Sole Survivor (14 page)

“What people?”

Ignoring the question, Joe said, “If something’s on your mind—or on your conscience—take time to think about it. I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”

Joe hung up.

Moths swooped. Swooped. Batted against the flood-lamps above. Clichés on the wing: moths to the flame.

The memory continued to elude Joe.

He called directory assistance in Colorado Springs. The operator provided him with a number for Barbara Christman.

She answered on the second ring. She did not sound as though she had been awakened.

Perhaps some of these investigators, who had walked through the unspeakable carnage of major air disasters, did not always find their way easily into sleep.

Joe told her his name and where his family had been one year ago this night, and he implied that he was still an active reporter with the
Post.

Her initial silence had the cold, moon-far quality of Oliveri’s. Then she said, “Are you here?”

“Excuse me?”

“Where are you calling from? Here in Colorado Springs?”

“No. Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” she said, and Joe thought he heard the faintest breath of regret when she exhaled that word.

He said, “Ms. Christman, I have some questions about Flight 353 that I would—”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted. “I know you’ve suffered terribly, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t even conceive the depth of your anguish, and I know it’s often difficult for family members to accept their losses in these horrible incidents, but there’s nothing I could say to you that would help you find that acceptance or—”

“I’m not trying to learn acceptance, Ms. Christman. I’m trying to find out what
really
happened to that airliner.”

“It’s not unusual for people in your position to take refuge in conspiracy theories, Mr. Carpenter, because otherwise the loss seems so pointless, so random and inexplicable. Some people think we’re covering up for airline incompetence or that we’ve been bought off by the Airline Pilots Association and that we’ve buried proof the flight crew was drunk or on drugs. This was just an accident, Mr. Carpenter. But if I were to spend a lot of time with you on the phone, trying to persuade you of that, I’d never convince you, and I’d be encouraging you in this denial fantasy. You have my deepest sympathy, you really do, but you need to be talking to a therapist, not to me.”

Before Joe could reply, Barbara Christman hung up.

He called her again. Although he waited while the phone rang forty times, she did not answer it.

For the moment, he had accomplished all that was possible by telephone.

Halfway back to his Honda, he stopped. He turned and studied the side of the service station again, where the exaggerated and weirdly distorted shadows of moths washed across the white stucco, like nightmare phantoms gliding through the pale mists of a dream.

Moths to the flame. Three points of fire in three oil lamps. Tall glass chimneys.

In memory, he saw the three flames leap higher in the chimneys. Yellow lamplight glimmered across Lisa’s somber face, and shadows swooped up the walls of the Delmanns’ kitchen.

At the time, Joe had thought only that a vagrant draft had abruptly drawn the flames higher in the lamps, though the air in the kitchen had been still. Now, in retrospect, the serpentine fire, shimmering several inches upward from the three wicks, impressed him as possessing greater importance than he previously realized.

The incident had significance.

He watched the moths but pondered the oil wicks, standing beside the service station but seeing around him the kitchen with its maple cabinetry and sugar-brown granite counters.

Enlightenment did not rise in him as the flames had briefly risen in those lamps. Strive as he might, he could not identify the significance that he intuited.

He was weary, exhausted, battered from the trauma of the day. Until he was rested, he could not trust either his senses or his hunches.

On his back in the motel bed, head on a foam pillow, heart on a rock of hard memory, Joe ate a chocolate bar that he’d bought at the service station.

Until the final mouthful, he could discern no flavor whatsoever. With the last bite, the taste of blood flooded his mouth, as though he had bitten his tongue.

His tongue was not cut, however, and what plagued him was the familiar taste of guilt. Another day had ended, and he was still alive and unable to justify his survival.

Except for the light of the moon at the open balcony door and the green numerals of the digital alarm clock, the room was dark. He stared at the ceiling light fixture, which was vaguely visible—and only visible at all because the convex disk of glass was lightly frosted with moonglow. It floated like a ghostly visitant above him.

He thought of the luminous Chardonnay in the three glasses on the counter in the Delmanns’ kitchen. No explanation there. Though Charlie might have tasted the wine before pouring it, Georgine and Lisa had never touched their glasses.

Thoughts like agitated moths swooped and fluttered through his mind, seeking light in his darkness.

He wished that he could talk with Beth in Virginia. But they might have her phone tapped and trace his call to find him. Besides, he was concerned that he would be putting Beth and Henry in jeopardy if he told them anything about what had happened to him since he’d found himself under surveillance at the beach.

Lulled by the maternal heart sound of the rhythmic surf, weighed down by weariness, wondering why he had escaped the plague of suicide at the Delmanns’ house, he slipped into sleep with nightmares.

Later, he half woke in darkness, lying on his side, facing the alarm clock on the nightstand. The glowing green numbers reminded him of those on the clock in Charles Delmann’s bloodied bedroom: time flashing backward in ten-minute increments.

Joe had supposed that a stray shotgun pellet must have struck the clock, damaging it. Now, in a swoon of sleep, he perceived that the explanation was different from what he had thought—something more mysterious and more significant than a mere bead of lead.

The clock and the oil lamps.

Numbers flashing, flames leaping.

Connections.

Significance.

Dreams reclaimed him briefly, but the alarm woke him long before dawn. He had been out less than three and a half hours, but after a year of restless nights, he was refreshed even by this much sleep.

Following a quick shower, as Joe dressed, he studied the digital clock. Revelation eluded him now as it had eluded him when he had been sotted with sleep.

Joe drove to LAX while the coast was still waiting for dawn.

He purchased a same-day, round-trip ticket to Denver. The return flight would bring him back to Los Angeles in time to keep the six-o’clock meeting with Demi—she of the sexy-smoky voice—at the coffeehouse in Westwood.

As he was on his way to the gate where his plane was already boarding, he saw two young men in blue robes at the check-in desk for a flight to Houston. Their shaved heads, the gold rings in their left ears, and their white tennis shoes identified them as members of the same cult as the group that he had encountered around the bonfire on the beach only hours earlier.

One of these men was black, the other was white, and both were carrying NEC laptops. The black man checked his wristwatch, which appeared to be a gold Rolex. Whatever their religious beliefs might be, they evidently didn’t take vows of poverty or have much in common with the Hare Krishnas.

Although this was the first time Joe had been aboard an aircraft since receiving the news about Michelle and the girls a year earlier, he was not nervous during the trip to Denver. Initially he worried that he would have an anxiety attack and begin to relive the plunge of Flight 353 as he had so often imagined it, but after just a few minutes, he knew that he would be all right.

He wasn’t apprehensive about dying in another crash. Perversely, if he perished in the same way that his wife and daughters had been taken, he would be calm and without fear on the long ride down into the earth, because such a fate would seem like a welcome return to balance in the universe, an open circle closed, a wrongness made right at last.

Of greater concern to him was what he might learn from Barbara Christman at the far end of his journey.

He was convinced that she didn’t trust the privacy of telephone conversations but would talk with him face-to-face. He didn’t think he had imagined the note of disappointment in her voice when she learned that he was not calling her from Colorado Springs. Likewise, her speech about the dangers of believing in conspiracy theories and the need for grief therapy, although compassionate and well stated, sounded to Joe as though it had been intended less for him than for the ears of eavesdroppers.

If Barbara Christman was carrying a burden that she longed to put down, the solution to the mystery of Flight 353 might be close at hand.

Joe wanted to know the whole truth,
needed
to know, but dreaded knowing. The peace of indifference would forever be beyond his reach if he learned that men, not fate, had been responsible for taking his family from him. The journey toward this particular truth was not an ascension toward a glorious light but a descent into darkness, chaos, the maelstrom.

He’d brought the printouts of four articles about Teknologik, which he had gotten from Randy Colway’s computer at the
Post.
The business-section prose was so dry, however—and his attention span so short after only three and a half hours of sleep—that he wasn’t able to concentrate.

He dozed fitfully across the Mojave Desert and the Rockies: two hours and fifteen minutes of half-formed dreams lit by oil lamps and the glow of digital clocks, in which understanding seemed about to wash over him but from which he woke still thirsty for answers.

In Denver, the humidity was unusually high and the sky overcast. To the west, the mountains lay buried under slow avalanches of early-morning fog.

In addition to his driver’s license, he had to use a credit card as ID to obtain a rental car. He put down a cash deposit, however, trying to avoid the actual use of the card, which might leave a trail of plastic for anyone who was tracking him.

Though no one on the plane or in the terminal had seemed to be especially interested in him, Joe parked the car at a shopping center not far from the airport and searched it inside and out, under the hood and in the trunk, for a transponder like the one that he had found on his Honda the previous day. The rental Ford was clean.

From the shopping center, he wove a tangled course along surface streets, checking his rearview mirror for a tail. Convinced that he was not being followed, he finally picked up Interstate 25 and drove south.

Mile by mile, Joe pushed the Ford harder, eventually ignoring the speed limit, because he became increasingly convinced that if he didn’t get to Barbara Christman’s house in time, he would find her dead by her own hand. Eviscerated. Immolated. Or with the back of her head blown out.

10

In Colorado Springs, Joe found Barbara Christman’s address in the telephone book. She lived in a diminutive jewel-box Victorian, Queen Anne style, exuberantly decorated with elaborate millwork.

When she came to the door in answer to the bell, she spoke before Joe had a chance to identify himself. “Even sooner than I expected you.”

“Are you Barbara Christman?”

“Let’s not do this here.”

“I’m not sure you know who I—”

“Yes, I know. But not here.”

“Where?”

“Is that your car at the curb?” she asked.

“The rental Ford.”

“Park it in the next block. Two blocks. Wait there, and I’ll pick you up.”

She closed the door.

Joe stood on the porch a moment longer, considering whether he should ring the bell again. Then he decided that she wasn’t likely to be planning to run out on him.

Two blocks south of Christman’s house, he parked beside a grade-school playground. The swings, seesaws, and jungle gyms were unused on this Sunday morning. Otherwise, he would have parked elsewhere, to be safe from the silvery laughter of children.

He got out of the car and looked north. There was no sign of the woman yet.

Joe consulted his wristwatch. Ten minutes till ten o’clock, Pacific time, an hour later here.

In eight hours, he would have to be back in Westwood to meet Demi—and Rose.

Along the sleepy street came a cat’s paw of warm wind searching the boughs of the pine trees for hidden birds. It rustled the leaves on the branches of a nearby group of paper birches with trunks as luminous white as choirboys’ surplices.

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.

Increasingly pitted and rutted, wandering among the trees as though weary and losing its way, the lane finally pulled a blanket of weeds across itself and curled up to rest under a canopy of evergreen boughs.

Parking and switching off the engine, Barbara said, “We’ll walk from here. It’s no more than half a mile, and the brush isn’t especially thick.”

Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services. Broken only by the snapping of twigs and the soft crunch of dry pine needles underfoot, this prayerful silence was, for Joe, as oppressive as the imagined roar of jet engines that sometimes shook him into an anxiety attack. It was a stillness full of eerie, disturbing expectation.

He trailed Barbara between columns of tall trees, under green vaults. Even in the late morning, the shadows were as deep as those in a monastery cloister.

The air was crisp with the aroma of pine. Musty with the scent of toadstools and natural mulch.

Step by step, a chill as damp as ice melt seeped from his bones and through his flesh, then out of his brow, his scalp, the nape of his neck, the curve of his spine. The day was warm, but he was not.

Eventually he could see an end to the ranks of trees, an open space past the last of the white pines. Though the forest had begun to seem claustrophobic, he was now reluctant to forsake the crowding greenery for the revelation that lay beyond.

Shivering, he followed Barbara through the last trees into the bottom of a gently rising meadow. The clearing was three hundred yards wide from north to south—and twice that long from the east, where they had entered it, to the wooded crest at the west end.

The wreckage was gone, but the meadow felt haunted.

The previous winter’s melting snow and the heavy spring rains had spread a healing poultice of grass across the torn, burnt land. The grass and a scattering of yellow wildflowers, however, could not conceal the most terrible wound in the earth: a ragged-edged, ovate depression approximately ninety yards by sixty yards. This enormous crater lay uphill from them, in the northwest quadrant of the meadow.

“Impact point,” Barbara Christman said.

They set out side by side, walking toward the precise place where three-quarters of a million pounds had come screaming out of the night sky into the earth, but Joe quickly fell behind Barbara and then came to a stop altogether. His soul was as gouged as this field, plowed by pain.

Barbara returned to Joe and, without a word, slipped her hand into his. He held tightly to her, and they set out again.

As they approached the impact point, he saw the fire-blackened trees along the north perimeter of the forest, which had served as backdrop to the crash-scene photograph in the
Post
. Some pines had been stripped bare of needles by the flames; their branches were charred stubs. A score of seared aspens, as brittle as charcoal, imprinted a stark geometry on the dismal sky.

They stopped at the eroded rim of the crater; the uneven floor below them was as deep as a two-story house in some places. Although patches of grass bristled from the sloping walls, it did not thrive on the bottom of the depression, where shattered slabs of gray stone showed through a thin skim of dirt and brown leaves deposited by the wind.

Barbara said, “It hit with enough force to blast away thousands of years of accumulated soil and still fracture the bedrock beneath.”

Even more shaken by the power of the crash than he had expected to be, Joe turned his attention to the somber sky and struggled to breathe.

An eagle appeared out of the mountain mists to the west, flying eastward on a course as unwaveringly straight as a latitude line on a map. Silhouetted against the gray-white overcast, it was almost as dark as Poe’s raven, but as it passed under that portion of sky that was blue-black with a still-brewing storm, it appeared to grow as pale as a spirit.