T
he scent of just-brewed coffee drifted up from the pot and filled the Hammon kitchen the following Monday. Erin leaned on the bar, watching Maureen pour. Her fragile hands shook, and some of the coffee sloshed onto the counter. The trembling was all too familiar to Erin. “Are you all right, Maureen?” she asked.
“Fine,” she said. “It’s just a little spill.”
Erin studied the woman’s pale face as she wiped up the liquid. She was pounds thinner than she’d been before the crash, and she hadn’t had a lot of weight to lose. The smudges of weariness under her eyes provided a stark contrast to the whiteness of her cheeks. She looked old and tired enough to sleep for a year.
Erin let her finish fixing the cups, then took hers before Maureen could spill it again.
“So,” Maureen asked, feigning higher spirits than Erin believed she really felt. “How long have you got?”
“About an hour,” Erin said. “It’s strange having a set lunch hour when I’ve been so used to a pilot’s schedule. How does the saying go? You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”
The potent cliché hung in the air, and Erin was instantly sorry she’d said it. They’d all lost…and Maureen’s loss was much deeper than her own.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to call you since Saturday,” Maureen said, taking a seat across from Erin. “But I can’t seem to keep my mind on anything.”
“Call me?” Erin asked, bringing the cup to her lips. “What for?”
“About last weekend,” Maureen said. “About Addison Lowe.”
Erin almost choked on her coffee. “Addison? You met him?”
Maureen nodded. “He was here.”
The torment in Maureen’s expression made Erin want to die. “Oh, Maureen, I’m so sorry.”
“Why?” she asked, meeting Erin’s eyes directly. “He couldn’t have been kinder, despite the things he had to ask.”
Erin listened, dumbfounded, as Maureen described the visit to her. The portrait Maureen painted of Addison as a kind and sensitive man shouldn’t fit into her idea of him after the fight they’d had last Saturday…yet strangely, somehow, it did.
“It was the first time Jason cried since the crash,” Maureen said. “And Addison was there for him.”
“But didn’t he break down
because
of Addison?” Erin argued. “I mean, if he’d never come up with this pilot error business in the first place, Jason wouldn’t have been so upset. And to sit there and tell a child so blatantly, so cruelly, that his father made a mistake…”
Maureen took Erin’s hand. “He needed to have it explained to him,” she said quietly. “God knows, I couldn’t do it. I don’t understand it myself. Addison was the only one who ever tried to make Jason understand.”
“But he’s just a little boy! That’s so cruel.”
“He didn’t just drop the facts in his lap and leave, Erin. Addison followed it up with the kind of masculine tenderness that Jason misses so much.”
Erin’s gaze fell to her cup as the images whirled through her mind. Addison confronting Maureen. Addison talking to Jason. Addison comforting the distraught boy.
The telephone rang, startling her out of her reverie, and she waited for Maureen to answer it. Maureen’s spine stiffened, and her hands began trembling more as they smoothed back her hair. She looked distracted.
“Aren’t you going to answer it?” Erin asked.
Maureen shook her head quickly. “I can’t,” she said. “Would…would you do it for me?”
Confused, Erin picked up on the fourth ring, noting the fear in Maureen’s face as she did. “Hello?”
“He murdered my daughter,” a voice said. “Murdered her. Because of his lousy addiction to whatever he was on, my little girl is dead.”
Erin’s eyes flashed protectively to Maureen. Was this what she’d been experiencing day and night? “Who is this?” Erin asked helplessly.
“It doesn’t matter,” the voice answered. “I just hope your husband rots in hell for what he did.”
Erin felt her face turning a pallid shade of white, like Maureen’s, as she hung up the phone.
“It was one of them, wasn’t it?” Maureen asked, her tears beginning to trickle over her lashes.
“You mean there are more?”
Maureen took her cup to the sink and dropped it with a crash. “All hours, day and night. They all say the same things. I’ve thought of getting an unlisted number, but then I’d feel so cut off from friends and family, and I don’t have the energy to call them all with the new number.”
“I knew there were
some
phone calls, but I had no idea…” Erin’s voice broke off, distraught, and she pulled the crying woman into her arms. “I’m so sorry, Maureen,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. “So sorry.”
The two women held each other and wept for a patch of time before anger dulled the grief in Erin’s heart. “If we could just get Addison to change his report. If they would just quit saying it was pilot error.”
Maureen pulled herself together as much as she was able and stepped back, holding Erin at arm’s length. “You listen to me,” she said. “Addison Lowe may not say what we want him to in his report. And we may have to defend Mick against the cruel people out there who use his information against us. But he’s a good man, Erin, and he’s doing the best he can.”
The words drifted into the dark void in Erin’s heart, the part she’d tried to keep empty of anything but anger where Addison was concerned. The need to believe Maureen burned through the icy walls, and the warmth she suddenly encountered there left her confused and more miserable than she’d ever been in her life.
A
ddison looked like he’d spent the night in a combat zone of some Schwarzenegger movie. And he felt like he’d been dragged by the bumper of an army jeep. Standing weary and haggard before the men who’d been working on his team since the crash, he tried to straighten his slumped posture and look authoritative. But he and insomnia did not do good things for each other.
“We’ve got to start over,” he told them in his no-nonsense voice, beginning to pace like a sergeant before a unit of new recruits.
“Start over?” one of his investigative engineers asked, astounded. “What do you mean, start over?”
“With the wreckage,” Addison clarified, as if the men didn’t know. “Man, it’s hot in here!”
Knowing his men wondered if he’d snapped at some point during the dismal weekend—and not caring much—he yanked off his jacket and tossed it over a gray folding chair. “We’re going to go back through every last piece of that plane…every nut, every bolt, every instrument…and we’re going to make absolutely sure that the crash happened the way we think it happened.”
“But, Addison, we’ve already done that,” Hank ventured. “Nothing’s going to change just by going over it all again. And headquarters is waiting—”
“Don’t tell me what headquarters wants!” Addison shouted belligerently, his voice echoing from the metal roof and reverberating off the walls. “This investigation is
my
responsibility. I call the shots! It’s all on my head!”
“But, Addison,” another team member, Horace, protested. “I promised my girl I’d be back in D.C. in time for—”
“You shouldn’t have made any promises!” he cut in, startling them all. “We’re staying here until the job is done. And anybody I see half doing it because he wants to get home can find alternate employment.”
The men grew quiet. Except for the rumbling engines of the airliners outside, there was no sound in the hangar. Eyes were averted. Arms were crossed. Impatience ticked away like a time bomb.
“So…are we going to just keep looking until we find the answers you want?” Hank asked. “The answers that’ll please your lady friend?”
Addison turned his head around to face the man he’d worked with the longest. The one who’d been the most faithful. The most diligent. His anger subsided, for he knew the men had a right to question his motives, when they’d watched him run the gamut of his emotions, all over Erin. He hadn’t made his relationship with her a secret, after all. He shook his head slowly. “Just like you guys, I think we’ll find exactly the same conclusions that we have now. But we won’t have any doubts. And we’ll—
I’ll
—be able to live with my report.” His voice faltered, then he met the man’s eyes directly. “And to answer your question, no, I’m not waiting until Erin Russell approves of my findings. Chances are, she’ll be miserable with the results no matter what we come up with.”
He clenched his hand into a fist at the sharp thought of her and felt his face reddening. “I just want to know that I didn’t make too many assumptions. That I didn’t stop just short of finding something important. We’re all too good at what we do for that.”
The men nodded grudgingly, and the anger and defensiveness in their eyes faded a few degrees. He had gotten through to them and made himself sound less like a beast hanging on the edge of sanity than an investigator determined to find the truth.
“Hank, I want you to finish piecing together the elevator system while the others work elsewhere. How close are you to finishing it?”
“Pretty close,” Hank said. “But I figured there was no point now that we’ve heard the tapes. If it’s clear the pilot was in error—”
Addison cut him off. “I want to make sure that when the first officer told Hammon to pull up, there wasn’t some reason he couldn’t.”
“That’s a long shot.”
“Do it anyway,” Addison said. “And hurry.”
Trouble was, he was pretty sure that the truth wouldn’t change. They couldn’t dissect the crash, any more than he could dissect his miserable heart. But he could give it a try.
E
rin tried to ignore the smell of airplane exhaust and gaseous fumes and the deafening sound of engines that made her heart vibrate as she stepped up to the hangar where the wreckage was stored during the investigation. She saw an open door on the corner of the metal structure, but stopped before she reached it and wrapped her arms around herself.
After she’d left Maureen, Erin had spent the afternoon watching for Addison, waiting to see him in the lounge or the coffee shop, waiting to see his jade, aching eyes, waiting to tell him she’d been wrong. If Maureen could handle the conclusion of his report, surely she could, too. But the day had unfurled like an old piece of tape that was hopelessly stuck to its roll. It had taken all the coaxing and peeling and tearing she could manage just to get to the end. When she was finally off work for the day, she decided that she’d find Addison if she had to turn Shreveport upside down. So she had come to the most obvious place first. This hangar. The hangar that stored the final moments of Mick’s life. The proof that he wasn’t coming back.
She wanted to see Addison, to tell him that she’d been wrong about him, that she appreciated what he’d done last weekend for Jason, that she’d like another chance, that she missed him, that she couldn’t explain the dull ache that had dogged her all week. But somehow, now that she was here, she was afraid to go inside. Afraid to face the end of Mick’s life in pieces of aircraft, all disassembled and tagged.
She started to turn back to the terminal, but the thought of another lonely night seemed worse than the fear that sent her heart careening. She had to see Addison. Even if it meant going inside.
Slowly, she stepped into the doorway.
She saw him immediately, crouched down on the concrete floor, examining the pieces of the wing lying before him, as if some crumb of evidence might fall out of the metal and proclaim that they’d had it all wrong. His shirt was soaked with perspiration, its tail hanging out, as if he’d thrown it on as an afterthought.
Deep lines of fatigue and concentration were etched in the hard angles of his face. Shadows occupied the normally crinkled lines of laughter beneath his eyes. To any passerby, he might look awful. To Erin, he was light to a dismally dark heart.
She looked around, saw that no one else seemed to be here with him, that he was working alone. Tentatively, she moved toward him.
The sound of her heels on the concrete summoned Addison’s attention, and he snapped his head up. His eyes meshed with hers across the large room…questioning, welcoming…and yet condemning.
“Are…are you alone?” she asked.
He glanced around him, as if he hadn’t given the fact a thought until she brought it up. “Looks like it,” he said coldly. “Even NTSB people have to eat.”
“Not all of them,” she said quietly.
Her voice was lost beneath the sound of a passing plane, and Addison stood up, hands riding his hips, a screwdriver dangling from his fingers. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
He nodded in frustration and wiped at his face with the back of his hand. “Look, I don’t know why you came here, but this is not the best place for you…”
“I came here to see you,” she said, feeling the wrenching of emotion in her heart. “I’ve been looking for you all afternoon.”
He shrugged, the indifferent gesture punctuating the uncracking facade he wore. “You would have found me here.”
“I did,” she pointed out.
He nodded. “Yeah. Guess you did.”
“I talked to Maureen today,” she said quickly, before they got into another round of meaningless banter that would rob the moment of its significance. “I wish I’d called her earlier. She told me about Saturday night. About how you were with Jason.”
He uttered a mirthless laugh and went to the table to toss down the screwdriver. “And don’t tell me. You came here to thank me for not coming on like the Hitler you had me figured for…”
“No,” she said. “I came here to tell you that I was wrong to manipulate you into meeting them.”
“You sure were.”
She felt familiar tears springing to her eyes, and turned away. Her hand swept through her hair. “Addison, I’m trying to apologize.”
“For what?” he asked. “For thinking I don’t have feelings? That I
like
it when my reports hurt people? For setting me up?”
A tear rolled down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away. “Addison, I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
Shaking his head, he ambled toward the corrugated wall and leaned into it, bracing himself on an elbow. She started to go toward him, but suddenly he ground his teeth and kicked the rippling metal, sending a loud clang echoing throughout the hangar. She jumped and muffled her sobs.
Addison turned back toward her. “Don’t be sorry, Erin,” he shouted, “because I’m not the big hero. I’m human. And as much as I want to, I can’t let that little boy’s pain, or yours, change my report.”
He stepped toward her, biting out each word. “I have…to tell…the truth. Can you understand that? Because as much as I felt for Jason Hammon and his mother, as much as I may even feel for you,
I
don’t have the power to change the facts. They are what they are!”
Erin set one hand across her stomach and covered her eyes with the other. Her nose was a shiny shade of crimson. “I know you can’t change them. Just like I can’t change the feelings I have…about the crash…and Mick’s dying… and my flying again…” Her voice broke off before she could list even half the things plaguing her.
As if he couldn’t bear to face her pain, Addison turned his back to her and leaned over a table, his head dropping down. She could see his own pain, his own despair, and though she ached—though he had
made
her ache—she wanted to heal him. Did it mean she was in love, she wondered dismally, that she could stand there and let him hurt her and still not want to see him hurt?
She went toward him, the sound of her clicking heels incongruous in the palpable tension of the room. “Tell me about her,” she whispered when she was close behind him. “Tell me about your wife.”
A moment of startled silence passed between them, but Addison didn’t move. A machinist’s jeep sped by outside, a voice in another hangar shouted to someone on the runway, a plane’s engine shook the building. Finally, Addison spoke. “I loved her,” he whispered. “Probably as much as Maureen loved Mick. As much as Jason loved his dad.”
More tears rivered paths down Erin’s cheeks, and her lips twisted, but she didn’t answer.
“She was going to New Jersey to visit her old college roommate,” he went on. “I was supposed to go with her, but I couldn’t work out my schedule, so I let her go alone.” The words seemed to come faster, louder, the more he spoke, but he still did not move from his position, slumped over the table.
“I was driving home from the airport when I heard the report on the radio…” His voice broke, then recovered, raspier as the tale unfolded. “I thought, ‘No, God, it’s a mistake.’ But I knew I had put her on that plane. I had watched it take off.” His shoulders heaved, and Erin longed to reach out to comfort him, but she knew it wasn’t the time. Not while he embraced his wife’s memory.
“It was a stupid, senseless accident. A collision with a private plane. Too much traffic in the area, and the controller hadn’t seen it.” He swallowed again, but the lump of emotion in his throat wouldn’t be dislodged.
“I swore that if I could, I’d make sure that nothing like that ever happened again…that no other husband on earth would ever have to suffer that grief. That’s why I asked the NTSB to move me to the field. But along the way since that time, I’ve learned that I can’t stop them all. I can’t protect every grieving widow. I can’t shelter the children. I can’t carry their load of misery on my back and still do my job.” He wiped his eyes roughly, leaving them red, and slowly stood up straight.
When he turned to her, the dullness in his expression told Erin that he’d slipped through her fingers once and for all.
“So think of me as the enemy if you have to, Erin, if it makes you handle your own grief better. Think of me as the one you can blame it all on. Because I’m going to tell the truth about this crash no matter what, so that every pilot out there in training will know that it can happen to the very best. That flying takes every ounce of concentration they have, and no amount of experience can substitute for it. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll stop one crash, and keep one little kid from suffering like Jason has had to.”
Erin’s sobs rose up in her throat. It was over. He was dismissing her, telling her that he was playing the game his way and that if she didn’t like it, she could hit the road. And while she understood his point and his pain, his dismissal hurt her.
“I wish I had known her,” she managed to say. “I wish I had known you then, when you were happy. And I wish things could be different.”
He didn’t answer, just stared at her with those dull, agonized eyes, those eyes that didn’t disappear from her mind even when he wasn’t there.
“Despite what you think of me now,” she choked out, “I’m still sorry for all the things I said and did. All the wrong conclusions. Next time I’ll take more care in checking my facts.”
And then she covered her mouth and left him standing in the hangar, surrounded by the sound of those engines rumbling through him like the thunders of hell itself.