“Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,” she said. “But what does it matter?”
When they had first stood together in this field, she had told him that on her arrival the morning after the crash, the debris was so finely chopped it didn’t appear to be the wreckage of an airliner. Virtually no piece was larger than a car door. Only two objects were immediately recognizable—a portion of one of the engines and a three-unit passenger-seat module.
He said, “Three seats, side by side?”
“Yes.”
“Upright?”
“Yes. What’s your point?”
“Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?”
“Joe—”
“From what part of the plane?” he repeated patiently.
“Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The centre rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.”
“Damaged?”
“Of course.”
“Badly?”
“Not as badly as you’d expect.”
“Burned?”
“Not entirely.”
“Burned at all?”
“As I remember… there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.”
“In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?”
Her broad clear face now clouded with concern. “Joe, no one survived this crash.”
“Was the upholstery intact?” he pressed.
“As I remember, it was slightly torn. Nothing serious.”
“Blood on the upholstery?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Any bodies in the seats?”
“No.”
“Body parts?”
“No.”
“Lap belts still attached?”
“I don’t remember. I suppose so.”
“If the lap belts were attached—”
“No, it’s ridiculous to think—”
“Michelle and the girls were in economy,” he said.
Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. “Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.”
“I know that,” he assured her. “I know.” But how he wished.
She met his eyes again.
He said, “They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.”
“So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.”
“If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy—that’s at least some small corroboration.”
“Of what?”
“Her story.”
“Corroboration,” Barbara said disbelievingly.
“That she survived.”
Barbara shook her head.
“You didn’t meet Rose,” he said. “She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such… power, presence.”
On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theatre-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.
In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, “They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive”
“I understand that.”
“God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe—but do you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew… in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like breadsticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel—a spray as fine as an aerosol mist—explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.”
Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.
He said, “You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander—and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.”
“That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.”