Angela looked at the faces surrounding her. They looked harmless enough and they hadn’t called her mother. Maybe they did just want to talk.
Lex went on, “I’ve explained the situation to Dr. Dayton, but I want him to hear it from you. So far Mr. Baumgarten has only my word, as does Mr. Summers, about what you saw.”
Angela waited. Let them say everything they had to say and then she would decide. Where was Heather? She would feel better if the pretty executive from the mall was in on this—whatever this was. She didn’t want to call it an interrogation.
Angela willed her face to total blankness and Lex cringed. Jesus, what if she refused to talk?
Eric looked directly into Angela’s eyes. “Your visit to Ms. Andrews and telling her about a potential explosion at Timberwoods Mall has caused us a great deal of concern. I’m going to ask you straight out, Angela, do you know anything about the bomb threat that you haven’t told us? Did you send it? Do you know who did?”
Angela involuntarily took a step backward, wanting to put some distance between herself and the man who seemed to be trying to peer into her very soul.
“I . . . I only know what I’ve already told you, nothing about the bomb threat. I don’t know who could have sent it.” She could feel herself beginning to tremble. Her gaze fixed on Dayton. “You said he’s a doctor. What’s he doing here? Did my mother send you?” she demanded suspiciously.
“I’m a psychiatrist, Angela, and I want to help,” Dayton said.
“Help who? Me or the police?” she snapped defiantly.
Surprising her, Harold spoke up, his tone gentle. “We’re here to discuss the possibility of saving lives. If we’re to believe what you say, then you have to help us. We aren’t going to laugh at you, and we aren’t going to ridicule you. I don’t pretend to understand these things; that’s why Dr. Dayton is here. Summers and myself are responsible for the safety of the people who shop in the mall. Lassiter is here because Heather called him into the situation. We want to help, but before we can do that you have to help us.”
Angela’s expression stayed blank as she stared at first one man, then the other. If she talked, she could walk out of this house—but it didn’t really make any difference; they wouldn’t be able to do anything. “What do you want to know?”
She heard the audible sigh of relief from one of the men. So, they were worried.
Noel questioned Angela for over two hours, making notes on a small pad he held on his knees. Not once, by voice or look, did he show belief or disbelief. Harold shifted position from time to time while Eric just sat, his face stony and hard.
“That’s all there is to tell,” Angela said finally. She had consciously omitted any mention of Charlie. They didn’t ask and she didn’t say anything. Charlie cared about her, she knew he did, and she didn’t want anyone to spoil it by telling him she was a weirdo. She wanted to keep the barely begun relationship going with him—she couldn’t just let go. It was as though she was connected to him somehow, and she needed that connection. “You can’t do anything about Timberwoods Mall. Nobody can do anything. Why are you trying?”
“If nobody can do anything, why did you go to the mall and speak to Ms. Andrews? Why did you tell her the story?” Noel asked in return.
“I don’t know exactly why. I just felt I had to tell someone. I suppose I thought that if I told someone it wouldn’t be so bad. If I didn’t, all those people . . . well, what happened would be partly my fault.”
“What would you say if I told you we could close the mall during Christmas week and there wouldn’t be anyone there to get hurt?”
“You won’t be able to close the mall,” Angela said flatly. “You can’t change what I saw. What I see happens, just like the plane and the little—” Angela stopped, trying to gulp back her words.
“What plane?” Noel demanded.
Angela flushed. “Nothing.”
“Tell me, Angela,” Noel said firmly.
“I don’t want to talk about it. I told you, it’s nothing. Leave me alone. You said that when I told you everything I could go. Well, I’ve told you and now I want to leave,” she said. She got to her feet.
“Wait a minute, Angela. The deal was that you were to tell me everything. You said you would. Now, what about the plane?”
“The plane had nothing to do with the mall,” Angela said, her face drained of color.
“Please,” Noel said firmly. “Up to now you’ve cooperated beautifully. Why leave anything out? Whatever it is, it might help us. Let us be the judges.”
“If I tell you, then can I leave?”
“You have my word, and I don’t give my word lightly,” Noel said, leaning across the coffee table, his face earnest.
Angela licked her dry lips and looked from one man to the other. “All right, but you aren’t going to like it. I woke up, just before I went to Timberwoods, right before the cop picked me up. I saw the light, just like the other times. I screamed and wouldn’t open my eyes, but somehow my eyes opened and there it was. I don’t want to tell you,” she said, getting up suddenly. “I changed my mind. I want to leave now.” Her features were rigid with fear. She could feel herself shaking. The tremors reached her fingers, her toes.
“You have to tell me, Angela,” Noel said quietly. “Sit down and take a deep breath and let it all out. Don’t you feel better when you tell someone? Of course you do,” he answered for her. “When you talk about it, it doesn’t seem so bad. I want to know, Angela. I have to know so I can help you.”
“You can’t do anything about this, either, so why do I have to tell you?”
“We don’t know for sure that we can’t do anything. All we can do is try. Isn’t trying better than nothing?”
“Okay, okay. There was this plane . . . It was little, not like the big jets. I don’t know if it was night or day, because of the bright light. The plane was on fire; I heard the drone of the engine and then I heard the sputter . . . the sky was lit up and the plane was burning.”
Angela’s voice began to rise with the onset of panic. “I think it crashed. There was a little girl who might have died—I hoped she was asleep. She was very pretty and she had gold circlets in her ears. She was tiny and so still . . . she had a lot of dark curls. I didn’t want her to be dead.”
Tears trickled down Angela’s thin cheeks as she talked. Wearily she shook her head from side to side. “You see, you can’t do anything about this, either. No one can do anything.” She looked to Noel, as if for reassurance.
Noel was off the chair and kneeling beside her. “Right now I don’t have any answers for you. But I want you to listen to me. You had this vision a few hours ago. Is that right?”
“Yes. I’ve already told you.”
“Where was the plane? By that I mean, was it here in Woodridge, or was it some place farther away? Could you tell?”
“No. It could be anywhere.”
“These other visions, the ones you’ve had in the past—were they all more or less around here, let’s say within a twenty-five mile radius?”
Angela nodded.
“And you couldn’t tell if it was day or night?”
“No, because of the bright light. I couldn’t see beyond the light.”
“Did the plane crash or was it on fire?”
“I think it crashed because it was on fire. The whole scene was fire.”
“What color was the plane?”
“White with some red on the wings and black letters on the side.”
Noel’s voice rose in excitement. “Did you see the letters?”
“Yes, I saw them. P-654RT. Big black letters.”
“The little girl—think again. Do you know what happened to her?”
“I wasn’t sure. But she was so still.”
“How old was she, Angela? Do you know? Could you guess?”
“Three years, maybe four. It would be hard to say because she was so tiny. And she had those little gold earrings, almost covered by the dark curls.”
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“Angela, if the plane was burning, wouldn’t she have burned, too? Or was she thrown clear?”
Angela frowned. “There wasn’t any fire around her. She wasn’t burned at all.”
“Where did she come from?”
Angela looked puzzled. “I don’t know. At first I thought she was asleep.”
“How do you know?”
Angela appeared confused. “I don’t know. Her mother was nearby, like she’d been watching over her. She seemed awfully sad. And don’t ask me how I know that, either. I just know.”
“Think. Was there anything else, anything you might have forgotten? Was there anybody else in the plane? What about the pilot? Were there any other passengers?”
Angela shook her head. “Just what I saw.”
“Is there any way for you to know how soon these things happen after you see them, how—”
“I don’t know!” Angela cried, jumping up. “A day, two days . . . I don’t know! Sometimes just a few hours. I don’t want to talk about it anymore!” Her voice rose to a shriek. She’d had enough. More than enough. She’d told them all she knew and they still wanted more. But there wasn’t any more. She buried her face in her hands and tried to erase the little girl’s face from her mind.
Charlie! She wanted Charlie! She wanted to know that when she left here she could go to him and that he would be waiting for her with open arms and no questions. But now she didn’t even know that, because he wasn’t home or he wasn’t answering the phone.
Amy heard her pathetic cry and was through the swinging doors in a flash, rushing to her side and wrapping her arms protectively around Angela.
“You stop it right now! Right this instant! Come on, honey, you come with me. We’re going to have chocolate cake and milk, and you clods can sit here and drink. You aren’t getting any of my cake.”
“Chocolate?” Harold asked longingly.
“Devil’s food,” Amy said tartly as she led Angela into the sweetly fragrant kitchen.
As soon as the swinging doors closed, Noel turned to the others, giving them a serious look.
“Hey, you believe her, don’t you?” Eric stared at Noel, a peculiar expression on his face. “Going on faith? From the look of you, you believe.”
“I wouldn’t call it belief exactly. More like instinct,” Noel replied.
Eric lifted a hand. “Now, hold on. I’m willing to believe she sees these things, but I draw the line at that. She may be just highly sensitive, though, or cursed with a wild imagination. I mean, claiming to foretell death and disasters—”
Noel’s calm gaze stopped Eric cold. “I want to know. Do you believe her?”
For a long moment Eric stared at the floor, unable to face Noel. Then his gaze went to Lex, who was looking at him, waiting for his answer. And Harold, who groaned and rubbed his face with short, stubby fingers.
“I guess I have my answer,” Noel said. “It seems I’m not the only one who believes her. Christ. I don’t want to. I don’t want to think she’s right. About the plane, about Timberwoods, anything.”
“Timberwoods!” Harold exclaimed. “She wasn’t right about the mall. Nothing happened today. The letter said seventy-two hours. That’s passed and nothing’s happened.”
Eric and Lex looked at one another and nodded. Harold was right. They could all take it easy. There wasn’t any plane tumbling to earth. There wasn’t any danger to Timberwoods.
Then Noel’s voice cut through them like a knife. “The bomb threat said seventy-two hours. Angela didn’t. She said the height of the Christmas season.”
His words were spoken with precise emphasis, so no one missed the point. Eric felt a spread of gooseflesh on his back. “All right, Dayton, what are we gonna do?”
“What time is it?” Noel snapped.
“Ten-fifteen,” Lex volunteered. “If it happens, let’s hope it happens after midnight. Wait a minute—think about the letter-numbers combination she saw. Don’t pilots have to file a flight plan? That very important detail would help us to identify the plane.”
Noel had the phone in his hand and was dialing as Lex finished speaking. He asked his questions, waited, then hung up.
Lex held his breath while Eric paced the room. Harold clenched and unclenched his moist hands.
At 11:10 the phone shrilled and Noel, in his haste, managed to bump his shins on the coffee table. They had been waiting for a call from an FAA contact in the agency’s liaison office, part of a team who assisted state and local police departments across the country.
“Hello, Dayton here,” he answered. “Is that the best you could do? Of course, I understand . . . All right, then, I’ll do that.”
Slowly he hung up the receiver. “They’re still trying to trace the plane. She might have the numbers wrong—you know how it is with visions,” he added wryly. “Not having a point of departure or arrival adds a degree of difficulty.”
“What did he tell you to do?” Eric asked.
“What?”
“You said you’d do something. What?”
“Oh. Yeah. He said to start calling around to check out private airstrips, airfreight companies, anything we can. There’s thousands of small planes and other aircraft in US skies—they don’t have up-to-the-minute information on every single one.”
“For all Angela’s told us, it could be in Oshkosh.” Eric blew out a frustrated breath.
“Let’s assume it’s within a two-hundred-mile radius of here.” Lex took a smartphone out of his pocket and started looking with a directory app on its screen, and Eric opened his laptop, clicking and saving information to an open document.
Harold looked over Eric’s shoulder at the information on the laptop. Eric dug in his pocket and handed him his cell. “Forget yours again? Here. Stay off the landline, please—Amy might need to make a call. This is my work phone.”
Harold dialed the number of the first airstrip and handed the cell to Eric, who identified himself by name, badge number, department, and locale. Speaking in his most authoritative voice, he asked to speak to air control, requesting notification if a small plane with the numbers P-654RT had asked for permission to land.
They repeated the process about a dozen times.
“Who knew there were that many private airstrips out there?” Noel said wearily.
“We have to call them all.”
It took a while. Then all the three men could do was wait.
“We believe that girl. Look at us. We really believe her.” Lex ran his fingers through his hair. “What are we going to do?”
“I wish to hell I knew. We’ll have to find some way to close the mall, that’s all there is to it. If anyone’s got any suggestions, I’d like to hear them,” Eric said, propping his feet on the coffee table and stretching his hands behind his head.
“Not me,” Lex mumbled. Noel was scribbling in his notebook and didn’t bother to answer. Harold fidgeted in his chair, his round eyes pools of concern.
“Our hands are tied. They’re not going to let us close the mall, and you know it. If this plane crashes—and one will, I can feel it in my bones—the girl was right. We can only hope she was wrong about Timberwoods.” Lex’s voice was dry and tight. He heaved a sigh and rubbed his eyes.
“Can we declare martial law to shut it down?” Harold asked.
“We’re police, not army,” Eric said.
“We could always throw Dolph Richards in the clink,” Harold muttered.
“Where he would be safe, unfortunately,” Eric pointed out. “And don’t forget the three hundred and forty-one shop owners who’d go with him,” he added. “All we can do is sit and wait.”
It was 12:21 in the morning when the phone rang. Eric answered it. “Yes, I’m Detective Summers of the Woodridge Police. I inquired about the plane.”
He swore softly at the information he was getting from the other end of the line. Another minute and he hung up the receiver.
“A Piper Cub crashed into the Apex Theatre on North Washington
at thirteen minutes after twelve. The pilot complained of chest pains at eleven fifty-nine. Let’s go.”
While the others were putting their coats on, Eric went into the kitchen. “Angela,” he said softly, “a plane crashed into a movie theater. Last show had just let out. The place was empty.”
She recoiled in silent horror. He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Amy will take care of you.” He looked to his wife.
“Of course I’m going to take care of her. What kind of mother do you think I would be if I couldn’t take care of this child? Do whatever you have to do and don’t worry about us.”
“In my gut I thought the kid was making all this up,” Eric mumbled on the way out. “It didn’t seem possible. I still don’t believe it. I won’t believe it till I see the little girl and the numbers on the plane. Maybe Angela once flew with the pilot or something—hell, who knows? But nothing about her surprises me by now. What I don’t get is how nonchalant she can be. When I walked into the kitchen she was asking my wife to explain how you grow herbs, as though she really wanted to know.”
“She probably did want to know. That’s why people ask questions,” Noel said shortly as he reached his station wagon out of the dark driveway. “I wish I had some answers for you.”
Both cars careened down the road, heading north to the outskirts of Woodridge. The silent passengers stayed that way until Noel pointed through the windshield. “Fire trucks.” Even as they watched, the black wintry sky grew bright with red flames.
Minutes later they maneuvered through the melee. Their passengers scrambled out when they parked and all the men ran over to the perimeter of the crowd of firemen and police. Eric flashed his badge at one of the firemen. “How’d you get here so fast?” he asked. “We only got the call minutes ago.”
“Fire station’s just down the road. We were having our annual Christmas party, so most of the guys were already on hand. Helluva way to end it.”
Eric nodded. “Looks like you’re getting things under control.”
The plane had lost a wing and its engines were ablaze. A rescue team, assisted by a rush of water from the hoses, was trying to make its way to the cockpit and survivors. The firemen worked with precision, carrying stretchers and hosing down the parking lot. Though the area was garishly lit by the flames, and by spotlights on the hook and ladder truck, Eric couldn’t see the numbers on the side of the plane.
Christmas At Timberwoods Page 15
