In the Blood (3 page)

Chapter Three

T
he rushing sound coming from the circular vents above him told Jefferson Tayte that he was getting all the air American Airlines would allow.
 
He twisted at them some more, just to be certain.
 
Then he checked his seat belt again, knowing it was as tight as he could bear it.
 
It was creasing his second linen suit that day, this one a shade paler than the last.

A brief sleep in the passenger seat of his Torch Red, 1955 Ford Thunderbird had barely refreshed him, but he was used to it.
 
4.8 litres of V8 muscle with manual three-speed overdrive.
 
He’d had the car since he started pulling paychecks, and even if it was on its third reconditioned engine, for all its faults he absolutely loved it.
 
Running on whitewall tires with a white hardtop and enough chrome to shame a custom Harley, it looked a little ostentatious when he pulled up to see a client, but he didn’t care.
 
That car was his only family.

A suitcase nearly as shabby as his briefcase was testament to a lifestyle of stopovers at cheap motels, imposing a diet of fast food and a snacking habit that had contributed to his appearance over the years.
 
Travelling prepared had at least saved him the trip back to DC to pick up a flight, and a few provisions from the shopping lounge at Boston’s Logan International Airport had serviced any needs his suitcase couldn’t provide for.
 
He even carried a valid passport.
 
He figured always having one with him meant he could go anywhere in the world if he wanted to, even if he had no intention of using it.

Looking around the cabin he noticed it was half empty and wondered what the absent passengers knew that he didn’t.
 
Then the thing happened that he’d been trying to avoid.
 
He caught the eyes that had been drilling into the side of his head from the window seat since he’d first sat down.

The woman’s voice suddenly burst the air, like she’d been holding her breath all this time, waiting to get an introduction out.
 
“Hi, I’m
Julia
- Julia
Kapowski.
”
 
Her voice was nasal with a grating edge, and she hung onto her words as though afraid to let them go again until she’d thought of something else to say.
 
She was grinning childishly, like she was meeting someone famous and was their all-time greatest fan.

Tayte twitched in his seat, recoiling intuitively.
 
Her accent was easy to place.
 
New York City,
he thought.
 
Queens - maybe Brooklyn.
 
A hand shot across the empty seat.
 
It was connected to the widest smile he’d ever seen and he was thankful for the space between them.
 
He shook the hand and offered an uncomfortable nod.
 
“JT,” he said.

The woman wriggled in her seat.
 
“J...
 
T...”
 
She repeated his initials slowly, as though buying herself time to work out what they stood for.
 
“Well...
 
The
mysterious
kind!”

Mysterious?
 
Tayte thought she’d never finish the word.
 
I really don’t need this.
 
His lips tightened, saying nothing to provoke further conversation, but she was off.

“You know, you look a lot like my
last
husband.”

Tayte imagined she must have gone through a few.
 
He just nodded politely.

“You
do,
it’s almost spooky.”
 
She turned to face him.
 
“He was a cuddly man,” she mused.
 
“Tall too.”
 
Her knees edged closer, straining beneath a dark trouser suit that was as sharp and raven as her hair.
 
The body language told Tayte that he would not be allowed to face his fears quietly.

The woman continued to stare at him.
 
“You have
nice
eyes...”
 
She sounded very sincere.

Tayte felt trapped.

“Did you know you had nice eyes?
 
I bet you didn’t.”

Nothing about Tayte felt nice.

“I bet you’re a
kind
man.
 
Kind men usually have nice eyes.
 
Well that’s my experience.”

She went quiet.
 
Tayte could feel her studying him again.

“They’re a nice shade,” she said.
 
“A girl could
drown
in there!”
 
She giggled, then at last she turned away and pulled a magazine from the holder in the back of the seat.
 
“My
dog
has brown eyes too,” she added.
 
“Not so nice as
yours
though.”

Tayte was thankful for that at least.
 
He didn’t know if she was coming on to him or just couldn’t help herself.
 
He figured the latter and weakly smiled.
 
Then he closed his eyes, fixed a song from
Les Misérables
in his head and pretended to sleep.

This would be Tayte’s second flight ever; the first was twenty-five years ago and he remembered it like it was just last week.
 
He was fourteen, taking an internal flight to Vermont from Washington National Airport as it was known before it was dedicated to Ronald Reagan in 1998; a promising winter vacation ruined by the sickening worry of the return flight home.

Everyone had said how lucky they were and that the storm hadn’t really been that bad.
 
Planes are designed to deal with lightning strikes.
 
He’d looked up the statistics and discovered that every commercial plane in the States is struck, on average, just over once a year.
 
He also knew that the last time a plane had crashed because of a lightning strike was back in 1967, when it hit the plane’s fuel tank.
 
But none of that put him any more at ease.
 
He remembered reading that you are many times more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be in a plane crash and thinking that he’d very nearly had both together.

The passenger safety announcements came and went.
 
The video screen in the headrest in front of him was blank again, reflecting unruly black hair that needed a cut and a comb, and a tired, sagging face in need of sleep.
 
He knew he should have paid closer attention to the announcements, but it made him think of all the negative situations that could occur.
 
He pictured himself fumbling beneath his seat for the lifejacket, and wearing the oxygen mask that would drop from the hatch beside his air nozzle as the plane plunged and they lost cabin pressure.
 
Then sliding down the inflatable escape chute, arms crossed on his chest as he sank into a freezing sea.
 
Yeah,
he thought.
 
A great help.

He looked out the window beyond Julia Kapowski who was thankfully buried in the duty free pages of the inflight magazine.
 
There were a few clouds, but it was otherwise clear.
 
He almost began to relax in spite of his thoughts and memories, then he heard the jet engines pick up and he continued to squeeze the seat arms.

A voice over the intercom said, “This is your captain speaking.”
 
Tayte tried to switch off - shut himself down until it was all over.
 
He only heard snippets: “Taxiing ... runway ... cleared for takeoff.”
 
Already way too much information.

The plane jolted as it began to move and Jefferson Tayte’s toes curled.
 
He took some comfort from the odd bump or two as the plane’s wheels caught the ridges in the asphalt, letting him know he was still connected to terra-firma.
 
Then the plane stopped and he knew they were at the end of the runway.
 
A lump came to his dry throat as he waited.
 
He thought he would have forgotten the little details, but he could already feel the impending rush of speed and the effect it would have on his body as powerful unseen hands pushed him back into his seat and held him there.
 
Then it came, and if he’d had any loose muscle left in his body to clench, he would have.

“Whooosshh!”
 
Julia Kapowski slapped her magazine onto her lap and jumped in her seat.

Tayte jumped with her.

“Don’t you just
love
the take-off?”

If only she knew.

Ten seconds later and that part at least was over.
 
When Tayte opened his eyes again, the plane was safely in the air and climbing - though
safe
was the exact antonym for how Tayte felt.
 
If he had the stomach to look out the window again, he would have seen the Boston Harbour Islands diminishing below, but his butterflies began to fight one another now, turning his stomach into a boxing ring.
 
Then the engine note changed.
 
The raging violence of exploding gases out on the wings, courtesy of
Pratt & Whitney,
settled and a
bong!
sounded around the cabin as the seat-belt light went out.
 
None of which gave him any further comfort.

He checked his watch - a cheap digital affair with glowing red digits that he’d had since the ‘80s and was still fond of in a retro kind of way.
 
It read ‘11:40’ and he couldn’t believe they’d only been up ten minutes.
 
A quick calculation told him that it would be 22:30, UK time, when they arrived.
 
Tayte couldn’t stop himself from rephrasing the sentence with the word
if
instead of
when.
 
He needed something else to think about.

He reached into his jacket and pulled out his travel documents, looking for the onward train journey details.
 
He picked out the highlights.
 
London, Paddington to Truro.
 
The departure time read, ‘23:45’.
 
That gave him over an hour to clear the airport and get to the train: an overnight sleeper that would take him to Cornwall in just over seven hours.

As he put the tickets away and the plane began to level, he recalled how close he’d come to jacking it in, even as he stood there at the departure gate, ticket shaking in his hand.
 
He always had when the f-word came up - found some excuse why he couldn’t
fly
here or
fly
there.
 
But not this time.
 
Irrespective of his client’s insistence, he wasn’t into this game just so some rich entrepreneur’s wife could have a nice birthday present.
 
This assignment was all about finding a family that someone did not want to be found and that made the whole thing far more personal than Walter Sloane could know.

If you can’t find
this
family,
he told himself,
how the hell do you expect to be good enough to find your own?

Tayte settled back and began to think about James Fairborne and his family again, wondering what they were like, piecing their lives together from the records he’d found.
 
He compared journeys: a couple of months being blown about in a wooden tub, guided by the stars at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean, versus seven hours in a relatively comfortable seat surrounded by the best technology modern science could provide.
 
The plane was steady now.
 
He had no idea how high they were and he cared even less.
 
It was just like riding a Greyhound bus, cruising on some smooth interstate.
 
He felt pathetic as tiredness caught up with him and he began to drift.

Chapter Four

N
amed in honour of the woman credited with having made the first flag of the American Union, the
Betsy Ross
was a one hundred and ten ton brig, bluff-bowed with a flat transom stern and both masts square rigged for speed.
 
Primarily, she carried cargo, trading in anything saleable along the busy coastal waters of the Eastern Seaboard between Boston and the Indies to the south.
 
In the August of 1783, however, she had a very different itinerary.

Sitting in the dock at Boston harbour, some seventy feet in length, she appeared to Katherine Fairborne as a ramshackle of heavy cordage and patched sail cloth, which did not instil confidence.
 
Yet Katherine understood the importance of the day well enough.
 
She had watched her father closely in the weeks that had built towards this cool yet fine morning, filling her journal with reflections of excitement and anxiety in equal measure.
 
Now she wished nothing more than to get underway so that she might continue to record their adventure.