“The earliest I can get you to Punta Cana is 1:35 in the afternoon, and to do that, you and Kurt have to catch a 6:45 a.m. flight to San Juan, then you connect there to Punta Cana.”
“That sounds great.” The sooner we started our journey, the better I would feel.
She continued. “You’re staying at the Puntacana Resort, about a mile and a half from the airport. The rooms are only ninety-five dollars per night. I had heard the DR was inexpensive, but, wow.”
A resort on the beach for that price? Nick and I should go there sometime, I thought. If we find him. When we find him. We will find him.
“You’re awesome. Thank you.”
“Do you want a car?” she asked.
“I don’t think so. Our business is at the airport. And the hotel is close.”
“I agree,” Kurt said. “Now, let me tell you what I found out.”
Kurt had had mixed luck. He confirmed that the content of Nick’s messages was not readable online. But he learned that AT&T’s system showed up-to-the-minute message logging by phone number for both sends and receives. He had handwritten a list of the numbers, which included mine and three others. I hated that the last one Nick had sent to me had been at noon the previous day, and that I had forgotten about it. However, that did shorten the length of his disappearance by seven hours, from the time he left my side at five a.m. to the noontime text.
And Annalise had sent me a message at one p.m. yesterday. I shivered. That suggested the window was shorter by yet another hour. Oh, Annalise. If only you could speak.
The big hand on the old wood-framed clock above the great room’s mantel was nearing midnight. Kurt and Julie trekked back downstairs to their apartment. Ruth had tucked in half an hour ago in the guest bedroom on the main floor. I scurried around shutting off lights, locking doors, and packing for the trip. I doubled back to the office twice, once for my passport—where I noticed for the first time that Nick’s was gone—and one time for my laptop charger. I stopped in to kiss Taylor and the girls before I retreated to my own room. Nick’s and my room.
I settled into our bed, cell phone and list of numbers in hand, still wearing Nick’s black t-shirt that I’d thrown on before Tutein hauled me off into the bush to threaten me. Had that really only been today? It seemed like weeks ago now.
My eyes wanted to close, but first I typed the same text message to each number on Kurt’s short list from AT&T:
“Hey, this is Nick. I got a new cell phone. Just checking in.”
If that didn’t yield results, I’d switch tactics in the morning. I prayed to God to keep Nick safe, and I closed my eyes.
A hand touched my shoulder, then pushed it. “Katie?” Nick said. “Katie, wake up. It’s me.”
I fought waking, but my eyes opened after he shook me a few more times. “What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s three a.m. I know it’s late, but I need to tell you something.”
“Where have you been?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember, silly? I went shopping for presents to make you smile.”
“Oh, yeah. You told me that.”
My eyes closed. His hand shook my shoulder again.
“Katie, wake up, listen to me, because I can only talk for a moment. I need you to know I am all right. Don’t stop looking for me. Take the picture with you. I’m counting on you.”
“Wait! What? Nick?” I jumped up and the cotton sheets slid to the floor as my feet hit it. “Nick?”
Nick was not there. Of course he wasn’t. You’re dreaming, I thought as I climbed back into bed, tears falling. It was just a dream.
I heard a crash and jerked awake. Annalise’s agitation was sparking in the air around me and I realized she had hurled something to the ground. I got out of bed again and flipped on the light switch. The sound had come from Nick’s closet. I opened the door and found his tackle box sitting upright on the floor, five feet down from its shelf above Nick’s hanging clothes rack.
“What do you mean, Annalise? A tackle box?”
I squatted down beside it and placed both my hands on its lid. I closed my eyes and Nick’s voice filled not just my head, but my whole body. “I’m all right. Don’t stop looking for me. Take the picture with you. I am counting on you.”
I opened the box and pulled out each item, one by one. Hooks, leaders, rubbery squid. Odds and ends I couldn’t name. And a water-damaged picture of Nick and his father on a fishing boat called the Little Mona Lisa.
“What is this? Annalise, Nick? What am I supposed to get from this? Annalise? Help me, please help me.”
Stillness. Complete quiet.
After several long minutes sitting on the floor in front of Nick’s closet waiting for an answer or an idea, I gave up. I tucked the picture into my travel bag and returned to bed to sleep for another hour and a half with Nick’s voice and Annalise’s antics in my head.
By five a.m., Kurt and I had grabbed the coffee cups Ruth held out for us, and I had steered the nose of the Silverado toward the airport. We sipped our coffee in silence.
Nick, I’m coming to find you.
Chapter Twelve
Spanish. Everyone in the DR airport spoke it, and my pidgin Tex-Mex version didn’t sound a thing like the guttural pronunciations that were pummeling my ears and setting off tiny explosions in my brain. My head throbbed so badly by the time we made it from customs out to the taxis that I wanted to clamp one hand on either side of it and squeeze it into stillness.
The day was hard, but Kurt made an ideal traveling companion. He stayed quiet, did the heavy lifting, and kept the assertive Puerto Rican and Dominican men away. He was responsible for most of our weight, though; he had maritime maps for half the world in his hard-sided suitcase that was so old it didn’t even have wheels. Thriftiness, another trait of a good Mainer. My in-laws had lived in Annalise’s downstairs apartment for over six months, and the close proximity meant continual, if congenial, interaction. I sincerely liked them, and Lord knows I appreciated them. I knew very little about my reserved father-in-law, though. He hardly spoke a word.
Towering over the Dominicans around us, Kurt hailed a taxi. The driver spoke in poor English and Kurt answered in perfect Spanish that even sounded somewhat Dominican. He ended the haggling by holding up five fingers, then shaking his head no when the taxi driver asked for more. Masterful.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” I asked as the taxi jolted out of the airport.
“What?” Kurt said.
“Speak Dominican Spanish, or any Spanish at all, for that matter.”
“I piloted ships in and out of the Corpus Christi Bay from all over the Caribbean and Central and South America for thirty-five years. And I lived in South Texas. Couldn’t help but learn it.”
I spent the rest of the short drive staring out the window at the hotels and beaches that seemed two-dimensional without Nick there with me. If I opened one of the front doors, I felt like I would step through a façade into nothingness.
When we arrived at the Puntacana Resort, Kurt paid the driver to wait while we checked in and deposited our bags. There was no time to waste, and I barely registered my surroundings in the rush. The resort was just like every other hotel in the Caribbean, anyway: lush greenery, tinkling steelpans, the hum of conversations over frozen rum drinks. Our rooms? Roofs and beds. Maybe I’d notice more later, but not now. We raced back to the airport.
This time, as we approached the airport by road instead of air, I could see the palm fronds that covered the terminals, making them look like giant thatched-roof huts. When we were ushered through customs and the public terminal by American Airlines and airport personnel an hour ago, I hadn’t noticed anything about the aesthetics. Tan on forgettable tan over hard floors. But from the outside I could see it was bigger than I’d realized. The ticket and bag-checking areas were classic Caribbean open-air patios, and even the interior of the terminal wasn’t fully enclosed by walls. I could see the beach in the distance.
W
e stopped at the curb and Kurt negotiated with our driver, who handed him a business card. Kurt read it, and then introduced us formally, which felt peculiar and right at the same time.
“Katie, this is Victor. Victor, Katie.”
“Mucho gusto,” I said.
“Mucho gusto, señora,” Victor said.
I slowed myself down enough to really see him for the first time. Victor looked about my age, although I found it hard to guess men’s ages. Especially dark-complexioned men, who to my eye aged better than light-skinned men, who in turn aged better than women of any skin tone. Lucky bastards.
“Victor will drive us anywhere we need to go. I paid him for the day. He will park at our hotel and come for us when we call.” He handed me Victor’s card and I programmed the number into my mobile.
Victor dropped us off at Terminal Three. We had entered through Terminal One, which housed the international commercial flights and teemed with people. Terminal Three was for private planes, and was enveloped in an atmosphere of serenity. The breeze was cooler, the light softer, and the pace slower. Terminal Three whispered “money—dirty, sexy money here.”
Kurt and I started our questions with a gristly old guy manning an information booth. He had an air of courtly pride, but no information. Next we talked to three different uniformed Dominicans in the customer service area. They made our St. Marcos citizenry seem churlish.
Within fifteen minutes—an astonishingly short period of time that still felt endless to me—a young woman ushered us into an office with a tarnished brass plaque on the door that read “G. Marrero.” She sat us in two chairs in front of a metal desk and left the room. We waited there, thinking that it was strange to be left alone, considering this age of terrorism. But we weren’t in Kansas anymore, for sure. We looked around at the framed certificates and diplomas on the walls, and spotted a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Miami. Miami—as in Miami on the southeast tip of the United States. That meant that G. Marrero should speak English. Please, Lord . . .
As the minutes passed, I grew antsy. I pulled the blue notebook from my purse and updated my notes and to-do list again, but I’d already updated it on the plane, so there wasn’t much to add. After half an hour, I was frantic. Since Nick’s disappearance, I’d been holding hysteria at bay (although not one hundred percent successfully) with action: action with the purpose of finding my husband. Sitting, waiting, doing nothing while at the mercy of this G. Marrero’s schedule was too action-less for me.
I tried to picture Nick and an image of his body strapped into a mangled airplane flashed up. No, not that one. I forced a replacement.
Nick standing before me in the backyard of Annalise, promising to forsake all others so long as we both should live, looking like he meant it.
Come on. Hurry, I willed G. Marrero.
“Buenos tardes,” someone—presumably with the last name of Marrero—said.
Kurt and I stood, and Gabriel Marrero introduced himself to us as the manager of the terminal and apologized for our long wait.
I jumped in. “Could you help us find out whether our Piper Malibu landed here two days ago?”
Gabriel’s English sounded like all consonants. “I am sure we could. Give me all the details.”
“Tail number RJ7041,” I said. Gabriel jotted notes as I spoke. I tried to read the upside down script, without success. Spanish. “Frankly, we don’t know much,” I continued, “and the circumstances are suspicious. Could we find out whether it ever landed here, and if it had cleared takeoff with the air traffic control tower, too? Our best guess for departure would be after the noon hour, but before three p.m.” I paused, and then added, “If the answer to either of these is a yes, we will have more questions, of course.”
Gabriel nodded. He hadn’t interrupted my explanation a single time. Now he read the details back for confirmation. The man was quick, and he had taken it in perfectly.
“Most troubling. I am so sorry for your situation,” he said. He leaned forward now, tapping his pen rhythmically on his notepad. Ba-da-dum ba-da-dum ba-da-dum. “The things you ask are no problem, and I would be honored to help you. It will be much easier if I talk to our people myself, since most of them don’t speak English. So if you will permit me to go do that, I would ask you to wait here. Give me half an hour,” he said. “Maybe less.”
“Thank you,” I said. I appreciated his help, his English, and his wonderful, comforting manners, that Caribbean Latino formality.
“De nada, you’re welcome,” he said. He left and the sound of his steps receded quickly.
We were alone again in the office. The press of time descended on me.
“I keep trying to think of something, anything we can do to move forward during all this waiting. It’s killing me. Nick is out there somewhere. He needs us to hurry,” I said.
Kurt nodded, making eye contact with me and holding it. He hadn’t shaved that morning and his stubble was coming in gray. It lightened his gypsy face. With their Hungarian ancestry, Nick and his father could really pass for Latino. Tall Latino.
I continued. “Maybe we should check in with the FAA.”
“Yup, I think we should do that while we are here today. Not yet, though. Let’s see if Nick was even here, first.”
Frustrated, I broke eye contact. He was right.
I dumped the contents of my purse on an open area of the desk in front of us.
Kurt grunted. I looked up. He raised an eyebrow.
“I have to do something. I’ll clean out my purse.” It was the perfectly sensible thing to do.
I separated the contents of my handbag into piles: trash, put back in wallet, and return to purse. I walked over to the trashcan and dropped my handful. One of the pieces stared back at me—not trash. It was the list of phone numbers Nick had sent texts to right before he vanished.
I fished it out and read it again, and something niggled my brain. Could any of these be numbers I recognized, people I knew? No. Had someone altered a number? No. Still, one of the numbers seemed to glare at me. I compared the numbers to the ones I’d texted from my own phone late last night.
“Shit!” I said.
“What?” Kurt asked.
“I texted these numbers, but I typed one in wrong. I’m doing it again right now.” I double-checked the digits this time, punching harder than necessary, and sent the message. More time lost.
Gabriel strode back into his office, interrupting my self-flagellation.
“Hola, Señor Kovacs, Señora Kovacs,” he said. He pulled his chair around to our side of the desk and straddled it, leaning so far forward he almost tipped into us. The man was excited. “My news es bueno.”
Now I leaned toward him.
Gabriel said, “Sí, sí, Mr. Kovacs landed your plane at this very airport and entered this very terminal,” he consulted his watch and his lips moved silently, “fifty-two hours ago. I talked to the man who directed them when they parked the plane. Not just Mr. Kovacs, but another man and two extremely beautiful women.” This last part he conveyed with his hands sculpting the air into an hourglass.
The hourglass was no surprise, but another man? What other man? What the hell had Nick done, anyway, flown a party barge over to the DR? What had happened to “just interviewing a few witnesses, Katie?” Oh, Nick!
“The tower confirmed a plane with those tail numbers landed here, but said that they came from San Juan, Puerto Rico,” he added.
Kurt and I exchanged a wide-eyed look. So Nick had not flown straight from St. Marcos? But what did that mean?
“Go on,” I said.
Gabriel continued, gesturing first at Kurt and then at me as he spoke. “Your son’s—your husband’s—plane made last contact with the tower at 12:52 p.m., clearing for takeoff.”
“Where did he go?” I asked.
“Lo siento,” Gabriel said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. Mr. Kovacs didn’t file a flight plan.”
“Doesn’t he have to tell someo
ne where he’s going?” I asked.
“No, not unless he’s flying using instruments, you know, like in bad weather. Otherwise, a pilot can fly wherever he wants, just like a person driving a car,” Gabriel explained.
Kurt added, “He didn’t even radio the tower when he took off in St. Marcos, Katie. In fact, they were pretty angry with him about it.”
This shocked me, although it jived with trying to “fly under the radar.”
“So how do we find out where he went? How do we know? Where is he?” I turned to my father-in-law and grabbed him by his upper arms. “Where is he?” I demanded in a wail. And I broke into sobs.
Gabriel leaped to his feet. He retrieved a cloth handkerchief from his desk drawer and proffered it to me. In the midst of falling apart, my natural instincts kicked in. Bacteria. Germs. Other People’s Bodily Fluids. I let go of Kurt and accepted the kerchief gingerly. Gabriel meant well, so I did my Academy Award nominee best of pretending to dab my eyes with it.
“Gracias,” I said. I handed it back to him and counted the seconds until I could reasonably pull out my hand sanitizer. God, I was a complete and total freak. Still, I was very grateful, and I liked the man. His kind gesture had helped me exert self-control by redirecting my attention to that square of fabric. I thought of men who were kind to women, and again that hateful image of Elena’s hand in Nick’s flashed into my head.
Please let Nick be OK, and please Lord let him not be in Mexico with that woman.
“Kurt, we’ll just need to find everyone we can that saw him. He has to have told someone where he was going,” I said. Just not me.
Kurt held his jaw and rubbed it with his thumb. “Well, maybe so. And ask them other questions, too, I guess.”
“Absolutely. Like, what did they do while they were here? Did they eat? Did they talk to anyone? Did they shop? Did they take a taxi? Rent a car? Did Nick have anyone service the plane? He could have had someone work on it or fuel it up. Did he talk to anyone in the pilots’ lounge? Who was with him when he left?” I spit the words out as fast as I could think of them.
Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) Page 10
