“Grant Westfield,” he said, wiping some mustard on a paper towel before shaking her hand.
“You work for Gordian Engineering, too?”
“Electrical engineer. Tyler recruited me into the firm. We did stints together in both Iraq and Afghanistan when I served in his combat engineering company as his first sergeant.”
“Then he abandoned us to join the Rangers,” Tyler said.
“
“Tyler was captain of the unit. And I didn’t abandon him. He left to start Gordian.”
“Why do you look familiar?” Fay said to Grant.
“You might remember Grant as the guy who gave up his pro wrestling career to join up,” Tyler said.
Jess didn’t follow sports much except during the Olympics. She looked at Fay, who shook her head.
“No, I think it’s because you remind me of that man on the reality show. The handsome bald one. I can’t remember which one now. It’ll come to me. But you do look a little like my husband. He had your type of muscular build.”
Tyler knew Jess’s background, but Grant gave her a new once-over at this tidbit of info.
“My grandfather was full-blooded Maori,” Jess explained. “That’s why you’d think I was Nana’s adopted grandchild.”
“Nonsense,” Fay said. “She looks exactly like her mother, who looked just like me.”
“And it seems like she got her sense of adventure from you,” Tyler said.
“That’s why she’s so good at coming up with the company’s tour packages.”
“Like what?”
Jess ticked them off using her fingers. “We’ve got six bungee-jumping locations, skydiving tours, kayaking trips, heli-skiing, white-water rafting. Just about anything you can name. Except jet boats. And we’re working on that.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a budding empire,” Tyler said.
“It’s in full bloom,” Fay said. “Jess’s company made twenty million dollars last year.”
“Okay, Nana. They don’t need all of the details.”
“I’m just so proud of you, honey.”
“I know.”
Now it was Tyler giving her a new appraisal. “Well, we’ve gone through a lot to get to this point, Fay. What exactly is it that you wanted me to take a look at?”
Fay went to her satchel and removed a hunk of silver metal the size and shape of a Frisbee cut in half. One edge was a smooth curve while the other was jagged, as if it had been hacked apart with a rusty can opener. Jess had seen it a hundred times, but now the attack gave it greater significance.
Fay gave it to Tyler, who held it carefully so that he didn’t cut himself, weighing it with his hands. “Too strong to be aluminum. Feels like a titanium alloy. Or possibly magnesium. I’d have to take it back to a lab to make sure.”
“Can you tell me if it’s from a spaceship?” Fay asked him.
Jess noticed Tyler’s lip curl at the ridiculous question, but he inspected the object carefully before answering. “It definitely looks like it’s been involved in a crash of some kind.” He pointed at the tears in the metal. “You can see evidence of explosive impact here, along with some melting of the material. But this could be from an aircraft. I’ve seen thousands of pieces like it.”
“From sixty-five years ago?”
“Well, no. My expertise is on recent accidents. But I have seen wreckage from old World War II bombers. Maybe that’s what you found.”
“Oh, no. This is definitely from the Roswell crash.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I found it there.”
“Perhaps a plane crashed in the area.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Fay,” Tyler said. “I’m having a hard time believing this came from a spaceship, but it’s not because of you. I’m just an inveterate skeptic. If this is from Roswell, why are you just investigating it now?”
“She’s been investigating it for the past five years,” Jess said. “Ever since my grandfather died.”
“I didn’t tell Henare — that was my husband — about my experience at Roswell until very late in life. I thought he would send me to a loony bin, so I told him about it only when he was dying. I was shocked when he said I should go on that quest, that he’d be with me every step of the way. Since then I’ve been trying to track down the origin of what I learned at Roswell. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction. All I want is an answer. I don’t care what it is, but I’d like to know before I end my days on this planet.”
Grant stopped cutting the sandwiches, and Tyler guzzled the rest of his beer. Though they hid it well, Jess saw the dubious look they exchanged.
“Fay,” Tyler said, tossing the bottle in the recycling bin, “I’m happy to take this piece of metal back to Gordian and test it every way we can. But I can tell you now that unless we find it’s made of some material that we’ve never seen before, the results will be inconclusive.”
“Did you show that to anyone else?” Grant asked. “The guys at your house today must have heard about it somehow.”
Fay gave them an embarrassed look. “Oh my goodness, I did talk about it, didn’t I? When you told me it would be three months before you could see me, I didn’t think it would hurt to go to Roswell for the annual UFO festival and see if I could get some information from the people there, although plenty of them are kooks.”
“Who did you talk to?” Tyler said.
“Lots of people. You could tell that ninety percent of them were just what I thought Henare would think of me: crackpots, all of them with wild tales that I knew were absolute hogwash, but there were also lecturers and authors there who’ve spent years researching the incident.”
“Did any of them seem to take a particular interest in your story?”
“Sure. I don’t know if they believed me, but a lot of people were interested.”
“Did you show anyone your artifacts?”
“No, but I did mention the piece of wreckage in an interview.”
“There’s even a video,” Jess said.
“What video?”
“I can show it to you after lunch,” Fay said.
“Do you know anything about the multicolored metal Foreman and Blaine were after?” Tyler asked.
Fay shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“You mentioned in the house that you had ‘artifacts’ plural. Is the second one another piece of wreckage?”
“Not wreckage really. But it’s from the crash.”
Fay pulled out her real treasure from the satchel, a battered piece of wood in a plastic sheath.
She handed it to Tyler, who peered at the engraving. His eyes lit up when he recognized the drawings etched into the smooth wood. Jess wasn’t surprised that he knew what they were.
“Where did you get this?” he said.
“At Roswell. The same day I picked up that piece of metal from the wreckage of the spaceship.”
“You found it in the wreckage?”
Fay looked at Jess, who nodded for her to continue.
“It was given to me,” Fay said. “By an alien who survived the crash for a short while.”
Grant, who had been taking a swig of beer, coughed as some of the liquid went down the wrong way.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Did you say alien?”
Tyler furrowed his brow at Jess, but she was glad to see that he didn’t immediately dismiss the statement. He obviously was willing to listen to more.
Jess picked up two of the plates and nodded for Grant to get the others.
“Let’s take our lunch into the dining room,” she said. “Nana has a tale to tell you.”
