Sole Survivor (7 page)

Helicopters.

And unmarked white vans?

Eight years ago, Medsped had been bought by Teknologik, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a score of wholly owned subsidiaries in the medical and computer industry. Its computer-related holdings were all companies developing products, mostly software, for the medical and medical-research communities.

When Joe ran a search on Teknologik, he was rewarded with forty-one stories, mostly from the business pages. The first two articles were so dry, however, so full of investment and accounting jargon, that the reward quickly began to seem like punishment.

He ordered copies of the four longest articles for review later.

While those were sliding into the printer tray, he asked for a list of stories the
Post
had published about the crash of Nationwide Flight 353. A series of headlines, with accompanying dates, appeared on the screen.

Joe had to steel himself to scan this story file. He sat for a minute or two with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of surf breaking on the beach at Santa Monica.

Finally, with teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw muscles twitched continuously, he called up story after story, scanning the contents. He wanted the one that, as a sidebar, would provide him with a complete passenger manifest.

He skipped quickly past photographs of the crash scene, which revealed debris chopped into such small chunks and tangled in such surreal shapes that the baffled eye could not begin to reconstruct the aircraft from its ruins. In the bleak dawn caught by these pictures, through the gray drizzle that had begun to fall about two hours after the disaster, National Transportation Safety Board investigators in biologically secure bodysuits with visored hoods prowled the blasted meadow. Looming in the background were scorched trees, gnarled black limbs clawing at the low sky.

He searched for and found the name of the NTSB Go-Team leader in charge of the investigation—Barbara Christman—and the fourteen specialists working under her.

A couple of the articles included photos of some of the crew and passengers. Not all of the three hundred and thirty souls aboard were pictured. The tendency was to focus on those victims who were Southern Californians returning home rather than on Easterners who had been coming to visit. Being part of the
Post
family, Michelle and the girls were prominently featured.

Eight months ago, upon moving into the apartment, in reaction to a morbid and obsessive preoccupation with family albums and loose snapshots, Joe had packed all the photos in a large cardboard box, reasoning that rubbing a wound retarded healing. He had taped the box shut and put it at the back of his only closet.

Now, in the course of his scanning, when their faces appeared on the screen, he was unable to breathe, though he had thought he would be prepared. Michelle’s publicity shot, taken by one of the
Post’
s staff photographers, captured her beauty but not her tenderness, not her intelligence, not her charm, not her laughter. A mere picture was so inadequate, but still it was Michelle. Still. Chrissie’s photo had been snapped at a
Post
Christmas party for children of the paper’s employees. She was caught in a grin, eyes shining. How they shone. And little Nina, who sometimes wanted it pronounced
neen-ah
and other times
nine-ah,
was smiling that slightly lopsided smile that seemed to say she knew magical secrets.

Her smile reminded Joe of a silly song he sometimes sang to her when he put her to bed. Before he realized what he was doing, he found his breath again and heard himself whispering the words:
“Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her? Neen-ah, nine-ah, no one finah.”

A breaking inside him threatened his self-control.

He clicked the mouse to get their images off the screen. But that didn’t take their faces out of his mind, clearer than he had seen them since packing their photos away.

Bending forward in the chair, covering his face, shuddering, he muffled his voice in his cold hands. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

Surf breaking on a beach, now as before, tomorrow as today. Clocks and looms. Sunrises, sunsets, phases of the moon. Machines clicking, ticking. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions.

The only sane response is indifference.

He lowered his hands from his face. Sat up straight again. Tried to focus on the computer screen.

He was concerned that he would draw attention to himself. If an old acquaintance looked into this three-walled cubicle to see what was wrong, Joe might have to explain what he was doing here, might even have to summon the strength to be sociable.

He found the passenger manifest for which he had been searching. The
Post
had saved him time and effort by listing separately those among the dead who had lived in Southern California. He printed out all their names, each of which was followed by the name of the town in which the deceased resided.

I’m not ready to talk to you yet,
the photographer of graves had said to him, from which he had inferred that she would have things to tell him later.

Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.

See what? He had no idea.

What could she possibly tell him that would alleviate his despair? Nothing. Nothing.

…like the others. You’ll see, like the others.

What others?

Only one answer satisfied him: other people who had lost loved ones on Flight 353, who had been as desolate as he was, people to whom she had already spoken.

He wasn’t going to wait for her to return to him. With Wallace Blick and associates after her, she might not live long enough to pay him a visit and quench his curiosity.

When Joe finished sorting and stapling the printouts, he noticed the white envelope that Dewey Beemis had given him at the elevator downstairs. Joe had propped it against a box of Kleenex to the right of the computer and promptly forgotten about it.

As a crime reporter with a frequently seen byline, he had from time to time received story tips from newspaper readers who, to put it charitably, were not well glued together. They earnestly claimed to be the terrified victims of vicious harassment by a secret cult of Satanists operating in the city’s parks department, or to know of sinister tobacco-industry executives who were plotting to lace baby formula with nicotine, or to be living across the street from a nest of spider-like extraterrestrials trying to pass as a nice family of Korean immigrants.

Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audioanimatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, “Yes, we’ve known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all.” He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled.

Consequently, he was expecting a crayon-scrawled message about evil psychic Martians living among us as Mormons—or the equivalent. He tore open the envelope. It contained a single sheet of white paper folded in thirds.

The three neatly typed sentences initially impressed him as a singularly cruel variation on the usual paranoid shriek:
I have been trying to reach you, Joe. My life depends on your discretion. I was aboard Flight 353.

Everyone aboard the airliner had perished. He didn’t believe in ghost mail from the Other Side, which probably made him unique among his contemporaries in this New Age City of Angels.

At the bottom of the page was a name: Rose Tucker. Under the name was a phone number with a Los Angeles area code. No address was provided.

Lightly flushed by the same anger that had burned so hotly in him earlier, and which could easily become a blaze again, Joe almost snatched up the phone to call Ms. Tucker. He wanted to tell her what a disturbed and vicious piece of garbage she was, wallowing in her schizophrenic fantasies, psychic vampire sucking on the misery of others to feed some sick need of her own—

And then he heard, in memory, the words that Wallace Buck first said to him in the cemetery. Unaware that anyone was in the white van, Joe had leaned through the open passenger door and popped the glove box in search of a cellular phone. Blick, briefly mistaking him for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, had said,
Did you get Rose?

Rose.

Because Joe had been frightened by the gunmen, afraid for the woman they were pursuing, and startled to discover someone in the van, the importance of what Blick said had failed to register with him. Everything happened so fast after that. He had forgotten Blick’s words until now.

Rose Tucker must have been the woman with the Polaroid camera, photographing the graves.

If she was nothing more than a whacked-out loser living in some schizophrenic fantasy, Medsped or Teknologik—or whoever the hell they were—wouldn’t be throwing so much manpower and money into a search for her.

He remembered the exceptional presence of the woman in the cemetery. Her directness. Her self-possession and preternatural calm. The power of her unwavering stare.

She hadn’t seemed like a flake. Quite the opposite.

I have been trying to reach you, Joe. My life depends on your discretion. I was aboard Flight 353.

Without realizing that he had gotten off the chair, Joe was standing, heart pounding, electrified. The sheet of paper rattled in his hands.

He stepped into the aisle behind the modular workstation and surveyed what he could see of the subdivided newsroom, seeking someone with whom he could share this development.

Look here. Read this, read it. Something’s terribly wrong, Jesus, all wrong, not what we were told. Somebody walked away from the crash, lived through it. We have to do something about this, find the truth. No survivors, they said, no survivors, catastrophic crash, total wipeout catastrophic crash. What else have they told us that isn’t true? How did the people on that plane really die? Why did they die? Why did they die?

Before anyone saw him standing there in furious distress, before he went in search of a familiar face, Joe had second thoughts about sharing anything he had learned. Rose Tucker’s note said that her life depended on his discretion.

Besides, he had the crazy notion, somehow more powerfully convincing
because
of its irrationality, that if he shared the note with others, it would prove to be blank, that if he pressed Blick’s driver’s license into their hands, it would turn out to be his own license, that if he took someone with him to the cemetery, there would be no spent cartridges in the grass and no skid marks from the tires of the white van and no one there who had ever seen the vehicle or heard the gunshots.

This was a mystery delivered to him, to no one else but him, and he suddenly perceived that pursuing answers was not merely his duty but his
sacred
duty. In the resolution of this mystery was his mission, his purpose, and perhaps an unknowable redemption.

He didn’t even understand precisely what he meant by any of that. He simply felt the truth of it bone-deep.

Trembling, he returned to the chair.

He wondered if he was entirely sane.

6

Joe called downstairs to the reception desk and asked Dewey Beemis about the woman who had left the envelope.

“Little bit of a lady,” said Dewey.

He was a giant, however, and even a six-foot-tall Amazon might seem petite to him.

“Would you say five six, shorter?” Joe asked.

“Maybe five one, five two. But mighty. One of those ladies looks like a girl all her life but been a mountain-mover since she graduated grade school.”

“Black woman?” Joe asked.

“Yeah, she was a sister.”

“How old?”

“Maybe early forties. Pretty. Hair like raven wings. You upset about something, Joe?”

“No. No, I’m okay.”

“You sound upset. This lady some kind of trouble?”

“No, she’s okay, she’s legit. Thanks, Dewey.”

Joe put down the phone.

The nape of his neck was acrawl with gooseflesh. He rubbed it with one hand.

His palms were clammy. He blotted them on his jeans.

Nervously, he picked up the printout of the passenger manifest from Flight 353. Using a ruler to keep his place, he went down the list of the deceased, line by line, until he came to
Dr. Rose Marie Tucker
.

Doctor.

She might be a doctor of medicine or of literature, biologist or sociologist, musicologist or dentist, but in Joe’s eyes, her credibility was enhanced by the mere fact that she had earned the honorific. The troubled people who believed the mayor to be a robot were more likely to be patients than doctors of any kind.

According to the manifest, Rose Tucker was forty-three years old, and her home was in Manassas, Virginia. Joe had never been in Manassas, but he had driven past it a few times, because it was an outer suburb of Washington, near the town where Michelle’s parents lived.

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
.

He called Demi’s number again to see if she would answer it in spite of what she had said.

To his surprise, he got a recorded message from the telephone company informing him that the number he had called was no longer in service. He was advised to make sure that he had entered the number correctly and then to call 411 for directory assistance. He tried the number again, with the same result.

Neat trick. He wondered how it had been done. Demi clearly was more sophisticated than her grits-and-collard-greens voice.

As Joe returned the handset to the cradle, the telephone rang, startling him so much that he let go of it as if he had burned his fingers. Embarrassed by his edginess, he picked it up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Los Angeles Post?”
a man asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this Randy Colway’s direct line?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you Mr. Colway?”

Startlement and the interlude with Demi had left Joe slow on the uptake. Now he recognized the uninflected voice as that of the man who had answered the phone at Rose Marie Tucker’s house in Manassas, Virginia.

“Are you Mr. Colway?” the caller asked again.

“I’m Wallace Blick,” Joe said.

“Mr. Carpenter?”

Chills climbed the ladder of his spine, vertebra to vertebra, and Joe slammed down the phone.

They knew where he was.

The dozens of modular workstations no longer seemed like a series of comfortably anonymous nooks. They were a maze with too many blind corners.

Quickly he gathered the printouts and the message that Rose Tucker had left for him.

As he was getting up from the chair, the phone rang again. He didn’t answer it.

On his way out of the newsroom, he encountered Dan Shavers, who was returning from the photocopying center with a sheaf of papers in his left hand and his unlit pipe in the right. Shavers, utterly bald, with a luxuriant black beard, wore pleated black dress slacks, red-and-black checkered suspenders over a gray-and-white pinstriped shirt, and a yellow bow tie. His half-lens reading glasses dangled from his neck on a loop of black ribbon.

A reporter and columnist on the business desk, Shavers was as pompous and as awkward at small talk as he thought he was charming; however, he was benign in his self-delusion and touching in his mistaken conviction that he was a spellbinding raconteur. He said without preamble, “Joseph, dear boy, opened a case of ’74 Mondavi Cabernet last week, one of twenty I bought as an investment when it was first released, even though at the time I was in Napa not to scout the vintners but to shop for an antique clock, and let me tell you, this wine has matured so well that—” He broke off, realizing that Joe had not worked at the newspaper for the better part of a year. Fumblingly, he tried to offer his condolences regarding “that terrible thing, that awful thing, all those poor people, your wife and the children.”