The Falling Woman: A Novel

by Richard Farrell

  No reason to startle her, he told himself. He would knock gently.

  “Do you want a drink?” she called from the porch. Then she lit a candle and placed it on a table next to her.

  “Yes,” he said, unsure of himself as he approached.

  “I just have wine,” she said.

  Radford stood near the porch. He heard the gurgle of wine being poured into a glass.

  “You can come up,” she said. “Get out of the rain. I don’t bite.”

  Radford wore his blue NTSB windbreaker. He hadn’t worn it in days, but he had it on now, despite the heat and humidity. He was here as an agent of the government and could no longer hide that. But now, the blue coat and its implications of power, of official business, felt burdensome, like somehow, he’d violated protocol.

  “Let me try this again,” he said. “My name is Charlie Radford. I’m an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board. Where would you like to begin?”

  “My name is Erin Geraghty,” she said, “and I think we say cheers.”

  He sat down and raised his glass.

  “Was it Adam?” she asked. Then she shook her head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “I have about a thousand questions,” he said.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I’d prefer if you skipped the caveats and begin.”

  “What do you remember?” he asked. “What happened on the plane?”

  He waited for her to talk. She began by describing the day in general: passengers at the gate, a handsome man on the walkway, a slightly queasy feeling in her gut. “I don’t remember much after that,” she said. “The medicine made me drowsy. I probably passed out before we took off.”

  The more she talked, the more he realized he needed some means of getting her story down on paper. He had not come prepared, and regretted letting his emotions get ahead of his work. Still, he couldn’t stop her. He asked her about the minutes leading up to the explosion.

  “Was anything strange happening? Did you see the captain? Smell fuel or smoke in the cabin?”

  “It was bumpy,” she said. “People began to make noise. There was a lot of lightning too. The clouds around us were all lit up. It was, oddly, quite beautiful.”

  He thought of Shep Ellsworth, and how much he would love to hear about the lightning. He let her talk without trying to direct her, asking the next question only when she finished. He listened carefully to every word, and quickly realized she was funny, smart, serious, and charming. But he also knew that very little of what she told him would help with the accident investigation. However, when she began to talk about the moment the plane came apart, and then said she didn’t want to linger there, he pressed her anyway.

  “What happened next?” he asked. “What do you remember?”

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I need to sleep. I need to take a shower and get to bed.”

  Radford hadn’t touched the wine, and he had at least fifty more questions he needed to ask her. But right now, of primary importance, he had to convince her to return to D.C. If they left soon, he could have her back in D.C. tonight. He’d get her a hotel room. In the morning, he’d interview her on the record and tell Carol Wilson to call a press conference for the Wednesday evening news cycle. He would call Ulrich on the drive in, alert the duty officer at L’Enfant Plaza. He could do all that in a day and be back in Wichita on Thursday, as Ulrich had demanded, to prepare for Friday’s hearing. He wasn’t entirely sure how it would all go down, but he felt the gears beginning to grind.

  “You can sleep in my car,” he said. “Grab a pillow and blankets.”

  “I’m not leaving with you,” she said.

  “You have to understand,” he said. “This doesn’t end with me taking down your story and you disappearing into the woods.”

  “I do understand,” she said. “But I also know you have no legal authority. I’ve broken no laws, done nothing wrong. I’ve done my research. What you decide to do with all this, how you decide to spin it back in D.C., that’s your business. But I’m not leaving until I’m ready. Not with you or anyone else.”

  How far could he push her? She knew the law; he couldn’t arrest her, but he could have her held on a material witness order. Though technically no one had found one piece of evidence to indicate criminal proceedings with Pointer 795, he could stretch it. The investigation remained open and ongoing.

  “I’m not leaving here without you,” he said. He tried to sound firm but not angry. The woman was an experienced lawyer and no doubt on firmer legal footing than he was.

  “That’s your choice,” she said. “But if you set foot on this porch after I say good night, you’re trespassing. And I’ll call the sheriff. He likes me. I bring him extra gravy for his meatloaf.”

  Had he really expected this to be easy? This woman had unplugged from the world. Why did he think that finding her, and talking to her, he could suddenly convince her to plug back in? She stood and picked up the wine bottle and the two glasses. The rain had stopped and the moon was above the cabin, glowing in the muggy evening sky.

  “I don’t understand your plan here,” he said.

  “I don’t have a plan,” she said. “I told you what I know. What I remember. I need to sleep on this. I need to unpack what’s happening. I’m not going to run, Mr. Radford. I’ll be at Sandy’s tomorrow. You can come by there and we can talk. Please,” she said, her voice softer now. “Please don’t do anything tonight. Please don’t call anyone. Can you make me that promise?”

  Reluctantly, he agreed. He wouldn’t call anyone. He wouldn’t report in. And with that, Erin Geraghty turned and went inside the cabin. A bolt slid through a lock behind the door. Radford stood on the porch a few moments longer and then stepped off, heading back toward his car. The prospect of spending the entire night staked out in front of her cabin didn’t seem pleasant, but he had little choice. He hadn’t booked a hotel.

  What had she told him, exactly? What had she revealed? Nothing more than what he already knew, or what he could surmise. General truths. Nothing specific about the flight, about what she may have witnessed. But he’d found her, the Falling Woman, and he could now prove to everyone involved that his search hadn’t been in vain. Maybe a good night’s sleep would bring her to her senses, make her see the futility of her situation. In the end, whatever she decided, however she chose to act mattered very little. Seven families were waiting. Soon, six of those families would have to be contacted, each of them then giving up hope. He’d be the one making those calls. But Erin’s family? She’d be back from the dead. A wave of exhaustion hit him. The night was warm, but the rain and the humidity had made the car feel chilly. He pulled on a sweatshirt and climbed into the passenger seat, reclining it as far as it would go.

  He thought about what his late mother used to say whenever his father would rant and complain: Don’t worry, Charlie. God works the night shift. In the morning, your problems will look different. His mother, the eternal optimist. And more often than not, she’d be right. In the morning, his father would have sobered up, and his mother would have cooked breakfast. She was so blindly obedient, so much a coconspirator in the wrack and ruin that was Martin Radford’s anger and addiction. Were she still here, what would his mother think and do about all this? She’d pray, that’s what she’d do. Find the supernatural explanation. In some ways, it would be easier to believe in miracles, to chalk this story up to angels and divine intervention than to try to piece together the science behind the truth. But Radford needed to make sense of this in the rational world, to understand it on its own terms.

  He simply had to bring her back. What she was choosing to do with her personal life, running away from her family, that was of no concern to him. He needed her to get her into a room, to take her formal statement, to get it down on paper, have her sign and verify that statement. He couldn’t worry about what happened after, what happened to her. He would take her statement back to Friday’s hearing and be able to say that he
’d found the woman. What she chose to do, whether to stay out of the spotlight or embrace it, that was not his concern. He’d expose her, but he wasn’t responsible for that. Maybe he could buy her some time, help her contact her family so she could make those personal choices privately. The night grew still. A cool breeze carried the smell of the forest. It was past midnight, and he hadn’t slept in almost two days. He wouldn’t sleep now. His mind still raced.

  What would happen after he filed his report? What would he do next? His emotions were shifting, not just about this crazy story but also about his work. He’d been baptized in the fields of Kansas, in the waters of his first major investigation. He’d been tested, and he knew he’d done well. Still, the gnawing inside remained. The work that sometimes felt like everything was turning out to be less than enough. Hadn’t that been Gray’s message? What did that leave? What would he need to do to quiet the voices? I’m wasting my life, he thought as he finally drifted off to sleep.

  Four miles away, a rental car pulled into town. The car drove slowly through the town center, and circled back twice before pulling into the bowling alley parking lot and turning off its headlights. The car stayed there overnight, inconspicuously parked in the back corner of the parking lot.

  Radford awoke to knuckles rapping the car window. Erin stood before him in a long bathrobe cinched at the neck. His back hurt and he had a difficult time finding the latch to raise the seat. She held a steaming mug of coffee in her hand. He rolled down the window.

  “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that,” she said.

  “I have a plan,” he said.

  “But I told you my plan,” she said. She handed the coffee to him.

  “I don’t need to make a spectacle out of this,” he said. “What I need is a detailed statement from you. I need you to answer a questionnaire. I’ll play it by the book. Standard accident witness questions. I won’t be able to shield your name from this, but you had to know that was inevitable.”

  She stood near the car with her arms folded. The bathrobe slipped open at the neck, enough to expose the soft curves of her breasts. For the second time, he noticed how pretty she was.

  “I don’t want to make a statement,” she said. “I don’t want to answer your questions. Haven’t I been through enough?”

  “You have,” he said. “But there are families out there holding on to false hope. Children who think their mother might still be alive.”

  “I have children too,” she said.

  “You’re making a choice,” he said. “But there are six families other than yours who are still clinging to hope. They have no choice.”

  “My name will be exposed?”

  He nodded and sipped the coffee.

  “That was going to happen eventually,” he said. “You had to know that. Your family already knows that you are a possible survivor.”

  “I’ll answer your questions,” she said. “But that’s all I’ll agree to at this point. I don’t know what comes next for me. Mr. Radford, I’m sick, dying actually, and I don’t have much time. I can see nothing good coming out of my return—my family has mourned my death several times over.”

  Radford realized there was so much he didn’t know, so much he might never understand. He told himself not to let those things get in the way. He reminded himself: don’t be smarter than the evidence. He had a plan of sorts, now that she’d agreed in part. She’d at least answer the standard questions. He’d have to let go of the rest.

  Radford swallowed a sip of coffee and looked around at the cabin and the forest.

  “It’s beautiful here,” he said. “I can appreciate why a person might want to come to a place like this and never leave.”

  She glanced around and nodded.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “I never liked being alone before. I always had to have people around me. But then I came here and just listened to what the world had to say. Does that make any sense?”

  “Something extraordinary happened to you,” he said. “It may take a long time to understand what that means. But going home, going back to the world, that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to escape. You can come back. Make it a priority.”

  “Your father was an alcoholic, wasn’t he?” she said, smiling.

  “How did you know that?” he said.

  “Psych major in college,” she said. “No. I just know a thing or two about compensation, about people who spend their lives smoothing over rough edges. I appreciate what you’re saying, Mr. Radford. I do. You are a decent man, I can tell. But if I go back to the world, I’ll be going back to sleep. The world makes few allowances for being awake.”

  She took a deep breath and took the empty coffee cup from his hand. He hoped she might invite him inside, but she made no such offer. He sensed that the conversation was over.

  “Come by the diner at two,” she said.

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight,” he said. “Sorry, no way.”

  “Mr. Radford, if I wanted to slip away from you, I’d be gone already. I’ll have time to answer more of your questions between my shifts.”

  NTSB: Witness Document 1.18.4.3

  Let me be clear. I possess no secrets. No messages from the great beyond. I’m just an ordinary woman who passed through an extraordinary chain of events.

  Normal. Everything appeared utterly normal. Dull engine sounds. Uncomfortable seats. A service cart pushed down a cramped aisle. How utterly unaware I was of all that space below me. All that emptiness. The great illusion of reality is how unreal it all feels. How does one hurtle through the sky at five hundred miles per hour without so much as a ripple on the surface of a glass of water? How does one zoom through the sky and not notice?

  I wish I could say I had a premonition. Some hidden, internal inkling of the disaster ahead, but I did not. I’ve read that Lincoln knew. They say King sensed his death before the shot in Memphis. Me? I thought about San Francisco, about home, about the remaining three olives in my “Mediterranean Snack Box,” an $8 bounty of bland hummus, flavorless crackers, a hunk of cheese, and a plastic tin of briny olives. I regretted my decision to purchase the snack box instead of ordering Pringles and M&M’s off the à la carte menu. These were the profound thoughts I was having right before all hell broke loose.

  Then the plane’s floor shuddered, a feeling not unlike hitting a gaping pothole, not so much a crash but a crunch, as if the bottom of the plane had clipped a mountain peak in the middle of Kansas. There was no explosion. There was no great boom. Only a thud, and then cold, black space.

  You’ve heard the rumors about me? People who were in the same hospital as me in Kansas experiencing miracle cures? Total bullshit. Not a stitch of truth to any of it. If my story gave hope to the hopeless, then great. But I had nothing to do with cures. No laying on of hands. No crutches in the basement. Seems to me, people make their own miracles.

  What really happened to me? At the end of the day, who will care? In five years, I’ll be a footnote, a $400 answer on Jeopardy. What happened to me was a mistake. A random act in a random world floating along in a random universe. The more I try to make sense of it, the more I try to distill meaning and purpose, the further I get from the truth. “Don’t expect this to be pretty,” my cancer surgeon said to me before slicing into my abdomen the first time. And while I appreciated her honesty, her humor, her skilled hands and years of training, I’d have appreciated her a lot more if she’d put me out of my misery. Cut it all out. Heart and soul.

  I was driving through traffic once, on my way into the office, before I was sick, when the world still seemed to adhere to the rules. I was listening to a program on public radio. They were talking about stochasticity. Randomness. How the miracles we experience can only be seen backward. Defying the odds only applies to prediction, not to outcomes. A golf ball lands on a particular blade of grass in a fairway. The odds against that ball landing on that single blade of grass are astronomical. Ten trillion to one if seen from the tee. But the certainty of
the ball landing somewhere, on some particular blade of grass, that’s a given. Maybe that’s my story. It only makes sense when seen in reverse.

  The most extraordinary moments in life are often the most ordinary ones. Why is that so hard to see?

  37

  Radford never intended to actually stay overnight, but now he found himself in desperate need of a shower, a change of clothes, a decent meal. Don’t think about what this means, he told himself. The Falling Woman was real. He’d found her. In a few hours, he’d be heading back to Kansas with definitive answers. What had Ulrich said? A case like this would open doors.

  The way he figured it, he’d simply get her to D.C. and depose her first. Get as much of her statement on the record as he could. It might take a few hours to type up a report. Then he’d catch an evening flight back to Wichita, leaving him the majority of Thursday to prepare for the public hearing. It would be tight, but he had every reason to think that his plan could work.

  He needed a place to shower and grab some sleep, but the nearest hotel was an hour down the road in Staunton.

  He drove through town, passing the bowling alley. He didn’t notice the woman standing outside the rental car, the same woman from the bar, the same woman from the hotel lobby. Nor did he notice the woman’s camera pointed at his car as he drove past. Running on adrenaline and coffee, he was aware only that he was exhausted and that his clothes smelled of sweat.

  He drove five miles out of town to a truck stop along the highway. He paid ten dollars for a trucker shower at the Sit & Sip Rest Stop, and ignored the black mildew in the grout as he enjoyed the steam. After a short nap in the car, he went inside the truck stop, ordered coffee, bacon and eggs, and began to write up the initial field report. He described Geraghty’s physical condition, her behavior, her reluctance to seek attention. He reported as many facts as he could. Then he turned his attention to the NTSB’s witness document.