‘That’s good. I want my Aunt Vicky, though. Where is she, do you think?’
‘I don’t know, hon,’ Laurel said. ‘I wish I did.’
Dinah thought again of the faces the yelling man saw: evil faces, cruel faces. She thought of her own face as he perceived it, a piggish baby face with the eyes hidden behind huge black lenses. Her courage broke then, and she began to weep in hoarse racking sobs that hurt Laurel’s heart. She held the girl, because it was the only thing she could think of to do, and soon she was crying herself. They cried together for nearly five minutes, and then Dinah began to calm again. Laurel looked over at the slim young boy, whose name was either Albert or Alvin, she could not remember which, and saw that his eyes were also wet. He caught her looking and glanced hastily down at his hands.
Dinah fetched one final gasping sob and then just lay with her head pillowed against Laurel’s breast. ‘I guess crying won’t help, huh?’
‘No, I guess not,’ Laurel agreed. ‘Why don’t you try going to sleep, Dinah?’
Dinah sighed – a watery, unhappy sound. ‘I don’t think I can. I was asleep.’
Tell me about it, Laurel thought. And Flight 29 continued east at 36,000 feet, flying at over five hundred miles an hour above the dark midsection of America.
CHAPTER 3
The Deductive Method. Accidents and
Statistics. Speculative Possibilities.
Pressure in the Trenches. Bethany’s
Problem. The Descent Begins.
1
‘That little girl said something interesting an hour or so ago,’ Robert Jenkins said suddenly.
The little girl in question had gone to sleep again in the meantime, despite her doubts about her ability to do so. Albert Kaussner had also been nodding, perchance to return once more to those mythic streets of Tombstone. He had taken his violin case down from the overhead compartment and was holding it across his lap.
‘Huh!’ he said, and straightened up.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jenkins said. ‘Were you dozing?’
‘Nope,’ Albert said. ‘Wide awake.’ He turned two large, bloodshot orbs on Jenkins to prove this. A darkish shadow lay under each. Jenkins thought he looked a little like a raccoon which has been startled while raiding garbage cans. ‘What did she say?’
‘She told Miss Stevenson she didn’t think she could get back to sleep because she had been sleeping.
Earlier.’
Albert gazed at Dinah for a moment. ‘Well, she’s out now,’ he said.
‘I see she is, but that is not the point, dear boy. Not the point at all.’
Albert considered telling Mr Jenkins that Ace Kaussner, the fastest Hebrew west of the Mississippi and the only Texan to survive the Battle of the Alamo, did not much cotton to being called dear boy, and decided to let it pass … at least for the time being. ‘Then what is the point?’
‘I was also asleep. Corked off even before the captain – our original captain, I mean – turned off the NO
SMOKING light. I’ve always been that way. Trains, busses, planes – I drift off like a baby the minute they turn on the motors. What about you, dear boy?’
What about me what?’
Were you asleep? You were, weren’t you?’
‘Well, yeah.’
We were all asleep. The people who disappeared were all awake.’
Albert thought about this. ‘Well … maybe.’
‘Nonsense,’ Jenkins said almost jovially. ‘I write mysteries for a living. Deduction is my bread and butter, you might say. Don’t you think that if someone had been awake when all those people were eliminated, that person would have screamed bloody murder, waking the rest of us?’
‘I guess so,’ Albert agreed thoughtfully. ‘Except maybe for that guy all the way in the back. I don’t think an air-raid siren would wake that guy up.’
‘All right; your exception is duly noted. But no one screamed, did they? And no one has offered to tell the rest of us what happened. So I deduce that only waking passengers were subtracted. Along with the flight crew, of course.’
‘Yeah. Maybe so.’
‘You look troubled, dear boy. Your expression says that, despite its charms, the idea does not scan perfectly for you. May I ask why not? Have I missed something?’ Jenkins’s expression said he didn’t believe that was possible, but that his mother had raised him to be polite.
‘I don’t know,’ Albert said honestly. ‘How many of us are there? Eleven?’
‘Yes. Counting the fellow in the back – the one who is comatose – we number eleven.’
‘If you’re right, shouldn’t there be more of us?’
‘Why?’
But Albert fell silent, struck by a sudden, vivid image from his childhood. He had been raised in a theological twilight zone by parents who were not Orthodox but who were not agnostics, either. He and his brothers had grown up observing most of the dietary traditions (or laws, or whatever they were), they had had their Bar Mitzvalis, and they had been raised to know who they were, where they came from, and what that was supposed to mean. And the story Albert remembered most clearly from his childhood visits to temple was the story of the final plague which had been visited on Pharaoh – the gruesome tribute exacted by God’s dark angel of the morning.
In his mind’s eye he now saw that angel moving not over Egypt but through Flight 29, gathering most of the passengers to its terrible breast … not because they had neglected to daub their lintels (or their seat-backs, perhaps) with the blood of a lamb, but because …
Why? Because why?
Albert didn’t know, but he shivered just the same. And wished that creepy old story had never occurred to him. Let my Frequent Fliers go, he thought. Except it wasn’t funny.
‘Albert?’ Mr Jenkins’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. ‘Albert, are you all right?’
‘Yes. just thinking.’ He cleared his throat. ‘If all the sleeping passengers were, you know, passed over, there’d be at least sixty of us. Maybe more. I mean, this is the red-eye.’
‘Dear boy, have you ever -‘
‘Could you call me Albert, Mr Jenkins? That’s my name.’
Jenkins patted Albert’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. Really. I don’t mean to be patronizing. I’m upset, and when I’m upset, I have a tendency to retreat … like a turtle pulling his head back into his shell. Only what I retreat into is fiction. I believe I was playing Philo Vance. He’s a detective – a great detective – created by the late S. S. Van Dyne. I suppose you’ve never read him. Hardly anyone does these days, which is a pity. At any rate, I apologize.’
‘It’s okay,’ Albert said uncomfortably.
‘Albert you are and Albert you shall be from now on,’ Robert Jenkins promised. ‘I started to ask if you’ve ever taken the red-eye before.’
‘No. I’ve never even flown across the country before.’
‘Well, I have. Many times. On a few occasions I have even gone against my natural inclination and stayed awake for awhile. Mostly when I was a younger man and the flights were noisier. Having said that much, I may as well date myself outrageously by admitting that my first coast-to-coast trip was on a TWA prop-job that made two stops … to refuel.’
‘My observation is that very few people go to sleep on such flights during the first hour or so … and then just about everyone goes to sleep. During that first hour, people occupy themselves with looking at the scenery, talking with their spouses or their travelling companions, having a drink or two -‘
‘Settling in, you mean,’ Albert suggested. What Mr Jenkins was saying made perfect sense to him, although he had done precious little settling in himself; he had been so excited about his coming journey and the new life which would be waiting for him that he had hardly slept at all during the last couple of nights. As a result, he had gone out like a light almost as soon as the 767 left the ground.
‘Making little nests for themselves,’ Jenkins agreed. ‘Did you happen to notice the drinks trolley outside the cockpit, dea – Albert?’
‘I saw it was there,’ Albert agreed.
Jenkins’s eyes shone. ‘Yes indeed – it was either see it or fall over it. But did you really notice it?’
‘I guess not, if you saw something I didn’t.’
‘It’s not the eye that notices, but the mind, Albert. The trained deductive mind. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I did notice that it had just been taken out of the small closet in which it is stored, and that the used glasses from the pre-flight service were still stacked on the bottom shelf. From this I deduce the following: the plane took off uneventfully, it climbed toward its cruising altitude, and the autopilot device was fortunately engaged. Then the captain turned off the seatbelt light. This would all be about thirty minutes into the flight, if I’m reading the signs correctly – about 1:00 A.M., PDT.