“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?”