Sole Survivor (21 page)

Joe waited.

“…but I don’t want to encourage you in this weird delusion of yours.”

“Delusion?”

She glanced at him. “This idea that there might have been a survivor.”

He said, “Encourage me. Encouragement isn’t something I’ve had much of in the past year.”

She hesitated but then sighed. “There was a rancher not far from here who was already asleep when Flight 353 went down. People who work the land go to bed early in these parts. The explosion woke him. And then someone came to his door.”

“Who?”

“The next day, he called the county sheriff, and the sheriff’s office put him in touch with the investigation command center. But it didn’t seem to amount to much.”

“Who came to his door in the middle of the night?”

“A witness,” Barbara said.

“To the crash?”

“Supposedly.”

She looked at him but then quickly returned her attention to the rain-swept highway.

In the context of what Joe had told her, this recollection seemed by the moment to grow more disturbing to Barbara. Her eyes pinched at the corners, as if she were straining to see not through the downpour but more clearly into the past, and her lips pressed together as she debated whether to say more.

“A witness to the crash,” Joe prompted.

“I can’t remember why, of all places, she went to this ranch house or what she wanted there.”

“She?”

“The woman who claimed to have seen the plane go down.”

“There’s something more,” Joe said.

“Yeah. As I recall…she was a black woman.”

His breath went stale in his lungs, but at last he exhaled and said, “Did she give this rancher her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“If she did, I wonder if he’d remember it.”

At the turnoff from the state route, the entrance road to the ranch was flanked by tall white posts that supported an overhead sign bearing graceful green letters on a white background:
LOOSE CHANGE RANCH.
Under those three words, in smaller letters and in script:
Jeff and Mercy Ealing.
The gate stood open.

The oiled-gravel lane was flanked by white ranch fencing that divided the fields into smaller pastures. They passed a big riding ring, exercise yards, and numerous white stables trimmed in green.

Barbara said, “I wasn’t here last year, but one of my people gave me a report on it. Coming back to me now…It’s a horse ranch. They breed and race quarter horses. Also breed and sell some show horses like Arabians, I think.”

The pasture grass, alternately churned by wind and flattened by the pounding rain, was not currently home to any horses. The riding ring and the exercise yards were deserted.

In some of the stables, the top of the Dutch door at each stall was open. Here and there, from the safety of their quarters, horses peered out at the storm. Some were nearly as dark as the spaces in which they stood, but others were pale or dappled.

The large and handsome ranch house, white clapboard with green shutters, framed by groupings of aspens, had the deepest front porch that Joe had ever seen. Under the heavy cape of gloom thrown down by the thunderheads, a yellow glow as welcoming as hearth light filled some of the windows.

Barbara parked in the driveway turnaround. She and Joe ran through the rain—previously as warm as bath water but now cooler—to the screened porch. The door swung inward with a creak of hinges and the singing of a worn tension spring, sounds so rounded in tone that they were curiously pleasing; they spoke of time passed at a gentle pace, of gracious neglect rather than dilapidation.

The porch furniture was white wicker with green cushions, and ferns cascaded from wrought-iron stands.

The house door stood open, and a man of about sixty, in a black rain slicker, waited to one side on the porch. The weather-thickened skin of his sun-darkened face was well creased and patinaed like the leather of a long-used saddlebag. His blue eyes were as quick and friendly as his smile. He raised his voice to be heard above the drumming of the rain on the roof. “Mornin’. Good day for ducks.”

“Are you Mr. Ealing?” Barbara asked.

“That would be me,” said another man in a black slicker as he appeared in the open doorway.

He was six inches taller and twenty years younger than the man who had commented on the weather. But a life on horseback, in hot sun and dry wind and the nip of winter, had already begun to abrade the smooth, hard planes of youth and bless him with a pleasantly worn and appealing face that spoke of deep experience and rural wisdom.

Barbara introduced herself and Joe, implying that she still worked for the Safety Board and that Joe was her associate.

“You poking into that after a whole year?” Ealing asked.

“We weren’t able to settle on a cause,” Barbara said. “Never like to close a file until we know what happened. Why we’re here is to ask about the woman who knocked on your door that night.”

“Sure, I remember.”

“Could you describe her?” Joe asked.

“Petite lady. About forty or so. Pretty.”

“Black?”

“She was, yes. But also a touch of something else. Mexican maybe. Or more likely Chinese. Maybe Vietnamese.”

Joe remembered the Asian quality of Rose Tucker’s eyes. “Did she tell you her name?”

“Probably did,” Ealing said. “But I don’t recall it.”

“How long after the crash did she show up here?” Barbara asked.

“Not too long.” Ealing was carrying a leather satchel similar to a physician’s bag. He shifted it from his right hand to his left. “The sound of the plane coming down woke me and Mercy before it hit. Louder than you ever hear a plane in these parts, but we knew what it had to be. I got out of bed, and Mercy turned on the light. I said, ‘Oh, Lordy,’ and then we heard it, like a big far-off quarry blast. The house even shook a little.”

The older man was shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

Ealing said, “How is she, Ned?”

“Not good,” Ned said. “Not good at all.”

Looking out at the long driveway that dwindled through the lashing rain, Jeff Ealing said, “Where the hell’s Doc Sheely?” He wiped one hand down his long face, which seemed to make it longer.

Barbara said, “If we’ve come at a bad time—”

“We’ve got a sick mare, but I can give you a minute,” Ealing said. He returned to the night of the crash. “Mercy called Pueblo County Emergency Rescue, and I quick got dressed and drove the pickup out to the main road, headed south, trying to figure where it went down and could I help. You could see the fire in the sky—not direct but the glow. By the time I got oriented and into the vicinity, there was already a sheriff’s car blocking the turnoff from the state route. Another pulled up behind me. They were setting up a barrier, waiting for the search-and-rescue teams, and they made it clear this wasn’t a job for untrained do-gooders. So I came home.”

“How long were you gone?” Joe asked.

“Couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes. Then I was in the kitchen here with Mercy for maybe half an hour, having some decaf with a shot of Bailey’s, wide awake and listening to the news on the radio and wondering was it worth trying to get back to sleep, when we heard the knocking at the front door.”

Joe said, “So she showed up an hour and fifteen minutes after the crash.”

“Thereabouts.”

Its engine noise masked by the heavy downpour and by the shivery chorus of wind-shaken aspens, the approaching vehicle didn’t attract their attention until it was almost upon them. A Jeep Cherokee. As it swung into the turnaround in front of the house, its headlights, like silver swords, slashed at the chain-mail rain.

“Thank God!” Ned exclaimed, pulling up the hood on his slicker. The screen door sang as he pushed through it and into the storm.

“Doc Sheely’s here,” Jeff Ealing said. “Got to help him with the mare. But Mercy knows more about that woman than I do anyway. You go ahead and talk to her.”

Mercy Ealing’s graying blond hair was for the most part held away from her face and off her neck by three butterfly barrettes. She had been busy baking cookies, however, and a few curling locks had slipped loose, hanging in spirals along her flushed cheeks.

Wiping her hands on her apron and then, more thoroughly, on a dish towel, she insisted that Barbara and Joe sit at the breakfast table in the roomy kitchen while she poured coffee for them. She provided a plate heaped with freshly baked cookies.

The back door was ajar. An unscreened rear porch lay beyond. The cadenced rain was muffled here, like the drumming for a funeral cortege passing out on the highway.

The air was warm and redolent of oatmeal batter, chocolate, and roasting walnuts.

The coffee was good, and the cookies were better.

On the wall was a pictorial calendar with a Christian theme. The painting for August showed Jesus on the seashore, speaking to a pair of fishermen brothers, Peter and Andrew, who would cast aside their nets and follow Him to become fishers of men.

Joe felt as if he had fallen through a trapdoor into a different reality from the one in which he’d been living for a year, out of a cold strange place into the normal world with its little day-to-day crises, pleasantly routine tasks, and simple faith in the rightness of all things.

As she checked the cookies in the two ovens, Mercy recalled the night of the crash. “No, not Rose. Her name was Rachel Thomas.”

Same initials, Joe realized. Maybe Rose walked out of the crash suspecting that somehow the plane had been brought down because she was aboard. She might be anxious to let her enemies think that she was dead. Keeping the same initials probably helped her remember the false name that she had given.

“She’d been driving from Colorado Springs to Pueblo when she saw the plane coming down, right over her,” Mercy said. “The poor thing was so frightened, she jammed on the brakes, and the car spun out of control. Thank God for the seat belts. Went off the road, down an embankment, and turned over.”

Barbara said, “She was injured?”

Spooning lumps of thick dough on greased baking sheets, Mercy said, “No, both fine and dandy, just shaken up some. It was only a little embankment. Rachel, she had dirt on her clothes, bits of grass and weeds stuck to her, but she was okay. Oh, shaky as a leaf in a gale but okay. She was such a sweet thing, I felt so sorry for her.”

To Joe, Barbara said meaningfully, “So back then she was claiming to be a witness.”

“Oh, I don’t think she was making it up,” Mercy said. “She was a witness, for sure. Very rattled by what she saw.”

A timer buzzed. Diverted, Mercy slipped one hand into a baker’s quilted mitten. From the oven, she withdrew a sheet filled with fragrant brown cookies.

“The woman came here that night for help?” Barbara asked.

Putting the hot aluminum tray on a wire cooling rack, Mercy said, “She wanted to call a taxi service in Pueblo, but I told her they never in a million years come way out here.”

“She didn’t want to get a tow truck for her car?” Joe asked.

“She didn’t figure to be able to get it done at that hour of the night, all the way from Pueblo. She expected to come back the next day with the tow-truck driver.”

Barbara said, “What did she do when you told her there was no way to get taxi service from out here?”

Sliding a sheet of raw dough drops into the oven, Mercy said, “Oh, then I drove them into Pueblo myself.”

“All the way to Pueblo?” Barbara asked.

“Well, Jeff had to be up earlier than me. Rachel didn’t want to stay over here, and it wasn’t but an hour to get there, with my heavy foot on the pedal,” Mercy said, closing the oven door.

“That was extraordinarily kind of you,” Joe said.

“Was it? No, not really. The Lord wants us to be Samaritans. It’s what we’re here for. You see folks in trouble like this, you have to help them. And this was a real nice lady. All the way to Pueblo, she couldn’t stop talking about the poor people on that plane. She was all torn up about it. Almost like it was her fault, what happened to them, just because she saw it a few seconds before it hit. Anyway, it was no big deal going to Pueblo…though coming back home that night was the devil’s own trip, because there was so much traffic going to the crash site. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks. Lots of lookie-loos too. Standing along the side of the road by their cars and pickups, hoping to see blood, I guess. Give me the creeps. Tragedy can bring out the best in people, but it also brings out the worst.”