No Return

Wes shook his head. “He didn’t say a word.” He knew instantly his father would have said nothing, fearing Wes would have tried to come back. “How … did it happen?”

Lars looked off toward the hills. “Suicide. Senior year.”

How was that possible? Wes thought. Mandy dead? Sixteen years dead? That couldn’t be right. And by suicide?

“She wasn’t that kind of person.”

“It happened exactly one year after that night,” Lars told him.

He didn’t have to say which night.

As Wes leaned against the wall, his body began shaking slightly. Lars reached down and picked something up off the ground. It was the article. Wes hadn’t even realized he’d dropped it.

“I didn’t leave this for you,” Lars said. “I would never have done that.”

“But no one else knew,” Wes whispered. It was true to a point. His father had known. But he, like Mandy, was gone. “How … how did she do it?”

“She took sleeping pills, then climbed into a bathtub full of water and never got out.”

“That … doesn’t sound like something she’d do.”

“Well, I guess you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”

“Why? Did you think that was something she’d do?” Wes snapped.

Lars leaned against the wall next to Wes. “No. I didn’t.”

An image of Mandy Johansson flashed in Wes’s mind. It was Halloween, junior year. She’d come to school dressed as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, and had spent most of the day teasing Wes about his attempt to look like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.

“I’m sorry. I really thought you knew,” Lars said.

Wes shook his head, his mind still in the past. He should have kept in touch. Maybe that would have helped. Maybe he could have pulled her through the darkness that must have overtaken her.

“Tell me about the break-in,” Lars said.

“Like you don’t know,” Wes said, but most of the fight had left him.

“No. I don’t. Tell me what happened.”

Wes told Lars about the chase, and then getting back to the motel only to find that he’d been robbed. By the end, Lars was staring at him, stunned. If he was acting, his performance was Oscar worthy.

“Jesus. And the article?”

“I found it tucked below the handlebars of the Triumph thirty minutes ago.”

“So it happened sometime between after you got home last night and then.”

“Obviously.”

“I just mean, it couldn’t have happened during the break-in, because you were on the motorcycle when that happened.”

“They could have come back,” Wes said, but Lars had a point.

“You think they were just after your footage?”

“What else?” Wes said. “The only things they took were the things that held our shots.”

“But why? What’s the value in that?”

Wes stared at his old friend for a moment, trying to get a read on him. Finally he said, “Okay, for the moment, let’s say you had nothing to do with it. But come on. Even you should be able to see they wanted to take any proof I had that the dead pilot isn’t who everyone said he is.”

“The crash again,” Lars said, shaking his head.

“Hell yes, the crash again. And I did have proof.” Still had it, in fact, on his thumb drive. But he’d keep that to himself for the time being.

Lars took a couple steps away, processing. “I don’t know what else to tell you about the crash. Whatever you had would not have proved anything but the truth.” He looked at Wes. “Why does this matter to you so much?”

“The pilot who was trapped in the cockpit when I got there was not the same man the Navy is saying died. I was just trying to get you to actually listen to me, but everyone’s just been trying to shut me up. Why? You’re in the service, Lars. This is one of your colleagues. The question is, why doesn’t it matter to you?”

Lars opened his mouth to speak, stopped himself, then said, “Of course it matters to me. Do you think I ignored what you were saying? We’re handling this internally, and your prodding isn’t helping.” He paused for a moment. “Look, what if I could prove to you Adair was the pilot? Would you accept that?”

“Prove how?”

“Hold on.” Lars pulled out a cellphone, then walked out of earshot and made a call.

Wes looked at the article again. Mandy. Dead. He figured she’d grown up, moved away, gone on to better things. Not this. Never this.

As Lars walked back up, Wes slipped the clipping into his pocket.

“Come on,” Lars said.

“Where are we going?”

“To show you that you’re wrong.”

33

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” Mandy asked from the front passenger seat.

She was excited, and probably a little anxious. It was her first party at the Rocks, after all. Wes and Lars were pros compared to her.

“I’m sure,” Wes said from the driver’s seat.

The dirt road was really not much of a road at all-two ruts on either side, beaten down by the tires of those who’d passed this way before, and a narrow, deeper gouge running roughly between them, cut there by the infrequent desert rains.

Wes turned the wheel suddenly, barely missing a rock sticking out of the ground on the right side. In the backseat, he heard Lars tumble sideways and the sound of several bottles clinking together.

“Careful!” Lars said. “You don’t want me to break any of these in here, do you? Try explaining that to your folks.”

Wes eased off the accelerator. “You should be holding on to them.”

“I am holding on to them.”

“Dip!” Wes yelled out.

The van lurched downward, then jerked up just as quickly.

“Woohoo!” Mandy cried out.

“Holy crap,” Lars said.

When the road evened out, Wes said, “We need some kind of code phrase to let each other know we’re ready to leave.”

“Leave?” Mandy said. “We haven’t even got there yet.”

“Yeah, but if any of us gets to the point where they want to go, then we all go. That was the deal.”

“Right,” Mandy said, sounding less than happy. “I remember.”

“So the code word?” Lars said.

“Dip!” Wes yelled out.

The car bounced again.

“I’m not sure ‘dip’ would be a good word to use,” Lars said. “Hard to work into a sentence.”

“Very funny, jackass,” Wes said.

“Why don’t we just say we want to go?” Mandy suggested.

“Because that would be completely uncool,” Lars told her. “We want to sneak away so people think we’re still there. We don’t want them knowing we left early. They’d think we were a bunch of losers.”

“Even if they do, at least we won’t be the only losers there,” Wes said. “Tommy from the debate team said