The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  Someone knocked on his door.

  “I love you,” she said, “but you need to hear me. I’ve never felt this way before. I need this, as much as you need your damn job. I want to be a mother, Charlie. I’m ready to start. I just want to know if my husband is going to be with me.”

  “I have to go,” he said. “I love you.”

  He pulled on a shirt and opened the door. Lucy Masterson stood in the hallway, already dressed for the field, her khaki pants tucked into her work boots. She held a stack of files in her hand.

  “I need to go over these with you,” she said. “I need to have my facts straight before the public hearing.”

  “I need movement on the bodies, Lucy.”

  “Charlie, you dumped all this on me and haven’t even said thank you yet.”

  He reached out and squeezed her hand. As an apology, it was a feeble one, but he was grateful she didn’t pull away.

  “Give me a minute,” he said, but as he turned to go back inside, Ulrich raced down the hallway.

  “Downstairs, now,” he said, not even slowing as he passed.

  Radford looked to Lucy for an explanation, but she shrugged. He grabbed his windbreaker, stepped into his shoes, and closed the door behind him.

  “What’s on fire now?” he asked.

  “No clue,” Lucy said. “Listen. I need to transfer some of the remains from the morgue to a D.C. lab. Double-check this paperwork for me. This is my first hearing too.”

  “Lucy,” Radford said, “you know they’re going to eat me alive.”

  “You deserve it,” she said, but a smile creased her lips.

  When they arrived at the conference room, Shep Ellsworth stood outside the door, grinning and back-slapping everyone who entered. He looked more smug than normal. The son of a bitch had even shaved this morning, and he wore a starched shirt, creased and clean khakis. He’d tucked his ponytail tightly behind his head.

  “Jesus,” Lucy said. “He’s such a prick.”

  Radford looked down as he approached. He tried to slip past Ellsworth, but a tattooed forearm blocked the entryway to the conference room.

  “This is what real investigators do,” he said. “Maybe you’ll learn something today.”

  Radford pushed Ellsworth’s arm aside and with Lucy went into the conference room. Whatever was happening, it attracted a lot of attention. The room was packed. Government officials, engineers from Boeing, reps from Pointer Airlines, and investigators all jockeyed for a spot. Ulrich stood by the pull-down screen, talking into his cell phone. Energy buzzed in the room. In his confusion, Radford felt outside of everything.

  “Let’s find seats,” Ulrich said. He sounded eager, excited, almost giddy. Light streamed in through the windows. A few stragglers entered the room smiling and shaking hands. Radford didn’t recognize half of the people. Clearly, there were many competing interests in the investigation.

  “Well, folks,” Ulrich began. “After two long, exhausting weeks, we finally have some genuinely good news to share.”

  Radford leaned in and whispered to Lucy, “What the hell is going on?”

  “Beats me,” she said. “Maybe Ellsworth won the lottery.”

  “Without further ado,” Ulrich said, “let me bring in Shepherd Ellsworth to fill you in. Shep.”

  Radford felt like he might throw up. At the same time, he envied Ellsworth’s entrance, envied the moment. This was the moment Radford had dreamed would be his.

  “As part of our ongoing investigation into combustion sources for Pointer 795,” Ellsworth said, “we’ve inspected fifteen more airframes in the fleet. Twelve of those planes showed degradation of thermal bonding in and around the center-wing fuel tanks. Of those twelve, at least six planes showed significant degradation.”

  “What does this mean?” an FBI agent asked.

  “It means,” Lucy whispered to Radford, “Shep Ellsworth just cracked the fucking case.”

  The knot in Radford’s gut tightened. Ellsworth explained how a gap in the bonds could, given the right electrical conditions, lead to an arc between two pieces of metal. “A short circuit,” he said, simplifying his explanation for the sake of the nonengineers. “Right now, it looks like the probable cause of the explosion was a combination of lightning, degraded thermal bonds, and fuel vapors in the center tank.”

  The man’s arrogance was unchecked. Even if he was right, a conclusion was still far away. “You buying this?” he asked Lucy.

  She shrugged, but the look on her face suggested that indeed she was buying it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ulrich said, “we have a lot of work ahead of us. Make no mistake. Based on Shep’s excellent work, we are making a recommendation for a fleet-wide inspection of all fuel tanks in the 737-600. We will decide soon about the 400 and 500 models. We will continue to investigate alternative combustion sources, but I believe everyone in this room will agree that this has brought us all one step closer to an answer.”

  There was applause, and Ellsworth beamed. A moment later, on the conference room video hookup, the NTSB director appeared on-screen. A wide smile broke across her face.

  “Just heard the good news,” Carol Wilson said. “Great work, Shep. Everybody out there too.”

  Radford quietly slipped out of the conference room, letting the excitement cover his absence.

  For the next two days, Ellsworth’s theory dominated the conversation. Structural engineers and metallurgists spent hours combing over the ruined pieces of the plane, seeking to confirm that somehow, because of improperly bonded metal components, a lightning strike could’ve led to a spark in the fuel tank that ignited the fuel and brought down Pointer 795. Experts arrived in Wichita: college professors, meteorologists, along with aerospace engineers and Boeing’s lawyers. Tests were run in adjacent hangars. Pieces of aluminum skin and iron baffles were jolted with electricity. Pictures were taken, X-rays, magnetic images. A section of the fuel tank was shipped to a lab at the Air Force Academy for further tests.

  Shep would get to announce his findings at Friday’s public hearing. This was a breakthrough, the first major one so far. The investigators would show the press, show the families, show the politicians and the public that they’d made great progress.

  But rather than taking the pressure off Radford, Ellsworth’s theory only intensified Ulrich’s demand for answers. He became obsessed with Radford’s findings, checking on him constantly. “What are you looking at now?” he’d ask over breakfast. “What have you found out?” he’d ask at lunch. “Where are we at now?” at the evening DPM.

  Radford felt stymied. If anything, his investigation regressed. Locked away in his hotel room, he did research day and night, trying to find a plausible explanation. He had stacks of papers now, reams of data, but none of it added up to anything. There were no experts in this field, no scientists to call, no free-fall consultants. He was stuck in place, and he knew it. And the hearing was now only days away.

  His hotel room began to resemble Dickie Gray’s office. Stacks of files covered the floor. When not conducting interviews, or attending meetings, he holed up inside, letting the maid enter for only the most cursory cleaning. He’d obtained a printer, boxes of file folders, pens, markers, poster boards, maps, photo paper, and tape. He pored over the information he had, but it pointed nowhere. There were only dead ends, uncorroborated sources, myths and legends. From what he could tell, historically a handful of people really had survived incredible falls, but no legitimate explanation existed for how.

  Meanwhile, the furor over the Falling Woman continued to grow. Rumors began to spread, tales of miracle cures in Via Christi Hospital. A diabetic patient who’d tossed her insulin. A woman with lung cancer claiming to be cured. An inveterate alcoholic sobering up. As ridiculous as these stories were, as utterly absurd, the press kept reporting them. Almost daily, there was a story that associated some miracle with the mystery of Pointer 795. Radford was sick of the whole thing, plus he was out of ideas, out of explanations, and so
on he’d be out of time.

  On Monday morning, four days before the public hearing, Radford went down for breakfast. Lucy had asked to meet up to discuss the paperwork from the morgue. When he exited the elevator, Radford felt a strange twinge of anxiety. A moment later, before he had time to maneuver away, three people approached him in the lobby. A man and two women stood before him, a look of desperation on their faces.

  “Are you an investigator?” the man asked.

  “My sister was on that flight,” one of the women said. Her face was flushed and angry. “Please, my god, tell me that she’s the one who survived.”

  “I’m sorry,” Radford managed to say. He started to back away and glanced around for hotel security.

  “Why aren’t you releasing more information?” the man asked. His tone was harsh, not just angry but sharp and hostile. “You goddamn people are holding us hostage. We need answers. We deserve the truth.”

  “Stop, Jack,” the other woman said. “Don’t make it worse.”

  Finally, a hotel security guard appeared. He grasped the man on the elbow, but the man spun around.

  “My daughter. Why won’t you tell us anything? You people are monsters.”

  Radford’s heart pounded. The security guard reached for the man’s elbow again, and this time, the man relented, holding up his hands and allowing himself to be led away. The two women followed the security guard toward the door, the man still shouting.

  A moment later, Lucy emerged from the elevator, but the commotion was now over. She looked at Radford.

  “What’s up?” she said. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  He didn’t know what to say. This was what he’d feared all along. The chaos was starting to circle around him. Those people didn’t even know he was the one leading the investigation into the missing woman. They were just desperate, grasping for some glimmer of hope, praying for an answer.

  “You okay?” Lucy poked his shoulder. “I’ve been thinking about Ellsworth’s lightning theory. How did six decades of engineering work somehow fail?”

  Her question shook him out of his trance.

  “Airplanes are struck by lightning all the time,” he said. They walked toward the small bar now converted into a breakfast buffet. He’d lost his appetite.

  “These families deserve a private meeting,” she said.

  “What the hell are you worrying about that for?” she said. “You seem to have enough to do to get ready by Friday.”

  “I’m nowhere,” he said. “I’m one hundred nautical miles east of nowhere and I’m running out of fuel.”

  “Can’t you get any information from the hospital?”

  “No one saw her leave,” he said. “And no one can seem to remember with any certainty what she looked like. The descriptions vary. I’ve interviewed everyone who had contact with her. I’ve interviewed many of them three times. They’re dodging my phone calls now. They think I’m nuts.”

  “I’m worried about you,” she said. “When was the last time you took a shower?”

  “It’s the families that get to me,” he said. “Seven female passengers still unaccounted for. Seven families still clinging to hope. Seven!”

  Under Lucy’s leadership, the forensics team had identified ninety-eight passengers and crew, but that still left twenty-five without IDs, and of those, seven women fit the potential profile for the woman who’d been admitted to Via Christi and disappeared. That meant seven families still didn’t know what to believe.

  “I need those IDs, Lucy.”

  “You know as well as I do that I can’t make that happen any faster.”

  “Then my only choice is to start interviewing those families.”

  “Why haven’t you before?” she asked.

  “Because as soon as I do, I legitimize their hope. I make it real.”

  “What then? What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tell Ulrich to keep me out of the hearing,” he said. “I have no evidence. He’ll have to see that.”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. After pulling you off the working group. After putting you on full-time assignment to find that woman. I’m not sure that will fly.”

  “Then I’m going to end up splashing down in spectacular fashion,” he said. “I hope you enjoy the show.”

  An hour later, Radford entered the hangar at McConnell. The reconstruction team had been working day and night to attach pieces of the ruined airplane to scaffolding. The eerie site of the shattered plane coming back to a recognizable form reminded him of a broken child’s toy repaired with glue and tape.

  The reconstruction team had made a solid start. Several sections of fuselage now hung in place. Waiting to be lowered, the starboard wing spar dangled from a gantry crane. Rows of passenger seats had been placed in the forward compartment. Radford thought again of the human costs. Real people’s lives wiped out. Whole families forever changed. Near the center of the plane, dark char marks—burn-through from the explosion—stained the white aluminum panels.

  Ellsworth’s theory—that a lightning strike had caused the fuel tanks to explode—wasn’t holding up. The various experts brought in to confirm the theory were instead ripping it apart. Secretly, Radford took a small measure of delight in how quickly the mood had changed for Ellsworth. As the hearing approached, the tension grew.

  Overnight, someone—almost certainly Ellsworth—had punched a hole in the victims’ bulletin board. A gaping maw in the corkboard screamed trouble. Radford bent and gathered the victims’ photos from the floor. Smiling, clear-eyed mothers and sons, sisters and husbands, each photo captured a moment when these people still harbored dreams and desires. He flipped through them slowly, trying to memorize their features. Then he stacked the photos neatly on a chair and bent to pick up the scattered pins.

  As he repinned the photos to the cracked board, he set aside the seven photos of possible female victims. One of them might be the Falling Woman, assuming there was a Falling Woman, assuming her story was true and not some wild fantasy. The photos reminded him that a lot of people were still holding on to hope, people whose lives and families were in limbo. On Friday, Radford would stand before reporters, lawyers, and some of the family members of those seven women, and he’d present his meager findings. The thought of it made him feel nauseous. It would be a public shaming. A repudiation of his work, of the path he had chosen. It was one thing to stay alone in his Wichita hotel room, quietly doing research and assembling stories, and quite another to step into the arena of a public forum with a story that had no substance. He wanted an answer, but one hadn’t appeared. Ellsworth openly mocked him. The other investigators ignored him. The only friend he had left, the only person he could still count on, was Lucy, and she was inadvertently making it worse. Without a body, without a name, Radford would look worse than foolish up there; he’d look incompetent.

  Upstairs, Shep Ellsworth cursed and slammed a door. They passed each other on the staircase, almost colliding, Ellsworth coming down, Radford going up. Ellsworth mumbled something as they passed, but Radford no longer cared. He entered Ulrich’s office without knocking.

  “I’m nowhere,” he said.

  “I don’t want to hear it, Charlie.”

  Ulrich was at his computer and barely glanced up.

  “I need those bodies identified,” Radford said.

  “At this point, I don’t care if she’s alive or dead, real or fake,” Ulrich said. “You have one job. One. You will stand up there on Friday and you’ll own this.”

  “I have nothing new,” he said.

  “You’ve shown pictures to the witnesses?”

  Radford nodded. He’d shown over thirty pictures to every witness. He’d gone back three times with the charge nurse at Via Christi, four times with the paramedic who rode in the ambulance. Not a single person could say for certain if the woman they’d seen—in the barn, in the ambulance, at the hospital—was among those in the photographs. For more than two weeks, he’d wrestled with ev
ery implication of this story. He’d kept an open mind. He’d asked all the questions he could think to ask. But he had no control over any of it now. It no longer mattered what questions he should ask.

  “I’m done,” he said. “I have nothing to present. Don’t put me up there on Friday.”

  “I can’t accept that,” Ulrich said. “Stop making excuses. Do your job.”

  “What am I supposed to do? Stand in front of the cameras, in front of those families, and tell them what? That a girl fell almost fifty years ago into the rain forest? That a goddamn tail gunner may have survived a fall in World War II? That’s my evidence?”

  Ulrich stopped typing and rolled his chair around so that he could face Radford.

  “Charlie, I’m going to say this once and not say it again. I don’t care what you do on Friday. I don’t care if you make shadow puppets onstage. But you asked for this, and so now you own this story. You’re going to stand up there and take responsibility.”

  Then his boss stood, grabbed a stack of files, and slammed them down on his desk. It was almost comical, as if this skinny bureaucrat’s tirade would somehow intimidate him. Radford turned away.

  He needed a break, something to fall his way for a change.

  “I might as well be writing fiction,” he said to Ulrich on the way out. Charlie Radford had no way of knowing that at that very moment, the break he’d been waiting for had just walked into the lobby of the Wichita Holiday Inn.

  30

  Erin had been thinking about betrayals. How she betrayed her husband. How Adam betrayed his wife. How cancer betrayed her body. How that plane betrayed its passengers, including her. How every act toward salvation was also an act of betrayal. She needed to be free, needed not to become part of a world that would turn her private life into a spectacle. But to do that, in order to be free, she had to imprison herself in a cabin in the mountains of Virginia, holed up like some fugitive.