‘God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe — but do you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew… in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like breadsticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel — a spray as fine as an aerosol mist — explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.’
Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.
He said, ‘You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander — and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.’
‘That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.’
‘Some of the families of survivors . . . Rose has shown them something that lifts them up.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, Barbara. I want to see. I want her to show me too. But the point is . . . they believe her when she says she was aboard that airplane. It’s more than mere belief.’ He remembered Georgine Delmann’s shining eyes. ‘It’s a profound conviction.’
‘Then she’s a con artist without equal.’ Joe only shrugged.
A few miles away, a tuning fork of lightning vibrated and broke the storm clouds. Shatters of grey rain fell to the east.
‘For some reason,’ Barbara said, ‘you don’t strike me as a devoutly religious man.’
‘I’m not. Michelle took the kids to Sunday School and church every week, but I didn’t go. It was the one thing I didn’t share with them.’
‘Hostile to religion?’
‘No. Just no passion for it, no interest. I was always as indifferent to God as He seemed to be to me. After the crash… I took the one step left in my “spiritual journey” from disinterest to disbelief. There’s no way to reconcile the idea of a benign god with what happened to everyone on that plane… and to those of us who’re going to spend the rest of our lives missing them.’
‘Then if you’re such an atheist, why do you insist on believing in this miracle?’
‘I’m not saying Rose Tucker’s survival was a miracle.’
‘Damned if I can see what else it would be. Nothing but God Himself and a rescue team of angels could have pulled her out of that in one piece,’ Barbara insisted with a note of sarcasm.
‘No divine intervention. There’s another explanation, something amazing but logical.’
‘Impossible,’ she said stubbornly.
‘Impossible? Yeah, well. . so was everything that happened in the cockpit with Captain Blane.’
She held his gaze while she searched for an answer in the deep and orderly files of her mind. She was not able to find one.
Instead, she said, ‘If you don’t believe in anything — then what is it that you expect Rose to tell you? You say that what she tells them “lifts them up.” Don’t you imagine it’s got to be something of a spiritual nature?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘What else would it be?’
‘I don’t know.’
Repeating Joe’s own words heavily coloured with exasperation, she said, “Something amazing but logical.”
He looked away from her, toward the trees along the northern edge of the field, and he realized that in the fire-blasted aspen cluster was a sole survivor, reclothed in foliage. Instead of the characteristic smooth pale trunk, it had scaly black bark, which would provide a dazzling contrast when its leaves turned brilliant yellow in the autumn.
‘Something amazing but logical,’ he agreed.
Closer than ever, lightning laddered down the sky, and the boom of thunder descended rung to rung.
‘We better go,’ Barbara said. ‘There’s nothing more here, anyway.’
Joe followed her down through the meadow, but he paused again at the rim of the impact crater.
The few times that he had gone to meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had heard other grieving parents speak of the Zero Point. The Zero Point was the instant of the child’s death, from which every future event would be dated, the eye blink during which crushing loss reset your internal gauges to zero. It was the moment at which your shabby box of hopes and wants - which had once seemed to be such a fabulous chest of bright dreams — was turned on end and emptied into an abyss, leaving you with zero expectations. In a clock tick, the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation — and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.
He had existed at the Zero Point for more than a year, with time receding from him in both directions, belonging to neither the days ahead nor those behind. It was as though he had been suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen and lay deep in cryogenic slumber.
Now he stood at another Zero Point, the physical one, where his wife and daughters had perished. He wanted so badly to have them back that the wanting tore like eagle’s claws at his viscera. But at last he wanted something else as well: justice for them, justice which could not give meaning to their deaths but which might give meaning to his.
He had to get all the way up from his cryogenic bed, shake the ice out of his bones and veins, and not lie down again until he had dug the truth out of the grave in which it had been buried. For his lost women, he would burn palaces, pull down empires, and waste the world if necessary for the truth to be found.
And now he understood the difference between justice and mere vengeance: genuine justice would bring him no relief of his pain, no sense of triumph; it would only allow him to step out of the Zero Point and, with his task completed, die in peace.
Down through the vaulted conifers came fluttering white wings of storm light, and again, and still more, as if the cracking sky were casting out a radiant multitude. Thunder and the rush of wind beat like pinions at Joe’s ears, and by the many thousands, feathered shadows swooped and shuddered between the tree trunks and across the forest floor.
Just as he and Barbara reached her Ford Explorer at the weedy end of the narrow dirt lane, a great fall of rain hissed and roared through the pines. They piled inside, their hair and faces jewelled,
and her periwinkle-blue blouse was spattered with spots as dark as plum skin.
They didn’t encounter whatever had frightened the deer from cover, but Joe was pretty sure now that the culprit had been another animal. In the run to beat the rain, he had sensed only wild things crouching — not the far deadlier threat of men.
Nevertheless, the crowding conifers seemed to provide ideal architecture for assassins. Secret bowers, blinds, ambushments, green-dark lairs.
As Barbara started the Explorer and drove back the way they had come, Joe was tense. Surveying the woods. Waiting for the bullet.
When they reached the gravel road, he said, ‘The two men that Blane named on the cockpit tape.
‘Dr. Blom and Dr. Ramlock.’
‘Have you tried to find out who they are, launched a search for them?’
‘When I was in San Francisco, I was prying into Delroy Blane’s background. Looking for any personal problems that might have put him in a precarious psychological condition. I asked his family and friends if they’d heard those names. No one had.’
‘You checked Blane’s personal records, appointment calendars, his chequebook?’
‘Yeah Nothing. And Blane’s family physician says he never referred his patient to any specialists with those names. There’s no physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist in the San Francisco area by those names. That’s as far as I carried it. Because then I was awakened by those bastards in my hotel room, a pistol in my face, and told to butt out.’
To the end of the gravel road and onto the paved state route, where sizzling silver rain danced in a froth on the blacktop, Barbara fell into a troubled silence. Her brow was creased, but not — Joe sensed — because the inclement weather required that she concentrate on her driving.
The lightning and thunder had passed. Now the storm threw all its energy into wind and rain.
Joe listened to the monotonous thump of the windshield wipers. He listened as well to the hard-driven drops snapping against the glass, which seemed at first to be a meaningless random rattle; but
gradually he began to think that he perceived hidden patterns even in the rhythms of the rain.
Barbara found perhaps not a pattern but an intriguing puzzle piece that she had overlooked. ‘I’m remembering something peculiar, but…
Joe waited.
‘...but I don’t want to encourage you in this weird delusion of yours.’
‘Delusion?’
She glanced at him. ‘This idea that there might have been a survivor.’
He said, ‘Encourage me. Encouragement isn’t something I’ve had much of in the past year.’
She hesitated but then sighed. ‘There was a rancher not far from here who was already asleep when Flight 353 went down. People who work the land go to bed early in these parts. The explosion woke him. And then someone came to his door.’
‘Who?’
‘The next day, he called the county sheriff, and the sheriff’s office put him in touch with the investigation command centre. But it didn’t seem to amount to much.’
‘Who came to his door in the middle of the night?’
‘A witness,’ Barbara said.
‘To the crash?’
‘Supposedly.’
She looked at him but then quickly returned her attention to the rain-swept highway.
In the context of what Joe had told her, this recollection seemed by the moment to grow more disturbing to Barbara. Her eyes pinched at the corners, as if she were straining to see not through the downpour but more clearly into the past, and her lips pressed together as she debated whether to say more.
A witness to the crash,’ Joe prompted.
I can’t remember why, of all places, she went to this ranch house or what she wanted there.’
‘She?’
‘The woman who claimed to have seen the plane go down.’
‘There’s something more,’ Joe said.
‘Yeah. As I recall . . . she was a black woman.’
His breath went stale in his lungs, but at last he exhaled and said, ‘Did she give this rancher her name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If she did, I wonder if he’d remember it.’
At the turnoff from the state route, the entrance road to the ranch was flanked by tall white posts that supported an overhead sign bearing graceful green letters on a white background: LOOSE CHANGE RANCH. Under those three words, in smaller letters and in script: Jeff and Mercy Ealing. The gate stood open.
The oiled-gravel lane was flanked by white ranch fencing that divided the fields into smaller pastures. They passed a big riding ring, exercise yards, and numerous white stables trimmed in green.
Barbara said, ‘I wasn’t here last year, but one of my people gave me a report on it. Coming back to me now. . . It’s a horse ranch. They breed and race quarter horses. Also breed and sell some show horses like Arabians, I think.’
The pasture grass, alternately churned by wind and flattened by the pounding rain, was not currently home to any horses. The riding ring and the exercise yards were deserted.
In some of the stables, the top of the Dutch door at each stall was open. Here and there, from the safety of their quarters, horses peered out at the storm. Some were nearly as dark as the spaces in which they stood, but others were pale or dappled.
The large and handsome ranch house, white clapboard with green shutters, framed by groupings of aspens, had the deepest front porch that Joe had ever seen. Under the heavy cape of gloom thrown down by the thunderheads, a yellow glow as welcoming as hearth light filled, many of the windows.
Barbara parked in the driveway turnaround. She and Joe ran through the rain — previously as warm as bath water but now cooler — to the screened porch. The door swung inward with a creak of hinges and the singing of a worn tension spring, sounds so rounded in tone that they were curiously pleasing; they spoke of time passed at a gentle pace, of gracious neglect rather than dilapidation.
The porch furniture was white wicker with green cushions, and ferns cascaded from wrought-iron stands.
The house door stood open, and a man of about sixty, in a black rain slicker, waited to one side on the porch. The weather-thickened skin of his sun-darkened face was well creased and patinaed like the leather of a long-used saddlebag. His blue eyes were as quick
and friendly as his smile. He raised his voice to be heard above the drumming of the rain on the roof. ‘Mornin’. Good day for ducks.’
‘Are you Mr. Ealing?’ Barbara asked.
‘That would be me,’ said another man in a black slicker as he appeared in the open doorway.
He was six inches taller and twenty years younger than the man who had commented on the weather. But a life on horseback, in hot sun and dry wind and the nip of winter, had already begun to abrade the smooth hard planes of youth and bless him with a pleasantly worn and appealing face that spoke of deep experience and rural wisdom.
Barbara introduced herself and Joe, implying that she still worked for the Safety Board and that Joe was her associate.
‘You poking into that after a whole year?’ Ealing asked.
‘We weren’t able to settle on a cause,’ Barbara said. ‘Never like to close a file until we know what happened. Why we’re here is to ask about the woman who knocked on your door that night.’
‘Sure, I remember.’
‘Could you describe her?’ Joe asked.
‘Petite lady. About forty or so. Pretty.’
‘Black?’
‘She was, yes. But also a touch of something else. Mexican maybe. Or more likely Chinese. Maybe Vietnamese.’
Joe remembered the Asian quality of Rose Tucker’s eyes. ‘Did she tell you her name?’
‘Probably did,’ Eating said. ‘But I don’t recall it.’