Sole Survivor

Page 16

The gentle waves wore only thin frayed collars of phosphorescent foam. Curiously, though the night was clear and pierced by a moon, within a hundred yards the sea rolled naked, black, invisible.
Denied the pacifying vista that had drawn him to the shore, Joe found some solace in the surging tide that pressed against his legs and in the low, dumb grumble of the great watery machine. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions, the peace of indifference.
He tried not to think about what had happened at the Delmann house. Those events were incomprehensible. Thinking about them would not lead to understanding.
He was dismayed to feel no grief and so little anguish about the Delmanns’ and Lisa’s deaths. At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had learned that following the loss of a child, parents often reported a disturbing inability to care about the suffering of others. Watching television news of freeway wrecks, apartment-building fires, and heinous murders, one sat numb and unaffected. Music that had once stirred the heart, art that had once touched the soul, now had no effect. Some people overcame this loss of sensitivity in a year or two, others in five years or ten, but others — never.
The Delmanns had seemed like fine people, but he had never really known them.
Lisa was a friend. Now she was dead. So what? Everyone died sooner or later. Your children. The woman who was the love of your life. Everyone.
The hardness of his heart frightened him. He felt loathsome. But he could not force himself to feel the pain of others. Only his own.
from the sea he sought the indifference to his losses that he already felt to the losses of others.
Yet he wondered what manner of beast he would become if even the deaths of Michelle and Chrissie and Nina no longer mattered to him. For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.
The busy service station and the adjacent twenty-four-hour convenience store were three blocks from his motel. Two public telephones were outside, near the restrooms.
A few fat moths, white as snowflakes, circled under the cone-shaped downlights that were mounted along the building eaves. Vastly enlarged and distorted shadows of their wings swooped across the white stucco wall.
Joe had never bothered to cancel his phone-company credit card. With it, he placed several long-distance calls that he dared not make from his motel room if he hoped to remain safe there.
He wanted to speak to Barbara Christman, the IIC - Investigator in Charge - of the probe of Flight 353. It was eleven o’clock here on the West Coast and two o’clock Sunday morning in Washington, D.C. She would not be in her office, of course, and although Joe might be able to reach a duty officer at the National Transportation Safety Board even at this hour, he would never be given Christman’s home number.
Nevertheless, he got the NTSB’s main number from information and placed the call. The Board’s new automated phone system gave him extensive options, including the opportunity to leave voice mail for any Board member, senior crash investigator, or executive-level civil servant. Supposedly, if he entered the first initial and first four letters of the surname of the party for whom he wished to leave a message, he would be connected. Though he carefully entered B-C-H-R-I, he was routed not to voice mail but to a recording that informed him no such extension existed. He tried again with the same result.
Either Barbara Christman was no longer an employee or the voice-mail system wasn’t functioning properly.
Although the IIC at any crash scene was a senior investigator operating out of the NTSB headquarters in Washington, other members of a Go-Team could be culled from specialists in field offices all over the country: Anchorage, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Kansas City, New York City, and Seattle. From the computer at the Post, Joe had obtained a list of
most if not all of the team members, but he didn’t know where any of them was based.
Because the crash site was a little more than a hundred miles south of Denver, he assumed at least a few of the team had been drawn from that office. Using his list of eleven names, he sought phone numbers from directory assistance in Denver.
He obtained three listings. The other eight people were either unlisted or not Denver-area residents.
The ceaseless swelling and shrinking and swelling again of moth shadows across the stucco wall of the service station teased at Joe’s memory. They reminded him of something, and increasingly he sensed that the recollection was as important as it was elusive. For a moment he stared intently at the swooping shadows, which were as amorphous as the molten forms in a Lava Lamp, but he could not make the connection.
Though it was past midnight in Denver, Joe called all three men whose numbers he’d obtained. The first was the Go-Team meteorologist in charge of considering weather factors pertinent to the crash. His phone was picked up by an answering machine, and Joe didn’t leave a message. The second was the man who had overseen the team division responsible for sifting the wreckage for metallurgical evidence. He was surly, possibly awakened by the phone, and uncooperative. The third man provided the link to Barbara Christman that Joe needed.
His name was Mario Oliveri. He had headed the human-performance division of the team, searching for errors possibly committed by the flight crew or air-traffic controllers.
In spite of the hour and the intrusion on his privacy, Oliveri was cordial, claiming to be a night owl who never went to bed before one o’clock. ‘But, Mr. Carpenter, I’m sure you’ll understand that I do not speak to reporters about Board business, the details of any investigation. It’s public record anyway.’
‘That’s not why I’ve called, Mr. Oliveri. I’m having trouble reaching one of your senior investigators, whom I need to talk with urgently, and I’m hoping you can put me in touch. Something’s wrong with her voice mail at your Washington offices.’
‘Her voice mail? We have no current senior investigators who are women. All six are men.’
‘Barbara Christman.’
Oliveri said, ‘That had to be who it was. But she took early retirement months ago.’
‘Do you have a phone number for her?’
Oliveri hesitated. Then: ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Maybe you know if she resides in D.C. itself or which suburb. If I knew where she lived, I might be able to get a phone—’
‘I heard she came home to Colorado,’ Oliveri said. ‘She started out in the Denver field office a lot of years ago, was transferred out to Washington, and worked her way up to senior investigator.’
‘So she’s in Denver now?’
Again Oliveri was silent, as if the very subject of Barbara Christman troubled him. At last he said, ‘I believe her actual home was Colorado Springs. That’s about seventy miles south of Denver.’
And it was less than forty miles from the meadow where the doomed 747 had come to a thunderous end.
‘She’s in Colorado Springs now?’ Joe asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘If she’s married, the phone might be in a husband’s name.’
‘She’s been divorced for many years. Mr. Carpenter . . . I am wondering if. After long seconds during which Oliveri failed to complete his thought, Joe gently prodded: ‘Sir?’
‘Is this related to Nationwide Flight 353?’
‘Yes, sir. A year ago tonight.’
Oliveri fell into silence once more.
Finally Joe said, ‘Is there something about what happened to Flight 353… something unusual?’
‘The investigation is public record, as I said.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
The open line was filled with a silence so deep that Joe could half believe that he was connected not to Denver but to the far side of the moon.
‘Mr. Oliveri?’
‘I don’t really have anything to tell you, Mr. Carpenter. But if I thought of something later… is there a number where I could reach you?’
Rather than explain his current circumstances, Joe said, ‘Sir, if you’re an honest man, then you might be endangering yourself by calling me. There are some damned nasty people who would suddenly be interested in you if they knew we were in touch.’
‘What people?’
Ignoring the question, Joe said, ‘If something’s on your mind —or On your conscience — take time to think about it. I’ll get back to you in a day or two.’
Joe hung up.
Moths swooped. Swooped. Batted against the floodlamps above. Clichés on the wing: moths to the flame.
The memory continued to elude Joe.
He called directory assistance in Colorado Springs. The operator provided him with a number for Barbara Christman.
She answered on the second ring. She did not sound as though she had been awakened.
Perhaps some of these investigators, who had walked through the unspeakable carnage of major air disasters, did not always find their way easily into sleep.
Joe told her his name and where his family had been one year ago this night, and he implied that he was still an active reporter with the Post.
Her initial silence had the cold, moon-far quality of Oliveri’s. Then she said, ‘Are you here?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Where are you calling from? Here in Colorado Springs?’
‘No. Los Angeles.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and Joe thought he heard the faintest breath of regret when she exhaled that word.
He said, ‘Ms. Christman, I have some questions about Flight 353 that I would-’
‘I’m sorry,’ she interrupted. ‘I know you’ve suffered terribly, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t even conceive the depth of your anguish, and I know it’s often difficult for family members to accept their losses in these horrible incidents, but there’s nothing I could say to you that would help you find that acceptance or—’
‘I’m not trying to learn acceptance, Ms. Christman. I’m trying to find out what really happened to that airliner.’
‘It’s not unusual for people in your position to take refuge in conspiracy theories, Mr. Carpenter, because otherwise the loss seems so pointless, so random and inexplicable. Some people think we’re covering up for airline incompetence or that we’ve been bought off by the Airline Pilots’ Association and that we’ve buried proof the flight crew was drunk or on drugs. This was just an accident, Mr. Carpenter. But if I were to spend a lot of time with you on the phone, trying to persuade you of that, I’d never convince you, and I’d be encouraging you in this denial fantasy. You have my deepest sympathy, you really do, but you need to he talking to a therapist, not to me.’
Before Joe could reply, Barbara Christman hung up.
He called her again. Although he waited while the phone rang forty times, she did not answer it.
For the moment, he had accomplished all that was possible by telephone.
Halfway back to his Honda, he stopped. He turned and studied the side of the service station again, where the exaggerated and weirdly distorted shadows of moths washed across the white stucco, like nightmare phantoms gliding through the pale mists of a dream.
Moths to the flame. Three points of fire in three oil lamps. Tall glass chimneys.
In memory, he saw the three flames leap higher in the chim­neys. Yellow lamplight glimmered across Lisa’s sombre face, and shadows swooped up the walls of the Delmanns’ kitchen.
At the time, Joe had thought only that a vagrant draft had abruptly drawn the flames higher in the lamps, though the air in the kitchen had been still. Now, in retrospect, the serpentine fire, shimmering several inches upward from the three wicks, impressed him as possessing greater importance than he previously realized.
The incident had significance.
He watched the moths but pondered the oil wicks, standing beside the service station but seeing around him the kitchen with its maple cabinetry and sugar-brown granite counters.
Enlightenment did not rise in him as the flames had briefly risen in those lamps. Strive as he might, he could not identify the significance that he intuited.
He was weary, exhausted, battered from the trauma of the day. Until he was rested, he could not trust either his senses or his hunches.
On his back in the motel bed, head on a foam pillow, heart on a rock of hard memory, Joe ate a chocolate bar that he’d bought at the service station.
Until the final mouthful, he could discern no flavour whatsoever. With the last bite, the taste of blood flooded his mouth, as though he had bitten his tongue.
His tongue was not cut, however, and what plagued him was the familiar taste of guilt. Another day had ended, and he was still alive and unable to justify his survival.
Except for the light of the moon at the open balcony door and the green numerals of the digital alarm clock, the room was dark. He stared at the ceiling light fixture, which was vaguely visible — and only visible at all because the convex disc of glass was lightly frosted with moonglow. It floated like a ghostly visitant above him.
He thought of the luminous Chardonnay in the three glasses on the counter in the Delmanns’ kitchen. No explanation there. Though Charlie might have tasted the wine before pouring it, Georgine and Lisa had never touched their glasses.
Thoughts like agitated moths swooped and fluttered through his mind, seeking light in his darkness.
He wished that he could talk with Beth in Virginia. But they might have her phone tapped and trace his call to find him. Besides, he was concerned that he would be putting Beth and Henry in jeopardy if he told them anything about what had happened to him since he’d found himself under surveillance at the beach.
Lulled by the maternal heart sound of the rhythmic surf, weighed down by weariness, wondering why he had escaped the plague of suicide at the Delmanns’ house, he slipped into sleep with nightmares.
Later, he half woke in darkness, lying on his side, facing the alarm clock on the nightstand. The glowing green numbers reminded him of those on the clock in Charles Delmann’s bloodied bedroom: time flashing backward in ten-minute increments.
Joe had supposed that a stray shotgun pellet must have struck the clock, damaging it. Now, in a swoon of sleep, he perceived that the explanation was different from what he had thought — something more mysterious and more significant than a mere bead of lead.
The clock and the oil lamps.
Numbers flashing, flames leaping.
Connections.
Significance.
Dreams reclaimed him briefly, hut the alarm woke him long before dawn. He had been out less than three and a half hours, but after a year of restless nights, he was refreshed even by this much sleep.
Following a quick shower, as Joe dressed, he studied the digital clock. Revelation eluded him now as it had eluded him when he Had been sotted with sleep.