Eventually, the phone rang, and as Magdalene answered it, she seemed perplexed. A few minutes later, she started yelling, and George wondered what the person on the other line had said. Magdalene kept yelling, and claiming she didn’t know the answer to whatever question had been asked, and she kept repeating the word “taste.” Then, she abruptly hung up the landline phone, which was mounted on the wall in the dining room, and joined George again by the dining table.
“Is everything all right, Magdalene?”
“It was the government—Does this taste, right?” Magdalene said in a ridiculing voice. “What kind of question is that?”
George tried his best to understand what the phone conversation had been about.
“They kept asking me if I recognized the voice on the phone. I told them no!” Magdalene yelled. “But they just kept on asking.”
Mrs. Gregorian shook her head, and was obviously upset. George tried his best to, once again, imagine what on earth the phone call was about, and the more he thought about it, the better the pieces started to fit.
“They asked you to identify a voice? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It wasn’t Isaac’s voice,” Magdalene said in a firm manner, and shook her head. “I’d recognize his voice anywhere.”
Just then, the front door to the house was slammed against the hallway wall, and a large man appeared in the doorway to the dining room. The man appeared to be in his early sixties. The clothes on his back were clean and perfectly ironed. However, the rest of his appearance was untidy. George recognized the man’s features from the horrendous picture on the wall, and just then, the horrific image of the actor Danny DeVito popped up in his head. The large man briefly glanced at the center of the dining room table, and then he turned his focus on George, and kept staring at him with the most aggressive look.
“Who the hell are you?”
George felt as if he couldn’t speak. He began trembling inside, and he felt lightheaded, almost as though he was about to pass out. However, George eventually found enough composure to turn his head toward Magdalene and was expecting her to introduce him to her husband. But she did nothing of the kind. Instead, she just kept chewing, and her eyes were focused on the bowl of toffee sweets.
“I’m George,” he stuttered, sounding like a child waiting to be reprimanded. He swallowed. “I work for the airline.”
“About time you people showed up,” the man said, and seemed pleased with the response. “Why didn’t you call ahead like normal people?”
George looked at Magdalene for a reply, but she just kept staring at the bowl of sweets. He began to wonder if the reason for her being so specific regarding what time he should arrive at the house was a way to prevent him from meeting her husband.
“My plane stopped in Calgary,” he said. “I mean, I thought I’d stop by on my way to Yellowknife.” His voice trembled.
The large man stared George in the eyes. “Did you bring a check?”
“I brought flowers,” he blurted out.
The man’s face dropped, and he looked enraged by the response. Then, he pointed toward George in a hostile manner.
“You better pay up, you hear me!”
George felt that fear had possessed his body and was squeezing his internal organs. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe or speak properly. Something about the man in front of him scared him so intensely.
“I’m a public relations manager. I don’t handle any legal issues.”
The man walked toward the table; the hardwood floor squeaked with every step he took. He stopped right beside George.
“Then what good are you?” he asked in a condescending tone.
The man picked up the glass vase, and made his way over to the kitchen; George could hear the twigs breaking as the man forced the flowers into the trash can. Magdalene kept chewing and she was holding a toffee sweet close to her lips, as though to make certain to replace the one in her mouth as soon as it was gone.
“I think I’ll be leaving now, Magdalene. My plane is departing shortly.”
Mrs. Gregorian didn’t respond. She just kept chewing, her eyes focused on the bowl of sweets. Even though George had lost track of the time, he felt certain he had plenty of time to get to the airport and make his connecting flight to Yellowknife. Fear was the true reason for his sudden departure. He felt absolutely petrified, his mind pleading with him to run away and hide.
George had never felt so small, not even as a child.
On his way to the hallway, he noticed how the smell of the house had changed, and the smell now reminded him of sulfur. George briefly glanced at the large mirror hanging in the hallway. He didn’t care for his reflection. He saw a coward staring back at him. And as he turned his head, and peered into the dining room, he saw the other coward standing behind a woman who frantically consumed the little joy she had left in her life.
When he’d reached the curb, he realized the taxi was gone. But then, he saw a flash of lights, and a car slowly drove toward him. To his relief, the taxi had parked just down the road. As George got into the car, he felt an even greater sense of relief and felt he’d done the right thing. The anxiety and fear were gone, and he felt that he’d made the right choice by leaving, even though his mind told him the complete opposite.
“Godzilla made me park down the road. Apparently, he thinks the curb belongs to the house,” the driver said and smiled over his shoulder.
George felt as though he were caught in a dream and nothing seemed real. His head was spinning, and he felt dizzy and nauseous.
“To the airport, right?”
“Yes, please,” he mumbled.
George noticed the newspaper in the front passenger’s seat, and once again, he read the headline.
George noticed the cup holder and the coffee cup with a flame design, and then, he thought of the phone call that Magdalene received. Does this taste, right? he kept chanting to himself, and then imagined a scene in which Captain Daniels handed a cup of coffee to his co-pilot and asked him to have a taste. Had Captain Daniels poisoned his co-pilot before crashing the plane? It would certainly have been easier to poison his colleague, rather than strangling him to death.
George assumed the phone call was from the National Transportation Safety Board or some other branch of the ‘government’ as Magdalene had put it. And the reason for the phone call must have been to identify the voices on the recording from the cockpit. But the question was why? Was it just standard procedure to establish who said what? Or was there something more to it? Was the terror angle still intact?
George suddenly thought of Trisha Boyle and her disabled boy.
Then it occurred to him, if in fact, Captain Daniels had poisoned his co-pilot, then the poison would probably appear on an autopsy. Or would it? The body had been in the water for more than a week. But why would they perform a toxicology? And did poison eventually disappear from a dead body? Perhaps that depended on the type of poison. If so, what kind of poison had Captain Daniels used?