One flick of her thumb, and it all would all come back, her lies, fears, hopes, passions, and dread. A few seconds for the call to find the cell tower, and then for the signal to bounce toward space at light speed; the miracle of instant communication, like so many other miracles, daily taken for granted. She spent most of her life going through the motions. Asleep. Habituated by routine. Unable to notice life surging around her. A few more seconds while the house phone rang. She imagined saying the words. I’m alive. Imagined hearing Doug’s voice.
I’m alive, she’d say, and then everything would change. Maybe the shock of her resurrection would snap Doug out of his obsessive behavior. Maybe at last he’d see her as more than a problem to solve. Maybe he’d pay attention to her again, not just to her disease. Could she go back and retain this feeling? Could she, by the sheer force of her story, awaken others too? Was this the temptation of the prophets? Yes, she’d had a spiritual awakening, as silly as that sounded. She saw the angle of her journey, which had started long before boarding the plane, had started, in fact, the day her father died some forty years ago. That was why she married Doug, why she’d led such a safe and predictable life. That was also why she had the affair with Adam. One man to feel secure and safe, the other to feel again.
After her father died, her mother stopped showing her love. A vital piece of her mother’s heart had been removed; Erin understood that now, understood that parents weren’t invincible, that they made mistakes, had lives, had desires and passions that reached beyond the ordinary. She wouldn’t go home. Standing on the dock staring out at the water, she knew a similar piece of her heart had been removed too. For the first time, she finally began to understand what had happened to her mother. She didn’t forgive her, but she saw that forgiveness was possible.
She was tempted to push the remaining numbers. The decision was not final until the split-second she lifted her thumb from the keypad, gripped her hand securely around the phone’s spine, and heaved it into the pond.
25
U.S. House of Representatives Panel Investigating Pointer Airlines Flight 795 (Fourth Session):
“Day after day, I buried myself in research,” Radford says. “I made three more trips to the barn.”
“You did more interviews?”
“Yes. Paramedics, nurses, Dr. Lassanske again. I spoke with the chaplain again. Everyone who’d seen her, everyone who encountered the woman said the same thing—there was no way she was faking it.”
“Such testimony hardly counts as evidence.”
“It reinforced my belief,” he says, “that the work mattered, and needed to be done.”
“What happened in Goddard? What happened at the barn?”
“I hired a cherry picker truck and crew,” he says. “Up in the bucket, I retraced the trajectory of the seat, running strings from stakes in the mud, up through the loft, the roof, into the top of the trees. I shot laser pointers through the branches.”
On-screen now, photographs and diagrams of his work appear. He goes through them slowly, allowing each image to register before moving on to the next.
“In the hangar,” he says, “I scrutinized the seat. Its braces were bent but intact.”
“How do you explain that?”
“The explosion in Pointer’s fuselage could’ve cracked at just the right angle to release the brackets. On the ground, we’d found at least a dozen seats with similar damage. Assuming a rapid decompression, the seats essentially ejected out of the crumbling plane.”
“There are still huge gaps though. Still inexplicable odds.”
“Yes,” Radford says.
“The first public hearing was still days away. Did you think you’d have a compelling argument by then?”
“If I made the right impression with the other investigators,” he says, “and if they conceded it was plausible, then I could take that as confirmation.”
“Confirmation of what?”
“That I wasn’t just wasting my time.”
“But you still had no identifiable name, no lead on the woman?”
He shakes his head. He remembers the shame of not solving the mystery of the Falling Woman, for not having a lead, or a theory, or anything he could present.
“What did it mean?”
“The possibilities,” he says, “felt endless.”
“At this point, what was the agency consensus?”
“They continued to call her Sasquatch,” Radford says.
Laughter ripples over the speakers in the hearing room. Radford thinks about how, back in Kansas, they’d all teased him about his work. Then he thinks about Dickie Gray investigating TWA 800 in 1996. Missiles and bombs and secret plots; it turned out that a single piece of electrical wiring misfired and the plane’s fuel tank exploded. For months, they’d investigated outlandish conspiracy theories that all turned out to be bullshit. What became of the guy who investigated those theories? Radford wondered. Where did he end up?
The congressional conference room is humid, fetid, like a locker room after a game. Why had he created so much anger and spite among the other investigators? Hadn’t he just followed the evidence? Wasn’t he simply doing his job? It is after four now. He’s been testifying for almost six hours. His back aches. His throat is sore. When he flips open the report again, he thinks about Kansas. Lucy stopped speaking to him after he dumped his workload on her. Ellsworth openly mocked him. He was on his own then, working, focused, driven to get to the end.
“No one took me seriously,” he says, unprompted.
26
First, he needed to get to the barn and reexamine the roof. He wanted to measure and inspect the rafters in the loft, to take samples of the tiny crater in the ground. He needed to talk with the family that owned the farm, find out what those people had witnessed. If he followed rational constraints, collected evidence, applied logic, he could file a detailed report. After all, Ulrich was a self-described data man. The trick was to stop judging the story. Investigate this as if it were a separate accident. Gather the evidence. Ask the right questions. He didn’t have to worry about the answers. Wasn’t that what he’d been taught? He still had no idea where the woman had disappeared to, much less if her story was true, but it didn’t matter. The barn wouldn’t lead him to the missing woman, but it was something tangible, something to put in the report.
Clouds formed on the distant horizon. Another warm spring day settled in as Radford drove west toward Goddard. In the haze, the red prairie barn appeared almost blue as he approached. No police cars idled along the country road this time. There were no fire trucks, no news crews. The barn’s gambrel roof was more pitched than he recalled, higher off the ground, a good forty feet up. The dual-pitch roof slanted at a steep angle before slowly descending into sidewalls. A rusted hay track extended from below the roofline. The building looked weathered but sturdy. Two heavy sliding doors were locked with a chain and bolt. He also took note of two massive bur oak trees that grew along the southern facade.
What Radford couldn’t initially see from the road was the odd memorial crawling up the east side of the red-clapboard walls. A few days after the news broke, a slow, steady procession of the curious made the daily pilgrimage to the barn. They were mostly locals at first, but by the third day, the dirt road adjacent to the farm became crowded with out-of-state cars bringing people who took selfies in front of the barn doors. Photographs, flowers, handwritten notes, crosses, empty whiskey bottles, helium balloons, paperback novels, and votive candles now littered the side of the barn, spilling out across hay bales and rusted hitching posts, all the way back to an old swine trough. Many of the photographs and notes had started to fade in the sun. As with roadside memorials for accident victims, the attention waned after an initial surge of interest. The pilgrimage for the Falling Woman had also disappeared from the sidewalks in front of the hospital. Life was returning to normal.
From his car window, Radford snapped a few photos of the barn and then drove to the farmhouse a hundred
yards past.
The farm had been in the Werner family for almost a century. Like most Kansas farms, it had gone through several iterations since old Hannibal Werner had planted his first field of rye wheat. The family had come west from Cincinnati when the Depression forced the closure of their business. Once there, the Werner brothers cobbled together a few acres of viable crop and eventually made a modest go of it.
All this Radford learned sipping iced tea on Norbert and Mildred Werner’s front porch, before he gently steered them to the subject of the Falling Woman.
“We had to hire a damned private security company to keep these nuts away,” Norbert said. His hearing aid was misfiring, so he often shouted despite the near silence of the afternoon. Millie smiled and offered Radford more tea.
“I’d really just like to see the barn,” he said politely.
“Well, I don’t have the key,” Norbert said. “And the security guard didn’t show up this morning.”
“You know where the key is,” Millie said.
“Don’t tell me what I know,” Norbert said. “What’s your name again?”
Radford smiled. He found their zaniness compelling, an almost welcome relief from the strain of the work. They reminded him of his grandparents.
“I’ll get you the key, son,” Millie said. “He likes to tell stories.”
Millie stood and went inside.
“Who found her?” Radford asked.
“Who found who?” Norbert said.
“The woman in the barn,” Radford said. “Did you find her?”
“I don’t get out to the barn much anymore,” Norbert said. “Rheumatism in my knees. No. Millie feeds the cats. Damn things could starve as far as I’m concerned. But she went out there that morning and came running back screaming blue bloody murder.”
He stretched one leg out in front of the chair and groaned softly.
“It scared me about half to death,” Millie said, returning from inside with the key. “That poor woman, all bruised and naked, out there all alone for more than a day. I’ll take you over.”
A thick alloy chain secured the doors. Millie struggled a bit with the lock before it gave way. Radford hadn’t spoken with the Werners when he was there earlier, an oversight that now seemed glaring. He’d interviewed the paramedics, cops, and firemen, but not the woman who stumbled onto the scene.
“We don’t get many visitors, and then all those people started showing up,” she said. “I’ll need some help with these doors.”
He pressed one door to the side, its hinges stiff with rust and silage.
“How often do you come out here?” he asked.
“To the barn?” Millie contemplated the question. “Well, before all this hoopla, not more than two or three times a week. I feed the cats a little milk, in case they come up short on the mice. The barn’s not much use to us these days. My grandsons store their motorbikes out here in the winter.”
Radford stepped inside. A shaft of light beamed through the hole in the roof. Standing there, in the middle of the barn, the story seemed more impossible than before. There was no way someone fell through the roof, crashed through the hayloft, and landed on the dirt floor. No way that a woman could survive that fall, never mind sustain only minor injuries.
Through the hole overhead, he could see where branches had been snapped off the top of the oak trees. Based on the angles and the arc line, whatever came through the barn roof hit the trees first.
“Can you tell me what you saw?” Radford asked.
“Well, like I told the police, I didn’t hear nothing. Sheriff Johnson had stopped by that very morning. Told us about the plane crash. Wanted to make sure we were okay.”
“You hadn’t seen the news?”
“Norb reads the paper still,” Millie said. “But we don’t watch the TV much these days. All that violence and sex.”
Millie pointed toward a spot below in the mud.
“The woman was just lyin’ there,” she said. “Naked as the day she was born.”
“Was she awake?” Radford asked. “Was she conscious?”
“Mister, I didn’t stick around too long. I ran inside and called the sheriff.”
Radford circled the spot, looking up at the loft. Was it possible? Did some uncanny mix of oak branch, pitch tar, rotting timber, hay, and muddy ground act as a cosmic shock absorber? He thought of Alan Magee crashing through a French train station’s glass roof. He thought of Juliane Koepcke falling from ten thousand feet into the waiting rain forest canopy.
“Did you come back outside?” Radford asked. “After you spotted her and called the sheriff, did you come out after?”
“We’re simple folk, Mr. Radford,” Millie said. “We aren’t looking for attention. You need to understand that. Some fancy magazine editor called and offered us five thousand dollars to do a photo shoot here. You see what I’m saying?”
Millie smiled but seemed irritated by all this curiosity. She’d probably never expected to be at the center of so much attention, especially this late in her life. Radford wondered if secretly, despite the security guards and the chain, the Werners welcomed it. He didn’t ask her if she’d accepted the magazine’s offer.
“I just need to understand what you saw,” he said. “Or what you thought had happened.”
Millie paused and seemed to contemplate his question. “I’m a Christian woman. I don’t get to church much these days, on account of my husband’s health, and, well, I’ll just say it—I don’t like all this happy horseshit that goes on these days.” Radford laughed. “But I’ve led a reasonable life. I think I’ve been, on balance, a decent person.”
She paused and looked up at the roof.
“Mr. Radford, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more frightened either. That poor woman was just lying there, helpless. I didn’t know what to do.”
Radford took out his notepad and began to make some preliminary observations. He circled around the spot where they found the seat and glanced up at the hole in the roof. Millie stood near the door.
“Do you think she fell from the plane?” she asked.
Radford put down his notepad.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He wasn’t sure what else to say. He asked Millie if he might climb up on the barn roof. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and the wind had picked up.
“May I ask you something?” she said. “What are you going to do with that woman, assuming you find her?”
“I just want to talk to her,” he said. “I just need to hear her version of the story.”
“Trauma changes folk,” she said. “If you find her, be kind. Make me that promise, will you? Whatever her story is. She deserves someone to look out for her.”
Radford asked Millie if he could spend some time alone in the barn taking measurements. He told her he’d lock up, and that he wouldn’t touch anything without her permission.
“You’re invited to stick around for dinner,” Millie said. “I’m making chicken and dumplings.”
He spent more than an hour in the barn. The storm passed overhead while he took detailed notes and measurements. Lightning flashed as he bagged samples of hay, timber, mud, and dirt. By the time he climbed onto the roof, the sun had come out again. Water dripped from the trees. The longer he worked, the less likely the story of the Falling Woman seemed. But he reserved judgment, forced the improbability to the back of his mind. When he finished, his shirt was soaked with sweat. He latched the heavy chain through the barn doors and waved to Norbert Werner, who still sat on the porch. From inside the house came the aroma of sautéing onions. As tempting as it was to stay for a home-cooked meal, he had to get back to the hotel to clarify his thoughts.
He spent the rest of Tuesday afternoon in his room typing up notes. What he needed now was research. He needed to compare the data he’d retrieved from the barn with other cases. When he finished, he had less than an hour until that day’s DPM. He showered, put on c
lean clothes, and headed down to the lobby bar for a drink.
The bar was empty. Radford hadn’t expected a warm reception from the rest of the investigators—after all, his new assignment shorted the team, and that slack would have to be made up, mostly by Lucy. Still, he felt like he’d done solid work. He ordered bourbon on the rocks, his father’s drink. Without much thought, he dialed his father’s number.
“I thought maybe you’d died,” Martin said. His voice slurred from his afternoon cocktails. Radford resisted the urge to judge his father’s drinking. Soon enough, Radford would be into his second whiskey.
“Just busy, Pops,” Radford said. “I’m in Kansas, investigating the plane crash.”
“Mr. Big Shot,” Martin said, laughing.
Over the years, the script of their conversation changed little. His father would launch into a litany of complaints that usually began with liberal politicians ruining the country and ended with his latest medical ailment. Radford tried to be a sympathetic son, tried not to react to his father’s often-incendiary words. Reacting only made Martin shout louder.
“You coming out this weekend?” he asked.
“Dad, I’m in Wichita. I can have Wendy go if you need something.”
“Just be nice to have company once in a while.”
When his father drank, which was every day since Radford’s mother had died four years ago, Martin teetered between maudlin anxiety and outright hostility. Radford had navigated this minefield enough times to know where to step, but sometimes he wanted to alter the script. Sometimes, he wanted to assert his own opinions.
“You flying at all?” his father asked.
“No, Dad. You know I have a heart condition. Listen,” he said. Just once he wanted to have a normal conversation with the man. Just once he wanted his father to give him some fatherly advice. “Wendy wants to have a kid. She thinks she’s ready, but I don’t know.”
The Falling Woman: A Novel Page 14
