Sole Survivor

Page 8

See what? He had no idea.
What could she possibly tell him that would alleviate his des­pair? Nothing. Nothing.
like the others. You’ll see, like the others.
What others?
Only one answer satisfied him: other people who had lost loved ones on Flight 353, who had been as desolate as he was, people to whom she had already spoken.
He wasn’t going to wait for her to return to him. With Wallace Blick and associates after her, she might not live long enough to pay him a visit and quench his curiosity.
When Joe finished sorting and stapling the printouts, he noticed the white envelope that Dewey Beemis had given him at the elevator downstairs. Joe had propped it against a box of Kleenex to the right of the computer and promptly forgotten about it.
As a crime reporter with a frequently seen byline, he had from time to time received story tips from newspaper readers who, to put it charitably, were not well glued together. They earnestly claimed to be the terrified victims of vicious harassment by a secret cult of Satanists operating in the city’s parks department, or to know of sinister tobacco-industry executives who were plotting to lace baby formula with nicotine, or to be living across the street from a nest of spiderlike extraterrestrials trying to pass as a nice family of Korean immigrants.
Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audio animatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, ‘Yes, we’ve known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all.’ He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled.
Consequently, he was expecting a crayon-scrawled message about evil psychic Martians living among us as Mormons — or the equivalent.
He tore open the envelope. It contained a single sheet of white paper folded in thirds.
The three neatly typed sentences initially impressed him as a singularly cruel variation on the usual paranoid shriek: I have been trying to reach you, Joe. My life depends on your discretion. I was aboard Flight 353.
Everyone aboard the airliner had perished. He didn’t believe in ghost mail from the Other Side, which probably made him unique among his contemporaries in this New-Age City of Angels.
At the bottom of the page was a name: Rose Tucker. Under the name was a phone number with a Los Angeles area code. No address was provided.
Lightly flushed by the same anger that had burned so hotly in him earlier, and which could easily become a blaze again, Joe almost snatched up the phone to call Ms. Tucker. He wanted to tell her what a disturbed and vicious piece of garbage she was, wallowing in her schizophrenic fantasies, psychic vampire sucking on the misery of others to feed some sick need of her own —And then he heard, in memory, the words that Wallace Blick
first said to him in the cemetery. Unaware that anyone was in the white van, Joe had leaned through the open passenger door and popped the glove box in search of a cellular phone. Blick, briefly mistaking him for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, had said, Did you get Rose?
Rose.
Because Joe had been frightened by the gunmen, afraid for the woman they were pursuing, and startled to discover someone in the van, the importance of what Blick said had failed to register with him. Everything happened so fast after that. He had forgotten Blick’s words until now.
Rose Tucker must have been the woman with the Polaroid camera, photographing the graves.
If she was nothing more than a whacked-out loser living in some schizophrenic fantasy, Medsped or Teknologik — or whoever the hell they were — wouldn’t be throwing so much manpower and money into a search for her.
He remembered the exceptional presence of the woman in the cemetery. Her directness. Her self-possession and preternatural calm. The power of her unwavering stare.
She hadn’t seemed like a flake. Quite the opposite.
I have been trying to reach you, Joe. My life depends on your discretion. I was aboard Flight 353.
Without realizing that he had gotten off the chair, Joe was standing, heart pounding, electrified. The sheet of paper rattled in his hands.
He stepped into the aisle behind the modular workstation and surveyed what he could see of the subdivided newsroom, seeking someone with whom he could share this development.
Look here. Read this, read it. Something’s terribly wrong, Jesus, all wrong, not what we were told. Somebody walked away from the crash, lived through it. We have to do something about this, find the truth. No survivors, they said, no survivors, catastrophic crash, total wipe-out catastrophic crash. What else have they told us that isn’t true? How did the people on that plane really die? Why did they die? Why did they die?
Before anyone saw him standing there in furious distress, before he went in search of a familiar face, Joe had second thoughts about sharing anything he had learned. Rose Tucker’s note said that her life depended on his discretion.
Besides, he had the crazy notion, somehow more powerfully convincing because of its irrationality, that if he shared the note with others, it would prove to be blank, that if he pressed Blick’s driver’s license into their hands, it would turn out to be his own license, that if he took someone with him to the cemetery, there would be no spent cartridges in the grass and no skid marks from the tyres of the white van and no one there who had ever seen the vehicle or heard the gunshots.
This was a mystery delivered to him, to no one else but him, and he suddenly perceived that pursuing answers was not merely his duty but his sacred duty. In the resolution of this mystery was his mission, his purpose, and perhaps an unknowable redemption.
He didn’t even understand precisely what he meant by any of that. He simply felt the truth of it bone-deep.
Trembling, he returned to the chair.
He wondered if he was entirely sane.
2
Joe called downstairs to the reception desk and asked Dewey Beemis about the woman who had left the envelope.
‘Little bit of a lady,’ said Dewey.
He was a giant, however, and even a six-foot-tall Amazon might seem petite to him.
‘Would you say five six, shorter?’ Joe asked.
‘Maybe five one, five two. But mighty. One of those ladies looks like a girl all her life but been a mountain-mover since she graduated grade school.’
‘Black woman?’ Joe asked.
‘Yeah, she was a sister.’
‘How old?’
‘Maybe early forties. Pretty. Hair like raven wings. You upset about something, Joe?’
‘No. No, I’m okay.’
‘You sound upset. This lady some kind of trouble?’
‘No, she’s okay, she’s legit. Thanks, Dewey.’
Joe put down the phone.
The nape of his neck was acrawl with gooseflesh. He rubbed it with one hand.
His palms were clammy. He blotted them on his jeans.
Nervously, he picked up the printout of the passenger manifest from Flight 353. Using a ruler to keep his place, he went down the list of the deceased, line by line, until he came to Dr. Rose Marie Tucker.
Doctor.
She might be a doctor of medicine or of literature, biologist or sociologist, musicologist or dentist, but in Joe’s eyes, her credibility was enhanced by the mere fact that she had earned the honorific. The troubled people who believed the mayor to be a robot were more likely to be patients than doctors of any kind.
According to the manifest, Rose Tucker was forty-three years
old, and her home was in Manassas, Virginia. Joe had never been in Manassas, but he had driven past it a few times, because it was an outer suburb of Washington, near the town where Michelle’s parents lived.
Swiveling to the computer once more, he scrolled through the crash stories, seeking the thirty or more photographs of passengers, hoping hers would be among them. It was not.
Judging by Dewey’s description, the woman who had written this note and the woman in the cemetery — whom Blick had called Rose — were the same person. If this Rose was truly Dr. Rose Marie Tucker of Manassas, Virginia — which couldn’t be confirmed without a photo — then she had indeed been aboard Flight 353.
And had survived.
Reluctantly, Joe returned to the two largest accident-scene photo­graphs. The first was the eerie shot with the stormy sky, the scorched-black trees, the debris pulverized and twisted into surreal sculpture, where the NTSB investigators, faceless in bio-hazard suits and hoods, seemed to drift like praying monks or like ominous spirits in a cold and flameless chamber in some forgotten level of Hell. The second was an aerial shot revealing wreckage so shattered and so widely strewn that the term ‘catastrophic accident’ was a woefully inadequate description.
No one could have survived this disaster.
Yet Rose Tucker, if she was the same Rose Tucker who had boarded the plane that night, had evidently not only survived but had walked away under her own power. Without serious injury. She had not been scarred or crippled.
Impossible. Dropping four miles in the clutch of planetary gravity, four long miles, accelerating unchecked into hard earth and rock, the 747 had not just smashed but splattered like an egg thrown at a brick wall, and then exploded, and then tumbled in seething furies of flame. To escape unmarked from the God-rattled ruins of Gomorrah, to step as unburnt as Shadrach from the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, to arise like Lazarus after four days in the grave would have been less miraculous than to walk away untouched from the fall of Flight 353.
If he genuinely believed it was impossible, however, his mind would not have been roily with anger and anxiety, with a strange awe and with urgent curiosity. In him was a crazy yearning to embrace incredibility’s, walk with wonder.
He called directory assistance in Maryland, seeking a telephone number for Dr. Rose Marie Tucker. He expected to be told that there was no such listing or that her service had been disconnected. After all, officially she was dead.
Instead, he was given a number.
She could not have walked away from the crash and gone home and picked up her life without causing a sensation. Besides, dangerous people were hunting her. They would have found her if she had ever returned to Manassas.
Perhaps family still lived in the house. For whatever reasons, they might have kept the phone in her name.
Joe punched in the number.
The call was answered on the second ring. ‘Yes?’
‘Is this the Tucker residence?’ Joe asked.
The voice was that of a man, crisp and without a regional accent:
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Could I speak to Dr. Tucker, please?’
‘Who’s calling?’
Intuition advised Joe to guard his own name. ‘Wally Blick.’
‘Excuse me. Who?’
‘Wallace Blick.’
The man at the other end of the line was silent. Then: ‘What is this in regard to?’ His voice had barely changed, but a new alertness coloured it, a shade of wariness.
Sensing that he had been too clever for his own good, Joe put down the phone.
He blotted his palms on his jeans again.
A reporter, passing behind Joe, reviewing the scribblings on a note pad as he went, greeted him without looking up: ‘Yo, Randy.’
Consulting the typewritten message from Rose, Joe called the Los Angeles number that she had provided.
On the fifth ring, a woman answered. ‘Hello?’
‘Could I speak to Rose Tucker, please?’
‘Nobody here by that name,’ she said in an accent out of the deep South. ‘You got yourself a wrong number.’
In spite of what she’d said, she didn’t hang up.
‘She gave me this number herself,’ Joe persisted.
‘Sugar, let me guess — this was a lady you met at a party. She was just makin’ nice to get you out of her hair.’
‘I don’t think she’d do that.’
‘Oh, don’t mean you’re ugly, honey,’ she said in a voice that
brought to mind magnolia blossoms and mint juleps and humid nights heavy with the scent of jasmine. ‘Just means you weren’t the lady’s type. Happens to the best.’
‘My name’s Joe Carpenter.’
‘Nice name. Good solid name.’
‘What’s your name?’
Teasingly, she said, ‘What kind of name do I sound like?’
‘Sound like?’
‘Maybe an Octavia or a Juliette?’
‘More like a Demi.’
‘Like in Demi Moore the movie star?’ she said disbelievingly. ‘You have that sexy, smoky quality in your voice.’ ‘Honey, my voice is pure grits and collard greens.’ ‘Under the grits and collard greens, there’s smoke.’ She had a wonderful fulsome laugh. ‘Mister Joe Carpenter, middle name “Slick.” Okay, I like Demi.’
‘Listen, Demi, I’d sure like to talk to Rose.’
‘Forget this old Rose person. Don’t you pine away for her, Joe, not after she gives you a fake number. Big sea, lots of fish.’
Joe was certain that this woman knew Rose and that she had been expecting him to call. Considering the viciousness of the enemies pursuing the enigmatic Dr. Tucker, however, Demi’s circumspection was understandable.
She said, ‘What do you look like when you’re bein’ honest with yourself, Sugar?’
‘Six foot tall, brown hair, grey eyes.’
‘Handsome?’
‘Just presentable.’
‘How old are you, Presentable Joe?’
‘Older than you. Thirty-seven.’
‘You have a sweet voice. You ever go on blind dates?’
Demi was going to set up a meeting after all.
He said, ‘Blind dates? Nothing against them.’
‘So how about with sexy-smoky little me,’ she suggested with a laugh.
‘Sure. When?’
‘You free tomorrow evenin’?’
‘I was hoping sooner.’
‘Don’t be so eager, Presentable Joe. Takes time to set these things up right, so there’s a chance it’ll work, so no one gets hurt, so there’s no broken hearts.’
By Joe’s interpretation, Derni was telling him that she was going
to make damned sure the meeting was put together carefully, that the site needed to be scouted and secured in order for Rose’s safety to be guaranteed. And maybe she couldn’t get in touch with Rose with less than a twenty-four-hour notice.
‘Besides, Sugar, a girl starts to wonder why you’re so pitiful desperate if you’re really presentable.’
All right. Where tomorrow evening?’
‘I’m goin’ to give you the address of a gourmet coffee shop in Westwood. We’ll meet out front at six, go in and have a cup, see do we like each other. If I think you really are presentable and you think I’m as sexy-smoky as my voice . . . why, then it could be a shinin’ night of golden memories. You have a pen and paper?’