The buttonhook! She mentally kicked herself for not remembering. Lillian had exulted when high-button shoes had gone out of style. “They confine a woman so,” she’d written. Perhaps Nick could quickly put together something based on The Buttonhook as Metaphor for the Restrictions on Women in Early Twentieth-Century Western America. That ought to stick in Ben Gilbert’s craw. It might also get her tenure.
Half an hour later, as Nick was scanning for articles on the history of the buttonhook, a title caught her eye. The Destruction of Buttonhook Creek: Rape of the Environment. The author was Matt Gault. Out of curiosity she requested the microfiche.
The article was depressing, outlining the systematic poisoning of one of the few water sources in the Four Corners area by unscrupulous mining practices. Matt must have made a lot of enemies, she thought to herself, but he wasn’t afraid to tell the truth.
She panned the microfiche to the end of the article. The author’s picture was there in black and white, but she could imagine the same startling blue eyes as John Gault, and the same smile that didn’t come easily.
She reluctantly put the article aside and returned to her research, but she couldn’t get rid of the image of Matt Gault’s face. She wondered what John was doing.
With a self-condemning shake of her head, she forced her mind back to buttonhooks, pearl-handled buttonhooks. Pearl! Pearl Benson was the mystery, the invisible woman. When had she really died? How had she died and why had her only sister made no mention of it?
Nick sighed and thought, to hell with sitting here. As great as the university’s library was, she was wasting her time. In Salt Lake, the most complete and extensive repository of birth, death, and other early-American records was administered by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If the mystery of Pearl was to be solved it would be there.
Nick smiled. Along with the Bensons, Salt Lake had a more certain attraction, a B-24 Liberator named the Lady-A not to mention John Gault.
Chapter 22
John Gault had trouble getting through to his old bombardier at first. Vic Campbell’s home phone didn’t answer and neither did his newspaper, though the answering machine at the Gazette took a message. The callback came twenty minutes later.
“Skipper,” Campbell said, sounding out of breath, “how the hell are you?”
Gault grinned. Only his old wartime crew called him that.
“I need my bombardier again.”
“Have we declared war?”
“The Lady-A’s going to fly again.”
“I’ll be damned. What’s the occasion?” Campbell asked.
“Matt’s dead,” Gault said, surprised that he was able to sound so matter-of-fact. “His plane went down in Arizona.”
“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“Matt always wanted to go up in the Lady-A, so I’m rebuilding her engines for one last flight. I intend to drop his ashes over the Great Salt Lake, and I’d like my old crew with me.”
“Now you tell me.”
“What’s the matter?” Gault asked.
“I’m in the hospital. I got into a fight.”
“At your age?”
“It’s a long story, Skipper.”
“How long will you be laid up?”
“Five minutes ago I didn’t think I’d get as far as the bathroom. Now, I’m checking myself out of here.”
“Is that wise?” Gault said.
“I wouldn’t miss flying in the Lady-A again for anything.”
“It’s going to take a while to get her up to spec.”
“Before you called I was feeling sorry for myself. Now . . .” Campbell’s voice rose dramatically. “Now I’m raring to go.”
“I never thought I’d see the day that you felt sorry for yourself, Vic.”
“Let me tell you something, old friend. I felt sorry for myself throughout those twenty-five missions we flew together. Without you, I wouldn’t have made it. None of the crew would. You were our luck, John. We all knew that the first time we laid eyes on you. All we had to do was stay close to you, we figured, and we’d make it through that damned war.”
Gault snorted. He’d always considered Campbell to be his lucky charm. “Are you still keeping in touch with the rest of the crew?”
“You bet, through my newsletter, the Lady-A Gazette, circulation six.”
“Seven,” Gault corrected, remembering the last issue.
“No more. Lee Randall’s gone, a heart attack. It was quick though. Just like that, the lucky bastard.”
Gault shook his head. He should have known about Randall, their tail gunner, who’d saved all their lives on more than one occasion.
“Four of us down,” Campbell said, “six to go. You know something, Skipper. I dream about those missions sometimes. In the dream everybody’s still alive. Tim Lambert squeezing into his belly turret, Perry Goddard at his waist gun, Mark Tanner on the radio when he wasn’t firing his .50-caliber, and Randall in his turret up top.”
“I see them, too,” Gault said quietly. “Even when I’m not asleep. Who else will want to come along, do you think?”
“We’ve only got two gunners left, Skipper, Russ Yarbrough and Jack Hill. But Hill’s out. He’s got arthritis so bad his wife has to write his letters.”
Gault felt a stab of shame for not having kept closer tabs on his old crew.
“So that leaves us with Yarbrough,” Campbell went on. “He’ll come.”
“What about Novak, our navigator?”
“No way, Skip. I can still see him down on his knees after that last mission, kissing the ground and swearing he’d never fly again.”
“You’re right. I forgot about that.”
“That’s a bad sign in a man your age,” Campbell quipped. “Hell, a man your age is going to need a copilot.”
“I’m old enough to know better than to get into a fight,” Gault replied, dodging the issue.
Campbell groaned for effect. “Don’t remind me. But I’m not so old I don’t remember asking you about a copilot.”
“If push comes to shove, I can handle the Lady-A by myself, but you don’t have to worry. I was planning on calling Brad next, though why a rich son of a bitch like him would be interested, I don’t know.”
“Roberts was always crazy. He’ll love this.”
******
Brad Roberts braked his Ferrari to a stop smack in the middle of Pebble Beach’s Seventeen-Mile Drive. It was dawn, shift-change time for the one sheriffs car that patrolled the area. His high beams picked out the first of a dozen hairpin curves that would eventually lead into the straightaway approach to the Pebble Beach Lodge.
The car trembled as he revved its 12-cylinder, 380 horsepower engine. The sound of it, the feel of it resonating through his body, made life worth living. Everything else was no more than going through the motions. His latest wife, his three children who wouldn’t speak to him, none of them would so much as miss a tennis lesson if he killed himself on the first curve.
He popped the clutch and screamed into the turn. From now on, the real risk was meeting another car. So far, that had never happened. The day it did, he’d take a swan dive into the Pacific and make his heirs happy.
In the middle of a controlled skid, he caught a blinking light out of the corner of his eye. He was about to ignore it, then had second thoughts. Perhaps the well-bribed guard on the Carmel entrance gate was trying to warn him of oncoming traffic.
He stood on the brakes hard enough to fishtail onto the dirt shoulder. By then the engine had subsided enough for the phone’s ring to be heard.
“This is Roberts,” he said curtly.
“Brad, it’s John Gault.”
“For Christ’s sake. Where are you?”
“I’m standing in my hangar in Salt Lake, looking up at the Lady-A.”
Gault sounded just the same, rock-solid. His voice had never changed, even when German fighters were closing in.
“How does she look?”
“She’s going to
fly again, and I’m going to need a copilot.”
Roberts smiled, remembering the feel of the B-24’s yoke in his hands, better than a Ferrari any day. Liberators looked like boxcars, some said. Others called them flying trucks and said they flew like one, too. But that was the challenge. Anybody could handle one of those easy-flying B-17s. But a B-24 took guts, not to mention brains and muscle. “I’m on my way, Skipper.”
There was silence for a moment and then Gault said, “You mean you’ll actually come?”
Roberts smiled to himself. “I seem to remember we were a team, Skipper. Nothing that’s happened since can ever change that. I’ll call you when I arrive.”
Whistling, Roberts drove sedately all the way to the Monterey airport.
Chapter 23
Frank Odell took one look at the outside thermometer and shook his head. What was God thinking about when he created Mesa d’Oro? Here it was 107 degrees in the shade, only there wasn’t any real shade, just man-made concrete overhangs. Only mad dogs would be dumb enough to live in a place like this.
Odell tapped the thermometer. The mercury didn’t budge.
He crossed the compound to the research building, where his meeting with the Director was scheduled. Odell had chosen to take the sunny route, instead of one of the interconnected air-conditioned corridors that linked the mesa’s three buildings—research, staff quarters, and the Director’s residence. The sunshine, he’d hoped, would dispel the sense of uneasiness that had come over him since hearing of the latest developments in Salt Lake, not to mention Ophir.
But his mood hadn’t changed by the time he reached the manned guard station, where Odell had his ID badge examined by the hard-eyed sentry.
“The Director’s expecting me,” he said evenly.
The sentry merely nodded before ushering him into the wide, carpeted corridor. At the end of it, the Director’s assistant stood by the open door.
Odell knocked anyway.
“Enter,” the Director said.
Light streaming through the wall of glass directly behind the Director’s desk turned the man into a black silhouette. Odell squinted against the dazzling glare, but the Director’s features remained unreadable. Maybe it was just as well. The window behind the Director opened onto the mesa’s sheer cliff and its two-thousand-foot drop to the desert floor below.
Odell took a seat and waited for the Director to speak. He didn’t wait long.
“Do you ever wonder about the work we do here?” the Director asked.
All the time, Odell answered to himself, but only shook his head.
“What we do here . . .” The Director paused, as if choosing his words carefully. “What we do here is necessary if we are to survive in the twenty-first century. Modern life has become so complex there are no longer clear choices, only necessary ones. Don’t you agree, Frank?”
He continued without waiting for Odell to reply. “It’s always a matter of what’s necessary, Frank. That’s what we have to focus on. History will say that we did what had to be done and we did it without flinching.”
His fingers drummed on the desktop. “That’s why we’re here, Frank. To make hard choices. Never lose sight of that. If a few have to die now to save thousands later, so be it. Wouldn’t you say that’s a cheap enough price to pay?”
Odell stared at the Director’s hands. The man was nervous. Maybe he was human after all.
“You don’t have to answer, Frank. Those lives will be on my conscience.”
The Director pointed a forefinger at Odell’s midsection. “I understand the archaeologist and her father survived the accident in Ophir.” His tone made the comment an accusation, though Odell hadn’t been personally involved in the episode, or the decision that precipitated it.
“Her father suffered a broken arm, I believe,” Odell said. “He’s back in Albuquerque, along with his daughter.”
“That was more than a week ago, Frank. Now my Blackbirds tell me she’s on her way to Salt Lake.”
“So I understand.”
“What do you think should be done, then?”
“Nothing.” Just like nothing should have been done before, Odell added to himself. They’d been very lucky that the local authorities had thought that the landslide had been caused by natural gases building up in the mine shafts. “Restoring that old plane will keep them busy and out of our hair. So let sleeping dogs lie.”
“I thought you were the one who said she sticks to these things like gum to your shoe?”
Me and my big mouth. “Surveillance is all that’s necessary.”
“You mean my ever faithful Blackbirds. Without them, you know, we’d be working in the dark.” The Director got up to pace. “I’m like you, Frank. I’m only a middleman. We both are. We do what we’re told.”
Swell, Odell thought, the Nuremberg defense.
“It’s too late to have second thoughts,” the Director added. “That reporter had to be interrogated. We had to know what he knew. After that . . .” The Director shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been wise to let him walk away.”
Odell sighed. No one walks away, not from a place like Mesa d’Oro.
Chapter 24
Nick was having second thoughts as she waited for her baggage at the Salt Lake airport. By now Elliot had probably forgotten his vows to take it easy and give his broken arm a chance to heal. Most likely he was back in his Anasazi museum at the university, cataloguing his latest finds and thumbing his nose at the doctor’s orders. Nick’s, too, for that matter, after she’d spent a week fussing over him.
She was about to go phone hunting to check up on him when she spotted John Gault crossing the terminal toward her. Today there was a spring in his step and he carried himself with nonchalant grace. She hadn’t seen him in nearly two weeks, but it seemed like only yesterday they’d flown over Mesa d’Oro together.
Unexpectedly, he grabbed her in a bear hug. Then just as quickly, Gault broke the contact saying, “Until I saw you, I wasn’t really sure you’d come.”
“I told you on the phone I had work to do here at the genealogy center.”
“And the Lady-A.”
Nick smiled. “I wasn’t planning to start my research until tomorrow.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. Now tell me about your father. How is he?”
“Sorry he couldn’t come. He’s supposed to be taking it easy. Doctor’s orders.”
They were interrupted as luggage began tumbling down the chute onto the carousel. Her bag arrived reasonably intact. It was small enough to have fit under her seat, but she preferred to fly unencumbered. As usual, she’d packed one change of jeans in addition to the wrinkle-resistant skirt with the matching olive blouse that she was wearing at the moment. The bag also held her favorite T-shirt, a couple of pairs of panties, clean socks, and her desert boots.
Hefting the carryall, Gault said, “Most women carry purses bigger than this.”
“Most women don’t dig in the desert or get excited about old relics.”
“I hope that doesn’t refer to me.”
“Maybe I should have said artifacts.” Smiling at him, she wondered just how old he was. To have flown in World War Two, he had to be seventy at least. But today he didn’t look it, despite everything he’d gone through.
“I don’t want to hear you calling the Lady-A an artifact,” he said. “Or a relic either, for that matter. Not in front of her, anyway. Now, come on. I’ll introduce you to her, and some of the crew.”
******
The moment the hangar door rolled open, Nick was in love. Even in pieces, the Lady-A looked majestic. All four of her engines were partially dismantled. Their parts lay in precise rows on separate tarpaulins spread beneath each of the engine nacelles.
Two men were sitting cross-legged on the hangar floor, examining the parts of the outboard port engine.
“This is Nicolette Scott,” Gault called to them.
“Just Nick,” she amended as the two men got up, wiping their hands on
rags, and came forward to greet her.
“Meet Theron Christensen,” Gault said, introducing the younger man first. “My chief mechanic.”
“And this,” Gault said, “is my copilot, Brad Roberts.”
Roberts responded with a grin and an outstretched hand.
Once Nick shook their oily hands, they stepped aside so she could admire the Lady-A.
“She’s named after John’s wife,” Christensen said. “The Lady Ann.” Nick nodded. “John told me.”
“When she behaved, we called her the Lady-A for short,” Roberts said. He pointed to her nose, where a painted green snake held a bright yellow bomb in its fangs. “When she didn’t, we called her the Serpent.”
“No war stories yet,” Gault said as he took Nick by the elbow and led her forward until she was standing beside the nose. Hesitantly, Nick ran her hand along the turret’s spotless Plexiglas. Her fingers tingled with excitement the same way they’d done when she’d uncovered her first airplane. It, too, was a B-24 bomber, one that had disappeared over New Guinea during World War Two. Until her archaeological expedition found the plane, its crew had still been listed officially as missing in action. That particular B-24, though, had been in so many pieces it hadn’t been recognizable at first.
“The Lady-A brought us through twenty-five missions,” Roberts said.
“The question is,” Christensen put in, “does she have another one in her?”
“I’d say that’s up to you.”
The mechanic nodded. “That’s what’s worrying me.”
“Hey, Vic,” Gault called at the top of his voice, “come out of there and meet Nick Scott.”
Legs appeared in the open bomb bay.
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