“They were just too extreme,” she told him when he asked why she didn’t mention the other cases. “They were too far outside the scope of what I was studying.”
Ulrich wanted a formal report by the end of the week, and now the end of the week was here—and Radford had almost nothing new. What’s more, he hadn’t even typed up his notes yet. He hoped his boss would choke on the damn report. The way he figured it, the final judgment on this woman’s story would soon be clear. Once they identified all the bodies, the truth would emerge. But as the story of the Falling Woman spread, the media coverage exploded. People stopped talking about the accident, and only wanted to know about the rumor that someone had survived.
As far as Radford was concerned, once this afternoon’s DPM was over, and he dealt with whatever shit Ellsworth and Ulrich threw his way, then he’d be done. He had real work to do, and he intended to get back to it.
The number of positive IDs from the morgue had barely moved. On top of the press and the families, insurance agents began leaving him voice mails. Everyone wanted answers.
His report would be little more than a short summary of his frustration and confusion. He had no name, no information. He could reference some of Lucy’s research, reference a few other sources he’d found on his own. But he knew he had nothing. It was almost time for the meeting. He couldn’t put off finishing his report any longer. But he had to do one thing first: from his room at the Holiday Inn, he called home.
“Charlie, what the hell is going on out there?” Wendy said.
“It’s a circus,” he said. “I’m heading in now for a meeting, and they’re going to tear me apart.”
“Is it true?” Wendy said. “Did someone really survive?”
Wendy never talked about his work. She never asked questions, never cared about the details. He wished for her apathy now.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. But whatever, I’ve done my part. It will be someone else’s problem soon.”
“What do you mean you ‘don’t know’?”
“She’s gone,” he said. “Whoever this woman is, whatever happened to her, she’s not at the hospital. She’s nowhere.”
“So now what?” Wendy asked.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m done. I’ll stand there tonight and take the criticism. And then I get back to work.”
He thought of Wendy’s freckled skin. How wonderful to be home, to watch a movie with her, to take her out to dinner.
“Charlie, can we please talk about the other thing?”
He knew what she meant, knew that she still wanted to discuss their future family.
“I can’t now,” he said. “Wendy, I’m getting killed here.”
The line went silent.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I just want you here,” she said. “I know the work matters, Charlie. I know you are dealing with all that misery and death. But I’m all alone here. I can’t depend on you, can I?”
He wanted to say more, but he wasn’t sure how. She hung up without saying goodbye.
After putting it off all week, he tackled the report in his hotel room an hour before the DPM. He’d mentioned the security, the crowds across the street, the wait for information, the lawyer, Dr. Lassanske. He’d written up the entire conversation. Jane Doe. Injuries to the woman’s hip and hands. Persistent amnesia. Injuries consistent with a motorcycle accident. There was no medical reason to keep her. He typed up the last paragraph.
The attending physician made no determination about the source of her injuries. Nor the extenuating circumstance of her arrival. The woman managed to leave the hospital on Monday morning, undetected. She had carried no identification, and gave no name. No further evidence exists at this time to support the claim that this woman was involved, directly or indirectly, with the ongoing investigation. Recommendation: closure of inquiry until further evidence presents itself.
The report was cold, rational, devoid of context or speculation. He omitted any mention of the priest’s ominous statement, She’s not lying, preferring to stick with the facts and the science. The story already had too many sharp edges; the last thing Radford intended to do was add another by talking about priests. After printing out the report, he spotted Lucy Masterson in the lobby.
“So, what now?” Lucy asked. The DPM was less than thirty minutes away.
“Let me buy you a drink?”
“Charlie, you know I don’t drink,” she said.
“Then come watch me drink.”
In the bar, Lucy read his report. The investigators began arriving from the field. A week had passed since Pointer 795 exploded, and the small lounge had become an oasis, a protected space where normal life could go on for at least a few minutes. The brutal fieldwork—the relentless gathering of body parts, aluminum, and despair—exacted a heavy toll.
Lucy finished reading and shook her head. “Charlie, this is pretty sparse,” she said. “I mean, I get that you don’t have answers, but I’m not sure Ulrich is going to take this as a conclusive summary.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I did my part. I’m not trained to find a missing person.”
She glanced at the report again and sipped a club soda with lime. He liked Lucy, trusted her in a way that he didn’t trust Ulrich or Ellsworth. He respected her work too, respected her instincts as an investigator. She didn’t wear the job on her sleeve like the others did. But once again, the affirmation he needed was not arriving.
“The priest said something,” he said. “It was strange. He said she wasn’t lying. But it was the way he said it. I just can’t get the sound of his voice out of my head.”
“Why didn’t you put that in the report?” she asked.
“I’m not sinking my career over the hunch of a priest,” he said. “Not until I know something concrete.”
“But you know it’s possible,” she said. “You know this woman might really have fallen and survived.”
“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s possible the sun won’t come up tomorrow. But why would she disappear? Why run away from such a thing?”
“You have no thoughts?” Lucy said.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I can’t spend my time speculating. I have real work to do too.”
Shep Ellsworth, his jeans splotchy with mud, entered and went straight to the bar. Radford hoped he wouldn’t come over, but Ellsworth had an instinct for fouling another person’s good mood. He didn’t ask to join them; he just sat at their table and lowered a sweating cocktail. One look at his eyes revealed this was not his first drink of the day. His forehead was sunburned, except for the raccoon coloration from his sunglasses. He squeezed lime into his gin and tonic.
“How’s the hunt for Sasquatch?” Ellsworth said.
“Don’t start on him,” Lucy said. “He drew the short straw.”
“I don’t get what Ulrich wants from me,” Radford said. “This is way out of my zip code.”
“Douchebag wants cover,” Ellsworth said. “He needs someone to eat this.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Radford said. “The woman is MIA.”
“You only wish it were that easy,” Ellsworth said.
What he didn’t need were opinions. He’d take small talk about the weather, stories from home, any subject but the Falling Woman. He’d rather lock himself away and drink in his room than listen to more talk of that.
“It’s a bad beat,” Ellsworth said, almost reading his mind. “I’ll give you that. But your partner here screwed you by talking about the other cases. She gave the whole thing plausibility.”
Radford nodded. “That did make everything harder.”
“What was I supposed to do?” Lucy said. “What does your hero, Dickie Gray, always say? Don’t be smarter than the evidence.”
“Except there is no evidence,” Radford said.
Their camaraderie, however intended, masked relief, a better-you-than-me gratitude. “What’s the next step?” Lucy asked.
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“Ulrich can do what he wants with it,” Radford said. “Tomorrow, I’m back on the bodies.”
Ellsworth laughed. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you’ll be back in D.C. this weekend. This is turning political. Someone has to carry the ball, and they aren’t letting you fumble it.”
Across the bar, Gordon Ulrich sat alone, scribbling into a notebook without looking up.
“Fuck you, Shep,” Lucy said. “You sure know how to kick a guy.”
“Next round’s on me,” Ellsworth said, raising his arm over his head to signal the waitress. “I’ll take it out of my future winnings.”
Radford finished his drink, but rather than waiting for the next one to arrive, he stood and walked over to Ulrich’s table. He pulled out a chair and sat down. Ulrich glanced up over a pair of wire-framed reading glasses, low on the bridge of his nose.
“I’m nowhere,” Radford said. “The woman, whoever she is, wherever she came from, is gone. Checked out of the hospital four days ago.”
Ulrich continued to scribble notes. Then he clicked the pen and placed it in his shirt pocket. Radford slid his report over the table, and Ulrich skimmed the document. He looked like a college professor, ready to correct grammar and footnotes. Radford glanced back at Lucy Masterson, surrounded now by four other investigators.
“This tells me nothing,” Ulrich said.
“It tells you what I know,” Radford said. “Read the whole thing, and then let me get back to work. I’m not trained for this.”
“I asked you to find her. To give her a name. I need this settled. Jesus, Charlie, I had higher hopes for you.”
“I have fieldwork to do,” Radford said. “Instead, I’ve spent four days chasing down rumors.”
“There are families out there,” Ulrich said. His voice was sincere. For the first time, Radford understood some of what his boss was up against. “Families wondering if this woman is their wife or daughter. Little kids crying on the six o’clock news, saying prayers that she’s really their mommy.”
“She’s gone, Gordo,” Radford said. He wanted to offer more but couldn’t. Was it the gin? The sheer exhaustion? He couldn’t keep up the act. “I’m not a private detective. I don’t know anything about tracking down missing persons.”
“You’re making excuses,” Ulrich said. “Look. Something like this, it could really set you apart. You’d make a name for yourself if you do this right.”
“I’ve done my job,” Radford said. “Read my report. Every hour I spend working this story is an hour that’s taken away from the real work. Give it to the FBI. They do this shit for a living.”
For a moment, Ulrich seemed to ponder the idea. He slipped Radford’s report into a pile of others. “I’ll read it this weekend,” he said.
Above the bar, on the television, reporters were discussing Pointer 795. Serving as a backdrop was a photo of the tail section of the ruined airliner. Radford cursed the muted television. Across the bar, Ellsworth stirred the now-slushy contents of his drink, grinned, and took out his wallet. On Ellsworth’s forearm, a tattoo of woman with huge, bulging breasts stared straight at Lucy Masterson.
20
Adam made one final plea that Erin let him take her home. Then he left, returned to work, went back to his wife and kids, but on Sunday morning, he drove back to the cabin. She welcomed him with a growing list of demands and favors. She sent him to town for groceries, for new clothes, for DVD rentals, books, bottles of wine. She apologized for nothing and expected everything. And with each request, each demand, she felt more empowered. His will buckled. The day passed this way, until he stood in the cabin’s small kitchen on Sunday night and began issuing his own ultimatums.
“It’s time to go home,” he said, sounding more like a stern teacher than the man who once shared her deepest passions.
“Stop being an ass,” she said. “Just let me be.”
“You need to be in a hospital,” he said. His tone was hurt, angry, confused. “I can’t care for you here. I’m worried about you.”
“Stop talking,” she said. “Go make us dinner.”
“This could be an incredible opportunity,” he said. “Do you realize what you could do with this? The entire world wants to know what happened.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Leave me alone. And change that—I don’t want dinner. Make me a drink.”
Her anger and its tyranny felt strange, new to him, newer still to her. Solitude had changed her, softened her in some ways, hardened her in others. He couldn’t seem to understand it, to locate its origins or unpack its implications, but ultimately his submission was complete and absolute. The truth was, she had come to realize this urgency Adam seemed to feel was not about her or her family. She had become a problem, a complication, one that could explode in his life. He wanted to get his life back to normal. Getting Erin to go home would take the pressure off him.
In the small kitchen, he burned the loaf of garlic bread he’d prepared to go with dinner. The cabin filled with the acrid smell of char and burnt garlic. He paced around the cabin, opening windows to release the stench. He fiddled with his phone, rearranged the furniture. For the first time, he reminded her of Doug.
“We need a plan,” he said. “We need to discuss what happens now.”
“A plan of what?” she asked.
“Your daughters,” he said. “God damn it, they need to know you are alive.”
All day, she’d resisted his entreaties, his kindness, finally breaking his spirit. She’d done the same thing to Doug when she was sick, making unyielding demands. Her recognition of this pattern came as something of a shock. She was not the giver, not the nurturing mother, not the glue that held the seams together. Adam was right. She should have rushed home, thrown her arms around her girls. Instead, for reasons she didn’t fully understand, she was hiding out in this cabin, refusing to do the only rational thing.
“How much do you remember?” he said again, circling back to the original questions.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I can’t. Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
She wanted to sleep, to remain still. She’d spent most of the previous three days in bed, resting, barely moving. And then she’d awake and go for an afternoon walk in the woods. What the hell am I doing? she’d think, but then she’d come back to the cabin and fall asleep again. She tried to forget about everything that existed outside this small patch of land.
“The accident,” he said. “That’s how you ended up in Kansas. Jesus, I don’t know what you remember. How do I tell you any of this?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“Your plane blew up,” he said. “Do you remember? You called me. I came and picked you up and brought you here. Do you remember any of that?”
The words he said felt as distant and remote as the Kawabata novel he’d once read to her. The details, the facts, the sheer outlandishness of what happened, about these things she didn’t understand, or chose not to believe.
“What do you remember?” he asked.
“Everything is jumbled, hazy,” she said. “I don’t know who to trust. I don’t know what to believe.”
“You can trust me,” he said. “You need to go home. You need to see a doctor.”
“No. No more doctors. No more hospitals.”
The only thing she knew, the only steady, consistent thought that kept running through her head was the one that told her she had to stay here until she could figure out what came next, or maybe to accept that nothing came next.
“You called me from a hospital. You asked me to come get you.” He explained how he’d flown into Missouri, rented a car, crossed the river, and that they left together. “I must be out of my mind.”
She knew what he said was true. She knew none of it made sense. She didn’t care. He pulled a sheaf of newspaper articles from his briefcase and threw them on the table.
“You need help,” he said, unfolding the papers. “You’re not act
ing rationally.”
She read the bold headlines: “Plane Explodes!” “Bodies Falling across Kansas.” She read further, about the speculation over bombs and lightning strikes. In the first articles, there was no mention of a survivor.
“So what?” she said.
Adam tapped on his phone and passed it to her.
“SURVIVOR?” the headline screamed. She skimmed the article quickly, her eyes glancing over the account of a woman rushed to a Wichita hospital. She knew it was the truth, the facts of what had happened, but still she didn’t believe it. She did not feel a part of it, as though it had happened to someone else.
“None of it matters,” she said.
“You need to call home,” he said. “Tell your daughters you’re safe. That’s the first thing. We can work out the details as we go.” He started pacing again. “You can tell Doug you called the firm. There are enough legal issues involved in this whole thing that it will make sense. We walk the story back through that lens.”
She closed her eyes, tried to concentrate on what he was saying for a moment, but still she couldn’t make the pieces fit. Her daughters, Doug, her home, her life, it all floated somewhere far away, hers but somehow not hers.
“I’ve never been very good at letting go,” she said. “Claire used to sleep with a stuffed blue dog.”
“What are you talking about?” Adam said. His voice was cold, angry. He refused to sit down.
“Just listen to me,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that stuffed dog since you left. It’s all I’ve been thinking about in some ways. I can still feel its faded blue fur, the scratchy place where the fur had worn down to plastic mesh. God, Claire loved that damned dog. She was always my sensitive one, always the one who reminded me most of myself.
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