by Nicole Baart
“To spare me the truth?” Dani spoke quietly, dispassionately.
“The truth that Etsell often flew with a woman? A woman who was a hunting guide at the lodge he worked for? A woman who made regular trips from the Midnight Sun to wherever her clients needed her to be?” Hazel speared Dani with a sharp look. “Stop trying to read into things. Sounds perfectly innocent to me. Besides, if I knew something, I’d tell you. When have you ever known me to spare anyone from anything?”
“So you don’t know anything,” Dani persisted.
“Nothing.”
“There was no woman.”
“Well, Dani, obviously there was a woman. But that doesn’t mean what you think it means.”
How do you know?
Dani wanted to break something. Not because she was so hurt or angry or sad. True, her mind was captive to a hundred different scenes, failures and fights, moments that she was suddenly convinced were enough to drive her husband into the arms of another woman. But the thought of Etsell with this stranger, this Samantha Linden, was numbing somehow. Danica turned it over in her mind, studying the sharp, unexpected angles, and thought, So this is how it ends.
When she had believed that Etsell went missing on his own, she understood the concept of death by broken heart. But nothing had prepared her for the possibility of this. Of his disappearance being intentional, a premeditated loss of self. A severing of “us.” It opened up a place inside her that she didn’t know existed, a corner of her soul so new and raw and untouched, she couldn’t help but press it and wonder what sort of pain she was capable of feeling.
It changed everything, knowing that Etsell might not have disappeared.
He might have left.
Of course, when Blair called to alter the very fabric of her world, he didn’t say that. He merely asked a few benign questions and told Danica that a certain Samantha Linden had been declared missing just that afternoon. They didn’t know for sure, but she might have been in the plane with Etsell.
“My husband has been missing for nine days,” Dani said, vaguely aware that there was a certain veiled urgency when she uttered “my husband.” As if their wedding vows invalidated any insinuation otherwise and bespoke an unassailable proprietorship. “If they’re together, why was Ms. Linden only reported missing today?”
“Sam is a skilled hunter and a fine outdoorsman, uh, outdoorswoman. She’s been known to disappear from time to time. She abandoned her car on the Denali Highway once and lived off the land for nearly two weeks.”
Blair sounded impressed and Dani muttered, “Good for her,” before she could stop herself. Good for her, like Samantha’s talents should earn her a gold star or something equally inane.
“Anyway, according to Russ Manfred, Sam had taken the week off and was flying to Seward with your husband. We know she got off the plane in Seward—she had lunch at the Yukon Bar—but now we’re wondering if she got back on.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t show up for work.”
“Maybe she decided to live off the land again.” Dani’s comment came off snide, but Blair seemed to take it seriously.
“That’s a very likely possibility. But we’re investigating every scenario. It seems just a little strange that Etsell and Sam would go missing within a week of each other, don’t you think?”
“Why?”
Blair stumbled. “Because they worked together. Because they flew together so much. And just a couple of hours after they landed in Seward, they both went missing.”
Dani couldn’t help it. As the rental car sped toward Seward, she pictured Etsell and Sam leaning toward each other in the cockpit of her husband’s borrowed plane. He had a soft smile on his face, the right corner of his mouth quirking a little as if to point to his one and only dimple. His eyes sparked green and gold, and though she knew every inch of his skin, the scent of his cologne, and words his mouth would form before he even said them, she was stunned by how magnetic he was. Of course Samantha Linden spirited him away. Who could blame her?
As if to agree with her private train of thought, Hazel released a long, low sigh. It was a sad sound. A sound of defeat. But then Hazel shook her head, twisting her neck as if she had long hair and she wished for a ponytail. Dani didn’t doubt that Hazel had made that exact movement a thousand times in her life. Ten thousand. There were a handful of faded photos of her with a dark braid that fell halfway down the middle of her back to prove it. And Dani was personally familiar with the look of resolve that settled over Hazel’s features; the way she squared her shoulders like a seasoned linebacker and set her jaw as if she expected a fight.
In a rush of awareness, Dani was grateful that Hazel was by her side. Hazel would fight for the truth. She would find Etsell.
“See the water?” Hazel nodded toward Danica’s window. “It’s Kenai Lake. It means we’re getting close to Seward.”
Dani’s chest seized. Her heart curled in upon itself, tugging the corners close so she wouldn’t have to face all that was to come with her soul wide and vulnerable.
It was a move she had perfected.
Blair Knopf was older than Dani had imagined him to be. He had the voice of a thirty-something, but when he held out his hand to shake Dani’s, it was wrinkled and as rough as fine-grit sandpaper, the age-spotted skin of a man quickly approaching seventy. And yet he didn’t seem old. His hair was thick and boyish somehow—it looked like his wife had cut it, with dubious success—and his eyes were clear and cheerful. If the deep lines arching to his temples could be trusted, he was a man who laughed much.
But he wasn’t laughing as he regarded Danica.
“Welcome to Alaska,” he said solemnly. “I’m sorry your visit is the result of such sad circumstances. Is this your first time here?”
Dani nodded. “It’s beautiful,” she told him, because he looked so heartbroken. It struck her in that moment that Blair thought she was in Seward on a fool’s errand. As far as he was concerned, Etsell was already gone. Dani could see it in his eyes. “The mountains are stunning,” she said, pressing back against his doubt with an attempt at untroubled banter.
“Thank you.” Blair seemed to take personal credit for the beauty of the earth around him. “Seward is really spectacular. You should be touring the glacier, taking a boat around Resurrection Bay, sampling the fare at Ray’s Waterfront. . . .” He shook his head. “But I suppose you’ll have a bird’s-eye view of it all, won’t you? Nothing like seeing the world from the perspective of God himself.”
Dani stole a peek at her surroundings and swallowed down a wave of panic at the sight of the papier-mâché airplanes before her. Blair had insisted on meeting at the Seward airport, and Dani stood bathed in the low shadows of at least a dozen tangible nightmares. They were winged beasts, allegedly large enough and sound enough to carry a precious cargo of life, but to Dani they seemed poised to devour their captives whole.
The Seward airport was a tiny affair about the same size as Blackhawk’s own rudimentary airfield. But while Blackhawk’s airstrip was frequented by only a smattering of pilots, Blair assured Dani that Seward was a regular Grand Central Station in spite of its size. She could hardly believe it, considering that there was only a single runway and two modest-sized Morton buildings surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was also what Dani considered to be a sort of airplane parking lot, and it was here that Blair made his introductions.
Here, Dani thought, her fingers tingling from fear and anticipation. He was here.
As Hazel stepped forward and presented herself to their Civil Air Patrol savior, Dani felt herself inexorably pulled toward Blair’s plane. It reminded her of Etsell’s, but it was older and obviously had more life experience. She lifted her hand to trace the white numbers against the midnight-blue paint, to touch the hard scales of the monster. The metal was cold, the rivets and bolts protruding like keloid scars. She stifled a shiver and backed away, thrusting her balled hands into the pockets of her coat.
“How?”
she whispered, not even knowing what she asked. How do you stay afloat? How did he go missing? How will I ever find him again?
“She’s a beaut, isn’t she?” Blair asked, coming up behind Dani and putting a comforting hand on her shoulder. It was a brief, fatherly touch and Dani leaned into the light pressure for a moment before he pulled away. The absence of his hand left her feeling unbalanced, dizzy.
“Etsell had many affairs throughout the course of our marriage, but they were all with airplanes,” Dani said wryly. She didn’t add that Sam Linden loomed in her mind as the one person who could change all that. Who could tear Etsell’s perfect record into bits of bitter confetti. “I’m sure he would have loved your plane.”
Blair didn’t ask her if she agreed, and Dani was grateful for that. She hadn’t bothered to tell him about her fear of flying, about her downright loathing of anything with metal wings. Her husband was missing, and her resolve was iron. Never mind the fact that she had a pocketful of pills that were supposed to carry her through. She fingered the plastic bottle, feeling the tumble of tiny tablets.
“I was thinking we’d just get an overview of the area this morning. I’ll take you around the bay, and then we’ll get a taste for the fjords. I could show you Exit Glacier and the Harding Icefield. . . .” Blair shrugged a little self-consciously. “I know that sounds kind of touristy, but I thought you might like to get your bearings up there a bit before we start really looking. Tomorrow it will be all business and binoculars.”
“This morning?” Dani all but whimpered at the same moment that Hazel said, “Sounds good.”
Blair looked between the two of them, a wrinkle between his eyes creasing even deeper as he considered the unlikely pair. “If you had something else in mind—”
“No,” Hazel interrupted before he could finish his thought. “We’re not here to waste time. We’re here to find Etsell.”
Blair started to say something, but thought better of it and offered the two women a wan smile. “We’ll do the best we can.”
As Blair readied the plane, doing a preflight check on the flaps, the weights beneath the wings, and every other minuscule wire, attachment, and connection, Hazel pulled Dani aside.
“Are you going to be okay?”
“Fine,” Dani muttered between clenched teeth. “I just wasn’t prepared for—”
“Flying today. I know. Is it too late to take your meds?”
Dani gave Hazel a dour look.
“Do you want to stay back? I can go with Blair today and you can join us tomorrow,” Hazel said.
But Blair was already calling in the flight plan on his cell phone. Dani could hear him giving his plane ID number, the amount of fuel, estimated travel time, route, and number of passengers. Three. Any misgivings she had were buried beneath a sense of obligation. It was her duty to get on that plane.
Blair helped Hazel into the narrow backseat of his Cessna 172, then locked the passenger seat into place for Dani. “I imagine you know your way around one of these,” he said with a knowing wink. “Do you fly much with Etsell?”
“Not much,” she said. It didn’t seem like a lie to her. She might not have been present in the cockpit, but she was with him every time he flew.
Dani buckled herself in, using logic to guide her as she fussed with the straps. Breathing shallowly around the boulder that seemed poised to crush her chest, she reached for the set of headphones on her side of the cockpit and settled them over her ears with a sense of finality.
“Can you hear me?” Blair’s voice crackled.
“Yes.” It was all she could do to make herself respond.
“Hazel?”
“Loud and clear.”
When they taxied down the runway, Dani’s skin pricked with the knowledge that nine days earlier her husband had taken off from this very runway. For a moment she could feel the stir of his excitement, the burst of adrenaline that must have washed over him every time he took to the air in this place that had been the object of his longing. Etsell had wanted this so much. He idealized it and planned for it and bound it with the woven strands of his wishes into private definitions of success and contentment and home. Dani didn’t understand, but as the Cessna picked up speed, she tried.
And in the mayhem of noise around her, the roar of the engine and the rumble of the lightweight plane as it parted the wind like water, Etsell hovered near. He whispered words in her ear. Words that were too soft to discern but impossible to ignore. Insistent phrases, demanding tones, that could have been declarations of love and commitment or the final shout of his frustration, of his pain over a marriage gone bad without her even knowing that it soured a little more every day.
“Did you leave me?” Dani whispered.
“What was that?” Blair asked, darting her a quick look at the exact moment that they lifted off the ground.
But Dani couldn’t begin to explain. And as the airplane gained altitude and shot like an arrow out over a rocky beach toward Resurrection Bay, she was seized with a dread so suffocating, she actually put her hands to her throat and tried to claw it away.
“Resurrection Bay is nine hundred feet at its deepest, so it’s one of the northernmost ice-free bays. It’s accessible even in winter.”
Blair was talking, but to Dani his voice was merely cacophonous nonsense, nothing more than white noise that throbbed against her head.
“Many planes have gone down here, and they are quickly swept out to sea. Not much chance of uncovering anything that has crashed in the bay.”
Dani didn’t mean to look down, but her eyes were drawn to a sparkle below, a slash of sunlight that glowed on the water like an open window. There were boats under her feet, and dark shapes that loomed far beneath the surface of the steel-colored bay. The wind rolled over the wings of the plane and rocked it, shiplike and slow. Some fragmented corner of her mind acknowledged that it was stunning, all of it, but Dani hated and feared it with a ferocity that left her gasping.
“Are you okay?” Blair asked, turning to regard her as she struggled for air.
Dani couldn’t answer.
“Danica?”
The blackness started in the corners of her eyes and slipped steadily inward. Dani could hear Blair call her name, and Hazel join the chorus to make it a frantic duet. The cockpit was hot, but Dani was frozen, trembling uncontrollably as they flew on the cusp of a world she never wanted to know. Gulping, crying, she finally managed to scream, “I can’t do this!”
She pressed her face to the icy window, weeping as she scraped the glass with her fingernails, trying to force her way out.
Danica
The first time I dreamed about Etsell’s disappearance was the night after my complete breakdown in Blair’s plane.
There were a few minutes of absolute mayhem in the sky, of shouting and turbulence and fear before Hazel leaned around my seat and caught my arms from behind. She held me in an iron embrace, her headset bumping against mine as Blair banked hard toward the water and turned us around. I think she whispered something, a faint hum of words tickled the back of my mind, but I was too hysterical to focus on the meaning.
When we were grounded and I had escaped the confines of the pocket-sized cockpit, I came to my senses so quickly, it was as if I had been doused in ice water. The air was cool and clean, the breeze a soft reminder that my nightmares were irrational. I was so humiliated I couldn’t bring myself to face Blair. “I’m sorry” played over and over in my head, a chorus without end, since my lips seemed incapable even of tracing the syllables of my apology.
As Blair shut the doors of his airplane and repositioned yellow blocks around the wheels, I stood at a distance, hugging a dark cloud of shame to myself with arms wrapped tight against my chest. I would have simply left, but Hazel had the keys to the car, and she was stuck so close to Blair’s side they seemed to move as one. I could see her mouth moving nonstop. He held his tongue and nodded, keeping time with the long stream of her monologue.
It took only a f
ew minutes for Blair to set everything right. Then he faced Hazel full-on, smiled politely, and left her in the middle of a sentence. She stopped with her mouth wide open, and I watched in horror as Blair headed straight for me. I held his gaze for a second, but it was too hard to look him in the eye and I dropped my head before he had crossed the space between us. I braced myself, preparing for the verbal lashing that I sorely deserved.
But when I could see Blair’s sneaker come toe-to-toe with mine, he didn’t say a word. Instead, he reached out and folded me to him, resting his cheek on the top of my head. He smelled of oil and exhaust, a scent so familiar and comforting I had to close my eyes against a barrage of memories.
“You okay?” he asked after a moment.
I nodded against his shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have done that to you,” Blair said in a bizarre twist on the apology that I had been mustering up the courage to offer. “It wasn’t fair of me to just assume you were ready for all that. You just got here.”
“It’s not that.” I pulled away, and we stood there awkwardly for a moment before I took a step back and offered: “I hate flying. I’m terrified of it. I thought I could handle it, but . . .”
“Ground work,” Blair said with a casual shrug. “We’ll keep you busy on land while Hazel and I take to the air.”
I battled a quick burst of jealousy—it didn’t seem fair that Hazel and this relative stranger were the ones who would continue the hunt—but it was short-lived. Blair’s suggestion was more than I could have asked for. I figured I would be useless if I couldn’t join them in the plane, but with one thoughtful suggestion Blair gave me a place in the search. My role was relegated to little more than paperwork and prayer, and yet it was something. The corner of my mouth tweaked. “Thank you.”
“No thanks required.”
Before Hazel and I left to check in at the Holiday Inn Express, Blair retrieved a file folder from his car and handed it to me with a look of determination. “I saved everything,” he said. “I know it’s a macabre souvenir, but I thought you would like to have it all the same.”
