Eventually, when he could speak again, he said, “My point is that there were a number of passengers for whom the pathologists were unable to find any remains. People who just… ceased to exist in an instant. Disappeared.”
“A large majority of them,” she said, turning onto State Highway 115 and heading south under a sky as hard as an iron kettle.
“Maybe this Rose Tucker didn’t just… didn’t just disintegrate on impact like the others. Maybe she disappeared because she walked away from the scene.”
“Walked?”
“The woman I met wasn’t disfigured or crippled. She appeared to have come through it without a scar.”
Adamantly shaking her head, Barbara said, “She’s lying to you, Joe. Flat out lying. She wasn’t on that plane. She’s playing some sort of sick game.”
“I believe her.”
“Why?”
“Because of things I’ve seen.”
“What things?”
“I don’t think I should tell you. Knowing… that might put you as deep in the hole as I am. I don’t want to endanger you any more than I have to. Just by coming here, I might be causing you trouble.”
After a silence, she said, “You must have seen something pretty extraordinary to make you believe in a survivor.”
“Stranger than you can imagine.”
“Still… I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Good. That’s safer.”
They had driven out of Colorado Springs, through suburbs, into an area of ranches, travelling into increasingly rural territory. To the east, high plains dwindled into an arid flatness. To the west, the land rose gradually through fields and woods toward foothills half screened by grey mist.
He said, “You’re not just driving aimlessly, are you?”
“If you want to fully understand what I’m going to tell you, it’ll help to see.” She glanced away from the road, and her concern for him was evident in her kind eyes. “Do you think you can handle it, Joe?”
“We’re going… there.”
“Yes. If you can handle it.”
Joe closed his eyes and strove to suppress a welling anxiety. In his imagination, he could hear the screaming of the airliner’s engines.
The crash scene was thirty to forty miles south and slightly west of Colorado Springs.
Barbara Christman was taking him to the meadow where the 747 had shattered like a vessel of glass.
“Only if you can handle it,” she said gently.
The substance of his heart seemed to condense even further, until it was like a black hole in his chest.
The Explorer slowed. She was going to pull to the shoulder of the highway.
Joe opened his eyes. Even the thunderhead-filtered light seemed too bright. He willed himself to be deaf to the airplane-engine roar in his mind.
“No,” he said. “Don’t stop. Let’s go. I’ll be all right. I’ve got nothing to lose now.”
They turned off the state highway onto an oiled-gravel road and soon off the gravel onto a dirt lane that led west through tall poplars with vertical branches streaming skyward like green fire. The poplars gave way to tamarack and birches, which surrendered the ground to white pines as the lane narrowed and the woods thickened.
Increasingly pitted and rutted, wandering among the trees as though weary and losing its way, the lane finally pulled a blanket of weeds across itself and curled up to rest under a canopy of evergreen boughs.
Parking and switching off the engine, Barbara said, “We’ll walk from here. It’s no more than half a mile, and the brush isn’t especially thick.”
Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services. Broken only by the snapping of twigs and the soft crunch of dry pine needles underfoot, this prayerful silence was, for Joe, as oppressive as the imagined roar of jet engines that sometimes shook him into an anxiety attack. It was a stillness full of eerie, disturbing expectation.
He trailed Barbara between columns of tall trees, under green vaults. Even in the late morning, the shadows were as deep as those in a monastery cloister. The air was crisp with the aroma of pine. Musty with the scent of toadstools and natural mulch.