. In his imagination, he could hear the screaming of the airliner’s engines.
The crash scene was thirty to forty miles south and slightly west of Colorado Springs.
Barbara Christman was taking him to the meadow where the 747 had shattered like a vessel of glass.
“Only if you can handle it,” she said gently.
The substance of his heart seemed to condense even further, until it was like a black hole in his chest.
The Explorer slowed. She was going to pull to the shoulder of the highway.
Joe opened his eyes. Even the thunderhead-filtered light seemed too bright. He willed himself to be deaf to the airplane-engine roar in his mind.
“No,” he said. “Don’t stop. Let’s go. I’ll be all right. I’ve got nothing to lose now.”
They turned off the state highway onto an oiled-gravel road and soon off the gravel onto a dirt lane that led west through tall poplars with vertical branches streaming skyward like green fire. The poplars gave way to tamarack and birches, which surrendered the ground to white pines as the lane narrowed and the woods thickened.