B
y the time Addison drove home, his anger had settled in the chamber of his heart where other smoldering injustices lay. And there were plenty of them. He was always the bad guy, the one ready to lay blame on someone or some
thing
that had caused a disaster. Always the villain, and he was getting tired of it.
He gathered his papers off the seat of his car and got out, shuffling them into order while he walked to the condominium the NTSB had rented for him. He reached into his pocket for his keys and pulled them out, jabbing one into the lock. But it wasn’t locked.
Puzzled, Addison pushed open the door. His bewilderment was quickly resolved when he encountered the older man sitting cross-legged on his couch, smoking a cigarette and reading some of Addison’s notes on the recent crash.
“Sid, I didn’t know you were coming,” he said, a trace of irritation in his tight voice, though he tried to conceal it. “You should have called.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” the older man said, rising to his feet and dusting stray ashes off his gray trousers. “Thought I’d see how things were going.”
Addison dropped his keys on the table, set down his things, and tried to control the tension rising to his head. He’d learned years ago that it was better to voice his feelings to Sid, or the man would run right over him. “Father-in-law or not,” he said, “you don’t have any business walking into my apartment anytime you please.”
“I’m not here as your father-in-law,” Sid said, stroking his gray mustache with the tip of a callused finger. “I’m here as your boss.”
Addison turned back to him, bracing himself for whatever was about to come. The NTSB didn’t send his superiors to check on him unless they weren’t happy with his job. He’d heard it all before, but the lecture never failed to scathe him. “And what am I getting my hand slapped for this time?”
Sid chuckled under his breath and came toward him, his small build complemented by the silk tie and long-sleeved dress shirt that shouted authority. “Come on now, Addison. Where’d all that hostility come from? Can’t we even take a minute to say hello?”
As usual when dealing with his father-in-law/boss, Addison felt his defenses lowering a bit. It was difficult to forget the pain Sid had suffered when his only child, Addison’s wife, had been snatched from life before her time. After losing his own wife just years earlier, Sid had been the portrait of loneliness, and following the death of his daughter he had clung to Addison as if he were his last living friend. When the double-edged sword of working with a relative sometimes put him unnecessarily on edge, Addison reminded himself of his dead wife’s adoration of the man, and the good relationship he’d had with him during the twelve years of his marriage to Amanda.
He smiled. “You’re right. I’ve just had a trying day, and I guess I expect the worse. It’s good to see you, Sid.”
The men shook hands, and then, as he often did, Sid pulled him into an awkward male embrace. “Louisiana’s treating you well,” Sid said in a paternal tone, stepping back. “Looks like you’ve gotten some sun.”
Addison disengaged himself from the embrace and went into the kitchen to search for something to offer his guest. “Yeah, well. We spent a good many days outside sifting through the wreckage. It was a little hard to tell one piece from another at first. Debris was scattered for a mile or so.”
“But you’ve had it all tagged and stored for at least a week now, am I right?”
Addison felt his defenses rising again. Sid was fishing, leading up to something. Already he could feel his anger pushing to the surface again, bracing itself for the boss-lecture that inevitably followed. He pulled out a pitcher of iced tea and poured Sid a glass. “More or less.”
Sid’s smile defined the age lines on his forehead and ridges down his jaw, and Addison wasn’t fooled. He knew that smile—the kind a cartoon feline offered to a cornered mouse.
“So where’d you get that sunburn?” Sid asked, as if he still made idle conversation. “Looks pretty fresh to me.”
“I didn’t know I was sunburnt,” Addison said, his tone growing less cordial. “I don’t usually burn.”
“Sure,” Sid said. “Right here on your nose, a little across the cheeks. Take a little time off today?”
So that was it. Sid was trying to make a case for his not working hard enough, not getting the facts down as fast as they wanted. “As a matter of fact, no. I was interviewing the captain’s first officer. It was difficult for her. The crash was only two weeks ago, and I had to question her on her terms. She wanted to talk at the lake, and since I wanted her cooperation, I obliged her.”
Sid took his tea, chuckling in his maddening, friend-foe kind of way. “The job should have been so cushy when I was in the field. Questioning beside a lake. Not bad. Must be why it’s taking you so long.”
Addison exhaled loudly and went back to the living room. Wearily, he sank down into a chair and regarded the man who had never quite stopped grieving over Amanda’s death. She was the one unifying factor between them, but sometimes their mutual love of her wasn’t quite enough of a bond. “So is that why you’re here, Sid? To badger me about how long the investigation is taking? Because it won’t do any good. You know that by now.”
Sid pulled the knees of his slacks and sat down, holding the tea on his knee. The condensation formed a wet ring on his pants. “There’s been some concern,” he began, “that you move too slowly. You know that crash that happened in Omaha two days after this one? It’s already wrapped up. That investigator is free to move on to his next assignment. Meanwhile, we keeping waiting…”
“That crash didn’t have any fatalities,” Addison pointed out. “It was different. All they had to do there was question the pilot and passengers. The answers were clear.”
“Some believe the answers are clear in this case,” Sid said. “Some of your own team members, as a matter of fact.”
Addison sprang to his feet, ire rising to color his face. He could tolerate criticism from his superiors, but the disloyalty of his team members was too much to accept. “Are you telling me that some of my team members have been complaining about my diligence in my job?”
Sid chuckled again, waving a hand to stem Addison’s anger. “No, no, of course not. Settle down. It’s just that it’s become our impression that they feel they’ve come to a conclusion…”
“How can you even think that?” Addison asked, appalled. “I haven’t even got all the test results back. I haven’t even heard the whole tape yet.”
“Mere formalities,” Sid said, waving the details off with his hand. “In a case where things are so cut-and-dried, those are nothing more than formalities.”
Addison couldn’t believe they were discussing the same crash. “Cut-and-dried? How can you say that?”
“It was a matter of pilot error, obviously,” Sid said.
“And I’m just trying to substantiate that,” Addison argued. “What do you want from me?”
“We want you to follow procedure. We want you to finish his profile and his seventy-two-hour history, then make an announcement.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing?” Addison shouted. “I spent the whole day doing that, and I have an appointment tonight at the health club to meet with another pilot who seems to have some more of the facts I need.”
Sid’s feigned pleasantness disappeared. “Don’t raise your voice to me, Addison. I’m not above losing my patience with you.”
Addison’s jaw went rigid, and he clenched his fist and turned his back to the man who had driven him to the edge of fury more than once. Amanda had loved him, he reminded himself again. For that, he at least owed the man his respect.
“We want you to move this along. The press is waiting for an announcement, and the public is holding their breath. The longer you take on this investigation, the worse the airline industry looks. It doesn’t take all day to question a first officer who wasn’t even on the plane. Maybe if you did it in a more professional environment than the lake, you’d get somewhere a lot faster. Presuming that information is what you want, and not something else!”
Addison caught the innuendo and struggled not to swing at the man. “I don’t work the way you did,” he said in an explosively calm voice. “I try to make the person I’m questioning comfortable. I try to take into consideration that they’re working through their own grief.”
“Grief in a health club? Are you going to question the pilot during an aerobics class?”
“Racquetball, as a matter of fact,” Addison admitted defiantly. “It works, Sid. If I can meet people on their own terms, they’re a lot more willing to cooperate.”
Sid set down his glass and crossed his knees. Silently, he shook his head, the way a father does when he can’t believe the naiveté in his son.
“What do you guys want?” Addison asked, finally. “Bottom line. Just get to the point.”
“We want you to go after the questions where you’ll get answers. Go to the family. Question the wife about that seventy-two-hour history. Stop pampering and start drilling. Start at the core, and you’ll cut weeks off the investigation. There isn’t time to waste with lakes and health clubs. You have a job to do.”
Addison crossed his arms rigidly, his compressed lips revealing his distaste. “So, does the NTSB plan to throw in some bright lights to put the subjects under, a few torture devices? That might save a little time, too. Maybe we could
make
those people talk. Show them we mean business.”
“Come on, Addison, you know what I’m saying.”
Addison leaned forward, waving his finger in the man’s face. “And you knew before you came here what my reaction would be. Either I do my job the way that I see best, or you give this assignment to someone else.”
Sid lurched up and grabbed Addison’s hand. Their eyes locked. “You’re walking on thin ice, son. I don’t like it.”
“Fine,” Addison said. “Then let up. Let me do my job. If you can’t do that, maybe I don’t belong with the NTSB anymore.”
“How can you say that?” Sid’s question was an astonished whisper. “How
dare
you say that? After your wife—my little girl—died in one of those planes. How dare you act as if your responsibility was a chore? It’s a privilege and an obligation! You used to see it that way!”
“I used to see a lot of things differently,” Addison confessed. “When you promoted me to this position, I went into it with a fever, ready to change the world. I was angry and driven, just like you were. But that was a year and a half ago, Sid.”
“She was your wife! Can you forget that easily?” Sid shouted.
“No, I can’t forget!” Addison returned. “But I can stop being ready to convict the world over it. I can stop seeing every crash as a way to get retribution! I can show a little compassion now, and as God is my witness, I’m going to do it.”
Electric silence enveloped them as they stood locked in each other’s angry gaze.
Finally, Sid set his lips and spoke in a frosty voice. “You have to interview that family sooner or later, whether you like it or not, Addison. I suggest you do it sooner.”
“I’ll do it when I’m good and ready,” Addison said. “But if I had my way, I wouldn’t do it at all.”
Sid lifted his chin with the sternness of an executioner and started for the door. Addison watched him open it, then linger in the threshold. Slowly Sid turned back, his expression unreadable, as though he might be about to beseech—or to threaten. “Don’t push me, son,” he finally said. “You’re the best field investigator we’ve got. But if you throw that away, not even I can protect you.”
“When I want your protection,” Addison said, “I’ll ask for it.”
The door slammed, echoing through the small apartment, and jolting Addison as a guilty mixture of pain and resentment blended in his heart.
T
he youth center contained its usual sounds of young voices striving to rise above the din, music blaring a bit too loudly on contrasting stations of rock and rap, the echo of basketballs bouncing and sinking.
Clint Jessup, who helped run the center, in addition to being youth director at Erin’s church, greeted her with an armload of basketballs. “Erin, what are you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you today.”
“Just had some spare time and thought I’d work on the mural,” she said.
She could see from the look on his face that he had heard the rumors. “Wanna talk?” he asked.
She tried to smile. “Not really.”
“I did take a few counseling courses at seminary, you know.”
Counseling.
She remembered her promise to Frank to get counseling, but something—pride? stubbornness?—stopped her. “I’m okay, Clint. Really.”
“Well, Sherry’s in the art room doing ceramics with the girls,” he said, referring to his new wife, Madeline’s former roommate. “If you’d rather talk to her…”
“Clint,
please,”
she said. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” He reached the supply closet and managed to get the door open, then let the balls fall in. “You know where we are if you need us.”
Erin watched him disappear into the gym, then she set her paint cans down in the hall, next to the mural she and the kids had been working on. The project had been her idea a year ago when the center was first built, and the freshly painted walls had soon become covered with obscene graffiti. If the kids wanted to paint the walls, she thought, she’d give them something worthwhile to paint. Maybe they’d take more pride in facilities that bore their signatures.
It had worked. On her days to come here, a crowd of kids—aged eight to eighteen, and from backgrounds as diverse as flavors of candy—waited eagerly in the colorful corridors for her.
But today no one waited, because she wasn’t expected. She knelt and unfolded the drop cloths she kept rolled beside the wall. After opening the paint cans, she headed upstairs to the supply closet where she kept all her brushes.
The heavy doors leading to the stairwell creaked as they opened, and she reached inside to flick on the light. The door shut behind her, and she started up the stairs.
“This isn’t your day to come.”
The young male voice startled her, and she glanced up the staircase, to the tawny-haired boy sitting on the landing between two twisting levels of stairs. His eyes squinted as they adjusted to the light. “Jason? What are you doing here?”
Mick Hammon’s son gave a shrug that belied the drawn lines on his nine-year-old face. “Nothin’.”
Erin finished the climb to where he sat, his arms hugging his knees. She lowered herself to the step beside him, unconsciously imitating his position. “Why aren’t you playing ball with the guys?”
“Not in the mood,” Jason said.
“Yeah,” Erin whispered. “I know.”
They sat quietly for a moment, neither venturing to broach the subject of the crash or the lies that circulated as a result of it or the pain that wouldn’t die. Finally, Erin patted his knee, where his Levis had worn to a thin blue-gray. “Feel like painting?”
“I guess,” he said.
Erin got to her feet, dusted off her pants, and held out a hand to the boy. Reluctantly, he took it and allowed her to pull him up.
“You’re gonna be all right, Jason,” she whispered, holding his gray gaze.
Trust gleamed like the toughest metal in his eyes—eyes that looked much older than nine—but she knew the doubt that plagued him, as it did her. He dropped his focus to his dirty Reeboks, his shoulders rising and falling with a painful sigh. “I’ll help you get the brushes,” he said.
Jason was quiet as they painted, and he hung conspicuously apart from the ten other kids, who dove into the project at hand. As much as Erin tried to draw him in, he clung to his distance, working with a diligent hand on the section of the mural she had assigned him.
But that distance called attention to him, and some of the other boys—the rougher ones who would have been in street gangs or juvenile delinquent centers if not for the distraction of the youth center—couldn’t stand leaving him alone. He had never quite clicked with many of the boys here, but his athletic nature, his creativity, and his friendship with Erin kept him coming anyway. The other boys were from poorer families, mostly fatherless, with little if any supervision from their mothers. Those were the boys who made trouble as easily as withdrawing the switchblades they often carried, the ones who chided and terrorized anyone who didn’t fit. Jason was different from them. It was obvious by his behavior, his clothes, his silence…He was an open target for anyone who needed one.
Erin’s muscles tensed in dread when three of the boys ambled toward Jason. There were looks of suspicious amusement in their hardened eyes, as if they planned to have “some fun” with the boy. She stopped painting and grabbed a rag to wipe her hands, preparing to intervene if it became necessary. She’d worked with these kids long enough to know that defending Jason too soon would humiliate him and make matters much worse than they were. Jason kept his eyes on his painting, never missing a brush stroke.
“Hey, Hammon,” one of the boys, who went by the name of T.J., said, strutting toward Jason. The belligerent newcomer’s thumbs were lodged in the front pockets of jeans that had been in good shape three or four hand-me-downs ago. “Guess your dad ain’t such a big shot now, huh?”
Erin saw Jason’s jaw twitch, but he set his mouth in a rigid line and kept painting.
“Mr. Airline Pilot,” T.J. mocked. “Guess he won’t be blowin’ his horn off on career day anymore at school. You’ll be just like the rest of us now.”
Jason’s hand froze and his face flushed, but he didn’t offer the boys the satisfaction of turning around.
Erin held her breath, aching to step in. Instead, she followed her judgment and hung back, giving Jason the chance to stop the bullying himself.
T.J. stepped closer to Jason, trying harder to provoke a reaction. “Hey, boys. Did ya hear how Hammon’s ole man zapped all those people? Freaked out and forgot which way was up.”
“Wait a min—,” Erin started to shout, but suddenly Jason snapped, and he swung around, crashing his small fist into the larger boy’s face. In seconds they were on the floor, tangled in a violent embrace, hands grabbing and scratching and tearing as the crowd of kids surrounded them, cheering.
Horrified, Erin pushed through the growing throng of kids and dove for the two thrashing bodies.
“Stop it!” she screamed, pulling on the boy closest to her. At this juncture they were faceless creatures eagerly inflicting pain on one another. “Stop it!”
“What’s going on here?” Clint bolted up the hall, pushed through the melee, and grabbed the scruff of T.J.’s shirt. Erin wrapped herself around Jason’s thrashing arms and pulled him away. As tightly as she held him, he continued trying to reach toward T.J., dead set on making the boy pay for his words.
T.J.’s nose and mouth were smeared with blood, and each raging breath he took made him seem more animalistic.
“Get him out of here!” Erin told Clint. Clint wrestled T.J. up the hall. “T.J., you aren’t welcome back until you can respect the place and the people who come here! I won’t tolerate that kind of behavior!”
“He
started it!” T.J. shouted back. “I was just
talking
to him! Why don’t you throw
him
out, too?”
“I’ll deal with him,” Erin said, casting an annoyed glance down at Jason, who still thrashed in her arms. “Don’t you worry.”
T.J. jerked out of Clint’s grip and, calling his friends to his side, left the center in a cloud of rage.
When Erin was certain the danger was past, she turned her attention to the troubled boy. He pulled from her grasp and dashed to the stairwell. She followed, closing them off so they could escape the crowd’s scrutiny.
“Jason,” she said, panting, “what got into you? You can’t pull a Hulk Hogan every time someone says something stupid.”
“What did you want me to do?” he cried. “You heard what he said about my dad!”
“He didn’t know what he was talking about. He’s jealous of you, Jason. You’re everything he wants to be, so he tries to belittle you, hurt you, make you seem more like him so he won’t have to envy you.”
“That’s bull!” Jason leaned into the corner of the stairwell, letting the shadows hide his bruised face. “He’s not the first one to say what he did, Erin.”
She wilted against the opposite wall, racking her brain for words that would make some sense of it all. “I know, Jason. But you’re going to have to ignore it. You can’t let it get to you. Your dad wouldn’t have wanted you getting in fights over him.”
“Well, my dad isn’t here, is he?” Jason shouted defiantly, his young voice cracking with fury.
“Is
he?”
Speechless, Erin tried to hold back her own tears. She stepped closer to the boy, her mouth twisted with pain, and reached out for him.
Jason pushed past her out the doors.
E
rin couldn’t maintain her interest in painting after Jason left, so she instructed the kids to wash their brushes and put them away.
Wearily, she loaded the paint back into her car and drove home. The emptiness of the house mocked her. Over and over, she saw Jason’s raging, tearless face, confused and haunted by a crash that no one understood. Out of necessity, she forced herself to eat a sandwich. By the time she was finished, she was ready to leave again, to go anywhere, to tackle anything except the memories that plagued her.
She changed into a pair of shorts and gathered her racquetball racquet and sped like a woman possessed to Marty’s, the health club frequented by most of the airline employees because of its proximity to the airport.
Once she’d arrived, Erin sat staring vacantly in the dark crowded parking lot. There would be pilots inside who’d already heard how she’d abandoned the flight yesterday. Flight attendants would treat her with sympathy. Even people who had nothing to do with the airline but who’d heard the gossip would probably be watching her, clicking their tongues and shaking their heads and declaring what a shame it was that the usually vivacious Erin was losing it.
The roaring sound of a plane overhead drew her eyes upward. Through the window, she followed the progress of tiny lights ascending into the dark sky. That sick feeling gripped her again. Determined not to surrender to it, Erin grabbed her racquet and duffel bag and hurriedly left the car.
Marty, the hulking proprietor for whom the club was named, was sitting behind the front desk when Erin bolted in. “How’s it going, Erin?” he asked when he saw her.
“Pretty good,” she lied. “Is there a court open?”
“Sure is. You want me to line up an opponent?”
Erin shook her head. “Just want to hit some balls. Practice my strokes.”
He handed her the clipboard to sign in. “If you get tired of it,” he said, “you ought to try our new aerobics class. Get some of those endorphins pumping. It’s real good for depression.”
Erin gave him a not-you-too look. “Maybe later. Thanks, Marty.”
The door to the empty court banged shut behind her, sending off an echo. Erin dropped her duffel bag on the floor and bent over it for her glove and wristbands. She glanced out the glass wall behind her, almost certain that someone was sitting on the spectators’ bleachers, watching her. But no one was there.
Pull yourself together, Erin,
she ordered herself.
Don’t let this thing beat you.
Slowly, she started her routine warm-up. But neither the exercise nor the solitude helped her to escape the tension that had her wound tighter than a propeller spinning out of control.
A
ddison Lowe saw Erin through the glass wall a few moments later, warming up with the grace of a professional athlete. He told himself that this wasn’t the time to see her again, that he should leave and let her work through her problems in her own way. He’d gotten the information he needed from the pilot he’d come here to meet, and he really had no business hanging around. But the sight of Erin compelled him to stand at the glass and watch.
He’d had her figured wrong, he told himself as she picked up her racquet and served the ball, then backhanded it against the right wall to ricochet back to her again. When he’d seen her that morning, she’d seemed too fragile, too broken, and he would have bet she was at home, wrapped in some sort of refuge, unable to cope in any way. But now he saw the aggressive side of her as she ran back and forth across the court, slamming her racquet into that ball with the anger and fury of someone with a debt to collect. Did that energy come from her anger?
She hit the ball too low, and he watched, breath held, as she recovered it, never missing a beat. Her hair swayed into her face and back. The muscles in her legs twisted and stretched as she leaped into the air and then crouched near the floor, always hitting the ball before it bounced a second time. Great
whacks
sounded with each stroke. Despite what he’d seen of her, Erin Russell was not a loser, he decided, neither on the court nor in the cockpit. Right now, she just needed a little help coping.
Drawing his heavy dark brows together, Addison leaned against the glass, watching more intently. After a rally of five or more minutes, Erin finally let the ball pass her, and set her hands on her hips while she caught her breath. She turned around and wiped her face on her wristband, and he saw that her eyes were red and wet. Her shoulders heaved, and the tormented expression on her face broke his heart.
Their eyes met through the glass before he had the presence of mind to step away from it, and he didn’t miss her look of shock and accusation. Quickly, she turned away from him and wiped her face again. Erin found the ball, picked it up, and prepared to serve it once more.
Addison didn’t know if it was ego or a feeling of kinship that forced him to finally knock on the glass. Before he realized what he had done, he had caught her attention again. Erin turned around quickly, stared at him for a moment, annoyed, then reluctantly came to the door. She unlocked it and held it slightly ajar. “I have this court,” she said.