The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  “Who is?”

  His father was too far gone. Radford pointed at his glass, and the bartender filled it with another shot of bourbon. He then spent the next few minutes trying to extract himself from the conversation with his father, after which he smacked his phone down on the bar, wondering why he’d called in the first place.

  “Long day?” a woman said.

  Radford hadn’t noticed her sit down. She smiled. She was young, attractive, well dressed. He never picked up women, not even when he was single, but at that moment, he rather welcomed the company if only to get his mind off troubling thoughts.

  “Several long days,” Radford said.

  “You waiting for someone?”

  What was this woman’s angle? he wondered. Sex? Was she trying to sell him kitchen cleaners? Convert him to follow Jesus? On the television, the news came on; the bartender turned up the volume. Radford and the woman looked up at the screen.

  “We’re going to go to Liz Rash,” the male anchor said, “who has live reactions from local Kansans to this incredible story.”

  The screen cut to a young reporter standing outside the McConnell hangar.

  “Sedgwick County residents continue to express strong opinions about this mysterious story,” the reporter said. “And they are wondering why investigators haven’t been able to confirm or deny the rumors of the so-called Falling Woman.”

  “It’s a miracle,” a woman said as her husband nodded. “We’ve been praying ever since that plane exploded. And now, God has answered those prayers. There is a survivor.”

  Radford sipped his drink. On the screen, a teenage girl appeared. “It’s creepy. You know?” she said. “A plane blows up like that, and now they’re saying one woman lived. It’s just so weird.”

  Radford glanced back at the woman sitting next to him.

  “What do you think?” she said. “Isn’t this the strangest story you ever heard?”

  Radford shrugged. When the news report cut back to the studio, Radford reached for his wallet. He couldn’t listen to this another moment.

  “Hers too,” he said to the bartender, handing him a twenty. The woman smiled at him. He didn’t look back to see her remove a small notebook from her purse. Had he turned before entering the elevator, he might have seen the woman scribbling in the notebook in the wake of his abrupt departure.

  27

  The days passed quickly and Erin fell into a rhythm. Loneliness continued to visit, but only in the margins of her days. When she was first told she had pancreatic cancer, she knew what the diagnosis meant. Her chances of being alive in five years were abysmal. She’d look around for other faces, for smiles from the girls, for words, even for Doug’s predictable habits—his nightly news, clopping work shoes on the kitchen tile, his grins and grimaces. In their place, she saw people still living their lives while she was dying. She resented them all, resented especially the very people who loved her the most. Their ingrained habits became one more reminder that she was alone. But in the midst of that depression, a strange comfort started to grow, in silences and shadows. She’d never paid attention to it before, how tuning out from the world allowed peace to enter.

  Once again, at the cabin, she discovered a familiar tug-of-war taking place. Solitude, the lack of connection to the world, loneliness—these things would start to weigh heavily, but then, just as quickly, a bird’s song would snap her out of it. Or the way the afternoon light fell across the cabin’s porch. Or the smell of a spring afternoon. The simplest things offered incredible, bountiful gifts. She once spent a whole morning arranging small sticks into intricate shapes, in some primitive expression of art that called to her. Another day, she made a great swirling vortex out of white and gray pebbles. How long since she’d been able to play like that? To sit and think. To read and be still. Or even just to let go and cry. Alone, in the cabin, she could lament her life properly, and she also could celebrate her good fortunes.

  One morning, the memories that had disappeared after the crash returned, in one large dump, like a massive file that finished downloading. She awoke and remembered everything, from the day her father chased her with a hose and she fell and skinned her knee, to the time in fourth grade when Dean Markarian tripped and knocked out his front teeth, to sixth-grade camp in the New Hampshire pines, to her father’s funeral, to the first day of high school, to college graduation, to law school exams, to her wedding night, to the birth of the twins. That morning on the trail, she flipped through the past as if reading a book, searching for and finding missing pieces. Her amnesia, such as it was, was cured. Her whole life returned, even pieces she hadn’t thought of in a long, long time. Something had reorganized the lapse in memory, collated the moments for efficient retrieval.

  She remembered her grandmother’s house, the hutch where she kept scented candles organized in precise rows. How the hinges squeaked when she pulled open the door to sniff inside. The summer her father died, she went to live with her grandmother. Two weeks of love and attention. She’d forgotten about that time, about the scent of the candles.

  She also remembered that day in the departure lounge at Dulles, that tension in her bowels, the phone call with Adam, the sandwich she ate. She remembered standing on the walkway talking to a handsome man, and she remembered the sapphire color of his shirt. Her memory no longer had gaps. No more missing hours. No missing facts.

  She remembered falling. Every sight, every sound, every second. The rush of wind. Fire. Blackness. Air thick with the smell of fuel. The ground.

  When she went to work at the bar, she told Sandy and Hazard very little about herself, only the barest of facts. An injury. Head trauma. They didn’t need to know the details, and they never pried. Intentionally vague, she was sparing them as much as herself because the truth of her life, its reality, was not something she was prepared to face.

  “It’s just nice to feel normal again,” she said at some point.

  That evening, after her shift, Hazard handed over her first paycheck, almost $400. The Pay To line was left blank.

  “She only knows your first name, sweetie,” Hazard said. “You want it in cash?”

  For a moment, she was trapped in her own lie. Were Sandy and Hazard and the others here onto her? Would the slipperiness of her new identity curse her in the end? At any moment, she expected to be exposed. She’d look up and see the police, Doug, her daughters walking in the front door to haul her away.

  “It’s okay,” Hazard said. “Half them guys in the kitchen get paid in cash too. You just don’t look like someone hiding from Immigration.”

  “It’s complicated,” she said.

  “I’ll have cash for you tomorrow,” he said. “You just be careful carrying all that money home on that bike of yours.”

  Her last year at the law firm, she pulled down close to $400,000, but the work was tedious, soul crushing. The contrast with this job and this pay was almost laughable. Doug believed in wealth as an article of faith. Hell, maybe she did too. She could’ve quit her job at the law firm. She could’ve gone off and chased her dreams. But every dollar in the bank account was another brick to strengthen their lives—Doug and hers, and Claire and Tory’s too. But at the same time, every dollar was also another brick to wall them in.

  She thanked Hazard, went and found Sandy in back, and told her how much she appreciated their patience, their decency.

  “You don’t need to thank me,” Sandy said. “How else do you treat people?”

  28

  Friday’s daily progress meeting was a dry run for next week’s public hearing. At the DPM, only the insiders would be present. But in a week’s time, the cameras would roll, and there would be reporters, lawyers, insurance agents, and family members. Radford knew that those people would demand answers.

  He spent the afternoon in his room, finishing up his new report. In the conference room that evening, attendance was thin. Lucy showed up a few minutes early and avoided him. Conspicuously absent, much to Radford’s relief, was
Shep Ellsworth. Ulrich opened the meeting with the usual remarks, reminders to fill out time sheets, to communicate with the local liaison for travel vouchers, to log miles driven.

  “I’m going to turn it over to Charlie Radford first,” Ulrich said. “As most of you know, he’s running a special investigation into reports about a possible survivor.”

  A faint chuckle of laughter spread through the room while Radford passed around the copies of his report.

  “This two-page summary details what I know,” Radford said, trying to sound composed and serious. For the moment, everyone at the table at least did him the courtesy of listening. “On or about 0900 on Sunday, May seventh, Mildred Werner entered the barn on her property in Goddard, Kansas. Upon opening the barn doors, Werner spotted the subject lying on the floor, naked, unconscious, lying next to a seat from the Pointer plane. ID on the seat is positive.”

  “What do we know about the seat?” an FBI agent asked.

  “We know the seat came from row twelve, forward of the port wing,” Radford said.

  “So not to ask the obvious here fellas,” the agent said, “but why don’t we just match up the passenger manifest with the seat and get back to the real work?”

  Radford was always amazed at how shortsighted the FBI agents could be. He wondered if their polygraph tests somehow screened out common sense along with the lies.

  “Pointer Airlines has an open seating policy,” Lucy said. “Seat numbers tell us very little.”

  “So where does that leave us?” Ulrich said.

  Radford pulled up pictures of the barn, the hayloft, the hole in the roof. He’d taken almost two hundred photos of the two bur oak trees that grew adjacent to the barn. He zoomed in on a few photos that showed the obvious path of the seat through the now-broken branches. A perfect trajectory from sky to tree to barn to ground.

  “There are indications that debris hit both trees before entering the barn,” Radford said, careful to use the word debris, and to avoid attaching any human characteristics yet. “Such impact could’ve dissipated energy. And the chair passed cleanly through the roof. From what I could see, it only scraped one of the roof beams. The combination of impact forces had the potential to slow the seat rapidly and to significantly diminish the impact forces.”

  He hated the sound of his own voice. He felt he sounded like a televangelist, exploiting half-truths and evidence to document the supernatural. What he wanted to say was that he had no idea what had happened at the barn in Goddard.

  “Jesus-H-Tap-Dancing-Christ,” Shep Ellsworth said, bursting into the conference room. “We’re really going to do this?”

  Radford’s stomach heaved as Ellsworth took a seat, but he allowed the laughter to settle before pushing the button for his next digital slide: a black-and-white photo of a train station in France. Between two stone-block buildings with dark trim was the large glass atrium. The triangular roof, even in the photo, looked sharp, its iron beams and spars hardly suggesting a soft place to land.

  “This was the train station where the American airman landed during World War II,” Radford said. “Notice the pitched angle of the roof.”

  Lucy Masterson nodded.

  “But Magee got tangled in the rafters,” she said. “He didn’t fall into the mud.”

  “I don’t have a theory yet,” Radford said. “I’m not even suggesting that this happened the way it’s being reported.”

  Several men shook their heads. Others whispered, or jotted notes and laughed. What the hell was he thinking by doing this?

  The mood had turned from comical to skeptical, then to downright hostile. He wanted to tell them, I didn’t go looking for this story, but of course, now he had. He’d stuck his neck all the way out, and now he had to let them hack away at it. He wanted to share in their skepticism, to sit there and laugh at this quackery. Who would try to convince a roomful of engineers, pilots, federal agents, and scientists that the laws of physics had temporarily been set aside? Who would defend such a ludicrous claim? At the same time, he couldn’t forget the look on Millie Werner’s face or the certainty of the priest when he said, “She’s not lying.” Neither of those people had a motive to protect anything, nor did they try to convince him of anything. They’d simply seen something they couldn’t rationally explain. No, the hostility in this room had nothing to do with truth. These people just wanted this crazy story to go away. They wanted him to erase it, and the longer he defended it, the more arguments he made, the more they resented him.

  “I’m going to say this once more,” Ellsworth said. “I’m not sitting through any more of this nonsense. I’m here to investigate an accident, not to listen to stories about Henny Penny.”

  “Shep, enough,” Ulrich said. “Charlie’s almost done.”

  “Charlie should’ve been done a long time ago,” Ellsworth said.

  An awkward silence followed. Radford waited for more to be said in his defense, hoping that Ulrich would explain that this investigation had been blessed—had been demanded, in fact—by the folks in D.C. But no such explanation came.

  “Lucy, you’re right,” Radford said. “In each of the other cases, there were unusual circumstances that helped increase the chances for survival. I’m not making a case for the Falling Woman. I’m simply looking for possible explanations.”

  “Maybe she’s a bird-woman,” Ellsworth said, evoking more laughter in the room. “Did you scour the place for feathers?”

  “Look,” Radford said, “the timber in that barn was soft from rot. The debris fell through a three-foot stack of wet hay. The ground was muddy. I don’t know if that’s enough to make a difference. I don’t even know who to ask.”

  Ellsworth mumbled something low, and a nearby FBI agent almost spit out his coffee.

  “Shep, that’s enough,” Ulrich said.

  Ellsworth made a mocking salute.

  “Is this woman a hoax?” Radford asked. “Maybe. Maybe she was in that barn and the seat hit her on the head. If so, where the hell is she? Why not step forward and tell her story?”

  Ellsworth shook his head.

  “Where are we now?” Ulrich said.

  “I need Lucy to push the IDs on the bodies,” Radford said. He hated saying it, hated calling her out for not making progress. But the IDs were the best chance he had, the fastest, simplest way to resolve things, one way or the other. Account for all the passengers on the plane, and this whole thing would go away.

  “Lucy?” Ulrich asked.

  “It could be weeks,” she said. “Hell, it could be months.”

  That night, Radford barely slept. He’d run out of options. He had no leads, no credible direction to take the next day. He had nothing beyond what he’d presented at the meeting. He remembered the days after he was told he couldn’t be a pilot. How lost he felt. How empty. His whole world had been crushed, his very identity shattered, but on the surface, to the outside world, everything looked the same. It was similar now. On the surface, he was still an accident investigator. He still wore the same uniform, carried the same credentials. But inside the meeting room, he was a pariah. They only wanted him to debunk this story. Each day his investigation continued, each day he kept doubt and uncertainty alive, each day his research pulled the team away from the credible work of the investigation, Radford’s reputation sank.

  Hell, he’d felt the same way two weeks ago. If this woman really survived this fall, if she really broke all the rules, then they’d never figure out how. No amount of rotten timber, wet hay, and mud was going to satisfy their skepticism. He needed to find the woman. He needed to march her into the conference room. It was the only way this story would make sense. These people believed in things that could be seen, measured, and documented. The lone way to prove or disprove this woman’s story was to find her. Short of that, it came down to Lucy and identifying the remaining bodies. Dickie Gray had told him to ask the right questions and trust the evidence. Radford had followed that advice. But this time, the evidence had walked out of V
ia Christi Hospital, and the right questions pointed in the wrong direction. No matter what questions Radford asked, no matter how many pieces of data he gathered, a story like this was too far off the charts. Only two questions mattered now: Who the hell was she? And where had she gone?

  29

  After tossing and turning most of the night, Charlie called Wendy on Saturday morning.

  “I’m looking at another house today,” she said. “Charlie, tell me this isn’t pointless. Tell me that we have a chance.”

  “Of course, we do,” he said. “How can you say that?”

  “You know what I mean. You know why I’m looking at houses. You know why this matters to me. If you can’t at least acknowledge what I’m saying, then what’s the point?”

  “Slow down,” he said. “Can’t you just slow down a bit? Can you wait until I’m through with this craziness? The whole damn thing is blowing up around me.”

  “It always is,” she said. “It will never change.”

  “It may not matter anyway,” he said. “I’m out of ideas. I have nowhere to turn. If something doesn’t pop loose, and soon, I’ll be home for the duration.”

  “It’s that Falling Woman, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s all over the news. Something about that feels wrong. Why do you have to be mixed up in it?”

  “If anyone asks,” he said, “reporters, even friends, please don’t tell them anything.”

  “That reporter keeps calling,”

  “Don’t talk to her,” he said.

  “What would I tell her?” she said. “I don’t know anything more than what’s on television.” She paused, then sighed. “Tell me you love me, Charlie. Tell me you want to have a family with me. I need to hear you say it.”

  “It’s weird,” he said. “The more they don’t believe in it, the more I think it really happened.”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Nothing has changed for me,” he said. “I love you. I will always love you. I will always want to be with you. I’m sorry that can’t be enough. It used to be.”