For Sandra, knowing they were only a few minutes away from their beloved home of 38 years was cold comfort. She’d lost weight, her skin had taken on an ash-like pallor, her eyes were dull, and her hair was thinner and somehow whiter. Her clothes seemed to swim on her; she looked out of sorts and lost.
She had spent the entire trip from the hospital staring out her passenger-side window, though not at anything. Tim knew there was no point trying to make conversation; she’d barely talked since she woke in the hospital, surrounded by blinking and beeping medical machines.
The crisis for Sandra Erwin would come far sooner than even the AFOAs had predicted. They knew releasing her into her husband’s care to go home would be a potentially dangerous event. But as they had deliberated over the issue for the past few days, they could see that it had to happen sooner or later.
Tim had been directly involved in those discussions, well out of earshot of his wife, and believed that the sooner she went home, the better. Besides, Tim reasoned, they had no choice. They weren’t wealthy, and having refused the idea of profiting from the horrible event by selling their story as they were still living through it, they couldn’t keep Sandra in hospital for long.
And Tim was keen to get home. He’d grown tired of the hospital, and especially having all the AFOAs around. He knew they were only trying to help, but he needed his space and time to deal with everything that had happened.
Tim, like millions of men across the globe, loved his workshop. The modern man now sometimes called places like this “man-caves,” though Tim’s, unlike some, had no large-screen television, pool table, or bar. He just wanted to put on his scruffy old denim jeans and a flannelette shirt, and look out his open garage door while he tinkered with various objects in his workshop.
“There she is, honey,” Tim said, nearly whispering, as they made their way down Central Avenue toward their immaculately maintained Victorian home, which was coming up a few hundred meters away. Seconds passed before Tim looked sidelong at his fragile wife. Sandra hadn’t stopped looking out her window. She must have felt Tim’s eyes on her, so she mumbled “humph,” to try and appease him.
Tim had been home a couple of times since Sandra was admitted to the hospital after their release from Vandenberg, but he had not stayed for more than a few minutes. It was enough to see that their home looked and felt the same, and to sit briefly with the difficulty of believing it had been five years, when outwardly nothing seemed to have changed.
As he eased his 2012 four-door Chevrolet Impala into the driveway, out of the corner of his eye he saw Sandra wince as the rear wheels bumped over the gutter. She drew a deep breath, and Tim knew she was already struggling with the thought of entering her own home.
Tim stepped silently from the driver’s side, and almost instinctively slipped around to Sandra’s door, keen to help her up and out of the car. It would be a testing few minutes for the both of them, and he wondered if it had been a good idea, in hindsight, to refuse his daughter’s offer to be there when he brought Sandra home for the first time since their ordeal. But it was too late to worry about that now, he reflected.
Sandra crept up the ten or so steps to their elevated front porch as if every step was a hundred meters on the way to the summit of Mount Everest. It was slow progress. Tim, there by her side for every step, could have shown the world the meaning of patience.
When they both reached the front porch, Sandra gripped her husband’s arm much tighter, pinching his skin in the process. Tim ignored the pain it caused him and led his wife the last few remaining feet to their front door.
Sandra was almost panting, but Tim believed that was more about navigating the front steps than her apprehension of walking through the front door.
It was at that moment that Tim felt the pang of something being awfully wrong.
He had always been conscious of home security, so he knew something was amiss when he noted that the front window blinds had been left up. He remembered checking them all when he’d last visited.
Tim would have never left the house with the shades up. One of his most loyally followed habits—if Sandra were out—was to check all the downstairs windows were locked, and the blinds down, before he left the house.
Sarah had confirmed only that morning that she had not entered the house since her mother had been hospitalized again, straight out of Vandenberg.
Sandra was completely oblivious to Tim’s concerns; she just stood and stared at their front door.
As Tim slowly opened the door, he was distracted by a strange sound coming from down the street. As he turned around, he saw a line of about six odd-looking cars, all making the weirdest kinds of noise. Alameda was famous for its locals’ love affair with custom-built vehicles of every size and make, so he realized it was nothing of interest to him.
But a moment later, he heard the all-too-familiar sound of his wife’s scream muffled by her own hand.
Tim spun and caught his breath as Sandra turned to him, looking as if she’d seen the ghost of their son standing right there in front of her.
When Tim’s gaze ventured beyond the small, shapely figure of his childhood sweetheart to their sitting room, just next to the entrance area on the first floor, his heart felt as if it was going to do what Sandra’s would do in about ten seconds.
The room, containing a sparse amount of antique furniture from the home’s original period, and serving mainly as a showpiece, rarely used for anything, had been trashed beyond what you would expect from the wildest frat party ever thrown. It was somewhat evident, to Tim, that some serious people had been looking for something, so intently that they had been willing to leave no object intact.
Tim, in a daze, then went to check on the lounge, leaving Sandra right where she was. Her moans were barely audible even though the house was deathly silent.
The lounge was the same, as was the kitchen, where every plate and cup had been pulled out and smashed on the floor, along with every drawer, cooking utensil, appliance and piece of cutlery. Anything that could be taken out, upended, smashed, or torn apart had been. Random floorboards in almost every room had been torn up and left where they fell.
When he’d heard Sandra call his name, he knew by the sheer strain in her voice that she was in serious trouble. Tim had heard the same tone before, only a few weeks ago—when Sandra had been told that her son, daughter-in-law, and three of her five grandchildren were dead.
As he ran down the stairs, Tim heard the sickening thud of Sandra falling to the floor. When he got to her, he found a discarded picture from their wall of framed photos—all of which had been thrown to the floor, the frames smashed—clenched in her left hand. It was of Ben, Jenni, and their three children.
Tim would reflect on that moment many times in the future and recall three things. One, his wife was having her fourth and final heart attack; two, it would be the last time he saw her alive; and three, it had all happened because someone had ransacked his house—looking for something.
Chapter Thirty-One
Tony, the Ben Stiller look-alike copilot, found the notion of a 24-day trip on a sea-bound cruise liner back to his hometown of Brisbane laborious, and overkill where safety was concerned. He boarded another Pacific International flight out of LAX, much to the amazement of his fellow crew members, the passengers, and the millions of people dotted around the globe, now known as “Nineteeners,” who were obsessed with the lives of anyone who had been aboard Flight 19.
Tony no longer cared about the risks of air travel. Like most of the people who’d been on Flight 19, he didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything anymore.
His brother Greg had greeted him at Vandenberg, not his wife of almost ten years. Greg in person, like Tony’s father on the phone, refused to elaborate on why Tony’s wife Tina had not made the trip to California to pick him up.
Ross had told him not to bother going back to Australia, saying there’d only a be a world of pain waiting for him back there. Ross couldn’t even find
out through airline sources what the fuck was going on back in Brisbane with Tony’s wife. It was shrouded in mystery.
So Ross had respected Tony’s decision to go home and try and make sense of what was going on, even if he didn’t quite agree. He only insisted that when Tony found out what was going on in his hometown and made his peace with it, he’d still have somewhere to stay back in Los Angeles—with Ross—if he needed it.
Being the stoic hard-ass that he was, Tony told Ross he’d been through enough in his life to handle anything anyone, even his wife, could throw at him.
Unfortunately, nothing would prepare Tony for what he encountered in Brisbane on his return.
“You’re fucking kidding me.” Tony’s words tumbled from his mouth as he struggled to keep eye contact with his wife.
“What would you have done, Tony?” His wife remained composed, devoid of all human emotion. She had been like that for as long as he could remember. The only time he saw her emotions explode had been when someone stole one of her prized Shih Tzus. Then it had been as if her heart were a volcano and her tears lava.
As the next few days passed, trickles of hindsight, mixed with subtle suspicions, came together for Tony.
Tony’s other brother, Ricky, had shared Tony’s good looks.
As younger men in their teens, the two brothers had the charms and the wits to match their latte-colored skin and boyish good looks.
Ricky had met his special woman a year or so after he had met Tina. Ricky and Suzanna had eventually moved to Sydney, where they had spent their last 12 years running a successful hair salon in Manly.
Ricky and Suzanna had been the two people that Tina gravitated to the most when Flight 19 vanished. They knew her better than most, and Tina and Suzanna had become like sisters.
Together, they tried to make sense of the mystery, and Tina found being with Tony’s brother and his wife, away from the home she had shared with Tony in Brisbane, a welcome distraction from her loss.
Ricky’s fatal heart attack sent their world into a spin. Tony and Ricky’s family was big, like many of the Greek families that had called Australia home for over half a century. As a group, they could not understand why God had taken both brothers away from them in the space of three short years.
Tina and Suzanna, two mourning widows, were left to fend for themselves, and spent months consoling each other, splitting their time between their homes in Sydney and Brisbane.
The family was grateful that the women had each other to turn to. More than anyone, each comprehended what the other was going through. It all made a certain kind of sense.
But at that moment, Tony struggled to get his head around it. After all, what had taken years for them had gone by for him in a matter of weeks.
“Even though it is as clear as day that I am not dead, and all of what happened to me was not my fault, you can stand there, right in front of me, and tell me this?”
Tina looked away from Tony’s piercing eyes for a moment, and looked at the small and very colorful tattoo she’d had done not long ago on her right wrist.
It was a match for the one on Suzanna’s left wrist, so that when they held hands, the tattoos touched each other. Just as they had been doing, in more ways than one, as long as they’d known each other.
And without their husbands around, it had been no point keeping it a secret.
They had come out.
And then Tony had come back.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Tony sipped on his Grey Goose and tonic; 95% Goose, 5% tonic. And he had asked the flight attendant, an old friend, to go very light on the ice. From Tony’s tired, washed-out look, she had judged that two blocks would be enough.
He knew he could count on Michelle to keep the vodka flowing as long as he needed it. That would be some time.
He wondered, as the first sip stung a tiny cut on the inside of his bottom lip, which he had been biting, whether it would have been better or worse if Tina had shacked up with some random guy rather than with his sister-in-law. Both were bad enough, though it felt like it hurt him more than the betrayal, as it seemed to him, had been with family—albeit not a blood relative.
However he felt about it, these, he reminded himself, were the facts: his marriage was over, and his wife was obviously now a lesbian. What Tony would never know was—she’d been a lesbian for far longer he thought.
Within a few hours of the flight leaving Brisbane on its way back to LA, Michelle was across what had happened to Tony and his marriage. She agreed with him that Ross’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel was probably as good a place as any for him right now. At least, Michelle said, he would be with people who were still living the nightmare of having the last five years stolen right from under them.
Michelle brought another glass of Grey Goose to Tony, adding to her count of how many he’d had. She wanted to make sure Tony wouldn’t get blind drunk and potentially make a fool of himself.
In her 16 years’ experience as an international flight attendant, she had lost count long ago of how many times she had seen passengers, both men and women, disgrace themselves through excessive alcohol consumption. International flights were, for most people, long and laborious, and hell, the alcohol was free, so why not? Some acted if it were their God-given right to get drunk and piss off everyone around them, including the attendants. She thought she knew Tony was not the type, but that was before Flight 19, and before his wife had left him for a woman.
He’d just taken ownership of his fourth bottle of Grey Goose when Michelle looked down at him and smiled.
Tony, feeling the calmness of being slightly tipsy, met her eyes and said quietly, “There’s gotta be at least one good story to come out of this, wight?”
Michelle decided she would suggest Tony get some sleep after he finished his next vodka. His words were starting to slur.
She looked over to one of the windows, watching the bed of white clouds nestled below them at 35,000 feet. She never got tired of the sight. Then she met Tony’s tired gaze once more.
His eyes were large and sad; she could see the hurt nestled deep within them, and hoped one day the pain would be gone.
She recalled the story of Rob and Leigh Beech.
Rob was a Flight 19 passenger. His wife of only three years (at the time of the disappearance) was not on-board.
“What about the Beeches?” Michelle looked down at Tony, searching for some recognition. Tony looked into the distance, searching the Flight 19 passenger manifest in his head. The name did not jump out at him.
It hadn’t been that long, but there were so many names and tragedies that he’d lost track of most of the stories except the ones that really stuck out: Michael E. Darcy, Melanie Lewinson, Tammy Hourigan, Emily Collins, the Erwins, and others he could recall faces, but not names.
His eyes came back to Michelle’s. “That name— I don’t remember shell.”
She took a moment to check the aisles of business class to ensure all the passengers were okay. No one was looking in her direction, so she knew she was free to talk to Tony a little more.
“Rob was on your plane, but his wife of only a few years was home when it disappeared,” she said. Tony nodded but still could not recall.
Michelle could feel herself blushing as she thought about it—one of the most romantic stories she’d heard in her life, let alone Flight 19.
“Leigh never stopped believing her husband would come back to her,” she said.
Tony smiled in a vain attempt to look slightly interested.
“That’s niysh,” Tony said, now realizing his words were getting a little fuzzy around the edges.
Michelle looked down at him, knowing he still was miles from the point of the Beeches’ story.
“Leigh kept paying for her husband’s cell service even after five long years of never hearing the phone ring.” Even in Tony’s current state of mind, he thought that was quite the lesson in dedication.
Michelle could see Tony was drifting
off to sleep—just what he needed. She reflected on the story she just told him, about the couple who had been reunited for the first time in five years, having been completely loyal and faithful to each other the entire time they had been apart (granted, not quite such an achievement for Rob as for Leigh). She thought it was a lesson in love that was bigger than life itself.
She recalled her elderly Greek neighbor, who lived in the apartment next door to hers, and whose husband had died when she was in her early forties. Now 79, she had never remarried or been in another relationship, for over three decades. Lisa thought it was unfathomable that love could be that deep, and wondered if she would ever feel the same for someone. The Beeches wowed her, and she’d seen a photo of Mrs. Beech. Quite the stunner. She wouldn’t have stayed loyal for lack of options.
Michelle thought Mrs. Beech had been through quite the ordeal, first losing her husband and then, only recently, her long-term employer being killed.
She peered back a few rows and watched Tony snoring peacefully into his small blue pillow, and thought—fuck, it’s a small world, huh?
Her employer’s wife had also been on Flight 19.
Leigh Beech had been Charles Lewinson’s executive assistant for many years.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tammy returned to St. Louis, her heart crushed, her soul broken, devoid of any positivity. She felt as if she had nothing.
Brandon had married Annie, who Tammy now deemed her “whore of a sister” and, to make matters a whole lot worse now had legal guardianship of her two young children.
Even though she could now afford a high-priced lawyer—maybe one of those celebrity types that basked in the view of television cameras—it could well prove futile.
Her heart ached for her children; she missed them that much more since leaving Vandenberg and losing what would have been her third child, her second daughter. She was due to see Beth and Noah the day after next. The hours couldn’t count down fast enough. And coupled with the anxiety of waiting to see them was her overwhelming apprehension about coming face to face with her twin sister.
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