When a Chevy sedan approached from the south and Joe saw three men in it, he moved casually around to the passenger’s side of the rental car, using it for cover in the event that they opened fire on him. They passed without glancing in his direction.
A minute later, Barbara Christman arrived in an emerald-green Ford Explorer. She smelled faintly of bleach and soap, and he suspected she had been doing the laundry when he’d rung her bell.
As they headed south from the grade school, Joe said, “Ms. Christman, I’m wondering—where have you seen a photograph of me?”
“Never have,” she said. “And call me Barbara.”
“So, Barbara… when you opened your door a bit ago, how did you know who I was?”
“Hasn’t been a stranger at my door in ages. Anyway, last night when you called back and I didn’t answer, you let it ring more than thirty times.”
“Forty.”
“Even a persistent man would have given up after twenty. When it kept ringing and ringing, I knew you were more than persistent. Driven. I knew you’d come soon.”
She was about fifty, dressed in Rockports, faded jeans, and a periwinkle-blue chambray shirt. Her thick white hair looked as if it had been cut by a good barber rather than styled by a beautician. Well-tanned, with a broad face as open and inviting as a golden field of Kansas wheat, she appeared honest and trustworthy. Her stare was direct, and Joe liked her for the aura of efficiency that she projected and for the crisp self-assurance in her voice.
“Who are you afraid of, Barbara?”
“Don’t know who they are.”
“I’m going to get the answer somewhere,” he warned.
“What I’m telling you is the truth, Joe. Never have known who they are. But they pulled strings I never thought could be pulled.”
“To control the results of a Safety Board investigation?”
“The Board still has integrity, I think. But these people… they were able to make some evidence disappear.”
“What evidence?”
Braking to a halt at a red traffic signal, she said, “What finally made you suspicious, Joe, after all this time? What about the story didn’t ring true?”
“It all rang true—until I met the sole survivor.”
She stared blankly at him, as though he had spoken in a foreign language of which she had no slightest knowledge.
“Rose Tucker,” he said.
There seemed to be no deception in her hazel eyes but genuine puzzlement in her voice when she said, “Who’s she?”
“She was aboard Flight 353. Yesterday, she visited the graves of my wife and daughters while I was there.”
“Impossible. No one survived. No one could have survived.”
“She was on the passenger manifest.”
Speechless, Barbara stared at him.
He said, “And some dangerous people are hunting for her—and now for me. Maybe the same people who made that evidence disappear.”
A car horn blared behind them. The traffic signal had changed to green.
While she drove, Barbara reached to the dashboard controls and lowered the fan speed of the air-conditioning, as though chilled. “No one could have survived,” she insisted. “This was not your usual hit-and-skip crash, where there’s a greater or lesser chance of any survivors depending on the angle of impact and lots of other factors. This was straight down, head-in, catastrophic.”
“Head-in? I always thought it tumbled, broke apart.”
“Didn’t you read any newspaper accounts?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t. I just imagined…”
“Not a hit-and-skip like most,” she repeated. “Almost straight into the ground. Sort of similar to Hopewell, September ninety-four. A USAir 737 went down in Hopewell Township, on its way to Pittsburgh, and was just… obliterated. Being aboard Flight 353 would have been… I’m sorry, Joe, but it would have been like standing in the middle of a bomb blast. A big bomb blast.”
“There were some remains they were never able to identify.”
“So little left to identify. The aftermath of something like this… it’s more gruesome than you can imagine, Joe. Worse than you want to know, believe me.”
He recalled the small caskets in which his family’s remains had been conveyed to him, and the strength of the memory compressed his heart into a small stone.