Bakersfeld!”
His footsteps echoing along the corridor, the tower chief walked toward them. “Lieutenant Ordway has been trying to reach you, Mr. Bakersfeld; so has the Snow Desk. They both want you to call.” He nodded. “Hi, Keith!”
Mel wanted to cry out, to shout for silence or delay, plead to be alone with Keith for a few minutes more. But he knew it was no good. At the first sound of the tower chief’s voice Keith had stopped in midsentence as if a switch were snapped to “off.”
Keith had not, after all, reached the point of describing his own guilt to Mel. As he responded automatically to the tower chief’s greeting, he wondered: Why had he begun at all? What could he have hoped to gain? There could never be any gain, never any forgetting. No confession — to whomever made — would exorcise memory. Momentarily he had grasped at what he mistook for a faint flicker of hope, even perhaps reprieve. As it had to be, it proved illusory. Perhaps it was as well that the interruption occurred when it did.
Once more, Keith realized, a mantle of loneliness, like an invisible thick curtain, surrounded him. Inside the curtain he was alone with his thoughts, and inside his thoughts was a private torture chamber where no one, not even a brother, could reach through.
From that torture chamber … waiting, always waiting … there could be only one relief. It was the way he had already chosen, and would carry through.
“I guess they could use you back inside, Keith,” the tower watch chief said. It was the gentlest kind of chiding. Keith had already had one work-break tonight; another inevitably threw a heavier load on other people. It was also a reminder to Mel, perhaps unintended, that as airport general manager his writ did not run here.
Keith mumbled something and gave a distant nod. With a sense of helplessness, Mel watched his brother return to the radar room. He had heard enough to know that it was desperately important he should hear more. He wondered when that would be, and how. A few minutes ago he had broken through Keith’s reserve, his secrecy. Would it happen again? With despair, Mel doubted it.
For sure, there would be no more confidences from Keith tonight.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Bakersfeld.” As if belatedly guessing Mel’s thoughts, the tower chief spread his hands. “You try to do the best for everybody. It isn’t always easy.”
“I know.” Mel felt like sighing, but restrained himself. When something like this happened, you could only hope for the right occasion to occur again; meanwhile you got on with other things you had to do.
“Tell me, please,” Mel said, “what were those messages again?”
The tower chief repeated them.
Instead of telephoning the Snow Control Desk, Mel walked down one floor of the control tower and went in. Danny Farrow was still presiding over the busy snow clearance command console.
There was a query about priorities in clearing the aircraft parking areas of competing airlines, which Mel settled, then checked on the situation concerning the blocked runway, three zero. There was no change, except that Joe Patroni was now on the airfield and had taken charge of attempts to move the mired Aereo-Mexican 707, which was still preventing the runway being used. A few minutes earlier, Patroni had reported by radio that he expected to make a new attempt to move the aircraft within an hour. Knowing Joe Patroni’s reputation as a top- notch troubleshooter, Mel decided there was nothing to be gained by demanding a more detailed report.
At the Snow Desk Mel remembered the message to call Police Lieutenant Ordway. Assuming that the lieutenant was still in the terminal, Mel had him paged and, a few moments later, Ordway came on the line. Mel expected the lieutenant’s call to be about the anti-noise delegation of Meadowood residents. It wasn’t.
“The Meadowood people are starting to come in, but they haven’t been a problem and they haven’t asked for you yet,” Ned Ordway said when Mel raised the question. “I’ll let you know when they do.”
What he had called about, the policeman reported, was a woman who had been picked up by one of his men. She was crying, and apparently wandering aimlessly in the main terminal. “We couldn’t get any sense out of her, but she wasn’t doing anything wrong so I didn’t want to take her to the station house. She seemed upset enough without that.”
“What did you do?”
Ordway said apologetically, “There aren’t many quiet places around here tonight, so I put her in the anteroom outside your office. I thought I’d let you know in case you got back and wondered.”
“That’s all right. Is she alone?”
“One of my men was with her, though he may have left by now. But she’s harmless; I’m sure of that. We’ll check on her again soon.”
“I’ll be back at my office in a few minutes,” Mel said. “I’ll see if I can do any good myself.” He wondered if he would have more success talking with the unknown woman than he had had with Keith; he doubted if he could do worse. The thought of Keith, who seemed close to breaking point, still troubled Mel deeply.
As an afterthought, he asked, “Did you find out the woman’s name?”
“Yes, we got that much. It’s a Spanish-sounding name. Just a minute; I have it written down.”
There was a pause, then Lieutenant Ordway said, “Her name is Guerrero. Mrs. Inez Guerrero.”
Tanya Livingston said incredulously, “You mean Mrs. Quonsett’s aboard Flight Two?”
“I’m afraid there’s no doubt of it, Mrs. Livingston. There was a little old lady, exactly the way you’ve described her.” The gate agent who had supervised boarding of
The gate agent had come to the office a few minutes ago in response to Coakley’s telephoned warning, to all Trans America gate positions, about the elusive Mrs. Quonsett.
“It just didn’t occur to me there was anything wrong,” the gate agent said. “We let other visitors aboard tonight; they came off.” He added defensively, “Anyway, I’d been under pressure all evening. We were short staffed, and apart from the time you were there helping, I was doing the work of two people. You know that.”
“Yes,” Tanya said, “I know.” She had no intention of passing out blame. If anyone was responsible for what had happened, it was Tanya herself.
“It was just after you left, Mrs. Livingston. The old lady said something about her son, I think it was, leaving his wallet. She even showed it to me. It had money in it, she said, which was why I didn’t take it.”
“She’d already figured that. It’s one of her regular gags.”
“I didn’t know it, so I let her go aboard. From then until a few minutes ago when I got the phone call, I never gave her another thought.”
“She fools you,” Peter Coakley said. He gave a sideways glance at Tanya. “She sure fooled me.”
The agent shook his head. “If I didn’t have to believe it, I wouldn’t, even now. But she’s aboard, all right.” He described the discrepancy between the tourist section head count and the ticket tally, then afterward, the ramp supervisor’s decision to let the aircraft go, rather than incur further delay.
Tanya said quickly, “I suppose there’s no doubt Flight Two’s already taken off.”
“Yes, they have. I checked on my way here. Even if they hadn’t, I doubt they’d bring the aircraft back in, especially tonight.”
“No they wouldn’t.” Nor was there the slightest chance, Tanya knew, of
“Is there a refueling stop?” Sometimes, Tanya knew, Europe-bound flights made nonscheduled stops for fuel at Montreal or Newfoundland. If so, there would be a chance to pull Mrs. Quonsett off, robbing her of the satisfaction of getting all the way to Italy.
“I asked Operations about that,” the agent answered. “The flight plan shows they’re going right through. No stops.”
Tanya exclaimed, “Damn that old woman!”
So Ada Quonsett was going to get her ride to Italy and back, with probably a night’s lodging in between, and with meals supplied — all at airline expense. Tanya thought angrily: she had underestimated the old lady’s determination not to be sent back to the West Coast; she had erred also in assuming that Mrs. Quonsett would head only for New York.
